PERSONAL PROBLEMS

Hegel uses some pretty condescending and dismissive language to refute the ideas with which he doesn’t agree. For example, he not only refutes the view of cognition as an instrument or medium, he asserts that this view is not worth “troubling ourselves with such useless ideas and locutions.” In the same breath he dismisses alternative views as “excuses which create the incapacity of Science by assuming relationships of this kind in order to be exempt from the hard work of Science.” Hegel’s certainly not pulling any punches but he seems to be doing more attacking than supporting the attacks he makes. I get that he has to make these refutations, especially the one in the preface against Epistomology, in which he questions the worth of an entire branch of philosophy to deal with the problem of infinite regression he encounters. Furthermore, he even goes so far as to suggest that refuting other arguments is unnecessary, claiming that “instead of bothering to refute all these ideas, we could reject them out of hand as adventurous and arbitrary, and all the words associated with them like absolute, cognition, objective, and subjective, and countless others whose meaning is assumed to be generally familiar, could even be regarded as so much deception.” Hegel just seems to have a lot of personal problems. Which makes sense, because I have a lot of personal problems with Hegel.