Invitations and Becomings

Is philosophy's relation to politics changing? Two recent online posts have me wondering... The first is a review on NDPR of Allen Wood's book Kantian Ethics, which blurs the line by infusing a scholarly philosophical publication with political invective. The second is a musing in the Daily Kos that 'purity trolls' in the lead-up to this year's US election are in fact a contemporary manifestation of Hegel's notion of a 'beautiful soul'.

In his book, Wood uses examples from the history of the US administration from 2004-6, "usually to illustrate arrogance, lying, and egregious violations of right. A few readers of my earlier work have told me they think this sort of thing inappropriate in a scholarly book. But my worries about appearing "unscholarly" pale next to my shame, which all Americans should feel at having failed to prevent the disastrous course events." (Kantian Ethics, p. xiii)

Here's an excerpt from the piece by Stroszek in the Daily Kos. It speaks for itself:

"You see, purity trolls have existed as long as people have had the option of disengaging from the world. Whenever reality created a gray area, there have been those who thought themselves so pure that they would retreat to their studies or monasteries, thinking they could uphold their ‘principles’ by keeping them abstract and ideal, untouched by the corrupting influence of human action. This, in turn, permitted them to look down upon those who do take on the burden of acting and governing. They saw the dirty hands of those who acted and said from their pedestals, "If only you would act in the way I think, perhaps you might be as righteous."

The philosopher G.W.F. Hegel was keenly aware of this self-defeating posture as he tried to conceptualize an ethics that combined the pristine formality of Kantian morality with classical philosophy’s emphasis on civil engagement. For Hegel, the purity troll, referred to as "the beautiful soul," manifests as a stages of the modern dialectic of Spirit, one of many states of consciousness that fails to reconcile its internal conflicts. In a sense, it is the self-consciousness that inverts the dilemma of the early Christian: rather than placing pure morality outside of itself and taking its own being to be unholy, it equates itself with a pure inner-world of moral thought that is separates from the corruption of the world. Thus, to maintain its purity, it withdraws from the world, refusing to act." 

(Daily Kos, Hegel's Phenomenology of Purity Trolls) 

I just hope the author realises that blogging about purity trolls is just a hair's breath away from being one...