I'm having surprising difficulty tracking down the source (or even, apparently, the true quote) of the standard Hegelism that the act of reading the morning newspapers has become the "realistic" or "pragmatic" "morning prayer" of modern individuals.
Any help or suggestions would be greatly appreciated.
pf
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
4 comments:
From Susan Buck-Morss, "Hegel and Hati":
http://www.uchicago.edu/research/jnl-crit-inq/issues/v26/v26n4.buck_morss.html
And yet this selfsame Hegel, in this very Jena period during which the master-slave dialectic was first conceived, made the following notation:
Reading the newspaper in early morning is a kind of realistic morning prayer. One orients one's attitude against the world and toward God [in one case], or toward that which the world is [in the other]. The former gives the same security as the latter, in that one knows where one stands.5
Footnote 5:
5. Karl Rosenkranz, Georg Wilhelm friedrich Hegels Leben (1844; Darmstadt, 1977), p. 543. Note that this biography is still the canonical one for Hegel, hence its republication in 1977 (and again in 1998). Although philosophical accounts of Hegel's development have been numerous and other biographies do exist, it is astonishing that Hegel has found no modern biographer to replace Rosenkranz definitively. See, for example, Horst Althaus, Hegel und die heroischen Jahre der Philosophie: Eine Biographie (Munich, 1992). Although certain objects of Hegeliana have received microscopic analysis (the watermarks on his manuscript papers, for example), there are startling gaps in our knowledge of his life. There are multiple reasons for this unevenness, beginning with the fact that Hegel moved repeatedly (from Würtemberg to Tübingen, Bern, Frankfurt, Jena, Bamberg, Nürnberg, and Heidelberg) before settling in Berlin for the last decade of his life, and he himself disposed of many documents, including personal papers, before he died. His (legitimate) son Karl was responsible for the archive after his death and may have repressed some of the sources. (Hegel's illegitmate son Ludwig, conceived in Jena in 1806 when Hegel was writing The Phenomenology of Mind, died in 1831, the same year as his father, in Indonesia as a member of the Dutch merchant marines.)
Bless your heart, post tot.
Hey - why don't you be Hegel's modern biographer and go ahead and replace Rosenkranz already?
I'll leave that to you Gildenstern.
Not a bad idea...Think I could pull a Dillio and become the new standard in Hegel biography without learning German?
Post a Comment