Žižek: Why You have to know Kant to understand Hegel
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- čas přidán 7. 05. 2024
- Good morning everyone. Today is like to explain why Žižek argues that you have to know Kant in order to understand Hegel. Žižek often refers to Kant as the “vanishing mediator” for Hegel, which in this video I will also try to explain.
Apologies for the sound of my dog in the background. She was sleeping and briefly woke up during the video.
Thanks for watching. You can a more detailed version of this in my “Complete Guide ro Žižek” ebook series. Now available on patreon. www.patreon.com/julianphilosophy
Julian
#zizek #slavojzizek #kant #hegel #marx
Apologies for the background noise. That was my dog Molly waking up and then going back to sleep. PS: the ebooks are here: www.patreon.com/julianphilosophy
oh god. you need to know hegel to truly know marx, and to truly know hegel you need to know kant. time to dedicate the rest of my year to idealism!
That's the whole point of Hegel. To grasp the Absolute, you must immanently analyze it through all its moments.
Then there are Hegelians who say that the distinction between analytic v continental philosophy is over exaggerated.
Kant is Hume and Descartes. Hegel was greatly inspired by Adam Fergusson, who believed in "common sense" philosophy. He believed that all moral systems could be combined into 1 and all the competing systems of morality were really describing the same thing. He was inspired by Adam Smith, Montesquieu, Hume and Hobbes. So when Marx sees some similarity between Adam Smith and Hegel, it is because Hegel's work was influenced by a second hand source of Adam Smith.
What Marx saw was that it is impossible to believe that all values can coexist. There are conflicts between interests.
Much of continental philosophy (Hegel, Marx, Freud, Lacan, Žižek, etc.) can be said to be footnotes to Kant, in the same way that Western philosophy is sometimes characterised at being footnotes to Plato. Kant was the point at which continental philosophy really starts, namely in trying to understand subjectivity.
@@he1ar1 read Schopenhauer , Hegel is beyond wrong. As was Marx as is anyone who believes that Objectivity and Subjectivity are connected.
Didn't Schopenhauer think objectivity and subjectivity were connected through the will existing in all things? Maybe Arthur wasn't too far from Hegel's absolute philosophy @@SI-qp7cm
And then in order to understand Kant you have to understand Hume. Fuck, I was drawn to philosophy because I didn’t want to work
To know Hume, you need to know Descartes.
Just learn Aristotle, from there you are fine.
@@SI-qp7cmstart with Thales and Heraclitus first 😨 or even Lao Tzu
You have to understand Hume to understand Kant, Kant to understand Hegel, Hegel to understand Marx, Marx to understand Zizek, so that you can finally analyze Christopher Nolan's Batman movies and Coca Cola advertisements the way they were meant to be analyzed...
I Kant understand any of this!
This is an important bit of information to understand many things about “the free subject”, which is THE topic of Juan Carlos Rodríguez’s work in Spain.
thank you for this video, you really articulate it very clearly.
Please, keep doing what you are doing
Ah, I finally understand sublation, thank you!
Video starts at 4:40
Apparently Hegel mistakes the boundaries of human reason as simply obstacles to be overcome, when in fact they are the very conditions that make knowledge possible...
Would it be fair to say that Marx anticipated the concept of the vanishing mediator in his essay “On the Jewish Question”? If I recall he makes similar arguments about how the stateform universalizes and secularizes Christianity, while capitalism universalizes and secularizes Judaism.
In SoL the vanishing mediator is Becoming. You try to think immediate thought without sensory representation or determination, known as Pure Being. You realize you are thinking Nothing. But this thought of Nothing still _is_. So it brings us back to Being, which again is Nothing. This back and forth, or dialectical dead-lock, is the immediate vanishing, we can retroactively in our Understanding analyze the moments, but the thought is immediate. Being immediately vanishes into Nothing which immediately vanishes into Being. Now, instead of abandoning the exercise due to the contradiction, we realize that this immediate vanishing is itself mediation, or Becoming, so the immediate vanishing has vanished itself into its own sublated concept of the Becoming. Continuing with Hegels method we know ask ourselves, "Becoming _what_?", movement from what to what? In our recollection we conclude it is Ceasing-to-Be (Being to Nothing), and Coming-to-Be (Nothing to Being), and this in turn will be sublated into Determined Being and Determined Non-Being. The point is you have to do the thought exercises yourself, it's hard, takes time, and requires the guiding of Hegels writing. Hegels lays out the moments for us, but to truly Vernunft it, we must do it.
(This is my understanding based on this video: czcams.com/users/liveQXR3IbfTnr0?si=4Lq0OJZ9PBXQGguE Antonio Wolf is great.)
approved
Is it fair to say the investigation to discover what the ideal object looks like is replaced by the investigation to discover what the ideal subject looks like, as well as, of course, interacting with the essence of the object in a way that you can dialectically redefine it?
no
@@cmo5150 thanks for the clarification I totally understand now
Is Hegel a vanishing mediator for Marx and Marx in turn provided materials for postmodern theory to come forth. Would be interesting if saw this way.
ugh
@@cmo5150 what?
50th like
As someone who’s read a bit… Don’t take shit like this too seriously. It’s never as necessary as people think it is, they’re just nerds that aren’t satisfied with a partial but still enlightening level of understanding, and they’re pressuring you to be as obsessive as they are. Don’t take it too seriously.
I always thought Marxism is mostly a critique the shortcomings of capitalism.. and how it requires war in order to exist.
lol capitalism has no “shortcomings”, Marx’s theory would say that capitalism is so productive and efficient that it will be its own undoing and overcoming; sublated
Why are we not critiquing Hegel - the way Schopenhauer did. The Thing in itself being solved by interaction with subjectivity is not open to him to take. Certainly not if one reads the Critique of Pure reason from start to finish. Shcopenhauer was correct to label Hegel a charlatan for that move. The only way one can accept it is by not understanding the fundamental question that Kant was looking into. Not a metaphysical but epistemological . Now apply Hegel to the critique of Hume as a resolution and it becomes nonsensical. That is how it seems to me at least.
What do you think of the following passages from the Phenomenology?
[...] if knowledge is the instrument by which to get possession of absolute Reality, the suggestion immediately occurs that the application of an instrument to anything does not leave it as it is for itself, but rather entails in the process, and has in view, a moulding and alteration of it. Or, again, if knowledge is not an instrument which we actively employ, but a kind of passive medium through which the light of the truth reaches us, then here, too, we do not receive it as it is in itself, but as it is through and in this medium. In either case we employ a means which immediately brings about the very opposite of its own end; or, rather, the absurdity lies in making use of any means at all. It seems indeed open to us to find in the knowledge of the way in which the instrument operates, a remedy for this parlous state; for thereby it becomes possible to remove from the result the part which, in our idea of the Absolute received through that instrument, belongs to the instrument, and thus to get the truth in its purity. But this improvement would, as a matter of fact, only bring us back to the point where we were before. If we take away again from a definitely formed thing that which the instrument has done in the shaping of it, then the thing (in this case the Absolute) stands before us once more just as it was previous to all this trouble, which, as we now see, was superfluous. [...] if the examination of knowledge, which we represent as a medium, makes us acquainted with the law of its refraction, it is likewise useless to eliminate this refraction from the result. For knowledge is not the divergence of the ray, but the ray itself by which the truth comes in contact with us; and if this be removed, the bare direction or the empty place would alone be indicated. (73)
Meanwhile, if the fear of falling into error introduces an element of distrust into science, which without any scruples of that sort goes to work and actually does know, it is not easy to understand why, conversely, a distrust should not be placed in this very distrust, and why we should not take care lest the fear of error is not just the initial error. As a matter of fact, this fear presupposes something, indeed a great deal, as truth, and supports its scruples and consequences on what should itself be examined beforehand to see whether it is truth. It starts with ideas of knowledge as an instrument, and as a medium; and presupposes a distinction of ourselves from this knowledge. More especially it takes for granted that the Absolute stands on one side, and that knowledge on the other side, by itself and cut off from the Absolute, is still something real; in other words, that knowledge, which, by being outside the Absolute, is certainly also outside truth, is nevertheless true - a position which, while calling itself fear of error, makes itself known rather as fear of the truth. (74)
It seems to be a critique to the idea that mediation somehow affects or "falsifies" the immediacy of the thing in itself (or that such a "falsification" isn't itself an activity of the thing in itself, implied in it). Hegel does make a difference however between an external kind of knowing (ratiocination, where the knowing subject actively intervenes and manipulates the concepts, associating subject and predicates) and an internal kind of knowledge (where the subject that directs the process of knowing is the object itself, and thus the knowing subject "becomes" the known object). We could say it's an inclusive view of the thing in itself (to be in itself does not exclude being for another, as the infinite, in Hegel, does not exclude the finite, or as God, in Nicholas of Cusa, is the "non aliud"), in contradistinction to the exclusive and dichotomic view of Kant. I think the exclusive view in the end makes "the thing in itself" an empty concept (an impossible answer to the question "How the world looks like when our eyes are closed?"), and here we should apply Wittgenstein's maxim: Whereof one can not speak, thereof one must be silent.
I've read and studied Schopenhauer for years (I've read even his commentaries to his own books of the World as Will and Representation), so I'm quite familiar with his critique of Hegel, but it's been a time I've read anything by him. I know he solves the problem my making the "will" the thing in itself, and it's ironic that he approaches Hegel in this, because for Hegel the Absolute is also the self-moving (in the sense that it moves freely, by its own initiative), but Hegel has a more "cataphatic" approach to such a principle. Schopenhauer, however, does try to interpret the world in the light of the thing in itself, Will, so he is (unwillingly) cataphatic about the thing in itself too.
@@thaliteco find it nonsensical . A fundamental misunderstanding of what Kant showed.
Perhaps an easier explanation then the snide close your eyes analogy is to imagine an alien race has landed . They do not have the same perception, senses or any of that. Let’s say they evolved from organic life forms such as trees or moss and eventually became sentient . Their view of what the world was like would be radically different . The thing in itself cannot be perceived , in any way, no matter what .
There are critique of Kant that are valid but Hegel is wrong beyond wrong. Not just here by the way. His notion of history forming around individuals is beyond wrong . The fact that Schopenhauer knew this to be the case , that he was a charlatan , is interesting .
I ask you this. Would there have been a World War Two without Adolph . Hegel would have an aneurism. Truth is the answer is of course .
What I find curious is there is a profound question Kant poses that it seems no one bothers to read. A conundrum that he has never been able to solve . This conundrum is better understood later by Darwin but Hegel blows past it to insanity.
Schopenhauer and his will , I do rather like it although I reject his pessimism . I don’t much like where Nietzsche took it with the Will to Power, given how few even care to power,
I find the latter Germans lacking in their resolution of nihilism. They conflate individual responses and constructions with group
@@SI-qp7cm but the aliens would still be living in our world, right? After all, you said they landed here. The 'thing in itself' is this nexus between our experience and theirs that allows for us to even say we live in the same world: we are perceiving the same thing differently, but it is still the same thing. It's not 'in itself' in the sense that it is separated from us, in the sense that it has nothing to do with us, there is no such a thing: we are "part" of the thing in itself, it being perceived by us can't be separated from it. By defining a thing in itself as something that has nothing to do with us, an affirmation like "The thing in itself cannot be perceived" is merely a tautology: such a thing, by being completely unrelated to us, is completely indifferent, completely irrelevant, is a non-concept. The "in itself" isn't the negation of it being perceived by us, but the negation of it being dependent on something else, it's the affirmation of the contingency of its being perceived in relation to its subsistence (i.e., it is in itself in the sense that it does not need our perception of it to subsist, and in the sense that its being perceived or not does not affect its nature); that is the useful or relevant concept of "thing in itself". Indeed such a thing can't be "accessed" (in the sense of being affected) through perception (because perception is its affecting us), only through action.
I've not read yet what Hegel said about the role of individuals in history, but if he said that history is made by the leadership or influence of key individuals, we can't say he is totally wrong (if it weren't for Mr. H., some other leadership figure would probably enter the scene and bring World War II).
OP is braindead
Imagine understanding the entire philosphy just to realise that is not what Hegel really meant.
That is Hegel in a nutshell.
And Marx sympathisers including Zizek.
Huh