Kafka reading Hegel on China

Dabei gilt in China kein Ansehen des hohen oder niedrigen Ranges. Ein Feldherr des Reiches, der sich sehr ausgezeichnet hatte, wurde beim Kaiser verleumdet, und er bekam zur Strafe des Vergehens, dessen man ihn beschuldigte, das Amt aufzupassen, wer den Schnee in den Gassen nicht wegkehre.

Vorlesung ueber die Philosophie der Geschichte

The continued importance of Content

There are of course many reasons why faculty and administration don’t feel comfortable sitting next to each other in the same room. But we'll leave most of those aside to focus on a basic difference. No matter how theoretical and abstract a professor’s work may be, it always involves a distinct commitment to a specific content. There is a subject area, a set of texts, or data, a problem with many thorny questions to solve. Something tangible that motivates and inspires, students in the class, researchers in the lab, writers at the keyboard.

What is troublesome about administrative operation, and indeed most management techniques generally, is their disengagement from the specific content of the work they are managing. Just as many successful store managers don’t really have to care about the product they are selling beyond the basic ability to interact with customers, so too administrators do not need to know the specifics of faculty research. They rely on general formulas to determine the success or failure of that research, but these formulas leave unaddressed the specific material questions that the research addresses. Whether you write on the history of medieval cities in Tuscany or methane gas abatement in coal mining facilities you are judged by general indicators, such as student enrollment, number of publications, placement of students, that have no direct connection to the actual subject matter of your research.

From the administrative perspective, it is important to evaluative criteria that reach across difference departments and colleges so that the many apples and oranges within a university can be compared. From the faculty perspective these general categories often have an implicit bias towards one type of research over another, even as they make no explicit attempt to judge the qualitative material of research.

Without directly addressing the long history of critiques made against the rational organization of knowledge and culture, we could jump to one key early debate in this to compare Kant’s architectonic organization of knowledge into a system in which the philosopher places individual sciences in relation to each other, in order to evaluate both how complete their claim to knowledge is and to judge whether these sciences set together into a whole serve the ethical needs of humanity, and Hegel’s historical account of how the material substance of knowledge and art both enables and restricts the expression of ideas.

Hegel argued that Kant’s formal organization of the basic preconditions of knowledge or beauty failed to account for the physical, hands-on, material substance that underlies any expression of thought. This debate between Kant and Hegel has implications for every discipline in the university. So for example, you could ask: Does architecture consist in a schematic plan drawn on paper or a computer screen, or is it the space created out of light, air, and the stone, wood, glass or steel as it has been shaped into a unity?

In general, most academic knowledge is created from an engagement with materials—data, texts, objects. Kant, even at his most formal remove, knew that science requires empirical data in order to develop reliable results. He added though, that the scientist sometimes did not have the full picture of what his research meant, and it was the job of the architectonic philosopher to bring the many strands of knowledge together into a coherent whole.

I hope all the administrators out there reading this blog appreciate the comparison to a Kantian/Socratic philosopher.

Alas, as it turns out, of course, the criteria in a university are more economic, than Kantian, even if they share a similar formal apparatus.

Haiti for Germanists

The world has once again discovered Haiti in the aftermath of the terrible earthquake. In addition to sending money, Germanists can read up on the long history of forgetting and remembering Haiti by taking another look at Susan Buck-Morss's essay "Hegel and Haiti," first published in Critical Inquiry ten years ago, and now reprinted with an introduction and accompanying essay by the University of Pittsburgh Press.

http://www.upress.pitt.edu/BookDetails.aspx?bookId=35923

Buck-Morss argues that news of the Haitian Revolution must have motivated Hegel as he elaborated the "Master-Slave dialectic" portion of his Phenomenology of Spirit. The Master-Slave dialectic is perhaps Hegel's most famous argument, one that has been read for almost two centuries as a precursor to Marxism.

In college I was taught that Hegel was thinking about Stoicism and the fate of Christians in the Roman Empire when he wrote that section of the Phenomenology, but Buck-Morss argues that the immediate condition of African slaves in the New World and the first successful revolution against white masters in Haiti must also have had a profound impact on the young Hegel, one which scholars have since forgotten.

Her argument is by no means confined to one German Idealist. She traces the long history of how European intellectuals looked past the immediate oppression of Africans when they theorized on freedom and slavery. The Mediterranean ancient past was always assumed to be the philosophical context for Enlightenment arguments against slavery, a perversion given the aggressive involvement of all European maritime powers in the Atlantic slave trade.

How much Buck-Morss's argument will shift our understanding of Hegel remains to be seen, but her essay, and this new book, is a compelling place to rediscover Haiti's crucial stand against oppression and the two hundred years of punishment that the United States and Europe of meted out ever since sugar cane slaves rose up against their masters.