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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Appearances
We only have this benefit of hindsight.
We have no power of foresight.
And, you know, for for Hegel, right, that when I.
operate as the owl of Minerva, when I take flight at dusk and I survey, as it were, the remains of the day, when I survey what came before, look at the past, that for my present, and hence my perspective or position to be what it is, that the past had to have unfolded in the way that it did.
That I would not be the I that I am at the present, looking back at this past,
if that past hadn't been precisely the past that it was.
So there's the idea that at least for my retroactive gaze, that that past is necessary.
But it's necessary only in retrospect after the fact.
In other words, as history leading up to my present was unfolding, there was not some sort of preordained necessity already at work in that sequence of events that
determined ahead of time in advance that they would turn out that way.
There was openness, there was contingency, there was a not constrained by necessity set of possibilities.
But once I'm situated at a particular point in the present, occupying a determinate position, inhabiting a particular, in this case, especially social historical context, in order for that
present to be the present that it is the past had to have unfolded as it did although at the time of its unfolding nothing made that unfolding in that way absolutely necessary right that's you know the the gist of the argument that zizek is making in formulations like the one you quoted um
You know, there's certainly that.
And of course, when we even talk about Hegel's view of more concretely human social history or what he would call sometimes world history, that, you know, Hegel, it's very interesting.
There's this lengthy, you know, in terms of his lengthy introduction to his popular lectures on the philosophy of world history.
At the end of that introduction is a separate section entitled The Geographical Basis of World History.
You know, and there, you know, Hegel says, look,
different human groups scattered in different places around the earth started off on unequal footing.
And they happened to just find themselves, you know, by the accidents of their emergence, you know, tossed into climates, environments, geographies, et cetera, that, you know, for the different groups presented very different sets of opportunities and obstacles.
Showing 361–380 of 618 · page 19 of 31
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