Hegel: Philosophy in an Hour. Paul Strathern
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Hegel
PHILOSOPHY IN AN HOUR
Paul Strathern
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Copyright © 1997 by Paul Strathern
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Contents
Chronology of Significant Philosophical Dates
In 1770, the year of Hegel’s birth, Kant delivered his inaugural dissertation at the University of Königsberg. In the same year the poets Hölderlin and Wordsworth were born. The seeds of ecstatic lyricism and profoundly sober systemization were sown: the extremes of subjectivity and objectivity. Europe stood on the brink of its greatest transformation since the Renaissance. The French Revolution was the political manifestation of this change; the Romantic Movement was its cultural expression.
Meanwhile the Industrial Revolution was to change the face of the entire continent. And within years of Hegel’s death, Marx was preparing a further transformation which was to change the face of the twentieth century.
Hegel was to be profoundly involved in both these transformations. In a U-turn such as could only have been encompassed by his celebrated dialectical method, the student Hegel welcomed the French Revolution, and the aged Hegel sang the praises of the arch-conservative Prussian state.
In the hands of Hegel, the dialectical method produced the most elephantine philosophical system known to man, a monolith in praise of the monolithic state. Yet in the hands of his avid follower Marx, Hegel’s method was to produce the greatest revolution since the French Revolution, which in its turn produced the most elephantine political system known to man (which in many aspects bore an uncanny resemblance to the Prussian state). This was much how Hegel’s dialectical system was meant to work, though he probably wouldn’t have seen it this way.
‘The height of audacity in serving up pure nonsense, in stringing together senseless and extravagant mazes of words, such as had previously only been known in madhouses, was finally reached in Hegel, and became the instrument of the most barefaced general mystification that has ever taken place, with a result which will appear fabulous to posterity, and will remain as a monument to German stupidity’. So wrote Schopenhauer, who was Hegel’s colleague at the University of Berlin. This remark is not intended to prejudice but merely to warn. With Hegel, philosophy becomes a matter of extreme seriousness, so we’d best get any jokes out of the way right at the start. As an earnest English hellfire preacher of the period commented while delivering a sermon to an amused fashionable audience in Bath, ‘There’s no hope for them that laughs’.
With Hegel, philosophy became very difficult indeed, requiring the utmost concentration. So it looks as if Schopenhauer, despite his razor-sharp intellect, just wasn’t trying hard enough. On the other hand, even Hegel conceded that ‘only one man understands me, and even he does not’. Some critics consider that here Hegel was exaggerating. Did this man ever really exist?
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel was born on August 27, in Stuttgart. His family had for generations been civil servants, and his father worked in the Württemberg tax office. Hegel’s upbringing gave him a heavy Swabian accent which he retained to the end of his days, as well as the belief that self-effacement is one of the cardinal virtues of true culture.
He was a sickly child and was to suffer from several bouts of serious illness before he reached manhood. At the age of six he caught such a bad case of smallpox that he nearly died. For more than a week he was blinded, and his complexion remained badly pockmarked. At the age of eleven he survived the fever that struck his entire family and carried off his mother. And during his student years he was laid low for several months by a malarial infection.
As Hegel grew up he read omnivorously – through literature, newspapers, and treatises on almost any subject he could find. Yet even at an early age he already believed in a strictly systematic approach, meticulously copying out in his journal excerpts from all he read. This thorough training in pedantry (his ‘excerpt mill’, as he called it) contained quotations