Acritical Vassals
There is no doubt that in Europe and the United States they consider us inferior. It seems to us this would explain why they are patient and sympathetic with governments they wouldn’t tolerate in their own countries, even for an instant. We, on the other hand, take up an inferior attitude in regards to that culture.
In philosophy, at least, it happens that way. We think a book elaborated by someone trained at a famous university has to be of great value. There are professors who continue to cite The Open Society and Its Enemies as a valid text. He situates Hegel as an enemy of an open and democratic society who, following Plato, expels individual liberty from the heart of society.
This is not true. Hegel critiques Plato for this expulsion, although he sees that fact as an effort by Plato to save the Greek state from the corrosive and subversive power of the free subjectivity that had appeared with Socrates.
In § 185 of Philosophy of Law there is a resounding critique against Plato. He not only expelled infinite autonomous personality, but he “even excluded it completely in its origin, which is found in private property and in the family, and then, in its subsequent development, regarding one’s own arbitrage and the choice of a profession.”
In § 206 Hegel posits how subjective freedom appeared in ancient States as a principle of corruption for the institutions and laws but in the modern State, where it is maintained within objective order and also within its laws, that subjective particularity becomes the beginning of any vitality in civil society.
There are at least six paragraphs in the Philosophy of Law where Hegel posits that same thesis. The free personality is the beginning of corruption in ancient States, but in the modern State it is the beginning of well-being and development. How could professor Karl Popper commit such a misinterpretation?
His great prestige gave him enormous authority to influence readers of Hegel. And there are still those who without reading Hegel follow Karl Popper’s interpretation. But there are many others who launch their nonsense to the four winds. One of them is the professor of philosophy at Princeton, Walter Kaufmann.
Isaiah Berlin writes that “he is one of the few philosophers of our time who understands, in tandem, Hegel’s thought and the world in which he lived.” W. Kaufmann writes the following: “I don’t so much reject the dialectic, as I say it does not exist.” (Hegel, Alianza Editorial, page 234, 1968).
We allow ourselves to doubt that professor Kaufmann read the Philosophy of Law. In § 31 Hegel very clearly describes what he calls the dialectic: “as in science (that is, logic) the concept develops from itself and is merely an immanent progression and a production of its determinations” (Spanish translation by Eduardo Vásquez).
It is true the term dialectic does not appear there, but “development of the determinations of the concept, immanent progress” are characteristics of the dialectic. In a book as well known by Hegelians as the Phenomenology we can read: “This dialectical movement of consciousness achieves within itself, both in its knowledge as in its object, as the new authentic object surges within it, exactly what would be called experience” (p. 58, Fondo de Cultura Económica).
{ Eduardo Vásquez, Tal Cual, 11 December 2008 }
Showing posts with label Eduardo Vásquez. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Eduardo Vásquez. Show all posts
11.25.2008
Moda y conceptos / Eduardo Vásquez
Fashion and Concepts
When a concept becomes fashionable we cease to know what’s being discussed. When the concept of alienation became fashionable it acquired so many meanings that it served for everything. Used by Feuerbach to explain how man was dominated by products and by the exteriorization of his own faculties, it was used by Marx to explain how men are dominated by merchandise, the product of their own labor force.
The lack of control over their own production turned them into slaves, beings dominated by their own production. Hegel had used it, since he realized that man was a being who had to exteriorize what constituted his being. He was not a passive being, as conceived by empiricism, but rather a being who modified his environment, who didn’t accept being dominated by things existing in the external world but instead acted on them, adapted them to his own thought and to his imagination.
Hegel highlighted the importance of activity and that’s why his philosophy is an exposition of how man becomes, by means of his activity, his own creator. In order to do that he had to exteriorize himself and submit to the products of his own activity. Due to its similarity to a psychiatric term it lost the previous meanings and moved into psychology and psychiatry. In the Soviet Union it was rejected because of its Hegelian origins.
Today we have a new term that’s become a furor among sociologists. It is the concept of epistemology. That term is the equivalent of a theory of knowledge. That was the meaning it had in Kant, who set for himself the problem of what we can know, of the limits of our knowledge, and of the problems that emerge when we go beyond those limits and incorrectly apply categories or entities that emerge in that transgression, but which are typical of space-time beings.
The postmoderns use epistemology in different ways, they apply it in the sense of a theory of knowledge, but also in the sense of an ontology. This term was used by Hegel as the equivalent of metaphysics, that is, a theory about what things are, what categories rule them. This is the source of Hegel’s critique of the identity principle.
Its inadequate application to finite beings. Ontology (or metaphysics) displaced the theory of knowledge, since before knowing what we can know it is crucial we know what things are, the world in which we exist and live, its origin, and how it is structured. In Hegel, we can say what G. Lukacs said: we can only know what we produce. Analyzing what we produce, we don’t get to know something strange, but rather we know what we are. Knowing the Greek world, its art, its philosophy, its literature, we know the Greeks. We would know nothing about them if they hadn’t left works that embody their thought, their psychology, their fears and hopes.
When a concept becomes fashionable, it not only loses precision, but it damages thought. It serves as a wild card for hiding conceptual deficiencies in order to pretend one has knowledge of the discipline in which that concept is used. It is said that words serve to hide thought, but they also serve to hide the lack of it.
{ Eduardo Vásquez, Tal Cual, 13 November 2008 }
When a concept becomes fashionable we cease to know what’s being discussed. When the concept of alienation became fashionable it acquired so many meanings that it served for everything. Used by Feuerbach to explain how man was dominated by products and by the exteriorization of his own faculties, it was used by Marx to explain how men are dominated by merchandise, the product of their own labor force.
The lack of control over their own production turned them into slaves, beings dominated by their own production. Hegel had used it, since he realized that man was a being who had to exteriorize what constituted his being. He was not a passive being, as conceived by empiricism, but rather a being who modified his environment, who didn’t accept being dominated by things existing in the external world but instead acted on them, adapted them to his own thought and to his imagination.
Hegel highlighted the importance of activity and that’s why his philosophy is an exposition of how man becomes, by means of his activity, his own creator. In order to do that he had to exteriorize himself and submit to the products of his own activity. Due to its similarity to a psychiatric term it lost the previous meanings and moved into psychology and psychiatry. In the Soviet Union it was rejected because of its Hegelian origins.
Today we have a new term that’s become a furor among sociologists. It is the concept of epistemology. That term is the equivalent of a theory of knowledge. That was the meaning it had in Kant, who set for himself the problem of what we can know, of the limits of our knowledge, and of the problems that emerge when we go beyond those limits and incorrectly apply categories or entities that emerge in that transgression, but which are typical of space-time beings.
The postmoderns use epistemology in different ways, they apply it in the sense of a theory of knowledge, but also in the sense of an ontology. This term was used by Hegel as the equivalent of metaphysics, that is, a theory about what things are, what categories rule them. This is the source of Hegel’s critique of the identity principle.
Its inadequate application to finite beings. Ontology (or metaphysics) displaced the theory of knowledge, since before knowing what we can know it is crucial we know what things are, the world in which we exist and live, its origin, and how it is structured. In Hegel, we can say what G. Lukacs said: we can only know what we produce. Analyzing what we produce, we don’t get to know something strange, but rather we know what we are. Knowing the Greek world, its art, its philosophy, its literature, we know the Greeks. We would know nothing about them if they hadn’t left works that embody their thought, their psychology, their fears and hopes.
When a concept becomes fashionable, it not only loses precision, but it damages thought. It serves as a wild card for hiding conceptual deficiencies in order to pretend one has knowledge of the discipline in which that concept is used. It is said that words serve to hide thought, but they also serve to hide the lack of it.
{ Eduardo Vásquez, Tal Cual, 13 November 2008 }
11.30.2007
Totalitarismo y pensamiento / Eduardo Vásquez
Totalitarianism and Thought
Both terms are incompatible. The existence of one is the death of the other. At the apparition of a man who aspires to exercise absolute power over society, that is, a power that penetrates up to the last interstice of human relations, that aspirant will try to liquidate thought. It’s not only a matter of liquidating the ideas that are opposed to him, but thought itself, since it is always subversive. When a functionary identifies himself completely with the ideas of his boss, he has renounced thought, he has renounced the only faculty that distinguishes him from animals. Freedom of thought and of expressing what is thought, which is inherent to democratic regimes, is what elevates men above animals. The man who aspires to be a totalitarian dictator cannot tolerate it. Democratic regimes, by nature, have to admit and foment it. What constitutes the dialectical in Hegel is, precisely, that thought houses within itself its own negation. And it’s no different in Marx. Only that the force of negativity is found in the development of the work force and in the means it elaborates in order to dominate production. Without negative power there would be no history or progress. Curiously, the pseudo-Marxist Chavistas do everything in their power to eliminate it. What happens to them is what Marx said about capitalist society, that it considers itself the final and definitive stage of history, sustaining that “history existed, but no longer” (The Misery of Philosophy). Regarding thought, all totalitarianisms try to eliminate it. In his program for governance one of Hitler’s biggest goals was to eliminate academic freedoms. It’s the same thing Ernesto Guevara says: it can’t be that the government has plans for development and the universities don’t march in step. Militarism is present in all totalitarianisms. The Venezuelan university already lived through this situation, in the sixties, when Soviet Marxism was the dominant philosophy (or anti-philosophy?). The followers of that current forced their students to repeat what the Soviet manuals sustained. He who castrates himself obliges others to undergo the same surgery. It was an era of extreme poverty for thought, whose effects we are still suffering. That unburied corpse maintains itself by means of its simplification, its superficiality and rejection of all critical versions. Its influence is seen in that philosophy of little spheres found in their pedagogical ideology. What appears there is the most absolute absence of thought. It’s not an ideology. It’s a group of slogans that buries all thought. Therein resides its success: it reinforces fanaticism, the absence of criticism and, above all, the absence of doubt, which is the manifestation of all thought. Our pseudo-Marxists have inverted the Cartesian axiom: I think, therefore I am, Descartes said. If I think, I don’t exist.
{ Eduardo Vásquez, Tal Cual, 29 November 2007 }
Both terms are incompatible. The existence of one is the death of the other. At the apparition of a man who aspires to exercise absolute power over society, that is, a power that penetrates up to the last interstice of human relations, that aspirant will try to liquidate thought. It’s not only a matter of liquidating the ideas that are opposed to him, but thought itself, since it is always subversive. When a functionary identifies himself completely with the ideas of his boss, he has renounced thought, he has renounced the only faculty that distinguishes him from animals. Freedom of thought and of expressing what is thought, which is inherent to democratic regimes, is what elevates men above animals. The man who aspires to be a totalitarian dictator cannot tolerate it. Democratic regimes, by nature, have to admit and foment it. What constitutes the dialectical in Hegel is, precisely, that thought houses within itself its own negation. And it’s no different in Marx. Only that the force of negativity is found in the development of the work force and in the means it elaborates in order to dominate production. Without negative power there would be no history or progress. Curiously, the pseudo-Marxist Chavistas do everything in their power to eliminate it. What happens to them is what Marx said about capitalist society, that it considers itself the final and definitive stage of history, sustaining that “history existed, but no longer” (The Misery of Philosophy). Regarding thought, all totalitarianisms try to eliminate it. In his program for governance one of Hitler’s biggest goals was to eliminate academic freedoms. It’s the same thing Ernesto Guevara says: it can’t be that the government has plans for development and the universities don’t march in step. Militarism is present in all totalitarianisms. The Venezuelan university already lived through this situation, in the sixties, when Soviet Marxism was the dominant philosophy (or anti-philosophy?). The followers of that current forced their students to repeat what the Soviet manuals sustained. He who castrates himself obliges others to undergo the same surgery. It was an era of extreme poverty for thought, whose effects we are still suffering. That unburied corpse maintains itself by means of its simplification, its superficiality and rejection of all critical versions. Its influence is seen in that philosophy of little spheres found in their pedagogical ideology. What appears there is the most absolute absence of thought. It’s not an ideology. It’s a group of slogans that buries all thought. Therein resides its success: it reinforces fanaticism, the absence of criticism and, above all, the absence of doubt, which is the manifestation of all thought. Our pseudo-Marxists have inverted the Cartesian axiom: I think, therefore I am, Descartes said. If I think, I don’t exist.
{ Eduardo Vásquez, Tal Cual, 29 November 2007 }
1.26.2007
Otra vez la postmodernidad / Eduardo Vásquez
Postmodernity Once Again
In an article published on December 17th, 2006, the economist Emeterio Gómez affirms that XXI Century Socialism has two foundations. The first, very easy to refute, is Marxism. According to Emeterio Gómez, Marx was mistaken in basing himself on a flimsy thesis: “work is the exclusive source of the value of merchandise.” More than twenty years ago already we commented to Emeterio Gómez that Marx does not speak about work, but instead about the force of work. We commented that (according to Marx) the force of work can be measured (the time used to produce) and not work itself. These critical observations appeared in El Universal’s cultural supplement and the article formed part of my book Libertad y enajenación (Monte Ávila Editores, 1987). On the other hand, the force of work as a source of value is not Marx’s idea, it belongs to Adam Smith. In the third manuscript (Property and Work) Marx praises that economist for giving the death-blow to the School of Ricardo, which proposed the rent of land as the source of wealth, when A. Smith proposed “work as the only essence of wealth.” In the same manuscript Marx turns to Smith for having established in multiple ways the unity of work and capital. Among those modes is the notion that “Capital is accumulated work.” The difference between A. Smith and Marx is found in that Marx changes the “work” of A. Smith for the “force of work.”
With the above we do not intend to say that Marx’s theory is still valid. We only demand a correct interpretation of his thought.
Chavismo has nothing to do with Marx. In it there are no proletarians, there are no forces of work (street vendors and the lumpen proletariat are not these): power is found in a single military man. This man has eliminated the base of economic development and of the proletariat’s formation: industry. To call this socialism is to praise Chávez, it is to give him a theoretical and philosophical foundation he absolutely lacks.
The second foundation of Chavismo, according to Emeterio Gómez, is “the death of the subject.” For that reason, he declares that Chavismo is postmodern. Naturally, Emeterio Gómez is in agreement with the death of the subject, of thought, of reason, of liberty. He performed hara-kiri on himself long ago. All those attributes are absent in him: there is only love, plenty of love, like Daniel and Hugo. But the death of the free, rational subject, with rights, is typical of Nazis and fascists. To not think, to not opine, absolute submission, love for the Führer, those were the equivalent values of the Nazis. Their theorists sustained that neither Kant nor Hegel were German because they had made the principles of the French Revolution their own: the universality of human rights, equality, brotherhood, all of these were contrary to the postmodern Nazis. Jews, gypsies, slaves could not be equal to the Aryans nor could they have the same rights. The Nazi’s were postmodern and quite consistent. Not only did they kill their consciences, but they destroyed their bodies. Black, very black (brown shirts) and red, very red (Stalinists). Chávez does not base himself on Marxism. His ideal State looks more like that of Plato, which emerges not as a historical evolution, but through Plato’s thesis of strengthening the State so as to avoid its decadence.
{ Eduardo Vásquez, TalCual, 25 January 2007 }
In an article published on December 17th, 2006, the economist Emeterio Gómez affirms that XXI Century Socialism has two foundations. The first, very easy to refute, is Marxism. According to Emeterio Gómez, Marx was mistaken in basing himself on a flimsy thesis: “work is the exclusive source of the value of merchandise.” More than twenty years ago already we commented to Emeterio Gómez that Marx does not speak about work, but instead about the force of work. We commented that (according to Marx) the force of work can be measured (the time used to produce) and not work itself. These critical observations appeared in El Universal’s cultural supplement and the article formed part of my book Libertad y enajenación (Monte Ávila Editores, 1987). On the other hand, the force of work as a source of value is not Marx’s idea, it belongs to Adam Smith. In the third manuscript (Property and Work) Marx praises that economist for giving the death-blow to the School of Ricardo, which proposed the rent of land as the source of wealth, when A. Smith proposed “work as the only essence of wealth.” In the same manuscript Marx turns to Smith for having established in multiple ways the unity of work and capital. Among those modes is the notion that “Capital is accumulated work.” The difference between A. Smith and Marx is found in that Marx changes the “work” of A. Smith for the “force of work.”
With the above we do not intend to say that Marx’s theory is still valid. We only demand a correct interpretation of his thought.
Chavismo has nothing to do with Marx. In it there are no proletarians, there are no forces of work (street vendors and the lumpen proletariat are not these): power is found in a single military man. This man has eliminated the base of economic development and of the proletariat’s formation: industry. To call this socialism is to praise Chávez, it is to give him a theoretical and philosophical foundation he absolutely lacks.
The second foundation of Chavismo, according to Emeterio Gómez, is “the death of the subject.” For that reason, he declares that Chavismo is postmodern. Naturally, Emeterio Gómez is in agreement with the death of the subject, of thought, of reason, of liberty. He performed hara-kiri on himself long ago. All those attributes are absent in him: there is only love, plenty of love, like Daniel and Hugo. But the death of the free, rational subject, with rights, is typical of Nazis and fascists. To not think, to not opine, absolute submission, love for the Führer, those were the equivalent values of the Nazis. Their theorists sustained that neither Kant nor Hegel were German because they had made the principles of the French Revolution their own: the universality of human rights, equality, brotherhood, all of these were contrary to the postmodern Nazis. Jews, gypsies, slaves could not be equal to the Aryans nor could they have the same rights. The Nazi’s were postmodern and quite consistent. Not only did they kill their consciences, but they destroyed their bodies. Black, very black (brown shirts) and red, very red (Stalinists). Chávez does not base himself on Marxism. His ideal State looks more like that of Plato, which emerges not as a historical evolution, but through Plato’s thesis of strengthening the State so as to avoid its decadence.
{ Eduardo Vásquez, TalCual, 25 January 2007 }
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