Reading Notes: March 7th, 2022

“The highest definition of the Absolute is that it is not merely mind in general but that it is mind which is absolutely manifest to itself, self-conscious, infinitely creative mind…” (Hegel, The Philosophy of Mind, §384) 

“But in truth, the finitude of mind must be regarded not as a fixed determination, but must be recognized as a mere moment; for as we have already said. Mind is essentially the Idea in the form of ideality, in other words, in the form of the negatedness of the finite. In mind, therefore, the finite has only the significance of a being which is not simply affirmative but has been reduced to a moment. Accordingly, the peculiar quality of and is rather to be the true infinite, that is, the infinite which does not one-sidedly stand over against the finite but contains the finite within itself as a moment. It is, therefore, meaningless to say: There are finite minds. Mind qua mind is not finite, it has finitude within itself, but only as a finitude which is to be, and has been, reduced to a moment. The genuine definition of finitude here…must be that the finite is a reality that is not adequate to its Notion. Thus the sun is a finite entity, for it cannot be thought without other entities, since the reality of its Notion comprises not merely the sun itself but the entire solar system. Indeed, the whole solar system is a finite entity, because every heavenly body in it exhibits an illusory independence of the others; consequently this collective reality does not as yet correspond to its Notion, does not as yet represent the same ideality which the nature of the Notion is. It is only the reality of mind that is itself ideality, and it is therefore only in mind that we find absolute unity of Notion and reality, and hence true infinitude. The very fact that we know a limitation is evidence that we are beyond it, evidence of our freedom from limitation.” (Hegel, The Philosophy of Mind, §386) 

“Natural objects are finite simply because their limitation does not exist for the objects themselves, but only for us who compare them with one another. We make ourselves finite by receiving an Other into our consciousness; but in the very fact of our knowing this Other we have transcended this limitation. Only he who does not know is limited, for he does not know his limitation; whereas he who knows the limitation knows it, not as a limitation of his knowing, but as something known, as something belonging to his knowledge; only the unknown would be a limitation of knowledge, whereas the known limitation, on the contrary, is not; therefore, to know one’s limitation means to know of one’s unlimitedness. But when we pronounce mind to be unlimited, truly infinite, this does not mean that mind is free from any limitation whatsoever; on the contrary, we must recognize that mind must determine itself and so make itself finite, limit itself. But the abstract intellect is wrong in treating this finitude as something inflexible, in holding the differences between the limitation and infinitude to be absolutely fixed, and accordingly maintaining that mind is either limited or unlimited. Finitude, truly comprehended, is, as we have said, contained in infinitude, limitation in the unlimited. Mind is, therefore, as well infinite as finite, and neither merely the one nor merely the other; in making itself finite it remains infinite, for it reduces the finitude within it to a mere moment…” (Hegel, The Philosophy of Mind, §386) 

“The question of the immateriality of the soul has no interest, except where, on the one hand, mater is regarded as something true, and mind conceived as a thing, on the other. But in modern times even the physicists have found matters grow thinner in their hands: they have come upon imponderable matters, like heat, light, etc., to which they might perhaps add space and time. These “imponderables”, which have lost the property (peculiar to matter) of gravity and, in a sense, even the capacity of offering resistance, have still, however, a sensible existence and outness of part to part; whereas the “vital” matter, which may also be found enumerated among them, not merely lacks gravity, but even every other aspect of existence which might lead us to treat it as material. The fact is that the Idea of Life is the self-externalism of nature is implicitly at an end: subjectivity is the very substance and conception of life—with this proviso, however that its existence or objectivity is still at the same time forfeited to the sway of self-externalism. It is otherwise with Mind. There, in the intelligible unity which exists as freedom, as absolute negativity, and not as the immediate or natural individual, the object or the reality of the intelligible unity is the unity itself; and so the self-externalism, which is the fundamental feature of matter, has been completely dissipated and transmuted into universality, or the subjective ideality of the conceptual unity. Mind is the existent truth of matter—the truth that matter itself has no truth.” (Hegel, The Philosophy of Mind, §389) 

“If soul and body are absolutely opposed to one another as is maintained by the abstractive intellectual consciousness, then there is no possibility of any community between them. This community was, however, recognized by the ancient metaphysics as an undeniable fact. Therefore, the question arose as to how the contradiction, to wit, that entities which are absolutely independent and for themselves, are yet in unity with one another, could be solved. The question as thus posed was unanswerable. But it is just this form of the question that must be recognized as inadmissible; for in truth the immaterial is not related to the material as a particular is to a particular, but as the true universal which overarches and embraces particularity is related to particular; the particular material thing in its isolation has no truth, no independence in the fact of the immaterial. Consequently, the standpoint which separates them is not to be regarded as final, as absolutely true. On the contrary, the separation of the material and the immaterial can be explained only on the basis of the original unity of both….[This] unity must not be taken as something neutral in which two extremes of equal significance and independence are united, since the material has absolutely no meaning beyond that of being a negative over against spirit and over against itself, or must be described—in the words of Plato and other ancient philosophers—as “the Other of itself”, whereas the nature of spirit is to be recognized as the positive, as the speculative, because the material, which lacks independence in face of spirit, is freely pervaded by the latter which overarches this its Other, does not account it as something truly real but reduces it to an ideal moment and to something mediated.” (Hegel, The Philosophy of Mind, §389) 

“Opposed to this speculative interpretation of the opposition between mind and matter is materialism which represents Thought as resulting from Matter, derives the simplicity of Thought from what is manifold. The explanations given in materialistic writings of the various relationships and combinations which are supposed to produce a result such as Thought, are unsatisfactory in the extreme. Such explanations entirely overlook the fact that, just as the cause is sublated in the effect and the means in the realized end, so, too, that from which Thought is supposed to result is itself deprived of its independence in Thought; also that mind as such is not produced by an Other, but spontaneously raises itself from a merely implicit being to an explicit existence, from its Notion to actuality, and that by which Thought was supposed to be posited is itself converted by Thought into a posited being.” (Hegel, The Philosophy of Mind, §389) 

“Europeans, on the contrary, have for their principle and character the concrete universal, self-determining Thought. The Christian God is not merely the differenceless One, but the triune God who contains difference within himself, who has become man and who reveals himself. In this religious conception of the opposition of universal and particular, of Thought and Being, is present in its most developed form and yet has also been brought back again to unity. Here, then, the particular is not left so quiescent in its immediacy as in Mohammedanism; on the contrary, it is determined by thought, just as, conversely, the universal here develops itself into particularization. The principle of the European mind is, therefore, self-conscious Reason which is confident that for it there can be no insuperable barrier and which therefore takes an interest in everything in order to become present to itself therein. The European mind opposes the world to itself, makes itself free of it, but in turn annuls this opposition, takes its Other, the manifold, back into itself, into its unitary nature. In Europe, therefore, there prevails this infinite thirst for knowledge which is alien to other races. The European is interested in the world, he wants to know it, to make this Other confronting him his own, to bring to view the genus, law, universal, thought, the inner rationality, in the particular forms of the world. As in theoretical, so too in the practical sphere, the European mind strives to make manifest the unity between itself and the outer world. It subdues the outer world to its ends with an energy which has ensured for it the mastery of the world.” (Hegel, The Philosophy of Mind, §393) 

“Although Berkeley is the most celebrated British idealist, towards the end of the nineteenth century British philosophy was dominated by a group of thinkers deeply influenced by German idealism, especially by Hegel. This group comprised F.H. Bradley, Bernard Bosanquet, Thomas Hill Green, and John McTaggart Ellis McTaggart. These thinkers are little read nowadays, mainly because of the severity of criticism levelled at them, first by G.E. Moore and Bertrand Russell and later by the logical positivists.” (Priest, Theories of Mind, 68-69) 

“And, as to the principle of the contention that presence in an experience is the very meaning of existence, it is, to my mind at least, as Mr. Bradley says it is to his, so evident that I should find it impossible to meet anyone who disputes it on common ground. Its full force will perhaps be best brought out by our disregarding the special grounds upon which it is supported by Berkeley, some of them only too insecure, and restating it in the form of a challenge. Produce, we may say to the objector, any piece of fact whatever of which you are prepared to maintain the real existence, and I will undertake to show that what makes it real can be nothing but its presence as an inseparable aspect of a sentient experience. What the special fact you choose for the purpose of the experiment may be, whether a physical quality or process, an artistic effect, or a moral excellence, makes no difference to the principle of the argument. For when you have chosen your fact, and made your assertion, “This fact, A, really exists,” we shall invite you to think, as you always can, of a corresponding A which is not real but merely imaginary, and then to say what it is that makes the difference between the real and the imaginary or unreal A. If you will try the experiment, you will always find, as Kant proved in the historical case of the hundred dollars, that the difference does not lie in the addition of a new predicate to those by which the imaginary A is characterized, but always in the actual presence of the real A to a sentient experience, its entrance into some immediately apprehended whole. Even in the case of an A which, for some reason or other, is wholly inaccessible to human perception you cannot really escape from this conclusion. For, suppose you say, “The ice at the South Pole really exists, though it is impossible for a human eye to behold it,” we shall invite you to explain more precisely what you mean by such a statement. You will then find yourself in a dilemma: either you mean that the Polar ice exists with all its qualities, including those which have no meaning at all except in relation to a perceiving organ, precisely as we should see it if we were there, and in that case the ice with all its qualities must presumably be always present, as such, to an experience which is not ours; or you mean that there really exist certain conditions, such that, on the addition of one further condition, the presence of a human spectator, they would yield a perception of the ice. But, not to insist on the point that the reality of a certain object and the reality of some of its conditions are not the same thing, what do you mean by a really existing condition as distinguished from one which is merely imagined to exist? Any answer to this question will show that the appeal to conditions only puts the difficulty back a stage, without in any way affecting the validity of the Berkeleian contention.” (Taylor, Mind and Nature, 58-59) 

“The question, so interpreted, is indeed only a special case of the more general question, “Is anything what it is known as being, outside the experience in which it is so known?” To answer this question fully would take us much deeper into metaphysical controversy than we can reasonably desire to go in a work of which metaphysics is neither the only nor the principal subject, but we must, at any rate, briefly indicate the conclusions which would naturally follow from the view which has been enunciated in our opening chapter as to the scope and the methods of metaphysics. If our original conception of the metaphysical problem was a correct one, it is clear that metaphysics can never reveal to us any existence entirely beyond or entirely independent of an experience in which it forms an inseparable aspect. As we have indicated already, the whole problem of metaphysics is to construct a description of the world of experience which shall answer to our ideal of “pure” experience—that is, shall contain no single element which cannot be completely described in terms of experienced fact. Just in so far as metaphysics or any other branch of science departs from this ideal, and employs in its theories concepts which cannot be resolved into descriptions of experienced fact, it ceases to be fully and completely true and becomes infected to an unknown degree with errors and false assumptions, which it is the work of scientific progress to remove. Thus, as against certain forms of philosophic Realism, we feel bound to maintain that metaphysics is incapable of ever transcending that reference to actual or possible experience which is involved in every assertion about existence. What is means for us, as for the plain man, what is or what would, under definitely known conditions, be experienced by a consciousness, and wherever we find science and philosophy apparently transcending these limits, and informing us of the existence of objects which, from their nature, cannot as such be contents of any experience, we expect to detect the presence in scientific theory of “symbolic” and unreal concepts.” (Taylor, The Problem of Conduct: A Study in the Phenomenology of Ethics, 448-449) 

“We maintain, then, that taking existence in the full and proper sense of the terms, nothing ever is, outside the concrete experience in which it is an ingredient, what it is within that experience. The utmost reality that can be conceded to any object of experience outside the experience in which it is known, is the reality of certain conditions which, with the addition of the further condition of certain psychological dispositions in the percipient, will yield the experience of the object in question. And by the reality of these “conditions” we must once more mean, unless we are to play fast and loose with words, their presence as an ingredient in some other experience. We cannot too strongly insist that of “existence,” in any full sense of the word, we can form no notion whatever except as forming the content of an experience. As Mr. Bradley puts it, “being” is indissolubly one with “sentience.” That this truth is so frequently denied by realists and misconceived by idealists is probably to be accounted for by the general prevalence of a most unfortunate error in philosophical order. If, instead of treating experience as a kind of knowing, metaphysicians had treated knowing as a kind of experience, it would have been less easy to mistake the mere symbols of inadequate conceptual thought for transcendently real things existing outside of, and independently of, the experience in which they are thought of.” (Taylor, The Problem of Conduct: A Study in the Phenomenology of Ethics, 450) 

“I am, of course, aware that there are many points of interest and importance raised by our general conception of the metaphysical problem to which we have in the present Essay been quite unable to do justice. It is clear that we might, for instance, asked to say whether we regard the contents of an experience and the experiencing process itself as inseparable or not, and again, whether we recognize the existence of anything inaccessible to the human experiences with which alone human knowledge has to concern itself. It might even be suggested—though I do not myself think the suggestion fully intelligible—that the human mind, even at its best, is such an uneven reflecting surface as is spoken by Bacon, and inevitably “distorts” the contents which it experiences. In a word, we might find ourselves called upon to deal with all the issues which are popularly regarded as summed up in the opposition of “Realism” and “Idealism.” If we have on the whole avoided the discussion of these issues, it has not been so much from not having an opinion upon them as because the determination of them did not seem absolutely necessary for our purpose, which was, after all, only to gain a firm basis for a conception of the relation between metaphysics and ethics. For this purpose it is hardly necessary to ask whether the experiences which are the material of all our knowledge are separable from the states which experience them or not. The question is one which I should not be unwilling to discuss at a more suitable opportunity, but for the present it will be sufficient to say that, as far as I can see, the onus probandi rests altogether upon the philosopher who maintains that experience and its contents are two—in other words, on the “realist.” And I may perhaps add that I have not as yet met a “realist” argument which appeared to be free from obvious fallacies.” (Taylor, The Problem of Conduct: A Study in the Phenomenology of Ethics, 499-500) 

“Indeed the only really forcible “realist” contention seems to be the favorite one that “idealism,” or “Berkeleyanism,” or whatever other name you prefer for the opposing view, leads logically to Solipsism, an argument which loses all its weight as soon as you realize that the distinction between “myself” and others is not original, but is as much a creation of the psychological mechanism as e.g. the distinction between myself to-day and myself of yesterday.” (Taylor, The Problem of Conduct: A Study in the Phenomenology of Ethics, 500)