Category Archives: History

Arts, History, Philosophy

(Philosophy): Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

1770–1831

GEORG HEGEL was born on 27 August 1770, in Stuttgart, Germany. He studied philosophy and classics at Tübingen, and, after graduation, he became a tutor and explored theology. Hegel taught at Heidelberg and Berlin, where he wrote and explored philosophical and theological concepts.

Hegel was a major figure in German idealism. His historicist and idealist account of reality was revolutionary at the time and a major factor in the development of some radical threads of left-wing political thought. His major work, The Phenomenology of Spirit (or mind), was published in 1807. Many of his ideas were developed in other deeply complex works until his death, from cholera, in 1831.

Almost everything that Hegel was to develop over the rest of his life is prefigured in the Phenomenology. The book and text is far from systematic and is generally accepted as difficult to read. The Phenomenology attempts to present human history, with all its revolutions, wars, and scientific discoveries, as an objective and idealistic self-developing Spirit or Mind.  

Hegel is a notoriously difficult philosopher to understand. For a beginner with next to no grounding in the Greek logic of Aristotle and the later works of Descartes, Hume and Locke it is probably a forlorn task best left until the fundamentals of philosophy are mastered. Being able to comprehend what he writes requires a grasp of at least the basics. Hegel still causes frustration among academics and one of the philosophers that give the discipline its forbidding reputation.

For example, in his book Hegel, Edward Caird writes: “But the height of audacity in serving up pure nonsense, in stringing together senseless and extravagant mazes of words, such as had previously been known only in madhouses, was finally reached in Hegel… and became the instrument of the most bare-faced general mystification that has ever taken place, with a result which will appear fabulous to posterity, and will remain as a monument to German stupidity.”

To have any chance of understanding Hegel one must first come to terms with the principle of the dialectic method. This is a type of argument or discussion between two or more opposing viewpoints whereupon the outcome or truth can be distilled. As the mechanism for this process Hegel proposed variations on the three “classical laws of thought” – that is, the law of identity (essentially “truths” that are taken to be self-evident), and the laws of [non]contradiction and the law of the excluded middle. Paraphrasing these last two suggests respectively that contradictory statements cannot both be true but that either proposition must be true. This is the kind of difficulty that any student of philosophy will be faced with.

Hegelian dialectics is based upon four concepts:

. Everything is transient and finite, existing in the medium of time.

. Everything is composed of contradictions (opposing forces).

. Gradual changes lead to crisis or turning points when one force overcomes its opposing force (quantitative change leads to qualitative change).

. Change is helical (spiral), not circular.

In summary, Hegel believed that when our minds become fully conscious, awakened, or enlightened, we will have a perfect understanding of reality. In short, our thoughts about reality, and reality itself, will be the same. He argues this by showing that the mind goes through an evolution on its way to what he calls “absolute spirit”.

Because Hegel’s philosophy requires a journey it can be seen that it is the process and not just the result that is important. A struggle exists between one viewpoint (or thesis) to which there might exist one or more opposing viewpoints (or antithesis). A process of debate or connected dispute such as revolution or war might lead to a higher level of understanding (or synthesis) to which another antithesis might emerge and thus the process towards truth will continue. This is a Hegelian description of all history as an inevitable progression towards truth. It is complex and a difficult area of study.

Hegel’s mark on history has been profound, in that his influence has spread throughout both left- and right-wing political thought. Marx drew influence from Hegel by developing the idea that history and reality should be viewed dialectically and that the process of change – the struggle – should be seen as a transition from the fragmentary towards the complete. Yet, this is a skewed development of what Hegel tried to suggest in Phenomenology. However, in practical terms it is likely that Hegel may have approved of Marx’s revolutionary interpretation, as he was witness at close hand to revolutionary Europe towards the end of the eighteenth century.

. Hegel on Reason and Experience

“Truth in philosophy means that concept and external reality correspond.

Genuine tragedies in the world are not conflicts between right and wrong. They are conflicts between two rights.”

Standard
Arts, Books, History, Literature

Book Review: The Turning Point

LITERARY REVIEW

Intro: A tale of one city . . . and the year that changed not just Charles Dickens but London, too

IN 1851, London was a city of dense and persistent fog, of foul acrid smells and, for a large swathe of the population, of extreme poverty and deprivation.

The capital was also a place of vibrant energy and opportunity and a growing sense of its own importance.

One topic dominated conversation that year: the opening of the Great Exhibition, masterminded by Prince Albert to highlight Britain’s dominant position in the industrial world.

Through this pulsing, crowded and malodorous city strode Charles Dickens, the most famous writer in the English-speaking world. By the age of 38, he had already written eight hugely successful novels including The Pickwick Papers, Oliver Twist and Nicholas Nickleby, and yet, for all his professional success, his private life was about to enter choppy waters.

This engrossing book subtitled The Year That Changed Dickens And The World, shows how, by 1851, Dickens was more than just a novelist. He was also “one of the busiest men in London… playwright, actor, social campaigner, journalist, editor, philanthropist.”

Much of Dickens’s boundless energy was inspired by the city. Although he called it “vile” and would sometimes go to quieter places like Broadstairs in Kent to write, he couldn’t bear to be away too long either, saying: “A day in London sets me up again and starts me.”

TWO

DICKENS was a father of nine in 1851, apparently a rather semi-detached one. His relationship with his shy and sweet-natured wife, Kate, was increasingly shaky. After giving birth to so many children in the space of 13 years she was, hardly surprisingly, permanently exhausted, and often depressed.

That spring, the family suffered a double blow. Two weeks after the death of Dickens’s father John, their youngest child, eight-month-old Dora, died suddenly after suffering convulsions. Dickens was overwhelmed with grief and deeply anxious about breaking the news to his fragile wife, who was undergoing a rest cure in Malvern.

Whilst he wrote sympathetically and lovingly to Kate, he remarked to a friend that this shock might even do her good: a chilling foreshadowing of his later attempt, when their marriage broke down, to have Kate sent to a mental asylum.

The death of Dora did nothing to slow down Dickens’s prodigious work output and, like most Londoners, he was intrigued by the “Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations” which opened in May in Hyde Park. The huge glass building itself was a source of wonder, the brainchild of Joseph Paxton.

The atmosphere before the opening of the Great Exhibition sounds like that of London before the 2012 Olympics – intense excitement, and dread that it would go horribly wrong.

When it was finally opened by Queen Victoria, the Crystal Palace was revealed to be crammed with 133,000 exhibits including the enormous Koh-i-Noor diamond, a steam-powered envelope-making machine, collapsible pianos, and a can of boiled mutton, designed to be taken on a polar exhibition.

Dickens’s work was also represented, with statues of two of his most famous characters: Oliver Twist and Little Nell from The Old Curiosity Shop. However, they couldn’t compete with the popularity of the exciting new flushing toilets in the “retiring rooms”. Eager visitors paid a penny to use them, giving rise to the adage “to spend a penny”.

Not everyone was entranced by it, including Dickens. He grumbled that “I don’t say ‘there’s nothing in it’ – there’s too much.” The future textile designer, 17-year-old William Morris, was so appalled by the vulgarity of it all that he staggered from the building and was sick in the bushes.

But the Great Exhibition was a triumph and crowds poured in from all over Britain. The profits from it went towards the purchase of 87 acres of land in South Kensington. It was here where the Victoria and Albert, the Natural History and Science Museums, Imperial College and the Royal Albert Hall were built. Above all, it was the event that cemented Britain’s position as the world’s leading industrial economy.

THREE

AS IT wound down, Dickens was edging towards writing a new book, Bleak House.

With its twisty plot, pointed social commentary and not one but two unreliable narrators, Bleak House was, says Douglas-Fairhurst, “the greatest fictional experiment of his career.” It was one of the earliest examples of a detective story.

The book is full of nuggets. 1851 was the first-time young women were recorded wearing trousers (or “bloomers”) – in Harrogate of all places. It was also the first-time terms such as “carbohydrate”, “police state” and “science fiction” were widely used.

Although the author focuses on just one year of the writer’s life, Charles Dickens comes over as a deeply complex character: warm, generous, and compassionate yet also overbearing, pompous and selfish. His life was so crammed with incident that you could argue that almost any year was some sort of turning point for him. But that is a very minor quibble about a splendidly enjoyable book.

– The Turning Point by Robert Douglas-Fairhurst is published by Cape, 368pp

. Appendage

– Robert Douglas-Fairhurst’s title begs several questions, for there were many turning points in Dickens’s life. The first came in 1824 when his father was incarcerated in the Marshalsea debtors’ prison. Dickens’s mother and younger siblings moved in with his father, but Dickens, aged 12, was sent to work among, as he recalled, “common labouring boys” in Warren’s blacking warehouse. It was a humiliation he never forgot or forgave, and the dilapidated, rat-infested warehouse came back to him in nightmares all his life. As a junior clerk in a law firm he was crazy about the theatre and yearned to be an actor.
Standard
Arts, Books, History

Book Review – Icebound: Shipwrecked At The Edge Of The World

LITERARY REVIEW

Intro: Thought your lockdown was tough? William Barents and his crew were stranded in the Arctic for nine agonising months, with barely any food and at the mercy of ravenous polar bears. Ice-olation as opposed to isolation

THE name of William Barents isn’t that familiar to us these days beyond perhaps a line of type on your atlas, marking a patch of blue north of Norway and Russia – the Barents Sea.

But this enthralling, elemental and (literally) spine-chilling epic of courage and endurance certainly deserves to change all that.

Barents was an energetic businessman and seafarer in the early days of the new-born Dutch republic at the end of the 16th century, a tiny country that would soon become the world’s leading economic and naval power.

It was an age of adventure and exploration, of burgeoning science and medicine, and of great art – Vermeer and Rembrandt would soon be along. It was also an era of limitless promise, as the undiscovered parts of the world opened-up their great and vast treasures.

Barents was the outstanding navigator of his age, and when the traders and merchants of the thriving port city of Amsterdam saw the chance to make a pile of money in the new world to the east, it was to him that they turned.

Barents hatched a plan to sail north to Nova Zembla (“New Land” in Dutch), an unmapped and infinitely desolate finger of rock and ice stretching hundreds of miles into the Arctic seas north of Russia.

If his little fleet could round that finger of rock, then maybe he could confirm the long-held (and very mistaken) view that there was a warm sea at the North Pole.

TWO

REACHING China would then be achieved much faster, and safer, than across the southern oceans and so bring untold wealth to the prosperous burghers of the fledgling Dutch republic.

It was, in today’s language, a no-brainer. And in William Barents, then in his 40s, the investors had just the man. An inveterate explorer, he had sailed all the shores of Western Europe and pioneered map-making and cartography in the region. This voyage was a chance to remake the geography of the world. It was too good to resist.

At the heart of this magnificent story – using two contemporary accounts from crewmen – is Barents’s third voyage, after a couple of early recces.

His ship was 60-odd feet long, about the length of a cricket pitch, and the crew numbered just 17.

In August 1597, they rounded the tip of Nova Zembla hoping to reach open seas, but they found themselves surrounded by icebergs – vast frozen cliffs moving dangerously around the boat, while the winds grew stronger, and the currents drove them into shore.

The icebergs began to tilt the vessel backwards and smashed parts of the stern. As the huge ice floes surged and withdrew like the ebbing of the tide, Barents realised the ship was finished and they would have to winter on dry land until the spring.

What an extraordinary decision it was: these bold, resourceful Dutchmen towed the contents of the ship by sled across the ice on to Nova Zembla, where they used driftwood to build a log cabin.

As the blizzards raged and the temperature dropped to -30C, it wasn’t just the devastating cold the men had to contend with. Food from the ship was limited so they hunted and cooked the marauding foxes. These were fortuitously a limited source of Vitamin C, but still the men fell ill with scurvy, which wrecked their bodies and loosened their teeth.

Besides the weather, their main enemy was the countless polar bears which were far from the loveable creatures to which they are often portrayed.

We might think of them floating, anxious and hungry, on a passing ice floe; for Barents and his men they were vast, cunning and savage enemies always ready to attack.

They were also a source of fuel: that is, if the sailors could kill the bears before they were killed themselves.

For the long winter, it was a matter of survival, with life on the very edge of mortality. These boundless and courageous Dutchmen did, however, find a way to celebrate Twelfth Night in January 1597, with the last of the wine from the boat, fox meat and ship’s biscuit. The blubber from a slaughtered polar bear fuelled their lights as they caroused.

When, after nine months imprisoned in their makeshift hut, the weather changed, the crew set sail in the little boats they had saved from the ship.

They went south in an epic of physical stamina, battling ice and foul weather before being rescued by Dutch traders near the Russian coast. On the way, even Barents’s endurance gave out and he could last no longer. His body may have been left to float away on a piece of ice, before he finally slipped below the freezing oceans that he had tried to conquer.

THREE

BACK in Amsterdam, the crew’s exploits were wildly celebrated, and chronicles of their ordeal were translated all over Europe. The voyage became a symbol of suffering: Shakespeare, writing about another Twelfth Night, has Sir Andrew Aguecheek dismissed thus: “You are now sailed into the north of my lady’s opinion, where you will hang like an icicle on a Dutchman’s beard.”

More than 400 years later, the remains of Barents’s little hut that kept his men alive through the long, frozen days can still be seen on Nova Zembla, as Ms Pitzer, a Washington-based journalist and historian who sailed Barents’s route, describes in a moving epilogue.

In exploration voyages today, every step of the journey becomes part of a daily Twitter blog or an Instagram update. But back then there was nothing; and after a while Barents and his band of crewmen were to all intents and purposes presumed dead.

As Ms Pitzer writes, he set the scale for a new kind of hero, based on knowledge, immense skill and endless endurance.

Barents may have been wrong about the warm Polar Sea, and his dream of an open trading route across the roof of the world wouldn’t arrive for centuries, but his heroism and the endurance of his small band of sailors became a shining example at that point in time. Perhaps it should be even now, especially at a time when many people are bellyaching about not being able to do exactly as they please.

. Appendage

– Long before Bering or Amundsen, long before Franklin or Shackleton, there was William Barents, in many ways the greatest polar explorer of them all. In this engrossing narrative of the Far North, enriched by her own adventurous sojourns in the Arctic, Andrea Pitzer brings Barents’ three harrowing expeditions to vivid life, while giving us fascinating insights into one of history’s most intrepid navigators.

Standard