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
And that, you know, some groups have certain resources, others not, et cetera.
And then Hegel says, look, I mean, that's just a contingent crapshoot.
That's a roll of the dice.
And that starting from that initially very contingent
givenness of differences in geographical settings that different human societies get up and running that then come to have very different histories and then interact with each other in fateful ways.
And for Hegel, even though you could say once human social history gets up and running on this basis, there comes to be some, you might say,
laws, loosely speaking, some sort of general structuring tendencies to how those histories unfold once you're up and running, that those laws of history are themselves, even if they seem to have a power of necessity, are ultimately contingent because they are the secondary emergent byproducts that are generated by this initial, again, random crapshoot of geography.
And so these sorts of things are very important to bear in mind in terms of approaching Hegel.
And another way I can flesh out this sort of argument about Hegel that you get with Zizek and that I'm also invested in, like with Hegel's phenomenology of spirit.
It's sometimes with justification characterized as a kind of philosophical argument.
a philosophical bildungsroman.
This is a sort of educational odyssey of what Hegel calls consciousness up to, at the end, absolute knowing.
And many readers of this text think that, all right, with Hegel as a kind of teleological necessitarian thinker, that there's some sort of metaphysically preordained itinerary that consciousness is
fated to run through and that, you know, it makes sure that consciousness inevitably achieves the standpoint Hegel calls absolute knowing.
And that all of this was already, you know, as it were written in the stars already decided in advance by perhaps some sort of cosmic godlike mega mind.
And that I don't think is the case.
I mean, for Hegel in the phenomenology with each phenomenon,
figure shape of consciousness that creates problems for itself, that gets itself entangled in dialectics in Hegel's sense of wrestling with self-generated contradictions.
Nothing for Hegel guarantees in advance that progress will be made beyond the deadlocks and impasses that a given figure shape of consciousness drives itself into.
But for Hegel, of course, he's writing in the early 19th century.
Showing 381–400 of 618 · page 20 of 31
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