Hegel and The Philosophy of History

[Jerry Biggers]

Back to Ridpath. Or, more correctly, ARI. It would have been very unusual if Ridpath or anyone else affiliated with the Ayn Rand Insititute, took a public position that differed greatly from the parameters that that institution allowed them to present; as to do so would likely result in the dis-continuation of their relationship with ARI, which strictly follows the party line set down by Leonard Peikoff. (As John McCaskey recently found out, after issuing a rather moderate criticism of John Harriman's The Logical Leap, which Peikoff regarded, apparently, as "sacred writ" [well, it was anyway, until Harriman defected to David Kelley's The Atlas Society. Harrimann is now persona non grata with ARI and reference to his works have disappeared from the "Ministry of Information," oops! I mean ARI website.]).

The ARI site has had some changes made since last I looked. David Harriman's book on physics and a number of his audio lectures are available still:

https://estore.aynrand.org/search?q=harriman

Interesting. Around a month or so ago, ARI had removed references to David Harriman's lectures and to his book, The Logical Leap, from their website eStore. But now, they are back..

Irfan khawaja, in a recent post here on OL reported that his sources who had attended this summer's TAS conference, noted that David Harriman did not take that occasion to explain his sudden appearance as a lecturer at their conference or to make any critical comments, (publicly, anyway) about his former [?] mentor, Leonard Peikoff (an act which almost certainly would have led to his permanent banishment from ARI and OCON, at least as long as Peikoff or his heirs have any controlling influence).

Perhaps someone here on OL knows what this unusual turn of events means?. I have no idea.

[eager_readerr]

On 9/6/2014 at 6:36 AM, Jerry Biggers said:

Assigned to read Hegel's Philosophy of History? Wow. What comes after that? Never mind.

Hegel is generally considered to be the philosophical forerunner of modern totalitarianism - both Naziism and of course he had a major infulence on Karl Marx who developed communist ideology based on a Hegelian dialectical foundation.One of the classic essays that tears Hegel's version of the dialectic to shreds, is "What is the Dialectic?," by Karl Popper, included in his collection of essays, Conjectures and Refutations. He also goes after Hegel in his monumental two-volume The Open Society and Its Enemies, which focuses on Plato and Hegel as the forerunners to the establishment of the totalitarian state.

Hegel is also discussed, from an Objectivist viewpoint, in Leonard Peikoff's The Ominous Parallels: The End of Freedom in America (1981). (Peikoff is the author, but Rand required him to make so many revisions that the book was delayed for about 14 years. On that basis, I think it would be fair to say that she is the co-author!) This book is about to be re-issued with a new title, The Cause of Hitler's Germany.

 

On 9/6/2014 at 11:56 AM, Samson Corwell said:

A contrary opinion on Popper from Voegelin: ""This Popper has been for years, not exactly a stone against which one stumbles, but a troublesome pebble that I must continually nudge from the path, in that he is constantly pushed upon me by people who insist that his work on the 'open society and its enemies' is one of the social science masterpieces of our times. … In that Popper violated this elementary vocational duty and stole several hours of my lifetime, which I devoted in fulfilling my vocational duty, I feel completely justified in saying without reservation that this book is impudent, dilettantish crap.".

I have heard most of those things are mischaracterizations.

Voegelin said this in a correspondence with Leo Strauss. The original webpage is gone now, but webarchive has a few snapshots of it. Here is one.

Popper and many others have indeed accused Hegel's philosophy, or aspects of it, as being nefariously employed by certain people. The Hegel-Nazi connection is old hat as far as I can tell. Many claim Popper has at best misunderstood Hegel and at worst only relied on select quotations from him totally ripped from context instead of digesting entire works of Hegel's in order to properly understand Hegel's total system of philosophy. I was first made aware of Popper's critiques of Hegel in a footnote on page 105 of George H. Smith's book Why Atheism? Smith says that Hegel sees the history of philosophy - thought in general - as a development of a certain 'geist' or 'spirit.' The history of philosophy (thought) moves in a dialectic way. Smith then says that the history of philosophy did not actually follow such a logical progression. Smith then mentioned two works by Popper which critiqued "historicism" as Hegel's approach is often called. Smith recommended The Poverty of Historicism (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1961) and The Open Society and Its Enemies, vol. 2 (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1966). Smith also mentioned Ludwig Von Mises, Theory and History: An Interpretation of Social and Economic Evolution (New Rochelle, N.Y.: Arlington House, 1969).

I have found some anti-Popper criticisms on the internet which take issue with Popper's critique of Hegel. While Smith only intended to send the reader to Popper to refute the Hegelian "historicism", there are in fact MANY problems in Popper that Smith's footnote does not touch on. One of the main critics of Popper was Walter Kaufmann. The latter accuses the former distorting Hegel nearly beyond recognition based on faulty secondary sources.

Source: “From Shakespeare to Existentialism: Studies in Poetry, Religion, and Philosophy” by Walter Kaufmann, Beacon Press, Boston 1959, page 88-119, Chapter 7: The Hegel Myth and Its Method;
http://hegel.net/en/kaufmann1959.htm

Highlights:
 

Quote

Popper’s treatment contains more misconceptions about Hegel than any other single essay.
[...]

In the case of Hegel, there is voluminous evidence that Popper ignores: beginning with Dilthey’s pioneering study of 1906 and the subsequent publication of Hegel’s early writings, ample material has been made available concerning the development of his ideas. There is even a two-volume study by Franz Rosenzweig, the friend of Martin Buber, that specifically treats the development of those ideas with which Popper is concerned above all: Hegel und der Staat.

Furthermore, Popper has relied largely on Scribner’s Hegel Selections, a little anthology for students that contains not a single complete work. Like Gilson in The Unity of Philosophical Experience (p. 246), Popper takes over such a gross mistranslation as “the State is the march of God through the world,” although the original says merely that it is the way of God with the world that there should be the State, and even this sentence is lacking in the text published by Hegel and comes from one of the editor’s additions to the posthumous edition of The Philosophy of Right — and the editor admitted in his Preface that, though these additions were based on lecture notes, “the choice of words” was sometimes his rather than Hegel’s.

Popper also appears to be unaware of crucial passages, if not entire works, that are not included in these Selections; for example, the passage on war in Hegel’s first book, which shows that his later conception of war, which is far more moderate, was not adopted to accommodate the king of Prussia, as Popper maintains. The passage on war in Hegel’s Phenomenology of the Spirit, in the section on “The Ethical World,” was written when Hegel — a Swabian, not a Prussian — admired Napoleon and was published in 1807, a year after Prussia’s devastating defeat at Jena. Hegel’s views on war will be considered soon (in section II); but questions of method require our attention first.

[...]

Quilt quotations...this device, used by other writers, too, has not received the criticism it deserves. Sentences are picked from various contexts, often even out of different books, enclosed by a single set of quotation marks, and separated only by three dots, which are generally taken to indicate no more than the omission of a few words. Plainly, this device can be used to impute to an author views he never held.

[...]
The writings of Hegel and Plato abound in admittedly one-sided statements that are clearly meant to formulate points of view that are then shown to be inadequate and are countered by another perspective. Thus an impressive quilt quotation could be patched together to convince gullible readers that Hegel was — depending on the “scholar’s” plans — either emphatically for or utterly opposed to, say, “equality.” But the understanding of Hegel would be advanced ever so much more by citing one of his remarks about equality in context, showing how it is a step in an argument that is designed to lead the reader to a better comprehension of equality and not to enlist his emotions either for it or against it.
[...]

Popper writes like a district attorney who wants to persuade his audience that Hegel was against God, freedom, and equality — and uses quilt quotations to convince us.

The first of these (p. 227 ) consists of eight fragments of which every single one is due to one of Hegel’s students and was not published by him. Although Popper scrupulously marks references to Gans’s additions to the Philosophy of Right with an “L” and invariably gives all the references for his quilt quotations — e.g., “For the eight quotations in this paragraph, cf. Selections ...” — few readers indeed will recall when they come to the Notes at the end of the book that “the eight quotations” are the quilt quotations that they took for a single passage. And Popper advises his readers “first to read without interruption through the text of a chapter, and then to turn to the Notes.”

[...]
5. “Influence.”

What especially concerns Popper — and many another critic of German thinkers — is the “influence” that the accused had on the Nazis. His Hegel chapter is studded with quotations from recent German writers, almost all of which are taken from The War Against the West by Kolnai. In this remarkable book Friedrich Gundolf, Werner Jaeger ( Harvard), and Max Scheler are pictured as “representative of Nazism or at least its general trend and atmosphere.” Kolnai is also under the impression that the men who contributed most “to the rise of National Socialism as a creed” were Nietzwhe “and Stefan George, less great but, perhaps because of his homosexuality, more directly instrumental in creating the Third Reich” (p. 14 ); that Nietzsche was a “half-Pole” (p. 453); that the great racist H. S. Chamberlain “was a mellow Englishman tainted by noxious German influences” (p. 455); and that Jaspers is a “follower” of Heidegger (p. 207 ). It would seem advisable to check the context of any quotations from Kolnai’s book before one uses them, but Kolnai generally gives no references. Popper writes:

I am greatly indebted to Kolnai’s book, which has made it possible for me to quote in the remaining part of this chapter a considerable number of authors who would otherwise have been inaccessible to me. (I have not, however, always followed the wording of Kolnai’s translations.)

He evidently changed the wording without checking the originals or even the context.

[...]

Besides, Popper often lacks the knowledge of who influenced whom. Thus he speaks of Heidegger and “his master Hegel” (p. 270 and asserts falsely that Jaspers began as a follower “of the essentialist philosophers Husserl and Scheler” (p. 270 ). More important, he contrasts the vicious Hegel with superior men “such as Schopenhauer or J. F. Fries” (p. 223 ), and he constantly makes common cause with Schopenhauer against the allegedly proto-fascist Hegel, whom he blames even for the Nazis’ racism — evidently unaware that Fries and Schopenhauer, unlike the mature Hegel, were anti-Semites.

Hegel’s earliest essays, which he himself did not publish, show that he started out with violent prejudices against the Jews. These essays will be considered in the next chapter; but they are not represented in Scribner’s Hegel Selections and hence were not exploited by Popper. Nor have they exerted any perceivable influence. When Hegel later became a man of influence’ he insisted that the Jews should be granted equal rights because civic rights belong to man because he is a man and not on account of his ethnic origins or his religion.

Fries, who was Hegel’s predecessor at the University of Heidelberg, has often been considered a great liberal, and Hegel has often been condemned for taking a strong stand against him; it is rarely, if ever, mentioned in this context that Fries published a pamphlet in the summer of 1816 in which he called for the “extermination” of Jewry. It appeared simultaneously as a review article in Heidelbergische Jahrbücher der Litteratur and as a pamphlet with the title “How the Jews endanger the prosperity and the character of the Germans.” According to Fries, the Jews “were and are the bloodsuckers of the people” (p. 243 ) and “do not at all live and teach according to Mosaic doctrine but according to the Talmud” (p. 251 ) of which Fries conjures up a frightening picture. “Thus the Jewish caste ... should be exterminated completely [mit Stumpf und Stiel ausgerottet] because it is obviously of all secret and political societies and states within the state the most dangerous” (p. 256 ). “Any immigration of Jews should be forbidden, their emigration should be promoted. Their freedom to marry should ... be limited... . It should be forbidden that any Christian be hired by a Jew” (p. 260 ); and one should again force on them “a special mark on their clothing” (p. 261 ). In between, Fries protests: “Not against the Jews, our brothers, but against Jewry [der Judenschaft] we declare war” (p. 248).

This may help us to understand why Hegel, in the Preface to his Philosophy of Right, scorned Fries’s substitution of “the pap of ‘heart, friendship, and enthusiasm'” for moral laws.

[...]
 

Popper, though he has written an important book on Die Logik der Forschung, “The Logic of Research,” does not find it necessary to check his hunches by research when be is concerned with influences in his Hegel chapter. He simply decrees that Hegel “represents the ‘missing link,’ as it were, between Plato and the modern form of totalitarianism. Most of the modern totalitarians are quite unaware that their ideas can be traced back to Plato. But many know of their indebtedness to Hegel” (p. 226 ). Seeing that the context indicates a reference to the Nazis and that all the totalitarians cited in this chapter are Fascists, not Communists, Popper only shows his ignorance of this brand of totalitarianism.

Hegel was rarely cited in the Nazi literature, and, when he was referred to, it was usually by way of disapproval. The Nazis’ official “philosopher,” Alfred Rosenberg, mentioned, and denounced, Hegel twice in his best-selling Der Mythus des Zwanzigsten jahrhunderts. Originally published in 1930, this book bad reached an edition of 878,000 copies by 1940. In the same book, a whole chapter is devoted to Popper’s beloved Schopenhauer, whom Rosenberg admired greatly. Rosenberg also celebrates Plato as “one who wanted in the end to save his people [Volk] on a racial basis, through a forcible constitution, dictatorial in every detail.” Rosenberg also stressed, and excoriated, the “Socratic” elements in Plato.

Plato, unlike Hegel, was widely read in German schools, and special editions were prepared for Greek classes in the Gymnasium, gathering together allegedly fascist passages. In his introduction to one such selection from the Republic, published by Teubner in the series of Eclogae Graecolatinae, Dr. Holtorf helpfully listed some of his relevant articles on Plato, including one in the Völkischer Beobachter, which was Hitler’s own paper. Instead of compiling a list of the many similar contributions to the Plato literature, it may suffice to mention that Dr. Hans F. K. Günther, from whom the Nazis admittedly received their racial theories, also devoted a whole book to Plato — not to Hegel — as early as 1928. In 1935, a second edition was published.

[...]

Hegel certainly has grievous faults. Among these is his obscure style, but it is dry and unemotional in the extreme. A detailed account of his almost incredibly unemotional style as a lecturer has been given by one of his students, H. G. Hotho, and is quoted in Hermann Glockner’s Hegel (1, 440 ff.), and in Kuno Fischer’s Hegel, too. If “hysterical” means, as Webster says, “wildly emotional,” Popper deserves this epithet much more than Hegel. For all of Hegel’s shortcomings, it seems wildly emotional indeed to say that “he is supreme only in his outstanding lack of originality” and was not even “talented” (p. 227 ). And “the critical and rational methods of science” could hardly establish Popper’s contention that the philosophy of Jaspers is a “gangster” philosophy (p. 272 ). Nor is this proved by a note on “the gangster philosophy” in the back of the volume, which turns out to furnish us with a quilt quotation (see above) from Ernst von Salomon’s book, The Outlaws, which bears no perceivable relation to Karl Jaspers — not to speak of Hegel.

Popper’s allegation of motives is scarcely distinguishable from vituperation. Hegel is accused of “a perversion ... of a sincere belief in God” (p. 244 ), but no evidence whatever is given to substantiate this charge. “Hegel’s radical collectivism ... depends on Frederick William III, king of Prussia” and his “one aim” was “to serve his employer, Frederick William of Prussia” (pp. 227 f.); and it is hinted that Hegel misused philosophy as a means of financial gain (p. 241 ); but Popper ignores the literature on this question, which includes, in addition to the volumes cited above, T. M. Knox’s article on “Hegel and Prussianism” in Philosophy, January, 1940, and his discussion with Carritt in the April and July issues.

Hegel, we are told, “wants to stop rational argument, and with it, scientific and intellectual progress” (p. 235 ), and his dialectics “are very largely designed to pervert the ideas of 1789” (p. 237 ). When Hegel explicitly comes out in favor of the things that, according to his accuser, he opposed, this is called ‘lip service” (ns. II and 43). Thus Popper claims — like Bäumler in his Nazi version of Nietzsche — that the man whom he professes to interpret did not mean what he clearly said. Quilt quotations are used to establish a man’s views, and his explicit statements are discounted when they are inconvenient.

[...]

8 The State.

When Hegel speaks of “the State” he does not mean every state encountered in experience. Immediately after first offering his epigram about the rational and actual, he himself continued:

What matters is this: to recognize in the semblance of the temporal and transient the substance which is immanent and the eternal which is present in it. For the rational (which is synonymous with the Idea), in its actuality, also embeds itself in external existence and thus manifests itself in an infinite wealth of forms, appearances, and figures, shrouding its core in a multi-colored rind. Our consciousness first dwells on this rind, and only after that does philosophic thinking penetrate it to detect the inward pulse and to perceive its beat even in the external forms. The infinitely varied relations, however, which take shape in this externality ... this infinite material and its organization are not the subject matter of philosophy.

Thus Hegel would distinguish between the Idea of the State, which he means when he speaks of “the State,” and the many states around us. But the Idea, he claims, does not reside in a Platonic heaven, but is present, more or less distorted, in these states. The philosopher should neither immerse himself in the description and detailed analysis of various historical states, nor turn his back on history to behold some inner vision: he should disentangle the rational core from the web of history.

Hegel is not driven to “juridical positivism” and the approbation of every state with which he is confronted, as Popper supposes (p. 252 he can pass judgment. Hegel makes a sharp distinction between such philosophic judgment and the arbitrary criticisms that reflect personal idiosyncrasies and prejudices. This would not involve any difficulty if he were willing to restrict himself to internal criticism, pointing out the multifarious inconsistencies that are so striking in the utterances of most statesmen, in the platforms of most parties, and in the basic convictions of most people. Hegel, however, goes further.

He believes in a rational world order and in his ability to understand it. For him, life is not “a tale told by an idiot”; and history, not merely, although also, a succession of tragedies. There is an ultimate purpose — freedom — and this furnishes a standard of judgment.

A few quotations from the Philosophy of Right may illustrate this. “One may be able to show how a law is completely founded in, and consistent with, both circumstances and existing legal institutions, and yet is truly illegitimate and irrational” (§3). Hegel also speaks of “unalienable” rights and condemns, without qualification,

slavery, serfdom, the disqualification from holding property or the prevention of its use or the like, and the deprivation of intelligent rationality, of morality, ethics, and religion, which is encountered in superstition and the concession to others of the authority and full power to determine and prescribe for me what actions I am to perform ... or what duties my conscience is to demand from me, or what is to be religious truth for me [§66].

According to the addition of Gans, the editor, Hegel remarked in his lectures in this connection that “the slave has an absolute right to liberate himself” (cf. also §77).

Hegel is not inconsistent when he writes: “the State cannot recognize conscience [Gewissen] in its peculiar form, i.e., as subjective knowledge [Wissen], just as in science, too, subjective opinion, assurance, and the appeal to subjective opinion have no validity” (§137). Conscience is fallible; and, while no government or church has the right to dictate to our conscience, no government can afford to recognize conscience as a legal standard. As several of his interpreters have pointed out, Hegel, when he wrote the Philosophy of Right, was concerned about the recent assassination of the poet Kotzebue by a student who was convinced that the poet was a Russian spy and deserved death.

We are bound to misunderstand Hegel when we apply his remarks about conscience within the framework of the Nazi state. It would be more pertinent if we thought of the German Republic before 1933 and of the conscience of Hitler. For by “the State” Hegel means one in which freedom is realized and “a human being counts because he is a human being, not because he is a Jew, Catholic, Protestant, German, Italian, or the like” — and this “is of infinite importance” (§209; cf. §270 n.). Hegel would consider rational the conscience of an opponent of Hitler who recognized his own absolute right to make himself free and to realize his unalienable rights — but not the conscience of a fanatic impelled by personal motives or perhaps by an equally objectionable ideology.

It is no wonder that the Nazis found small comfort in a book that is based on the conviction that “the hatred of law, of right made determinate by law, is the shibboleth which reveals, and permits us to recognize infallibly, fanaticism, feeble-mindedness, and the hypocrisy of good intentions, however they may disguise themselves” (§258 n.). In his Preface, too, Hegel called the law “the best shibboleth to distinguish the false brothers and friends of the so-called people.” One may agree with Herbert Marcuse when he says in Reason and Revolution: Hegel and the Rise of Social Theory: “There is no concept less compatible with Fascist ideology than that which founds the state on a universal and rational law that safeguards the interests of every individual, whatever the contingencies of his natural and social status” (pp. 180 f.).

In sum: Popper is mistaken when he says, like many another critic, that, according to Hegel, “the only possible standard of judgment upon the state is the world historical success of its actions” (p. 260 ). Success is not the standard invoked in the Philosophy of Right when Hegel speaks of “bad states.” “The State” does not refer to one of “the things in flux,” but to an Idea and a standard of judgment, to what states would be like if they lived up fully to their raison d'être. This reason is to be found partly “in a higher sphere” (§270) for which Hegel himself refers the reader to his system as outlined in his Encyclopaedia. The whole realm of Objective Spirit and human institutions that culminates in the State is but the foundation of a higher realm of Absolute Spirit that comprises art, religion, and philosophy.

The discussion of “the State” in the Philosophy of Right opens with the pronouncement: “The State is the actuality of the ethical idea.” If he were a Platonist, he would mean justice; but Hegel means freedom: not that freedom from all restraints which, at its worst, culminates in anarchy, license, and bestiality, but, rather, man’s freedom to develop his humanity and to cultivate art, religion, and philosophy. He considers the State supreme among human institutions because he would subordinate all such institutions to the highest spiritual pursuits and because he believes that these are possible only in “the State.” He himself says: “To be sure, all great human beings have formed themselves in solitude — but only by assimilating what had already been created in the State."^[1] One might nevertheless insist, as Hegel does not, that conformity should be discouraged beyond the necessary minimum, and one might dwell, as Nietzsche did half a century later, on the dangers of the State.

It would be absurd to represent Hegel as a radical individualist; but it is equally absurd to claim, as Popper does (p. 258 ), that Hegel’s State is “totalitarian, that is to say, its might must permeate and control the whole life of the people in all its functions: ‘The State is therefore the basis and center of all the concrete elements in the life of a people: of Art, Law, Morals, Religion, and Science.'” Popper’s claim simply ignores Hegel’s emphatic insistence on the sphere of “subjective freedom,” which he himself considered a decisive advance over Plato. The quotation from Hegel, of course, does not at all prove the preceding contention: it means — and the context in the lectures on the Philosophy of History (Preface) makes this quite clear — that the State alone makes possible the development of art, law, morals, religion, and science. And Hegel’s formulation here shows less the influence of Plato, whom Popper represents as a terrible totalitarian, than the impact of Pericles, whom Popper admires. The sentence Popper quotes could almost come from Thucydides’ version of Pericles’ most famous speech.

Hegel’s philosophy is open to many objections, but to confound it with totalitarianism means to misunderstand it. Ernst Cassirer puts the matter very clearly in The Myth of the State (1946), a book dealing with much the same material as Popper’s, but in a much more scholarly manner. His Hegel chapter ends: “Hegel could extol and glorify the state, he could even apotheosize it. There is, however, a clear and unmistakable difference between his idealization of the power of the state and that sort of idolization that is the characteristic of our modern totalitarian systems.”

[...]

We are told that Hegel was guilty of

historical and evolutionary relativism — in the form of the dangerous doctrine that what is believed today is, in fact, true today, and in the equally dangerous corollary that what was true yesterday (true and not merely “believed”) may be false tomorrow — a doctrine which, surely, is not likely to encourage an appreciation of the significance of tradition [p. 254].

Hegel, of course, excelled in his appreciation of the significance of tradition; in his books and lectures he took for granted its essential rationality, and he condemned as arbitrary any criticism of the past or present that was not accompanied by an appreciation of the significance of tradition.

He did not maintain “that what is believed today is, in fact, true today” but insisted that many of his contemporaries, both philosophers and “men in the street,” held many mistaken beliefs. And “what was true yesterday ... may be false tomorrow” is, in a sense, a commonplace — as when we take such statements as “it is raining” or “the Americans, while saying that all men are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, including liberty, hold slaves” or “another war might well spread the ideals of the French Revolution, without endangering the future of civilization.” The same consideration applies to many a generalization about a nation and about war.

Hegel did not believe that such propositions as “two plus two equals four” were true at one time but not at another; he thought that the truth comes to light gradually and tried to show this in his pioneering lectures on the history of philosophy. He emphasized not how utterly wrong his predecessors had been but how much truth they had seen; yet Plato’s and Spinoza’s truths were not “all of the truth” but were in need of subsequent qualification and amendment.

Hegel’s approach is not amoral. Although he finds the aim of history in its “result” (p. 260 ) and considers the history of the world the world’s court of justice (p. 233 and n., 11), he does not idolize success. His attitude depends on his religious faith that in the long run, somewhere, somehow freedom will and must triumph: that is Hegel’s “historicism.” Those of us who lack his confidence should still note that he does not believe that things are good because they succeed, but that they succeed because they are good. He finds God’s revelation in history.

This point is best illustrated by Hegel’s polemic against Von Haller in the Philosophy of Right (§258). Throughout, he tries to avoid the Scylla of that revolutionary lawlessness that he associates with Fries and the Wartburg festival and the Charybdis of conservative lawlessness that he finds in Von Haller’s Restauration der Staatswissenschaft. He cites Von Haller (I , 342 ff.): “As in the inorganic world the greater represses the smaller, and the mighty, the weak, etc., thus among the animals, too, and then among human beings, the same law recurs in nobler forms.” And Hegel interposes: “Perhaps frequently also in ignoble forms?” He then quotes Von Haller again: “This is thus the eternal, immutable order of God, that the mightier rules, must rule, and always will rule.” And Hegel comments: “One sees from this alone, and also from what follows, in what sense might is spoken of here: not the might of the moral and ethical, but the accidental force of nature.”

Popper quotes Hegel: “A people can only die a violent death when it has become naturally dead in itself” (p. 263 ); and Hegel continues, “as e.g. the German Imperial Cities, the German Imperial Constitution” (n. 77 ). Applied to the collapse of the Holy Roman Empire in 1806, Hegel’s remark makes sense, while his bold generalization invites criticism. But one should take into account that Hegel is in agreement with a religious tradition that extends from Isaiah to Toynbee.

Intent on dissociating Hegel from this religious tradition and on associating him with the Nazis instead, Popper fastens on Hegel’s conception of world-historical peoples. He quotes (p. 258) Hegel’s Encyclopaedia (§550) as saying that “the Spirit of the Time invests its Will” in “the self-consciousness of a particular Nation” that “dominates the World.” This would seem to be another instance where Popper improved a translation without checking the original (cf. section 5 above). The passage in the Encyclopaedia reads: “The self-consciousness of a particular people is the carrier of the current stage of development of the universal spirit as it is present, and the objective actuality into which this spirit lays its will.” In Scribner’s Hegel Selections, this becomes “... in which that spirit for a time invests its will.” And in Popper, finally, we suddenly encounter “the Spirit of the Time.” His profuse capitalization of nouns in his quotations from Hegel is apparently intended to make Hegel look silly.

Hegel goes on to say, though Popper does not quote this, that the spirit “steps onward” and “delivers it over to its chance and doom.” His position depends on his assumption that ultimate reality is spiritual and that the spirit reveals itself progressively in history. The stages of this revelation are represented by different peoples, but by only one people at any one time.

[...]

Hegel’s whole conception of “world history” is arbitrary and amounts to an attempt to study the development of his own civilization. But here he was at one with almost all of his contemporaries and predecessors who were also under the influence of the Bible. For it is from the Bible that the Western idea that history has a single beginning and moves along a single track toward a single goal received its impetus and sanction. Today we are apt to be more agnostic about the beginning; we are bound to deny the single track; but we may once again think in another sense of the unity of world history — a unity that is established by the present confluence of hitherto independent streams.

Hegel was not impeded by the recognition that some of the ancestors of his own civilization had made their epoch-making contributions simultaneously. Homer may have been a contemporary of the earliest prophets; Thales and Jeremiah wrote at the same time; and Stoicism flourished while Christianity developed out of Judaism. Elsewhere, Confucius and the Buddha were contemporaries. A pluralistic perspective is needed, as is more respect for individual units. There is no single plan into which all data can be fitted, and Hegel was certainly something of a Procrustes.

Any attempt, however, to read into Hegel’s conception of “world domination” an exclusively political or even military sense in order to link him with Hitler is quite illegitimate. It is doubly misleading when one does not emphasize that Hegel was not making predictions or offering suggestions for the future but was scrupulously limiting himself to an attempt to understand the past. Pedagogically, the single-track conception has the virtue of simplicity; and it is still adopted almost universally in the field of Hegel’s primary competence — the history of philosophy.

[...]

According to Popper,

Hegel twists equality into inequality: “That the citizens are equal before the law,” Hegel admits, “contains a great truth. But expressed in this way, it is only a tautology; it only states in general that a legal status exists, that the laws rule. But to be more concrete, the citizens ... are equal before the law only in the points in which they are equal outside the law also. Only that equality which they possess in property, age, ... etc., can deserve equal treatment before the law... . The laws themselves presuppose unequal conditions... . It should be said that it is just the great development and maturity of form in modern states which produces the supreme concrete inequality of individuals in actuality [p. 239 ].

The omissions in the Hegel quotation are Popper’s, and Popper explains them in the very next sentence:

In this outline of Hegel’s twist of the “great truth” of equalitarianism into its opposite, I have radically abbreviated his argument; and I must warn the reader that I shall have to do the same throughout the chapter; for only in this way is it at all possible to present, in a readable manner, his verbosity and the flight of his thoughts (which, I do not doubt, is pathological).

A look at the Encyclopaedia (§539) shows that Hegel is not “for” or “against” equality but tries to determine in what sense it can be embodied in the modern state.

With the appearance of the State, inequality enters; namely, the difference between the governing forces and the governed, authorities, magistrates, directories, etc. The principle of equality, carried out consistently, would repudiate all differences and thus be at odds with any kind of state.

It is in the following discussion that we find the sentence italicized by Popper, and it seems best to quote it without omissions and with Hegel’s, rather than Popper’s, italics:

Only that equality which, in whatever way, happens to exist independently, regarding wealth, age, physical strength, talents, aptitude, etc., or also crimes, etc., can and should justify an equal treatment of these before the law — in regard to taxes, liability to military service, admission to public office, etc., or punishment, etc.

Hegel’s sentence, though hardly elegant, is carefully constructed and exhibits a crucial parallelism. Only those with equal wealth should be taxed equally; age and physical strength should be taken into account by draft boards; talents and aptitudes are relevant qualifications for public service; and so forth. Or should we have equal punishment for all, regardless of whether they have committed equal crimes? Should we induct children into the armed forces and exact equal taxes from the poor and the rich? Is it Hegel that is guilty of a “twist"?

To return to “great men”: Hegel said, according to Gans’s addition to section 318: “Public opinion contains everything false and everything true, and to find what is true in it is the gift of the great man. Whoever tells his age, and accomplishes, what his age wants and expresses, is the great man of his age.” (Popper’s “translation” of this passage [p. 267 ] makes nonsense of it: “In public opinion all is false and true... .”) Hegel’s passage ends, in Popper’s translation: “He who does not understand how to despise public opinion, as it makes itself heard here and there, will never accomplish anything great.” Popper’s italics as well as his comments appeal to the reader’s prejudice in favor of the supremacy of public opinion, though he previously appealed to the prejudice in favor of the supremacy of conscience. These two standards, however, are very different; and Hegel recognized the fallibility of both because he did not believe, as Popper alleges (p. 237 ), that “self-evidence is the same as truth.” Hegel argued, in the body of section 318, that “to be independent of [public opinion] is the first formal condition of anything great and rational”; and he had the faith that public opinion “will eventually accept it, recognize it, and make it one of its own prejudices.”

In the above quotation from Gans’s addition, Popper finds an “excellent description of the Leader as a publicist”; and since he has introduced it with a reference to “the Leader principle,” one is led to think of the Führer and to consider Hegel a proto-Nazi. The quotation, however, is not at odds with a sincere belief in democracy and fits beautifully not only Franklin D. Roosevelt’s “interventionism” but also Lincoln’s great speeches; for example, “A house divided against itself cannot stand” or “With malice toward none; with charity for all.” And it is true of Lincoln, too, when Hegel says of the world-historical personalities, “They were practical, political men. But at the same time they were thinking men, who had an insight into the requirements of the time — into what was ripe for development.”
[...]

Hegel looks back, not forward. He is not less interested than Popper in “the furthering of civilization” (p. 268 ) but finds that our civilization has been furthered by any number of wars in the past; for example, the Greeks’ war against the Persians, Alexander’s wars of conquest, some of the Romans’ wars, and Charlemagne’s conquest of the Saxons. Believing that it is the philosopher’s task to comprehend “that which is” — to cite the Preface to the Philosophy of Right — and not to construct utopias, Hegel speaks of war as one of the factors that have actually furthered civilization.

Second, we should not confuse Hegel’s estimate of the wars that had occurred up to his own time with a celebration of war as we know it today or imagine it in the future.

Third, Hegel’s attitude is not fully comprehensible when considered apart from its religious roots. He considered all that is finite ephemeral. According to Gans’s addition to section 324, he said: “From the pulpits much is preached concerning the insecurity, vanity, and instability of temporal things, and yet everyone ... thinks that he, at least, will manage to hold on to his possessions.” What the preachers fail to get across, “Hussars with drawn sabres” really bring home to us. ( Popper writes “glistening sabres” [p. 269]; and the change, though slight, affects the tone of the passage.)

These three points are sufficient to show how Popper misrepresents Hegel’s view. “Hegel’s theory,” we are told, “implies that war is good in itself. ‘There is an ethical element in war,’ we read” (p. 262 ). This is a curious notion of implication: from Hegel’s contention that “there is an ethical element in war, which should not be considered an absolute evil” (§324), Popper deduces that Hegel considered war “good in itself.” Hegel attempted to solve the problem of evil by demonstrating that even evil serves a positive function. He accepted Goethe’s conception of “that force which would/Do evil evermore and yet creates the good” (see chapter 5, section 5, above). It is of the very essence of Hegel’s dialectical approach to penetrate beyond such assertions as that war is good or evil to a specification of the respects in which it is good and those in which it is evil. Today the evil so far outweighs any conceivable good that we are apt to be impatient with anyone who as much as mentions any good aspects; but in a concrete predicament, the majority still feels that the good outweighs the evil, even if this point is made by speaking of “the lesser evil.”

The one passage in which Hegel does consider the question of future wars is not well known and is worth quoting. It is found in his Berlin lectures on aesthetics:

Suppose that, after having considered the great epics of the past [the Iliad, Cid, and Tasso’s, Ariosto’s, and Camoëns’ poems], which describe the triumph of the Occident over the Orient, of European measure, of individual beauty, and of self-critical reason over Asiatic splendor, ... one now wished to think of great epics which might be written in the future: they would only have to represent the victory of the living rationality which may develop in America, over the incarceration into an infinitely progressing measuring and particularizing. For in Europe every people is now limited by another and may not, on its part, begin a war against another European people. If one now wants to go beyond Europe, it can only be to America. ^[3]

In his lectures on the philosophy of history, Hegel also hailed the United States as “the land of the future.” ^[4] Plainly, he did not believe that world history would culminate in Prussia. His lectures on history do not lead up to a prediction but to the pronouncement: “To this point consciousness has come.”

This may also be the clue to the famous expression of resignation at the end of the Preface to the Philosophy of Right — a passage that, at first glance, seems at odds with the subsequent demand for trial by jury and for a real parliament with public proceedings, institutions then still lacking in Prussia. But apparently Hegel did not believe that Prussia, or Europe, had any real future: “When philosophy paints its grey on grey, a form of life has grown old, and with grey on grey it cannot be rejuvenated, but only comprehended. The owl of Minerva begins its flight only at dusk.”

[...]

One of the major themes of Popper’s Hegel chapter is that “Hegelianism is the renaissance of tribalism” (p. 226 ). Popper’s use of “tribalism” and “nationalism” is emotional rather than precise, and he accuses Hegel of both. Even so he must admit that Hegel “sometimes attacked the nationalists” (p. 251). Popper cites Hegel’s Encyclopaedia where the so-called nation is condemned as rabble:

and with regard to it, it is the one aim of a state that a nation should not come into existence, to power and action, as such an aggregate. Such a condition of a nation is a condition of lawlessness, demoralization, brutishness. In it, the nation would only be a shapeless wild blind force, like that of a stormy elemental sea, which however is not self-destructive, as the nation — a spiritual element — would be.

The Nazis concluded quite correctly that Hegel was unalterably opposed to their conception of the Volk and that his idea of the State was its very antithesis. ^[5]

Popper, on the other hand, is so intent on opposing Hegel that he immediately seeks to enlist the reader’s sympathies on the nationalist side when he finds Hegel criticizing it. Thus Popper is not content to point out, quite correctly, that Hegel is referring “to the liberal nationalists” but must add, “whom the king hated like the plague.” Hegel’s attitude, of course, cannot be understood or reasonably evaluated in terms of the emotional impact of such words as “liberal” and “king.” What is wanted is a profile of the movement condemned by Hegel; and that may be found in Herbert Marcuse’s Reason and Revolution (pp. 179 f.):

There was much talk of freedom and equality, but it was a freedom that would be the vested privilege of the Teutonic race alone... . Hatred of the French went along with hatred of the Jews, Catholics, and “nobles.” The movement cried for a truly “German war,” so that Germany might unfold “the abundant wealth of her nationality.” It demanded a “savior” to achieve German unity, one to whom “the people will forgive all sins.” It burned books and yelled woe to the Jews. It believed itself above the law and the constitution because “there is no law to the just cause.” The state was to be built from “below,” through the sheer enthusiasm of the masses, and the “natural” unity of the Volk was to supersede the stratified order of state and society. It is not difficult to recognize in these “democratic” slogans the ideology of the Fascist Volksgemeinschaft. There is, in point of fact, a much closer relation between the historical role of the Burschenschaften, with their racism and anti-rationalism, and National Socialism, than there is between Hegel’s position and the latter. Hegel wrote his Philosophy of Right as a defense of the state against this pseudo-democratic ideology.

The “liberal” Fries called for the extermination of Jewry (section 5 above), while Hegel denounced the nationalistic clamor against the extension of civil rights to the Jews, pointing out that this “clamor has overlooked that they are, above all, human beings” (§270 n.). Are we to condemn Hegel because he agreed with the king, or praise Fries because he called himself liberal?

[...]

Popper’s most ridiculous claim — and the last one to be considered here — is that the Nazis got their racism from Hegel. In fact, the Nazis did not get their racism from Hegel, and Hegel was no racist (see section 5 above).

The Nazis did find some support for their racism in Schopenhauer, with whom Popper constantly makes common cause against Hegel, and in Richard Wagner, who Popper eccentrically insinuates was something of a Hegelian (p. 228 ) though he was, of course, a devoted disciple of Schopenhauer. Popper declares that one W. Schallmeyer, when he wrote a prize essay in 1900, “thus became the grandfather of racial biology” (p. 256 ). What, then, is the status of the rather better known and more influential Gobineau and Chamberlain and any number of other writers who publicized their views before 1900 and were widely read and constantly quoted by the Nazis?

Popper offers us the epigram: “Not ‘ Hegel + Plato,’ but ‘ Hegel + Haeckel’ is the formula of modern racialism” (p. 256 ). Why Haeckel rather than Bernhard Förster, Julius Langbehn, Hofprediger Stöcker, Chamberlain, Gobineau, or Wagner? Why not Plato, about whose reflections on breeding the Nazis’ leading race authority, Dr. Hans F. K. Günther, wrote a whole book — and Günther’s tracts on race sold hundreds of thousands of copies in Germany and went through several editions even before 1933? (See section 5 above.) And why Hegel?

Decidedly, Hegel was no racialist; nor does Popper adduce any evidence to prove that he was one. Instead, Popper says: “The transubstantiation of Hegelianism into racialism or of Spirit into Blood does not greatly alter the main tendency of Hegelianism” (p. 256 ). Perhaps the transubstantiation of God into the Führer does not greatly alter Christianity?

One can sympathize with G. R. G. Mure when he says that the increasingly violent and ill-informed attacks on Hegel have reached a point in Popper’s Hegel chapter where they become “almost meaninglessly silly."^[6] But familiarity with Hegel has waned to the point where reviewers of the original edition of The Open Society and Its Enemies, while expressing reservations about the treatment of Plato and Aristotle, have not generally seen fit to protest against the treatment of Hegel; and on the jacket of the English edition Bertrand Russell actually hails the attack on Hegel as “deadly” — for Hegel. Since the publication of the American edition in 1950, John Wild and R. B. Levinson have each published a book to defend Plato against the attacks of Popper and other like-minded critics, and Levinson’s In Defense of Plato goes a long way toward showing up Popper’s methods. But Popper’s ten chapters on Plato, although unsound, contain many excellent observations, and his book is so full of interesting discussions that no exposé will relegate it to the limbo of forgotten books. The Open Society will be around for a good long while, and that is one reason why its treatment of Hegel deserves a chapter.

What is ultimately important is not the failing of one author but the increasing popularity of the Hegel myth and of the methods on which it depends

 

Defending white ashkenazi Jews doesn't make you a non-racist necessarily. Jewish race is a myth. What were Hegel's views on blacks? THAT would be a more accurate litmus test. That's my only critique of Kaufmann's work.

[eager_readerr]

The reason I mention all off this Popper-Hegel controversy is because Popper seems to be reading a lot into Hegel that is simply not there. Popper appears at least to me to be guilty of distorting Hegel. While Smith only intended to reference Popper to refute the dialectic view of the history of philosophy, these works by Popper also contain many distortions of Hegel's philosophy. Was Smith aware of this? I ask because it would be incredibly ironic that Smith promoted Popper's distorted view on Hegel, when Smith was the one who wrote an essay called Will The Real Herbert Spencer Please Stand Up? which showed the many distortions and inaccuracies that plague secondary resources on Herbert Spencer. He says at the end of the essay that with few exceptions, secondary resources on Spencer should be avoided. Yet, here is Smith promoting the anti Hegel work of Popper that also suffers from huge inaccuracy and distortion.

Bringing it back to Kaufmann. He wants us to believe that Hegel was not in the employ of the King of Prussia and did not write and teach philosophy in order to praise the monarch or gain favour with him. However, Schopenhauer accuses Hegel of doing precisely that. Example:
 

Quote

“Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel are in my opinion not philosophers; for they lack the first requirement of a philosopher, namely a seriousness and honesty of
inquiry. They are merely sophists who wanted to appear to be rather than to be something. They sought not truth, but their own interest and advancement in the world. Appointments from governments, fees and royalties from students and publishers, and, as a means to this end, the greatest possible show and sensation in their sham philosophy-such werethe guiding stars and inspiring genii of those disciples of wisdom. And so they have not passed the entrance examination and cannot be admitted into the venerable company of thinkers for the human race.
Nevertheless they have excelled in one thing, in the art of beguiling the public and of passing themselves off for what they are not; and this undoubtedly requires talent, yet not philosophical.”

― Arthur Schopenhauer, Parerga and Paralipomena

https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/7597655-fichte-schelling-and-hegel-are-in-my-opinion-not-philosophers

Schopenhauer also said this about Fichte.
 

Quote

Schopenhauer, a student of Fichte's, wrote of him:

...Fichte who, because the thing-in-itself had just been discredited, at once prepared a system without any thing-in-itself. Consequently, he rejected the assumption of anything that was not through and through merely our representation, and therefore let the knowing subject be all in all or at any rate produce everything from its own resources. For this purpose, he at once did away with the essential and most meritorious part of the Kantian doctrine, the distinction between a priori and a posteriori and thus that between the phenomenon and the thing-in-itself. For he declared everything to be a priori, naturally without any proofs for such a monstrous assertion; instead of these, he gave sophisms and even crazy sham demonstrations whose absurdity was concealed under the mask of profundity and of the incomprehensibility ostensibly arising therefrom. Moreover, he appealed boldly and openly to intellectual intuition, that is, really to inspiration.

— Schopenhauer, Parerga and Paralipomena, Vol. I, §13

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_idealism

 

 Popper has this to offer on Fichte in his chapter on Hegel in Vol 2 of The Open Society and Its Enemies. Starting on page 51. Apparently Fichte was a German nationalist who also was willing to leave Germany and teach in Russia for a higher paycheque. I guess Fichte (and also Hegel and Schelling) doesn't live by philosophy or even for philosophy. Philosophy is just used for personal enrichment. At least that's how Schopenhauer sees it about Fichte and the other two.



From what I can gather so far, Schopenhauer besides accusing Hegel of placating the ruling class in Prussia, thought much of his philosophy was babble and incomprehensible. But so did many others. In fact Hegel is reputed to have said that he was the only one who understood his philosophy.

 

Features September 2000

The difficulty with Hegel
by Roger Kimball

 

Reflections on the philosopher, occasioned by the recent biography by Terry Pinkard.

https://www.newcriterion.com/issues/2000/9/the-difficulty-with-hegel
 

Quote

Hegel, Bertrand Russell observed, is “the hardest to understand of the great philosophers.” Hegel would not have liked very much that Russell had to say about his philosophy in A History of Western Philosophy (1945). Russell’s exposition is a classic in the library of philosophical demolition, much despised by Hegel’s admirers for its vulgar insistence on common sense. (Best line: that Hegel’s philosophy “illustrates an important truth, namely, that the worse your logic, the more interesting the consequences to which it gives rise.”) But I am not at all sure that Hegel would have disagreed with Russell’s comment about the difficulty of understanding him. He knew he was difficult. He was always going on about the “labor of the negative,” the superficiality of mere common sense, and the long, “strenuous effort” that genuinely “scientific” (i.e., Hegelian) philosophy required. It is even said that on his deathbed Hegel declared that there was only one man who had understood him—and he had misunderstood him.
[...]

What Mr. Pinkard has given us with his new book on Hegel is partly an intellectual biography, partly an outline of Hegel’s work. Recognizing that some of his readers will be more interested in Hegel’s life than in detailed discussions of his ideas (and vice versa), he has done his best to segregate the story of Hegel’s life and intellectual formation from the book reports. He corrects some misconceptions. For example, I had always thought that Hegel died of cholera when an epidemic of that disease swept through Berlin in 1831. Not so, says Mr. Pinkard. What Hegel really died of was “most likely . . . some kind of upper gastrointestinal disease.” Good to know that. And like almost every sympathetic commentator on Hegel I have read, Mr. Pinkard sternly points out that the one thing everyone remembers about Hegel’s philosophy—that it says reality develops according to a process of “thesis/antithesis/synthesis”—is actually nowhere to be found in Hegel’s writings. It was in fact a shorthand devised by a “deservedly obscure” professor called Heinrich Moritz Chalybäus. The popularity—could it be the clarity?—of that formula seems to incense Hegelians. Mr. Pinkard argues that it “misrepresents the structure of Hegel’s thought,” though I have to say that readers who encounter Hegel’s description of “the movement” in which thought “becomes estranged and then returns to itself from estrangement, and is only then presented in its actuality and truth” might be forgiven for making the same mistake.

[...]
Bertrand Russell remarked that Hegel was attracted to mysticism when young and that his mature philosophy was “an intellectualizing of what had first appeared to him as mystic insight.” If you look at Hegel’s philosophy, that seems plausible, though Mr. Pinkard gives no evidence for “mystic insight” in the young Hegel. What is true, I think, is that in Hegel we see a theological student who became disenchanted with theology but could not see his way clear to dispensing with the aura of profundity that theology offered. The result was the attenuated theology of Hegelian idealism, in which the Absolute stands in for God.

[...]

One note of drama came in 1807 when Hegel fathered an illegitimate child, named Ludwig, with his landlady. Mr. Pinkard notes that after Hegel was married (in 1811) and had two other sons, he arranged for Ludwig to live with his family. It ended badly. Ludwig wished to study medicine, but Hegel refused to pay for his education. (In general, it seems that he treated Ludwig as a second-class citizen.) Ludwig broke with the family around 1826, commenting that “I always lived in fear but never in love of my parents.” Mr. Pinkard deals fairly with the story of Ludwig in his text but, curiously, there is no sign of the child in the index, either in his own right or as an episode in Hegel’s life. Under “Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich,” we find entries for everything from “beer” to “napping on sofa,” but nothing under “illegitimate child” or “Ludwig.” A very Hegelian sense of priorities.

[...]

Arthur Schopenhauer, one of Hegel’s bitterest enemies, was right to complain about “the stupefying influence of Hegel’s sham wisdom.” (No one under the age of forty, he thought, should read Hegel: the danger of intellectual corruption was too great.) But I believe that Schopenhauer was wrong to attribute mystifying motives to Hegel. He may have been, as Schopenhauer also said, a “charlatan,” but Hegel was a sincere charlatan. He said a lot of loopy things. He believed them all.

[...]

On the first page of his preface, Mr. Pinkard plaintively asks how it is that Hegel “came to be so badly misunderstood.” That is one question I think I can help him answer. Item: “A rational consideration of Nature,” Hegel wrote in his Philosophy of Nature,

must consider how Nature is in its own self this process of becoming Spirit, of sublating its otherness—and how the Idea is present in each grade or level of Nature itself: estranged from the Idea, Nature is only the corpse of the Understanding. Nature is, however, only implicitly the Idea, and Schelling therefore called her a petrified intelligence . . . ; but God does not remain petrified and dead; the very stones cry out and raise themselves to Spirit.

Which leaves us—where? Between a rock and a hard place, anyway. All but Hegel’s most abject admirers are (at least secretly) embarrassed by his philosophy of nature. It takes a strong man to read, for example, that “the celestial bodies only appear to be independent of each other” without blanching.
[...]

So why read Hegel? For one thing, he has startling flashes of insight—about the nature of modernity, the relationship between the state and civil society, the self-enchantments of freedom. Hegel is deep. He is also muddy. His work, the philosopher Roger Scruton observed, is “like a beautiful oasis around a treacherous pool of nonsense, and nowhere beneath the foliage is the ground really firm.” It may be worth visiting, but both the going and the getting back are treacherous. Many never return.

A second reason to read Hegel has to do with that treacherousness. Just as doctors learn a lot about health by studying diseases, so we can learn a lot about philosophical health by studying Hegel. As Russell noted, Hegel “epitomized better than anyone a certain kind of philosophy.” It wasn’t, Russell thought, a good kind of philosophy—he believed that “almost all of Hegel’s doctrines are false”—but it vividly illustrated the mental consequences of looking at the world in the peculiar way that Hegel’s philosophy teaches us to.

A third reason to read Hegel is his influence, which everybody—friend as well as foe—admits was enormous. “No philosopher since 1800,” Walter Kaufmann wrote in his 1965 appreciation of Hegel, “has had more influence.” That influence took several different directions, of which I will mention three. In the first place, Hegel’s writings, especially the Phenomenology and the Philosophy of Right (1820), were a definitive influence on the philosophy of Karl Marx and, through him, on Lenin and Stalin and on Marxism in general. It is true that Marx devoted many pages to criticizing Hegel’s philosophy. But he firmly embraced Hegel’s view of history as a realm of ineluctable dialectical progress—progress, that is to say, which is necessary, i.e., inevitable, and which proceeds by continuous negation. As the philosopher Louis Dupré put it, Marx accepted the method of Hegel’s philosophy while discarding its content. One often hears that Marx attempted to “stand Hegel on his head.” What Marx actually said (in Capital) was that Hegel’s idealism left his dialectic “standing on its head. It must be turned right side up again, if you would discover the rational kernel within the mystical shell.”

[...]

As George Santayana noted in Egotism in German Philosophy (1916; rev. ed. 1939), implicit in Hegel’s dialectic is a monstrous piece of “egotism” that presupposes the preposterous effort of “making things conform to words, not words to things.”

Hegel’s admirers hate that sort of criticism. It seems downright philistine to point out that the idea of one thing “containing” (or “positing,” as Hegel liked to say) its opposite is really just a piece of verbal legerdemain. That is exactly the sort of thing your man in the street, someone who hadn’t had the benefit of reading Hegel, would say. But then Hegel has always been especially popular among people whose entire livelihood is bound up with verbal legerdemain—I mean academic professors of philosophy. Whatever else can be said about Hegel, he is the ideal professor’s philosopher. He has been extremely helpful in keeping the mills of academic industry grinding away. Not only does the inherent difficulty of his books guarantee a virtually endless stream of work—Hegel’s books cry out for academic commentary, the more the better—but also his view of the universe was calculated to be deeply gratifying to academic philosophers. After all, his philosophy puts them and their profession at the very apex of creation.

[...]

In the long preface to the Phenomenology, for example, he early on tells his readers that “philosophy must beware of the wish to be edifying”: “What I have set myself to do is to help bring philosophy closer to the form of Science, to the goal where it can lay aside the title ‘love of knowing’ and be actual knowing.”

Fair enough, you say. “Science,” “actual knowing”: it all sounds eminently worthwhile. Thank God he is not some crazy Berkeleyan who thinks that “to be is to be perceived” or whatever. But exactly what does Hegel mean by “science,” by “actual knowing”? Perhaps the following passages will clear things up. The first is from the preface to the Phenomenology, the second from its last chapter:

The True is the whole. But the whole is nothing other than the essence consummating itself through its development. Of the Absolute it must be said that it is essentially a result, that only in the end is it what it truly is; and that precisely in this consists its nature, viz. to be actual, subject, the spontaneous becoming of itself. Though it may seem contradictory that the Absolute should be conceived essentially as a result, it needs little pondering to set this show of contradiction in its true light. The beginning, the principle, or the Absolute, as at first immediately enunciated, is only the universal. 

Spirit . . . has shown itself to us to be neither merely the withdrawing of self-consciousness into its pure inwardness, nor the mere submergence of self-consciousness into substance, and the non-being of its difference; but Spirit is this movement of the Self which empties itself of itself and sinks itself into its substance, and also, as Subject, has gone out of that substance into itself, making the substance into an object and a content at the same time as it cancels this difference between objectivity and content. . . . Spirit, therefore, having won the Notion, displays its existence and movement in this ether of its life and is Science.

Everywhere in Hegel there is an aroma of religiosity—religion so to speak “sublated” into the frightful patois of philosophical idealism. In the introduction to his Lectures on the Philosophy of World History, Hegel assures readers in one breath that of course “the universal spirit or world spirit is not the same thing as God. It is the rationality of spirit in its world existence. Its movement is that it makes itself what it is, i.e., what its concept is.” Thanks for that clarification. But in the same work he tells us that philosophy has demonstrated that “Reason . . . is both substance and infinite power, in itself the infinite material of all natural and spiritual life as well as the infinite form, the actualization of itself as content. . . . the True, the Eternal, the Absolute Power and that it and nothing but it, its glory and majesty, manifests itself in the world.” Amen.

[...]

According to Hegel, self-consciousness exists “only in being acknowledged.” Like Rodney Dangerfield, it is not complete in itself but demands the respect, the recognition of the other. This, Hegel says, leads to a struggle for recognition, a contest that quickly escalates to a life-or-death struggle:

They must engage in this struggle, for they must raise their certainty of being for themselves to truth, both in the case of the other and in their own case. And it is only through staking one’s life that freedom is won; only thus is it proved that for self-consciousness, its essential being is not [just] being, not the immediate form in which it appears, not the submergence in the expanse of life, but rather that there is nothing present in it which could not be regarded as a vanishing moment, that it is only pure being-for-self. . . . Similarly, just as each stakes his own life, so each must seek the other’s death, for it values the other no more than itself.

Gee. Does this sound like anyone you know or have ever heard of—excluding, that is, current or potential guests of your local penal establishment? I know, I know: that is a terribly vulgar question. After all, Hegel is not talking about you or me; he is talking about the necessary unfolding of self-consciousness as it struggles into a recognition of its own freedom. If you find that convincing, then you have the makings of a true Hegelian.

[...]

Almost everyone who reads very far into Hegel is struck by his famous observation in the preface to the Philosophy of Right that “The rational is the actual and the actual is the rational.” Hegel’s sympathetic commentators keep telling us not to worry, that although it might seem more or less equivalent to a cynical defense of the status quo (“Whatever is, is right”), really, in its true determination, it doesn’t mean that. But how can you tell? Hegel presents his system as the very incarnation of freedom. But, as Russell noted, what Hegel describes is “a very superfine brand of freedom. It does not mean that you will be able to keep out of a concentration camp. It does not imply democracy, or a free press.” Why should it? If the “essence of each thing lies . . . in what is the opposite of itself,” then anything goes. In The Science of Logic, Hegel remarks in passing on the advantages of German as a language for philosophy. “Some of its words,” he observes, “even possess the further peculiarity of having not only different but opposite meanings so that one cannot fail to recognize a speculative spirit of the language in them.” That “speculative spirit” is at the very center of Hegel’s philosophy. It implies a kind of verbal intoxication in which reality is subordinated to unanchored cogitation. At one point in the Phenomenology, Hegel defines “the True” as “the Bacchanalian revel in which no member is not drunk.” He wasn’t kidding.

 

[eager_readerr]

I am beginning to think Hegel, like Nietzsche is just another phantom donkey for some philosophers to pin the Nazi tail on. Not only did Walter Kaufmann write the book From Shakespeare to Existentialism: Studies in Poetry, Religion, and Philosophy of which has its seventh chapter as a defense of Hegel (that big article that I copied and pasted above), but he also wrote an ENTIRE book dedicated to helping better understand Hegel. This is a clip from an old article that has been put on the internet, but only subscribers can see the whole thing. Here is all that Johnny Q. Public can see, for what it's worth:

https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1965/07/15/restoring-hegel/

Quote

Restoring Hegel

 

George Lichtheim

July 15, 1965 Issue

Hegel: Reinterpretations, Texts, and Commentary

by Walter Kaufmann

Doubleday, 498 pp., $6.95

If civilization is wiped out in a nuclear war between East and West, it is quite likely that Hegel will be among the few authors to survive the holocaust. His writings are currently being studied in places as far apart as Ghana and Cuba. He is part of the curriculum in Samarkand, and Mao Tse-tung has seen to it that Chinese schoolboys are imbued with a proper respect for the official philosopher of Prussian conservatism. There are bearded sages in Central Asia for whom he has taken the place of Aristotle (the only other philosopher to have come to their notice). Africans who study in Paris cannot fail to return with potted fragments of Hegel in their mental baggage, though they may think of themselves as followers of Marx or Sartre. All in all, Hegel has made good. The only considerable area of contemporary civilization where he remains taboo is the Anglo-American academic world.

The appearance of a critical commentary on Hegel by Professor Walter Kaufmann provides a welcome opportunity for examining some of the reasons for this cultural lag. The most important of them is obvious. As Sidney Hook observed in a recent Encounter article, the Anglo-American school of philosophy has been hard at work since the First World War trying to make people forget its own previous indebtedness to Hegel. Green, Bradley, and McTaggart in Britain, Royce and Dewey in America, had been deeply influenced by him. Indeed the whole idealist movement down to 1914 owed its peculiar cast of mind to the impact of the Hegelian tradition. Penance was called for, and Hegel was duly exorcized, along with Nietzsche (with whom he had literally nothing in common). In later years, the rise of Communism and Fascism—both ostensibly linked to Hegel—sharpened the antagonism. By 1945 the educated public was ready for Karl Popper’s furious vituperation in The Open Society. In vain did the surviving academic Hegelians, with G. E. Mure of Cambridge in the lead, point out that Popper clearly had not read Hegel properly, let alone understood him. The general reader was impressed by Popper’s authoritative tone and reluctant to credit the notion that he might be talking through his hat. Only when Professor Kaufmann some years ago, in a lengthy and effective polemical essay demolished Popper’s criticism, did it become possible once more to get the debate back on dry ground.

What Kaufmann has now done in his new book is decidedly original. He opens with a brief biography of Hegel, and then goes on to a discussion of some of the more difficult texts: principally the Logic and the Phenomenology. In addition he has provided a full translation of the lengthy and important Preface to the latter work, with a textual commentary on facing pages. There he not only clarifies Hegel’s famous obscurities, but offers the reader a guide to the often very puzzling connotations of Hegel’s elaborate punning in German. No translator can do full justice to the Phenomenology—the most poetic, as well as…

Here is what the original 1965 edition looks like in hardcover.

https://www.amazon.com/Hegel-Reinterpretation-Commentary-Walter-Kaufmann/dp/B000GWV45W
 

A different edition, also from the late 1960's. Also running 498 pages.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Hegel-Reinterpretation-Walter-Arnold-Kaufmann/dp/B0000CN4TM

This large book seems to have been broken up into smaller volumes in later years. There is a 1st printing from 1977 called Hegel: Text and Commentary running at 144 pages, and there is also Hegel: A Reinterpretation published in 1988 running 432 pages.

 

In summary, if one  wants to get an accurate view of what Hegel really said and meant, avoid Popper and read the following:

Hegel: Reinterpretation, Texts and Commentary by Walter Kaufmann.
From Shakespeare to Existentialism: Studies in Poetry, Religion, and Philosophy by Walter Kaufmann. Specifically, chapter 7.
Some unnamed book that Wilhelm Dilthey wrote in 1905 or 1906 about Hegel based on previously unpublished and unknown papers of Hegel.
Hegel und der Staat by Franz Rosenzweig.
"Hegel and Prussianism” in Philosophy, January, 1940 by T. M. Knox
"Hegel and Prussianism" in Philosophy, April, 1940 by E.F. Carritt
"Hegel and Prussianism" in Philosophy, July, 1940 by E.F. Carritt and T. M. Knox

Or if one can not obtain those 3 articles from the Philosophy magazine, they can get a 1970 Walter Kaufmann paperback which reproduces them called Hegel's Political Philosophy. That book is on Amazon here. Or one can purchase a newer edition with a different title called Debating the Political Philosophy of Hegel.

An article by Jon Stewart called "The Hegel Myths and Legends" (1996), from http://hegel.net recommends many books that rehabilitate Hegel. One of them being  Hegel's Theory of the Modern State by Shlomo Avierni. The article also mention authors Errol E. Harris and Steven Walt who have helped rehabilitate Hegel. There is even a full length paperback anthology edited by Jon Stewart with the same name. I would also argue that Frederick Copleston has a very accurate and fair treatment of Hegel in A History of Philosophy #7.   The hegel.net FAQ is a great summary of the anti Hegel bent in philosophy.