Monthly Archives: September 2016

Hegel the consummate Neoplatonist 11k

Posted on by under Concealed priesthood, dialectics, G.W.F.Hegel, mysticism - the pornography of academic philosophers, Neoplatonism, Plotinus

11.3.11.6 Being, being and nothing

Dillon wrote

One major problem which Plotinus inherited from previous Platonism was a contradiction between the Platonic-Pythagorean doctrine of the first principle as a radical unity – One, or a monad – and the belief, enunciated most notably by Aristotle (but going back to Anaxagoras) that the first principle was an intellect (nous), and specifically an intellect thinking itself1

Plotinus’ ‘solution’ (modified by Proclus, Cusanus and Hegel) was to make the One and intellect the first and second hypostases (the latter generated from the first – followed by the third, Soul, created by the second). Dillon continued

That the first principle was both a monad and an intellect was accepted already by Xenocrates in the Old Academy (Frs. 15, 16 Heinze) – though not, we may note, by his predecessor Speusippus – and became the accepted position in Middle Platonism, no contradiction being apparently observed between absolute unity and self-intellection.2

Hegel drew on this flexibility, maximising the philosophical and creative potential of his first principle by not only conflating Plotinus’ One with the first element Being in Proclus’ triad Being/Life/Intelligence in the second hypostasis Intellect, but also by overlying the Christian Trinity across that triad. The first principle could now, with a range of philosophical and religious meanings to use creatively, be known as One, Absolute, Mind, Being and God – forming the first element both in a single reality (Hegel’s ‘reason-world’) and in the stages in the unfolding of ‘reality’.3

For Plotinus the activity of Intellectual-Principle is thinking. It is the author of being and Plotinus equated Intellectual-Principle with it.4 Hegel began his Science of Logic and Encyclopaedia with this thinking, the first element in Proclus’ triad.5

Not only does Being think,6 that thinking, as Hegel indicated in a quote in Greek from the Metaphysics at the culmination and close of his Encyclopaedia, is divine, is God7 which Hegel described using the same expressions – ‘essential being’ and ‘absolute being’ – he had used when discussing the One in Plotinus’ philosophy (7.1).

Hegel’s God and Plotinus’ Intellectual-Principle are only truly what they potentially are having ‘emanated’ and returned, and in that process become fulfilled and complete.

Hegel wrote

in our thinking, our first thinking, God is only pure being, or even essence, the abstract absolute, but not God as absolute spirit, which alone is the true nature of God.8

and Plotinus expressed the result of the same Neoplatonic process thus

It is now Intellectual-Principle since it actually holds its object, and holds it by the act of intellection: before, it was no more than a tendance, an eye blank of impression: it was in motion towards the transcendental; now that it has attained, it has become Intellectual-Principle9

The divine activity of thinking requires an object to initiate that process and it finds that object by creating a distinction within itself

Intellect, to act at all, must inevitably comport difference with identity; otherwise it could not distinguish itself from its object by standing apart from it, nor could it ever be aware of the realm of things whose existence demands otherness, nor could there be so much as a duality.’10

Redding identifies that initial object

As the Logic is an investigation into the categorial structure of thought, its starting point will be the most immediate thought determination, that presupposed by all others: being, or das Sein.11

and thinking about that initial object is the basis of all further development

Being seems to be both immediate and simple, but it will show itself to be, in fact, only something in opposition to something else, nothing. The point seems to be that while the categories being and nothing seem both absolutely distinct and opposed…they appear identical as no criterion can be invoked which differentiates them. The only way out of this paradox is to posit a third category within which they can coexist as negated (Aufgehoben) moments. This category is becoming, which saves thinking from paralysis because it accommodates both concepts. Becoming contains being and nothing in the sense that when something becomes it passes, as it were, from nothingness to being.12

The dialectical cognition of God is underway, to which process negation is essential

There is…a technical, logical sense in which the second concept or form is the “opposite” or negation of—or is “not”—the first one—though, again, it need not be the “opposite” of the first one in a strict sense.13

Theorising the relationship between contradictories, between a concept and its other is fundamental to Neoplatonism. Proclus discussed being, non-being and the negation of being and Cusanus discussed both the relationship between creation, being and nothing and Being, being and not-being. (8.4.5)

Plotinus described the process whereby Intellectual-Principle comes to know its prior14 – the same process whereby divine Being comes to cognise itself in the Science of Logic

Thus the Intellectual-Principle, in the act of knowing the Transcendent, is a manifold. It knows the Transcendent in very essence but, with all its effort to grasp that prior as a pure unity, it goes forth amassing successive impressions, so that, to it, the object becomes multiple: thus in its outgoing to its object it is not (fully realised) Intellectual-Principle; it is an eye that has not yet seen; in its return it is an eye possessed of the multiplicity which it has itself conferred: it sought something of which it found the vague presentment within itself; it returned with something else, the manifold quality with which it has of its own act invested the simplex.

If it had not possessed a previous impression of the Transcendent it could never have grasped it, but this impression, originally of unity, becomes an impression of multiplicity; and the Intellectual-Principle in taking cognisance of that multiplicity knows the Transcendent and so is realised as an eye possessed of its vision.15

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Notes

1. Dillon, ‘Plotinus: an Introduction,’ The Enneads (Abridged), op. cit., xcii ↩
2. Ibid. ↩
3. ‘Are Being, Life and Intelligence to be regarded as three aspects of a single reality or as three successive stages in the unfolding of the cosmos from the One? Proclus characteristically answers that both views are true: they are aspects, for each of them implies the others as cause or as consequent; they are successive, not coordinate, for each is predominant (though not to the exclusion of the others) at a certain stage of the process.’ Dodds’ commentary, Proclus, The Elements of Theology, op, cit., 254 ↩
4. ‘Intellectual-Principle is Being,’ Plotinus, The Enneads (Abridged), op. cit., V.3.16; ‘Thus it is true that “Intellection and Being are identical”,’ Ibid., V.9.5; ‘The Being of Intellect…is activity, and there is nothing to which the activity is directed; so it is self-directed.’ Plotinus, Enneads, Trans., A.H.Armstrong, op. cit., vol. V, V.3.7 ↩
5. ‘the beginning…has the significance and form of abstract universality. …it is…thinking,’ Hegel, Hegel’s Science of Logic, op. cit., 827 ↩
6. ‘the absolute Being is just this being that is thought,’ Hegel, Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, op. cit., 371 ↩
7. Hegel, Hegel’s Philosophy of Mind, op. cit., 315; translation from Aristotle, The Metaphysics xii, 7, 1072b, Trans. and Introduction by Hugh Lawson-Tancred, Penguin, London, 2004, 374: ‘And God also has life; for the activation of thought is a life, and He is that activation. His intrinsic activation is supreme, eternal life. Accordingly we assert that God is a supreme and eternal living being, so that to God belong life and continuous and eternal duration. For that is what God is.’; ‘God, far from being a Being, even the highest, is the Being,’ Hegel, Hegel’s Logic, op. cit., 164 ↩
8. Hegel, Hegel’s Science of Logic, op. cit., 527 ↩
9. Plotinus, The Enneads (Abridged), op. cit., V.3.11 ↩
10. Ibid., VI.7.39 ↩
11. Redding, Hegel’s Hermeneutics, op. cit., 145 ↩
12. Redding, ‘Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel,’ Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/hegel/, op. cit. ↩
13. Julie E. Maybee, ‘Hegel’s Dialectics,’ Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/hegel-dialectics/ ↩
14. Neoplatonic theory is anything but hard and fast. Plotinus’ position regarding the One’s transcendence is an instance. Dillon wrote ‘(Although Plotinus) emphasises the transcendence and otherness of the One, its superiority to Being and Intellect, and its unknowability by any normal faculty of cognition…in a number of passages…he makes some attempt to explore what sort of apprehension the One might have of itself. For Plotinus, after all, the One is not really a negativity…,’ Dillon, ‘Plotinus: an Introduction,’ The Enneads (Abridged), op. cit., , xciii-xciv. He then quoted from V.4.2: ‘The intellectual object (i.e. the One) is self-gathered, and is not deficient as the seeing and knowing principle (i.e. Intellect) must be – deficient, I mean, as needing an object – it is therefore no unconscious thing…it is, itself, that self-intellection which takes place in eternal repose, that is to say, in a mode other than that of the Intellectual-Principle.’ Ibid., xciv ↩
15. Ibid., V.3.11 ↩

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Reply to Jason 3

Posted on by under Capitalism, Capitalist ideology, dialectical materialism, dialectics

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Hi Jason,

I do believe the result of the poll (that ‘49% of Australians support banning Muslims immigrating to Australia’) is accurate – it was taken twice to confirm the result. One of the pollsters said the number was too big to say that it is unrepresentative.

I have heard the poll discussed in the middle-class media and no-one (as much as they would like to) has claimed that the result is in any way ‘false’.

If you step back and look at the ‘big picture’: there is a rising anti-refugee sentiment across the US, Europe and Australia. Fascism and fascist parties play an increasing part in this – discussions in the Australian middle-class media about the possibility of a Trump presidency have included mention of fascism in the US.

What is fascism? Capitalism in extremis. When the GFC hit the fan, a lot of tax-payers’ money was thrown at it. That money has now gone but the GFC hasn’t. The capitalists ponder – ‘What to do?’

Blame someone, ramp up protectionism, wage war and make force and the threat of force internally more prominent.

All of this, with regard to Australia, feeds into a pre-existing cultural ‘mind’ set.

Not only has racism always been deeply ingrained in Australia (the ‘White Australia policy’ was only finally dropped in 1973) – recent instances of anti-Chinese xenophobia yet again exemplify this – this racism is representative of a broader problem in Australia – the fear of difference.

Aussies on their island continent at the arse-end of the earth (to quote a former Prime Minister) cannot comprehend difference and its necessity, wrapped otherwise than in conformist ‘decency’ (hence the comparative welcoming of the Vietnamese refugees after the defeat of the US and Australia in their war on Vietnam).

Again, what is particularly repulsive about the behaviour of the white-dominated nations (including Australia – one of the richest nations in the world) towards the present great tide of refugees is that those people are fleeing from destruction initiated either directly by capitalist nations or as a consequence of their previous behaviour – led by the number 1 capitalist power, the US.

The West fears ‘Islamic terrorism’? Think of the treachery and terrorism that the West has dished out over and again to the Islamic people, particularly in the last 100 years.

As capitalism goes deeper into crisis, within capitalist nations, the rich get richer, the poor poorer and the middle class diminishes while beyond those nations, their militaries continue to wreak the destruction and suffering that puts further pressure on capitalism.

This is dialectics in action.

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‘49% of Australians support banning Muslims immigrating to nation they insist isn’t racist’

Posted on by under Australian culture, convict culture, Western supremacism, White supremacism

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The Backburner, SBS, ‘49% of Australians support banning Muslims immigrating to nation they insist isn’t racist’ 21.09.16

A new poll from Essential media has shown a troublingly high number of people support banning all Muslims from immigrating to a nation that they insist is free, welcome and accepting of all people.

Early analysis of the results show community concerns that Muslim immigrants will not abide by Australian values such as a baseless, hysterical fear of all Muslim immigrants. The poll has somehow come as a shock to the nation that recently elected multiple senators on the same fearful platform, but others have insisted that the result was obvious and predictable.

“It’s about the Australian way of life,” one respondent told The Backburner. “I mean, we have a nation here built on freedom – the freedom to deeply fear anyone who you find different and scary – the freedom to restrict their freedoms.

“Australians have always been deeply exclusionary to anyone in need. Neglecting others while insisting we’re great people is one of our proudest national traditions. I mean, what’s the point of being a city shining on a hill if you’re not using that shining light to spot and repel people trying to clamour up the hill to take refuge in your nice city?

“I’m just saying that if we want to keep this country great we have to be willing to sacrifice every last tenet of what we believe makes this country great.”

The poll reported 49% of people supported a ban on Muslim immigration with many respondents claiming that Muslims did not integrate well into the kind of free society that would never place a religious test on immigration and absolutely wouldn’t be caught dead making sweeping statements admonishing a community that makes up a significant percentage of the population.

“We’re just trying to preserve good old fashioned Australian fear-mongering. We want to make sure we keep ourselves true blue, easy-going, deeply aggressive and unbelievably bigoted and exclusionary.

“I’m sure there will be backlash against this but I’ve come up with a clever strategy: what I am going to say is that I’m not actually racist because Islam is not a race. See, I’m not a racist, I’m a completely different kind of bigot. I’m attacking a minority group on an entirely different basis. You know what? I think I’ll find this article when you put it up and make this very comment on it.”

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Hegel the consummate Neoplatonist 11j

Posted on by under Capitalist ideology, Concealed priesthood, G.W.F.Hegel, mysticism - the pornography of academic philosophers, Neoplatonism

 

11.3.11.5 With what does the Science of Logic begin?

My contention is that for philosophical and creative reasons, Hegel conflated the Neoplatonic hypostases with Proclus’ triad Being, Life and Intelligence which Proclus ‘suspended’ from the first hypostasis, the One.

Hegel’s philosophical reasons were that this triad of triads gave him the greatest potential for the development of Neoplatonic dialectics and that, with one stroke, it enabled him to obviate the impossibility of the cognition of the One. Now the entirety of the Neoplatonic system was open to the full development of ‘reason’.

Hegel’s creative motives were that by conflating the hypostases with Proclus’ triad and overlying the Christian Trinity across and weaving it into his use of it, every aspect of the Neoplatonic system could be illustrated and made more metaphorically rich – divine ‘mind’ and divine Being were now interchangeable with the Neoplatonic One and Absolute, with the Christian God, Father, Son and Spirit.1 Hegel used God, Christ and Spirit to symbolise every stage in the process of emanation and return.

By further anchoring Neoplatonism in the world through the coming of Christ and the Christian Spirit to it, Hegel aimed to make this austere, mystical philosophy more relevant to those who were drawn to the cultus he believed necessary for his time. In arguing thus, he also protected his career.

Hegel described the broad flow of his Science of Logic in Neoplatonic terms

The essential requirement for the science of logic is not so much that the beginning be a pure immediacy, but rather that the whole of the science be within itself a circle in which the first is also the last and the last is also the first.2

Despite writing that it must begin without presuppositions, Hegel then appeared to emphatically contradict himself

God has the absolutely undisputed right that the beginning be made with him3

Magee wrote of this

Hegel believed that before Christianity appeared philosophy could not have presented absolute truth in a fully adequate form. This leaves us with a troubling question: how can one square this claim about philosophy’s dependence on religion with Hegel’s claim that his philosophy is ‘presuppositionless’?…the thought that thinks the Logic is the thought of modern man shaped by Christianity, and much else. …Spirit had to undergo its encounter with Christianity in order to know the whole.4

But what did Hegel have to say of this beginning of his Science of Logic? That it must be made in pure knowing, without distinction; that it must be an absolute, that

it cannot contain within itself any determination, any content; for any such would be a distinguishing and an inter-relationship of distinct moments…The beginning therefore is pure being. …it is not truly known5

and

that which constitutes the beginning, the beginning itself, is to be taken as something unanalysable, taken in its simple, unfilled immediacy, and therefore as being, as the completely empty being.6 (all my italics)

These descriptions are philosophical not religious7 and are applicable not to the Christian God but to Plotinus’ One when brought into Intellectual-Principle, into the first element of Proclus’ triad – Being – and made the equivalent of that Being. Of the One Plotinus wrote

It is precisely because there is nothing within the One that all things are from it8

and Henry

The One is the One and nothing else, and even to assert that it ‘is’ or that it is ‘One’ is false, since it is beyond being or essence. No ‘name’ can apply to it; it eludes all definition, all knowledge9

While Hegel did argue that Christianity is the religion of absolute spirit – volume III of his Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion is sub-titled ‘The Consummate Religion’ – his philosophy identifies the God that has the right that the Science of Logic begins with him and the religious basis for the presentation of absolute truth in ‘a fully adequate form’ as Neoplatonic.10 What Magee considers a ‘troubling question’ was, for Hegel – as he correctly wrote – a philosophical requisite.

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Notes

1. ‘it is the abstract God, the supreme being, the Father, who dies in the death of the Son, and who is, as it were, reborn as concrete, world-encompassing Spirit.’ Hodgson in Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, op. cit., vol. III, 53; ‘if pure being is to be considered as the unity into which knowing has collapsed at the extreme point of its union with the object, then knowing itself has vanished in that unity, (my italics)’ Hegel, Hegel’s Science of Logic, op. cit., 73 ↩
2. ‘We begin with a knowing that cancels the distinction between subject and object – and we end with Absolute Idea, which is the unity of subjectivity and objectivity. …The end returns to the beginning, though the movement from beginning to end involves the self-specification of Absolute Knowing into the myriad forms of the Logic. The goal of the whole system (and, Hegel thinks, of reality itself) is implicit in the beginning and, in a way, known immediately: the sublation of subject and object.’ Magee, The Hegel Dictionary, op. cit., 113 ↩
3. Hegel, Hegel’s Science of Logic, op. cit., 75, 78. Schlitt wrote that ‘the entire Hegelian system begins in the Encyclopaedia with God.’ Schlitt, Hegel’s Trinitarian Claim: A Critical Reflection, op. cit., 36 ↩
4. Magee, The Hegel Dictionary, op. cit., 246-247 ↩
5. Hegel, Hegel’s Science of Logic, op. cit., 70-72 ↩
6. Ibid., 75; ’this emptiness is therefore simply as such the beginning of philosophy.’ Ibid., 78 ↩
7. Plant wrote that Hegel believed that a philosophical reinterpretation of religion would enable the achievement of community and argued that this is ambiguous, asking why religion would be needed by a community that had achieved the philosophical perspective. Plant, Hegel, An Introduction, op. cit., 196-197 ↩
8. Plotinus, The Enneads (Abridged), op. cit., V.2.1 ↩
9. Henry, ‘The Place of Plotinus in the History of Thought,’ op. cit., liii-liv ↩
10. ‘while the object or content of religion is the absolute, religion itself does not entail absolute knowledge of the absolute: that is the role of philosophy. The representational forms of religious expression, even of the Christian religion, must be “sublated” (annulled and preserved) in philosophical concepts. …Whether religion as such is to be superseded by philosophy is another question…’ Hogdson in Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, op. cit., vol. III, 4 ↩

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Hegel on the dialectical relationship of cause and effect

Posted on by under dialectics, G.W.F.Hegel, mysticism - the pornography of academic philosophers, Neoplatonism, Objective reality, Plotinus, Proclus

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…though the cause has an effect and is at the same time itself effect, and the effect not only has a cause but is also itself cause, yet the effect which the cause has, and the effect which the cause is, are different, as are also the cause which the effect has, and the cause which the effect is.

But now the outcome of the movement of the determinate causal relation is this, that the cause is not merely extinguished in the effect and with it the effect, too, as in formal causality, but that the cause in being extinguished becomes again in the effect, that the effect vanishes in the cause, but equally becomes again in it. Each of these determinations sublates itself in its positing, and posits itself in its sublating; what is present here is not an external transition of causality from one substrate to another; on the contrary, this becoming-other of causality is at the same time its own positing. Causality therefore presupposes its own self or conditions itself.

G.W.F.Hegel, Hegel’s Science of Logic, Trans., A.V.Miller, Humanities Press, New York, 1976, 565-566

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Engels on Dialectics, Part Five: Causality

Posted on by under dialectical materialism, Friedrich Engels, Marxism

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The first thing that strikes us in considering matter in motion is the inter-connection of the individual motions of separate bodies, their being determined by one another. But not only do we find that a particular motion is followed by another, we find also that we can evoke a particular motion by setting up the conditions in which it takes place in nature, that we can even produce motions which do not occur at all in nature (industry), at least not in this way, and that we can give these motions a predetermined direction and extent. In this way, by the activity of human beings, the idea of causality becomes established, the idea that one motion is the cause of another. True, the regular sequence of certain natural phenomena can by itself give rise to the idea of causality: the heat and light that come with the sun; but this affords no proof, and to that extent Hume’s scepticism was correct in saying that a regular post hoc can never establish a propter hoc. But the activity of human beings forms the test of causality. If we bring the sun’s rays to a focus by means of a concave mirror and make them act like the rays of an ordinary fire, we thereby prove that heat comes from  the sun. If we bring together in a rifle the priming, the explosive charge, and the bullet and then fire it, we count upon the effect known in advance from previous experience, because we can follow in all its details the whole process of ignition, combustion, explosion by the sudden conversion into gas and pressure of the gas on the bullet. And here the sceptic cannot even say that because of previous experience it does not follow that it will be the same next time. For, as a matter of fact, it does sometimes happen that it is not the same, that the priming or the gunpowder fails to work, that the barrel bursts, etc. But it is precisely this which proves causality instead of refuting it, because we can find out the cause of each such deviation from the rule by appropriate investigation: chemical decomposition of the priming, dampness, etc., of the gunpowder, defect in the barrel, etc., etc., so that here the test of causality is so to say a double one.

Natural science, like philosophy, has hitherto entirely neglected the influence of men’s activity on their thought; both know only nature on the one hand and thought on the other. But it is precisely the alteration of nature by men, not solely nature as such, which is the most essential and immediate basis of human thought, and it is in the measure that man has learned to change nature that his intelligence has increased. The naturalistic conception of history, as found, for instance, to a greater or lesser extent in Draper and other scientists, as if nature exclusively reacts on man, and natural conditions everywhere exclusively determined his historical development, is therefore one-sided and forgets that man also reacts on nature, changing it and creating new conditions of existence for himself. There is devilishly little left of ‘nature’ as it was in Germany at the time when the Germanic peoples immigrated into it. The earth’s surface, climate, vegetation, fauna, and  the human beings themselves have infinitely changed, and all this owing to human activity, while the changes of nature in Germany which have occurred in this period of time without human interference are incalculably small.

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Reciprocal action is the first thing that we encounter when we consider matter in motion as a whole from the standpoint of modern natural science. We see a series of forms of motion, mechanical motion, heat, light, electricity, magnetism, chemical union and decomposition, transitions of states of aggregation, organic life, all of which, if at present we still make an exception of organic life, pass into one another, mutually determine one another, are in one place cause and in another effect, the sum-total of the motion in all its changing forms remaining the same (Spinoza: substance is causa sui strikingly expresses the reciprocal action). Mechanical motion becomes transformed into heat, electricity, magnetism, light, etc., and vice versa. Thus natural science confirms what Hegel has said (where?), that reciprocal action is the true causa finalis of things. We cannot go back further than to knowledge of this reciprocal action, for the very reason that there is nothing behind to know. If we know the forms of motion of matter (for which it is true there is still very much lacking, in view of the short time that natural science has existed), then we know matter itself, and therewith our knowledge is complete. (Grove’s whole misunderstanding about causality rests on the fact that he does not succeed in arriving at the category of reciprocal action; he has the thing, but not the abstract thought, and hence the confusion – pp. 10-14.) Only from this universal reciprocal action do we arrive at the real causal relation. In order to understand the separate phenomena, we have to tear them out of the general inter-connection and consider them in isolation, and then the changing motions appear, one as cause and the other as effect.

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For one who denies causality every natural law is a hypothesis, among others also the chemical analysis of heavenly bodies by means of the prismatic spectrum. What shallowness of thought to remain at such a viewpoint!

Friedrich Engels, Dialectics of Nature, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1976, 230-232

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Part five/to be continued…

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Hegel the consummate Neoplatonist 11i

Posted on by under Capitalist ideology, G.W.F.Hegel, mysticism - the pornography of academic philosophers, Neoplatonism, Plotinus, Proclus, Reason

11.3.11.4 The Science of Logic is a theology

Logic for Hegel is the ‘scientific,’ systematic exposition of the ‘formal structure,’ the infinite ‘mind’ of God

logic is to be understood as the system of pure reason, as the realm of pure thought. This realm is truth as it is without veil and in its own absolute nature. It can therefore be said that this content is the exposition of God as he is in his eternal essence before the creation of nature and a finite mind.1

Plotinus wrote of this ‘system of pure reason’ and ‘realm of pure thought and truth’

(in the Intellectual Cosmos, dialectic) pastures the Soul in the ‘Meadows of Truth’: it employs the Platonic division to the discernment of the Ideal-Forms, of the Authentic-Existence, and of the First-Kinds (or Categories of Being): it establishes, in the light of Intellection, the affiliations of all that issues from the Firsts, until it has traversed the entire Intellectual Realm…it leaves to another science all that coil of premisses and conclusions called the art of reasoning2

The truth of logic is God alone, the relationship between religion and philosophy having a long history

Already for the Neopythagoreans and Neoplatonists, still situated within the pagan world, the folk deities were not deities of phantasy but had become deities of thought.3

Not only is the Logic, consistent with Neoplatonic philosophy, both an ontology and a metaphysics –

an account of what it means to be…(and) simultaneously an account of the highest or most complete individual being4

– as the exposition of God, again consistent with Neoplatonic philosophy, it is also a theology. Schlitt, who described Hegel’s logic as ‘speculative theology’5 wrote

In his 1829 lectures on the proofs for the existence of God, Hegel spoke of logic as metaphysical theology in so far as logic consisted in the elevation of finite thought determinations to the infinite. ‘Logic is to that extent, metaphysical theology, which treats of the evolution of the Idea of God in the ether of pure thought…’6

Jaeschke and Magee both refer to Hegel’s logic as a theology.7 Jaeschke importantly noted the potential for a ‘more detailed interpretation of the Science of Logic as speculative theology’8 and Magee, in identifying the philosophical strands in the Logic unknowingly identified the elements of Proclus’ triad – Being, Life and Intelligence

The Logic is simultaneously an account of the formal structure of God (the self-knowing Idea), the soul or mind (the living embodiment of Idea), and the Cosmos (the whole whose every part is an approximation to the being of Idea). It is thus at one and the same time a theology, rational psychology and cosmology.9

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Notes

1. Hegel, Hegel’s Science of Logic, op. cit., 50 ↩
2. Plotinus, The Enneads (Abridged), op. cit., I.3.4. The note added ‘This puts Aristotelian and Stoic logic in its place. These logical systems deal with words and propositions and their relationships, and are thus merely preliminary to Platonic dialectic, which deals with the structure of reality.’ Of Hegel’s ‘structure of reality,’ Schlitt wrote ‘When (Hegel) spoke of “logic,” he meant the immanent and consistent self-positing and self-determining movement of pure thought,’ Schlitt, Divine Subjectivity: Understanding Hegel’s Philosophy of Religion, op. cit., 136 ↩
3. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, vol. I, op. cit., 152; ‘In ordinary moods of mind there is a long way from logic to religion. But almost every page of what Hegel has called Logic is witness to the belief in their ultimate identity.’ Bibliographical Notice in Hegel, Hegel’s Logic, op. cit., xlii ↩
4. Magee, The Hegel Dictionary, op. cit., 148; ‘Hegel himself did not hesitate to speak of categorical determinations of pure thought as metaphysical definitions of God. “Being itself and the special sub-categories of it which follow, as well as those of logic in general, may be looked upon as definitions of the Absolute, or metaphysical definitions of God …For a metaphysical definition of God is the expression of his nature in thoughts as such; and logic embraces all thoughts so long as they continue in the thought form.” (Logic #85)’ Dale M. Schlitt, Hegel’s Trinitarian Claim: A Critical Reflection, E.J.Brill, Leiden, 1984, 37 ↩
5. Ibid., 34 ↩
6. Ibid., 32 ↩
7. ‘(Hegel’s Science of Logic) is not solely a logic in the sense of an ontology but just as much a metaphysical theology.’ Walter Jaeschke, Reason in Religion: The Foundations of Hegel’s Philosophy of Religion, Trans., J. Michael Stewart and Peter C. Hodgson, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1990, 22 ↩
8. Ibid., 22 ↩
9. Magee, The Hegel Dictionary, op. cit., 133 ↩

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Hegel the consummate Neoplatonist 11h

Posted on by under Capitalist ideology, G.W.F.Hegel, mysticism - the pornography of academic philosophers, Neoplatonism, Nicholas of Cusa, Plotinus, Proclus

11.3.11.3 The Science of Logic and Neoplatonism

The Science of Logic, rather than being as Magee thinks the core of Hegel’s philosophy1, is the point of overlap for the influence on it of the Neoplatonism of Plotinus and Proclus.

Reflecting the development in the Enneads through Intellectual-Principle to its highest point before the first hypostasis, its conclusion in its final category Absolute Idea is the furthest attainment of the course initiated in the Phenomenology with the rise of consciousness from ‘sense-certainty,’ itself echoing the rise of Plotinus’ soul from the sensory world, through Soul, to Intellectual-Principle.

Again, reflecting the influence of Proclus, the Science of Logic is also the first element in Hegel’s Encyclopaedia of Philosophical Sciences (in order – the Science of Logic, the Philosophy of Nature and the Philosophy of Mind/Spirit).

Beginning with the act of thinking in the sphere of ‘absolute knowing,’ the process here has its completion not in Absolute Idea but in Hegel’s discussion of religion and philosophy in Absolute Spirit at the end of his Philosophy of Mind/Spirit 

The eternal Idea, in full fruition of its essence, eternally sets itself to work, engenders and enjoys itself as absolute Mind2.

As I have argued (11.3.7), the Encyclopaedia is not based on the Christian Trinity but on Proclus’ triad in the second hypostasis Intellect – Being/Life/Intelligence. In this, as I will argue in my discussion of the relations between Hegel and Cusanus, Hegel also followed the broad structure of the three books in Cusanus’ De docta ignorantia, the subjects of which are in turn God, the universe and Christ. Where Cusanus concluded the last book with a cultus of the Church, Plotinus concluded his system with a cultus of souls and Hegel his with a cultus of Spirit – each cultus one of individuals3.

Hegel criticised Plotinus’ hypostases, finding them inadequate for his dialectical interests4 but found in Proclus’ triad – a triad of triunities5 – the complexity, the potential, the ‘real trinity’ he sought (11.3.6). To creatively intensify this, again as I have argued and will return to, he introduced the errors that he made in his discussion of the philosophies of Plotinus and Proclus into his own philosophy by conflating the hypostases into Proclus’ triad (Chapter 7).

It is Hegel’s adherence to this triad and the degree to which he developed it that identifies him as the consummate Neoplatonist.

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Notes

1. ‘one may argue that the Logic is the core of Hegel’s philosophy,’ Magee, The Hegel Dictionary, op. cit., 244 ↩
2. Hegel, Hegel’s Philosophy of Mind, op. cit., 315 ↩
3. ‘God is a trinity (my italics) of Oneness, Equality-of-Oneness, and the Union thereof,’ Jasper Hopkins, Nicholas of Cusa On Learned Ignorance, A Translation and an Appraisal of De Docta Ignorantia, The Arthur J. Banning Press, Minneapolis, 1990, 1-50, 2; ‘DI began with a discussion of the Absolute Maximum, which was shown to be Absolute Oneness. From out of Oneness there arose a oneness in plurality, viz., the created universe, which was discussed in Book Two. Book Three then took as its theme the return of the creation to God through Christ. But in its return the creation is not re-enfolded in God, is not merged with Absolute Oneness, for each finite thing retains its individuality; rather, the creation is reunited to God.’ Ibid., 49; ‘We shall have to consider this idea, this content, in three spheres (my italics):/1. the idea in free universality, or the pure essence of God – the kingdom of the Father;/2. the inward diremption of the idea, held fast for a moment in its differentiation – the kingdom of the Son;/3. the reconciliation of this finite spirit with spirit that has being in and for itself – the kingdom of the Spirit.’ Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, op. cit., vol. III, 362. To repeat, my contention regarding Hegel is that his philosophy is not Christian but that he used the Christian Trinity to disguise (eagerly pandered to by ideologues, supremacists and academics), illustrate and ground his Neoplatonism. ↩
4. ‘in his Enneads he frequently reiterates the same general views; we find plenty of adversions to the universal and no convincing progression through the whole, of the sort we have seen in the case of Aristotle. The logos or what is thought is not apart from nous; the nous is what is thought; it envisages only itself, as thinking…’ Hegel, Lectures on the History of Philosophy 1825-6, op. cit., vol. II, 337 ↩
5. Proclus wrote of ‘essence indeed in the first triad, intelligible life in the second, and intelligible intellect in the third. …essence is suspended from the first deity…life from the second, and intellect from the third.’ Proclus, On the Theology of Plato, op. cit., Bk. IV., Ch. III ↩

Contents of Hegel the consummate Neoplatonist posts

All the world’s a stage

Posted on by under Art and social life

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What it means to be Australian

Posted on by under Australian culture, Australian servility, Capitalist ideology, China, Western supremacism, White supremacism

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Peter Martin, ’China’s gifts, research, “special bonds” and Sam Dastyari’s ghost from his past,’ The Sydney Morning Herald, 08.09.16

Sam Dastyari had been in the Senate mere months when a ghost from his past came back to haunt him. He was sued by a marketing company over work it said he had commissioned and then abandoned while general secretary of the NSW Labor Party.

He settled the case for around $5000, but rather than pay it himself or get the Labor Party to help, he sent the bill to the Yuhu Group, reporting its support in the register of senators’ interests.

The Shenzhen Yuhu investment development group was founded by Huang Xiangmo, a Chinese-Australian billionaire to whom $5000 was literally small change.

A few months earlier he had given $1.8 million to the University of Technology in Sydney to help establish an Australia-China Relations Institute, which supplanted an existing China Research Centre whose publications had at times been critical of China.

It emails journalists offering all expenses paid trips to China (“flights, accommodation, meals and internal transport”) and, in an unusual approach for a university body, describes itself as taking a “positive and optimistic view” of the Australia-China relationship.

Click the “research” button on its website and you won’t see research, but “fact sheets” urging Australia to approve the Australia-China free trade agreement, not to run freedom of navigation exercises in the South China Sea and not to block the takeover bid for an electricity network.

Huang chairs the Institute himself, or so he says, in another departure from normal practice. He says he personally chose Australia’s former foreign minister Bob Carr to run it.

John Fitzgerald, a China specialist who directs philanthropy studies at Swinburne University, says it is the clearest departure from accepted university practice he has seen. Other research centres, such as those part-funded by the United States, critically examine what’s happening in the US. Another academic familiar with the Institute who teaches in China says there is more questioning of the Chinese regime among his own Chinese students than there is at the University of Technology, which seems to be the way Huang wants it. A prodigious donor to both sides of Australian politics, he wrote in a Chinese newspaper last week that donors needed to learn how to have, “a more efficient combination between political requests and political donations, and how to use the media to push our political requests”.

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Huang sees donations as transactional. But the transactions aren’t always in Australia. In China, where some of his associates have been under a cloud, giving money to Australian universities and politicians is seen as a way to do the right thing by Chinese officials. China has set up “Confucius Institutes” at 10 Australian universities including the University of Melbourne with the aim of promoting “Chinese language and culture in a friendly, accessible and educational way”. They are also in high schools, 35 of them according to the former education minister Christopher Pyne.

To the Chinese Communist Party they are “an important part of China’s overseas propaganda set-up”. To Australian schools desperate for funds, they are a way to get teaching resources cheaply.

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The Communist Party itself has ultimate control over their curriculum, budget and hiring and training of staff, according to a Parliamentary Library research note, creating “extra-territoriality” within Australian universities and schools.

In Canada the Association of University Teachers has urged universities to sever their ties with Confucius Institutes. In the US, the Association of University Professors has issued a report suggesting their governance arrangements are “inconsistent with principles of academic freedom”, and at Chicago University the university senate has voted against renewing the institute’s contract after receiving a petition from 100 staff complaining that an outside entity was “in effect seriously influencing who’s teaching and what’s taught under our name”.

But here we don’t seem to care as much, perhaps because, like Sam Dastyari, we believe we can take money without being expected to give anything back in return. That isn’t how it’s seen in China, that’s not how it’s seen by donors such as Huang, and it’s not what the research shows. Yes: there is economic research into our response to gifts.

Oddly, and disturbingly for recipients such as Dastyari, it finds that small gifts can pack a biggerscreen-shot-2016-09-08-at-1-25-45-pm punch than big ones. For their study entitled You Owe Me, Ulrike Malmendier and Klaus Schmidt allowed bidders to give gifts to students deciding which firms to award contracts to in a laboratory experiment. The games weren’t repeated, so there was no chance of ever encountering the gift-givers again. Yet the small gifts won them over, even when what the bidders were offering was a worse service. As the size of the gift grew the effect faded.

They explain their findings by saying gifts “create a special bond between the gift giver and the receiver”. The more obvious the attempt, the more our guard goes up. It’s why doctors surgeries are filled with branded pens and free samples rather than wads of cash.

But there’s a caveat. Experienced China watchers say the gift needs to be just big enough to create a slight feeling of unease. Once the recipient feels they might have transgressed, they’re hooked for next time.

* Fairfax Media (the publisher of The Sydney Morning Herald and of this article) has joined visits to China organised and paid for by the Australia-China Relations Institute

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The sort of speaking that resulted in so much political heat for Dastyari:

Gareth Hutchens, ’Labor senator Sam Dastyari claims 10 companies have taken control of Australian politics’ Bendigo Advertiser, 08.09.16

What a US peppercorn buys in Australia:

At a ceremony in 1967 the US ambassador to Australia Ed Clark laughingly paid the Australian Prime Minister Harold Holt a peppercorn for a year’s rent on their spy base at North West Cape in Western Australia. The lease did not allow Australia any degree of control over the station.