WOID XVII-34. PLANET MARX [IV]. Who you gonna call? Geistbusters!

Friday, August 24, 2007 1:12 pm

By the first quarter of the nineteenth century The World Order had been established firmly. The Mind’s World Order was ruled by Hegel and Kant, philosophers; It is still, and that explains why Hegel and Kant are rarely read: there’s no need, they’re part and parcel of the fabric of our own social thought. Today as then, to break away from the mind games of the Master means to break away from Kant and Hegel.

For Marx and his generation it was Hegel who taught you to think, only to lead you on to an intolerable world. Most of Hegel’s method is contained in the Phänomenologie des Geistes – actually, in the Preface and Introduction, which set out the basic principles of his dialectic: the mapping of the mind’s movement to resolve apparent contradictions through reconciliation – or is it through resolution, or supersession, or suppression?

There are considerable intellectual asperities in Hegel’s thought; the real pain comes from the inferences in the books he published after the Phenomenology had brought him fame and a cushy job at Berlin U.: the Phenomenology of Mind plays the old Socratic game of arguing and resolving apparent contradictions in a narrowing spiral until all previous aspects of all previous philosophies are absorbed into one great Idea; Hegel’s later works do the same thing for Art (pretty harmless), and for Law (not), and for the State, and above all for History, which gets scary when he demonstrates that the end of all thought, the Perfect Religion, the Perfect Society (and for all I care the World's Best Bratwurst), is incarnate in the Prussian State. The point of all this brilliant questioning is never after all to propose dialectics as a way of thought, a “science,” as Hegel calls it, a “way of walking” as we'd call it today, but a mere means to that place of perfect rest in the Lord of the Way Things Are. Rebels and progressives who tried to follow Hegel step by step found themselves in the position of the undergraduate arguing with the teacher, back and forth as the Great Professor smiles benignly, till the discussion comes to rest where the professor wants it and the bell rings in the hallway. Hegel says somewhere that all History occurs twice, the second time as a tribute band: the Young Hegelians were a rebel rock group that sooner or later was going to settle for an office job.

The Young Hegelians never got beyond tweaking Hegel’s system here and there – arguably that would include Marx’s life-time buddy, Engels. Marx, I suspect, went to Hegel and back; the others met him halfways. Arguments rage as to when, or whether, Marx himself broke with Hegel; just to keep things going I'm going to say this haappened at the ampersand in the Economic & Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 when Marx stopped trying to fit Hegel to political ideas like “alienation” and asked how "alienation" looked to Hegel.

The problem with Hegel isn’t his thought process but the categories of the so-called Real that he chooses – Hegel is a medieval nominalist, deciding in advance that Private Property, say, or the State, is an essential category of the mind which the mind must overcome. It’s the same game played now on National Public Radio, where every guest from beekeeper to neurobiologist gets interrupted by the host, a certain Brian Liar, with: “But isn’t it always true that...?” I’m still waiting someone to say, “Actually, Brian, not only are very few things always true – in your case they’ weren’t even true to begin with.”

It’s a lie to say Medieval scholars counted the angels dancing on the head of a pin: all they wanted was to know if they could count the angels dancing on the head of a pin, at all. Were angels transubstantial or consubstantial? Could they pass through matter or must they make themselves as small as atoms? Five-year olds share the same type of worry about Santa Claus: Can he pass through the door with all my presents, or must I leave an open crack somewhere? It’s a perfectly reasonable argument as long as you believe in angels or Santa Claus; actually it’s an excellent approach for those who are desperate to believe in Santa, or the angels, or Private Property. Hegel, under pretense of describing things as they were, was sneaking in the image of things as he thought they should be. He was what another Marxist would later call an “organic intellectual,” paid to prove that the subjective, changing world-view of his time and place, the Ghost of State, was Universal Spirit in empirical drag. Today in every college, high school, newspaper, blog, a million professors, students, bloggers and hacks are twisting and turning to prove that angels do/do not dance on the head of a pin. A million Hegelinos chew their hands in anguish; and are grateful for the job.

- Trotsky the Horse