This paper is a meditation on thinking the section “Self-Consciousness" of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (POS) through the contradictions of theory and practice.  Contradiction between theory and practice is captured through the tendency in theory and practice to develop a totalising relationship with each other, where one completely dominates.  This paper then articulates the movement from “Consciousness” to “Self-Consciousness” in POS through knowing the world without relation with the world to knowing the world in relation to it. Hegel's own relationship with this transition is problematised.  It is shown that this contradiction between these two modes of knowing, far from being solved in Hegel, actually come to the fore in Hegel's writing itself.  This contradiction that becomes visible in Hegel subsequently becomes visible in social sciences in 20th century sociology and anthropology which Bourdieu’s writings and his struggle with philosophy bring out.  A way forward from these fissures is developed through thinking Hegel’s notion of negativity alongside development of intensive dimension from Kant to Deleuze.  Theory then is conceptualised as a way to track this intensive dimension.  Intensity, as far as it is separate from both quantity and quality and finds its ground in our ability to think multiplicity, not just through indifference but through an affirmation of the world, is explored as that force that shapes our world without completely becoming present to the world.  Thus, this affirmation is an affirmation of the tension between theory and practice without seeking any prior guarantee from either of them.  It’s an affirmation of the constitutive negative force that constitutes the theory-practice divide itself, and it is then thinking multiplicity in this light and its relationship with politics that is explored.  Here, the common critique of Hegel, that dialectics eventually ends up making the world an homogenous entity, is countered by exploring a counter-tendency of dialectics through its constitutive negative dimension, where heterogeneity itself can be the ground of our ability to affirm the world.

This essay brings together Mahayana Buddhist philosophy, with a focus on Nāgārjuna’s dialectical form, with Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, investigating where they overlap in their emphasis on the negation of fixed abstractions and symbolic death, and where they diverge in relation to contradiction, presuppositions, and overall logical structure.  It attempts to highlight that what is absent in Mahayana philosophy and Nāgārjuna’s logical form is the dimension of becoming and an understanding of the negation of the negation in its position articulation.  It proposes that becoming as the third term in the dichotomies explored in the paper, form-emptiness (Śūnyatā), thought-being, and unity/non-duality-duality (non-duality), is the expression of their living dialectical movement within time.  It then examines the deeper implications of understanding non-duality and śūnyatā through the Hegelian axiom of substance as subject (A=B) as the process of becoming and concludes by pointing towards the possibility of a philosophical "Science of Spirit” suitable for the technological and alien horizon of the 21st century.

This is my attempt at thinking the real of the Sexual-Tantric Realm provided by The New Tantra school from a perspective of a young Spirit working through Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit.  I argue that Hegel's Science of Spirit can provide a useful method accompanying a subject on his pursuit to spiritual self-knowing, or Absolute Knowing.  Using psychoanalysis, the paper begins by explaining the importance of both Sutra and Tantra and their distinguishing.  It precedes to explicate the Science of Spirit and continues with speculations of my Tantric philosophy, ending with thoughts on the Non-Relation in regards to Tantric spiritual practice and the impasse of the religious layer, of which Spirit Science is the beyond.

This paper is about understanding the Kantian origins of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit.  I specifically analyse how Kant solves the problem of Hume’s skepticism by arguing in favour of an anti-realist paradigm.  I then describe Hegel’s reading of Kant’s solution in the transcendental deduction which, in turn, shows us how Kant’s philosophical limiting of human consciousness inspired Hegel to create the Phenomenology of Spirit so that human cognition can, in fact, come to know the Absolute. 

Taking ideas from the Phenomenology of Spirit, my work traces the way in which the concept of Realism — the general philosophical commitment that a thing exists “out there” relative to the mind — can be understood in light of Hegel’s Absolute.  I look at the way in which Hegel moves beyond Kant’s “noumenal” Realism, where the phenomenal world is separated from the more real noumenal world, by critiquing this very separation of thought and being.  The unity of this separation, the Absolute, is then in turn contrasted with the noumenon, or the thing-in-itself, through an analysis of the relationship between truth and knowledge, as well as their developments.  Ultimately, I show how Hegel complicates the picture of experience and reality by taking into account time and history, the dissolution of the subject/object distinction, and the co-instantiation of the mind and the world.  This complication, however, enigmatically serves to clarify the role we play in reality.

Recognition is a step in Geist’s journey where the individual human transcends biology and becomes subject and a particular coalescence of the universal. It is one of the most important steps in “becoming” human and enables civilization with all that it brings. In this paper, I discuss Hegel’s recognition from the individual subject’s perspective and explicate how a subject is born using the intersubjective psychoanalytic theory of Jessica Benjamin, who was influenced by Hegel’s theory of recognition. Recognition is one of the areas where psychoanalysis melds with philosophy.

Symbolic language is always ontologically a reflection.  As a medium, it is a constant prompt.  An utterance is sounded in order to bounce back, in whatever manner might: in communication, recognition, defiance, etc.  While the voice is not merely transactional, language always seems to be so. In our transacting, we inherently perpetuate, so much so that language itself becomes the sole world we trans-act or inter-act from and remain within.  In this essay, I attempt to trace “abstraction” through its historical-material becoming, with abstraction being the necessary act for there to be processual knowing.  This knowing culminates in the formation of the letter, and it is only with the perpetuation of the letter in symbolic language that the self too perpetuates (which, in my view, is the notion of the absolute in “Absolute Knowing”—the simple notion that finally knows itself as notion and takes itself up as simple).

In this paper, I explore Hegel’s notion that Art is complete in-itself because Philosophy has disclosed the for-itself of Art’s incompleteness through the becoming Absolute Spirit.  I will argue for the validity of this thesis through an analysis of the history of iconoclasm, the devotion to icons, and Malevich’s Black Square on a White Surface, a painting that presents to the subject the experience of “non-objectivity” through the artifice of abyssal negativity — a zero-point through which the subject must pass, bringing about the space for something new.  The “Spirit is Artist” is Hegel's claim of the becoming of Spirit in the Absolute (death).  As Artist, Spirit holds together the contradiction of outward appearance and internal essence dialectically, sublating its identity and winning its truth when it finds itself in dismemberment and loses itself in alienation and absolute otherness.  Overcoming this is the power of the subject to face negativity by tarring with the negativity of death, “tearing itself asunder”, and going through the process of negating the negation, thus realising itself in its relation to the other by relating itself back into itself in the Absolute Spirit of art.

While Hegel’s Science of Logic (1812) is, for many, obscurantist, it should be appreciated that Hegel was forced to describe its central theme of transformation—sublation—using entirely novel concepts that we may now recognize as: The real numbers, isomorphism, and sinusoidal waves—none of which had been mathematically established yet. Relegated to a speculative language that preceded the advent of these mathematics, Hegel’s sublation may have remained a philosophical vaguery. Today, however, with these concepts in view, a reexamination of sublation may provide far more distinct and consequential insight into matters of scientific interest than previously thought. 

Comparing Hegel’s prophetic descriptions of sublation to the real numbers, N ➝ ∞ limits, and isomorphism, sublation reveals itself to be not only a supple explication of phase transitions and personal transformation, but a revelation of the emergence of cartesian space itself. While philosophical tradition has long preoccupied itself with problematizing the dichotomy of being to becoming, stasis to flux, and the one to the many, this revised understanding of Hegel’s sublation shows each to be an emergent property of its opposite.

Hegel’s most famous phrase from Elements of the Philosophy of Right might also be his most challenging: “What is rational is actual; and what is actual is rational.” Is Hegel saying that everything real can be understood rationally? It sounds that way, which makes it easy to then interpret Hegel into an Enlightenment tradition that sees the world as a place growing every year in truth, efficiency, and progress. But Dr. Todd McGowan isn’t so sure if the phrase means what it seems, and ultimately this leads to “A Tale of Two Hegels,” one which I will call the “Rationalist Hegel” and another I’ll call the “Absolute Hegel.” In the first, we are led to believe “the true is the rational” (A=A) while in the second we glimpse how “the true isn’t the rational” (A=B). Ultimately, we ourselves must choose in our daily lives how we think truth and rationality relate, and yet the very need to make this choice might suggest something Absolute.

The chapter Absolute Knowing in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit is applied to think through ideological problems of contemporary “New Atheism”.  In the dominance of New Atheism in the 21st century, we find the emergence of a scientific world that succeeds in thinking complex substance, but still struggles to think about the nature of subjectivity.  To be specific, complexity science can obfuscate the position of the subject and the unity of thought and being in the creation of models; the scientific method can be used to test external cognition without self-reflexivity opening a world of untested subjectivity; and secular society with an emphasis on democracy and rational cognition can fall into crises of meaning and authority without obvious solutions within democracy and rational cognition itself.  In this application, there is an identification that complexity science must be complemented with an active mediation of the way subjectivity comes to be a simple form of knowing with the immediacy of its being; the scientific method must include within itself the irreducibility of the particular singularity of each historical form of subjectivity; and secular society must press forward into the incompletion and contradiction of identity-paradox as self-revelation in the historical process itself.  Ultimately, the idea is that Hegel’s chapter on Absolute Knowing allows us to develop a more sophisticated form of atheism, an atheism that can think about the pain and the process of the subject’s coming-to-be in the world, its endless self-experimentation, and the paradoxical struggles of modern political order.  Without a more sophisticated form of atheism, what I will call Hegelian Atheism, regression to a form of fundamental religion (which sees itself as the end-point) and hedonist nihilism (which sees itself as the end-point) is unavoidable and inevitable. In other words, without Hegel, we cannot really begin the real work of the 21st century.