“Economics, Politics, Imaginaries”系列讲座第二讲


演讲主题： Hegel’s Brain  黑格尔的智慧

主讲人：英国伦敦大学  Scott Lash 教授



时间：2012年3月21日（周三）晚18:30—20:30

地点：逸夫馆9楼高研院报告厅


Abstract:

  For Foucault, liberalism was linked to Smith’s political economy and Adam Ferguson’s concept of civil society. G.W.F. Hegel drew on both Smith and
Ferguson for his notion of civil society.  Hegel’s Phenomenology of Mind was first and foremost, not about absolute spirit, but about the human subject as mind. Here the subject and mind consists of on the one hand perception and on the other the concepts of the understanding. For Kant the imagination mediates between perception and the understanding. Kant of course featured the reason of the understanding. Post-Kantian romantics - such as Fichte and Hegel’s close friend Schelling - focused instead on the imagination, on the productive imaginary as creating the world.  For Kant the subject is more or less rigid.

  For Hegel the subject and mind is plastic. This plasticity is attained through this the imaginary, through the schema of this imaginary encountering the uncertainty of the future.  This encounter is a process of constituting and transforming our identity itself. At stake so far is consciousness and (Freudian) unconscious mind. But any Hegelian dialectics must synthesize the ideality of mind and the materiality of the brain. Today cognitive neuroscience shows that biological evolution has led to the increased plasticity of the human brain. Our mind-brains encounter and ‘couple’ with objects, with technology and with other humans in a multiplicity of configurations. To the extent that we (and our relations) are rigid, they are driven by a functional mechanism of reproduction.  To the extent that we are plastic, our self-organization and this productive coupling is driven by the (social) imaginary.