THE ENLIGHTENMENT: HECKLING HEGEL (4)

October 07, 2020

THE ENLIGHTENMENT: HECKLING HEGEL (4)

The present is a series of essays on the roots of modern European political philosophy. These ideas shaped many states on the continent, determined the nature of their Governments, and defined the role of the people as subjects of the state. The result is a distinct European culture that since the Enlightenment, has been working towards the destruction of its Greco-Roman and Judeo-Christian roots. In this installment, G.W.F. Hegel.

Continued from The Counter-Enlightenment: Countering Kant (3)

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Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831) was, like Immanuel Kant (Part 3), a great admirer of Jean Jacques Rousseau (part 2). Like today's cosmologists are warping reason for their holy grail, the 'theory of everything', these anti philosophers of the Counter-Enlightenment did the same in their efforts to unify heaven and earth, the building of paradises on earth. But two and a half centuries with Utopia has learnt that they usually turn into dystopia.

Hegel feverishly sought to square faith with reason. In his efforts he made an irrational decision: he allowed Kant's dialectics to reflect contradiction. To mention just one example, this is the reason why postmodernists today can be full blown racists in the name of fighting racism. A thing can be black and white at the same time; because truth is in the eye of the beholder.

Hegel's follower, Karl Marx claiming to be on the side of science, did not entirely underwrite Hegel's anti reason theory on contradictions, but used it whenever expedient. Building on Hegel's Slave-Master theory, Marx devised his own version, which is with us until this day as a divisive mechanism for progress through social struggle.

We came to know it later as Scientific Marxism-Leninism, the idea that victory of the international workers class over Capitalism was historically inevitable.

With the workers failing the intellectual and ruling elites in bringing down capitalism, the dualism of oppressors versus the oppressed is played out in our own time in the form of minorities versus the white patriarchate.

And then there is Hegel's dialectic of 'progress' in society through social strife, an mechanism today taken for granted as a means of public debate. With the regularity of a human ratwheel, groups in society are pitted against each other, veering from one extreem to the next, laid down in Hegel's formula, thesis -> anti thesis -> synthesis.

Reality or truth does not come into the argument. If group A claims truth is A, group B comes out in favor of the opposite. Common sense and contextual thought are the sacrificial victims of this insanity.

Cosmologic fantasy

Hegel's philosophy is conceptually a secular fantasy based on Judeo-Christian cosmology: God's projection, a spirit called the Absolute, represents creation which is seeking reunification with God. Its development through struggle and conflict by means of which it gets to know itself, is the story of the history of the world. The story ends when the Absolute - reunited with God - is achieving full self-consciousness.

Hegel's theme was the National state. As Rousseau is the father of the totalitarian state, Hegel is the founder of the National state. The Orwellian term, 'freedom through the state' describes well where Hegel is coming from.

According to Hegel freedom is not a God-given right, inherent in man and therefore inalienable as the fathers of the Enlightenment held, but temporary and conditional, a social contract (Rousseau) granted or to be dissolved by law as the State sees fit.

Aministic Nationalism

Acting under the Platonic dualism of 'as above, so below' the National State became a placeholder of God, until the State replaced God entirely under a virulent form of Nationalism and Communism. In the terms of Hegel it is the 'ethical whole', the 'actualization of freedom', and the self-consciousness of the Absolute.

As a mere sacrificial animal of the by now animistic State, the individual has the duty to submit to its needs, and worship it as a terrestrial divinity. Consider the following quote as illustrative of the idea:

''Otto Braun, age 19, a volunteer who died in World War I, wrote in a letter to his parents: "My inmost yearning, my purest, though most secret flame, my deepest faith and my highest hope - they are still the same as ever, and they all bear one name: the State.

One day to build the State like a temple, rising up pure and strong, resting in its own weight, severe and sublime, but also serene like the gods and with bright halls glistening in the dancing brilliance of the sun - this, at bottom, is the end and goal of my aspirations.''

In Hegel we see how human free will, the essence of morality in individual man, has shifted to the collective State. The process has continued to this day. We see it clearly in aid and other social programs. Originally a Biblical commandment to the individual to help the poor, these good works have now been outsourced to the state, expenditures covered from the treasury through taxation.

Today's politicians love to see themselves as Hegel's 'World historical figures,' agents of God's Plan. They may be exacting high cost in terms of human misery, but collective historical development is of a higher order than mere morality.

The ethics of the duty to sacrifice to the collective common good, and the ease with which others are sacrifized to a perceived higher cause, provides moral cover to the idea that the end justifies any means.

The European Union Versus the United States

The suspicion may be justified that the rift between the Enlightenment and the Counter-Enlightenment, the American-Continental fault-line, Locke versus Rousseau, is still visible today in the geopolitical differences between the United States and the European Union.

Americans have taken up ownership of their politeia, safeguarded by the Constitution and the Second Amendment, ensuring that the rule of law will be defended with something more impressive than corroded pitchforks and burning barricades.

Europeans on the other hand are still stuck in the mind-set of subjects. They have not given up being the pawns of Hegel's 'world historical figures', the new agents doing 'God's work' happen to be carving out a heroic role for themselves as unelected road-builders to the Kantian \World Government by the New World Order.

Hegel's Legacy

Expert on anti reason Counter Enlightenment thinkers, Stephen Hicks, lists four of Hegel's contributions to Postmodernism:

1. Reality is an entirely subjective construct: 'thought creates reality' (or, reality for its existence is dependent upon the subjective mind). Is was a reversal of reason resting on Kant, who enclosed the mind inside the skull, rendering knowledge of the external world impossible.

2. Ignoring at their peril the Law of Identity -- A=A -- contradictions were built into reality which made them a natural part of reason, or more precise, anti reason. From here onwards anything goes.

3. As reality evolves contradictorily, truth is no longer an absolute, but is relative to time, place and the will of the subject (the immediate victim of this illogic is morality, the knowledge of good and evil).

4. The collective, not the individual, is the operative unit.

All this unfixed relativism and subjectivism may be astounding, but compared to the Counter-Enlightenment movement's later religious as well as atheist philosophers known as the Irrationalists, Kant and Hegel are the essence of reason.

Education

NASA psychiatrist and blogger Dr Sanity has written extensively about the Counter Enlightenment and Hegel in relation to schooling and education, early victims of the 'new logic'. Here's a self-explanatory example:

"....in this new century, both utopian systems (right wing Nationalism and left wing Hegelians) have been given new life by recruiting a potent new ally in their attempts to control the minds of men. That ally is postmodern philosophy and rhetoric. This 18th century philosophical rise of collectivism is still playing itself out several hundred years later in the competing ideologies of our own time.

The most important battlefield in this war in our time is the educational system, from kindergarden through college, where strenuous efforts are being made by the remnants of both types of collectivists to claim the minds of the next generation. (...)."

Free Download of Stephen Hicks primer on Postmodernism (PDF)

Coming up next: "Flunking Fichte": "Education should aim at destroying free will so that after pupils are thus schooled they will be incapable throughout the rest of their lives of thinking or acting otherwise than as their school masters would have wished."

First posted on Politeia on March 3, 2008 and subsequently on PomoNews.

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