Hegel Today
aeon.co
aeon.co
As a software engineer, I was surprised to see how some of Hegel's ideas describe dynamics I've observed in my career. His dialectical process resembles how software systems evolve over time, and his "Spirit" reminds me of the ferment of ideas and collaboration on the Internet. The beauty of Hegel's rich texts is that each generation of readers brings him back to life in a new way.
"Truly to escape Hegel involves an exact appreciation of the price we have to pay to detach ourselves from him. It assumes that we are aware of the extent to which Hegel, insidiously perhaps, is close to us; it implies a knowledge, in that which permits us to think against Hegel, of that which remains Hegelian. We have to determine the extent to which our anti-Hegelianism is possibly one of his tricks directed against us, at the end of which he stands, motionless, waiting for us"
A another engineer / not-trained philosopher I was also surprised how intuitive Hegel's ideas were when I started to read philosophy on my own, having had the idea in my head that he's not understandable at all. (Of course that's not to say he isn't actually difficult at a higher level that probably went over my head)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foucault%27s_lectures_at_the_C...
[2] http://s3.amazonaws.com/arena-attachments/2288168/a517f61536...
This means poststructuralist texts can be extremely hard to read and understand, especially to non-philosophically trained people or those hoping to get a logical theory about the world instead of a multi-facetted view onto some phenomenom within it. That doesn't mean you cannot pull a lot of interesting stuff from those texts, it just means it is very hard and never clearcut. Critics and people who failed to parse such a book dislike poststructuralists for this.
Focoult however wasn't a typical poststructuralist anyways and many of his books are very well observed and describe power relationships within society on the base of some other phenomena. As any philosopher with a precise language his books stand and fall with the quality of translation. I liked the German translations better than the English ones, because English as a language doesn't really lend itself to auch thinking..
My main complain is that he ascribed to the notion that it is more important to have the "right" political impact than to seek the truth. That and the fact that he was a pedophile, but I digress.
Here is just one random passage of The Phenomenology of Spirit, it's all like this:
The distinction which was made between actual Spirit and Spirit that knows itself as Spirit, or between itself, qua conscionsness, and qua self-consciousness, is superseded in the Spirit that knows itself in its truth; its consciousness and its self"con~sdousnessare on the same level. But, as religion here is, to begin with, immediate, this distinction has not yet returned into Spirit. What is posited is only the Notion of religion; in this the essence is self .. consciousness, which is conscious of being all truth and contains all reality within that truth.
Arthur Schopenhauer criticized Phenomenology of Spirit as being characteristic of the vacuous verbiage he attributed to Hegel: "I do not think that it is difficult to see that whoever puts forward anything like this is a shameless charlatan who wants to fool simpletons and observes that he has found his people in the Germans of the nineteenth century.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frederick_C._Beiser#Works
Also, it's much easier to start with Hegel's lectures (on aesthetics, history, religion etc.) and just go read the Phenomenology & Science of Logic after one has a sense of his style and general philosophy. It's foolish to start by the most difficult texts.
And don't take Schopenhauer's criticisms of Hegel too seriously, as they are mostly due to personal misgivings and envy (Sch. couldn't stand Hegel's popularity, while Sch. barely managed to get any students for his classes).
I don't believe in bombastic word vomit, especially when that person deliberately chose to make his prose more incomprehensible.
Modern theology is a lot more fun than the stuff they worked with in Aquinas' time. Dangerous, too.
> And last, the obscurity of Hegel’s writing made rejecting Hegelian philosophy all the easier. After all, who could tell what he was actually saying?
But then interpreting the prophet is probably a more secure job ...
> Unravelling his turgid prose turns out to be worth the effort, affording us glimpses of how things ‘hang together’ that others miss.
On the other hand, Schopenhauer (as anti-Hegel as they come) hit quite a few good points writing clear and elegant prose, even tossing out witty essays as a sort of topping.
Hegel by HyperText:
https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/index.htm
Visualiation of the Science of Logic:
we are all rats trapped in Hegel's maze until the apocalypse ;).
Down with Hegal.
Unfortunately, It'll be hard to go against his views, since they've been baked into almost every child's subconscious as "this is just how life is."
I can only make observations that Hegel's writings on education mirror the realities of U.S. public (and most private) schools -- if only because he was a teacher in the "Prussian System," (itself, a reactionary thing born of Frederick William III's loss of face from losing to Napoleon) and thus his views were molded by his culture and the time he lived in.
I don't think Hegel really had any say in the matter -- or was that popular (or even heard of) among policymakers of the 19th and 20th centuries. Only that he is a window into the soul (or rather its destruction) of his nation at the time.
So, when adressing an individual, props for discovering a great philosopher. When adressig a community of people/philosophers going back to hegel though... ouch... that's a regression...
My fear (for lack of a better word) is that people now portray hegel as something progressive. Whereas it should be more of those journeys we do as devs, where we take a closer look at some of the basic low level tools we use (eg read the docs of a language, or linux, or bash), learn them more in depth and then go back to doing more advanced stuff using that knowledge.
Yes, there are ups and downs in their reception (for example the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas has had a long hiatus from public perception in the 1700s and the 1800s) but that only happened because of our different way to read/interpret the history of philosophy hence philosophy itself (the materialists in France and the empiricists in Britain weren't that fond of Aquinas).
For crying out loud, that was the point of the whole ball of wax.
They came up with "scientific materialism" so they could "demonstrate" that the inexorable progress of history would lead from the original primitive communism to the final advanced communism.
(All other believers in communism that did not adhere to the doctrine were to be shunned because their "unscientific" approach would make them bad guides.)
Also, I do not subscribe to the latest philosophical trends as these are mostly rehashes/reskins of old ones. Similar to many modern programming languages