[HoratiuM]

La fel stau lucrurile şi cu celelalte tâmpenii ale lui Kreeft cu privire la Hegel:

5. Fatalismul: ideea că dialectica şi rezultatele sale sunt inevitabile şi necesare, nu libere. Marxismul este un fel de predestinare calvinistă fără un Predestinator divin.

6. Statismul: ideea că, deoarece nu există nici un adevăr sau o lege eternă, care să transcendă istoria, statul este suprem şi necriticabil. Aici Marx a internaţionalizat din nou naţionalismul lui Hegel.

7. Militarism: ideea că, deoarece nu există o lege universală naturală sau veşnică peste toate statele, care să judece şi să rezolve diferenţele dintre ele, războiul este inevitabil şi necesar atât timp cât există state.

De fapt, lucrurile stau aşa:

Hegel's description of the rational State in his "Philosophy of Right" (1821) cannot be identified at all with a description of the Prussian Monarchy at the time Hegel was writing. Hegel was describing the kind of State that liberal and progressive Prussian reformers (such as Stein, but particularly Hardenberg and Altenstein) would have liked to establish if they would have been given the possibility by King Frederick William III and his reactionary entourage.

Hegel's political philosophy - with its support for constitutionalism, public parliamentary debate, free elections and a strong civil service - was regarded with suspicion by the Prussian Monarchy, which saw in it a sort of moderate fulfillment of the principles proclaimed by the French Revolution in 1789.

For these reasons, Hegel was rarely invited to Court. The only well-documented episode, regarding a dinner with the Prussian Crown Prince and future King Frederick William IV, witnesses how tense the relations were between Hegel and the Court. During that dinner, the Crown Prince attacked Hegel's friend and foremost disciple, associate professor Eduard Gans, for his liberal ideas, suggesting that Hegel should take direct control over Gans's lectures on ...Hegelian philosophy.

Moreover, due to the opposition of a conservative academic milieu and the Court, Hegel never made it through the Royal Academy of Science in Berlin, contrary to the major intellectuals teaching in Prussia.

Bearing all this in mind, the old and often repeated statement that Hegel was the "State Philosopher" in Prussia has to be utterly rejected. Not only was Hegel threatened by the Crown Prince and excluded by a prestigious academic position: his name is also mentioned a lot of times in Police reports of the time, as the one of a person involved in spreading liberal and progressive ideas.

Finally, while Hegel remained a constitutional monarchist until the end of his life, he never attributed excessive importance to the role of the sovereign. During his lessons on the philosophy of right he affirmed that the monarch's power consisted only in saying "yes" and then "dotting the i".

German nationalism began flourishing after 1807, as a consequence of Prussia's humiliating defeat by Napoleon's army and of the occupation of most of the former German Empire by French troops. Though sympathetic to the idea of a unified Germany, Hegel was never a nationalist. He actually endorsed Napoleon's victory over Prussia (just like Goethe), seeing in it the progress into Germany of the ideas born with the French Revolution.

Soon German nationalism evolved in a form of irrational exaltation of everything "German", and the condemnation of foreign principles (among the, the ones of the French Revolution). The foremost supporter of this exalted form of nationalism were Fries and Schleiermacher. Both of them were bitter academic adversaries of Hegel, who never embraced this kind of nationalism and remained skeptical towards any reactionary glorification of "typically German" traditions. Also in Berlin, Hegel remained sympathetic to France (during a trip to Paris, he wrote to his wife that he had arrived in the "capital of the civilised world").

Hegel was actually accused by German nationalists for being "unpatriotic". This accusation can be found in different authors, such as Rudolf Haym and Heinrich Treitschke.

Finally, it has to be noted that (contrary to widespread prejudice) Hegel never declared that History would have culminated in Germany. The fact that his lectures on the philosophy of history end with a section entitled "The Germanic World" has given rise to some (guilty) misunderstanding. In German, the proper title is "Die germanische Welt", where the adjective "germanisch" does not at all refer to the word "German", the inhabitant of Germany (which, in Goethe's language, actually sounds "Deutsch"). "Germanic" refers on the contrary to the peoples who invaded the Roman Empire in the fourth/fifth century AD: from those tribes all European nations (i.e. French, Germans, Italians, Spaniards, Russians, etc.) derive.

Hegel's main concept, "Spirit", cannot in any case be identified with the one of "race". Already in the "Phenomenology" Hegel heavily criticizes pseudo-scientific doctrines which claim to be able to explain human behaviour through "exterior and accidental" details such as the form of the head or the characteristics of the body.

According to Hegel, one of the major conquests of Christianism (and then of the French Revolution) was the discovery of the concept of "human being" as such. In his "Philosophy of Right" (1821), he claims that it is no longer important whether one is called French, German, Jew or Italian, because these characterisations are sublated in the very concept of "human being".

Moreover, Hegel is a staunch supporter of law, codification and rationality against "tradition" and "feeling". In his "Philosophy of Right" he declares that the respect for the codified law is the "shibboleth" distinguishing the true philosopher from the dangerous fanaticist.

Bearing this in mind, it is not surprising that Hegel's philosophy was explicitly rejected by Adolf Hitler in his Table Talks of 1940.

Nowhere in Hegel's philosophy can we trace a glorification of war as such. Hegel deals with war as an undeniable "fact" that characterise human history and reality; instead of simply dismissing this phenomenon as "evil", he tries to explain it and to incorporate it in his conception of the "universal". The major feature of Hegel's philosophy in general is movement. War, for all its tragical consequences and its sufferences (and Hegel describes them without any kind of romantic pathos or exaltation, but just for how terrible they are), brings movement to history and sometimes allows the progress in the consciousness of freedom.

Let's take the French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars, for instance: instead of simply condemning these events as violent expression of human rage, Hegel locates them in their own context, acknowledges the role violence has played in these events and the fact that without violence the principles of the French Revolution wouldn't have spread. Let's not forget that "Perpetual Peace" was not only a concept brought forward by the Abbot of Saint-Pierre and Kant; it was also the self-confessed ideal that inspired the 'Holy Alliance'. Eternal stability benefits the privileged with respect to the underprivileged.

Finally, it would be a gross mistake to project back on Hegel our own experience with contemporary wars. When writing in the early XIXth century, Hegel was not aware of the destructive potential of modern weapons. It is obvious, but it has to be repeated: during Hegel's lifetime, war was violent, of course, but was also very different. Civilians were rarely involved in direct attacks; the powers at war always envisaged the possibility of peace. There were no weapons capable of destroying entire nations and endanger the very survival of human life on Earth.

There is a famous sentence in Hegel's Lectures on the Philosophy of History that has been badly translated into English, so that it fits with the old prejudice that Hegel identified the State with God. The bad translation is: "The State is the march of God through history". The actual correct translation, corresponding to the German text, is: "That the State exists, is like the march of God through history". From the surrounding text, it is clear that Hegel is not affirming that the State is God. He is just using a theological metaphor to explain that the State represents the incarnation of human freedom in a set of institutions, just like Christ represent the incarnation of God in our human history.

It is true that Hegel attributes to the State an important function in his political philosophy. He considers the State to be the highest incarnation of the "objective spirit", the highest form of institutionalised freedom ever reached by man. It is important to note that Hegel considers a State to be rational, insofar it is also free: the more a particular State is free, the more it is closer to the concept of State itself.

The fact that State is so important to Hegel does not diminish the crucial function of the previous moments of the objective spirit, i.e. family and civil society. Hegel never proposes to "swallow" and annihilate them in the State. The existence of civil society as such is an essential feature of modern times. As far as international politics is concerned, Hegel was well aware that any given State was limited by its self-interests, and that those interests were at odds with those of other nations.

Finally, Hegel's system cannot be reduced to the section of the "objective spirit". There is a higher reality than the one represented by the State, and it is constituted by the three moments of the "absolute spirit": Art, Religion and Philosophy. While creating the material conditions that enable artists, theologians and philosophers to operate, the State can't impose itself on these crucial aspects of the freedom of consciousness.

(http://hegel.net/en/faq.htm#6.4)