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
And what I could say about that is simply for Hegel, as I just talked about him in terms of the opening chapters of the phenomenology in Zizek,
it would be that our own beliefs are part of the very reality that we are attempting to formulate a picture of.
And so the idea of a reality that we could get at separate from our beliefs would be nothing for us.
But at the same time, it's not that our beliefs are
you know, some sort of, you know, transcendent separate, you know, reality or not even a reality, just, you know, something that, you know, is or could be bracketed off, you know, from, you know, the reality we're trying to describe, that internal to the ontological dimension, you know, as part of it, are very beliefs about, you know, this dimension.
And so, you know, and, you know, Hegel, the Hegelian sensibility that's crucial for Zizek here is that
as you could put it for Hegel, the notion of the concrete apart from the abstract is itself the height of abstraction.
And so the idea of belief as abstract separate from reality as concrete would itself be a peculiar sort of belief that isn't really tenable in that the only really defensible option from a Hegelian standpoint is to
you know, find a way to make explicit for ourselves and spell out how our beliefs are part of the very reality that they are beliefs about.
And to have a more robust picture of reality is including within itself beliefs about reality.
But that follow up out of the way.
So, you know, in terms of deflationary Hegelianism,
You know, perhaps the best way to begin answering this would be to say a little bit more about the history of this sort of approach going back to, as you correctly point out, Charles Taylor's 1975 hulking tome, simply entitled Hegel.
And, you know, in that work, you know, Taylor, the position Taylor takes is that
Yes, Hegel did have a metaphysics, but it is a ridiculous, implausible, outdated worldview or perspective that is best left in the dustbin of history.
Yet at the same time, there are things in Hegel that are very valuable and that should indeed be salvaged and appreciated even by analytic philosophers.
And that for Taylor, Hegel's metaphysics would be something along the lines of, I mean, it's a standard caricature that opponents of Hegel frequently wheel out.
And I think it's utterly indefensible, but it's to say that, you know, Hegel was some sort of theologically minded person.
pantheist or panpsychist, you know, that he has the idea that there's some sort of godlike megamind that would be some sort of cosmic world spirit and that it is a metaphysical reality that's the ultimate reality.
And everything that we deal with here in this finite world of, you know, human beings, you know, nature, et cetera, we are just puppets and playthings of this cosmic spirit that, you know, in a very...
Showing 141–160 of 618 · page 8 of 31
← Previous
Next →