Skholiast makes a key point in response to my post on perennial questions. Regarding the categories I have drawn in the history of philosophy – ascent and descent, intimacy and integrity – he notes that these categories need to be viewed as dialectical, such that different thinkers do not merely oppose each other but supersede each other. I have noted before that the categories are intended as ideal types, so real thinkers will rarely if ever fall on one side or the other; that most thinkers land somewhere in the middle is a feature of the scheme, not a bug. But Skholiast goes further. It is not merely that all of history’s great thinkers have some element of both these sides – that they are in the middle – but that they try in some respect to put them together. They aim, that is, at synthesis and not merely compromise. I addressed this point in the earlier (perennial questions) post, but wrote the post as if it’s only modern comparative philosophers like Ken Wilber who try to do this. Skholiast rightly notes that this sort of attempt to put together opposites dialectically is to be found in the West as early as Plato, and possibly before. On a question as big as ascent and descent, everyone tries to put the opposing views together to some extent.
This is a broadly Hegelian account of the history of philosophy. Judging by his use of the term Aufhebung, Skholiast has intended it to be such. My own sympathies with G.W.F. Hegel are no secret, given my influence by James Doull and his school. But while expressing my admiration for Hegel before, I also expressed my biggest concern about his system: that it fails to do justice to Asian thought.
Hegel’s Lectures on the History of Philosophy argue that philosophy proper begins with the Greeks and only develops in the world that they influenced. Much of this comes out of an idiosyncratic definition of philosophy, one that ties it closely to the individual political freedom that the Greek citizens had. I’ll admit I don’t understand Hegel well enough to understand why he defines philosophy this way, but it seems highly suspect to me – especially given that he is perfectly content to consider feudal Christian thought philosophy, at a time where there was little political freedom to express wide individual differences in thought, and when Greek democracy had disappeared.
Probably more important than mere definition is the question of timing. Hegel places Asian thought at the start of philosophy, in a way that presumes Asian systems of thought to be static. In Hegel’s defence, the project of translation was only beginning; Hegel had little access to Asian thought beyond the classics. If one hadn’t read any Western philosophical texts dating from the common era, it might look static too. With only the Asian classics available, it might be easy to characterize Asian systems as lost in one side of the truth: the Chinese lost in the particular and pragmatic details of statecraft and etiquette, the Indians lost in the abstract universals of metaphysics and logic. And so in neither one do you get something that Hegel (more plausibly) takes as central to philosophy: a universal principle that is nevertheless expressed in the particulars of reality. I’ll admit some of my own generalizations might sound like they support Hegel’s claims here – but that is because they are generalizations, and therefore by their nature must leave out some significant details.
For once one explores the later development of both Indian and Chinese thought, one can find major thinkers who take the particulars of the world as real expressions of universal principles, in the Aristotelian way that Hegel takes as so crucial – and what’s more, they do so in a way that could not have happened if not for the centuries of philosophical development that preceded them. I think here of Rāmānuja in India and Zhu Xi in China. Rāmānuja articulated an understanding of the world’s particulars as the real expression of a divine unity, refuting Śaṅkara’s view of those particulars as an illusion. But Rāmānuja was also building on Śaṅkara’s exposition of the nature of that unitary universal (braḥman); and both of them developed their views with the tools of logical argument first developed by Buddhists. All of this happened well after the classical era that Hegel’s books refer to. So too, Zhu Xi saw the particulars of the world as expressing a universal principle or pattern, li 理 – but he got that term from Chinese Buddhists who had equated this li principle with the emptiness of all things (a rather un-Hegelian view). It was his Confucian commitments, his desire to synthesize Buddhism and Confucianism, that led him to develop the idea of li as expressing a pattern in real, concrete things. And the idea of li among Buddhists had itself been a new Chinese development beyond the Indian schools it had derived from. In both places there is an active working out of philosophical positions in history – and one which leads, at one major medieval point, to a synthesizing view that puts together universal and particular in a way that Hegel should be able to respect.
If all of this is the case, it implies that there is a recognizably Hegelian development taking place in three different and parallel philosophical traditions, not merely in one. But this fact complicates any Hegelian story of philosophy’s history, because Hegel characterizes the history of philosophy as a single story with a single telos, a single development. The Marxist geographer David Harvey said perceptively about Marx’s thought that it is “strong with respect to time and weak with respect to space.” This insight, I think, was the foundation of Harvey’s project to turn Marx’s historical materialism into a historical-geographical materialism. I wonder whether one could take what Harvey did with Marx in social theory, and do it with Marx’s mentor in philosophy.
skholiast said:
Amod, just a brief off-the-cuff response/question at first to this in-depth post. What do you think of Collins’ work as an attempt to “geographize” the dialectic? I seem to recall you touching on him before. As I read him, the weakness seems to me to be that Collins subordinates philosophical truth to the the categories of the social sciences, which risks begging the question. It really does court mere compromise instead of synthesis. But of course one could also argue that Collins is attempting description, not dialectic.
I always like it when your posts get Doullian. Almost no one talks about him, it seems.
Amod Lele said:
I don’t think of Collins’s work as an attempt to geographize the dialectic at all; but that’s not really a weakness, because that’s not what it’s supposed to be. There’s really nothing dialectical that I can see about his book – as you say, it’s primarily description. Don’t get me wrong, description is useful; it’s a good one-volume history of philosophy, and I suspect Hegel could have done a much better job describing India and China if he’d had Collins (let alone Collins’s well documented sources) on his bookshelf beside William Jones and Alexander von Humboldt. Reading him would be a good start to thinking beyond the West, but only as a road map of the territory that lies ahead; one hasn’t actually begun the journey.
Collins does go beyond description to explanation/analysis; but as you also note, this is entirely done in the categories of contemporary social science. The mode of thought is universalizing comparison: one finds patterns (the law of small numbers, innovation through conservatism, etc.) according to which particular phenomena in the history of philosophy are likely to repeat themselves. There’s nothing wrong with this as far as it goes. But there’s also nothing dialectical about it; not only is it not synthesis, it’s not even compromise. The truth of the positions addressed is really not even discussed; rather, the truth of one methodological position, which roughly puts together a few modern thinkers like Durkheim and Weber, is assumed before the book begins.
I’m hoping to go back and read some more Doull in the next few months. My thoughts have been in a somewhat Hegelian direction lately and I’m interested in going further with that.
elisa freschi said:
Very insightful. I like your remark about the possibility of Hegel being right, but only as for a certain region within the development of Philosophy (understood by him as “History of Philosophy”). In this sense, even his remarks about Asian thought could be better understood as referring not to Asian thought sic et simpliciter, but to Asian thought within the History of *Western* philosophy (where, indeed, Asian thought has played, and often still plays, such a role).
Last, Saverio Marchignoli (2000, 2002, 2004) has shown –convincingly, in my humble opinion– that Hegel’s account of Asian thought is less straightforward as depicted by all of us. And I would not anyway damn someone because s/he shared the prejudices common to his/her era.
Amod Lele said:
The last thing I’d want to do is damn Hegel for sharing his era’s prejudices. Wilhelm Halbfass has argued that Hegel’s views on Indian thought were actually fairly forward-looking for his time – he was willing to grant that it was genuinely part of “the history of philosophy,” in a way that relatively few before him had been willing to do. (Does Marchignoli argue something similar, or does he go further or in a different direction?)
At the same time, if we are looking to give a remotely true account, we cannot share those prejudices ourselves. And those prejudices are in their way fairly central to Hegel’s system: if there are multiple histories of philosophy out there, with their own rational progresses and developments, then contemporary Western thought is dislodged from its podium as the place where spirit can think itself.
Thill said:
We are deeply indebted to Hegel for his insidious misconception that there was no pure philosophy in India and that all its philosophical thought was part of its religion. In the Philosophy of History, he claims that the Indian mind cannot conceive of reality in terms of “rational predicates”! He also offers the blinding insight, in the context of his “discussion” of Chinese morality that the Chinese lack the concept of trust!
As Schopenhauer accurately put it:
“But the height of audacity in serving up pure nonsense, in stringing together senseless and extravagant mazes of words, such as had previously been known only in madhouses, was finally reached in Hegel, and became the instrument of the most barefaced general mystification that has ever taken place, with a result which will appear fabulous to posterity, and will remain as a monument to German stupidity.”
As Marx pointed out in his critique of Hegels’s Philosophy of Right, the latter’s method typically abstracts or generalizes to a “universal principle” from particulars and then bombastically declares the stunning “discovery” that those particulars are “unfolding instantiations” of that “universal principle”!!!
Hegel’s much-vaunted “thesis-antithesis-synthesis” is sheer nonsense! You cannot “synthesize” contradictions, e.g., thesis and antithesis. You cannot “synthesize” a view and its opposite or negation! Try synthesizing “God exists.” and “God does not exist.”! You can only synthesize or combine different theses which are not mutually incompatible.
Thill said:
Thus saith Georg “Owl of Minerva” Hegel!
“The Hindoo is incapable of holding fast an object in his mind by means of rational predicates assigned to it, for this requires reflection.” (Phil of History, p. 157, Dover Publications, 1956)
Ok, then, “Hindoos” are not capable of reflection! But it is better to remain incapable of “reflection” than to engage in “reflection” a la Hegel!
“Deceit and cunning are the fundamental characteristics of the Hindoo. Cheating, stealing, robbing, murdering, are with him habitual.” (ibid., p. 158)
Well, Herr Hegel, you seem to have forgotten your Christianity and its “legend of the fall”. Does not your “highest religion” hold that “deceit and cunning” are evils of human nature? If so, they would also be “the fundamental characteristics” of Germans!
“What we call historical truth and veracity-intelligent, thoughtful comprehension of events, and fidelity in representing them-nothing of this sort can be looked for among the Hindoos.” (ibid., p. 162)
Well, where else can we turn for examples of “historical truth and veracity” than for such statements in your German “Volk-ly” product The Philosophy of History!!!
“Among the Hindoos there is no such superstition so far as it presents an antithesis to Understanding; rather their whole life and ideasare one unbroken superstition, because among them all is revery and consequent enslavement.” (ibid., p.167)
Well, Herr Professor, I wish you had met Herr Schopenhauer before writing all this Quatsch!
“This is the character of the Chinese people in its various aspects. Its distinguishing feature is , that everything which belongs to Spirit-unconstrained morality, in practice and theory, Heart, inward Religion, Science and Art properly so called is alien to it.” (ibid., p. 138)
Oh, ein Deutscher Owl of Minerva! You mention Confucius on p. 136 and give the (misleading) impression that you read his “moral apophthegms”. How could you all this about the Chinese if you even read a line of Confucius?
Schopenhauer was so right about you!
Correction: In the earlier response, I wrote, relying on my memory of having read the Philosophy of History several years ago, that Hegel says that the Chinese lack the concept of trust. Actually, he claims that the Chinese have not developed “the feeling of honor”!!! (ibid., p. 128)
Amod Lele said:
Hegel’s getting a lot of awful information. All of these views were current among most of the educated people that Hegel spoke to about these places. I think one can quite reasonably argue that, in acknowledging that somehow the primitive peoples of Asia had actually been able to produce something like philosophy, Hegel was well ahead of his time for the most part.
If your work is good enough to have people read it 200 years from now, others will pull passages from it and sneer at you too.
Thill said:
1. It is a non-sequitur to conclude that something must be good or great on the basis that a few or many have been reading or subscribing to it for a significant number of years. Just take a look at the history of superstition, religion, theology, ethics, and philosophy!
2. I was not “pulling passages” randomly from Hegel, but quoting his silly derogatory conclusions on the “Hindoo”, Indian culture, and the Chinese. A man who claims to be a philosopher cannot justify absurdities, illogic, and patent falsehoods on the grounds that they were prevalent in “learned” circles! And a scholar has no excuse for remaining abysmally ignorant of important material on her subject accessible to his or her contemporaries.
In Hegel’s case, his silly derogatory statement that the Chinese lack “unconstrained morality” are at odds with his own grudging acknowledgment concerning the “moral apophthegms” of Confucius. Further, the notion that members of a civilized and hierarchical society such as China would lack “the feeling of honor” is absurd. It only takes minimal thought to figure out that a “feeling of honor”, not to mention a complex code of honor, is a concomitant of rank, status, and hierarchy. Hegel’s comments on the “Hindoo” and the Chinese tell us more about his intellectual abilities than about the “Hindoo” or the Chinese.
3. In the context of understanding the philosophical and literary heritage of India and China, Hegel was really ignorant and backward compared to Schopenhauer, Goethe, and others in Germany and England at that time.
4. When he claims that murdering comes naturally to the “Hindoo”, he seems to have forgotten the history of Europe! His must be a great and acutely logical mind indeed not to see that the “Hindoos” and the Chinese could point to that history to support the claim that murdering comes naturally to Europeans.
Amod Lele said:
“Try synthesizing ‘God exists.’ and ‘God does not exist.’!”
Sure! Any synthesis of the two would very likely involve the point that God exists only in a certain and particular sense of “God” (and perhaps also of “exists”) – perhaps Aristotle’s First Explanation / Demiurge, or something like Aurobindo’s evolving Hegelian cosmic spirit. Such a being has enough divine attributes for the concept “God” to apply meaningfully, but is very different from the bearded dude in the sky who literally turns people into pillars of salt, as most people imagine God to be. These two statements, which contradict each other when left alone, can be put together quite easily once more careful attention is paid to the concepts in use. Thanks for providing a good example!
Thill said:
“Any synthesis of the two would very likely involve the point that God exists only in a certain and particular sense of “God” (and perhaps also of “exists”) – perhaps Aristotle’s First Explanation / Demiurge, or something like Aurobindo’s evolving Hegelian cosmic spirit.”
That’s interesting, but try this one for a so-called Hegelian synthesis: God is “Sat” or “absolute” existence, but having infinite modes, it is also Nirguna or Sunya, the “Great Void” which the human mind identifies with nothingness or non-existence. So, God has both existence and non-existence (Sunya) as its modes.
Impressed? LOL
Well, neither your shot nor mine hits the synthesis mark! The reason is that neither of us has given a “synthesis” proper or a view which has combined the contradictory claims (a logically impossible feat anyway!) that God exists and does not exist. What we have done is simply clarify or interpret the claims “God exists.” and “God does not exist.” to make them meaningful! Both of us have merely engaged, in the guise of doing some profound synthesis, in an interpretation of the claims “God exists.” and “God does not exist.”!
You have tried to make sense of the claim that “God exists.” by interpreting “God” in terms of “Demiurge” or “Aurobindo’s Hegelian cosmic spirit” exists.” You have also tried to make sense of the claim that “God does not exist.” by interpreting “God” now to mean something different, viz., “the bearded dude in the sky who literally turns people into pillars of salt”.
So, you have simply offered an interpretation of the two claims, but, obviously, your interpretation or alleged “synthesis” equivocates on “God”.
Try synthesizing “The Demiurge exists.” and “The Demiurge does not exist.”! Or, better, “The cosmic spirit exists.” and “The cosmic spirit does not exist.” Or perhaps, we could announce a prize for those who can synthesize “Hegel is a thinker.” and “Hegel is not a thinker.”?
It might seem that my version comes closer to a synthesis with its invocation of “modes” and such, but I don’t think it does. It is still an interpretation of the claims masquerading as a “synthesis”!
What I did was to say that “God does not exist.” means “God exists in the mode of Sunyata or Void.”. It is also an interpretation of “God does not exist.” and a bizarre one too. It is a misuse or abuse of language to distort “does not exist” to mean “exists as sunyata or Void”! “X does not exist” simply means the damn thing “X” does not exist, is not real or actual.
Anyway, contradictory statements, by definition, cannot be combined, reconciled, or synthesized if construed literally. Hence, if one wants to achieve this logically impossible feat, one is led along the tortuous route of equivocation, semantic distortion, etc. But the feat remains impossible as it must!
Thill said:
Does the view that Hegel is a zombie manage to synthesize the opposing views that he is alive and that he is dead? LOL
Seriously, does the concept of a “zombie” synthesize the opposing notions of “alive” and “dead”?
A zombie is a reanimated corpse. In other words, a dead body brought back temporarily to life. So, to say that “Hegel is a zombie.” implies that Hegel died and his corpse was reanimated, perhaps by means of “dialectical voodoo” or something like that.
But a zombie is still alive. So, it is not dead. Thus to say that Hegel is a zombie is still to deny that Hegel is lifeless or dead. Therefore, the claim “Hegel is a zombie.” still excludes the claim “Hegel is dead.”
The claim that X is a synthesis of Y and Z is false if X excludes Y and/or Z. Since the claim “Hegel is a zombie.” excludes the claim “Hegel is dead.” or “Hegel is lifeless.”, it cannot be a synthesis of “Hegel is alive.” and “Hegel is dead.” (QED)
Amod Lele said:
“The cosmic spirit exists” and “The cosmic spirit does not exist” could similarly be put together with a subtler definition of “Demiurge” – or, for that matter, “exists” (such a spirit could exist in one sense or respect but not in another). Still, I will grant you the larger and more important point that there are some opposing pairs of propositions that cannot ultimately be synthesized. But at any rate, this focus on single propositions is beside the point. Generally speaking, it is not supposed to be single propositions that are synthesized in the first place, but larger positions, theories, worldviews. Notice the examples of synthesis I discussed in my previous post on the nature of synthesis: putting together the best in a contrary pair of vices in order to make a truly virtuous mean; or Śāntideva’s suspicion of external goods and Nussbaum’s embrace of them. If you reduce any of these to a single proposition, you miss the whole point. Nobody lives for a single proposition taken in abstraction (at least, not if they live remotely well). The idea that every position comes down to a single proposition is the kind of reductionist approach that Hegel is rightly avoiding.
Thill said:
I am sure you wouldn’t deny that points of view or positions have a couple (sometime a single one) of constitutive claims or propositions and that the possibility of synthesis of those points of view or positions depends on the possibility of synthesis of those constitutive claims.
Amod Lele said:
To the extent that that’s true, synthesizing the constitutive claims can be a matter of accepting one of the claims but not others.
Pingback: How not to think dialectically | Love of All Wisdom