What a wonderful elaboration of my metaphor! If I should say something like this again (as I am sure to do), I shall include your addition, giving you full credit for it (but omitting the line from Hegel – I am too old to change my ways, alas.)
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I suspect that the source of this interview will excite an automatic negative response from some. However,
https://jacobin.com/2022/07/new-democrats-social-welfare-programs-dlc-left-behind
which is actually an interesting (to me, at least) history of the Democratic Party, seems to reveal how, to borrow from RPW’s image, big boulders have been arranged to block or control the movements of the insignificant detritus
For those who’d like more information on the interviewee:
https://www.cmc.edu/academic/faculty/profile/lily-geismer
One could point to the now-popular concept of tipping points.
Or, of course, to the Hemingway phrase "gradually and then suddenly."
The so-called Linguistic Turn is somewhat responsible for the slowness of consequences from philosophical argument. To de-mystify liberalism or work beyond the unstable political categories requires taking its universal claims about the whole of time and inverting them into the particularized claims of a fragmented time and cultural slice of partial humanity. Approaching liberalism not by refuting its doctrines or principles, Raymond Guess (in Not Thinking Like a Liberal) is telling a story of malaise within liberal lives that generates resistance over time to what John Rawls thought was a reasonably just society in a property owning democracy, as the individuality assumed by political liberalism is phony and a fairy tale of the unencumbered self making self-interested decisions that turn out to be also in the common good. In the slowly emerging or finally exposed theory of justice, the capitalist Veil of Ignorance and the liberal original position of social atoms making up contracts and legal systems democratically becomes its historical opposite or the domination of the majority over minorities, and oppression rules its legal system.
Correcting Rawls with Geuss and Adorno, you get liberalism as a horror story: "Measured by its concept, the individual has indeed become as null and void as Hegel's philosophy anticipated: seen sub specie individuationis, however, absolute contingency, permitted to persist as a seemingly abnormal state, is itself the essential. The world is systematized horror, but therefore it is to do the world too much honour to think of it entirely as a system; for its unifying principle is division, and it reconciles by asserting unimpaired the irreconcilability of the general and the particular. Its essence is abomination; but its appearance, the lie by virtue of which it persists, is a stand-in for truth" (Minima Moralia, p 113).
Rawls, imprisoned by the actual time limits of his working life in philosophy from the 1940s to his 1995 stroke, his roughly 50 year window of understanding his particular world and its implied morality or traditional intuitions about value, had access to the history of ideas prior to his life window and no understanding of what happened after 1995 and how political liberalism was dying as an ideal to guide humanity forward. Rawls gave up his absurd project of an ideal theory of justice when he collided with the cage created by his own limited experience and understanding. The huge landslide of identity politics and minority rights which has happened after Rawls faded without leaving us videos on YouTube to perpetuate his ideal is however dividing people much more and undermining rational argument as we knew it.
@ Tony Couture
Rawls continued to work after 1995.
"In 1995, he suffered the first of several strokes, severely impeding his ability to continue to work. He was nevertheless able to complete The Law of Peoples, the most complete statement of his views on international justice, and published in 2001 shortly before his death Justice as Fairness: A Restatement...." (Wiki)
You write: "Rawls gave up his...project of an ideal theory of justice."
What evidence is there that he "gave up" the project? I'm not aware of any. His views changed somewhat over time in various ways, but I don't think he ever gave up the project.
Your concluding implication, or what seems to be an implication, that YouTube videos are the main way thinkers propagate their views is a little weird. There are still things called books. YouTube videos can be effective, as RPW knows, but they're not the only way to spread ideas.
Why this adversion to Hegel?
If you've explained it before at length, maybe you or some reader can link to it.
I've never read Hegel myself. I've tried to read Marcuse book on him, Reason and Revolution, and I get the general idea in some vague sense. While Hegel is not likely to be featured on my list of the most enjoyable or my favorite thinkers, I don't really understand your general anomosity, which borders on that of Schopenhauer, who, I doubt, is one of your favorite philosophers either, although I'm fond of him.
s.w.
see this:
https://robertpaulwolff.blogspot.com/2019/03/a-response-to-talha.html
For future reference -- and I'm trying to be helpful here, not snarky -- this blog has a search box located in the far upper left corner. I just typed "hegel" into the search box and hit the return key. The first post listed wasn't all that much on point, but the second one (which I've linked above) is.
p.s. If you can't find or don't see the search box, tell me and I'll try to describe its location more precisely.
I see now there's another search box on the right-hand side, so there are actually two of them.
LFC,
Thank you. Yes, I know there's a search box, but first of all, I'm lazier than you are and second, I hoped that Professor Wolff might have a slightly different take on Hegel than he did three years ago and that he might share that up-to-date opinion with us.
Maybe I'm weird, but although my opinion on most thinkers is fairly similar to what it was three years ago, I'd explain it differently in all cases now than I would have three years ago.
In three years I've read stuff that has modified my view on things, I've talked to people who have modified my view on things, I've stopped talking to people and people have stopped talking to me and that has modified my view on things. I assume that occurs with all of us.
In my blog role as Raymond Geuss's #1 fan, I'd like to point out that Geuss's essay on Hegel and The Phenomenology of Spirit in his book Changing the Subject is a great place to get an overview of what's living in Hegel's thought. I'd also second Geuss's suggestion elsewhere that a good approach to Hegel is through the Lectures on Fine Art: read the 100-page introduction and then dip in as you like (e.g. the marvelous account of Dutch painting).
John Rapko,
Thanks. I have that book and I'll take another look at the chapter on Hegel.
For a more positive (but still critical) view, I’d strongly recommend the Hegel chapter in William James’s Pluralistic Universe.
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/11984/11984-8.txt
James is such a stellar writer, though - he can make anything sound fascinating. (Also, according to another essay he wrote, nitrous oxide plus Hegel equals a winning combination.)
https://www.uky.edu/~eushe2/Pajares/jnitrous.html
John Rapko: I’ve long been aware of RPW’s aversion to Hegel (and to the “improper” use of the word decimate) , but some of his friends in very high academic places (e.g., Marcuse and Danto) seem to have thought highly of Hegel. In particular, this might be of interest to you (if you don’t know it already): In 1994, Italian philosopher Giovanna Borradori published “The American Philosopher,” a book of interviews she conducted with various leading American philosophers, one of whom was Danto, RPW’s friend and colleague at Columbia in the 1960s. Danto, an “analytic philosopher” par excellence, had some remarkable things to say about Hegel in his interview with Borradori. For example: “I think that nobody has ever talked better about art than Hegel, and when he talks about artistic beauty as the idea given sensuous embodiment, I think that’s about as good as you can get. As long as sensuous embodiment is essential, I don’t think that art can ever become, as it were, pure abstraction. Not even abstract art escapes the materialization of the sensible. Philosophically speaking, the disappearance of art is not possible….”(97).
Fritz Poebel--Thanks for the reference. I'm pretty sure I read the interview back in the 90's, but I had forgotten that remark. I've been writing about Danto recently and so will certainly take a look again. There's a funny drawing in one of Danto's books of him with his characteristic look of enthusiasm explaining Andy Warhol's 'Brillo Box' to a skeptical looking Hegel.--Richard Wollheim also had a very high opinion of Hegel's philosophy of art; see for example Art and Its Objects (2nd edition), p. 260: "Many of the crucial insights [on the reciprocity of artist and spectator] are to be found in G. W. F. Hegel, Philosophy of Fine Art: Introduction."--When I first met Wollheim, he asked me who Hegel's favorite composer was (seemingly to test whether I knew anything about philosophy and the arts). I had to think for a few seconds, but after I responded correctly we talked about art for 11 straight hours, and he seemed perplexed and disappointed when at 1:15 a.m. I said I had to go home.
So who was Hegel's favorite composer?
LFC--I had remembered, or seemed to have had remembered, reading a letter Hegel wrote his wife from Vienna saying how much he had enjoyed seeing Rossini's operas. So I went with Rossini, and Richard accepted the answer. Perhaps he especially liked Rossini because neither Hegel nor the Barber of Seville had much use for Occam's razor.--The only real joke I know about Hegel was told to me by my first Hegel teacher, Daniel Dahlstrom, to wit: 'There are two wings in Hegel scholarship, a left-wing and a right-wing, and the right-wing is much larger. That's why Hegel and the Hegelians are always going around in circles.'
Thanks.
I've never really read Hegel, though have picked up a bit here and there, enough so that if someone mentioned sublation at a cocktail party I wouldn't be totally lost (not that I ever go to cocktail parties).
During my long sojourn in grad school getting a (worthless) PhD in intl relations, the only line of Hegel's that came up is "world history is the world court" (sounds better in German).
That's a loose translation.
Die Weltgeschichte is das Weltgericht.
correction: ist
For a thorough discussion of Hegel’s views on music see “Hegel On Music,” at https://works.swarthmore.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1105&context=fac-philosophy.
He had rather rigid, puritanical views regarding the merits of music, as indicated in this excerpt from the above essay:
“Yet, second, Hegel also remarks that music that is simply selfenclosed development “remains empty and meaningless” (A 2:902). In order to defeat this threat of meaninglessness, music must acquire “spiritual content and expression” (A 2:902). If it fails to acquire this content, then it fails to be “a genuine art” (A 2:902). These remarks suggest that Hegel is committed to the view that successful art music must somehow be about something—a position held by Aristotle and defended in contemporary music theory by Kendall Walton, Jerrold Levinson, Edward T. Cone, and Ered Everett Mans.”
Here is Wittgenstein’s take on Hegel:
Wittgenstein once said: “Hegel seems to me to be always wanting to say that things which look different are really the same. Whereas my interest is in showing that things which look the same are really different.” (Recollections of Wittgenstein, ed. by Rush Rhees, Oxford 1981, p. 157) This difference between Hegel’s and Wittgenstein’s thinking has been seldom raised despite being, from a contemporary point of view, particularly pertinent.
My father, who graduated from City College in the early thirties, particularly enjoyed the intellectual street fight which was Morris Cohen’s philosophy class. He liked recalling that once a student came rushing up to Cohen crying: “Professor Cohen, Professor Cohen, I just read all of Hegel in the original German.” Cohen raised an eyebrow and responded: “Why?”
@ N. Thorner
Amusing.
A relative of mine went to City College a decade or so after that, enlisting or bring drafted, I forget which, in the middle. (I don't think he took a course with Cohen, if Cohen was still there.)
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