Goethe, Hegel and Marx BLUNDEN, ANDY
Science & society (New York. 1936),
01/2018, Volume:
82, Issue:
1
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
Hegel's philosophical system rested on an appropriation of the concept which lay at the heart of Goethe's scientific work, the Urphänomen (archetypal phenomenon). In a sense, the Urphänomen is the ...Urphänomen of Hegel's philosophy: Hegel transformed and expanded this idea in his Logic, in which the place of the Urphänomen is taken by a Concept rather than a phenomenon. Marx in turn took this idea as the foundation for Capital, with the practice of commodity exchange being the Urphänomen of bourgeois society; but changed the relationship between conceptual and practical development. Each link in this chain turns the Urphänomen "inside out" in the act of appropriating it.
...I want to stick with Brooks because in his insistence that paraphrase "conveys" the poem "into an unreal competition with science or philosophy or theology," he challenges some reigning paradigms ...of interdisciplinarity that deserve, I think, to be cast off, and to have better ones lodged in their place ("HP," 201)....we could modify Davidson's claim that figurative representations mean nothing at all and say, instead, that they are "referentially indeterminate"-that, in the words of Hartry Field, they don't "really denote" any one thing but admit of a range of possible near-meanings, some of which may be mutually exclusive, and none of which may assume explanatory priority over the others.22 If Field is right, not even phrases like A. R. Ammons's "Hegel is not the winter / yellow in the pines," or Robert Bly's "every old frog is the son of Robespierre" would provide any intelligence about the historical persons Maximilien Robespierre or G. W. F. Hegel, even if knowing who Hegel and Robespierre are goes some way toward our appreciation of Ammons and Bly.23 These are essentially the same premises behind Sidney's insistence that, when it comes to what is "not affirmatively but allegorically and figuratively written," the poet "citeth not," while the vanishing of proper names into poetic tropes discloses nothing more than, as Sidney says, "we cannot play at chess but that we must give names to our chessmen," and no one asks a piece of wood to tell him anything about a bishop.24 Of course, it's also the case that, for Sidney, poetry's refusal or inability to stipulate goes hand in hand with its pedagogical and oracular promise: because it doesn't bother "to tell you what is or is not," poetry is free to campaign for "what should or should not be," and to achieve an "application most divinely true" through a "discourse itself feigned....that those facts describe invariable states of affairs, like the conservation of mass or the chemical composition of salt....that all the branches of science-theoretical physics, zoology, astrogeology, analytical chemistry, classical mechanics, and so on-apply themselves to what are, at bottom, the same phenomena, with some prospective candidates being elementary particles or atoms or physical laws.
In this article I argue that Hegel has become analytic philosophy's "pharmakon"-both its "poison" and its "cure." Traditionally, Hegel's philosophy has been attacked by Anglo-American analytical ...philosophers for its alleged charlatanism and irrelevance. Yet starting from the 1970s there has been a revival of interest in Hegel's philosophical work, which, I suggest, may be explained by three developments: (1) the revival of interest in Aristotelianism following Saul Kripke's and Hilary Putnam's work on natural kinds, and Elizabeth Anscombe's, Philippa Foot's, and Putnam's opposition to the fact-value distinction; (2) the rehabilitation of Hegel's theories by various philosophers, including Robert Pippin, Terry Pinkard, Fred Beiser, Robert Stern, and Stephen Houlgate; and (3) the Sellars-inspired philosophy of mind of John McDowell and of Robert Brandom. The first and third of these reasons, I argue, have led several analytic theorists to cast Hegel in a more positive light as the "cure" for analytic philosophy. The combined outcome of these changes, both ironic and fitting, is that the Hegelian principle of internal critique has played a significant role not only in analytic philosophy's rapprochement with Hegel's philosophy but also in overcoming the Analytic-Continental philosophical divide.
Accounts of human and animal action have been central to modern philosophy from Suarez and Hobbes in the 1500s, to Wittgenstein and Anscombe in the mid-twentieth century via (among many others) ...Locke, Hume, Reid, Kant, and Hegel. Philosophies of action have thus greatly influenced the course of both moral philosophy and the philosophy of mind. This volume gathers together specialists from both the philosophy of action and the history of philosophy with the aim of re-assessing the wider philosophical impact of action theory.
Martin Jay’s sweeping account of reason in Western philosophy provides the context for understanding the crisis that the Frankfurt School thinkers faced when they spoke of the “eclipse of reason.” In ...the background of the thinking of the first generation of Frankfurt thinkers such as Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, and Herbert Marcuse is a hankering for a more substantive conception of reason that bears affinities with what Hegel called Vernunft (reason), which he contrasted with Verstand (understanding). According to Jay, the first generation of Frankfurt thinkers never quite succeeded in elaborating this substantive concept of reason and grew increasingly pessimistic in the face of the self-destruction of reason. Habermas sought to elaborate a communicative theory of rationality that did not fall into the misleading promises of Hegelian Vernunft but could nevertheless provide a normative basis for the critique of instrumental, strategic, and systems rationality—a normative basis for critical theory. Jay presents an extremely lucid account of Jürgen Habermas’s theory of communicative rationality. He concludes by reviewing some of the outstanding problems and questions that have been raised about the adequacy and success of Habermas’s project. I seek to do justice to the strengths and weaknesses of Jay’s narrative, and I focus on a number of deep, unresolved issues that confront the future of critical theory in its attempt to develop an adequate conception of rationality. I also raise concerns about what precisely is distinctive about critical theory today.
Marx had already attempted to transform the world through philosophy, Hegel and Kant were at times commenting on the event of the day, and even Plato was constantly reflecting on the social and ...political norms of daily life. The novelty was that “theory” would consider the dimensions of psychic agency, the becoming of concepts, the sociohistorical conditions of an epoch, the material and epistemic culture as well as the thought allowed by works of art, altogether and at the same time. ...Kristina Mendicino’s study of newswriting in Heinrich Heine helps us situate the diffracted historicity of our “untimely actualities.”
Hegel, Deleuze, and the Critique of Representation provides a critical account of the key connections between twentieth-century French philosopher Gilles Deleuze and nineteenth-century German ...idealist G. W. F. Hegel. While Hegel has been recognized as one of the key targets of Deleuze's philosophical writing, Henry Somers-Hall shows how Deleuze's antipathy to Hegel has its roots in a problem the two thinkers both try to address: getting beyond a philosophy of judgment and the restrictions of Kant's transcendental idealism. By tracing the development of their attempts to address this problem, Somers-Hall offers an interpretation of the sweep of nineteenth- and twentieth-century philosophy, providing a series of analyses of key moments in the history of thought, including the logics of Aristotle and Russell, Kant's own philosophy of judgment, and the philosophy of Bergson. He also develops a novel interpretation of Deleuze's philosophy of difference, and situates his philosophy in relation to the broader post-Kantian tradition. In addition to Deleuze's relation to Hegel, the book makes important contributions to the study of Deleuze's philosophy of mathematics, as well as to the study of several underappreciated areas of Hegel's own philosophy.
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