Diet Soap #150: Bedazzled by Hegel's Monstrous Reason




Zero Squared show

Summary: There is no guest this week as Benjamin and I discuss Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit focussing on Hegel's ideas about reason and organic life while pointing to the movies Bedazzled (a comedy starring Peter Cook and Dudley Moore) and Frankenstein to help us understand. I want to thank everyone who is a regular donor to Diet Soap and to thank everyone who regularly participates in the Philosophy workshop. I didn't receive any individual donations last week, but I did receive help from my regular subscribers. If you'd like to donate or subscribe to the podcast the buttons are at dietsoap.podomatic.com and at douglaslain.com. Donations of $6 or more in the US or $15 internationally will receive a copy of my book "Pick Your Battle." Also, if you'd rather not receive a copy of "Pick Your Battle" you can get on the list for a copy of "The Doom that Came to LOLcats" which is a novella due out from Eraserhead press this year. I should tell you all to follow me on twitter and friend me on Facebook. Also you can send me email through my webpage. That's douglaslain.com. Again, this week is another Hegel podcast with my son Benjamin. Next week we'll hear from the journalist Margaret Kimberley, and I have conversations with Daniel Coffeen, Jason Horsley, Bradley Sands, and many others in the hopper. The music you're listening to is the Vitamin String Quartet's cover of Joy Division's Love Will Tear Us Apart, but in just a moment you'll be listening to my son Benjamin and I discuss Hegel's Reason. --- Unrelated Essay: Star Trek, Pong, and Class Struggle One question that came out of John Scalzi’s apt blog post “Straight, White, Male: The Easiest Difficulty Level There Is” is this one: “How might we understand the idea of class through video games?” That is, if using the analogy of an RPG video game can help white male nerds understand institutionalized racism and white privilege, it’s also possible that video games might help nerds of every gender and race understand the concept of class structure and class struggle. In Adam Curtis’s documentary “All Watched Over by Machine’s of Loving Grace” the filmmaker interviewed Loren Carpenter about his 1991 experiment using the game Pong to inspire mass collaboration. In the interview Carpenter explains how a group of 5000 people spontaneously figured out how to collaborate to play pong on a giant screen. The collaborating crowd spontaneously figured out how to cooperate with a minimum amount of communication and no hierarchal structures of power; there were no overt directions nor any chain of command, but the crowd was able to figure out how to collectively move the paddles on the big screen and keep the ball bouncing back and forth. They learned how to run a flight simulator game collectively, and how to solve the variety of other puzzles put to them. They worked together each time in a completely egalitarian way and as a mass. Read More at Tor.com