Mediation (philosophy)
The mediation describes the intellectual process of balancing opposites and its result.
Significance in Hegel
The concept of mediation has gained in importance especially through Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel . Hegel describes historical reality as the result of numerous annulments of contradictions. In his Phenomenology of Spirit (1807), Hegel sets up a series of levels of consciousness: self-consciousness, reason, spirit, religion, absolute knowledge. Hegel calls the rise of consciousness “experience”: In its experience, consciousness encounters itself in every other person. Every encounter becomes a new self-experience, which in turn changes consciousness. Of course, it only recognizes in the other what it perceives in itself and is therefore part of the process of knowledge. Since the consciousness changes through this process of knowledge, it must also revise the impression of its counterpart: the counterpart appears changed and has to be mediated anew. At the highest level of knowledge, with “absolute knowledge”, there is perfect mediation: consciousness and object coincide.
See also
Web links
- Gotthard Günther: Fundamentals of a new theory of thinking in Hegel's logic , in: www.vordenker.de (Edition: SEMINARtexte 2005). J. Paul (Ed.). First publication: Felix Meiner Verlag, Hamburg, 1933, 1978. Chapter 5: The problem of the topic and the concept of mediation , p. 126.