Questions About Hegel

[LeoCasey at aol.com]

Questions about Hegel:
> I am unable to read more than a page of Hegel at a time, and then I have to 
> recover for a week or two; can someone tell me if he actually argued stone 
> plain dumb contradictions like "[M]embership in the state one of the 
> individual's highest duties. ... [T]he state is the manifestation of the 
> general will, which is the highest expression of the ethical spirit. 
> Obedience to this general will is the act of a free and rational 
> individual.... [But] the abridgment of freedom by any actual state is 
> morally unacceptable"?  This kind of doubletalk seems like charlatanry, as 
> Popper says; and I hate to agree with Popper.
> 

Hegel is not a philosopher to read in brief excerpts. If you are going to 
grapple with him, you have to immerse yourself in the texts in a pretty 
serious way, because only when you figure out the general structure of the 
argument do all of the particulars begin to make sense.

Part of the problem here is that these terms do not necessarily mean the same 
for Hegel as they do in contemporary Anglo-American usage. Thus, for Hegel, 
the state as laid out in the _Philosophy of Right_, a state which he 
understands to be an entirely rational construction [ie, is the rational 
kernel of existing states] is the embodiment of freedom, and the expression 
of the free will. 

I don't want to defend this Hegelian view, because I believe it is seriously 
flawed in a number of ways, but it is also not easily understood. Popper's 
critique is of a rather vulgar reading of Hegel. 

Leo Casey
United Federation of Teachers
260 Park Avenue South
New York, New York 10010-7272 (212-598-6869)

Power concedes nothing without a demand.
It never has, and it never will.
If there is no struggle, there is no progress.
Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet deprecate agitation are men who 
want crops without plowing the ground. They want rain without thunder and 
lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its waters.
-- Frederick Douglass --

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