This comment was prompted by Taimur Rahman asking me to watch this video.
Taimur, you are certainly a very good and clear lecturer but I dont think that the lecture has made me any more sympathetic to the idea of contemporary students studying Hegel. Far from being a help it would , I think be a hinderence to their intellectual development.
The problem is that the whole edifice is the most awful mysticism and speculation. The very concepts that are being applied like being, nothingness and essence have no part in the scientific materialist understanding of reality. These ideas are not relied upon by any of the contemporary sciences.
No biologist thinks that there are essences, instead we know that species are characterised by common genetic codes, that the relationship between species is familial or inherited not one of logical characterisations. In other words the relationships come down to actual configurations of atoms in DNA and the comparative shared sequences in related species.
The idea that logic is something that nature has, is also quite misleading. Logic can only occur where matter is so configured as to perform logical operations, conjunctions, disjunctions negations etc. This is something that can be done by neural networks, by various electical and mechanical devices, and at a lower level by various enzymatic feedback relationships within cells. But that is because it is advantageous to the evolutionary survival of organisms to be able to react to their environment. To do this they must process information. This processing of information by neurons can, in certain cases, be approximated by a description in terms of boolean logical operations. So to a limited extent neural systems can implement logics, but describing them in terms of logic is actually very crude, a very poor approximation to what they do. A more sophisticated understanding would be in terms of matrix multiplication rather than simple logic.
I can not think of any instances in which a useful understanding of any real process can be well modeled by the sort of abstractions that Hegel employs.
We have so more tools to look at the world with developed in the last 200 years that to go back to 1820s would be a terrible retrograde step. The great danger is that young people’s minds will get stuck in a time warp, employing modes of thought that have long since been abandoned whilst in the process they ignore the concepts and threads of intellectual development that have led up to a modern scientific understanding.
The only useful point from Hegel in what you covered is the determino est negato point. But this is nothing specific to Hegel. Students at school level are introduced to this early on in the curriculum maths when they cover set theory and Venn diagrams. It is so much the common understanding of anyone who has been to high school that they hardly have to read Hegel.
If people are to understand a modern materialist outlook, and if they are to start that with philosophy then the starting point has to be Lucretius. Then move onto either Maxwell or Boltzman and get a grip on the concept of entropy. From that move onto the application of Boltzmanns concepts via Shannon in information theory, then Crick and Watson and the information revolution in our understanding of life. They should obviously read Darwin as well.
If you want to concentrate on logic the thinkers I would recomend would be Boole, Russell, Turing and perhaps Deutsch.
Paul Cockshott's Blog 
Thank you for these postings. Have followed your (and Cottrell’s) work for some time. This makes it far more accessible
You can’t be this thick, Dr. Cockshott.
You should further elaborate on your comment. I tend to agree with Paul when it comes to “dialectics” as a method of engaging natural systems. We have developed abstractions and methods in mathematics to describe processes in these fields quite adequately and rigorously. The study of motion and change can be done 100 times better by studying differential equations than Hegel – and 18 year olds can start applying themselves within a year or so for elementary problems.
Where I might leave some room for “dialectics” is in the study of social sciences, not only because the observer-scientist very much is embedded in his object of study (in a sense that a scientist in a pool studying fluids is not) , but also because even if societies are modeled as quasi-natural systems (as Marx intended to do in Capital), they are still immensely complex and some philosophical insight (“dialectics”) can certainly help avoiding theories imposed on realities, ideological treatments etc..
For Paul: what do you think of Feuerbach and Marx’s critique of him, and where would you fit them in the study of materialism. I say that because your recommendations to Mr.Rahman as far as logic and materialist processes resemble what Marx was critiquing Feuerbach for (i.e. human action and human “sensuousness” also being very much materialist processes).
When I read Feuerbach it struck me that by the standards of later Marxism, Marx’s critique of his Essence of Christianity was remarkably mild. Feuerbach goes through elements of christian doctrine and christian texts and completely misses the class content, the class language of the bible and new testament are so overt to anyone with a grounding in historical materialism, that they are hard to miss. But Marx does not criticise this blindness to class on Feuerbach’s part. Perhaps it was generosity on Marx’s part not expecting a predecessor to have a clue about class ideology. Or perhaps the class analysis was so new to Marx that it was at that point not the first thing that he tought of.
Based.
Late to the party but this…..”If people are to understand a modern materialist outlook..” with no mention of Marx strikes me as a bit odd. Of course, Marx kept his “materialist outlook” to the social organization of labor, mostly, so maybe that doesn’t count.
Are you referring to Bertrand Russell in the final paragraph?
Paul A book attached, and hopefully wishing you a prosperous new year, Saludos, carlos
http://dlc.dlib.indiana.edu/dlc/handle/10535/10756
El vie, 21 ago 2020 a las 6:15, Paul Cockshott’s Blog () escribió:
> Paul Cockshott posted: ” This comment was prompted by Taimur Rahman asking > me to watch this video. Taimur, you are certainly a very good and clear > lecturer but I dont think that the lecture has made me any more sympathetic > to the idea of contemporary students studying Heg” >
lol Not so fast. Try telling that to all of the lying Masons in West Central Scotland with Fake Hegel on the back burner. Not by you….but Hegel is being taught, badly. Ibrox is a Mecca for Masons. You want to know who is for you and who is against you and liable to lead you up the garden path.