Merge pull request #23 from ridetoruin/ridetoruin-patch-1

Ridetoruin patch 1

src/pages/hegel/reference/Presuppositionlessness → src/pages/hegel/guides/presuppositionlessness.md

@@ -17,14 +17,12 @@ We have looked at the reasons for why one might take presuppositionlessness as a
 Hegel shows his gratitude to these presuppositions in the preface to second edition of the SL. He writes: “but this traditional material, the familiar forms of thought, must be regarded as an extremely important source, indeed as a necessary condition and as a presupposition to be gratefully acknowledged even though what it offers is only here and there a meagre shred or a disordered heap of dead bones” (31). It is clear that Hegel accepts language, experience, and history as necessary presuppositions for doing philosophy. But if Hegel is not sceptical about the very medium through which we grasp and develop our understanding of the world, then about what is he sceptical? The answer is given in a passage a few pages down in the preface to the second edition of the SL: 
 
 > “Such presuppositions as that infinity is different from finitude, that content is other than form, that the inner is other than the outer, also that mediation is not immediacy (as if anyone did not know such things), are brought forward by way of information and narrated and asserted rather than proved. But there is something stupid - I can find no other word for it - about this didactic behaviour; technically it is unjustifiable simply to presuppose and straightway assume such propositions” (41).
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 Hegel’s concern has to do with whether our specifically philosophical assumptions are justified or not. Hegel is not out to question whether language is the best medium for us to do philosophy; or to investigate what happens if we abstract from experience. He takes these things as necessary presuppositions. Rather, Hegel is interested in whether we have actually comprehended the concept of infinity or the concept of mechanism. Obviously we already have these concepts. We already have the concept of infinity and the concept of mechanism – Hegel does not doubt that. But have we properly understood them? What is the infinite? Is it the unbounded? Is it absolutely opposed to the finite? Is it made up of infinite finites? Again, Hegel does not doubt that there is a concept of the infinite. Hegel doubts that we have an adequate comprehension of the infinite. 
 
 This, again, raises interesting questions about the justification for Hegel’s scepticism. Why does Hegel just doubt our philosophical assumptions? Why stop there? Why not doubt everything? Because, and unlike Descartes, Hegel is deeply sensitive to the essentiality of some presuppositions. Hegel has often been credited as being a philosopher who is sensitive to history, and nowhere is this more significant than at the beginning of his philosophical project. Hegel has no time for philosophical projects that are complete abstractions because they are merely pretensions to abstract thinking, because such abstraction is impossible. There is a bedrock of assumptions, without which we cannot do any kind of philosophy. 
 
 ## How does presuppositionlessness work?
 
 In this final section, I will briefly outline how exactly presuppositionlessness works in practice. We have already stated that presuppositionlessness does not require us to do away with language or our reservoir of concepts. We are not trying to invent the wheel anew. Rather, we are taking for granted that our concepts are true, in a sense. What we are inquiring into is whether we have understood the nature of our concepts correctly or not. In this sense, then, we are not calling into question the conditions that enable us to do philosophy in the first place. Our presuppositionlessness is, instead, a methodological presuppositionlessness.
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-The first tenet of methodological presuppositionlessness is “do not take anything for granted”. As such, whilst doing philosophy we will never be driven by what philosophers have normally taken ‘x’ to be, or by what we think ‘y’ is based on experience. We will set aside our assumptions about how philosophical concepts ought to be. In the absence of any assumptions about how philosophical assumptions ought to be, how is our philosophical inquiry to proceed? This brings us to the matter of the beginning of philosophy, which is a whole topic unto itself; for now, we will assume that there is nothing problematic about the beginning. Hegel’s strategy for beginning his philosophical inquiry, despite setting aside all assumptions, is to abstract all content from thought and to see where thought takes us. This is the second methodological tenet: “attend to the immanent determination of thought and do not import anything external into it”. Once we have set aside all of our assumptions and abstracted all content from thought, our philosophical inquiry will proceed by attending to the immanent character of our thought. Whatever that may be. As it turns out, when we abstract all content from thought what we are left with is the simple is-ness of thought or “pure being”. If we think about “pure being” and consider its characteristics we will discover that it is, in fact, “pure nothing”. And so on and so forth, the dialectic of thought proceeds. 
 
+The first tenet of methodological presuppositionlessness is “do not take anything for granted”. As such, whilst doing philosophy we will never be driven by what philosophers have normally taken ‘x’ to be, or by what we think ‘y’ is based on experience. We will set aside our assumptions about how philosophical concepts ought to be. In the absence of any assumptions about how philosophical assumptions ought to be, how is our philosophical inquiry to proceed? This brings us to the matter of the beginning of philosophy, which is a whole topic unto itself; for now, we will assume that there is nothing problematic about the beginning. Hegel’s strategy for beginning his philosophical inquiry, despite setting aside all assumptions, is to abstract all content from thought and to see where thought takes us. This is the second methodological tenet: “attend to the immanent determination of thought and do not import anything external into it”. Once we have set aside all of our assumptions and abstracted all content from thought, our philosophical inquiry will proceed by attending to the immanent character of our thought. Whatever that may be. As it turns out, when we abstract all content from thought what we are left with is the simple is-ness of thought or “pure being”. If we think about “pure being” and consider its characteristics we will discover that it is, in fact, “pure nothing”. And so on and so forth, the dialectic of thought proceeds.