Random Synaptic Activity

A Reverie, not even serious, and likely thought all through by someone already.

It's lovely what happens when my mind let's itself go slack for a second and forgets to be distracted from list-making n' such. This morning: I am amazed at Hegel. No, not because I'm reading him again, nor reading about him anywhere at all (which, is a pity). Because that's just what I pinged on while brushing my hair, readying to go pick up the newly de-dinged/de-smashed and painted '92 Nissan I drive (or will once i can voluntarily control the inner muscles of my left arm). It's 1804, and The Phenomenology of Spirit has been exuded from H's head. This is one of the major sources of the Myth of Progress, the MasterNarrative to beat all MasterNarratives -- that things just get better because they can't do anything else. Hold that thought.

See, Hegel shows the dialectical process in which say, science emerges from religion to oppose it, and to move Spirit toward further realization of itself by now having a world of both religion and science. OK. But Herr Hegel does not point out that One Particular Monk created the first inklings of the scientific method, didn't even really care to pursue it, and then told the Pope at the time, who then said, "Hey, get after it and tell me what you find." History is also people. For H though, its impersonal movement.

Which, is wierdly ego stroking even for a Romantic because if you're in the dialectical flow of Spirit, are its tool for expression, then you are utterly justified in your endeavor because It Cannot Be Stopped. And so, just bit down the road, Shelley and Thoreau are unacknowledgebly legislating the world, and meaning that phrase in dead earnest.

Problem: History is also people, and progress is not necessary or inevitable: Germany's historical sidetrack, American apartheid under Jim Crow, but also The New Deal and iPods. So, flash forward, PoMo Marxists like Jameson and the Report on Knowledge: MasterNarratives (of which H's is one sterling type) are all falling apart because Immovable Movers, Necessity, Origins, and Solidity of All Kinds are so much being maliciously dismantled by bored French philosophy students as they are crumbling under the weight of the 20th Century in all its dimensions.

Now, as Hegel also noticed, but glossed over for the sake of presentation, in the process of the dialectic, when B arises to oppose, test, and sublate with A into a larger and more comprehensive incarnation of Spirit, well, things get hairy and unstable. People start talking about the End of History and of Times and of Crossroads in the Future of Being and all that. Because..... History is also people and the choices they make and/or are led to make.

So, even if you are an anti-romantic like Hegel, get on about your business: choose and know that you are chosing, that it matters even when it's a contingent choice. How could it not be? You don't know everything and the flow of becoming won't hold still no matter what you do.

But, what I want to know is: Why didn't Nietzsche thump him harder for this tidy story H told? By which I mean: all metaphysics in which Inevitability plays c/overt roles are deeply suspect. Even PoMo Marxist metaphysics.

And now, more coffee for yours truly.