Last time we took a look at important develops that are centered upon the figure of Hegel. I can’t give a comprehensive analysis of Hegel’s thought; it’s too complex and sophisticated. I was trying to do the best I could to capture that within Hegel’s thought which is directly relevant to our understanding the genealogy of the meaning crisis.
We saw how Hegel proposes how to move beyond Kant and the Romantics by rejecting Kant’s notion of ‘the thing in itself’ and saying: “look, reality is just the patterns of intelligibility, there is nothing above and beyond that,” a form of idealism. As our ideas are being realized, as patterns of intelligibility are being developed, reality is also simultaneously being developed. We took a look at this notion of a quasi-living system of these patterns of intelligibility in development called Geist. Hegel proposed that that development can be understood as a process that he called dialectic, echoing Plato but I think severing the notion of dialectic from anagoge (which features in some criticisms of Hegel that we looked at towards the end).
This dialectic is a process in which ideas (again, not just things in the head; these are patterns of intelligibility, patterns in the way reality is realized in both the sense of being known and being actual) articulate and differentiate from each other. One idea is opposed by another, contrasted to, distinguished from, and then it is taken up in a higher order integration and then that serves as a new idea that can be contrasted with other ideas. This dialectical process complexifies the pattern of intelligibility. It emerges and develops and becomes more and more. The irrationality, the failure to understand, is being slowly transmuted, actualized into deeper patterns of understanding, deeper aspects of being, and then the idea is that this reaches a state in which a system of ideas emerges that grasps the dialectical process itself (as found exemplified, Hegel believed, in his own philosophy) and this is the culmination of the state of absolute Geist.
For Hegel, the real is the rational, the rational is the real; what we get then is that this development of the rationality and intelligibility of reality is also the development of reality itself. So this codevelopment of meaning and being is absolute spirit, absolute mind; this is Hegel’s version of God; a secularized, non-religious God.
Hegel understood his philosophy in religious terms, but he was always pursuing that understanding by translating religious terms and religious experience into philosophical conceptual structure. He advocates for a new mythology; a mythology that is integrated with philosophy, a mythology of Reason which will be the last and greatest work of mankind, the culmination of all of history.
I took you through an example of how understanding the ability to make sense passes into this moment of self-realization in reason as mythology passes into philosophy. We did an example of that showing how Hegel secularized the Trinity in a historical process of the self-realization of rationality. In that sense, Hegel is the Thomas Aquinas of Protestantism; he was proposing this grand synthesis, this grand secularization of the whole Hebraic Christian idea of God at work in history and God working through human beings and the Agapic processes to co-create the real future, the utopic but real future.
We took a look at the main criticisms of Hegel; we reminded ourselves of the criticisms made by Schopenhauer about the will to live was missing, and then how Nietzsche takes this up in the will to power, and the centrality of the will. I took a look at the other great existential Kierkegaard and his criticism, basically using some of the terms we’ve developed, that Hegel has reduced everything to propositional conceptual knowing. He has left out the perspectival participatory knowing, he has left out the anagoge, he’s given us only epistemic transcendence, he hasn’t given us existential ethical self-transcendence, personal transformation, and transformative experience that are necessary for returning to / making deeper contact with reality.
We noted this is also consonant with the work of L. A. Paul about how we can’t reason our way out of transformative experiences that are so central to the cultivation of wisdom. We then looked at another person who emphasized this lack of will and participation in Hegel’s system, and this is the work of Karl Marx. Marx’s great proposal—great and terrifying proposal—is that history is not driven by reason (the man in Plato’s system) but by the monster. Marx is deeply influenced by Feuerbach and Feuerbach’s critique of religion as the projection of our own humanity, and that religion is not the arena in which spirituality is working itself out, religion is the projective distortion that distracts us from how we are the authors of spirituality in history. It is a vehicle of self-alienation. So Marx takes the Feuerbachian critique and he rejects the theistic resonances within Hegel (the idealistic) and he says ‘no, the dialectic is not a dialectic of ideas that’s playing itself out religiously. It is a dialectic of economic forces that is playing itself out politically.’
The dialectic is not between ideas that are in contrast but between socioeconomic ways of life, classes that are in political conflict with each other but are nevertheless systematically related. As that historical process of class conflict unfolds, this dialectic will work out all the self-contradictions in our socioeconomic system (our current one being capitalism for example) until the contradictions are resolved in a socioeconomic state in which peace and freedom have been achieved because all of the internal contradictions that drive the violence will be resolved. This is a completely secularized version of the Judeo-Christian model of God working himself out in history to bring us to the promised land. Marx offers the participatory knowing that is missing in Hegel by proposing how we identify with our class, we identify with the struggle, and we participate in the Kairos, the turning of history, by engaging in revolution and so the totalizing, the totalitarian kind of ideology that Hegel is proposing is being wedded to the idea of violent political change within revolution. So this is a very, very powerful pseudoreligious ideology.
Hegel has reduced everything to propositional conceptual knowing. He has left out the perspectival participatory knowing, he has left out the anagoge, he’s given us only epistemic transcendence, he hasn’t given us existential ethical self-transcendence, personal transformation, and transformative experience that are necessary for returning to / making deeper contact with reality.
So I feel like there’s a Schopenhauer-like response here, which is something like… “development is the joke that the civilization plays on the individual”? That is, you might go about your life thinking there’s some deeper purpose to your life or some great spiritual growth on offer, but actually what really matters is a hundred thousand people all being gears in a giant machine to make slightly better semiconductors, which then serves as gears in another giant machine, and the whole thing is aware of this process of using material progress to advance material progress. One can view the scientific / capitalistic revolution eating the world as the narrowly propositional / materialistic forces competing against the balanced / spiritualistic forces and just actually delivering the goods in a much more obvious way.
Like, it’s a coincidence that this paulfchristiano post came out yesterday, but it somehow feels very relevant for thinking about material dialecticism.
My inner Vervaeke responds with “but you pay a terrible price for that!”, and he’s right; if you give up on individual development / experience, then the bottom falls out and you end up with Bostrom’s Disneyland with no children.
Episode 24: Hegel
So I feel like there’s a Schopenhauer-like response here, which is something like… “development is the joke that the civilization plays on the individual”? That is, you might go about your life thinking there’s some deeper purpose to your life or some great spiritual growth on offer, but actually what really matters is a hundred thousand people all being gears in a giant machine to make slightly better semiconductors, which then serves as gears in another giant machine, and the whole thing is aware of this process of using material progress to advance material progress. One can view the scientific / capitalistic revolution eating the world as the narrowly propositional / materialistic forces competing against the balanced / spiritualistic forces and just actually delivering the goods in a much more obvious way.
Like, it’s a coincidence that this paulfchristiano post came out yesterday, but it somehow feels very relevant for thinking about material dialecticism.
My inner Vervaeke responds with “but you pay a terrible price for that!”, and he’s right; if you give up on individual development / experience, then the bottom falls out and you end up with Bostrom’s Disneyland with no children.