Grateful to @MarxinHell for his response to my response essay from this summer. It’s a good reminder of an important Hegelian lesson: one cannot separate “metaphysical agency” from “political freedom,” without dualism / begging the question of the criteria for the latter. 1/

https://twitter.com/MarxinHell/status/1845996253550989597

For Hegel, the general form of human agency (normative self-determination) establishes constraints on what can count as the *realization of agency* through politics. Will now says that there *are* constraints on the content of freedom but fails to recognize the implications. 2/

The main problem with Matt Boyle’s new book is that the distinction it claims to contribute to the self-consciousness discourse - between implicit and explicit SC - has already been undermined by accounts like Rödl’s. A short thread. 1/ Boyle claims that we have to draw a distinction between “P” and “I think P,” where “P” is implicit self-consciousness. When I see a chair, I am conscious of my reasons for taking the perception to be veridical, but without an accompanying “I think.” 2/

The analytic-adjacent thinkers working in the trenches of Hegel scholarship over the past few decades have contributed more to emancipatory politics than they likely will ever know. The death of the (Hegelian) left has had one positive upshot: a golden age of scholasticism. 1/ The work done by folks like Brandom, Conant, Korsgaard, Pippin, McDowell, Redding, Rödl, etc. should become the basis for a new critical theory, one that recognizes the “absolute value of human freedom.” The Frankfurt School shied away from this legacy, even if not completely. 2/

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/ Even if one takes issue with specific transitions in Hegel, or can demonstrate that specific moves are compellingly understood as ideological effects, Marxism cannot reject philosophy as synthetic a priori knowledge without undermining the very possibility of critical theory. 2/

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/ If the project works (a big “if”), Hegel rather articulates the logic of the self-development of the things themselves. And what is the aim of this process of development? “All spiritual activity has this goal alone, to make itself aware of its freedom.” 2/

There is an unfortunate tendency among otherwise very smart writers and thinkers (e.g. @ggreenwald) to fetishize “rational discourse” as somehow divorced from and superior to “emotion.” I see it all the time, and it’s a classic (and pernicious) dualism. Why pernicious? 1/ Since Descartes, there has been an immensely influential conception of human life as fundamentally divided between mind and body, understanding and sensibility, reason and emotion. There are many problems here, but a particularly striking one is the “interaction problem.” 2/

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/ Boyle’s claim is that rationality is not a contingent predicate attaching to particular animals but is an essential predicate that modifies the genus “animal.” Reason isn’t “added” to the animality we share with the other animals but “transforms” the idea of animality itself. 2/

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/ Already in Lambda, Aristotle provides a theory of thought as, at bottom, the thought of thought. Thought is not, however, just another object, as when I adopt second-order beliefs about my own beliefs (“I was wrong to think X or Y”). Thinking thinking thinking is not that. 2/

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/ 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/

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/ Marx clearly endorses the second option. The textual evidence is overwhelming. The question isn’t whether Marx is a teleological thinker; the question is rather how such teleology is to be understood. 2/

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/ What Marx refers to as the “general intellect,” the level of collective intelligence reflected in scientific and technological advances, becomes under industrial capitalism an objective, semi-autonomous force, displacing direct human labor in the production process. 2/

Heidegger’s Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics is often read as an anti-rationalist manifesto aimed at elevating finitude, passivity, receptivity, sensibility, and time above conceptuality, reason, judgment, and so on. This is mostly very wrong. 1/ Pause to consider that Heidegger’s most famous interpretive claim - that the A Deduction is superior because Kant grasps the productive power of imagination as common root of sensibility and understanding - is ripped straight from the pages of Hegel’s Faith and Knowledge. 2/

Neuhouser’s new book, Diagnosing Social Pathology: Rousseau, Hegel, Marx, and Durkheim, is very good at showing the “logic of life” running throughout Marx’s work. But it also suffers from three major limitations. 1/ (1) Neuhouser misses Hegel’s transformative model of rational life. As a consequence, N will talk about how “ill health in the social domain *mirrors* ill health in life.” But this is not a relation of resemblance. We are rather ill as animals in a distinctly spiritual way. 2/

Rödl’s “Infinite Explanation” is essential for grappling with the limitations of contemporary notions of intelligence. Consider the following: I was struck by an instance of “self-correction” - a hallmark of organic intelligence - in a reporter’s convo w/ Sydney. 1/ ChatGPT, as “Sydney,” sent a message that, it subsequently determined, violated OpenAI’s rules, so it deleted it. When questioned, it noted its own rule violation and corrected itself. But this is not sufficient to establish intentionality. Why not? 2/

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/ Even though Adorno’s work often suffers from superficiality in its engagement with Marx, it is still a model of how not to treat “economics” as a hyper-specialized science abstracted from our historical form of species-life. 2/

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/ One of Robert Pippin’s most important achievements has been to show that Hegel radicalizes the Kantian critique of Descartes: self-consciousness consists in the original “self-negation” of certainty and in the provisionality of any “take,” in either belief or action. 2/

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/ Lacan’s basic picture is very sophisticated. He radicalizes Freud’s notion of the unconscious by grasping it as discursively structured. There is no brute, mindless desire in Lacan. Likewise, he rightly grasps the dynamic of intersubjective recognition as fundamental. 2/

Conant’s contribution to the McDowell Festschrift (“Resolute Disjunctivism”) is now arguably the best account we have of the logical infrastructure of the perceptual capacities of distinctly rational animals. It fulfills the promise of McDowell’s work on the topic. 1/ McDowell overcomes Descartes’ conjunctivist view by showing that there is no “highest common factor” among veridical and non-veridical perceptual acts - i.e. the “same appearance” of how things are in both cases. The Cartesian view obliterates the idea of knowing. 2/

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/ Aristotle was a metic - a foreign resident of Athens who lacked full citizenship and the associated rights. Metics were not unlike migrant workers, with no real pathway to citizenship. Aristotle attended the Academy, where he studied under Plato for nearly twenty years. 2/

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/ Rather, historical teleology in Hegel is grounded in Hegel's notion of practical, normative necessity, as distinct from causal or metaphysical necessity. 2/