(THIS ARTICLE IS MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)
"Hegel's concept of experience, ace ... is precisely ... the experience of the term.” The words were groaned out by an older and more experienced student in the legendary tea room on the 9th floor of Niels Treschow's house in Blindern, where the Department of Philosophy was located in the last millennium. His concept-ravaged face inspired respect: He had read both Phenomenology of Spirit (1999, [1807]) and science of logic ('The Science of Logic', 1812–1816) in German.
It took a few years before I could connect something comprehensible with the "experience of the term". Ragnvald Blix's perhaps best-known caricature was published in January 1944 under the title "Til audiens hos Hitler". Vidkun Quisling extends his arm in the Nazi salute: "I am Quisling!" The doorman then asks: "And the name?"
Quisling presents himself as an individual, but the doorman thinks he is using a term. Quisling had, through his treason, actually become a term, a quisling. GWF Hegels (1770–1831) dialectical experience consists in the fact that when we think we maintain something individual, it turns out to be general. IN Phenomenology of Spirit Hegel begins by asking the figure of consciousness "What is now?" "Now is the day!" Then twelve hours pass, and the answer to the same question becomes "It's night!". This leads to a experience of the term now. It is different from both night and day, it is something other than the individual that should be maintained. And so Hegel continues throughout to show that we say something other than what we mean – at ever higher levels.
The self is a social relationship
The philosopher Sigurd Hverven has tried to write a "fairly simple book" about the notoriously difficult philosopher. It might have been better to call the book "Hegel's relevance – an attempt to show his relevance today". For this is not a systematic presentation of Hegel, but a book that concentrates on selected passages from Åndens phenomenology og The legal philosophy (1821). In conclusion, we also get an update of Hegel's lesser known naturfilosofi. Hverven's strength is that he has enough courage to put current problems in a Hegelian perspective.
Hverven's strength is that he has enough courage to put current problems in a Hegelian perspective.
Hverven emphasizes the procedural aspect of Hegel and takes the consequence that philosophy is "to grasp one's own time in thought". He thus rejects interpretations of Hegel that would imply the "end of history", a concept Francis Fukuyama has managed to further discredit with his book The End of History and the Last Man.
The basic perspective is that Hegel's thinking is "social to the core". Identity formationn is dialectical and social, "your identity is to be seen, recognized by others, to be met as a human being". Hegel thus becomes a means of counteracting atomism, that everyone "has an indisputable and self-written insight into himself and his own identity". Hverven repeatedly points out that the self is a social relationship, something fraught with risk that makes you vulnerable. Therefore, the 4th chapter becomes i Phenomenology of Spirit particularly important for Hverven, because that is where the battle for recognition unfolds.
Madness and recognition
Work goes a long way in making people dependent on social conditions: "if the human self is fundamentally dependent on recognition, there is no solid core in you, to which only you have access." Fixed core or not, no one can experience exactly what the subject experiences. I can relate to the suffering of others through external criteria, but if I did the same to myself, I would rightly be perceived as crazy: I'm bleeding, then it must hurt! Conclusion: Ouch! Ludwig Wittgenstein has rightly pointed out the asymmetry between first and third person when it comes to emotions such as pain – but such perspectives are not discussed in the book.
Somewhere, Hverven tries to understand madness as a withdrawal from relations of recognition: The madman is closed within himself. But madness can also be caused by the opposite, that one is too dependent on recognition. Here Hverven could have written better about the madness of Hegel's friend, the poet Friedrich Holderlin, e.g. based on Jean Laplanches' book Hölderlin and the father question ("Hölderlin and the Question of the Father", 1961). Laplanche emphasizes Hölderlin's violent idealization of Schiller, which is evident, among other things, in Hölderlin addressing him in unhelpful German. Then the tense arc bursts, and Hölderlin lives the last half of his life in a tower in Tübingen.
Dag og Tid and Morgenbladet
Hverven particularly emphasizes Hegel as the philosopher of love. In an early draft from the time in Frankfurt in 1797–98, Hegel wrote that "only in love is one with the object, it does not control and is not controlled", "it is a union of subject and object, freedom and nature, the real and the possible".
He also concentrates on the concept Ethical Life in Hegel's legal philosophy, which was published in 1821, especially what Hegel writes about marriage and child-rearing in approx. 30 of the book's total of 500 pages in the Suhrkamp version, while the state and civil society get less space in Hverven. The main idea is that man is a social being, and that relationships of recognition between people are fundamental.
The divide between fantasy and reality is breaking down at every level.
Jan Inge Sørbø proposes i Day and Time (03.05.24) that Ethical Life with Hegel should be translated with "morality", because morality (Nynorsk: sedation) is now associated with sexual life and crimes of immorality. This is a bad suggestion, since Hegel himself put Ethical Life against morality. Morality in Hegel is opposed to Ethical Life linked to the subjective will. Hegel uses moral og Ethical Life over 200 times in Spirit fairynomenologi, but Dag Johnsen has avoided the term entirely in his readable Norwegian translation from 2022 and translated it with e.g. "customs and customs". Hvern uses the word community spirit a few dozen times, a word which does not occur in Johnsen's translation.
Espen Hammer highlights Hegel's conservative aspects in Morgenbladet.
I Morgenbladet highlights Espen Hammer Hegel's conservative pages (12.04.24), that he "criticises the French Revolution for its blind radicalism and praises a strong (albeit constitutionally governed) monarchist state".
This is too one-sided. German idealism is unthinkable without the French Revolution. Herbert Marcuse, for example, claimed in Reason and Revolution (1941) at «The ideas of the French Revolution thus appear in the very core of the idealistic systems, and, to a great extent, determine their conceptual structure». Joachim Ritter har også i Hegel and the French Revolution ('Hegel and the French Revolution', 1972) showed that the image of Hegel as the philosopher of the Prussian Restoration is too one-sided. Hegel, together with Schelling and Hölderlin, were German Jacobins when they studied together in Tübingen. Hverven writes: "Although Hegel never ceased to understand the French Revolution as a significant historical step towards the realization of freedom and human dignity, he takes a sharp stand against the Jacobin terror on several occasions" p. (114).
Dialectics and hyperreality
A point Hverven does not mention is that the dialectic and the experience of the contradiction now disappear in a kind of hyperreality, which the sociologist Jean Baudrillard (1929–2007) formulated as the operational unity of the real and the imaginary. The distinction between fantasy and reality is breaking down on all levels – from the individual self-image to foreign policy enemy images. The world becomes the way we want it to be, without problems. Hegel's philosophy can instead inspire us to experience the contradiction.
Although Hverven provides many good examples of dialectics, he also has an undialectical touch when he idealises the Norwegian welfare state and, with Hegel, wants to use it to combat individualism and objective rationality and strengthen recognition and social ties. But social democracy also has its internal contradictions: the "Workers" party is hardly represented by a single traditional worker in the Storting. Thorbjørn Berntsen was the last. It would have been typical for Hegel to start from this internal contradiction.
Everyday examples
This was an inspiring and thought-provoking book to read. It has long since become a self-help book for young adults in the establishment phase, with everyday examples of the philosophical consequences of smartphone use, child rearing and love relationships. Using Hegel for this is an original move and represents valuable popularization. If the book can increase interest in philosophy in general and Hegel in particular, it must certainly be welcomed.
