Copyright © 2018

Avello Publishing Journal

ISSN: 2049 - 498X

Issue 1 Volume 8:
Intentionality in Semantics.

Jason Wakefield, University of Cambridge, England.

Review: Intelligence and Spirit (2018) Reza Negarestani. Sequence Press.

This new 579 page book distributed by Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Press is about grasping, thus understanding (Verstand), the territory of the

Hegelian revision of Kantian transcendental subjectivity and intelligibilities

with 'the exploration of conditions for object-intentionality' (Pippin 2016: 48).

Rather than give a chapter-by-chapter summary of the book relying on a

retelling of Reza Negarestani’s main clinical points, one will examine the

experiment-based elements of his science that one formally approves of and

the elements of his experimental activities that one formally rejects.

One formally approves of Negarestani’s argument that the mind is only

what it does in total reality, however one formally rejects Negarestani’s

argument that Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel's description of Geist is a

picture of a deprivatized mind in spirit because sociality is not a formal

condition of Geist as a model of mind. The interaction of a thesis and

antithesis Hegel termed with the verb sublation (Aufhebung) which has

several seemingly contradictory meanings if you compare the different

translations of Hegel into English by different translators, however Hegel is

very clear that the mind's absolute knowledge (das absolute Wissen) never

changes or develops further. Thus there is no deprivatized das absolute

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Wissen of mind in spirit because the seemingly paradoxical dialectical spiral of

Aufheben is not a condition of the mind. Negarestani admits on the second

page of Intelligence and Spirit (2018) that he does not remain authentically

faithful to the philosophy of Hegel, however what he has written in his latest

book is far more serious then not remaining authentically faithful to Hegelian

science because he has severely misunderstood critical parts of the logical

relations of Hegel's philosophy of history in juxtaposition with Hegel's

Phenomenology of Mind (1807)! Not remaining authentically faithful to the

philosophy of Hegel is not a problem, as many distinguished teachers stray

slightly away from Hegelian science, such as Bob Brandom and Slavoj Žižek,

however what Brandom or Žižek both do not do is misunderstand the logical

relations of Hegel's philosophy, thus the parts of their work that draw heavily

on Hegelian science to enhance their new analytic semantic pragmatism,

logical expressivism and metaphysics of intentionality is technically rigorous.

Many analytic pragmatists might criticize my reading of Negarestani

as biased towards the sciences of Bertrand Russell (the logician and Nobel

laureate) or Wilfrid Sellars (who graduated from Oriel College, Oxford before

teaching philosophy at Iowa, Minnesota, Yale and Pittsburgh) as they both felt

a deep repugnance for Hegel and they both influenced Brandom - however

one does not loathe the Right Hegelians such as Karl Daub, Johann Philipp

Gabler and Leopold August Wilhelm Dorotheus von Henning because they

where the first phase of theologians to integrate Hegel's perspectival

awareness into logico-mathematical proofs. One is indeed very fond of the

progress Sellars made in his Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind (1997)

which includes a conclusive study guide written by Brandom because since

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the text was first published in essay form in 1956, it helped change the

philosophical link that bound Bertrand Russell's mathematics to David Hume's

skepticism - thus one is not biased towards Russell because one likes this

Sellarsian shift in analytic philosophy.

Negarestani is an excellent Iranian philosopher and his grasp of the

discursive practices of Brandom, The Analysis of Mind (1921) written by

Russell and the causal modalities plus counterfactuals of Sellars are often

quite superb, however Negarestani fails to resolve his fusion of English

Bayesian logic, German Idealism and Humean purely logical Scottish

reasoning (as unfortunately altered radically by Kurt Gödel) thus

Negarestani's datum remains inconclusive - thus his datum is pointless! One

completely agrees with Negarestani that we should emancipate ourselves

from exploitation, however the eight chapters of Intelligence and Spirit (2018)

are inconsistent in quality, thus read like a series of disconnected

transcriptions of his lectures, rather than reading like the unique trajectory of

a book similar to Žižek's Like a Thief in Broad Daylight: Power in the Era of

Post-Humanity (2018) which practices the art of brevity, clarity and

succinctness when analysing the influence of the ethical philosophies of Young

Hegelians (such as Edgar Bauer, Ludwig Feuerbach and Karl Marx to

illuminate the new dangers and the radical possibilities thrown up by today's

scientific advances. Negarestani does analyse both techno-scientific progress

and the techno-scientific corrosion of the global capitalist edifice like Žižek,

however Negarestani's discursive speech about the links between new

scientific advances and their transformations lacks Žižek's semantic-pragmatic

reasoning that he critiques the Young Hegelians with.

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 My final recommendation is that political theorists and scholars

should buy this book because it contains several key passages, regardless of

the treatise not systematically examining Hegel's Phenomenology of Mind

(1807). The book at 579 pages in length is a bargain for its price! It might not

matter that one has dined wisely then been out drinking with Brandom in-

person when he flew over from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania to Cambridge, East

Anglia in 2014 and it was a pleasure to finally shake Žižek's hand in person in

2018 at Cambridge University the evening after he talked about the

precisification of ideologico-politics with complete reasoning in Oxford

University because approximately half of our Professors from Cambridge

where on research sabbatical leave from the faculty of philosophy at the time

to write books on the philosophy of logic. Žižek's philosophy of mind proves

he has a much deeper understanding of Hegel's semantics than Negarestani,

however Negarestani's diagrammatization of intentional actions with litanies

about Hegelian consequentialism are also worth buying.

Analytic rigour and the complexity of systematic semantic

comprehensiveness is exactly the same thing, thus there is nothing

antithetical about the two. The lack of this analytic comprehensiveness is

perhaps because the final chapter of Intelligence and Spirit (2018) perhaps

alludes too heavily towards the matérialisme spéculatif taught by Ray Brassier

at the American University of Beirut, Lebanon where nihilism is pushed to its

ultimate conclusion.

Bibliography

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Pippin, R.B. (2011) Hegel on Self-Consciusness: Desire and Death in the

Phenomenology of Spirit Princeton University Press.

Sellars, W. (1997) Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind Harvard University

Press.

Žižek, S. (2018) Like a Thief in Broad Daylight: Power in the Era of Post-

Humanity Penguin Books.