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BASIC HEGELHegel remains the most elusive and hard to read philosopher of the 19th Century, and any “basic” summary of his philosophies is necessarily a shot in the dark. I have tried to emphasize those simplest and most common Hegelian notions, dialectics and the state, with special emphasis on their application to debating about values. Hegel’s application to value debate is found in two areas of his thinking: 1. Dialectical reason, or dialectical logic, is a method of analysis designed to do justice to the experience of ideas never being really absolute, of their clash and their eventual reconciliation in some higher idea. Every time something is “opposed” to something else, the resulting clash of those things never leaves the “loser’ in the clash utterly destroyed; instead, the victor in the struggle has been, in some way, affected by the defeated. 2. Hegel’s political philosophy demands allegiance to the political and social order to which the citizen belongs. This is for reasons much different than, say, Socrates’ argument that a citizen must abide by the laws of the state. Such a claim as Socrates makes is an ethical claim, a demand of moral responsibility. Hegel, on the other hand, is making a metaphysical claim, a claim based on his understanding of the way the world works. Since nothing can occur in history until its rational time, then the emergence of the state in history proves its rationality. Additionally, Hegel saw his contemporary govemments as being rational enough to at least attempt to give a voice to their citizens, although ultimately Hegel believes the state reflects the will of those citizens whether they are aware of this or not. DIALECTICAL LOGIC“It is in this dialectic (as here understood) and in the comprehension of the unity of opposites, or of the positive in the negative, that speculative knowledge consists. This is the most important aspect of the dialectic, but for thought that is as yet practiced and unfree, it is the most difficult. If thought is still in the process of cutting itself loose from concrete sense-perception and from syllogizing, it must first practice abstract thinking, and learn to hold fast concepts in their definiteness and to recognize by means of them.” Hegel, “The Science of Logic,” (in Beardsley, THE EUROPEAN PHILOSOPHERS FROM DESCARTES TO NIETZSCHE, 1960, p. 636) Hegel’s dialectical approach to ideas would ultimately yield the conclusion that truth, as life, is itself in a constant state of change. Although Hegel would cling to the idea of a far off Absolute, which would finally transcend the dialectical clash and suffer no further contradictions to itself, until such a state was reached it made sense to find a method which would get us somewhere in the meantime. Dialectical thinking is thinking which seeks an understanding of balance, of struggle, and of change. The dialectic approach to logic differs from the linear, if-then approach known as Aristotlean logic. In a dialectical process, there is something beyond merely true and false. Hegel attempted to find half-truths, as it were, those things which are both true and false, or by extension, both good and bad, things he saw as true to both human experience and the vision of history. Take a simple idea. Freedom. If you wish, it may be a statement, “freedom is...” but it makes more sense in the abstractions of Hegelian logic to simply take “freedom” as the idea wholly. Then, having taken that idea, proceed to imagine its total opposite: We might want to say “slavery,” but in a more complex sense, the opposite of freedom is “necessity,” or the compulsion to act. Placing them in a state of clash does not simply result in one idea killing the other one. The “surviving” idea is of another sort entirely, for it has been affected by the struggle, modified and changed. The “new” idea might be something as simple as “freedom is the recognition of necessity,” or as complex as an attempt to resolve the free will-determinism debate. In any case, you have the following ingredients: 1. Thesis (“Freedom”) 2. Antithesis (“Necessity”) 3. Element of clash of ideas 4. Synthesis (“Freedom is the recognition of necessity”) That idea in #4 will go on to be a thesis, until it too is challenged: 1. Recognition of necessity (thesis) 2. Possibility of transcendence (antithesis) 3. Possibility of understanding the necessary natural or social forces which allow transcendence (synthesis). Truth itself is simply the progress of the synthesis of contradictions. Because of this, things which appear in opposition to us in a given moment are not really opposed at all; on a higher level of consciousness, sometimes arrived at over painfully long periods, they are the same. Eventually, all will be synthesized in “the absolute” level of consciousness, a consciousness completely aware of itself as a process and without any contradiction, because there is nothing other than itself. Vaguely, Hegel hinted that this consciousness, this absolute synthesis, would be called ‘God.” At other times he indicated it was simply the sum total of everything. Hegel, naturally, didn’t think these two designations were really contradictory. Struggles which seem to serve no purpose at the time of their occurrence (wars, political intrigue and the like) make complete sense as far as their purposes are contemplated later in history. This type of thinking is called “teleological,” meaning that it is end-oriented, that it concerns itself with why things must happen as they do. For Hegel, they happen that way because history, like dialectical truth, follows a rational course. The Fall of Rome, which must have been a miserable event for its “guests,” was necessary for the rise of Christianity, which was necessary for the birth of the Enlightenment, and so on. It is useless to speak of these events, any of them, as things that “should not have happened that way,” since once you accept the assertion that history follows a rational path, you also see that things always happen as they should. They could not possibly happen as they shouldn’t. 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