Dear Peeps,
Here's another piece of watered down philosophical writing that I'd like to hear your responses to. It don't think it's necessary to have read Hegel in order to think about the ideas. And I've gotten in this bad habit of writing things with my own student voice that would't be acceptable to a lot of teachers, but i feel like this is one of the only ways to make writing accessible to myself and more realistic or tied to the ground. Academia seems to have its head up its own ass, and can't see that what's actually happening in human experience is indescribable and will never have anything to do with their ideas or even care about their ideas. That having been said, academia is helpful for some things. Maybe it just needs a little more humility. I hope this is humble enough.
Ryan D. Chaney
CCII
Benjamin Fogarty
3/16/10
Response to Hegel's "Introduction to the Philosophy of History"
It's difficult to judge thinkers as individuals living the same human experience we all are and living within communities of people, as we all are, and use our understanding of their experience (from our own) in order to understand and critique their ideas. The problem is that, by virtue of their being “philosophy,” the ideas take on a complex life of their own, and exist autonomously of the thinker him/herself. They are forced to exist without the thinker. Here lies a central paradox; How can a thinker conceive of an idea or set of ideas and claim that they stand on their own, autonomous and anchored in the cosmological realm of possibility. Hegel tried to give his "History of Philosophy" a machine-like life that not only existed, but served as canonical pillars holding up the structure and hegemony of reason, an force that exists independently of anything outside of its own laws and conclusions.
This might well be why we still mention the importance of the society and context in which the thinkers thought and wrote. More and more, however, that aspect is being de-emphasized by teachers and students who want take-home packages of “knowledge” that outlast the specific thinker. (Reminds us of CC and Lit. Hum, two Columbia requirements). It's not sexy to learn historical facts about an old white man's life who no longer lives, and nobody will bear it, much less pay for it. Nevertheless, this is where, quite possibly, the keys to figuring out weird thinkers like Hegel and their impacts are being lost. Maybe Hegel's “Introduction to History” is one big performative creation.
It's easy to get into an epistemological fist-fight with Hegel and argue that it's quite evident that humans aren't rational beings. One could take it further and argue that he either sheltered himself from the outside world of difference and contingency, or he ignored the irrational behavior of his closest acquaintances and community.
If we grant Hegel this axiomatic premise and believe that he speaks of a structure of reason outside of our individual subjective capacity - one which limits our capacity to see clearly, understand or participate in this higher realm of reason - only then can we move forth. Only then can we see whether reason actualizes "itself" in the world, or whether "it" is actualized selectively by those who benefit from it.
Reason has long been used as a tool for domination. The master is careful to craft the slave's self-consciousness through habitus, in order to make the slave realize his distance from the objective universal that the master's authority is there to impose. It can be extrapolated from the master/slave, onto higher levels of relations, such tribe/state and citizen/state. The problem Hegel didn't see was that at this level, the state, if not democratic, will always exist to further it's own survival, and if democratic, will, also for its own survival, stoop down to populism and simplistic utilitarianism.
Another problem with giving Hegel the benefit of the doubt, is its vast similarity to Christian religious doctrine. On a first reading, it seemed as if Hegel had to perform a leap of faith in order to get beyond his problematic premises. Similar to Christianity, he describes the course of history as destined to perfect itself over time until human passions are kept at bay by universal principles. In Christianity, God's existence is destined to save humanity from its own doom by showing them the transcendental, or divine - which is like the Platonic form, always better and higher then human faculty, but still elusively accessible to it. In addition, history's being guided by rational "spirit," sounds a lot like history being influenced by the hand of God. This is an idea that has proved nefarious throughout colonialism, into imperialism, and now strongly into liberal "free market" Capitalism. Hegel argues that the rational spirit becomes conscious of itself through its subjective aspect. This reminds me of the idea of the believer coming into contact with the truth of God through the bible. To Hegel, the more in line with reason, the closer to the universal. To Christian doctrine, the more in line with God's ways, the closer you are to being at one with God (at[one]ment). In addition, Hegel talks about how the individual becomes improved through self-negation, eerily similar to Christian notions of asceticism and sacrifice for the Kingdom of Heaven.
Following this logic, it leads me to conclude that Hegel espoused the following: as part of the self-perfecting nature of the rational spirit of history, it has been ordained that subjective individuals hindered by human passions be enslaved by masters (the state) who have a better/higher notion of the objective universal, actualizable through enlightenment, and most importantly reason. This means that the enslavement that gives the slave self-consciousness in regard to the master, is the same force, or spirit, that will lead to ultimate universal perfection, where self-consciousness is achieved by all humans.
It seems, today, in the age of reason and a peak of enlightenment, Hegel's “Philosophy of History” served as a seminal performative, which, along with other works like Adam Smith's “Wealth of Nations,” Hobbes “Leviathan,” Kant's “Groundwork,” Burke's “Reflections,” Rousseau's “Social Contract,” and Mill's “On Liberty” lead to universal reason's “self”-realization in the world.
To me, it sounds like Hegel had to have lacked self-consciousness - an awareness of the way his own human experience was unfolding - in order to so assuredly posit such problematic and axiomatic ideas. Maybe he thought that it was the only way out left to man: to live in chains, for the better good. Maybe he thought that it all actually works that way. Or, maybe he just did it to fuck with us.
