HERR DOKTOR

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831) was an extremely important philosopher, both objectively and to me personally, in view of my immense interest in the subject of totalitarian psychology and totalitarian sociology, the serious and objective study of which has been so far pitifully inadequate.

There are numerous references to Hegel throughout several sections of this book, thereby underscoring his great value, particularly for the studies of philosophy, history, and society.

Hegel’s influence on his and all subsequent generations has been tremendous. He had his admirers: Bauer, Feuerbach, Marx, and later Dewey and Sartre, among the better known, but, ironically, some of the greatest of those who were deeply influenced by him were to become his harshest critics. (Schopenhauer, Schelling, Kierkegaard, and, to a much lesser, or milder, extent, Russell. I would not put Nietzsche in the category of Hegel’s worst critics, as is often suggested: his overall fairness to Hegel is all the more surprising, knowing how much he admired Schopenhauer and respected his opinions!)

Before I even mention any criticism of Hegel, which I will be doing in extreme moderation, here is a great excerpt from Part One of Hegel’s Encyclopedia of Philosophical Sciences, in which he presents by far the best defense of every refuted philosophical system in the history of human thought. It is ironic, I must say, that the very same philosopher who is virtually unanimously considered the most difficult to comprehend, (in Russell’s words, Hegel’s philosophy is very difficult--- he is, I should say, the hardest to understand of all great philosophers), and some of whose obscure passages have remained undeciphered even today, was able to come up with a thought so lucidly and wonderfully expressed as this one:

A much misunderstood phenomenon in the history of philosophy: the refutation of one system by another, of an earlier by a later. Most commonly, the refutation is taken in a purely negative sense to mean that the system refuted has ceased to count for anything, has been set aside and done for. Were it so, the history of philosophy would be, of all studies, most saddening, displaying, as it does, the refutation of every system which time has brought forth. Now although it may be admitted that every philosophy has been refuted, it must be in an equal degree maintained that no philosophy has been refuted. And that in two ways. First, every philosophy that deserves the name always embodies the Idea; secondly, every system represents one particular factor or particular stage in the evolution of the Idea. The refutation of a philosophy, therefore, only means that its barriers are crossed and its special principle reduced to a factor in the more complete principle that follows.

This definitive effort of philosophy defending herself in the court of her critics is an excellent preemptive strike against Schopenhauer’s repudiation of Hegel’s philosophy (as “...a colossal piece of mystification, which will yet provide posterity with an inexhaustible theme for laughter at our times, that it is a pseudo-philosophy, paralyzing all mental powers, stifling all real thinking, and, by the most outrageous misuse of language, putting in its place the most hollow, most senseless, most thoughtless, and as is confirmed by its success, most stupefying verbiage…”), and to some extent of the following introductory summary of Hegel in my otherwise much-loved Bertrand Russell’s History of Western Philosophy (although I can argue that the gist of what Russell says echoes Hegel’s defense of all philosophy):

“Hegel was the culmination of the movement in German philosophy that started from Kant. Although he often criticized Kant, his system could never have arisen if Kant’s had not existed. (Exactly the same can be said of Hegel’s philosophy and his legacy, and, most probably, with an even stronger justification.) His influence, though now diminishing, has been very great, not only or chiefly in Germany. At the end of the nineteenth century, the leading academic philosophers, both in America and Great Britain, were largely Hegelians. Outside of pure philosophy, many Protestant theologians adopted his doctrines. His philosophy of history profoundly affected political theory. Karl Marx, as everyone knows, was a disciple of Hegel in his youth and retained in his own finished system some important Hegelian features. (Now comes the famous Russellian repudiation of Hegel’s doctrines, which I have underlined.) Even if (as I myself believe) almost all Hegel’s doctrines are false, (now comes the implicit retraction of the preceding criticism, which I have underlined as well) he still retains an importance which is not merely historical, as the best representative of a certain kind of philosophy, which, in others, is less coherent and less comprehensive.” Later, in the Hegel chapter, Russell continues with the same pattern of a repudiation followed by a vindication: “…This was a mistake, and from this mistake arose the whole imposing edifice of his system. (And now the apotheosis of the conditional vindication, considering that the word interesting is the highest compliment that can be paid to a philosopher or any other creative thinker.) This illustrates the truth that the worse your logic, the more interesting the consequences to which it gives rise.

Having solicited such a sublime compliment to Hegel from his alleged detractor Bertrand Russell, we shall now proceed to the next entry in our Hegel series, which separately addresses a certain unsolved mystery.