German Idealists: Georg Hegel

So the one philosopher who I've read the least-of-but-still-talk-about-the-most is Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, who you can meet personally at:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hegel

and of course at

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/hegel/


Why is this guy the guy? Well for one thing, he liked my guys Kant and Spinoza, both of whom I have done a modest amount of work about. Remember, the namesake of this blog is Immanuel Kant, who believed all we can know are appearances.

In fact, Hegel thought that he was completing the Kantian system with his more thorough, rigorous system.

What's the big deal about the Hegelian system?

I don't know, and it would be pretense, facade, and hypocrisy to say that I do know.

I can take one limited educated guess, though. One of the reasons Hegel is popular is because of Hegelian Dialectic.

We've gone over Dialectic quite a bit in reference to the Socratic Dialogues, which were Plato's way of communicating ethics (one of the testimonies to their power is their survival: they're over 2000 years old). Dialectic in the traditional-ancient sense is basically the revealing of some truth from discussion, dialogue. Dialogue would become substantial for the Moderns' communication of their moral discussions, too; this includes David Hume, George Berkeley (I remember the 3 Dialogues characters Hylas and Philonous), and Gottfried Leibniz; among others.

Judaism also has its own dialogue called Talmudic Dialectic (again I'm citing wikipedia; Jewish Facadesaside readers, Religious studies majors, or those interested might just as easily look at the Talmud, Mishnah, and so on). Talmudic Dialectic is conflicting dialogues by intelligent authorities in the Jewish Religion committed to the pages of the important works, such as the Talmud. So for instance, if you open a page of the Talmud, you might see one author comment on the primary source, then another author commenting on that author, and then another author commenting on that author.

(Big Digression: One time, looking at the Talmud with my Rabbi, he said that it was like hypertexting in the internet; even bringing out a book that compared the Talmud to the internet; which furthered my hypothesis that Hebrew itself was like the internet. I haven't written any papers on this yet, but it makes sense: for the longest time, only those polyglots who could speak mutiple languages would be able to cut the mustard of thousands of years of texts; all of which were important. This is the big reason why Latin was forced down the throats of the students back then. This was also the big reason why Latin was the language used by Academia for people like Spinoza, Leibniz (a little bit, he also used German and French, which was the slightest bit audacious at the time) and Descartes all wrote in Latin. The fact that Hebrew and Latin were like the internet is most likely the reason Spinoza was in the middle of writing a practical guide for Hebrew at the time he died; considering that he was a Pantheist and was brutally kicked out of the Jewish community, without any remorse on his part.)

Back to Hegel: what's the big deal? Hegel was a three dimensional philosopher in any of the best ways you can stretch that metaphor. There was something substantial about his metaphysics if you will pardon the philosophy joke.

But he also realized that Kant's Categories, the most important of which include substance and causality; should be dynamic; that is, ever-changing.

What did this mean? Again, I'm not offering too much pretense here, but I think it's Hegelian Dialectic.

Okay, we defined Dialectic upstairs of this blog entry as discussion which reveals a greater moral or a series of greater morals (hopefully all having to do with each other).

Hegelian Dialectic is when two things conflict and converge, but this time instead of revealing a moral truth, they synthesize into something greater. The defeated side actually absorbs into the victor. The victor therein has elements of the defeated in the synthesis. It looks like half of the March Madness bracket for the NCAA basketball tournament. (That too, like just about everything, is interpret-able by Hegelian Dialectic).

Hegel applies this everywhere, in a whole bunch of scenarios. You can, too. It's that fun and easy. Friedrich Nietzche hijacks this philosophy for his will to power theory; and Karl Marx of course hijacks it for Marxist dialectic.

Hegel had a master and slave dialectic whereupon the master uses the slave, but her reliance on the slave makes her weak. Once the slave realizes this, she rebels against the master and becomes the master herself. Cool! Of course, it's a little more complicated than that.

Hegel also applied this to substance-metaphysics: the concept of nothing versus the concept of something produces becoming (hence the dynamic categories).

There's other applications of Hegelian dialectics; and this concept is one of the greater unities of his entire work.

One of the most important implications of this theory is recognition. This would be influential on political philosophers such as Charles Taylor and philosophers of the self.


Hegelian Dialectic and Nostalgia:

Take for instance nostalgia, which is actually what brought on this entire diatribe. Hegel would have you missing something, sure. But when you're missing it, it's not simply you in the past or you in the present. It's you considering the past and recognizing the past. You couldn't do it without the recognition of the past. You couldn't miss something outside of the present, but you couldn't miss something unless you had experienced it then (and it was in the present then), and you probably wouldn't be missing it if you have it in the present.

Here's my triangle, but you can sketch your own on paper if you disagree:

past
present
recognition

You, right now: thinking of something or experiencing something, but not having it or doing it
You, back then: having something or doing something
You a couple of seconds after right now: missing something


Remember, the dynamic nature of this stuff doesn't exactly look this way.

It looks more like


the past \ __combine into_________> recognition of the past in the present
present./ ---------------------------->


Nevertheless, you could not experience missing something unless you had that something in the past or did that something in the past. Furthermore, you could not miss something actively in the past, and the only time you could miss something actively is in the present. Sure, we have missed stuff in the past, but we cannot actively miss something without being in the present. We cannot do anything outside of the present.

But there's something sinister about missing stuff, call it the treachery of memory after Magritte's treachery of images series, which we have talked to death about. But nostalgia and sentimentality lay a treacherous trap: they are necessarily in the past and can only be "regarded" as such.