Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

Like many college students, I struggled mightily to understand what the hell Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel was trying to say in his very dense philosophical texts.  Since I don’t read German, I wouldn’t say that I ever really got there.

But what I got out of Hegel was the Hegelian dialectic.  Now, many philosophers say that the Hegelian dialectic wasn’t really Hegel’s at all, but Kant’s.  That may be true, but I don’t care, because I still call Hegel’s dialectic Hegel’s.

And from what I remember from my college philosophy class from Hegel is that the march of history starts with a proposition, known as the thesis, and from that proposition comes the counter, known as the antithesis, and from the conflict of the thesis and the anti-thesis comes the synthesis, which symbolizes progress.

Hegel used the French revolution as an example.  First, you have the revolt against the French monarchy.  After the revolution came the Reign of Terror.  And only after the Reign of terror, came a Constitutional society that values the rights of individual citizens.

I was thinking about the Hegelian dialectic in the context of the current political climate in America.  Read more...