Notes on Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer Episode 11

Posted on October 12, 2015 by Lee

Sometimes you have some money in your pocket and you feel content and secure. And sometimes you spend that money and fill your belly up with what you desire, and then “you feel empty, disgusted with yourself.”

Henry Miller returns to Paris with some money in his pocket. Just having money makes him feel “elated”. It’s the feeling of security, and the possibilities it opens up. Possibilities of comfort: a little food, a good bed for a while.

He’s already spent more than he ought to have spent on a good meal. It makes him “miserable” to hoard the money away, against his “nature”, and so he rebels, spends twice as much as his budget allows.

But he feels “wretched” now, he’s doing neither one thing nor the other. He’s neither craftily saving his money up nor carelessly recklessly enjoying himself.

And then he meets a woman: “kind sir . . . dear sir . . . my good man . . .” She wants money. He doesn’t want to help her but he can’t leave her either. She doesn’t want to be left alone. He can’t “break away” for some reason. Stood there in the pouring rain. And eventually he gives her fifty francs and is glad of it. A side of Miller is winning the side that wants to squander all and open himself up to the cosmos . . .

We’re given all sorts of reasons for Miller’s behaviour on this night, but none of them make sense. He “supposes” he felt this way and that, he reasons that doesn’t everybody feel the urge to roam the streets sometimes on nights like these. He’s acting on impulse, something is controlling him, he’s part of a machine – and more precisely we can assume he had a drink or two with his expensive meal and he’s letting the drink carry him along . . . And eventually he arrives at a bar where women are dancing – “women with bare backs and ropes of pearls” – he orders a bottle of champagne. He talks to a woman who starts to cry and has a sick mother and again he wants to escape but can’t, something stops him:

“The thing to do when you’re trapped is to breeze – at once. If you don’t, you’re lost. What retained me, oddly enough, was the thought of paying for a hat check a second time. One always lets himself in for it because of a trifle.”

In the toilet he’s counting his money again, stashing some away, keeping some ready to spend. He keeps fifty francs free and some loose change. He’s allowed to spend this. And he tells the woman this is all he can give her. But she protests and soon he’s agreeing to give more . . .

They’re at her home, and he’s undressed and worrying about the money in the pocket of his trousers laying there on the bed. He wants to keep it close by. He’s already given one hundred francs to the woman. And in bed with her it’s over faster than he’d hoped. And his money spent, the promise of contentment and security it brought is gone.

She goes downstairs and a still drunk Henry Miller starts to feel “restless” and moves about the room. He reads a love letter on her table, he inspects the bottles in the bathroom. She’s been gone a while now and he starts to feel alarmed, some idea that not all is as it seems. She’s told him she’s gone downstairs to look after her sick mother but something feels wrong and “out of a sense of self-preservation, I suppose” – Miller is never entirely sure why he does anything – he dresses again. And then he remembers the one hundred francs he gave the woman. He knows where she put it. He could take it, and he does. Again we’re given no explanation, no justification for this act. Only a sense that one side of Henry Miller has won, the side that wants the money in his pocket and to hell with the rest.

And back in the streets he starts to rationalise his actions. The story she had told about her mother probably wasn’t true. The house was too strange somehow, something was up. This wasn’t an ordinary situation . . . And to hell with the woman and her sick mother anyway. Miller isn’t asking for forgiveness. He’s describing his actions, and we can see for ourselves that this is a man without seriousness, drunk, without direction, worried about the money in his pocket and his next drink and lost, so lost . . . Henry Miller, drunken man-animal, stumbles to the next bar, the deed done, the tale told, and no apologies.

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Alyosha Karamazov’s Laughter

Posted on October 9, 2015 by Lee

Alyosha’s sinful laugh after reading the love letter. And then the laugh is repeated, it isn’t sinful any longer. With the first laugh he seems to be laughing at the girl who is in love with him. With the second laugh he’s laughing at all of us. “These unhappy and turbulent souls”, we are all lost but we will find joy in God. It doesn’t matter how little we know God, our anxieties come to nothing because He exists. And so a light and joyful laugh not only at everyone else’s worries but at his own too, the troubles of the day that even brought him to tears earlier that evening.

When he got to the monastery he’d regretted having forgotten even “for one instant” Father Zossima. Perhaps he’d forgotten God that evening too. To be troubled by such worldly cares! And all it takes is laying down on your hard bed in the monastery to remember again your place in the world and see that none of it matters, or if it matters it’s out of your hands, and you will get your share of joy however you fret.

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Notes on William S Burroughs’ “Ghost of Chance”

Posted on August 24, 2015 by Lee

William S Burroughs’s Ghost of Chance (1995, High Risk Books) has a simple political point at the heart of it: humanity will perish if it continues at odds with nature.

It’s a familiar theme. Human beings are destroying the environment and must stop before it’s too late. But Burroughs’s unique view of why this is happening is interesting. For Burroughs, it’s happening because one side of the human organism – the side that uses language and tools to dominate others – is dominating the other side, the intuitive and innocent side.

To explain Burroughs’s view, it’s worth skipping ahead to the centrepiece of the book: the bit about the “Christ Sickness”.

About half-way through the book, a virus breaks out that makes millions of people believe that they are the Messiah. The symptoms of the disease are:

You hallucinate and start to believe that you can perform miracles.

Violence. You begin to accuse everyone of betraying the Son of Man, and you might attack those you suspect of betrayal: “And some, in their zealous dementia, were driven to release the fateful lightning of terrible, swift homemade flamethrowers and bizarre electrical devices, or to make bloody use of swords and axes.” (34)

The final stage is “grief, apathy and death”. (34)

Those who suffer from the Christ Sickness, believing that they are Christ, believe they can perform miracles. “The question arises: Did Christ actually perpetrate the miracles attributed to him? My guess is that he did certainly commit some of these scandals.” (25)

Miracles are not good things, for the author of Ghost of Chance. And on this point he believes he agrees with Buddhism: “Buddhists consider miracles and healing dubious if not downright reprehensible. The miracle worker is upsetting the natural order, with incalculable long-range consequences, and is often motivated by self-glorification.” (25-6)

You don’t perform miracles if you want to help people, as there’s no way of knowing what the long-term consequences of a miracle will be. Christ didn’t perform miracles in order to help people, but in order to bring glory to Himself. Worse than this, by bringing glory to himself he created the impression that only He could perform miracles. He created a “monopoly” on miracles, “so no more miracles can ever occur”. (25)

People believed Christ when he claimed he was the source of miracles, and when he was gone from the earth the illusion was complete: with Christ gone, people now believed that miracles were impossible. It took a virus outbreak to cause people to believe again in the possibility of miracles.

I don’t know how seriously Burroughs intended for us to take his theory about Christ, but it’s interesting because it’s a vivid illustration of one method of control: make it appear that you are the only game in town. Don’t just do what you can do, but create the impression that only you can do it. In this way you will gain followers, people who depend on you (or think they do, which is the same thing) for your power to create what you create. If you con them expertly, your followers won’t work out that they were ever capable of doing the work themselves.

It’s not just Christ and certain PR people that use this method. It’s also used by a virus called “the word”.

We use words every day, and they are essential to our mode of existence. But aside from their function allowing us to communicate they also have another function: ensuring their own survival. And they do this by creating the impression that we cannot exist without them. (When in fact it’s just our current mode of existence that would be destroyed were the word to be destroyed.)

In Ghost of Chance, Burroughs gives us his ideas of how language functions in the human organism:

“A rift is built into the human organism, the rift or cleft between the two hemispheres, so any attempt at synthesis must remain unrealisable in human terms. I draw a parallel between this rift separating the two sides of the human body and the rift that divided Madagascar from the mainland of Africa. One side of the rift drifted into enchanted timeless innocence. The other moved inexorably toward language, time, tool use, weapon use, war, exploitation, and slavery.

“It would seem that merging the two us not viable, and one is tempted to say, as Brion Gysin did, ‘Rub out the word.’

“But perhaps ‘rub’ is the wrong word. The formula is quite simple: reverse the magnetic field so that, instead of being welded together, the two halves repel each other like opposing magnets.” (49-50)

So whereas Gysin suggested killing the language-using side of ourselves in order to return to innocence – perhaps giving up on talking and writing and simply painting the world as you see it would be a way of doing this – Burroughs is suggesting that all that is necessary is that we give the non-linguistic side of ourselves a chance, and stop dominating our intuitive and innocent side with our word-using, rationalising side.

In practice perhaps this would mean: stop using language to rationalise the world, and instead look at the world first, and if you have to speak let the words follow from the impression you had before you started trying to put it into words.

“What would a wordless world be like? As Korzybski said: ‘I don’t know. Let’s see.’” (50)

In Ghost of Chance, it’s too late for mankind. They never broke the hold of the word on human life, balance between cleverness and innocence was never achieved, and mankind as we know it is destroyed. And what is the end result? “People of the world are at last returning to their source in spirit, back to the little lemur people of the trees and the leaves, the streams, the rocks, and the sky. Soon, all sign, all memory of the wars and the Plague of Mad will fade like dream traces.” (54)

Pure innocence is forced upon mankind because he couldn’t find balance. The word virus is eliminated, or “rubbed out”.

Burroughs didn’t want humanity as we know it to be destroyed entirely. He wanted it to be transformed so that the word would no longer rule us and we would be able to see clearly.

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“This is realism”: Lessons from Poetry

Posted on July 31, 2015 by Lee

Langdon Hammer describes the stone that Yeats’s fisherman sits on (in the poem “The Fisherman”) as “resistant” and “non-ideal, that is, real”. This equation of “non-ideal” with its common meaning of “imperfect” (as in “my new flat isn’t ideal…”), while also keeping in mind the opposition of “ideal” to “real” is very illuminating: reality is what we get when we make do with things that are not perfect.

The fisherman doesn’t complain, he probably barely notices that the stone on which he sits could be smoother. He does not impose upon reality, he makes do with what he has, which is what makes him the simple soul that Yeats admires.

Compare him to “the clever man who cries the catch cries of the clown”. This man is trying to shape the world to fit him, by bending people to his will (making people repeat his slogans). The poet does not admire this sort of cleverness.

We can learn something about what a poet is supposed to be from Yeats’s poem. Compare to Auden’s famous lines, from his “In Memory of W. B. Yeats”:

For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives

In the valley of its making where executives

Would never want to tamper, flows on south

From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs,

Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives,

A way of happening, a mouth.

The poet is not trying to change the world, to rally support, and if they did try to do this they would fail anyway. The poet writes about reality, and accepts reality as it is.

So we get Kathy Acker’s method of writing about painting: “I see what I see immediately; I don’t rethink it. My seeing is as rough or unformed as what I’m seeing. This is realism: the unification of my perceiving and what I perceive or a making of a mirror relation between my world and the world of the painting.” Perhaps we could make our writing more polished. But the roughness of the words conveys the roughness of the world as we find it.

The puzzle is: how can the poet accept reality as it is and yet be motivated to try to effect a change in the heart of the reader? I think the answer is: the heart of the reader will never be unaffected if the poet is true in her depiction of reality. And if the reader is affected then she will change. “This is what poetry can offer: it can offer a lesson …” What the poet must do is: write about reality and hope to change the reader by showing her what is real. What the poet really cannot do is: determine what course this change will take.

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Notes on Honoré Daumier, Don Quixote (1868)

Posted on July 10, 2015 by Lee

He’s instantly recognisable, though he has no face. He has no face because he doesn’t know who he is. He’s Don Quixote, famous for his confused identity.

In this blurred image, he really could be a knight-errant. His armour could be magnificent armour, his lance a sturdy lance, his shield a strong shield. His horse could even be a powerful warhorse. The line between reality and illusion is blurred. We’re seeing Don Quixote as he sees himself.

The landscape behind him stretches for miles. He’s far from home, and in a sense a knight-errant doesn’t have a home. And in this wilderness, where is Sancho Panza? Don Quixote has forgotten about him. He’s puffed up, forgetting how he relies on his servant. Don Quixote is essentially forgetful.

And that clear blue sky, the sun beating down from it. How Don Quixote suffers in that sun, from thirst, from hunger, from assailants who would surely benefit from the clear day, they can see this old man coming for miles. They don’t see Don Quixote as we see him in this picture. They see something quite different, the cold reality, the confused old man.

But in the distance, the sun reflecting off his makeshift armour a certain way, Don Quixote might look like this, easily mistaken for a knight. Although it seems that we’re right next to him, perhaps we’re seeing him as if in the distance, confused to see a knight-errant now, in the 17th century. From this distance, it’s still possible to believe his dream is true, that he really is a knight.

“This is realism.” We’re glimpsing the moment the illusion seems true, how nature––the sun, the distance across the plains––can conspire to fool us, and lull us into dream.

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Kathy Acker on William Burroughs

Posted on June 8, 2015 by Lee

As I prepare to talk about William S Burroughs at the end of the month, I’ve been re-reading Kathy Acker’s essay “William Burroughs’s Realism”. You can find her essay in Bodies of Work (Serpent’s Tail, 1997). The following is a one-page summary of her three-page essay:

Some American writers have criticised American society in cultured tones. But this doesn’t work because America isn’t cultured. American society is insane because it has a view of the world that doesn’t match up to the world and it cannot change its view. American society is unaware of anything other than itself.

Burroughs does not use cultured tones to criticise American society. He writes in a way that exhibits discontinuity, mutation, twisting of time so that it becomes space. It is a psychotic writing, but American reality is now psychotic, so it is a writing for America in our time.

Then Acker compares an extract from Burroughs’s The Soft Machine to a story that a friend told her. Both Burroughs’s text and her friend’s story are fictional. But then Acker writes: “What is fiction is that which will become actual.” This is what Burroughs does: he writes fiction that describes the future. “Writing that seemed radical when it appeared today looks like journalism. In other words: today in the United States, we are living in the worlds of Burroughs’s novels. Pray that the wild boys will help us escape.”

Burroughs wrote the future, but he also offered us a means of escape. He did this––in The Wild Boys and in all of his books––by using language opposed to the language of the media:

“The language of our media who dictate our political and social actualities is that of (false) continuity and (always partially false) fact: simple declarative sentences, as little use of ambiguity as possible, no dwelling within verbal sensuousness. Burroughs fights this post-bourgeois language with poetry: images, dangling clauses, all that lingers at the edge of the unsaid, that leads to and through dreams.”

We need this language of dreams because without it we will die. This is what Burroughs tells us, and what Acker tells us again here, at the end of her essay. Burroughs is a “mad journalist” because he describes reality but he also twists it so that we have a means of escape through dreams.

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Some thoughts on Michael Hardt

Posted on August 14, 2014 by Lee

I’m getting back into some philosophy.  First thing to read: Michael Hardt’s An Apprenticeship in Philosophy: Gilles Deleuze (University of Minnesota Press, 1993).  It’s an old book and an important one, and I thought it deserved a re-read.

This is a book about Deleuze’s early work.  In the introduction to the book, Hardt explains that Deleuze’s anti-Hegelianism is a key element in Deleuze’s work.  When Deleuze was writing, Hegel was an important figure in Continental philosophy, and poststructuralist philosophers felt they had to oppose Hegel in order to reveal “alternative lineages” in philosophy. (x)  In other words, they wanted to show that it was possible to reject Hegel and still do philosophy.

Hardt suggests that Deleuze’s early attempts to escape Hegelianism were not entirely successful.  This is because despite all his efforts, Deleuze kept coming back to problems and concepts that belonged to Hegelian thought, and so he was never free of Hegel’s influence in this early work. “We find that Deleuze often poses his project not only in the traditional language of Hegelianism but also in terms of typical Hegelian problems – the determination of being, the unity of the One and the Multiple, and so on.” (xi) 

So Hardt writes: “If Hegelianism is the first problem of poststructuralism, then, anti-Hegelianism quickly presents itself as the second.” (xi)  The question is: How is it possible to be anti-Hegelian?  This might not seem a very pressing problem today, but Hardt appears to be suggesting that “this [Hegelian] cultural and philosophical paradigm was so tenacious” in Deleuze’s day that it seemed to many to be impossible to talk about philosophy without sounding Hegelian, and slipping into a Hegelian mode of thinking.

Towards the end of the introduction, Hardt discusses a trap one can easily fall into when trying to be anti-Hegelian.  We might call this the trap of “oppositions”.  If you are “anti-” something then it is common to think of your own position as opposed to the thing you are against.  When two things are opposed we define them in terms of one another, with one thing defined as in some way “not” the other.  This is useful for debate and discussion, because, since you define your position in terms of the thing you are against you have to offer a definition of that thing (say, “Hegelianism”) in order to describe your own position (“anti-Hegelianism”).  (So you say: I am anti-Hegelian because Hegelians believe x and I do not.)  Your opponent can then decide whether you have defined their own position adequately or not, and maybe suggest an alternative definition.  If you agree you might change the definition of your own opposed position accordingly.  Or you might abandon that position altogether, in light of the new definition (It turns out I’m not anti-Hegelian after all, since I agree that y).  This is how dialectic works: agreement is reached, even if it is an agreement to disagree, by a gradual redefinition of terms on both sides.

But Hardt suggests that Deleuze is not trying to reach an agreement with Hegelianism when he opposes it.  Instead he is trying to strike out in a new direction altogether.  His position is “antagonistic” to Hegelianism rather than “opposed” to it.  (xv) His “antagonism” to Hegel is “a total critique and rejection of the negative dialectical framework” of Hegelianism rather than an attempt to engage in a debate with Hegelianism.  This is because Deleuze wants “to achieve a real autonomy” in thought, a new direction free from the established Hegelian ways of thinking. (xi)  In effect, a Deleuzian should not care what a Hegelian thinks of his critique.  Rather than trying to change the mind of a Hegelian, Deleuze is trying to positively set out a new kind of philosophy free of Hegelianism.

I like Hardt’s view of Deleuze, if indeed I’ve presented it correctly, and I think this antagonistic aspect of Deleuze’s thinking is something I often lose sight of.  But I’m also not sure that Deleuze ever really managed to maintain this antagonism, which is why I still think that a great deal of overlap and agreement can be found between the Deleuzian and Hegelian positions.  As I re-read Hardt I’m going to try to reconsider my view of the relationship between Hegel and Deleuze, and I’ll blog about it if I find anything interesting.

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William S. Burroughs and Scientology

Posted on February 8, 2014 by Lee

I’ve been reading Scientologist! William S. Burroughs and the ‘Weird Cult’ by David S. Wills.  (Beatdom Books, 2013)  It’s an excellent book, that describes in clear and engaging prose the development of William Burroughs’s ideas and beliefs, particularly his shifting attitude towards Scientology.

For me, it’s been interesting to learn just how seriously Burroughs took Scientology.  As Wills points out, Burroughs considered himself a sceptic who based his beliefs on facts.  But Wills also shows us that what Burroughs meant by “fact” was quite subjective.  A “fact” for Burroughs tended to be anything that he happened to believe in.  (p.26)  Burroughs believed in many of the theories and methods of Scientology, and so they were facts for him.  Of Scientology, Burroughs wrote to his friend Allen Ginsberg: “You see it works.” (p.66)

Scientology does seem to have worked very well for Burroughs, since not only was he able to mine the literature of Scientology for material for his “cut-ups” (a method of writing where pages are cut into pieces and rearranged to create new combinations of words), but also some concepts of Scientology, such as the “reactive mind”, became ideas so central to Burroughs’s writing that it is impossible to imagine what sort of books he might have gone on to write had he never learned of such concepts.  Brion Gysin joked that Burroughs was one of the few people to make more money out of Scientology than they made out of him. (p.122)

Perhaps the most interesting bit of Wills’s book is the final chapter, where he describes Burroughs’s break with Scientology.  We learn that however valuable he found some of the Church’s ideas and methods, he hated what he saw as the religious, controlling and organisational aspects of Scientology.  For Burroughs, the ideas of Scientology offered the promise of escape from systems of control, but this promise was negated by the fact that Scientology wanted to control its own members, by determining what they could read, who they could see, subjecting them to tests, and so on.  Interestingly, Burroughs believed that what he had gained from Scientology was a deeper understanding of methods of control, since in his view the means that Scientologists used to control their members were very similar to those used by governments and their agents. (p.148)

But Wills shows us that although Burroughs broke with Scientology he never gave up on its ideas altogether.  Towards the end of the book, Wills looks at how some of Burroughs’s later works contain ideas from Scientology.  For example:

“In [The Place of] Dead Roads, Burroughs’s alter ego, Kim, thinks about space travel as his ‘only purpose,’ and a means of escape.  He considers the necessities for leaving this planet – namely a change in biological form in order to adapt to the environment of space.  And what is the environment of space?  ‘SILENCE.’  Humans need to evolve in order to deal with silence.  It was from Scientology that Burroughs took the idea that silence is important, a method of avoiding triggering an engram.” (p.203)

That Scientology remained an obsession for Burroughs is something that is often overlooked, according to Wills.  (pp.4-5)  I’m glad I read Wills’s book, as I think it’s given me a deeper insight into Burroughs’s later work.

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Deleuze and Guattari: Creative versus Utopian Thinking

Posted on February 27, 2013 by Lee

It’s been almost a year since I last posted here, and it feels like it’s about time I explained what happened with those three “projects” I described in my last post.   The projects were to be: a follow-up to the “Deleuze, Guattari and May’68″ paper I posted in 2011; an account of Hegel’s logic of the Concept; an examination of Hegel’s account of the state.  Today I’ll start by looking at what I did on the subject of Gilles Deleuze and May ’68, and I’ll discuss how I got on with the two Hegel-related projects in later posts.

My follow-up to the “Deleuze, Guattari and May’68” essay became a paper entitled “Deleuze and Guattari: Creative versus Utopian Thinking” which I presented at the London Conference in Critical Thought in June 2012.  You can read the paper here.

In the paper I compare what Deleuze and Guattari have to say about history and resistance to what William E. Leuchtenburg writes about the history of the New Deal in the USA and the creative approach to politics that we see in America at that time; I then look at some of the things that Henry Miller said about the individual’s search for meaning in life to illustrate how the problems that people face today in the USA, Europe and elsewhere are quite different to those that the New Deal was supposed to tackle, even if they evolved from those old problems.  In sum, the old problem was how to allow people to find work; the new problem (or rather, the old problem that we are hopefully slowly coming to recognise) is to allow people to find meaning in their lives.  For Miller, getting people into work is not enough; we also need to ensure that the work that people do does not make them mean and miserable.

I do feel that the conclusion of the paper is quite unsatisfying, as I don’t explain how the processes described by Miller could spark a creative political approach that would lead to anything but failure.  My next paper on this topic will look at Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus in more detail and show in what way Deleuze and Guattari claim to get further than Henry Miller, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac and all the other writers who fail to escape the “neurotic impasse” in which they find themselves trapped.

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Hegel after Deleuze and Guattari

Posted on March 21, 2012 by Lee

I’m currently working on three separate projects, each of which will appear on this blog in the not too distant future. One will be a follow-up to the “Deleuze, Guattari and May’68” paper I posted last year; another will be an account of Hegel’s logic of the Concept; the third will be an examination of Hegel’s account of civil society and the state.  (Though I won’t necessarily post them in that order.)

In the meantime I’ve decided to post my PhD thesis, which I completed fairly recently.  Here’s the link.

The title is “Hegel after Deleuze and Guattari: Freedom in Philosophy and the State” and it is an attempt to show how some of the criticisms of Hegel offered by Deleuze and Guattari can help us to work out what Hegel’s “immanent” approach to logic and philosophy should consist in.  Deleuze and Guattari argue that Hegel reduces contingency to necessity; I argue that the Hegelian approach can only be genuinely immanent and presuppositionless if it does not reduce contingency to necessity, and that Hegelian immanence recognises that contingent events determine what becomes necessary.  If a principle is “necessary” in the Hegelian sense of the term, this does not mean that it has been proven to have been (“always already”) true or good all along, but instead it means that it has in fact become true or good (“retroactively”, to use a Deleuzian term), given the previous development of our thoughtful activity (whether this activity is the act of thinking itself, performing ethical actions, or whatever), and this development is subject to contingency.  Contingent events become necessary, but were not always already necessary, and so contingency is not reduced to necessity, for Hegel.

One could divide the thesis into three parts, so if you don’t have the time or the inclination to read the whole thesis, you might want to read just one or two of these parts, according to what interests you.  Chapter 1 could be called the first part, which is about Deleuze and Guattari’s “schizoanalytic” approach to philosophy, according to which no concepts are eternal, but are instead created in order to solve problems specific to a singular “image of thought”; the second part would be Chapters 3 to 6 (plus Chapter 2 if you like, which serves as a short preface to Chapters 3 to 7) in which Hegel’s Science of Logic is discussed (Chapter 3 covers the logic of “being”; Chapters 4 and 5 cover “essence”; Chapter 6 covers the beginning of the logic of the “Concept”); the third part is Chapter 7, which covers Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, where Hegel discusses freedom, morality and ethical life.  In addition to these three parts, there is a long-ish conclusion to the thesis after Chapter 7.

If anyone does read the thesis, or part of it, I’d be really grateful for any comments, questions or criticisms.

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