As an intellectual exercise there is no harm in reading UC in light of Hinduism.

 

But to be clear, there is no chance given how Hegel understood the audience for the Phenomenology that Hegel had Hinduism in mind.

 

• Alan

 

From: hegel@yahoogroups.com <hegel@yahoogroups.com>
Sent: Friday, December 7, 2018 8:50 AM
To: hegel@yahoogroups.com
Subject: Re: [hegel] perception

 

 

Paul,

 

It is quite likely that Zizek is using Hegel as a vehicle for his own expeditions.  And he remains very interesting to me.  But there is certainly an irresistible magnetism to Hegel's thought -- initially because he is such a built up figure, but later in the encounter with the work itself.

 

About Unhappy Consciousness and Hinduism -- I would need to read the section closely and then think about it in relation to Hinduism.  My intervention in this debate has been based on my memory of secondary readings.  So I will certainly comment on the Unhappy Consciousness and Hinduism perhaps later -- about six months (more likely a year perhaps?  Since our reading group has to complete Perception, Force and the Understanding and the first part of Self Consciousness before coming to this.  Perhaps after February, when I retire at 65, I can afford to read two parts of Phenomenology at the same time, but things are building up and I may be more busy after retiring than before!) down the road.  Well, we don't have a flight to catch, So...

 

Srivats

 

On Fri, Dec 7, 2018 at 11:25 AM Paul Trejo petrejo@... [hegel] <hegel@yahoogroups.com> wrote:

 

Srivats,

 

Your quote from Zizek is original, and although he borrows terms from Hegel, his narrative of The Fall has nothing whatever to do with Hegel.

 

For Zizek, The Fall is the cultural crisis of 2000 BC, in his interpretation, the collapse of ,"ancient wisdom" and the rise of violent nation-states, precursors of modern Europe.

This is nothing like Hegel's narrative of The Fall in his LPR, which parallels that of Jacob Bohme.   For Hegel, the story of The Fall in the Book of Genesis is a mythology to illustrate the metaphysical fall of humanity from the innocence of animal life, to the Knowledge of Good and Evil which is part of human existentialism -- starting more accurately around 40,000 BC.

 

For Hegel, the Knowledge of Good and Evil occurs roughly during the early Sense-certainty stage, when people are still very close to animals in thinking -- i.e. in terms like "Here," and "Yonder" and "This" and "That" and "You and "Me" -- now we add the terms "Good" and "Evil".

 

This first sharp distinction is the mother of all further distinctions -- and thus the mother of Science itself, which is ultimately a science of distinctions. 

 

So -- Hegel is speaking about all of Humanity at an Existential and even an Ontological Level.    Zizek is merely speaking of a relatively local history. 

 

The contrast is such that Zizek's account is boring.    Hegel shares plenty of these ancient catastrophes with us -- but Zizek doesn't want to explore Hegel -- but to try some himself.

 

All best,

--Paul

 

P.S.  I feel that you have neglected my question about Hinduism-- about how Hegel's Unhappy Consciousness in his PhG refers really to the world's earliest Monasticism -- Hinduism (since Hegel clearly takes no Christian terms into his narrative).

 

 

 

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

On Thu, Dec 6, 2018 at 5:05 AM, R Srivatsan r.srivats@... [hegel]

<hegel@yahoogroups.com> wrote:

 

In The Ticklish Subject (not quite early, but 1999), Zizek begins his chapter on the Ticklish Subject with a discussion of Colin Wilson's book From Atlantis to the Sphinx where Wilson speaks of a synthesis between ancient wisdom and modern knowledge.  After a longish description of the book's attempt to come to a proper synthesis of the ancient and modern, Zizek comes to the paragraph:

 

quote

So what happened 3500 years ago -- that is around 2000 BC?  The decline of the Old Kingdom of Egypt, the highest achievement of ancient wisdom, and the rise of the new, violent cultures out of which modern European consciousness arose -- in short, the Fall itself, the fateful forgetting of the ancient wisdom which enabled us to maintain a direct contact with the 'dance of life'.  If we take these statements literally, the unavoidable conclusion is that the moment of the Fall (the forgetting of ancient wisdom) coincides with its exact opposite, with the longed for next step in evolution. Here we have the properly Hegelian matrix of development: the Fall is already in itself its own self sublation: the wound is already in itself its own healing, so that the perception that we are dealing with the Fall is ultimately a misperception, an effect of our skewed perspective -- all we have to do is to accomplish the move from In-itself to For-itself: to change our perspective and recognize how the longed-for reversal is already operative in what is going on.

end quote

(p 71)

This is what I was referring to.

There is an uncanny closeness between Crites Dialectic and Gospel, pp 349-350 and Zizek in this position, where Crites both disavows and claims the relationship between the concept of Unhappy Consciousness and Christian thinking.

Srivats

 

 

On Thu, Dec 6, 2018 at 3:19 PM eupraxis@... [hegel] <hegel@yahoogroups.com> wrote:

 

Which early book of Zizek do you mean?

 

Will

-----Original Message-----
From: R Srivatsan r.srivats@... [hegel] <hegel@yahoogroups.com>
To: hegel <hegel@yahoogroups.com>
Sent: Thu, Dec 6, 2018 12:27 am
Subject: Re: [hegel] perception

 

From what I understood of Zizek's reading of the Fall in his early book at least, His argument is that speculative comprehension is precisely the understanding of the Fall as a state of 'givenness'; that realizing fallenness as an inalienable and absolute condition is comprehending the truth of the matter.  The Second Coming is nothing but that realization. 

 

Now I am not sure if my memory of the above is accurate enough to pass muster, but if this is so, it would seem that Zizek is here not accepting the common understanding which would involve a faith in a blessed time to come..

 

But I may be wrong in reading this against your line about Zizek:  "In fact, Zizek seems to be influenced by the common understanding when he says that a speculative move simply involves accepting as the truth the irresolvable conflict exhibited as a dialectic." 

 

Perhaps you mean some other turn of his argument?

Srivats 

 

--

R Srivatsan
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