File spoon-archives/bhaskar.archive/bhaskar_2000/bhaskar.0009, message 86


Date: Thu, 28 Sep 2000 10:45:54 +0200
From: Hans Puehretmayer <hans.puehretmayer-AT-univie.ac.at>
Subject: Re: BHA: Hegel, dialectics, Stalin, etc


Hi Phil!

one could also say: without Hegel there would have been no philosophical
Stalinism, no speculative-mysticist Lukácsianism, etc.
I think, critical realism shouldn't fall back into a prae-Althusserian
paradigm.

Hans

Phil Walden wrote:
> 
> Hi Nuala, Mervyn, Gary, and listers
> 
> Nuala, without Hegel there would have been no Marxism.  No dialectical
> philosophy.  None of his work on the status of modern culture.  None of his
> work on the relation of science to the humanities.  None of his work on the
> role of the state.  None of his work on how we are to understand history.
> None of his work on what are the possibilities for modern art.  In fact, now
> you have made me think about it more, wouldn't there have been another Dark
> Ages?  I should actually not have been talking about retardation, but about
> history being thrown back centuries.  But I suppose someone (who?) might
> have followed Kant's lead on dialectics, so it might not have spelled the
> end of humanity.
> 
> Mervyn, there are Great Men (and Women) in history and Hegel was one of
> them.  Hegel's category of the world-historical individual was applied to
> figures from the past who had radically changed the course of history.
> Speaking from the present, I would apply that category to Hegel in spades.
> But the category is not meant to be applied to figures from the present, and
> that is what is wrong with FEW.  The connection between present and past has
> been severed in FEW, and some abstract speculations about human potential
> are supposed to plug the gap.  But the truth is concrete, as someone once
> said.
>     I don't believe my approach to Hegel is idealist, because his ideas are
> an immense material force in contemporary society, and their absence would
> have radically altered the course of history.  Dialectics allows for the
> material power of ideas as well as the material power of nature, so I don't
> think I am being anti-materialist.
>     Who is the individualist?  For me, to take account of and point up
> Hegel's contribution to thought is to care for the collective interests of
> humanity.  To say that Hegel was only one person and therefore to vaunt him
> is substitutionism, is frankly to introduce bourgeois liberal egalitarianism
> into the argument.  I am surprised at you Mervyn.
> 
> Gary, you insist on claiming that Hegel made a self-serving choice about his
> relations with the Prussian State, but you provide no evidence.  But I have
> evidence that he acted in the interests of humanity as a whole - it is in
> the Terry Pinkard biography to which I referred.  There was no 'trahison'
> about Hegel.
>     I do think a large part of system is precision in the use of concepts.
> Hegel had it and Kierkegaard didn't.  I also think your claim that
> Kierkegaard attempted to produce "an absolutely independent body of thought"
> is strange.  For one thing, what body of thought can be absolutely
> independent?  Surely where Hegel scores and Kierkegaard doesn't, is that the
> former tackled the burning questions of philosophy left over by his
> predecessors whereas the latter was such an avoider of difficult and
> pressing issues that he topped off his quirky efforts at philosophy with a
> flight into mysticism.  (Though I do concede that he was progressive in
> relation to the Danish church).  If you are right and Kierkegaard was a
> system-builder, then every philosopher is a system-builder and the term
> loses all meaning.  I see no systematic connection between the different
> phases of Kierkegaard's philosophy (aesthetic, ethical, and religious).  The
> "leap of faith" that Kierkegaard requires of the reader in his religious
> phase does not seem to follow from anything he has said before.
>     I am sure you are right that Adorno was influenced by Kierkegaard but I
> suspect the influence was malign.  At one point in Negative Dialectics
> Adorno says philosophy is clowning and that piece of nonsense strikes me as
> eminently Kierkegaardian.  But Adorno generally rose above postmodern irony
> and indifference.  Can the same be said of Kierkegaard?  On your point about
> aesthetics I plead ignorance.  An elaboration from you on how Adorno's
> 'truth content' is influenced by Kierkegaard's subjective definition of
> truth would be very welcome.
>     Who are the Gang of Three?
> 
> Warm regards,
> Phil
> 
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