#hegelians

[weil-weil-lautre]

Since the Young Hegelians consider conceptions, thoughts, ideas, in fact all the products of consciousness, to which they attribute an independent existence, as the real chains of men (just as the Old Hegelians declared them the true bonds of human society) it is evident that the Young Hegelians have to fight only against these illusions of he consciousness. Since, according to their fantasy, the relationships of men, all their doings, their chains and their limitations are products of their consciousness, the Young Hegelians logically put to men the moral postulate of exchanging their present consciousness for human, critical or egoistic consciousness, and thus of removing their limitations.This demand to change consciousness amounts to a demand to interpret reality in another way, i.e., to recognize it by means of another interpretation. The Young Hegelian ideologists, in spite of their allegedly 'world-shattering' statements, are the staunchest conservatives. The most recent of them have found the correct expression for their activity when they declare they are only fighting against 'phrases.' They forget, however, that to these phrases they themselves are only opposing other phrases, and that they are in no way combating the real existing world when they are merely combating the phrases of this world.

Karl Marx from The German Ideology in The Marx-Engels Reader, 149

[fuckyeahdialectics]

The Young Karl Marx (Le jeune Karl Marx) 2017

“I’ve had enough of fighting with pins. I want a sledgehammer!” [Reference to pins a sly insult against Adam Smith?]

[wisdomfish]

Eastern mystics, philosophical Hegelians, and followers of the overrated evolutionist Teilhard de Chardin all agree that there is no distinction between the Creator and the creature. They adhere to this doctrine because of its convenience. It denies that there can be any eternal separation of God and His creation and therefore it denies any eternal separation of saved and lost. It denies any ultimate distinction between good and evil, past and present, structure and change. Such an occultic philosophy has the technical name of monism, to distinguish it from its occultic cousin, dualism, which claims that good and evil are in eternal tension. Neither can triumph.

Gary North

[exoergo]

Modernity vs. Epistemodiversity

María Iñigo Clavo

In her classic book Hegel and Haiti, Susan Buck-Morss argues that Hegel’s interest in the Haitian Revolution inspired his early masterpiece The Phenomenology of Spirit (1807).5 However, although Hegel was a contemporary of the Haitian declaration of independence from France, there is little evidence that the master-slave dialectic was understood in colonial terms. Like the French Revolution, the Haitian Revolution was based on the tenets of equality, liberty, and fraternity—only it extended these rights to slaves.

In the years following Haiti’s independence in 1804, European governments began to undermine the political agency of former slaves by refusing to recognize the sovereignty of the new nation. Before long, Hegel had discarded his admiration for the Haitian general Toussaint Louverture, and by 1820 the philosopher considered Haiti to be in a state that Kant termed “guilty immaturity.”6 Hegel advocated the recolonization of former colonies: “Against the absolute right of that dominant people who are the present carriers of the degree of development of the world Spirit … the spirit of other peoples has no right.”7

This was consistent with Hegel’s affection for Napoleon, whom he understood to be a “world-historical” personage. It was Napoleon who turned against Louverture, forcing the latter’s resignation, deportation, and the imprisonment which led to his death. Hegel’s version of modernity bears, in this respect, the scars of its German origins, a heritage marked, in the words of Rebecca Comay, by a kind of “mourning sickness” regarding the legacy of the French Revolution. Which is more “modern,” the French Revolution or the reaction that brought Napoleon to power? In the conflict between Napoleon and Louverture—contrary to Hegel’s understanding—it is Napoleon, and the Europe that empowered him, that would seem to be the representatives of the “antimodern,” insofar as we allow “modern” to signify what the revolutionaries of France and Haiti thought it did.

But of course this is not how the French empire saw things. The newly created Haitian Republic became the most delegitimized state in Latin America, and Napoleon presented Haiti with a bill for its own freedom, in the amount of 150 million francs. Haiti only finished paying it in 1947. Such was the price for Haiti daring to self-abolish slavery and declare itself an agent of its own history.

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In his “Cannibal Manifesto” of 1928, Oswald de Andrade explains how the Latin American “swallowing” of intellectual theories from Europe is an example of cannibalism, the ritual that frightened Europeans the most. 

[fuckyeahdialectics]

The modern State cannot be grasped as a reality, substance, objectivity (an inert or organic object). The State is not seen. No more than the Law. They do not pertain to the sensible. You can photograph rulers. Not the State. What does the spectator see, from the outside, or the member, from the inside? He does not see the Law, only the policeman. We only see the theatrical appearance of the State, the ceremonial garments. The State is not seen, it is conceived: this allows Hegel and Hegelians to claim that the State is (nothing but) an idea.

Lefebvre, Henri, De l’État, vol. 1, 1976, pp. 42-3

[sorensays]

Does he [the Hegelian] never relate himself to the future in such a way that he acts? And if he never acts, will he not then forgive an ethical individuality for saying with passion and with dramatic truth that he is an idiot?

Johannes Climacus Concluding Unscientific Postscript

[sorensays]

For the philosophy, world history is ended, and he mediates. This accounts for the repugnant spectacle that belongs to the order of the day in our age - to see young people who are able to mediate Christianity and paganism, who are able to play games with the titanic forces of history, and who are unable to tell a simple human being what he has to do here in life, nor do they know what they themselves are to do.

Judge William Either/Or II

[ucokfuckingrowl-blog]

“Religion is the Opiate of the Masses.” ― Karl Marx, Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right