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Re: [xmca] Where is thinking



Ha, ha, ha! And imagine, if those 5 pages of his first book have proved to be so rich, just imagine the wealth to be uncovered in the remaining 99.9% of his corpus!

:)    Bloom away!

Andy

Martin Packer wrote:
Let 1,000 Hegels bloom!

Martin


On 4/21/09 7:28 PM, "Andy Blunden" <ablunden@mira.net> wrote:

Let 1,000 flowers bloom. And may every flower cross
pollinate with every other flower! No problem. But that does
not mean that there is no problem with the Hegel that Marx
and Lenin read being cast into the skip parked out the back
of the library, or with the meaning of terms being jumbled
up into meaninglessness. ("Being determines consciousness"
said Marx, but if Being is personal identity formation, does
Being still determine consciousness? For example)

It is my very mission to facilitate interaction between
divergent currents of thinking, most specifically
Hegelianism, Marxism and CHAT, and I am more than happy to
appropriate French philosophy along with the way.

But this wave of master-servant (NB "servant" not "slave"
which was an insertion of Kojeve's) mythology is actually
destroying, burying and eradicating Hegel's legacy. Kojeve
and Sartre were brilliant writers whose contribution I
value. I even see Sartre as a precurser of my own work. But
why dump Hegel? Isn't it worth considering that one passage
in his early work which in its whole structure and tenor
though not content, is very untypical of Hegel, if taken out
of context, could lead to misunderstanding? even if that
misunderstanding is itself an interesting insight?

Andy

Martin Packer wrote:
Andy,

I don't see the mixing of Hegelian and existentialist concepts as
problematic. Existentialism started with Kierkegaard, right? He was writing
a kind of anti-Hegelianism, in which rather than there being a logic that
guarantees the movement of spirit, there are moments in which a leap is
necessary. He wrote of a "leap of faith" but (just as with Hegel) a secular
reading is possible. These are the moments when humans must choose, without
guarantees, without certainty, without transparent rationality.

So existentialism has always had ties to Hegel. The existential-Marxists, it
seems to me, were rediscovering in Marx what Michael just mentioned, a place
for agency on the level of the individual. That has been a valuable
counterpoint to those readings that find in Marx, like Hegel, only an
anonymous movement to the historical process in which no genuine choices are
available.

Martin


On 4/21/09 10:28 AM, "Andy Blunden" <ablunden@mira.net> wrote:

I'm actually quite fond of Sartre, Martin, and I appreciate
his efforts in "Critique of Dialectical Reason" to make
something like an activity reading of Hegel. It is the
eclectic mixing up of Existentialist concepts with Marxist
or Hegelian concepts that I object to. What does "Being"
mean? It depends doesn't it, whether you are reading Hegel,
Engels or Heidegger. I can't cope with mixing up these
sources indiscriminately.

There may be differences between French and German Marxism,
but I think we are here talking about post-WW2 Marxism, yes?
and the particular experiences of Algeria, 1968, Berlin, the
PCF, etc., and Kojeve. And there is no doubt that the legacy
of the French Revolution still figures hugely in France.

But I really think this has little to do with a reading by
Marx or French Marxists of the master-servant narrative at
any time earlier than 1933.

For a start, the Phenomenology had not even been translated
into French until 1939. So a knowledge of the master-servant
narrative was kept to a pretty small group in France. A few
professional philosophers like Koyre and Hyppolite.

When I started up the Hegel-by-HyperText website in 1999, it
intrigued me that I got mail from two quite distinct groups
of people. One of these groups I just could not understand
what they were talking about. After a while I realised that
these were people who had read Kojeve or were reading Hegel
in the wake of Kojeve. This is a completely different
philosopher than the one I learnt as a Marxist, reading
Marxists texts and then moving on from Marx, Lenin and
Lukacs to study Hegel's Logic. This other group only knew
these 2% of Hegel's first book. The other group usually knew
only the Logic and Philosophy of Right, the books that Marx,
Engels, Lenin, Lukacs & Co. commented on.

Why not read my book Martin? Much easier to read than the
Phenomenology!

Andy

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--
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Andy Blunden http://home.mira.net/~andy/
Hegel's Logic with a Foreword by Andy Blunden:
From Erythrós Press and Media <http://www.erythrospress.com/>.

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