{"id":29001,"date":"2016-02-17T01:00:07","date_gmt":"2016-02-17T06:00:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=29001"},"modified":"2017-12-14T14:11:18","modified_gmt":"2017-12-14T19:11:18","slug":"qotd-hegel-is-really-interesting","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2016\/02\/17\/qotd-hegel-is-really-interesting\/","title":{"rendered":"QotD: “Hegel is really interesting”"},"content":{"rendered":"

I\u2019m reading through Marx: A Very Short Introduction<\/em>, and one of its best features is its focus on Marx\u2019s influence from Hegel. Hegel is really interesting.<\/p>\n

I should rephrase that. Hegel is famously boring. His books are boring. His ideas are boring. He was even apparently a boring person — a recent biography of him was criticized<\/a> on the grounds that \u201cHegel\u2019s life was really not eventful enough to support a graceful biography of eight hundred pages\u201d. But the phenomenon<\/em> of Hegel is interesting. I don\u2019t know of any other philosopher with such high variance.<\/em><\/p>\n

[…]<\/p>\n

to merge all of these together, it is \u201cdifficult for us to appreciate\u201d and \u201cnow difficult to comprehend\u201d how Hegel \u201cdominated\u201d, \u201cdefined\u201d, \u201covershadowed\u201d, and \u201creigned\u201d in \u201cGermany\u201d, \u201cEngland\u201d, \u201cAmerican universities\u201d, and \u201cthe philosophical world\u201d in \u201cthe beginning of the nineteenth century\u201d, \u201cfrom 1818 until his death in 1831\u2033, \u201cthe time from 1830 to 1840\u2033, \u201cthe second quarter of the nineteenth century\u201d, \u201cthe end of the nineteenth century\u201d, and \u201cthe time Freud\u2019s thinking developed\u201d (Freud was born 1856 and would have been in university in the 1870s).<\/p>\n

I will take this as evidence that Hegel was really really important for the entire nineteenth century.<\/p>\n

On the other hand, it\u2019s hard to find many people who will put in good words for him now. In fact, hilarious pithy denunciations of Hegel are an entire sub-genre. Hegel\u2019s Wikiquote<\/em> page, among other sources, includes:<\/p>\n

\u201cHegel\u2019s philosophy illustrates an important truth, namely, that the worse your logic, the more interesting the consequences to which it gives rise.<\/em>\u201d \u2013 Bertrand Russell<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen I was young, most teachers of philosophy in British and American universities were Hegelians, so that, until I read Hegel, I supposed there must be some truth to his system; I was cured, however, by discovering that everything he said on the philosophy of mathematics was plain nonsense. Hegel\u2019s philosophy is so odd that one would not have expected him to be able to get sane men to accept it, but he did. He set it out with so much obscurity that people thought it must be profound. It can quite easily be expounded lucidly in words of one syllable, but then its absurdity becomes obvious.<\/em>\u201d \u2013 Bertrand Russell<\/p>\n

\u201cAmong Noah\u2019s sons was one who covered the shame of his father, but the Hegelians are still tearing away the cloak which time and oblivion had sympathetically thrown over the shame of their Master.<\/em>\u201d \u2013 Heinrich Schumacher<\/p>\n

\u201cHegel\u2019s was an interesting thesis, giving unity and meaning to the revolutions of human affairs. Like other historical theories, it required, if it was to be made plausible, some distortion of facts and considerable ignorance. Hegel, like Mane and Spengler after him, possessed both these qualifications.<\/em>\u201d \u2013 Bertrand Russell (are you starting to notice a trend here?)<\/p>\n

\u201cWhile scientists were performing astounding feats of disciplined reason [during the Enlightenment], breaking down the barriers of the \u201cunknowable\u201d in every field of knowledge, charting the course of light rays in space or the course of blood in the capillaries of man\u2019s body \u2014 what philosophy was offering them, as interpretation of and guidance for their achievements was the plain Witchdoctory of Hegel, who proclaimed that matter does not exist at all, that everything is Idea (not somebody\u2019s idea, just Idea), and that this Idea operates by the dialectical process of a new \u201csuper-logic\u201d which proves that contradictions are the law of reality, that A is non-A, and that omniscience about the physical universe (including electricity, gravitation, the solar system, etc.) is to be derived, not from the observation of facts, but from the contemplation of that Idea\u2019s triple somersaults inside his, Hegel\u2019s, mind. This was offered as a philosophy of reason.<\/em>\u201d \u2013 Ayn Rand (unsurprisingly)<\/p>\n

Scott Alexander, “What The Hell, Hegel?”, Slate Star Codex<\/em><\/a>, 2014-09-12.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I\u2019m reading through Marx: A Very Short Introduction, and one of its best features is its focus on Marx\u2019s influence from Hegel. Hegel is really interesting. I should rephrase that. Hegel is famously boring. His books are boring. His ideas are boring. He was even apparently a boring person — a recent biography of him […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[32,1118,7,28,41],"tags":[576],"class_list":["post-29001","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-germany","category-history","category-media","category-quotations","tag-philosophy"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-7xL","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29001","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=29001"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29001\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":29003,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29001\/revisions\/29003"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=29001"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=29001"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=29001"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}