Markov Processes, Brownian Motion, and Time Symmetry Book

I haven't read this book in the way it needs to be read. Really, you would need to sit down with a pen and paper and map out how he makes his way through his logic. I think it would also help to have a kind of guide book alongside me while I was reading this to explain what is going on and to make his allusions to other philosophers and philosophies clearer (and not as 'taken for granted'). I read this for the first time in my mid-twenties. God knows what I got out of it then. I'm not sure I've gotten too much more out of it now, either, I'm afraid.

One of the things that people know about Hegel is that he develops all of his ideas according to the 'triad' - you posit a thesis, it is somehow related to an antithesis, and in their mutual interaction you end up with a synthesis, which then becomes your new thesis and the process continues. Given this is generally understood as the Hegelian method and since this book is him explaining how logic works, you might expect a long and involved (Hegel likes to be both long and involved - that is certainly true) discussion of this triadic process. However, this thesis and antithesis idea is mentioned only once in the book, and in that case he is discussing it in relation to Kantian philosophy. And here he is anything but complimentary, "However, the proofs that Kant proposes for his theses and antitheses must indeed be regarded as mere pseudo-proofs, since what is supposed to be proved is always already contained in the presuppositions that form the starting-point and only through the long-winded, apagogic process is the semblance of mediation produced." p. 95 I've read other people say exactly the same thing about Hegel's triad.

Still, it is clear that Hegel builds his system using something like this three-part process - although, it is also clear that this is not all he is doing. Key to what is going on here is the idea that our understanding of the world (and philosophy is nothing if not people thinking deeply about what it means to understand the world) has grown and become richer over time. As such, Hegel spends about a third of the Logic on the 'preliminary conception' - I guess, a kind of introduction. And here he spends a lot of time discussing the nature of God and the implications of this nature of God to the possibilities for humans to understand that nature. As someone raised an atheist, I found this part of the book hard work, even more hard work than some of the later parts of the book, as I have nothing to hook many of these ideas onto. Still, there was enough 'philosophy' mixed in here with the 'theology' for me to only feel somewhat lost.

His logic proper is in three subdivisions: the doctrine of being, the doctrine of essence and the doctrine of concept. You might think that with each of these subdivisions we are moving further and further away from the 'real' world and more into the realm of the abstract. But Hegel's point is the exact opposite. While we think of 'being' as concrete existence, where our being is immediate and rich, our 'concepts' are thought of as being abstract and distant from our lived experience. Hegel says that it is the concepts that are rich in their power to help us understand how the world really is and therefore it is these seemingly abstract concepts that prove to be 'more concrete' than the 'merely real' world of being. Having tools and lenses to view the world with helps us understand the richness of the world and as such it also allows us to see how the world sits in the richness of its interconnectedness. Those interconnections are, for Hegel, the truly concrete necessity of the world.

I want to play with these ideas for a minute, not least because they are pretty close to the opposite of how we generally think. His doctrine of being comes in three parts - virtually all divisions and subdivisions in this book are in triplets, as I hinted before - being is divided into quality, quantity and measure. For Hegel, we move from one to the other, but only can understand any of these three by seeing how they interpenetrate each other.

Plato is said to be the first really dialectical thinker - Plato, that is, and not Socrates. Hegel points out that for Socrates dialectics was mostly subjective and negative - that is, what he calls irony (p.130). This is important. Socrates was told he was the wisest person alive, but he believed this was a kind of joke, since all he knew was that he knew nothing at all. For Socrates to really be the wisest person alive he needed to show that his 'wisdom' lay in the fact that at least he KNEW he didn't know anything - whereas everyone else thought they were experts, but really didn't know anything (as the Irish say, their arse from their elbow). It is that which makes Socrates's dialectic negative. He spent his life asking people to say what they believed to be true, then he would ask them a series of questions and show that they actually believed the opposite of what they started off saying they believed.

The dialectic proper is this idea of getting to the truth through understanding that every idea contains in itself its own opposite. But since Socrates was only doing dialectics for the purely negative purpose of showing that he (and everyone else) knew nothing - it was left to Plato to show that the dialectic had a positive side.

The example Hegel gives is from the Parmenides where Plato shows that to understand the One you need to understand the Many and vice versa. This isn't just showing that people are confused, or that knowledge itself is impossible, but rather that in understanding complex ideas you need to understand them in their richness - and that means, in their contradictoriness. That if these ideas are living then they grow and become what they are not from what they are - and therefore had to also have in themselves that opposition. The seed (as he more or less says at one point) isn't a plant, but to become a plant it needs to have the concept of the plant - its opposite - contained within itself. And this is why Hegel's system progresses in these three stepped processes - where his discussion of quality necessarily then moves to a discussion of quantity and then onto measure as the unity of quality and quantity.

Let's do that more slowly. Let's imagine that the world wasn't created by the Christian God, but by the Greek ones. For the Greeks, the universe prior to creation wasn't a void like in the Christian universe, but rather it was a chaos. What the gods did was to give form to that chaos. So, how do you do that? Well, a chaos is without form because it has no things in it that you can pick out. To be able to pick things out from the chaos you need to know what qualities those things have. Once you have defined quality you are then able to consider quantity - initially this is as a kind of mathematical counting of how many of one thing there is when compared with something else. But quantity and quality interpenetrate each other too. The example he gives is on p.170 where he talks about the phases of water and therefore the differences that are wrought when you change the quantity of heat in the water and force phase changes - for a long time changing the amount of heat hardly does anything at all, but eventually the liquid either turns to solid or to gas. This idea of quantitative changes making qualitative ones is a key idea here - he also talks of the idea of a man losing a single hair not thinking of himself as necessarily going bald, but he must get to a point where to lose enough hairs baldness is the necessary result.

For Plato dialectics was used to show that the world we live in is a world of appearances. That is, Plato noticed the contradictions in the world, and he knew that those contradictions were 'in the world' and not just in our understanding - that is, it wasn't just that our reason wasn't up to the task of understanding the world, but rather that the world itself actually contained contradictions - as I said before, that the one is the many, for instance. But if that was true, and if the world ought to be 'perfect' (and perfect can't be self-contradictory) then Plato was forced to conclude that the world we live in can't be the 'real' world, but rather one of appearances.

Hegel goes a step further than this - the contradictions that exist in the world aren't just due to our limited understanding, nor to the world being 'merely of appearances', but that these contradictions of things (and in things) are how we need to go about understanding the world - to understand the world is to understand those contradictions. That is, the contradictions aren't mistakes or accidents, but real and provide the actual path to truth.

So, one of the parts of this that particularly stood out for me was his discussion of the relationship between freedom and necessity. We generally think of these as being opposites - if I NEED to do something, I can't really say I'm all that free, and if I freely choose to do something, then surely that can't have been the same as being under the compulsion of necessity. Ok, even with that said, there are probably times when the two can be brought close together - I need to eat something, or I will die, but what I eat is up to my free will to decide. For Hegel, this example isn't going far enough. Freedom and necessity are not only opposites, but they interpenetrate each other and so understanding one involves getting a truer understanding of the other. By seeking to understand our own essence those things that seemed open to our free choice and will become increasingly necessary and the things that might have been enforced upon us, if they are true, increasingly become those things that we will freely choose.

I had thought that with this three part system that when he got to discussing the syllogism that he would be all praise - but he certainly wasn't - and that this would be the clear culmination of his philosophy, which I guess it was in a way, even while he also calls it something that is pedantically followed and therefore has mostly fallen out of use. The section on the syllogism (you know, all men are mortal, Socrates is a man, therefore Socrates is mortal) is probably the hardest part of this book - well, for me anyway - and I'm still not sure I understood it at all.

This book was hard work, and I've started his Science of Logic now too (which, from the looks of things, is pretty much exactly the same book all over again, but hopefully will be written differently enough so as to explain bits I've not really understood in ways that will make them a bit clearer). I wanted to talk about difference too - how the world is a kind of kingdom of differences (and how this idea seems to have been used by linguisitics and semiotics in interesting ways), but perhaps that will give me something to talk about when I finish his Science of Logic.