Eric, a loyal MR reader, asks:
Could you comment on
Hegel? What do you make of his argument regarding the desire for
recognition as a fundamental driving force of history. I have not read
much of Hegel, but this idea was attributed to him in Francis
Fukuyama’s "The End of History."
My competence here is low but who I am to turn down a loyal reader? I have looked at every page of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit — usually considered his most profound work — but I can hardly claim to have read it. Maybe the Master-Slave dialectic was profound at the time but, frankly, I considered the book a waste of time and I couldn’t keep on paying attention. Philosophy of Right and Philosophy of History are more coherent (the writings on aesthetics also) and every now and then Hegel is striking prescient or otherwise brilliant, such as when he is writing about the forthcoming nature of bourgeois commercial society. But "every now and then" is the operative phrase here. Mostly you read him because he has been an influential thinker. A few points:
1. He is more of a classical liberal than most people think. The correct translation does not in fact have him writing: "The State is the march of God in the world." And he had a very well-developed theory of property rights.
2. "Thesis-Antithesis-Synthesis" is a very bad representation of what Hegel believed.
3. The whole Hegelian structure becomes more plausible once you see it as motivated by the belief that philosophy had become truly, absolutely stuck after Hume and Kant. Hegel thought that his "moves" were required to get out of the mess that preceded him. I prefer the pragmatic turn myself.
4. I very much like Charles Taylor’s book on Hegel. I do not think it is what "Hegel really meant" but perhaps it is what "Hegel would have had to have really meant, had some smart people like Robin Hanson pinned his back against the wall, lectured him about futarchy, and made him write shorter sentences to boot."
5. I believe that the secondary literature on Hegel is fraught with danger and is highly unreliable.
On the desire for recognition, yes it is a fundamental driving force (ask any blogger) although it was a well-known eighteenth century idea.
Overall I don’t think much people should spend much time with Hegel, although if someone tells me he found it a revelation, I don’t think him crazy.
As a law prof, I tried reading Hegel’s treatise on law “The Philosophy of Right” on my own time. “Tried” is the operative word because Hegel (or his translator) seems to make no effort to present his ideas in a coherent fashion. It was one of the most unpleasant experiences of intellectual my life, and I have to consider Hegel as the father of academic jibberish.
As one of my profs, who was a big fan of the neglected Scottish philosopher Thomas Reid, once said: perhaps Reid would have received more attention if “he were as inscrutable as Hegel”
Bo Diddley’s interpretation of Kierkegaard is widely regarded as innovative but unreliable. But I should forebear from intruding on Tyler’s territory here.
Hegel is really not THAT bad… The Philosophy of Right still seems very prescient to me, an updated Aristotle as it were. What you need to do is lop off Geist. You can find an astonishingly clear recounting in Oakeshott’s On Human Conduct, much clearer than that found in Taylor’s fat orange tome.
Even though Bo Diddley made the Hall of Fame, he still thought others were getting credit that he should have gotten — Elvis, the Rolling Stones, and Kierkegaard.
enrique wrote above “I have to consier Hegel as the father of academic jibberish.”
But academic gibberish has been successful (for the academics), and success has a thousand fathers (failure is an orphan) — so surely there are other candidates.
Tyler’s take on this would be interesting, and would probably generate interesting comments from the other people here. Worth a posting in its own right.
Apparently Tyler *does* know Diddley!
(freakin impressive, I must say. Now I know *why* I am not reading Hegel.)
My impression from the bits of Hegel that I’ve read:
-Hegel simply replaces “God” with Geist. The reason why he needed this replacement is because he couldn’t pair up his “dialectic process” with God, and so he declared the dialectic in history as being the manifestation of the Geist. the latter being purely spiritual/idealist and placing the material world in the background.
-personally I quite liked Kojeve’s reinterpretation of Hegel. Kojeve argued that if the death of our bodily existence is the ultimate negation of all life, then how can the material world be as irrelevent as Hegel supposed? We become what we are today because we didn’t want to remain as we were yesterday. None of us knows where we want to be in 5 years from now, but we all know that we don’t want our future to be exactly as we are right now (life would be dull). We change ourselves through our “Labour” to create that which we are not.
The implications:
1. We have free will to do as we wish in order to fulfill our personal ideal of becoming what we are not.
2. there is only “history” because we want to be able to tell the story of how we became what we were not.
3. We are not bound by an overwhelming sequence of events that dictate and limit our individual will. Instead, the sequence of events only make sense as long as we are a part of them. (This is in line with Tolstoy’s take on history if you read the second part of the epilogue of War and Peace)
1. If you want insight into Fukuyama, read Kojeve’s Introduction to the Reading of Hegel. Kojeve is the true source of Fukuyama’s thought. Whether K. accurately reflects H is a matter of some controversy, but reading K frees you from the necessity of reading H., if your goal is thinking about F.
2. The desire for recognition is the 19th century term for the Greek thumos. The best discussion of thumos is still the Republic, Book 2-4. Also Homer.
It is a wrong approach to find a major force. it is method of reductionism, but reductionism is not correct way to describe the development of history.
But still I would name two forces – the desire to keep status and desire to take place of those who has status and also the information medium is important. Oral culture differs from print culture, the culture of mass communications and then internet ( and virtual communications ) play a big role. These three ingredients could explain much more in history than the desire to recognition.
It’s Schopenhauer’s Hegel I like best.
I did my undergrad thesis on Fukuyama and biotech; it seems to me that the Hegelian (Kojevian?) concepts of recognition and the master-slave dialectic are quite germane to economic signaling, the importance of relative status and such.
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