Hegel, Part 2
What Hegel is Not
Jon Stewart’s 1996 Introduction
to “The Hegel Myths and Legends” (attached; download linked below) does
not give a complete description of the deceptions that surround the work of
Hegel – and it launches a few myths of its own.
But what this text can do is
to give us some idea of how exceptionally plagued is the work of Hegel with
misrepresentation, in a field, philosophy, where misrepresentation and
vulgarisation is already common. Jon Stewart writes categorically: “…the reputation of no other major
philosopher has suffered such universal opprobrium on such a broad spectrum of
issues as Hegel’s has.”
In this piece Stewart gives
no indication that he is other than a bourgeois academic. For example, he is
happy to relieve Hegel of the “wooden triad”, but then to hang the same “wooden
triad” around Karl Marx’s neck. So, we are not reading Stewart for Marxism.
The “wooden triad” is the
series, simple to the point of triteness, of “thesis, antithesis and synthesis”
that is wrongly attributed to Hegel, according to Stewart. So why pass it on to
Marx?
Karl Marx was a brilliant
student of philosophy in Berlin, beginning his course at the height of
Hegel-mania just five years after the death of Hegel. We will not presume that Marx’s
understanding of Hegel was any less than Stewart’s. We will rather take Marx as
one of the all-time experts on Hegel, if not the greatest of all.
But Stewart is correct to
point out “the extremely difficult nature
of Hegel’s own texts.”
Stewart continues: “His complex philosophical system, couched
in a stilted, abstract, and idiosyncratic language, has certainly been one of
the major causes for the disparity of opinion. Where some see profundity and
originality in the obscurity, others see simply gibberish and nonsense. The
result of Hegel’s opaque writing style and neologistic vocabulary is that his
works remain largely inaccessible to the nonspecialist.”
A neologism is a
newly-invented word. An example from South Africa in 2015 would be “tenderpreneur”.
Hegel invented words, and also gave his own peculiar meaning to existing words.
Stewart’s round-up of
information gives a good indication of the place of Hegel within bourgeois
philosophy up to today. Hegel’s work was a catalyst, not just for the eruption
of Marxism, but also of many strains of bourgeois philosophy.
Stewart writes that Hegel’s
philosophy [which] “marks the crossroads
in the modern intellectual tradition, has given birth to virtually all of the
major schools of contemporary thought: phenomenology, existentialism, Marxism,
critical theory, structuralism, pragmatism, hermeneutics, and so on.”
Between these different strands
there has been antagonism from time to time. One of the consequences has been
the use of Hegel as a kind of whipping-boy. Stewart gives examples of this.
A consequence of the
calumnies that people have laid on Hegel in this way is that people come out of
nowhere to attack Hegel, even today, because they are carrying grudges.
We will hold fast in this
course to the Marxist understanding of Hegel, not only because we are Marxists,
but also because Marxism will give us a steady vantage point and
measuring-stick with which to size up Hegel. The warring factions of bourgeois
philosophy will not provide such a steady standpoint or scale.
In the next item, we will
examine the legacy of Kojève, Edward Said, and the case of “The Other”, and
then we will take a first look at Hegel’s version of dialectics.
·
The above is to
introduce the original reading-text: Hegel Myths and
Legends, Introduction, 1996, Stewart.
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