"Hegel" on the First World War

I’ve been playing around a bit with Google’s AI chat program, Gemini, formerly called Bard. I asked it to create a text for a one-page commentary by G.W.F. Hegel on the First World War.

It quickly produced the text below. My comments are below it. I’m afraid AI Hegel was a bit lazy on this one.

The Spirit of Strife: A Hegelian Reflection on the Great War

By Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

The recent conflagration that engulfs Europe, aptly named the "Great War," presents a spectacle both tragic and fascinating for the discerning observer. While the immediate causes may be attributed to the machinations of statesmen and the clash of national ambitions, a deeper analysis reveals the underlying currents of the World Spirit at work.

This war, in its unprecedented scale and destructive character, signifies a moment of dialectical tension within the historical process. The existing order, characterized by the nation-state system and its attendant rivalries, has reached a point of internal contradiction. The pursuit of individual national interests, fueled by narrow self-preservation and a misplaced sense of absolute sovereignty, has resulted in a collision of wills on a global scale.

However, within this destructive conflict lies the potential for progress. The very act of war, though seemingly antithetical to reason, can serve as a catalyst for the emergence of a higher synthesis. Through the crucible of conflict, the limitations of the nation-state system become evident, paving the way for a more universal and rational order.

Just as the petty conflicts of ancient Greece ultimately gave rise to the Roman Empire, a larger political entity encompassing diverse cultures, the Great War may prefigure the emergence of a global community. This new order, however, will not be imposed through brute force, but through the recognition of mutual interdependence and the necessity for cooperative action on a global scale.

The horrors of war, with its immense loss of life and devastation, serve as a stark reminder of the limitations of human nature and the dangers of unchecked national ambition. Yet, within the dialectical process, even tragedy can become a catalyst for progress. The World Spirit, through the agency of historical forces, strives towards the realization of Reason in the world. The Great War, though a moment of immense suffering, may ultimately pave the way for a more unified and rational global order.

It is important to note that this realization will not be achieved overnight. The path towards a more harmonious world will be arduous and fraught with challenges. However, the dialectical process inherent in history suggests that the very contradictions and conflicts of the present hold the seeds for a brighter future. The task of future generations, then, is to learn from the present tragedy and work towards the reconciliation of national interests with the demands of a globalized world.

This, then, is the message the Great War, in all its destructive fury, whispers to the attentive ear. It is a message of tragedy and hope, a reminder of the fragility of human civilization and the ever-present potential for progress. [emphasis in Gemini text]

It’s fun to do. But several things stick out in this little AI Hegel essay.

It manages not to mention even a single country that actually took part in the war. Also, not a single national leader. Couldn’t he have tossed in at least a mention of Kaiser Bill, or to poor old Franz Ferdinand and his fateful trip to Sarajevo?

AI Hegel’s text uses the present tense, i.e., it assumes that the war is still going on. So that got him out of having to say anything about the big mess the peace treaties after the war left behind.

AI Hegel is upbeat. Human Hegel wasn’t particularly upbeat. He wrote things like, “history is not the soil in which happiness grows. The periods of happiness in it are the blank pages of history." (Lectures on the Philosophy of World History) He also called history a “slaughter block.” That would have been a relevant description of the First World War!

It calls the war “a moment of dialectical tension within the historical process.” For Hegel, the process of history was a dialectical development. Which in his version proceeded by the process by which given moment is faced with a negative/opposite of itself, and the contradiction is transcended by a “sublation” in which the contradiction is preserved, cancelled, and lifted up to a higher level. And that counts as progress, because that is how history progresses.

But the higher level doesn’t necessarily produce greater human happiness. And the whole process isn’t one that stumbles occasionally onto moments of “dialectical tension.” The whole process is dialectical.

AI Hegel seems to be a bit fuzzy on this whole contraction/sublation business. He talks about the “emergence of a higher synthesis.” It’s a common assumption that Human Hegel’s dialectics involved a triad: thesis-synthesis-antithesis. But that was actually Immanuel Kant’s version of dialectics, not Hegel’s. I think AI was aping Kant a bit on that one.

I double-checked by asking Gemini to have AI Hegel comment on Kant’s dialectics. And AI Hegel responded by talking about his own dialectics involving “a process of negation and synthesis.”

AI Hegel also seems to have borrowed from Tom “the-world-is-flat” Friedman: “The task of future generations, then, is to learn from the present tragedy and work towards the reconciliation of national interests with the demands of a globalized world.”

Moral of this story: If you’re writing a paper for a philosophy class, don’t ask AI Hegel to do it for you!

The History of Hegel: Biographers have been taking new looks at Hegel 250 years after his birth

It seems appropriate to start off this site called Contradicciones [this piece originally appeared on my Substack site] that is mainly devoted to politics and history with a column on the grand philosopher of contradictions himself, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel.

Hegel’s 250th birthday in 2020 was the occasion in the German-speaking world for several new publications on his life and times. One of those is Hegel: Der Weltphilosoph (2020) (Hegel: The World Philosopher) by Sebastian Ostritsch. Hegel is one of the most influential figures in “continental” philosophy. Through Marx and Engels, his philosophy of history is especially well known, though those two tried to draw a sharp distinction between their philosophy and Hegel’s. But there is a conservative trend of historical thought also associated with Hegel, such as Francis Fukuyama’s famous End of History thesis.

But his influence also shows up in diverse philosophies, from pragmatism (via the Young Hegelians) to existentialism (Heidegger, Sartre). Hegel is considered one of the major figures of the “classical” period of German philosophy whose leading figures included Immanuel Kant, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Friedrich Schelling, and Hegel himself. Hegel’s philosophy provided a strong impetus to the development of social theory and sociology.

The great value of Hegel’s approach for understanding history and politics in the present is that he combined an Enlightenment notion of historical progress with an understanding that such progress occurred via contradictions. This gave him a way to understand the immense messiness in both politics and history, in which progress in science or improvements in governing institutions could come together with negative and destructive developments.

We see that in Ostritsch’s account of one of the most famous incidents in Hegel’s life, in which he said after catching sight of Napoleon Bonaparte in the university city of Jena, he had seen the World Spirit riding on a horse. Hegel understood, as many of his contemporaries did, that Napoleon’s wars of conquest were simultaneously French nationalist power politics and also a powerful blow against feudal institutions that opened the way for the development of more republican forms of government, an outcome to which Hegel was very sympathetic.

At the same time, Napoleon’s soldiers ransacked Hegel’s own house and he narrowly avoided them roughing him up personally. Napoleon’s occupation of Jena in 1806 also coincided in time with Hegel’s sending his only manuscript of his first major publication, The Phenomenology of Spirit, to his publisher. Ostritsch quotes a contemporary’s observation that the book was literally completed under the “thunder of cannons in the battle of Jena.”

Ostritsch opens his biography with a description of dialectics, a concept heavily associated with Hegel but today especially with Marxism. It’s actually a much older concept in Western philosophy, with the pre-Socratic Heraclitus (540-480 BCE) typically credited with its origination. The most popular description of Hegel’s dialectic, as Ostritsch explains, is wrong: the notion of development as a process of Thesis-Synthesis-Antithesis. This triad more accurately describes Kant’s formal logic. But it was actually a philosophy professor named Heinrich Moritz Chalybäus, who popularized it to describe Hegel’s dialectic and who directly influenced the thinking on the subject of, among others, Karl Marx.

Hegel’s actual dialectic was part of his working through the problems stemming from Kant’s transcendental philosophy while incorporating the contemporary scientific developments in electricity, chemistry, and magnetism into a philosophy of nature. It was not a concept of formal logic but an understanding of development in nature as a process of one state of being developing into another through negation of itself, and then being raised to a higher level in a way that both preserves and cancels the original state and its negation. (The latter step is called Aufhebung in German, “sublation” in English.)

This philosophy that proceeded from the notion of identity within contradictions came to be known as identity philosophy, a viewpoint developed in close collaboration between Hegel, Schelling, and the poet Friedrich Hölderlin. The three had been roommates at the Tübingen Stiftung where they had their college-level education. Their shared philosophical perspective was based on the formula hen kai pan (Ἓν καὶ Πᾶν), a Stoic concept which for the three stood for Spinoza’s idea of the unity of everything.

Hegel’s career included stints as a private tutor; a professor in Jena; editor of a newspaper; work on scholarly journals; principal of a school (Gymnasium) in Nuremberg; a professorship in Heidelberg; and, finally, assuming the professorship at the University of Berlin previously held by Fichte, where he served from 1818 until his death in 1831.

Hegel is generally not understood as a political philosopher in the sense of Locke, Rousseau, or Jefferson. But the political elements of his philosophy were highly developed, if carefully formulated to minimize trouble with official censors. Hegel’s concept of Enlightenment progress saw it as a continuing unfolding of the consciousness of freedom, a further development of Kant’s philosophy that put freedom at its center. And Hegel understood this very much in the sense of the ideals of the French and American revolutions, with both of which he remained a sympathizer his whole life.

Ostritsch at least partially misses this aspect of Hegel’s outlook, describing him as “in political matters an ideology-free realist,” apparently assuming that being a “realist” about political affairs was incompatible with holding a distinct ideology. Yet he also gives Hegel well-deserved credit for risks he took during his Berlin years to support pro-republican dissenters.

But Ostritsch also rejects the notion, common in earlier Anglo-Saxon scholarship, of Hegel as an authoritarian reactionary. The 20th century German legal philosopher Carl Schmitt – a major figure among the Conservative Revolution thinkers of the 1920s, a supporter of the Third Reich and later an influential conservative in the West German Federal Republic – had a far better understanding of Hegel in his remark that when Hitler became Chancellor in 1933, “Hegel, so to speak, died.”

Hegel’s life and career was intertwined in many ways with that of Schelling. The younger Schelling emerged early as a philosophical whiz kid, pursuing a path heavily emphasizing natural philosophy that took up the challenges presented by Fichte’s philosophy. Hegel began as a partisan of Schelling’s philosophy and with the 1801 essay known as the Differenzschrift, he put what was basically his common position with Schelling at that time. But by 1807, after the publication of Hegel’s Phenomenology, Hegel and Schelling went in different philosophical directions which also coincided with a personal break between them.

There was also a political element in their differences. Hegel, Hölderlin, and Schelling in their youth were all enthusiasts for the democratic impulses of the French Revolution. Hölderlin later narrowly ducked a treason charge over his connection to French revolutionaries. But Schelling took a much more conservative turn, embracing the conservative bent of the Restauration period that followed the Congress of Vienna in 1814-15.

Several years after Hegel’s passing, the Prussian King Friedrich Wilhelm IV selected Schelling to take his place in Berlin, tasking him with rooting out the “dragon’s seed of Hegelian pantheism” that His Majesty imagined the deceased Hegel had been spreading to impressionable students in his realm.

In present-day terms, the king expected Schelling to “cancel” Hegel posthumously. It turns out in the long run that his success in that endeavor was fairly limited.

Boris Johnson and the road to "illiberal democracy"

There's a difference between revolution and revolutionary methods. Sociologists and political scientists can come up with more-or-less well-delineated definitions to clearly distinguish them. For most people, the distinction is about as vague as it is irrelevant.

Britannica Online provides a useful general definition of the concept as it evolved since antiquity (Revolution, 2019), including references to these modern theories of revolution:

The 16th-century Italian writer Niccolò Machiavelli recognized the importance of creating a state that could endure the threat of revolution; but, at the same time, his detailed analysis of power led to a new belief in the necessity of changes in the structure of government on certain occasions. This new acceptance of change placed Machiavelli at the forefront of modern revolutionary thought, even though he never used the word revolution in his texts, and he was primarily concerned with the creation of a truly stable state.

The 17th-century English writer John Milton was an early believer in revolution’s inherent ability to help a society realize its potential. He also saw revolution as the right of society to defend itself against abusive tyrants, creating a new order that reflected the needs of the people. To Milton, revolution was the means of accomplishing freedom. Later, in the 18th century, the French, Haitian, and American revolutions were attempts to secure freedom from oppressive leadership. Modern revolutions have frequently incorporated utopian ideals as a basis for change. [my emphasis]

The Britannica editors also give credit to Immanuel Kant, who "believed that revolution was a 'natural' step in the realization of a higher ethical foundation for society," noting that the Kantian "idea helped serve as a basis for the American and French revolutions." Although in the former, more people got it directly from Thomas Paine rather than from Kant.

They even give credit to Hegel as "a crucial catalyst in the formation of 20th-century revolutionary thought" who "saw revolutions as the fulfillment of human destiny, and he saw revolutionary leaders as those necessary to instigate and implement reforms." A new biography of Hegel by Klaus Vieweg that emphasizes Hegel's republican thought rooted in the French Revolution, as suggested by its subtitle, Hegel: Der Philosoph der Freiheit [Hegel: The Philosopher of Freedom] (2919). Hegel, like Thomas Jefferson, was deeply engaged with the political ideals of the French Revolution and supportive of them, while of course keeping a critical view of its actual outcomes. Paine himself was an elected deputy to the French Revolutionary National Convention, though his service was interrupted for a year when he was imprisoned for his criticism of the Terror.

In the United States for the last 40 years, Republicans have tended to be more comfortable than Democrats with using "revolution" to describe their goals, e.g., the Reagan Revolution, the Gingrich Revolution. Although Bernie Sanders' use of "political revolution" currently has Republicans, corporate Democrats, and poor babbling Chris Matthews reverting to a more classical conservative view of at least feigning horror over the very notion.

But in our current, much-discussed trend in the world of rising authoritarianism, including in the US, Europe, Latin America, and India, some governments and parties are using and advocating methods that the Founding Father of modern reactionary thought, Edmund Burke, might have regarded as French Jacobin approaches.

The authoritarian, "illiberal democracy" that Viktor Orbán established after winning the Hungarian Presidency in 2010, he moved rapidly to build the current version of government in Hungary, using extreme gerrymandering, wide-ranging control of the press with help from allied oligarchs, politicized institutions of justice, without resorting to tactics like jailing or murdering journalists. Elections are still nominally free and competitive and people aren't arrested for political reasons. But the system is sufficiently rigged that Orbán's party can retain control without winning a majority in elections.

Peter Oborne has a thought-provoking take on Britain's Trumpish Prime Minister which is a reminder that there are various potential models for those seeking to get rid of democracy (Boris Johnson as a revolutionary figure, Boris Johnson is leading a revolution, and this time it's coming from the right Middle East Eye 02/08/2020:

Most of us were taught in college to think that revolutionary movements come from the left. It seemed to make sense: Robespierre, Marx, Lenin, Che Guevara, Mao. It may be time to reconsider. Johnson is leading a revolution, and this time it's coming from the right.

He's either forgotten, does not know, or most likely does not care that the Conservative Party came into existence in the wake of the French Revolution as a defender of great institutions - monarchy, parliament, rule of law, the church - against abstraction, ideology and political violence.

This means that Johnson repudiates the doctrines of every Conservative leader from the Duke of Wellington onwards. Johnson's hostility to institutions is so striking that I don't believe he can be viewed as a Conservative in the way the term has been understood over the last two centuries.

The party he leads has detached from its moorings, while Johnson himself should be understood as part of a group of populist leaders that includes Donald Trump, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and most relevantly Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban. [my emphasis]

He cites various examples of Johnson's authoritarian bent, including trying to politicize the courts, attacked and restricted journalists Trump-style, and a five-week shutdown of Parliament last fall that the British Supreme Court ruled illegal.

Oborne also calls attention to the often-mentioned charismatic leader in building an authoritarian political order. He cites an article by New Statesman international editor Jeremy Cliffe (Central Europe’s authoritarians show where an unleashed Boris Johnson could lead Britain 12/18/2019) on authoritarianism in the Visegrad nations - Czechia, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia. Cliff sees Boris Johnson as having just followed an "electoral narrative of 'people versus politicians' requiring rescue by a muscular father-of-the-nation type" that "is straight out of the Visegrad playbook."

But I try to be cautious about the notion a single charismatic leader as a ncessary element of authoritarian rule. All movements, including democratic ones, need leadership. Conventional wisdom often equates populism with authoritarianism and rightwing politics. I take a more restrictive view of populism as a way of doing politics that pose an antagonism between "the elite" and "the people." There are left and democratic versions of populism. And charismatic leadership does not equate to authoritarian or antidemocratic political goals.

But the institutional moves toward dismantling democracy and the rule of law need to be taken very seriously. And in the United States, the Democrats need to take "revolutionary" actions by the Republicans as the sign of asymmetric polarization that need to be countered within the rule of law. But they need to give up the fantasy that they can be countered with covering and "bipartisan" platitudes.

Again with Hegel and thesis-antithesis-synthesis

A major new biography of the philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831) by Klaus Wieweg was published this year, Hegel.Der Philosoph der Freiheit (Hegel: The Philosopher of Freedom). I'm working my way through it. But it reminded me of one of the weird parts of Hegel's legacy is that his descriptions of his central concept of dialectics was long described by the triad thesis-antithesis-synthesis.

The reason this is weird is that Hegel never used that formula to describe his version of dialectics. For Hegel, dialectics was not simply a principle of logic. He used it to understand developments in history, organic growth, and even natural science and physics more generally.

Hegel's brand of dialectics

His use of the concept in organic development is shown by his famous example of a tree growing. Hegel had been very interested in Goethe's studies on plants in Weimar while Hegel was a professor in nearby Weimar, and Goethe's findings were an important influence on the development of Hegel's thought. As Julie Maybee describes it (Hegel’s Dialectics Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy 06/3/2016):

... the highest determination of the concept of “tree” will include within its definition the dialectical process of development and change from seed to sapling to tree. As Hegel says, dialectics is “the principle of all natural and spiritual life” ..., or “the moving soul of scientific progression” ... Dialectics is what drives the development of both reason as well as of things in the world.

Hegel saw the dialectical movement (in thought and in things) as based on contradictions. Science around 1800 was being transformed by important developments in understanding magnetism, electricity, and chemistry. Alessandro Volta (1745-1827) successfully demonstrated the first battery to store electricity in 1800, for which he was rightly renowned. Recent discoveries in geology and expanded biological investigations had made people aware that the earth and its organic inhabitants had gone through long periods of complex development. Physics was advanced enough that there was discussion of how the universe may be expanding out from a single central point. The nature of light and its relationship to heat was a big focus. Goethe famously criticized Isaac Newton's theory of light heavily; his criticism was basically wrong, but it wasn't as quirky as it has sometimes been portrayed.

Old science can later sound like mystical speculation

It requires some effort today to picture how drastically innovative such things seemed at the time. Science, and philosophy that tries to make theoretical frameworks based on the science of its time, are trying to understand new discoveries in the context of previous knowledge and assumptions and to make new assumptions in the process. In the period around 1800, Charles Darwins's and Alfred Russel Wallace's work that produced the theory of biological evolution by natural selection and Gregor Mendel's gene theory were in the future. So for people of Hegel's time to understand evolution in the way that was possible in 1900 or today. Just as our understandings of gravity, time, and space could only take their current forms after Einstein's theory of relativity and theories of quantum physics based on expanded knowledge of the microscopic world had been developed.

But the cutting-edge discoveries in magnetism, electricity, and chemistry put dualities like attraction and repulsion, combination and separation, positive and negative poles, at the center of understanding the physical world. So while dialectic thought in philosophy had a long history going back to Heracleitus and Socrates, the versions that appear in Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762-1814), and Friedrich Wilhelm Schelling (1775-1854) were simply relics of ancient philosophy, but philosophical forms newly applied and developed based on contemporary knowledge.

Hegel's understood the growth of a tree in his scheme as a process of contradiction and development. The acorn in the ground grows into a tree. In Hegel's terms, the tree is the negation of the acorn. When it emerges as a tree, it is no longer an acorn. But when the acorn becomes the tree, what is happening is that the possibility contained in the acorn to become a tree is becoming real. In this case, it could be said to be a teleological possibility, because the acorn is organically programmed to become a tree. In Hegelian terms, developing into a tree is a necessity for the acorn. It cannot remain in the form of only an acorn.

In this understanding, the acorn and the tree are contradictions of each other, in the sense that the acorn contains its acorn nature and also the tree is a inherent part of the acorn. It is part of the nature of an acorn that it has an internal drive to become a tree, i.e., not-an-acorn.

But Hegel understands the acorn-to-tree transformation as an Aufheben, which translates into the generally unfamiliar English word ablation. Klaus Wieweg describes the scheme as the "logischen Form der bestimmten Negation - der berühmten Hegelschen Aufhebung als Einheit von Vernichten, Bewahren und Hoherheben."

Hegel's "ablation" (preserving, cancelling, and raising to a higher level) is not that famous triad

The acorn is destroyed or cancelled in the sense of no longer being an acorn. But it is maintained or preserved in the sense that the tree form was already contained in the acorn; it's a transformation of the same organic entity. And it is raised to a higher level in the sense that it has become a bigger and more mature form of itself.

Herbert Marcuse in his book on Hegel, Reason and Revolution: Hegel and the Rise of Social Theory (1941/1960) writes:

... Hegel makes the claim that the triad (Triplizität) is the true form of thought. He does not state it as an empty schema of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis, but as the dynamic unity of opposites. It is the proper form of thought because it is the proper form of a reality in which every being is the synthetic unity of antagonistic conditions. [my emphasis in bold]

Walter Kaufmann (Hegel: An Introduction, 1965) describes Hegel's use of Aufheben in his dialectical triad as having the triple meaning of preserving, cancelling, and lifting up to another (implicitly higher) level:

... the characteristic Hegelian term aufheben, rendered "sublimate" throughout this book, is encountered in Schiller. The word, of course, is common and can mean "cancel" - and in Hegel's usage it almost always means at least that - but it can also mean "preserve" and, thirdly, "lift up." Often Hegel uses aufheben to suggest all three meanings at once, as in the example just given. ...

Aufheben (sublimate) means literally "pick up." Like every single one of the other terms explained so far, it is quite common in ordinary speech: it is what you do when something bas fallen to the floor. But this original sensuous meaning has given rise to two derivative meanings which are no less common: "cancel," and "preserve" or "keep." Something may be picked up in order that it will no longer be there; on the other hand, I may also pick it up to keep it. When Hegel uses the term in its double (or triple) meaning - and he expressJy informs us that he does ... - he may be said to visualize how something is picked up in order that it may no longer be there just the way it was, although, of course, it is not cancelled altogether but lifted up to be kept on a different level. [my emphasis in bold]

The Hegel scholarship is clear on the thesis-antithesis-synthesis triad: Hegel didn't use it.

Kaufmann writes:

In an interesting note in the second edition [of the Critique of Pure Reason], Kant called attention to the fact that his twelve categories of the understanding are arranged in four groups of three, and that the third category in each group is a synthesis of the two preceding it. (He did not use the word "synthesis" at this point...)

Fichte introduced into German philosophy the three-step of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis, using these three terms. Schelling took up this terminology; Hegel did not. He never once used these three terms together to designate three stages in an argument or account in any of his books. And they do not help us understand his Phenomenology, his Logic, or his philosophy of history; they impede any open-minded comprehension of what he does by forcing it into a schema which was available to him and which he deliberately spurned. The mechanical formalism, in particular, with which critics since Kierkegaard have charged him, he derides expressly and at some length in the preface to the Phenomenology. [my emphasis in bold]

Gustav Mueller, who Kaufmann cites, wrote in "The Hegel Legend of Thesis-Antithesis-Synthesis" (Journal of the History of Ideas 19:3; June 1958) criticizing the treatment W.T. Stace gave to Hegel's dialectic:

This abstract separation of "principles" and " vision" is utterly un-Hegelian. The actual texts of Hegel not only occasionally deviate from "thesis, antithesis, and synthesis," [as Stone argued] but show nothing of the sort. "Dialectic" does not for Hegel mean "thesis, antithesis, and synthesis." Dialectic means that any "ism " - which has a polar opposite, or is a special viewpoint leaving " the rest " to itself - must be criticized by the logic of philosophical thought, whose problem is reality as such, the "World-itself."

Mueller could identify only two obvious references in Hegel's works to the "the Fichtean terms 'thesis, antithesis, synthesis'" used together:

In all the twenty volumes of Hegel's "complete works" [as of 1958] he does not use this "triad" once; nor does it occur in the eight volumes of Hegel texts, published for the first time in the twentieth century. He refers to "thesis, antithesis, and synthesis" in the Preface of the Phaenomenology of Mind, where he considers the possibility of this "triplicity" as a method or logic of philosophy. According to the Hegel-legend one would expect Hegel to recommend this "triplicity."

There Hegel uses the term "triplicity" to refer to philosophical use of the triad without explicitly citing the words "thesis, antithesis, and synthesis".

But, after saying that it was derived from Kant, he calls it a "lifeless schema," "mere shadow" and concludes: "The trick of wisdom of that sort is as quickly acquired as it is easy to practice. Its repetition, when once it is familiar, becomes as boring as the repetition of any bit of sleight-of-hand once we see through it. The instrument for producing this monotonous formalism is no more difficult to handle than the palette of a painter, on which lie only two colours..." [my emphasis]

Where does this misreading of Hegel originate?

So how did the triad thesis-antithesis-synthesis become a common way to describe Hegel's dialectic?

Mueller did some scholarly detective work and traced it back to this source:

In the winter of 1835-36, a group of Kantians in Dresden called on Heinrich Moritz Chalybäus, professor of philosophy at the University of Kiel, to lecture to them on the new philosophical movement after Kant. They were older, professional men who in their youth had been Kantians, and now wanted an orientation in a development which they distrusted; but they also wanted a confirmation of their own Kantianism. Professor Chalybäus did just those two things. His lectures appeared in 1837 under the title Historische Entwicklung der speculativen Philosophie von Kant bis Hegel, Zu näherer Verständigung des wissenschaftlichen Publikums mit der neuesten Schule. The book was very popular and appeared in three editions. In my copy of the third edition of 1843, Professor Chalybäus says (p. 354): "This is the first trilogy: the unity of Being, Nothing and Becoming ... we have in this first methodical thesis, antithesis, and synthesis ... an example or schema for all that follows." This was for Chalybäus a brilliant hunch which he had not used previously and did not pursue afterwards in any way at all. [my emphasis in bold]

But a young philosophy student named Karl Marx ...

... was at that time a student at the University of Berlin and a member of the Hegel Club where the famous book was discussed. He took the hunch and spread it into a deadly, abstract machinery. Other left-Hegelians, such as Arnold Ruge, Ludwig Feuerbach, Max Stirner use "thesis, antithesis, synthesis" just as little as Hegel.

Marx, now the most famous of the Young Hegelians, did run with the triad in describing Hegel, presumably having picked it up directly or indirectly from Chalybäus.

Marx cites the triad in his early work The Poverty of Philosophy (1847), a polemic against Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (1809-1865):

If we had M. Proudhon's intrepidity in the matter of Hegelianism we should say: it is distinguished in itself from itself. What does this mean? Impersonal reason, having outside itself neither a base on which it can pose itself, nor an object to which it can oppose itself, nor a subject with which it can compose itself, is forced to turn head over heels, in posing itself, opposing itself and composing itself – position, opposition, composition. Or, to speak Greek – we have thesis, antithesis and synthesis. For those who do not know the Hegelian language, we shall give the ritual formula: affirmation, negation and negation of the negation. [my emphasis]

Not surprisingly for an article appearing in the deep Cold War year of 1958, Mueller makes sure he harshes on Marx and Marxists for spreading this misimpression, e.g., "Brutal simplifications are Marxistic [sic] specialties." But as his article demonstrates, Marx and his intellectual followers may have just plain misunderstood Hegel's dialectic in this particular way. They didn't just pull the formula thesis-antithesis-synthesis out of the air, since both Fichte and Schelling used it, and Hegel in his early career was a close ally and supporter of Schelling and his philosophy.

Peter Benson gives a more generous version (Hegel and the Trinity Philosophy Now 42:2003): "If read carefully, Marx’s account of Hegel’s philosophy is fairly accurate. But his use of the word ‘synthesis’ has subsequently led to grave misunderstandings."

The misreading of Hegel's concept of dialectics was picked up and commonly propagated by Marxists, although there were Marxist readings of Hegel like the one quoted from Herbert Marcuse above that did not.

David Riazanov, founder and director of the USSR's Marx-Engels Institute, wrote in his book Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels (1927):

In each phenomenon, in each object, there is the clash of two principles, the thesis and the antithesis, the conservative and the destructive. This struggle between the two opposing principles resolves itself into a final harmonious synthesis of the two.

This is how it was expressed in the Hegelian idiom.

But it wasn't.

(I did a similar post on the above The thesis-antithesis-synthesis mystery on 01/10/2015.)

The "Hegelsche Prinzip"

It was only this year that I became aware of a weird twist on the Hegel/thesis-anthesis-synthesis story. I've only encountered it in German as "das Hegelsche Prinzip" (Hegel Principle or Hegelian Principle) and haven't come across it in English. It (fortunately) doesn't seem to be very widespread. But we see crackpot notions bubble their way into the mainstream all too often.

One of the few mentions I find online is from a blog that was apparently active for only a few months during 2014, called Gehirnwaschmaschine (Brainwashing Machine) that seems to have been an attempt to illustrate some techniques of information manipulation in the media. It seems to have to struck a fairly neutral tone politically, though the kinds of manipulation it discusses are most often encountered these days on the radical right. The pseudonymous author is Vladderjunker.

In Das Hegelsche Prinzip (Gehirnwaschmaschine Blog 06/10/2014), he assumes that Hegel employed the dialectical triad theseis-anthesis-synthesis, and he tries to apply this (actually non-Hegelian) "Hegel Principle" to political propaganda:

Das Hegel-Prinzip arbeitet mit der Dreiheit [sic] These, Antithese und Synthese. Im Zusammenhang mit der Manipulation der Bevölkerung wird folgender Prozess durchgeführt: Um ein bestimmtes Ziel zu erreichen, schafft man zuerst eine Tatsache bzw. ein Problem (These), erzeugt damit eine Reaktion (Antithese) und bietet dann eine Lösung des Problems an (Synthese).

[The Hegel-Prinzip works with the triad thesis, antithesis and synthesis. In connection with the manipulation of the population, the following process is carried out: In order to achieve a certain goal, one first creates a fact or problem (thesis), thus generates a reaction (antithesis) and then offers a solution to the problem (synthesis ).] (my translation)

Aside from being a bad description of basic Hegelian thinking, Hegel was not in the habit of giving PR advice on political messaging for demagogic politics. Hopefully, the Hegel-Prinzip notion will stay in the obscurity in which it currently resides.

Robert Stern podcast

This Philosophy Bites podcast with Robert Stern (Hegel on Dialectic) is an example of how thesis-antithesis-synthesis is hard for people explaining Hegel's concept to avoid. But it's still, well, wrong.