To this degree, the question of this relationship itself has in no way lost its relevance. Even for us today it would be all too hasty to assume that everything involved in this relation has been sufficiently clarified. Whatever side one ends up choosing, the decision remains, in one way or another, marked by the coordinates and consequences of the Hegelian break, and on least at some level one continues tarrying with Hegel.Īnother immense question falls within this general philosophical framework this concerns the relation between Hegel’s dialectics and Marx’s critique of political economy. One could indeed sustain that Hegel became the name of an inevitable, maybe even forced choice, comparable to the notorious ‘your money or your life’. whether Hegel stands for something good or bad, whether his developments are considered progressive or reactionary, whether thinkers depict one unique or several mutually-exclusive Hegels, and so on. Post-Hegelian thought is, so to speak, marked by a new affect, which accompanies the quarrels: viz.
#KARL MARX DIALECTIC MATERIALISM SERIES#
If Whitehead could write that ‘the safest general characterisation of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato’, then the nineteenth and twentieth centuries did not only produce a series of more-or-less pertinent footnotes to Hegel, but his philosophy moreover sparked an entirely new conflict, one that seems to be significantly more heated than the polemic around Plato. The name can hardly be pronounced without recalling the weight of polemics that revolve around his place and role in the history of philosophy.
Andrew Cole’s The Birth of Theory contains just such a displacement, and it concerns probably the most challenging name in the history of philosophy, the enfant terrible of dialectical thought, G.W.F. Or, an engaged attempt at re-actualising the historical material, combined with close reading of classical texts, may challenge the habitual narratives of the history of dialectics and produce maximal consequences, which end up redrawing the cartography and reshaping the panorama of the entire field in question.
The history of dialectics is undoubtedly a plausible candidate for a terrain where one would probably not expect any major surprises. Sometimes groundbreaking developments require no more than a minimal displacement within a familiar and apparently charted field. Īndrew Cole, (2014) The Birth of Theory, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. The review affirms Cole’s attempt to renew strong continuity between the Hegelian and Marxian dialectical method and, in parallel, proposes to extend this dialectical framework to psychoanalysis, which, despite not standing in the foreground of Cole’s volume, affords The Birth of Theory strong implicit conceptual guidance. It provides an overview of the author’s take on the history of dialectical thought, notably on the complex relation between the medieval and modern dialectic, before finally turning toward Cole’s engagement with Hegel and Marx. Humboldt Universität zu book review of Andrew Cole’s The Birth of Theory examines his philosophical position and the distinctive contribution of this volume to the ongoing renewal of materialist dialectics. A Review of The Birth of Theory by Andrew Cole
0 kommentar(er)
