CU Course on Hegel, Part
2
What Hegel is Not
The 1996 Introduction
to “The Hegel Myths and Legends” (download linked below) does not give
a complete description of the downright 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 an idea of how
exceptionally plagued is the work of Hegel with misrepresentation, in a field,
philosophy, where misrepresentation and vulgarisation is 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”, and 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 “thesis, antithesis,
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 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.
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 2010 would be “tenderpreneur”. Hegel invented words, and 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 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.
Therefore 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.
Please
download and read this text via the link:
Hegel
Myths and Legends, Introduction, 1996, Stewart (6643 words)
Further reading:
The System of
Ethical Life, 1802-3, Hegel (521 words)
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