Hegel??

"After decades of trying and utterly failing to see what could possibly be worthwhile in Hegel's philosophy, I believe I've had a breakthrough."

That's the first paragraph of an essay I posted here on December 11, 2023. 4 months later, it seems more and more likely that what I understood was a YouTube which purported to be about Hegel. Does that video actually have anything to do with Hegel? I don't know. I don't have any Earthly. I can't even. 

 

What we have here, now as before, is failure to communicate. We're back to where we were before last December. I am not getting the message from Hegel's texts. 

Unless I am. Unless Schopenhauer was right about Hegel's philosophy: that it was pseudo-intellectual gibberish successfully passing itself off as philosophy. But I can't be sure about that anymore. 

It's not that I am afraid to assail the reputation of a celebrated thinker and purported genius. Every word Susan Sontag published or said on a broadcast was pseudo-intellectual garbage, delivered with that smug grin William Gaddis warned us about. Spengler is, im Grunde genommen, pretty silly, and hugely overrated. But at least much more entertaining than Sontag.

It's not that I can't follow philosophers in general. With those up to and including Hegel's most celebrated immediate forerunner Kant, and also with those following him, although I must often read very slowly and repeat certain passages, I don't get this feeling I get with Hegel. Not with Kant himself, not with Heidegger, not with Adorno. Not with the world's most famous Hegelian, Marx. 

Well, as Kierkegaard said -- Kierkegaard, who has often delighted me, often made me shake my head chidingly, but never puzzled me: enten -- eller. Either Hegel has fooled a great number of very smart people, who regard him as a great genius, but not me, or Schopenhauer, or Kierkegaard -- or all of those people have significantly smarter than all three of us, at least in this regard.

I can easily admit it when a single person is clearly more intelligent than I  -- okay, not easily, but I can admit it. When an entire group is outdoing me, it's disturbing. 

It sort of reminds me of the historical Jesus question. I've studied it pretty thoroughly. Most of the people who have studied it pretty thoroughly say that it's pretty obvious that a person named Jesus preached in Galilee and Jerusalem in the 20's, 30's or 40's AD, that he said many of the things in the text we today call the Sermon on the Mount, and that he was crucified on Pilate's orders. 

Well, it's still not obvious at all to me. That light bulb above my head, which is supposed to go on when I see how the evidence all adds up to Jesus having really lived and preached and been crucified by Pilate -- that light bulb is not on, it has not begun to flicker. The Biblical scholars go over the evidence, and to me, they're making the case that it's possible Jesus existed, the case that it's conceivable -- and then they say, so you see, it's really certain that he existed! And I shout wearily: No! I don't see!

I also don't see how I'm not keeping up with what those Biblical scholars are saying. Let's take the example of another famous controversy: were the writers of the New Testament wrong when they said that a virgin birth was prophesied by Isaiah? Yes. They were wrong. Bart Ehrman explained this to me in less than half a minute. To make a short story even shorter: read the entire chapter of Isaiah 7, and as Ehrman said: shame on all of us supposedly brilliant people for not already having read the entire chapter. It's not long. The Hebrew word can mean "virgin," or simply "young women," somewhat like the English term "maiden." Reading Isaiah 7, the entire short chapter, makes it clear that the Greek New Testament authors were mistaking in translating the word as "virgin" instead of simply "young woman."

I had zero trouble keeping up with that. But understanding what is so great about Hegel...

"The Big Bang Theory" : Fake

I'm talking about the TV show, not the well-known theory in physics.

"The Big Bang Theory" is just fake "Malcolm in the Middle." They even have theme music by Barenaked Ladies, who are the fake They Might Be Giants, who made the theme music for "Malcolm in the Middle." "Malcolm" is made by and about authentic geniuses, including TMBG; TBBT is made by fake geniuses, and its characters are crude stereotypes of geniuses, just as BNL are crude imitations of nerds, and specifically, crude, inept imitations of TMBG. TMBG, besides being geniuses, are too nice to call BNL on this. I'm not.

The repeated guest appearances by Neil deGrasse Tyson and Stephen Hawking on TBBT do not refute my thesis; instead they show 1) that quality sitcoms are not Tyson's or Hawking's area of expertise, and 2) how desperate the producers of TBBT are to demonstrate (to themselves most of all) that they are really smart.

The presence of scientist and actual smart person Mayim Bialik in the cast (in a role as stereotypical and tired as the rest) does not refute my thesis. Let's see what you or I would do if offered that much money (reportedly Bialik receives half a million dollars per episode currently) after several years' worth of slowed-down career.

Neglected Geniuses

Hey, here's a group that discusses the history of the Roman and Byzantine state. "...from 753 BC to AD 1475." Oh. No. No, no, no, no. The link to the group shows a picture which they say is of Constantius II's entry into Rome in AD 357. Constantius II did visit Rome in 357. But when was this picture made? I'm guessing 19th or 20th century. I'm also guessing that I could find out more quickly when and by whom the picture was made by researching it myself than by asking the members of the group, and that my asking would probably mostly have the effect of annoying them.

Hey, look at this: Vinča symbols. Never heard of them? Me neither, before yesterday. And yet these people (not the same people as in the previous paragraph) are saying they're a writing system going back to -- 5300 BC? And that there's a bias among academics who study early writing against paying any attention to them? Oh dear. Actual academics simply don't behave that way. They don't cover up plausible discoveries which would "rock the boat." They're boat rockers. The key word there was "plausible."

How many people are there who think that they are geniuses and that their genius is neglected, for every neglected genius? I don't have an actual number for you, but it's a lot.

And Albert Einstein was not a neglected genius: he started publishing papers in the Annalen der Physik, the pre-eminent academic publication on physics at the time, around his 22nd birthday, in 1901, four years before his most famous group of papers were published in the same journal. In 1905, not only were those papers published, but Einstein also received a PhD from the University of Zurich. Although he was working in a patent office at the time, not taking courses at the university or anything like that. He got the Nobel Prize when he was 42 or 43. (He was chosen to receive it in 1921 but it wasn't awarded to him until the next year.) That is not neglect by the academic establishment. That is not by any stretch of the imagination neglect. That is almost as far from being rejected by the academic mainstream as anyone could ever be. Yes, there were people who rejected Einstein's findings, many laypeople outside the field of physics and just a handful within, but they would not have rejected his findings if he hadn't been a rock star within his field. Because they probably never would have heard of him, for one thing, and they would have had no reason to get so upset about his being, in their mistaken opinions, completely, absurdly wrong about space and time and matter and energy. People who are completely, absurdly wrong are a dime a dozen in every walk of life. Someone you think is completely, absurdly wrong, but most of the rest of the world thinks they're a genius -- that's different. That can be very annoying.

I imagine it would be all the more annoying if the annoyed person felt him- or herself to be a neglected genius.

The ones who thought that they were unrecognized geniuses were the ones who vehemently rejected Einstein's ideas. And they weren't geniuses. The geniuses understood Einstein and were blown away. Leading directly to the previously-mentioned condition of him not being neglected in the slightest, but wildly celebrated and one of the two or three most famous people in the world.

Nuggets

We're in that awkward in-between time of the year, those few days between when the MacArthur Foundation has disappointed me again and when the Nobel Committee, most likely, will disappointment me again. Get it together guys, this is getting old, and so am I.

I've tried to just take it easy today, because it seemed like I should. Taking it easy is not something which comes naturally to me. I'm always struggling to help the world break on through: past Trump, past two-party systems, past the GOP, past petroleum, past capitalism... Past silly notions that I somehow don't deserve the Mac and the Nobel.

I almost took it so easy today that I didn't blog at all, but I couldn't quite.

Past nationalism, I almost forgot to add. I struggle to get people past the notion that there's something wrong with someone being from somewhere else, the notion that someone should automatically be distrusted because he or she is from somewhere else.

We haven't quite yet gotten to the point where the general public has really faced the fact that capitalism is anti-social, that it calls for sociopaths. Those times when Trump ripped off those he did business with, because he could, and when he and Mitt paid no taxes, because they could, and when that AIDS medication douchebag almost got away with those price hikes -- they were all just being good capitalists. When someone gives someone a break, for that moment they're not being business-savvy. The public has sort of halfway faced these things when they acknowledge that it's dog-eat-dog in the business world.

Anyway. One step at a time: past Trump. Past two-party systems. Past big oil. Keep on strugglin' against that big bad ol' entropy. Get me that damn Nobel...

Have yrselves a nice evening, pardners and cowgirls. A nice lunch, cobbers. A nice every other part of the day or night, every other part of the big spinning blue marble. Don't shoot! Be nice! Play with a kitten, or a doggie or a baby elephant or a human whom you happen to adore and the feeling's mutual, ya lucky cobber!

You see: when I write "mee r munkee. mee luv yu" on this blog, I'm striving. I don't love everybody all the time with the unconditional love you sometime get from well-treated animals. But I admire being able to love like that. I know, monkeys aren't always nice. Sometimes in real life a chimp will rip a person's face off, or so I've heard. On the other hand, sometimes monkeys and people can be nice.

Academia And Genius

If we're going to go strictly by academic records, then Einstein's records before 1905 don't show all that much. Academic records may be a good general indicator of talent, and there have always been non-academics who ridicule academics (or academics who ridicule whole other academic disciplines, cough cough New Atheists Postmodernists cough cough) and are, you know -- wrong; but on the other hand there are a few people whose relationship to academia is unconventional. Like Einstein going so quickly from the patent office to a professorship. Like William Gaddis and Cormac McCarthy, neither of whom ever graduated from college.

Like me. I'm staggeringly brilliant -- let's face it -- and I graduated from college with high honors, and I managed to do that in the very same university where McCarthy failed to graduate at all, but I did it when I was nearly 28, and I had never graduated from high school (got a GED instead) and my graduate school record, all in all, would have to be called a disaster, spanning 3 universities in 3 years and resulting in no graduate degrees.

And all of that led me to be well-inclined, at first, to people who sneered at academics, until I got to know those people and realized that they were mostly just idiots. On the one hand there's Gaddis and McCarthy and RB Morris and Pynchon and Schopenhauer and me -- just 6 of us -- and on the other hand there's a bazillion non-academic morons who are basically all just a bunch of damn Fredo Corleones who insist that they're smart! not like everybody says, like -- stupid! They're smart and they want some damn respect!

Well, they're not smart. (Although, unfortunately, they do get some respect sometimes. On shows about ancient aliens and the Grail in Amurrka, for example.) The thing about Gaddis and McCarthy and RB and Pynchon and and Schopenhauer and me is that there ain't too many of us. And we don't generally get called stupid. Unless somebody loses their patience with us and yells at us that we're "the smartest and the dumbest person I've ever met!" the way Mandy Patinkin screamed that at Carrie Mathison and threw up his hands and pulled his hair. We get called that, but not because we're stupid, but because we're brilliant and unconventional, and someone loses his or her temper because we're not using our genius the way they'd expected. Just like Einstein, working at the patent office and completing his doctorate, and the papers that would make him world-famous, at the same time. That's unconventional. The same way that it was very unconventional that Saul Bellow spent decades in the 2nd half of the 20th century as a professor at the University of Chicago, and the only doctorates he ever got in his life were honorary.

Did Bellow teach English? No, of course not! He taught a course on Rousseau. McCarthy hangs with academics -- but mostly scientists.

We draw outside the lines, some of us, and sometimes that means that we don't do the academic thing conventionally, if at all. There's only a very few like us, but there are many geniuses in academia, in the places designed specifically for them, just where you'd expect geniuses to be. Conversely, among the genius full professors there are a few fully-professorial morons, like Hegel and Robert Price, but they too are anomalies. We anomalous geniuses don't go around proclaiming that we're going to "rip the cover off of what academia doesn't want you to know!" because, generally speaking, the academics want you to know the real deal. Generally speaking. Theologians, maybe not always so much.

Yes, Dear, You're Smart. Of Course You Are

Robert McAlmon's memoir Being Geniuses Together,about the community of artsy folk in Paris in the 1920's which included Gertrude Steinand Alic B Toklas, Picasso, Pound, Joyce,Hemingway and, yes, Robert McAlmon, never gave me any indication that McAlmon was actually a genius, and it did give me several strong hints that he was not. Then suddenly this morning, it became clear to me how the interaction between McAlmon and the geniuses worked: those of the geniuses who, like for instance Joyce, were not wealthy, got lots of free meals and drinks and "loans" and no doubt many other assorted handouts from rich boy McAlmon, who in turn got to feel like a genius, when in fact he was plainly a bonehead. Much the way writers and painters in ages past, as recently and with as much spine as Kant,flattered princes for a living. (Have you read the dedications to Prussian royalty in Kant's books? Disgusting!)

Stein was the center of this community, and most certainly a genius, and wealthy, and formidable in every which way -- say it with a French accent, please -- but presumably not even she could do everything all by herself. Enter the well-married and deluded McAlmon: ah, how convenient. I don't know why it took me so long to figure that out.

Who need to be constantly reassured that they are smart? Stupid people, of course. Don't you ever -- EVER! -- call me stupid! Who need to be reassured that they are wondrously virile studs? Impotent men.

Although it seems to be the opposite when it comes to looks: supermodels and other stunningly-beautiful people seem so often chronically insecure about their looks -- some actually say things like, My earlobes are hideous. Or, My navel. Honey, put the mirror down, sit down and listen to me: if you have to search yourself all over until you get to your earlobes or your navel before you find something you don't like, you're gorgeous. Just trust me, you are. Try to enjoy it. You're gorgeous, and you probably haven't spent a lot of time carefully looking at average-looking people. People probably generally tend to like you a lot, because, well, c'mon. But if you could stop whining about your tiny, barely-perceptible, probably mostly imaginary appearance problems around the rest of us, who have never looked nearly as good as you and never will, that'd be swell, that'd make you much more likable still. If in addition to realizing that you're beautiful, you could also realize that sometimes you're not as intelligent or witty as people tell you you are, because, well, c'mon -- (McAlmon was once a nude model) -- then you'd be way ahead of the curve. The world would pretty much be yours.

Plainer people, on the other hand, often have the attitude of, I know, I'm ugly. Can we move on? Not like with other things. Impotence must be widespread, judging from the sales of medications for it, but you don't often see a guy come into a bar and say to everyone, Man, I just can't do it at all! I am one limp-dicked loser! Give everybody a round on me! You don't often hear the stupid say, Yes, I'm stupid. Perhaps it's partly that Socratic I-know-that-I-know-nothing paradox. Perhaps it's mostly or entirely that.