7/30/2014 The Great Philosophers 6: Hegel www.theschooloflife.

com
https://www.readability.com/articles/yvx71op8 1/6
theschooloflife.com
The Great Philosophers 6: Hegel
by The Philosophers' Mail On 15 July 2014 6 min read original
Culture, Mind & Body, Society
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel was born in Stuttgart in 1770. He had a
very middle-class life. He was obsessed by his career path. He was a
newspaper editor and then a headmaster before becoming an academic
professor. He fretted all his life about his income. He never quite got
his hair under control. When he was older, he liked going to the opera.
He was very fond of champagne. Intellectually he was adventurous but
in externals he was respectable, conventional and proud of it. He
ascended the academic tree, and reached the topmost branch head of
the University of Berlin in 1830 (when he was 60 years old). He died
the following year.
Hegel has had a terrible influence on philosophy. He writes horribly.
He is confusing and complicated when he should be clear and direct.
He tapped into a weakness of human nature: to be trustful of grave-
sounding, incomprehensible prose. He made it seem as if the mark of
reading deep thought is that one cannot quite understand what is
going on. This has made philosophy much weaker in the world than it
should be. And the world has paid another heavy price for Hegels
problems with communication. It has made it much harder to hear the
valuable things he has to say to us. Amongst which a small number of
lessons stand out:
7/30/2014 The Great Philosophers 6: Hegel www.theschooloflife.com
https://www.readability.com/articles/yvx71op8 2/6
Important parts of ourselves can be found in history
Hegel was rare among philosophers in taking history seriously. In his
day, a standard European way of looking at the past was to consider it
as primitive and to feel proud of how much progress had been made
to get us to the modern age.
But Hegel preferred to believe that every era can be looked at as a
repository of a particular kind of wisdom. It will manifest with rare
clarity certain very useful attitudes and ideas which then become
submerged, unavailable or more muddled in later periods. We need to
go back in time to rescue things which have gone missing even in a so-
called advanced era.
So, for example, we might need to mine the history of Ancient Greece to
grasp fully the idea of what community could be; the Middle Ages can
teach us as no other era can about the role of honour; an inspiring
vision of how money can pay for art is to be found in the Florence of
the 14th century, even if this period featured appalling attitudes to
children and the rights of women.
Progress is never linear. There is wisdom at every stage which points
us to the task of the historian: to rescue those ideas most needed to
counterbalance the blind spots of the present.
Learn from ideas you dislike
Hegel was a great believer in learning from ones (intellectual)
enemies, from points of view we disagree with or that feel alien. Thats
because he held that bits of the truth are likely to be scattered even in
unappealing or peculiar places and that we should dig them out by
asking always, What sliver of sense and reason might be contained in
otherwise frightening or foreign phenomena?
7/30/2014 The Great Philosophers 6: Hegel www.theschooloflife.com
https://www.readability.com/articles/yvx71op8 3/6
Nationalism, for instance, has had many terrible manifestations (even
in Hegels day). So, the temptation of thoughtful people is to give up
entirely on this field. But Hegels move was to ask what underlying
good idea or important need might be hiding within the bloody history
of nationalism a need waiting for recognition and interpretation. He
proposed that its the need for people to feel proud of where they come
from, to identify with something beyond merely their own
achievements, to anchor their identities beyond the ego. This is an
unavoidable and fruitful requirement, he suggested something which
remains valuable even when some particularly awful movements and
politicians have exploited this need and driven it in catastrophic
directions.
Hegel is a hero of the thought that really important ideas may be in the
hands of people you regard as beneath contempt.
Progress is messy
Hegel believed that the world makes progress but only by lurching
from one extreme to another, as it seeks to overcompensate for a
previous mistake. He proposed that it generally takes three moves
before the right balance on any issue can be found, a process that he
named the dialectic.
In his own lifetime, he pointed out that governments had improved,
but far from directly. The flawed, stifling, unfair 18th-century system
of inherited traditional monarchy had been abolished by the French
Revolution whose founding fathers had wanted to give proper voice
to the majority of people.
7/30/2014 The Great Philosophers 6: Hegel www.theschooloflife.com
https://www.readability.com/articles/yvx71op8 4/6
But what should have been the peaceful birth of representative
government had ended up in the anarchy and chaos of the Terror. This
in turn had lead to the emergence of Napoleon, who had restored order
and ensured opportunity for talent and ability but who had also
overreached himself and had become a military brute, tyrannising the
rest of Europe and trampling on the liberty he had professed to love.
Eventually, the modern balanced constitution emerged, an
arrangement which more sensibly balanced up popular representation
with the rights of minorities and a decent centralised authority. But
this resolution had taken at least forty years and incalculable
bloodshed to reach.
In our own time, think of the slow path towards sensible attitudes to
sex. The Victorians had imposed too much repression. Yet the 1960s
may have turned out to be too liberal. It might only be by the 2020s that
we will find the right balance between extremes.
Hegel takes some of the weight off our backs by insisting that progress
will always be slow and troubled. He adds that what happens in
history will occur in individuals as well. We too learn slowly and with
massive over-corrections. Take the development of our emotional
lives. We might, in our 20s, have been with someone so emotionally
intense we felt suffocated; we therefore freed ourselves and took up
with someone cooler and more reserved; but they might eventually
also have become oppressive in their distance. We may be 52 before we
get this aspect more or less right.
This can seem the most appalling waste of time. But Hegel insists the
painful stepping from error to error is inevitable, something we must
expect and reconcile ourselves to when planning our lives or
contemplating the mess in history books or on the nightly news.
7/30/2014 The Great Philosophers 6: Hegel www.theschooloflife.com
https://www.readability.com/articles/yvx71op8 5/6
Art has a purpose
Hegel rejects the idea of art for arts sake. Painting, music,
architecture, literature and design all have a major job to do. We need
them so that important insights become powerful and helpful in our
lives. Art is the sensuous presentation of ideas.
Just knowing a fact often leaves us cold. In theory we believe conflict
in Syria is important; in practice we switch off. In principle we know
we should be more forgiving to our partners. But this abstract
conviction gets forgotten at the least provocation (a crumpled
newspaper in the hall, imperfect parking technique).
The point of art, Hegel, realises is not so much to come up with
startlingly new or strange ideas; but to make the good, important,
helpful thoughts we often already know and make them stick in our
minds.
We need new institutions
Hegel took a very positive view of institutions and of the power they
can wield. The insight of an individual might be profound. But it will
be ineffective and transient unless it gets embodied in an institution.
Jesuss ideas about suffering and compassion needed the Catholic
Church to take them to the world. Freuds ideas about the complexity
of childhood didnt become a properly constructive force until they got
organised, extended and institutionalised at the Tavistock Clinic in
London.
The point is for ideas to be active and effective in the world a lot more
is needed than that they are correct. This was a point Hegel made
again and again in different ways. In order for an idea to be important
7/30/2014 The Great Philosophers 6: Hegel www.theschooloflife.com
https://www.readability.com/articles/yvx71op8 6/6
in a society it needs employees and buildings, training programs and
legal advisors, Institutions allow for the scale of time that big projects
need much longer than the maturity of one individual.
The essential function of an institution is to make the major truths
powerful in society. (And an institution loses its way when it stops
having a profound mission). So, as new needs of a society get
recognised they should, ideally, lead to the formation of new
institutions.
Nowadays, we might say we need major new institutions to focus on
relationships, consumer education, career choice, mood management
and how to bring up less damaged children.
Conclusion
Hegel put his finger on a crucial feature of modern life: we long for
progress and improvement yet we are continually confronted by
conflict and evidence of setbacks.
His insight is that growth requires the clash of divergent ideas and
therefore will be painful and slow. But at least once we know this, we
dont have to compound our troubles by thinking them abnormal. Hegel
gives us a more accurate and hence more manageable view of
ourselves, our difficulties and where we are in history.
Original URL:
http://www.theschooloflife.com/blog/2014/06/the-great-philosophers-6-hegel/