Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

Someone asked on the question-and-answer site Quora, what are the differences between Hegel and Marx with regard to their understanding of the State? My answer: That’s a complicated question. You’re deep in the weeds here. But here is where you might start research on Hegel in particular: https://www.iep.utm.edu/hegelsoc... Very short course. For Hegel the State is the third moment in the usual dialectical triad, where the family is the thesis and civil society is the antithesis. Both are subsumed into the State. You don’t know what this means because it isn’t how normal folk talk? I’m with you. You can delve more deeply into what he meant by the terms involved, but it won't change that. For Marx the State is the executive committee of the ruling class. See the difference? Marx didn’t use the dialectical terminology that, as a Hegelian, he knew perfectly well how to throw about, when it came time to DEFINE the state. Marx did talk like normal folk in defining the state, a...

Last week, in writing about Judith Butler, I quoted a notoriously obscure sentence of hers, often invoked to show how much her work requires that the reader work in the decoding business. I'd now like to take a crack at the decoding of that sentence myself, so here it is again: The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power.   So ... what does this mean? I'll substitute three shorter sentences for that one ungain...

I remember years ago reading a book about cave paintings.  It was an unusual book. I can't remember the title and am not going to work too hard on recovering information about it, but I'll just write down here what I can remember, for fun. The writer seemed to be a Marxist, though of a specifically unorthodox kind. He disbelieved in the traditional Marxist notion of "primitive communism," that is, the quasi-Rousseauist idea that there was a time in human history before private property, surplus value, or class conflict. The rise of the ancient slave societies (on this trad-Marxist view) was over the dead body of those more primitive communities. But the book I was reading said that Marx was wrong in this, that there was a class conflict underway even among the cave dwellers, and that the famous admired cave paintings are evidence of it.  I don't remember the particulars of the argument, but IIRC at all, the author was telling us we shouldn...

A year or so ago I discovered that one of my relatives was reading some heavy-duty intellectual named Slavoj Zizek. Since she is merely an impressionable half century or so of age and her reading must be monitored, I asked her who Zizek was. She told me I could read about him on Wikipedia, and even sent me a link to the relevant article. I should mention that we've had philosophical differences before -- she was once an admirer of Ayn Rand, and I tried to persuade her that Randianism was crap. She now sees that it was crap, but I don't get any credit for my efforts at explaining this to her before she was ready.  Instead, she thinks of me as an officious intellectual meddler, and does things like referring me to Wikipedia for accounts of her recent reading material. I read, but wasn't satisfied by, the Wikipedia article. There's more about Zizek in a Routledge publication, "Fifty Key Postmodern Thinkers." It is arranged in reference-work fashion, alp...

Somebody at Yahoo!Answers asks what is "dialectical materialism." When answering such a question I try to abstract from the whole question of my personal reaction to the thing to be defined and just ... well ... answer the question.  Regular readers of this blog will know perfectly well that my reaction to DiaMat is negative. But that wasn't asked!  So I went with this: -------------------------------------------------------------------------------  Dialectical materialism is the metaphysical side of Marxism. On the one hand there is Hegel, the Towering Figure of mid 19th century German thought. Hegel developed a system sometimes known as "dialectical idealism" which says that the world moves in zig-zags, and that the ultimate goal of the movement is an Absolute Idea that knows itself and is all in all. God, then, is not the Creator of the world but its summation and Judge, and the world moves in its zig zag (back-and-forth among contraries, but none...

This will be the last post in which I'll be working from Leon Chai's book on the connections between Europe's romantics and America's Renaissance figures, because I am near finished with said book.  For one of my earlier invocations of Chai , go here. That scholar's summary of Schiller's philosophy is as follows: "For Schiller, there is a pathetic, moving eloquence [in the relation of consciousness and object]: never can the object attain the nature of the idea, in which reposes the infinitude of the purely ideational. Consciousness here embodies, implicitly, a state of striving or aspiration: having informed or identified itself with an object, it then attempts in relating that object to an idea to pass from finite to infinite, the transcend the material element of its own content through realization of the purely ideational." What the heck does that mean? I don't know. To those of us who aren't ever going to be tested on our grasp of ...