If Hegel’s claim that animals do not think is to carry any philosophical weight, it must rest on something more than behavioral observation, since the inference from outer behavior to inner experience presupposes precisely what is in question — namely, whether there is an inner experience to which the behavior corresponds at all. Hegel has no access to the subjective interior of the animal, and the confident negative claim that no genuine thought occurs there requires a penetration into that interior which his own philosophy, on any honest reading, cannot provide.His response to this difficulty is to deny that the interior is sealed. The inner expresses itself in the outer, and a hidden interior causally disconnected from all expression is, he argues, not a genuine interiority but an incoherent remnant of Cartesian mythology. Yet this reply does not survive contact with the most ordinary facts of human experience. In dreaming, in silent thought, in states of intense altered experience, there is demonstrably rich inner content accompanied by no legible outer expression whatsoever. The dreamer lies still. Nothing in the behavior indicates what is occurring. If the identity of inner and outer held as a general thesis, such states would be impossible — yet they are among the most common features of human life.Hegel is not unaware of the problem of qualitative experience. The Phenomenology opens with sense-certainty precisely because it is the philosophical expression of this claim — that immediate felt experience, the sheer thisness of what is given, constitutes the richest and most concrete form of knowledge. His dialectical response is to show that when sense-certainty attempts to articulate what it knows, it collapses into universality. This, here, now — these are universals, applicable to any this, any here, any now. Pure particularity cannot be said, and what cannot be said cannot ground knowledge. Sense-certainty is thus sublated, and the movement toward Absolute Knowing proceeds.
But this movement occurs entirely within a single consciousness. It is my sense-certainty that gets sublated into my universality. The felt interior of another subject — their pain, their dream, the specific quality of their experience — is never available to me even as the raw material which the dialectic might then overcome. One cannot sublate what one cannot access. The universality Hegel derives from sense-certainty’s failure is therefore not a universality of experience as such but a universality of conceptual form, abstracted from a single first-person case and extended to others without any demonstrated warrant for doing so.The consequences for Absolute Spirit are considerable. If Absolute Spirit is genuinely the self-knowledge of the whole — all finite spirits comprehended as moments of Spirit’s self-articulation — then it possesses a blind spot coextensive with the felt interiority of every finite subject, which is to say an infinite number of blind spots. It knows the conceptual structure of experience universally while remaining, in principle, exterior to the qualitative content of any experience other than the one through which it happens to be philosophizing at a given moment.The only resolution available within the system is the one Hegel in effect asserts — that philosophy achieves the divine standpoint, that the Absolute is genuinely thinking through every finite mind, and that in Absolute Knowing the separation between perspectives is overcome from within because there was never more than one Spirit to begin with. This may be true. But it cannot be demonstrated from any finite position, and from any finite position it therefore has the character of an assertion rather than a result. Schelling and Kierkegaard both recognized that something escapes — the brute facticity of existence for Schelling, the irreducible inwardness of the existing individual for Kierkegaard. What escapes, in each case, is the same thing: the felt interiority of the finite subject, which the system requires but cannot reach.
Imagine wasting years of your life trying to understand Hegel's gooblyglok only to find out he was wrong.
>>25188382> His response to this difficulty is to deny that the interior is sealed. The inner expresses itself in the outer, and a hidden interior causally disconnected from all expression is, he argues, not a genuine interiority but an incoherent remnant of Cartesian mythologyDoesn’t he spend like 100 pages of the Phenomenology of Spirit arguing that human interiority can’t be reliably grasped in external signs, including language?
>>25188512Without having read the relevant text but knowing of the relation between Hegel and Descartes, I assume the reasoning is a remnant of Descartes’ argument against animals having Qualia - parrots can make noise but not form sentences/ mute humans can communicate non-verbally. It’s just a downstream form of that argument from Discourse seeping into Hegel I imagine.
>>25188382>>25188386>more ai shit
>>25188382> If Hegel’s claim that animals do not think is to carry any philosophical weight, it must rest on something more than behavioral observation, since the inference from outer behavior to inner experience presupposes precisely what is in question — namely, whether there is an inner experience to which the behavior corresponds at all. Hegel has no access to the subjective interior of the animal, and the confident negative claim that no genuine thought occurs there requires a penetration into that interior which his own philosophy, on any honest reading, cannot provide.It follows from the dialectic in his Phil of nature. So the answer to this is the same as the answer to “why does Hegel think freedom is real?” Because it follows logically from reciprocal action, causality, necessity, substance, etc. > His response to this difficulty is to deny that the interior is sealed. The inner expresses itself in the outer, and a hidden interior causally disconnected from all expression is, he argues, not a genuine interiority but an incoherent remnant of Cartesian mythologyNot what the speculative identity of inner and outer means. Words like “the same”, “unity”, “is” actually never mean this in Hegel. As another anon pointed out above Hegel distinguishes inner and outer all the time, like in his own dialectical progressions when early stages are “merely inner” = “merely outer”.> Yet this reply does not survive contact with the most ordinary facts of human experience. In dreaming, in silent thought, in states of intense altered experience, there is demonstrably rich inner content accompanied by no legible outer expression whatsoever. The dreamer lies still. Nothing in the behavior indicates what is occurring. If the identity of inner and outer held as a general thesis, such states would be impossible — yet they are among the most common features of human life.Yeah he talks about these phenomena at length in Philosophy of Spirit. I don’t know where you get the idea that Hegel didn’t believe in inner experience or interiority in general.> But it cannot be demonstrated from any finite position, and from any finite position it therefore has the character of an assertion rather than a resultThe Phenomenology does just this. Read more, OP, I am sorry but this is rubbish, and you used AI to help you write it.
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