Long Sunday

Deleuze and Guatarri on the national state and human rights

In a discussion of Deleuze and Guatarri's notion of the concept in What is philosophy?, one of the commentators points to p. 107 of that book where 'communication' is discussed. Starting with 106, the authors write:

If there is no universal democratic State, despite German philosophy's dream of foundation, it is because the market is the only thing that is universal in capitalism. In contrast with the ancient empires that carried out transcendent overcodings, capitalism functions as an immanent axiomatic of decoded flows (of money, labor, products). National States are no longer paradigms of overcoding but constitute the "models of realization" of this immanent axiomatic . . . .

Precursors

They say that the best way to get inside the head of a philosopher is to read all the books s/he read, or at least had on their desk at the time of writing. But what had the Kranke who wrote that bizarre passage ‘the master-slave dialectic’ been reading? It had always puzzled me, until recently when I managed to fill in one more piece in the jigsaw. Sure, I thought, there’s some Hobbes in there, this is some account of the founding of society out of a state of nature, individuals giving up some of their liberties for peace? And maybe there’s some Rousseau there too, the “One thinks himself the master of others, and still remains a greater slave than they” of The Social Contract. Much later someone put me on to Schelling’s System of Transcendental Idealism of 1800, and its discussion of recognition of self by other. But only this week did I realize all this only makes sense in the light of Fichte’s Science of Rights (1796). This is Fichte as doppelgänger, the guy who could be so fearlessly monological in the Wissenschaftslehre (1794) has done an about-turn by the time of the Grundlage des Naturrechts (one day I will exclusively reveal the role played in this volte face by Madame de Stäel) and is suggesting that other humans follow axiomatically from my own existence. It still reads like a deduction of otherness (when Hegel will find the other phenomenologically) but its language of ‘mutual recognition’, of the need to create ‘a community of free beings’, and of the danger of ‘a quarrel or war ending with the complete extermination of one of the parties’ is a striking precursor to the Stuttgarter.

And a funny thing in the preface to my library’s 1867 American translation: A.E. Kroeger writes that the Science of Rights “ought to have preëminent interest for the people of this Republic, since what the philosopher has in it deduced as the only rational form of government has been realized and established as such here.”

Hegel on Poverty

A while back the Young Hegelian had a post that reminded me of Hegel's passages on poverty in  the Philosophy of Right.  While these passages have been commented on extensively, I think it is worth noting that they reveal a great insight about our current situation. 

With all the recent self righteous indignation directed at the plight of the poor, it seems Hegel's discussion touches on something staring us in the face: The unfettered activity of a market economic system produces a group of people unable to participate in the benefits of that system.  While this may seem self evident to many Marxists, Hegel lays out the logic of this phenomenon without identifying a revolutionary alternative.  What is unique concerning the issue of poverty is that Hegel is unable to find a solution immanent within the system itself.  The larger implication is that the poor represent a certain blind spot for civil society, one that cannot be accounted for or incorporated into its regular functioning.  This presents a seemingly insurmountable problem for Hegel's dialectic, one that neither the mediating structures of Civil Society, nor those of the State, are able to accomadate.

Historical Enlightenment

"The nation must know the universal on which its ethical life is based and before which the particular vanishes away, and it must therefore know the determinations which underlie its justice and religion… This spiritual self-consciousness is the nation’s supreme achievement… All this is the work of the spirit, which knows how to bring the un-reflected – i.e. the merely factual – to the point of reflecting on itself. It thereby becomes conscious to some degree of the limitation of such determinate things as belief, trust, and custom, so that the consciousness now has reasons for renouncing the latter and the laws which they impose. This is indeed the inevitable result of any search for reasons." Hegel from the Philosophy of World History

War, Huh! What's it good for?

"War is the state of affairs which deals in earnest with the vanity of temporal goods and concerns- a  vanity at other times a common theme of edifying sermonizing.  This is what makes it the moment in which the ideality of the particular attains its right and is actualized.  War has the higher significance that by its agency...the ethical health of peoples is preserved in their indifference to the stabilization of finite institutions; just as the blowing of the winds preserves the sea from the foulness which would be the result of prolonged calm, so also corruption in nations would be a product of prolonged, let alone 'perpetual peace.'"  Hegel's Philosophy of Right/sec{324}

Beiser's Hegel

Sorry to take up more space (my colleagues at Long Sunday must have taken the advice and gone on holiday with the CIA) but I thought I’d share with you how good I think Frederick Beiser’s new book Hegel is. It seems like the fruit of many years teaching the subject, and sure enough he’s distilled the essentials down to a very readable, admirably clear and blissfully doxa-free account of Hegel’s philosophy. What’s more it has a nice cover, and though one isn’t supposed to judge a book by it, this sure beats Continuum’s recent gaudy efforts.

A Parapraxis and a Half

Your author is thankfully not going to follow the latest ‘meme’ (why do I dislike that word so much?) and list how many books he owns. He could list all the books whose price he has ‘self-lowered’ (as the Autonomist euphemism goes). But no, instead he is going to tell you about what he has been reading in the library, and following Thomas Mann’s perceptive comment, display “that childish impulse to force upon the reader verbatim all that the writer has read and drawn his consolation from, instead of allowing it to form the silent and reassuring background of his message.”