36 The Good Hegel (Part 2)

One of the major goals of this series is to acquaint my listeners with Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831) and his philosophy. We must know the enemy, as he is us. We have so deeply internalized Hegel‘s logic that we seem unable to see beyond it, and we are today reaping the consequences of confining ourselves within immanence. Once we see the cage, we can move beyond it. Hegel, however, is not all bad - not by a long shot. In fact, Hegel and even those who followed him have important perennial insights to offer us. His narrative dialectical logic gives us a profound tool to understand the Shadowlands in which we dwell. I used this tool to illuminate the conflict between atheists and theists in our last series of podcasts. In addition, Hegel himself (in opposition to those who followed him) restrained his reach to description, to explaining what is, to ”carving nature at the joints.” So while he arrogates to himself the perspective of God, he embraces the central value of creation. This Hegelian ”humility,” if we can call it that, prevents him from falling prey to many of the fatal errors of his progeny, which I will call the ”prescriptive Hegelians.” It was this humility that caused Hegel to deeply respect tradition, the wisdom of Conservatism, a wisdom that, unbalanced, can itself be dangerous.