Thank you😊

The end of the book and the analysis are really fascinating. It seems there is some connection between absolute ethical life already having been achieved and the Absolute Idea (or Absolute Knowledge?) Having already been achieved? ... which also brings up the question of what is the difference between Absolute Knowledge at the end of POS and the Idea at the end of the Logic. I'm just finishing the Essence section of POS about to start book 3 on the Concept so I'm looking forward to it

Thank you!! The concept of finitude reminds me of what Heidegger will say about our being towards death

Great video. I am reading the SoL this summer and I appreciate your thoughts alongside mine. I truly believe Hegel is a process we have to undergo for ourselves. So I love your approach

Great lecture.

Excellent.

I'm not sure if nihilism is the opposite of rationalism, I always thought that rationalism eventually leads to some form of nihilism.

Hey guys, thank you for taking our comments, so cool of you. I think me and digetic have almost the same point, except that im criticizing not just Houlgate but Hegel himself. What I am saying is as far as I can tell there is no logical movement, transition or vanishing of being into nothing because they’re the exact same thing. In other words the “becoming” is illusory, or just a semantic shift between different names of the same thing. Kind of like how there is no becoming of water into H2O, they’re the exact same thing. That said, almost all the Hegelian literature I read all agrees that being and nothing are both identical and yet different, but I dont understand what is the difference here? The philosopher Schelling had the exact same criticism of Hegel which Houlgate attempts to address in an article. Itd be really cool it you guys can review that Houlgate article. That said, although Houlgate is thoughtful as always, he didn’t convince me. Also thank you for the excellent comments on the psychological aspect of it, much appreciated.

Thanks.Hope to see you more.

Great job

Thank you for doing this! I really enjoy these discussions.

Isnt Hegel here just saying being is being? Or being is itself? How you get becoming if being is just itself? Turns Schelling had the same criticism. I read an article by Houlgate addressing this and wasn’t convinced.

I’m partial to Houlgate’s reading of Hegel. Although I still don’t understand how he gets from being to nothing, since they’re really just two words for the same thing. Becoming then is just a semantic trick not an actual becoming. When you’re saying being is nothing and nothing is being, all you’re saying is being is being. The closest response I’ve heard is that , it is not a purely logical movement but more of a psychological one, in which the thinker can’t help but identify indeterminate immediate being with nothing. But this seems to detract a bit from the “logical” character of the SOL , and instead highlights an experiential process going on. Idk 🤷‍♀️ Any thoughts?

🎊 *Promosm*

There is no transition from being to nothing. There is also neither polarity nor change. Being and nothing are the same indeterminateness. (Houlgate's use of "collapse", as you understand it, is unfortunate here.) This is Hegel's starting point. If you don't get this basic beginning, you will be out at sea by the time you attempt Hegel's Doctrine of Essence.

These are all great arguments. However, im not entirely convinced that Nietzsche would be satisfied with this (though i completely understand that your arguments here arent meant as an exhaustive response to him but only to serve as an encouragement for the study of the SoL). There is a circularity to your defence. In order for us to conceive of a truth which is deeper than Nietzsches potentiallly shallow notion of it, and of the possibility of unveiling such a truth through philosophical dialogue, we must already presuppose truth as something objective and philosophy as a possible path towards this object or realm. Nietzsche does not share these premises. As im sure you know, Nietzsches ideas on truth are changing, multifarious and sometimes contradictory if thought of in an abstract way. However to provide one nietzschean stance on truth i would say the following. Humans are frail animals. We are therefore herd animals. The herd makes us powerful. Things and words come into being through generalizing sense experience by creative metaphors, synthesizing from the sea of sense stimuli that which we value. The herds power lies in everyone using the same metaphors. We tell ourselves that they arent metaphors but pre existent "truths" to shield ourselves from the unbearable dionysian groundlesness of existence. Will to truth then becomes a moral virtue for the herd man. From this perspective, your invitation to a dialogue through which we can potentially reveal a deeper notion of truth than what i am proposing, is no longer a good hearted, friendly invitation. It is now the facade of a will to power which is seeking to subsume my reality. It is now a rhetorical, not a rational gesture. We could say to Nietzsche that this idea of truth as a creation refutes his own claims about it. But again, to do so we would have to presuppose truth as something pre-existent. Nietzsches claims are perfectly intelligible from their own ground. His whole point is that he takes full responsibility for his artistic creation. In my view then, the only argument against Nietzsche can be an irrational rhetorical argument. He must be persuaded to see that there is another way. We can choose to see truth as violence. Or we can, like Scheler and Levinas, see truth as love, as the transcendence of our individual one sidedness through dialogue. But Nietzsche must make the choice in his own absurdity. No logical necessity can make it for him.

As a friend of Wittgenstein, heres how i would answer Trents question. For the tractarian Wittgenstein, the world is that which is the case. By stating what is the case i am thus expressing reality by a one to one mapping. The limits of my language are the limits of my world. For late Wittgenstein, reality, in so far as we can speak of it in this context, is articulated through language, reflecting our form of life. Just as for Gadamer, this does not mean that reality is a nominalistic convention which we arbitrarily decide upon. Rather, reality is that which grounds our actions, including our decisions. Language expresses this reality. To say that "reality is x", abstracted from my attitude towards life, would be then, a misuse of language. To say "climate change is real" means "we should act as if climate change is real". Reality is ethical. In a letter, Wittgenstein called the Tractatus a primarily ethical work, which makes sense as it aims to correct the misuse of language as it is abstracted from the ethical. "If I say "I know that that's a foot" - what am I really saying? Isn't the whole point that I am certain of the consequences - that if someone else had been in doubt I might say to him "you see - I told you so"? Would my knowledge still be worth anything if it let me down as a clue in action? And can't it let me down? " On Certainty, 403-4 In Philosophical investigations, Wittgenstein distinguishes between depth grammar and surface grammar. Surface grammar is all that is explicit in the meaning of a word, while depth grammar is everything that is implied within it, as it is said in a specific circumstance. He says: “the problems arising though a misinterpretation of our forms of language have the character of depth. They are deep disquietudes; their roots are as deep in us as the forms of our language and their significance is as great as the importance of our language” As Gadamer notes in his Idea of Hegels logic, Hegel proceeds from one stage to the next by seeing what is implied in what we mean, for example, by "Being". This leads to contradictions and their sublation. Thus, we can accomodate SoL in Wittgensteins philosophy as depth grammar. However, it will no longer be a "science" but, as for gadamer, the natural, intuitive movement of language embedded in a form of life. This does not make it trivial, but on the the contrary, is precisely what makes it deep. It is the articulation of our being. Unlike Carnap, Wittgenstein actually didnt consider continental philosophy meaningless, only misguided. He said he understands what Heidegger means by Being. In his words, "there is no such thing as phenomenology, but there are phenomenological problems."

Thank you for this podcast. It is heart warming and inspiring to hear others who share a passion for Roses thoughts and the SoL. I also appreciate the heterogeneity of perspectives from the historian and the philosopher, in so far as we can distinguish such disciplines. The part about ancient chinese was deeply fascinating. Very insightful listening overall! I would challenge a bit your reading (as i understood it) of Gadamer and the examples used. Quantum mechanics is "applicable" to me in so far as it describes the behaviour of particles of which my body is supposedly composed. How then, is the Science of Logic "applicable" to me? For it to be applicable in the scientific sense, it would have to be a thesis. The conclusion "agency is reducible to chemistry" can be applied to me in so far as i am an agent. But the science of logic can not contain any concluding thesis like this because such a conclusion would negate its point, which is the movement of dialectical sublation. Lets now consider agency. Can it be "applied" universally? If we read Homers iliad we will see that there is no agency there, in the sense we generally use this word. There are people and "gods" that are telling the people what to do. Perhaps we can say that we have "applied" agency to the ancients by noting its absence. And we have. However, in my view, this does not mean that we are somehow at a higher stage of knowing than Homer, or that we could explain to Homer that theres no agency in the iliad. "Agency" is our way of understanding the world. It is a light by which we see things. The greek view of the human as without agency and subject to gods and fate, is not merely a primitive stage where we didnt yet realize that agency exists. It is a different way of being-towards-the-world. Agency makes sense only as the gestalt of agency and the world-for-us. It can not be transposed unproblematically to the world-for-the-greeks. We can understand the greeks, but in this understanding, both the greeks and we ourselves are transformed or "sublated", so to speak. Lets consider the question wether german language conditions Hegel. What does this mean? Is such an objection not predicated on a kantian view of a reality or thing "out there" and a subject divorced from it, seeing it through the faculties of her understanding? I may be mistaken, but it sounds to me as if you were saying that this is Gadamers view. For Gadamer, reality and truth come into being through articulation. If we take on this view, then we can not say that the SoL is something pertaining solely to 19th century Prussia, just as we cant say that it presents some kind of objective reality independent of human finitude. For Gadamer, SoL is true precisely because it embodies german language. Language is not a veil, but a light. He has written a brilliant essay called the idea of Hegels logic. Therein, he does not critize it as a peculiarity of human language. Instead he proclaims its truth and relevance. For him the essence of SoL is the dialectical movement of thought, which is embedded in the movement of meaning which is our historical horizon. For Gadamer, this is actually the essence also of Platos dialogues. The difference is that in the dialogues, the movement does not always resolve and sublate itself in a teleological way. Socrates is more interested in questioning than answering. For the dialectic to be a "science" it must be a movement towards "knowledge". This idea is not only an enabling premise, but also in a sense, a founding premise of hegels system. It is this that makes the dialectic "applicable" as a thesis. If the truth of contradicting differences is their resolution, then we can say as Hegel does, that the truth of an individual is in the state. It is this tendency towards the objectification of the dialectical movement into resolution, which Hegel himself critiques and points beyond, which is Gadamers problem with him. As Gadamer and even Hegel himself note, it is not really so that becoming somehow arises from the tension between being and nothing. Rather, being and nothing arise as moments of becoming which we have divided. However, by narrating this process as a movement from contradiction to resolution, from abstraction to truth, Hegel can frame it as teleological. Now he can say that the history of Europe is a progress towards towards absolute knowledge, meaning that Europe is superior to and closer to God than other peoples who have not undergone similar sociohistorical processes. It is in this sense that the critique of Hegel by Bergson (he tries to build Paris from (the sublations of) paintings of its streets) and Deleuze (he starts from "empirical being") are legitimate. As Rose says in HCL, Gadamer is still in a sense neo-kantian, but in a sophisticated way. The noumenon has dissappeared but history and language are kind of faculties understanding. But i would say there is also another post-hegelian voice in Gadamer which proclaims the infinity of finite language transcending itself in its dialectical movement, which even surpasses Hegel in a way. In Gadamer, kantianism overcomes itself through a kind of deconstruction of the finite and the infinite binary. In my view, Gadamer differs from Rose precisely because he is still in a way, too hegelian. While he pleads Hegel to renounce the drive towards resolution, he nevertheless thinks we can sublate the finite and the infinite through "cultuvation" (bildung), broadening our horizons. Roses negotiated broken middle is the truth of Gadamer, as its the truth of Hegel also. You pondered why Houlgate equates suspension and religion. According to a very well written review of his book an introduction to Hegel, on Amazon, Houlgate interprets Hegels view on religion as being one of suspending reason to give way to faith. This is of course quite an unorthodox interpretation considering Hegels insistence on the need to go beyond faith towards absolute knowledge, and how philosophy must supercede religion, which in turn must be made rational. In other words, Houlgate reads Hegel like Rose, indicating again a continuity. Since im relying on the Amazon review, this account of Houlgates interpretation of Hegel on religion may of course be crude or completely false. This Hegel, as a kierkegaardian philosopher of contradiction, is true. It is the truth of Hegel for us. But it is a truth which transcends Hegels own interpretation of his work (as perhaps the works of Gadamer and Rose transcend their authors). That is why we needed Kierkegaards counterpoint of absurdity, paradox and unmediated faith-over-reason. Again, thank you for your thoughts and godspeed!

Great video bud, keep it up :)

"Hegel" Might as well be St. Augustine, that philosopher is so obsolete, lol

Thanks guys

Thank you

Great stuff, I hope you guys continue.

Thank you very much for your analysis and effort-it's greatly appreciated.

Aside from Stephen Houlgate (his 2-Volume work On Being, which covers the entire logic of being, is his greatest work IMO), other faithful philosophers of the "metaphysical view" of Hegel would be Richard Winfield and David P. Levine, both of whom actually _expanded_ the rest of Hegel's system and updated it (from the Philosophy of Nature to Mind and Right) to overcome Hegel's _own_ shortcomings. Highly recommend their works, particularly in the following order in reflecting Hegel's system: 0. Hegel and the Future of Systematic Philosophy (Science of Logic) 1. Hegel's Science of Logic: A Critical Rethinking in 30 Lectures 2. From Concept to Objectivity: Thinking Through Hegel's Subjective Logic (Philosophy of Nature) 3. Conceiving Nature after Aristotle, Kant, and Hegel 4. Universal Biology after Aristotle, Kant, and Hegel (Philosophy of Spirit) 5. The Living Mind: From Psyche to Consciousness 6. The Intelligent Mind: On the Genesis and Constitution of Discursive Thought (Objective Spirit) 7. Reason and Justice 8. The Just Family 9. Law in Civil Society 10. The Just Economy 11. Contributions to the Critique of Economic Theory 12. Economic Theory (Part 1): The Elementary Relations of Economic Life 13. Economic Theory (Part 2): The System of Economic Relations as a Whole 14. The Just State: Re-Thinking Self-Government (Absolute Spirit) 15. Systematic Aesthetics 16. Stylistics: Rethinking the Artforms After Hegel 17. Rethinking the Arts After Hegel: From Architecture to Motion Pictures (Forthcoming)

18:10 "Where did we get this assumption of [the discrete rational human being]?" Well, how about this: You have the task to model a human being mathematically. (We do that because Mathematics is the new language of Science and Science is the most credible source of truth somewhere about since Newton.) Now, how are you going to do that? Honestly, the most straightforward convincing way to do this - as far as I know - is by assuming discrete rationality. In economics, there are many attempts to change this (in Behavioural Economics, Bounded Rationaliy ...). I am not too convinced by either of them. So, do you know how one may express humanity in Mathematics? Or do you argue one ought not to do that at all? Then my question would be: Why? Why are we allowed to abuse Nature and her "laws" with such cold, deterministic models of Rationality and determination (as we do in Science), but we are not allowed to apply them to ourselves?