Eva, I appreciate your comments about reading "old writers". I am an
engineer by training and it is always a painful process for me to get my
head around "old writers", and also I might say a lot of "new writers"!! It
was very much my aim in writing "Getting to Know Hegel" to give people an
"ariadne's thread" through which they could navigate through a reading of
Hegel. As Paul has re-iterated, you cannot (in my view) get past reading
Hegel in the original. No-one will ever do that labour again. But at the
same time, he *is* an "old writer", and the job has to be done
materialistically, ... as we all tell ourselves time and again!! ... and
that job has to be done in the streets and communities where the dialectic
is actually unfolding nowadays.
I don't really understand what you mean by "system dynamical reasoning".
But it sort of works like this (Hegel's Logic, I mean - if we use the word
"dialectic" in contexts like this, we need to know what the hell object we
are talking about, so I will talk about Hegel's Logic for a now) ...
When something new gets going, like for example, when a lot of women are
all deciding to find factory jobs instead of staying at home doing
domestics all day, but are not necessarily saying anything about it or
reflecting on it, or even know that they are not alone ... then this
concept which is to become "Women's Liberation" exists at a certain stage
of development, "Being" in fact, in Hegel's Logic. Associated with that
stage of development, there is a kind of reasoning, a way in which these
specific social relations are internalised and reproduced in thought-forms
by the participants (participants = everyone really). What Hegel describes
in the Logic is these thought forms. He then launches a critique of each of
these thought forms as he comes to them. Hegel's critique then is a
"logical form" of what takes place out there in the world and sooner or
later leads to a new stage of development - people doing different things,
people reasoning differently about this fact under emergence. The women
conceive of the fact that they are unwelcome and unaccustomed to going into
factories, that they have no existence in this realm and that there is a
problem (but still as individuals, unaware that anyone else is thinking the
same, in this example - "Nothing").
This way of looking at the Logic becomes abundantly clear when you get up
to the Subjective Logic (which Lenin skipped over when he was doing his
1914 reading of the Logic), where party procedures, bureaucratic modes of
reasoning, formal thinking and so on come under Hegel's assault, but it is
a thread that runs from beginning to end of the Logic.
Now, a lot of statements about "dialectics" don't make a lot of sense to me
in this light, because very different kinds of things are happening all
along the way. Hegel refused to get involved in talk about "triads" and
"thesis-antithesis-synthesis" because (for example) each of these two
aphorisms are only relatively applicable to *some* of the moments Hgeel
discusses, and there is not rigid pattern to the whole thing.
If "dialectics" is anything, it has to be the object which Hegel was
describing (rather than his description), and we cannot agree with Hegel on
what that object was. Also, as Marx observes in his Critique of Hegel's
Philosophy of Right, we cannot agree with Hegel's description either. It is
wrong in detail and in some very important aspects as well.
I don't know what "system dynamical reasoning" may be, but I presume like
any other reasoning (hegel's included), it has its limits.
Andy
At 12:24 14/06/2000 +0200, you wrote:
>Hi Andy
>
>Thanks for the direction pointer, it sounds like a useful frame of mind to
>wear if I ever get around to REALLY reading Hegel. (I make admiring dips
>into your website now and then, that's all).
>
>I find something of a generality in this, that when I read writers of the
>older generations I need to make a mental turn to find the point from where
>they make perfect sense, and then it is a good thing to have a clew from
>someone who is familiar with the territory. And yet, I am very impatient
>with secondhand or thirdhand renderings, vastly prefer to sample or
>navigate the actual texts with an ariadne thread like yours.
>
>I do have a question (well, the question is if I can formulate my wondering
>AS a question) -- as I did not understand whether your conclusion is that a
>reading of Hegel would show that dialectical modes of reasoning and system
>dynamical modes of reasoning are incompatible, or on the contrary, that
>they might be compatible.
>
>Eva
>
>
>
>At 11.20 +1000 0-06-13, Andy Blunden scrobe:
>>My reading of Hegel's Logic has led me to the conclusion that the entire
>>Logic, and all its little syllogisms, judgments and moments, make perfect
>>sense if you understand him as talking about how rational social relations
>>develop, and that he expresses this description of the "laws of motion of
>>social rationality" in the form of a critique of the types of thinking that
>>rationalise each stage of the process.
>>
>>See http://home.mira.net/~andy/works/iup.htm
>>
>>Andy
>
>
>
>
**************************************************
* Andy Blunden, Teaching Space Consultant,
* and Manager of Videoconferencing Operations
* http://home.mira.net/~andy/
* University of Melbourne 9344 0312 (W) 9380 9435 (H)
**************************************************
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Sat Jul 01 2000 - 01:00:33 PDT