The Truth About Hegel: A Book Review

The Truth About Hegel: A Book Review

By Don Curren

 

 

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel is a notoriously difficult philosopher. 

An anecdote:

It’s 2016.

I’m buying a book with the title “The Spectre of Hegel” at a used bookstore in downtown Toronto.

“You’re still banging your head against that wall?” the clerk asks, bemused.

He must be inferring from the way I look that it’s been a while since I had been a student and am therefore reading about Hegel while not under some form of scholarly obligation to do so.

 I acknowledge that, well, yes, I am. He says, chuckling, “I took up golf.”

Anybody engaging with Hegel invariably ends up banging their head against that wall.

But we keep doing it.

That’s because, despite being painful, it’s been a fertile pursuit.

 Hegel was a towering influence on philosophy and other disciplines in Germany and elsewhere in the 19^th and 20^th centuries. The continued banging of their heads against the high walls of his dense verbiage proved highly productive for many other highly influential thinkers, including Soren Kierkegaard, Karl Marx and Frederich Nietzsche.

That suggests underneath Hegel’s dense verbiage and idiosyncratic jargon are some profound and richly rewarding insights.

Occasionally someone comes along who can translate those insights into clearer prose, giving the rest of us a glimpse into truths hidden in the abyss of Hegel’s obscure verbiage

The American philosopher and writer Grant Maxwell is one of them.

In his book Integration and Difference: Constructing a Mythical Dialectic, published this summer, Maxwell arrives at a direct, lucid and helpful explanation of Hegel’s “dialectic,” one of his most central and influential ideas.

“Hegel’s innovation, derived from the tradition initiated by Heraclitus and Plato ... is that problematic conflicts tend to produce an emergent unity more profound than the opposition, so that the question becomes how the two opposed sides can both be aspects of a more complete and profound truth,” Maxwell writes.

Stated that way, the dialectic’s underlying insight into the nature of thought – its dynamic, evolutionary, dialogical nature – seems simple, lucid, and compelling. Maxwell captures an essential truth about Hegel.

“Hegel recognized that conventional logic is inadequate for describing the living reality in which we are immersed,” Maxwell writes.

“The truth of an entity is not to be found only in the origin or end of its process of becoming, but in the entire complex trajectory that leads to the emergent entity through the process of its becoming,” he writes, describing Hegel’s conception of truth.

(Full disclosure: Maxwell, a Twitter friend of mine, generously included me in the Acknowledgments section of his book.)

In a way, Hegel is only incidental to Maxwell’s book. He’s one of 13 philosophers that Maxwell considers in the context of an overarching dilemma, the question of where Western thought will go after the self-declared exhaustion of its dominant tradition of narrowly rational, “logocentric” thought.

The presiding spirits in Integration and Difference are the French philosophers Jacques Derrida and Gilles Deleuze.

The first, in Maxwell’s reading, represents the end of the “logocentric” tradition, the latter the first halting steps toward something new and more inclusive. Derrida articulates the limits of that mode of thought from within, while Deleuze sketches out possibilities for thought beyond it.

His book discusses thinkers who in some form grappled with the issue of logocentric thought and its limitations, Hegel being just one of them along with Nietzsche, Spinoza, Leibniz, Bergson, William James, C.G. Jung, Schelling, Whitehead, James Hillman, and Isabelle Stengers.

But Hegel also haunts several of those thinkers. In cases such as Nietzsche and Deleuze, he’s implicitly present as an ancestral spirit whose influence their struggling to transcend.

It’s an excellent book.

Maxwell’s treatment of Hegel, which focuses on the Phenomenology of Spirit, is characteristic of the way he works. Maxwell penetrates to the essence of at least one aspect of these thinkers and describe their thinking in the clear, engaging language.

As well as providing insightful treatment of each thinker on an individual basis, Maxwell links them to the broader context in the history of thought he is addressing, the “closure” of the Western logocentric tradition and what might come next.

Maxwell has done an excellent job of banging his head against the walls of intellectual difficulty presented by Hegel and some of the key thinkers in philosophical and psychological thought in the West in a very constructive and thoughtful way, and of describing what they have to offer at this pivotal juncture in the history of Western thought.

We can all benefit from the patience, skill, and depth of insight he brings to his work.