principium stilisationis · 1:54am Jan 3rd, 2016
I need help from Latin scholars. I'm reading The Theory of the Novel by Georg Lukács. It's remarkably prescient in describing the aims of post-modern literature. In fact, it's so prescient that I think it must have created post-modern literature, since as far as I know, no literature of the kind it describes existed when Lukács wrote it in 1914-15 at age 29, and he didn't mention any 20th-century literature.
I was stumped by this passage at the beginning of chapter 2:
AS A result of such a change in the transcendental points of orientation, art forms become subject to a historico-philosophical dialectic; the course of this dialectic will depend, however, on the a priori in ‘home’ of each genre. It may happen that the change affects only the object and the conditions under which it came be given form, and does not question the ultimate relationship of the form to its transcendental right to existence; when this is so, only formal changes will occur, and although they may diverge in every technical detail, they will not overturn the original form-giving principle. Sometimes, however, the change occurs precisely in the all-determining principium stilisationis of the genre, and then other art-forms must necessarily, for historico-philosophical reasons, correspond to the same artistic intention.
To understand the passage, I had to figure out what principium stilisationis meant. I checked a Latin dictionary, and the closest word I could find to 'stilisationis' was 'stilistica', a word of dubious authenticity for "stylistic" (it appears to be a contemporary Italian word that was used 2 or 3 times in modern Latin sources). Google Translate and Google N-grams both came up empty-handed; there are no uses of the word 'stilisationis' in either database.
So I Googled it. If you click that link and then click on any of the results, you'll find that the word 'stilisationis' only occurs in the phrase 'principium stilisationis', which is used only by people talking about aesthetic theory who've read The Theory of the Novel. Some examples:
That afffective investment in the modern sublime was, in Benn's case, correlated to a poetics of depersonalization and ambivalent ego-loss (Ich-Verlust), and has been, appropriately enough, subjected to psychoanalytic examination. What is important for the present discussion is the inherent and manic instability of this self-referential sublime, its constant alternation, right to the end of Benn's poetic career, with a depressive sense of helplessness, even a sentimental recourse to the most predictable topoi from the lyrical tradition, including evocations of nature in its most Goethean sense. If anything, these lapses into sentimentality increase towards the end of Benn's career. The ominpresent figure of irony serves less to undo this paradox than simply to contain it as a principium stilisationis.
-- Larson Powell, The Technological Unconscious in German Modernist Literature
Number of references to Hegel in book, not including index and list of references: 15
[Samuel] Beckett's characters behave in precisely the primitive, behavioristic manner appropriate to the state of affairs after the catastrophe, after it has mutilated them so that they cannot react any differently; flies twitching after the fly swatter has half-squashed them. The aesthetic principium stilisationis turns human beings into the same thing.
-- Jennifer Birkett, Samuel Beckett
References to Hegel: 5
"The lack of this 'present' is the essential characteristic of film. Not because films are still unperfected, not because even today their moving forms remain mute, but simply because they are only the acts and movements of people, and not people themselves. This is no deficiency of film, it is its limitation, its principium stilisationis. Hence the weirdly lifelike character of film, not only in its technique, but also in the effect of its pictures, identical in character, and, unlike those of the stage, every bit as organic and lively as nature; film brings forth a totally different kind of life; its life becomes--in short--a life of fantasy... film is a life without measure and order, without reality and value; a life without a soul--a life of pure surface appearances."
-- Georg Lukács again, quoted in R. Bruce Elder, DADA, Surrealism, and the Cinematic Effect
References to Hegel: 30
Like Heidegger, Adorno also stresses that the element of 'intoxication' belonging to the all-embracing work of art constitutes an indispensable 'principium stilisationis' insofar as it generates the 'delusory appearance of an ideal unity', the 'delusory appearance of absolute closure and presence'.
-- Alexander García Düttmann, The Memory of Thought: An Essay on Heidegger and Adorno
References to Hegel: 31
So what we seem to have is a phrase that Georg Lukács invented, using a word that he made up, which he never defined but which is the key phrase of a key paragraph in his most-famous book. This phrase has become common in literary theory--332 hits on Google--yet is nowhere defined, nor is its meaning ever apparent from its context.
My theory is that Lukács had a vague notion of what he wanted to refer to, so he threw in a Latinate phrase to stand for what he wanted to say. He wasn't bothered that the phrase didn't mean anything, because he didn't think words really meant anything anyway. Whatever he meant by it would become clear from the context he put it in--or, if it didn't, it would become clear later on, when more people used the phrase.
Such a phrase could plausibly appear and spread in post-modern literary theory because post-modern literary theory claims that all languages is just like that. If this is truly a nonsense phrase that post-modernists use without having a clear idea of what it means, then their theories of language have become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Deconstructionist dogma about language seems true to these people because they have made it true in their own lives.
However, Latin being a language of many conjugations, I can't be sure that "stilisationis" isn't a valid Latin word. Does anyone know, Calipony?
I listed the number of references to Hegel in each book that used the phrase, because I was testing my observation that whenever I find meaningless nonsense in philosophy or literary theory, it's by people strongly influenced by Hegel. Hegel ruined continental philosophy by teaching people, by example, that it was acceptable to draw conclusions, and proclaim them as inevitable and universal, based not on logic or empirical observations, but on the dramatic force of the argument. (Rationalists call such arguments "just-so stories", named after Rudyard Kipling's fables.)
Well now that you've noticed it, they'll have to kill you
I stopped caring about George Lukács the moment he thought up Jár Jár Binkcs.
Seriously though, have you considered that it may just be a malformation of another Latin word? Bad Latin has a long and storied history in both academe and art.
Also-- the Element of Intoxication:
pre05.deviantart.net/c3f6/th/pre/f/2013/159/b/c/drink_like_cheerilee_by_kp_shadowsquirrel-d689y9i.jpg
"Principium stilisationis? Gaudeamus igitur!"
He wrote about novels...did he ever write one?
3659988
You win.
stilisationis, genitive of stilisatio, which is the gerund for "using a stilus" (stylus), i.e. writing.
principium is just principle.
So he's just coined a term for "principle of writing".
The idea I think is that this principium is sort of like the first and/or final cause of the writing, the basic idea behind it all.
Edit: stilis = stilus? Now I'm not so sure.
It's almost certainly vulgate. Used like that, principium would definitely mean "first." Although it's malformed, stilisationis has got to be "writing" or "written work."
I'm guessing he meant the first work that defines or sets the tone for a new genre.
3660346
I don't get that at all. Principium is definitely something like origin. But the philosophical overtone, at least to me is, how would I put it, the sort of aesthetic vision or ideal or purpose that acts as a work's origin, in that the pursuit of this ideal is what causes the work to come into existence.
Also keep in mind that stilisationis, whatever it is, is genitive. So we're looking at something like "the origin of the written work", not "the original written work".
Could it just be a typo?
3660466 3659988 If it's a typo, one of the dozens of other people who used the term over the next hundred years should have figured that out and corrected it.
Also, in Hegel's defense, lol I trole u
3660541 You know, there's got to be a pony story in there somewhere:
Twilight Sparkle: So I tracked down the usage of the word through the last seven centuries, and I finally came to the first use of 'Threpage' a social event you threw at the castle.
Princess Celestia: (thinks) Oh, yes. Tuppence Perk, my seventy-third Tea Steward, was celebrating his retirement after one-hundred and fourteen years service in the castle. He technically started as a flag-colt for the Royal Guard, carrying the regimental standard during parades, and worked his way up through the castle bureaucracy." Celestia sighed. "We had to ease him out of his position. He seems to have gotten one of the upstairs maids with foal."
Twilight: (boggled for a moment) A hundred and fourteen... Ahem. Yes, Anyway. Records of the event said it was a Threpage Celebration, and ever since then, the phrase has cropped up in all kind of places, but nopony uses the same definition. Do you remember what it means?
Celestia: I believe I told the social reporter that the celebration flier which had been prepared for Tuppence was three pages long. Why, Twilight? Is it important?
BH, first hoof, I really appreciate you naming me as a Latin expert (which I hardly am).
Your stilisationis looks to me like a mock (technically called a ‘back-formation’) of a modern Romance language word such as Italian stilizzazione or French stylisation both meaning “the process by which you simplify a drawing or literature to make it look more artistic”. Decrufting, so to speak. Principe de la stylisation, badly translated as your principium stilisationis would therefore simply mean “outlining principle”.
Creation of pseudo-Latin words is not unusual in pedants' “works”. Gives a veneer/sheen of competency, culture and authority. That habit has been copied and scoffed in the English word ‘bloviate’ where the Latin suffix is applied to the verb ‘blow’ to create a cockeyed chimera. You can also add the other funny word ‘absquatulate’.
So,
The next time you chance upon someone who bloviates that much, absquatulate!
PS: I just realised with dread that I wasn't following you. Unforgivable omission now corrected.
PPS: what about the principium stallionis?
I have no competence regarding Latin, so let's see what I can do searching and interpreting data. I didn't get much once I filtered out anything regarding Lukács or with references to him.
I found a reference in a German book from 1959, a supplement to the Journal of Romance Philology. It seems to be the only time it was used in a context relevant to pre-modern literature of any kind (at least in German and Italian). To be specific, it was an analysis about allegorical medieval poetry centered around animals (it was a genre here for a while). It seems to have been used a few times in music essays regarding Wagner and Verdi.
The Accademia Della Crusca, the Authority regarding Italian and involved in almost every part of the "higher" literary culture, gives me exactly 0 matches for principium stilisationis . It doesn't mean that it isn't used in Italian, it means only that this specific institution doesn't use it. Considering their snobbish nature and that usually they usually don't have any problem using Latin words, this seems another point in favor of your hypothesis about it being a made-up term.
Oh, the humanities!
3660681 There's a pony story in everything.
3660891 ... you win. You just win.
3659988
3660742
Aha! I knew it smelled like bad Latin.
(Here we are now! Bloviate us!...)
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3661124
Say, guys, did you borrow your avatars from a chess game?
Just wondering.
3661381
craveonline.com/images/stories/2011/Film/Spy%20vs%20Spy.jpg
3661392
Who’s the rat and who’s the shrew?
3660891 Threadwinner, right there.
3660742 mod·es·ty
ˈmädəstē
noun
the quality or state of being unassuming or moderate in the estimation of one's abilities.
ex. Disclaiming your ability in the field of Latin translation right before giving a two-paragraph exposition on said translation that references Latin, English, Italian, and French. See: Calipony
Did you read the preface? Because Lukacs quite clearly says -- more or less -- "The Theory of the Novel is a mediocre book by a young author who'd read too much Hegel."
Basically, that passage is saying, "There is a primary force which dictates what kind of art is being made, and when it changes, all art must likewise change." It's clearly similar to the Marxist conception of "the superstructure", though draped in glittery German Idealism rather than gritty materialist empiricism. His youthful confusion is evidenced by his describing it as "historico-philosophical", a mishmash of Hegelianism, which says everything is dictated by rationalist philosophizing about higher ideals, and Marxism, which says everything is dictated by historical economic forces.
3662633 Yes, I read it. Perhaps it would be fair to Lukacs the man to have mentioned that. I will when I post a review of the book. But I'm here to evaluate important books, not their authors. Theory of the Novel was his most influential work in literary theory, regardless of what he himself thought of it later.
If I were here to evaluate the man, I might say harsher things about him, given that he served Stalin in silencing dissent, and remained loyal to the communist party all his life. His own opinion was that he later got on the right track by trying to elucidate Marx's aesthetic theory. I frankly doubt looking to Karl Marx for guidance on aesthetic theory was an improvement over Theory of the Novel.
3662690
I'm struggling to remember Marx saying anything at all about aesthetics, so that doesn't paint a terribly flattering picture of Lukacs.
3662729 Well, he said he was "trying to uncover Marx's real aesthetic and to develop it further." Logically, Marxism, to be a totalitarian system (by which I mean one that encompasses all of life), must imply an aesthetic theory, even if Marx didn't say anything about it. So he may have meant the aesthetic theory that must be implicit in Marx.
3662175
Thanks Georg
But I'm not that modest.
3662690
To clarify: what I meant by pointing out the preface was that Lukacs directly stated its excesses were directly inspired by Hegel, as per your theory, not that it was necessarily good or bad.
First, I found this page in Google search when I came across the phrase in Theodore Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory. He does discuss Lukacs, so the connection makes sense. He’s talking about Debussy’s Pelleás on p. 308 and says, “without making the slightest concession, with exemplary purity, the lyrical drama pursues its principium stilitationis.”
This page has been a great resource and I appreciate everyone’s contributions.
I would only add that there’s nothing wrong, pretentious, or bloviating about creating a Latin phrase when a simple English term that is an exact equivalent isn’t available. Those are called neologisms as well. There’s nothing wrong with that, and during the Renaissance, as I’m sure many of you know, over 25,000 words were added to the English language from Latin.
5773468
Thanks for taking the effort to reply here!
There's a footnote in Lecture 6 of the Wieland Hoban translation of Adorno's Aesthetics which reads, "Adorno knew the term principium stilisationis from Lukács's The Theory of the Novel (p. 40). Admittedly, the way in which he uses it here serves not so much to set apart the principle of a particular form of stylization from another possible one; rather, it serves more fundamentally as the principle of stylization as such, which was called into question by expressionism."
Principium stilisationis is pretentious because there is no definition of it anywhere, and it's never used in a sentence which is clear enough that you can figure out from context what it means. You will not find it in a dictionary, and you won't find it defined anywhere except in footnote 11 of Hoban's translation above. Adorno copied the phrase from Lukacs, where it was not at all obvious what it meant. If Adorno had cared about communicating meaning to the reader, he would have defined the phrase, and certainly not used it to mean something which, as the footnote explains, is different from what Lukacs (probably) meant by it (and is also different from what it means in the Adorno sentence you quoted). If Lukacs had cared about communicating, he wouldn't have used the phrase in the first place.
After collecting enough examples, it looks like "principium stilisationis usually means "a principle of style", with ambiguity as to whether it is one of many principles of style, the one key principle of style for a genre or medium, or the principle that style is important. But that's super pretentious, if all a writer uses it for is to say "principle of style" in a more-vague and ambiguous way, in Latin, when she could just as easily state it clearly and unambiguously in the language the writer is pretending to use.
My opinion is that it's just one example of the linguistic trick that Hegel uses to fool people into thinking that his writing has meaning. He writes a paragraph with 3 words or phrases that he made up, or is using in an undefined "technical" (Hegelian) way. A Hegel scholar decodes Hegel by first assigning a meaning to the first word, then using that to guess at the meaning of the 2nd word, using that 2nd word to figure out the meaning of the 3rd word, and using that 3rd word to figure out the meaning of the first word. If he comes up with some set of meanings where his guess from the 3rd word of the meaning of the first word is the same as his original guess for the 1st word's meaning, he think's he's understood Hegel. But in fact there can be several possible different meanings of the first word for which this happens. This is borne out by the unusually large differences in meaning between different translations of Hegel, as compared to other authors.
I think the usage of principium stilationis in the literature bears this out: many people have used the phrase, and yet it is still not apparent what it means, or how many of these people agree on what it means. It is a group of people fooling themselves into thinking there is meaning where there is not, just by adopting the community standard that nobody ever has to say clearly what they mean.
Bad Horse -
Thanks so much for responding and for continuing the conversation.
There are two things going on here: 1. The fact of this great conversation about Luckacs, Adorno, theory, philosophy, and language, and 2. It's on a MY LITTLE PONY FANFICTION SITE.
So I'm going to assume I've descended into an alternate reality where Taylor Swift is some kind of presiding deity and just play by the rules I've been handed. Clearly, being pretentious is bad.
I think your expectations for the use of terms in works of philosophy are a bit too narrow. It sounds to me like you expect terms to have a single meaning that's consistently used at all times, and if words don't meet this criteria, then they or the texts in which they are used are "meaningless."
I think the truth about philosophical discourse is that apart from a few of its branches, such as positivism, philosophical discourse is often about the meaning of the terms themselves. What does "being" mean? What is "love"? So the conversation only progresses as people use the terms in continually differentiated ways.
In the process, philosophers also use terms to position themselves in relationship to specific authors who participate in this conversation. So Adorno could have said "principle of style" or "of writing" or "of composition" or something like that, but by using the Lukacs's phrase, he's clearly responding to Lukacs's discussion in that part of Theory of the Novel, which you already know he addresses (and you did great work chasing down these references). In that case, maybe some kind of developed meaning of the term isn't the point -- maybe it just means something like "principle of style or writing or composition" and he's just referring to the broader context?
Finally, words in general and especially in philosophy and literature almost always have more than one meaning, including neologisms, especially as they are used over time, and writers as late as the early 20thC who are writing in subjects like philosophy and aesthetics would assume their readers probably knew Latin, Greek, German, and French, at least, so could figure out their neologisms without an English or German dictionary. They would see the roots, maybe even identify a misspelling, and get the general point.
PS Hegel's philosophy is difficult but not meaningless. That's the kind of thing a first year grad student would say.
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BTW thanks so much for directing me to Adorno's Aesthetics, which is probably a better place to start with his thought on the subject than Aesthetic Theory, which is a total pain in the neck.
5773592
No, that would be Plato (who concludes words aren't meaningless), or Derrida (who concludes they are). :)
I'm an empirical scientist, and so a nominalist. "Being" is a uniquely troublesome word, but one which I think is usually if not always unnecessary. "John is tall" is shorthand for something like "if you measured John's height, you would get a number more than one standard deviation above the average." If you find yourself asking "But what is being?" or "What does it mean to say Heidegger is?", you're confused about how grammar works. "Is" is a closed-class grammatical function term, more like "of" and "on" than like a verb. "John is" is at least as agrammatical and meaningless as "John is on", and is used only in metaphysical contexts, like when Jehovah answers Moses with "I am I AM." And to me, "metaphysics" works out to mean "use of words in a way which can't be grounded in observation and is thus meaningless." If you want to know what the meaning of "is" is, read up on E-prime rather than Hegel or Heidegger.
If you want to know why or how you exist, and you imagine the answer is somehow different than if you asked the same question of a speck of dust, you are a vitalist and you're wrong. If you want to know why there's something rather than nothing, that's a question for physics. If you want to know why you're conscious, that's a question for neuroscience.
("Love" is another uniquely troublesome word, for a very different reason: I think its purpose is to obscure distinctions. The Greeks had no word for our modern concept of "love"; the word "eros" means "lust" or "desire" everywhere it's used. That's because our modern word "love" is so broad and vague that it lets us pretend that all the different human relationships we cluster together under the word "love" are basically the same, and therefore you can simplify human romantic relationships to "I love you" or "I don't love you". It would be awkward if we had different words for different types of love. Everyone would realize they had to settle for getting just /some/ type of love rather than the full spectrum.)
Most attempts to explain nominalism in the philosophical literature are confusing and wrong, because they weren't written by nominalists. The best simple explanation of it I know is by Karl Popper, who wrote that a realist believes definitions should be read left to right, while nominalists believe they should be read right to left. That is, if the dictionary says "Bachelor: An unmarried man", the realist says that the true meaning of the word "bachelor" is "an unmarried man", while the nominalist says it means that if we see an unmarried man, we'll call him a "bachelor" for short. To nominalists, words are shorthand for full sentences, established by social convention. When I say "electron", I don't mean there "are" little points out there in the world. I mean whatever it was that created a curve in my cloud chamber with a particular curvature. Likewise, if I say "alpha particle", I mean the phenomenon or phenomena which make a different kind of curve in my cloud chamber. It didn't matter that the people who discovered electrons and alpha particles didn't know that electrons might "exist" as fundamental particles, while alpha particles don't. Whereas a continental philosopher would have worried uselessly about the ontological difference between what "is" means in "The electron is a subatomic particle" and "The alpha particle is a subatomic particle".
So I care about how we use words in different contexts, but I don't search for the "true meaning" of dikaiosuné like Plato did, and I don't demand that names correspond to things that "exist". That's a recipe for disaster, which led Plato into being boggled by things that ordinary six-year-olds understand, like how two very different people can have the same name.
In grad school I minored in psychology, neurology, and linguistics, and I worked for many years in artificial intelligence, so I know a lot about how concepts can and cannot be represented, in the human brain and in working AI, though many of the people developing today's LLMs know more. The mysteries of epistemology have been solved, not by dialectics, but by experiments and lots of mathematics. This is proven by the fact that neurologists have used electrodes to trace the basins of attraction for simple concepts in mammalian brains and characterize how they change during the learning process, and the fact that computer programs can now read lots of texts and form concepts on their own, unsupervised, which are so close functionally to the human use of those concepts that you can have arguments with them over the meaning of a word in a particular context, and they reply more intelligently than most humans. If you insist on knowing what "being" and "love" mean, you'd be better off studying the networks that are activated in GPT-4 when it encounters those words, than using dialectics.
(Caveat: LLMs have no grounding in sense data. They think only in words, so their "understanding" of words is a strict and small subset of human understanding. Ironically, that's how most or all philosophers have assumed humans think, and the assumption on which post-modern "proofs" that human thought is just language games, or that "there is nothing outside the text", rely. But those proofs are still wrong even for LLMs, as far as the ability of language to refer to reality, since the correlations between the constraints on the sentences found in the training text used for LLMs, and the constraints on what we can observe in the physical word, are very strong. But they may have some truth phenomenologically, in that the "conscious" thoughts of an LLM have no grounding outside of text. It's scary to contemplate.)
There is a lot of math involved, but doing the math isn't nearly as hard as understanding Heidegger. The problem is that doing the math is much harder than convincing yourself that you understand Heidegger, because, like Hegel, the key parts of his writings have indeterminate meaning.
"Indeterminate meaning" literally means "a collection of words in a verbal environment such that an optimization algorithm or other learning algorithm will converge on different meanings for those words given different starting points." You know the various post-modernist arguments that you can't escape your own hermeneutic circle, that words don't have objective meanings, because all reasoning is done from within some context, and there is no neutral outside view? That turns out to be bullshit in practice. You know how Chomsky said that an infant isn't exposed to enough words to learn a grammar? That's exactly the same bullshit. The vast majority of words have meanings that are very, very much over-determined by the data. Chomsky could have done the math in 3 minutes on the back of a napkin if he understood information theory and probability theory.
Inferring the meaning of a word during language learning isn't done all-at-once or in isolation; it's part of a lifelong, probabilistic, iterative optimization process which continually tries to infer and refine the meanings of all words, and the degree of truth of all propositions considered during the process, using an error- or energy-minimization process. (In LLMs, the meanings of words and the degree of truth of entire sentences aren't maintained separately; rather, the learning process works one symbol at a time, and the meaning of the individual words, and the degree of truth of the sentence, are hopelessly entangled. It may be this way in humans as well.)
Machine learning algorithms only learn concepts which are over-determined by the data, which means it learns those for which an optimization process nearly always converges on roughly the same meaning, regardless of starting point. I can't quite say that AI or humans learn only words whose meaning is over-determined, because of the way that the correctness of sentences and the meaning of words is entangled. Because the LLM has no sense data to use to evaluate the correctness of sentences, it doesn't have any error measure other than its error in predicting the next symbol in a sentence. This means it can learn very well which sentences are probable, and which are improbable, without understanding the isolated meanings of the individual words, just as a child studying a holy book can learn what kind of sentences people in their religion are likely to utter without having a clear understanding of what "salvation", "sin", "faith", and "atonement" mean–or like Hegelians can learn what sentence Hegel is likely to utter, without having a clear understanding of what "being" or "absolute" mean. The main place you find words for which the learning process doesn't converge on a meaning is within disciplines which don't have empirical verification of their sentences by observations of the real world: theology, art criticism, and continental philosophy.
The situation is worse in continental philosophy, because it evolved to accept unusually lax and vague definitions of words. I mean "evolved" literally. There was a selection process among the anti-intellectual Romans, who rejected all the clever Greek philosophers and Hellenistic scientists, but loved gnosticism and Plato's worst writings (eg the Timaeus). There was a selection process on medieval scholastics, which weeded out anyone who looked to the physical world for understanding. There was a selection process among French philosophers beginning in the 18th century, and the selectors were the idle rich of Parisian salons, and later the bourgeoisie who attended public lectures at the Ecole de Normale Superior, who selected those philosophers like Rousseau and Lacan who got away with saying the craziest and most-entertaining things. There was a selection process on German philosophers in the 19th century, driven by the belief in Germany during the Romantic era that anything deeply confusing must be profound. There was a selection process on continental philosophy in the 1930s, carried out by the fascist governments that controlled the continent, to kick out empiricists and positivists and elevate phenomenologists, because phenomenologists aren't restricted by inconvenient facts. All of these selection processes were perverse, selecting for insane philosophers whose concepts were not grounded in reality, with the result that continental philosophy itself is one of the only domains of knowledge which post-modernist theories of meaning accurately describe.
When I wrote that "metaphysics" works out to mean "use of words in a way which can't be grounded in observation and is thus meaningless", what I REALLY meant was, "metaphysics refers to concepts which a robot controlled by neural networks could not learn from observing the world."
You might then ask me, "Why do you call 'soul' a meaningless metaphysical concept? A robot could learn to distinguish between "alive" and "not alive", which could be said to mean it has a concept of "having a soul" and "not having a soul"."
I would answer that the concept of "spirit" wasn't metaphysical when it was first conceived. It was a serious hypothesis that living things had something inside them which made them move. The Hebrew and Greek words we translate as "spirit" actually meant "wind", and the people who first used those words that way believed that living things were moved hydraulically, by wind power, as proven by the fact that they stop moving when they stop breathing. Only when people dissected bodies and failed to find wind tunnels in the arms and legs, or anything that could be a spirit, and declared that the spirit is "non-material", did it become a metaphysical concept. I have a hard time imagining how a neural network could understand the concept "non-material" in terms of non-linguistic sense data, since it is an incoherent, self-contradictory concept: the non-material is that which interacts with the material world in a consistent way, but doesn't interact with the material world in a consistent way. But a NN can certainly learn to use it the same way spiritualists do.
Some parts of it appear to be pretty clear. There is a general agreement on many aspects of Hegelian philosophy. Some parts are agreed to be unclear. For instance, did Hegel believe that individuals each have an immortal soul? I've read translations of the relevant passages, and I think we can infer that he did not; yet many Hegelians disagree with me. Some long passages are not at all clear, and some parts contradict other parts. Finally, Hegel wrote so darned much that any argument about Hegel will be won by whichever scholar is most-familiar with his writings, because you can manufacture a convenient Hegel-of-the-moment by careful selection of passages, just as Christians habitually manufacture a convenient God-of-the-moment by selecting particular verses.
But the real problem is that many of the parts which appear to be clear, use terms such as "Being" or "Absolute", which I think are not in fact meaningful. Those are the concepts which are under-determined by physical observation. Different Hegelians can agree on whether Hegel would agree or disagree with sentences using such metaphysical terminology; but that doesn't mean the sentences have meaning in the world, only that they can be evaluated within the language game of Hegelianism, which does not have a unique mapping onto the physical world, because it contains these under-determined concepts.
It's like the Catholic doctrine of the Trinity: Priests can argue logically over whether God the Son is coessential or consubstantial with God the Father, and these arguments are self-consistent. Yet if you try to figure out what the difference is between coessential and consubstantial, it turns out to depend on precisely what "being" means. Which I've already argued is not a well-formed question. So the 500-year-long theological battle which devastated Europe and arguably caused the medieval Dark Age was based on an argument that was ultimately meaningless.
Worse, what Hegel calls "logic" is a system of deliberately-crippled logic which makes it possible to prove absolutely anything. The basic Hegelian dialectic of thesis-antithesis-synthesis involves starting with a contradiction, which artificial intelligence researchers proved long ago means your system is broken and can prove any arbitrary desired fact (google resolution theorem proving). Arguments made in such a broken system of logic are each individually meaningful, but they are embedded in a logic which is inconsistent, so the statement "this conclusion is valid and meaningful" can be true in the logic, yet meaningless, because whether a conclusion is valid in a broken logic has nothing to do with whether it's true in the world. As I said above, the selection process elevated Hegel because his logic legitimizes illogic and unreason. Just as bad, his Science of Logic argues that axioms need not be grounded in external reality (this is the seed of phenomenology), so even if his logic were valid, a Hegelian can begin with arbitrary axioms, chosen to prove whatever he wants to prove.
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I pretty much nailed your point of view on first guess, and in the process of correcting my perception of you, you just reinforce it. Yes, positivism. I should have mentioned Popper.
That whole project is terribly naive. It mistakes working assumptions for established fact and uncritically refuses to question the ground of its own thought. Commitment to doing is the reason why people ask what is meant by the term "being," or what it means "to be."
I mean, my God, how can you write this with a straight face? -- "The mysteries of epistemology have been solved, not by dialectics, but by experiments and lots of mathematics." And you accuse other people of being "pretentious"?
The mysteries of epistemology have been solved.
That's very funny :).
If you're not willing to question the subjectivity that devised the experiment, you're naive. If you're not willing to question the subjectivity that developed the mathematics, you're naive. If you accept the results of those experiments without questioning the assumptions on which they are built, you're naive. It is a fact that we can produce quite a bit without questioning those assumptions, but please don't mistake that for the work of philosophy. You really do go on quite long to just talk in circles in the end.
Hegelian thought is typically reduced to thesis-antithesis-synthesis, but that's truly just shorthand for a process that involves a lot more than abstract concepts.
No, Derrida does not "conclude" that words are meaningless. That idea is erroneous however common it is. Derrida started with geometry.