1. Important parts of ourselves can be found in history
Hegel preferred to believe that every era can be looked at as a
repository of a particular kind of wisdom. It will manifest with rare clarity
certain very useful attitudes and ideas which then become submerged,
unavailable or more muddled in later periods. We need to go back in time to
rescue things which have gone missing, even in a so-called advanced era.
2. Learn from ideas you dislike
Hegel was a great believer in learning from one’s intellectual enemies, from
points of view we disagree with or that feel alien. That’s because he held that
bits of the truth are likely to be scattered even in unappealing or peculiar
places – and that we should dig them out by asking always, ‘What sliver of
sense and reason might be contained in otherwise frightening or foreign
phenomena?’
Hegel’s move was to ask what underlying good idea or
important need might be hiding within the bloody history of nationalism – a
need waiting for recognition and interpretation. He proposed that it’s the need
for people to feel proud of where they come from, to identify with something
beyond merely their own achievements, to anchor their identities beyond the ego.
Hegel is a hero of the thought that really important ideas may be in the
hands of people you regard as beneath contempt.
3. Progress is messy
Hegel believed that the world makes progress, but only by lurching from one
extreme to another as it seeks to overcompensate for a previous mistake. He
proposed that it generally takes three moves before the right balance on any
issue can be found, a process that he named the ‘dialectic’.
Hegel insists the
painful stepping from error to error is inevitable, something we must expect
and reconcile ourselves to when planning our lives or contemplating the mess
in history books or on the nightly news.
4. Art has a purpose
Hegel rejects the idea of ‘art for art’s sake’. In his most impressive work – the
Introductory Lectures on Aesthetics – he argues that painting, music, architecture,
literature and design all have a major job to do. We need them so that
important insights become powerful and helpful in our lives. Art is ‘the
sensuous presentation of ideas’.
5. We need new institutions
Hegel took a very positive view of institutions and of the power they can
wield. The insight of an individual might be profound. But it will be
ineffective and transient unless it gets embodied in an institution
Hegel explored in The
Phenomenology o
f Spirit, which he finished in 1807.
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