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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And I think that, you know, he got worried that there might be something misleading or at least potentially misleading in that formulation.
And so in what you're asking about in A New German Idealism,
I address this new kind of oscillation or qualification that pops up in Less Than Nothing.
And I think that it's not that he's rejecting what I meant when I, in my previous work, described his version of Hegel as centered on this idea of ontologizing Kant.
It's a qualification that
that involves saying, look, if we assume that ontology, and when we talk about ontology as a philosophical discipline, theory of being at its most fundamental level, if we assume that being at its most fundamental level is ultimately some sort of unity, oneness, wholeness, self-consistency, grand totality, etc.,
any picture of being in that vein, if that's what, you know, ontology is a theory of being addresses, then indeed Zizek would be right to say Hegel by no means ontologizes Kant.
If an ontology automatically entails commitment to a picture of being in this vein as unified, et cetera.
Um, but you know, as Zizek knows full well, um, there are certain ontologies, for instance, you know, his, uh,
Another of his favorite references, the contemporary French philosopher Alain Badiou, who attempts to develop an ontology based on post-Cantorian transfinite set theory, the mathematical discipline that in the guise that Badiou favors it is what's called the Zermelo-Fraenkel theory.
axiomatization of set theory.
But Badiou, having recourse to mathematics and specifically set theory, wants to develop a theory of being as pure multiplicity and as devoid of any kind of fundamental unity or underlying oneness.
So, you know, you don't have to automatically think of being as one, all, whole, total, etc.
when you do ontology.
But if you assume that ontology has to presuppose or posit this kind of picture of being, then you would have to say, no, it's not correct to say Hegel ontologizes Kant.
Because what Hegel does, and this is what Zizek, you know, I think still
holds as a central move all the way up through his present word.
What Hegel does is he takes the entire second half of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason that is entitled Transcendental Dialectic.
And whereas for Kant, whenever we run into anything dialectical that involves antagonism, conflict, contradiction, you know,
incommensurability, irreconcilability, et cetera, Kant thinks, well, anytime you encounter that at the level of thinking, that means that you are definitely stuck within the confines of thinking as separate from being itself, you know, independently of our thinking.
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