Friday, November 3, 2023

"Wanted" --One World Historical Individual



Vishnu
Hegel iterated the idea of the World Historical Individual.  Augustus, Napoleon, the three Yalta alumnae Roosevelt. Stalin, Churchill, even Hitler, Pol Pot and now Putin qualify. Hegel famously proposed a dialectics (thesis, anti-thesis, synthesis) that Marx adopted in Das Capital. Of course Hegel’s notion was as “value-free” as Newton’s Third Law of Thermodynamics  (which itself is curiously applicable to realpolitik). Kant believed in a categorical imperative which dictated morally correct action but Hegel looked on history like an astrophysicist gazing through his telescope at a distant star. World Historical figures don’t appear by way of want ads. They emerge from history. Martin Luther King was both a product and impetus for the Civil Rights Movement. Gandhi signaled the end of British Imperialism and was enormously significant  in his advocacy of non-violent or "passive resistance." How far away such "ways and means" seem in the present volatile environment where a Democrat or Republican crossing the aisle can elicit the kind of rage Liz  Cheney and Adam Kinzinger have endured. Humanity is so far gone that even atheists have begun to pray. Could God be the answer? Why not fight God with God? The problem is no one will be able to agree on which one (or two or more depending on the religion).

read the review of Francis Levy's The Kafka Studies Department on Booklife

and hear Francis Levy discuss The Kafka Studies Department at Canio's



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