Enter the Alien
Thinking as 21st Century Hegel
Welcome to “Enter the Alien”—the first official publication from Philosophy Portal.
If you have been following this blog all year, you will know that I led a course on Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, which started in January 2022 and extended until May 2022 (with a Conference). You can find some of my posts about that course at the bottom of this article, and you can find out, or even still access the recorded version of that course, here.
My goal with Philosophy Portal has always been to both teach the foundations of Modern Philosophy—starting with Phenomenology, Existentialism and Psychoanalysis—as well as opening up new opportunities for collective creativity and collaborations.
Enter the Alien is the first concrete result of this intention. Here is a description of the book:
“AN ALIEN WORLD IS EMERGING. The 21st century presents human self-consciousness with a qualitatively different environment, largely as a consequence of scientific thinking and action opening global communications and connectivity. In this anthology, a community of Spirit has meditated on the idea that the great idealist philosopher G.W.F Hegel can be used as a starting point for thinking this alien world. Hegel, of course, could not have predicted this world (and nor would he have tried), however, Hegel was well aware that Spirit found itself in a new Scientific age, and that this age would have disorienting consequences for Spirit’s capacity to inhabit the world at all. Considering that many contemporary intellectuals relate to the present moment with ideas of crises of authority or value and meaning, it makes sense that starting with Hegel could in many ways bring deeper conceptual clarity and orientation. How does “The Hegel Event” help us to sense-make (1) contemporary problems of the theory-practice divide in the sciences, (2) Westerners increasing interest in Eastern spiritual wisdoms, (3) higher and more complex forms of sexual expression, (4) debates on idealism, materialism and realism, (5) human development post-psychoanalysis, (6) the nature of abstraction in the process of becoming, (7) artistic expression beyond religious icons, (8) the philosophical foundations of mathematics, (9) logic of everyday life, and (10) the dominance of contemporary atheism? Through mediations of the immediacy of these dimensions, we hope to show that it is worth starting with Hegel to sense-make in the 21st century.”
What you will find in this book is a carefully crafted collection of 11 articles by 11 different authors that offer deep meditations on phenomena with relevance to our 21st century civilisation. As stated above, our basic premise is that starting with and working-through Hegel can bring deeper clarity and orientation for our present moment. Consequently, this work holds together as a coherent collective work, even if presented by a multiplicity of voices. What it demonstrates, is that far from being a force of systematic homogenization (a common criticism of Hegel), it is only by actually working through the “Hegelian Singularity”, that one is opened up to a truer and deeper differentiation (as is unreflectively proven by the existence of post-Hegelian philosophy itself). In other words, Hegel is not an end-point, Hegel is not the “be-all-and-end-all”, Hegel is not a “theory of everything”, but rather a philosopher who marks the beginning (of Modernity, of Science, of Knowing).
Thus, once we have passed through Hegel we can truly begin the necessary work of the 21st century. But not before. Attempts to find some starting point in pre-modern mysticisms or pre-modern religions, is ultimately a dead-end (whether East or West, it doesn’t matter). These mystical pre-Modern starting points are not derived from a careful logical analysis of the qualitative emergence that characterises the Modern political, social, and historical world. These starting points are not capable of bringing their mythos to logos, so to speak. And once we enter Scientific Modernity, one can no longer really inhabit a mythos without deeper logical meditation, let’s just be honest about it.
I should add that you will also find a few extra meditations in the book (beyond the 11 formal chapters by 11 different authors), including a Foreword and Conclusion by myself. The Foreword attempts to situate our work and aim in relation to contemporary philosophical interpretations of Hegel, and the Conclusion offers a deeper meditation on the Preface of the Phenomenology of Spirit, which I think gives us Hegel’s own interpretation of the result of his great work. You will also find an Introduction by philosopher and futurist Alexander Bard, who gives us the idea of “The Hegel Event”. This idea essentially suggests that, there was a philosophical break between Kant and Hegel, and our civilisation has had to live with the consequences ever since. However, he also suggests, that we are only now bringing this break to conscious awareness, after a long and drawn out succession of post-Hegelian philosophy (Kierkegaard, Marx, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Deleuze etc.), which is essentially anti-Hegelian, reactive (paradoxically, in the case of Deleuze), in its basic nature.
Finally, there is a Free Preview available on Philosophy Portal. In this Free Preview, I offer a “Note on the Phenomenology of Spirit”, which gives you a sense of my own relation to the text, how I taught it and in what context, and how this may impact my own interpretation of the work for our present. The lead editor of the work, Daniel Garner (O.G. Rose), also offers us an “Editor’s Note”, where he emphasises the way in which we attempted to bring this multiplicity, not into a “perfect unity”, but into a “perfect tension” that, in a truly Hegelian fashion, speaks to the crack or the negativity of our present.
The work is also endorsed by the greatest living Hegelian philosopher, Slavoj Žižek:
“The collective work Enter the Alien: Thinking 21st Century Hegel is an extraordinary achievement. Instead of interpreting Hegel from a safe historical distance and judging what is still alive in his work, it treats Hegel as our contemporary, as a philosopher whose time has finally come today. And it is a profoundly Communist work: a collective endeavour in which the new picture of Hegel emerges through the interaction of multiple individual interventions. For this reason, the volume should be read (at least) two times, so that one is able to grasp how the meaning of a single text is affected by what precedes and by what follows. It is thus one of those rare works which are ‘Hegelian’ already in its form. Thinking as 21st Century Hegel is simply a volume about what thinking means today. So it is not a book for specialists but a book for everyone who seriously wants to think!”
Older posts introducing Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit: