Emancipation After Hegel Quotes

“[Hegel] sees that no principles is sustainable as a first principle since it implicitly relies on other principles in order to distinguish itself.”
― Todd McGowan, Emancipation After Hegel: Achieving a Contradictory Revolution

“When Hegel arrives absolute knowing in the Phenomenology of Spirit, he reveals the theoretical radicality inherent in his position. This is not the point at which the subject knows everything that there is to know but rather the point at which the subject recognizes that there are no more conceivable paths out of contradiction. Absolute knowing affirms the necessity of a failure that occurs when the subject collides with the inevitability of contradiction. This is why one might rename absolute knowing the recognition of the inevitability of contradiction.”
― Todd McGowan, Emancipation After Hegel: Achieving a Contradictory Revolution

“Though Hegel constructs a totalizing system, its airtight structure does not produce a perfectly harmonious whole in which nothing is out of place. Instead, the totality renders visible the ontological necessity of contradiction. This is the reason that Hegel insists on thinking the absolute idea... on their own, particulars create the illusion of the possibility of avoiding contradiction. This is, for Hegel, the great danger of the failure to think absolutely.”
― Todd McGowan, Emancipation After Hegel: Achieving a Contradictory Revolution

“The universal necessarily imposes itself on even the most self-interested act. We can see this in a variety of instances. It is the great lesson of the capitalist economic system, which functions on the basis of the self-interested particular actually working on behalf of the whole. When I try to enrich myself at the expense of everyone else in society b selling real estate, for example, I inadvertently benefit others by helping them find a place to live and by giving them jobs working for me. What's more, I can only sell real estate within a social system that guarantees the protection of private property. My private act of selling real estate cannot escape involvement with universality. Despite its ultimate betrayal of universality (through its destruction of the public world held in common), the capitalist system reveals universality's triumph. It shows that no matter how we try to avoid it, we make reference to the universal.”
― Todd McGowan, Emancipation After Hegel: Achieving a Contradictory Revolution

“Hegel insists on the absolute because he recognizes that we must think absolutely in order to arrive at the singular. The irony of Hegel's philosophy - an irony many have missed - is that, though he seems to serve up individuals for the sake of the systematic whole, the whole exists for the sake of the singularity. When we stop short of the totality, we obscure singularity. Hegel recognizes that attempting to isolate ourselves in our immediate particularity and refusing the universal is actually a way of missing the opening for singularity. It is Hegel, not his later antisystematic critics, who is the apostle of the singular.”
― Todd McGowan, Emancipation After Hegel: Achieving a Contradictory Revolution

“According to Hegel, philosophy should not try to change the world because it cannot. It always arrives too late on the scene to offer concrete political proposals.”
― Todd McGowan, Emancipation After Hegel: Achieving a Contradictory Revolution

“Recognizing the self-division of the other doesn't reduce everyone to sameness but eliminates the possibility for anyone's hierarchical elevation above another. It is a philosophy of universal equality through the split of every subject from itself.”
― Todd McGowan, Emancipation After Hegel: Achieving a Contradictory Revolution

“By revealing that there is no external solution to the contradiction of being, the absolute tells us that we can no longer hope for relief from the trauma of history. This is the point when contradiction makes itself manifest as irreducible and when politics becomes unavoidable.”
― Todd McGowan, Emancipation After Hegel: Achieving a Contradictory Revolution

“The contradiction of the state - it creates the subject's singularity by thoroughly submitting its particularity to a universal law - provides the basis for the subject's freedom. Rather than creating the illusion of eliminating contradiction in the way that mutual recognition does, the state constantly confronts the subject with it.”
― Todd McGowan, Emancipation After Hegel: Achieving a Contradictory Revolution

“By giving priority to the state, Hegel claims that we are public individuals before we are private ones. Our investment in the public sphere is not an option - like the decision to vote or not - but the basis for our private existence. The priority of the state indicates that one must go through the detour of the public in order to be a private individual.”
― Todd McGowan, Emancipation After Hegel: Achieving a Contradictory Revolution

“For Hegel, philosophy intervenes politically by making clear the relations that already exist.”
― Todd McGowan, Emancipation After Hegel: Achieving a Contradictory Revolution

“For Hegel, attempts to change the world through philosophy will misfire. They will recapitulate what they struggle against. This is because philosophy cannot transcend the material conditions of its own time. When we propose an alternate future, we do so within the terms presently available to us. Even Plato's ideal republic, as Hegel sees it, was not an alternative to Greek society at the time but an expression of its internal logic. The possibilities that we conceive are possibilities determined by the prevailing symbolic structure, not challenges to that structure. Philosophers that give practical political advice almost inevitably express the hidden logic of the system they attempt to contest.”
― Todd McGowan, Emancipation After Hegel: Achieving a Contradictory Revolution

“Freedom, equality, and solidarity are not just values that the French Revolution invents. Instead, the revolution discovers them. Hegel recognizes that they derive from the structure of being itself, even if it takes modernity for this structure to become evident. But the ontological basis of these values does not ensure their political survival. There are many societies that have had no acquaintance with them, despite the profound reverberations of the French Revolution around the world. Most commonly, societies retreat from these values and accede to regimes of unfreedom, inequality, and self-interest.”
― Todd McGowan, Emancipation After Hegel: Achieving a Contradictory Revolution

“Freedom, equality, and solidarity are inherently traumatic values insofar as they require us to confront the absence of any substantial authority. We can only live out these values if we forgo any self-identical other that provides a secure background for our subjectivity.”
― Todd McGowan, Emancipation After Hegel: Achieving a Contradictory Revolution

“Taking [Hegel's] philosophy as the point of reference, we could say that emancipation involves making explicit and embracing contradiction, whereas conservatism aims at repressing or eliminating it.”
― Todd McGowan, Emancipation After Hegel: Achieving a Contradictory Revolution

“In the act of grasping the symbolic structure absolutely, as an ultimate horizon for thought, we can illuminate the contradiction that marks the point of the structure's internal vulnerability. This at once creates the possibility for change and indicates that no change, no matter how revolutionary, will ever heal the wound of the social order. A society can move beyond a specific contradiction, but it will necessarily encounter another one. This is not a recipe for quietism but a call to act. The point of political contestation is to move in the direction of an increasingly resistant contradiction, and philosophy plays a vital role in this movement. This is Hegel's definition of progress: the movement from more easily resolved social contradiction to more intractable ones.”
― Todd McGowan, Emancipation After Hegel: Achieving a Contradictory Revolution

“Despite the salience of Marx's critique of capitalism, this was the worst event to occur within the internal history of the project of emancipation. The theoretical turn from Hegel to Marx paved the way for a practical catastrophe.”
― Todd McGowan, Emancipation After Hegel: Achieving a Contradictory Revolution

“Christianity is not these retrograde political positions that various self-proclaimed Christians take up. These positions are heresies, betrayals of the radicality of the Christian event, which is the moment at which the God of the beyond becomes a divided subject, when the infinite shows that it must appear as finite. It is this event that Hegel cannot abandon without destroying his entire system. When one removes Christianity, as Marx does, one ends up erecting a new substantial form of the divine with tragic consequences.”
― Todd McGowan, Emancipation After Hegel: Achieving a Contradictory Revolution