Hegel in 4 words

 

Hegel in 4 words: the critique of romanticism.  (Maybe we can cut it down to 3 if we get rid of the "the".)

Hegel in 5 words: the immanent critique of romanticism.  This is equivalent to the 4 word version, because for Hegel, critique is immanent critique.  Anything less than the immanent fails to rise to the level of critique.

All too often, when we attack someone else's views, whether on the level of everyday political disagreements or on much more abstract philosophical topics like, say, the existence of free will or the meaning of being, we tend to attack these views from an external perspective - and therefore these debates often go nowhere, with both sides talking past each other, and not listening to each other.  In other words, people who engage in this kind of rhetoric are merely monologuing, not engaging in true dialectic.  

Immanent critique means critique, not from some external standpoint, but rather the critique of something from the standpoint of its own presuppositions, or, moreover, from that which motivates it - from its own spirit, as it were.  It means pointing out how a particular "shape of consciousness" fails to meet its own criteria, and therefore inevitably becomes another shape of consciousness, which, again, fails to meet its own criteria, and so on.  For immanent critique, there is no way out, but through.

Hegel seeks to accomplish this for romanticism.  That is to say, he's not attacking romanticism, or rejecting romanticism, or dismissing romanticism, or making fun of romanticism, but just the opposite - he takes romanticism very seriously, and tries to show how romanticism itself fails to be fully romantic.  He's showing how romanticism fails its own criteria, and how fidelity to the spirit of romanticism forces us to move beyond romanticism.  In a way you could say that Hegel sought to be more romantic than romanticism (but only in the sense that romanticism itself was more enlightened than the enlightenment, and so on).

(At least, Hegel as philosopher did not make fun of romanticism, directly, in his books.  Apparently, in person, in the classroom, he could be a bit sarcastic, and even quite funny about romanticism.  And of course, "romanticism" in Hegel's vocabulary was a kind of euphemism for the philosophy of his erstwhile friend, Schelling.  And one can even get a little bit of a sense of this, creeping into his books.  But that is not his philosophical attitude.  So to speak, "officially," his critique of romanticism was respectful, recognizing its genuine validity, and taking it seriously - perhaps even more seriously than it took itself.)

In other words, Hegel does for romanticism what, according to Christianity, Jesus did for Judaism: he fulfills it by transcending it.  Or at least, that's what Hegel was going for - that's what Hegel thought we should do, and by "we," I mean philosophers - that's what philosophers should do, or perhaps better yet, that's what philosophy should do.  And Hegel actually uses the term "science" - so, in his mind, that's what scientists should do, or what science should do.  For Hegel, science should do for romanticism what Jesus has already accomplished for the Jewish law: fulfill its fundamental motivating force by liberating itself from it - which entails the recognition that what the fundamental motivation behind the law had always aimed at was our very liberation.

That's Hegel in a nutshell - a huge nutshell.

Entailed in this is what I would call a drive towards ipsissimosity, or a feeling for the liberation of details.  Not a liberation from details, but a liberation of details - a feeling that details are, themselves, liberating.  Romanticism is, in its deepest essence, a negation.  At its highest, most spiritual level, romanticism is one with apophatic theology.  It cannot express what is, but only what isn't.  At its pinnacle, it achieves what Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite called "divine silence, darkness, and unknowing."  For Hegel, this was the night in which all sheep are black.  His goal is to negate this negation, and return to the fullness, the abundance of the world, and to embrace this world in a glorious affirmation, as it is, in all of its richness and complexity.

This is the reason for Hegel's famous charge against romanticism, which can strike an initial reader as a bit odd, even strange: as is well-known, the accusation that Hegel levels against the romantic "shape of consciousness" focuses on the romantic's irony.  It seems very strange to accuse romantics of being excessively ironic - on the contrary, the usual criticism is that romantics are usually too caught up in their own feelings, that they lack a certain circumspection, that they take themselves a bit too seriously, that their heads are in the clouds and they are not grounded enough in the real world, that they are too idealistic, too focused on passion and authenticity and so on.  But Hegel recognizes that all of these attacks that are leveled against romanticism fail to attain true critique, true immanent critique, because they are all attacks from an external viewpoint.  That's why he focuses on irony as the characteristic conversational trope of the romantic - because it is this which cuts to the quick of romanticism, which reveals romanticism as mere negation - and indeterminate negation.  This is what reveals that romanticism is insufficiently romantic.

This is why Hegel's many detractors, whether Schopenhauer or Kierkegaard or what have you, have failed to supersede him - because they have all turned out to be ironists, and thus romantics.  Hegel anticipated them and went beyond them.

This also explains Hegel's prescription for the romantic world, the world that is, as it were, sick with romanticism.  He doesn't say that we should destroy romanticism, or end romanticism, or kill romanticism, or ignore romanticism, or forget romanticism, or avoid romanticism.  His prescription can be summarized in one word: self-consciousness.  We are romantics.  We will become self-conscious romantics.

Sometimes people speak of modernism as "coming after" romanticism.  For instance, it's not uncommon for people to speak of "modern art" as the form of art that comes after romantic art.  In addition, many see Hegel as an early modernist, or even as the philosopher of modernism.  I don't disagree.  But it's important to see that, although Hegel critiqued romanticism, he did not do so from some standpoint beyond romanticism.  For Hegel, very explicitly, modern art is romantic art.  Period.  There is nothing beyond romanticism.