Event: Hegel

Many find Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit daunting to read. I don’t pretend that it’s easy sledding. But the main thrust is not difficult to grasp. The work offers a genealogy: What explains the world in which we live? Where does truth come from? Most answers throughout history have been theocentric. In one fashion or another, God (or the gods) gets things going. The power that forms reality comes down from above. Hegel was and remains seminal for modern thought, because he answered genealogical questions without reference to the transcendent. Our circumstances, conditions, identities—indeed, our truths—are emergent. The power that fashions all things comes from below. Materialist philosophies were formulated in antiquity. Epicurus speculated that reality was composed of atoms circulating in a void—and nothing else. The power comes from below, and it stays there. Epicurus counseled calm acceptance of the brute meaninglessness of existence. There’s a coldness in the unfeeling atoms, and in this approach to life. But there’s also a hardness that is invulnerable and enduring—again like the atoms. Hegel’s view is very different. Rather than inert matter, Hegel’s primal reality is time itself, which is dynamic and alive. Things happen! And they do so in accord with an inbuilt logic. The term Hegel uses for the logic of time and its unfolding is “dialectic.” Developments speak to other developments. The conversation of ­situations and events advances and evolves, leading to who we now are, living and thinking as we do. Hegel’s innovation is not found in the supposition that time brings changes. That’s a banal truth. Rather, Hegel depicts history as a shaping power, singular and omnipotent in its effects. In this regard, it is fitting that we should capitalize “History,” for it is in a real sense our creator. The final section of Phenomenology of Spirit concerns…