"If you look upon the world rationally, then world looks rationally back." Is this statement true? During the class discussion on Thursday, I was asking myself this question. Why is rationality so highly valued amongst philosophers? The obvious answer is that rational thinking is responsible for nearly all human advancement. But what does it mean for the world to look rationally back upon you? I eventually came to the conclusion that if you look upon the world rationally, then things tend to make sense. There is no doubt that Hegel's "Lordship and Bondage" was incredibly difficult to read, but after Dr. J made sense of the conglomeration of words, I finally began to understand the dialectic. Dr. J explained that in a dialectic argument, you have a Thesis and an Antithesis that is met with a negation, and from that negation we are met with a synthesis and another antithesis which stems a negation from the original negation. This process continues until we reach an absolute. My question to this is that if this absolute is found using fool-proof rationality, is the reasoning of the "absolute" infallible? Moreover, is it possible for humans to be capable of infallible reasoning? Theoretically it is true, however failures of human reasoning make it unlikely. I believe with rational reasoning, the Dialectic's "absolute" is capable of being completely true.
However, what I found most interesting about Thursday's class was the idea of a "Contest for the will of recognition." This so called contest is one of those concepts that you never really realize, but we experience it nearly every day. Lars gave a good example of a good ole fashioned stare down, and the first to look away is the recessive personality, while the the other is the dominant. What is interesting about this so called battle is that, according to Hegel, it is a battle to the death, because if one does not recognize the other as a rational being, then they essentially go off and die. This consequence leads to the conclusion that mutual recognition is necessary, because without it, there is no starting point. So, from Hegel's perspective, the only way to win is to mutually recognize the other self consciousness, because if you don't, you die. So I guess if you can't beat 'em, join 'em.
To call a stare down a battle to the death is pretty radical. While I agree with Hegel that a battle for recognition is crucial to every interaction between two rational, it seems obvious that not every encounter between two people walking by each other on the street results in one or the other's death because one looked away first. While Hegel is not saying that every encounter is a fight to end, I wonder how many people have the will to duel for the sake of proving their existence. Do people a) have enough faith in humanity and in their own existence to do so? I would observe not since it is so often the case that we allow one person to dominate over us, and b) find their own existence worth fighting for? Think, how much would you give to be recognized?
ReplyDeleteI think that most people do not really need any proof in their existence in one exact instance, but rather that you know yourself that you exist. One person dominating me in a staring contest does not prove I do not exist, and I do not believe winning a staring contest is a fight worth fighting to prove my existence. I have already been around long enough to have had interactions with others that I find as sure enough evidence that I myself exist. I'd like to think most people have found recognition pretty easily in life, and maybe I'm wrong but it does not seem to hard to recognize that I am a rational being that does indeed exist.
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