Shiko — say a bit more about Hegel’s philosophy..

Moshe, wow!!!

First time we’ve reached an area you don’t know and don’t have an opinion on!

Blessed are You… who has kept us alive!

Look — I’ll tell you: I’m one of those who believe with complete faith that everything is written in the Torah. So I’m always looking for the answer in the Torah, and not everything really comes from my own mind. I just copy from the Torah, add a little connective filler, and write an answer. Let’s say I have a Torah insight. The kind of thing the Sages meant by: “If you labored and found, believe it.” Do you believe?
And when I don’t find it, then I ask, like here — I didn’t understand what Hegel’s philosophy is in order to copy an answer from the Hebrew Bible.
Hobbes, what exactly were you getting out of that message you wrote? Were you praising me? Mocking my intelligence? Jealous? Or just taking a jab? Are you holding a grudge against me?

Moshe,
I’m not an expert on Hegel, and even so I’ll try to present his view — which is not at all simple — in a nutshell. To do that, I’ll contrast it with two competing approaches: one is classical philosophy, represented here by Rabbi Michi, and the second is that of the Nazi philosopher Heidegger.
I’ll try to present the approaches through the question: who is the subject of reason? In grammar we know that every sentence has a subject and a predicate. That idea is also a philosophical one, first presented by Socrates in Plato’s dialogues. In a linguistics course I once took in teacher training at the yeshiva (the only course I actually attended), they argued that the subject is the given and the predicate is the new element. One of the questions in philosophy is: who is the subject whose predicate is reason? Or in other words, what is the given upon which reason operates?
Classical philosophy (Rabbi Michi) — the individual human being. Each person bears reason within himself. To do that, he has to accept the law of non-contradiction. Reason, as Plato presented it, is a kind of movement that does not tolerate contradictions. If there is a contradiction, the claim collapses and must be restarted elsewhere. The philosopher’s role is to take claims and check that they contain no contradictions. But the claims are not his; they belong to the public. People raise claims and the philosopher checks their validity (in fact, a large part of the posts on this site are devoted to that task).
Hegel — Spirit (Geist). According to Hegel, the active factor is not the human being but what he calls Spirit. Human beings are only objects of Spirit, through whom it exercises reason. Since Spirit is a single subject, its movement is self-movement. It is impossible to raise a claim and then have another person come and examine it. Spirit has to examine its own claim by itself. How does Spirit do this? By what Hegel called dialectic. First there is a thesis. Then an antithesis appears. And finally a synthesis appears between the thesis and the antithesis (Yirmiyahu Yovel translated the process as “positing-sublating,” and anyone who wants can look at his introduction to The Preface to the Phenomenology of Spirit, which he also translated). So for example, Parmenides gave a thesis: “Being is, and non-being is not,” and therefore all change in reality is ultimately an illusion (Zeno’s paradoxes were meant to make this idea clear to the common people). But in reality there is change, so Heraclitus came and gave an antithesis to Parmenides and argued that “everything flows.” Then Plato came and gave a synthesis between Parmenides and Heraclitus through the idea of the Forms (change stems from the embodiment of the Forms). The process is not only in philosophy. Ancient paganism gave a thesis — everything is sensual. Judaism gave an antithesis — God is abstract. Christianity gave a synthesis — an abstract God embodied in flesh. And so on and so on. The fact that Spirit examines itself turns philosophy into something historical, and therefore historicist. There are theses, there are antitheses, and there are syntheses. The process must continue as long as Spirit is not self-aware. In the modern age, Spirit becomes aware of itself and therefore free. The expression of its freedom is found in the rise of liberty in the modern state, where people are free subjects ruling themselves. And so history reached its endpoint (and then came a twist in the plot: history still hadn’t ended, and everything goes back to chaos).
Heidegger — language. According to Heidegger, the subject of reason — or of history, in Hegel’s sense — is not Spirit but language. Language is what acts upon itself and thereby creates history. But each language has its own history. The history of the Germans, and therefore German philosophy, is not like the history of the English, and therefore English philosophy; and both are unlike the history of the Greeks, and therefore Greek philosophy. Every people and every language has internal assumptions that are unintelligible to other languages and other peoples, and therefore only they can understand themselves and develop themselves. If the classical philosopher ignores language and focuses on the argument (as Rabbi Michi does all the time), Heidegger’s philosophy focuses solely on language and its dictates. The claim that there is a universal reason in the classical or even Hegelian style is an illusion. As many languages as there are, so many forms of reason there are, and each invites its own kind of reflection. Only the Jews have no language of their own (and thus, to distinguish between the impure and the pure, that was also the Satmar Rebbe’s view), and therefore their existence is an unnatural anomaly, for whose treatment the Führer was chosen. Postmodernism is a development of Heidegger’s claim into additional areas through what is called identity politics.
So much for a very superficial presentation of the different approaches. If you notice, the Hegelian and postmodernist approaches are analytical, as Rabbi Michi called it in his book Two Carts and a Hot-Air Balloon. They assume that one cannot make claims about reality, but only clarify the self-assumptions of the existing subject, each according to its own method — Spirit in Hegel, language in Heidegger. By contrast, both Rabbi Michi and Hegel believe in reason and in the law of non-contradiction at one level or another. In Heidegger there is no such requirement. Every language has its own internal assumptions, which do not arrive at a common denominator with other languages. Analytical approaches carry another price. If you assume that the subject is not the ordinary person with his own reason, but entirely different factors such as economic class (Marx), the nation (Heidegger), society (Foucault), faith / belief (Rabbi Kook), then you will have no reason to argue and persuade other people. After all, they merely represent some entirely different factor. Better to topple the competing factor than to persuade other people. From here comes the loss of respect that the left, which adopted analytical approaches, shows toward other people — leading to a loss of self-respect as well (for what kind of respectable person fails to respect others?). The more the phenomenon of identity politics expands, the more the ability to reach the kind of rational discussion Rabbi Michi dreams of declines.
Hope that helped — and this really was just in a nutshell.

Thank you,
Q. One of the questions in philosophy is: who is the subject whose predicate is reason, or in other words, what is the given upon which reason operates?
A. It’s easy enough to prove that Rabbi Michi is right, because if we place a person somewhere where there is no spirit, would reason then not function? In any case, it’s enough to understand that reason would function, because there’s no situation where a person exists and there’s no air near him, since he needs oxygen to breathe. And it’s obvious that the subject is the human being, or any other living creature, because animals clearly have wisdom of their own that they need, and it exists naturally within them.

If you want to stop a person’s wisdom/reason (the additional kind), take away his teacher or the book from which he acquires wisdom/reason.

Reason is in the brain, and with our death everything disappears, “and the wise shall shine like the brightness of the firmament, and those who lead the many to righteousness like the stars.”

“Be wise and know Me” — every person, the more Torah he studies and the more commandments he keeps, rises in his level of reason.

I don’t accept the approach that language is what makes it possible to advance a certain community. In a certain sense, there’s no connection. It all depends on the brain. Not on language. After all, there’s BASIC and there’s C++ and there’s this and that and that…

Spirit here is understood as an auxiliary assumption. You can understand it as God, but it’s not exactly God (a rational entity that created the world). It’s more fitting to see it as a process in which reason is realized in reality. Humanity stops being operated blindly and becomes conscious of its rational form. Spirit, then, is not the individual members of humanity but humanity as a whole. If you take away someone’s teacher or the book from which he acquires reason, you detach him from the whole and thereby prevent him from participating in this process of creating collective reason.

You wrote, “Reason is in the brain, and with our death everything disappears” — does that mean you do not believe in a World to Come of souls?

There are cases of wolf-children — children who somehow ended up in the wild and grew up there among wolves. From what I’ve read, they never managed to acquire language and remained at the mental level of wild animals. Some of them died young. From these cases one can see the priority of language over reason. Reason does not exist outside language and then acquire language as a communication tool. Language exists, and reason is one of language’s tools (alongside art, communication, and more). But language is not some universal matter identical among all human beings. There are different languages and different language families (Semitic, Indo-European, Mongolic, Sudanese, and so on). And every language places different demands on its speakers, expressing different conceptions of reality. In Hebrew we have masculine and feminine. Ostensibly God is neither male nor female. In practice, He is male. Hebrew is a verb-based language in which the root of being is absent (the Tetragrammaton / the Name of Being). Western philosophy revolves entirely around this root in a way that makes translating Western philosophy into Hebrew a kind of nightmare for translators (see Dori Manor’s introduction to Descartes’ Meditations). My impression from this site is that Rabbi Michi treats language as a transparent matter (and that is certainly true of classical philosophers), but that is not clear at all. Computer languages developed following Noam Chomsky’s attempt to characterize the basic structure of languages. That attempt is accepted by some linguists (the generativists) but not by all. But it’s clear that their structure is extremely basic and nowhere near the capacities of human languages.

Reason is in the brain, brother. I do believe in a World to Come of souls — that’s the whole beauty of it. The soul takes in whatever you give it, and in contrast to the body, which returns to the earth, the intellectual soul — which is the soul — acquires and inherits everything the brain knew. And with that it moves onward. They didn’t call it the intellectual soul for nothing…
Just because you write “creation of collective reason” doesn’t mean there isn’t also the creation of personal, private reason. Reason doesn’t change because it’s created in quantity. It’s created because it’s acquired. What kind of creation of collective reason can you demonstrate for me?

If I take a dog and raise it among rational human beings, do you think it will grow up to the mental level of a human being?

I think all your genius has scrambled your mind. Just kidding… now seriously, private rationally speaking:

Did you notice this is kind of a ridiculous discussion?

You asked for Hegel to be presented to you. I presented him.

You’re not the first to think Hegel is ridiculous, and probably not the last. And yet, what at first glance seems illogical can take on a different flavor at another time and in another place. In any case, I’ll note that among the secular left (and some of the secular right, if there is such a thing), Hegel is a first principle.

Hegel is not a first principle among the secular left.
He is accepted across the board (in a materialist version) only among the Marxist left.

A.B.,
See here: http://www.textologia.net/?p=8032
The whole idea of praxis, activism, and movements for social change begins with Hegel and with Hegel’s idea that reason is realized in history.

Y.D., I didn’t see in the link what you’re claiming.
In any case, you don’t need Hegel in order to be an activist and strive for social change, and nowadays there is hardly any Hegelianism in thought and ideology.

You don’t need Hegel. You can also be a Chabadnik. But what both sides share is that ideas shouldn’t remain abstract; they need to be realized in reality. From there the road to activism is short.