Hegel on Africa

My last post on the analysis of District 9 set off the following chain of thought:

Students of Western philosophy often find themselves compelled to read large tracts of perhaps the densest and most confusing philosophical work ever written - by Hegel. I have recollections of sitting with 20 or so in the last seminar series on the German philosopher by Gillian Rose, a diminutive but intellectually ferocious professor at Warwick.

The seminars took place in the afternoons in the autumn of 1995, with the set text being Hegel's utterly impenetrable brick, "Science of Logic". For some reason, we didn't turn on the light, so by the end of a three hour session, we were all in darkness. The seminar proceeded by Professor Rose making some opening remarks (next to a portrait of her philosophical hero by her desk). Then, we each had to read a sentence or two and then provide an exegesis. According to Rose, the key to the book was the chapter on "Illusory Being". This chapter begins, "Essence that issues from being seems to confront it as an opposite; this immediate being is, in the first instance, the unessential." There are 800 pages of sentences like this. Looking back on my time studying philosophy, I don't think any philosopher made less sense than Hegel, not only in terms of the pure torture of his sentences, but also in terms of the logic of his thinking. Hegel's thought boils down to the idea that there is a grand logic at work in world history, which is reflected in the developing consciousness of man. Its pure bunkum, but it does give academic philosophers something to do.

It wouldn't be so bad if Hegel remained merely an academic curiosity in a dusty cabinet in one of the increasingly fewer high quality departments around the world. However, Hegel's work is not only a dense bundle of obfuscation, it also Eurocentrist and racist, as this post clearly indicates.

At some point, but not yet, western philosophy and western philosophers will come clean about all the ways subtle and not that Eurocentrism and racism has infiltrated that which they teach, perhaps beginning with the erasure of Abbassid thinking and its import for "western" philosophy in the House of Wisdom. But let us place emphasis on the "not yet." The west continues to require its "others" in the present and in the past.