“The leading thread of this book will be the notion of energeia. In contradistinction to the existing literature, this book does not limit itself to an analysis of Hegel’s lectures or even to a general discussion of energeia; rather, this notion will serve as a guide to show how the idea of a self-referential activity operates in the details of Hegel’s interpretation of Aristotle as well as in particular contents of Hegel’s own thinking on subjectivity.
Energeia, usually rendered in English as ‘actuality’ after the Latin translation ‘actus’, is by and large translated by Hegel as Tätigkeit (activity) or as Wirklichkeit (actuality), even though in the context of single works he will prefer different words (e.g., in the Philosophy of Spirit and the Logic Aktuosität, actuosity, while in the Phenomenology a closely related notion is that of Entwicklung, development). However he translates it, though, he invariably means the same, an actualization of a potency originally immanent in the subject of the process or movement. Hegel interprets energeia as the self-referential activity that he finds at work in its several manifestations: from the self-grounding of essence to the Concept, from the teleological process to natural life, from the essence of man to the forms of knowing and acting down to its most obviously free and self-determining dimension, absolute thinking that has itself as its object.”
“In the words of the Nicomachean Ethics, we can say that spirit’s energeia is its own eudaimonia (happiness), its activity is its own flourishing.”
“Back with a vengeance, Schelling poked sarcasm at Hegel’s absolute as a God who knew no Sabbath. Hegel’s God is an eternal incessant activity and not a simple final cause like Aristotle’s.”
“The comparison between Hegel and Aristotle, continues Schelling, could only be established by some ignorant people in Germany.”
“Heidegger’s thesis that energeia is being-at-work should be understood literally to refer to the world of production, poiêsis.” “By this interpretation, Heidegger suppresses any sense of finality from energeia: actus is a faulty translation just because it suggests an actualization, not to say a self-actualization, which is absent from Aristotle’s understanding of energeia.”
“For one thing, it may well be far-fetched to read into Aristotle the existentialist idea that in his life man projects his most proper finite possibilities in a groundless void. Yet how one can make sense of the Ethics without taking action as a self-determination, an actualization of one’s potentialities with respect to the kind of life one chooses, is hard to see”
“While in movement a process is subordinated to its end, and reaching the end is the conclusion of the process that is thus extinguished, in energeia (I find it difficult not to translate it here as ‘activity’) time does not bring any new content.”
“For Solon (Eth.nic. I 10), happiness is of a past (for us too, by and large: take Proust’s immemorial past); you have to step out of happiness to judge it. For Aristotle instead the happiness of a good life spans through a lifetime; it is the exercise of a permanent possession, not a movement that ceases once it reaches its end; it is a being, not a search, an actuality and not a result.”
1. THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY AND ITS PLACE WITHIN THE SYSTEM
“Lang ist
die Zeit, es ereignet sich aber
Das Wahre
Longo é
o tempo, como se não sucedesse
a verdade”
Hölderlin
“The material we still read today is the result of Michelet’s compilation of these sources, along with notes taken by students who attended Hegel’s lectures in Berlin.”
“Michelet, who was in the habit of disposing manuscripts after their publication by entrusting them to people often unrelated to the edition of Hegel’s works, is not only responsible for the loss of the precious Jena notebook. To the eyes of the 20th-century scholar, he is also responsible for the hasty publication of an edition that satisfies none of the fundamental philological criteria any work should have of which the supposed author never had a chance to print a single page.”
“Reading Lasson’s or Hoffmeister’s criticisms of Michelet’s work, one hardly imagines he could have done worse.”
“I wish to add that before the unanimity with which everybody who writes on the Lectures finds it indispensable to be pitiless with Michelet, I believe that the first edition, for all its limitations, is an unparalleled and rich text, a more concise exposition than the more ‘readable’ second version. Besides, Michelet could still use the Jena notebook and other now lost sources. His edition is therefore still indispensable for the Hegel student.”
“The history of philosophy as we still practice it today is heavily influenced by Hegel; it did not exist before him. It was neither a recognized discipline in the university curriculum nor an established genre. There were, to be sure, several histories of philosophy; but a philosophical treatment of the history of philosophy was never practiced, let alone theorized.”
(*) “Bodei argues that this relation between eternity and time is inspired by Saint Paul’s notion of aiôn mellon (‘Zeit’, 1984: 92). If so, this seems to me to make the clash between eschatology and parousia of the eternal – the ‘kingdom of God’ made present and manifest here according to the gospels – even more paradoxical.”
“Hegel’s confrontation with Aristotle and more generally with classical metaphysics after the modern revolution – that is, after the reduction of knowledge to legality, first of the world, then of reason – compels us to face the problem of the meaning of a revitalization of Greek philosophy in a radically changed context.”
“This also means that we should put in question the implicit assumption present both in Hegel and in Heidegger, the thesis of a basic continuity, interpreted, respectively, as the progressive revelation of reason to itself or the progressive oblivion of origin and reification of ontological difference.”
“Every rigorous historiography must question what Hegel says about past philosophies and verify their presence and actual importance in Hegel’s thought, over and above the judgments we find in the Lectures.”
“we can say that not only are all claims of Heraclitus present in the Science of Logic, but also those of Plato, Plotinus, Spinoza, and Kant. And most of all those of Aristotle.”
“Aristotle does not appear as a shape of consciousness in the Phenomenology of Spirit (as do skepticism or stoicism for example), or as a position of thought with regard to objectivity in the ‘Preliminary Concept’ of the Encyclopædia.”
“Marcuse say[s] that ‘Hegel simply reinterpreted the basic categories of Aristotle’s Metaphysics and did not invent new ones.’”
“Greek philosophy (a disconcertingly loose umbrella that for Hegel spans a language more than a period, extending from the Presocratics to late Neoplatonism, from Greek colonies to Athens and Alexandria) starts from the assumption that thought is being. Bacon, Böhme, and Descartes, whom Hegel considers the first ‘Christian-German’ philosophers (sic: even here, despite appearances, the designation does not cover a geographical area or a language), began with the opposition between thinking and being”
“the principle of Dilthey’s hermeneutics, that we must understand an author better than he understood himself, is already somehow at work in the idea of completion shared by Aristotle and Hegel.”
“The medieval idea of seeing farther thanks to the possibility of standing on the shoulders of giants,¹ or the Renaissance idea of a dialogue with the classics, is as far from both as is scholarly accuracy.”
¹ Sempre achei esse pensamento cretino.
“The notion that history is a decline from an original beginning, and not progress, was standard in Greek mythology, but often appears also in the Platonic dialogues. In Hegel’s age a picture of the history of philosophy as negative development from an original revelation (often found in oriental religion), a decline from a mythological unity between nature and spirit, is a guiding theme for many historians inspired by the later Schelling, such as Rixner and Ast, and is a tenet of the philosophy of history of Romantics such as F. Schlegel, Windischmann, Görres, and Novalis.”
Crer que Aristóteles só pode ter entendido a filosofia de seu mestre perfeitamente, afinal conviveu com ele 20 anos, é bem estúpido. “This is not so nearly as incomprehensible as Heidegger’s claim that we must go through Aristotle to understand Plato, like going from the clear to the obscure, because ‘what Aristotle said is what Plato placed at his disposal, only it is said more radically and developed more scientifically.’ See Heidegger, Sophistes” Hahaha! Heidegger sempre ordena que se leia filósofos numa sucessão pré-determinada, programa obviamente furado.
“As Hegel says in the Aesthetics, ‘if we have not read Aristophanes we hardly know how man can have fun.’”
“Hegel himself warned us against identifying the system of truth itself with the specific order of the Encyclopædia.”
Enciclopedistas franceses vs. Enciclopedistas românticos germanos
“In his Encyclopædia of Philosophical Sciences, Hegel contrasts a scientific or philosophical encyclopædia with an ordinary encyclopædia. While the latter takes the empirical disciplines as it finds them in ordinary life, and groups them together according to affinities and similarities, the former is the science of the necessary connection of sciences. The positive or ordinary encyclopædia derives its scientific status from the sciences it brings together, while a philosophical encyclopædia is science, in that it forms the conceptual order and relations among the sciences as well as demonstrates how their principles first arise.”
Entre as exclusões da “enciclopédia científica” estão a filologia, a geografia, a medicina, a lei de impostos e a história.
“Once Hegel shifted, after 1805, his understanding of logic to include metaphysics as a theory of the absolute in relation to which ‘life’ and ‘knowing’ were no longer external, he needed an introduction to the speculative standpoint of the logic. The Phenomenology of Spirit was written with the purpose of satisfying such a need.”
“In Nürnberg, Hegel again changed his approach. Spirit is treated as erscheinend, appearing, and as in and for itself; this leads Hegel to the gradual reelaboration of the material from the earlier Phenomenology of Spirit, and the reduction of its systematic scope to its first section, and to the genesis of the mature philosophy of spirit.
The Phenomenology of Spirit no longer acts as an introduction to the system. We are not carried to the Absolute through the stages of consciousness thinking itself. Now the decision to think purely, the freedom to abstract from everything, is sufficient for us to enter the system. The Phenomenology of Spirit, in many respects Hegel’s most impressive work, is later reinterpreted by Hegel as an introduction to pure thinking, [wtf] the overcoming of all oppositions of consciousness and all presuppositions external to thinking.”
“And, most importantly, if the Science of Logic is Hegel’s scientific masterpiece, and the only part of the system he developed fully in print, what is the relation between the logic and the other two parts of the system, and between the Idea and spirit?”
“The absolute Idea, which at the end of the logic shows to have ruled and generated the entire logical movement, can be the object of philosophical consideration in itself, thus be considered formally, or, alternatively, it can be considered in its embodiment in finite natural or spiritual forms. It can, in Hegel’s metaphor, be considered, respectively, as the concept of God (WL 2: 572–3, SL 842–4) or as the objectivity of God. Absolute spirit is just the stage at which the two are thought together as one truth.”
“By investigating all thought in the synthetic unity of apperception Kant brings about the new principle; by reducing all knowledge to a phenomenality against which the in-itself stands opposed, as the truth we will never reach, Kant prevents his great discovery from being effective.”
“Historically speaking, first you need care for truth and trust in reason (religion is one of the paramount cases of such a trust to be made true and validated by philosophy), then you find the determinate universals thanks to observational reason or empirical sciences, then you comprehend determinate universals as particular moments of thought, and finally you comprehend the universal as one logical form, among others, of thought thinking itself.”
“Hegel passes over centuries of meditation on the continuity between animals and man and holds the Aristotelian as well as Christian view that reason distinguishes man from animals. As for Aquinas, an animal cannot think inasmuch as it cannot say ‘I’, cannot reflect on itself; everything is for it a singularity in sensation.” Resta a aplicação do a priori kantiano ao animal: a apercepção de um tempo e espaço que são não-humanos, e ausência de princípio de causalidade, ou também um princípio de causalidade inumano?!
“Aristophanes’s picture of love as an infinite striving for an impossible completion would be a perfect example of what Hegel means here by dialectic and finitude.” “Thought is the only exception to the contradictory, finite nature of all that is.”
(*) “Diotima’s criticism of Aristophanes (Symp. 205d 10–206a 1) marks the difference between the ancient Platonic-Aristotelian and the modern understanding of strive.” A virtude em si, a fixidez da excelência de caráter, como o fim do processo para Platão-Aristóteles.
“If we take it as the first stage and express it in a proposition or first principle, we turn it into something finite and posited by reflection, which still has to prove itself against that to which it stands in opposition (Fichte).” Lógica = verdade; lógica = lógica; redundância. Fichte conhecido como o idealista da finitude (eu = eu). A mesma carência cartesiana do moto “penso logo existo”, que deveria ser “penso (em algo)”.
“In the doctrine of synthetic a priori judgments, Kant had sketched the true theory of the identity-in-difference of universal and particular, of subject and predicate. But since he began with empirical intuition, stressing its absolute alterity to thought, he could not proceed to the unity of that which he had severed. If Kant had thought through the relation between intuition and concept, he would have understood the relation between universal and particular – he would have grasped the immanence of thought.”
“All forms of finite knowing and acting must be ascribed to the originary synthetic unity of apperception interpreted as absolute self-consciousness or infinite reason.”
“According to many recent interpretations, Hegel has offered the final critique of metaphysics. I think this is true”
“Kant is the Robespierre of thought and religion that Heine took him to be. The Critique of Pure Reason is indeed a fatal blow to metaphysics, but only that form of metaphysics that Kant knew and criticized, the Wolffian”
“We can have synthetic a priori judgments in metaphysics, simply given that such judgments have a different sense than they did for Kant. Metaphysics as a science is possible insofar as it is logic, the logic of productive thought. We cannot separate metaphysics from logic, critique from speculation, negativity from rationality, analytic from dialectic. The logic must deal with all thought-determinations, including that which Kant had isolated as the objects of metaphysica specialis. And, most importantly, it has to be a theory of pure thought – unlike Kant’s subjective idealism, which had as its object finite thought and an empirical logic that derived categories from the forms of judgment.”
Ser o Kant de Wolff e Hume, ser o Hegel de Kant, ser o Marx de Hegel e o Nietzsche de Schopenhauer. Refutar como deve ser refutado.
“As is well known, it is to Andronicus that we owe the title of Metaphysics. Andronicus organized Aristotle’s writings – both those found in the Metaphysics and those forming the corpus at large – in an order that, if not systematic in Hegel’s sense, was certainly more systematic than anything Aristotle had known.”
“Another move of incalculable consequences is Andronicus’s isolation of the logical works in an Organon. Now Aristotle suddenly becomes the founder of logic as an instrumental and independent discipline, a status it did not have for Aristotle. With Porphyry the Aristotelian logic was adopted in the Neoplatonic curriculum as a requirement before students moved on to the study of the Platonic dialogues and the theology of the One found in the Parmenides and Timaeus. As Sorabji puts it, it is no wonder that Boethius in the early 6th century, like the early Augustine, did not distinguish between Neoplatonism and Christianity.”
(*) “The word sustêma does actually appear in both Plato’s dialogues and Aristotle, but Jaeger is right that the connotation familiar to us today is a hellenistic novelty.”
“Neither Aristotle nor Hegel understood physics as a science that leaves all philosophical questions to speculation. Aristotle does not write that first philosophy should come before physics, as if it borrowed principles from a higher science. Nor does he write that the distinction between first for us and first by nature explains how we move from physics to first philosophy, since the distinction in priority is internal to all disciplines. Physics is for him a science investigating ta prota kai tas archas tas protas (Phys. I 1, 184a 10–15), the first beings and principles of sensible substances subject to change”
“Since change is eternal and presupposes an eternal mover which will turn out to be a pure, immaterial substance within a physical analysis of motion, physics reduces itself to secondary wisdom and gives way to theology. There is no metaphysical consideration which reduces physics to its less universal role”
INVERSÃO COMPLETADA SOMENTE EM MARX: “As is well known, the dramatic change in mankind’s relation to nature at the beginning of modernity goes hand in hand with the redefinition of science and of philosophy. We can summarize this shift in the reversal of the Thomistic motto operari sequitur esse (work follows being). While for Aristotle the world of production was subordinate to practice, thus to the realm of freedom, and production could not pretend to change nature but at best to imitate it, for modernity art becomes instrumental to mankind’s liberation from nature.”
“In Hegel, as Riedel puts it, there is a reflexive connection between work and the worker that is absent from the Aristotelian notion of poiêsis”
“Work is formative precisely because we objectify our will in a product that will be consigned to externality and lead a life of its own, independent and beyond the power of its originator.”
“Proclus and Plotinus do not say how the procession from the One is to take place; they express in imaginative and enthusiastic language the true understanding of the Absolute, but they miss the full-fledged notion of negativity and infinite subjectivity.”
Plotino, Enéadas
“Despite Plotinus’s paganism and Proclus’s criticism of the creation of the world, which the Christian Philoponus later attacked, the conciliation between Neoplatonism and Christianity was widespread soon after Proclus’s death.”
“just as in Hegel metaphysics is indistinguishable from the logic of a philosophy of spirit, for Plotinus metaphysics is an absolute, nonfinite form of psychology.”
II. LOGIC AND METAPHYSICS
“
Leitura interrompida
Seclusão Anagógica 