Wellsy wrote:A piece I wanted to share on the chance it might spur some thoughts in you @annatar1914
Hegel and the Ancients - Andy Blunden
A brief read, two pages but something which resonates now that I have been re-listening to Rick Roderick’s lectures about The Self Under Siege. It stands out in its concluding remark:
Where the emphasis seems to me to point to the problem of the sort of thinking that is prolific in modern/capitalist society. I wonder if this is what comes under the criticism of instrumental reason, the rationality of life in narrow individual ways to manage the complexity of it. But is the very thing which causes problems which are irrational in their outcome all the while seemingly rational with appeals to being evidence based and empirical as they pursue clearly defined goals.
I feel concerned with this manner of thinking as it has clearly harmed the education system I’m hoping to be employed within and also is a constant tension when I do things with no clear utility. Wanting to learn things out of curiosity is against the idea of doing things for a clear purpose. And this seems to infect a sort of anti-intellectualism because why do anything other than what is bare necessity? Of course many have little choice but to live as such but to carve out a space beyond necessity seems itself necessary to maintaining some sort of self.
@Wellsy , my beginning foray into reading Hegel was an interesting one, once I got past the clunky German thought forms (like my later reading of Heidegger). But one thing that struck me early on was this dichotomy between that philosophical thought that had crystalized out of scholastic and yes, essentially bureaucratic thought (the systemization of life into discrete and understandable ''quanta'' of rational information-on one hand-and Hegel's understanding which seems to ''flow'', with everything as a process never fully understood; Becoming, not Being-on the other.
The takeaway being for me (initially reading Hegel just to tackle Hegel's pantheism, which seems ultimately that of Spinoza's, by the way) that if one can at least make one's students catch fire with an enthusiasm for learning as a process, that one can accept the mystery even as one uncovers the truth just a little bit, that one has done a service to them. That is, if the limit is bounded by what we call ''natural philosophy''.
But back to Bureaucracy itself as being the enemy concretized in the West... Yes, I think that it contributes immensely to rationality turning into irrationality, for sure. We're finite creatures, yet we want to know. Some of us anyway, falling into a concupiscence of knowledge so much that we strike bargains with the Devil just like Dr. Faustus did...
Mr. Blunden mentions appropos of this perhaps, Martin Luther and Nicholas Copernicus. But of the two, I'd say that Luther's dispute was one that could have been made anytime really between 1000 AD and 1500 AD, while the Copernican revolution was a greater leap by far, utterly changing the mental topography of most of mankind by say, 2000 AD for sure (I'd argue that it was part of the Hermetic/Occult/Neo-Pythagorean teachings for possibly thousands of years prior). Giordano Bruno is a Modern, while John Calvin is not, yet even most ''traditional'' people today are pretty much followers of Bruno almost without exception.
Is this itself part of Hegel's thinking on display as historical process, as most think, or is it the triumph of a new ''Orthodoxy'', of a new and ever more scholastic bureaucracy at work? I'd argue uniquely I admit that it is the latter rather than the former, a return to a sort of Paganism that would be very alien to most of our ancestors circa 500-1500 AD. Neitzsche saw it, of course, as did Pascal, and Kirkegaard drawing off the experience of reading Hegel himself. They have, in trying to create a ''new man'' managed to re-create an old type of self disguised as a new one.
All of this is to say, on a practical level at least, that I believe it would be far more useful to teach people to think, more than just giving them information to be absorbed, especially absorbing the foundational assumptions of our modern world.