Right. Having an objective understanding of history is important, regardless of our feelings about it. Hegel can be seen as (one of) the greatest of his time in establishing a method for objective understanding of history, albeit in an inverted, idealist form. There is a difference, however, between understanding history and sanctifying it. The latter stance serves to crush the individual and regiment the intellectual into passive acceptance or active complicity with crimes being committed. To say no one has the right to judge eliminates the element of individual responsibility for what happens next, which must never be occluded. This language about the world spirit on horseback is very dangerous language, if it is taken to mean something more than cold objectivity, as it does in Trejo's childish rants about Napolean and Canfora's nostalgia over Stalin. On another list, we might have a discussion of the identical psychodynamics of Catholicism and Stalinism, which might well apply to the mentality of the Italian left.

-----Original Message-----
From: Neri De Giuli <ndegiuli@...>
Sent: Feb 16, 2004 7:16 AM
To: hegel@yahoogroups.com
Subject: [hegel] comprehension of history

A lesson that should be learnt from Hegel is the effort of comprehension
rather than easy (abstract) judging. All the"you're not hegelian"
discussions fall in background, if one forgets that, just to make an
example, if Stalin had a role in history, this is to be comprehended,
and not reduced to "someone who butchered milions". And my personal
point of view on the topic is not in question.
A reflection, by the way: how many people in the land of the free (usa)
live under the poverty threshold? How many people have no access to
pharmaceutical resources? How many do queue on the street every day to
get something to eat? Compare, compare...the oh my god so good
capitalism easily forgets about so many things.
Best regards,
Neri De Giuli.


Ralph Dumain's The Autodidact Project
http://www.autodidactproject.org
The C.L.R. James Institute
http://www.clrjamesinstitute.org

Since you ask, Neri, there really aren't many poor people in 'the land of the free'.

When I was a boy in the South in the 50's the poverty was palpable. This was particularly true of the black people, but the whites in the South were also poor - the poorest in the nation. But the conditions in which blacks lived was absolutely unbelievable. When my relatives from up North came to visit they always wanted to drive through a black slum so that they could be horrified at the conditions. Virtually all black people lived in shacks.

All I can say is that the transformation in the past fifty years has been miraculous. Growing up I felt very uncomfortable living in the South. But now there is no place I would rather live.

But the South is still the poorest part of the nation. So if things are going fairly well here then I suppose things are going well everywhere.

People in America don't 'queue', by the way. Unfortunately there are, though, several hundred homeless people in Atlanta, a city of 4 million.

What you say about medical access is a very real problem here, though.

I think the great difference between America and seemingly the rest of the world is that Americans aren't mad at anyone, and for the most part we aren't mad about much of anything. It seems like people in the rest of the world are just so mad about so much, and so mad at so many. Very often they are mad at Americans. And Americans think - well, what in the world have we done to get the Italians or whomever so mad at us? And when they try to explain it, we don't understand a word they say.

John

----- Original Message -----
From: Neri De Giuli
To: hegel@yahoogroups.com
Sent: Monday, February 16, 2004 7:16 AM
Subject: [hegel] comprehension of history



A reflection, by the way: how many people in the land of the free (usa)
live under the poverty threshold? How many people have no access to
pharmaceutical resources? How many do queue on the street every day to
get something to eat? Compare, compare...the oh my god so good
capitalism easily forgets about so many things.
Best regards,
Neri De Giuli.


[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]

Neiri, Ralph etc,

one of the fascinating aspects of such international mailing lists is that
one gets
interesting insights in other cultures and ways of thinking, so from that
ascpect
your recent posts were interesting to me.

However, I guess you will admitt that they have little to do with Hegel per
se,
so you realy should put such off topic posts to privat email exchange or
establish a conection/relevance to Hegel topics.

Also, as I am aware that political discussions easily tend to get
caried away, I have created Hegel-os (about Hegel's teaching on "Objective
Spirit", including law, family, society, economics, state, world history
etc),
were there is more room to go into detaqils and also into side pathes.

All the best,
Kai



--
Kai Froeb, Muenchen
http://kai.froeb.net
http://hegel-werkstatt.de

At 01:22 PM 2/16/2004 -0500, JOHN BARDIS wrote:

>I think the great difference between America and seemingly the rest of the
>world is that Americans aren't mad at anyone, and for the most part we
>aren't mad about much of anything. It seems like people in the rest of the
>world are just so mad about so much, and so mad at so many.

This particular passage belongs to a science fiction discussion. As for
Stalinism, American capitalism, etc., yes, such a discussion belongs
elsewhere, but remember that my remarks were directed at the use of Hegel
for the sanctification of the existent and necessary, with implications for
future actions as well as judgment of the past.

Ralph Dumain:

>>

Having an objective understanding of history is important, regardless of our
feelings about it. Hegel can be seen as (one of) the greatest of his time
in establishing a method for objective understanding of history, albeit in
an inverted, idealist form. There is a difference, however, between
understanding history and sanctifying it. The latter stance serves to crush
the individual and regiment the intellectual into passive acceptance or
active complicity with crimes being committed. To say no one has the right
to judge eliminates the element of individual responsibility for what
happens next, which must never be occluded.
<<

The problem with all this is that you are addressing a strawman, not Hegel's
(or my) position.

***
1. First question: what do you mean by "inverted, idealist form"?

This criticism of Hegel's philosophy is not accurate, because Hegel's
philosophy is the tentative of dialectically reconciling being with thought.
This does not mean (as Bob Fanelli's fantasies seem to imply) that "whatever
I think" is also "real". This mean that the apparently irreductible
contradiction between being and thought can actually be "thought" and
"understood" by using Hegel's philosophy. That means that what is rational,
if it is rational, must also have the stength to actualise itself in
history. Otherwise this rationality is a mere chimera.

Whatever philosophical tradition has called it, Hegel's philosophy is so
much more "materialist" than you can actually imagine. Each philosophy with
an immanent point of view is also somehow materialist.

***
2. Second question: is there really a difference between understanding
history and sanctifying it?

I admit it, this is a provocative issue.
According to most Hegel's contemporaries, there was no real distinction
between "materialism", "divinisation" of reality and "hybris". Declaring
that the rational is the actual and that the actual is the rational meant
declaring that what had happened since 1789 had a logic within itself. Most
Hegel's contemporaries thought of the Revolution as a divine punishment for
a bad humanity (among them, intellectuals of the calibre of Joseph De
Maistre).

But neither Hegel, nor myself, are "sanctifying" anything.

All I wrote is that Hegel's philosophy does not leave space for any kind of
eschatology. There is no "Heaven", there is no "perfect Republic" waiting
for us at the end of the tunnel. These ideas are just chimerical
abstractions with a very low degree of rationality within them. The
dialectical nature of our world is an objective feature of it. Dialectics
will never cease to caracterise our relations.

The leaders of communist societies have learned this hard lesson on their
own skin. They believed they were building a classless society, the Heaven
on this Earth. But this project was just the ideological expression of a
chimera coming out of the enthusiasm of a few revolutionaries. But
organising a communist society is something very different than organising a
"permanent revolution" (in Trotsky's sense). Enthusiasm can only play an
enticing role in it, then you need competence and a strong dose of realism.

***
3. Third question: do we have the right to judge?

You wrote:

>>

To say no one has the right to judge eliminates the element of individual
responsibility for what happens next, which must never be occluded.
<<

Well, I agree. Nobody has ever denied the possibility of judgment. History
(the progress in the consciousness of freedom) is actually a continuous, not
very consistent expression of judgments on his own past (Weltgeschichte ist
Weltgericht). According to Hegel, the "Spirit" is first of all "Subject",
therefore history is value-oriented, is not a Spinoza-kind-of world "sub
specie aeternitatis", where everything can be accepted because it is just
another piece of God's puzzle.

The only problem is that we cannot identify this possibility of judgment
with the individual's moral viewpoint (the very viewpoint that makes someone
outrageously affirm that "Stalin was just a butcher").

To judge, one must understand - objectively - what its past History means.
To really judge Stalin's role in history, one must understand the world
Stalin was acting in (and on), and not "abstract" Stalin's objectively awful
crimes from the context, in order to proclaim (implicitly or by stealth) the
"superiority" of the West (whose contemporary awful crimes in the colonies
are never remembered).

To grow out of Stalin, moral indignation is not enough. We need to
understand the objective historical conditions of the existence of Stalin
and judge whether all of Stalin must be thrown in the trashbin of history or
not.

It is my opinion that we would have never had 70 years of communist
societies without Stalin's work. I suspect that this is the underlying
reason why there is such a strong attack (and such a strong grudge) against
Stalin (sometimes using "stalinist" methods against its own creator) in the
field of capitalist ideologues.


****

Finally, you wrote:

>>

On another list, we might have a discussion of the identical psychodynamics
of Catholicism and Stalinism, which might well apply to the mentality of the
Italian left.
<<

This would deserve a long reply, but -- as you say -- it is material for
another list. I cannot abstain to notice, however, that my ideas are not the
ideas of what you could call the "Italian left" (let's admit for a moment
that there is such a thing under these particular historical conditions).
Please don't confuse my position with an "Italian" position. Nationality has
nothing to do with it.

But frankly, if we must continue to speak in terms of nationalities, it is
well known that the "Italian Left" (the real one) was indeed kept out of
power for more than 40 years because of American "oppression". American
sponsored and equipped "Stay Behind" structures were demanteled in Italy
(actually in the very region where I come from) only in 1991.

Voters in 1976 had given the Italian Communist Party more than 35% of the
votes, actually more than the votes received by the Christian Democrats. And
we were never in power, because the US did not want a communist party to
rule Italy. They were ready to stage a military coup. This is now a well
documented history.

A history we should objectively understand, and not sanctify (as you said).


All the best,
Maurizio Canfora

In a message dated 2/16/2004 11:51:34 AM Eastern Standard Time,
ndegiuli@... writes:

> if Stalin had a role in history, this is to be comprehended,
> and not reduced to "someone who butchered milions"
>
> Neri,
>
> All people have a role in history. Stalin should be judged, regardless of
> his altruistic pretensions of setting the world upright and fair and
> equitable, on his conduct in the 'affairs of men,' which, as you know, was abominable.
> The sum total of any human's life is nothing if he or she has caused the
> suffering of so many. 'The mills of the gods grind exceeding small.'

Regards,

Bob Fanelli


[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]