From: "Widder,NE" <N.E.Widder-AT-lse.ac.uk>
Subject: RE: dialectic
Date: Fri, 8 Jan 1999 14:00:02 -0000 


> At 01:31 AM 1/6/99 -0000, Nathan wrote:
> 
> >...There is no thing-in-itself, therefore all things are nothing but
> their
> >relations.  Hence Hegel says the logic of the atomistic thing gives way
> to
> >relational forces -- just as Deleuze outlines in the opening pages of
> >Nietzsche and Philosophy.
> 
> This seems like the crux of the matter.
> 
> (Note the reductionism involved in the statement 'nothing but'). There is
> a
> distinction btwn the 'thing' related and the relation itself (this is the
> 'externality' of relations). 
> 
> 'Things' (distinguished within the 'objects' of experience) are not
> 'nothing
> but their relations' .
> 
> The things involved in relations are not relations, they are _relative_
> beings. This distinction is easily occluded and seems to have been with
> Nietzsche and pomo.
	[]  
	I do not think this is correct, but perhaps the problems come from
the way I rather casually said that a thing is nothing but its relations.
Hegel does not say there are no things.  He says there is no
thing-in-itself.  In short, the relations are ontologically prior to the
things.  You are correct that the things involved in relations are not
relations but related beings.  But Hegel is operating on a different level
than this -- and I think Nietzsche and "pomo" are as well.  If anything,
they are operating on a level that is ontologically prior to the
internal/external relations distinction, at least insofar as I understand
the terms as they are used in Anglo-American philosophy.


> Hegel seems to get close to this but it gets lost in the complexities of
> his
> own system. At least he recognized the mind indep. reality of relations
> (in
> distinction to the essentially nominalist modern philosophies (with Kant
> as
> their apotheosis). But he lacks a semiotic analysis of the common ground
> of
> mind-indep and mind dependent relations, or their interrelation in
> knowledge. The problem is to show how categorial schemes can be derived
> from
> experience.
> 
	[]  As Michael pointed out, Hegel is doing something other than
this.  In the Phenomenology he begins with immediate experience of the
"external world" and shows how the experienced thing is not reducible to the
mind, but also cannot be anything other than its phenomenalization (that is,
there is no thing-in-itself permanently opaque to consciousness).  The Logic
goes through a derivation of the categories, and you are correct that he
does not derive these from experience, but as Hippolyte points out at the
end of Genesis and Structure, the Logic presupposes the union of thought and
mind already worked out in the Phenomenology.  Also, the Logic ends with the
division into Spirit and Nature, the separation of mind and thing, which can
then be dialectically unified.  The problem you are citing here comes only
if you restrict your reading of Hegel.

> What is interesting is that there is a logic of relations that is
> discussed
> throughout the latin west and it is truly monstrous to claim that Hume
> develooped the first 'autonomous logic of relations.' BUt that's another
> story......
> Got to go, but i'll be bak.
> 
> 
>