Chapter 4 Preface: On Scientific Understanding IV. Requirements in Philosophical Research

1.Speculative thinking Therefore, in scientific research, it is important to take up conceptual thinking efforts.The thinking effort of concepts requires us to pay attention to concepts themselves, to simple determinations, to determinations like being-in-itself, being-for-itself, self-identity, etc.; since these determinations are such pure movements in themselves, we may call them Soul, if their concept does not denote something higher than the noun soul.Conceptual thinking interrupts the habit of thinking in representations, and this is as much a nuisance to the habit of representational thinking as in formal thinking, which deduces and deduces the past in unreal thoughts.The habit of thinking in representations may be called a kind of material thinking, an accidental consciousness which is so completely immersed in the material that it is difficult to free itself from it while remaining independent.On the contrary, another kind of thinking, formal reasoning, is free from the content, and prides itself on being beyond the content; and here, the real thing to be proud of is to try to give up this freedom, not to become the principle of arbitrarily mobilizing the content, And sink this freedom into the content, let the content move by itself according to its own nature, that is, according to its own self, and thus examine this movement.For restraint like avoiding disturbing the inner rhythm of concepts, interfering with arbitrary arbitrariness and wisdom obtained elsewhere, is itself an essential moment of attention to concepts.

In formal reasoning, two aspects deserve further attention, in which conceptual thinking and formal reasoning are opposed to each other. —On the one hand, formal reasoning treats the content of knowledge negatively, and is good at refuting and destroying this content.But to see that the content is not like this is itself only an empty negation; this empty negation is itself a limit which cannot go beyond itself to a new content, on the contrary, in order to regain a content, it Something else must be taken from wherever else for its content.This reasoning is a reflection back on the empty self, and it expresses the vanity of self-knowledge. —This frivolity signifies not only the emptiness of this content, but also the frivolity of the perception itself, since it is a negative which does not see in itself what is positive.Since this reflection has no content in its own negativity itself, it does not dwell in things at all, but always floats above them; Views with content are far-reaching.In conceptual thinking, on the contrary, negation itself is part of the content, as pointed out above; whether as the inner movement and determination of the content, or as the whole of this movement and determination, negation is also affirmation.For negation, in its effect, is what emerges from this movement: negation defined, and therefore also a positive content.

But if we consider that such discursive thinking, whether it has as its content representation, or thought, or a mixture of the two, always has a content, then it has another aspect; Difficult to understand the concept.The peculiar nature of this aspect is intimately connected with the above-mentioned essence of the Idea, or rather, it expresses the Idea, which emerges as the movement of mental grasping. —If, in the above-mentioned negation of reasoning thinking, reasoning thinking itself is the self to which the content returns, on the contrary, in its affirmative cognition, itself is an imagined subject, and the content as accidental Sex and predicates are connected with this subject.This body serves as the base upon which content is combined and movement reciprocates.In conceptual thinking this is not the case.Since the concept is the inherent self of the object, and this self appears as the forming movement of the object, the object itself is not a static, motionless subject loaded with accidents, but is itself moving and transforming it Its own determination reverts to its own concept.In this movement the static subject itself tends to collapse; it penetrates into distinctions and contents, and constitutes, so to speak, determinateness, that is to say, a differentiated content and the movement of this content, rather than And then against each other with movement.Thus the firm ground that discursive thought has found in the static subject is shaken, and only this movement itself becomes its object.The subject fills the content, it no longer transcends the content, it can have no other predicates or other accidents.On the contrary, in this way, the scattered content gathers under this self, and it is not the kind of universal or universal that can be separated from the subject and belong to many things.In fact, the content is no longer the predicate of the subject, it is the substance, the essence and concept of what is being said.Representational thinking, since by its very nature it thinks in terms of accidents or predicates, and has a right to transcend them, because they are nothing but accidents or predicates, so when that which has the form of a predicate in a proposition is When it is the entity itself, the progress of representational thinking is hindered.We can even imagine it being countered.For it starts from the subject, as if the subject could always be the basis, but when the predicate is the substance, it finds that the subject has been transformed into the predicate, and thus has been sublated; Thought is no longer free to drift here and there, but is held back by this gravitational force and comes to a standstill—always always first grounded in the subject as the fixed self of objectivity; from this The necessary movement towards various determinations or predicates begins on the basis of that subject; now, in place of that subject, comes the ego itself engaged in knowing, the point of assembly of the various predicates, a sustaining The subject of various predicates.But since the first subject penetrates into the determinations themselves and becomes their soul, the second subject, that is, the subject engaged in knowing, is willing to end its relationship with the first subject and go beyond it. Returning to itself, only to find it still inside the predicate; the second subject cannot be an inferring agent in the movement of the predicate to deduce which predicate should be attached to the first subject, it must rather be related to the content Continuing to deal with the self of the content, it should not exist for itself, but with the content itself.

What has been said above can be expressed formally as follows: judgments or propositions in general contain within themselves the distinction between subject and predicate, and this property of propositions has been destroyed by speculative propositions, which have become The same proposition contains a counterattack to the relationship between the subject and the predicate mentioned above. —This conflict between the form of general propositions and the conceptual unity which destroys this form is quite similar to that which occurs in rhythm between syllables and accents.Prosody is the result of the difference between syllables and accents and the synthesis of the two.Therefore, the identity of subject and predicate in philosophical propositions should not eliminate the difference between subject and predicate expressed by the propositional form. On the contrary, the unity of subject and predicate should be expressed as a harmony between the two.The form of a proposition is the expression of a specific meaning, or it can be said that it is the stress that distinguishes the content of the proposition; but the predicate expresses the substance, and the subject itself belongs to the universal or universal, which is the unity in which the stress is not heard.

To illustrate what has been said above, we may take this proposition as an example: God exists.In this proposition, the predicate, being, has the substantial meaning in which the subject melts.Here, being should not be the predicate, but the essence; and it would seem that God ceased to be the one it acquired by virtue of its place in the proposition, that is, it ceased to be a fixed subject. . —— Thought does not continue to pass from subject to predicate, but rather feels inhibited by the loss of the subject and thrown back into the subject's thought because it has lost it; in other words, because the predicate itself is expressed as A subject, expressed as being, expressed as exhausting the essence of the subject's nature, thinking finds that the subject is directly in the predicate; now, not only does thinking not return to itself in the predicate and acquire the free attitude of formal reasoning, it instead Deeper immersion in the content, or at least it is called upon to be deeper in the content. —Then, if it is said: Reality is the universal, likewise, as a subject, reality disappears in its predicate.Universal should not only have the meaning of a predicate. What the fatal question expresses is "reality is universal". On the contrary, universal should express the essence of reality. —Thus thinking is thrown back into the subject in the predicate, and likewise loses the firm objective ground it once had in the subject; and in the predicate thinking returns not to itself, but to the content subject.

Complaints like the usual complaint that philosophical writings are difficult to understand even when one has all the other cultural conditions for understanding them arise largely from the very unaccustomed repression just mentioned.We can also see from what has been said why the extremely definite charge is often made against philosophical writings, that many of them must be read repeatedly before they can be understood—a charge which, It should be said that it contains inappropriate and extreme things, as if as long as the admission is well-founded, there is no longer any excuse. —Actually, the true state of the matter has already been made clear above: a philosophical proposition, as it is a proposition, recalls the observations about the usual subject-predicate relations and about the usual situation of knowledge.This state of knowledge, and the opinion about it, is destroyed by the philosophical content of the proposition, and the old opinion now experiences that the state of affairs is quite different from what it originally thought; Such a correction, knowledge is then obliged to return to propositions, to grasp them in a different way than before.

If what we say about a subject means at one time its concept, and at another time only its predicate or accident, and thus confuse the two modes of speculative and inferential, we shall Create a difficult situation that should be avoided. —The speculative and inferential modes interfere with each other, and only the mode of philosophical expression, which has been mentioned above, can be stretched, strictly excluding the usual relation between the two parts of a proposition. In fact, non-speculative thinking has its rights, but this right, though valid, has not been noticed in the speculative propositional manner.The form of a proposition must never be superseded in a mere direct manner, that is to say, it should not be superseded only through its content; It should be limited to that internal repression, and this movement of the concept back into itself must also be articulated.This movement, which undertakes the task normally assigned to proofs, is the dialectical movement of the proposition itself.Only this movement is real speculative, and only the account of this movement is speculative statement or manifestation.As a proposition, the speculative is only an inner repression, a non-existent self-return of the essence.Thus we find that we are often led by philosophical formulations to this inner intuition, and thus cease to state the dialectical movement, which was what we were asking for in the first place. —It is true that propositions should express truths, but truths are essentially subjects; as subjects, truths are nothing but dialectical movements, nothing but this process that produces itself, develops itself and returns to itself. —In ordinary cognition, this aspect of external statement, which constitutes immanence, is proof.But after the separation of dialectics and proof, the concept of philosophical proof has actually been lost.

At this point it may be reminded that the dialectical movement likewise has propositions as its constituents or elements; therefore the difficulty revealed above seems to recur forever and ever, as if it were a A difficulty that belongs to the matter itself. —This situation is quite similar to what usually happens in proofs: the proof uses grounds, which themselves need grounds, grounds after grounds, and on and on to infinity.But this form of seeking grounds and providing conditions belongs to a kind of proof that is completely different from dialectical movement, and therefore belongs to external cognition.As for the dialectical movement itself, the pure concept is its element; it therefore has a content which is already in itself subject through and through.Thus, a content does not occur at all as if it were related to the subject as ground or justification, and as if it had meaning only because it was a predicate of this subject; In other words, a proposition is a purely empty form. ——

Here, what signifies the pure subject, the empty, conceptless one, apart from the sensuously perceived or imagined itself, is mainly the name used as a name.For this reason, it may be advantageous if one avoids a name such as God, since this word is not at the same time directly a concept, but merely a proper name, a secure anchorage for the underlying subject. and because, as in the case of God, words such as being or one, individual, subject, etc., at the same time directly designate concepts themselves. —As for the former subject, such as God, even if some speculative truths about it are said, the content of these truths still lacks internal concepts, because this content exists only as a static subject, and because of this In this case, the truths about it can easily take a purely revelatory form. —In this respect, therefore, the hindrances of the habit of not taking speculative predicates in the form of propositions as concepts and essences may be increased or diminished by errors in philosophical discourse. Small.Philosophical statement, in order to be true to its knowledge of the nature of the speculative, must preserve dialectical form and avoid the inclusion of everything that is not understood conceptually and that is not a concept.

2.Genius Inspiration and Healthy Common Sense Presuming to possess ready-made truths without reasoning is as much an obstacle to philosophical research as is the method of reasoning exclusively.This kind of possessor thinks that there is no need to go back and reason about the ready-made truths, but directly takes them as grounds, believing that he can not only express them, but also make judgments and conclusions based on them. From this point of view, it is especially necessary to reconsider philosophical thinking as a serious task.In all sciences, arts, techniques, and crafts, it is believed that learning, training, and so on are necessary to master them.In philosophy, on the contrary, it seems to be the prevailing prejudice that, though every man has eyes and fingers, he does not make shoes when he acquires leather and tools. On the contrary, he thinks that everyone can think philosophically and judge philosophy directly, because he already has the standard of philosophical judgment in his natural reason, as if he did not have the standard of shoes in his own breast. of. —Possession of philosophy seems to be due precisely to lack of knowledge and lack of research, and where knowledge and research begin, philosophy seems to end.Philosophy has often been regarded as a form of knowledge empty of content; and it is entirely unrecognized that in any science or science what can be called truth in its content is only true when it is It was only when philosophy came into being that it deserved the name of truth; and it was quite unrecognized that the other sciences, though they may, as they wish, do without philosophy but by reasoning alone, without philosophy they would be It cannot have life, spirit, or truth in itself.

As far as true philosophy is concerned, we see that divine revelation and the common sense of the common man, tempered and molded neither by other knowledge nor by true philosophizing, consider themselves simply equal, or at least It is as good a substitute for the long road of cultural edification and the rich and profound movement of development by which the mind acquires knowledge, as bittersweet claims to be a substitute for coffee.In fact, when we notice that the state of ignorance, the wanton carelessness of those who are incapable of thinking at all an abstract proposition, much less the interrelationships of several propositions, are sometimes described as The fact that it is freedom and openness of mind, sometimes said to be a sign of genius or inspiration, and so on, is very unpleasant.We all know that the style of genius that is now prevalent in philosophy once flourished in poetry; Not poetry, but bland prose, or if not prose, some babble.In the same way there is now a natural philosophic mind, which considers itself disdainful of concepts, and which, for want of them, claims to be an intuitive and poetic mind, brings to the market what may be said to be disturbed by the mind. the haphazard cobblestones of a mature imagination—something that is neither fish nor meat, nor poetry nor philosophy. But on the other hand, this kind of natural philosophical thinking, which flows on the calm riverbed of common sense, is best able to create some beautiful words about ordinary truths.If it is accused that words are insignificant things, it will, on the contrary, assure that it does feel the meaning and content in itself, and believes that it must be the same in other people's hearts, because it thinks that when it comes to the heart The innocence, the purity, and so on, have said the last thing which can neither be refuted nor added.But the crux of our problem is not to keep the best stuff hidden within, but to let it be brought out of this mine to the surface and exposed to the light of day.As for the hidden final truths, it would have been unnecessary to expend any effort to express them, because they have long been contained in religious texts such as quizzes and popular proverbs. —In fact, it is not difficult to be aware of such truths in their uncertain and irregular form, and it is even easy to show that the awareness of such truths sometimes contains the very opposite.But when consciousness tries to get rid of its own confusion, it will fall into new confusion, and will probably insist that it must be so and so, and that all previous statements are sophisms--sophistry is common sense against certain One of the slogans used by trained reason, people who do not understand philosophy simply think that philosophy is sophistry, just fantasy. —Since common sense is based on emotion, on its inner oracle, it has nothing to do with those who disagree; The person must declare that it has nothing more to say.In other words, common sense is trampling on the very foundations of human nature.Because the nature of human nature is to pursue agreement with others, and human nature only exists in the commonality achieved by consciousness and consciousness.What is contrary to human nature or animal nature is that it is only limited to emotion, and can only communicate with each other based on emotion. If anyone wants to know a broad road to science, there is no easier and quicker road than this: rely on common sense, and in order to be able to keep up with the times and the progress of philosophy, read reviews of philosophical works, and even read philosophical works. The preface and the first chapters in a work; for the preface and the beginning of a philosophical work deal with general principles relating to all questions, and the reviews of a philosophical work provide, besides the history of the work, a judgment of the work , and since judgment is a kind of judgment, the scope of discussion even goes beyond the thing being judged itself.This is the common way, on which one walks in civilian clothes, but on the other, one filled with noble sentiments of eternity, the sacred, the infinite, in the throne It is a road that comes with strides in the Taoist robe—it should be said that it is already the most inner direct existence, and it is the kind of genius that produces profound original ideas and noble inspirations.But as profound as originality is, it has not yet revealed the source of the inner essence, just as inspiration, though so radiant, has not yet illuminated the loftiest firmament.True thought and scientific insight can be gained only through the labor of concepts.Concepts alone can produce a universality of knowledge which, on the one hand, does not have the usual indeterminacy and impoverishment of common sense, but is formed and complete. knowledge, on the other hand, is not that uncommon generality of the gift of reason, which tends to be corrupted by the laziness and conceit of genius, but the truth which has been developed in its original form, and which is capable of becoming all conscious rational property. 3.Conclusion, author-reader relationship Since I affirm that what science depends upon is the movement of concepts themselves, and since I have noticed that, in what I have said and in other respects which I have not yet said, the prevailing views and My views are so divergent, even diametrically opposed, that I feel that an attempt to state a scientific system in my own light will not be welcomed by the reader.But at the same time it occurred to me, for example, that although the best of Plato's philosophy is sometimes thought to be his myths which have no scientific value, there have been other periods in which one might even call it a period of fanaticism. In the 1980s, Aristotle's philosophy was valued for its speculative profundity, and Plato's Parmenides - arguably the greatest work of ancient dialectics - was also regarded as a tribute to the divine life. True disclosure and positive expression, and however dark the things that the mania produces, this misunderstood mania itself should in fact be nothing but pure concepts; I also thought that the excellent things in contemporary philosophy think that their value lies in their scientific nature, and, no matter what others think, in fact, the excellent things are recognized as excellent things entirely because of science. sex.I may also hope, therefore, that my attempt to produce science out of concepts and to state it in its own elements may perhaps clear the way for itself by virtue of the inner truth of the matter.We should be sure that truth has a nature of self-emergence when time or ripeness comes, and that it appears only after time, so that its appearance is never premature, and never encounters immature reader; at the same time we must also be sure that the author himself needs to see this situation, in order that he can test through the reader what was originally his alone, and can feel that what was at first only peculiar has finally come to pass. became something universal.But here we often distinguish the reader from those who claim to be their representatives and spokesmen.The two are different in many ways, even opposite to each other.If readers prefer to blame themselves with good intentions when they encounter a philosophical work that does not agree with their own opinions, on the contrary, these representatives and spokesmen, convinced of their own ability to judge, put all the blame on themselves. The fault is all blamed on the author.The practical effect of a philosophical work on the reader is much milder than the actions of these dead men in burying their dead.If general opinion is now more cultivated, it is more sensitive to new things, it judges faster, so that the feet of those who carry you out are already at the door, then we must from time to time pass the slower Distinguished from that effect, the slower effect of the work, the importance attached to moving words and the condemnation designed to create contempt, all correct and only after a considerable time Some works have enjoyed a large number of readers, while others have been popular for a while and never found a follow-up reader. ① See Chapter 8, Section 22 of the Gospel of Matthew. ——Original Editor ② See Chapter 5, Section 9 of Acts of the Apostles. ——Original Editor Moreover, in an age in which we now live, in which the universality of the mind has so greatly increased, the individual has been of course rendered irrelevant, and the universal still asserts and claims its full extent and its ready wealth, Hence that part of the whole enterprise of the mind which belongs to the sphere of individual activity can only be insignificant.Because of this, the individual author must, as the nature of science already suggests, be more selfless in order to be what he can be and do what he can do!However, just as individuals do not expect too much from themselves, and do not expect too much from themselves, so people must try to avoid too much from the author.