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
This indeed is the best of all possible worlds.
And so the idea of the primacy of necessity, the notion that in terms of modal categories, the most fundamental level of reality that we can delineate as grounding everything that is, that we can make as metaphysically or ontologically foundational, is a matter of necessity, of ironclad determination of whatever sort.
And in revisiting Hegel's doctrine of modal categories in The Logic, what I am interested in showing at that point in the book is the idea that Hegel is at all committed to any sort of valorization of necessity as the ur-category, at least in terms of modal categories.
You know, that Hegel is some sort of necessitarian, determinist, etc., as he's often misperceived as being.
that if you read his account of modal categories in the logic with the care that text demands, you find that in fact, not only is that inaccurate, it's a 180 degree inversion of the truth.
It gets things completely backwards.
Now for Hegel, and here's where I think Zizek is right with formulations like the contingency of necessity, right?
That the ontological zero level
is a kind of openness uh a contingency in the sense of a lack of any kind of necessitation or pre-orchestration and out of that initial chaos you gradually have in a bottom-up fashion the emergence of more constrained forms of order and organization and so yes you eventually have things that exhibit a certain kind of necessity based on order and organization
But that is a secondary derivative byproduct that arises out of an initial non-necessitarian contingent openness.
And so for both Zizek and I, Hegel properly read is the opposite of what he's often accused as being, which is a kind of post-Kantian Leibniz, someone with a kind of theodicy, someone who thinks teleological necessity is the ultimate explanation for...
why things happen the way they happen, how things turn out, etc.
And just to demolish that falsifying caricature of Hegel is, I think, something that is indeed quite important.
And really, that's what I'm after in that section of the book that deals with Hegel's doctrine of modal categories.
Yeah, and just, I can begin with, you know, unpacking that exact formulation of Zizek's that you just quoted, you know, and then there's a few other things that I think ought to be added.
You know, so, you know, for, you know, Hegel, as Zizek reads him,
If I take the position that I occupy in my status quo and the vantage point or context in which I'm situated and I cast my glance backward and for Hegel, he famously uses that image of the Isle of Minerva in the preface to the philosophy of right.
And the point of it is that, well, we are all philosophers included, not unable to see into the future.
And so when we view ourselves, we can situate ourselves in our present in relation to our past.
But that's it.
Showing 341–360 of 618 · page 18 of 31
← Previous
Next →