‘Spirit is a bone’ is a phrase uttered, or more precisely, written by the nineteenth century German idealist and continental philosopher Hegel. Its meaning is multiple, but suffice it to say that it combines my two primary interests: spirit, or knowledge, the mind and truth on one end, and the manner and means by which we discern that truth (the method) on the other.
When Hegel declared that spirit is a bone, he identified the limited nature of truth seeking itself. For a long period of our history, the phrenologist determined the intelligence of man by the skulls weight and length. History moved forward with this truth as a universal.
But this is not a monograph blog charting some genealogy of ignorance. On the contrary, what you will find at Spirit is a Bone are simply my opinions, ideas, fragments, notes, thoughts, links, as well as more well-formed essays and blogs.
By way of background: I’m interested in bringing the philosophical tradition of continental philosophy (Kant, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Schelling, and the German Idealists) into dialogue with the psychoanalytic tradition (Freud, Lacan, Žižek, Badiou). You might boil this down into a trinity of ‘interests’:
1. Psychoanalysis offers offer a usable and fluid theoretical system for positioning my work towards liberation and freedom (two words that signify so much and so little).
2. The subject. What do we make of the subject after the supposed ‘death of the subject’? My interest in subjectivity refers to how we become (or are) dependent upon systems that influence our relation to others and self. Suffice it to say that I can’t create a bullet point about subjectivity, but that I write and read about it a lot.
3. Politics and democracy: These philosophical traditions provide the set for my writing, while you could say the stage is filled in by my interest in a wide range of political theory, including liberal thought, multiculturalism, and other deontological traditions.
Daniel Tutt
