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23rd September 2021 at 3:17pm
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Reading List

23rd September 2021 at 4:23pm
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A curated reading list for the purpose of escaping your context. The overarching theme with the list is media studies and process philosophy because they're particularly suited to rapidly and radically altering the experience of ‘self’.

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the phenomenology of spirit

30th September 2021 at 7:14pm
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Preface

1

The preface famously begins with a refusal to write the customary sort of preface explaining the conclusions of the book because to do so would be incompatible with philosophy. This upsets our expectations for a preface but tells us a lot about what Hegel thinks is important. It also transforms the preface into a microcosm of the larger method.

2

Hegel invites the reader to think of philosophy like the lifecycle of a plant.

As the opposition between the true and the false becomes firmly fixed for opinion,1 opinion tends to expect either assent or contradiction in response to a current philosophical system, and to see in any comment on such a system only the one or the other. Opinion does not comprehend the diversity of philosophical systems as the progressive unfolding of the truth; rather it sees in the diversity only contradiction. The bud disappears when the blossom bursts forth, and one could say that the bud is refuted by the blossom; similarly, when the fruit appears, the blossom is declared to be a false Being-there2 of the plant, and the fruit replaces the blossom as the truth of the plant. These forms are not only different, they also supplant one another as mutually incompatible. Yet at the same time their fluid nature makes them moments of the organic unity, in which they not only do not conflict, but each is as necessary as the other; and this shared necessity alone constitutes the life of the whole.

3

The subject-matter of a philosophical work is adequately treated only when the result is paired with the process of arriving at that result. Although it can feel like a concern with what is essential, the demand for a preface and the satisfaction of that demand are a preoccupation with the thought-process, with existing opinion, etc. An adequate treatment of the subject requires crossing the barrier from assessing the conclusions to thinking with the method and assessing the entire process. To do otherwise is like confusing the flower for the reality of a plant. With philosophy, the entire movement from start to finish must be accounted for.

5

The true shape in which truth exists can only be the scientific system of truth. To help bring philosophy closer to the form of science—to the goal of its being able to give up the name of love of knowledge and become actual knowledge1—that is what I have set out to do. The inner necessity that knowledge should be science lies in its nature, and the only satisfactory explanation of this is the presentation of philosophy itself. But the external necessity, insofar as it is conceived in a general way, leaving aside contingencies of the person and individual motives, is the same as the inner necessity, in the shape, that is, in which time represents the Being-there of its moments. To show that the time is ripe for the elevation of philosophy to a science—this would therefore be the only true justification of the attempts that have this aim, because this would demonstrate the necessity of the aim, because it would indeed at the same time fulfil this very aim.