tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5687347459208158501.post6805705315919171307..comments2024-03-28T06:07:03.667-04:00Comments on The Philosopher's Stone: AFRO-AMERICAN STUDIES: A TUTORIAL PART FIFTEENRobert Paul Wolffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11970360952872431856noreply@blogger.comBlogger2125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5687347459208158501.post-4562050651849498822011-07-16T11:36:31.479-04:002011-07-16T11:36:31.479-04:00I am sure you are right. I dislike Hegel so much ...I am sure you are right. I dislike Hegel so much that I have difficulty cutting him any slack. I am too old and set in my ways to try to go back and struggle through those pages of incomprehensible garble to get at whatever he was driving at, so I will just plead senility and move on. At least I have never hidden my animosity. Oh well.Robert Paul Wolffhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/11970360952872431856noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5687347459208158501.post-45376397980372579012011-07-16T11:30:21.077-04:002011-07-16T11:30:21.077-04:00I basically agree with your larger point here, but...I basically agree with your larger point here, but I think you're being unfair to Hegel in those final two paragraphs. It may well be true that Arendt and Asante "understand human history as a timeless accumulation of artistic, philosophical, and religious ideas, rather than as the temporal unfolding of collective struggles to produce the means of existence and to control both the product and the process by which it is produced." And it may be that "they imagine that philosophical ideas, not material realities, are the principal movers of history." But Hegel argues against that sort of position in great detail. In fact, Hegel's view is exactly that history is driven by collective agents (what he calls <i>Geist</i>) and that it is grounded in material reality. He just doesn't think that there is such a thing as the <i>merely</i> material, any more than he thinks there's such a thing as the <i>purely</i> ideal. He thinks it's a mistake to carve things up in that way. When a slave rises up against his master, he's not a merely material creature utterly devoid of any ideality, any more than he's an armchair philosopher placidly contemplating a possible world. Action, in Hegel's view (and, for that matter, in Kant's, though he wouldn't put it this way), involves making an idea real, for example by acting in accordance with some aim (what Kant calls "practice" rather than "mere doing"). What we would ordinarily call "real" Hegel calls "actual" (<i>wirklich</i>), and mere dead matter or merely hypothetical ideas are for Hegel unreal because one-sided. Hegel calls his position "speculative idealism," and he thinks it's the opposite of Plato's idealism insofar as Hegel denies that anything at all is genuinely transcendent. For Hegel there are no "ideas" in Plato's sense, only organisms and collectivities.<br /><br />Hegel did, of course, have ludicrous ideas about Africans. Unlike his American counterparts, he very likely never saw a black person in his life, so one can at least imagine how an otherwise intelligent person might have arrived at this bizarre conception of Africa. But he's certainly not to blame for the de-historicized treatment of The Great Works of Western Civilization. He's the guy who invented historicism, or at least gave the first systematic account of it (Hamann should get some credit). People like Lessing, Schiller, and Hoelderlin were much more uncritically hellenophilic than Hegel. Hegel thought ancient Athens had ideas that it was materially incapable of putting into practice, so that it had to be destroyed to fulfill itself.<br /><br />I'll get off my hobby horse now. Thanks for the tutorial, which I'm enjoying tremendously and learning a lot from!English Jerkhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/14960822939548263926noreply@blogger.com