Alfredo Ferrarin

The author shows that Hegel's philosophy entails a radical criticism of an ordinary conception of thinking. Breaking with the habitual presuppositions of modern philosophy and common sense, the author explains that thought, negation, truth, reflection, and dialectic for Hegel are not properties of an I and cannot be reduced to the subjective activity of a self-conscious subject. Rather, he elucidates, thought is objective for Hegel in different senses. Reality as a whole is animated by a movement of thought and un unconscious logic as a spontaneity that reifies itself in determinate forms. The author concludes the book with a comprehensive comparison of Hegel's and Kant's concepts of reason."-- Back cover.

In this paper I discuss the notions of practice, institution and radical imaginary in Castoriadis. In section 1 I clarify the premises of my essay by contrasting Castoriadis with contemporary social ontology and an Aristotelian concept of practice. In section 2 I approach the problem of institution by distinguishing between production and creation and highlighting the crucial problem of the new ontology of magma with its distinctive temporality as opposed to the traditional identity logic and ontology of determinacy. In section 3 I deal with autonomy and the psyche, by focusing especially on Freud and the monad. In section 4 I try to identify the heart of the novelty of Castoriadis’s treatment of imagination in its relation with the symbolic. I conclude in section 5 with a discussion of the meaning of representation and its internal difficulties.

The Critique of Pure Reason—Kant’s First Critique—is one of the most studied texts in intellectual history, but as Alfredo Ferrarin points out in this radically original book, most of that study has focused only on very select parts. Likewise, Kant’s oeuvre as a whole has been compartmentalized, the three Critiques held in rigid isolation from one another. Working against the standard reading of Kant that such compartmentalization has produced, The Powers of Pure Reason explores forgotten parts of the First Critique in order to find an exciting, new, and ultimately central set of concerns by which to read all of Kant’s works. Ferrarin blows the dust off of two egregiously overlooked sections of the First Critique—the Transcendental Dialectic and the Doctrine of Method. There he discovers what he argues is the Critique’s greatest achievement: a conception of the unity of reason and an exploration of the powers it has to reach beyond itself and legislate over the world. With this in mind, Ferrarin dismantles the common vision of Kant as a philosopher writing separately on epistemology, ethics, and aesthetics and natural teleology, showing that the three Critiques are united by this underlying theme: the autonomy and teleology of reason, its power and ends. The result is a refreshing new view of Kant, and of reason itself.

For Kant as for Hegel method is not a structure or procedure imported into philosophy from without, as, e.g. a mathematical demonstration in modern physics or in the proof-structure of philosophies such as Spinoza’s or Wolff’s. For both Hegel and Kant method is the arrangement that reason gives its contents and cognitions; for both, that is, method and object do not fall asunder, unlike in all disciplines other than philosophy. For Kant method is the design and plan of the whole, the scientific form that guides the organization of cognitions (KrV A 707/B 736, Ak 24, 780). Likewise, Hegel writes that method is the consciousness of the form of its inner movement (WL 1, 49, SL 53, W 3 47, PhS 28). Unfortunately, Hegel never considers Kant an example or a precursor or a positive role model. It is important to ask why Hegel never takes seriously Kant’s Doctrine of Method. Why, if he shares so many central points with the Architectonic of the first Critique, does he never acknowledge Kant as a possible ally? Why does he misunderstand Kant on analysis and synthesis as he does? These are some of the questions I plan to discuss in this paper.

Hegel is, arguably, the most difficult of all philosophers. To find a way into his thought interpreters have usually approached him as though he were developing Kantian and Fichtean themes. This book demonstrates in a systematic way that it makes much more sense to view Hegel's idealism in relation to the metaphysical and epistemological tradition stemming from Aristotle. The book offers an account of Hegel's idealism in light of his interpretation, discussion, assimilation and critique of Aristotle's philosophy. There are explorations of Hegelian and Aristotelian views of system and history; being, metaphysics, logic, and truth; nature and subjectivity; spirit, knowledge, and self-knowledge; ethics and politics. No serious student of Hegel can afford to ignore this major interpretation. It will also be of interest in such fields as political science and the history of ideas.

Whether or not we think that Marshall McLuhan’s prophecy regarding the end of the Gutenberg galaxy and the advent of the civilization of the image has come true in the era of sophisticated computer-enhanced imagery, it seems indisputable that images play a central role in our existence. We are constantly bombarded and inescapably surrounded by images. Publicly accessible and reproducible images are a singularly effective way to find and exemplify a visual representative for what they picture, or to convey a message. Their main virtue is simplification: they not only select significant aspects in the representation of something concrete and individual, while at the same time isolating it from its particularity, but also they idealize and make what they represent general enough that virtually anyone can recognize and relate to it. Only thus can we explain their often spellbinding effect and their popular appeal.

WHEN NIETZSCHE CALLED MAN THE YET UNFINISHED ANIMAL, he echoed a phrase that had remote origins. In classical German philosophy, the idea of man as a Mängelwesen, a lacking and underdetermined being, was shared by Herder, Kant, and even Hegel and Marx, among others. It was brought to clear expression by Schiller when he wrote: “With the animal and plant, Nature did not only specify their dispositions but she also carried these out herself. With man, however, she merely provided the disposition and left its execution up to him.” What distinguishes man from animals, according to these thinkers, is the unfinished character of the gifts he is endowed with by nature; at the same time, this underdetermined quality is responsible for human openness and adaptability. To play on the myth of the birth of eros in the Symposium, one could say that for man poverty is resourcefulness.

In my review-essay I focus on some questions left open in Ferraris’ book Documentalità. Its limits are the same as those of a descriptive metaphysics of the social world that does not investigate, but rather assumes as its starting points, problematic basic relations such as those between individual and intelligibility, the givenness of essences and our access to them, the difference between objects and objectification. Finally, Ferraris’ conflation of production and practice brings me eventually to the link conspicuously missing in Ferraris’ analysis: the subjects who produce and hand down the documents we decided to turn our exclusive attention to.