Darwin

I read large chunks of Darwin's writings and many other smaller chunks of works about Darwin, all from the Norton Darwin: Texts and Commentary. Let's try to get the useful stuff:

First, a little bio: After his voyage on the Beagle, inspired by the idea of Malthusian struggle, Darwin came up with the idea that natural selection was responsible for the origin of the species. But he feared to publish this work, and spent 20 years developing his theory until a friend of a friend, Wallace, discovered natural selection himself. Darwin feared he had been pre-empted but Lyell, the mutual friend, arranged for them to publish simultaneously and give a talk together, and Darwin's pre-eminence immediately shone through.

Effects: There were evolutionists prior to Darwin, especially Lamarck, but those theories did not hold up to scientific examination. Quite startlingly (given our own feelings on the subject) the Darwinian revolution occurred very rapidly, first because naturalists, especially younger naturalists, rapidly accepted Darwin's research. More startlingly, the Victorian populace, which was fascinated by science, also accepted Darwin's research. The society's general interest in science allowed for Darwin's rapid success.

Before Darwin, humanity could see the hand of God in both man and nature. Darwin's biggest effect was to eliminate this certainty; no longer were things they way they were because God ordained them, but rather came about through struggles to the death. This reoriented everything, and eliminated teleology (something Lamarck tried to preserve). But Darwin, despite his atheism and materialism, did not give up on meaning in the universe. Origin of Species ends: "Thus from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved" (174).

By using language such as "grandeur," "exalted," "most beautiful and most wonderful," as contrasted to "famine and death," Darwin is clearly making evolution a hopeful progress. Famine and death may be the mechanisms of evolution, but its end result thus far has been humanity, which he wishes to exalt rather than debase.

Descent of Man: I found the Descent of man to be incredibly boring, far less readable than Origin. There are a few passages I wish to note. First, as seems quite obvious, this leading evolutionist seems to offhandedly support voluntary eugenics: "Both sexes ought to refrain from marriage if they are in any makred degree inferior in body or mind; but such hopes are Utopian and will never even be partially realised unil the laws of inheritance are thoroughly known. Everyone does good service, who aids toward this end" (253). Although he acknowledges this idea as Utopian, he seems to think that it will also become commonly accepted, once a theory of genetics is advanced.

Also: "Animals endowed with the social instincts take pleasure in one another's company, warn one another of danger, defend and aid one another in many ways. These instincts do not extend to all the individuals of the species, but only to those of the same community. As they are highly beneficial to the species, they have in all probability been acquired through natural selection" (247). This strikes me as a rebuke to the naturalists; the naturalists seem to see all return to instincts as negative; whenever impulses or drives are given free range, cruelty towards man results. But as Darwin has made quite clear, or impulses are also towards love and helping one another. Naturalism has emphasized the flip side of this to a poor degree.

Spencer: According to Richard Hofstadter, writing in 1955, Spencer combined Darwin with thermodynamics - his theory was predicated not just on "survival of the fittest" but also "the persistence of force" (aka conservation of energy). This led Spencer to take solace in an equilibirum, which ultimately led to his popularity among the rich: degeneration would always follow evolution, no ultimate progress would be gained, and thus there's no reason to try to legislate change. Evolution is a zero-sum game; humanity as a whole cannot be elevated (this union of Darwin and thermodynamics seems to me to completely misunderstand Darwin). Hofstadter also notes that Spence was popular in American b/c of his doctrine of "the Unknowable" - it was impossible to know anything in the realms of religion. This meant that religion could not be proved, but also not disproved, and thus, once religion and science were separated, the free practice of religion was not in the slightest bit conflicting with evolution (391).

Dewey on Darwin: Pragmatism is essentially evolution in the realm of ideas, so it's no surprise that Dewey appreciated Darwin. As always, Dewey wants to beat down an older, Platonic notion of change: prior to Darwin, change and origin were "signs of defect and unreality" and what change that did occur within a species (eidos) was merely the movement towards the final telos of that species - a "fixed form and final cause" reached by change (483, 485). Darwin did away with this Aristotelian notion (he wasn't the first to do so, but the most successful) and thus philosophy was permanently altered - the old problems of philosophy are done away with, and new ones appear. No longer are final problems and certain answers interesting, but rather, philosophy should turn itself to the questions of change, to truths that can be shown to "be generated by concretely knowable conditions" even if we don't know there "inclusive first cause and some exclusive final goal" (488). To think otherwise is "intellectual atavism."

Northop Frye

Northrop Frye – Essay 1 of Anatomy of Criticism

I found the introduction to Anatomy of Criticism uninspiring, but the first essay, “Theory of Modes,” was rewarding. In it, Frye divides literature up into five main modes, in descending order: mythic, romance, high mimetic, low mimetic, and irony. The mythic mode is about gods and demi-gods (the hero is different in kind from us); the romance is about a hero who exists in a world close to ours, but one in which “the ordinary laws of nature are slightly suspended” (33) (the hero is different in degree from us); the high mimetic mode takes place in a world just like ours, but follows a leader or other important people (the hero is just like us, but with greater authority and passions); the low mimetic mode doesn’t seem to have a hero, as it just gives us a variety of normal people; in the ironic mode, the subjects are inferior to us in “power or intelligence” and thus “we have the sense of looking down on a scene of bondage, frustration, or absurdity” (34). As Frye points out, as works like Ulysses seem to blend the ironic and the mythic, it turns out that these are not hierarchical distinctions, but circular ones.

As always, I read with an eye to naturalism. It seems clearly that naturalism represents a tragic mode, and thus it is at times either a tragic low mimetic mode or a tragic ironic mode. Frye describes the low mimetic (domestic) tragedy as the expression of the sensation of pathos. He states “the root idea of pathos is the exclusion of an individual on our own level from a social group to which he is trying to belong” (39). This seems to be the perfect definition for the low mimetic version of naturalism: in The Damnation of Theron Ware, in An American Tragedy, in Martin Eden and other novels a young man attempts to join a slightly higher social group and fails. And the young man in each of these cases is on our level not in terms of class, but in terms of intelligibility; he can speak and be understood. Furthermore, the contrast to the low mimetic tragedy is the Horatio Alger story; it is exactly like low mimetic version of naturalism, except that this time lower class individual is accepted into the next social class (45).

But the next step down, the ironic mode, gives us the works of Zola, of Hamlin Garland, and the great novel McTeague. In this ironic tragedy, the fiction writer “pretends to know nothing” (40); unlike a London or Harold, who beats us over the head with the various philosophies that offer up different values for life, there are absolutely no articulate characters proposed in this kind of life. Frye puts it this way: “Thus pity and fear are not raised in ironic art: they are reflected to the reader from the art” (40). The author has absented himself from judging the circumstances; he simply puts them on the page for the reader to see, and pretends “to know nothing, even that he is ironic” (40). And Frye agrees with my central tenet: that the force that sends the hero into his spiral is random. “Thus the central principle of tragic irony is that whatever happens to the hero should be causally out of line with his character […] Irony isolates from the tragic situation the sense of arbitrariness, of the victim’s having been unlucky, selected at random or by lot, and no more deserving of what happens to him than anyone else would be” (41). As much sense as this makes for the works Frye is discussing (such as The Trial) it doesn’t seem that useful for my understanding of naturalism. Or rather, it is useful insofar as it gives an explanation for why the works of naturalism operate as tragedies of the arbitrary, but not why the authors think such a system would be compatible with naturalism.

This connect up for me to something that Frye notes in the introduction; when discussing how authors are frequently not the best critics of their own work, Frye quotes John Stuart Mill: "the artist [...] is not heard but overheard" (5). I don't think that's uniformly true; for Frye, I think that's supposed to explain why Ibsen is not a good critic of Ibsen, because we are supposed to overhear Ibsen's ideas (in his art) not hear them (in his direct commentary to us). But I think this distinction becomes problematic/interesting when we apply it to the low mimetic/ironic distinction. We can only overhear the artist who pretends to know nothing; we must overhear the message of Zola. But we can hear Jack London loud and clear in some of his books; when his characters spout philosophies based on the works that he himself has read, it becomes hard not to hear him. And of course we hear him in The Jungle as well, in which he has a brief cameo as a socialist speaker.

More tidbits:

Frye describes naturalism’s movement from low mimetic to irony: “On the other hand, the term ‘naturalism’ shows up in its proper perspective as a phase of fiction which, rather like the detective story, though in a very different way, begins as an intensification of the low mimetic, an attempt to describe life exactly as it is, and ends, by the very logic of that attempt, in pure irony. Thus Zola’s obsession with ironic formulas gave him a reputation as a detached recorder of the human scene” (49)

Naturalism as a fringe version of literature; if literature is a different mode of language, more interested in putting together words in a certain way than simply conveying knowledge, then “literature goes about as far as a representation of life, to be judged by its accuracy of description rather than by its integrity of a structure of words, as it could go and still remain literature” (80)

Finally I want to extract from Frye the idea of the "green world" in comedy which Cavell makes so much of, and which I've argued that Deleuze has inverted. Frye writes: "We may call it the drama of the green world, its plot being assimilated to the ritual theme of the triumph and love and life over the waste land...Thus the action of the comedy begins in a world represented as a normal world, moves into the green world, goes into a metamorphosis there in which the comic resolution is achieved, and returns to the normal world" (182). This sounds exactly like Deleuze's argument that naturalistic cinema represents the fusion of an originary world and a real milieu, as displayed in Stroheim's Blind Husbands. But in Blind Husbands, everything is reversed: the suitor is in fact an interloper, and the blocking father figure is in fact a husband. And yet the suitor seems to have been successful, until we see that, in contrast to the comedy, the note the woman gives him is actually a repudiation of his interests. And we find that out while the suitor and the husband are on the peak, and there, in a terribly bleak green world, they behave like animals to one another, and the result is the death of the suitor. Cinematic naturalism, at least, seems to be the exact inverse of Frye's "new comedy," and that starts with the fact that the simple and pastoral "green world" has become an "originary world" of cruel impulses.

Cinema 1

Having now completed Cinema 1, I'll try to give an overview of it, to the best of my abilities. As the movement-image, it is concerned with three different kinds of movement images which represent the three different ways of making films, and then the fourth that calls them into question These are:

1.The affect-image, or affection. This mode of filmmaking corresponds to Peircean firstness; it is a thing in and of itself. It emphasizes close-ups to get the emotional affect of a human face. It does not take place in a realistic setting (which would render it secondness) but rather in an "any-place-whatever." The affect-image
2. The impulse image, or naturalism. The impulse image is a transitional place between firstness and secondness. It is concerned with real milieux, places that are really there, but it imposes on them an "originary world" where human beings are under the control of their animal impulses. It is neither an any place whatever nor a real milieu, but something in between.
3. The action image, or realism. The action image takes place in a real milieu, and it seems to be the dominant form of the movement image. It is the mode of secondness, what Deleuze calls the binomial or the duel, in which two terms are in conflict with one another and one must work to overcome the other.
Deleuze divides the action image into two main forms, the large form and the small form. The large form takes the form SAS' . A situation (a real milieu, it seems) is presented, a character must take an action to deal with that situation, and a new situation (S') is created due to the characters action. This is the mode of most westerns and of the gangster film. A negative corollary is SAS", where the new situation is worse than the previous one.
The small form, which is often dictated by a low budget and encompasses a noir, instead takes the form ASA'. What opens the film is action, which brings about a new situation, to which the character must respond with a new mode of action. The alcoholic hero is a version of this; he opens the film in a rut, a new situation presents itself, and he either rises (or fails to rise) to the situation and ends up with a new way of acting at the end of the film.
4.The mental image, or the crisis. This is a version of thirdness: not just the emotional affect, not just the relationship between the two things, but a third play considers them, interprets them, considers them logically. What matters in Hitchcock is neither who committed the murder (firstness) nor how they did it (secondness) but "the set of relations in which the action and the one who did it are caught" (200). Deleuze argues that this is the mode of logic and philosophy, and thus Hitchcock is the philosopher of the cinema. Unfortunately, the cinema could not rest there, although he wanted it too. By opening up the idea that the cinema could have a version of thirdness, could question its precepts, a crisis was opened up. Film moves beyond SAS and ASA (no longer believing that situations or actions can be changed) in favor of a much more diffuse and problematic mode of filmmaking. This mode, which appears in Italian neo-Realism, the French New Wave, German neues Kino, and certain films of American New Hollywood (Lumet, Scorsese, Altman), has these characteristics: "dispersive situation, the deliberately weak links, the voyage form, the consciousness of cliches, the condemnation of the plot" (210).

Cinema 1: The Impulse Image

I have now read the chapter on naturalism in Cinema one 4 or 5 times, so I'm finally going to try to make sense of it. It will be a crucial text for me.

First, Deleuze situates the "impulse-image" between the action-image and the affect-image. In the affect-image, which highlights emotion, a part (especially face) is rendered such a way as to become a whole. And space isn't part of a larger environment, but becomes an "any-place-whatever" (123). Through these techniques, emotion is evoked. And moving beyond that, to the action-image, we'll get the "Determined milieu" where things are where they are, not any place whatever. This will trade in affect for action. But in between is the impulse-image, which takes place in an originary world.

To try and make sense of this: a determined milieux is a realistic place. An originary world, by contrast, is a place dominated by impulses, which is to say animal drives. In an originary world "the characters are like animals: the fashionable gentleman a bird of prey, the lover a goat, the poor man a hyena" (123). The impulse image creates a strange fusion of a real milieux and an originary world; it is a determined milieux which seems to have been invaded and controlled by an originary world, usually with a single setting where nature dominates infecting the entire film. Deleuze has a whole list of originary worlds in Stroheim and Bunuel films: "the mountain peak in Blind Husbands...the rock garden of the Golden age..." (125). He concludes that list with: " Even though it is localised, the originary world is still the overflowing location where the whole film happens, that is, the world which is revealed at the basis of the social mileiux which are so powerfully described" (125).

This idea - that the originary world is the originary point - has so much room for unpacking. First, it reminds me of Freud's/Lacan's navel of the dream, which is the place where the conscious mind's meaning-making system is no longer able to graft an interpretation on the overdetermined expression of the unconscious. This seems to be very similar to Deleuze's concept; in the impulse-image, the originary world erupts into the real milieux, rendering the entire milieux a naturalistic system. And at the point of contact between the milieux and the originary world (the desert, the rockgarden) the interpretive act becomes problematic - after all, the desert potion of McTeague/Greed has long troubled reviewers. Besides that navel, the milieux and the originary world seem to have the same relationship as the conscious interpretation of the dream and the unconscious expression lying below it: "But what gives their description such force is, indeed, their way of relating the features to an originary world which rumbles in the depths of all the milieux and runs along beneath them. This world does not exist independently of the determinate milieux, but conversely makes them exist with characteristics and features which come from above, or rather, from a still more terrible depth" (125-126).

Deleuze identifies a number of directors who attempt to be naturalist but fail, with some interesting results (p 134+, including Vidor, Nicholas Ray, Fuller, Renoir, and others). But he is mostly interested in the three directors who do succeed in being naturalist: Bunuel, Stroheim, and Losey. The most interesting part of Deleuze's commentary on these directors seems to be his distinction between how they treat degeneration. Stroheim does straight degeneration; he has an entropic system of degeneration, and he uses Expressionistic techniques of lighting and shadow to demonstrate how degeneration occurs over a period of time (126-127).

Bunuel has a much more interesting and problematic version of degeneration, one which, like Stroheim and expressionism, is linked to surrealism. Deleuze describes the system as follows: "The originary world thus imposes upon the successive milieux not exactly a slope, but a curvature or a cycle" (127). This cyclical nature of degeneration, which takes place as a "precipitating repetition, eternal return" means that there is never anyone who is completely evil (as they will always swing back to good) and that good figures play a stronger role than in Stroheim, as there always exist those on the upper part of the cycle. But ultimately things do not improve, as even the positive figures ("the male or female lover, the holy man") will eventually return and thus are "no less harmful than the pervert or the degenerate" (127). Either way, naturalism becomes very close to leaving the movement image and finding the time-image, but will never get there because it keeps its conception of time "subordinate to naturalistic co-ordinates" and thus naturalism could "only grasp the negative effects of time: attrition, degradation, wastage, destruction, loss, or simply oblivion" (127).

Much later than Stroheim or Bunuel is Losey, in whom the degradation takes the form of "the reversal against self" (137). In Losey, every character breaks down and degenerates when their own impulses are too strong to bear. "Fundamentally, there is the impulse, which, by nature, is too strong for the character, whatever his personality" (137). But Losey does seem to offer up, like Stroheim and Bunuel, an ambiguous form of salvation. This reversal only affects the men: "It seems that the world of impulses and the milieu of symptoms enclose the men hermetically, delivering them up to a sort of male homosexual game from which they do not emerge" (138). The women in Losey, by contrast, do not seem to feel the impules. "The leave naturalism to reach lyrical abstraction."

Well, I'm sure there's much, much more, but I think that's all I have for now. Whew. This Deleuze is a bitch to read and think through, but it's also very satisfying and above all rich with meaning.

The Politica Unconscious

I should begin by saying that I found this book pretty unuseful. As Jameson himself admits, a great deal of the content is very technical. Having not read any Lukacs and very little Althusser, I found the complicated discussion of their two positions meaningless. And I felt less confused - as if Jameson was saying something important but I didn't understand it - than apathetic. He did not seem to be working in an area that seemed fertile.

This may be because Jameson, along with most Marxists, partakes in the Marxist myth which I find absolutely laughable: "In the spirit of a more authentic dialectical tradition, Marxism is here conceived as that 'untranscendable horizon' that subsumes such apparently antagonist or incommensurable critical operations, assigning them an undoubted sectoral validity within itself, and thus at once canceling and preserving them" (10). I couldn't agree with Jameson more that the various modes he's discussing - psychoanalytic, ethical, myth critical, structural, etc - deserve to be treated this way. They should all be canceled as all-inclusive systems but preserved for their own provisional value. But the fact that he accepts the Marxist orthodoxy that Marxism itself is outside of ideology and can be the Ur-system that preserves and cancels the others is just silly. Perhaps he explains why this is so the technical portion that I did not understand.

Besides this pre-eminence of Marxism, Jameson's main goal seems to be to historicize everything. - to turn all of interpretation into the retelling "within the unity of a single great collective story" (19). He seems to be rescuing interpretation from uselessness by hooking it up to a Marxist narrative of history, in which each text has something to tell us about it's historical time and place, which in turn will inform us about the march of history, which we hope to maneuver in favor of fairer economic distribution.

He also seems to side with Western Marxism in tossing aside Vulgar Marxism and accepting a more complex relationship between the base and the superstructure, one which requires an immanent critique rather than mere economic manipulation (see p. 36).

Outside of that big picture dismissal, I did find a few interesting things. First, Jameson argues that Anti-Oedipus is doing a similar sort of thing - Deleuze and Guattari are eliminating the mommy-daddy-me triangle in favor of a "reassert[ion of] the specificity of the political content of everyday life" (22). He ties this in with the Deleuzian command to ignore what a text means and look instead at how a text works. This seems to me to be an endorsement of Deleuze's pragmatism, although the rhizomes of Deleuze, as an alternative to the Freudian triangle, strike me as very far from Jameson's "collective story." Jameson is just reigning things in through a different, historical lens; Deleuze wants to let them all loose.

Some things that are interesting for naturalism: Jameson argues that Freud's theory of sexuality is truly just the theory of the flow of desire, but he seems critical of the fact that Freud has isolated sexuality from the rest of life, which seems to me a valid complaint (64). And he quotes Frye as saying desire is "the energy that leads human society to develop its own form" (71), which makes it sound opposed to naturalism and a good deal like Eros.

Finally, one thing that Jameson gets really, really right: "the mirage of of an utterly nontheoretical practice, is a contradiction in terms; that even the most formalizing kinds of literary or textual analysis carry a theoretical charge whose denial unmasks it as ideological" (58). Well said.

Karl Marx

On Hegel's Philosophy of Right


Every complaint I had about Hegel's philosophy of right is taken up by Marx in this brief piece. Most importantly, as the introduction in the Selected Writings of Marx points out, Marx takes issue with Hegel starting with abstract ideas and working out the way things should be, rather than taking the way things are and working from there to theory. As Marx puts it in a more philosophical manner: "Hegel gives the predicates an independent existence and subsequently transforms them in a mystical fashion into their subjects" (18). That's a mouthful, but I think it means that Hegel has taken what is supposed to be the acted upon and made it the actor. He's subordinated actually existing humanity to his abstract philosophy, which is obviously the opposite of Marx's project. Another quote makes this more concrete, whereas Hegel's Philosophy of Right (also translated as Philosophy of law) puts his theoretical conception of the law first and asks that the people conform to it, Marx writes "Man does not exist for the law but the law for man." (20)

The German Ideology

The German Ideology is a really great and clear philosophical enumeration of materialist philosophy, just as we'll see that the 18th Brumaire is an example of actually writing history using materialist philosophy.

The basic point of the German Ideology might boil down to this: the real world exists, and the world of consciousness is not a separate plane, but simply one aspect and manifestation of the physical/material world.

Marx starts, in a very un-Hegelian way, with dealing with what reality is. He begins at the very beginning: "The first premise of all human history is, of course, the existence of living human organisms" (149). Damn. That's a good first premise.

But how do you define the human organism? There are several ways (including consciousness and speech) which Marx mentions, but a materialist conception of humanity begins with production (150). Everything else in human society flows from the fact that they must work to produce their subsistence; every historical event stems from the play of intercourse - of trade - ie the course that production and exchange takes place.

This leads Marx to make some very big claims:
p. 155 - "Life is not determined by consciousness, but consciousness by life." His method of philosophy starts with "real living individuals themselves, and consciousness is considered solely as their consciousness" (ie not as some vague, abstract spirit consciousness)

158 - "Consciousness is, therefore, from the very beginning a social product, and remains so as long as men exist at all."

160- Since the interaction of production leads to different classes, one of which must dominate at any given time, "It follows from this that all struggles within the State, the struggle between democracy, aristocracy, and monarchy, the struggle for the franchise, etc., etc., are merely the illusory forms in which the real struggles of the different classes are fought amongst each other."

Spirit-philosophers like Hegel might describe the march towards liberalism as democracy becoming consciousness, but Marx knows that's a bunch of bull. All democracy is is the lower classes, who do not control production, trying to get empower themselves politically so they can control production. And if they control production, they can better their lives materially - the only goal.

162 - "Communism is not for us a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality [will] have to adjust itself. We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things." Post-Soviet Union, I have a tendency to view Communism as a vague and unattainable abstraction. It's good to have this perspective - Communism as an active changer of the world.

The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte

I have to confess, I didn't get much out of this piece. This is definitely Marx at his most cogent and insightful; you could subtitle it "Marx for Bartlett's."

It includes the classic lines: "Hegel remarks somewhere that all great, world-historical facts and personages occur, as it were, twice. He has forgotten to add: the first time as a tragedy, the second as farce" (594).

"Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly found, given, and transmitted from the past" (595). The first part of this phrase gave us Sartre's existentialism; the second, Levi-Strauss' structualism.

Besides that, the 18th Brumaire is just a very well-reasoned and very specific analysis of the movement of history, as it works itself out through class. The most interesting thing is the introducer's description of it "as a prologue to later Marxist thought on the nature and meaning of fascism" (594). Statements about Louis' rise seem to support this, such as: "The Bonaparte dynasty represents not the revolutionary, but the conservative peasant; not the peasant that strikes out beyond the condition of his social existence, the small holding, but rather the peasant who wants to consolidate it; not the country folk who want to overthrow the old order through their own energies linked up with the towns, but on the contrary those who, in stupefied bondage to this old order, want to see themsleves with their small holding saved and favoured by the ghost of the empire" (609).

Hegel's Philosophy of Right: Preface and Intro

Hegel's Philosophy of Right seems to provide some surprisingly ripe material for an examination of naturalism. It also seemed slightly more readable to me than much other Hegel.

The preface makes it clear that the project at hand is to prove that "the Right" - ie the concept of good and right laws in society - can be philosophically proven. And Hegel puts the idea that it can't be proven into the language of degeneration: his method (which he calls speculative, which is more philosophical than the "empirical" method but still scientifically based) "is essentially distinct from any other way of knowing" by virtue of its "mode of scientific proof." "It is only insight into the necessity of such a difference that that can rescue philosophy from the shameful decay in which it is immersed at the present time" (2). Hegel is attacking a philosophical method which- sense the old rules of logic seem to be in doubt - wants to toss scientific method into the dustbin altogether, and replace it with the belief that "that only is true which each individual allows to rise out of his heart, emotion, and inspiration about ethical institutions" (5). This transcendental way of knowing "the Right" is the enemy - it depends on "opinion and caprice" (6).

Hegel's manner of proving that "the Right" is considerably more difficult to follow, but it rests on a notion which is compatible with naturalism's vocabulary, if not in sync with its beliefs. Hegel does some very complicated stuff with the idea of determinism and free will, and ultimately produces something which sounds very much like Dreiser's famous opening to Chapter 8 of Sister Carrie.
Dreiser: "Our civilization is still in a middle stage, scarcely beast in that it is no longer wholly guided by instinct; scarcely human, in that it is not yet wholly guided by reason."

Hegel's goal is to prove that, although the human will is constantly beset by these instincts, which he calls (anticipating Deleuze) "impulses, desires, inclinations, whereby the will finds itself determined in the will of nature" (25), the will can actually overcome these impulses and reach a state of greater rationality, which he calls both universality and the "essentially human."

P. 30: "This self-consciousness which apprehends itself through thinking as essentially human, and thereby frees itself from the contingent and the false, is the principle of right, morality, and all ethical life." I can't say I entirely understood Hegel's complex proof as to why this is possible, nor do I agree with him. But I think this overcoming is the core tenet in his belief in the Right; when he declares "An existent of any sort embodying the free will, this is what right is. Right therefore is by definition freedom as Idea" (33) he's articulating that Right is what happens when humanity achieves freedom, not by abandoning itself to its instincts, but by understanding that it can free to act not on instincts but in a purely rational manner - ie, when its subjectivity becomes the same as rational objectivity.

Wikipedia offers these thoughts: "The Philosophy of Right (as it is usually called) begins with a discussion of the concept of the free will and argues that the free will can only realize itself in the complicated social context of property rights and relations, contracts, moral commitments, family life, the economy, the legal system, and the polity. A person is not truly free, in other words, unless he is a participant in all of these different aspects of the life of the state."

I think this is just a more grounded version of what I was saying. In other words, if impulses drive us to be outside these structures, our reason drives us inside them. And thus "the Right" is achieved when we can reorient our will so that we subjectively desire to be enmeshed in the objectively useful framework just discussed by Wikipedia.

Finally, Wikipedia summarizes the rest of the book:

The bulk of the book is devoted to discussing Hegel's three spheres of versions of 'right,' each one larger than the preceding ones and encompassing them. The first 'sphere' is abstract right, in which Hegel discusses the idea of 'non-interference' as a way of respecting others. He deems this insufficient and moves onto the second sphere, morality. Under this, Hegel proposes that humans reflect their own subjectivity of others in order to respect them. The third sphere, ethical life, is Hegel's integration of individual subjective feelings and universal notions of right. Under ethical life, Hegel then launches into a lengthy discussion about family, civil society, and the state.

Hegel also argues that the state itself is subsumed under the higher totality of world history, in which individual states arise, conflict with each other, and eventually fall. The course of history is apparently toward the ever-increasing actualization of freedom; each successive historical epoch corrects certain failures of the earlier ones, but Hegel does not seem to have figured out--and he admits as much--how the modern state can solve the problems of poverty and class division, something his successor Karl Marx would attempt to solve. At the end of his Lectures on the Philosophy of History, Hegel leaves open the possibility that history has yet to accomplish certain tasks related to the inner organization of the state.


Erin Sez: Hegel (and Kant) seem to be frequently dealing with linguistic problems. they seem to believe that language can actually capture the truth. this pre-rupture (pre-wittgenstein?) approach is what leads them to believe they can answer these questions absolutely and universally - the very form of language leads them to them.

History of Sexuality, v1

Although I never would have guessed it, The History of sexuality reads more or less like a history of naturalism, or at least traces a phenomenon which naturalism and degeneration are a part of. Along the way, Foucault does something which I find impressive and relieving in equal parts: he relieves Freudian psycho-analysis of the pseudo-scientific burden of naturalism and sets it up, at least partially, as an opposing force to the deterministic, normalizing, and racist beliefs of naturalism.

Foucault's thesis is a reversal of received wisdom: sexuality, which once flowed freely, was clamped down on during the 18th and 19th centuries - the periods of Victorian repression. Foucault denies such repression and argues instead that the tradition of confession, in which sexual desires, dreams, and whims, are extensively catalogued and brought to light, means that sexuality was actually flowing to an unprecedented degree in this period of so-called repression. Every single desire that a human has is transformed into discourse, and thus becomes a point of power relations (21).

This obsession with sexuality had four main outlets, which he outlines on pages 104-105:
1.hysterization of woman's bodies - women become "saturated" with sexuality
2.pedagogization of children's sex - children must be educated about the (paradoxically) natural inclination to a sexuality that is against nature
3.socialization of procreative behavior - power was exerted on the control and direction of fertility
4.psychiatrization of perverse pleasure - perverse pleasure was defined as anomalous, a normalization procedure was necessary

It's this last one that I deem most interesting. Foucualt tells of a village simpleton who paid young girls for some form of sexual gratification in 1867, and, when his actions are known, something quite remarkable occurs: the simpleton's "bucolic pleasures" become the object of "a judicial action, a medical intervention, a careful clinical examination, and an entire theoretical elaboration... they went so far as to measure the brainpan, study the facial bone structure, and inspect the possible signs of degenerescence the anatomy of this personage who up to that moment had been an integral part of village life" (31). This is part of the project of naturalism, or at least it's fellow travelers; Foucault, in a very useful move, is linking naturalism's racist narrative of (in his words) "degenerescence" with this project of turning sexuality into discourse.

Almost of equal importance is how Freud downplays concerns about Freud's "normalization" and argues that psycho-analysis "rigorously opposed the political and institutional effects of the the perversion-heredity-degenerescence system" (119). Psycho-analysis did this by, rather than hunting out desires like incest "as a conduct," "alleviating...the severity which repressed it" (130). Although this is a limited and not entirely clear endorsement of psycho-analysis, it is an important one for my project nevertheless.