So, barring the appearance of some irresistable provocation, I may be off the net for a bit, because I’ve undertaken a review of Hegel. It’s been some time, and in that interim I’ve had the old boy filtered for me, first by my long engagement with Marxism, and later through a (still) difficult engagement with Kierkegaard (neither Hegel nor Kierkegaard make it easy on their readers). I’m re-reading Hegel himself, beginning with Inwood’s translation of Phenomenology of Spirit, and enhancing the experience by jumping around between Hegel: a collection of critical essays (ed. MacIntyre, 1976), Hellner’s “Toward a Critical Theory of Eduction,” and some stuff by David Bentley Hart on Hegel and Heidegger. More will be added, because my “method” is to let one author bird dog the next. I’ll likely check out a few AV interviews with Žižek, too (I have a weird fantasy about taking Žižek fishing).
Perhaps I’ll post some thoughts on the experience afterwards, on Hegel that is, but this is just a note to other imaginary (for me) readers, who may—like me—be . . . well, I won’t say autodidacts, because that term suggests a real lack of humility—we are still relying absolutely on the works of others, even if we haven’t paid them to be professors . . . but people who are off the academic grid, yet still feel that enigmatic call that leads one into the catacombs of philosophy (without those handy maps provided by a more formal academic experience).
Don’t give up. There’s some treasure down here.
In the past, rather than spelunking, and quail hunting, I’ve used another hobby metaphor: rock climbing, something I did a bit of once upon a time, long long ago, in a universe far far away. When one undertakes the challenge of scaling the sometimes treacherous rock face of the “world-view,” with all its psychological risks, one takes possession of the path from one position to another by a sequence of hand holds and foot holds (be sure you have someone on belay). A good general rule is, as much as possible, to maintain at least three points of contact on the rock face at all times. That is, one doesn’t just abandon one intellectual/philosophical/epistemological (and, yes, affective) position for another by springing from point to point like a mountain goat. You move from one point to the next with three points of contact to the existing position, and one point of departure. One foot or hand at a time.
In grasping at philosophy from outside the craft and the academy, I keep having to re-learn. (I have already learned in this most recent venture that I have made references to Hegel that were inadequate, oversimplified, and occasionally just wrong.) The metaphor of rock climbing, from handholds and footholds, illustrates why I rely on those thinkers whose work I’ve managed, with great effort, to internalize; but the comparison is insufficient because it doesn’t capture the kind of confirmation bias to which I, like most human beings, am vulnerable.
Both things—reliance on the existing base with all its insights, and the urge to prematurely judge the rightness or the wrongness of new material based on my perception of the judgements of my standby references, often without sufficient apprehension of the source material—can and probably do operate at once.
Combine this with an unfortunate tendency—left probably by my formation in early life by the military—to think and speak (and write) more decisively than what prudence might call for, and we have a formula for occasionally letting my mouth (or keyboard) overload my ass. That is, I can occasionally lead with my face, leaving me not just with a battered face, but reliant upon that most difficult virtue of confession and repentance (with its bitter spoon of humility) to get correct again.
On the other hand, there’s a payout, which is that transcendent kick one gets when a new perspective pulls back the curtains a bit further on the world and that brighter light floods in.
What I hope is now a relic of my own past was a tendency during my younger years to absolutism. This might be accounted for, in part, by having been exposed early to Seventh Day Adventism, then Ayn Rand, then the Army, then Marxism. Or more psychoanalytically, some profound insecurity from growing up with one parent who was a unpredictable minefield of sometimes violent mental (and occasionally physical) explosions.
(This is not a whine. My childhood had a lot of positives, and I was better off than many. No one’s life is perfect. No one is perfect. All of us, in fact, are very far from it. The trash fire of a world we live in right now is characterized, and formed by, the rejection of forgiveness, which is the first principle of living together beyond an axis of violent domination and subordination. Forgiveness is first learned, by many, as forgiveness of parents by children, and forgiveness of children by parents. The absence of forgiveness as a first principle explains a great deal about why we live in a world now where many swing seemingly uncontrollably between self-absorbed whining and puritanical aggression.)
There is one good cure for absolutism, and that’s surviving enough experiences of hardship, pain, rejection, defeat, humiliation, and close calls to grow old. I’m thinking of two kinds of old people now, especially among men: those who pig-headedly refuse to learn humility through experience (because humility is for sissies, or whatever), and who then become bitter old bastards because the mean old world won’t conform to their fantasies; and those who learn to bend so they don’t break. The greater the diversity of experience—and by that I don’t mean insular, protected Carnival Cruise diversity—the greater the likelihood of becoming the latter.
And sadness. Anyone who is old and not sad—I don’t mean chronically and pathologically—is missing something essential. About themselves and the world. Having an undercurrrent of sadness is not pathological, especially for the old. It’s the outcome of giving a shit. And paying attention. Sad realism, or realistic sadness, is an antidote to absolutism.
Of course, people have dispositions and predispositions. Anyone who has had a hand in raising more than one child knows this. Some people are fortunate enough to be predisposed against absolutism and conflict for it’s own sake . . . almost at some metabolic level. (How I envy them!)
Speaking for myself and those others who like mapless philosophical spelunking (hope I'm not being presumptuous), there are all sorts of tangential payoffs as well. Just today, Charles Taylor introduced me to the word exiguous, which means scanty. New vocab and new ideas are like finding sweet berries along a trail; and then there are all the aha!’s. Two sorts of the transcendent aha! are out there for the taking. There’s the aha! of a new insight (seeing inside) altogether, and the aha! of someone saying something one has long intuited, and saying it in such a precisely perfect way that it allows you to quote them and make that intuition legible to others.
Hegel said something interesting about philosophy. He said “the owl of Mineva” (philosophy) flies at the “dusk” of history. A lyrical way of saying that philosophy describes the past or that which is nearly past a lot better than it describes the moment . . . or the future. His disciple Marx wanted to dispute that, for all the same reasons I also hope old Hegel was wrong (even though he may not be). It would be nice if my hobby, or untutored avocation, had the capacity to redeem the world; but that’s not the first pleasure of pursuing it.
As MacIntyre distinguished between the internal and external rewards of a practice, the external rewards (like changing the world) can have a corrupting influence on the internal rewards (aha!s and berries and fellowships and the joys of practical mastery) by eclipsing them—one of those key corruptions being of the pursuit of excellence in that practice.
I can still enjoy the berries and the aha!s, even if they don’t have magical world-changing properties. I am not, after all, a consequentialist. I’m willing, then, to make arguments based on philosophical insights (accurate or erroneous or a bit of both), but I’m also reluctantly willing to accept that Hegel may have been right. History thusfar seems to validate that particular opinion, as well as the scariest shit that Nietzsche said (apart from eternal recurrance—that one’s a horror worthy of Poe).
History validates Genesis (on human nature) and Paul’s Letter to the Romans (on the Powers), too, and those preceded both Hegel and Nietzsche.
At any rate, I hope I have something interesting to report, should I feel like doing that by the time I’m done.
Here we go, Hegel. See y’all on the other side.
Hi Stan,
We've never met, but I feel I know a bit about you, having read you online on Feral Scholar. I wanted to say hello and say that I'm glad you're still writing online!
These two passages are memorable:
"The absence of forgiveness as a first principle explains a great deal about why we live in a world now where many swing seemingly uncontrollably between self-absorbed whining and puritanical aggression."
...........
"There’s the aha! of a new insight (seeing inside) altogether, and the aha! of someone saying something one has long intuited, and saying it in such a precisely perfect way that it allows you to quote them and easily make that intuition legible to others."
In my case the first quote led to the second type of aha!
I pay close attention to people who change their minds about big things. Conversion stories are always powerful and interesting. Enjoy Hegel! I’m diving deep on some power of the mind, meditation stuff these days. Forgiveness and humility and sadness. Compassion. Thanks Stan!