Ok kids, I already wrote this post long in the past. You might even say, hours ago (which it was). So why write it again? Well you see, I am a sucka and I forgot to save and also accidentally closed the tab containing the contents of my post on my browser (whooopsies).
This isn't the first time this has happened to me. I have had classes that require blogs and have done this multiple times on blogger and also with papers, emails, facebook comments, etc. Each time it becomes apparent that I have made a damning and frustrating mistake, and I feel pretty dumb and downright annoyed with myself. I wasted time and here I am doing it all again. But it will necessarily be a new endeavor somehow. I may sit down in the same spot and listen to the same music while I type but even if I am doing it all over again and I am doing it differently. According to Hegel, through experience we learn that "we meant something other than what we meant to mean." The task of philosophy, and the scientific way of doing philosophy, concerns itself with the reexamination and reanalysis of ideas as we continually test the proposition against itself in a newly separate context. Hegel identifies the dialectical process as one that is ever-evolving towards absolute truth and thinking about the way I ordinarily orient myself in the world this seems true. I am concerned with examining my past behaviors and situations and the possibilities that may follow accordingly. It seems that the retrospective nature of human consciousness still exists presently and even later we can continually reflect on the experience reflecting (whoa). And so I write this blog again, in a new moment and that is very much like the last. The basic concerns I have are still the same and the same questions still seems to puzzle me, but the doing this a second time definitely seems clearer (kind of).
It seems to me that Hegel's approach to philosophy as a science necessitates a kind of personal and emotional removal from experience. Additionally, it appears that we must acknowledge an inherent incorrectness to personal experiences, as they can only become more truthful once a contradictory account is proposed. An antithesis, colloquially, is something that is directly opposed to something else. While this is not exactly the Hegelian terminology, it seems to point to a kind of conflict of diametrically opposed positions in which each side must compromise rather than a nuanced building of consciousness that logically proceeds from one step to the next.
How much information is compromised in the dialectical process? As I write this blog post for the second time, it appears to be more sophisticated to me, but damn I wish I had that other one back so I could know for sure. The information is lost. So next time, I'll make sure write in a word processor rather than directly into blogger, or I'll at least remember to save frequently. But the experience of having to do this twice was actually not so bad once I removed got over my feelings of loss and embraced what I had retained in the process.
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first off you are one hundred percent right in making sure you do your posts initially in word, or some other word processor. Not only can you save them, but you you can also use a more sophisticated spell checker, and check the length of your posts compared to an actual page, and not the little blogger window. Now in reference to your actual post, i thought it was very interesting. I always appreciate when people incorporate actual personal experiences into their blogs, or when they just introduce new ideas or questions they have thought about. While i think it is true that this version of your post is probably more clear than your first, i think that ultimately Hegel would say that the truth of what you experienced, is in the entire process and the reflection on that process itself.
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