Generalizations

If someone said, "All engineers are the same. They're just working to further enrich themselves and to screw over the rest of us," you would respond that this is entirely incorrect, and that the speaker seems to know very little about engineers. And, of course, you'd be right.

The thing is, the statement is just as wrong if you substitute any other group for engineers. "All billionaires are the same," "all Jews are the same," "all Belgians are the same," "all Republicans are the same" -- all of those statements are making the same mistake: they are assigning characteristics to people based on their perceived membership in a group, rather than regarding them as individuals.

It's an over-generalization, an over-simplification, and it's mistaken, about 100% of the time.

Now, maybe you would respond, "What about Nazis? Weren't they all the same in some very important ways?"

I'm glad you asked! No, they weren't. You know Oskar Schindler, the guy played by Liam Neeson in that movie, the guy who saved all of those people's lives and sabotaged the German war effort in WWII?

He was a Nazi. A member of the Nazi Party. He joined the party for business reasons, and he started to work against it when he could no longer ignore the death camps and stuff.

Individual human beings will constantly surprise you, if you go to the trouble of paying attention to them. 

 

HEGEL!!

After decades of trying and utterly failing to see what could possibly be worthwhile in Hegel's philosophy, I believe I've had a breakthrough.

I'm not bragging. On the contrary: I'm saying that I'm starting to grasp certain ideas which have occupied a great number of people over the past 200 years. Probably millions of people. And almost all of them began to grasp these same ideas decades quicker than I did. Well, better very, very late than never, and who knows what you might achieve if you simply don't give up, etc. 

I am not now going to explain Hegel to you. Of course not. Many others can do that far better, and there's always the drastic step of actually reading a philosopher's work, itself. It's still only been about 2 days since I moved from Schopenhauer's position on Hegel: that he was a simpleton, a charlatan, a pseudo-philosopher passing off the most awful nonsense as genius. I'm not now convinced that Hegel is a genius. I'm being cautious here. For a while I thought Sloterdijk was a genius. What has changed is that I think that now I've gotten a glimpse of why so many others think Hegel is a genius. I'm a take it from there.

If almost everyone thinks that you and Schopenhauer are wrong -- you and Schopenhauer may be wrong. Don't worry, Schopenhauer was still right about many things. 

It's so wonderful to suddenly see that you were wrong about something, and that it actually is as good as all those people have been saying, whether it's someone's music or someone' paintings or someone's philosophy. Suddenly, there's this wonderful thing. Well, it was there all along, right under your nose. But suddenly, you understand that it really is wonderful. 

Perhaps a great deal of the difficulty, for me and and also for Schopenhauer, was very simply that we are solitary natures, and Hegel's emphasis is on interaction, from the interaction of the smallest insect with its environment, to the interaction of entire civilizations, and the interaction of individual humans with each other in between. You and I interact, and we change each other. Previously, philosophers had investigated the way that people and things are. Hegel asks what people and things are becoming, and how this happens. That is the beginning, or one of the beginning premises of Hegel's philosophy, or one of its significant points of departure from Kant's. You and I change each other, and it goes on endlessly from there, and the mind races at the immensity of the possibilities.

I repeat, I'm not the one to explain any of this to you, as it's been just a couple of days since anything Hegel said began to make the slightest bit of sense to me. But don't worry, as one of the handful of most popular philosophers of all time, he's had plenty of people write entire books just about him. And, I repeat, you could, actually. Read. One. Of. His. Books.