Marshall McLuhan's Tetrad- (Thesis) What does the artifact make obsolete? (Ground/Context) (Identity)
- (Antithesis) What does the it enhance? (Figure/Medium) (Negativity)
- (Synthesis) What does the it flip into when pushed to extremes? (Ground/Context)(Totality)
- (Parallax) What does the it retrieve that had been obsolesced earlier? (Figure/ Medium)(Totality)
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"With regard to its form, [dialectical] logic has three aspects: (a) the abstract or understandable aspect [Ground]; (b) the dialectical or negatively rational aspect [Figure]; (c) the speculative or positively rational aspect [Figure + Ground]."
"With regard to its form, [dialectical] logic has three aspects: (a) the abstract or understandable aspect [Ground]; (b) the dialectical or negatively rational aspect [Figure]; (c) the speculative or positively rational aspect [Figure + Ground]."
(Hegel, First Part of the Encyclopaedia, "Logik")
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"When talking about the 'Hegelian triad,' the first thing to do is to forget the story about alienation, loss of the original organic unity, and the return to a "higher" mediated unity. To get a more appropriate idea of it, it is worth recalling the sublime reversal found, among others, in Charles Dickens' The Great Expectations? When, at his birth, Pip is designated as a 'man of great expectations,' everybody perceives this as the forecast of his worldly success; however, at the novel's end, when he abandons London's false glamour and returns to his modest childhood community, we become aware that he did live up to the forecast that marked his life - it is only by way of finding strength to leave behind the vain thrill of London's high society that he authenticates the notion of being a 'man of great expectations'. We are dealing here with a kind of Hegelian reflexivity: what changes in the course of the hero's ordeal is not only his character, but also the very ethical standard by which we measure his character. And did not something of the same order happen at the opening ceremony of the 1996 Olympic games in Atlanta, when Muhammad Ali lighted the Olympic fire with the torch held by his hand shaking heavily on account of his severe illness - when the journalists claimed that, in doing this, he truly was "The Greatest" (a reference to Ali's boasting self-designation decades ago, the title of the film about himself in which he starred and of his autobiography), they, of course, wanted to emphasize that Muhammad Ali achieved true greatness now, through his dignified endurance of his debilitating illness, not when he was enjoying the full swing of popularity and smashing his opponents in the ring... This is what 'negation of negation' is: the shift of perspective which turns failure into true success.
"The predominant way to assert the actuality of Hegel, i.e., to save him from the reproach that his system is a totally outdated metaphysical madness, is to read his thought as an attempt to establish the normative conditions or presuppositions of our cognitive and ethical claims: Hegel's logic is not a system of universal ontology, but just a systematic deployment of all ways available to us to make claims about what there is, and of the inherent inconsistencies of these ways. In this reading, Hegel's starting point is the fact that the fundamental structure of the human mind is self-reflective: a human being does not simply act, it (can) act(s) upon rational freely assumed norms and motivations, which means that, in order to account for our statements and attitudes, one cannot ever simply refer to some positive data (natural laws and processes, divine Reason, God's Will...) - each of these reference has to be JUSTIFIED, its normative binding power has to be somehow ACCOUNTED FOR. - The problem with this elegant solution is that, in contrast to the robust direct metaphysical reading of Hegel as rendering the structure of the Absolute, it is too modest: it silently reduces Hegel's logic to a system of global epistemology, of all possible epistemological stances, and what gets lost to it is the intersection between the epistemological and ontological aspects, the way "reality" itself is caught in the movement of our knowing it (or, vice versa, how our knowing of reality is embedded in reality itself, like journalist embedded with the US Army units in Iraq)."
"The predominant way to assert the actuality of Hegel, i.e., to save him from the reproach that his system is a totally outdated metaphysical madness, is to read his thought as an attempt to establish the normative conditions or presuppositions of our cognitive and ethical claims: Hegel's logic is not a system of universal ontology, but just a systematic deployment of all ways available to us to make claims about what there is, and of the inherent inconsistencies of these ways. In this reading, Hegel's starting point is the fact that the fundamental structure of the human mind is self-reflective: a human being does not simply act, it (can) act(s) upon rational freely assumed norms and motivations, which means that, in order to account for our statements and attitudes, one cannot ever simply refer to some positive data (natural laws and processes, divine Reason, God's Will...) - each of these reference has to be JUSTIFIED, its normative binding power has to be somehow ACCOUNTED FOR. - The problem with this elegant solution is that, in contrast to the robust direct metaphysical reading of Hegel as rendering the structure of the Absolute, it is too modest: it silently reduces Hegel's logic to a system of global epistemology, of all possible epistemological stances, and what gets lost to it is the intersection between the epistemological and ontological aspects, the way "reality" itself is caught in the movement of our knowing it (or, vice versa, how our knowing of reality is embedded in reality itself, like journalist embedded with the US Army units in Iraq)."
(Slavoj Zizek, The Parallax View)
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