Author: Kyle Marquis (---.237.65)
Date: 09-20-2002 14:31
I would like to talk for a few moments about G.W.F. Hegel. A German philosopher of the 19th century, Hegel, like so many thinkers before him, attempted to offer a description of the history and progress of thought, both within an individual mind and within the philosophy developed by society. Here at St. John's College, I'm reading his opus, Phenomenology of Spirit, right now.
Phenomenology of Spirit is, hands-down, the single worst-written book I have ever encountered. I can stomach reading Aristotle when it's translated word-for-word. I made it through Kant's often clumsy and befuddling prose. I didn't even blink when told to read the Summa Theologica of St. Thomas. But Hegel...God, there are no words. Imagine a cross between Timecube and Wick tantrum run back and forth through Babelfish three times. It is the most obfuscatory, poorly written, badly laid-out philosophical treatise I've ever encountered. In the classes I have on Hegel, we often can't even decide about whether he's talking about one or two people, despite having not one but two philosophers in the room. Making metaphysical judgments of Hegel is like making moral judgments of a thunderstorm--whenever something bubbles to the surface that looks like something normal people recognize, whether that be consciousness or Christianity or despair, closer examination causes that one clear beacon to sink back into the roiling jibberish that is the Hegelian dialectic.
Reading Hegel gives me a keen appreciation for these articles. Not only are they clearer than Hegel--that's a given--they allow me to examine Hegel as a non-unique phenomenon. That is, there's more than one person who writes like this. So, I ask this question: what the hell is wrong with people like this? It can't simply be pretence, since there are much better ways of being smug and obnoxious. Are there any cognitive scientists in the audience that could offer a professional opinion on this disorder? Is there some chemical thing in the brain that causes people like Hegel and our good article-writer to take what appear to be straightforward (indeed, often banal) concepts and run them through the linguistic wringer, producing sentences that could seriously maim or even kill a sufficiently sensitive linguist?
My mind is boggled, but it's dinner-time, so off I go. The good news, though, is that if I'm understanding Hegel's idea of the passage of the World Spirit properly, it makes a wonderful idea for a magic system. Unfortunately, I don't think Neon Genesis Evangalion got it right.
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Kyle Marquis
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