...It's all because of the leftists honestly.
[The characteristic element of Hegel's philosophy as compared to the orientalism of the philosophy of identity is difference.]
Hegel's spirit is logical, determinate, and—I would like to say—entomological; in other words, Hegel's is a spirit that finds its appropriate dwelling in a body with numerous protruding members and with deep fissures and sections.
Hegel determines and represents only the most striking differences of various religions, philosophies, times, and peoples, and in a progressive series of stages, but he ignores all that is common and identical in all of them.
[To be sure, the last stage of development is always the totality that includes in itself the other stages, but since it itself is a definite temporal existence and hence bears the character of particularity, it cannot incorporate into itself other existences without sucking out the very marrow of their independent lives and without robbing them of the meaning which they can have only in complete freedom.]
Granted, nature has made man the master of animals, but it has given him not only hands to tame animals but also eyes and ears to admire them.
[Nature always combines the monarchical tendency of time with the liberalism of space.]
Do not the forsaken and the rejected find a substitute for the ingratitude, scheming, and unfaithfulness of their fellow human beings in the faithfulness of the animal?
Here, totality or the absoluteness of a particular historical phenomenon or existence is vindicated as predicate, thus reducing the stages of development as independent entities only to a historical meaning; although living, they continue to exist as nothing more than shadows or moments, nothing more than homeopathic drops on the level of the absolute.
But however sagacious the author is otherwise, he proceeds from the very outset uncritically in so far as he does not pose the question: [Is it at all possible that a species realizes itself in one individual, art as such in one artist, and philosophy as such in one philosopher?]
Hence, if the question is not raised, it is quietly taken for granted that there must and does exist an aesthetic or speculative Dalai Lama, an aesthetic or speculative transubstantiation, and an aesthetic or speculative Day of Judgement. It is just this presupposition, however, that contradicts reason.
It is true that the spirit or consciousness is species existing as species,
but, no matter how universal, the individual and his head—the organ of the spirit—are always designated by a definite kind of nose, whether pointed or snub, fine or gross, long or short, straight or bent. Whatever enters into time and space must also subordinate itself to the laws of time and space. The god of limitation stands guard at the entrance to the world. Self limitation is the condition of entry. Whatever becomes real, becomes so only as something determined. [The incarnation of the species with all its plenitude into one individuality would be an absolute miracle, a violent suspension of all the laws and principles of reality; it would, indeed, be the end of the world.]
Incarnation and history are absolutely incompatible; when diety itself enters into history, history ceases to exist.
[The manifestation of the deity, which is only a report, a narration for other later times—and hence only an object of imagination and recollection—has lost the mark of divinity, and relinquishing its miraculous and extraordinary status, it has placed itself on an equal footing with the other, ordinary phenomena of history in as much as it is itself reproduced in later times in a natural way. The moment it becomes an object of narration, it ceases to be a miracle. It is therefore not without reason that peolpe say that time betrays all secrets.]
[If Hegelian philosophy were the absolute reality of the idea of philosophy, then the immobility of reason in the Hegelian philosophy must necessarily result in the immobility of time; for if time still sadly moved along as if nothing had happened, then the Hegelian philosophy would unavoidably forfeit its attribute of absoluteness.]
Let us put ourselves for a few moments in future centuries! Will not the Hegelian philosophy then be chronologically a foreign and transmitted philosophy to us? Will it be possible for us then to regard a philosophy from other times, a philosophy of the past as our contemporary philosophy? [How else do philosophies pass if it is not because men and epochs pass and posterity wants to live not by the heritage of its ancestors but by the riches acquired by itself?]
But is it not rational, is it not the duty and task of the thinking man to anticipate through reason the necessary and unavoidable consequences of time, to know in advance from the nature of things what will automatically result from the nature of time?
Every philosophy originates, therefore, as a manifestation of its time; its origin presupposes its historical time.
Hegel starts from Being; i.e., the notion of Being or abstract Being. Why should I not be able to start from Being itself; i.e., real Being?
I certainly do not begin to think just at the point when I put my thoughts on paper. I already know how the subject matter of my thinking would develop. I presupposed something because I know that what I presuppose would justify itself through itself.
What is the first principle? Is this connection not proved by the fact that the method of Hegel—disregarding, of course, the difference of content which also becomes the difference of form—is essentially, or at least generally, the method of Fichte? Is this not also the course described by the Theory of Science that that which is at first for us is in the end also for itself, that therefore the end returns to the beginning, and that the course taken by philosophical science is a circle?
And yet, systematic thought is by no means the same as thought as such, or essential thought; it is only self-presenting thought.
Only during the course of the movement of presentation does that from which I start come to determine and manifest itself. Hence, progression is at the same time (retrogression)—I return whence I started. In retrogression I retract progression; i.e., temporalization of thought: I restore the lost identity. But the first principle to which I return is no longer the initial, indeterminate, and unproved first principle; it is now mediated and therefore no longer the same or, even granting that it is the same, no longer in the same form.
In the end, the Logic leads us, therefore, back to ourselves, i.e., to our inner act of cognition;
No one else can think for me; only through myself do I convince myself of the truth of a thought.
To bestow understanding does not lie in the power of philosophy, for understanding is presupposed by it; philosophy only shapes my understanding.
The philosopher produces in me only awareness of what I can know; he fastens on to my mental ability.
To demonstrate is to show that what I am saying is true, is to lead expressed thought back to its source. The meaning of demonstration cannot, therefore, be grasped without reference to the meaning of language. ... Now, the element in which the word exists is air, the most spiritual and general medium of life. A demonstration has its ground only in the mediating activity of thought for others. Whenever I wish to prove something, I do so for others.
If I am to write and, indeed, write well and in a fundamental way, then I must doubt that the others know what I know, or at least that they know it in the same way as I do.
Demonstration is therefore not a mediation through the medium of language between thought, in so far as it is my thought, and the thought of another person, in so far as it is his thought ... nor is it a mediation of I
and You
to know the identity of reason, nor, again, a mediation through which I verify that my thought is not mine, but is rather thought in and for itself so that it can just as well be mine as that of someone else.
It is of course true that man can be self-sufficient because he knows himself to be a whole, because he distinguishes himself from himself, and because he can be the other to himself; man speaks to and converses with himself, and because he knows that his thought would not be his own if it were also not—at least as a possibility—the thought of others.
In reality, we are not indifferent; the urge to communicate is a fundamental urge—the urge for truth. We become conscious and certain of truth only through the other, even if not through this or that accidental other. That which belongs neither to me nor exclusively to to you, but is common to all.
The thought in which I
and You
are united is a true thought. This unification is the confirmation, sign, and affirmation of truth only because it is itself already truth. That which unites is true and good.
To express thoughts is to teach; but to teach is to demonstrate the truth of that which is taught. This means that demonstrating is not just a relationship of the thinker to himself or of a thought that is imprisoned within itself to itself, but the relationship of the thinker to others. [Hence, the forms of demonstration and inference cannot be the forms of reason as such, i.e., forms of an inner act of thought and cognition. They are only forms of communication, modes of expression, representations, conceptions; in short, forms in which thought manifests itself.]
In short, reason lies in the fact that we express and articulate our thoughts in thought itself. Demonstrating is therefore only the means through which I strip my thought of the form of mine-ness
so that the other person may recognize it as his own. Demonstrating would be senseless if it were not also communicating.
...otherwise the philosopher could really produce philosophers, something which so far no one has succeeded in achieving.
Self-constituting and systematic philosophy is dramatic and theatrical philosophy as opposed to the poetry of introspective material thought.
Every system is only an expression or image of reason, and hence only an object of reason, an object which reason—a living power that procreates itself in new thinking beings—distinguishes from itself and posits as an object of criticism.
All presentation, all demonstration—and the presentation of thought is demonstration—has, according to its original determination—and that is all that matters to us—the cognitive activity of the other person as its ultimate aim.
The presentation of philosophy must itself be philosophical—the demand for the identity of form and content finds herein its justification.
The presentation is, of course, systematic to the extent to which it is philosophical. By virtue of being so, the presentation comes to have a value in and for itself. For that reason the systematizer is an artist—the history of philosophical system is the picture gallery of reason.
The system was supposed to be, as it were, reason itself; all immediate activity was to dissolve itself completely in mediated activity, and the presentation of philosophy was not to presuppose anything, that is, nothing was to be left over in us and nothing within us—a complete emptying of ourselves.
[The presentation is that which is mediated in and for itself; what is primary is therefore never immediate even within the presentation, but only posited, dependent, and mediated, in that it is determined by the determinations of thought whose certainty is self-dependent and which are prior to and independent of a philosophy presenting and unfolding itself in time.]
Being, whence the Logic proceeds, presupposes on the one hand the Phenomenology, and on the other hand, the Absolute Idea. Being (that which is primary and indeterminate) is revoked in the end as it turns out that it is not the true starting point. But does this not again make a Phenomenology out of the Logic? And being only a phenomenological starting point?
...But just as the notion of man from which you have excluded the specific difference of man is not a notion of man, but rather of a fabricated entity as, for example, the Platonic man of Diogenes, so the notion of being from which you have exluded the content of being is no longer the notion of being.
Therefore, how can the Logic, or any particular philosophy at all, reveal truth and reality if it begins by contradicting sensuous reality and its understanding without resolving this contradiction? That it can prove itself to be true is not a matter of doubt; this, however, is not the question.
Dialectics is not a monologue that speculation carries on with itself, but a dialogue between speculation and empirical reality. A thinker is a dialectician only in so far as he is his own opponent.
The antithesis of being—in general and as regarded by the Logic—is not nothingness, but sensuous and concrete being.
All modern philosophies, however, begin only with themselves and not with what is in opposition to them. They presuppose philosophy; that is, what they understand by philosophy to be the immediate truth. [They understand by mediation only elucidation, as in the case of Fichte, or development, as in the case of Hegel.]
Hegel polemicized against the Absolute of Schelling; he thought it lacked the moment of reflection, apprehension, and negativity. In other words, he imbued the Absolute Identity with Spirit, introduced determinations into it, and fructified its womb with the semen of the Notion.
...That the Absolute existed was beyond all doubt. All it needed was to prove itself and be known as such. In this way it becomes a result and an object of the mediating Notion; that is, a scientific
truth and not merely an assurance given by intellectual intuition.
What Hegel premises as stages and constituent parts of mediation, he thinks are determined by the Absolute Idea. Hegel does not step outside the Idea, nor does he forget it.
The externalization of the Idea is, so to speak, only a dissembling; it is only a pretense and nothing serious—the Idea is just playing a game. The conclusive proof is the beginning of the Logic, whose beginning is to be taken as the beginning of philosophy as such. That the starting point is being is only a formalism, for being is here not the true starting point, nor truly Primary. The starting point could just as well be the Absolute Idea because it was already a certainty, an immediate truth for Hegel before he wrote the Logic; i.e., before he gave a scientific form of expression to his logical ideas. The Absolute Idea—the Idea of the Absolute—is its own indubitable certainty as the Absolute Truth. It posits itself in advance as true; that which the Idea posits as the other, again presupposes the Idea according to its essence. In this way, the proof remains only a formal one. To Hegel, the thinker, the Absolute Idea was absolute certainty, but to Hegel, the author, it was formal uncertainty.