Hegel

What I’m Currently Reading

1. Karl Ove Knausgaard, My Struggle: Volume III  — I just received this in the email and am eager to plow through it this weekend. The Norwegian writer’s Proustian memoir, six volumes in all, are slowly being published in English. I think this is one of the finest works of literature in our time — at least based on my reading of the first two volumes.

2. Aristotle, Politics, translated by Joe Sachs — I am studying this as part of my research into the topic of homonoia (like-mindedness) for the paper I will presenting in Germany this summer. (I just completed a study of his Eudemian Ethics for the same reason.) I just discovered that Sachs had translated it and am obviously delighted. My one disappointment is that he didn’t write the introduction. I have nothing bad to say about Lijun Gu‘s introduction, but Sachs’ other introductions are some of the best short pieces on Aristotle.

3. Kostas Kalimtzis, Aristotle on Political Enmity and Disease: An Inquiry Into Stasis — A nice study of the concept of stasis, which means something like political disorder/disagreement/civil war. Stasis is the contrary of homonoia, so it is important for me to well understand stasis.

4. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, translated by Lewis White Beck — I am reading this with a friend who is doing some work on Kant. I have read the Groundwork many times, but have not read the Second Critique since 20 years ago. As I have been doing some reflective thinking on homonoia, it suddenly occurred to me that Kant had already figured out much of what I had been discovering. The Categorical Imperative might even be an articulation of the condition of the possibility of homonoia.

5. John McCumber, Hegel’s Mature Critique of Kant — I picked this up as a complement to my Kant reading and am finding it quite stimulating. Hegel thought through some implications of Kant quite well, however idiosyncratically, adapting Kant to his own purposes. Hegel’s relation to Kant reminds me of Aristotle’s to Plato. Interpreters often focus too much on disagreement and not enough of the treasure of deep and tacit agreement between each pair. I am frustrated with a common tendency to emphasize disagreement at the expense of deeper agreement. The riches of the tradition are more to be found in homonoia than doctrinal conflict.

6. Rene Girard, Battling to the End — I am still working through this slowly as one of the core textual sources of my paper. A provocative work, at once stimulating and maddening. Girard thinks through the war theorist Clausewitz as a way of understanding the apocalyptic dangers of our age. Girard’s last major work, more important than I thought on my first superficial reading.

7. Thomas Mann, Joseph and His Brothers, translated by John Woods — Somehow I convinced my reading group to take up this massive 1500 page epic, a work that Mann had considered his best but which had suffered from a bad English translation until Woods remedied that. We start in a couple of weeks. We’ll see…

 

 

 

The city is the soul writ large (Slow reading of Book II continued)

Picking up again in Book II from where we left off in our slow reading of Book II, Socrates proposes a certain way of getting at the notion of justice in the soul. Here is the text:

Glaucon, then, and the rest besought me by all means to come to the rescue and not to drop the argument but to pursue to the end the investigation as to the nature of each and the truth about their respective advantages. I said then as I thought: “The inquiry we are undertaking is no easy one but [368d] calls for keen vision, as it seems to me. So, since we are not clever persons, I think we should employ the method of search that we should use if we, with not very keen vision, were bidden to read small letters from a distance, and then someone had observed that these same letters exist elsewhere larger and on a larger surface. We should have accounted it a godsend, I fancy, to be allowed to read those letters first, and examine the smaller, if they are the same.” “Quite so,” said Adeimantus; [368e] “but what analogy to do you detect in the inquiry about justice?” “I will tell you,” I said: “there is a justice of one man, we say, and, I suppose, also of an entire city.” “Assuredly,” said he. “Is not the city larger than the man?” “It is larger,” he said. “Then, perhaps, there would be more justice in the larger object and more easy to apprehend. If it please you, then, [369a] let us first look for its quality in states, and then only examine it also in the individual, looking for the likeness of the greater in the form of the less.” “I think that is a good suggestion,” he said. “If, then,” said I, “our argument should observe the origin1 of a state, we should see also the origin of justice and injustice in it.” “It may be,” said he. “And if this is done, we may expect to find more easily what we are seeking?” [369b] “Much more.” “Shall we try it, then, and go through with it? I fancy it is no slight task. Reflect, then.” “We have reflected,” said Adeimantus; “proceed and don’t refuse.” — Perseus Project translation

That’s the text I would like to discuss. Here is some commentary to get us started: (more…)