Hegel Everyday #3

 Preface (Continued)

10. Intuition places itself “above” determinate = extensional  = phenomenal = computationally reliable    knowledge. E.g. creative people saying they’re ‘not linear thinkers'', can’t think with their left brain etc but real creativity is only in determinate forms (content is consciousness). in such a situation spirit pours “forth as finite multiplicity without force”. intution without expression thinks it has acquired depth even though it hasn’t, it is just hazy - the power of spirit is only as great as its expression. Spirit has to take determinate forms otherwise dialectic stops and “hides the truth from itself”

Introduction

        73. Talks about cognition. Is cognition an instrument or a medium to know the absolute?? 

                Instrument -> Problems:

• Its possible that we can choose the wrong category of thought to examine the absolute

•  The instrument modifies what it works upon.

• Medium ->Seeing through a window e.g. we again see only what the medium allows us to see. 

Means bring about the opposite of their end in both cases. So before trying to examine how knowledge comes to know the absolute, examine knowledge in itself. Epistemological turn.

Trying to remove the part that cognition added doesn’t work because it is through these mediums that we come to know the absolute anyway. If its instrument and you account for how much its changed then you are left with indeterminate absolute again and similarly with medium. 

Another possibility - Instrument is not as intrusive as we think it is. This is a ruse, it can only work if absolute was with us in and for itself in the first place. None of these are ways that can work to think the absolute

74. Start then learn, Don’t Learn then Start.

Skepticism already assumes a difference between cognition and reality/the absolute. If you are doubting the possibility of absolute knowledge being acquired then why not doubt that doubt itself => infinite regress, so the solution is to start doing the actual work required. This is in a way the reappearance of the intuitionistic mode, or the complacency to think that absolute knowledge will be given to you immediately. Fear of being wrong is actually a fear of knowing the truth in this way because it paralyzes you with skepticism. Once you start then through the whole dialectic process more clarity will come about.