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.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsNo recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.
Appearances
pulse or sort of, you know, the core sort of lifeblood of, you know, of history as it is unfolding.
So, you know, in a given present in a particular, you know, current sociopolitical context.
that there will be some aspects of that context that are very much expressive of a powerful general thrust in a certain socio-historical direction.
But it's never the case that the dominant thrust is so dominant that everything that's part of your context is an expression of it.
that there will be a whole scattered series of other elements of any given situation that will be part of your social contextual presence, but that are perhaps, for instance, vestiges of an earlier form of social life that's already dying out or that will be near kind of anomalies or outliers.
For Hegel, if we took all of the elements of our social circumstances,
And then if we looked at the history of our society and we plotted all of its elements, we would see that they can be scattered all over the place.
But then there will be some that cluster around a definite line of directed movement, that there will be some sort of thrust that is tending in a certain direction.
And Hegel, it's clear, even when he says the actual is rational, the rational is actual –
that Hegel is, in his view, actuality here, the central thrust of social history is on the side of things like the French Revolution.
And yes, the Prussian reaction to that exists, it's there, but it is fighting a losing battle.
It is at best just delaying the inevitable.
Hegel talks about mere existence or being there, Dasein.
And he says, he provides all of this evidence for him,
This kind of conservative backlash in places like Prussia against the, you know, gain and the progressive march of human freedom represented by the French Revolution that he thinks, you know, the things like Prussian reaction are doomed eventually to be swept away.
Yes, they exist.
They're here.
They're around us.
But time is not on their side.
The wind of history is blowing against them and they will eventually be swept aside.
Showing 301–320 of 618 · page 16 of 31
← Previous
Next →