Hegel's World

Reading the works of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel is surprisingly (or not) fascinating and rewarding, but also refreshing. Here are three reasons why:

1. His View of Objects

In reading Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, I cannot say that I understand all of it. Everyone knows how difficult Hegel's writing is to comprehend, and I don't think it is primarily (if at all!) his being a bad writer. Any thinker trying to elucidate his ideas with the depth and breadth Hegel attempts to do in his Spirit would face similar challenges. As I understand it, Hegel's view of our perception of objects is fascinating.

First, in order to perceive anything at all, we must understand ourselves as perceivers. To do this, we are already treating ourselves as "something else" and not just "I" or "Me" or "Myself". Already, we're in a realm of relation between "I" as an object and "I" as a subject. Second, we open our eyes and see various objects: an apple and a banana. For Hegel, when we look at one object, it is never just one object but a relation between us, the object, and other objects. Said another way, we understand the objects of the world through the differences they have with each other. Not just that, but the specific properties of the object (i.e., "yellow," "sweet," "red," "sour") are equally in relation to each other within their own object (the yellow in the banana differentiates itself with the sweetness of the banana), but it also does the same with other properties of other objects (the yellow of the banana and the red of the apple).

In this way, we see things as "their own thing," but we also, at the same time, see things as a relationship with other things. As such, what is created with Hegel is a world of interconnections and wholes where each boundary between an object is both exact and determinate, but also loose and transient. Such a world is one that is exciting but not overbearing—constantly in flux, but there are still things to understand and hold onto. Moreover, it sees the world as interconnected and makes one part a part of everything else. To put it frankly, Hegel's metaphysics seems to formalize mystical and spiritual interpretations of reality that human beings have always had.

2. His Optimism

"...what one generation has brought forward as knowledge and spiritual creation, the next generation inherits. This inheritance becomes its soul, its spiritual substance, something one has become accustomed to, its principles, its prejudices, its riches....And since each generation has its own spiritual activity and vitality, it works upon what it has received and the material thus worked upon becomes richer. Our position is the same: to grasp the knowledge at hand, appropriate it and mold it." --Hegel, Introduction to the Lectures on the History of Philosophy.

The above quote, I think, illustrates Hegel's view of history, as well as his refreshing optimism. His view was that, with every age, people believe in particular ideas and self-reflections about who they are, what they should do, and how the world works. This includes the good parts as well as the bad. Moreover, these people in their particular age appropriated and adapted the beliefs and progress of the past and turned it into something that they thought was better for them. As such, what is true for one generation soon changes for the next, and, according to Hegel, the next iteration is a better one than the last, at least in some parts.

Compare this to the anxieties about the world seen in our current generation. There's conversation about the end of the world or the end of society everywhere. Our problems seem insurmountable and seem like they will burn everything to the ground. I propose we see the story a bit more like Hegel does. It's not that our futures are inevitably going to be good, but rather that the idea that everything is going to be bad is just another story! So why not choose the one that has a better prognosis? Take every contemporary problem we have today, and instead of panicking and thinking that it is never going to get better, imagine instead ways that it could improve—that is, ways that we could take the bad parts of the systems we have made and make them good. Such is, according to Hegel, the nature of human beings.

3. The Personal Element

Importantly, this can be applied to one's own personal journey. With Hegel, we can think about our lives as a constant dialectical movement between belief about a particular thing, counterarguments to that thing, and then a new belief. As such, our beliefs are never set in stone nor purely defining of who we are—we are constant works in progress with the hope that we are going in the right direction. On the one hand, this is a hopeful way of seeing our lives and our development as thinking beings; on the other hand, it produces a humility towards our current beliefs. The fact is that we won't be done with our self-development anytime soon, and we have no idea where our self-reflecting natures will take us.