Hegel and his Heirs

one way to get to know someone like Hegel is to ponder some of his sentences here's an interesting one governments have never learned anything from history or acted on principles deducted from it now what does that mean well to begin with it means that the philosopher may deduce principles from the events and course of history but only in retrospect first history has to happen and only afterwards can the thinker recollect its principles in tranquillity or Indiana as it were there's something tragic about this belatedness or this retrospective Twilight gaze of Minerva's owl because it means that the philosopher is of little use when it comes to prescribing standards or norms for actions reason in its cunning may be at work in our action but we act mostly in the dark another sentence from Hegel's corpus confirms this quote amid the pressure of great events a general principle gives no help translation it is our fault if we never learn anything from history or it is not our fault if we never learn anything from history since history is constantly under the pressure of great events which renders principles useless conclusion we know not what we do until after it's done and by then it's too late to do anything about it the good news is that Hegel was not Macbeth he did not believe that life is a tale told by an idiot he believed that history has meaning purpose and a redemptive end namely the full realization of our potential for freedom I'll quote one last sentence perhaps his most famous one the history of the world is none other than the progress of the consciousness of freedom what exactly that means and how exactly Hegel intended for us to understand it is a question that I'll refer to the guest who joins me in the studio's of KZ su today Adrian doub is an assistant professor of German Studies here at Stanford specializing in 19th and 20th century German literature and philosophy especially German idealism and Romanticism as well as the Frankfurt School of Marxism Adrienne has been my guess on entitled opinions before in the spring of 2009 I look forward to talking to him today about one of the greatest philosophers in the history of philosophy Adrienne welcome back to entitle opinions thank you so much Robert that last quote I read Adrienne is pretty heavy stuff the history of the world is none other than the progress of the consciousness of freedom what do we need to know about Hegel or the historical period in which he was writing in order to make sense of that well I think it's because emerge is central both because it it encapsulates the particular kind of optimism that Higa and his generation exude 'add and our let's say our dissatisfaction with it over the last 200 or so years in other words on the one hand this is clearly a sentence that comes out of out of a generation that came of age and in the shadow of the French Revolution and of all these states and all these forms of government emerging that had not been seen in Europe since antiquity but at the same time it's something that you know especially after the events of the 20th century we have a lot of harder time signing our name to and so I think that's a very good place to start it's a it's both what makes Higa bracing and and exciting but it also is what threatens to consign him to the dustbin of history right the fact that we don't think that we can legitimately think about history in this way anymore well that we is a it's not a total we have to say that there are some people for example Francis Fukuyama who wrote a book called the end of history in which he said basically Hegel was more or less right without maybe knowing why he was right but that history has been so far on you know a long sort of series of wars and battles especially the battles of edia ideology and forms of government and so Forte's but now we we are living in what he calls the end of history a galleon kind of concept in which it's finally been revealed through the outcome of these battles that you know liberal democratic capitalist states are really the the best form of government that the rest of the world is destined to adopt you know our saligan one way or another so therefore the dustbin of history is it might be a little bit premature to say that he that's where Hegel belongs oh and I would I would absolutely I I don't think he belongs there at all however in the case of Fukuyama I'd have to say with friends like him I think he doesn't need anyone to check him in the dustbin anymore but if Okayama whatever his most readings of Hagar were points to a very interesting thing about him you have to grapple I mean that the difficult thing with a lot of modern thinkers is the critical and the seemingly destructive edge I mean if when you tried teaching Hume to undergraduates you always see this well what's left Hegel presents the opposite problem in many ways how do we deal with that much affirmative relationship to what exists how do we how do we make sense of that given that we live in a world in which all of us I think tend to emphasize the things that we'd like changed and that we think are unjust or irrational and I think that's the frankly that charge that would would have to be leveled against Fukuyama Higa does not posit that the different ideological systems worked themselves out through history and the best one comes up on top that may be some kind of social Darwinism it's not a galleon ism as the sentence that you read indicates it's the realization of human freedom now the question is you know do liberal democracies of the kind that Fukuyama extols genuinely realize freedom in the way that Hegel had sought and I think the answer would be would probably no they are probably further along the way than most other forms of govern but you know the end of history thesis whatever it whatever he means by end we'll have to well we could we can talk about that more I don't think he means a cessation he means completion or or a goal point has more to do with well with the complete realization of human autonomy and I think you know in in a country in which ten percent of people are or twenty percent probably if you look at all the figures are unemployed right now not for not because the autonomously chose to do so but because someone decided that for them you know we're clearly a little ways off from what what Hegel had envisioned that's fine I can go along with that but number of questions are raised obviously in when I probably shouldn't have brought Fukuyama into the discussion this early on however it does give us the opportunity to raise the following question which is what did what did Hegel really mean by freedom when you spoke about the attaining the consciousness of freedom to what extent is the state the final end point or culmination or embodiment of this fully realized freedom or is Fukuyama's thesis that the maximum freedom that one can expect from a state is the recognition of the human dignity and autonomy and legal rights of every one of its citizens yeah and if that's all that you can expect from the states from a state and if that's what and Fukuyama if you were here might say that well what's going on in the arab world and all these kind of soaring uprisings that all this is still trying to work out there some people are still trying to get to the end of that history that's a way and I'm not defending that thing no and I mean I I think you know Fukuyama is a very good entry point into this the problem though is that he I think he shortchanges Haga in in neglecting how a liberal thinker he really is and I don't mean that critically I mean I necessarily it's it's something that each of you listeners will have to make up their own minds the interesting thing about Haga is that for him the state is not there to safeguard the autonomy of the individual or to rein it in when it gets out of control the state when it is shot through with Geist when it is shot through with spirit is in fact the realization of human autonomy now that's very very different from the way we as 21st century Americans or Westerners in general tend to think of freedom we tend to think freedom is the is the ability to do something over and against something else for Higa that which is the traditional liberal view of you know from Locke onwards was the view of the Enlightenment by and large against this Higa mobilizes this idea that in a ethical society in a society of that is dictated by customs that are shot through with rationality the state is in fact a expression of human freedom and the oppositional element on which Fukuyama also relies sort of can be worked away that to us I mean I I think it's safe to say that for most of us that's a very alien conception but it is it is he goes so the British tradition conceives of freedom largely in terms of what Hegel would have called negative freedom freedom from coercion that's right freedom from not that's understood as it's not being obliged to do something you don't want to do and this is also I think the American Founding Fathers vision is about that and then there you have Thoreau that government governs best which governs least and I have to say as an American I'm a little bit sympathetic to that because I know you know when we when you don't have this freedom from Korres and you you appreciate negative freedom but you're I think you're absolutely right that hate for Hegel positive freedom is a very different thing well and it's not just positive freedom it's also it's also a for him freedom as autonomy has to do with what with an opposition to arbitrariness that is to say you're not free to do whatever the heck you want because you know you should not be free to indulge your stupid whims in order for your dignity as a human rational agent to be respected means that you also be blocked from things that you should not wish right that is to say if you use your freedom just to satisfy your appetites then frankly Hager thinks that this that this a government that allows you to do that is probably not doing its job properly and a state in which that's possible there's something terribly wrong in it yeah so yeah so it's not libertinism and in that sense the question that now arises is Geist the because this freedom an autonomy that's associated with it in Hegel's system is certainly at least in the phenomenology of spirit or the phenomenology of Geist you can translate guys either a spirit or mind it doesn't have it exactly swivel n't but if I understand the larger project of the phenomenology it's the way in which Hegel retraces all the various stages that this so-called Geist has gone through and the various historical institutional instantiations various ages of history and so forth and that basically it's not so much the human individuals autonomy and freedom that is being realized as much as it's guys it's the mind it's spirit itself which is coming to a full realization of what its own essence has been from the very start namely that it is working itself through history in order to come to a moment of self realization of itself as the author as well as the protagonists of the whole story that's right spirit cognizing itself as spirit is is what what Hegel terms absolute knowing which concludes you know in that in that rapturous last chapter out the phenomenology that that's that concludes spirits trajectory according to Hegel however I don't think that at least when you look at his political philosophy it's fairly clear that we can't that that the autonomy of spirit cannot come at the expense of individual autonomy and obviously there is a it's very easy easy to read Hegel that way sometimes he says things that really don't help him out in the disrespect and of course this is what has served to recommend him as a you know proto totalitarian to critical readers for much of the twentieth century some of them has most astute readers however it's pretty clear that that Hegel as a dialect as a dialectical thinker wants to maintain in dialogue or in tension the autonomy of the individual and the autonomy of the world spirit and one place where you can see that is human history you you read a wonderful apropos quote and and you pointed out that you know we can only know about you know spirit coming to it's self-realization through world history after the fact well why is that well because world spirit works its way through our autonomously chosen actions just to say if we Higa hates this idea of and we had to do subjective laws of history and they're gonna tell politicians how do how to run things and we're gonna figure out who the bad guys are that we've got to get rid of he doesn't mean that he's interested in he thinks that essentially human freedom fully realized on an individual level in and within rationality in in time will essentially bring about the this course that he's describing for spirit freedom we have connotations as well with that word that also come with the notion that things are not dictated by necessity that's right but is it not the case that when you go through the various stages of history that Hagel outlines in the phenomenology that you cannot say that something like the Enlightenment could have preceded you know the Christianity or the French Revolution is not something that could have happened more right at a different time that it happened so if there's not a necessity to the actual itinerary that history has followed there there is a certain logic to oh there is absolutely and I think the different it's good that you're making a distinction between logic and necessity Hagar doesn't think that a necessity that you know if I don't know if let's say you know if this microphone is this microphone that that has to be the case in order for for us to be able to say anything about the world that's not the kind of constraint that he's concerned with then he's a Content in that way necessity means that forces from outside of you dictate your course of action not that intrinsic forces to the things you're trying to do dictate the course of action there is something about human rationality that wants to unfold in a certain way right the same way that we can you know that of course we can develop fanciful theories about the origin of the universe but it turns out that that the ones that we've come up with come closer to explaining it than anything else that that is means that the universe is to some extent forcing our hand but he's not concerned with that if however the people act morally quote-unquote only out of self-interest that to him means that they are driven by something outside of themselves their animal instincts their animal appetites and that's the kind of necessity that he's concerned with there's a famous egg alien concept of the cunning of reason I alluded to it in my remarks how do you understand this notion of the cunning of reason that sometimes there is a rationality to things the way things happen even though we the actors and the agents of it are not aware that's exactly it it means that rationality in in world history doesn't have to assert itself in a self-conscious way it means that people don't always have to know that they're doing the rational thing so the question there that then Adrienne is agency are human beings ultimately the the agents of this movement of world spirit or is there a different agency of which humans are executives or I don't know what metaphor you would want to use well yes I'd know right why does Alexander charge into Asia why doesn't Empoleon conquer Europe there's a volitional element in it they decide to do this that also there was an old world to be wiped away because it had tottered and it had outlived itself it was something that they would have at best been very very dimly aware of so that's how Eagle is thinking this there's of course a an element of of of necessity let's say in there but there's also volitional element there's an element in which you know it could have been Alexander it could have been a successor he could have been Napoleon he could have been someone else he could have started in France he could have started someplace else yeah did Hegel believe that the possibility for him to tell the whole story of world spirit and his final realization and declare the so-called end of history was possible only because certain historical events had taken place in his era namely the French Revolution and perhaps its aftermath and in Napoleon or was this sort of thinking did he presume it to be to rise above this sort of historical contingency absolutely not I think there is a there's a strong indication that I mean for his generation the French Revolution loomed very large there's a line in the preface of the phenomenology of spirit where he says you know it's it's not difficult to see that ours is a birth time and a period of transition to a new era and I think he adds spirit is broken with the world that it has hitherto inhabited and imagined and is of a mind to submerge itself in the past and in the labor of its transformation so there is very clearly a well let's put this way Higa thinks that there is a reason in history and history in reason and he thinks that there is a confluence happening around his time where yeah human freedom has advanced to a point where it could become become self-conscious as that right we're not asking you know we're not questioning the Divine Right of Kings so much as we were saying human freedom has a value in itself and it now needs to be asserted and he is connecting that with with Immanuel Kant he thinks that it's not an accident that that the you know for him the greatest and most productive enunciation of philosophical a ton of autonomy infant in the history philosophy occurs you know in the in 77081 so for 1781 referring to water the first critique the critique of Pure Reason and I mean for he got out that is the book without which he's unimaginable that's for him really there and why is that well higa higa and his entire generation sort of encountered can't I guess probably in high school sort of thing they went to this this religious school they called a shift in in in tubing and we're here in fact room for a short moment with foolish hurdle in the poet and and pretty for him use of shelling another great idealist for the other great idealist tinkerer who would go on to be both his mentor a little bit though he was younger and his great enemy at the end and for these really young kids they discovered conned and found in him the battering ram they needed to well to in to liberate metaphysics from the residual theology that clung to it in in their education and they experienced this well this this coming to themselves as philosophers as very much in resonance with the events in France there is a very murky incident that biographers make a lot of one of the three clearly was caught whistling the Marseillaise in the end of Stift we don't know much more about it than that but they understood their own emancipation from the tottering structures of the old metaphysics and of the old theology as being of a of a peace with the French people's emancipation from the irrational strictures of the absolutist state and do you think Immanuel Kant would have gone along with them in that reading because it's true that Kant does a lot to streamline metaphysics delimit it radically what we can know in a kind of synthetic a priori way but at the same time he is famous for that little essay what is enlightenment in which it's not an apology for revolution no on the contrary it's like this progressive incremental enlargement of the sphere of freedom and there's something I think about that I German idealist and perhaps the romanticism that's connected with German idealism which had such a thirst for the absolute that they were not willing to accept the sort of de limitations that Kant placed on reason yes and knowledge it's as knowledge only of the phenomenal not the numeral well given that Kant battled the censors famously for for for much of his career molest so in his political theory theory then when it came to his religious philosophy it's interesting this is this is a a battle between these this this these Young Turks of German philosophy and this master that they both very much idolized and who they who they criticize it's fought on live in the field of religion they thought that contact given away the game in the second critique when he admitted what's called the postulates of pure practical reason is to say that the old metaphysical baggage all had to be assumed in order to be or the theological baggage had to be assumed in order for the content system to make any sense at all but it's certainly true that for for them this sort of failure of a nerve on the part of or that's how they saw that these went along with a more broader political failure and which had to do with a capitalization the capitulation sorry V Xavi the the structures of society and of the state as they existed in their time and both the critique is the same in each case it's dualism right they criticize con for for insisting on a separation of the phenomenon the noumenon the object as it appears to us an experience and the thing as it is in itself and they and they see a similar kind of dualism at work a willingness to let particular stand unreconciled in political and religious matters matters of morality matters of the organization of a state and if you want to look if you look at any Hegelian passage and you don't understand it one good thing to look at is what opposition's are being left unreconciled in this passage because you know that's where he's going to be driving at those two are actually going to be one and this is a kind of mania that all the idealists have bringing together by reference to the absolute things that can't lift dualistic 'le the same and that's I that's what I find so heroic about German idealism and essentially Hegel and dear even the Hegel of the phenomenology more than the later hey : right in my view because it it's more it's a more romantic sure to work and the the the this refusal to take no for an answer when it comes to our access to the absolute and its it then would it be correct to say that the only way Hegel can overcome the dualism and con system is by making the subject which for Kant was human subjectivity and he then outlines all the limitations of the knowledge of the human any human subject which is sense experience and the a priori forms intuition of space and time and so forth in order to overcome that dualism Hegel then turns the subject into I don't want to use the term transcendental ego which is a term that was real uses later but a subject which is actually again as we were saying about Geist is not that removed from the object in fact is the object that's right and objectivity is the this Geist in a different mode and ultimately the distinction the opposition between the two will be overcome at the very end of the story that he tells in the phenomenology about his spirit self recognition at the end of the holster exactly that goes back to the old content distinction between the object of experience and and and the thing as it is in itself for Kant this was not a problem and me meant that philosophy had to limit itself in its everyday business to a couple of things and it couldn't talk about some of the things that metaphysics had had very confidently pronounced on previously does this mean simply there is an object that we constitute through the use of our categories of the understanding it is not identical with the thing as it is in itself but no matter it something in reality clearly corresponds to this and and this is fine this is not something that that his young readers would have would have endorsed they thought that Kant was leaving him a problem he wouldn't have realized that there recognize this is a problem at all he thought this was fine their assumption is to some extent to have the or let's put it this way for twenty years after after Kant the the game and German philosophy was to try and figure out how to drop the thing in itself out um Schopenhauer famously did the you know docked on the solution where the thing in itself which he called the will becomes all reality so that way you get around it because suddenly you know the perceiving subject is only an emanation of the thing in itself you know voila you've got the two things put together Haga and the idealist tend to think no it has to be the other way the thing in itself that is uncolonized able needs to sort of drop out and for Higa leaders that it's worked away slowly that is to say we recognize that as disguised as this human rationality or at this rationality to cool and becomes more refined and more internally declined that say or defined it will eventually come to realize that it is all reality there's nothing outside of it so that's he gets he goes approach to this problem and in each case it you know the intention is the same it's you don't want to let stand a kind of a kind of partial or a particular ization of the field of philosophy that gives philosophy sort of a job to do but nothing else and there's an anti bourgeois effect you affect here - these were philosophers who really thought that they could be part of them what they call their revolution of reason they wanted to change the big picture it was not they didn't want to just work on a on a finite set of problems they wanted to say something but reality as such right subsequent lead to Hegel in twenty or thirty years there would be a kind of aggressive turn against Hegel and the universities would go on to particularize the different scientific disciplines and actually want to operate in in local what in in terms that Hegel would have found very objectionable because it was losing sight of the whole picture and of course science went on to definitely pursue and aggravate this sort of increasing specialization and separation of one discipline from the other and absolutely and that's where he goes sort of became a victim of of a historical material necessity as new departments developed in German universities you had to sort of justify this new course of study you know the been you know deserved its own its own department it's on 10-year lines it's on grants and how do you do that while you pointed out to those over reaching theologians that in fact you know this was a sub-discipline that philosophy had nothing to say about and this continues in professional well in in the humanities in general until today I have we have a colleague in the philosophy department who shall remain nameless who's on record as saying that taking advice from Hegel on Logic is like asking Jeffrey Dahmer for for food recommendations so we have a professional philosophy as it as it exists today really enunciated its core mission over and against these kinds of projects that the German ideal is slightly largely stood for which I think both accounts for the fact that they're rarely they're not taught as much and they're not often taken seriously when they're taught but also why they won't go away they're sort of the constant irritant a little bad conscience that I think dogs a lot of the humanities and Social Sciences well I think the science has certain Sciences especially life sciences are realizing that this discrete approach to phenomena is not it's severely limited and that basically you don't understand a particular phenomenon discreetly until you put it in relation to what surrounds it and that into relation to larger context and even you know from the cell to the organ to the organism to the environment to the to the biosphere to the whole cosmos I mean a holistic sort of thinking is becoming more and more necessary for certain kinds of scientific investigations and if nothing else Hegel is the is the most sublime grand symphony of what a kind of thinking of totality represents absolutely and I think that's why as the as the university found less and less use for Higa those who wanted to criticize the totality as it existed in their day I mean I'm gonna mention Marx here as an example found Haga useful and now marks of course thought he was turning Haga from his head back onto his feet there's every indication that by turning him into by turning to materialise idea a materialist however an idealist one one has to say in Marx's defense that he was really reacting against a particular kind of ego that was being taught at the time and that really if you had if you got to the two thinkers into one room over a couple of beers you'd be surprised by the amount of overlap I think you'd find not so much on the revolutionary stuff but he got as a dialectician he thinks the material does have a the material basis of existence does have a profound bearing on consciousness at the same time so I think that that's that's that's sort of the the the counter current to the specialization and the in some way a professionalization of these disciplines there is this kind of these people who want to put on trial what exists I've always found Higa very very congenial I mean there's that famous saying you know if the facts don't conform to the because I feel of Reason well so much the worse for the for the facts and so if you're not particularly enamored with the facts as they stand right now then he indeed is a kind of a go-to guy for you so Marxism would be one legacy absolutely hey Galen system where the drive to understand things as a whole would still be very important for for for for Marx and other certain other maybe even for Ibaka in the history of religion Horace him for yeah the fire Bach you know was it was a member of the so-called lefty galleons yummy galleons who in in many ways I mean they sought to radicalize Higa but really it was a kind of a family squabble about which parts of Hagar one takes more seriously and and part of the problem was that the parts that the young Hegelians who were at that time sort of adjunct professors we call them today at different universities where were emphasizing were the least pallets of all with respect to religion and state whereas those Italians who had ridden Higa's coattails all the way to the University and into you know full professorship set cetera were loath to emphasize those parts of the system that seemed to seem to claim that you know monotheistic religion and the Prussian state we're gonna go the way of the dodo if reason that anything to say about it so the the Higa that we've gotten that is you know this conservative caricature of him is owed again more to professional politics of the day in that these people figured they'd be out of a job real quick if they ran with the wrong implications of the Galleon system and feuerbach and una bala and and maxilla as you say no actually no of course being sort of the worst of the worst in that respect had no qualms about just running with the most outré parts of the system and and and explicating them fully and i think correctly probably but in ways that that of course were not good for professional advancement and or staying out of jail as the case may be Adrian can we talk a little bit about the relationship between Hegel sinking and in very broad terms just call it totalitarianism or certain ideologies associated with totalitarianism because we've had you know gee Jack was on campus just a few years ago and he is well known for having critiqued in in aggressive ways the the craving for the absolute in certain kinds of forms of political ideology and this this and there is a romantic drive in many of us that now it's not only the you know the Marxist who want a world revolution and new absolutely new state and a new life in a new beginning but I'm even even though you know fundamentalist Christians and in the United States for them you know the separation of church and state is you know that's too rational that's too Kantian they you know it's we want the world and we want it now in fact we want the whole and if there's not going to be this competitor a Shinto a Newman aloneness then then it's going to be insufficient we're going to live in constant disappointment the the G check among others says that this is what certain kinds of dictatorial regimes thrive on by promising always in false promises that some kind of sense of lost unity or or the absolute is going to be is going to be provided by fear get rid of those people who in exactly setting our our wonderful or wonderful so ammonia is either I find myself very torn between on the one hand the the the more modest Kantian living within the limits of what we can know and what we can say and do and the limitation of freedom and even conceiving of freedom as as negative freedom because it it does correspond to a certain kind of democratic forms of government that stumble along and you have little minor increments of human freedom but you don't have the whole thing then on the other hand there there is a sense no it has to be the whole otherwise it it's all just bushwa particularism self-interest and so forth so i want to retrieve Hegel for some for some kind of insistence that one must push towards the totality but without going down the line of totalitarian do you think that's possible that's a good question I mean the I mean as I say the roots of this problem are probably the fact that he does just not a liberal in any way does that mean he's the totalitarian I don't think so but does it mean that it puts him in a position where the individual is often subsumed to larger whole yeah it kind of does however Hegel is a dialectician and there's nothing less dialectical and totalitarianism I'd say if in a in these kind of fantasies of unification you know we're all separation falls away there is a kind of well there there is a sub sum ssin of the individual under the totality but no corresponding move from the individual back to the totality that the individual exists solely to confirm and mirror back the whole back to itself that to Hegel is the sign of a good old-fashioned you know ancient sort of either theocracy or Asian despotism I was trying to describe that system exactly I was trying to make him briefly more palatable but you caught me there and there is this some this break-in in the field of epistemology that he has with the romantics and with the earlier idealists at the time of the phenomenology where he says you know the absolute knowledge of the absolute is has to be earned it is created through a it's a result it's a process it's a process created in a process of self-discovery and of labour as his word there and it's not and this is the this is what he says to feast it you don't go to leave Victor says it's not shot from a pistol the absolute doesn't come for a shot from a pistol it's a pathological point but it shoot it goes through all of Haggard's political writings as well the unity cannot be given or dictated because it's just there right it's organically creates in a dialogue between particular and totality if it doesn't it's just phony coherence and so that is probably the place where you'd want to start if you wanted to say here does not really totalitarian because facility Aryans always assume and fundamentalist of all strive it's always assumed that this unity is pre-given right the right thinking individuals German race the you know I don't know found the Family Values crowd right I mean or just America right I mean like we we all agree and that's just a given if that coherence is to some extent arrived at in this kind of wrangling process and we're kind of looking at something different aren't we well one of the other characters in the 20th century speaking now about the legacy of Hegel's philosophies is a theater Adorno that's right who certainly was not a gala in any kind of Orthodox sense but Hegel is important for him although he was had severe criticisms of the of Hegel's systems what was a door knows take on Hegel all about well I mean Adorno is usually I mean you refer to him and yet if you refer to the Frankfurt School of Marxism and your introduction and that's the interesting thing for a forest supposed Marxist Adorno seems to be a lot more interested in Haga than he is in Marx and that's true for a lot of the Frankfurt School his and he struggles with exactly this question that we talk about he likes the anti bourgeois anti-capitalist and burn anti-liberal strain and he go he likes the strive towards the totality which he thinks of as a corrective to a to the dictatorship of what works of the just the stuff that's always worked for us and therefore we're gonna keep doing it and for him that's a big part of what it means to be political in the twentieth century however he really is worried about what exactly we are to make of the clear consonants between Hagen and and fascist thought well going back to the question of the you know the subjective or Lessig Isis the subject the grand absolute subject of the whole story and you we began our conversation with you saying that there it's impossible to divorce Geist from the human element that is part of the realization or maybe is the subject of the realization and that Hegel conceived of this ever-growing consciousness of freedom as linked to the human but Adorno doesn't follow him all the way down that line on the contrary well he does he does Adorno's favorite phrases or favorite word mites might be negative there's the famous book negative dialectics which is essentially a negative version of the Hegelian dialectic and he proposes a negative universal history he says he goal is absolutely right there is something working itself out in world history however that's not to be affirmed what is asserting itself is a negative principle that is to say spirit does not find its completion and liberal democracy does not find its conclusion in the its end in the Prussian state or anything it finds its conclusion in Auschwitz it is this absorption of all subjects to this overarching objectivity you know it's for him Western rationality is that he drives to that Tilos it's just why is that piece you know why does he think that not why does he think it but well what is it in the development of reason that drives towards the absol reification and reduction of the human - kind of numerical anonymity and and so forth because if you ask that of Heidegger who sees the world he sees the history of metaphysics culminating in what he calls Tecna City right and you can follow his his whole notion of the dispensation of different epochs of being where right where where things appear one way and the other and that we are now because of the way metaphysics has thought of the object subject distinction and so on and so forth and the role the will plays and the will to will and the will to power techni City now is the frame the castell within which everything appears to us as manipulable controllable at our disposal etc well Adorno has a very similar view it's the that's the famous dialectic of enlightenment which is another title of a book that I'd urge you readers to check out your listeners to check out its he thinks that yeah there is in Russian in Western rationality a tendency to treat the particular as exchangeable and eventually that rationality will extend to human beings and treat them as exchangeable until they become predicates of the object which is to say of well he would say guys Adorno would say well the catastrophic sort of progress of rationality for him of course and here's where Adorno's Hegelian isn't comes through this is rationality misunderstood right this is what he calls instrumental rationality true rationality that demands that again this this harmony between subject and object but doesn't enforce it upon the OP did the subjects but rather you know let's subject object sort of figure it out for themselves that kind of rationality will inevitably sort of assurance um effort I should say uh sure in a better world so how vicious how streets is not the end of the of a particular kind of rational particular kind of rationality but that particular kind of rationality does not fulfill or does not bring to completion the but is he had gaily enough to believe that the good form of rationality will eventually come into its own he's not enough of a yarn is enough of a Marxist I mean he avoids the word revolution like the plague but I think that's what he's driving it he thinks that a the right kind of rationality will mean that the totality of existence has to be transformed how do you do that well you don't do it to a reform he doesn't come out and say this but it seems that yeah he thinks left to its own devices even something as innocuous seeming as liberal democracy will produce only greater disenfranchisement of the subject and a true reconciliation between subject and object is capable as possible own if you change the entire framework you know he doesn't he leaves it open how he thinks this needs to be done and his own students when they joined the the student protests in 68 were quite surprised to find that that's not how he had in mind you should do it he never died before he passed on how exactly he thought this was gonna be done it wasn't gonna happen through Soviet Communism absolutely not he hated that and and for the very same reason that we've talked about with you know with these these despotisms and his critique of the Soviet Union is that of you could Xerox pages from Higgins philosophy of history and and just paste in when you wouldn't even call it so he's it's called in the East very dismissive all the Frankfurt School sort of started out very Marxist until they went to Moscow or encountered Moscow in whatever way and realize this this can't be it yeah there's something about Adorno's thinking that that always enervates me I I've asked you before please help me figure out why I'm allergic to this particular kind of recasting of abigaile Ian and and Marxist that but of course there are many things I'm sympathetic to in Adorno it had it not been Adorno himself right who would have formulated it one of the things I think I can point to is this is his insistence that philosophy must always remain critical philosophy that's right therefore it's it's it almost guarantees that disenchantment has to be the mode in which we remain yes and it's always the philosophy of suspicion of attack prosecution I guess it's because I don't like the prosecutorial I prefer the the the defense the defense over the prosecution in general when it comes to legal things and this prosecutorial mode and tone and and his dismissal of a popular culture his refusal to understand that the the most interesting things about the 20th century were if her size of the things that that he held in most contempt I don't know did it makes it difficult for me to say okay at door no I'm gonna join you now and say that the right kind of reason is what we have to work towards and we and we have to make sure that we give marks a second chance and it works out well if I am if you do not like the prosecutorial well let me parse that on the one hand I I think you my attempted conversion of you to her galleon ISM has failed then because of course he gonna does this to I however I mean if the image that the prosecutor is sort of meant to suggest you know there are these tables of the law and you then measure up a particular moment in history or a particular art movement or whatever according to what those tables that you got from the mountain say neither Hegel nor Adorno does this these are eminent critics the rationality of the thing itself is allowed to work itself out if you look at the phenomenology that you know he got in each case and each chapter will show us a knowledge relation and then show us how its internally contradictory he doesn't sort of show up with oh here's how it should be and here's how you fall short and Adorno it does much the same thing he is interested in he thinks that there are contradictions in modern bourgeois capitalism that if comprehend correctly point you towards a better way of doing things but yeah that is necessarily negative or not necessarily critical I don't know if it's prosecutorial because he's very mum on what any of these any any of these better ways of doing things would look like and I think I think it's it's but it's it is critical that's that's for sure I mean that's his big beef with Heidegger who he spent decades salvaging well the problem was that he thought harshly I would say well I mean his critique is a simple one I don't know how he could have gone around it he says Heidegger gets the exists gets the fact factors of existence of late bourgeois capitalism exactly right his problem is that then he turns around and says these are necessary determinants of all of human design in general and just says I don't see where you wear your license to make that move and I don't and I think and and he thinks it's a it's a it's a misunderstanding of miss reading of history now I don't know how high degree would have countered that it's not I don't I mean you have to you have to essentially if you if you're a galleon that that automatically makes sense if you had a gariand automatically it doesn't so some way I think it's it's not exactly a dialogue between these two men no it's not and there's probably would be a whole other radio show to try to put them into dialogue and see points of coincidence and possible sympathy and and it could just be a question of style I can I can understand a doorknob being completely put off by Heidegger's postures and his style and everything that the same way I react to a door knows style price cannot stand well to read him I try with I always try over and over again to you know to get into them and kind of rescue but I just for the moment maybe in ten years it'll be different maybe they're both unique in that way that that you that you can pick up on people who've read too much of them within a second of reading any article or essay or book you end up they both sort of impose their own jargons on on on especially German philosophical writings in the latter half of the twentieth century one thing that's interesting is that though that Adorno's jargon of authenticity which is the book that excoriates this this Heidegger ease is actually very light on Heidegger quotes and there's some indication that he didn't think Heidegger was to guilty of this he he doesn't dislike higher so much as he dislikes high daguerreian so I can understand that and I think there's something like that one or two for sure the problem is that you know it's tragic to be a great thinker or even a great writer because disciples there's such a huge a Bissel divide between let's say Heidegger and Heidegger is even dated on the durians or I you know Marx and and so Marxist and even even Jesus and and and his followers so it you know there I can I can understand that but going back to Hegel I find that he had some very worthy heirs not all of them and you know we're talking you know about we mentioned the left two galleons of Feuerbach Marx and others so I and I and I believe that even Heidegger was definitely one of one of the heirs and and felt it absolutely had retell the story because he needed to make room for a different kind of philosophy of history than the one that Hegel had brought to an end right well I think you're sort of remembering I mean I think the story you tell the he galleons this maybe a little bit more positive than the one I would tell I think he he girl is lucky in that he had a great many good airs unfortunately he also had I mean thankfully these people are now forgotten but he had a bunch of terrible ones too and I think the good ones are precisely the ones that that kept sight of this idea of holism and of the totality and were able to do interesting things with it the ones that are today justifiably forgotten are the ones that were enamored with the idea of building the system and finding room for things and system these were people who were you know you know they would have studied spreadsheets if they if they hadn't discovered Hegel instead the ones that got that this was about the big picture in here I think Adorno for all his faults is a good an astute reader of he for sure from the ones who've got that this is about this is about making sense of a world that seems new and that clearly calls up for a new kind of thinking they're the ones that sort of preserve even if they miss read Hegel terribly they really preserve what was appealing and energetic and energizing about his philosophy in the first place I warned our listeners at the beginning that this was going to be one of those heavy philosophical shows and I don't think we've disappointed the ones who actually prefer those kind of shows on entitled opinions so Thank You Adrian we've been speaking with professor Adrian Dao for in title opinions my name is Robert I want to thank our production manager Dylan monkey Nadi who is the one who takes care of all the technical technicalities sends out the emails and announcements and keeps the whole thing going so thanks again Adrienne thank you everyone again

Channel: Philosophy Overdose

Views: 22,066

Rating: 4.9179487 out of 5

Keywords: Philosophy, Hegel, History of Philosophy, German Idealism, Adorno, Political, Negative Freedom, Positive Freedom, Positive Liberty, History, Historicism, Kant, Hegelian, Progress, Dualism, Continental Philosophy, Romanticism, Metaphysics, Kantian, Post-Kantian, Heidegger, Dialectic of Enlightenment, Dialectic, End of History, Fukuyama

Id: 7cubchhqCQs

Length: 57min 54sec (3474 seconds)

Published: Mon May 15 2017