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...

It Looks As If the Pope and I Aren't Going to Be Friends After All

I don't think I'm going to be reading Benedict XVI's new book about the birth and infancy of Jesus. On the Amazon page for that book, there is an excerpt from Chapter 1. That excerpt was enough for me. As some wise man has said frequently, you don't need to drink the whole ocean to know that it's salty. (Oh yeah, that's right -- it's me! I'm the wise man who came up with that one.) You don't need to read an entire book to know that it's silly.

In the excerpt, as you can see, Benedict comments upon the meeting of Jesus and Pilate in John, chapters 18 and 19, with reference to some other passages from the Bible. And as you can also see if you read chapters 18 and 19 in John, Benedict gets a lot out of those passages which wasn't in them to begin with. For example, three sentences from Benedict say: "All this must have seemed like madness to the Roman judge. And yet he could not shake off the mysterious impres­sion left by this man, so different from those he had met before who resisted Roman domination and fought for the restoration of the kingdom of Israel. The Roman judge asks where Jesus is from in order to understand who he really is and what he wants."

It's good that we have Benedict to "interpret" things for us. Because the Bible actually doesn't say that it all must have seemed like madness to Pilate, nor that Jesus gave him a mysterious impression, nor that Pilate could not shake off this impression, nor that Jesus was different from others Pilate had met, nor why Pilate asked where Jesus was from.

Of course, this sort of thing is familiar to anyone who's heard a certain type of Christian sermon, where the pastor or priest first reads a passage from the Bible somewhere between one and ten verses long, and then proceeds to comment upon that passage for half an hour or longer. Assuming you're not speaking to an audience composed of linguists, historians or textual critics, and sometimes even then, it's very hard, maybe impossible, to go on for so long about a passage so short without straight-up making stuff up. Now, I have no problem with this as long as you are clear that what you are presenting is historical fiction, as I was clear when I called the book I wrote about Pilate and Jesus what it is: a novel.

When theologians do it they call it exegesis. The Methodist theologian Ben Witherington calls it exegesis. Here Witherington describes some of his adventures preceeding the publication in 2011 of the Pope's book about Jesus during the Holy Week. To his obvious great excitement, he was chosen by someone connected in some way with the Pope to participate in a discussion of the Pope's new book: 4 Catholic scholars, 1 Jew, and just 1 Protestant. Witherington doesn't make clear whether he was asked to take part in this discussion or just told that he would do so. I assume it's the former, but he doesn't actually say. (See what I did there, kiddies? I could have indulged in exegesis, but I didn't, I actually confined myself to the information contained in Witherington's written account.) Witherington says that he had to read and digest the book in a great hurry in order to be ready to participate in this discussion. He doesn't say whether there was such a hurry because he was the Vatican's 12th choice to be the token Protestant. Poor puppy, I wonder whether such a thing even occurred to him. He just says, "I considered this an honor. Somebody out there must trust me as an exegete and a theologian."

And he considers the Pope to be a very great exegete indeed, and happy happy joy joy bla bla bla. Not only do these people believe that the Bible is the inspired word of God, disturbed in this belief neither by modern scholarship nor common sense, they applaud each other for embellishing greatly upon the Bible, they dress up their common wish not to want to know with academic jargon, they praise each other to the skies as great theologians, and insist that a great theologian, a great Student of He Who Is Not, is a great intellectual, just as much as Nietzsche or Russell or Sartre is, the better, I think, to drown out the derisive laughter of those few brighter people who have troubled to look in upon their little academic fiefdom.

In that excerpt from his new book Benedict refers to Pilate as "The 'enlight­ened' Roman judge, who had already expressed skepticism regarding the question of truth (cf. Jn 18:38)" To me, that one question of Pilate's, "What is truth?" alone makes him the most interesting character in the entire Bible, the only one who might actually be thinking about things in a challenging and deep way. (Not that I assume that Pilate ever actually posed such a question, simply because the Bible states that he did.) To Benedict it makes him worthy of derision, of being called "enlightened" only with that word in quotation marks. So, for all his elegant prose and imposing jargon, Benedict is anti-intellectual. Like a snake-handling televangelist, but better-spoken. What a shame. He and I can't be friends, it's just not in the cards. Each of our raisons d'etre is to oppose the other and what he stands for.

And "exegesis," at least when it refers to Bible interpretation, is Greek for "pulling stuff out of your butt."