"The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold
two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain
the ability to function. One should, for example, be able to
see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make
them otherwise."
-- F. Scott Fitzgerald
tusar n. mohapatra
- Tusar N. Mohapatra
- Ghaziabad, U.P., India
- President, Savitri Era Party. [Savitri Era of those who adore, Om Sri Aurobindo & The Mother.] Director, Savitri Era Learning Forum. [SELF posits a model of counselling and communicative action as an instrument in order to stimulate the public sphere. The model aims at supplementing the individual’s struggle for a successful social adjustment with more aspirational inputs so as to help one take an informed and balanced attitude towards life as well as society.] SRA-102-C, Shipra Riviera, Indirapuram, Ghaziabad, U.P. - 201014, India. Ph: 0120-2605636 tusarnmohapatra@gmail.com
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Good day Sir (Tusar N. Mohapatra),
Just thought I would write you a quick note to say I like the work you are doing. I see a similarity in your own work and mine at ‘Hegel’s Hotel’….the centre piece and similarity in our work being a humanistic-existential, balanced interpretation and rendition of Hegel.
Some of your work is perhaps a little too metaphysical for me….a little too much ‘mental work’when i haven't read all the philosophers you are writing about... (Husserl and Heidegger are tough to read and not on my priority list right now...)
However, I like your ‘I am the conflict’ piece….I am the fire and the water – that kind of stuff…very ‘yin’/’yang’…and Heraclitus..
'I am the conflict, their being bound together. I am both the combatants, and am the strife itself.' I like that one. (Very Gestalt Therapy oriented as well as Hegelian... this comment added Feb. 15th, 2010.)
Keep up the good work.
I will check in on your site periodically,
Cheers!
David Bain,
Author of Hegel’s Hotel
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Scattered Thoughts on Dialectical Reason
Posted by larvalsubjects
In Negative Dialectics, Adorno writes, “the most enduring result of Hegelian logic is that the individual is not flatly for himself. In himself, he is his otherness and linked with others” (161).
For me, Hegel’s Science of Logic has always been the great white whale, Ulysses, or Finnegans Wake of philosophy. What interests me in Hegel is not what he has to say about Spirit or reconciliation or the formation of a total system where nothing escapes– as absolute knowledge is sometimes thought to be...
No, what interests me about Hegelian dialectics– especially as formulated in the Logic –is its capacity to think otherness, relation, and an immanent tension within a system pushing it to the point of auto-critique. Anyone who musters the will to read the Science of Logic with open eyes, free of the invectives that have been levelled against Hegel by figures such as Lacan, Deleuze, and Derrida, will be deeply rewarded with the conceptual clarity he brings to the table and the various conflicts that he unfolds and which repeat again and again in a variety of different structures of thought. Despite its Joycean prose, it is a work worth studying carefully and returning to again and again as an endless source of ideas. One can literally say, “oh there’s Deleuze, there’s Quine, look there’s Badiou”, and so on...
This, I think, is the real hope and lesson of Hegel’s dialectical reason, for Hegel does not begin from the stance of this sort of immanence– immanence to consciousness –but rather begins from the split nature of that which posits itself as self-identical.]
http://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/2007/03/12/scattered-thoughts-on-dialectical-reason/
Download book as PDF (Open Access)
http://www.re-press.org/content/view/60/38/
Description
Bringing together for the first time all of G.W.F. Hegel’s major Introductions in one place, this book ambitiously attempts to present readers with Hegel’s systematic thought through his Introductions alone. The Editors articulate to what extent, precisely, Hegel’s Introductions truly reflect his philosophic thought as a whole. Certainly each of Hegel’s Introductions can stand alone, capturing a facet of his overarching idea of truth. But compiled all together, they serve to lay out the intricate tapestry of Hegel’s thought, woven with a dialectic that progresses from one book to another, one philosophical moment to another.
Hegel’s reflections on philosophy, religion, aesthetics, history, and law—all included here—have profoundly influenced many subsequent thinkers, from post-Hegelian idealists or materialists like Karl Marx, to the existentialism of Kierkegaard and Jean-Paul Sartre; from the phenomenological tradition of Edmund Husserl to Martin Heidegger, Jacques Derrida and other post-moderns, to thinkers farther afield, like Japan’s famous Kyoto School or India’s Aurobindo. This book provides the opportunity to discern how the ideas of these later thinkers may have originally germinated in Hegel’s writings, as well as to penetrate Hegel’s worldview in his own words, his grand architecture of the journey of the Spirit.
