CU Course on Hegel, Part 2a
The Fake “Other”
The
fundamental question of philosophy is the relation between human and
environment; or in other words, between mind and matter, or in philosophical
terms, between Subject and Object.
Some
philosophers, including the so-called “Post-Modernists” of our times, have
considered that humans are products of circumstances, or effects of chemical
processes, and do not have free will. In this view, human society is driven by
forces outside its own consciousness, and beyond its control. These
philosophers have consequently sometimes declared “The Death of the Subject”,
as if to say that all ideas of free will, and of the conscious, self-propelling
human development know as Humanism, are out of date now; and this view suits
the bourgeois class at this time.
James
Heartfield’s 2002 book “The
‘Death of the Subject’ explained” deals with many different
anti-Humanist theories and concludes:
“Like Mark Twain’s death, reports of the ‘Death of the Subject’ are
exaggerated. They have to be. The fulcrum point on which society turns is the
freely willing subject. For all of the attempts to imagine a world without
subjects, but only processes and objective forces, no developed society is
conceivable without rationally-choosing individuals at its core.”
In
our study of G W F Hegel we will have to return to the question of the relation
between the Subject and the Object, because it is central to Hegel’s
contribution to philosophy in general and to Marxism in particular. Hegel took
this relation and made it dialectical; in other words, he showed how its
development happens.
But
for the time being we are still concerned with what Hegel is not, and we will
use the attached Chapter 3 of Heartfield’s book (a downloadable file is linked
below) to show why the by-now-commonplace concept of “The Other”, which appears
in newspaper and magazine articles all the time, should not be attributed to
Hegel, as much as Hegel does write about “the other” in his books.
Hegel’s
“other” is another other, as can be seen from Heartfield’s writing. Heartfield
gives the 20th-century history of this confusion, and he is not the
only writer to have done so.
The
vulgar concept of “The Other” is a fixed, alien and threatening presence, real
or imagined. In this imaginary framework, individuals and societies are
believed to have their behaviour affected by fear of “The Other”, perhaps
unjustly. So for example, in the example of Edward Said’s “Orientalism” that
Heartfield begins with, Said’s complaint is found to be that the Muslims are
wrongly treated as “Other”, when they are not actually “Other”. The Muslims are
unjustly “Other”-ised, according to Said.
From
a philosophical point of view Said could have better held that there is no such
thing as “The Other” in this fixed sense.
Heartfield
then goes further back to show that the origin of the undialectical concept of “unbridgeable opposition between Self and
Other” is Paris, France, in the 1930s and 1940s, in the persons of
Alexandre Kojève, Jean-Paul
Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, among others. Kojève imported and popularized a
fake version of Hegel’s philosophy, and it took on a life of its own, even
penetrating down to popular bourgeois journalism, where “the other” has become
a stock phrase, or cliché.
We
will look at Hegel’s writing, including the famous Master-Slave dialectic, and
we will see that, as with Ubuntu, the Hegelian Self and Other are not in
“unbridgeable” opposition but are instead intimately linked, to the extent that
they are the condition for each other’s development, and as such, form a unity.
·
The above is to
introduce the original reading-text: The
‘Death of the Subject’ explained, 2002, C3, The Other, James Heartfield.
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