REFLECTION ON GROWING
UP MODERN
Reading
Hegel, like reading Kant, is like doing archaeology
on the buried artifacts of one's own consciousness.
At least that is the case for anyone whose mind took
form before the modernist orthodoxy broke apart in
the wake of the revolutionary 1960s. In particular, I
find in this text the affirmation of several tenets
of my formal education:
--the
absolute truth is approachable through the exercise
of the rational mind;
--the
apprehension of truth by human society is
progressive;
--history
evolves; and therefore qualities of human life, such
as freedom, can progress from less to more.
Tenets
such as these were not drummed into me by rote. They
were not even taught in any direct way. They were
interwoven in the very substance of what I studied.
Without assuming them, I would have been able to make
no sense of the materials put in front of me for
study. Professors did not expect me to argue the
validity of such tenets. But they expected me to
understand that our texts and the world that produced
our texts would be incomprehensible if I did not view
them as the products of such a vision.
For
a random example, I landed on Matthew Arnold's speech
at Eton, published in his Irish Essays
of 1882. The speech purports to trace the changing
uses of the Greek word for "flexibility" (eutrapelos,
eutrapelia) through the centuries of classical
history. Arnold manages to use the word as a thread
that ties together the rise and fall of Dorian and
Ionian culture and the rise of Christianity; and, as
one might expect, he finishes with an application of
his classical excursion to the moral imperatives of
Victorian England. The moral for the Etonian audience
is this:
that man has to make
progress along diverse lines,
in obedience to a
diversity of aspirations and powers,
the sum of which is truly
his nature; and that he fails
and falls short until he
learns to advance upon them all,
and to advance upon them
harmoniously.
(Craig Hardin and J.
M. Thomas. Eds. English Prose of the
Nineteenth Century. New York:
Appleton-Century-Crofts, Inc., 1929, p. 598.)
The
Hegel-like refrain of historical dialectic in this
bit of Arnoldiana could be found in countless texts
from the authors of modernity.
But
I did not think of such texts as expressive of a
Hegelian vision. I knew that this was the vision of
the world my generation inherited. The many voices of
the literary canon, which we studied, conveyed it
implicitly or explicitly. And, of course, it was not
exclusively Hegelian anyway; it was the sum of what
we now call cultural production on a host of fronts
over the course of a couple of centuries.
Institutionalized as liberal humanism in the American
academy, it determined the mental architecture of the
generations that we now can look back upon as
"modern"--of which I must count myself a
member.
I
visited Hegel's text not only to see some of the
lathes and joists behind the facade of that modern
mental architecture. I also wanted to visit Hegel's
thought for itself. There is a freshness in old texts
that are read without the baggage of their history.
It was Hegel's fate in general accounts of the
history of ideas to become cast as the main influence
in the work of his most famous student, Karl Marx. It
was also his bad luck that--partly because of Marx's
appropriation-- commentators transformed his
essential idea of the dialectic of becoming into a
cartoon formula,
"thesis-antithesis-synthesis." Kaufmann
reports the finding of a Hegel lexicographer that
Hegel mentioned the formulaic terms together only
once--and then disparagingly! (81). Yet
"Hegel" has become almost synonymous with
the formula.
It
seems, then, a small salute in fairness to the master
to seek an encounter with his thought head-on. He
insisted on a new philosophical standard of intense
concentration on the thought at hand: "Scientific
knowledge...demands precisely that we surrender to
the life of the object or--and this is the same
thing--that we confront and express its inner
necessity." (80) I heard that Hegelian call
in the refrain of faculty over the years, implanting
academic "rigor" in the curriculum and
demanding that students "rigorously" pursue
it.
Reading notes: