1 upvotes, 1 direct replies (showing 1)
View submission: What drives the dialectic: Hegel's transition from being to nothing
It’s driven by the contradiction that occurs when we compare the category to the content of the definition provided by the understanding alongside the principle of determinate negation (that contradiction/negation does not reduce to a nullity, but is a nothing that results). The latter is what Trendelenburg is saying is based off the experience of motion, iirc.
Hegel seems to think that determinate negation is self-evident from any number of examples, including examples that are not spatio-temporal. trendelenburg iirc says it depends on experience, like the experience of motion. So if it is an intuition for Hegel, it’s more of a Cartesian style logical intuition than a spatio-temporal intuition.
Being as indeterminate immediacy *is* nothing, its opposite, which is a contradiction. Likewise with nothing. That very contradiction is the concept of becoming: the transition where being is nothing and nothing is being.
I think some of Hegel’s students actually do respond to Trendelenburg, Rosenkranz I believe for sure, although idk which work.
I’d say more but it’s early and I just woke up.
McTaggart’s commentary sucks, don’t bother with it.
Edit:
The commentator seems to be talking about the move from being to nothing, not from the contradiction to becoming, which I’m not sure is a fair representation of Hegel and is possibly misrepresenting Trendelenburg as well.
So there are two moves that need to be justified:
1. Why is being nothing rather than just not-being?
2. Why does the contradiction “being is nothing” (and vice-versa) produce “becoming,” a new positive concept?
In my view these are justified in the following ways:
1. This is justified by the meta-logical commitments about negation and disjunction where we can infer that whatever in no way is is nothing. It has to do with the idea that disjunction determines the entire space of possibilities and that we can infer contraries from a negative. This was taken for granted by Hegel and Kant, yet isn’t an assumption of 20th century formal logic, so you have to retrofit your logic.
2. Hegel says this is “self-evident” if you consider any number of dialectical examples. Of course, Trendelenburg wants to say that we need to draw off the experience of the real contradictions in motion (a point that Engels seems to follow him on), yet Hegel thinks it’s our ability to recognize the logic of certain self-sublating contradictions with reason itself. So like, if I tell you Socrates knows that he knows nothing, therefore he is wise because he knows one thing, viz. that he knows nothing, you recognize that the order of these negations make it so that the “nothing” is both canceled out by Socrates knowing and preserved. You grasp this with reason, not based on spatio-temporal intution.
Comment by iunoionnis at 05/02/2024 at 11:12 UTC
1 upvotes, 0 direct replies
Pretty dope that you’re reading LU by Trendelenburg. I’ve skimmed through the arguments in German, but have been wanting to read it closely at some point. Might make a good reading group if there’s some German speakers ready to roll.