Just to remind you, the recent Hegel episodes are not our first: we covered Hegel on history (the later, in some ways less radical Hegel) last year, shortly before I started posting videos related to our episodes. So here's a video addressing that aspect of him.
Rick Roderick, talking in 1990, stresses Hegel's view of freedom (as Tom did) and discusses Hegel's relation to then-current politics. His reflections on communism are most interesting to me looking back on what the world was like as of 1990, not as much what he has to say about Hegel.
-Mark Linsenmayer
Hahgel, liberul demahcrasee, uhn VCahRs… Love it!
What Roderick says in the 2nd part about the creation of mass desires by capitalism is not limited to the sort of Marxist or leftist criticism he seems to express. This is a problem pointed out just as much by social conservatives and a cause of rupture between them and the free market libertarian wing of the Republican party. It’s interesting and significant that this creation of mass desires is of concern to the more outlying, less dominant views, left and right, even though they’re different from each other, but not as much to the homogenous middle.
Incidentally, there is a post today on Slate on this very issue, noting an ad created by Target to make kids and moms feel ashamed of home-made Halloween costumes:
http://www.slate.com/blogs/blogs/scocca/archive/2010/10/19/target-despises-homemade-halloween-costumes.aspx?wpisrc=obnetwork
“The ad only makes sense as a piece of propaganda in service of a broader mission, to teach children that they should be consuming identical mass-produced products whenever possible. Would a kid in a funny homemade Iron Man outfit feel inferior to his foam-suited peers? Maybe a kid in a foam suit might feel awkward about being one of eight matching Iron Men in his third-grade class. It’s all in how you set expectations.”
– Tom
Interesting to note here the parallel work on “Mimetic Desire” by the French Catholic writer Rene Girard. (Interviewed on the lit podcast Entitled Opinions here (the september 17th show). Basically he argues from readings in Western literature (mainly Shakespeare) that characters in great literature evolve according to a set of universal laws. Here is how Wikipedia summarizes the theory: “These laws and this system are the consequences of a fundamental reality grasped by the novelists, which Girard called the mimetic character of desire. This is the content of his first book, Deceit, Desire and the Novel (1961). We borrow our desires from others. Far from being autonomous, our desire for a certain object is always provoked by the desire of another person — the model — for this same object. This means that the relationship between the subject and the object is not direct: there is always a triangular relationship of subject, model, and object. Through the object, one is drawn to the model, whom Girard calls the mediator: it is in fact the model who is sought. René Girard calls desire “metaphysical” in the measure that, as soon as a desire is something more than a simple need or appetite, “all desire is a desire to be”,[9] it is an aspiration, the dream of a fullness attributed to the mediator.”
Having heard discussions of his work, it is astonishing how little remarked upon its proximity to Hegel and Lacan is.
Hula hoops and the conspiracy that keeps the secret of NASA’s frictionless ball bearings lest it might satisfy the needs of mankind? Really? Food, shelter and basic “ordinary” health care is just a push of a button away! All we have to do is to appropriate the means of production and voilà!