Here Come the Germans.

Seminar time certainly comes about quickly. This time we were discussing Kant and Hegel. And these are my higgledy-piggledy notes.

Immanuel Kant was of the ideological school of thought that believed in (to paraphrase) mind over matter. Many of his writings have an air of romanticism about them, and indeed I got a feeling that there was a definite link to Rousseau’s General Will idea (as mentioned in a previous blog).

Kant is a great believer in a priori knowledge (knowledge that is known without experience), and is vehemently anti-empiricist.

We also discussed perception of the world. This tends to annoy me as I can’t see the point of thinking about it. For anyone who doesn’t know what I mean (probably most of you), a good example is that if a tree falls in the woods and no one is around, does it make a sound? The usual argument being that sound is a human concept, and if there are no humans there to hear it then no sounds exists. This kind of talk irritates me because I can’t see the relevance to my life. As far as I’m concerned, when trees fall over, they make noise. It’s wouldn’t matter if there was noone around to hear it because it doesn’t affect people. At least, not until they find their car blocked by a tree lying across the road.

We also touched upon Numenal objects, which are things around us that cannot be seen , but we know they are there. This got George very excited because it meant he could talk about dark matter and other physicsy gobbledegook, but most of it went sailing over my head. Something about string theories…

But I digress. Kant would say that if something is not being perceived, it is still there. But it is constantly changing. At a molecular level he is right, but once again, I don’t see the practicality of thinking like that. It just gets in the way of the important things in life. Like crossword puzzles.

As far as his morals go, he might as well live on a chessboard, they are just black and white. Lies are bad, even for a good cause, because the good cause is in relation to you. Doing your duty is very important (this part got very Nurembergy at this point).

It is interesting to note that in their respective ways, both the Nazis, and the Christians, are followers of Kant’s train of thought. Though obviously, not necessarily with the same results. We’ll see.

Hegel was essentially the same start as Kant. He was a Romantic and he was anti-empiricist. He was not a fan of logic (in the traditional sense), considering it to be metaphysical and therefore of no real use. His theories centred around the idea of absolutes. There is no truth without the whole, and since it is virtually impossible to know everything as it is irredeemably complex, nothing could be considered wholly true. A simplified example of this would be to say: A is the father of B, Kant would reply that we do not  sufficiently know A enough to make such a statement. We would need to know all his relations to everything in the universe before we could assess his relationship to B. Not particularly practical in my opinion. Maybe we’ll just give him the benefit of the doubt (I tried to be ironic there, I’m not sure if it worked…).

Something that both Kant and Hegel share is a love of change. And the best way for change to happen (in their opinions) is war. Generally, in war, you have two opposing sides, and whichever side wins, spreads their values to the other side. This allows for greater improvement of said values as there are more people to work on them. War is change, only accelerated.

This also leads to the Geist. It’s not easy to pin down what this means, but Spirit will do. It is the essence of thought at a time. Zeitgeist, for example, meaning in this context the ‘wind of change’ blows across the world carrying ideas (for want of a better word). You could say that the Zeitgeist of the current epoch is revolution. From the student protests in London, to the demonstrations in Libya, Egypt, and Bahrain. They are all linked, with this ‘spirit’ regardless of boundaries. How very deep, I think I fell down a philosophy well. Oh dear.

Thanks for reading my terrible attempt to explain German ideology. Go get yourself something nice.