Hi Ian, Ken and Andrew,
>What is the whole? How could we possibly test/verify/falsify Hegel's
>assertion? It was Protagoras who said "man is the measure..."
>
>Ian
True enough, Protagoras said it. Aristotle just wrote it down. Kinda like
Socrates and Plato, I would've thought.
Ken, I take no responsibility for the interpretation I quoted! By
"neo-eleusinian" I meant (what the guy I quoted said): borrowed from
Parmenides of Elea.
Andrew, I believe Hegel is as much of a Herakleitos fan (everything comes
about by battling with its opposite) as he is a friend of the idealist
Parmenides ("being" is "one and indivisible").
From the forward to the Phenom. of the Spirit:
http://www.gutenberg.aol.de/hegel/phaenom/phavorr2.htm
"Das Wahre ist das Ganze. Das Ganze aber ist nur das durch seine
Entwicklung sich vollendende Wesen. Es ist von dem Absoluten zu sagen, daß
es wesentlich Resultat, daß es erst am Ende das ist, was es in Wahrheit
ist; und hierin eben besteht seine Natur, Wirkliches, Subjekt, oder
Sich-selbst-werden, zu sein. So widersprechend es scheinen mag, daß das
Absolute wesentlich als Resultat zu begreifen sei, so stellt doch eine
geringe Überlegung diesen Schein von Widerspruch zurecht. Der Anfang, das
Prinzip, oder das Absolute, wie es zuerst und unmittelbar ausgesprochen
wird, ist nur das Allgemeine."
My rough xlation:
"The True is the whole. But the whole is only the [being / creature /
nature / essence] fulfilling itself through its development. It should be
said of the Absolute that it is essentially result, that it is not what it
is in truth until the end; and this is precisely what its nature to be
[actual / real (thing)], subject, or [self-realisation / self-becoming]
consists in. However contradictory it may seem, that the Absolute should be
understood essentially as result, a little pondering will make sense of
this apparent contradiction [lit: put it right]. The beginning, the
principle, or the Absolute, as it is first and immediately expressed, is
only the [general / universal / common]."
Aristotle probably contributes the idea of entelechy (purpose and
realisation of purpose), here, with his acorn-to-oak example. In any case
it looks as though, in this paragraph, the whole-true is something like the
entelechy of the thing-that-is (*das Wesen*): the oak to the acorn. And
that the same thing can be said of the general and the absolute. But I
don't know where that gets us, politically speaking. Unless perhaps we can
use it to remind ourselves that the end is not independent of the means,
that abstractions are after the facts that they're derived from, and that
therefore absolutes (if we want to posit them) are no more important than
the elements we put into their conception.
cheers,
Joanna
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