Hegel and Kanye

When Hegel talks about freedom and slavery in one of philosophy’s most celebrated passages, he isn’t just pulling this stuff out of the air. Or, rather, that’s exactly what he’s doing: he’s talking about things that were in the air at the time he was writing Phenomenology of  Spirit in 1805-1806. Specifically, as Susan Buck-Morss argues in her article “Hegel and Haiti” (later expanded into the book Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History), the Haitian slave revolt was very much on his mind and provided the obvious inspiration for his thoughts on this subject. That no one has made this argument in the two centuries of commentary on Hegel strikes Buck-Morss as ridiculous, a kind of huge elephant in the room that has gone unremarked upon by generations of scholars. It's a reminder that philosophy, for all pretensions to exist in the rarefied world of pure thought is inevitably a product of time.

It’s this same kind “real talk” that I hear in one of Kanye West’s verses on “Diamonds from Sierra Leone.” The song is about the consequences of so-called “blood” or “conflict diamonds”—diamonds from Africa (including, as the song’s title suggests, from Sierra Leone) the sale of which finances sectarian civil war. But rather than issue platitudes about the evils of the diamond trade, Kanye comes clean:

When I speak of diamonds in this song
I ain't talkin’ ‘bout the ones that be glowin’
I'm talkin’ ‘bout Rocafella, my home, my chain.

Part of what I’ve found so compelling about Kanye over the years (but particularly in his earlier material) is that he’s a materialistic, misogynist brat—and he knows he’s a materialistic misogynist brat, and he feels guilty about being a materialistic misogynist brat, but he’s still a materialistic, misogynist brat. It’s a kind of honesty I find, well, compelling.