| | Georg Wilhelm Hegel was born in Stuttgart in 1770. His father was a civil servant in the department of finances at Württemberg. He was educated as a theologian but did not follow the orthodoxy of his time. He wrote a book about Jesus in which the virgin birth was not mentioned, but he did not publish it. He was a private tutor until the age of thirty when he went to the University of Jena. In Jena, in 1807, he wrote the Phänomenologie des Geistes, which, in English, can be translated to Phenomenology of the Mind. (In German, “Geist” can mean” mind,””spirit,” “ghost,””reason,” and any number of intellectual references.)From 1808 to 1816, he was Principal of a high school in Nuremberg, and he wrote two volumes of his Logic. From 1816 to1818, he was Professor in Heidelberg, and he wrote Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences in Outline. In 1821, while he was Professor in the University of Berlin, he wrote the Philosophy of Right. (In German, “right” can mean “law,” “moral principle,” or “civil right,”and is used interchangeably.) Hegel died of cholera in an epidemic in 1831, and his students pooled their notes and published his lectures in the Collected Works, in1832-1840.
To Hegel, philosophy is the attempt to understand the whole, the Absolute, God. A cog is not meaningful until it is seen in the context of a machine which is seen in the context of its larger function and so on until everything is understood. One can’t know anything until one knows everything. Hegel isn’t satisfied simply declaring that everything is a unity and that differentiation is only illusion. This is okay for the mystics, but he would rather explain differences and reconcile them. His method for doing so is the familiar dialectic used by Plato, Aristotle, and Kant. He takes a concept, like “being,” and analyzing it until it leads us to its negation,”nothing.” Then, he can subsume the two extremes to be “becoming.” Plato did this by synthesizing Heraclites and Parmenides to come up with his theory of the forms. Aristotle did this by finding the golden mean, in his moral philosophy, between the two extremes, and Kant did this by combining British Empiricism with Continental Rationalism to make German Idealism. Later philosophers followed this dialectic, this give and take to produce a third option, and it was referred to as the thesis-antithesis-synthesis approach.
In Hegel’s dialectic of history, world-history unfolds logically: “the real is the rational, the rational is the real.” The movement is triadic; thesis-antithesis-synthesis. And, each resolution is a beginning for another triadic. It keeps on going as it approaches the Absolute.
This is a very systematic way of looking at history and the future. If it is true and we can become adept at reading these movements, then we should be able to predict the future just as we study the past. Predicting the future would be just like studying the past in reverse.
Because negation is at the root of all conflict, division and limitation, the dialectic is also the process of overcoming division, moving from self-identity to self-alienation to reconciliation. We see others as alien to ourselves but then we also see ourselves in others. In this way, the spirit is alien to matter but reenters matter. Reality is a living, evolving process, a rational development. Again, the real is the rational and the rational is the real.
Both Kant and Hegel placed emphasis on this mental view of reality, that it is more a mental thing than empirical. How we see nature tells us more about how our mind works than how nature really is. Kant said we really can’t get to real reality. It is the noumena we never reach, but Hegel thought the rational is the real.
Marx turned Hegel on his head and used the dialectic to talk about what he called the material, not the spiritual. And, by material, Marx meant the means of production and capital and things people use to survive and flourish, not just rocks and furniture or spiritual and mental things. However, he also thought the future could be predicted. Just as Hegel was a Neo-Kantian, Marx was a Neo-Hegelian.
Hegel’s moral philosophy is developmental, much like Kohlberg’s model. He has classifications of “citizen,” “person,” hero,” and “victim.” He sees a “citizen” as someone who is subjugated to the state, whose morality is conventional, customary, much like someone at Kohlberg’s good boy good girl stage. The “person” is the individual who can transcend conventional morality and, like Socrates, act on ideas, not just following the herd. The “heroes” are those who act in attunement with what Hegel called the World-Spirit. He once saw Napoleon and wrote that he was an example of someone being used by Reason to actualize the self-consciousness of freedom. He saw Caesar and Alexander the Great as other examples. The “victim,” according to Hegel, is the person who acts only for personal gain with no regard for customary morality or principle or World Spirit. Hegel doesn’t care much for the victim.
Hegel sees the individual as unimportant. He or she becomes important as he or she fits into the state, and Hegel sees the state as an entity which makes the individual meaningful. This is exactly opposite to the way I and many others would look at individuals. I think there wouldn’t be collectives; states, churches, or classes without the individual members of those collectives. The group should serve the individual, not the other way around. I think Hegel is responsible for much of the subjugation of individuals to states and nations, and this is something that Marx kept intact from Hegel.
bis bald,
Nick
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