Pillars of the Postmodern Age (link list)

It doesn't say he was a nazi. It says he was the nazis favorite philospher.

Echo on the Hegel.

Oh God, one of those incipient mindless threads. Have mercy on them, for they know not what they do.

Darwin and Hegal are covered in the articles posted. Hegal is covered in the one devoted to Kant. Darwin is mentioned in Freud...I think.

What exactly is mindless about the thread? The post-modern atheism philosphy? I agree.

I am a notorious bad typer on FR, but please note, it's Hegel with an e.

The squibs are superficial. A little knowledge is a dangerous thing. Just put serious thinkers in a little preconceived contemporary ideological box, add eight more, and play tic tac toe.

Just put serious thinkers in a little preconceived contemporary ideological box, add eight more, and play tic tac toe.

This is where you come in, Torie. Always room for a pedagogue.

for obvious reasons I disagree about Kant. :> His take on ethics, particuarly the Catagorical Imperative, is decidely not postmodernist. Eh. One can argue anything in some circumstances

Everything after Hegel is post-modern. He is the last of the optimistic rationalist and took rationalism to its acme. Darwin is not postmodern. The theory of evolution has been here since BC and continued right on through the modern period.

Actually, I look to YOU for philosophical tour de horizons. But the above one is so silly, that even the sans coulotte can smell the odoriforous wafts of superficiality.

In general, Peter Kreeft is sensible and worth reading. But journalism is obliged to put things in consumable and bite-size pieces. FR thrives because of it.

I think that Jean Jacques Rousseau belongs with these dregs.

"The Difficulty with Hegel"

by Roger Kimball

Philosophy need not trouble itself about ordinary ideas. —G. W. F. Hegel, Philosophy of Nature

He described what he knew best or had heard most, and felt he had described the universe. —George Santayana, on Hegel

Philosophers are hardly ever cynical manipulators of their readers’ minds. They do not produce delusions in others, without first being subject to them themselves. —David Stove, “Idealism: a Victorian Horror-story (Part One)”

Hegel, Bertrand Russell observed, is “the hardest to understand of the great philosophers.” Hegel would not have liked very much that Russell had to say about his philosophy in A History of Western Philosophy (1945). Russell’s exposition is a classic in the library of philosophical demolition, much despised by Hegel’s admirers for its vulgar insistence on common sense. (Best line: that Hegel’s philosophy “illustrates an important truth, namely, that the worse your logic, the more interesting the consequences to which it gives rise.”) But I am not at all sure that Hegel would have disagreed with Russell’s comment about the difficulty of understanding him. He knew he was difficult. He was always going on about the “labor of the negative,” the superficiality of mere common sense, and the long, “strenuous effort” that genuinely “scientific” (i.e., Hegelian) philosophy required. It is even said that on his deathbed Hegel declared that there was only one man who had understood him—and he had misunderstood him.

I first came across that mot in Søren Kierkegaard’s Concluding Unscientific Postscript (1846), another anti-Hegelian salvo, quite different from Russell’s. Neither Kierkegaard nor his editors supply a source for the observation, and Terry Pinkard, in his new biography of Hegel, [1] sniffily describes it as an “apocryphal story,” “emblematic of the anti-Hegelian reaction that quickly set in” after the philosopher’s death in 1831.

I was sorry to learn that. Like many people who have soldiered through a fair number of Hegel’s books, I was both awed and depressed by their glittering opacity. With the possible exception of Heidegger, Hegel is far and away the most difficult “great philosopher” I have ever studied. There was much that I did not understand. I secretly suspected that no one—not even my teachers—really understood him, and it was nice to have that prejudice supported from the master’s own lips...

From The New Criterion Vol. 19, No. 1, September 2000
©2000 The New Criterion
www.newcriterion.com

Full Text: http://www.newcriterion.com/archive/19/sept00/hegel.htm

I recommend reading the Freud link.

Well the guy I know best is Machiavelli, and the squib is errant nonesense. Mach was describing what was, not what should be, and he made it rather clear in his more extensive works, such as The Florentine, that that stunk. Granted, at bottom he was a pessimist. He thought governance was subject to terminal entrophy. But based on the empirical data in his world, that has rather hard to refute.

Nietzsche is always good for abuse, and misreading. Freud by no means favored unleashing the id, and in fact feared it. Like Hobbs, he percieved the beast that lay within the human psyche that needed to be tamed. Dennis Prager likes Freud, so do I.

I hated reading Kant in college. I will check up on him, but to suggest that he is inventor of destructive relativism simply isn't going to cut it.

Whatever one may say about Marx, one thing is clear: the Marxian God is dead. It simply doesn't have much influence anymore. That's why we all knash our teeth these days about Islam. We DO have a physcological need to find a devil in corporeal form to hate and fear pending our prior exit.

I don't know anything about Satre really. Teach me.

It is even said that on his deathbed Hegel declared that there was only one man who had understood him—and he had misunderstood him.

This story seems to work in Hegel's favor. But certain things MUST be understood about him. The most important: the excercise of power through manipulative negation. Satirist, humorists, and ironists beware!

Your note about marx...keep in mind that these articles are dated. I still think with your relative views on sexuality that Freud would have interested you much more than Machiavelli, but he did lower the standard to allow for just about any kind of behavior.

I hope to learn from much from this thread, (many thanks for posting it), as I am not adequately familiar with the details of the distinctions between the many philosophers of the past few centuries or millenia.

Therefore I ask, isn't any philosophical doctrine exclusive by nature? Most often, are they not refutations or more finite redefinitions of previous widely-held beliefs?

It seems to me that philosophers from the onset of the scientific and industrial revolutions have erred in their failure to incorporate any allowance for any "divine" power that could not be "scientifically" proven. Though they may have overshot in their desires to provide a great new leap "forward" in understanding, does that necessarily mean that their contributions were not more positive than negative?

Every single man is but a blind link in the chain of absolute necessity by which the world builds itself forth ( sich fortbildet ). The single man can elevate himself to dominance ( Herrschaft ) over an appreciable length of this chain only if he knows the direction in which the great necessity wants to move and if he learns from this knowledge to pronounce the magic words ( die Zauberworte ) that will evoke its shape ( Gestalt )." { Fortsetzung des “Systems der Sittlichkeit ,” (1804-1806, written while working on the Phaenomenologie ) Dokumente zu Hegels Entwicklung , Stuttgart, 1936, 314-325, at 324.}]

Propositional discourse has its perils. If genre theory is still the chess game of choice, Northrop Frye may have some answers. Although Walker Percy is always informative, Ralph Wood's Comedy of Redemption: Christian Faith and Comic Vision in Four American Novelists helps out with understanding the relevant ontology. I can recommend that as an antidote if the Hegel ride ever gets too dizzy.