Reading Notes: August 1st, 2022

“[We] construct a notion of [the physical world] as independent of our thought, consisting of things with primary and secondary qualities…and we regard our bodies with their sense organs as the media of observation which should convey it to us as it is and as it exists apart from them….But this view is full of confusion….Everything revealed to us of such a physical world can be so only as an affection of our own organisms; yet these again are physical things and so must be reduced to affections of themselves. We cannot infer from our affections to the causes which affect us, for to do that would be to conclude to some “thing-in-itself” which is in the nature of the case unknowable and could not therefore help us, nor could it conceivably be related causally to what is knowable so as to validate the inference. Accordingly, the physical world as the complex of relations between physical things turns out to be “the phenomenal relation of the unknown to the unknown.” Bradley develops this paradox at more length, asserting that inevitably the outer world exists only for my organs. If this means only that my perception of the physical world is so dependent, it can hardly be gainsaid; and, of course, my organs can be perceived as physical objects only on the same condition. In these terms any attempt to explain our experience of the world must lead to vicious regress and circularity. But what if we were to say that the world and our organisms are self-existent apart from any affection we may suffer and apart from our perceiving? That could help us in no way at all to comprehend the physical world, to explain what we know of it, or to say how we come to experience it.” (Harris, Bradley’s Conception of Nature, 187-189) 

“Formal logic…treats negation merely as a logical operator, as a mere striking out or erasure of the negated term, whereas in dialectical logic it is always significant negation: that is, it has positive as well as negative import….To negate is to indicate an alternative, a neglected compliment; it is to delineate a determination and to fix a definitive character. Negation is a necessary feature of all systematic structure, without which it has no coherent function, and within which it is the instrument of specification….The essential point is that negation differentiates between the elements of a system, or, what have found to be the same thing, between the gradations of a scale of continuously diverging forms. It sets the distincta in mutual contrast and so makes them contraries. It excludes one from the other and so makes them contradictory opposites. It defines each in terms of the other and so makes them complementaries. In a dialectical scale, the differing degrees in which the universal manifests itself are its specific forms. They are thus species of the genus (or generic essence), and so they rank as distinct elements of the system. As mutually complementary, they are contraries. But they also exclude one another and the level of gradation appropriate to one is inappropriate and inimical to any other. They are in this respect contradictories. Negation, which differentiates them, denotes either or both of these relationships. Not-A, as substitute for A, is its contradictory; as complementary of A, it is contrary. It is always both, for as complement it can never be substitute, and as contradictory it is always complement. The substitution of not-A for A is what the Law of Non-contradiction forbids; their complementarity is what the Law of Excluded Middle affirms.” (Harris, Formal, Transcendental, and Dialectical Thinking, 157-158) 

“Now, it ought to be clear that if something emerges from something else, the emergent must be present in some way or other in that from which it emerges. Otherwise, it cannot emerge, but must come into being independently of what appears to be the prior stage. The butterfly is said to emerge from the chrysalis only because it has all along been present in the chrysalis, even if it has not always been there in the same form. However difficult it may be to understand the notion of becoming or development, so much seems plain, that if the process is to be truly continuous what emerges at the end of the process must have been present in some form, or in some degree, at the beginning.” (Harris, The Spirit of Hegel, 96-97) 

“In the modern age, realism, in its many forms, has invariably become entangled in insoluble problems in its efforts to give a feasible account of knowledge. If the material world exists independently of our consciousness, if (as has been often asserted) “knowing makes no difference to the known,” and if our minds are lodged in a material body, how do we become aware of these facts? How do we acquire consciousness of what lies outside of ourselves? And how are our minds related to the bodies they are alleged to inhabit? ourselves? and how are our minds related to the bodies they are alleged to inhabit? There is no need for me to recapitulate here the tortuous history of attempts to answer these questions. Every freshman is familiar with the paradoxes to which those attempts have led. Either we are seduced by the epistemologist’s fallacy to give an account of knowledge, from which we exempt ourselves, as epistemologists: we explain our awareness of the external world as ideas, mysteriously produced from the transmission into the brain by physical processes of effects caused by external things upon our sense organs; an account which, if it were true, could on its own terms never be known; and, if it is known, must certainly be false. Or else we are induced by brilliant and persuasive writers, like Berkeley, to renounce the external world altogether and to lose ourselves in a radical subjectivism, which leads either to scepticism or to a still more paradoxical solipsism.” (Harris, The Spirit of Hegel, 109) 

“The first essential is accurately to grasp the nature of the dialectic and the relation between its successive phases. To this, Hegel’s pronouncement is fundamental that the truth is the whole. The whole, moreover, is no blank unity or any undifferentiated uniformity (not, as Hegel protested against Schelling, “a night in which all cows are black”). The whole is system. Not a set, fixed, or static system, but one that is infinitely and eternally self-diversifying. It is dynamic, self-activated, “infinite restlessness,” at once a self-realizing process and an eternally self-realized activity, like Aristotle’s energeia. It is not a whole of separable parts, except as conceived at a specific level of the dialectic where whole and parts is a limited and provisional category. According to the level on which it is conceived it may be viewed as an aggregate of constituent segments, a process of successive phases, a series or scale of developing forms, a totality of distinguishable but inseparable moments, or a gamut of logical categories dialectically interrelated. But at every level, and in all manifestations, the whole, which is essentially self-actualized and self-complete, is immanent. Yet because it is dynamic and constantly, actively, self-specifying, it manifests itself perpetually in forms or aspects of itself which are only partial and provisional (its moments). At the same time, nothing less than the self-complete whole can render the partial phase or provisional moment intelligible, for the truth is the whole; and it is this truth, immanent in the partial phase, which reveals its limited and finite character. It is this, likewise, that generates the internal contradiction of the finite, drives it into its opposite (what it lacks and excludes, what negates it) and forces it to unite with its other to produce a more complete representation of the whole in which the less adequate manifestations are sublated.” (Harris, The Spirit of Hegel, 110) 

“Because the whole is immanent in every manifestation, each phase of the process is a whole of sorts, and the relation between phases is a relation between wholes. But they are wholes in varying degrees, and each is a specific form of the ultimate whole of which it is a partial expression. The negative relation between them due to their mutual exclusion as differents emphasizes itself as opposition; but, for all that, they are interdependent for their own intrinsic characters as moments of the whole, and they merge into one another in a continuous scale of increasingly concrete forms of self-differentiated unity, in which each reveals a higher degree of truth than its predecessor, a degree to which the prior aspires.” (Harris, The Spirit of Hegel, 110) 

“Mind, as it first emerges, is mere subjective feeling, in which subject and object are not distinguished, and no world is cognized as “external.” The distinction of external object from cognizant subject is the result of mediation characteristic of consciousness proper, which supervenes upon mere sentience and is reflective in a higher degree, making sensation its object. Thus, what is sensorily presented appears as immediately “given” object, which simply is for the subject, and which, only on reflection, is seen to be mediated by the subject-object antithesis. The discrimination of objects as “external” to the mind and to one another in space and time involves (as must be obvious to reflection) a systematizing activity of judging. Hence thought is already at work at the perceptual level where the world of common sense is constructed. Further reflection upon that again brings us to the rational level of observational science, the stage at which consciousness explicitly seeks the universal (idea), which is its own essence, in its object as observed in Nature, and finds it in the system of natural laws.” (Harris, The Spirit of Hegel, 111-112) 

“Consciousness is shown here to begin with immediate sense-certainty the direct awareness of a this-here-now; but to be this it must at once become something more, for no this, or here, or now can maintain itself except in relation to a that, a there, and a then. And though the purport of “this” is particular, the term applies indifferently to every this, and so is universal—as are “here” and “now.” The conflict resolves itself in a here which is many heres, a present which embraces a lapse of several nows, and a this which is a complex of sensuous thises—an individual object. So, sense-certainty develops into perception, the cognition of individual objects and their mutual spatio-temporal relations. Here again individuality and universality vie with each other. The thing is one, but its qualities are many, and though it is individual its qualities are each shared with innumerable other things. The merely apparent (qualities) comes to be contrasted with what is veridical, the subjective with the objective, and perception appears now as the one and now as the other. The urge towards assurance locates certainty in each in turn and finds it in neither, until it seeks truth in a new form of the universal, unconditioned by sense. This is the form of essential reality, unsensed, yet imagined as lying behind, or beneath, the play of sensuous appearances. The phase of consciousness that thus emerges is what Hegel calls Understanding (Verstand). It moves from the postulation of force as the underlying explanation of sensible change, to the idea of a law governing the play of forces. It presents the object as double and self-reflected, as reality and its appearances, as substance and accident, as cause and effect. It analyzes and distinguishes, and keeps the distincta apart, as if in their mutual dependence they were separable and self-contained.” (Harris, The Spirit of Hegel, 123) 

“In defending Kepler’s conception of the movement of the planets, Hegel stresses the fact that their motion is a single curved movement, and he inveighs against Newton’s analysis of it into two rectilinear movements, one tangential to the curve of the orbit and the other radial. The protest is against the rigid divisions and separations of the understanding. Hegel’s point is that the two elements in the planet’s motion are not two separate and accidentally combined forces, producing separate rectilinear courses, neither of which is actually pursued, and which could not actually be combined to constitute an elliptical curve. “The motion of the heavenly bodies,” he says, “is no such hither and thither drag (Hin- und Hergezogensein), but free movement; they go on their way, as the ancients said, like the blessed gods.” So poetic, and apparently fantastic, a description of the astronomical facts is apt to be laughed to scorn by the hard-headed scientist. Yet Eddington made this quotation a text on which to elaborate his own version of the movement of the planets in the new light of relativity theory in the twentieth century. The Einsteinian conclusions, that the “forces” are simply curvature in space-time, and that the planets move freely along geodesics, precisely vindicate Hegel’s contention….Hegel is not wrong to insist that what must here be conceived is not a collection or a bundle of forces, but a single movement along a geodesic determined by the total configuration of the system. And that is exactly how present-day physicists would wish to represent the fact.” (Harris, The Spirit of Hegel, 135) 

“The whole…is a self-differentiating system. It is a whole that determines, by the principle of organization that is universal to all its parts and moments, the nature and interrelations of its elements, making them mutually interdependent and constitutive. Accordingly, if their distinction one from another is elevated into a separation, and if they are severally isolated from each other and from the system, as is wont to happen under the influence and operation of the understanding, they contradict themselves and one another, a contradiction symptomatic of defect that is occasioned by their mutual exclusion and the oversight of their mutual complementarity.” (Harris, The Spirit of Hegel, 142-143) 

“As a result of the presence of matter—or curvature—in space-time, the physical universe curves in upon itself and becomes a four-dimensional hypersphere, described by modern cosmologists as finite but unbounded. It could just as truly be described as infinite but closed, and it answers aptly to what Hegel called the true infinite, as opposed to the spurious infinity, or endless progression of repeated finites. The hypersphere is an all-inclusive whole, whereas the absolute space of Newtonian physics was endless extension, never self-complete.” (Harris, The Spirit of Hegel, 145) 

“The unity of the universe—of Nature—is the ultimate determinant of all its detailed forms and phenomena. Their explanation and the truth about them is ultimately to be found in the universal principle ordering the whole….Only when it is cognized and comprehended as a systematic whole—when it becomes für sich—is the ultimate unity fully realized.” (Harris, The Spirit of Hegel, 153) 

“Consciousness is self-transcendent in a manner that is impossible for material things. It not only stands in relation to its objects, but is aware of that relationship, it grasps within itself both of the terms. No physical body can do this. The relations of physical bodies to one another are at best an sich, whereas the relation between consciousness and its object is für sich.” (Harris, The Spirit of Hegel, 155) 

“Hegel saw the activity of thought as one of construction, and what it constructs is a concrete universal, or system—a world, which is a single totality comprised of a multitude of internal differences. This kind of union of differences is organization, and that involves distinction and relation between elements which is impossible without negation. Distinction and discrimination require the identification of “this not-that” and the combination of both by correlation within one complex. The negative, therefore, plays an indispensable part in the process of thought, or dialectic. But what is negatively distinguished from what is other than itself ranks, in that negation, as its opposite, and the distincts and their subsequent correlation therefore present themselves as thesis, antithesis, and synthesis. The structure is triadic because the negative relation is essentially bipolar whether the negated other is simple or complex….The object of thought thus reveals itself ultimately both as the world and as the thinking self-awareness, a statement that ought not to surprise us, for the final goal of thought is generally admitted to be both the comprehension of its object as a self-differentiating and self-differentiated system, as well as of its own procedure. The object of knowledge is the world, which, while it is the content of experience, is also a world of which the subject who thinks is aware that he or she is a member. Reflective thought, therefore, always presupposes (more or less tacitly) the whole of experience as its prepredicative background; and that experience presupposes in its turn the world, not only as its object but also as the source of its own development. Accordingly, in increasing its knowledge of the world, the mind ipso facto increases its knowledge of itself.” (Harris, The Spirit of Hegel, 156-158)