Hegel was not a Cubs fan

Probably not a Cards fan either. But I hit upon a fun new way of trying to explain Hegel yesterday in Co-Phi, inspired by an essay on 19th century St. Louis Hegelians Henry Brokmeyer and W.T. Harris:

Hegel’s progressive unfolding [of rational consciousness, geist, Utimate Reality] thrived on conflict, what Hegel’s popularizers (but rarely Hegel himself) referred to as “thesis and antithesis.” Hegel stuck to lofty abstractions like Being (thesis), Nothing (antithesis) and Becoming (synthesis.) Henry Brokmeyer, not so much. His unimpeachably practical list of theses and antitheses encompassed nearly every aspect of American life: religion vs. science, abolitionism vs. slavery, St. Louis vs. Chicago.

It just so happens that St. Louis defeated Chicago on Sunday to keep their flickering MLB postseason hopes alive. What could be the "world-historical" significance of that? Or of the fact that the lowly Astros knocked the Cards off last night, dropping the Braves' magic number to 2?

I'm going to go out on a limb here and say: none at all. But I still like Hegel's largest message, as reported by the authors of our Co-Phi text. "We're all in this together." I wonder if they came to that after a hit of nitrous? Or after reading "On Some Hegelisms"...

"The interest of history is detached from individuals." Squashed Hegel

Kant to Schopenhauer

O 98-114, PW 89-101


1. What did the Romantics emphasize? What was their view of rationalism and empiricism?

2. How did Herder describe Germany's cultural heritage?  What did Goethe's "Faust" sell his soul for?

3. What did Immanuel Kant "synthesize" (i.e., what philosophies and what kinds of statements?)? Where did he live? What did he do every day (that his neighbors noticed)? Who was his favorite French author? Who "awakened him from his dogmatic slumbers"? (And what does that mean?)

4. What are Kantian "categories"? Appearance and reality correspond to what "worlds"? Which did Kant say was knowable? How? What did he say was unknowable?

5. What did Kant find awesome? How did he answer ethical questions (such as whether it's ever acceptable to tell a lie)? 

6. Who said there's no such thing as the thing-in-itself? Who said architecture is frozen music? Who loved dogs and introduced Kant to the French?

7.Who said "the real is the rational & the rational is real," also denied the existence of unknowable things in themselves, and said everything is intricately related (like a jigsaw, or a giant organism)?

8. What historical process did Hegel claim connects spirit, nature, and mind? What are its parts? When does it end? 

9. According to Hegel, what's another term for "Time-Spirit"? What is history? What's the creative source of reality?

10. What blind, irrational force did Schopenhauer, "starting from Kant," say is the "thing-in-itself" and the source of evil? How did he think wisdom could be achieved?

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11. Kant was originally a follower of who?

12. Kant proposed to limit what, to make room for what? What "great ideas" did he hope to place beyond the reach of science?

13. What, according to Kant, do we do to the objects of our experience, with the result that we don't have to infer or prove the existence of an external world? (TIP: This is a useful mnemonic, worth remembering.) To whom was this a direct response?

14. How did Kant reconceive Descartes' conception of self, or "thinking thing"?

15. How did Kant say we demonstrate our freedom? When are we unfree?

16. Why did Kant think faith in an unproven God a "rational postulate" (though not knowledge)?

17. Who did Hegel call "world history on horseback"? What did he consider philosophy's final goal?

18. What was Hegel's term for what he considered the all-enveloping "cosmic soul" that includes us as part of all nature and history? What did he see as its most important implication?

19. What Kantian thesis about knowledge and consciousness did Hegel reject? What Aristotelian thesis did he accept? What does this imply about the self? What "sensibility" did he embrace?

20. What was Hegel saying about philosophy when he spoke of the "Owl of Minerva"?

21. What kind of hero were the young Romantics looking for? Who did they find? What did their hero most despise in Hegel's philosophy?

22. How did Schopenhauer adapt Kant's philosophy to his own? What was his view of the point or purpose of existence? What did he share with the Buddhists? How did he think we could break free of the controlling and all-consuming Will?

"Friend Hegel"

In my bygone undergraduate years in the seventies I had a teacher who spoke familiarly of "friend Hegel," and my pals and I convened our little Friday afternoon beer-and-conviviality club under the banner of what we pretentiously called "The Hegel Society." (Maybe we meant to emulate the St. Louis Hegelians, I forget.) That was a club destined for dissolution, when one of our group attempted a demonstration of his free will by bashing himself with a mug of beer. In any case, I never really cottoned to Hegelian philosophy – especially after discovering William James’s send-up in "Some Subjective Effects of Nitrous Oxide." There James notes a parade of contradictory candidates for Hegelian reconciliation and rational synthesis, such as "God and devil, good and evil, life and death, I and thou, sober and drunk, matter and form, black and white, quantity and quality, shiver of ecstasy and shudder of horror, vomiting and swallowing, inspiration and expiration, fate and reason, great and small, extent and intent, joke and earnest, tragic and comic, and fifty other contrasts... "

Tongue deeply lodged in cheek, James then proceeds to report a series of his own "deep" musings allegedly recorded while under the influence of Hegel and laughing gas, including:

What's mistake but a kind of take?
What's nausea but a kind of -usea?
Sober, drunk, -unk, astonishment.
Everything can become the subject of criticism --
How criticise without something to criticise?
Agreement -- disagreement!!
Emotion -- motion!!!!
By God, how that hurts! By God, how it doesn't hurt!
Reconciliation of two extremes.
By George, nothing but othing!
That sounds like nonsense, but it is pure on sense!

(Michael Pollan undertakes a similar "experiment" in Botany of Desire, reading The Selfish Gene while smoking marijuana. His results were more enlightening.) But James finally tips his hand, venting a fiercely anti-Hegelian temperament:

the identification of contradictories, so far from being the self-developing process which Hegel supposes, is really a self-consuming process, passing from the less to the more abstract, and terminating either in a laugh at the ultimate nothingness, or in a mood of vertiginous amazement at a meaningless infinity.

And there my own negative appraisal of Hegel rested for a long time, until eventually I came across an essay a couple of years back fetchingly titled (in coincident echo of my old prof) "My New Friend Hegel," by Michael Prowse:

"To the degree that we are thinking beings, Hegel says, we have to consider ourselves as part of a larger whole and not as neatly individuated। He calls this mental whole Geist, or Spirit, and tries to work out the rules by which it develops through time... Hegel didn't regard Geist as something that stands apart from, or above, human individuals. He saw it rather as the forms of thought that are realised in human minds... What Hegel does better than most philosophers is explain how individuals are linked together and why it is important to commit oneself to the pursuit of the general or common good."

This gloss anticipates the criticisms of Schopenhauer and Kierkegaard, two virulently anti-Hegelian pessimists whose philosophies were contemptuous of communitarian values and the public interest. Arthur Schopenhauer asserted the ubiquity of blind, striving, impersonal, purposeless Will. Soren Kierkegaard affirmed the propriety of "leaps of faith." The harm done in each case, I believe, is to reinforce the irrationalist impulses of modern life; and to extend to them an unearned respectability. We must not believe "because it is absurd"... and must not embrace despair until we’ve really given meliorism a fair shot.