A Commentary on the Passing Scene by Robert Paul Wolff rwolff@afroam.umass.edu
Sunday, January 24, 2016
I HAVE MY WORK CUT OUT FOR ME
With Lecture Four recorded, edited, and transformed into the MP4 format suitable for uploading to YouTube on Friday next, I sat down this morning to start work on Lecture Five, in which I shall begin to engage with Edwin Wilmsen's Land Filled With Flies. Immediately, I realized the manifest impossibility of my task. The Introduction is a mere seven pages, and yet there is enough in it to require several lectures of explication and commentary! I have no idea how I am going to manage this, but if a few of you are making an attempt to follow along, and thought perhaps of reading one of the books I am discussing in my lectures, then let the Wilmsen be your choice. I find it stunningly brilliant.
I watched lecture three on the weekend and continue to enjoy the series. I have a comment and a question that stems from the comment. You discuss Mannheim’s idea that an ideologically-based weltanschauung can affect our perceptions of time itself, and you make the point that his idea is deeply disturbing for a Kantian. But in listening to your discussion of Mannheim’s four examples of this phenomenon, it struck me that what he is really talking about is our ideologically blinkered perceptions, or interpretations, of human history--human time and its meaning--and not time in the physical sense, as it exists independent of human events. I think that people living under, or within, all four world views would agree, for example, on notions like “before” and “after,” and the closely-related ideas of cause and effect and the irreversible, “one way” nature of time. But, and now we come to my question, was it not time in this more fundamental, physical sense that Kant had in mind when he talked about our capacity for a priori understanding? By the way, this is not a “gotcha” question--I have only the most limited understanding of these matters. But I didn’t think that Kant had a theory of human history. I thought that was more Hegel’s department.
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