Hegel's ennui

Fragment 9

Hegel’s ennui - There’s a great anecdote about Hegel. One day his friends invited him to go on a hike to see the splendid views surrounding Jena. Hegel reluctantly agreed. When they reached the top of the local hills, his friends looked at him and said, “what do you think?” Hegel replied, “it is what it is.” It’s a funny story, not only because Hegel was grouchy, but because it chimes with his philosophical antipathy towards romantic exuberance. In his preface to the phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel even mocked his onetime friend Fichte, suggesting that his so-called Naturphilosophie amounted to nothing more than a declaration that at night all cows are black. And yet Hegel was in a sense the most sublime romantic, elevating the Spinozean idea of natura naturans (a naturing nature) from a mere mysticism into a philosophical system of Spirit or Geist. Instead of exulting in the natural world, he wanted to know it in its totality. Hegel’s lack of enthusiasm was therefore also a matter of scale. For what is a single view compared to a view of the whole? In this sense, Hegel wanted to climb even higher, much higher than a single hilltop, perching himself in such lofty heights as only his abstract philosophy could provide. Lying in bed, in his nightcap, Hegel could survey the world. Hegel’s ennui was therefore not only a characteristic borne out by his metaphysics, but also a way of staying true to the romantic notion of the enlightenment: a pessimism of the intellect and an optimism of the will.¹

1. To cite Gramsci