The ghost of Hegel

Lots of people nowadays are getting into (or back into) Hegel and teen gaging with dialectic think in ways that focus more on diving deep into contradictions, rather than a system that synthesizes difference.

As such the ghost of Hegel’s dialect is haunting those who live now in very interesting ways.

I read the text below and saw it a deciding the contemporary Hegelian haunting.

For Hegel (as I have come to understand his thinking), history is immanent and thus unfolds in purposive ways. Thought—and human agency as such—does not stand above this unfolding, as a sort of superstructure. Rather, human thought—which is intersubjective and, at its philosophical best, collective—is history unfolding.

In the Hegelian dialectic, it is silly to think about structure and agency as separate. And so it was with Marx. Social relations and modes of production were to be understood as history unfolding in purposive ways. Marx theorized that history was unfolding from capitalism to socialism and that his thinking on the matter was part and parcel of such an unfolding. But ultimately there was nothing inevitable about Marx’s reading of history unfolding, and the best Marx could do was read a moment in a larger process of unfolding. … Nothing is predetermined, at least insofar as humans can know, which means that humans have freedom and responsibility—in a word, agency—because we cannot know how history is unfolding from one moment to the next. Our actions matter—our actions are purposive—because we are the unfolding of history.

Source: Andrew Hartman, May 18 2017. s-Usih.org blog pos on To the Finland Station.