#absolute idealism

[theoptia]

Hegel’s logic deals with the development of God's thinking, prior to the creation of the world, and is called heavenly logic. However, unlike formal logic, it does not merely deal with the formal laws of thought. Although it holds itself to be the development of God's thinking, it attempts to deal with the most universal definitions and laws of reality.

[the-funtime-autocrat]

Consciousness knows and comprehends only what falls within its experience; for what is contained in this is nothing but spiritual substance, and this, too, as object of the self. But Spirit becomes object because it is just this movement of becoming an other to itself, i.e. becoming an object to itself, and of suspending this otherness. And experience is the name we give to just this movement, in which the immediate, the unexpected, i.e. the abstract, whether it be sensuous (but still unsensed) being, or only thought of as simple, becomes alienated from itself and then returns to itself from this alienation, and is then revealed for the first time in its actuality and truth, just as it then has become a property of consciousness also.

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, “The Phenomenology of Spirit” (1807).

[anaxerneas]

"William James and Josiah Royce, near James's country home in Chocorua, New Hampshire in September 1903. James's daughter Peggy took the picture. On hearing the camera click, James cried out: 'Royce, you're being photographed! Look out! I say Damn the Absolute!'"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_James

[gegen-kapital-und-nation]

Hope in my Satisfaction by Following Through of Carnal Desire: Yes

Faith in an afterlife where an omnipresent being rules the universe, whereby I will have my “true” desires revealed to me and realised: No

[the-funtime-autocrat]

To be human, man must act not for the sake of subjugating a thing, but for the sake of subjugating another desire (for the thing). The man who desires a thing humanly acts not so much to possess the thing as to make another recognize his right--as will be said later--to that thing, to make another recognize him as the owner of the thing. And he does this--in the final analysis--in order to make the other recognize his superiority over the other.

Alexandre Kojève, “Introduction To The Reading Of Hegel” (1947).

[itsmightyfunny]

[itsmightyfunny]

Nevertheless, for both Kant and Hegel there is a close bond between thought and Being to the extent that both take the world of beings to be available in principle for our intelligibility. Hegel goes so far as to think that Being itself is intelligible. As Martin Heidegger aptly puts it in a comment on Hegel’s Logic in Pathmarks, for Hegel the 'movement of principles circling within themselves' is 'itself the absoluteness of Being.' While he does argue that this idea of the system of principles as Being originates in Kant, Heidegger shows that for Kant, contrary to Hegel, Being can be addressed or determined only to the extent that a necessary distinction between possibility and actuality is made: our understanding can only 'think an object in its possibility” (emphasis added). To be able to know the object “in its actuality' we need to be affected through the senses. Being is determinable only 'from positing [vom Setzen her] as [an] act of human subjectivity.' In Hegel, this limitation is lifted. Being’s intelligibility is no longer relativized to merely human subjects. Hegel in fact radicalizes Kant’s insight into the necessary reciprocal relation between thought and object by identifying the absolute identity that lies at the heart of this reciprocal relation, Kant’s productive imagination, as Being itself—not in any pre-critical, substantivist sense, but in the sense of Being as reason, as pure intelligibility.

[footnotes-2-plato]

Audio of my Whitehead Conference presentation at Munich School of Philosophy

This talk was delivered on July 29th, 2023 at 4:30pm at the Munich School of Philosophy. Thanks to Godehard Brüntrup for chairing the session. You can find the paper I am summarizing here: “Whitehead’s Philosophy of Organism: Turning Idealism Inside Out“

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