All pass and some return. The one who put the notion of relationship and contradiction at the center of reality, the one who thought again of the human being and gave him prominence in history, the one who spoke of blood and freedom in the great philosophy, was considered for a long time “a dead dog” But if we read Slavoj Žižek, Judith Butler, and Byung-Chul Han, some of the most widely followed thinkers of this century, one thing seems certain: Hegel’s legacy is very much alive.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel represents in popular culture the dark thinker that Monty Python proclaimed as the best defender in his old gag of the football game between German philosophers and Greek philosophers. Now, more than 250 years after his birth, books inspired by his philosophy are published and reissues of his work follow one another. Even the German Minister of Health, Karl Lauterbach, quoted a phrase of his – “freedom is the recognition of necessity” – to illustrate a debate on the moral duty to be vaccinated in times of pandemic.
Let’s see. Two of Slavoj Žižek’s latest books are Hegel in a Wired Brain and Less than nothing. Hegel and the shadow of dialectical materialism. On the phone, Zizek reflects on that Hegelian vision of history as a path of tears: “Hegel does not tell us about the future —that is Karl Marx—, but what he wants is for us to look at the processes of history and at the act of constantly rewriting it,” he warns. In this sense, Hegel’s lesson today is not to trust our visions of the future: “We have to be more skeptical, and not consider ourselves great makers of history,” he explains.
With posthumanism on the horizon, Zizek warns that the true game changer of our time is not surveillance capitalism, but possible new forms of domination through the brain-machine interface, whose goal is to make our thought processes transparent. This new technological capacity, incipient but real, “is horrible because it threatens metaphor, poetry and the very idea of language. What is at stake is our basic form of freedom, which is human thought”, he concludes.
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desire and power
Since his last book, The force of nonviolenceto the first, The disputed gender, Judith Butler’s work uses and transcends Hegelian concepts such as the need for recognition, mediation or the right to citizenship. Butler, who received his doctorate from the University of Heidelberg with a thesis on Hegel and the concept of desire, published an article in 2019 in The Institute of Art and Ideas, entitled ‘Hegel for our times’, where he underlined the current strength of the notion of interdependence, so Hegelian, compared to that of the individual. “It is in the course of the encounter with the other that I have the opportunity to become aware of myself,” he writes.
The thinker Byung-Chul Han, who studied Philosophy at the University of Freiburg, seems instead to read Hegel from a less transformative and more orderly point of view. On The agony of Eros, Han identifies Hegel’s notion of the absolute with love, and warns that in a narcissistic world where all social interaction is mediated by technology, we run the risk of eradicating the notion of the other. And one of his last books is Hegel and powerwhose thesis is that certain forms of dialectics of power can be given from harmony, as occurs with surveillance capitalism.
Populism and conspiracy
For Germán Cano, professor of Philosophy at the Complutense University of Madrid, there is a return to Hegel’s work due to the need to try to think about the whole, to think about the structure of reality, a relevant perspective in these times of populism or conspiracy. , based on the logic of scapegoats. For Cano, the problem lies in the fact that we live in increasingly atomized societies, without a robust public sphere, which makes it difficult for us to understand ourselves as a society.
Hegel was the first to unravel the trap behind expressions such as “it is what there is”, the one who discovered the gear of ideas disguised as natural statements, highlights Ricardo Espinoza Lolas, professor of History of Contemporary Philosophy at the Catholic University of Valparaíso . That is why it is so important today, because Hegel offers us tools to “perforate what is given, mediate what is immediate, and build a new socio-historical fabric”, such as the feminist, anti-racist or anti-colonial movements. It is the idea that underlies the Hegelian phrase “it would be necessary to remedy the misfortune of many with a few means that, however, are the property of others”.
Let’s not spit on Hegel
Hegelian glasses help to see beyond, but they don’t work for everyone. On Let’s spit on Hegel and other writings, the activist Carla Lonzi stressed that feminism was the first social movement to interrupt the masculine monologue, so carefully cultivated from Western philosophy. But in turn, the concept of transformation, so Hegelian, is at the heart of feminism. “From the hand of thinkers indebted to Hegel such as Butler, the idea that each person is simultaneously singular and plural is introduced”, reflects Francesca Recchia Luciani, professor of History of Philosophy at the University of Bari. Recchia affirms that we are experiencing a profound change, a conflict between an old and a new world, a dialectical duel that seeks to overcome the patriarchal paradigm, which denies space and voice to the majority of people.
A revolutionary beer drinker
Hegel lived through the French Revolution and understood that the idea of conflict in history is painfully real. Until 1800 Hegel did not want to be a philosopher but a revolutionary, and that crossroads is essential in his work, explains José María Ripalda, professor of History of Modern Philosophy at the UNED in The young Hegel. Essays and sketches.
Something of a poet, Hegel liked beer and girls, he had a son and, as a good student of ethics, he took care of his upkeep all his life. Beyond the philosophical icon, Hegel is also a man, in the same way that Beethoven said of Napoleon: “Isn’t he, after all, a human being?” Marie von Tucher, his wife, described him as one of those people who expects nothing and wishes for nothing. But not everyone loved him: Schopenhauer said that the Hegelian work would remain “a monument to German stupidity.”
In any case, Hegel, for whom philosophy was a kind of lost religion, is a light that does not go out. The historian Wilhelm Dilthey defined him as “one of those men who have never been young and for whom a hidden fire still burns in old age”.
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