I find this fascinating, for a great liberator to be keen on Hegel, but I have a concern that the passage shows the well-coached treatment of Kant by Hegelians that is undoubtedly rife in seminaries where the faith of preachers has to be kept safely away from Kantian danger.
This canned treatment of Kant is also the fate of Marxists, the reason I mention the point.
I should indeed not wonder at Schopenhauer's desparing scorn, and what amounts to the net destruction of German philosophy through the mesmerization by pretentious gibberish, making off with the Hegelian treasure chest like pirates, the owl of minerva a sort of pirate's parrot.
This is rude, or else real respect for someone like King, but I think essential, as one examines the training of great liberators, and the way Hegel tends to fool them all. Marx was a smart fellow. I wish he could gotten Hegel off his chest. In Marx's case we weren't so lucky, and I always marvel at the way someone as smart as Lukacs could never quite shake Hegel either.
(None of these remarks are even criticism of Hegel, who exists in a bigger limbo than even Kant as a sort of phantom of dementia in philosophic pretenders.)
All in all, I admire King the more if Hegel's contemplation on history and freedom contributed to his efforts.
But in the future, one has to hope that the use of these streams of thought should be taken in their totalilty, and students reach the source, and most of all not get their philosphic brains neutralized in seminaries. Answer: the entire sequence from Kant to Jacobi, Rheinhold, Maimon, Fichte, Schelling, Schopenhauer, Hegel, should be required study before one starts becoming a 'sudden certain conver'.
We have to stop getting unlucky with poorly trained leaders.
"...The categories began their history, so far
as modern philosophy is concerned, in the
system of Kant. The categories were for Kant,
like space and time, pure forms without content
or matter, prior to all experience, and not given
from any external source but contributed to
cognition by the mind itself. These categories
were also universal and necessary. But with
all their importance, Kant insisted that the
categories were limited to phenomena. They
did not apply to the thing-in-itself (Ding an
sich). The thing-in-itself was not a cause, or
a substance; it was neither quality nor quantity.
These concepts applied only to phenomena,
not to noumena. So for Kant the categories
were mere subjective forms of thought, not
objective ontological entities. It was at this
point that Hegel went beyond Kant."
(Dr. Martin Luther King, AN EXPOSITION
OF THE FIRST TRIAD OF CATEGORIES
OF THE HEGELIAN LOGIC, 1953)
"The categories for Hegel were more than
epistemological principles of knowing; they
were ontological principles of being. They
were not merely the necessary and universal
conditions of the world as it appears to us,
but they were the necessary and universal
conditions of the world, as it is in itself.
Reason, the system of categories, is
self-explained and self-determined,
dependent only upon itself. This means
that it is real. Therefore, "the rational is
the real and the real is the rational."
(Dr. Martin Luther King, ibid. 1953)
"The task which Hegel undertakes in the
Logic is, therefore, this: to give an account
of the first reason of the world; to show
that every single category necessarily
and logically involves every other single
category; and finally to show that all the
categories, regarded as a single whole,
constitute a self-explained, self-determined,
unity, such that it is capable of constituting
the absolutely first principle of the world.
Kant had named twelve categories. But he
made no effectual attempt to deduce them
from one another...because the categories
were for him only epistemological forms of the
mind, not objective ontological entities...When
we come to Hegel, however, the picture is
different. Just as in formal logic the conclusion
flows necessarily from the premises, so in
Hegelian logic the categories are logically
deduced from each other." (Dr. Martin
Luther King, ibid. 1953)
This point by Dr. King is never given enough attention.
Hegel is not simply announcing his science of logic.
There is nothing authoritarian about it. It is not a mystic
belief-system. Rather, Hegel carefully and scientifically
*deduces* each category of his Dialectical Encyclopedia
from the other categories. This is a mammoth scientific
challenge, and Hegel was the first (and so far the last)
philosopher to attempt this world-historical activity in
such dialectical detail.
----- Original Message -----
From: "Ralph Dumain" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Monday, June 09, 2003 10:48 PM
Subject: [hegel] Martin Luther King on Hegel
>"An Exposition of the First Triad of Categories of the Hegelian
>Logic--Being, Non-Being, Becoming"
>
http://www.stanford.edu/group/King/publications/papers/vol2/530522-An_Exposi
tion_of_the_First_Triad_of_Categories.htm
John Landon
Website for
World History and the Eonic Effect
http://eonix.8m.com
Blogzone
http://www.xanga.com/nemonemini