Posted on 08/31/2016 11:52:14 AM PDT by DavidThomas
Can one man -- a man who died in 1831 -- be blamed for Nazism, Communism and even the uprisings in places like Milwaukee and Ferguson? Karl Popper, Leo Strauss and Ayn Rand all suggested G.W.F Hegel, the greatest philosopher of the nineteenth century, contributed to the most malignant totalitarian systems in history. But his ideas shaped how many interpret recent events in Milwaukee and Ferguson, too. By describing the world as a conflict between two competing concepts, Hegel created a paradigm used by Marx, Hitler and even African-American protesters.
(Excerpt) Read more at americanthinker.com ...
Well, that’s the author’s thesis.
I am sure that there is an opposing view out there.
Maybe they can be reconciled into something new!
:-)
Another explanation for Hegelian dialectics of Thesis vs Anti-thesis resulting in Synthesis is Nietzsche.
Nietzsche said “gaze too deeply into the abyss and it gazes back” and “he who fights dragons long enough becomes a dragon”.
There has always been a dearth if not concerted effort to not analyze and interpret American culture and politics of the 20th and 21st centuries in Hegelian constructs and terms. Ultimately it gives the game away or would show American’s to have been manipulated and shallow. False dichotomies of primrosed paths are the bread and butter of the false left/right paradigm.
I have an opposing view. When between the thesis and antithesis, one is good and one is evil, both the good and the evil will be mitigated by the other, always moving in the direction of evil. That is the flaw in his logic. Only when two opposing concepts are equally good, can something positive result. Furthermore, his principle presupposes that there is no such thing as original thought and therefore precludes it.
Blaming Hegel for totalitarianism is as stupid as blaming Einstein for the Russians getting the A bomb.
The dialectic is merely a way of analyzing how ideas interact. Only a complete fool would confuse a method of historical analysis with the actions of tyrants and dictators. American ‘Thinker’ has been circling the drain for some time now, and I think they are barely above National Enquirer ‘I feel like I’m losing IQ points with every paragraph’ at this point.
Ayn Rand hated Kant and Hume as well didn’t she?
Thanks for that excellent insight.
No, no, don’t give too much credit to the street thugs. They are semi illiterate thugs, that’s it.
Well... Hegelian dialectics are often credited as the basis for Marx & Engle's dialectical materialism which became Stalin's historical materialism.
No telling how true the offspring were to their parents & grandparents in this case, but Ayn Rand credited Aristotle as the father of freedom while blaming Plato as the great-great-great grandfather of tyranny.
Doubtless it's gross simplification to line them all up like that...
Plato to Hegel to Marx are responsible for a misintegrated mode of thought where THE ONE is the true reality, and this world is mere appearance, and knowledge of reality requires some other method besides perception combined with reason. In politics, this mode of thought produces the tyranny of absolutism.
LOL...I amuse myself. hehehe.
You are so right. The tree is faulty to begin with, and therefore does not bear good fruit.
I do find it nonetheless interesting that Red China has adopted a fair number of capitalist characteristics, while the US has adopted a fair number of police state characteristics.
It does seem to imply that the US and China will eventually be very similar (synthesis). Sort of like “The Alliance” in Firefly/Serenity that is essentially a melding of America and China.
Jerry Pournelle covered a similar idea in his novels and short stories in the Codominion world(s), which was a future coming together of the U.S. and the USSR. This was not necessarily a good thing, needless to say.
They seem to totally ignore or forget how Hegel saw the resolution to the dialectic.
Such a waste of effort.
And that's all the fault of Hegel?
Not likely.
You saw the same dynamic before Hegel came around.
One British soldier killing an American or one French nobleman running over a peasant child was just an isolated individual incident.
Until it wasn't. Nobody was reading Hegel back then. And nobody was a committed "holist" or "anti-holist."
NORMAN DODD: Rowan Gaither was at that time president of the Ford Foundation. Mr. Gaither had sent for me when I found it convenient to be in New York, asked me to call upon him at his office, which I did, and on arrival after a few amenities, Mr. Gaither said: “Mr. Dodd, we’ve asked you to come up here today because we thought that possibly, off the record, you would tell us why the Congress is interested in the activities of the foundations such as ourselves.” Before I could think of how I would reply to that statement, Mr. Gaither then went on and said: “Mr. Dodd, all of us who have a hand in the making of policies here have had experience operating under directives, the substance of which is that we shall use our grant-making power so to alter life in the United States that it can be comfortably merged with the Soviet Union.”
Well it was not such a good idea in the “Firefly” universe either... it resulted in the “Browncoats” in the outlying worlds rebelling against the authority of “The Alliance”.
The Alliance won, but they are corrupt and pushy and intrusive.
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