[A]s Napoleonic armies battled on the streets of Jena, Hegel completed his first major work, The Phenomenology of Spirit, in which he declared that “the Truth is not only the result [of philosophy] . . . the truth is the whole in the process of development.”
Let us examine that last statement for a moment. Hegel is, for lack of a better word, evolutionizing the idea of philosophical truth. Truth is the whole in the process of development. He is liberating truth from the spell of solidity. Truth is not just found in this insight or that revelation; it is to be found in the very process of one idea giving way to another, and then being transcended by yet another, in the rough-and-tumble struggle of history. Truth is not static, he is saying, it is a process, a developmental unfolding. In order to appreciate any current philosophical idea, we need to understand its tributaries; we need to recognize the developmental process that has given it life. We need to take into account the give and take, the back and forth, the dialectical process, as Hegel calls it, as one stage of understanding gives way to another. “Hegel was the first to recognize that consciousness develops through a series of distinct stages,” writes Steve McIntosh, “[and] among the first to understand that this process of development or ‘becoming’ is the central motif of the universe.”
The Constitution of Knowledge relies on independent judgment; cancel culture relies on bullying.
In analyzing a shock, economists like to disentangle changes in supply from changes in demand. The distinction matters because different causes require different remedies. If production, employment, and income contract because of a supply shock, then what is required to restore economic activity is an adjustment in the way we produce, deliver, and consume goods and services. This is what economists tend to call a “real” adjustment. If the problem is inadequate demand, then the system of production and distribution can remain as it is. What we need to do is to stimulate more spending by loosening budget constraints, for instance, through lower taxes, government spending, or easier credit.
The fact is, there are very few political, social, and especially personal problems that arise because of insufficient information. Nonetheless, as incomprehensible problems mount, as the concept of progress fades, as meaning itself becomes suspect, the Technopolist stands firm in believing that what the world needs is yet more information.
The Greek view of nature, at least that cosmology transmitted from them to later ages, was essentially dramatic. It is not necessarily wrong for this reason: but it was overwhelmingly dramatic. It thus conceived nature as articulated in the way of a work of dramatic art, for the exemplification of general ideas converging to an end. Nature was differentiated so as to provide its proper end for each thing. There was the centre of the universe as the end of motion for those things which are heavy, and the celestial spheres as the end of motion for those things whose natures lead them upwards.
The direct influence of Greek literature vanished. But the concept of the moral order and of the order of nature had enshrined itself in the Stoic philosophy. For example, Lecky in his History of European Morals tells us ‘Seneca maintains that the Divinity has determined all things by an inexorable law of destiny, which He has decreed, but which He Himself obeys.’ But the most effective way in which the Stoics influenced the mentality of the Middle Ages was by the diffused sense of order which arose from Roman law. Again to quote Lecky, ‘The Roman legislation was in a twofold manner the child of philosophy. It was in the first place formed upon the philosophical model, for, instead of being a mere empirical system adjusted to the existing requirements of society, it laid down abstract principles of right to which it endeavoured to conform; and, in the next place, these principles were borrowed directly from Stoicism.’
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