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Heinrich Heine on Hegel

15 April 2007 / / 1 Comment

The man was funny! Here he is giving the Romantic reply to Hegel:

I was young and proud, and it pleased my vanity when I learned form Hegel that it was not the dear God who lived in heaven that was God, as my grandmother supposed, but I myself here on earth. This foolish pride did not by any means have a corrupting influence on my feelings; rather it raised them to the level of heroism. At that time I put so much effort into generosity and self-sacrifice that I certainly outshone the most brilliant feats of those good Philistines of virtue who merely acted from a sense of duty and obeyed the moral laws. After all, I myself was now the living moral law and the source of all right and sanctions. I was primordial Sittlichkeit, immune against sin, I was incarnate purity; the most notorious Magdalens were purified by the cleansing and atoning power of the flames of my love, and stainless as lilies and blushing like chaste roses they emerged from the God’s embraces with an altogether new virginity. These restorations of damaged maidenhoods, I confess, occasionally exhausted my strength….

(Confessions, tr. Walter Kauffman)

Summary: might be better to believe that there is something in the universe not within one’s authority or knowledge. Could be God, could be aliens, could be the unified theory.

Hegel’s Conservatism (and McGoohan’s Too)

5 March 2007 / / 3 Comments

Again on the subject of Hegel’s conservatism. I’m not really trying to convince anyone here, only to provide a verbal formulation for those who already suspect deep in their hearts that something about Hegel is deeply tradition-bound and backwards-looking. (Whatever his faults, Marx is not guilty on that charge.)

Jurgen Habermas to the rescue, then. He makes two points against Hegel in <b>The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity</b>. The first is that because Hegel cites the need for social and political institutions for human will to express itself, revolutionary movements that sufficiently reject the state don’t qualify as expressions of reason at all, and are therefore invalid. Habermas cites Hegel’s opposition to the English Reform Bill, but whatever Hegel’s political views at the time, I grant him some slack on this point. The notion of these institutions is sufficiently vague that I don’t see an open and shut case against revolution in Hegel’s writings on these grounds alone.

The second point is more damning though. Citing an early 1802 essay, Habermas says:

Hegel distinguishes two kinds of criticism. One is directed against the false positivities of the age; it understands itself as a maieutic of repressed life that pushes out of rigid forms: “If critique does not allow the work and the deed to be valid as the figure of the idea, still it will not deny the quest; thereby the properly scientific interest in stripping away the husk which keeps the inner striving from seeing the light of day.”…Hegel directs another kind of critique against the subjective idealism of Kant and Fichte. Of them it is true to say “that the idea of philosophy has been more clearly recognized, but that subjectivity has striven to guard itself against philosophy to the degree that it becomes necessary to save itself.” Here it is a question of discovering and laying bare a limited subjectivity which closes itself off to a better insight that has long since been objectively accessible. The Hegel of the Philosophy of Right regards critique as justified only in this second version.

Rephrasing: early Hegel is willing to grant the existence of minority and individual movements that strive to actualize repressed existence that the current system is currently suppressing. Later on, he rescinds this point. Hell, he contradicts it, implying that the subjective viewpoint is the object of criticism, and so the model of criticism is not the individual against the group but the group against the misled individual (or group of individuals that view themselves as subjective individuals in an objective world, Kant-style). The misled individual is not a symptom of the social order but merely a localized case of arrested development, to be corrected by the totality. Now doesn’t that sound ominous? Again, I don’t think it quite breaks down cleanly into government vs. individual, but Hegel does want to restrict criticism to those who are doing it thoughtfully and intelligently. Like philosophers.

From whence comes Marxism and left Hegelianism? From this, let’s go to The Prisoner. People everywhere quote “I am not a number, I am a free man!” as some defense of anarchist individualism, but Patrick McGoohan was and is a social and political conservative, and the ethos was far more Hayek than Marcuse. Remember this speech from the final, McGoohan-penned episode?

We have just witnessed two forms of revolt. The first: uncoordinated youth, rebelling against nothing it can define. The second: an established, successful secure member of the establishment turning upon and biting the hand that feeds him. Well, these attitudes are dangerous. They contribute nothing to our culture and are to be stamped out!

And then #6 gets effusively praised for his more thoughtful and consistent form of revolt. It’s arguable if these words are really McGoohan’s own beliefs, but they seem awfully congruent. Either way, it’s the same old manifestation of the elitism that Habermas trashes in Hegel. Revolt has to be done the right way, the polite way, and it must be done in good conscience, fully aware of the stakes of the battle. Otherwise, it’s just mindless violence. If you’re going to be that picky about the right form of revolt, all I can say is: don’t wait up.

Vladimir Sorokin: Ice

16 February 2007 / / 3 Comments

The way this book is structured, it’s almost over just as it begins. I was deeply struck by Chetyre (aka 4), which was scripted by Sorokin, and Ice plays on some of the same themes: weird genetics, supernatural myths become gritty urban reality, and an emphasis on flesh and the physical at their most blunt. Blunt this book is, because the first half of it is Keystone Kops caperings of mobsters and a secret society of chosen people (blond and blue-eyed) who seek to awaken their comrades by smashing in their chests with a hammer, to awaken their “hearts” and cause them to speak. Some of their candidates do not have such a heart within them, and they tend not to survive the attempted awakening.

That this is evidently a pastiche of contemporary decadent writing only becomes apparent in the last half, where the style inverts into a long chronicle of the movement’s history by its current leader Khram, an old lady who survived the Nazis and survived Stalin to bring her movement to fruition with the aid of an aggressive oil tycoon post-perestroika. She’s upfront: there are 23,000 of them, alien visitors who were trapped through ambiguous means in the bodies of humans. As it is explained to her:

The absolute majority of people on this earth are walking dead. They are born dead, they marry the dead, they give birth to the dead, and die…That is the circle of the dead lives. There is no way out. But we are alive, we are the chosen. We know what the language of the heart is, the language we have already spoken to you. And we know what love is. Genuine Divine Love.

There is more to the mythology, particularly the notion that they commune not through physical sex but through mystical “conversations of the heart,” but this is the basic duality: life and death, love and lack of love, hope and despair. There is no hope for most people, and the chosen treat them as objects, because that’s all they are.

The book ends with the ascension just beginning, and there is both a sequel and a prequel in the offing. Aside from Sorokin’s slick navigation of styles (it seems that way in English, at least, and a few Russian speakers have confirmed this), there’s not too much more than the secret history presented in this novel, from the oppression of the chosen to their rise in the chaos of present-day Russia. In some ways it is a glib vision that Sorokin offers. Accepting the disbelief in spiritual salvation, but not wishing to produce nihilism (Chetyre was, for all its grotesqueries, deeply humanistic), he takes off from Kafka’s famous aphorism: there is “Plenty of hope for God–no end of hope–only not for us.”

People tend to excise the “God” part from that quote, but the quote is merely fashionable pessimism without it. Though he leaves the certainty of the salvation ambiguous, Sorokin resolutely focuses on a set of chosen who resist reader identification and are therefore wholly other. It makes Sorokin an inversion of Hegel: life is always elsewhere. Intuitively, this seems a far better model for the big claustrophobic world of today than Hegel’s steadfast one-world (hell, one-country) view.

Update: See also this excellent review.

The Basic Conservatism of Hegel

5 February 2007 / / 2 Comments

The final message of Hegelianism, therefore, is not the opposition
between Reason and an unreasonable world, but contemplation of the
world as a priori reasonable. We do not know what parts of the
existing world are or are not true instruments of Mind: we cannot be
sure, for example, that it has ceased to use criminals for its
purposes. The individual has no rules of morality which he can oppose
to the supremacy of the historical process. In Hegel’s system,
rebellion against the existing world may be justified in a
particular case, but we have no means of telling whether it is or not
until its destiny is accomplished. If it proves successful, this shows
that it was historically right; if crushed, it will evidently have
been only a sterile reaction of ‘what ought to have been.’ The
vanquished are always wrong.

Leszek Kolakowski, Main Currents of Marxism (p. 66 in the new ed.)

As the saying goes,
“The Nation is read by people who think the country should be
run by the powerless.” This is, I guess, the liberal position that
gets attacked so much by aggressive leftists who believe that simply
negating political power is no recipe for a revolution.

But I don’t believe that Hegel’s position merely provides
tautological ex post facto justification for whatever has happened. It
would be were it constrained merely to a despondent fatalism, as with
Schopenhauer, but since Hegel is after far bigger game, he must
fundamentally reify the whole of history up to the present day and
present it as all the ingredients in his in-progress stew for a
perfect, complete world. Yet even if some dialectical process negates
the current state of affairs and declares it to be lousy (which, to be
sure, Hegel doesn’t really seem to anticipate), it can only negate it
as an end and not as a processual step. The revolutionary can never be
purely revolutionary, because the
revolutionary is still acting out within the confines of a historical
process.

This sounds to me like Burke; no matter what you do, you are
building on the work of the generations before you. To believe in this
paradigm and see one’s self as part of a historical consciousness is
to be fundamentally conservative. Hegel is capable of justifying the
French Revolution where Burke would not because he’s more progressive,
but because the conservative ideology is more flexible. It leaves no
room for those fundamental tenets of genuine revolutionary movements:
(colloquial) idealism and the probable futility of it all. Hegel
demands praxis because there simply can be nothing else;
History reigns supreme.

Kierkegaard, who proposes an unincorporable personal otherness, and
especially the antifoundationalist Max Stirner, don’t offer a Hegelian
progression so much as tearing up the whole framework. (The
alternative interpretation, which is that every little detail, no
matter how inconsequential and futile, is somehow important to
History’s progress, is tenable but pretty lame.)

Hegel and Stoicism

24 January 2007 / / 3 Comments

I quote Hume and I have nothing more to say. I quote Hegel and I
have a lot more to say, and not just because Hegel is something of a
bete noire for me:

The True and the Good, wisdom and virtue, the general terms beyond
which Stoicism cannot get, are therefore in a general way no doubt
uplifting, but since they cannot in fact produce any expansion of the
content, they soon become tedious.

Phenomenology of Spirit, 200

The greater context (as it was <a href=http://bernsteintapes.com/hegellist.html>explained to me) is
that Hegel is explaining self-consciousness looking for a way out of
the great divide between the phenomenal and the noumenal worlds, the
world as we perceive it and the world as it is in the infinite, and so
on. The stoic’s solution is to deny the phenomenal world by
withdrawing from it and all desire. Hegel is referring to the stoics
and particularly Epictetus, the slave who taught that you simply
shouldn’t want what you don’t have. This is also a caricature of
Buddhist philosophies advocating the suppression of all desire.

The problem, Hegel says, is that having detached from the real
world, stoicism is empty. Unattached to any particulars, you’re left
with a world of nothing and nowhere to go. You’re just as stuck as you
were in the miserable real world, trapped and without freedom. It’s
not so bad, since all your pain is gone, but it is tedious.

Stoicism always holds an interest for me, maybe because I’m so
naturally non-stoic, but the idea of tossing frustrations aside rather
than conquering them is awfully appealing. And I don’t think that Hegel’s
criticism holds. Have you ever met a genuine stoic? I’ve only met
people trying to be stoics, and succeeding on rare, brief
occasions. So I decided that stoicism was less about being stoic all
the time and more processual. Again, think of the Zen model of
constantly correcting one’s course to maintain mindfulness; you always
drift away, but you always correct yourself. If you ever achieved
perfect mindfulness, you’d have reached a veritable state of non-being
(whether nirvana or simply an impossibility), and Hegel’s tedium
wouldn’t even arise because there would be no being left to have it.

Unfortunately, that sort of perfection doesn’t seem to happen, so it’s
not as though stoicism provides a genuine way out. But the dead end
seems to be more of a bottomless pit, since you will never find out
that stoicism fails to satisfy. Hegel’s subsequent problems of
skepticism and unhappy consciousness are states in which one can
live, but stoicism’s problem only become apparent after you’ve already
gotten there. Which you don’t.

It’s strange that Hegel, who’s obsessed with process and
development, treats such waystations as points unto themselves. It
would be fine if each was an effort that failed in the trying, but I
just don’t think that’s true with stoicism, which provides the
unreachable end of the rainbow and no indication that it could ever
disappoint. But as far as that endless striving and approximation
goes, is it worth putting your effort to that end more than any other?
I doubt it.

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