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2024/09/23
Hegelian dialectic is a process of overcoming contradictions. That is the simplest definition I can come up with to describe the key aspect of German Idealist philosophy.
I hate to be a reductionist but I cannot help but explain Hegel's thinking as a reflection of the Zeitgeist (the Spirit of the Time, so to say) of the post-Napoleonic post-Enlightenment Germany. After all, it was not a unified country we are used to seeing but a split and splintered colllection of kingdoms, city-states and bishoprics, all severely traumatized by the transformations at the hands of Napoleon - from caving out new German states out of the decrepit medieval statelets, to the abolition of the millennial instution of the Holy Roman Empire.
Hegel's Absolute - be it God or another abstract entity - is the totality of existence. Or the way I put it - it is Hegel's German Republic, a mirror image of the French Republic, which for the past two hundred odd years refused to die despite all odds.
This obsession with the unification with the Absolute is a reflection of the age of Enlightenment and a search for a "new union" in Europe. The French found it by forging the French nation in the fire of the revolution and the bloody massacre that followed afterwards. The Germans and the Italians followed. Others found an inspiration in the idea to boost their morale for rebellion - the Slavs of the Balkans, the Hungarians, the Poles, the Czechs and Slovaks, and even the Turks. Others tried but were less successful. The Nationalists within the fledgling nations of the crumbling Russian Empire learned that the Absolute was not limited to themselves, as they were paraded to GULAGs or plain executed en masse in the name of a higher totality - that of the world revolution of the proletariat. The sheer barbarity of the Russians made them a fertile ground for Marxism. No wonder then that the murderous ideology was so successful in other barbarous hell-holes throughout the past century, no?
The epitome of the Hegelian experiment is the New Soviet Man - Homo sovieticus. No, it is not a chiseled athlete from Stalin's propaganda posters or the Brezhnevite Olympic champions. It is a dysgenic poor alcoholic breaking his back on the oil wells of the sub-Arctic. It is the ugly fat female working at the local bakery, selling stale tasteless bread to a line of malnourished engineering students in Moscow. It is no wonder that Marxists (who are in their essence Hegelians) vehemently opposed genetics and the science of heredity in the first place. It implied that the higher classes are so through their heredity, and the proletariat deserve their subordinate place, having origins among the lower and peasant classes. Natural world's wonders opened up a whole new universe that the city-dwelling intellectuals of the 19th century never could even dream of. Even though they paraded Charles Darwin's discovery as the ultimate evidence of the fallacy of the Middle Eastern Creation myth, they seldom ever developed Darwin's ideas further. But natural scientists did. And I should add that, even though the Marxists preached equality, they did recognize heredity, shooting and imprisoning descendants of "traitors of the people", the children of the "bourgeois", priests and feudal lords alike, while extolling incompetent alcoholic factory workers as the highest form of life itself. No wonder, the highest form of life for a Marxist (and Hegelian) is something that can hardly be called life.
Evolution of life is a gradual process starting with a primordial soup - a totality of life - and diverging into more and more distinct, more and more incompatible, and more and more complex life forms. Man in his inner workings is a construct of many symbiotic elements, from mitochondria to gut bacteria, from the labor of complex proteins regulating his bodily activity and immune system, to electric signals in his nervous system. All life grows more and more distinct. All life diverges in perpetuity. And with that it bears with it the legacy of the past, while diverging ad infinitum to the point of becoming no more recognizable.
Bringing distinct people together in hope that they can unify in a new reality as a manifestation of the Absolute is the inverse of nature. Hence, we know from genetic studies that when the Homo Sapiens met the Neanderthal, a product of their hybridization were new, distinct races of man. I myself happen to have a significant genetic sediment left by the Neanderthals somewhere within my chromosomes, only making me more and more distinct from, not alike others.
If we look further into the animal world, we see these distinctions rise up in the evolution of artiodactyls, perhaps the most successful mammalian order. Not only have they become incredibly distinct from each other as a result of human domestication: pink short-hair pigs are more and more unlike the hairy tusked boars, merino sheep in its large curly white coat is unlike the slim horned mouflons of Anatolia, the playful omnivorous goats on our farms are not nearly as threatening as the mighty ibexes they have descended from. Human did not bring these creatures to make them alike with their ancestors, but rather make them more distinct. Similarly, goats', sheep's and pigs' distant relatives - the baleen cetaceans - were only made unspeakably more distinct with time. Therefore, with history, life becomes more and more distinct.
In this world, there can be no "equality" as there can be no uniformity. Suffering is to be overcome and minimized by individuals of the species, and its qualities pertaining to its surviving honed and perfected, while those that are unnecessary to that task shall gradually recede. In the natural world, perfection and excellence are rewarded, and inadequacy and incompetence are punished.
And that is what Hegelians refuse to accept. What Hegel offers us is a natural order upside down. No, say Hegelians, our goal is to go back to that primordial soup. The archaea. That is where all of us are destined to end up, apparently. Ironically or not, but that's exactly what Hegelianism led us to. The twentieth century is often referred as the bloodiest century in history. And for a reason! It is a reflection of the Hegelian dialectic. The opposite of evolution is extinction - that is, death. The ever increasing diversity of life is a threat to the totality of life. Diversity is the opposite of totality. What is the solution? Death and extinction. Punish and exterminate the perfection and excellence, reward inadequacy and incompetence. Devolve until all that is left are prokaryotes dwelling in the gas vents at the bottom of the sea. This is the ultimate manifestation of totaliy that Hegelians offer - the final end to history.
But let's say, the Hegelian experiment becomes at least partially successful. What happens then? You end up with archaea - primitive organisms on the verge of what life itself represents. But on the way there you cannot skip the atavistic process of de-evolution - on the way back to archaea you will end up with parasitic microorganisms, which will leech off and poison other, more advanced life forms.
What a sight it is then, when certain people - whether knowingly or not - subscribe to the Hegelian delusion, as they intentionally destroy, maim and punish all forms of more and more advanced life. They punish success and achivement, and they reward inadequacy, derangement and mediocrity. They will release criminals from custody. Why not? It is not a fluke's fault it was born one, when there are blue whales swimming in the ocean. Surely the whales owe them. Hence, they have adapted to parasitize and slowly drain the life out of higher lifeforms. Similarly, the incompetent, the poor, the mentally deranged, and so on, have the right to parasitize on the capable, the rich and mentally sound. But in the natural world, a fluke is not given an unfair advantage. Humans are not swimming on boats to whales and poison them with trematodes. But when it comes to humans, we are chastized for being privileged, unfair and entitled for not allowing ourselves fall victim of the same kind of parasitism.
Dysgenics are now in fashion, and the ideology of Hegel justifies it. But look at the language its proponents use! They say diversity but I hear uniformity, they say equality but I hear injustice, they say justice but all I hear is lawlessness.
This is atavism, and the delusions of a low-grade paper pusher from Stuttgart are its moral groundwork.