# Hegel ## Dialectical Thinking Each thing is what it is only by becoming what it is not. ### Examples: - Tolerance is only truly tolerant by becoming intolerant - Freedom is only truly free if you limit freedom for those who will otherwise destroy freedom - Democracy is only truly democratic when you disenfranchise the people who have undemocratic ideas - Critical thinking is only truly critical when it adopts a Critical Consciousness - Desegregated spaces can only become desegregated if you segregate it from the structural deterministic force of racism (otherwise present in the superstructure of society). - Desegregation through segregation is rationalized once one realizes that a space can only be deracialized by intentionally racializing, which empowers those who are otherwise oppressed by racism #### Kimberle Crenshaw There is a fundamental difference between saying "I am Black" and "I am a person who happens to be black". Racialize to fight against hte race that's already present and dominant. #### Horkheimer and Adorno Theodore Adorno criticized the fact that pursuing synthesis through the mechanisms of dialectic thinking can lead to hypocrisy and nonsense. He was later turned into a post-Marxist by these very mechanisms, though. Believed that a perennial philosophy can emerge, if we simply negate the particulars first by using dialectics, but without completing the dialectical process of synthesizing the new. Negation is enough to allow for the perennial philosophy to be realized. ### Postmodern Analogs #### Foucault had the idea that through criticism, we can expose all of the absurdities and thus expand the potentialities of being #### Marcuse *From "Essay on Liberation":* ``` Beyond these limits, there is still the same, both physical and mental, for building a realm of freedom which is not that of the present. Liberation also from the liberties of the exploitative order. A liberation which must precede the construction of a free society; one which necessitates a historical break with the past and the present ``` The concept of alchemy is still present, with different wording, and less mysticism: the alchemist must purify themselves appropriately, or his alchemical magic won't work - a key hermetic belief. More: ``` What is now at stake are the needs themselves. At this stage, the question is no longer 'how can the individual satisfy his own needs without hurting others' but, rather, how can he satisfy his needs without hurting himself. Without reproducing through his aspirations and satisfactions his dependence on an exploitative apparatus, which, in satisfying his needs, perpetuates his servitude. The advent of a free society would be characterized by the fact that the growth of wellbeing turns into an essentially new quality of life. This qualitative change must occur in the needs (in the infrastructure of man), itself a different dimension of the infrastructure of society. The new direction, the new institutions in relationship to production, must express the ascent of needs and satisfactions very different and even antagonistic to those prevalent in the exploitative societies. Such a change would constitute the instinctual asis basis for freedom, which the long history of class society has blocked. Freedom would become the environment of an organism which is no longer capable of adapting to the competitive performances required for wellbeing under domination. No longer capable of tolerating the aggressiveness, the brutality and ugliness of the established way of life, rebellion would then have tkaen root in teh very nature - the biology of the individual, and on the grounds the rebels would redefine the objectives in the strategy of the political struggle in which alone the concrete goals of liberation can be determined. ``` Hegel can be found all throughout this. Change the nature of the biology of the individual so he's no longer capable of tolerating domination. Maybe he can become psychopathic. When he speaks of biology, he doesn't necessarily mean it as was think of it as a scientific discipline, but rather the phenomenon of people being totally intolerant to the idea of tolerance or oppression. They are not psychologically capable of tolerating life - they need a liberated world. Marcuse project can be a vehicle to such a world. Marcuse considered that social change remains incomplete or even self-defeating unless it is being driven by human nature - by our very biology. In the advanced capitalist countries, the radicalization of the working class is counteracted by a socially enineered arrest of consciousness. And by the development and satisfaction