Industrial Modernism and the Hegelian Dialectic in Winslow Homer

This paper looks at the themes of nature, humanity, and military and industrial development in the nineteenth century American painter Winslow Homer through the lens of the Hegelian theory of art. Robert Pippin's After the Beautiful (2015) has recently put the Hegelian framework to very fruitful use in understanding pictorial modernism. This study of Homer follows a similar approach but argues that Homer's canvases represent a development in the modern spirt which, in many ways, goes beyond the canvases of Manet – a very tight modernist contemporary of Homer's. Homer communicates a presentment of the immense and, in certain profound respects, horrifying power of humanity's growing industrialization. I trace the development of this idea over the course of his career, from this early Civil War canvases to his final seascapes and argue that an understanding of Homer's work is important for understanding the modern spirit of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

The Faces of Russian Hegelianism: S.L. Frank Between Hegel and Nietzsche

This article dwells on S.L. Frank’s philosophical views in the context of the crisis of European metaphysics and compares his ontological and religious views with the teachings of G.W.F. Hegel and F. Nietzsche. The author critically examines Frank’s attempt to synthesize Hegelianism and Orthodoxy. The methodology of this research is based on the key principles and attitudes of comparative philosophy and historical and philosophical reconstruction. The article substantiates the thesis that the reception of Hegel’s works by Frank is a product of the pseudomorphosis of Russian culture. The main conclusion of the study is that Frank’s intention to go beyond Hegelian dialectic leads to the convergence of his ideas with the philosophy of life, in particular with Nietzsche’s teaching. Within the framework of the comparative analysis of the teachings of Frank, Hegel and Nietzsche, the paper focuses on the problem of the border. It demonstrates that, according to both Frank and Hegel, the border acts as the main condition for the constitution of being as a certainty. At the same time, the border is an ontological condition for a certain and limited being to go beyond its limits. The author concludes that, in this regard, Frank follows the fundamental principles of Hegelian dialectic. At the same time, Frank goes beyond the philosophy of Hegel’s attitude towards the philosophical comprehension of the irrational, incomprehensible depths of being. In this sense, Frank comes close to the principles of Nietzsche’s teaching and turns to the study of the borderline phenomena of human existence.

Complexity explained: The dialectical position between theory and practice. Theoretical group analytic concepts and clinical examples

I present below an attempt to understand complexity theory and the dialectical relationship between theory and group analytic practice. These are often concepts difficult to make sense of as they are rarely illuminated with clinical material for the reader or the trainee group analyst to comprehend. After the introduction of the Kantian and Hegelian dialectic and its use to understand group analytic concepts, I move on to the complexity theory and attempt to illustrate its significance with a clinical example from a small group analytic group. Cavafis’s celebrated poem ‘Ithaka’, is used as a metaphor for the utmost importance of the splendid interpersonal and transpersonal journey in group analysis with all its challenges and gains that this brings to the individual and to the group as a whole as the emphasis is on the process (journey) rather the destination (Ithaka).

Anxiety, Freedom, and Evil

Overcoming his early admiration of Fichte’s Doctrine of Science and his philosophy of the “absolute I,” Schelling crowned his own philosophy of nature with an account of the emergence of the absolute out of itself. The only way in which God or the absolute might thus emerge and evolve was if it encompassed within itself what was both itself and not itself. Two years after Hegel’s Phenomenology, Schelling published his Freedom essay, arguably setting Hegel’s 1807 dialectic on its head. Starting with God (or what-is) as a self-organizing being, Schelling introduced vitality and self-origin into an absolute that was no longer a historic terminus ad quem. By reviving Spinoza’s holism, Schelling proposed a new logic of identity: A=A and their indiscernible difference, or B. The possibility of the living absolute giving rise to itself thus resulted from two principles existing in “indifference to each other” yet inseparable, and there was no third term by which to distinguish them. Eschewing Hegelian dialectic in favor of contrariety in a genre, Schelling characterized the coexistence as Sehnsucht, an objectless “affect” out of which emerged an incipient order. All living beings contained this bi-une principle. However, in humans the two could become unbalanced, thereby accounting for the possibility of evil, of “a merely particular will” striving for ascendency. While this characterized evil in humans, the tension between the two principles, which had begun as Sehnsucht, would soon be called angst in the Ages of the World, underscoring the importance of the affect.

Fanon and Recognition

This paper applies Hegel’s master-slave dialectic to Fanon’s issue of pseudo-recognition discussed in the essay, “The Negro and Recognition,” as a way of establishing a form of self-consciousness. I begin the paper by arguing that in the Hegelian dialectic establishing a self-consciousness is an essential prerequisite to Fanon’s goal of mutual subject-recognition. I then argue that given the position of black people as slaves within the master-slave dialectic, they are denied the recognition required to attain being in-itself for-itself, which in reality can only be obtained if black people establish self-consciousness on their own terms. I then make the case that this required self- consciousness can only be obtained through struggle, essentially reversing the stages of the dialectic to create a new master/slave relation. In particular, I argue that this moment of struggle provides a moment of proto-recognition which can be used to build a new mutual subject-recognition. I then theorize on what form this new relation must take, making the case that it must be a relation where the categories of master and slave are made irrelevant, and where all subjects are capable of mutual recognition.

Fanon and Recognition

This paper applies Hegel’s master-slave dialectic to Fanon’s issue of pseudo-recognition discussed in the essay, “The Negro and Recognition,” as a way of establishing a form of self-consciousness. I begin the paper by arguing that in the Hegelian dialectic establishing a self-consciousness is an essential prerequisite to Fanon’s goal of mutual subject-recognition. I then argue that given the position of black people as slaves within the master-slave dialectic, they are denied the recognition required to attain being in-itself for-itself, which in reality can only be obtained if black people establish self-consciousness on their own terms. I then make the case that this required self-consciousness can only be obtained through struggle, essentially reversing the stages of the dialectic to create a new master/slave relation. In particular, I argue that this moment of struggle provides a moment of proto-recognition which can be used to build a new mutual subject-recognition. I then theorize on what form this new relation must take, making the case that it must be a relation where the categories of master and slave are made irrelevant, and where all subjects are capable of mutual recognition.