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A return to the philosophy of existence was necessary.
Hegel’s retrospective world history, bereft of a future, struck Kierkegaard as equally inhuman.
“It may be that life can only be understood backwards, but it has to be lived forwards.”
It is possible to leave Hegel out of the picture.
the thankless doctrines which try to forget their Hegelian origin
Hegel’s importance is acknowledged even by those like Jacques Derrida (b. 1930) who wish to oppose or “deconstruct” his influence.
Whether through logic or epistemology, whether through Marx or Nietzsche, our entire epoch struggles to disentangle itself from Hegel. (Michel Foucault)
Philosophers are doomed to find Hegel waiting patiently at the end of whatever road we travel. (Richard Rorty)
A new, radical “unfinished” Hegelianism became discernible.
Today we can see that the young Marx, who had no access to the writings of the young Hegel, retraced much of the same ground. The young Marx and the young Hegel are extraordinarily close in spirit.
In the early part of the 20th century, many Marxist intellectuals realized that Marx’s schematic treatment of history needed re-examination.
Their concerns were sharpened by the cataclysm of the 1914-18 war, the success of a Communist revolution in pre-capitalist Russia and the failure of similar revolutionary attem...
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This brand of “aesthetic” Marxism in the 1930s was described as Critical Theory,
Only a permanently self-critical approach to theory can avoid paralysis.
Critical Theory represented a “negative” libertarian alternative to the empires of Soviet Communism and US-led capitalism, particularly in the Cold War years of deadlock after 1945, and it influenced the New Left radicalism of the 1960s.
confronts a “bad totality”.
but acknowledges a residue of reality which will always escape total theorization.
The absence of any discussion of the future by Hegel was unacceptable to the next generation of “Young Hegelians”. Hegel’s retrospective historicism had to be transmuted into historical futurism.
justify anything that happens in history.
But this carries the unfortunate implication that whatever has been successful is thereby also somehow “right” and superior to what has been unsuccessful.
Whatever vanished from the memory of history, because it was destroyed or unsuccessful, was to Hegel an “unjustified existence”.
For Fukuyama, as for Hegel after 1789, history is at an end because it has reached its logical conclusion.
“Philosophy always comes on the scene too late to give instruction as to what the world ought to be.
As the thought of the world, it appears only when actuality is already there, cut and dried, after its process of formation has been completed… When philosophy paints its grey on grey, then a shape of life has grown old. It cannot be rejuvenated by philosophy’s grey on grey; it can only be understood.
