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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   33011 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 17, 2023

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You can totally say what's wrong with this passage. Translating from Hegelian to English, Hegel is saying

Immediate perception is our direct, unreflective perceptions of the world. By contrast, intellectual perception is a higher form of knowledge that involves recognizing the unity and interconnectedness of self-consciousness and the fundamental essence of reality. Through intellectual perception, we can understand that the absolute meaning (content) of something is the same as its absolute structure or appearance (form).

Self-consciousness can be understood in three stages:

1: As a negative relation: Someone who is self-conscious can identify the part of the world that is not themselves as "other," and then define their "self" as everything that is not "other."

2: As a positive relation: Someone who is self-conscious can recognize that they exist in relation to the outside world and understand what that relationship is.

3: As a synthesis of these positive and negative relations, called "intellectual perception": Someone who is self-conscious can see that their thoughts and self-identity are both connected to and separate from the outside world. This synthesis allows them to recognize the unity of content and form, and achieve a deeper understanding of reality.

True intellectual perception goes beyond immediate knowledge derived purely from thoughts and sensory experience. It is a type of absolute knowledge.

A possible critique might look like

  1. Someone who takes a heroic dose of LSD can experience ego death. Such a person experiences a merging of their self-identity with the outside world. This proves that their "absolute knowledge" of their personal identity is contingent on their sensory experiences, and as such is not absolute knowledge.

  2. Also this writing style frankly sucks. Use simple words. Use paragraphs. If you find yourself using pronouns like "it" and "that" to refer to three or more different things in a single sentence, you should replace those pronouns with their referents.

You're doing the Lord's work

Immediate perception is our direct, unreflective perceptions of the world.

This is a perfectly sensible statement, that you can have a conversation about, but can you point to it's counterpart in the original that translates into this? I get the feeling you're engaging in poetry analysis.

The counterpart is

This intuitive perception which does not recognize itself is taken as starting-point as if it were absolutely presupposed; it has in itself intuitive perception only as immediate knowledge

I reordered the arguments because Hegel put things in a weird incomprehensible order.

I reordered the arguments because Hegel put things in a weird incomprehensible order.

Ah, I thought I was going crazy for a moment.

That is a common symptom of trying to consume unmediated Hegel.

One thing that can notably help with the task of understanding writing which is bad in this way, and which did help me here: (Chat)GPT4 is mildly superhuman at the Winograd task, which is to identify what an ambiguous pronoun refers to. As such, the prompt "replace all pronouns in the following passage with their referent, in square brackets" works wonderfully to help disentangle dense obscurantist philosopher babble.

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