/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.16500531]

Can someone just clearly explain what Hegelian unity even fucking means?

[Anonymous No.16500544]

it's meaningless, anyone giving you an explanation is lying to himself

[Anonymous No.16500548]

chud bait

[Anonymous No.16500574]

>>16500531
Bump

[Anonymous No.16500636]

>>16500531
Bump

[Anonymous No.16500707]

>>16500531
Bump

[Anonymous No.16500830]

>>16500531
Purely because of socio-economic factors.
Now that africa can be lifted out of poverty through aid, they will contribute

[Anonymous No.16500835]

The cancellation of apparent logical contraries by their sublation in a higher more complete concept that contains them both.

Complicatedly related to idealist and mystical thought on the so-called coincidentia oppositorum, the coincidence of (apparent) opposites, in which either higher (often mystical) knowledge of some logically antithetical/dualistic/polar phenomenon reveals its underlying wholeness. Associated with Nicholas of Cusa but it is older than him and he is not perfectly representative of it.

[Anonymous No.16500862]

>>16500835
Anon I asked for a clear answer, wtf does any of that even mean?

[Anonymous No.16500885]

>>16500862
Let's say you have a computer and a baseball. They negate each other as objects, each one is not the other one. But they are unified by the higher fact of you having both of them.

[Anonymous No.16500903]

Sometimes I wonder if the "death of the author" phenomenon was a byproduct of the expansion of hire education to the masses, and was a way to cope with their inability to comprehend complex texts, lacking the prerequisite education in the classics.

[Anonymous No.16501004]

>>16500885
I still don’t really get it. So is unity just trying to find something that connects all objects in relationship to each other?

[Anonymous No.16501019]

>>16501004
Yes, but that's just any unity. Hegel really wants to focus on the things that tend to unify apparently contradictory objects or phenomena, thus showing that the supposed contradiction was at most apparent or transient.

[Anonymous No.16501334]

>>16501019
Do you have any examples of what two contradictory phenomena would be?

[Anonymous No.16501373]

>>16501334
Not that anon, but would a doctor and an illness be two such objects?

[Anonymous No.16501399]

>>16501019
What exactly is the point of Hegel’s unity? Why does he care so much about showing that contradictions are transient?

[Anonymous No.16501413]

>>16501334
>>16501373
One example Hegel himself uses is the parts of the life of a plant, the stem is contradicted by the bud, the bud by the flower, and the flower by the fruit. All of these things are, upon just seeing them, apparently entirely different things that cannot coexist with one another (a bud cannot be a flower) and are hence contrary, but their truth is actually grounded as one thing by all being that plant.

[Anonymous No.16501509]

>>16501399
To oversimplify, Hegel wants to do this because he is a holist. He thinks that the only complete description or understanding of an entity or phenomena is by referring it to how it functions as a part of something larger than it. Take a worker ant as an example, you can explain an ant by breaking it into pieces and analyzing all of its parts, but the facts you get from that would fail to explain that the worker ant is one that as a part of its colony brings food to the queen from the outside. Similarly, if you break the ant into pieces, you are probably actually explaining those parts of the ant's anatomy as having a purpose relative to the entirety of the ant.
In Hegel's time and to a large extent in ours most philosophers and intellectuals tended more towards thinking atomistically rather than holistically. This is roughly because of the success in physics and engineering in accounting for things by appealing to their parts. However, there are puzzles in both hard sciences and soft sciences (especially biology) in taking this atomistic form of reduction in that in every day life let alone in science you can come across propositions which are true on their own and true in their parts yet fail to hang together. Hegel's doctrine of unity is meant to outline roughly how those problems can be avoided, namely by appealing to a truth that "sublates" the contradiction. Sublate is an English translation of "Aufheben" which is a German word that means simultaneously "to cancel" but also "to lift up" or "preserve" and "transcend."
>TL;DR: The way that science since around the Enlightenment tried to explain things by investigating their parts left important philosophical, social, and scientific problems unanswered and appealing instead to unity or a greater whole can address those problems.
This is by no means a complete version of Hegel, and I am sure I got some such or another detail wrong. Yet as far as I understand it, this is the most reasonable way to view his project vis-a-vis holism.

[Anonymous No.16501696]

>>16501334
Sameness and Difference

[Anonymous No.16501746]

>>16501509
Thanks anon, you explained a lot. Good post. Here’s a you.

[Anonymous No.16502478]

>>16501413
STEMfags were right all along...

[Anonymous No.16502689]

>>16501509
So he's just talking about layers of abstraction here?

[Anonymous No.16502957]

>>16500531
“May Hegel's philosophy of absolute nonsense - three-fourths cash and one-fourth crazy fancies - continue to pass for unfathomable wisdom without anyone suggesting as an appropriate motto for his writings Shakespeare's words: "Such stuff as madmen tongue and brain not," or, as an emblematical vignette, the cuttle-fish with its ink-bag, creating a cloud of darkness around it to prevent people from seeing what it is, with the device: mea caligine tutus. - May each day bring us, as hitherto, new systems adapted for University purposes, entirely made up of words and phrases and in a learned jargon besides, which allows people to talk whole days without saying anything; and may these delights never be disturbed by the Arabian proverb: "I hear the clappering of the mill, but I see no flour." - For all this is in accordance with the age and must have its course.”

[Anonymous No.16503340]

>>16501413
So another way to explain Hegelian unity is a sort of gestalt of existence?

[Anonymous No.16503747]

>>16501509
I read about half of the Phenomenology (original language): to me it was just chapter after chapter of stating the obvious in an unnecessarily verbose way. This I've experienced with every philosopher after Kant: Heidegger, Hegel, Wittgenstein, Sloterdijk, ... Yes, they do formulate their thought in more or less systematic ways, which abviously require no little intellect. Still, they are just feeling their way through a dark hallway. When reading Aristotle and Plotinus for example, I truly *knew* I ascertained to something. My knowledge of the All had intensified. Ever since Kant, philosophy has been a major cope imho

[Anonymous No.16503757]

>>16500830
nu-academia trying to flip flop between "africa was never poor" and "now that africa is less poor they can stop eating mud-cakes and having six children for every mother"

[Anonymous No.16504542]

>>16502689
To reduce it abstraction would not be the right approach because Hegel would insist that the whole is real and concrete just in its instantiation as its various parts or moments.
>>16503340
A gestalt is forming a unity by focusing on a point in psychology of perception iirc--Hegel wouldn't endorse that metaphysically.
>>16503747
>it was just chapter after chapter of stating the obvious in an unnecessarily verbose way.
Have you ever considered that the observation just felt obvious to you only after suffering through the prose that has to force it there?

[Anonymous No.16504579]

>>16502957
Wait Im probably retarded but what I understand is that Schop was in favor of schizo babbling? or is that just his edgy doomer irony

[Anonymous No.16504602]

>>16500531
Based

[Anonymous No.16504714]

>>16500903
death of the author doesnt extend to non fiction. in fiction, obscurity and vagueness is intentional and adds to the beauty of the work/helps you have a more personal experience with the work

[Anonymous No.16504759]

>>16500830
History is over anon, what is there to contribute to? Did you even read Hegel?

[Anonymous No.16504856]

>>16504579
Schop is accusing Hegel of being a schizoid babbler and probably above all just a con-man. It's important to remember that Schopenhauer had a very (one-sided) personal and professional antipathy toward Hegel and also just philosophic divide from other German Idealists.

[Anonymous No.16505002]

>>16504542
Yes, but Aristotle's Metaphysica is far more obscure. When I finished it, re-read some chapters etc. I *got* it in a way one *gets* a mathematical problem. Hegel (and as I said, most post-Kantian phil) simply explicates statements, lumps them together with other statements and calls it a system. In the end there's no aim to any of it. Consider a poor musical album, where you feel track after track is lumped together without aim. Am I missing something? Is there something I'm not getting? Or is there simply so little value to philosophy after the CoPR?

[Anonymous No.16505062]

>>16504714
death of the author is a bad essay anyway.
academics only applauded barthes because he told them what they wanted to hear: that they get to interpret fiction in whatever way they like, so long as their ideas are "interesting", that they don't need to engage with texts, because projecting their own ideas is all anyone ever does anyway. The death of the author equals the death of the reader, all you're left with is masturbation in a solipsistic void of arbitrary signifiers.

[Anonymous No.16505068]

>>16504579
Schop disliked Hegel because Hegel's lectures drew throngs of hot, thirsty, nubile philosophy co-eds, and his failed to. Take his analysis of Hegelian philosophy as salt-posting.

[Anonymous No.16505083]

>>16500830
>Now that africa can be lifted out of poverty through aid

About that...