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