Tuesday, June 7, 2011

What does a non-totalizing Hegel look like?


Just to add what the non-totalizing Hegel sounds like, see how Clayton Crockett describes Hegel's dialectic:

"The Hegelian dialectic “works” by not working, by breaking down and exposing the gap that persists between reality and our ideals. It’s not that the dialectic gets reality to become our ideal; it’s that the dialectic shows how reality IS the irreducible gap within our ideals themselves."

"What the dialectic does is show us the split between what religion promises in an ideal way and what it can actually accomplish, as well as the gap between the actual state of political affairs and what the political is theoretically supposed to accomplish. This gap is internal to philosophy, to religion/theology, and to politics itself. And the Hegelian dialectic is the process that propels us to think about these problems in a complex, historical, contextual, abstract and concrete way. But we have to free ourselves from the modern progressive view that Hegelian Absolute Knowledge simply overcomes the Kantian antinomies AND the postmodern critique of Hegelian Absolute Knowledge as this devouring monster. We never escape the interrelated nexus of problems that we call philosophy, religion and politics, and we need to return to Hegel to understand this nexus, but we never return to Hegel in any simple or positivistic fashion."

No comments:

Post a Comment