Why Hegel Matters

"To apprehend what is is the task of philosophy because what is is reason. As for the individual, every one is a son of his time; so philosophy also is its time apprehended in thoughts...To recognize reason as the rose in the cross of the present, and to find delight in it, is a rational insight which implies reconciliation with reality. This reconciliation philosophy grants to those who have felt the inward demand to conceive clearly, to perceive subjective freedom while present in substantive reality, and yet though possessing this freedom to stand not upon this particular and contingent, but upon what is self-originated and self-completed."

So wrote Hegel in 1820. It is important to understand that, by reason, Hegel sometimes meant (or at least seemed to mean) more than "rationality" or "logic"--words that, in English (since at least Bacon and Mill), have become somewhat shrunken or dessicated. For Hegel, it appears that reason was logos and logos is--despite Hegel's criticism of Kant on this point--the "thing in itself" (whatever that might be). "What is." To apprehend "what is" may indeed be the task of philosophy, but first we must define our terms. Once we have accomplished that prerequisite (answered the threshold question) we have delimited the undelimitable logos and betrayed our very quest.




Unconsciously (or perhaps consciously) echoing Hegel, Norman O. Brown declared that "Nature, Natura naturans, is not an orderly Spinozistic or Dantesque cosmos; Nature is Heraclitean fire. And the fire and the rose are one. And so, in spite of Dante, Heaven and Hell are the same place...Modern, or is it postmodern, thought begins with Blake's Marriage of Heaven and Hell" (NOB, "Revisioning Historical Identities").

Only to end, perhaps, in Henry Miller's Rosy Crucifixion. As Hegel understood only too well, philosophy, "as the thought of the world, does not appear until reality has completed its formative process, and made itself ready. History thus corroborates the teaching of the conception that only in the maturity of reality does the ideal appear as counterpart to the real, apprehends the real world in its substance, and shapes it into an intellectual kingdom. When philosophy paints its grey in grey, one form of life has become old, and by means of grey it cannot be rejuvenated, but only known. The owl of Minerva takes its flight only when the shades of night are gathering."

Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.







And so, thanks to Hegel, we may conclude that our masterpiece is the private life...

And then along comes Feuerbach and turns Hegel on his head: God is an objectification, an alienation of our subjectivities. Feuerbach is followed by Thomas Wolfe, the great Hegelian poet of "Immortal love, alone and aching in the wilderness..." The poet "...of wandering forever and the earth again." The poet Of Time and the River.

As the author of Love's Body admonished us all: "There is only poetry." Hegel probably did not intend to teach us that but, as his most perspicacious readers have understood, he left us no other conclusion.