Adrian Johnston
speaker
618 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jan 2020
last heard Jan 2020
Adrian Johnston’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Now, for me, I should say,
Apropos what dialectical materialism was, I mean, one, I don't think that Zizek is interpretively fair to it.
I think that there's a certain amount of exegetical injustice in some of his dismissals of it.
And I think moreover, it was not itself, historically speaking, if we're just being careful about the history of ideas, it was certainly not wedded to this project of making the pair of contingency and necessity
you know, the essence of materialism qualified as dialectical, that what it was, I mean, I think really the lowest common denominator of the different permutations of dialectical materialism developed by everybody from Engels through, you know, a certain Althusser, et cetera, is that it is more in line with, and here it's strange to me Zizek doesn't draw on this more, you know, it's more in line with this Hegel-inspired project that Zizek also is committed to of
you know, being able to offer an account of the emergence of subjectivity out of material reality, like how we get, you know, the genesis of a number of things that, you know, going up to and including ourselves as minded and like-minded subjects, how to account for that starting with, you know, the flat monistic reality of the physical universe alone prior to the rise of life
you know, sentience, sapience, et cetera.
And, you know, so the pursuit of a kind of a non-reductive, you know, somewhat naturalistic materialism that would, you know, also allow us to, for instance, account for the compatibility between our freedom and the necessity of the whole sway in reality.
This, you know, sort of project was really what I think traditionally dialectical materialism was after.
And so, to me, there's a lot in there that, in fact, is very close to what Zizek himself is pursuing, despite the fact that he's now come to be a little, it seems, cautious or hesitant about fully embracing the label, even though he uses it a lot.
And then also having this very austere, kind of surprisingly reduced version of it, in which it's just a matter of asserting the contingency of necessity rather than
you know, any other combination of modal categories.
Yes.
Now, of course, actuality is for Hegel also a modal category and that Hegel has a well-worked out doctrine of modal categories in his mature logic.
And the logic is divided into the doctrines of being, essence, and concept.
into these three books.
And it's the very last stretch of the second book, The Doctrine of Essence, in which Hegel delineates basically what is metaphysically foundational, what is most basic to the categories that are modal categories for us at that point.
And he signals, and this is part of why we are given warnings by Hegel himself,
that his infamous, notorious proclamation about the relationship between the rational and the actual is not saying what is typically taken as saying, which is this is by, especially by Hegel's critics, this has consistently been construed as saying that essentially Hegel is there in this privileged academic position with his chair at the University of Berlin
And at the time, you know, you had this very, you know, reactionary Prussian government that was seeking to turn the clock of history back to before 1789, you know, and the aftermath of the French Revolution, you know, that was part of the Germanic reaction against French influence, you know, as involved in the Napoleonic Wars, that, you know, this was taken as Hegel pronouncing a philosophical benediction over the Prussian authorities that, you know, that they're
Showing 261–280 of 618 · page 14 of 31
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