I’m reading Hegel’s Philosophy
of Nature, a text not often discussed in Hegel literature, perhaps because
it’s obscure, even for Hegel, and contains gross errors regarding
scientifically explained phenomena—including mistakes about the science of
Hegel’s day. Now, I adore Hegel for some perverse reason, and his errors are
embarrassing.
That’s only
a minor problem compared to Hegel’s racist and sexist comments, and those occur
in texts that are taken seriously not just by Hegel scholars. For instance, his
account of women in marriage as the material moment through which the ethical relation
becomes manifest takes up a significant if small part of the Phenomenology of Spirit (the most-read
book by Hegel in the English speaking philosophy world). Sexism and racism
appear in the Philosophy of Right as
well (probably second most-read).
I recently
had a brief chat at a conference about this basic problem in the canon of
philosophical writing. The woman I was talking to summed things up well by
saying that if she stopped reading any philosopher who wrote something
outrageous about women or that was racist, she’d have to give up reading
philosophy just about altogether.
Since
almost no one but academic philosophers reads books from the tradition of
philosophy, this may seem like a picayune problem. People don’t seem to quit
reading novels by racist authors, or stop looking at paintings by sexist
painters. If there is a difference, it could be that unlike literature or art,
philosophy is supposed to reveal the truth. Since we have rejected the notion
that the truth could be racist or sexist, racism or sexism in philosophical
writing could seem to undermine its status as philosophy altogether.
I don’t
know if I believe that, in part, ironically enough, because of the influence of
Hegel on my thinking about philosophy. Hegel’s concept of the truth as “the
whole,” which would include “moments” of would-be truths that turn out to be
false—indeed, which at times Hegel writes includes
the false. If racism and sexism are false, they nevertheless are moments in
the development of truth, in the same way that an immediate sensation of
something, while not taking in the “whole” of it and thus false, must still be
part of knowing that something. Put another way: philosophical texts that
involve racism and sexism are necessary for the articulation of philosophical
truth because we (philosophers, people) have been and are racist and sexist.
That means that racism and sexism must be uttered, but not left simply posited.
The positions of racism and sexism must be posited in order to be thought
through, in the “labor of the negative” (Hegel’s so-called dialectic), to
recover and bring forward what is true in racism and sexism. And that could
turn out to be that the opposite of
racism and sexism is the truth of racism and sexism.
That’s not
to defend Hegel’s racism and sexism, because, at least as I read him, he posits
racist and sexist ideas and leaves them standing. To refer to his own language,
Hegel commits falsehood whenever he fails to undermine these positions. In as
much as the truth and the revelation of the truth would require that negation,
Hegel’s books do not tell the truth.
All that is
preface to the question of the day, which is what the relationship is between
philosophy and truth. Is that a strange question? Anyway, I have two ideas in
mind.
First is
whether philosophy or philosophers should tell the truth. I think that by
reputation, philosophy and philosophers are very much concerned with truth,
even dedicated to it. In Plato’s dialogues, Socrates seems to prefer the truth
to everything, even life itself. (Everything except for hot guys, that is. In
the dialogues, Socrates unfailingly prefers hot guys to the truth.) All the
same, Socrates lies, a lot. Plus, if philosophy and philosophers should follow
Socrates’ lead in the practice of recognizing our own ignorance, philosophy and philosophers should be reluctant, even
reticent, to posit anything as true. (Hegel was hip to this, and as much as
said that every position is untrue,
just because no position can propose
or state the whole that is the truth.)
Second is
whether philosophy or philosophers should be held to a standard of truth or
truth-telling. Here I mean something like whether philosophy or philosophers
that cannot tell the truth should be ejected from the canon. For instance, if a
philosopher’s work was based on patently false premises and obviously faulty
reasoning, should that disqualify that philosopher from the traditional canon? By
analogy with sciences like physics or biology, in which theories are not taught
that have been demonstrated to be false, should philosophical works also be
excluded? If not, then should those works not be presented as falsehoods, in the manner in which one might tell a biology
class about Lamarck’s surmise about evolution? Perhaps no one should read
Hegel, given his works’ repetition of bad (or evil, depending on your point of
view) ideas. Or perhaps, like a joke in the old Monty Python’s Flying Circus
series, we could read it, provided we understand that he was wrong. In that
case, what does the tradition of philosophical texts amount to? I hate to think
that it is nothing but a special form of literature, having as its differentia specifica that these are texts
that pretend to the truth—or are just very badly plotted novels.
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