Hegel in 60 Minutes E-Book

Walther Ziegler

• Herausgeber: Books on Demand
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 84

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016

Beschreibung

Already as a student Hegel was often reprimanded for excessive drinking and gambling and he is surely one of the most unconventional – today, one might say “coolest” – thinkers of all time. He is sometimes mockingly accused of having been drunk when he hit on his key idea of a “World Spirit”. Nevertheless, his philosophy remains fascinating and highly relevant even today. Hegel was the first philosopher to realize the full implications of the dimension of “becoming”. Human life has as much the character of a process as do Nature and History. A human being comes into the world as a baby and becomes a child, an adolescent and finally an adult. Likewise, human history marches onward from small beginnings. One epoch follows another. The expression “spirit of the times” that we use so casually today is in fact one we owe to Hegel’s great discovery that every epoch possesses a specific spirit that completely permeates it. This “spirit of the age” – or, as Hegel also called it, “World Spirit” – manifests itself in all the ideas held by this age’s people regarding morality, justice, art, music and architecture. A second contention central to his great philosophical discovery was that these different epochs and their “spirits” do not follow one another merely randomly and by chance but rather obey a logical principle of movement: the so-called “dialectic”. The pendulum of history swings, “dialectically”, first in one direction, then in the other. But human history is nonetheless steering its way, slowly but unstoppably, toward a great final goal. The book “Hegel in 60 Minutes” explains, how this “dialectic”, and thus the motor of human history, is argued by him to function. All the exciting questions raised by Hegel’s fascinating philosophical vision are answered here: at what point do we reach “the end of History”? Are we only spectators of this History, or actors in it? What is the meaning of life? The book forms part of the popular series “Great Thinkers in 60 Minutes”.

Leseprobe

My thanks go to Rudolf Aichner for his tireless critical editing; Silke Ruthenberg for the fine graphics; Lydia Pointvogl, Eva Amberger, Christiane Hüttner, and Dr. Martin Engler for their excellent work as manuscript readers and sub-editors; Prof. Guntram Knapp, who first inspired me with enthusiasm for philosophy; and Angela Schumitz, who handled in the most professional manner, as chief editorial reader, the production of both the German and the English editions of this series of books.

My special thanks go to my translator

Dr Alexander Reynolds.

Himself a philosopher, he not only translated the original German text into English with great care and precision but also, in passages where this was required in order to ensure clear understanding, supplemented this text with certain formulations adapted specifically to the needs of English-language readers.

Contents

Hegel’s Great Discovery

Hegel’s Central Idea

Dialectics – The Motor of Thought

Dialectics and the Idea of

Aufheben

The Logic of Becoming

The Master-Slave Dialectic

The Dialectical Movement of World History

The Self-Developing World-Spirit as God

The Cunning of Reason

The Final Goal of History

Of What Use is Hegel’s Discovery for Us Today?

Is There Reason in History or Has the “World-Spirit” Failed Us?

To Think Dialectically is to Think Critically

To Live Means to Change

Hegel for Managers

Using Hegel to Go Beyond Hegel

Bibliographical References

Hegel’s Great Discovery

Hegel (1770 – 1831) is one of the most significant philosophers who ever lived. Already on his contemporaries he exerted enormous fascination; intellectuals from all over Europe came to Berlin to hear the famous professor. His lectures were legendary – despite the daunting nature of both his personal appearance and his writing style. His facial features were rough: a downturned mouth and a gaze sombre to the point of being painfully piercing. His language was equally unprepossessing. His writings display an eloquence which, because it persists lengthily in pure abstraction, is often opaque and even impenetrable.

Hegel’s sympathizers found this quality admirable; his opponents were angered and outraged by it. Hegel’s contemporary Schopenhauer was infuriated by the over-complex style of expression that had come, at this time, into fashion among university philosophers and saw Hegel as the main culprit: “But the height of audacity in serving up pure nonsense, in stringing together senseless and extravagant mazes of words such as had previously been heard only in madhouses, was finally reached in Hegel.”2 The famous American philosopher of culture Will Durant also called Hegel’s books “masterpieces of obscurity […]”3

Not everyone, then, was well disposed toward Hegel. The abstractness and ambiguity of his language led to his being interpreted also by his posterity in very different ways. Some saw in him a reactionary “court philosopher” to the autocratic Prussian state; others, by contrast, a visionary social reformer; while still others interpreted him as a great mystic. His work remains the object of such interpretative controversies still today.

But one thing is certain: For all the abstractness of his chosen language, Hegel made a magnificent discovery. He was the first philosopher to recognize all the implications of the notion of “becoming”. One might describe him as the Charles Darwin of philosophy.

Because for Hegel everything is in constant motion. Human life has as much the character of a process as do Nature and History. A human being comes into the world as a tiny baby and becomes a child, an adolescent and finally an adult. Likewise, human history marches onward from small beginnings. One epoch follows another. New states arise and laws too are repeatedly adapted to fit the new epoch. Not even justice stands as an unalteringly valid standard but likewise changes with time. What was just for one epoch often counts as unjust for the next. Even truth – i.e. that which people consider to be correct and objectively so – changes in the course of history.

Thus Aristotle, for example, in the age of Classical Greece, held slavery to be quite natural and just. He counted slaves as part of ta onta, mere household objects. Today, however, slavery is forbidden and punishable as a deprivation of liberty. From such facts Hegel draws the radical conclusion that even truth is not a timeless ideal but rather a living process.

Everything – literally everything – is in constant motion: people’s convictions, morality, justice, law and the bodies of legislation, even art, music and architecture. In seeking truth, Hegel argues, one must avoid taking any phase of development for the absolute truth; rather, one must understand the whole process. This conviction is summed up in one of Hegel’s most famous statements:

Even English-speaking people today often encounter the German word Zeitgeist – meaning “spirit of the age” – in newspapers and books. Most of us are unaware that this is an idea which we owe to Hegel’s great discovery that every epoch possesses a specific spirit that completely permeates it. Geist, indeed – the part of this composite term which corresponds to “spirit” – is perhaps the key term in Hegel’s philosophy. And, as the entry of Zeitgeist into our language suggests, it is a term that is impossible to translate entirely adequately into English.

Whereas the English language separates the spiritual and the intellectual aspects of human self-awareness from one another and uses “spirit” to describe the first and “mind” to describe the second, the German language combines both these aspects in the single word Geist. In the various English editions of Hegel, Geist has sometimes been translated as “Spirit” – lending a religious-mystical colouring to Hegel’s arguments – and sometimes as “Mind” – lending them rather a rationalist-intellectual colouring. But for Hegel this distinction between the “spirit” of an age and its intellectual “mentality” did not really exist. Therefore, we shall retain the term Geist, which evokes both “spirit” and “mind”, in what follows.

Hegel’s Geist, then, changes, in the course of history and constantly takes on new forms. But for certain periods of time the thinking and feeling of an entire epoch is marked by a common spirit. One such Zeitgeist was, for example, absolutism, with its single all-powerful monarch at the head of the state. Its equivalent in Europe today would doubtless be the spirit of democratic pluralism. In each respective guiding idea of an epoch – or, as Hegel says, in its “guiding principle” – there is reflected the self-understanding and self-awareness of its people. The Weltgeist – once again, a term that we need to understand as meaning both “World-Mind” and “World-Spirit” – elaborates the inherent principle of each historical stage into a multitude of typical trends and phenomena. For example: aristocrats in the Age of Absolutism wore, all over Europe, similar wigs and corsages, listened to the same works by Vivaldi, Handel and Mozart when they went to the opera, and built their castles in the same Baroque style with halls of mirrors, French-style gardens and fountains. This is why Hegel can say:

The Zeitgeist, says Hegel, is so extremely rich a thing because it embraces not just the current fashion in clothes or furniture but extends also to the music, painting, architecture, state constitutions and even the philosophy of the age concerned. Hegel speaks, therefore, of how any “snapshot” image of a particular age will tend to capture one of the many individual forms of Geist that mankind has brought forth in the course of history:

The form of Geist manifest in the Romanesque era, for example, is a different form from that manifest in the Gothic or Baroque era; and the form of Geist that we see in the Age of Absolutism is different from that which we see in the Age of Enlightenment. When we see temples, statues or paintings from past eras, we can usually easily assign them to a specific period. We do not have to be art-historians to recognize that the Acropolis with its marble columns belongs to the form of human Geist manifest in Classical Antiquity or a crusader’s castle to that manifest in Medieval Christian feudalism.

Thus far, Hegel’s discovery of the dimension of “becoming” appears a simple, uncontroversial thing. For who would contest that history has indeed displayed such “spirits of the ages”, i.e. different forms of collective Geist pervading different epochs?

But in fact Hegel contends more than this. He also made a second discovery of great consequence. The various forms of Geist, he claims, do not succeed one another by chance or arbitrary choice but rather according to a logical principle of motion: the so-called “dialectic”. Hegel initially compares the logical sequence of forms of Geist in history with the growth of a plant. Because the phases of a plant’s growth and maturation are not just blind and senseless changes but rather follow an inner principle and have a definite goal, even if this goal is not immediately recognizable:

Just as the plant is first a seed and a germinating bud, which then brings forth leaves and flowers, before finally bearing its fruit, human history too follows an inner logic. Each form proceeds logically from the form that preceded it. This is what Hegel calls “dialectics”.

Hegel’s dialectic, indeed, is not just a matter of growth and harmonious development of latent forces but rather proceeds by way of crises and contradictions.

Hegel portrays the transition from one phase of life into another as often dramatic. Just as a child, on reaching puberty, suddenly no longer wants to be a child subject to others’ tutelage and begins violently to question and reject all that adults tell him, so too are epochal transitions in world history characterized by crises, conflicts and contradictions. Hegel often used this term “contradiction” in his works. He meant by it a sense (felt either by an individual or by a whole people) that two things or notions are incompatible with one another.

Hegel saw nothing bad in “contradiction” in this sense; on the contrary, he saw it as something highly beneficial: