Rick Roderick on Hegel and Modern Life [full length]

source: The Partially Examined Life     2012年8月25日
This video is 5th in the 8-part lecture series Philosophy and Human Values (1990).
Thanks to rickroderick.org for making this available. I'm merely interested in redistributing to anyone who might enjoy and benefit.

I. Hegel was conservative.
A. The culmination of this long historical process is that history proper came to an end.
B. Right wing Hegelians took Hegel to be fundamentally right and therefore applied his method over and over.
C. To left wing Hegelians such as Marx Hegel's is a classic text but has an ambiguous legacy.

II. Marx criticized capitalism.
A. A criticism of capitalism is a criticism of Hegel because for Hegel, capitalism coupled with liberal democracy is the highest achievement of humanity.
B. The democratic state is in contradiction with the imperatives of the capitalist economy.
1. We are used to these contradiction in our current society. This was not true in Marx's time.
2. The secret of capitalism is the shift in identity from what you are in a society to what you own or have.
C. Marx identified several effects of capitalism.
1. It reduces human needs to those which can be bought and sold in the market place.
2. It produces from nature more technological abilities than in all of history.
3. These come into contradiction because of the imperative of the economy to make a profit and to fulfill nil these new needs.

III. Marx's ideology:
A. If you really want to know how someone thinks, look at their surroundings. This outlook, "materialism," criticized ideas by examining.
B. Moral or philosophical clilemnas must be understood in terms of being different for different classes.
C. There is a difference between a theoretical approach and an approach rooted in daily life.
D. You must not let your life be reduced to poverty or work.
E. Before moral problems arise, there are preconditions for human life that have to be fulfilled such as food, shelter, health care and freedom to pursue other goals besides work.

Rick Roderick: The Self Under Siege: Philosophy in the Twentieth Century (1993)

# automatic playing for the 8 videos (click the up-left corner for the list)

source: The Partially Examined Life     2012年1月25日
For more information, see http://www.rickroderick.org

Rick Roderick on The Masters of Suspicion [full length] 48:03
Rick Roderick on Heidegger - The Rejection of Humanism [full length] 44:52
Rick Roderick on Sartre - The Road to Freedom [full length] 39:58
Rick Roderick on Marcuse - One-Dimensional Man [full length] 45:23
Rick Roderick on Habermas - The Fragile Dignity of Humanity [full length] 47:34
Rick Roderick on Foucault - The Disappearance of the Human [full length] 45:47
Rick Roderick on Derrida - The Ends of Man [full length] 44:13
Rick Roderick on Baudrillard - Fatal Strategies [full length] 48:03

Rick Roderick on Habermas - The Fragile Dignity of Humanity [full length]

source: The Partially Examined Life    2012年1月25日
This video is 5th in the 8-part video lecture series, The Self Under Siege: Philosophy in the Twentieth Century (1993).

Lecture notes:
I. Habermas is perhaps the last important defender of a kind of rationalism that attempts to save the contributions of modernity, while recognizing its distortions and pathologies. He will attempt to disentangle enlightenment in myth in the name of human emancipation free from unnecessary constraints.
II. Habermas begins his project with a distinction between labor (as analyzed by Marx) and interaction. The first is based on production, the second on communication. The first is monological, the second dialogical. Freud serves as the model for the study of distorted forms of speech and action upon which a critical theory of society can take its start.
III. But to criticize distorted communication, a model of undistorted communication is required. Habermas seeks to develop an argument that the human species has a fundamental interest in undistorted communication that is built into the very structure of language.
IV. Undistorted communication must meet four conditions; the symmetry condition (everyone has an equal chance to talk and listen); the sincerity condition (everyone discloses what they believe to be true); the normative condition (everyone attempts to say what is right morally).
V. Such communication would make a free society possible in which the only force a free person must recognize is "the unforced force of the better argument". This is not just an elitist notion, since "in a process of enlightenment there can only be participants".
VI. Undistorted speech and action opens us up to the concept of communicative rationality that acts as a counter concept to merely instrumental rationality as criticized by Marcuse. For Habermas, we should seek a balance between instrumental and critical reason, between science and the ethical and the aesthetic dimensions that have been unbalanced by power and money, state and economy.
VII. The fragile self is caught between these abstract systems of control in its struggle for autonomy and meaning. Habermas' project for emancipation holds out the hope that a measure of the dignity of humanity can be rescued from the one-sided development of modernity through the power of solidarity and reason.
VIII. Habermas' project is ongoing, and includes activity in the public sphere where alone the promise of a reasoned consensus based on undistorted communication might be fulfilled.
For more information, see http://www.rickroderick.org

Rick Roderick: Philosophy and Human Values

# automatic playing for the 8 videos (click the up-left corner for the list)

source: The Partially Examined Life    2012年8月26日

Rick Roderick on Socrates and the Life of Inquiry [full length] 46:20
Rick Roderick on Epicureans, Stoics, and Skeptics [full length] 41:29
Rick Roderick on Kant and the Path to Enlightenment [full length] 44:03
Rick Roderick on John Stuart Mill on Liberty [full length] 44:14
Rick Roderick on Hegel and Modern Life [full length] 40:44
Rick Roderick on Nietzsche on Knowledge and Belief [full length] 44:33
Rick Roderick on Kierkegaard and the Contemporary Spirit [full length] 46:27
Rick Roderick on Philosophy and Postmodern Culture [full length] 33:57

Rick Roderick on Philosophy and Postmodern Culture [full length]

source: The Partially Examined Life    2012年8月25日
This video is 8th in the 8-part lecture series Philosophy and Human Values (1990).
Thanks to rickroderick.org for making this available. I'm merely interested in redistributing to anyone who might enjoy and benefit.

I. A recap of the lecture series:

A. Retrace the history of the accounts of human values given in Western Philosophy, and you'll probably find a dead end with some rather ordinary philosophic problems.
B. Hegel reminds us that human values and moral and ethical problems arise in historical circumstances.
C. Society and history has to do with economics and the state.
D. Culture is less systematic. A culture based on spectacle and images has a peculiar nonsystematic character.

II. Freud outlines the process of economic building with cultural unawareness.
A. The conscious mind is a very small part of our psychic life. A. Freud's goal was for the unconscious (id) to become the conscious (ego).
B. Mass culture turns the conscious to unconscious.
C. We can tune out the culture, however, we cannot destroy it.

III. Civilisation can be seen as a drama between eros (love) and thanatos (death). A. The mechanism of one side has clearly gained the upper hand (thanatos). 1. However, eternal eros might come in and strike a blow for the other side. 2. This is about to be a global situation that will be difficult to solve because there are no concrete walls. B. We must reinject resistance into or at least put up a simulation of resistance to it. 1. The worst thing we can do is to be unanimously for something. 2. We have not yet written the last obituary for radical democracy. C. St. Paul's answer is in Corinthians. It is a masterpiece of sophistry, rhetoric and bitter invective. D. Philosophy is disconsolate in principle. 1. Hegel said dialectics or philosophy does not run from detestation but tarries with it awhile and looks it in its face. 2. The structural principles of our society are as barbaric in their structure as they ever were, perhaps more so.