More Reading About Hegel

When you're up to your ass in alligators, it's easy to forget that you came there to drain the swamp. Reading various philosophers' opinions about various other philosophers is fun -- for me, it can be a huge amount of fun -- but a couple of days ago, I began to re-approach Hegel, through the filter of the opinions of others, because Hegel set out to change the world, and many people say he did. Marx, the most prominent follower of Hegel, was even more explicit about wanting to change the world, and the most famous follower of Marx, Lenin, who was most certainly a philosopher, reading the entire course of Western philosophy in many languages and writing a huge amount himself of what can only be called philosophy, also led the Russian Revolution.

But how many other philosophers have been political leaders on Lenin's scale? I can't think of any. And whatever you think of Lenin, he was succeeded by Stalin, who is highly thought-of by very few.

Did Lenin really name Stalin to be his successor, or did Stalin falsify the record to make it seem so? (Did Caesar really name Octavian/Augustus as his successor, or did Octavian/Augustus cheat his way into that?)

On pp 382-83 of Subjekt -- Objekt, his book about Hegel, Ernst Bloch says that Lenin wrote, in 1914, that whoever had not thoroughly studied and completely grasped the entire logical system of Hegel, could not thoroughly understand Marx' Kapital and especially the first chapter of Kapital. "Folglich hat nach einem halben Jahrhundert keiner von den Marxisten Marx begriffen." ("It follows that, after half a century, none of the Marxists has understood Marx.")

Yes, I have a copy of Das Kapital, untranslated, right here. Band 23, Volume 23, of the Werke von Marx und Engels, the collected works, published in (East) Berlin in 1977. Das 1. Kapitel, the first chapter, covers pages 49 through 98 in this edition. No, I didn't think I had already thoroughly understood this long first chapter before reading that Ernst Bloch quoted Lenin to the effect that I most assuredly had not as yet.

I can't read everything. And I never really did consider myself a Marxist anyway, even before my first contact with postmodernism made me pretty sure that I'd been a postmodernist for a while, and therefore not a Marxist, since you can't be a postmodernist and a Marxist at the same time, despite Jordan Peterson's dire warnings about supposed throngs of postmodern Marxists swarming over our college campuses in order to destroy out lives and enslave us. Have you ever read the first chapter of Das Kapital, translated or not? It's really quite something. I'm not sure I really want to try to read it again, let alone carefully study all of Hegel just so that I can read that one chapter again with greater comprehension.

I haven't read any Lenin. I hear he's quite good. Haven't read any Trotsky either. My reading comprehension in Russian is not good, but of course, both Lenin and Trotsky are available in translations.

Where was I? Maybe that's the title I should've given to this blog post. Where was I? Who am I? Where did all of these figurative alligators come from? What the Hell am I trying to prove? If I'm trying to prove that I'm even half the reader either Marx or Lenin was, it would be best to just stop right now. They've got me beat, and I don't say that about many people, living or dead.

I'm still enjoying Bloch's book in which he praises Hegel to the skies, and, paradoxically, I still don't want to read Hegel. I still can't take Spengler seriously, although I still enjoy going through the index of his Untergang des Abendlandes (Decline of the West) to see what he has to say about this or that person. I've been doing that in the past couple of days because there are numerous references to Spengler in Bloch's indexes.

Where am I going? I don't know, but I'm enjoying this journey, and maybe it will eventually actually prove to be of some worth.

Will I Re-Consider Hegel?

If everyone or almost everyone disagrees with you, you may be a genius, far ahead of your time, or you may be wrong. Best to at least investigate the latter possibility.

I know of only one person who shares my opinion of Hegel: Schopenhauer, who called Hegel the worst, most ignorant, incoherent, empty, pretentious charlatan ever to successfully pass himself off as a philosopher. (See any remark about Hegel in any of Schopenhauer's works in which Hegel is mentioned.)

On the other side, those who considered Hegel to be somewhere between very clever and a world-beating genius include almost everyone whose opinion remotely matters, from Marx to Adorno to some of today's sneakiest anonymous post-postmodern YouTubers... Kierkegaard rejects some aspects of Hegel's system very energetically, but he doesn't call Hegel a fool or a fake the way Schopenhauer does. Kierkegaard clearly sees Hegel as a worthy adversary, who will not be defeated by mere insults.

Even Nietzsche, who has some passing insults for Hegel, seems to regard him as at least interesting. Speaking of having almost everyone disagree with you: When Nietzsche composed his list of "meine Unmoeglichen" ("my impossible ones," that is: "those whom I simply cannot stand") at the beginning of the chapter "Streifzuege eines Unzeitgemaessen" in Goetzendaemmerung, he doesn't list Hegel, but he does list Kant (along with Seneca, Rousseau, Schiller, Dante, Victor Hugo, Liszt, George Sand, Michelet, Carlyle, John Stuart Mill, the brothers Goncourt and Zola), whom almost everyone else whose opinion matters -- including Schopenhauer -- considers to be a stone genius. Time for me to admit: I don't understand Kant nearly well enough to have any opinion about him, and time for me to admit that maybe my hero Nietzsche, who was dead wrong about women and war, didn't understand Kant either. (I'm still just fine with the rest of the list.)

For Schopenhauer (and almost everyone else), Kant was the most brilliant by far of all the philosophers of the preceding century.

Hegel built upon Kant, and so did Schopenhauer.

And Marx built upon Hegel, which means that most Leftists since Marx have built directly or indirectly on Hegel.

What finally made me decide that I had to give Hegel another chance, although the camel's back had been close to breaking already for a while, was Ernst Bloch. He's one of my favorite writers, and he wrote an entire book so extravagantly praising Hegel that I had to throw in the towel and agree to read and re-read some Hegel, this time trying to hold my mind open to the possibility that he's not as bad as Schopenhauer thought.

Or at the very least, I need to re-read that particular book of Bloch's, -- Subjeckt-Objekt. Erlaeuterungen zu Hegel -- slowly and carefully, and try to decide whether I want to approach Hegel again. At this point, I don't really want to. But I'm willing to let Bloch try to change my mind. I probably will read Hegel again. It's not just Bloch, it's everybody except Schopenhauer.

Oh, and I also need to research this fellow Solger. He's mentioned by both Kierkegaard and Bloch, it seems he and Hegel were friends. I've never heard anyone else mention him, but Kierkegaard and Bloch are more than enough.

I recently heard an English philosopher say that, yes, Hegel's prose is terrible, but that his books were actually lecture notes, not intended to be published as books. And this guy was saying that Hegel was brilliant even though his prose was awful. In Subjekt-Objekt, Bloch is having none of this talk about Hegel's prose being awful. Hegel's prose is sometimes difficult, Bloch says, but it's brilliant, full of deep music and blood and guts and Luther. And the thing is: German is Bloch's native language, he's very very good at it. If Bloch says someone writes brilliantly in German, I have to listen, even if that someone is Hegel, whom I'm used to thinking of, agreeing with Schopenhauer, as writing sheer shameless nonsense.

As long as I'm here I may as well defend Schopenhauer and Nietzsche against the usual accusation from my colleagues on the Left, that they were reactionary. Certainly neither of them was progressive, but reactionary? What, exactly, do you think they were reacting against? They were both classless, and both clueless when it came to politics. I see no evidence that either of them was the slightest bit familiar with any socialist philosophy.

I Can't Find A Pope Francis Effect In The Book Market Yet

Rush called Francis a Marxist. Francis makes statements about the rich and the poor which certainly sound more Leftist than Rightist. Now he's said, "I know many Marxists who are good people." In angry opposition to Francis, or so he thinks, a rightwing freemarket laissez-faire rah-rah-siss-boom-bah capitalist has written: "Capitalism and many variants called Capitalism has raised the standard of living for more people around the world than any system every created by man. Capitalism has produced more wealth and increased production greater than any other system in the world." I replied to him: "That's very close to a direct quote from the first pages of the Communist Manifesto. Which you might want to read sometime. It's only 20, 30 pages or so. Maybe some people somewhere dispute what you say about capitalism's effect on the world's wealth and productivity. Marxists certainly don't."

So that's when I wondered whether perhaps many Americans had indeed read the Communist manifesto because of Francis. What with the economy and all, and now in top of that what with Francis infuriating rightwingers on such a regular basis in such a delightful way. Marx has been read very little in the US in proportion to how much he is dissed. People don't know what they're talking about when they diss him, they're just repeating the staggeringly-successful US capitalist talking points on Marx and Communism. So I thought, maybe now, after years of spectacular worldwide abuse of financial deregulation and now with Francis, and what with the economy and all -- maybe now, finally, Americans would start reading Marx. The Communist Manifesto at least. Capital and Critique of Political Economy, that could come a little later, and then pretty soon Jimmy Kimmel and Conan O'Brian could discuss Maoism versus New Left with their movie-star guests and everybody would get it and the Earth would be saved and we could all just really get on with it. Thanks to a Pope, sure, why not, who, if not History, doesn't love irony?

But no, I was getting a little ahead of myself. I couldn't find an edition of the Communist Manifesto higher than around #20,000 on Amazon's book bestseller list. Then I thought: maybe AD-AMAZON The Portable Karl Marx,but ouch: it's at #147,305.

Even Francis himself is not burning up the track: a book by him published in November is at #1348, and AD AMAZON Evangelii Gaudium,which caused such a fooferah in the headlines? It's at #661. Holy moly, pardon my French, Holy Father. Wouldn't something by John Paul II have been at #1 by now? And in Amazon's top 20 for books there are items by Bill O'Reilly and Glenn Beck. It's all horribly disappointing and surprising for me, except for the success of O'Reilly and Beck, which is merely horribly disappointing for me.

Then I thought: Maybe Kindle is here and it's passed me by because I'm old, and that's where the real bestsellers are, and Francis is way up high in the Kindle bestseller list, but no. Marx, also no.

For Non-Theological Philosophy

It used to be, in Western society, that a philosopher was also a theologian, and a mathematician, and a literary critic. A philosopher was just about anyone who wrote for a living who wasn't also a poet, and sometimes someone was both a philosopher and poet, like Dante, for example. It's not well-known that Galileo wrote commentaries on Dante, but in his time it didn't seem strange -- he was a learned man, everyone agreed on that. Why shouldn't he write commentaries on Dante? The fact that the philosopher Roger Bacon in the thirteenth century, and Descartes, Spinoza and Leibniz in the seventeenth and earlier eighteenth centuries, were also leading mathematicians of their day, did not seem at all remarkable to their contemporaries -- they were philosophers. Who else but a philosopher should lead the way in math? The fact is that the term philosopher meant something very different back then, it referred to a learned man, and a learned man was expected to study all fields of learning. The division of labor which makes it seem strange that an astronomer is also a literary critic, or that leads some people to claim that a biologist like Richard Dawkins is not competent to write on theological matters, because he is a biologist, is a recent intellectual habit in our society, not more than a few centuries old.

Nowadays, a philosopher is -- what? Philosophy is a rather ill-defined term today. I think it's defined negatively, by the things which it is not, by the disciplines which have broken away from it. Philosophy is no longer astronomy or chemistry or mathematics, although the combination of philosophy and mathematics lasted somewhat longer than the combination of philosophy and some other fields. (A philosopher can of course still be an astronomer or a chemist. The difference is that now it would seem odd.)

Theology has not yet completely broken away from philosophy, or should I say, philosophy has not yet completely freed itself from theology. This is good for the reputation of theology and bad for that of philosophy.

One of the chief tasks of theology, a task which has grown steadily in importance over the past couple of centuries as atheism has begun to spread like wildfire, is to KEEP THINGS MURKY.

CLARITY is an archenemy of religion. And so when you make some clear points in a public forum about religion, and it's clear as well that you have the Abrahamic religions in mind, and above all contemporary Christianity in the US, there's a fairly good chance that some theologically-minded individual will come along and accuse you of having said something which does not apply at all to the Upanishads. And it's not unheard-of that this individual would be a professor of philosophy. Faculty in both philosophy and theology will bore and infuriate you with long speeches closely resembling sermons, and they'll make things even worse by enthusiastically quoting people like Nietzsche and Freud. Nietzsche hated, hated, hated theology and was crystal-clear about that, Freud took for granted that his stuff was not to be mixed up with that stuff those jokers down the hall in the theology department were instigating. Both Nietzsche and Freud underestimated how low theologians would stoop. They're like that repulsive booger which has attatched itself to to the end of your finger, and you shout in horror and shake and shake your arm and hand but it stays stuck there.

Life can be confusing under the best of conditions, and when it comes to philosophy there is often the difficult attempt to re-define certain things most of us take for granted, there are often long or rare words and texts in many different languages. But don't let the long words and various languages of theology fool you, philosophy does not have to be lumped in with theology. Schopenhauer, Marx, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Adorno, Sarte, Derrida & co are atheists, they aren't having any of that stuff -- although some of them do often cite authors of the time of the Christian hegemony, also known as the Late Ancient, Medieval and Renaissance eras, and show how substance and sense con be separated from the obligatory religious goobledeegook of those times.

With recent theology, the division of labor has proceeded to the point, I fear, that the goobledeegook has become their whole profession. Kierkegaard may mark the end of the era where philosophy and theology were still combined. (Karl Barth, Karl Barth! they're shouting. No. I really don't think so.)