>For Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, the dialectic was a process

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>>9365558
Coffee without milk.

>>9365558
There is no such thing as an all encompassing statement, all statements have innate opposites. For example, lets use the statement "Trees are tall". The natural negation and antithesis in this case would be the statement "Trees aren't tall" which is nessacarily implied as the counter-statement.

I'll explain the negation in terms of dialectical materialism and hopefully you can jump from there into idealism (unlike the Marxist that thinks Hegel only exists to have given dialectics to Marx)

The negation of the negation is that in a failed revolution, negation, you will receive new knowledge that allows us to create a new one that hopefully succeeds. This also disproves people who use the USSR as a point against Marxism; we must learn from the mistakes and successes of the past in order to secure the future.

For proto dialectics, look up Heraclitus and his fragments that finished philosophy in antiquity.

Read the dialogues Parmenides and Sophist. Had you started with the damn Greeks this thread would never exist.

>>9365588
In the same way, ultimately we progress forward by past failures. In anything, revolution or otherwise.

You are given a positive, which, if imperfect has inherent negatives. These negatives then demand solutions that in turn raise new issues until perfection is achieved. This is the nature of dialectic

>>9365558
I could be wrong because I haven't really read Hegel but this is how I have come to think of it so far:

Without their own negation they would be everything (wholeness), and since they are not they contain their own negation -- things find definition by what they are not. They are not everything, so they are something (and not nothing, because they have form). An absence of negation would be wholeness, which is how the process of sublation works towards wholeness. I haven't found it useful to think of specific everyday examples because it seems to me that's beside the point

>>9365579
>>9365626
So what you're saying is that "things contain their own negation" means "for every statement an opposite statement exists"?

Okay sure, but is that really all Hegel is saying? Is it just worded that poorly?

That an opposite statement exists says nothing about the truth value of the statement itself. Let's consider two kinds of statements (I cannot remember the term for their classification) and their opposites:

>Circles are round
>Circles aren't round

>The sky is blue
>The sky isn't blue

Who cares about the second statements? How does their existence affect anything? How does merely stating them overturn the first statements? Circles are round. The sky is blue.

Maybe I'm wrong but I think Hegel must be saying that the mere existence of statements of an opposite position show that the position must be flawed, because otherwise why would he even bother talking about it (and creating a whole philosophical system from it). I think he then concludes that to move forward both of those flawed parts have to be "sublated into something greater." I don't see why the existence of contradictory statements inherently undermine the original statement.

>>9365588
I don't understand it at all. The idea is that revolution needs to be refined on successive attempts. Doesn't this assume that some kind of revolution is ultimately 'correct'? And why?

>>9365763
You missed the mark by a thousand miles. Seriously kid, go back to the basics and read the dialogues above.

>>9365765
Or read Hegel's lectures.

>>9365765
>2deep4u heh. nothing personal, kid.

Great post. Makes me all the more convinced you're completely full of shit.

>>9365781
Is there nothing in all of philosophy that can't be explained in the space of a 4chan post? Must be nice to live in a world where you can safely dismiss any idea that ends more than a few feet after starting.

>>9365781
You just want to be spoonfed and being told you are a 'good boy', I'm not having it.

>>9365781
Plus, Plato is philosophy 101, if you think that's '2deep4you' then you're a lost cause.

>>9365804
>>9365808
>>9365818
>dismiss
>want to be spoonfed
I didn't dismiss anything. I made the thread trying to understand it after weeks of trying to understand it on my own. Then I posted >>9365763 in an attempt to understand it.

In that post I re-stated the people who I was replying to (without bothering about explicitly stating the 'wholeness' thing but leaving it implied with "to move forward") for clarification. I then stated that I didn't see how their statements gave any new knowledge and hypothesized about one way that they could.

Judging by these responses my error is in failing to see how such statements give new knowledge.

I still cannot see how they do.

You can explain my errors in reasoning, ignore me, or kindly fuck off. I'm not having being called a baby.

You act like nobody has found Hegel difficult to understand before (when history shows the opposite) and that he's so difficult to understand that he cannot be discussed on /lit/. There's a contradiction for you.

>>9365857
The anon told you to read the dialogues three fucking times already. You could have read both of them in the time this retarded thread has been up.

>>9365763
I am >>9365626 by the way.

I think that statements don't actually contain the truth they reference so the comparison of statements is not useful in determining negations, which in this case are internal. A statement is a conscious imposition by the imagination, limited by knowledge as determined by experience of sense-data, so it is not representative of the Absolute. If it does not represent (or just 'present') the Absolute, it is not whole, therefor it contains an internal negation. Counter-statements arise from internal negations -- the instability of inadequate, un(re)presentative conscious imposition -- but are not internal negations themselves. They also contain internal negations since they are not the Absolute, and both -- presented as oppositions by both not (re)presenting the Absolute -- are sublated to progress towards the Absolute.

From my understanding something doesn't have to be a direct opposite for it to be an external negation -- the contrast of two internally-negated ideas is enough for the process of sublation. And they are 'defined' however, rather than exist as 'things' like chairs or desks. It could be, for example, 'Western history', which comes about through the process of sublation from the imposition on events in that history.

I could be entirely wrong and I'm not even sure my interpretation is 'allowed' by Hegel. I come at it mainly through secondary sources, which is mostly postmodernism and art history.

This thread has gone absolutely nowhere, jesus

Does anyone really understand Hegel?

>>9365558
I'll give you an example.

Oligarchy, the system where power is dictated by wealth.
>Not as badly as plutocracy or timocracy, but bear with me here and do not take issue with the above statement; it is the form that most of the people understand it
Now, that system is backed by insatiable greed by necessity. If nobody wants to have more, nobody will have excess amounts.
But Hegel understood something here. The oligarchs have to share their wealth to remain, and to get even richer. Yes, the greedy have to spend.

Say, an oligarch does not use their wealth to sharpen their fangs or brandish their shield, they will fall to the competition, as the other oligarchs want what he has. So what follows is an arms race of sorts. However, the shield in this case would be to fund the law and law enforcement to see the corruption in other oligarchs, but not them. Hence the corruption funding the anti-corruption movements. The top of the pyramid is the cog in the machine. Leaders are servants.

It is no accident that wherever the leadership is murdered, the farmers and lower classes suffer. Equality is hell.

>>9365558
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/hegel-dialectics/

>>9366481
>Does anyone really understand Hegel?


DOES PHILOSOPHY EVEN MATTER IN THE 21ST CENTURY? - HAWKING

>>9365763
To give any meaning to the statement "the sky is blue" you must comprehend the possibility of the sky not being blue. If you can't, then the statement is meaningless. Same is for circles.

>>9366481
Obviously not. Faggots can't even bother to understand Plato.

>>9365558
>This is the part I cannot wrap my head around. I've been trying to understand how things contain their own negation for weeks and I just can't do it.
If something is wrong, you can see that it is. It negates itself.

>>9365558

take a category like Quantum, which can be defined as the gathering-together of an abstract Quantity into a particular delimitation. now within Quantum you can have increase or decrease, to get a larger or smaller value. In that idea is the notion of increasing indefinitely to the infinite, which at the first moment the mind takes to be its glimpse of Infinity. but the Infinite Qualitative Progression doesn't actually give you infinity, because the very notion of Quantum depends on its delimitation. You can't have an "infinite quantity" (in Hegel, idk about actual maths) because the very idea of a quantum denies it: it insists on its own finitude, its own limitation. That limitation, for Hegel, constitutes negation, because it must pass away before the Idea's motion toward infinity; in fact it is that motion that makes us think the Infinite Quantitative Progression in the first place. So because the Idea is always "looking for" its infinity, the finite concepts of the Understanding have to pass away before this power: in their very finitude, they tell the tale of their negation, whose motion becomes Dialectic.

To get an idea of what a "good" infinity looks like in Hegel, recall that after negating the "bad" infinity of the IQP, he offers Ratio. Ratio is infinite for Hegel because you can freely change the variables in proportion to each other while maintaining the "exponent" of the ratio: 2/4 = 3/6 = 4/8 = 1/2 =... Hegel is always looking for these kinds of infinities, what Findlay calls "eternity in an hour, infinity in an inch" or something like that. it's the infinity of the Idea, a free development without the concept of limitation.

i forgot how he moves on from the Ratio into Measure, so consult the Logic

>>9367348

Infinite Quantitative* Progression, sorry

>>9366556
This. This is all it means.

Every positive statement gives rise to an infinite amount of negatives. "This is a circle" means "This is not a square, plant, elephant" etc. etc.

Negation is how things and beings find their ground in reality. Things are just as much "not this" as they are "this." When Spirit (consciousness) progresses along its path it confronts itself in negations like this in order to discover that it is, for example, NOT the whole world (like Berkeley, Fichte, or even Descartes might say), but merely a piece of it. It continues going through negations and each time wrests a new definition of itself by realizing what it is not, and what opposes it. The self informs itself about itself by looking at what challenges its conceptions of itself. Thesis to Antithesis to Synthesis. Thesis is the assertion. Antithesis is the moment of negation. Synthesis is the progress towards something that balances both Thesis and Antithesis.

>>9367348

and i should add that it really, really pays to read the Encyclopedia Logic. Hegel is perfectly lucid there and it also contains his lectures, appended as a note to each relevant section. So first you get the extremely abstract, bare-bones outline presentation of the concept or transition he's working on, then the insightful re-presentation at length for the students, where Hegel is much more colloquial, accessible, and even witty at times. Wallace's translation is a peach, using a very intuitive idiomatic Scots phraseology, and Findlay gives a good intro.

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Hegelians are fucking jokes.

>>9367401
*autistic screeching*

Shoppy was jealous Hegel was much more popular than him, he was a bitter and hateful person with nothing relevant to say.

>>9367412
The difference between Hegel and Schopenhauer is that Hegel will eventually be forgotten and replaced by an even bigger goofball.

>>9367442
His philosophy is so ingrained in the continental tradition that I seriously doubt that. Philosophers rarely tend to be forgotten and even if they seem so there's usually a 'revival' later on, like Plato was 'forgotten' in the middle ages.

>>9367442
Cultural studies and critical theory are here to stay. Hegel will always be relevant.

He and Schops were onto very similar things anyway. Schops just didn't care about being a critic of history or culture. He cared more about scientific explanations and so he doomed himself to not being as widely read as science advanced

>>9367442
More like the difference is that Schopy already has been.

>>9367401
Schopenhauer was the true heir to Kant

>>9367452

I guess Hegel was the price to pay for Kant and Schopenhauer.

>>9367379
>thesis antithesis synthesis
>DROPPED
>R
>O
>P
>P
>E
>D

>>9367401
What the fuck did you just fucking say about me, you little bitch? I'll have you know I graduated top of my class at the University of Tübingen, and I've been involved in some serious ontology. I am trained in dialectical warfare and I am the top dialectician of all German philosphers. I will wipe you the fuck out with some serious post-Kantian idealism, mark my fucking words. You think you can get away with saying that shit to me over the Internet? Think again, fucker. As we speak I am contacting my secret network of Hegelian sorcerers across the world and your IP is being traced right now so you better prepare for the storm, caveman. The storm that wipes out the pathetic little thing you call your life. You’re fucking dead, kid. I can be anywhere, anytime, and I can destroy your entire philosophical system in over seven hundred ways, and that’s just with my bare hands. Not only am I extensively trained in the ancient philosophy of the Greeks, but I have access to the entire arsenal of German Idealism and I will use it to its full extent to wipe your miserable ass off the face of the continent, you little shit. If only you could have known what unholy retribution your little “clever” comment was about to bring down upon you, maybe you would have held your fucking tongue. But you couldn’t, you didn’t, and now you’re paying the price, you goddamn idiot. I will shit fury all over you and you will drown in it. You’re fucking dead, kiddo.

>>9365558
According to Hegel, history inexorably moves towards perfection.

Take a violent fascist. This is countered by people revolting, protesting, demanding greater liberties. Of course, they can't have absolute liberty yet, but it eventually creates a compromise, a third result different from the two. This new result itself must eventually struggle with another result, creating a third mean between them. This is eventually refined into absolute freedom/a perfect state, given history goes on long enough.

It's almost mystical, to be honest.

Also, as others say, defining something also includes everything that it is "not". For instance, take a circle inside of a square. You could define the circle by itself, but it also must/can be defined by what it is not: a paper square with a circle cut out of it. The definition of a circle requires the idea of a border, a boundary, everything it isn't.

The reason Hegel is almost terrifying is because his philosophy "includes everything" and even can be seen as justifying the greatest evils, terrors, sins, etc., if they are counterbalanced with something else in response and lead ultimately to greater understanding.

>>9367379

this thread is about Hegel, not Fichte lol

>>9367401
>tfw the real truth lies in dialectically merging Hegel/Schopenhauer

>>9365558
If you claim to understand this man, then you have completely misunderstood him.

>>9367713
That's Derrida.

>>9367654
Hegel makes Fichte's consciousness not retarded. What do you think the certainty chapters of Phenomenology are about?