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Hegel's Concept of Life: Self-Consciousness, Freedom, Logic

Book by Karen Ng · 2 quotes · Purposiveness, Thinking, Chemism

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Hegel's Concept of Life: Self-Consciousness, Freedom, Logic Quotes

“The ability of an object to constitute itself as a subject is thus defined, in the first instance, by the objective context provided by the genus; that is, the capacity or incapacity of an object to constitute itself as an individual subject depends first and foremost on the kind of thing the object is. For mechanical, chemical, and externally purposive objects, the power of the genus is determined essentially as violence insofar as these objects cannot constitute themselves as subjects through a predicate due to their very nature as defined by their genus. For example, a rock, qua rock, can be determined through a predicate externally - by means of external impact from other objects and forces (it can be crushed or cracked into pieces) or by means of human definition and conceptualization (this rock is igneous and that one is sedimentary) - but is cannot determine itself through a predicate and constitute itself as a subject by means of its own activity. The power of the objet to constitute itself as a subject is necessarily defined in relation to its essential Gattung-predicate, a predicate that manifests the power of violence insofar as the object is unable to constitute itself as a subject by means of this very same predicate. The third characteristic, finally, is that power as violence directs itself against individuality. In specifying that it is only in the presence of the freedom of self-consciousness that the power of the genus can be determined as fate, Hegel writes the following: 'Only self-consciousness has fate in the strict sense, because it is free, and therefore in the individuality of its 'I' it absolutely exists in and for itself and can oppose itself to its objective universality and alienate itself from it'. Individuality is thus defined as an existence in and for itself that can stand opposed to and be in contradiction with its objective universality or genus, while continuing to manifest the genus's power as identical with its own self-relation. Without the ability to oppose its genus, the ability to be self-alienated with respect to its genus, the object is not, strictly speaking, an individual (it remains a mere particular, a token of its type entirely interchangeable with other tokens of the same type). Individuality is therefore not only the power of the object to constitute itself as a subject through its predicate, but moreover, this power of self-constitution is essentially also the power to oppose, contradict, and transform the genus by means of the genus's own power as manifest in the determinateness of an individual.”

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“We can recall that earlier, Hegel claimed that the particularization, individuation, and determinateness of the Concept is a movement and reference outward, which suggests that the judgment of the Concept must have the same outward reference. The notion of outward reference suggests that the subjective Concept strives to correspond with reality and approximates it, but ultimately remains inadequate and unequal to reality until we reach what Hegel calls the Idea. What does it mean, then, that life is the immediate Idea, the immediate unity and division of Concept and reality? Roughly, I think it means the following: life qua Idea not only is the ground of the correspondence between subject and predicate in judgment but must also be the ground of a schema of reality, allowing reality to take shape for and appear to the judging subject in a way that corresponds with its powers of judgment. That is, in order for reality to potentially correspond or not correspond to judgments of the Concept, reality must appear immediately to the judging subject in a particular way. This reality is not the immediacy of sheer being, not is it the immediacy of intuition in the form of space and time; rather, it is the immediate schema of the form of life, a form that Hegel outlines in the chapter on 'Life' according to three poles: corporeality, externality, and process of the species. Reality for Hegel is this not the immediacy of sheer being or bare givenness but, rather, always appears as shaped by the specific constitution of one's life-form, and all life-forms immediately experience reality according to the specific constitution of these three poles.”

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