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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   26459 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 29, 2024

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There's always been an authoritarian streak to leftism going back to Marx

And, you know, that other guy.

I think listening to a bunch of Marxists about Kant is an exercise in futility. Everything is ego defense of Granddaddy Hegel, all the way down.

EDIT:

But something about this explanation rubs me the wrong way. It paints a purely structural view of the formation of ideologies, and ignores the role of the individual completely

This is Marxism in a nutshell. The ideological superstructure is determined by the material substrate, not the other way around. If you find this disturbing....well, now you know why they find it so important to try to blame Kant for Naziism (you know, that famously individualist creed).

Everything is ego defense of Granddaddy Hegel, all the way down.

It's truly astounding how many bad ideas and practices Hegel is responsible for. His "influenced" list is a who's who of the worst of the worst in philosophy. @non_radical_centrist below rightfully bemoans the "difficult to parse" style of certain philosophers, and there is perhaps no greater offender than Hegel. Kant isn't particularly concise, but pull up The Phenomenology of Spirit next to The Critique of Pure Reason, and the difference is night and day.

Hegel

Seeing as you're conversant with what to me seems like insufferable turgid nonsense, what do you make out of the claims that Hegel is being misunderstood and misclassified ?

Thus far, however, the most influential English-language account of Hegel’s Hermeticism is Eric Voegelin’s. In his essay, “Response to Professor Altizer’s ‘A New History and a New but Ancient God’” Voegelin admits that “For a long time I studiously avoided any serious criticism of Hegel in my published work, because I simply could not understand him.” The turning point came with Voegelin’s study of gnosticism, and the discovery that, “by his contemporaries Hegel was considered a gnostic thinker:” Voegelin goes on to claim that Hegel’s thought “belongs to the continuous history of modern Hermeticism since the fifteenth century."’ Voegelin’s principal statement on Hegel’s Hermeticism is a savagely polemical essay, “On Hegel: A Study in Sorcery,” referring to the Phenomenology of Spirit as a “grimoire” which “must be recognized as a work of magic — indeed, it is one of the great magic performances.”

Voegelin’s claims are unique in that he does not simply claim that Hegel was influenced by the Hermetic tradition. He claims that Hegel was part of the Hermetic tradition and cannot be adequately understood apart from it. Unfortunately, however, Voegelin never adequately developed his thesis. He never spelled out, in detail, how Hegel is a Hermetic thinker. Voegelin has, however, encouraged other scholars to develop his thesis more systematically (and more soberly). David Walsh, for instance, has written an important doctoral dissertation entitled The Esoteric Origins of Modern Ideological Thought: Boehme and Hegel (1978), in which he makes strong claims about Hegel’s indebtedness to Boehme. Gerald Hanratty has also published an extensive two-part essay, entitled “Hegel and the Gnostic Tradition” (1984-87).

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