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Hegel Today

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Re: Hegel Today

#41

Post by atoav »

stewbrew wrote: post #40
TeeMassive wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of all people, I wouldn't quote Foucault to make sense out of anything .

Why?

Focoult moved into poststructuralism, a school of thought which was sceptical of clear explainations (they had very valid reasons for this in my eyes).

This means poststructuralist texts can be extremely hard to read and understand, especially to non-philosophically trained people or those hoping to get a logical theory about the world instead of a multi-facetted view onto some phenomenom within it. That doesn't mean you cannot pull a lot of interesting stuff from those texts, it just means it is very hard and never clearcut. Critics and people who failed to parse such a book dislike poststructuralists for this.

Focoult however wasn't a typical poststructuralist anyways and many of his books are very well observed and describe power relationships within society on the base of some other phenomena. As any philosopher with a precise language his books stand and fall with the quality of translation. I liked the German translations better than the English ones, because English as a language doesn't really lend itself to auch thinking..

Re: Hegel Today

#42

Post by stewbrew »

atoav wrote: post #41
stewbrew wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why?

Focoult moved into poststructuralism, a school of thought which was sceptical of clear explainations (they had very valid reasons for this in my eyes). This means poststructuralist texts can be extremely hard to read and understand, especially to non-philosophically trained people or those hoping to get a logical theory about the world instead of a multi-facetted view onto some phenomenom within it. That doesn't mean…

No offence but I was asking the OP. I know Foucault and actually like his writings. His work is highly opinionated and I don't agree with everything but IMHO reading his work is generally worth the time.

Re: Hegel Today

#44

Post by cyber_kinetist »

recuter wrote: post #15
culi wrote: post #2

Continental philosophy is making a comeback! The kids love Žižek

I find him to be a bit of a character, and a lovable one at that, but can't bring myself to actually sit down and listen/read because of it - am I missing out?

I’m currently reading How to Read Lacan (which is basically how to read Zizek’s interpretation of Lacan), and am having an absolute blast. It’s short, full of witty jokes, and is still packed of insightful thinking. (And you’ll probably get something out of it even without any background on continental philsophy)

Re: Hegel Today

#45

Post by HKH2 »

paganel wrote: post #24
gtsop wrote: post #22

Seeing people getting excited about hegel is like seeing a kid learning physics and getting excited about newton's laws. Surely, it's a step forward to one's individual knowledge, it is a stepping stone, but the human intelect has gone beyond that and there are bigger problems to be solved. So, when adressing an individual, props for discovering a great philosopher. When adressig a community of people/philosophers go…

I'm not a philosopher by any means but I do believe that philosophy is actually the history of philosophy (or a very close approximation of that), and for that reason Hegel or Thomas Aquinas or Epicurus are as contemporary now when it comes to philosophy as they were when they were alive. Yes, there are ups and downs in their reception (for example the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas has had a long hiatus from public pe…

There are a lot of useless detours, as well as survivorship bias and namedropping. Added to that is the deliberate obtuseness of certain so-called philosophers. I wish philosophy were as noble as what you seem to believe.

Re: Hegel Today

#46

Post by throwawaygal7 »

antioedipus wrote: post #33
humanistbot wrote: post #25

Ah yes, the man who believed that the human struggle was a deterministic process of synthesis crashing into antithesis over and over again, with each new generation overturning the prior and then regressing back a bit, building from small tribes to modern civilization. A process of continual improvement that, according to Hegel, can be logically derived from first principles so that the arc of civilization just happe…

I’m not even sure where to start with this because it’s such a vulgar misreading of Hegel… Hegel generally rejected the “thesis, antithesis, synthesis” triad (which mostly comes from Fichte.) Dialectics, and his overall system of immanent critique, have considerably more subtlety and complexity than the determinism and teleology that you suggest. An even cursory reading of any of Hegel’s major works reveals how entir…

You must know you're advancing a recent idea about Hegel? I believe your viewpoint has about fifty years of age to it, and few observers made these claims prior. Now, as popular as this 'recovery' of hegel has been- it has been strongly argued against with very manifest arguments from the major hegelian works. I guess it could be that people misinterpreted hegel for a century and then we managed to figure him out correctly in the post war.... but what I am convinced actually happened is that Hegel was so popular and influential that after his dialectical methods became seen as silly, in order to preserve the myriad fields that had been founded by their use , a hasty revision was developed so that we didn't have to throw away all his ideas had spawned.

Re: Hegel Today

#47

Post by recuter »

cyber_kinetist wrote: post #44
recuter wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find him to be a bit of a character, and a lovable one at that, but can't bring myself to actually sit down and listen/read because of it - am I missing out?

I’m currently reading How to Read Lacan (which is basically how to read Zizek’s interpretation of Lacan), and am having an absolute blast. It’s short, full of witty jokes, and is still packed of insightful thinking. (And you’ll probably get something out of it even without any background on continental philsophy)

I'll give it a whirl, cheers :)

Re: Hegel Today

#49

Post by heyhegalhey »

Can anyone recommend a book that makes Hegel actually legible and not completely bonkers to extract what he's saying? I think it's possible he needs to be read in German. Reading and breaking down The Phenomenology of Spirit should be used as a torture method.

Here is just one random passage of The Phenomenology of Spirit, it's all like this:

The distinction which was made between actual Spirit and Spirit that knows itself as Spirit, or between itself, qua conscionsness, and qua self-consciousness, is superseded in the Spirit that knows itself in its truth; its consciousness and its self"con~sdousnessare on the same level. But, as religion here is, to begin with, immediate, this distinction has not yet returned into Spirit. What is posited is only the Notion of religion; in this the essence is self .. consciousness, which is conscious of being all truth and contains all reality within that truth.

Arthur Schopenhauer criticized Phenomenology of Spirit as being characteristic of the vacuous verbiage he attributed to Hegel: "I do not think that it is difficult to see that whoever puts forward anything like this is a shameless charlatan who wants to fool simpletons and observes that he has found his people in the Germans of the nineteenth century.

Re: Hegel Today

#50

Post by B1FF_PSUVM »

gtsop wrote: post #39
justin_time2 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who or what superseded Hegel then?

Dialectic materialism by engels and marx. If you take their communist ideas out of the equation (because we may not agree on that), on their philosophical system, they took all the great dialectics of hegel, advanced it further and replaced hegel's idealism with materialism (very, very roughly speaking).

> If you take their communist ideas out of the equation

For crying out loud, that was the point of the whole ball of wax.

They came up with "scientific materialism" so they could "demonstrate" that the inexorable progress of history would lead from the original primitive communism to the final advanced communism.

(All other believers in communism that did not adhere to the doctrine were to be shunned because their "unscientific" approach would make them bad guides.)

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