Ok, how is it possible that three of these four are able to present their thoughts and systems in a (mostly) clear and comprehensible way, while one outlier is (it seems) on purpose obscure and dense? Also schelling writes the most beautiful German of these four, then Fichte, then Kant and then the obscure one.
>>25303622I disagree, Kant writes the most beautiful German, then Fichte, then Schelling.
>>25303622Kant is the most obscure of the four; you have to do independent work to reconstruct the foundations of his system and justify his methodology and even to see what the methodology is. The other three are 'hard' but they're not outright incoherent the way Kant appears to be. Even on the question of 'hard' writing I have to disagree, have you read the original Science of Knowledge? It makes the Phenomenology of Spirit look like a picture book in comparison. It annoys me how people here read Kant in such an uncritical manner, as if it's totally obvious that a priori judgments need to be grounded in the subject. Kant is only (relatively) easy to read if you're not thinking very hard about what he's saying.
Kant's not obscure. He's clear, comprehensible, and wrong.
>>25303629How can he be wrong when it's impossible to disprove what he said; his entire project is simply a logical analysis of what experience is. He recognizes that there is a dualism between contingency (=sensation) and necessity, he thinks necessity must be subjective because if it was external it would be contingent, and he's off to the races. You can quarrel over the details but the overall project is sound. Do you accept that there is necessity in the world? Do you accept that the world is not 'up to' you? You can't deny either one of these propositions without being retarded or insane and these are the foundations of the entire system. Throw in some considered agnosticism about the possibility of transcendent concepts like freedom and there you go. I don't mean to trivialize him but that's the 'gist' for you, this is how he did what he did.
>>25303628I grant that the science of knowledge gets pretty hard but I wasn’t talking about difficulty. My problem is understanding what is being said (concerning the language). Schelling and Fichte are quite clear most of the time. Kant is a little obscure but I can understand what he is saying. Hegel on the other hand writes like a madman and he is a poor stylist imo.>>25303629True
>Ob die Bearbeitung der Erkenntnisse, die zum Vernunftgeschäfte gehören, den sicheren Gang einer Wissenschaft gehe oder nicht, das läßt sich bald aus dem Erfolg beurteilen. Wenn sie nach viel gemachten Anstalten und Zurüstungen, sobald es zum Zweck kommt, in Stecken gerät, oder, um diesen zu erreichen, öfters wieder zurückgehen und einen andern Weg einschlagen muß; imgleichen wenn es nicht möglich ist, die verschiedenen Mitarbeiter in der Art, wie die gemeinschaftliche Absicht erfolgt werden soll, einhellig zu machen: so kann man immer überzeugt sein, daß ein solches Studium bei weitem noch nicht den sicheren Gang einer Wissenschaft eingeschlagen, sondern ein bloßes Herumtappen sei, und es ist schon ein Verdienst um die Vernunft, diesen Weg womöglich ausfindig zu machen, sollte auch manches als vergeblich aufgegeben werden müssen, was in dem ohne Überlegung vorher genommenen Zwecke enthalten war.>Whether the treatment of those sorts of knowledge, which belong to the business of reason, walk the sure path of a science or not, can soon be judged by the result. If it, after much preparation and planning, as soon as it approaches its goal, becomes stuck, or, in order to correct this, must go back again and go another way; likewise if it is not possible for the different collaborators to be made unanimous in the manner in which their common intent ought to have resulted: so one can always be convinced, that such a study has not entered the certain path of a science by a wide margin, but rather it is a mere bumbling, and it is already a merit for reason, to perhaps track down this way [in which metaphysics can be done], even if something must be given up as worthless, which had been held without consideration before this as its goal.Shit translation because I'm trying to be as literal as possible but had to break with literalness at some points. When you learn Latin or Greek there is a massive gap between the textbooks and the actual literature but it turns out German is not like that and even Kant isn't that hard to read for a relative beginner partly because the word order is so much more fixed than Latin or Greek. We're all gonna make it lads.
>>25303622eso— esoterik kantianism?
>>25303641De gustibus non est disputandum, to me Hegel is the most stylistically showy and skilled at least in the Phenomenology. I think I know what you mean though, Fichte is hard as fuck but it doesn't seem like he's writing in an alien language. You can pick a sentence out of isolation and at least have a vague or general idea of what he's saying; Hegel is off the reservation entirely. He would say, of course, 'I have to write in le speculative way' but there's a rhetorical element as well. If you make it so that the reader has to put a lot of effort into understanding you then your thoughts become the reader's and the reader is convinced.
>>25303656i know this entire passage by heart.
>>25303670wow, really???
>>25303664>If you make it so that the reader has to put a lot of effort into understanding you then your thoughts become the reader's and the reader is convinced.That’s an interesting point. Perhaps I’m reading too fast and too much. I will try to read more bite size and think these completely through.
>The idealists' program promised to bridge the gulf between philosophical theory and the internal experience of human life. In their view, philosophy originates in such inner experience and aims toward its interpretation.... So constituted, this program (I have Fichte in mind as I describe it) has to become a transcendental theory. It has to make the claim that there are different basic structures of the mind that are essentially linked with images of the world.Henrich is losing me a little bit with all this talk of experience and mental 'acts'. I know that's how both Kant and Fichte talk but they are not really describing any sort of experience, more the logical conditions for experience. This is part of why Henrich sees a shift in Fichte's thought from the transcendental to the metaphysical after 1795 which I don't see at all, for me it is a seamless transition and the distinction can't even exist for Fichte. This is still a great book (From Kant to Hegel), one of the best secondaries I've encountered so far.
>>25303685Read H.M. Chalybäus' Historical Development of Speculative Philosophy from Kant to Hegel. It's free online.
PoS makes no fucking sense if you haven't read at least the lesser logic, which came out five years after PoS. Did you have the dream too?
>>25303638>How can he be wrong when it's impossible to disprove what he saidWell, for one, he said lying is always wrong. But that's provably nonsense by considering a hypothetical where you are dealing with someone who you know would treat whatever you say as a lie, thus the only way to convey truthful information to them would be to lie. In such a situation lying would be morally equivalent to telling the truth in another situation, so for lying to be always wrong, telling the truth would have to be always wrong, too.
You lads will like this quote from the Henrich book:>In the eyes of Fichte and Hegel, Kant was like the Spanish conquistadors who discovered America: he believed that this 'new land' - his theory of mental activity - would provide new means of survival and stability for the 'old world' of science and metaphysics. But the discovery of this new 'continent' actually changed the 'old world' completely, and his students did not follow Kant's admonition to carry the new 'treasures' away and apply them to science and the criticism of metaphysics. They felt it necessary to explore and colonize the new land, a project that had already started, as a matter of fact [esp. in the transcendental deduction]. Kant was a kind of Columbus in their eyes, who neither knew nor wanted to know the point at which he had arrived.I also get a bit of a sensible kek out of the fact that he doesn't think Schelling is even worth mentioning, by and large. We're perfectly aligned in seeing Schelling as a retard and seeing Fichte as at least equal to Hegel.
>>25303747I'm not defending the categorical imperative just the foundations of his system. You can pare it down to this very simple and bare-bones distinction between sensation and cognition which is nothing but the distinction between contingency and necessity.
>>25303638>his the fucking fuck can he be wrong when he's unfalsifiable???!!
>>25303747>considering a hypotheticalsmfhthere is no hypothetical that can trump a categorical
>>25303754Right, no philosophical theory is falsifiable because they all transcend experience, even a 'critical' philosophy like Kant's. If you think Kant is making an empirical claim about how our brains create reality then it is falsifiable and also quite retarded but that isn't really what he is saying. What got Kant's gears spinning in the first place was that there seemed to be no way to decide problems in metaphysics - what you think is a fatal objection to my post and by extension all philosophy is just what Kant was writing about to begin with, your end-point is the starting-point of German idealism. You don't have any frame of reference for these discussions and should just choke on a dick, honestly. I can't stand the aggressive anti-intellectual retardation you see on this board, I'm sure you belong on /pol/ or maybe /sci/.
>>25303699On the contrary, the initiate who has passed through Phenomenology and Science is now prepared condense the entire opus under the form of Encyclopedia. Hegel of course was an esoteric practitioner of the Hermetic arts of memory and magic.
>>25303638>he thinks necessity must be subjective because if it was external it would be contingentNoetic for us as Absolute Finite (and sentients): Metaphysics it's not just the Understanding parsing the objective concrete world, it and we must frame it in memory by Events, which are not as such apart from our perspectival selvesAbsolutely exteriorized and void as Hyle mass of becoming of the All: Physics in which we are determinately negating until we can fashion a Notion of a non-subject thing's 'nature', or what Necessity (in the Greek sense) obliges of it to apodictically self-avail to sensibility
>>25303831I can't stand these retardo-schizo posts either. Here's more Henrich for the lads:>Kant's successors saw an entirely new way of reasoning in the Critique. Not only his ideas, but also the fact that Kant had made so little use of them, intrigued them. They interpreted this as a deliberate withholding, as Kant's not wanting to disclose the ultimate truth, and as a sign that he was some sort of prophet who had to be careful to keep his final insight hidden. Accordingly, they believed that he wanted first to propagate the system in terms of particular ideas. In fact, he really gave only the introduction into the critical philosophy, leaving the task of development to his students.... They believed, accordingly, in a hidden, secret teaching of Kant about the nature of self-consciousness as the common root of our cognitive faculties.Then he draws on the Opus Postumum to argue that Kant actually did have a deduction of sensibility and understanding from the 'I think', proceeding from the unity, activity, and emptiness of the I to the necessity of the given, and that Kant withheld this proof in the CPR (assuming he possessed it at the time) because he thought it would needlessly complicate matters, his primary aim being to solve metaphysics and the possibility of science, not a speculative deduction from a common root. Again though he's twisting my melon when he interprets Kant's 'activity' as the spontaneity of producing thoughts when in the transcendental deduction it's simply cognition as opposed to receptive sensibility. If he's going to mix up empirical psychology and transcendental psychology throughout the book it is going to spoil a lot.
>>25303819It's thanks to Hegel that I realized that Kant's Tr. Ae. is essentially the sensibility of different kinds of formal intuitions. "Consciousness has arrived at thoughts", in other words.
>>25303909You needed Hegel to realize that the Transcendental Aesthetic is about how sensibility has a priori forms? Or surely I'm misunderstanding you? The phrase 'Tr. Ae. is essentially the sensibility of different kinds of formal intuitions' seems rather senseless to me.>Consciousness has arrived at thoughtsAgain, I don't understand how this relates to the Transcendental Aesthetic, and one of Kant's main points of difference with Hegel is simply that sensibility is *not* cognitive.
>>25303622Kant is the worst writer I've ever read, to the side of Adam Smith. Hegel is obtuse but he at least makes sense the third time through.
>>25303935Yes, I am inclined to agree, in fact if I'm not mistaken that's the meaning of the word 'aesthetic' quite literally. However in Ch. 1 of PoS Hegel describes the instance of a positive temporal magnitude that goes through success nows- minutes to hours as a way of explaining the synthesis of the manifold, as Kant would have it. I just took that as a good way to think of how temporality is sensible, or in other words that formal intuitions are not entirely arbitrary.
More Henrich for the boys. Hope it's not obnoxious to drop these quotes but I think they're all of interest to any esoteric Kantian.>In the very last writings he was able to publish, Kant established a distinction between his philosophy and any other possible philosophy that pretends to depend on his but is in fact not critical. The true critical philosophy is labor, and that means ascent. The direct opposite of it is descent, or an initial departing from the ultimate insight, which he calls mysticism. In German this is an alliteration - Arbeit und Alchemie.
>>25303989I definitely see what you mean as far as the connection between Kant and Hegel here; still I tend to see the rupture even more. Kant does not try to prove the world is intelligible, he assumes it is and then works out the logical conditions of its intelligibility. Hegel, otoh, basically sees a contradiction between universality and particularity and the negation of this negation is an intelligible cosmos. What Hegel is doing is much sexier but I'm not convinced it actually makes any sense. It is cool, though.
>>25303900esoteric kantanon has been vindicated. he wasn't a retard after all.
>>25303622>while one outlier is (it seems) on purpose obscure and dense?
>>25303760>there is no hypothetical that can trump a categoricalMy point was it wasn't a categorical, and Kant was wrong under his own system. More simply categoricals can't actually exist under his dogshit system because it is trivial to formulate anything claimed to be a categorical as its own moral antithesis.The only winning move is to not fucking play.
>>25304250>More simply categoricals can't actually exist under his dogshit systemwhy not?
>>25304226indeed
>>25304247Yes this is another aspect, avoiding censorship while writing politically and theologically subversive texts. It isn’t the primary reason though more of an added benefit. The idealists write weird because they think weird and it’s part of the fun.
>>25304250Everyone knows the categorical imperative doesn’t make sense but it is far from being among his core insights. Rejecting Kant over such a thing is churlish.> More simply categoricals can't actually exist under his dogshit system because it is trivial to formulate anything claimed to be a categorical as its own moral antithesis.That’s part of Hegel’s argument too. Pat yourself on the back you’re thinking like Hegel.> The only winning move is to not fucking play.You need to figure something out though. Hegel shows how ‘muh conscience’ is really a form of evil. I think it’s worth trying to figure out the extent to which Kant may have been right all along and why he went astray.
>>25304253I just fucking told you?Honestly his system is fucked outright from considering ends but judging means in a vacuum.
>>25304267It really is so beautiful and elegant though especially science of logic. I wish I could salvage more of Hegel but it will take time and distance. I love the ‘batshit’ sections like being-for-self and being-for-one, or the thing and its properties, or the conditioned and unconditioned. It’s a wild book but ffs did anyone get anything tangible out of it besides Marx? Besides him it’s just fart-sniffing like Houlgate. And I mean something more than the general idea of negativity and dialectic.
>>25304360You’re still doing this thing where you think an ancillary aspect of his system is the Sache selbst. Fichte was a Kantian who managed to jettison the CI and lived to tell the tale, for example.
>>25304339True, but if you trust Heine's recollections, Hegel could be anxious about people catching on to him.>One beautiful starry evening, we stood, the two of us, at a window, and I, a young person of twenty-two, having just eaten well and drunken coffee, spoke rapturously about the stars, calling them the habitations of the blessed. The master, however, mumbled to himself, “The stars, ho! hum! the stars are just leprous spots glowing on the sky.” For God’s sake – I cried – is there no happy place up there to reward virtue after death? Hegel just stared at me with his pale eyes and said cuttingly, “You took care of your sick mother, and you didn’t poison your brother. Do you really expect to receive a tip?” – After these words, he looked around anxiously, but seemed to grow calm soon afterwards when he saw that it was only Heinrich Beer approaching him to invite him to a round of whist.>We now have monks of atheism who would burn Mr. de Voltaire alive because he is a stubborn deist. I have to admit that I do not like this music, but it also does not frighten me, since I was standing behind the maestro [i.e., Hegel] when he composed it, in very confused and ornate symbols, to be sure, so that not everyone could decipher it – I saw how on occasion he would look around anxiously, worried that he would be understood. He was quite fond of me, since he was certain that I would not betray him; at the time, I even considered him servile. Once, when I was displeased by the phrase: “Whatever is, is rational,” he smiled in a strange way and remarked, “It could also be put: whatever is, must be.” He hastily looked around, but soon grew calm since only Heinrich Beer had heard him.
>>25304505Jesus Christ. This is exactly how I thought he would be, a smug little atheist with an NPR totebag had they had such things. Fichte saw further, he saw through modernity and he saw through atheism. Ty for giving me greentext that confirms my pseud musings. Hegel hates the ‘ought’, das Soll, the future; he rolls in the mud of the present like a pig, he just happens to be a very smart pig. As Kierkegaard put it he turns wine into water.
>>25304360no you didn't
Schelling is the only true philosopher of the four.
>>25304565Say that to my face not online and see what happens.
>>25303900>mfw esoteric Kantianism is literally correct and confirmed by academics
>>25304352>Rejecting Kant over such a thing is churlish.First of all, I was responding to a claim that he wasn't wrong. Second of all, I came to Kant through studying ethics. I'm not cherry picking. If in my first exposure to the dude, he proved himself to be an insufferable dimwit, why the fuck shouldn't I reject him? There are a glut of philosophers to be found in history. Surely, you aren't suggesting everyone wade through their all their shit until they find gold every time? What makes Kant so special?
>>25305398>If in my first exposure to the dude, he proved himself to be an insufferable dimwit, why the fuck shouldn't I reject him?because he's a systematic philosopher and you can't understand his ethics independent of his metaphysics
>>25305347i told ya'll, i bet you all feel stupid now. i was a turbo genius all long. i was far right of the distribution curve you retards thought i'd circled back into the left side of the curve. my iq has to be at least, AT LEAST, 476.
>>25303622test
>>25303622The Germans are mogged by the Ancient Greeks. The only reason the Germans have any value is because they raised the standard of philosophical inquiry (incrementally) from the shallows of the Early Modern period to a barely tolerable level. The Scholastics, for their errors and ideological bias, had more rigorous terminology and distinctions. And the Ancient Greeks were far more penetrating while also being less verbose and less prone to fictional world-building in their investigation of all that is. Perhaps that is due to their serendipity of being the first to ever do it, so they never had to sift through the baggage of the history of ideas. But their collective brilliance from Parmenides to Aristotle is simply unsurpassed. After all, the only system worth building the inquiry into τὸ ὄν. If you're doing anything else... what the fuck is you doin', nigga? This ain't creative writing class.
>>25303750Why did Schelling hate Hegel so much?
>>25305533>you can't understand his ethics independent of his metaphysicsI'm a humanist. The fuck I can't.
