The Purely Negative Concept of the Substack-Post as Being-for-Self
A guest post by Hegel
Today we’re breaking up the scheduled programming to bring you a very special guest. Ladies and gentlepeople—back from a nearly 200-year slumber—none other than Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel!
(308 words - approx. 39 minute read)
Guten Tag. It seems presumptuous, in the search for the cognition of being-in-itself, to, when thinking is mediately mediated through the medium of Substack posts, assume that the Absolute-for-us-in-it is graspable, except insofar as it is negatively determined by the The of the writer, through writing-as-such. Nevertheless it is the utmost responsibility of the Substack-phenomenologist, conceived as absolute unmediated mediated spirit, to attempt this not-not-negatively contradictory endeavor, in order that their self-consciousness consciously sublates das Unaufhebbare des Selbstbewusstseins, which it unconsciously, and not-negatively, conceives as being-for-consciousness in the conscious act of cognizing.
Thus, in the search for the Being-for-Self of the Being-in-itself, which manifold Substackers have rashly taken to be an attainable aim of the superficial immediacy of a merely representational philosophical consciousness of recent philosophers, it is necessary—and sufficient (though not necessary)—to start from the ending and work towards the ending from the beginning of the end. I therefore end this post by beginning its ending with a self-sublating preservation of its beginning towards the determination of its middle; in other words, the self-conscious-writing-self-for-itself, in a single unmediated dialectical movement, considers itself in a self-considering non-cognitive cognizing as a manifestation of the This of Substack.
It is plainly obvious from the above that the only rational course of development for the self-explaining Begriff of Absolute Spirit, der sich selbst in der reinen Tat aufhebt, is to assimilate into the objective world-spirit of Substack philosophizing, which has its particular manifestation of this substacking-self-determining-self-consciousness that births an inter-subjective community of self-consciousnesses out of its own self-contained negation. This development is not only necessary, but also obligatory, and a failure would present a halting of the necessary development, through various shapes of consciousness, of the World Spirit in its coherent self-discovery of internal contradiction.
I guess what I’m trying to say is that you should subscribe to Wonder and Aporia:1
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I thought it would be fun to ask ChatGPT to explain the main points of the text in simple terms. Here is what it said:
“This text is a playful, over-the-top parody of dense philosophical writing, particularly drawing on Hegelian terminology and style. Here’s a simpler breakdown of its main ideas:
Thinking Through Writing – The author starts by questioning whether we can truly grasp "absolute being" (ultimate truth or reality) when our thinking is filtered through something as indirect as writing on Substack. Writing itself shapes and limits understanding.
A Complicated Journey – Many writers on Substack assume they can reach deep philosophical truth easily, but the author insists that real understanding requires a paradoxical process—starting at the end, moving backwards, and somehow looping through the middle.
The Role of Writing Itself – The act of writing is seen as part of an ongoing philosophical process where self-awareness develops through contradiction, much like Hegel's idea of how consciousness unfolds.
Substack as a Philosophical Force – The author humorously suggests that Substack itself represents a new stage in the evolution of philosophical thought, where self-consciousness develops in an online community of thinkers.
The Call to Subscribe – In the end, all of this high-level theorizing boils down to a clever way of saying: “Subscribe to my Substack.”
Overall, the passage plays with complex philosophical jargon to make a humorous and self-aware pitch for a newsletter.”