Fall 2018 Seminar: The Frankfurt School and the paradoxical idea of progress

In this course, we exam­ine the metaphysics/ontology of indi­vid­u­a­tion, rup­ture, sin­gu­lar­i­ty, and time. Indeed, the ques­tion that starts philo­soph­i­cal think­ing (What is it?) is not only the ques­tion about the essence of real­i­ty, the what­ness of things, but it is also the ques­tion of the process of indi­vid­u­a­tion, change, and ulti­mate­ly of sin­gu­lar­i­ty. The sec­ond, but more foun­da­tion­al, ques­tion, asked by Par­menides (Is it or is it not?), will, per­haps para­dox­i­cal­ly, pro­vide us with the crit­i­cal tools for an under­stand­ing of the dialec­tics of exis­tence, the vor­tex of becom­ing described by Her­a­cli­tus. The rela­tion­ship between being and becom­ing, per­ma­nence and change (Par­menides and Her­a­cli­tus) will be cen­tral through­out the course. This is the ques­tion of time, which we will prob­lema­tize start­ing from the orig­i­nal thought of Anax­i­man­der. Yet, the point is to also appre­ci­ate the impor­tance of this ear­ly think­ing for (and in) our own times. We will also make ref­er­ence to oth­er philo­soph­i­cal tra­di­tions, such as Tao­ism in Chi­na.

Giv­en the mul­ti­ple Left, Lib­er­al and Neo-con­ser­v­a­tive inter­pre­ta­tions of Ger­man ide­al­ism in terms of the end(s) of his­to­ry and or its new begin­ning, we will inter­pret the world his­tor­i­cal spir­it 1. in the light of the enlight­en­ment 2. a close read­ing of Hegel’s Phe­nom­e­nol­o­gy engage the con­tem­po­rary world and its mul­ti­ple vari­a­tions. By think­ing through the after­math of the clo­sure of West­ern philo­soph­i­cal thought and its mean­ing for the neo-lib­er­al epoch, we will encounter some of the poet­ic respons­es to this clo­sure and the attempts made philo­soph­i­cal­ly to reori­ent thought. Authors read will include Kant, Hegel, Mal­larme, and Rim­baud among oth­ers.

Much has been said about “dialec­tics” in the con­text of left­ist think­ing about pol­i­tics, yet often the con­ver­sa­tion is often vague on the specifics of what is it that dialec­tics in think­ing actu­al­ly means? What is gained by deploy­ing “dialec­ti­cal thought”? To counter this ten­den­cy, we will trace spe­cif­ic artic­u­la­tions of dialec­ti­cal move­ment in thought, with the aim of gain­ing a clear­er under­stand­ing of the fun­da­men­tal con­cepts, ideas and meth­ods that relate to this mode of think­ing.

Our focus is on build­ing a ground­ing in think­ing about every­day life that seeks (rather than avoids) con­tra­dic­tions, and is capa­ble of sur­viv­ing (as Hegel said) the ten­sions that arise with­in it.

Read­ings will begin with a dis­cus­sion of sec­tions from Aristotle’s “Pri­or Ana­lyt­ics” and “Cat­e­gories”. We will then fol­low with a few excerpts from Hegel’s stud­ies of log­ic, while mak­ing explic­it Hegel’s con­ver­sa­tion with Aris­to­tle. We will con­clude with a close read­ing of Sovi­et philoso­pher Evald Ilyenkov’s pre­sen­ta­tion of dialec­ti­cal think­ing, in the con­text of the thread run­ning from Aris­to­tle, through Hegel and Marx.