Modern European Philosophy: Week 8

Hegel was much, much better than I was expecting! I actually got through the reading after class because I was interested in what Hegel had to say, and because his ideas were easy to follow, especially compared to some of the other philosophers.

Hegel was all about dialectic philosophy, which is basically a circular process meant to preserve what is good about an idea and dismiss what is bad. It is also meant to more accurately reflect reality than other types of philosophy. Dialectic philosophy goes something like this:

1. You get an idea
2. Opposition is raised
3. A counter-idea is proposed
4. Opposition is raised to that
5. Synthesis of 1-4 occurs

The suggested reading for Hegel was his Introduction to the Philosophy of History, so naturally that is what we focused on in class. Main points about this are:

• Rational laws are continuously working themselves out through history
• If you studies a topic, you are doing so because of a wish for rational insight
• Each person brings his/her own categories/context with him/her when s/he looks at history/sociology
• If you look upon the world rationally, you will see that history is rational; if you look upon the world irrationally, you will find history to be irrational
• Humans are set apart from other beings/objects because they have both consciousness AND self-consciousness

I was actually fully awake and paying rapt attention during this class, so my notes are more comprehensive than they have been in weeks. Because of this,  I am going to continue with the bullet points to convey the important/interesting stuff:

• Hegel thinks religion is a way of trying to understand the world with images from imagination and that philosophy is a way of seeing the world through scientific conceptions
• Religion and philosophy run on parallel tracks
• "Spirit" (or geist) is Hegel's term for mind; the realm of the spirit is anything that humans do
• There is one idea that organizes spirit and another that organizes matter
• Newton proposed that the essence of matter is gravity. For Hegel, the essence of spirit is freedom, and thus spirit's essence is within itself
• Hegel thought that governments and laws are necessary to have freedom

Finally, a fascinating little tidbit: Hegel predicted that the world would become a struggle between the US and Russia, and that each would have a different concept of freedom. Dude wasn't too far off there. One of the things that drew me into Hegel is that his philosophy seems more grounded in reality and easier to relate to than those of the other philosophers we have studied so far.

I get what Hegel is talking about (whether I agree with it or not) because his examples and arguments still resonate in today's world, even though his day-to-day reality was very different from ours. He even had to cloak his writings in religious terminology because he was not free to write that which he really intended or wanted to write under Frederick's rule in Germany. Perhaps the subject of history is one that resonates in today's world more strongly since every generation is faced with the renewed task of making sense of that which has come before them.