Jensen Suther
@jensensuther
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Unironic believer in the Absolute. Marx in my heart; Hegel in my head. PhD @Yale . Junior Fellow @Harvard .
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I wrote about the deep significance of Hegel’s thought for current debates surrounding AI and machine learning, for
@NewStatesman
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Trying to get into Hegel? Don’t start with the Phenomenology, or the lesser Logic. Start with the entry on Aristotle in the Lectures on the History of Philosophy. Probably the best and most concise summary of Hegel’s approach to metaphysics, dialectic, and speculative thought.
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Derrida once called Joyce the most Hegelian novelist, and this is true but not for the reasons he thought. To understand "Joyce, the Hegelian," one has to first understand "Joyce, the Aristotelian," especially since Joyce rarely alludes to Hegel, if ever. 1/
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I’ve been reading Aristotle seriously since December 2018, when I first read the Physics and Metaphysics systematically. I was prompted by Korsgaard’s and McDowell’s suite of essays on Aristotle, which I read earlier on the year. Few things have impacted my thinking as much. 1/
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Aristotle is the only philosopher whose metaphysics Hegel essentially just accepts. Aristotle’s one major limitation for Hegel lies in fact in one of his unparalleled strengths: his ability to derive the most fundamental speculative categories via empirical observation. 1/
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One of the greatest challenges for Marxist theory in the present is to overcome what I take to be one of its most baleful influences: Lacanianism. Not an exaggeration to say that “Lacanian Marxism” represents the self-annihilation of critical theory. 1/
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Fear of an AI takeover is so incredible because we have been dominated by our own “objectified” intelligence, in industrial technology, for almost 200 years. This is Marx 101. AI fears express a much deeper anxiety about not “them” but *us*, what we are doing to ourselves. 1/
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If Adorno were to write “On Popular Music” today, the production of chart-topping music using AI would be recognized simply as what it is: the logical conclusion of the process of formalization at the heart of industrialized culture. The inhumanity of pop music come into its own.
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The three greatest Aristotelians in modernity:
Hegel, Marx, Joyce.
The greatest failed Aristotelian in modernity:
Heidegger
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Marx was a teleological thinker, and rather than ignoring or explaining away this fact, we should affirm, celebrate, and seek to develop it further. Anyone who rejects “teleology” out of hand—especially in the name of progressive politics—is simply selling snake oil.
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The point of Marx’s critique is not to get capitalists to change their behavior by “exploiting” less; they are just doing what is required of them, to make the world go round. The point is rather to overcome a form of wealth (value) that structurally necessitates exploitation. 1/
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Lacan’s entire discourse is founded on a catastrophic misreading of Hegel: for Lacan, the Hegelian “I” is the self-certain Cartesian ego, “master of its own house.” The Unconscious - “discourse of the Other” - puts paid to this illusion of self-mastery. Wrong, wrong, wrong. 1/
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It’s often thought that Benjamin is proposing an alternative to Hegel’s philosophy of history when he opposes a “history of the vanquished” to the “history of the victors,” governed as it is by a whiggish principle of progress. But this is actually what Hegel was already doing.1/
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Dissertation submitted! Modernism, Hegel, Marx, Pippin, Postone - things I’ve been thinking about and working on for over a decade synthesized in a piece of writing I’m truly proud of. Can’t wait to share the book with the world.
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One of the most important results of contemporary research surrounding German Idealism is a recovery of the true meaning of "teleology" in history for Hegel, which has nothing to do with divine intents, metaphysical necessity, or a world-historical "demiurge" unfolding itself. 1/
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Cant’t overstate how important it is for anyone doing humanistic work to have a firm grounding in political economy, beyond just “the commodity fetish.” The Frankfurt School ideal of transdisciplinarity (notably, not “interdisciplinarity”) should be a universal academic ideal. 1/
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The thesis of an “epistemological break” between the young and the mature Marx—which, by the way, Althusser later retracted—is one of the most damaging misinterpretations in all of modern thought. The rot continues to spread to this day.
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Adorno so good: "America is purely a country of the bourgeois revolution; it is a country in which this revolution constitutes the precondition of its entire society, a country whose very foundation it has been to arrange society in a consistently bourgeois fashion."
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One of the most beautiful moments in all of Hegel is his deduction of the blossoming of a flower - literal flourishing - as the first expression of selfhood in nature. In its flowering, the plant is no longer endless green growth but marks its self-individuation with color. 1/2
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What Hegel gives us is a non-anthropological, non-empirical, deduction of the historically self-constituting, embodied form of any possible rational agency. Once one sees that it is this (and not neo-Platonic mysticism), the deep significance for a Marxian materialism is obvious.
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Incredible qt from Marx's dissertation: "Philosophy makes no secret of it. Prometheus' confession that 'I hate the pack of gods’ is its own confession, its own aphorism against all heavenly and earthly gods who do not acknowledge human self-consciousness as the highest divinity.”
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Judith Butler’s first book was a revised version of her dissertation on Hegel, and surprisingly, it is blurbed by none other than Robert Pippin. It also happens to be exceptionally good.
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G.M. Tamas, who was one of the greatest living Marxist theorists, passed away yesterday. I append below the powerful concluding to passage to his best known work:
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Long in the works, my article on why we should move beyond Houlgate’s “ontological reading” of the Science of Logic is now up on the Hegel Bulletin.
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When reading philosophy, it’s best to leave one’s “always historicize!” imperative at the door. Yes, philosophy is also a historical project. But above all it is a pure, a priori project, concerned with what it so much as means to act or believe or be. 1/
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I’m very thrilled to announce that, in December, I was elected as a Junior Fellow to the Harvard Society of Fellows. I couldn’t be more excited and grateful to have this extraordinary opportunity to continue my work on Hegel, Marx, and modernism in Cambridge.
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Civil War is the pinnacle of post-politics, on both a formal and a narrative level. Aside from a few oblique references to Trumpism, the film has no political content, and it elevates photography above narrative art forms like cinema because it is indexical, “objective.” 1/
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Lukács’ account of the “moment” (Augenblick) in his unpublished response to critics of HCC is the Aristotelian notion of phronesis, now applied to a collective agent. Marxism - rather than Heidegger - is the legitimate heir to Aristotle’s theory of praxis. 1/
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Marx 1861-1863 Capital manuscripts - a treasure trove: “Just as plants live from the earth, and animals live from the plants, so does the part of society which possesses disposable time live from the surplus labour of the workers. Wealth is therefore disposable time.”
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Gravity and Grace is one of the most evil works of philosophy I’ve ever read. Every line is an anti-materialist horror show, written with absolute disdain for reason and life. One should never forget that spirit is not a disembodied soul; “spirit is a bone.”
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After nearly a lifetime of defending Hegel's anachronistic defense of bourgeois society, Robert Pippin has finally conceded Marx's point. For anyone who knows Pippin's work, this is a pretty major turn:
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A temptation in the philosophy of biology that Aristotle and Hegel enable us to resist is “process ontology,” which is premised on a strawmaning of ideas like “substance” and “essence.” Process thinkers regularly misrepresent the view to which they are offering an alternative. 1/
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Alfredo Ferrarin’s Hegel and Aristotle isn’t often mentioned in contemporary discussions, but it is a staggering work of scholarship and should be read carefully by *anyone* working seriously on Hegel, not just those interested in the A&H connection. 1/
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In Seminar VII, Lacan makes a remarkable claim: the Aristotelian notion of happiness is now anachronistic because “the satisfaction of one depends on the satisfaction of all.” Happiness has no place in analysis, for Lacan, because it is now the object of politics. 1/
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I sometimes hear that I have an unfortunate tendency to “see Hegel everywhere,” as if Hegel is a kind of framework I’m imposing on Hegel-alien art objects. But there is no framework. Hegel has no theory and puts forward no claims. There is no “Hegelian position.” 1/
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Why does the history of philosophy matter? One way the continental-analytic line has often been drawn is to align the former with the idea that history is essential to philosophy, the latter with the idea that philosophy is “pure,” indifferent to its own process of genesis. 1/
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Heidegger is absolutely right when he tells us that it a catastrophic error to interpret live beings as “a kind that make themselves,” or as auto-poietic. They do not make themselves, as if they are carrying out a design they just happen to be; nor do they preserve themselves. 1/
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Pippin’s new book, The Culmination, is a masterful contribution to the Anglo-American discourse on Heidegger, decisively demonstrating the deep continuity between early and “late” Heidegger and in many ways dispelling the myth of a hard break with the infamous Kehre. 1/
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In a pivotal passage in the Grundrisse, Marx draws the key distinction between objectification (Entäußerung) and alienation (Entfremdung) he accused Hegel of collapsing in the 1844 manuscripts. So much rests on keeping alive the thought in passages like this one:
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I read in a recent popular academic work (Russia against Modernity) that Marx and Smith’s “labor theory of value” is wrong because we now know that labor is not the only source of value. 🤦♂️This sort of “scholarship” is the reason that public discourse re: Marx is so bad. 1/
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There are two, mutually exclusive options: either one thinks that socialism is an end external to history, which renders it arbitrary, or one thinks that socialism is an end internal to history, in which case it “realizes” history or is the “riddle of history solved” (Marx) 1/
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Panpsychism rightly holds that the only way to overcome dualism or “spookiness” is to show that mindedness or consciousness must have an antecedent in inanimate matter. This is right, but there is a different, hard-to-state alternative to panpsychism. 1/
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When Zizek tells us that the “harshness of Lacanian ethics lies in its demand that we thoroughly relinquish the reference to the big Other,” it is not at all clear that he can escape the nihilistic consequences: a rejection of objective, shareable criteria for a good life. 1/
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It is often claimed that Marx, in his mature scientific work, abandons the theory of alienation elaborated in the Paris Manuscripts. This is false: “What we are confronted by [in capitalism] is the alienation of man from his labor,” Marx writes in Capital. 1/
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There is an unfortunate tendency among otherwise very smart writers and thinkers (e.g.
@ggreenwald
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One of Hegel’s most important logical points is that “asymptotic” thinking - infinite striving towards the good, towards freedom, towards socialism, etc. - is ungrammatical: the asymptote has no place in matters of practical rationality. 1/4
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A parting reminder (until I return) that “non-empirical” inquiry (i.e. philosophy) is unavoidable, even (and really especially) for historical materialists:
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My article on Hegel’s concept of the organism, its role in his aesthetic theory, and the crucial implications of Hegel’s “bio-aesthetics” for a Marxist criticism, is finally out at Representations. Thrilled to see this in print.
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A complete transcription of Hegel’s Heidelberg aesthetic lectures has finally been found. This is an incredible development that could help to resolve the long-standing controversy surrounding the widely read Hotho edition. Very excited to read it!
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Thrilled to announce that my piece - “Hegel’s Metaphysics of Rational Life: Overcoming the Pippin-Houlgate Dispute” - is now forthcoming in the Hegel Bulletin. I hope that it helps clarify the immense stakes of that debate - for Hegel studies, but above all for critical theory.
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Reading contemporary liberal philosophers writing about “how [transhistorical] fascism works” after reading Adorno, Horkheimer, Trotsky, Postone, etc. is akin to looking at a child’s finger painting after beholding a grandmaster.
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What really makes Lacan difficult isn’t his obscurity. It’s the extremely lopsided ratio of dross to insight, particularly in the lectures. It is genuinely thrilling when one hits pay dirt, but the showboating and digressive displays of erudition are truly something else.
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Imagine thinking that, say, Foucault on power, not Hegel on freedom, contains the key to understanding the dynamic of capital in Marx. This is where we are currently at, and without an intervention at the level of metaphysics, there’s no way of adjudicating between accounts. 1/
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Does a secular materialist philosophy of freedom have any use for the concept of “the soul”? Should it be decommissioned, or abandoned to the theologians? Hegel and Wittgenstein say “no,” and I think we should to. 1/
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Joyce’s modernism lies in the realization that the only way to write a novel now, after Flaubert, is to bring it to self-knowledge. How better to do that than to recapitulate the entire history of the form, than to be the Odyssey (the epic) in a self-knowing way? 3/
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Hegel contra Barbie:
“The laying hold of ego-hood is an extremely important point in the development of a child; it is when it reflects into itself out of its immersion in the outer world. The most rational thing that children can do with their toys is to break them.”
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While Joyce was a self-avowed “Viconian” and only knew Hegel in passing, he attains to Hegelianism by radicalizing Aristotle: Aristotle’s idea of “form-as-activity” becomes the historically dynamic form of the novel - just as in Hegel it becomes the form of philosophy itself. 5/5
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In 1919, while Joyce was writing Ulysses, he wrote to a friend that he was systematically rereading Aristotle,
"the greatest of the philosophers."
Throughout the novel, Joyce invokes the divine as the "thought of thought" (MXII) and the soul as the "form of form" (DAIl). 2/
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It’s impossible to overstate the importance of this point: Marxism cannot do without the Hegelian idea of institutional, reciprocal recognition, which is in no way reducible to (a) a psychologistic idea of face-to-face acknowledgment or (b) the bourgeois notion of contract.
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In the debate over AI, the Hegelian point is that we must distinguish between three kinds of systems:
- Mechanism (non-living, non-purposive)
- Machine (non-living, purposive)
- Organism (living, purposive)
Only the third kind of system is an *intelligent* system. 1/
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Capital Vol. 2 is the one we tend to hear the least about, but after a systematic study over the past several months, I can say that Marx’s challenging account of the threefold circuit of capital (money, commodity, productive) is one of his most indispensable contributions. 1/
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In a new article for Krisis, drawing on Hegel, Marx, and Aristotle, I sketch the program for a “dialectical naturalism.” Thrilled to be included alongside such a wonderful group of scholars, including one of the living greats, Jay Bernstein.
𝐍𝐞𝐰 𝐈𝐬𝐬𝐮𝐞 𝐨𝐮𝐭:
𝐊𝐫𝐢𝐬𝐢𝐬 𝟒𝟑 (𝟏): The Care Dossier 2
Including:
• The second instalment of our dossier on The Political Economy of Care
• 16 critical responses to the Critical Naturalism Manifesto
• 5 book reviews
Visit it here!
>>>🧵
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The strongest argument against theological readings of Hegel is Hegel’s own claim that “God,” as a name for the Absolute, must be conceptually explicated. “God” can do no explanatory work on its own; the Concept must explain the meaning of God. 1/
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Writing about Marx, Hegel, and Aristotle for the next three weeks in an absolute grecian paradise:
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Yes: with capitalism, labor was emancipated from its feudal bondage and the idea of universal freedom dawned on the world. Marx was not a vulgar “anti-capitalist”; Marx, more than anyone else, simply held capital to its own promise of securing freedom for all.
“There’s nothing nice to say about capitalism” is not the Marxist position one might imagine it to be
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Marxism remains committed to the notion of the state, even given the crucial notion of its withering away. What Marx and Engels call the commune, or the “administration of things” rather than people, is the post-capitalist form of collective political deliberation, i.e. a state.
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Philosophy owes Hume an immense debt. Hume’s problem - his recognition of the absence of a proof for the objective validity of causality - set the task not just for Kant but also for Hegel. The SoL provides what Hume thought impossible, what Kant thought only subjectively valid.
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Just as Kant famously and rightly says that “there is no Newton for a blade of grass,” Robert Rosen teaches us that there is no Turing for a mouse or a human being. Rosen’s work remains one of the most powerful critiques of the computational paradigm underpinning work on AI.
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R. Brandom has emphasized that one of Hegel’s master thoughts is the idea of “giving contingency the form of necessity” in experience. This is the logical form that underlies Darwin’s theory of natural selection. In one sense, there has been no greater Darwinian than Hegel. 1/
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Engels on Hegel on life:
“The dialectical conception of life is nothing more than the thought of life in relation to its necessary result, death. For anyone who has understood life by means of dialectics, all talk of the immortality of the soul ceases. Living means dying.”
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Chapters 7 and 9 of the Lambda book of the Metaphysics contain the seeds of Hegel’s most radical idea: not that thought is a divinity but that divinity characterizes thought. It can assume any form without becoming that form, by thinking itself in thinking anything at all. 1/
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Aristotle’s idea of the soul as the form of form becomes in Joyce the idea of the novel as the form of form: the form of all literary forms. And the “thought of thought” figures as authorial self-consciousness retracing the history of its own self-determined constraints. 4/
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In a way, the most important question in philosophy is whether final causes are real, part of nature, or just an illusion, how we must understand some things. Aristotle was the first to really argue that they must be real; but it took Hegel to fully vindicate his insight.
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Part of what is so valuable about Hegel’s project is that he gives the lie to anyone purporting to avoid “universal type claims.” There is no one on this earth who isn’t committed to some conception of the good, how one ought to live. I don’t make the rules - pure reason does.
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The problem with post/structuralism has never been that it understands society and history as “texts” but that it conceives textuality on the model of the “signifier” rather than on the model of the *judgment*. This is the post-Kantian insight never grasped by the structuralists.
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For Marx, it is because of the liberal idea of the right to individual self-determination that capitalism represents revolutionary progress over what came before. Socialism is not the abstract negation of liberalism but must be its simultaneous negation and fulfillment. 1/
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The conflation of mechanism with "machine" by e.g. Dennett is one of the most fateful missteps in contemporary philosophy of mind. Machines are, a priori, artifacts, products of minded designers. Mechanism, by contrast, is truly mindless. Life is neither mechanism nor machine.
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This is why exploitation in Marx is a derivative rather than a primary category - because exploitation is not a bad, evil choice that some people make but something capitalists *must* do to persist. “Capital perishes if it does not exploit labor-power,” Marx writes. 2/
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Under communism, August 27th will be celebrated as a holiday across the globe. Like secular scripture, passages from the Encyclopedia will be publicly recited. This is because it was through Hegel that the possibility of universal emancipation dawned on the world.
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Learned today that the bikini is so named after Bikini island, where a nuclear bomb was tested in 1946, because of the “explosive” effect of the garment on male consumers. Good Adornian example of how culture and barbarism are two sides of the same late capitalist coin.
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It always fills me with joy to see Hegel so clearly denying the claims his detractors (and right-wing proponents) love to ascribe to him:
“The forms of nature cannot be brought into an absolute system, and this implies that the species of animals are exposed to contingency.”
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The Science of Logic is not the derivation of everything there is. Hegel explicitly rejects this position - i.e. “Krug’s pen,” the idea that, say, my twitter account can be derived from pure reason. The SL is rather the derivation of the form of what there can be. 1/
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One really incredible thing about various Hegel-inspired naturalisms in contemporary phil is how virtually all of them pay lip service to Matthew Boyle’s (truly invaluable) idea of a “transformative” approach to rational animality - but then argue the exact opposite. 1/
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One could be forgiven for forgetting that the death drive in Freud is the compulsion not just to mindlessly “repeat” but to master and even redeem the past. Lacan and Zizek have suppressed this - which also happens to be the true point of continuity between Freud and Hegel. 1/
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5/ Both the moral and journalistic standpoints inhabited by the film exemplify the idea of a “view from nowhere” - a view that Lukács pointedly diagnoses as the “apogee of capitalist reification” in his famous essay:
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The notion of “uploaded intelligence” is yet another version of the Cartesian fantasy of the disembodied mind, a “brain in a vat.” It is a fantasy because a brain in a vat is a brain in name only. There is no intelligence outside of an embodied, life-sustaining system. 1/
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An extraordinary feature of Hegel’s thought is that, prior to Darwin, in a Spinozist milieu, he provides a secular account of natural teleology in which life contingently emerges from a mechanical universe and nature’s only purpose is the one humanity gives to it.
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Zizek’s invocations of quantum physics represent one of the most traditional and conservative aspects of his thinking: it is simply meant to update the Kantian notion that acts of freedom must be exempt from the efficient-causal “texture” of nature. 1/
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Reading Todd McGowan’s recent Hegel book, I am shocked by how deeply the “Lacanians” misunderstand “mutual recognition” in Pippin and others. I have said this many times before, but recognition has nothing to do with overt, face-to-face, psychological acts of acknowledgment. 1/
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It thus makes complete sense that the young Marx, in the 1844 manuscripts, would adopt the Aristotelian notion of rational form, as further developed by Hegel, in order to formulate the task of a material realization of human freedom: genus-being (Gattungswesen). 18/18
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Louise Bourgeois says that “pain is the ransom of formalism.” This is a good, a true, slogan. But as Hegel also shows, pain is not an exception to form but is identical with it: it is living, organic form that makes the receptivity to pain so much as possible. 1/
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One of the most striking (yet perhaps less discussed) features of Kant’s CPJ is his claim that aesthetic judgments are actually higher and more fundamental than teleological judgments, which, strictly speaking, do not necessitate the critique of judgment Kant pursues. 1/
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Hegel's prima facie insane idea that the earth is a "geological organism" is actually a brilliant anticipation of Lovelock and Margulis' notion of Gaia theory, the idea that life is a self-regulating, planetary entity comprised of the totality of organic processes. 1/2
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It is hard to believe that there are still folks trying to show that the Science of Logic is a historically specific set of categories, a “theory of capital” avant la lettre. It’s time for Marxism to leave its incoherent ultra-historicism behind. 1/
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1/ The combination of narcissism, obscurity, and delusion in Lacan’s reflection below on meeting Chomsky says a lot about the insularity and aggressive irrationalism of post-structuralism as a tradition of thought. The irony is that his point against Chomsky is not wrong.
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While not even Hegel is always perfect, no other philosopher has been more consistently right. Aristotle is perhaps second, and early Heidegger third. No one after Aristotle had a more important breakthrough than Kant, but Kant is also dead wrong at least half the time.
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The history of philosophy after Kant and Hegel is a history of evasions. To paraphrase Adorno, the philosopher who intervenes in debates nowadays "discovers to his shame that whatever ideas he might contribute were expressed long ago--and usually better the first time around."
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