Monthly Archives: August 2013

Hegelian Myths

I found a section on debunking “hegelian myths” on, I think hegel.com. The myths include Hegel rejecting the law of excluded middle, his saying that we live at the end of arts, philosophy, times… And next to each myth were a few sentences explaining why it is not true.

I think such “debunking” does more harm than good. First of all only a petit bourgeois mentality would seriously engage in believing the above mentioned (by “believing” I mean taking it literally and stopping there: Hegel does say that we live at the end of philosophy, time, etc). Intellectual curiosity is precisely what would motivate a true seeker of knowledge to immerse himself in hegelian philosophy to try and answer for himself why one of the most influential thinkers in the history of mankind would allow himself the luxury of such superfluous nonsense. That would lead to many a wonderful discovery, and en route, these boring “myths” will be explicated.

It is the very attempt to dispel it that really creates this kind of drivel. Any universal thought taken out of its context and split into individual parts will display the same nature, just like in the famous tale about an elephant examined by several blind people. When sensations like “elephant is a cord”, or “elephant is a pillar” are expressed, we do not try to disprove them individually “heads on”. We just demonstrate the whole elephant and the falsehoods simply wither out and fall off. In order to do that we must also cure blindness. In this case – intellectual blindness.

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Filed under Hegel, Philosophy

Culture, Barbarism, Žižek, Vico

In this essay, Žižek quotes Benjamin, and wonders with him:  “what if culture itself is nothing but a halt, a break, a respite, in the pursuit of barbarity?” He gives an example of how culture can be not just synonymous but identical with barbarity in Less Than Nothing, where he mentions an utterance attributed to various Nazi leaders: “When I hear the word ‘culture’ I reach for my pistol.” Here “the intended meaning was probably that he was ready to defend high German culture… against Jews and other barbarians; the true meaning, however is that he is himself a barbarian who explodes with violence when confronted with true works of culture.” (at the end of The “Magical Force” of Reversal section of Part III, Chapter 8).

In La Scienza nuouva, Vico has already intuited this position: after the “human” stage of history, comes “barbarie ritornata”, which he defines as “barbarie della riflessione” (barbarity of reflection). His evidence comes from the Middle Ages: an example of new barbarity that set in after the most enlightened teachings of Christianity were revealed. How far away are we from this intuition coming true? For one thing seems to be certain: the same symbolic framework that gives rise and supports culture in a society is also the framework of that society’s possible or existing barbarity. Take the USSR. How proud its citizens were of its ballet, arts, literature. Yet, this was the muster of a totalitarian society, suppressing its citizens with violence only matched by that of Nazi Germany (which, incidently, did not concentrate on its own citizens, not that I am defending the monstorsity of Nazism, just stressing that the monstrocity of communism belongs on a different level). So Benjamin was right: any monument to culture is simultaniously a monument to barbarity.

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Filed under Philosophy, Reading, Žižek

Emotional Life in a Neurobiological Age: On Wonder

http://www.cornell.edu/video/emotional-life-in-a-neurobiological-age-on-wonder

Catherine Malabou discusses the connection between the biological and the symbolic: the brain and the mind.

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August 13, 2013 · 9:47 PM