What does Hegel mean by Desire? Most simply, Hegel says that “desire is self-consciousness,” but the natural question in following that is: what is self-consciousness? Or, for that matter, what is consciousness? I have not read enough Hegel to claim anything more than the most amateur level of expertise on this, and the answer is [...]
Tags: Consciousness, Desire, hegel, Object, Self-Consciousness, Subject
This week’s reading has brought me back to the well-worn yet still at least superficially complex world of Hegel’s Infinite. Hegel is the kind of writer that I think I understand when reading him and about him, but when I go to explain him, I inevitably stumble. Nevertheless, here I will venture a few thoughts [...]
Tags: Desire, Finite, hegel, Infinite, Infinity, Levinas, Other
Apart from the example of his tumbling ideas, the invigoration of his rhetoric, the penetrating asides, the humor, and his elucidations of Lacan, Hegel, Marx and Hitchcock, I think the following quotation from this old interview with Zizek best summarizes why I think he’s worth reading:
Today, whenever somebody tries to risk something politically, you immediately [...]
Tags: ethics, hegel, hegel marx, History, hitchcock, holocaust, humor, interview, lacan, Marx, mass murder, pragmatism, twentieth century, worth reading, Zizek
Having some free time this evening, I took the opportunity to begin reading Charles Taylor’s Hegel. I found his set up of Hegel’s context immensely interesting—especially as a coherent jumping-off point for further thought. Taylor asserts that Hegel’s whole philosophy is—put most economically—a vast attempt to solve a problem of “the nature of human subjectivity [...]
Tags: Aristotelian, Bacon, book, Calvin, calvinism, charles taylor, desacralize, freedom, god, hegel, Hobbes, Locke, Man, meaning, Modern, objective, order, Philosophy, predicament, reformation, science, self, subjectivity
That delicious three week holiday is almost upon us. What will you be reading? These are my plans:
Dan Simmons’s Hyperion trilogy (aloud, with my fiancee)—it is, in my opinion, the greatest science fiction trilogy of all time.
Charles Taylor’s Hegel.
William James’s Collected Works.
Walter Bruegemann’s Old Testament Theology.
Aristotle’s Physics.
Tags: aristotle, charles taylor, christmas, hegel, hyperion, old testament theology, physics, science fiction trilogy, simmons, william james
