Monday, August 18, 2003
(2:04 PM) | Adam Kotsko:
Hegel can suck it
Recently I've decided that I need to read some Hegel -- namely, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, the 19th-century German Idealist philosopher. All the cool kids around town were carrying their copies of Phenomenology of Spirit; some had moved on to The Science of Logic. The really slow ones were still slogging through his lectures on The Philosophy of History. I knew that if I was going to get any action, ever, I needed to be conversant in Hegel -- it's just part of living in a college town like Bourbonnais, Illinois. For a while I could fake it by drawing on my knowledge of Zizek, who loves Hegel, but everyone around here seems to think that Zizek is a lightweight, a "phase" that you go through before you get to the real hardcore stuff, kind of like in stupider towns how people start off with Blink 182 before getting into "real" punk. In Bourbonnais, the fashion is philosopho-punk, and Hegel is NOFX, the Clash, and the Sex Pistols all rolled into one massive orgy of dialetical fury.
Hegel's big hit, aside from his preface and intro to the Phenomenology, is his famous passage on lordship and bondage -- a staple of the philosopho-punk porn niche market. I decided to cut to the chase and skipped right to the good stuff, assuming that I'd end up reading the rest of the book later, in German. The twisted relationships between self and other, subject and subject, were laid out in all their gory detail by the H-man. The lord believes that he has independence and that his relationship to the object is one of pure enjoyment, but the truth of the situation is that this very independence is thoroughly dependent on the work of the bondsman. Meanwhile, the bondsman seems to be completely dependent on the lord, but this dependence only comes through the lord's power over the object. Here's where it gets really twisted: the independence the master believes he has is only found in fact in the bondsman, who becomes independent of the given state of things through his work. Rather than simply negating the object through wasteful enjoyment, he works on it and shapes it, and that shaping ability is the concrete version of the negativity of the lord's enjoyment. Negation of negation!
So far it seems pretty good, right? One wonders what Hegel would do with the S&M situation, but since he lived in such a distant era when people didn't talk about that kind of stuff (usually), I can understand the exclusion. I could see what the kids were getting excited about, but all I could think was, "Lame!" Have these people ever heard of Lacan? His diagrams of the four discourses achieve in the space of half a page what it took Hegel to do in ten, and Lacan has a much more nuanced and supple concept of desire as well. I know that all my peers want to seem "authentic" by pretending to like all the old stuff, but don't they realize that the stuff that has survived to our age is just what was picked out by our corporate overlords? By advocating only the very biggest hits of past ages, you're doing nothing but legitimating the authority of academic marketting campaigns to decide what kind of philosophy we'll like. Screw that! We can think for ourselves!
So while you guys are all trying to convince each other that you really like Hegel and really "get it," and while you're trying to get inside some girl's pants using the dialectical method, I'm going to be thinking for myself. Just wait for it: "Everyone's heard of Hegel -- ever heard of Schelling, poseurs? Huh, what's that? You've never read the unfinished third version of Ages of the World? Oh, that's too bad -- he has a pretty stunning materialist analysis started there, so groundbreaking that even he couldn't live with the implications. Oh, you want to throw Kant at me? Oh, of course I've read Prolegomena to any future metaphysics and Metaphysics of morals -- but did it ever even occur to you to pick up some of his later stuff, like Critique of Judgment or even Opus Posthumum? No? What a surprise. I thought you were a philosopho-punk, but I guess it's just a fashion thing for you. Ladies, would you like to talk about some real philosophy -- not this Hegel bullshit that your teacher told you you should like? Sure, we could swing by my place -- see you, poseur."
I'm doing it for the cause. It's hard to be a true philosopho-punk when there are so many poseurs around here, but I know one thing: I will never sell out.
