Who's Hegel?

Who is Hegel? This guy, to your left.

But on a more serious note, I just borrowed Hegel: A Biography by Terry Pinkard from the library yesterday and it begins in a very interesting way. The opening paragraph in the Preface states:

Hegel is one of those thinkers just about all educated people think they know something about. His philosophy was the forerunner to Karl Marx's theory of history, but unlike Marx, who was a materialist, Hegel was an idealist in the sense that he thought that reality was ultimately spiritual, and that it developed according to the process of thesis / antithesis / synthesis. Hegel also glorified the Prussian state, claiming that it was God's work, was perfect, and was the culmination of all human history. All citizens of Prussia owed unconditional allegiance to that state, and it could do with them as it pleased. Hegel played a large role int he growth of German nationalism, authoritarianism, and militarism with his quasi-mystical celebrations of what he pretentiously called the Absolute.

Wait a minute. My mind raced as I read this. I'm about three-quarters done with my first read-through of the Hegel omnibus, having just finished a remarkably clear (at least to my ear) Lectures on Aesthetics, and I'm excited to start the final major selection, The Phenomenology of Spirit. But that first paragraph ... did I waste my time on a biography that despises its subject? While some of Pinkard's statements seemed true, I know now, having read a lot of the philosopher's works, that the thesis / antithesis / synthesis formula was never used. At least in what I've read. Nor did he claim that Prussia was the be-all and end-all of societal evolution.

Something's amiss.

Then, a single-sentence follow-up: Just about everything in the first paragraph is false except for the first sentence.

Now, that makes sense, and I actually smiled. Great point. Hegel's works have been treated harshly during the past two hundred years. There's more than a couple of reasons for this. For starters, there's a built in difference between English-speaking philosophers and their continental European counterparts that's biased against Hegel. He's inextricably linked to Marx, usually for the worst. A few decades after his death his philosophy was butchered by others, and the thesis / antithesis / synthesis formula was inserted into his works though Hegel himself never used it. And philosphers such as Bernard Russell and Karl Popper excoriated his philosophy, even to the point of associating it with Nazism and the horrors of the twentieth century.

But that's not Hegel. Who is he? We think of our times as extremely turbulent, especially regarding the massive technological changes we've seen in the past twenty years or so. But Hegel lived through even greater revolutions. As a youngster and teenager he lived through the American and French Revolutions, and survived in very dangerous times. Napoleon's armies rampaged through his homeland. Death was never far away. And once Napoleon vanished from the scene, leaving the possibility for stability, the Industrial Revolution transformed society. Trains and steam engines shortened the size of the world. Photography was born. Science grew. Urban society supplanted agrarian. So, his philosophy is an understandable attempt to make sense out of the chaos and struggle of the world around him.

That is exactly what I find most fascinating about the man. That is Hegel.