When I heard the quote "For those who look at the world rationally, the world looks rationally back," I had many different rewording go through my head. The following is an account of a solipsistic rewords of a Hegel's formula, where reason is not so much as important as unique consciousness: you look at the world and see only yourself.
According to my reinterpretation, you just greeted yourself.
It will take awhile to break it down, but bare with me.
The first thing to understand is you. I should first clarify that there are two kinds of you, and this is why you can greet yourself.
One that is first and immediate. This is the situated-you. This is the you of intent, location, and particularity. This situated-you is looking out at the world, it only has particular sense-certain experience, which I call the what it is like for you, and it is always certain of where, when, and who it is. This you is uncomprehending and incommunicable.
The second is the universal-you. This is the you of objective understanding, and it is born from the situated-you by a process of universalizing what it is like to be for you and applying it to the world as communicable concepts.
The third is the defining-you. Because universal-you is aware of the many particular situated-yous through time and space, it creates a identity that persists through change. This new you is both the definer, as it sees the world in its own terms, and it is the defined as it finds itself in the world (it is the subject that makes itself its own object). As a consequence, it can act intentionally through understanding of universals, which importantly includes acts of communicating universals.
The third is the defining-you. Because universal-you is aware of the many particular situated-yous through time and space, it creates a identity that persists through change. This new you is both the definer, as it sees the world in its own terms, and it is the defined as it finds itself in the world (it is the subject that makes itself its own object). As a consequence, it can act intentionally through understanding of universals, which importantly includes acts of communicating universals.
In the park experience, universal-you are on a park bench looking at the world. Everything universal-you understands in sitting and seeing is in terms of what it is like for you because what do you have other than situated-you to understand situated-you's actions.
The second thing in the question is the someone. How do you understand her? Universal-you only has situated-you to draw upon to create experiences. The universal-you understands someone walking but by applying what it is like for you to walk on her. She becomes another situated-you in your mind, and any inadequacy between you and her may be acknowledged but it cannot be communicated because universal-you does not have access to her situated-otherness.
She is also walking down the street and towards you. This is a duality of both general terms and personal terms. 'Walking down the street' is the universal-you's perspective. It understands act as the universal walking, understood because a situated-you has walked before. It understands the direction from an abstract from the perspective of the general town or city because it has abstracted from many situated-you being particularly located, a general location.
The 'towards you' is the situated-you's perspective because only it is certain of where it is.
Next, when the someone says hi, universal-you understands the act from situated-you's relationship with the term over time. Having imposed the laws of etiquette upon your defined identity, defining-you reciprocates the greeting. Situated-you makes the noise 'hi.'
Next, when the someone says hi, universal-you understands the act from situated-you's relationship with the term over time. Having imposed the laws of etiquette upon your defined identity, defining-you reciprocates the greeting. Situated-you makes the noise 'hi.'
There is much more to both senses of you, but I don't have space, so without going any much further, a rereading of experience in these terms in these terms: From upon situated-you's perch on the park bench, situated-you watches something come towards it. Universal-you understands that one situated-you is watching another situated-you, who is walking down the street towards the first.
Again, this was just one way I thought about Hegel's quote. I also changed it to "People look at the world biasedly, and the world confirms that bias." Did any of you guys have rewordings of the quote and unique applications?
Your second rephrasing of Hegel's statement has been stuck with me ever since my first encounter with Hegel in my Early Modern Philosophy class a couple years ago.I feel like Hegel's mantra, "For those who look at the world rationally, the world looks rationally back", is dangerously close to "For those who look hard enough for X, they will find X" aka confirmation bias. I call this kind of thinking dangerous because it can perpetuate harmful stereotypes, prejudices, and forms of systematic oppression. So the concern is whether or not Hegel's insistence on the world being rational is invalid because it assumes what it is trying to prove. Now, Hegel seems to dismiss the empirical evidence and evaluation methods of modern scientific practice and thought, which is a very flawed move in its own right but I won't go into that here, so I'm not even sure what would possibly falsify or contest Hegel's claims. Even if I did develop this argument, Hegel would probably just respond by saying that my consciousness isn't developed or that its simply a necessary step in the "unfolding of Spirit" and that only "we phenomenologists" can understand why his view is correct, but is this anything more than forcing me to drink the kool aid?
ReplyDeleteI find Hegel's position difficult to evaluate because Hegel just presents everything as if its obviously the case or as if he is just giving a descriptive account and I don't find any parts of the text to answer why I should accept any of Hegel's views. Hell, it isn't even entirely clear whether Hegel is doing thought experiments throughout the text or if some parts are descriptive accounts of our actual world. However, this is probably because the Phenomenology of Spirit is supposed to be a kind of preparatory work, so as much as I don't want to say it, the answer to my concerns can only really be found by reading more Hegel.
Eric, assuming your description of the "park event" stands true, I think this remains an isolated occurrence. Of course, I'm willing to grant you that in certain situations you-you projects some kind of you-ness onto another subject, which effectively effaces the subject qua subject, replacing it with a subject qua object/mirror. While I think your formulation is useful in as much as it raises certain questions about ontological categories within what is physically one solid corporeal subject, I'm not sure you can successfully universalize these claims, in the way that you have attempted to do. This form of solipsism seems to be the absolute death of the subject as subject, if we grant that Hegel is right in saying that freedom and self-consciousness are both predicated upon an event involving reciprocal recognition between, at the very least, two subjects. From what I can tell from this post and some of your comments in class, you sound persuaded by the argument that all subjects are physiologically marooned, isolated, and condemned to a desperate isolation. Practically though, you don't deify that abstraction into concrete behavior, which makes me wonder if you aren't as persuaded by the logical consistency of this as your claim to be.
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