If you have a question to ask, how does Hegel explain his cognitive activities in "Phenomenology of Spirit"?
So we can say that his cognitive activity is centered on the relationship between knowledge and objects, and aims to achieve new cognitive activities by changing the free and independent process of knowledge and objects. Therefore, it is a spiral upward process. This is his understanding of cognitive activities. Simply put, this is Hegel's understanding of cognitive activity.
In his book, he specifically discusses how to view such a process based on his understanding of philosophy. So, in this process, he emphasized even more on the cognitive activity of concepts, that is, understanding philosophical cognitive activity as a cognitive activity of concepts.
Here he wrote that in the process of understanding concepts, he said that philosophy does not examine non essential regulations, but only essential regulations. Its elements and content are not abstract or non real, but real things, things that are self established. What lives within oneself is what actually exists in its concept.
What are these three points talking about?
The self-centered characteristics of philosophical understanding.
When he criticized Kant, he specifically criticized Kant's formalistic viewpoint, which is the approach of traditional Chinese medicine shops that we just talked about. You just listed that thing and let us see the results. It seems that what we see is just an illusion.
For Hegel, the true conceptual thinking, also known as speculative thinking. So, he specifically talked about speculative thinking.
He said that conceptual thinking is a slave, requiring us to pay attention to the concept itself, to pay attention to simple rules, that is, what is. Don't care what this is, and don't bring out white things to tell me. That is what is called white. This is not what you call white. This is just like discussing the concept of human beings. When we discuss the concept of human beings, we don't think about specific people, we think about the generality of human beings, and we talk about abstract characteristics of human beings. We don't understand this person as a specific person.
Therefore, philosophy focuses more on simple rules, paying attention to rules such as the existence of freedom, self existence, self-identity, and so on. Because these regulations are purely self movements, we can call them souls. He said that if their concepts do not represent something higher than the word soul, then conceptual thinking breaks the habit of superficial thinking in the past. Traditional thinking is representational thinking, which means that we understand objects through appearances based on what we see.
In Kant's sense, epistemology is also a representational thinking activity, which can be formed through our sensory organs to understand a representation of things and then form concepts. Therefore, it is a representational thinking. The habit of representational thinking can be referred to as a material thinking, an accidental thinking that is completely immersed in the material, making it difficult to detach itself from the material while still existing independently.
On the contrary, there is another type of reasoning that is formal, even detached from content as freedom, and proud beyond content. What is truly worth being proud of here is the slave's abandonment of this freedom, rather than becoming a principle of arbitrary manipulation of content. This form, this is the way conceptual thinking can provide us, therefore, conceptual thinking is precisely a more advanced way of thinking that goes beyond representational thinking and pure formal reasoning thinking.
Conceptual thinking is dialectical thinking.
So, the dialectical thinking method he talked about is actually a higher level of thinking that goes beyond representational thinking and formal thinking. Because of this dialectical thinking, what he needs to do is to describe the internal movement and regulation of the content, that is, as a whole of this movement and regulation.
He discusses this issue, it's not about the existence of a specific or object, it's about the entire conceptual content, how it moves and changes.
So, we call conceptual thinking dialectical thinking. Dialectical thinking is a way of viewing the evolution of concepts from the perspective of the development and connection of movements, and this is a form of dialectical thinking.
He discussed many issues related to conceptual thinking here, and of course, the discussion of consciousness is a very important aspect of Hegel's. In his first article on consciousness, we discussed many factual phenomena and the relationship between phenomena and the extrasensory world, as well as how to discuss the importance of conscious activity.
He said that for consciousness, objects return to themselves from their relationship with other things, thus becoming a free concept; However, consciousness is not yet a self imposed concept, as it does not yet recognize itself in the process of returning to itself.
So, in our view, this object becomes a free object through the movement of consciousness, and in this process, consciousness is involved in the development of this object. Therefore, the return of both aspects to themselves or even to the same or just one process.
These two ways of returning are for the object to return to itself as a free thing, or for consciousness to return to itself as a free self.
So, however, he emphasizes here that even when it reaches the level of being in itself or the level of being in itself, it has not yet fully entered the level of being in itself, that is, it has not entered the level of being in itself or the level of being in itself, because being in oneself requires more than just returning to oneself.
The first return to the self is forced, for example, when we talk about the formation of the concept of "white", its actual formation is the process of becoming a thing in itself. It is actually based on different understandings of objects, and finally discards the particularity of objects to form abstract understanding, which is a process of being a free object.
However, it has not yet entered the process of self action, that is to say, it has not yet reached a state where the concept of "white" can be completely regarded as an independent concept, no longer considering other things related to white, and discussing the concept of white itself separately. If we can discuss the concept of white itself and understand the nature of "white" based on this concept, we will have achieved the self action nature of this concept of "white" itself.
So, these are two questions. So, the process of self action is more abstract than the process of being in itself, more detached from the existence of concrete things and more abstract. Therefore, in this way, we can understand the concepts of freedom and self action. It is not about the concept of an object and consciousness, nor is it just about the existence of things and consciousness that we commonly understand. It seems that the thing in itself is a physical existence, and the thing in itself is the existence of consciousness, which is not the case.
It needs to go through two processes at the levels of object and object, object and consciousness, which are the process of becoming a thing in itself and the process of becoming something for itself. However, both of these processes occur simultaneously in people's conscious activities, thus constituting Hegel's dialectics as the process of conceptual movement and development.
We can understand Hegel's dialectical thinking, which is closely related to his epistemology, ontology, and logic. Therefore, in Hegel's view, we usually call it epistemology, ontology, and logic as a trinity.
Earlier, I briefly introduced some basic ideas of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, especially how he understood the development and evolution of absolute spirit, and how he embodied spirit as a representative of reason in his entire profession.
Today, we are going to fully present Hegelian philosophy to everyone. We will demonstrate Hegelian philosophy from its overall philosophical framework, philosophical system, and the composition of its basic ideas.
Because Hegelian philosophy is not unfamiliar to us, almost every one of us has learned some basic content of Hegelian philosophy through studying Marxist philosophy. So, for Hegelian philosophy, it seems that everyone can say 123. Everyone claims to have read Hegel's books, and we have also read a part of the phenomenology of the mind, including "The Little Logic", as well as its grand logic, natural philosophy, and spiritual philosophy.
Although his spiritual philosophy has not been fully translated into Chinese so far, today we will first outline the general framework of Hegel's entire philosophy, so that everyone can follow the clues and grasp its main clues, in order to help us find a way out in the maze of Hegelian philosophy.
So, when we talk about the thoughts of any philosopher, we are willing to follow the clues and search for the development path of the entire philosophy, including its future direction.
We also adopt this method for Hegelian philosophy. Hegel was one of his early philosophers, and before 1801, his philosophical ideas mainly focused on the theory of religion and its so-called practical philosophy. In fact, he began writing "Phenomenology of Spirit" in 1802 and 1803, thus embarking on his true philosophical journey.
Therefore, we usually regard "Phenomenology of Spirit" as an introduction to his entire philosophy. At the same time, we can also regard 'Phenomenology of Spirit' as a starting point for revealing its entire later philosophical development.
As we have mentioned before, Hegel was only 37 years old when he wrote "Phenomenology of Spirit". It was during this time that his thoughts were most active, his intelligence was most developed, and he developed his own understanding of the world, forming a philosophy. It can also be said that 'Phenomenology of Spirit' foreshadowed both the development of his philosophy and the future direction of philosophy.
