Hegel

plato.stanford.edu/entries/hegel

www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/works/hi/lectures1.htm

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Dinesh ^club

If one considers Hegel’s though at the political and social level and asks, “At what point in the development of society is the conflict-free situation achieved? The answer is less obvious. Hegel himself seemed to think it was already embodied in the constitutional monarchy of the Prussia of his day. Devotees of that state seized on this aspect of his thought and made it the philosophical basis of t recognizably German form of state-worship which had a long subsequent history. For some time these people were known as Right Hegelians, and through them Hegel came to be seen as the founding philosopher of the sort of right wing German nationalism that culminated in Hitler. However, there were other followers of Hegel, known as Left Hegelians, who saw the Prussia of 1830 as self-evidently far from local, and believed that radical if not revolutionary further change was necessary before the ideal society could be achieved. The most important of the Left Hegelians was Karl Marx. The spirit between Right and Left Hegelians explains a fact which has puzzled many people, namely that the same philosopher, Hegel, was the intellectual grandfather of both Nazism and Communism. ` Page 162

A third idea of Hegel’s that has been highly influential is that the alienation. The point here is that man, in the process of building his own civilization, creates all sorts of institutions and rules and ideas that then become constraints on him, external to him, despite the fact that they are his own invention. He may even not understand them. For instance, when it comes to religion, many people project the qualities they most desire for themselves on to God whom they then see as perfect, omniscient, and omnipotent, while thinking of themselves as contrast as base, ignorant, and powerless. The unhappy soul who does this fails to realize that it is =, at least in part, human characteristics that he is projecting on to a being other than himself. He sees God as being quote different from indeed opposite to, himself, when in reality he and God share the same spiritual existence. One of Hegel’s followers, Feurbach, thought that God and gods were solely human creations, and were entirely to be understood in this way. That idea of Feurerbach’s was widely influential in the 19th century. ~ Page 163

23 months ago. Edited 15 months ago.

Dinesh ^club

youtu.be/0F8REGux8qs

19 months ago.

Dinesh ^club

It turns out that the evolution of Hegel’s thought from his youth to maturity provides a kind of parallel to our problem. Young Hegel was looking for a religion, we may say an ideological form, which would reconcile modern individualism with the fine harmony of community as found in the Greek polis. Later he came to construct a philosophy that produces this reconciliation by means of levels of reality, which it originates hierarchically, ascending from subjective spirit to objective spirit (institutions), and from this to absolute spirit (religion, art, philosophy). The latter two levels broadly correspond to the two poles of Troeltsch’s formulations. Still, Hegel knew very well that, as distinct from his youthful dream, this philosophy offered reconciliation only for the benefit of educated people, in other words within ‘Bildung’. There is something aristocratic, or elitist as we would say today, in the result, just as there is, after all, in Troelsch’s presentation: everything indicates that the common man must be content with self-dedication while individualistic culture will be the privilege of the few . . . . Page 48

18 months ago. Edited 18 months ago.

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