The Paradigm of change

Hegel:

Hegel was the dominant philosopher in the 19^th century. He believed that change was constant, however we couldn’t see this change because everything had a ‘Geist’ or spirit which appears separately. Basically, since you know someone you see their Geist, which is their spirit, you know what they’re like and everything so even if physically they’re constantly changing, you don’t see this change because you see the person as a whole. This is similar to Plato’s forms but it isn’t identical. It’s best likened to the ship of Theseus, which is that Theseus had a ship made of planks and he kept replacing the planks until eventually everything on the ship had been replaced. It was still the same ship, but made of different planks. Hegel believed that the Geist knew itself until the fall, which was Adam and Eve being cast out of the garden of Eden. This caused the Geist to be Alienated from itself and the entirety of human existence has been spent with the Geist trying to know itself again. The way in which this would happen is through Hegel’s Dialectical Reasoning. This starts with a proposition, which is the Thesis. By its own creation the Thesis will contain its own negation which is the Antithesis, these will collide and what is created will be the Synthesis. The Synthesis becomes the new Thesis and the whole process will repeat until it gets to a perfect Synthesis which cannot be negated which, according to Hegel, will be a new Eden.

  Hegel also brought about the idea of the Zeitgeist, which translates to the spirit of the times, so basically the popular feeling that is expressed by the culture at the time. Hegel said that there are no constant points; everything is in a constant state of change. He is famous for saying you cannot stand in the same river twice. The water you stood in has gone and therefore the river you stood in has gone. The term used for these kinds of thoughts is called ‘German’ Idealism. All German idealists were annoyed at Hume; it was essentially a philosophical world cup insofar as it was England versus Germany, with German idealism pitted against British empiricism. Their objection to Hume was that he had destroyed metaphysics in the philosophical realm. This is where Kant comes into play.

Kant:

Kant said how can we have science if Hume has completely rejected metaphysics, saying that there is no causality in nature. Kant therefore set out to rescue metaphysics. He gives us the idea of the “Unknowable” saying that there are some things that cannot be known. This can be traced all the way to Freud who brings about the role of a subconscious, where there are many subconscious drives that you have no idea about and cannot know about. Einstein believed that things were altered just by observing them; this agrees with Kant’s system but destroys Newton’s. The only area where Kant and Hume agree is with analytic Apriori and synthetic aposteriori. The difference is that Kant believes that you can have synthetic Apriori, whereas Hume doesn’t. Space and time are necessary pre-conditions for existence, nothing could exist that doesn’t exist, basically there’s no such thing as literally nothing. Because cause and effect are mental phenomena – there is no cause and effect in nature. You don’t know that space and time exist but you believe they do. Kant synthesises Hume’s materialism/empiricism with Descartes’s idealism and rationalism.  Contra Descartes and Contra scepticism – the world is both a mental phenomenon and a thing in itself. Phenomena is mental and is the creation of the mind. Noumena is the real “thing in itself”, it is the impercieved object. This is the Copernican revolution in philosophy, previously it was assumed that objects must conform to our knowledge. Ideas depend on cognitive apparatus (such as the eyes) and the transcendental necessary catagories which are inferred by means of synthetic Apriori reasoning. An example of this is a trench, a trench isn’t a thing in itself since it’s a gap in a substance, but since we can acknowledge things in three dimensions we can identify a trench.