The Rebel, Entry 9, Hegel, and Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home
This is the kind of combination you'll only find on my blog, congratulations. Camus launches into a summary of Hegel's Phenomenology and the history of consciousness through the development of mutual recognition of humanity. First there is the Master/Slave relation, then there's penitent/God, then there's citizen/citizen, etc... History ends with the full recognition of humanity. Our recognition of ourselves as human is dependent on the recognition we get from others. History, up through Hegel's time(corresponding to the era of Napoleon), is an evolution of self-consciousness as the transcendental Idea unfolds.
Left-wing Hegelians, such as Marx, materialize this, leading to the workers' revolution. For the Hegelians, rebellion is part of the divine development; I should think that for orthodox Hegelians no rebel, anarchist or otherwise, does anything other than forward this development. For Marxists, there can be counter-revolutionaries who have to be eliminated. The confidence of the Marxist is that ultimately these counter-revolutionaries will be destroyed by the necessary logic of history.
Philosophy of History, in these postmodern days, perhaps has no meaning. Perhaps 'History' is over. There is no belief we are progressing to any ultimate goal. I think the Hegelians, left and right, are all wet. I also think the postmoderns are all wet. In the Derridean sense I am preferring the 'dry' over the 'wet' in the wet/dry dualism; so take that you deconstructionists. I'm just a logocentric anti-wettist monster to you all; well, you can cram it, smarty-pants(all right, pants made me think of Claude Levi-Strauss and 'The Raw and the Cooked': http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Raw_and_the_Cooked.
Happy now?!)
Well, where does that leave me? Us? Well, you know, in Star Trek they don't even use money. We imagine a galaxy where all our social ills are solved. Starfleet Academy -- how does this rate against Plato's Academy? In the Star Trek universe, it's all dry. Somehow we've even managed to break the speed of light travel in time, etc...
I've already, many moons ago, posted on cyberpunk and postcyberpunk. The real question is, is the future like Bladerunner or like Star Trek? How are these pictures related to the Philosophy of History? Some Science Fiction worries about us becoming less than human, more than human, other than human, transhuman. What kind of recognition is there when we become cyborgs? What would Hegel think of that? Is Hegel even relevant?
There is, before Star Trek, assumed a history that leads up to a kind of utopic world centered on San Francisco. Somehow the dialectic succeeds beyond anyone's wildest imagination, at least in Star Trek IV. The movie goes back to 1986, when I was 19, 'a primitive, paranoid culture'. They come back and save the whales. Science Fiction has the luxury of not explaining how we end up in a classless society where they don't use money(though I assume there's prestige in getting into Starfleet Academy; I don't know what kind of proletariate there is in the United Federation, though obviously racism has been replaced by a speciesist hatred of Klingons, until the Next Generation.)
True, the other Star Trek movies are less utopic than IV; there are plenty of things wrong in the Star Trek universe. But the point of IV is that there is hope that our current problems can be solved and that our descendants can inhabit a realm where it has all been solved, somehow. But it's the somehow that's still the problem in 2013. Roddenberry was evidently quite the atheist, humanist type; it is unclear to me that the humanist utopia is the future. I've ordered some biographies of him so I'll have some more to say about him in later posts.
Left-wing Hegelians, such as Marx, materialize this, leading to the workers' revolution. For the Hegelians, rebellion is part of the divine development; I should think that for orthodox Hegelians no rebel, anarchist or otherwise, does anything other than forward this development. For Marxists, there can be counter-revolutionaries who have to be eliminated. The confidence of the Marxist is that ultimately these counter-revolutionaries will be destroyed by the necessary logic of history.
Philosophy of History, in these postmodern days, perhaps has no meaning. Perhaps 'History' is over. There is no belief we are progressing to any ultimate goal. I think the Hegelians, left and right, are all wet. I also think the postmoderns are all wet. In the Derridean sense I am preferring the 'dry' over the 'wet' in the wet/dry dualism; so take that you deconstructionists. I'm just a logocentric anti-wettist monster to you all; well, you can cram it, smarty-pants(all right, pants made me think of Claude Levi-Strauss and 'The Raw and the Cooked': http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Raw_and_the_Cooked.
Happy now?!)
Well, where does that leave me? Us? Well, you know, in Star Trek they don't even use money. We imagine a galaxy where all our social ills are solved. Starfleet Academy -- how does this rate against Plato's Academy? In the Star Trek universe, it's all dry. Somehow we've even managed to break the speed of light travel in time, etc...
I've already, many moons ago, posted on cyberpunk and postcyberpunk. The real question is, is the future like Bladerunner or like Star Trek? How are these pictures related to the Philosophy of History? Some Science Fiction worries about us becoming less than human, more than human, other than human, transhuman. What kind of recognition is there when we become cyborgs? What would Hegel think of that? Is Hegel even relevant?
There is, before Star Trek, assumed a history that leads up to a kind of utopic world centered on San Francisco. Somehow the dialectic succeeds beyond anyone's wildest imagination, at least in Star Trek IV. The movie goes back to 1986, when I was 19, 'a primitive, paranoid culture'. They come back and save the whales. Science Fiction has the luxury of not explaining how we end up in a classless society where they don't use money(though I assume there's prestige in getting into Starfleet Academy; I don't know what kind of proletariate there is in the United Federation, though obviously racism has been replaced by a speciesist hatred of Klingons, until the Next Generation.)
True, the other Star Trek movies are less utopic than IV; there are plenty of things wrong in the Star Trek universe. But the point of IV is that there is hope that our current problems can be solved and that our descendants can inhabit a realm where it has all been solved, somehow. But it's the somehow that's still the problem in 2013. Roddenberry was evidently quite the atheist, humanist type; it is unclear to me that the humanist utopia is the future. I've ordered some biographies of him so I'll have some more to say about him in later posts.
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