[Bups-dis] Peter Wolf on Hegel

[Russo, Matteo]

Peter sorry for the delay in responding to you. Your analysis is excellent its just Hegel's writing is so distinctive its almost esoteric. I won't try and decipher everything but if I read you rightly you're saying that Hegel resituates the process of justification from an ongoing static regress which does not yield any truth, to a positive process of dialectic in which the movement of thought turns on itself knowledge claims are postulated, which means they are temporarily tenable, so to speak, this allows for their flaws to be exposed by the antithesis (which is possible in virtue of the reversal of thought) which then merges to form the synthesis which is altogether closer to the truth. The trilemma demands immediate justification and does not allow for the possibility that there is a process involved in arriving at objective truth. Eventually our understanding and knowledge of reality will be purely objective, we will reside in a realm of objectivity which he calls the rational state (I forgot how he says this in German could you remind me?) 

The Agrippan sceptic is merely demanding the justification of each consecutive and finite belief. To attain justification would be to embrace the whole process. The movement of thought is finite in that it passes from one finite thought to the next, infinity is never reached. True infinity I assume would be to have all thoughts simultaneously and for the trilemma infinity I assume would be to have all justification simultaneously or immediately. Solving the problem thus in a sense consists in attaining this 'good' form of infinity.

Instead of attempting to justify beliefs by appeal to an external truth standard which according to Hegel is obviously still beyond us - explaining why we can't justify our beliefs immediately I presume - Hegel explains that we should reverse our critical impetus unto our own concepts, let us critically analyse our claims in relation to one another to see how they may be false, as opposed to assert their unjustifiability in view of the lack of any immediate truth standard by which to judge them. Each claim is simply a rung on the ladder, intuitively the internal or subjectively confined process of dialectic is the only way of weeding out falsity since we are still precisely in the process of attaining an external standard. By doing this we will thus be embarking on the process which will lead to objective truth. I think what you wrote about consciousness and its internal criterion is related. 

I'd certainly be interested in knowing where you think Hegel's gone wrong particularly in relation to his refutation of the sceptic.

Matt