OF A GOLDEN AGE

wednesday in philosophy class we argued tangentially about free will, which I only mildly buy into in any form, and I told the class that I believe humans are utterly predictable if there existed the capability to analyze us fully. good thing it doesn’t, right? unsurprisingly, I join the ranks of millions of other people who choose to not think about free will at all.

free will came up because of Hegel. through his idea of divine spirit, Hegel wraps up the entire universe in a process wherein we hone in on perfection for eternity — like a wildly oscillating curve that smoothes out as it extends toward infinity. in his mind, the germanic (christian) world is the best thing to come down the pipe and the best setup for the triumph of “reason” in order to perfect mankind.

his definition of reason, though, is aggressively vague. it guides the universe? okay, sure. it is substance and infinite power? here is where I start to lose the daylight in this concept. it’s probable that he defines the concept through examples in the rest of his book Philosophy of History but, frankly, the introduction doesn’t interest me enough to make me want to read on. Hegel’s writing is so obtuse and inaccessible — moreso than can be explained by his time frame in the early 1800s — that it turns me off in a big way.

ironic that Emerson and the transcendentalists were so influenced by Hegel when, in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, Hegel is considered largely impenetrable and only really relevant because of his influence on others. people resent having to read Hegel and only do so reluctantly, which I would imagine leads to far fewer people gleaning anything from Hegel’s writing. it’s sad, really. I liked the twenty pages that we read, but that was only after spending a number of hours reading it aloud to myself again and again. even logistically, that is too impractical to tolerate.

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