Hegel - As bad as Popper says?

Quoting Ansiktsburk

More generally, what good can be said about Hegel?

Not much, at least according to Schopenhauer:

Arthur Schopenhauer:Hegel, installed from above, by the powers that be, as the certified Great Philosopher, was a flat-headed, insipid, nauseating, illiterate charlatan, who reached the pinnacle of audacity in scribbling together and dishing up the craziest mystifying nonsense. This nonsense has been noisily proclaimed as immortal wisdom by mercenary followers and readily accepted as such by all fools, who thus joined into as perfect a chorus of admiration as had ever been heard before. The extensive field of spiritual influence with which Hegel was furnished by those in power has enabled him to achieve the intellectual corruption of a whole generation.

Reply to darthbarracuda The problem with Hegel is that his writing and ideas are so complex, that they admit of no consistent means of interpretation. You could gather a roomful of ‘notable Hegel experts’, and they would all present divergent views of what Hegel meant. My theory is that after Hegel, philosophy proper basically collapsed under the weight of verbiage. Everything became so portentous, so obscure, so cumbersomely long-winded and tortuously complicated, that the world heaved a sigh of relief when Moore published Refutation of Idealism. [‘Here is a hand’ was a zinger against Hegel....] After that, ‘plain language’ and analytical philosophy filled the vacuum. And here we are.

Hegel is a popular enemy. He's easy to turn into the 'bad guy' because he can so easily be shape-shifted into whatever or whoever you'd like. But I think Foucault said it best - it's probably one of my favourite quotes of his - when he noted that even anti-Hegelianism might itself play right into the hands of Hegel...

"[T]ruly, to escape Hegel involves an exact appreciation of the price we have to pay to detach ourselves from him. It assumes that we are aware of the extent to which Hegel, insidiously perhaps, is close to us; it implies a knowledge, in that which permits us to think against Hegel, of that which remains Hegelian. We have to determine the extent to which our anti-Hegelianism is possibly one of his tricks directed against us, at the end of which he stands, motionless, waiting for us".

I'm by no means as philosophically adept as most posters on this forum, yet I found both Philosophy of History and Philosophy of Right to be fairly easy to comprehend and filled with interesting insights. Can't say the same for Phenomenology of Spirit, though, which is apparently a much more important work and has been sitting on my shelf about half-read for a few years now. I had to give up for lack of comprehension but may give it another go fairly soon.

My quick opinion is that he's similar to Heidegger in that it takes a good deal of time and effort to become acclimated to the conceptual framework he lays out - most people seem to dismiss his work as nonsense before ever getting to that point - but once you have that down you see that he's not being purposely obscure in order to conceal a complete lack of substance, which, if I recall correctly, was the charge leveled at him by Schopenhauer.

Going off recollection, some interesting things in Hegel include: his notion that history is not a tale told by an idiot but has a certain rational trajectory and a final goal (appearances to the contrary notwithstanding - the "cunning of history"); his attempt to outline the development of (self)consciousness and freedom through successive stages of human development; the role that Christianity played in influencing later movements like the Renaissance and the Reformation, and ultimately its secularization through the Enlightenment; his important analysis of the master-slave dialectic within the "state of nature"; his subtle take on the relationship between the individual and the State, which was far much more advanced (imo of course) than anything posited by previous contract theorists who started from highly questionable notions of autonomous individuality; his idea that just because something has a history - maybe even in origins which it has since transcended - does not mean its current significance is diminished in the least (thus finding a way of reconciling the conflicting claims of relativism, historicism, absolutism, etc.); his very thisworldy "spirituality" in which former antagonisms (e.g. spirit and matter) are once again reconciled; etc.

People may not agree with him on any of these things - and I may have even unwittingly misrepresented some of them - but at the very least they're worthy of consideration. And there's also the important role he played in influencing later thinkers as diverse as Marx, Heidegger, MLK, Francis Fukuyama, etc.

I think what we owe to Hegel is the idea that philosophy and its subject matter is evolutionary. I'm not saying I agree with Hegel, in fact there are some things he says that (at least in English translation) are totally impenetrable to me, but prior to him both the empiricists and the rationalists tended to share a view of philosophy as uncovering final elements which are just sitting there waiting to be found (either in the realm of reason or in the realm of sensation) and which have only external relations to each other. With Hegel we see the introduction of the idea that what is found is partly determined by the means we have for finding it, with those means themselves in turn adapting to our discoveries. The history of philosophy as a distinct branch of the subject really begins with Hegel. Of course, Hegel appears to have married this evolutionary conception with a doctrine of a final end, as - under some interpretations of him - the whole process of philosophy, indeed existence itself, had worked itself out to its conclusion when he put the final full stop on the manuscript of the Phenomenology of Spirit.

Popper had a pretty unsophisticated approach to the history of philosophy and his interpretations of the philosophers he mentions in the book you are talking about should be taken with a large pinch of salt.

It's also been a very long time since I read Popper's work but I vaguely recall some of his criticisms of Plato, Hegel and Marx being compelling. I actually read The Open Society and its Enemies before I read any Hegel, so I should probably revisit that work and see how fair (or unfair) Popper was towards him. There's an obvious danger in subsuming all individual actions and historical events within some larger, suprapersonal unfolding of things which posits a definite goal, an end of history. Those who fancy themselves privy to this hidden meaning and direction of the process will not hesitate to sacrifice anyone or anything for the sake of achieving that end, and they will do so in good conscience.

So yeah, Popper's criticisms of Hegel et al may be worth considering, too. Popper lived through the horrors of Nazism and communism, so I'm sure that affected his views on (e.g.) Plato's anti-democratic philosophical elitism, in which the masses are to a large extent dehumanized, and also the historical determinism of Hegel and Marx, which again seems to have led to a devaluing of the significance of the lives of actual human beings, etc.

Honorable exception for this essay on Hegel’s philosophy of religion, which I find congenial:

If there is a higher degree of reality that goes with being self-determining (and thus real as oneself), and if we ourselves do in fact achieve greater self-determination at some times than we achieve at other times, then it seems that we’re familiar in our own experience with some of the higher degree of reality that we associate with God. Perhaps we aren’t often aware of the highest degree of this reality, or the sum of all of this reality, which would be God himself (herself, etc.). But we are aware of some of it – as the way in which we ourselves seem to be more fully present, more fully real, when instead of just letting ourselves be driven by whatever desires we currently feel, we ask ourselves what would be best overall. We’re more fully real, in such a case, because we ourselves are playing a more active role, through thought, than we play when we simply let ourselves be driven by our current desires.