Unknown asks, "In your lectures of the Critique you didn't seem too keen on Hegel, what gives?"
It is quite simple. I have spent my entire life trying as hard as I could to take complex and difficult ideas and clarify them in my mind until I was able to explain them simply and clearly, so that my readers or students could see their beauty and power. Hegel, it seems to me, takes relatively simple ideas and does everything in his power to make them as obscure and difficult as possible.
I hate that.
While I am at it, let me note that I did not say The Racial Contract was the most widely read book or the most influential book or the book with the biggest reputation or the most frequently translated book on political philosophy of the last century. I simply said that I thought it was the best. That, I trust everyone will agree, is quite different.
33 comments:
Actually, you said that it was "the most important".
"Most important" can certainly be read as "most influential" as well as "the best".
Not exactly defending Hegel here, but this is funny:
"I am sure I cannot be alone in having more than once had the following experience: initially finding some turn of phrase in Hegel obscure; eventually satisfying myself that I have some understanding of it; then struggling to find some less obscure paraphrase; eventually satisfying myself that I have a perfect candidate; and finally turning back to the original to compare the two, only to find that they are the same."
-A.W. Moore, The Evolution of Modern Metaphysics, p. 162 n. 2
Hegel: 'the night in which all cows are black'; 'history as this slaughterhouse'; 'with no more significance than cutting off the head of a cabbage'; a boy throws stones in a stream and looks with wonder; etc.--Hegel's writing is full of astounding expressions and images that one would not wish to live without. I've taught Hegel numerous times, mostly the Lectures on Fine Art, which have always seemed to me 'perfectly' clear. Having taught the Phenomenology of Spirit and consulted all the major commentaries, I'll admit that there are still some paragraphs (especially in 'Force and Understanding') that I simply could not understand. But mostly it seems to me that one just has to get used to the jangle of the Hegel music--'in itself','for itself', 'for us'. The core of the Hegelian dialectic, that is, historical development/change as grasped in terms of the correlation of and dissonance between central experiences and the criteria through which they are understood and evaluated, seems to me a fundamental contribution to thinking about human life, as it did also for Marx, Dewey, and Adorno. What looks like obscurantism might look from a different angle like the attempt to articulate things as processes with an eye towards their roles in an unfolding totality.
Although Alexandre Kojeve's lectures on Phenomenology of Spirit are not Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, I found them to be infinitely more comprehensible than than the source material and invaluable to understanding the source material.
Whatever else you may think about Schopenhauer, his prose were clear, and he his barbs against Hegel were some of the most memorable in philosophical history.
-Tyler
I have no wish, or standing. to ask you to write about Hegel since you find him, as you have made clear, deliberately obscure. However you have told that you collaborated with Marcuse on the Critique of Pure Tolerance and that he was also a family friend. Marcuse was of course an authority on Hegel to whom he devoted at least two books. He was also someone who loved a good fight and delighted in provoking argument. I can't imagine that he didn't try to tease you into an argument about Hegel and the dialectic. If you have any recollections to share about getting drawn into, or dodging, arguments with Marcuse about Hegel, I would love to hear them.
Hegel becomes much more comprehensible after reading the section in "The Holy Family" titled 'The Absolute Fruit.'
Hegel on God is how I feel about Hegel: "the sewer into which all contradictions flow". Schopenhauer and Nietzsche had Hegel's number.
John Rapko,
It does appear that Prof. Wolff is one who does wish, and therefore would wish, to be without the Hegelian expressions you cite, and I, and numerous others who have read those expressions, including, as noted above, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, would also wish to do without them. They add nothing of substance to our understanding of the universe, of human cognition, or of historical events. They are merely pretentious logorrhea, auf Deutsch.
I won't put Nietzsche into the anti-Hegel brigade.
I open the index of Beyond Good and Evil and I look for Hegel. At random I select section 204 where Nietzsche speaks of Schopenhauer's "unintelligent wrath against Hegel". Kaufmann with a footnote sends me to section 252 where Nietzsche, speaking of Hegel and Schopenhauer,
refers to them as "these two hostile brother geniuses in philosophy who strove apart toward opposite poles of the German spirit and in the process wronged each other as only brothers wrong each other".
I'm sure if you search Nietzsche hard enough, you'll find anti-Hegel remarks in other contexts and in other moods, but Nietzsche is certainly not consistently critical of Hegel.
In saying that 'one would not wish' to be without those marvelous Hegelian expressions and images, I used the term 'one', and not 'everyone/any sane person/any intelligent person/etc.' in order to keep the expression as an offer of identification, not as a demand for universal assent. For what it's worth, to my knowledge the evidence is that Nietzsche would have read little or nothing of Hegel (as well as of Kant), and that most of what he had to say about them he got from Schopenhauer. As for "numerous others," I suppose one anonymous or unnamed numerous other is as good as another, but one can easily name further non-anonymous instances of prominent folks who seemed to have found reading Hegel worthwhile, such as Heidegger, Lukács, Foucault, Charles Taylor, Alasdair MacIntyre, Robert Brandom, and Raymond Geuss. In one of the great works of English-language philosophy, 'Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind', Wilfrid Sellars cites approvingly the Hegelian critique of 'immediacy' in the very first sentence. And so on. If Hegel doesn't rock one's boat, non est disputandum; hopefully someone else does.--I would be interested in reading what the professor thinks are the relatively simple ideas that Hegel does his darndest to make obscure and difficult.
Simone de Beauvoir read The Phenomenology of the Spirit after the defeat of France in World War 2, at the time unaware whether Sartre was still alive and prisoner or killed in action.
Somehow, she found it therapeutic. That's in her memoirs.
This is also funny, and fascinating. The whole essay is linked below. -
"Some observations of the effects of nitrous-oxide-gas-intoxication which I was prompted to make by reading the pamphlet called The anaesthetic revelation and the gist of philosophy (Blood, 1874), have made me understand better than ever before both the strength and the weakness of Hegel's philosophy. I strongly urge others to repeat the experiment, which with pure gas is short and harmless enough. The effects will of course vary with the individual, just as they vary in the same individual from time to time; but it is probable that in the former case, as in the latter, a generic resemblance will obtain. With me, as with every other person of whom I have heard, the keynote of the experience is the tremendously exciting sense of an intense metaphysical illumination. Truth lies open to the view in depth beneath depth of almost blinding evidence. The mind sees all the logical relations of being with an apparent subtlety and instantaneity to which its normal consciousness offers no parallel; only as sobriety returns, the feeling of insight fades, and one is left staring vacantly at a few disjointed words and phrases, as one stares at the cadaverous-looking snow peak from which the sunset glow has just fled, or at the black cinder left by an extinguished brand..."
-William James, "Subjective Effects of Nitrous Oxide"
https://www.uky.edu/~eushe2/Pajares/jnitrous.html
Some other author/speaker (it was just a brief mention, and way too long ago for me to remember the source) described a college student as experimenting with LSD and having a revelation as to the understanding of Kant. As for me, I once had a (very minor!) James-like experience with laughing gas in the dentist's chair. It's silly, but I remember thinking about a romantic interest I had at the time, trying to figure out whether and in what way I loved her. A sort of feedback loop spontaneously ensued - "I want her to want me to want her to want me to want (etc.)" - maybe somewhat reminiscent of Hegel (or at least Cheap Trick).
John Rapko,
As you say, Nietzsche read little or nothing of Kant and Hegel, but he had read about them and heard about them in conversations with other students and professors. I myself have never read Chomsky on linguistics or Keynes, but I have a general idea of what Chomsky has to say on linguistics and Keynes about macroeconomic policy.
What's more, Kant and Hegel were in Nietzsche's youth and student days still two important players in German culture, whom people talked about. They weren't, as they are today,
two historically significant German philosophers who are talked about and read only by specialists.
s. wallerstein--I don't disagree with anything you say, with the qualification that there was no neo-Hegelianism movement emergent in Nietzsche's early adulthood as there was neo-Kantianism. My very minor point was only that one would hardly look to Nietzsche for authoritative statements on whether it's worthwhile to read Hegel and Nietzsche. In any case, it's easy enough to find somewhere in Nietzsche's writings highly critical remarks about almost everybody, except Heraclitus, Goethe, and Cesare Borgia.--To my long list of important philosophers who think it worthwhile to read Hegel, I would add Collingwood, Merleau-Ponty, and Gadamer. And then there was at least one prominent political actor in the 20th century amongst the careful readers of Hegel, a gentleman known as Lenin, who studied and wrote detailed commentary on The Science of Logic. And finally, an intellectual historian who was at Oxford with the former American president Bill Clinton told me that he once asked Clinton in a letter whether he had read Hegel, and Clinton replied that he had. Since Clinton said it, it must be true.
Not to nitpick or anything or play an analytic philosopher, which I'm not, but it can be "worthwhile" to read someone even if that author is, in terms of style or otherwise, unnecessarily obscure or difficult. Some people probably read Hegel because they know Hegel influenced others in whom they are interested, Marx for instance. I would guess, for example, that Michael Harrington read Hegel because of Harrington's deep interest in Marx (though I could be wrong, and perhaps Harrington read Hegel first). Anyway, Harrington makes a favorable, albeit brief and general, remark about The Phenomenology of Spirit in The Vast Majority (1977).
John Rapko,
Just to add a bit of trivia, Nietzsche refers very favorable in Ecce Homo to "that old Hegelian Bruno Bauer" and according to the Wikipedia article on Bauer (which I just glanced at), Nietzsche visited Bauer once and Bauer encouraged him to attack David Strauss, which he did (no source given for the visit).
Nietzsche makes a positive reference to Hegel in section 357 of Die froehliche Wissenschaft, section 357: "Recapitulate in your mind the real achievements of philosophical thinking that one owes to Germans... [N first discusses Leibniz and then Kant] Let us take, thirdly, the astonishing stroke of Hegel who struck right through all our logical habits and bad habits when he dared to teach that species concepts [Artbegriffe] develop out of each other... We Germans are Hegelians even if there never had been any Hegel, insofar as we (unlike all Latins) instinctively attribute a deeper meaning and greater value to becoming and development than to what 'is'; we hardly believe in the justification of the concept of 'being'... " N then goes on to talk at length about Schopenhauer, including S's hostility to Hegel. [Walter Kaufmann's translation]
Weber I think was influenced by Hegel and one might say was Hegelian. He expressed his ideas with clarity and it can be agreed was a better sociologist and thinker than Marx, by far, who is an historical artifact.
Can good ideas be expressed with some lack of clarity?
Marx simplified to the point of caricature- I ask you who understood life better? Not Marx or Hegel but Marx or Weber?
Howie,
With the caveat that perhaps Weber was not always served well by certain of his translators, if you think Weber always expressed his ideas w/ clarity you might glance at some of the thornier passages in the essay on objectivity (cite to follow later).
p.s.
"it can be agreed that" etc.
Well, not everyone of course would agree w that. I don't think I do. Nor does the host of this blog, for that matter.
Howie,
I have no idea whether Weber was a better sociologist than Marx since I've never been especially interested in sociology.
However, you claim that Weber is a greater thinker than Marx and I don't agree with that although obviously, we may differ on how we define a "great thinker".
As a result of the discussion above in this thread about Nietzsche, I picked up my old copy of the Portable Nietzsche and by chance glanced at the end of Walter Kaufmann's introduction. Kaufmann's final sentence is "He (referring to Nietzsche) challenges the reader not so much to agree or disagree as to grow".
For me, that is what constitutes a great thinker, someone who challenges me to grow intellectually and spiritually. That is true about Nietzsche and about Marx.
Marx challenges me to look at the real forces behind the world of work, behind the economic statistics which I read in the media every day, behind the glorification of professional and business success, behind the products I buy, behind all the markers of social status which most people guide their lives by, behind the irritation and lack of courtesy of my fellow subway riders during the commuting hours. Marx challenges my petit bourgeois comfortableness and that keeps me (along with other thinkers) from drifting into complacency and makes me grow, I hope.
Marx is a philosopher and one of the chief functions of philosophy is to challenge hegemonic common sense, and I thank Marx for that.
On a lighter note, all I can say to the above is: Dos Passos, Castaneda and psychedelics.
While it is obviously true that critiquing a book as the best of its genre is not equivalent to claiming that it is the most read, most translated, or most appreciated, I have to take issue with the assertion that Charles Mills “The Racial Contract” is the best work of political philosophy of the last century. It is not even a work of political philosophy; it is a work of sociology.
On p. 110 of the paperback edition, Prof. Mills writes, “… when white people say ‘Justice,’ they mean ‘Just Us.’” This is not an analytical statement regarding the philosophical merits of Hobbes’, Locke’s or Rousseau’s political philosophy, or a commentary on which among them best represents how human beings should structure their government in order to maximize the freedom and security of the governed. It is simply a comment on the fact that these political philosophers were white Europeans who gave no thought to the rights of other races and whose white interpreters implemented their political philosophical views to benefit whites at the expense of other cultures and races, particularly Africans. But a commentary on how a political philosophy is implemented in a warped manner to benefit one race over another is a criticism of the philosophy’s implementation, not its philosophical merit. Mills work adds nothing to evaluating alternative political philosophies which would better maximize the rights of the governed, regardless of race or ethnicity.
Nothing in these political philosophies implies that their frameworks can only work in European white societies, and cannot be implemented in Asian or African societies. The political philosophies are themselves neutral with regard to the race or ethnicity of the societies which can implement them. A government modeled after Locke’s ideal of a divided government where there is a balance of power among equal bodies is just as valid for a predominantly white society in 1776 America, as in Nigeria, Japan, or Russia. To suggest that the political philosophies of Locke or Rousseau were devised to be applied in only white European cultures, and can only work effectively in such cultures, is akin to saying calculus can work best in the European cultures of Newton and Leibniz who invented it, but is invalid in Nigeria, Japan, or Russia.
This distinction is particularly relevant in contemporary America, where certain segments of our society are complaining that educational curricula which teach the racist history of America are promoting critical race theory which they regard as condemning certain people as inherently inferior based on their skin color because they oppressed other people based on their skin color. Regardless how the political theories of Locke and Rosseau may have been implemented in the U.S. Constitution, which originally counted each African slave as equal to 2/5 of a free white, this aberrant implementation of their political philosophies is not implicit in the philosophies themselves, and to regard a work which focuses on that aberration as a work of political philosophy is not, to my mind, a work of political philosophy, but a work of sociology.
To Another Anonymous:
It was three fifths.
https://www.encyclopedia.com/politics/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/three-fifths-clause#:~:text=THREE-FIFTHS%20CLAUSE.%20Article%20I%2C%20section%202%2C%20clause%203%2C,untaxed%20Indians%29%20%22three%20fifths%20of%20all%20other%20Persons.%22.
David,
Article I, sec. 2, states: "Representatives and direct Taxes shall be apportioned among the several State which may be included within this Union, according to their respective Numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole Number of free Persons, including those bund to Service for a Term of Years [i.e., indentured servants], and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other Persons."
I read "excluding" to refer to 3/5 of all other Persons, leaving each slave to count as 2/5 of a free person. But I guess you are correct - "excluding" refers only to "Indians not taxed."
But, as a political philosopher yourself, what do you think of my main point, that Charles Mills' criticism of continental political philosophy is not itself political philosophy, but a criticism of its implementation.
AA,
You plucked one sentence from the book and, apparently mostly on that basis, declared it a work of sociology. W/r/t the traditional social contract theories, I would assume that Mills does make an argument to the effect that either the content, or the presentation, or both, indicated that their authors built some racist presuppositions into the theories themselves. For instance, Locke, iirc, supports a right of revolution against regimes that trample on the rights of the governed (rights to consent, etc.) But how does Locke define a tyrannical regime, or one against which the rt of revolution applies? That's a substantive theoretical point, not merely a matter of implementation. At any rate, I wdn't label a book w/o having read it. Maybe you've read The Racial Contract, but if not, I wd refrain from the labeling game.
I haven't read the Racial Contract either, although I have read a bit about it since this discussion began.
However, let's take Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morality. It's sold in the philosophy section of the bookstore, it's shelved in the philosophy section of the library, it's taught in philosophy classes and commented on by philosopher professors.
Yet its content is very unlike that of Rawls. It contains a bit of history, some anthropology, some Indoeuropean philology, some psychology, etc.
Is it philosophy? Most people seem to think so.
We shouldn't forget that the 3/5 clause was yet another way the Constitution advantaged the Slave Power. The slave states wanted to apportion representation counting each slave as a whole person. That was objected to because slaves were outside the political process. The 3/5 Compromise still left the slave states with more Representatives then they should have had. Focusing on the term as diminishing the humanity of the slaves misses the point.
(Yes I'm aware that most states had slavery in 1787 but outside the south plus Maryland the number wasn't nearly as significant.)
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