“Today Marx’s dialectic dominates a large part of the total population of the globe, while Kierkegaard’s has been adapted by some of the most outstanding thinkers of the free world, notably Heidegger and Tillich, Barth and Niebuhr.
Two later revolts against Hegelianism dominate English and American philosophy in the twentieth century: pragmatism and analytic philosophy. William James, though occasionally he attacked Hegel himself, reconstructed Hegel somewhat in the image of his Harvard colleague, Royce, who was then the outstanding American idealist; while Moore, at Cambridge, who was joined by Russell, led the fight against the influence of Bradley and McTaggart.”
“One of the few things on which the analysts, pragmatists, and existentialists agree with the dialectical theologians is that Hegel is to be repudiated: their attitude toward Kant, Aristotle, Plato, and the other great philosophers is not at all unanimous even within each movement; but opposition to Hegel is part of the platform of all four, and of the Marxists, too. Oddly, the man whom all these movements take to be so crucially important is but little known to most of their adherents; very few indeed have read as many as 2 of the 4 books that Hegel published.
Hegel is known largely through secondary sources and a few incriminating slogans and generalizations. The resulting myth, however, lacked a comprehensive, documented statement till Karl Popper found a place for it in his widely discussed book, The Open Society and Its Enemies. After it had gone through three impressions in England, a revised one-volume edition was brought out in the United States in 1950, five years after its original appearance.”
“Forward-looking liberals and even believers in ‘piecemeal social engineering’, like Popper, often distort history, too. And so, alas, did Hegel.”
“The calamity in our case is twofold. First, Popper’s treatment contains more misconceptions about Hegel than any other single essay. Secondly, if one agrees with Popper that ‘intellectual honesty is fundamental for everything we cherish’ (p. 253), one should protest against his methods; for although his hatred of totalitarianism is the inspiration and central motif of his book, his methods are unfortunately similar to those of totalitarian ‘scholars’ — and they are spreading in the free world, too.”
“Although the mere presence of nineteen pages of notes suggests that his attack on Hegel is based on careful scholarship, Popper ignores the most important works on his subject. This is doubly serious because he is intent on psychologizing the men he attacks: he deals not only with their arguments but also — if not altogether more — with their alleged motives. This practice is as dangerous as it is fashionable, but in some cases there is no outright evidence to the contrary: one can only say that Popper credits all the men he criticizes, except Marx, with the worst possible intentions. (Marx he credits with the best intentions.)”
“beginning with Dilthey’s pioneering study of 1906 and the subsequent publication of Hegel’s early writings, ample material has been made available concerning the development of his ideas. There is even a two-volume study by Franz Rosenzweig, the friend of Martin Buber, that specifically treats the development of those ideas with which Popper is concerned above all: Hegel und der Staat.
Furthermore, Popper has relied largely on Scribner’s Hegel Selections, a little anthology for students that contains not a single complete work. Like Gilson in The Unity of Philosophical Experience (p. 246), Popper takes over such a gross mistranslation as ‘the State is the march of God through the world’, although the original says merely that it is the way of God with the world that there should be the State, and even this sentence is lacking in the text published by Hegel and comes from one of the editor’s additions to the posthumous edition of The Philosophy of Right — and the editor admitted in his Preface that, though these additions were based on lecture notes, ‘the choice of words’ was sometimes his rather than Hegel’s. ”
“The passage on war in Hegel’s Phenomenology of the Spirit, in the section on ‘The Ethical World’, was written when Hegel — a Swabian, not a Prussian — admired Napoleon and was published in 1807, a year after Prussia’s devastating defeat at Jena.” Não em subserviência ao império prussiano, como alega Popper.
QUILT QUOTATIONS (COLAGEM OU COLCHA DE ASPAS): “Sentences are picked from various contexts, often even out of different books, enclosed by a single set of quotation marks, and separated only by three dots, which are generally taken to indicate no more than the omission of a few words. Plainly, this device can be used to impute to an author views he never held.
Here, for example, is a quilt quotation about war and arson: ‘Do not think that I have come to bring peace on earth; I have not come to bring peace, but a sword… . I came to cast fire upon the earth… . Do you think that I have come to give peace on earth? No, I tell you… . Let him who has no sword sell his mantle and buy one.’ This is scarcely the best way to establish Jesus’ views of war and arson. In the works of some philosophers, too — notably, Nietzsche — only the context can show whether a word is meant literally.”
“Popper writes like a district attorney who wants to persuade his audience that Hegel was against God, freedom, and equality — and uses quilt quotations to convince us.”
“No conception is bandied about more unscrupulously in the history of ideas than ‘Influence’. Popper’s notion of it is so utterly unscientific that one should never guess that he has done important work on logic and on scientific method. At best, it is reducible to post hoc, ergo propter hoc. Thus he speaks of ‘the Hegelian Bergson’ (p. 256 and n. 66) and assumes, without giving any evidence whatever, that Bergson, Smuts, Alexander, and Whitehead were all interested in Hegel, simply because they were ‘evolutionists’ (p. 225 and n. 6).”
“His Hegel chapter is studded with quotations from recent German writers, almost all of which are taken from The War Against the West by Kolnai. In this remarkable book Friedrich Gundolf, Werner Jaeger (Harvard), and Max Scheler are pictured as ‘representative of Nazism or at least its general trend and atmosphere’. Kolnai is also under the impression that the men who contributed most ‘to the rise of National Socialism as a creed’ were Nietzsche ‘and Stefan George, less great but, perhaps because of his homosexuality, more directly instrumental in creating the Third Reich’ (…) that the great racist H.S. Chamberlain ‘was a mellow Englishman tainted by noxious German influences’ ; and that Jaspers is a ‘follower’ of Heidegger. It would seem advisable to check the context of any quotations from Kolnai’s book before one uses them, but Kolnai generally gives no references.”
“Of the goods that man has cherished
Not one is as high as fame;
When the body has long perished
What survives is the great name.
For every Nazi who knew Hegel’s remarks about fame there must have been dozens who knew these lines. Does that prove Schiller a bad man? Or does it show that he was responsible for Nazism?”
“he constantly makes common cause with Schopenhauer against the allegedly proto-fascist Hegel, whom he blames even for the Nazis’ racism — evidently unaware that Fries and Schopenhauer, unlike the mature Hegel, were anti-Semites.
Hegel’s earliest essays, which he himself did not publish, show that he started out with violent prejudices against the Jews. (…) When Hegel later became a man of influence, he insisted that the Jews should be granted equal rights because civic rights belong to man because he is a man and not on account of his ethnic origins or his religion.”
“It does not follow that Fries influenced the Nazis. [Ele deu idéias proféticas como marcar os judeus com símbolos nas roupas; disse, não muito diferente de Wagner e tantos outros em seu século, que a Judeidade deveria ser exterminada, mas que não tinha nada contra judeus específicos, isto é, homens concretos conhecidos, amigos até…] He was soon forgotten, till, in the twentieth century, Leonard Nelson, a Jewish philosopher, founded a neo-Friesian school that had nothing to do with Fries’s racial prejudices.” As voltas que o mundo (e o espectro político) dá!
“Popper, though he has written an important book on Die Logik der Forschung, The Logic of Research, does not find it necessary to check his hunches by research when he is concerned with influences in his Hegel chapter.”
“Hegel was rarely cited in the Nazi literature, and, when he was referred to, it was usually by way of disapproval. The Nazis’ official ‘philosopher’, Alfred Rosenberg, mentioned, and denounced, Hegel twice in his best-selling Der Mythus des Zwanzigsten jahrhunderts. [O Mito dos Anos 1920] Originally published in 1930, this book bad reached an edition of 878,000 copies by 1940. In the same book, a whole chapter is devoted to Popper’s beloved Schopenhauer, whom Rosenberg admired greatly.”
“Plato, unlike Hegel, was widely read in German schools, and special editions were prepared for Greek classes in the Gymnasium, gathering together allegedly fascist passages. In his introduction to one such selection from the Republic, published by Teubner in the series of Eclogae Graecolatinae, Dr. Holtorf helpfully listed some of his relevant articles on Plato, including one in the Völkischer Beobachter, which was Hitler’s own paper. Instead of compiling a list of the many similar contributions to the Plato literature, it may suffice to mention that Dr. Hans F.K. Günther, from whom the Nazis admittedly received their racial theories, also devoted a whole book to Plato — not to Hegel — as early as 1928. In 1935, a 2nd edition was published.”
“Hegel certainly has grievous faults. Among these is his obscure style, but it is dry and unemotional in the extreme. A detailed account of his almost incredibly unemotional style as a lecturer has been given by one of his students, H.G. Hotho, and is quoted in Hermann Glockner’s Hegel (1, 440 ff.), and in Kuno Fischer’s Hegel, too. If ‘hysterical’ means, as Webster says, ‘wildly emotional’, Popper deserves this epithet much more than Hegel.”
“‘the critical and rational methods of science’ could hardly establish Popper’s contention that the philosophy of Jaspers is a ‘gangster’ philosophy (p. 272 ).”
“In the name of ‘the critical and rational methods of science’, one must also protest against such emotional ad hominem arguments as that Heidegger’s philosophy must be wrong because he became a Nazi later on (p. 271), or that ‘Haeckel can hardly be taken seriously as a philosopher or scientist. He called himself a free thinker, but his thinking was not sufficiently independent to prevent him from demanding in 1914 <the following fruits of victory …>’ (n. 65).”
“Popper’s occasional references to ‘the doctrine of the chosen people’, which he associates with totalitarianism, show little knowledge of the prophets though a great deal of emotion, and his references to Christianity are also based on sentiment rather than the logic of research. He is ‘for’ Christianity, but means by it something that is utterly at variance with the explicit teachings of Paul, the Catholic Church, Luther, and Calvin.” “Julius Streicher, in his violently anti-Semitic paper, Der Stürmer, constantly quoted the Gospel according to St. John.”
“These simple sentences have seemed striking to some and have excited hostility — even from people who would not wish to deny some understanding of philosophy, not to speak of religion… . When I have spoken of actuality, one might have inquired, without being told to do so, in what sense I use this expression; after all, I have treated actuality in an elaborate Logic and there distinguished it precisely not only from the accidental, which, of course, has existence, too, but also, in great detail, from being there, existence, and other concepts.” Hegel, na Enciclopédia, sobre o mal-entendido de sua famosa citação “todo racional é real”, aludindo ao conceito de realidade efetiva, sem dúvida…
“It would prevent some confusion if Hegel’s term wirklich were translated actual, seeing that he opposed it to potential rather than to unreal or nonexistent.”
“Hegel would consider rational the conscience of an opponent of Hitler who recognized his own absolute right to make himself free and to realize his unalienable rights — but not the conscience of a fanatic impelled by personal motives or perhaps by an equally objectionable ideology.
It is no wonder that the Nazis found small comfort in a book that is based on the conviction that ‘the hatred of law, of right made determinate by law, is the shibboleth [estrangeirismo, anomalia, exceção] which reveals, and permits us to recognize infallibly, fanaticism, feeble-mindedness, and the hypocrisy of good intentions, however they may disguise themselves’ (§258 n.).”
“Success is not the standard invoked in the Philosophy of Right when Hegel speaks of ‘bad states’.”
“Hegel’s philosophy is open to many objections, but to confound it with totalitarianism means to misunderstand it. Ernst Cassirer puts the matter very clearly in The Myth of the State (1946), a book dealing with much the same material as Popper’s, but in a much more scholarly manner. His Hegel chapter ends: ‘Hegel could extol and glorify the state, he could even apotheosize it. There is, however, a clear and unmistakable difference between his idealization of the power of the state and that sort of idolization that is the characteristic of our modern totalitarian systems.’”
“Hegel, like Augustine, Lessing, and Kant before him and Comte, Marx, Spengler, and Toynbee after him, believed that history has a pattern and made bold to reveal it. All these attempts are controversial in detail and questionable in principle; but a sound critique of Hegel should also take into account his remarkable restraint: he did not attempt to play the prophet and was content to comprehend the past.”
“His attitude depends on his religious faith that in the long run, somewhere, somehow freedom will and must triumph: that is Hegel’s ‘historicism’.”
“Philosophy of Right (§258). Throughout, he tries to avoid the Scylla of that revolutionary lawlessness that he associates with Fries and the Wartburg festival and the Charybdis of conservative lawlessness that he finds in Von Haller’s Restauration der Staatswissenschaft.”
“Hegel’s notion [de que em cada época reinava um povo] was surely suggested to him by the way in which the Romans succeeded the Greeks — and perhaps also the Greeks, the Persians; and the Persians, the Babylonians.” “Hegel’s conception is dated today: we know more than he did about the history of a great number of civilizations. We can no longer reduce world history to a straight line that leads from the Greeks via the Romans to ourselves; nor can we dispose of ancient Asia as ‘The Oriental Realm’ and understand it simply as the background of the Greeks. We are also aware of ambiguities in the conception of a Volk or nation and should not apply such terms to the carriers of Greek or Roman civilization.”
“There is no single plan into which all data can be fitted, and Hegel was certainly something of a Procrustes.”
“Public opinion contains everything false and everything true, and to find what is true in it is the gift of the great man. Whoever tells his age, and accomplishes, what his age wants and expresses, is the great man of his age.”
“from Hegel’s contention that ‘there is an ethical element in war, which should not be considered an absolute evil’ (§324), Popper deduces that Hegel considered war ‘good in itself.’”
“For in Europe every people is now limited by another and may not, on its part, begin a war against another European people. If one now wants to go beyond Europe, it can only be to America.” Curso de Estética. Interessante. Hegel diz que acabou o material para poesia épica ou epopéias no solo europeu, e que novas histórias só poderiam ser contadas, com base em fatos reais, no Novo Continente, que progrediria…
NOW THE LAND OF THE PAST: “In his lectures on the philosophy of history, Hegel also hailed the United States as ‘the land of the future’. Plainly, he did not believe that world history would culminate in Prussia. His lectures on history do not lead up to a prediction but to the pronouncement: ‘To this point consciousness has come.’”
“When philosophy paints its grey on grey, a form of life has grown old, and with grey on grey it cannot be rejuvenated, but only comprehended. The owl of Minerva begins its flight only at dusk.”
“Quando a filosofia retrata o grisalho, uma forma de vida se tornou velha demais, e o que é reconhecido como grisalho não pode rejuvenescer, só ser compreendido. A coruja de Atena só alça seu vôo na escuridão.”
A análise filosófica sempre chega tarde. O que chegou a conceito já é História, não mais efetividade (ato, presente). Mas é para isso que serve o olhar filosófico: para momentos de crise, não para o auge da civilização. Ressaca da cultura. A coruja é por si só um animal de fábula, velho, astuto, sábio; a coruja de Minerva é o mascote da própria Deusa da Sabedoria e da Justiça, e portanto está a seu serviço, mas também sob sua proteção. Poder-se-ia dizer, com qualquer outro pássaro, que levanta vôo e canta alegre na aurora, mas esse pássaro filósofo não é. Sombra e noite. Retorno à caverna. Liberdade póstuma.
P.S.: Quase toda tradução para português que vejo deixou de me agradar de um tempo pra cá… Por isso resolvi eu mesmo traduzir o trecho.
Antídotos para Popper e que não sejam ao mesmo tempo apologias do Nacionalismo, preceituados por Kaufmann, sob a forma de 2 obras de um mesmo autor (na verdade 1 obra e 1 capítulo):
Hans Kohn, The Idea of Nationalism (1944) / “Nationalism and the Open Society” in: The Twentieth Century (1949). Com certeza a expressão “Open Society” estava de moda!
“Popper’s use of ‘tribalism’ and ‘nationalism’ is emotional rather than precise, and he accuses Hegel of both. Even so he must admit that Hegel ‘sometimes attacked the nationalists’ (p. 251).”
Aparentemente, H. contrasta Estado e nação: para ele, nação é a barbárie ‘burocratizada’. Uma não-unidade territorial, a despeito de unitária formalmente. Parece falar de uma terra abandonada por Deus, pelos sabiás e pelas palmeiras, sem aurora, crepuscular, mas também sem filosofia, como o Brasil…
DO TREAD ON US, PLEASE!
“The state was to be built from ‘below’, through the sheer enthusiasm of the masses, and the ‘natural’ unity of the Volk was to supersede the stratified order of state and society.”
“The Nazis did find some support for their racism in Schopenhauer, with whom Popper constantly makes common cause against Hegel, and in Richard Wagner, who Popper eccentrically insinuates was something of a Hegelian (p. 228) though he was, of course, a devoted disciple of Schopenhauer.”
“Popper offers us the epigram: ‘Not <Hegel + Plato>, but <Hegel + Haeckel> is the formula of modern racialism’ (p. 256). Why Haeckel rather than Bernhard Förster, Julius Langbehn, Hofprediger Stöcker, Chamberlain, Gobineau, or Wagner? Why not Plato, about whose reflections on breeding the Nazis’ leading race authority, Dr. Günther, wrote a whole book — and Günther’s tracts on race sold hundreds of thousands of copies in Germany and went through several editions even before 1933? And why Hegel?”
“‘The transubstantiation of Hegelianism into racialism or of Spirit into Blood does not greatly alter the main tendency of Hegelianism’ (p. 256). Perhaps the transubstantiation of God into the Führer does not greatly alter Christianity?”
“One can sympathize with G.R.G. Mure when he says that the increasingly violent and ill-informed attacks on Hegel have reached a point in Popper’s Hegel chapter where they become ‘almost meaninglessly silly’. But familiarity with Hegel has waned to the point where reviewers of the original edition of The Open Society and Its Enemies, while expressing reservations about the treatment of Plato and Aristotle, have not generally seen fit to protest against the treatment of Hegel; and on the jacket of the English edition Bertrand Russell [certamente o ‘filósofo’ mais burro de todos os tempos] actually hails the attack on Hegel as ‘deadly’ — for Hegel. Since the publication of the American edition in 1950, John Wild and R.B. Levinson have each published a book to defend Plato against the attacks of Popper and other like-minded critics, and Levinson’s In Defense of Plato goes a long way toward showing up Popper’s methods. But Popper’s 10 chapters on Plato, although unsound, contain many excellent observations, and his book is so full of interesting discussions that no exposé will relegate it to the limbo of forgotten books. The Open Society will be around for a good long while, and that is one reason why its treatment of Hegel deserves a chapter.”
Ironicamente, a citação que fecha o texto é de Popper, comentando sobre Toynbee. Mas, numa daquelas divertidas inversões dialéticas, serve como uma luva para quem deve emitir um juízo sobre A Sociedade Aberta e Seus Inimigos (embora ache que ainda é dar bola demais para Popper):
“I consider this a most remarkable and interesting book… . He has much to say that is most stimulating and challenging… . I also agree with many of the political tendencies expressed in his work, and most emphatically with his attack upon modern nationalism and the tribalist and ‘archaist’, i.e., culturally reactionary tendencies, which are connected with it. The reason why, in spite of this, I single out … (this) work in order to charge it with irrationality, is that only when we see the effects of this poison in a work of such merit do we fully appreciate its danger (pp. 435 f.).”
Seclusão Anagógica 