My fortysomething self is attempting to come back to grips with the obvious phenomenon of Hegelian e-girls (scroll down a bit on the linked web page for particulars). I’ve nonetheless probably not discovered precisely what an e-girl is normally: it typically appears to contain having an anime-based look or aesthetic, like pink pigtails, however the women in query right here don’t look very anime to me.
Particularly, the main Hegelian e-girls seem like two younger New Yorkers on Twitter who go by anna kw and Nikki the Hegelian. There’s nothing notably startling about two folks combining a female on-line aesthetic with Hegelian philosophy on their very own; the Web is full of people that make a distinct segment by combining one factor with one other factor. What’s extra putting is their obvious recognition: it seems that these two held a Hegelian e-girl occasion and 700 folks RSVPed.
I don’t assume that any of this can be a joke. On the web it’s at all times so laborious to inform who’s being ironic or trolling. However so far as I can inform, anna and Nikki are critical about being Hegelian philosophers and do not make up the recognition of their occasion. In that case, it feels to me like a extremely nice shock. I’ve been hoping extra younger folks would uncover the persevering with relevance of philosophy, however regardless of my very own love for Hegel I might by no means have anticipated it could be him – not given the infamous problem of his work.
anna kw helpfully posted a “mini-manifesto” of Hegelian e-girls. The manifesto takes off from the actual downside of political polarization within the current age, noting that that polarization isn’t restricted to “governmental energy as such” however even into “essentially the most mundane interactions.” She then notes:
It appears the one factor that nearly everybody can agree on is a desperation for radical change to the established order. It’s this establishment which has given rise to those radically contradictory calls for for change within the first place; they’re signs of the paradigm that birthed them, a paradigm of entitlement to expressing one’s voice politically for little greater than the aim of demanding rapid gratification in accordance with one’s most delinquent impulses. That is the self-interested nihilism of bourgeois democracy.
I imagine the Hegelian e-girls are intellectually critical as a result of this does certainly appear to me like a profoundly Hegelian factor to say. At one stage, Hegel’s philosophy is all about searching for fact in all the things, noting that everybody is true in some respect. The issue is that when folks search fact in all the things too rapidly, it typically leads them too rapidly to a easy center place, which regularly seems like an unquestioned centrist establishment. And that isn’t the place Hegel really takes you. Nic Thorne’s quietly Hegelian research of Thucydides and Plato is, at some stage, all about how an unquestioned establishment wants to vary: violent and nihilistic antagonists like (Plato’s) Thrasymachus and Callicles clearly see the contradictions that others have been scared to talk.
Distinction right here the works of Ken Wilber, whose “integral” philosophy begins from the Hegelian premise that philosophies ought to transcend and embrace competing views. Wilber isn’t mistaken about that. The issue is that he transcends and consists of these philosophies at a really shallow stage, one which kinds philosophies into phases with out offering convincing causes why one stage is definitely greater than the opposite, taking on an empiricism that doesn’t actually put the underlying causes in dialogue.
We are able to see what’s mistaken with Wilber’s strategy in the best way he utilized it to politics twenty years in the past. Wilber spoke admiringly of Tony Blair being “an genuine pioneer in “third manner” politics (cf. A Principle of All the things), which is likely one of the first critical strikes towards an integral politics that unites one of the best of liberal and conservative…” In fact, that “third manner”, which Blair shared with Invoice Clinton, was a mixture of social and cultural liberalism with the brutal capitalist economics of their predecessors Reagan and Thatcher. All of which could appear to be “one of the best of liberal and conservative” in case you’re one of many wealthy folks benefitting from Reagan’s and Thatcher’s large tax cuts, however appears much more like a vicious imply in case you’re one of many many individuals Reagan and Thatcher put out on the road.
Worse, the actual context for Wilber’s reward of Blair, written in 2003, was the conflict in Iraq, which George W. Bush’s US authorities initiated and continental European governments opposed:
As for world leaders—are any taking one thing resembling an integral view? The one world chief who comes shut, in my view, is Tony Blair. Blair—nearly alone, it appears to me—holds the multifarious sides pretty in consciousness and attracts conclusions (and programs of motion) primarily based on a much bigger image…. Blair, virtually single-handedly, is sitting between America and Europe and screaming at each of them: you can not begin competing and combating with every other-that street results in extra nightmares than you’ll be able to think about. Just like the colossus at Rhodes, Blair has one foot in America and one foot in Europe, and heroically appears the one world chief trying to maintain that integration in existence.
How’d that heroism work out for Blair? The Iraq conflict, which Blair championed, turned out to be made up on the false premises that Iraq had nuclear or organic weapons – and on these false premises led to not less than 100 000 violent deaths, most of them civilian. It turned out that Blair’s tried center place on Iraq was the mistaken place: the European governments had been proper and the American authorities was mistaken, and Blair finally sided with the latter. The problem for which Wilber most praised Blair was Blair’s undoing, resulting in his resignation. Ten years later, his unpopularity remained such that he admitted he can be a legal responsibility within the marketing campaign to maintain Britain within the European Union. Blair’s tried center floor was a fuckup – and, due to this fact, so was Wilber’s.
The Hegelian e-girls are most likely too younger to recollect the Iraq conflict. But I feel they however get the lesson that Wilber had not realized: an final dialectical synthesis, the one which preserves fact from either side, isn’t essentially discovered on a center floor. Or not less than it’s not on simply any center floor: some means may be worse than the extremes.
In contrast, a report from the Hegelian e-girl get together signifies it was attended by radicals of all stripes: “An uncommon mixture of platypus socialists, maga communists, jreg, Joshua Citarella, Jamie Peck, theorycels, man who officiated Curtis Yarvin’s marriage ceremony who’s gay however not homosexual, tech bros, and a pro-gamer named Rod who hated the get together.” This can be a mixing of various extremes that doesn’t find yourself within the center. It does appear to be the form of occasion that may assist push the world’s dialog ahead, in a manner that the Reaganite stagnation of Clinton and Blair didn’t.
Such an occasion is, at some stage, presupposed to be harmful – because it seems this occasion certainly was. The get together was first postponed, and anna kw claimed that this was as a result of threats of violence. Some dispute that the violent threats really occurred, however they’re one thing that you’d actually count on to occur at an occasion bringing collectively a bunch just like the one simply subscribed. These aren’t the type of folks that you’d count on to get alongside peacefully.
However that, in flip, is one factor that may be mentioned in defence of status-quo centrism. Whereas in the long run it might’t final – its inner contradictions will come out – a status-quo centrism can not less than preserve some peace. In the event you weren’t one of many ones tossed into the road by authorities cuts or murdered in Iraq, the Clinton-Blair period might really feel cozy, in a manner the present one can’t. Maybe that leads us to a special type of Hegelian synthesis: whereas a nihilistic Thrasymachus is required to push the dialectic ahead, there’s additionally one thing to be mentioned for the complacent Cephalus who delays that motion so long as attainable.
