I’ve been thinking a lot lately about why I like Hegel.  At first Hegel was the necessary evil that I had to go through to study Lacan, Marx and religion.  Then he took over my PhD, but in the back of my mind it was still just a hoop to jump through on the way to later research interests.  But now, I actually really like Hegel.  Especially after reading Heidegger.  I find Hegel so much more convincing in his method, his conclusions and the political implications of both (at least as I see them).

Then this morning I was listening to an old Radiolab episode on ‘What Technology Wants’, taken from the title of a Kevin Kelly book.  Kelly, who was one of the guests, was describing how technology taken as a whole, has come to have a degree of autonomy.  For example, imagine trying to turn off the internet.  I can’t even understand what that means.  How would you do it?

What Hegel offers is a way of understanding these kinds of things.  Technology, politics, religion… things that are related to human beings, but have developed a kind of autonomy.  God acts in the world.  I don’t believe in a divine being, but there is an idea, referred to commonly as God, who has effects on people.  Hegel gives us a way of understanding this without necessitating that we ascribe wholeheartedly to confessional ideas about God, but while also allowing us not to condescendingly dismiss the way that a substantial number of people order the world.  I think this logic is transferable to the way we think about all ideas or processes that originate within humanity, but then achieve a degree of autonomy (granted there is a difference between religion and technology, but perhaps the difference is as profound as often think).

Quoted in Fromm’s You shall be as Gods.  Surely Roland Boer has referenced this in something, right?

Clearly Fromm never saw a Woody Allen film.

My favorite podcast discovery of last year, though, was American Public Radio’s Dinner Party Download.  They have everything you could want: fantastically terrible opening jokes; historical trivia paired with excellent cocktail recipes; interviews that this year included Das Racist, Molly Ringwald, Kid Cudi, Judd Apatow, and Spike Jonze; and really good taste in music.  I know that I should enjoy insightful leftist commentary on the news more, but it’s just a solid 20 minutes of pleasure.

You should check it out.

- Reading it in a group is definitely the way to go.  I met with a four other people each week to discuss relatively small chunks of text.  I don’t think I would have been able to read it as consistently without the pressure of knowing I needed to be able to talk about it once a week.

- A friend turned me on to J.M. Bernstein.  His syllabus provides an excellent list of secondary texts both generally and for specific sections.  His discussion questions also helped to focus my reading.  There is a also a trove of information in the audio from a series of lectures on the Phenomenology that he gave at Berkeley in 1994.

- Regarding secondary texts, I used Quentin Lauer’s Reading of Hegel’s “Phenomenology of Spirit” and Henry Silton Harris’ Hegel’s Ladder (2 volumes).  I read nearly all of Lauer, but I dipped in and out of Harris more arbitrarily.  Harris proves interesting paraphrases of each of the paragraphs in the Phenomenology.  These paired with the analysis of the text at the end of Miller’s translation helped me to work through more difficult sections.  I also started out reading Hyppolite’s The Structure and Genesis of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, but decided about half way through that I wanted to read the book as a whole rather than breaking it up over the course of reading the primary text.

- On the side of thing I would have done differently, I think we may have rushed the reading a bit.  That may seem ridiculous since it took us 8 months, but I think that our/my impatience often got the better of us.  Realistically, I needed to get through the text so that I can move on to his other works, but I may have benefited from spending a little more time on the most difficult sections.

- In the Berstein tapes, in his introduction to the course, Bernstein tells the students that they will be writing short summaries of each of the sections as they go along.  I listened to this recording about 3/4 of the way through my reading and I didn’t feel like it was worth starting to do the summaries that close to the end, but I do think it would have helped me internalize the work more than I did.

Now that I’ve finished, I’m hoping to read Merold Westphal’s History and Truth in Hegel’s Phenomenology, Robert Pippin’s Hegel’s Idealism, and return to Hyppolite’s Genesis and Structure.  I’m also nearly finished with Glenn Alexander Magee’s Hegel and the Hermetic Tradition, which has been interesting to read in the wake of several of Marjorie Reeve’s works on Joachim of Fiore.  I suppose that I’ll also need to look at Cyril O’Regan’s The Heterodox Hegel and then I’ll be able to move on to the Philosophy of History and Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion.  Hopefully at that point I can move on to something other than Hegel… like Schelling.

Though a full length response seems a bit redundant at this point, I can’t help joining others in pointing to the most offensive section of the essay:

The proper response to our present, seemingly incommensurable tensions is not to gloss over or seek to rehabilitate the past in such a dishonest way, but to analyse why exactly Islam has largely taken such a dangerous, non-mystical and often political direction in recent times.

This surely has to do with the lamentably premature collapse of the Western colonial empires (as a consequence of the European wars) and the subsequent failure of Third World national development projects, with the connivance of neo-colonial, purely economic exploitation of poorer countries.

Because, of course, the initial colonial national development projects didn’t aim at economic exploitation.  Perhaps more disturbing than Milbank’s theoretical death grip on the good old days of ‘the Empire’ is the corresponding sentiment in Phillip Blond, who once informed me that everything good in India resulted from Britain’s influence and that America’s biggest problem was that it wasn’t British any more.

I also second Adam’s criticism of the patronizing position that we should support those forms of Islam that are like Christianity.  These of course are the good forms of Islam.

Finally, another particularly brazen assertion:

Christianity already proclaimed a universalism based upon love and the divinity of the human beyond law and custom. Far from being especially mysogynistic, Christianity is itself the sustained source of feminism, and it is evident that even St Paul played a positive role in this respect (so long as one does not absurdly imagine that he could have arrived at modern views concerning female emancipation in the first century AD).

I was reading Marx and Engel’s The German Ideology last night and came across this particularly apt reply:

Whilst in ordinary life every shopkeeper is very well able to distinguish between what somebody professes to be and what he really is, our historians have not yet won this trivial insight.  They take every epoch at its word and believe that everything it says and imagines about itself is true.

Perhaps it is just my disposition, but I read Milbank’s statement on feminism with an emphasis on the ‘the’ (as in ‘Christianity is itself the sustained source of feminism’).  It could be that this is an uncharitable reading of a grammatical error, but I can’t help but picture him making the statement, completely with a emphatic two handed finger jab thrown in to remind us that Christianity stands up for women’s right to submit dutifully to the authority of men and realize their spiritual potential.

- From the Deadweather’s ‘Will there be enough water?’ to whatever the hell is the first track on Deanna Carter’s album Did I Shave My Legs for This?

- From Explosions in the Sky to Fall Out Boy

- From Frightened Rabbit’s ‘Who’d You Kill Now?’ to Garth Brooks ‘Ain’t Going Down (Til the Sun Comes Up)’

- From Harlem Shakes to Harry Connick, Jr.

- From Jenny Lewis to ‘Be Our Guest’ (from Disney’s Beauty and the Beast)

- From Jimi Hendrix to Jimmy Buffet

- From John Lee Hooker to John Mayer

- From Josh Ritter to Julie Andrews singing ‘Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious’

- From The New Pornographers to some song from Moulin Rouge