Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, (born August 27, 1770, Stuttgart, Württemberg [Germany]—died November 14, 1831, Berlin), was a German philosopher who developed a theory that explained the progress of history
Hegel gave us a new way to look at fall of the roman empire, the end of the renaissance period, the end of the enlightenment, and even the rise of facism.
He viewed them as necessary and that they were simply a process, repeated many times throughout history, therefore we should not give up hope when things a bad.
Hegel saw the mass murder brought about by massive political and economic change in his revolutionary and imperial age, but in his estimation, such man-made disasters were necessary occurrences, the “slaughter bench of history,” as he famously wrote in the Philosophy of History in 1830.
Hegel stated that history moves forward in what he termed a dialectic process.
For Hegel, the individual personality was not important, only collective entities: peoples, states, and empires.
These moved against each other according to a reasoning process working through history which Hegel called the dialectic.
So let’s put this dialectic process in the terms we usually use—thesis, antithesis, synthesis—though Hegel himself did not exactly use the same terms.
This is the common shorthand way of understanding how Hegel’s explanation of history works: “the world makes progress, by swinging from one extreme to the other, as it seeks to overcompensate for a previous mistake, and generally requires three moves before the right balance on any issue can be found.
So applying this to our current situation here in the US, we had 8 years of Obama and lived through his progressive social reforms and foreign policies.
We have now swung to the conservative extreme under President Trump.
As we approach the next election, we see the shift again pushing for extreme progressivism under Elizabeth Warren and socialism under Bernie Sanders.
Make sense?
How about a historical example:
The terror of the French Revolution of 1789 is a great example of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis in action.
In this case you have King Louis XVI and his wife Marie Antoinette as the thesis (established order).
The antithesis is the French people led by rebels within their newly elected parliament called the Estates General.
Revolution ensues and when the smoke clears, it gives way to the synthesis, the brutal autocratic empire of Napoleon in another extreme swing.
Now the role changes and once Napolean has complete control of France, he becomes the new Thesis (established order), and the whole cycle begins anew.
According to Hegel, the world makes progress by lurching from one extreme to the other as it seeks to overcompensate for a previous mistake.
Hegel assures us that in the darkest of times when all appears to be lost, we are merely seeing the pendulum swing back for a time, but that this period is needed because the initial move forward had been blind to crucial insights by the opposing view.
Hegel contends that all sides contain certain truths buried in extremism, exaggeration, and propaganda.
It is through the dialectic process that these truths will be sifted out through time.
This is why historians contend that we must remember our past.
Hegel states that the dark moments in history are simply a part of the dialectic process, an antithesis, that will bring about a future synthesis.
The question of whether or not genuine human progress is possible, or desirable, lies at the heart of many a radical post-Enlightenment philosophical project.
More pessimistic philosophers have, unsurprisingly, doubted it.
Arthur Schopenhauer, cast total suspicion on the idea.
Danish Existentialist Soren Kierkegaard thought of collective progress toward a more enlightened state an unlikely prospect.
One modern critic of progress, pessimistic English philosopher John Gray, writes in his book Straw Dogs that “the pursuit of progress” is an idealist illusion ending in “mass murder.”
These skeptics of progress all in some way write in response to G.W.F. Hegel, whose systematic thinking provided Karl Marx with the basis of his dialectical materialism.
In the case of Marx, the thesis is the rich, the antithesis is the common working man, and the synthesis is communism.
This suggests a very brutal view, and yet Hegel believed overall that “Reason is the Sovereign of the World; that the history of the world therefore, presents us with a rational process.
In our own time, we have encountered the progressive ideas of Hegel not only through Marx, but through the work of Martin Luther King, Jr., who studied Hegel as a graduate student at Harvard and Boston University and found much inspiration in the Philosophy of History.
Though critical of Hegel’s idealism, which, “tended to swallow up the many in the one,” King discovered important first principles there as well: “His analysis of the dialectical process, in spite of its shortcomings, helped me to see that growth comes through struggle.” stated King.
We endlessly quote King’s statement, “the arc of history is long, but it bends toward justice,” but we forget his corresponding emphasis on the necessity of struggle to achieve the goal.
As Hegel theorized, “the dark moments aren’t the end, they are a challenging but in some ways necessary part… imminently compatible with events broadly moving forward in the right direction.”
King found his own historical synthesis in the principle of nonviolent resistance, which “seeks to reconcile the truths of two opposites,” he wrote in 1954’s Stride Toward Freedom, Nonviolent resistance is not passive compliance, but neither is it intentional aggression.
Hegel and his socially influential students like Martin Luther King and John Dewey, American philosopher and leader of the progressive movement in education, have generally operated on the basis of some faith in reason or divine justice.
There are much harsher, more pessimistic ways of viewing history than as a swinging pendulum moving toward some greater end.
Pessimistic thinkers may be more honest about the staggering moral challenge posed by increasingly efficient means of mass killing and the perpetuation of ideologies that commit it.
Yet it is partly through the influence of Hegel that modern social movements have embraced the necessity of struggle and believed progress was possible, even inevitable, when it seemed least likely to occur.
Hegel knew that just because men and women learned about the past, that didn’t mean they’d make better decisions about the future.
He once commented, “What experience and history teach us is this—that people and governments never have learned anything from history, or acted on principles deduced from it.”
Once the potential of a particular society had been realized in the creation of a certain way of life, its historical role was over; its members became aware of its inadequacies, and the laws and institutions they had previously accepted unquestioningly were now experienced as restrictions, inhibiting further development and no longer reflecting their deepest aspirations.
Thus, each phase of the historical process could be said to contain the seeds of its own destruction and to “negate” itself.
The consequence is the emergence of a new society, representing another stage in a progression whose final outcome is the formation of a rationally ordered community with which each citizen could identify himself and in which there would therefore no longer exist any sense of alienation or constraint.
Somewhat curiously, the type of community Hegel envisaged as exemplifying this satisfactory state of affairs bore a striking resemblance to the Prussian monarchy of his own time.
Self-avowed Chicago Marxist Saul Alinsky (the godfather of “community organizing”), whose protege was none other than Barack Obama, wrote in his radical left-wing book Rules for Radicals:
“Any revolutionary change must be preceded by a passive, affirmative, non-challenging attitude toward change among the mass of our people. They must feel so frustrated, so defeated, so lost, so futureless in the prevailing system that they are willing to let go of the past and change the future. This acceptance is the reformation essential to any revolution.”
Does this sound familiar folks? How do you currently feel about the whole state of affairs in Washington?
One thing I can get even my liberal friends to admit is that the system is broken and that both liberals and conservatives in our federal government are to blame.
Have we been led to this point intentionally?
If so, who led us here?
Alinsky’s approach in a nutshell: issues, problems, crises, conflict.
The purpose is to bring about “radical social change”–paradigm shift, fundamental transformation, transition, a new system, etc.
The scary part to Alinsky’s approach for “radical social change” is his belief in the Marxist-Leninist method of always keeping the masses demoralized so they will demand change, or even insist the system be abolished altogether.
It was Vladmir I. Lenin who originally put Marxist-style revolution into practice, i.e. the “dictatorship of the proletariat,” killing millions in the process, without mercy or compassion, and spreading Marxist-Leninism around the globe–still existing to this day.
Hegel and Marx merely developed the theory. But it was Lenin, and those who followed in his footsteps, who committed genocide on an industrial scale in the name of Marx and Hegel.
Although the ideology of Hegel, Marx & Engels greatly influenced Lenin, Marx merely came up with the theory. Lenin took action.
Good grief! Are we there?
I can’t help but point out some striking ironies and stark contrasts regarding Hegelian and Marxist dialectics. Although the dialectics of Hegel and Marx promote the very concept of absolutes and the deity of a Higher Power, the systematic and formulaic approach that Hegel and Marx use to employ their strategy requires absolutes.
For example, the Hegelian dialectic requires a thesis and an antithesis, a pro and a con. Are these not absolutes?
Is not the very concept of left and right, east and west, black and white, etc., required by the dialectic a confirmation of absolutism itself? In other words, there is no middle ground. You must be either all one way or all the other for the process to work.
Is that what is happening? Are we being driven from the position of compromise to being either total liberals of total conservatives? If so, who is driving us there?
Bella Dodd, a former communist who later left the Party and became a vocal anti-communist, in her book School of Darkness, stated:
“… I have had many occasions to see that this cataloging of people as either ‘right’ or ‘left’ has led to more confusion in American life than perhaps any other false concept. It sounds so simple and so right. By using this schematic device one puts the communists on the left and then one regards them as advanced liberals – after which it is easy to regard them as the enzyme necessary for progress. Communists usurp the position of the left, but when one examines them in the light of what they really stand for, one sees them as the rankest kind of reactionaries and communism as the most reactionary backward leap in the long history of social movements. It is one which seeks to obliterate in one revolutionary wave two thousand years of man’s progress.“
In this light, the leaders of Marxist-Leninist regimes throughout history appear not to be leaders, per se, but rather change agents, whose dialectical formula of seduction, deception and manipulation is injected into the masses to gain supremacy over all groups for the sake of so-called “unity in diversity.”
Therefore the role of the change agent is to create permanent conflict–forwarding the Hegel and Marxist belief that all “progress” is brought about by conflict.
What to you folks think? Are we being led to a conflict by unknown sources?
Is history repeating itself?