[Xmca-l] Re: Hegel for Social Movements

[Andy Blunden]

Glad you're enjoying it, David. I hope that I will have my 
copies soon too! Both you and Helena have managed to get 
copies before me!

Your questions: (1) Hegel does tend to deal with topics in 
terms of the very end points and extremes, and this has 
brought a lot of criticism and misunderstandings down on his 
head, especially from our generation. Mainly I deal with it 
by simply ignoring the passages of Hegel which go to God and 
the Absolute Idea, World History and so on. I recently put 
an article on my website and Hegel and Teleology, in which I 
specifically advised people to read Hegel without obsessing 
on these excesses. I should have put something to this 
effect in the book. You are right there.

(2) Hegel's writing on language are in the Philosophy of 
Subjective Spirit, and they are not very interesting, I 
thought, in the context of linguistics today. But I can 
imagine that if Linguistics was your thing, then reading the 
Logic you would see Language everywhere. It is like that. 
But my book is "Hegel for Social Movements" not "Hegel for 
Linguists."

(3) I must have not made myself clear, David, somehow. Hegel 
completely supported the Haitian Revolution and he was a 
complete Realist in International Relations, which he called 
"the animal kingdom of the spirit." He said states should 
honour treaties that they have entered into, but that's all. 
Quite confronting for the modern reader. It was Kant who 
promoted a "United Nations" and Fichte who used recognition 
of national sovereignty as a model for intersubjective 
relations. For Hegel, there was nothing higher than the 
nation state.

The term "immanent critique" actually dates from the 
Frankfurt School. Hegel never used the term. But the Logic 
is clearly the model of immanent critique. Hegel was 
actually pretty dogmatic in how he critiqued his 
contemporary protagonists.

Andy

------------------------------------------------------------
*Andy Blunden*
https://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/index.htm
On 1/09/2019 8:15 pm, David Kellogg wrote:
> I'm reading "Hegel for Social Movements", and I highly 
> recommend it, particularly to Helena. Although Andy 
> doesn't say very much about his own rich experience in 
> trade unionism, it clearly illuminates a lot of his examples.
>
> I have three questions though. They are questions that I 
> kept stumbling over when I read the Logic and I have yet 
> to really find anything that answers them in Andy's book.
>
> First of all, why is Hegel so big on purity? He is always 
> talking about pure being, and absolute idea. I guess I 
> don't believe in purity--I not only don't believe it 
> exists, I am not even sure it should exist.
>
> Secondly, one of the delights of Andy's book is that he 
> likes to switch back and forth between (e.g.) the Logic 
> and the Grundrisse.  Bloomfield remarks that when he read 
> Capital he thought it was a book about linguistics 
> (because of the part on exchange value and use value, 
> which does look kind of Saussurean if you squint a 
> little!) A lot of what Andy is saying about how movements 
> become first conscious of their own existence (there is a 
> line like that in Malraux's "Les Conquerants"--les coolies 
> ont decouvert ils existent, seulement qu'ils 
> existent....), and then become conscious of their internal 
> differences--these seem to be statements about the 
> development of LANGUAGE and not simply language-pure 
> consciousness. So why so little explicit treatment of 
> language?
>
> Thirdly, Andy sometimes slips into Hegelian (rather than 
> Marxist) politics, e.g. on Haiti (p. 55) and and when he 
> considers "international law" an absolute (35). Haiti did 
> not slip into neocolonialism because of some lack of 
> international civil society but BECAUSE of that 
> "international community" and still is!
>
> (Andy--I thought "immanent critique" (the practice, not 
> the term) was Kant, not Hegel! How is Hegel's use of the 
> practice different from Kant's?)
>
> David Kellogg
> Sangmyung University
>
> New Article:
> Han Hee Jeung & David Kellogg (2019): A story without 
> SELF: Vygotsky’s
> pedology, Bruner’s constructivism and Halliday’s 
> construalism in understanding narratives by
> Korean children, Language and Education, DOI: 
> 10.1080/09500782.2019.1582663
> To link to this article: 
> https://doi.org/10.1080/09500782.2019.1582663
>
> Some e-prints available at:
> https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/KHRxrQ4n45t9N2ZHZhQK/full?target=10.1080/09500782.2019.1582663
>
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