Hegel is on something of a rebound, with the publication of a major English-language biography in 2000, and you will many a time find classes just on Hegel, or perhaps a dual sequence of Kant and Hegel, or German Idealism with Hegel as a strong focus, in strong analytic departments, and not just so the philosophy majors can fulfill a "history of philosophy" requirement.
Last summer i read his Outlines for the Philosophy of right and it was lacking in relevance to anything.
If you read it for an English class I'm not surprised. But any competent historian with a background in the relevant period would have heaps to say about its "relevance" as a historical work reflecting the political context, and the book itself comes up in political philosophy quite frequently.
If you really read the whole thing and gave it a good crack and came away with nothing...then you didn't try hard enough or you have no interest in the subject matter. It might be helpful to read his Phenomenology first, which is the introduction to his work, but that's another time-sink.
It was full of the typical 'rationality' that makes up what we often call the continentals.
This distinction and generalization on "continental" philosophy is silly and superficial. Read, among other things, quotes from mainstream analytics such as the following:
Find an educated layperson who has read any part of either the Nagel or Frankfurt books, as well as, say, the "Sense-Certainty" section of Hegel's Phenomenology or the "Introduction" Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception, and then ask Ms. Heifetz's childish question: which of these philosophers are addressing "questions that are important and interesting to everyone"? The "Continental" philosophers won't win.
Look, I think a lot of the philosophy that goes on in most non-analytic, "postmodern," etc. areas is a joke, and god knows what they do with Hegel in English departments (not to mention any other philosopher), but the caricatures and flat-out dismissals people make of Hegel from a sort of societal groupthink that he simply "didn't say anything" is just laughable. If there weren't strong currents in mainstream philosophy dealing with elements of Nietzsche, for example, you might have a point in saying we should just drop off all the dead German dudes, but that's not the case. Sure, maybe it's a cost-benefit consideration and it's not worth the time hacking through the jungle to figure out what Hegel said, but it doesn't mean that there's nothing in there and that you can close the lid on an entire historical and philosophical epoch as "irrelevant." Forget the gender-studies articles or whatever on Hegel and get into the real philosophy people have written about him.
Also, here's a good interview that addresses this to some degree:
Spoiler:
The question itself points to a fascinating piece of intellectual history: the reception of Hegel in the English-speaking world. First, there was the establishment of Analytic philosophy by Bertrand Russell and G.E. Moore in the beginning of the 20th century, which was itself always billed by both of them as an attack on "Hegelianism" in particular and "idealism" in general. Part of the force of that attack had to do particularly with Russell's own, rather stark modernism. He and that whole Edwardian generation were rebelling against the overdecorated Victorian house and against what they saw as irrational, suffocating Victorian morals—in short, against the whole panoply of overstuffed, overdecorated, pompous Victorian "earnestness" (think of Oscar Wilde's witty play on Victorian stuffiness) and the puffed-up excess that seemed to go with it. Against all of that, men cut their hair, shaved their mutton chops, and started wearing modern suits. Modern, rigorous houses were built, modernism in poetry became a movement unto itself, and so forth.
All these things signified a cultural change of no small magnitude. In philosophy this was touted as a defense of reason, a truly "scientific" approach to things, a mathematization of theory, a paring down to the arguments pro and con for a position, and the like. For Russell, the opposite of all that was the overly inflated, pretentious "Hegelianism" of his day. "Hegelianism" seemed like the perfect philosophical embodiment of everything that the "modernists" (in art, architecture, painting, poetry, and philosophy) were against. Thus, one of the great achievements of Anglophone philosophy—the invention of Analytic philosophy, its techniques of argument, its professionalized style, its extreme seriousness about itself—was achieved by, as it were, "killing off" Hegel. There is something almost Oedipal in the reaction of Anglophone philosophers to Hegel: He just had to be dead. Analytic philosophy could only be created by "killing" the Hegelians (Russell's and Moore's teachers); if Hegel were to return, the whole Analytic show, it was felt, would be doomed.
The other set of events had to do with the demonization of Germany in World War I and the German moral catastrophe that led to World War II. In both cases, for rather spurious and scandalous reasons, Hegel became identified with the kind of "Teutonism" that gave all things German a bad name. The Nazis never liked Hegel, and he was always considered by the party hacks to have too much "Jewish" influence in his thought to be really German. (Of course, there were also opportunistic philosophers in Germany trying to make Hegel, just as they tried to make all kinds of other German philosophers, into heroes of Hitler's state.) Nonetheless, in English-speaking countries, "Hegel" (already the bane of Analytic philosophers poised for their postwar takeover of philosophy departments) became the evil German Hegel. He thus became not only stuffy and pretentious, to be jettisoned in favor of the cool, sparse, argumentative rigor of Analytic philosophy; he became evil.
Those two events—the attack on Hegel that led to the establishment of Analytic philosophy and the false identification of Hegel with German militarism and Nazi terror—made Hegel persona non grata in the Anglophone world until, really, only a few years ago. Only now has Hegel begun to be taken seriously enough that anybody would think of writing such a biography.
Of course Hegel never left continental European philosophy, where people were not taken in by the idea that he was a gasbag who couldn't "argue" or was really in his heart a proto-Nazi. Hegel simply never got burdened with those misreadings on the continent, where he stayed alive while he lived at best an underground existence in Britain, the United States, and Australia.
I remember one of Hegel's buz phrases being "The Real is Rational". I have, since hearing that phrase attributed to him (as well as from reading other bits of his thought), kind of thought of him as the ultimate detached observer. It is perhaps not unremarkable that Marx started out as a "young Hegelian." Wasn't it Marx's words more or less that the object of philosophy was not to simply observe the world but change it for the better? I can sort of see (albeit from what little I understand of Hegel) how someone who studied Hegel in depth probably ended up a radical revolutionary.
The major link between Hegel and Marx is rather different from that. It's to do with their philosophy of history. Hegel believed that the course of history follows a process basically the same as his famous dialectic. For Hegel, dialectic works like this: you start with a thesis (a basic idea). That inevitably gives rise to its antithesis (the opposite idea). Then you combine them and come up with a synthesis (an idea that combines elements of both). This becomes your new thesis, and so on. For example: being (thesis) - non-being (antithesis) - becoming (synthesis). Keep going and eventually you'll get to the grand idea which unifies and explains everything. Or something like that.
Hegel thought that history is a succession of political and social systems which work like this. Each society eventually gives way to its antithesis, which itself gives way to a synthesis that combines the best of both. So history is a progression of different political and social systems which are slowly working up to the best of all. Surprisingly, it turns out that the ultimate best socio-political system is that of Prussia in the early nineteenth century.
Marx subscribed wholeheartedly to this basic approach. But what he did was simply change the political and social systems in question. So he thought, like Hegel, that each political system is a reaction to the one before, and that they are slowly improving; the difference is that he saw the changes from one to another in terms of revolution rather than evolution, and (most of all) he thought that the final and best one is communism. The key thing here is that Marx inherited from Hegel the belief that this progression is inevitable, something that is built into the very nature of society itself. So the communist revolution will come whether you do anything about it or not. Lenin of course would reject that, and hold that if you want the communist revolution to happen you have to go out there and make it happen. To that extent, Lenin was less of a Hegelian than Marx was.
The major link between Hegel and Marx is rather different from that. It's to do with their philosophy of history. Hegel believed that the course of history follows a process basically the same as his famous dialectic. For Hegel, dialectic works like this: you start with a thesis (a basic idea). That inevitably gives rise to its antithesis (the opposite idea). Then you combine them and come up with a synthesis (an idea that combines elements of both). This becomes your new thesis, and so on. For example: being (thesis) - non-being (antithesis) - becoming (synthesis). Keep going and eventually you'll get to the grand idea which unifies and explains everything. Or something like that.
Hegel thought that history is a succession of political and social systems which work like this. Each society eventually gives way to its antithesis, which itself gives way to a synthesis that combines the best of both. So history is a progression of different political and social systems which are slowly working up to the best of all. Surprisingly, it turns out that the ultimate best socio-political system is that of Prussia in the early nineteenth century.
Plotinus, in every respect I am in sincere awe of your knowledge and would not dare think myself more informed than you on practically anything, but the two main aspects here of your characterization of Hegel--the dialectical triad (which is more of a Kantian notion and what Hegel himself calls an "inert schemata") and the supposed glorification of the Prussian state--are pretty roundly debunked in the secondary literature, and are not really what he is about if you are trying to get at him in a general sense.
I would love to debate this, maybe in another thread...
Then in that case I stand corrected - I probably know less about Hegel than about pretty much any other major philosopher, so I wouldn't be much good at debating about him!
The major link between Hegel and Marx is rather different from that. It's to do with their philosophy of history. Hegel believed that the course of history follows a process basically the same as his famous dialectic. For Hegel, dialectic works like this: you start with a thesis (a basic idea). That inevitably gives rise to its antithesis (the opposite idea). Then you combine them and come up with a synthesis (an idea that combines elements of both). This becomes your new thesis, and so on. For example: being (thesis) - non-being (antithesis) - becoming (synthesis). Keep going and eventually you'll get to the grand idea which unifies and explains everything. Or something like that.
Hegel thought that history is a succession of political and social systems which work like this. Each society eventually gives way to its antithesis, which itself gives way to a synthesis that combines the best of both. So history is a progression of different political and social systems which are slowly working up to the best of all. Surprisingly, it turns out that the ultimate best socio-political system is that of Prussia in the early nineteenth century.
Marx subscribed wholeheartedly to this basic approach. But what he did was simply change the political and social systems in question. So he thought, like Hegel, that each political system is a reaction to the one before, and that they are slowly improving; the difference is that he saw the changes from one to another in terms of revolution rather than evolution, and (most of all) he thought that the final and best one is communism. The key thing here is that Marx inherited from Hegel the belief that this progression is inevitable, something that is built into the very nature of society itself. So the communist revolution will come whether you do anything about it or not. Lenin of course would reject that, and hold that if you want the communist revolution to happen you have to go out there and make it happen. To that extent, Lenin was less of a Hegelian than Marx was.
The major link between Hegel and Marx is rather different from that. It's to do with their philosophy of history. Hegel believed that the course of history follows a process basically the same as his famous dialectic. For Hegel, dialectic works like this: you start with a thesis (a basic idea). That inevitably gives rise to its antithesis (the opposite idea). Then you combine them and come up with a synthesis (an idea that combines elements of both). This becomes your new thesis, and so on. For example: being (thesis) - non-being (antithesis) - becoming (synthesis). Keep going and eventually you'll get to the grand idea which unifies and explains everything. Or something like that.
Hegel thought that history is a succession of political and social systems which work like this. Each society eventually gives way to its antithesis, which itself gives way to a synthesis that combines the best of both. So history is a progression of different political and social systems which are slowly working up to the best of all. Surprisingly, it turns out that the ultimate best socio-political system is that of Prussia in the early nineteenth century.
Marx subscribed wholeheartedly to this basic approach. But what he did was simply change the political and social systems in question. So he thought, like Hegel, that each political system is a reaction to the one before, and that they are slowly improving; the difference is that he saw the changes from one to another in terms of revolution rather than evolution, and (most of all) he thought that the final and best one is communism. The key thing here is that Marx inherited from Hegel the belief that this progression is inevitable, something that is built into the very nature of society itself. So the communist revolution will come whether you do anything about it or not. Lenin of course would reject that, and hold that if you want the communist revolution to happen you have to go out there and make it happen. To that extent, Lenin was less of a Hegelian than Marx was.
i havent read hegel, but as far as i'm informed historcal materialism is marx' own concept, using the dialectic of hegel (btw. marx speaks of negation and negation of negation instead of thesis and anti-thesis) as a frame to look at history in.
i havent read hegel, but as far as i'm informed historcal materialism is marx' own concept, using the dialectic of hegel (btw. marx speaks of negation and negation of negation instead of thesis and anti-thesis) as a frame to look at history in.
Well Hegel's whole notion that history is evolving toward a final truth sounds a lot like Marx's end of history and the communist revolution, the revolution to end all revolutions. I'm sure Marx's communist revolution was borrowed right out of Hegel's philosophy.
But I also think that there are tendencies in Marx to rebel against the sort of detachment from the world which I understand was Hegel's. My understanding is that Hegel was very much an "ivory tower" theorist. He kept a certain detachment from human affairs. Marx was very much "get down in the trenches and join the struggle".
Again maybe I'm wrong. It's been a long time since I studied philosophy, although once upon a time I was very much into reading philosophy and stuff. Then along came computers and the Internet.
Well Hegel's whole notion that history is evolving toward a final truth sounds a lot like Marx's end of history and the communist revolution, the revolution to end all revolutions. I'm sure Marx's communist revolution was borrowed right out of Hegel's philosophy.
Hegel did not predict a final material-historical point of society; he predicted a final cognitive vantage point and the development to it that allowed him to interlink epistemology, metaphysics and the material events in human history. The sheer immenseness of his whole project is not what people today might think of as "philosophy" and it goes a lot deeper than a cursory reading or summary would be able to convey, because everything is related to everything along a set of core posulates. (But to his credit, to his death he never stopped endorsing and building off of his primary and introductory work on philosophy, the Phenomenology, while many other great thinkers were characterized as often undergoing great changes over their lifespans.) Marx's intention of resolving class struggle is completely different from Hegel's thought on the matter, and Marx did not borrow anything "right out" of Hegel, certainly not a communist revolution. Again, it is not in the general notion of dialectic that Hegel distinguished himself. Marx owes the crude triad to a much longer trajectory of thought than just Hegel, so it both caricatures Hegel as well as ignores a large body of philosophy pre- and contemporary to Hegel to say so. Without Kant and many of the other figures of German Idealism* there would be no Hegel. (*Not to mention notions of logic going back to Aristotle!)
To point back to the same interview as earlier:
Spoiler:
Britannica: One of the things most associated with Hegel's thought is the thesis/antithesis/synthesis scheme, the process by which reality unfolds and history progresses. But you claim this never appears in Hegel's work.
Pinkard: This myth was started by Heinrich Moritz Chalybäus. It appears in a history he wrote of recent German philosophy (published in the 1840s), in which he said, roughly, that Fichte's philosophy followed the model of thesis/antithesis/synthesis, but Hegel went further and cosmologized that notion, extending it to the entire universe. The book was widely read (apparently the young Marx was one of its readers), and the idea stuck. It's still touted in a lot of short encyclopedia entries about Hegel. Like many little encapsulations of thought, it has the virtue of being easy to understand and easy to summarize. It's just not very helpful in understanding Hegel's thought. It has also contributed to the lack of appreciation of Hegel in Anglophone philosophy. It's not too hard to point out all the places where it doesn't apply, dismiss it as a kind of dialectical trick, and then just go on to conclude that Hegel isn't worth reading at all.
And anyway, doesn't sound like Marx was too big on Hegel or his followers:
"The Old Hegelians had comprehended everything as soon as it was reduced to an Hegelian logical category. The Young Hegelians criticised everything...The Young Hegelians are in agreement with the Old Hegelians in their belief in the rule of religion, of concepts, of a universal principle in the existing world. Only, the one party attacks this dominion as usurpation, while the other extols it as legitimate....The Young Hegelian ideologists, in spite of their allegedly 'world-shattering' statements, are the staunchest conservatives." (from German Ideology)
Aside from indirect passages like this, there is simply no direct, traceable link between Hegel and Marx and we do not know exactly what Marx thought of Hegel. He certainly wasn't the philosophical protogé of Hegel like people keep batting around.
Gary Childress said:
But I also think that there are tendencies in Marx to rebel against the sort of detachment from the world which I understand was Hegel's. My understanding is that Hegel was very much an "ivory tower" theorist. He kept a certain detachment from human affairs. Marx was very much "get down in the trenches and join the struggle".
Hegel wasn't personally involved in politics like, say, Max Weber, but he was most definitely concerned with human affairs, particularly the unfolding of human history. Maybe you are thinking indirectly of Kant, whose railing against the passions would qualify him much more of a "detached observer," while Hegel said that in human history, nothing great had been accomplished without passions. Hegel was a detached observer (or tried to be) of human cognition, and the unfolding of history with all its everyday struggles had a primary importance for him.
Hegel is on something of a rebound, with the publication of a major English-language biography in 2000, and you will many a time find classes just on Hegel, or perhaps a dual sequence of Kant and Hegel, or German Idealism with Hegel as a strong focus, in strong analytic departments, and not just so the philosophy majors can fulfill a "history of philosophy" requirement.
If you read it for an English class I'm not surprised. But any competent historian with a background in the relevant period would have heaps to say about its "relevance" as a historical work reflecting the political context, and the book itself comes up in political philosophy quite frequently.
If you really read the whole thing and gave it a good crack and came away with nothing...then you didn't try hard enough or you have no interest in the subject matter. It might be helpful to read his Phenomenology first, which is the introduction to his work, but that's another time-sink.
This distinction and generalization on "continental" philosophy is silly and superficial. Read, among other things, quotes from mainstream analytics such as the following:
Find an educated layperson who has read any part of either the Nagel or Frankfurt books, as well as, say, the "Sense-Certainty" section of Hegel's Phenomenology or the "Introduction" Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception, and then ask Ms. Heifetz's childish question: which of these philosophers are addressing "questions that are important and interesting to everyone"? The "Continental" philosophers won't win.
Look, I think a lot of the philosophy that goes on in most non-analytic, "postmodern," etc. areas is a joke, and god knows what they do with Hegel in English departments (not to mention any other philosopher), but the caricatures and flat-out dismissals people make of Hegel from a sort of societal groupthink that he simply "didn't say anything" is just laughable. If there weren't strong currents in mainstream philosophy dealing with elements of Nietzsche, for example, you might have a point in saying we should just drop off all the dead German dudes, but that's not the case. Sure, maybe it's a cost-benefit consideration and it's not worth the time hacking through the jungle to figure out what Hegel said, but it doesn't mean that there's nothing in there and that you can close the lid on an entire historical and philosophical epoch as "irrelevant." Forget the gender-studies articles or whatever on Hegel and get into the real philosophy people have written about him.
Also, here's a good interview that addresses this to some degree:
Spoiler:
The question itself points to a fascinating piece of intellectual history: the reception of Hegel in the English-speaking world. First, there was the establishment of Analytic philosophy by Bertrand Russell and G.E. Moore in the beginning of the 20th century, which was itself always billed by both of them as an attack on "Hegelianism" in particular and "idealism" in general. Part of the force of that attack had to do particularly with Russell's own, rather stark modernism. He and that whole Edwardian generation were rebelling against the overdecorated Victorian house and against what they saw as irrational, suffocating Victorian moralsin short, against the whole panoply of overstuffed, overdecorated, pompous Victorian "earnestness" (think of Oscar Wilde's witty play on Victorian stuffiness) and the puffed-up excess that seemed to go with it. Against all of that, men cut their hair, shaved their mutton chops, and started wearing modern suits. Modern, rigorous houses were built, modernism in poetry became a movement unto itself, and so forth.
All these things signified a cultural change of no small magnitude. In philosophy this was touted as a defense of reason, a truly "scientific" approach to things, a mathematization of theory, a paring down to the arguments pro and con for a position, and the like. For Russell, the opposite of all that was the overly inflated, pretentious "Hegelianism" of his day. "Hegelianism" seemed like the perfect philosophical embodiment of everything that the "modernists" (in art, architecture, painting, poetry, and philosophy) were against. Thus, one of the great achievements of Anglophone philosophythe invention of Analytic philosophy, its techniques of argument, its professionalized style, its extreme seriousness about itselfwas achieved by, as it were, "killing off" Hegel. There is something almost Oedipal in the reaction of Anglophone philosophers to Hegel: He just had to be dead. Analytic philosophy could only be created by "killing" the Hegelians (Russell's and Moore's teachers); if Hegel were to return, the whole Analytic show, it was felt, would be doomed.
The other set of events had to do with the demonization of Germany in World War I and the German moral catastrophe that led to World War II. In both cases, for rather spurious and scandalous reasons, Hegel became identified with the kind of "Teutonism" that gave all things German a bad name. The Nazis never liked Hegel, and he was always considered by the party hacks to have too much "Jewish" influence in his thought to be really German. (Of course, there were also opportunistic philosophers in Germany trying to make Hegel, just as they tried to make all kinds of other German philosophers, into heroes of Hitler's state.) Nonetheless, in English-speaking countries, "Hegel" (already the bane of Analytic philosophers poised for their postwar takeover of philosophy departments) became the evil German Hegel. He thus became not only stuffy and pretentious, to be jettisoned in favor of the cool, sparse, argumentative rigor of Analytic philosophy; he became evil.
Those two eventsthe attack on Hegel that led to the establishment of Analytic philosophy and the false identification of Hegel with German militarism and Nazi terrormade Hegel persona non grata in the Anglophone world until, really, only a few years ago. Only now has Hegel begun to be taken seriously enough that anybody would think of writing such a biography.
Of course Hegel never left continental European philosophy, where people were not taken in by the idea that he was a gasbag who couldn't "argue" or was really in his heart a proto-Nazi. Hegel simply never got burdened with those misreadings on the continent, where he stayed alive while he lived at best an underground existence in Britain, the United States, and Australia.
I applaud parts of this critique. I readily admit that i dismissed Hegel outright after reading him as a primary source which was rash and immature. But i believe one of your main arguments is plain wrong. I bolded the argument and underlined a contradiction to give grounds to my claim.
I used "relevant" poorly. However, anything that Hegel had to say about ethics, epistemology and other major areas of modern philosophy have no bearing on recent thought. None What-so-ever. Of course he is historically relevant, and relevant to understanding historical political theory. If you are learning about German Idealists, then you damn well ought to learn about Hegel. But in your typical 'Knowledge and Reality' class I doubt the question ever arises: 'What would Hegel have to say about this?" I dare assert that even in a Political Philisophy class the same question would be equally as rare.
At the same time, I will be much more hesitant to make the claims i had above in the future. Consider me pushed back into Doubt over the utility of Hegel, as opposed to definite uselessness i claimed prior.
I applaud parts of this critique. I readily admit that i dismissed Hegel outright after reading him as a primary source which was rash and immature. But i believe one of your main arguments is plain wrong. I bolded the argument and underlined a contradiction to give grounds to my claim.
I used "relevant" poorly. However, anything that Hegel had to say about ethics, epistemology and other major areas of modern philosophy have no bearing on recent thought. None What-so-ever.
There is a distinction to be made between the notion that, given ample time to investigate, there would be nothing useful to be found, and the notion that this investigation has indeed taken place and Hegel's arguments have been found to be without merit in an open arena of debate. It is the opinion of many in Hegel scholarship that his proper appreciation is confounded by several factors and that this debate simply has not taken place. There are people who make an entire career out of critiquing Hegel, but obviously they find something compelling to address and they certainly don't fall back upon the black-and-white generalizations of him that many use to sweep him under the rug.
I think he should be judged on the merits of his arguments and not on the soundbytes created by misreadings and smear attempts by some of his contemporary rivals as well as Russell, Popper, Adorno etc. I'm not saying that Hegel was indispensable to Russell and Popper and that they should have read him in depth or even at all, but it seems disingenuous for them to have gone out of their way to make a stab at him and throw their intellectual weight behind discouraging the study of Hegel when their own study of him was clearly incomplete--you get the strong impression that they simply did not read the relevant texts, because this image of Hegel is nowhere else reproduced among people who actually read him, no matter their personal convictions. There's the let's-beat-the-piñata Hegel of Russell and Popper and there's the real Hegel that is simply not what they say he is.
I mean, I could take a look at Bertrand Russell, read a quote such as "Mathematics, rightly viewed, possesses not only truth, but supreme beauty - a beauty cold and austere, like that of sculpture," and say "oh, he's an obscurantist and a mystic! No argumentative rigor to be found here, move along!" but that would be totally wrong, of course. It's literally that bad with Hegel. It doesn't make sense why people do the exact same thing with him based on the grievous mis-readings done by Hegel-haters. For many reasons he's become the poster boy of something that he is not, and it's just convenient to keep demonizing him as the source of all pseudo-intellectual garbage that clouds real philosophical investigation, when he himself was a very logical and consistent thinker. But that's just intellectual laziness; critique something on its own merits or leave it alone.
Maybe I will make a Hegel thread in the history sub-forum at a later date, but at the moment I will stop trolling the thread...
...the supposed glorification of the Prussian state--are pretty roundly debunked in the secondary literature, and are not really what he is about if you are trying to get at him in a general sense.
Pretty and round secondary debunkers notwithstanding, Hegel can certainly be be charged with glorifying, if not outright apotheosizing the state:
The state, which is the realized substantive will, having its
reality in the particular self- consciousness raised to the plane of the
universal, is absolutely rational. This substantive unity is its own motive
and absolute end. In this end freedom attains its highest right. This
end has the highest right over the individual, whose highest duty in turn
is to be a member of the state.
That reminds me of a Dilbert comic where Dogbert hypothesizes that God is the entity created when enough people are united by the power of the Internet. The forfeiture of individuality as a cost to the creation of states seems to be a recurring theme (a wrong one) among socialistic thinking. But this coming from a guy that plays a game where everyone listens to your word as edict "for the glory of civilization."
So you're saying you can step over the secondary literature and hip-shoot your own interpretation of a single passage? Are you taking any care to interpret what a guy 200 years ago in a different language might have meant by "state," or are you just filling in with your own definition?
If you think of what I said earlier, Hegel does not tie himself to a particular material organization of society, so the term "state" for him does not reference a particular concrete form of government, like the Prussian state for example. Everything in Hegel starts out from a cognitive standpoint, so by "state" he's talking more about the organism of society and its interrelatedness on an abstract, formal level. Think of language as a type of human community, for example, or our evolved cognitive categories that we share. If you don't take care to read Hegel as a whole and you just cherry-pick passages and try to interpret them with your own notions, you're missing the whole point. Again, nobody is telling you to read him, but he pretty clearly said how he wants one to introduce themself to his work and system of thought, and it's just not going to work to try to cram him into your own set of definitions, no more than it would work to translate this exact sentence word-for-word into Hindi, as if there were a one-to-one correlation of words and semantic units and the same word order, without reinterpreting it in the Hindi grammar and syntax.
Anyway, I'd love to talk about this, but I don't think Fifty wants his thread to turn into a Hegel-fest. I don't much time at the moment and going into more depth than the little I have said will take a while, but at some point I will open a thread in the history section on Hegel. Or open it yourself if you want.
What are current trends in Epistemology?
Why should the ethical distinction be made between human life and nonhuman life?
Can somebody support the death penalty and still be considered a pacifist?
What are current trends in Epistemology?
Why should the ethical distinction be made between human life and nonhuman life?
Can somebody support the death penalty and still be considered a pacifist?
Humans vs nonhumans: I assume you aren't talking about ETs but animals and plants. Animals and plants don't appear to have actionable systems of ethics, at least not insofar as they relate to human standards of ethics, which if both exist, would be inherently different based on motivations.
Death Penalty Pacifists: Yes. Pacifists are against war and violence as competitive activities with resolved outcomes. Those being put to death are not losing, they are lost and can do more harm alive than dead. Maintaining the life of a violent offender is tantamount to promoting violence.
If one were to make the argument that violent offenders can be incarcerated to deter violence, there is typically a violence needed to get to this point and then there is the cost associated with incarceration. Killing a killer is a way to preserve pacifist passivity. However, killing a thief or forcing a pacifist community to cope with a violent kidnapper on the loose would be definitely pacifist incompatible situations.
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