The Impossible Scheme

This and subsequent related posts are necessarily going to be a bit wild & wooly. Given the size and scope of the subject -- which touches on everything and everyone -- it can't be helped. We're trying our best. Well, not "trying." Rather, just letting it rip, as usual.

Godlessness does peculiar things to a mind. Under the best of circumstances,

When the gods are expelled from the cosmos, the world they have left becomes boring (Voegelin).

The world necessarily becomes boring -- at least to the intelligent-but-unwise -- because it is drained of intrinsic meaning. But this is easily remedied with recourse to politics and to political activism. For awhile, anyway. For human nature always catches the leftist by surprise. It can be distorted and suppressed for awhile, but not forever.

By the way, we're discussing an essay by Voegelin called On Hegel: A Study in Sorcery. Hegel is a particularly important thinker -- not to you and me per se, but indirectly, for he is one of the most important influences on Marx and on the first wave of American progressives -- in particular, on the odious Mr. Wilson, our first president from the tenured class of credentialed idiots (Obama being the second).

If you want the grotesque details, there are plenty of good books on this bad man, nor do we want Wilson to hijack the post. Suffice it to say that you may not care about Hegel, but that Hegel (via Wilson and his ilk) certainly cares about you -- about your rights, your property, and your so-called "living constitution" (their euphemism for a dead-because-they-murdered-it one):

Hegelians believe that, until we reach the end of History, "enduring" rights exist only to be negated by future generations. Thus, Wilson wrote, "Justly revered as our great constitution is, it could be stripped off and thrown aside like a garment, and the nation would still stand forth in the living vestment of flesh and sinew, warm with the heart-blood of one people, ready to recreate constitutions and laws."

Yes, he was an awful writer too.

But let's be fair to Hegel. Let's approach him with an open mind and try to understand what he was up to and sympathize with the problems he was attempting to remedy. As we've said before, every comprehensive philosophy begins with a diagnosis of the world and of man, which is followed by the prescription (whether explicit or implicit). The former can be *interesting* even if the latter will prove fatal if strictly applied.

Jumping ahead a bit, Marx famously placed more emphasis on the cure than the diagnosis. Inscribed on his gravestone is the diabolical boast to the effect that The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways. The point, however, is to change it. Well done, good and faithful servant!

What can we say of a man who wants to transform the whole world -- you included -- but can't even govern himself? Correct: you can say he's an activist: whether Antifa, BLM, homosexual, feminist, whatever. Each attempts to treat himself by curing society. It never works, neither for society nor certainly for the activist. Except perhaps financially.

However, I actually agree with leftists that we can't blame Marx for everything his wackolytes did with his ideas after he was safely beneath the sod, and this for at least two reasons: first and foremost, his principles are impossible, and nothing can render the impossible possible, not even the most fashionable word magic of the tenured. This is the problem of external inconsistency: to paraphrase E.O. Wilson, good theory, wrong species.

There is also the problem of internal inconsistency, not just between the young and old Marx, but in any number of areas that he simply patches up with abuse and vilification (as do leftists down to the present day). If your only tool is the hammer of denunciation, everyone looks like a class enemy. Who and Whom, Master and Slave, proletariat and bourgeois, end of story.

Back to the essay:

The new freedom and activism of self-salvation is experienced by Hegel as the core meaning in the great [revolutionary] events that shook the world.

Boom, there it is: self-cure via the manmade drama of imaginary meaning and real activism.

But in reality,

Nobody can heal the spiritual disorder of an "age." A philosopher can do no more than work himself free from the rubble of idols which, under the name of an "age," threaten to cripple and bury him.

Yes, I absolutely believe in liberation theology, but with this caveat: one assoul at a time! Would you like to do the world a lovely favor?

The first act of charity is to rid the soul of illusions and passions and thus rid the world of a maleficent being; it is to make a void so that God may fill it and, by this fullness, give Himself. A saint is a void open for the passage of God (Schuon).

This is what the ideologue refuses to do. Voegelin:

The deformed cognitive core, then, entails a deformed style of cognition by which the First Reality experienced in open existence is transformed into a Second Reality imagined in closed existence.

Models are nice, but they're not the world, let alone the cosmos, to say nothing of the meta-cosmos. As Schuon points out,

The rationalism of a frog living at the bottom of a well is to deny the existence of mountains: perhaps this is "logic," but it has nothing to do with reality.

So, ideology is rational within its own closed system. Even Paul Krugman makes sense to himself.

Shifting gears a bit, for my money, one of the best books I've read on our subject is Charles Taylor's Hegel. It is at once scholarly, sympathetic, and accessible. Regarding the sympathy, Taylor spends a good deal of time laying out the philosophical problems Hegel's philosophy attempts to address.

Cut to the chase, the bottom line is that Hegel's problems aren't my problems, so his cure is certainly not my cure. Jumping ahead, even less are Marx's problems my problems, and let's not even talk about his cure for my non-problems.

True, every man that comes into this world is going to be aware of "alienation," but for us the sufficient explanation is Genesis 3 (understood metaphysically). It can only be "treated" on its own metaphysical plane, not by reducing this plane to the dialectic of class struggle or the labor theory of value. Nor is it in man's power to reinstate paradise lost; attempting to do so only ensures hell found.

What was Hegel's Big F-ing Problem? And why are we paying for it?

We cannot really understand what he was about until we see the basic problem and aspirations which gripped him, and these were those of the time (Taylor).

As we've mentioned before, it's always dangerous to apply permanent solutions to temporary problems. Rather, we're only interested in a permanent solution to permanent problems, i.e., those that are in the very nature of things, both human nature and the conditions and constraints of human existence. That Marx couldn't support himself is not my problem. There are plenty of explanations for his loserhood which don't involve the murder and enslavement of hundreds of millions of people to set things right.

Frankly, I don't know that I even want to get into Hegel's problems or Marx's issues. Bor-ring. Let's cut to the interesting part: how does it affect me, Bob? For this let's jump ahead to chapter 20, Hegel Today. Like Marx -- and generally through Marx -- Hegel is still torturing us, and not just through his tortuous prose.

For Taylor, Hegel's influence is obviously present in ideologies of the left, but also in the so-called right (which has nothing whatsoever in common with American-style conservatism). The leftist tradition of Marx is more "Promethean," while fascism is more "Dionysiac," but each is present in the other.

One has only to turn on the television to witness the ecstatic Dionysian violence of the left. The left's reactionary attempt to undo the principles of the founding is both totalitarian and fascist, half Prometheus and half Dionysius. We -- and the founders -- are at a bright angle to both their diagnoses and their cures (not to mention their pagan gods). Ordered liberty, limited constitutional government, and unalienable natural rights are incompatible with both.