Tyler ’s Comments (group member since May 09, 2008)

Tyler ’s comments from the Philosophy group.

Nathan "N.R." wrote: "Tyler:

Thanks for the interrupt. Good to know we've got some lurkers. Feel free to join in our Hegelian dance if you like. My reading of Hegel shouldn't be taken as any kind of gospel because I..."

Thanks for your recommendations. It was the Miller translation I read.

Nathan "N.R." wrote: "Damn, Dora! We really ought to perhaps try to keep our posts shorter. But I think that that might be really rather very unlikely. This way no one else will interrupt our conversation. ; )"

Actually, I'm following the exchange, but I agree that there's no way to talk about this in short posts!

I may go on to Science of Logic sooner rather than later. It looks like a monster, but based on what I've been reading in the reviews and over here, it appears that by reading Phenomenology I've committed myself to reading Hegel's Logic.

... just in case you all want to know what I'll be doing for the rest of the year...

Hi Henry --

Philosophy refers to wisdom more so than knowledge. Science and philosophy are involved in different pursuits, with some overlap.

I agree that free will, if it exists, is under constraints, and that we in modern life may be less free in certain respects than our ancestors.

People tend to look at these external constraints and conclude that people don't have any free will whatever. I don't think that conclusion is justified. Even if people are capable of very little by way of free will, that's not the same as saying they have no free will at all.

Hi James --

And no, the fact that a portion of the brain lights up before the nerve ganglia receives an impulse to act is absolutely NOT scientific proof of free will or determinism.

I'm glad you pointed this out. There is a tendency to confuse science and philosophy on this point, and there's also an equivocation at work between "the brain" and "consciousness."

Hi Garrett --

Thanks for your post.

All the questions you raise are interesting ones. In fact, you may want to start threads on them when you have time to participate because I don't think anyone has posted on them yet, except for the free will issue.

If I understand your post correctly, one thing you asked about is the idea that "nothing exists." That idea is a proposition, not a concept. As such, it doesn't contradict itself. But since a proposition is composed of concepts, you might look closer at what we mean by the concept of "existence" and the concept of "nothingness" in order look more critically at the proposition.

Anyhow, welcome to the group. I hope you find this a profitable space for thinking. And again, feel free to start a topic if you don't see it being discussed yet.

Hi Nathan --

Yes, I thought you might be referring to the collapse rather than the form.

More often than one might imagine, a person observing me can adduce facts about my state of consciousness better than I can through introspection. Throughout Phenomenology, as you pointed out, we're privileged observers, along with Hegel, of consciousness.

So despite the confusion (I noticed this too) I'd say that if Hegel is writing from the standpoint of an observer, he must be referring to the collapse itself, the one thing the conscious subject is unlikely to comprehend about itself. If the reference were to each particular form the subject could potentially comprehend it without the help of a third party and I think the text would be more explicit that that was the case.

And if it is the collapse, then I need to trace out its implications better than I've been able to do so far. The book lends itself to a considerable degree of contemplation.

Hi Nathan --

In the contradiction between the Object and its concept that particular form of consciousness collapses, which is its truth.

I'm not clear about this part. Are you saying that each particular form of consciousness is the truth of that consciousness, but that the form subsequently collapses?

It is said that the 20th century was the century of the Phenomenology and that the 21st will be that of the Logic.

What an interesting possibility!

Hi Nathan --

Thank you for your comments -- they're all very informative. I distinguished static and dynamic concepts to point out that Hegel was, from my reading, the first to think of concepts as having what I'd call a temporal aspect, and Hegel located the "constant in the change" by developing this point.

I had at first thought the truth content would be borne by the whole, but somewhere in my reading Hegel referred explicitly to the movements as the several bearers of the truth, so it wasn't clear if he meant they were the only ones.

I think I would need to move on to Hegel's Logic to understand his philosophy better. I'm glad to have finally read Phenomenology because so much of the reading I do refers in one way or another to something Hegel said.

I finished Phenomenology only a short time ago. Following a hint in the Miller translation, I read Hegel's preface last, so I ran into the technical language first.

The terminology took a while for me to get used to, and the changes taking place in the evolution of a concept were hard to keep track of.

What I found interesting was Hegel's general effort to bring us to the idea of an Absolute or a World Spirit by means of individual consciousnesses. This for me was the most interesting aspect of Hegel's description of how consciousness unfolds.

But I'm also struck by the contrast between a static and a dynamic concept. If the experience of reading Hegel takes on a "psychedelic" feel, I wonder if this is the reason. From what I can tell, the consciousness that reflects upon itself draws on its very dynamism to take that step.

My favorite part by far is the preface, which I read last. If "picture thinking" takes on added significance with Hegel, it is there. Have you read the preface yet, or are you saving it for the end? The metaphor of the Bacchanal is astonishingly vivid. I'd love to know what other people think about it and the preface in general.

One thing still confuses me: What finally bears the truth of the concept? Is it the whole, or the several movements, or maybe both together?

A question: If the constant in all this is change, then why does Hegel conclude with the Absolute, or the World Spirit? In other words, is the Absolute itself a static or a dynamic discovery?

I think the question goes well on this thread because it takes us to the question of what Plato's arguments were grounded in, and surely that wasn't cynicism.

I've read The Prince, too, but it seemed more like pragmatism than any real after-the-fact attempt to justify treachery. That book, to be sure, has its fans today, and their numbers may be on the increase. I think they mistake the realpolitik of Machiavelli for sound reasoning. I don't think it is.

Your question is interesting. Come to think of it, I wonder why Nemo reached back toward Plato in response to reading Machiavelli, rather than forward to some more modern philosophy. Was it simply because that's where Machiavelli pointed?

Plato does offer some version of the Good in the form of an Idea to counteract cynicism. I recall that the Sophists were active around that time, and Socrates pointed out the flaws in their reasoning. If I remember sophistry well enough, I think it, too, contained an element of cynicism. In any case, Machiavelli's description of Plato's morality (in the first post) is a fair characterization of Plato.

Essentially, we're trying to establish a reason people should be moral, or good, or aspire to the Good. The element of moral nihilism abounding in the world would have it that establishing morality just isn't possible -- and there would be the opening for cynicism in human relations.

Here's Machiavelli, quoted in the first post:

...a man who wishes to act entirely up to his professions of virtue soon meets with what destroys him among so much that is evil.

In Plato's writings, did he succeed in establishing morality in something non-subjective, as Nemo was hoping to find? Machiavelli says no. Yet is this conclusion of Machiavelli's even sound? What could be answered to Machiavelli in Plato's defense? There's the issue

I'm not familiar with Eastern philosophies, but what you're saying sounds close in many ways to Hegel, except that, for Hegel, Time is the agent of the necessary change that validates philosophical conceputualization. I've recently been reading Phenomenology of Spirit.

It is Hegel's position, as you've written, that reality is mind dependent. In a break from the more theologically oriented idealisms, he further expounded what you've said here on your own, that the mind that constucts our world is our own, not an external one.

I think you might be in disagreement with Hegel over the status of time and space, and perhaps the implications of a mind-over-matter outlook. But I think you might like the overall thrust of Hegelian idealism. Either way, you have interesting ideas in your post.

If this is so then it must follow that we are the universe witnessing itself.

It does not follow. Even if we (by which I take it you mean human consciousnesses) are part of the universe, we're not all of it. There is no equivalence.

From a logical standpoint, the idea that we are able to witness this universe isn't directly relevant to the conclusion you're making. That conclusion might be true or false regardless of whether we witness it or not.

What does follow is that if we're part of the universe, we're not separate from it. As an argument, that's valid. Given that, the analogy with the tree is appropriate.

You're right to distinguish between something we can know "certainly" and something we know absolutely, or "with necessity." I'm sure you will be able to find examples of both for your essay.

Since "knowing" entails a mental grasp of reality, a world of appearances we cannot know would make our world unreal. Sometimes people propose such things, conceding how odd or unlikely they might be.

Because we live in a contingent reality I cannot say with absolute certaintly that a world of unknowable appearances is impossible. That means it's logically possible.

But if someone wants to bring into a discussion an extraordinary but logically possible scenario, I would want to know why they're holding the logical possibility open. Sometimes they might be using it to make or support some other argument or line of reasoning, but if they're raising a logical possibility just for the sake of raising it, that doesn't place any obligation on the rest of us to consider it. Millions of logical possibilies cannot be ruled out, but neither do they demand our attention.

What do "metaphysical" and "certainty" mean, and what does it mean "to know"? It's definitions that make what looks like an easy question a hard one.

Kant establishes that we can know the appearance of something, if not the thing in its entirety. The "thing" is some aspect of reality, so there's your metaphysical tie-in. We accept reality because rejecting it would entail a contradiction, so we can know with certainty (not absolutely, but not tentatively, either) the phenomenal appearance of the thing which is the object of our apperception.

Therefore, we can be certain of the phenomenal appearance to us of any thing.

Hi Anthony, and welcome to the group. The Concept of Mind is a book I've been reading that also takes up the question of dualism, but more in relation to modern Western philosophers such as Descartes.

Welcome to the group, Arkar. I like Nietzsche, too, but I haven't read much of him yet. Sorcha suggested Beyond Good and Evil, which I think I'll read as my next Nietzsche.

Philosophy is all about the search for truth, and that inherently involves some (but not too much!) skepticism. People commonly avoid philosophy because they don't want to read things they don't like, but a very few of us humans come to feel they must find out the truth, no matter what. Perhaps that's part of a mental "will to power."

I like ethics (and morality, too). It's all about humans, and in the end what other reason do we have for wanting to study philosophy?

Economics and politics I didn't at first like, but I have made myself read philosophies about both subjects because they are essential ingredients to human well being. Now I like those subjects better. I recently read a remark that you don't have to participate in the political system itself in order to be politically active. I find that a thought-provoking observation.

Nice to hear from you, Dereck. Welcome to the group.

Beyond Good and Evil it shall be, then!

Hi Sorcha --

Well, that's two votes for Wittgenstein and Nietzsche in the past few days. I have a question for you and Naxa: I've only read Thus Spoke Zarathustra so far. Which book by Nietzsche would be good to follow that up with?

I don't know anything about paraconsistent logic and dialetheism. I hope you'll have time to post about those subjects at some point. For now, welcome to the forum.

Hi Naxa --

Welcome to the group. The philosophers you refer to are an eclectic bunch, so your overall philosophy must be interesting. Keep reading. Other philosophers introduce new ideas and add new layers to one's understanding. That's been my experience.

Several discussion threads involve some of these philosophers or their ideas. You can also add a thread of your own if something you'd like to discuss isn't yet posted.