Reading Notes: August 3rd, 2022

“There is no philosophical or scientific inquiry, there is no thinking of any kind, unless the thinking has faith in itself or in its own value, unless there is spontaneous and unyielding conviction of thinking the truth. The skeptic, who thinks he has cut this faith off at the root by suspending judgment—as the only reasonable alternative left to his thinking—stops with the unshaken certainty that his suspension is reasonable, and, since he continues to think, faith in this stubborn and empty thought of his is what he goes on. The fact of thinking, and, therefore, of philosophy, whatever the solution at which it aims, presupposes this affirmation of the truth of thinking as it thinks what it actually thinks.” (Gentile, The Act of Thinking as Pure Act, 683) 

“The limit of thinking cannot be a limit of thinking unless it starts by being thinking itself, unless, as limit, it is in the sphere of thinking itself. Nature—the only possible limit of thinking—is nature only abstractly; in the concrete it is thinking in its internal mediation….Nothing, in short, transcends thinking.” (Gentile, The Act of Thinking as Pure Act, 687-690) 

“When, in the act of thinking it, we attend to what we think, all points of time, distinct and successive, merge and contract into a single and unmultipliable point.” (Gentile, The Act of Thinking as Pure Act, 689) 

“The act of the I is consciousness in that it is self-consciousness: the object of the I is the I itself. Every cognitive process is an act of self-consciousness. This is not abstract identity and immobility but concrete act. If it were something identical, inert, it would need another to be moved. But that would annihilate its freedom. Its movement is not a posterius in relation to its being; it coincides with the being. Self-consciousness is movement itself or process….It is otherness within: not being, but being that bends back on itself, thus negating itself as being. A thing (abstractly considered, fixed by abstraction) is (always that), but precisely for that reason it is not thinking—self-consciousness, in other words.” (Gentile, The Act of Thinking as Pure Act, 691-692) 

“In the Greater Logic, Hegel asserts that “every philosophy is essentially Idealism, or at least has idealism as its principle,” and this, it seems in several ways. First, every philosophical first principle (e.g., even the water taken as such by Thales) is an idea. It is the universal, water, not the actual liquid itself, so far as it constitutes the universal essence of different and changeable finite things. Also, the finite forms themselves are reduced to mere appearances of the universal, which is their essence and so are idealized. Much more so is this the case with Concept, Idea, and Spirit, taken as first principles. Secondly, the finite so-called “concrete” reals are all sublated in consciousness, in concept and idea, and only as so sublated can they become objects of philosophical reflection. Thus, the truly concrete, or whole, turns out to be the ideal—it is only grasped as a whole in idea—while its finite moments (its specific differentiations, its content) as moments, are no less ideal. Even Realism, accordingly, is a type of idealism, because the reality which it affirms is a conceived or thought reality, a reality defined and conceptualized by philosophical thinking, as is the antithesis it postulates between the real and the ideal. And any philosophy which hypostasizes finite existence as such as the ultimate truth, or as absolute, Hegel says, is not worthy of the name.” (Harris, An Interpretation of the Logic of Hegel, 113-114) 

“The point of all this is that philosophy of any sort can emerge only on the level of self-awareness and self-reflection, the level at which an organism has become conscious and brings to self-awareness the natural world with which it is in contact and in organic relationship. Here the thinker has become conscious of him or herself as subject confronted by an object, which, on reflection, is found to be the subject’s own self-development. In other words, the subject is now aware of itself as the object sublated in and as Being-for-self. Philosophy is this turning back upon itself, the reflection upon the experience of the world and the discovery of itself as the world brought to consciousness as subject. So, whether it be called “realism” or “idealism,” it is inevitably the idealization of the external world—its Fürsichsein.” (Harris, An Interpretation of the Logic of Hegel, 114) 

“What Hegel called the Concept is not the abstraction of a feature common to many particulars, but a principle of order, structure and organization which specifies itself by determining the elements of the system it organizes….Hegel’s basic contention is that the universal principle (Idee; Begriff) is not externally related to its particulars, but “holds them in itself” and thus generates a system through self-specification.” (Smith, Review of Harris’ “An Interpretation of the Logic of Hegel”, 464) 

“Bradley has one further objection to physical nature which is rather unusual and worth quoting in his own words. In order to state the problem, says Bradley; “We may here use the form of what has been called an Antinomy. (a) Nature is only for my body; on the other hand, (b) My body is only for Nature…the outer world is known only as a state of my organism….And yet most emphatically…my organism is nothing but appearance to a body. It itself is only the bare state of a natural object….[This] gives us one thing as qualified by the state of another thing, each within that known relation being only for the other, and, apart from it, being unknown and, so far, a nonentity….Nature is the phenomenal relation of the unknown to the unknown; and the terms cannot, because unknown, even be said to be related, since they cannot themselves be said to be anything at all.” The puzzle is, that nature can only be understood through our sense organs, but our sense organs can only be understood as part of nature, which as before can only be understood through our sense organs. Thus, the physical world turns out to be an unknown relation between two mutually presupposing elements in a vicious downwards spiral. This is a curious argument, which might at first appear to be making a very obvious mistake. Surely Bradley should have referred not to our sense organs, but our experience. Is it not the case that nature, including our sense organs, simply comes to us in experience, in which case where is the circle? But in fact, this objection concedes precisely Bradley’s point. For what he is attacking is the notion of a purely physical world, and experience in order to do the task that it is being given here, must be something more or other than the physical world. His point is that a purely physical world, whatever else it may be able to explain (e.g. facts about us and our behaviour) can never account for its own cognition—that requires something more of a wholly different order. Within that restriction it seems reasonable to say that a knowledge of nature depends on an understanding of our sense organs. Since it is only filtered through them that cognition can take place, we have to understand the sense organs in order to understand what they give us. This is true in the same sense that we have to understand what a Geiger counter is doing in order to understand what it is telling us. But in that case, since our sense organs are part of nature, they too can only be understood in the same way, launching us on a regress. The only solution is to move to something outside of physical nature, like “experience,” for we do not have to understand experience in order to understand what it tells us. Its data comes already interpreted. Thus understood, I would maintain that this argument of Bradley’s is a valid and sound reductio of the idea of a purely physical nature.” (Mander, F.H. Bradley and the Philosophy of Science, 70)