Hegelian Dialectic Research Articles

A defence of identity for persons with disability: Reflections from religion and philosophy versus ancient African culture.

BackgroundReligion and philosophy follow the Hegelian dialectic, man as thesis, evil as antithesis and ideal man or God the final synthesis, locking out persons with disability stating that they don’t meet the criteria of being human persons. In contrast, persons with disability were accepted in ancient Africa and their disorder was not shown as a physical handicap.ObjectivesThe objective of this article was to critically examine how disability is constructed in philosophy and religion in comparison with African culture, in the shaping of disability identity as a form of humanity.MethodThis article undertook a document review of both grey and peer reviewed literature. The papers reviewed were identified and screened for relevance, then analysed with the aim of comparing the portrayal of disability in philosophy, religion and ancient Africa.ResultsOur analysis revealed that African cultures revered the disability identity, as opposed to philosophy and religion that portrayed it as abnormal. A person with disability was accepted in ancient Africa and given a visible role in society suggesting their integration in daily life activities while their disability was believed to be a blessing from the gods.ConclusionReligion and philosophy have incredibly alienated persons with disabilities with linguistic and derogative identities. Whereas African spiritualism inherently glorified and/or approved disability, in today’s Africa, persons with disability are increasingly objectified and abused because of ignorance and harsh economic conditions. Nevertheless, the contemporary mistreatment of people with disabilities (PWDs) does not reflect a true African culture but is a symptom and a consequence of the material and economic injustice that PWDs encounter.Keywordsdisability; identity; philosophy; African; religion.

Autogenous crisis as a conceptual model of system changes

The article introduces a conceptually new line in ensuring the long-time sustainable development of the organization, i.e. autogenous crisis. The notion of ‘crisis’ is analyzed and its forms in different socio-cultural systems are described. Crisis is a concentrated in time and at a certain place crucial, drastic for the system moment of truth, a point of bifurcation – a critical condition of the system, when it becomes unstable. Examples of crises in different social systems show that crisis is an inevitable stage in the life cycle of any living system. During its evolution any living system repeatedly passes a dynamic cycle ‘stability – crisis – new stability’. The author puts forward the thesis that crisis demonstrates the 3-rd law of Hegel dialectics - negation of negation. A conclusion was drawn that crisis breaks a former balance (stability) and at the same time provides an opportunity (potential) of passing-over to a new balance (new stability), i.e. crisis acts as a method of object movement from the former disintegration and conflict to a new condition. Speaking about a practical application of the phenomenon of crisis the author proposes to initiate by top executives of the organization a controlled (autogenous) crisis in order to eliminate contradictions, disproportions and misbalance arising in any living system during its life cycle. The autogenous crisis gives an opportunity to re-load the system and to move to a new level of stability. The conceptual apparatus was developed to resolve the task and goals, object, subject, key principles and components of the notion ‘autogenous crisis’ were defined.

The biopolitics of the Buribunks: the digital archive and the end of history

ABSTRACT This essay reads ‘The Buribunks’ as a biopolitical parody of the Hegelian dialectic. Schmitt tells us that the essence of the Buribunk is the fact that they keep a diary. For the Buribunks, this is a means of realising reason in History and through it, they become the instruments of World-Spirit. Yet the ‘noble realm’ that emerges when the Buribunks overcome the Master-Slave relationship looks more like the world of biopolitical management that we find in Foucault, than the victory of freedom and equality that, according to Hegel, characterises the post-historical state. I also argue that Schmitt's story speaks directly to some of the fundamental problems of our digital era: like the Buribunk, the digital subject enables an apparatus of surveillance by voluntarily recording the minute details of their life; the vast archive this produces then deprives the subject of the comforts offered by the myths of progressivism.

Fenomenologia innego. Paul Ricœur i Emmanuel Lévinas wobec ontologii całości

Artykuł ten jest próbą krytycznego omówienia sporu Ricœura z Lévinasem dotyczącego rozumienia etyki, ściśle rzecz biorąc koncepcji „podmiotu” etycznego. Wychodząc od przeprowadzonej przez obu filozofów krytyki nowożytnej absolutyzacji cogito, poddaję analizie rozwijane przez Ricœura dialektyczne ujęcie podmiotu (fr. soi) wyrażonego w formule „ten-który-jest-sobą-samym-jak-i-innym” oraz opisany przez Lévinasa fenomen „radykalnej inności”. Następnie staram się odpowiedzieć na pytanie, czy możliwe jest intelektualne porozumienie między Ricœurem i Lévinasem, polegające na wyznaczeniu wspólnego horyzontu dla koncepcji podmiotu otwartej dialektyki i podmiotu ukonstytuowanego przez źródłowe „wyznaczenie” do odpowiedzialności, w granicach którego można mówić o fenomenologii siebie, tj. fenomenologii podmiotu, który rozpoznaje się dzięki innemu niż on sam.

The Sands of Un-Certainty: Tidalectically Synthesizing Nature and Culture in Derek Walcott's Omeros

"The tidalectic, a tidal dialectic between the land, the sea, and the beach, is as follows: the land embodies the hypothesis, the sea the antithesis, and the beach the synthesis. Because the beach serves as the synthesizing locus for a Caribbean poetics of beginnings in Omeros, I am adapting Kamau Brathwaite's neologism of the tidalectic to re-name the threefold relation between these natural spaces, as opposed to Hegel's dialectic, which would abrogate the spirit and intention of a Caribbean nation-making poem. The use of the tidalectic is redefined as a poetic nod to Walcott's adamic act of re-naming and as a cue to the overall aim of this undertaking, which is to re-view Omeros through first and foremost a rebuttal of the very name that has kept it as an outpost of the very same empire it wishes to expel."

Friedrich Engels and the Technoscientific Reproducibility of Life: Synthetic Cells as Case Material for Practicing Dialectics of Science Today

textabstractFriedrich Engels’ dialectical assessment of modern science resulted from his fascination with the natural sciences (cell physiology, thermodynamics, theory of evolution) in combination with his resurging interest in the work of “old Hegel.” Engels became especially interested in what he saw as the molecular essence of life, namely proteins or, more specifically, albumin (Eiweis), seeing life as the mode of existence of these enigmatic substances. Hegelian dialectics is crucial for a dialectical materialist understanding of contemporary technoscience. The dialectical materialist understanding of technoscience as a research practice builds on Engels, but also on later (scientific) authors who were inspired by his writings, e.g., life scientists such as Haldane and Bernal. Considering the criticism raised against Engels’ dialectics by 20th-century Marxists, a dialectical diagnostic of contemporary technoscience can be achieved, which shifts the focus from artificial albumin as “living matter” (as discussed by Engels) to contemporary research on synthetic cells (as anticipated by Engels)

On the Swerve and the Flow in Thomas Adès's Polaris, op. 29

ON THE SWERVE AND THE FLOW IN THOMAS ADÈS’S POLARIS, OP. 29 ORIT HILEWICZ NE OF MY FAVORITE MOMENTS in John Rahn’s writings is the surreal yet vivid scene he presents in “The Swerve and the Flow,” after Lucretius, of “the universe as a frame of atoms of Being falling (naturally, according to their weight) forever in parallel lines, with this important tweak: occasionally, for no reason, an atom will swerve in its fall. . . . The frame of structure (or divine) order and the Swerve of free and artistic will.”1 Reading these words, I could not resist visualizing a scene of heavy, steady rain falling in a vacuum, comprising drops of varying sizes, each falling at a different pace but always directly downwards in multitudes of vertical columns. However, every now and then a drop deviates from its course of its own volition, unexpectedly, as if blown by a sudden wind.2 With this representation of the universe Rahn starts his discussion of musical Being and Becoming, and how music-theoretical accounts can reflect not only fixed and measurable aspects of music as an experience, but also its fluctuating, changing quality. Too often, Rahn contends, analytical methods take as their object a sort of frozen version of the piece, as if it has been transferred from time to space, where it is available all at once to be examined. Indeed, music’s in-the-moment O 224 Perspectives of New Music aspect, which Rahn describes as artistic or human will, is frequently represented in analysis only through the traces it leaves behind, after the change has already taken place. Being is inseparable from Becoming—a chaotic system does not Become, because free will and intention cannot be detected in complete chaos. Musical works establish their state of Being both contextually (within a work) and intertextually, through relationships created with other works. If each musical work is its own universe of falling atoms, then groups of works (e.g. tonal music, or Beethoven’s late string quartets, or serial film music) can share constellations—theorists have been dedicating their life’s work to draw these constellations and explore them. Rahn, however, is posing a problem. While the tools of our discipline (and Rahn is referring specifically to mathematical tools used by theorists) already accommodate accurate descriptions of Being, can mathematical tools be applied also to describe the artistic will that is the impetus of change? Thinking of this predicament when I first read Rahn’s essay, I set aside the fact that he was calling on us to reconsider the potential of mathematical theories for describing the fluctuating aspects of musical experience. Instead, I was interested in the more general problem of isolating that “free and artistic will,” in music-theoretical understanding, from its material consequences in a musical work. Becoming, or the Swerve, is a highly slippery concept to grasp, yet I was impressed by the force of Rahn’s descriptive language, which came close to conveying Becoming. It felt as if the language reveals a trace of the concept in lieu of an explanation. Rahn’s writing in this essay seems to me a powerful tool to express the experience of the Swerve. For example, Rahn never clearly states what a Swerve means for musicians. Neither does he expand on what in music (or in a particular musical work) can be considered Becoming or Being beyond characterizing Being as lack of change (“flash-frozen slices of the universe . . which lie quiet so that their structure may be perceived and described”3) and Becoming as change itself (“change, flux, fire, plasma, flow”4). Still, reading descriptions such as “music flows, and swirls madly,” and considering Rahn’s references not only to Hegel and Nietzsche but also to Langer, Bergson, and Deleuze and Guattari,5 it seemed clear that Becoming for Rahn encompasses something much broader than, say, Schmalfeldt’s deployment of the Hegelian dialectic in the analysis of certain aspects of nineteenth-century musical form, which defines musical Becoming as “the special case whereby the formal function initially suggested by a musical idea, phrase, or section invites retrospective reinterpretation within the larger formal context.”6 But restricting...

Leo Bersani's Speculative Aesthetics

Leo Bersani's Speculative Aesthetics Mikko Tuhkanen (bio) Our life is an apprenticeship to the truth, that around every circle another can be drawn; that there is no end in nature, but every end is a beginning; that there is always another dawn risen on mid-noon, and under every deep a lower deep opens. --Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Circles" We live in a universe of circulating forms—at once material and spiritual—that, while colliding with and resisting one another, also continuously repeat, re-find one another. The viability of our being-in-the-world depends on a certain continuity in our exchanges with an otherness never wholly differentiated from ourselves. The perception of correspondences and analogies is the preliminary step to the discovery as well as the creation of new correspondences and analogies. --Leo Bersani, Receptive Bodies Original thought cannot be "criticized"; one can only move with—which is to say, be moved by—it, only yield to its rhythm or fascination. "Critical" approaches not only assume that an object is available for recognition, that extant criteria suffice for its translation, they also embrace the reactive ethos whose hegemony in nineteenth-century historiography Friedrich Nietzsche traced to the insidious influence of Hegelian dialectics ("On the Utility" 142-43). Forsaking all critical postures, all ambition to rub against thought's grain, reading happens, and happens only, when readers approach a text "without reserve, without trying to criticize it" (Wright 238). Leo Bersani suggests that another name for an "unreserved" readerly attitude is "speculativeness." All thought worthy of the name speculates: its operation coincides with the self-reflexivity indicated by the term's etymological history (Lat. speculārī, speculum). In this, Bersani commits to an unpopular position: notwithstanding the recently re-emergent tradition that runs via Alfred North Whitehead to contemporary "speculative realists," claims for the efficacy of speculations have not fared well since Immanuel Kant dismissed synthetic a priori propositions in metaphysics and Karl Marx designated speculative thought, exemplified by Hegel, as the constitutive error of Western philosophy. The term "speculation" and its derivatives recur in Bersani's texts with striking frequency. When, in a recent interview, Bersani was asked if this repetition signals his work's affiliation with what is called "speculative philosophy," he expressed hesitation and doubt: "That I'm not sure of," he grumbled and changed the subject ("Rigorously" 292). The wager of the present essay is that, a little uncannily, Bersani's oeuvre, unfolding over the last half century, contributes to this philosophical history and is itself speculative. This kinship is uncanny because, as the interview response suggests, Bersani himself is not fully aware of (nor, it is important to add, does he care about) the implications of his participation in this genealogy. While he consistently indicates that the only thought worth committing to is always "speculative," he is not attuned to this term's full resonance in the history of philosophy (a deafness shared, I happen to know, by the interviewer who posed the question). The recent book Receptive Bodies (2018) contains some of Bersani's most explicit statements about the nature of "speculative" thinking. Bersani proposes that "essayistic writing"—a style with which he identifies his own work—constitutes "a way of writing that wanders, inconclusively," one that, as he rephrases, "moves speculatively" (Receptive 126, 128). Speculative writing demands that one is "thinking rigorously, but with an unemphatic, even somewhat relaxed rigor" (Receptive 126); it is marked by "the agitated questioning of inconclusive thinking, and of inconclusive being" (Receptive 128). Bersani asks, "why not simply welcome the pleasure in repeatedly failing to conclude—in our thinking, in our writing, in our sexuality?" (Receptive 127-28). Why not, that is, yield to our becoming as speculative beings? While these ideas are given the most explicit attention in Receptive Bodies, they are not new in Bersani's work. In a characteristic moment in 1995, for example, Bersani encourages us to "speculate" about a work of art beyond what the text "seems to authorize" (Homos 117); in 1990, he speaks of "the risky movement of speculative thought, of thought unanchored, set loose from all evidential 'land' securities" (Culture 151); and, in 1981, he finds in Stéphane...

Dissensus, Irony, Dialectic

Dissensus, Irony, Dialectic

La secularización europea como superación de la separación

This article proposes the conception of secularization as a process of Aufhebung, logically expressible through the Hegelian dialectics. From a critical standpoint, it can lead to questioning secularization as an abstract negation of religion or as a mere mechanical separation of spheres (both in the objective respect of institutions and in the subjective one of behavior). From a pro-positive point of view, this perspective also allows us to recover elements of the religious background of politics and philosophy that are beneficial to achieve a Europe united in diversity and open to otherness. Regardless of how secularization is understood, one of the main achievements of our continent’s history cannot and should not be used as a tool of exclusion and identity-based closure. Keywords: Hegel, dialectics, Europe, migration, radicalism, identity, alterity.

The Wall of History

This text is an experiment in ‘mythological anthropology’ (Georges Bataille). Through a parody of Hegelian dialectic in which the moment of ‘synthesis’ is displaced by a delirious ‘prosthesis’, autobiographical and historical elements are disfigured in a play of phantasms.

WRESTLING WITH THE SHADOW: THE PANLOGISM CONTROVERSY IN HEGEL'S FRENCH RECEPTION (1897–1927)

This article widens the scope of the history of Hegel's reception in turn-of-the-century French philosophy by thematizing an often neglected moment, namely the years 1897 to 1927. Before the so-called “Hegel renaissance,” in fact, the Hegelian dialectics was generally understood as a “panlogist” doctrine aimed at dissolving the concrete individual in the abstract dimension of the concept or in the all-encompassing realm of Absolute Spirit. However, even at the beginning of the century, attempts were made to provide a more positive assessment of Hegelian philosophy. The author reconstructs this panlogist controversy by analyzing the points of view of some prominent philosophers of the time, namely Charles Renouvier, René Berthelot, Émile Boutroux, Émile Meyerson and Léon Brunschvicg. The aim of the article is to provide a deeper understanding of the historical continuities and discontinuities characterizing Hegel's reception in France.

Trabajo y pasiones tristes. El sentido de lo negativo en Gilles Deleuze

Este artículo propone una lectura de la crítica de Gilles Deleuze a la dialéctica hegeliana, con especial foco en los problemas de la negatividad y las “pasiones tristes”. A partir de allí, se evaluará si acaso existe en el pensamiento deleuziano una cierta tendencia felicista que resulta en una reducción de la diferencia, de signo inverso pero en lo demás simétrica a la que Deleuze critica en Hegel. El artículo busca mostrar que hay, en estas cuestiones, una tensión interna en el pensamiento deleuziano que no puede resolverse sino por medio de una elección en la lectura.

Kant y el "círculo de los círculos"

The conceptual roots of the Hegelian dialectic are already presente in the Kantian transcendental philosophy, and especially in the Foreword to the first edition of the Critique of Pure Reason. This is the reason why one can speak about the Circle of circles in the context of the critical philosophy. Furthermore, the Kantian transcendental philosophy is the main conceptual background of every substantial direction of thought in the XX Century.

Individualidade, liberdade e educação (Bildung) em Max Stirner

Resumo Este artigo pretende discutir como os temas da individualidade, da liberdade e da educação se articulam no pensamento de Stirner. Começa-se por uma breve história da recepção de Stirner. Em seguida, analisam-se a subversão da dialética hegeliana e a crítica do humanismo ateu de Feuerbach e de Marx, que permanecem ligados à teologia cristã por divinizar a essência humana abstrata. Enfocam-se, a seguir, o nominalismo stirneriano e sua crítica de Deus, Estado, humanidade e sociedade como construções ideológicas que dominam o indivíduo concreto. Por fim, analisa-se a proposta de uma nova ética e uma nova educação, fundadas na singularidade do eu mortal e corporal.

Subjectivity and Transcendence: The Primacy of Truth and Goodness in Hegel and Levinas

AbstractThe Hegelian concept, with its all-encompassing power, epitomizes the kind of totality-oriented thinking that Levinas, a philosopher of genuine alterity, sharply criticizes. This paper investigates this antagonism by focusing on a notion that is pivotal for both authors, the notion of subjectivity. Hegel makes transcendence into an immanent dimension of the subject whereas Levinas conceives transcendence as the subject’s relation with radical exteriority. The decisive question is whether Levinas falls back into the failures of so-called ‘philosophies of reflection’ or whether the Hegelian dialectic of being and nothing relies on an un-condition for which it does not and indeed cannot account. The paper culminates in the thesis that Hegel and Levinas reverse the order of priority of the Good and the True. While Hegel conceives of the absolute as system of truth, for Levinas the ethical ‘failure’ of totalization constitutes a necessary condition for rationality.

Herbert Marcuse's Repudiation of Dialectics: From Reason and Revolution to One-Dimensional Thinking

Marxist dialectics continue to be relevant for both the study of society and political practice—a premise based on an analysis of selected works by Herbert Marcuse. In Reason and Revolution: Hegel and the Rise of Social Theory, published in 1941, Marcuse draws on Hegelian dialectics to defend Marxism, and he criticizes Marxists who have abandoned the dialectic and, consequently, their revolutionary goals. By the 1960s, however, Marcuse himself had shifted from a Hegelian-Marxist standpoint to a New Left rejection of dialectics and class struggle. Even though his work was immensely popular during the 1960s among intellectuals, students and activists on the left, his anti-dialectical theories weakened the analysis and contestation of capitalism during that time. His theories were also symptomatic of a larger trend among New Left intellectuals to abandon Marxism. This critique of Marcuse's later works suggests that for our contemporary moment dialectical Marxism is more strategically viable than Marcuse's 1960s theories of one-dimensionality and the techno-industrial society. Read More: https://guilfordjournals.com/doi/abs/10.1521/siso.2018.82.3.413

ПРОБЛЕМА ЕДИНСТВА МИРА В ПЕРСПЕКТИВЕ АНТРОПОЛОГИЧЕСКОЙ ИНТЕРПРЕТАЦИИ ГЕГЕЛЕВСКОЙ ФИЛОСОФИИ: КРИТИЧЕСКАЯ ОЦЕНКА

The article aims to consider the logical and historical-philosophical validity of anthropological interpretation claims for adequate disclosure of Hegelian philosophy’s meaning and content. It is proposed to accept the possibility of solving the problem of the world unity as an evaluation criterion. The author shows fundamental difference in approaches to ontological problems between classical Hegelian dialectics and its anthropological interpretation. The paper reveals the presence of insurmountable obstacles to the disclosure of the universal unity of being in the cases of adopting an attitude toward consistent anthropologization of the German classic’s philosophy.

A Synthetic Approach to the Grounds of Global Justice

This paper argues that neither the relational approach nor the non-relational approach to global justice is at once necessary and sufficient to deal with complex cases of global (in)justice. In this intervention in the dispute between relational and non-relational approaches, the aim of the paper is not to support one side and oppose the other, but to combine both approaches in order to arrive at a more robust approach. Using the strengths of the relational approach to compensate for the weaknesses of the non-relational approach and vice versa, the aim of the paper is to set out a mixed, combinatorial or synthetic approach that will be used to address complex cases of global (in)justice. Rather thandiscussing how the synthetic approach applies to a particular complex case of global (in)justice, the paper shows how a synthetic approach that intends to address complex cases of global (in)justice will look like. Perhaps, colloquially in Hegelian dialectics, the relational approach can be seen as a thesis, the non-relational approach as an antithesis and the combination of both approaches as a synthesis.

Nietzsche and the rhetoric of dialectics

Despite Nietzsche’s frequent disavowals of Hegelianism, scholars have repeatedly stressed Nietzsche’s affinities with Hegelian dialectics. Other scholars have responded by denying such affinities. Taking On the Genealogy of Morality as a case study and comparing it to the paradigmatically Hegelian A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right by Marx, this article argues that the question of whether or not Nietzsche is a dialectician unduly narrows the scope that Nietzsche envisioned for philosophy. For Nietzsche, a certain mode of philosophizing (dialectical or otherwise) becomes activated within a rhetorical matrix. Marx sees dialectics as the inexorable logic of history, but has to rely on the rhetorical persuasiveness of the chiasmus to make his claim plausible. Nietzsche, on the other hand, conceives of two incompatible logics: the nobles’ positive affirmation (non-dialectical) and the priests’ negative oppositionality (enabling dialectics). Instead of arguing for one logic over another, Nietzsche foregrounds their rhetoricity by performing the historically contingent invigoration and desiccation of each, leaving it to the reader to assimilate whichever mode of philosophizing they find most plausible.