kokorodoko wrote: Fri Sep 29, 2023 2:25 pm(Hegel:
The Science of Logic)
"All philosophers we know have expressed—i.e., taught—their ideas either orally, like Socrates, or in written form; otherwise they could not have become known to us. To express thoughts is to teach; but to teach is to demonstrate the truth of that which is taught. This means that demonstrating is not just a relationship of the thinker to himself or of a thought that is imprisoned within itself to itself, but the relationship of the thinker to others. Hence, the forms of demonstration and inference cannot be the forms of reason as such; i.e., forms of an inner act of thought and cognition. They are only forms of communication, modes of expression, representations, conceptions; in short, forms in which thought manifests itself.
The reason why we regard the forms of communication and expression as the basic forms of reason and thought lies in the fact that, in order to raise them to the clarity of consciousness, we present our fundamental thoughts to ourselves in the same way as we present them to another person, that we first teach ourselves these fundamental thoughts which directly spring from our genius for thinking—they come to us we know not how—and which are perhaps innate to our being. In short, the reason lies in the fact that we express and articulate our thoughts in thought itself.
Demonstrating is therefore only the means through which I strip my thought of the form of “mine-ness” so that the other person may recognize it as his own. Demonstrating would be senseless if it were not also communicating.
Hegel, in his presentation, aimed at anticipating and imprisoning the intellect itself and compressing it into the system. The system was supposed to be, as it were, reason itself; all immediate activity was to dissolve itself completely in mediated activity, and the presentation of philosophy was not to presuppose anything, that is, nothing was to be left over in us and nothing within us—a complete emptying of ourselves."
- Ludwig Feuerbach, "Towards a Critique of Hegel's Philosophy" (1839)