My Theory of the Brontosaurus

Oh I get it...

When he says Rousseau discovered the basis of the political in will he means it. We don't will the content of the law but its lawfulness, for us. The former is Kant's mistake. NB that in the first section on the state he is adamant that it is irrelevant if a particular state be evil. Is there a proviso that subjective freedom means that the state is limited to issues of universal concern? But that opens the whole can of worms again--what is private and what is public? But the point is that it must be possible for humanity to grasp its humanity without slipping into objectification of it. That is the entire point of his argument with  Kant. Such objectification is not even conceivable; the subject grasps itself only as subject--there is no other way of grasping. An individual might be objectified, but not "humanity." The will is the form of the individual in relation to spirit, the way we know spirit? 

NB that the argument between Hegel and Kant is not about a law but about lawfulness. If, as I believe, Thoreau is a descendent of Kant, civil disobedience is precisely the irrationality Hegel deplores. He must also, then, deplore the American constitutional conceit of a revisable state? A state subject to anything, even, or especially, universal suffrage?

For Hg, the state is where right and duty are the same, obviating civil disobedience. We have to stress the importance of the thought of subjective freedom, what he associates with the choice of occupation. The difference from Socrates trial and death is that the state, vs. the Greek polis, allows subjective freedom, which then defines objective freedom as the state itself. The argument is circular: I have objective freedom in the state because the state is my objective freedom, ie reasonableness itself, lawfulness. (Subjective = I, objective = We, and one = spirit?)

I note that he objects to a universalism that becomes "cosmopolitanism."
He seems to assume the possibility of slavery--slaves cannot be citizens of the state.
There is no way to tell if thirty lashes or twenty nine are demanded, but one less is injustice.

If there is an other, there is no law combining us (state).
If there is an other, I don't know him, what is due to him (is anything due to him, in general?)

The other is the thought of my own death; not a thought, really.

Globalization makes religion impossible (the universal is philosophy).
But Globalization allows us to imagine our extinction.

The state takes on God's role, death as punishment. But makes death substantial, the human ruling the human opens the maw of death.

When humanity tries to grasp/group itself, as law, it grasps death. It never manages to stay law. This is diremption.

Communism makes the state total in order for it to disappear. But total state is political with purpose. Hg says state is not total, just the end; purposiveness without purpose (need). The state is the (circular) purpose of the human, the purpose of the human is to be human, to live in a state.
Do I owe the state my life, or just my taxes?
The state is the purpose of my existence, because it is the law; being lawful is an end in itself.

Problem of the one, the they, splits into the transference.

Both Kant and Hegel are thinking the political; the question of legitimacy isthe question of the state. The political is the thought of the human ruling the human.

Hegel didnt see the World Wars, the Holocaust, Darwin and nuclear tech; that we might see ourselves scientfically, environmentally, destroy our selves.

Nor that capitalism would develop beyond interdependence to the production, and sale, of needs.

The limit, Kant's error,is the externality of law--the sujet supposer savoir?

I cant experience myself as source of law without state?

Your freedom is in being human, in being an urbanite. Subjective and objective, particular and universal, combine in the human. But human is not to be thought, abstractly, but realized in the state, the action of the generality. War?

The amazing rigor of Derrida is his remaining on the margin, working in, delineating the margin of philosophy, without a theory of the margin, for that would be philosophy.
All language does not equal writing. The argument is that the subordination of writing to speech is a projection of a problem that affects even speech. He work is not, therefore, a thought of the techne of writing. That too is easily subsumable to philosophy.
(The human directing nature, having and putting nature to its ends, the human is having ends, purposiveness. The arche = the human, that humanity can put the whole world to its ends proves humanity is God (self consciousness); the aesthetic is the truth of technology ; the human becomes the master of the universe, our power, absolute, must be authority (God): we fill his shoes; not an end, but endfulness. Nb there can be no nothing, no absolute destruction.)
Language is the not known, negativity at the origin of true/false (Sophist); logos insists that everything is known, there is no nothing. Not that thought is language, just that thought cannot subsume language.

If the state is not sovereign it is nothing. The state cannot be "subject" to anything.
Obedience = being reasonable, not felt as coercion.
But it is defined by its difference from civil society; if they were to mix the state would become mere power, the power of one person over the whole.
Human quest for knowledge stops at the state, humanity stops with itself.
Consciousness cannot be object, ie vs. the Kantian limit. Presuming consciousness means there is no presumption. We do not derive consciousness.
If all consciousness coincides with self consciousness of humanity there is no need for transcendental object, no chance of solipsism.
Consciousness and self consciousness merge in humanity, humanity, conscious of itself, is unity of self consciousness and consciousness--what is humanity? humanity is that.
State is the action of man, qua man.
There is no authority external to humanity.
[Man cannot rule man in necessary absence of authority, ie qua man.]
In the absence of religion, especially in the absence of religion, there is still reason.
To ask what laws are is to ask the question of legitimacy, is to stand outside reason, to ask why reason.
Each state is its own sitt, therefore war. That is our finitude. He says we can leave a society, but that we cannot not be in a society. (Cf Th.)
The randomness of the finite world is not an argument against spirit.
To grasp spirit is to give up the absolute.
The question of why spirit acts disappears with the individual.
The unity of consciousness(es) is the reality of the world, vs. skepticism.
Finitude is spirit's self - negation in order for it to know itself, ie what it is not.
The desire for an absolute as content is desire for immortality.
To admit your own finitude is to submit to law(fulness)?
If the purpose of the world is for spirit to know itself then its purposiveness is what is know about it?

For a second I had it. On the subway platform at 231st street I got it, and I saw how all the pieces fit together, how it all falls into place, but I knew I could not hold it, that as I focussed on one and then another part of the elephant it was disappearing. But I was calm, for I knew the elephant was there.

Kant: we might reason to agreement on epistemology but only if we bracket moral questions. That what we agree to ultimately, must, ultimately, be true. The problem, skepticism, arises because of universalism. Plato: only the philosopher, apart from the world, knows truth; everyone else is deluded. That (every)man might reason to moral truth is what creates demand to prove epistemology. As man is enabled morally he is disabled, separated, epistemologically. This is the diremption again.

Hegel will enclose within philosophy not just morality but creation, ie God.
Danger is that spirit is just the biggest humonculus of all homunculi.

To ask what law is to ask what reason is. The state is the human taking the human as its object, which the human does, as subject.

Hg's I = I means the achievement of that, that I does not equal the world but consciousness, that self consciousness becomes consciousness of consciousness.

The absolute cannot be an appeal against the real.

Self consciousness is humanity locking into itself.

That humanity will come to control itself, and hence the world.

The very identification of humanity, what we take for granted, is his subject?

Spirit is the thought of history, that history is intelligible? What we know is our own history. Minerva's owl flies at night.

No one is (fully) human until everyone is?

Does that happen--self consciousness and consciousness merge on one level--only when humanity recognizes itself as law, ie in the fold of the state?

Hg is shifting from the Kantian spatial (in/out) to the temporal? We don't outflank the whole, spirit moves through time.

NB that Kant is the question of legitimacy, the diremption of law from morality. Hg is the human knowing itself in and as the state. Kant wants to disempower the state and end war. Hg sees war as natural.

In itself = content = essence = object = consciousness / picture thinking

For itself = form = self = subject = self-consciousness

What can be both itself and not itself, ie its own object? Spirit. 

So self-conscious spirit, religion, is recognized by consciousness as itself.

The consciousness that is conscious of itself is called humanity, the ethical substance. The ethical substance is knowing knowing, ie knowing the knower. What Kant separates Hegel brings together.

Religion, Judaism, is the cause of the diremption problem, so death of God, Christianity, is the solution. The church impedes, delays the emergence of the state by promising the city of God. It is not international but prenational. 

The very idea of a shape of consciousness is non-sensical: if we were conscious of it it would be a content, ie consciousness. But he knows this. We always, already, find ourselves in consciousness. If we could stand outside of it it would be a tool for us. Ie if we could "explain" consciousness scientifically. Kant left us in it, but with no knowledge of it. Hegel's bet is that by making ourselves its object, without relinquishing our status as subject, by thinking 'we" rather than "I", he can touch the sides of consciousness.

Any limit is self imposed by spirit.

If murder is the refusal to acknowledge the otherness of the other, ie my own death, we need to look again at Thoreau, wildness is the salvation of man, and Midgley's thought of wickedness as cruelty. Specifically, does the American thought of nature provide a new context in which the stresses of the diremption are reduced by solitude? And Midgley helps us think of our behavior toward animals as toward ourselves.

Derrida made it clear he wanted to put a stick in Hegel's spokes. So Rose's charge of nihilism is not odd. We might question whether believing that Christianity provides a solution to the diremption is the same as believing in Christ; the actual Good Friday is not the speculative one. What is odd is her insistence that Hegel will provide a solution to the diremption. There is no moment when the individual knows what the group knows; the demand for that is revolution, which produces death and destruction. There is no 'absolute sittlekeit.' The absolute vanishes as the individual understands that his individuality is but a beautiful soul: the absolute and sittlekeit are aufgehoben in the state, as conscious society. But how does so relentless a thinker get something so basic so wrong? Which suggests maybe she doesn't.