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
alternately God and nature, and that human subjectivity as involving individuated agency, a capacity for reflective deliberation, self-determination, et cetera, that human-mindedness and like-mindedness and the agency that seems to be involved with that, that all of that is an illusion, and that when we
penetrate the veil of appearances when we see through this facade, we realize that it's just this one single soul substance running the show and that we aren't the individual agents we like to think of ourselves as being.
And in the wake of Kant and Fichte, Schelling and Hegel want to find a way to affirm this
model of autonomous subjectivity that is central to Kant and Fichte's philosophies, but in a way that can be rendered compatible with something, you know, Kant and Fichte reject, which is a kind of ontological monism a la Spinoza that would indeed be compatible with materialist or naturalist sensibilities.
And so this compatibilism, this bringing together of, uh,
You might say material substance and human subjectivity.
Schelling and Hegel are both after versions of this, and this is central to Zizek's work as well.
And, you know, taking into account after Hegel and Schelling, developments such as Marxism and psychoanalysis is part of this.
And Hegel puts it in the form of a slogan early on in the preface to his famous 1807 Phenomenology of Spirit.
Hegel talks about the need contra just an unqualified Spinozism.
Hegel implores us to try to think substance also as subject.
And that, I think, is a nice formulation of what Zizek and myself are after as well.
And simply put, you might say that what we want is a materialism with a subject rather than materialism as we often think of it in its more reductive guises.
It says,
Our sense of being minded subjects is an illusion that can be dissolved by, you know, present best science or what have you.
And that we can see that it really is just anonymous, impersonal matter in motion.
And anything over and above that is just, you know, a sterile epiphenomenon.
Well, with good reason, I strongly suspect that some of Zizek's qualifications or apparent rejections of this language about Hegel ontologizing Kant, this first surfaces in Less Than Nothing from 2012.
And by that point, he, of course, had already read
you know, some of the earlier renditions of his work that I had put together, such as Zizek's Ontology from 2008.
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