Talk:Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

IT BEGINS
I have so many sources for this page. Reverend Black Percy (talk) 18:48, 30 March 2017 (UTC)
 * But still not as sloshed as Schlegel. Chair tater (talk) 04:03, 1 April 2017 (UTC)

Dialectic
1: Balance fallacy.

2: Hegel's theory is ridiculously non-predictive. You can shoehorn ANYTHING into the roles of "thesis and counterthesis" and claim that we've always been pendulating between extremes. Hegel could easily have summarized his argument as "people's views in change in relation to what other people of the time think" and have had as specific a theory. 04:37, 1 April 2017 (UTC)
 * Note also that Hegel never actually used the terminology of "thesis-antithesis-synthesis" — this is a later rescue attempt reformulation of what people thought Hegel meant (taken from Fichte, IIRC?).


 * Regardless, Hegel's own dialectic relies on violating the, which states that:


 * Hegel's "logic" is based on going against the above principle. Indeed, as the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy puts it (noting that LNC stands for Law of Non-Contradiction):


 * Now, according to Hegel, he wasn't contradicting the LNC at all — thanks to a term he invented, called Aufhebung (from Aufheben, a verb simultaneously interpretable as "to preserve" and "to cancel out" — as well as "to lift up" in an overtly transcendental sense).


 * This latter, transcendental use is the "real" purpose of Hegel's dialectics. Indeed, as philosopher put it:

Hegel’s dialectic in the Phenomenology is a transcendental account.


 * The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy explains how this is all meant to work thusly:


 * In other words, it's a flexible mix of begging the question, arguing from arbitrary axioms, and mistaking the map for the territory. The goal of this is to skip the legwork and graduate directly to dispensing ultimate metaphysical truth.


 * This all comes as no surprise, considering how much Hegel — and as such, he was more than willing to rely on other ways of knowing in order to be able to divine mystical truth with absolute certainty.


 * And, believe it or not, this isn't just a character assassination on my part. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy discusses his motives:


 * In other words, Hegel forged a system that would allow him to ignore any constraints that reality would otherwise place on his thinking. No wonder he got pissed by Socrates' method.


 * Hegel didn't share our contemporary focus on the process — on fallacies, on justification, on stipulative belief. On the contrary, Hegel's work was in part an attempt to write himself a "Get Out Of Jail Free"-card as pertains to logical limitations — thereby allowing him to "cut to the chase" by skipping straight to the mouth-watering divine truths.


 * As put it:


 * Worth noting is that in a footnote to the above passage, Solomon added that:


 * The weight of this point cannot be understated — Hegel's method quite literally cannot be formalized. The meaning of which is: Hegel's approach is entirely illogical. Not in the colloquial sense, "Oh, that's illogical, haha". Rather, in the sense that it's really not possible to formalize his approach, even in theory. Oops.


 * Furthermore, as put by philosopher Thomas J Bole III:


 * Keep in mind, also, the truly vast extent to which Marx and Engels built on this core Hegelian approach (see above), as did many prominent Postmodernists. Now, while these later writers are certainly not equivalent to Hegel in any sense, you better believe that their reliance on Hegel comes at a great cost to the fundamental reasonableness of their theories.


 * I mean, not to sound like a STEMlord here — though, to sound very much like an analytic philosopher — but no wonder they can't even tell what's right in front of them half the time.


 * And yes, I'm barely getting started here. Reverend Black Percy (talk) 14:01, 1 April 2017 (UTC)
 * By all means, please edit this article and rework the Dialectic section. As I haven't read Hegel's Phenomenology and have only had an introductory course to philosophy (the rest is self taught and I'm only 17 so I probably haven't learned that well haha), you all undoubtedly understand this better than I do. Edhelrimdil (talk) 16:20, 1 April 2017 (UTC)