Hegel, Part 2
What Hegel is Not
The 1996 Introduction
to “The Hegel Myths and Legends” (attached; 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 already 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”, but 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, simple to the point of triteness, of “thesis, antithesis and
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 his course 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. We will rather
take Marx as one of the all-time experts on Hegel, if not the greatest of all.
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 also 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 different
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.
· The above is to introduce the original reading-text: Hegel Myths and
Legends, Introduction, 1996, Stewart.
