The flasher’s trench coat
A critique.
No. I haven't read Hegel. And I know what you're thinking if you have- tugh, she hasn't even read Hegel. (Told you)
I've not read Hegel because it's not that his ideas lack value, but because the way in which his work is written expresses a quality of intellectual masturbation I find repulsive. Let me demonstrate by repeating myself
The phenomenological encounter with the Hegelian corpus (feel free to scroll), conceived not as a negation of its immanent dialectical totality but rather as a refusal — a refusal which is itself a kind of knowing, a knowing-against — proceeds from the recognition that the textual instantiation of Geist in its self-unfolding cannot be separated from the mode of its expression, which is to say: the form is the content, and the content, in its formal self-presentation, performs a species of intellectual auto-eroticism the Subject finds, in its immediate sensuous apprehension, repugnant.
Poor uni students… as if their employability prospects weren't bad enough… they have to sit down and swallow each load as it comes. Four years of being good students just to understand (and worse: write like) this gibberish.
At least if you learn nothing from the ancients, you might learn to think like one. They had no academic tradition to perform, no institution to impress — just the idea, standing in the open.
But the hallmark of a brilliant idea is that it doesn't need dressing up to be taken seriously. A brilliant idea shouldn't be ashamed of its nakedness. Stripped bare, truth is easier to communicate.
A key indicator of truly understanding an idea is whether you can paraphrase it — perfectly, excuse the oxymoron — without adding or removing any of its composite parts. Try it with Hegel. You'll find you either have to dumb it down until it says something obvious, or keep the jargon intact and say nothing at all. That's not profundity protecting itself. That's absence wearing a flasher trench coat.
Contemporary philosophy — anything from the last 200 years odd — reminds me of alchemy in its gatekeeping. The truth is hidden in here somewhere. Either you understand. Or you don't. And you parrot.
It is beautifully ironic that the age of light produced many thinkers and even more frauds. Bringers of light they would like to have called themselves in their private circle jerks — the philosophers being quite luciférien. The age that declared god dead and man sovereign, that mistook brilliant technology for illumination, was not stealing fire from heaven. It was striking its own match and calling that Prometheus. The light was its own. No circle needed.