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'Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainity and agitation distinquish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones ... All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned.' Marx

historical change « Previous | |Next »
October 20, 2008

For Hegel, philosophy’s task is the rational comprehension of the historical present whilst reason while reason, has the incumbent task of bringing the ‘growing contradiction’ of our age to concepts.It aims to grasp conflict, contradiction, and hence historical change, which are fundamental features of the modern world, or modernity. Contradiction is a real force operating in history; is a force moved by its own inner development.

Angelico Nuzzo in Dialectical Reason and Necessary Conflict: Understanding and the Nature of Terror in Cosmos and History says:

The tension catalyzed in contradiction is the mark of an epoch in which all certainty and security has been shattered and the only hope of survival lies in the acceptance of transformation, in the capacity of facing the negativity in which life is immersed. Knowledge by itself cannot effect transformation although it may be one of the conditions thereof. Rather, Hegel seems to suggest that transformation lies somehow in the nature of things, in the inner contradiction that animates the present time once the obstacles to its radicalization and free development are removed and contradiction is let grow to its extreme consequences without being fixated into an unmoved ‘absolute

Since a ‘growing contradiction’ is not the result of philosophical speculation but a hard fact in everybody’s life in 1807 such contradiction ‘is not difficult to see’. The challenge to philosophy is to give conceptual, rational form to the mere feeling, perception or indeed ‘experience’ of change that we are living/
.
Nuzzi argues that our time is different from Hegels. Instead of a discontinuity of a revolutionary transition to the unknown new our time is the continuous repetition of the same:
Now the normality of habit does not allow contradiction to ‘grow’ and hence to produce the ‘need’ for it to be overcome and refuted. Contradiction cannot be pinpointed; it is so diffuse (or globalized, as it were) that being everywhere it is really nowhere. Thus, very generally, I shall characterize our age in opposition to Hegel’s as an age that aims at normalizing conflict and change by neutralizing them into habituation, and at dissolving them by making them all-pervasive. This, in turn, is clearly a corollary of the process of globalization in which contradictions are progressively erased (not solved) and flattened out for the sake of the common, homogenizing imperative of economic profit.

| Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 8:30 AM | | Comments (1)
Comments

Comments

Perhaps some of above relates to Marcuse's idea of repressive tolerance; commodity fetishism, consumerism and use versus exchange value.You talk about the rat race just above inn another post, I think.
It is always worthwhile to recall that we are not the suppressed plebs of the era of Kierkergaard and Hegel; Marx and Dickens. The relevant successor abjects live on the Magic Mountains of Delhi, Manilla, Cairo and the like.
To this extent liberalism has reified itself and Marx always warned that the system has evolved and evolving inherent self- replicating mechanisms involving culture, individuation, etc.
But the fat lady hasn't sung yet. Can you imagine the shock on the faces of the Aztec aristocracy, circa 1510, if they had been able to see forward a couple of decades.
Isn't Adorno in a way restating Kant in that little quote from Negative Dialectics you include at this site, just opposite.
Genetics may change things in ways we can't guess at, for example.
Although the problem becomes metaphysical a bit, since we start to think of good/evil v good/bad, value and meaning, role of suffering and consequence etc.
I suppose it will all come out in the wash.