GWF Hegel

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Just read Schopenhauer instead. You can learn more about Hegelianism by reading its almost-negation than by actually reading Hegel.

>ontology
he makes the error of considering pure being the immediate indeterminate, when in fact our conception of pure being is the end result of a process of removing qualities that results in a thing with one quality, namely that it exists. In other words, pure being is both mediated and determinate. This error causes him to consider nothing and being to be equal for us. Nothing is the result of final step in the above process, but this step can never actually be accomplished, because as soon as you think about nothing you don't think at all. Thus, nothing is a word that points towards something; we can't actually conceive of nothing, whereas we can conceive of pure being.

Hegelian ontology is also dualistic, i.e. opposites necessarily exist together. Dark and Light are ontologically equivalent for Hegel. However, this dualism fails when you ask what the necessary opposite of "something" is. The answer is "nothing," which indicates that it has no opposite, and thus the ontology fails, again due to a misunderstanding about what "nothing" is.

Finally, Hegelian Ontology involves things necessarily self-othering, and then reconciling their other to themselves. If you take "pure being" as your object, it's other is simply nothing, i.e. it has no other, and the ontology falls apart.

The main issue with Hegelian Ontology is it's conception of nothing, which is closer to something like the empty set in set theory than what "nothing" really is.

>concept of necessity
Hegel's conception of necessity requires that there is a justification for everything. On it's surface, it sounds nice, but it also results in myriad errors on his part. For instance, in his section "Force and the Understanding" in his Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel criticizes the Notion of Law. This Notion is that every Law possesses a Force, and the way that Force applies to its specific content. He takes two examples, the Electric Force and the Force of Gravity. Notably, he claims that for the Understanding this Notion of Law is unsatisfactory because things within the Law are not necessary. I'll go ahead and note that for Hegel, the Understanding seeks the "Unconditioned Absolute Universal" or the rule that works for everything.

For the first, he notes that the Electric Force has for its content Electricity, which manifests as a positive and negative charge. However, he says that there is no necessary connection between the Electric Force and Electricity, or no reason why it should work one way for positive charges and one way for negative (if you look at the math, there actually is a reason, but I'll let him have it since at some point it is indeed arbitrary). He says that because there is no necessary connection, this cannot be the way things work.

His criticism for Gravity is that it's contents involve space and time, which are not opposites like negative and positive, thus the contents of the law are not necessarily connected either. So in some respects his concept of necessity is founded upon his ontology.

For Hegel, this lack of relational necessity between the form and contents of the Law, and between the contents of the Law itself, indicate that the existence of these things is unnecessary, and that the Understanding cannot be satisfied that things should exist necessarily. Again, for Hegel since nothing implies being and vice versa, being necessarily exists. But, it's fairly clear that the Understanding only cares about the Absolute Unconditioned Universal, and that "real and arbitrary" unconditionally, absolutely, and universally works.

>read all these other people's before you think for yourself.

If it's your thing, you can. If it's not your thing, you also can just skip that and do just fine. It's strange that you warn against taking a single reading as *the* reading, and yet you warn people against engaging their own reading first. If you're afraid of your own mind and don't trust your own reason, great, knock yourself out reading secondary lit as a place to start. If you're not scared, great as well, you *can* read it without all the background and have a quite intelligible experience which can give as strong a reading as any. This bs of historical contextualization vs the logical ahistorical reading is silly since both readings are possible, both are legit, and both should be engaged at some point because they're both important.

They're wrong because it's his opinion that they're wrong, of course. Just see his reasoning here >error of considering pure being immediate indeterminate

He literally talks about this in the first comment after those two first paragraphs of that chapter (Being is a memory of abstraction). He literally says it in the introduction essays, "There is nothing, nothing in heaven, or in nature or in mind or anywhere else which does not equally contain both immediacy and mediation, so that these two determinations reveal themselves to be unseparated and inseparable and the opposition between them to be a nullity."

The immediacy of Being is a logical immediacy of development. Yeah, Being as absolute is an indeterminate concept and so is Nothing.

>This error causes him to consider nothing and being to be equal for us. Nothing is the result of final step in the above process, but this step can never actually be accomplished, because as soon as you think about nothing you don't think at all.
Key being
>you don't think at all.
That's literally in the first paragraph of the book: this non-thinking, or rather, empty thinking, is precisely the origin of the concept of Nothing for Hegel.

> However, this dualism fails when you ask what the necessary opposite of "something" is. The answer is "nothing," which indicates that it has no opposite, and thus the ontology fails, again due to a misunderstanding about what "nothing" is.
Literally didn't read past the first paragraph of the Logic, didn't you? I mean, you're ignorant of chapter one, so no surprise that you're ignorant of the section in chapter 1 where he preempts your argument and shuts it down, and chapter 2 where it is made clear why.

>The main issue with Hegelian Ontology is it's conception of nothing, which is closer to something like the empty set in set theory than what "nothing" really is.
The problem isn't with Hegel, it's with you. You said it yourself, "Nothing" as you >want< to conceive it is impossible, and yet we must have a concept of it. Nothing and Being cannot be torn apart.

You clearly misunderstand necessity as well.

You'd do well to read the Logic, Hegel goes quite into detail as to why you fall for such confusions of the understanding.

Read something cool and obscure instead, like George Gurdjieff

>insistence that his system is presuppositionless
This is the one that bugs me the most. In his Preface to his Phenomenology, Hegel says that if you make a system that has presuppositions, they're arbitrary, people can give reasons for or against them, and they don't generally have the sort of self-moving character Hegel claims his dialectic possesses. He gets real buttmad at mathematicians because of this.

Hegel does make presuppositions, and they aren't any more self-moving than mathematics is. He starts with the presupposition: sense-certainty is certainty that a thing is, without having certainty of any other aspects of the thing. He then immediately breaks his own rule by claiming that sense-certainty, which can only know that a thing is, is able to distinguish between one Here or another. Really, it can only know that Here is, and that the other Here is, and thus for sense-certainty they are equal, and it will be unable to move itself forward.

One common claim is that consciousness includes its higher forms already, so the reason sense-certainty makes this movement is because it secretly possesses higher forms of consciousness, like perception. This seems to defeat the purpose of the Phenomenology on it's face, but it's an idea worth considering nonetheless. Suppose I come along and say that the statement "Self-Consciousness seeks self-certainty as its truth" is false. On what grounds can I be criticized? It cannot be that the previous modes of thought necessarily lead to self-consciousness, because they already possessed it, and we have simply a "lifeless equality." If higher forms of consciousness seem to imply it, I can refute them because self-consciousness is necessary for their truth, and I have rejected it. Indeed, why should we believe that self-consciousness seeks to raise certainty of itself to truth; if it does not take itself for truth, then it is not certain, and if it is certain, it does not seek truth.

The dialectic then is not self-moving; it is moved along by Hegel, and it is for this reason that so many Hegelians see his work as incomplete, because they see a movement that Hegel takes as unnecessary, or they see a movement which Hegel does not make which they think is necessary. In truth, the only criterion which makes a movement necessary is that Hegel said it was necessary.

I will say, there are some movements which are compelling. For instance, sense-certainty finds that its content is sensuous universals, so Perception becomes the process of uniting those universals into things. It's an intuitive move, but not necessary.

Non-thinking cannot be the origin of nothing. Rather, only the removal of qualities from our objects of perception can be the origin.

I understand that this empty thinking is the justification for Hegel's equivalence between being and nothing. But, like I've already argued, being can be conceptualized, while "nothing" cannot. The word nothing simply points to the end of a process which we can never complete.

>The problem isn't with Hegel, it's with you
>They're wrong because it's his opinion that they're wrong
Classic pettiness A.W., never change.

>we must have a concept of it
Really? Nothing as we commonly conceive of it, in everyday use, is more like "empty." Normally there are groups of things, and then one day the group has no things of its usual sort in it. The "nothingness" of space is just an emptiness of typical objects.

>you clearly misunderstood necessity as well
>Hegel goes quite into detail as to why you fall for such confusions
I do like that Hegel believes preempting arguments is the same as refuting them.

Hegel is one of the only people that keeps me (a little) humble.

Even though I know it isn't the best way to go through life, I pretty much think everyone is considerably dumber than me or, at most, as smart. I have never met anyone that I believe to be smarter.

Hegel, along with a few other great thinkers, sets the bar incredibly high. It keeps me grounded. I'm sure all the genius mathematicians are slightly smarter too but I don't engage with their abilities so I don't care.

>Non-thinking cannot be the origin of nothing. Rather, only the removal of qualities from our objects of perception can be the origin.
It's like you really can't read.

>Classic pettiness A.W., never change.
Classic not an argument, user.

>Really? Nothing as we commonly conceive of it, in everyday use, is more like "empty."
And no one ever was talking about beings, but Being. Once again, read.

>I do like that Hegel believes preempting arguments is the same as refuting them.
I do like your claims without exegetic argument. It's easy to make empty claims to ignorants, but alas I am here. What do you want me to do? I mean, read Hegel and make an argument against his counterargument.

Don't be a common plebe, be like Socrates and accept your ignorance to transcend it.

I concur with this. People telling you to jump straight into the Phenomonology are memeing, this does a much better job of clearing stuff up and directing you con concrete examples of his ideas.

>Really? Nothing as we commonly conceive of it, in everyday use, is more like "empty." Normally there are groups of things, and then one day the group has no things of its usual sort in it. The "nothingness" of space is just an emptiness of typical objects.

This is literally something I realized in the 4th grade.

>read a brainlet's rant about Hegel

The absolute state of pseuds.

subtle and obscure pasta
well placed

>great thinker
He was certainly that. But a "great thinker" does not necessarily = a thinker of great things.

Hegel is an example of someone who got so far up their own butt that they folded the fabric of spacetime. THAT is his accomplishment. That and that alone is the only reason he is deemed a worthy hero of Veeky Forums