One of the endearing features of Wilkie Collins’s novel The Moonstone is the way the author pokes gentle fun at his hero Franklin Blake, who has the disadvantage of a continental education. Steeped in German philosophy, Blake baffles his English friends by distinguishing between the “objective” and “subjective” aspects of problems, and complains of a “curious want of system” in the English mind.
A Victorian novelist’s dismissal of German philosophy as “foreign gibberish” would be mildly amusing but for the fact that cultural prejudices are nearly as pronounced today as in the 1860s. I should know because I once shared these prejudices. Like many English students of philosophy, I readily accepted that Immanuel Kant deserves his status as a great moral philosopher. But I lapped up criticism of the idealist philosophers that Collins ridiculed.
I was naive enough to trust the harsh assessments of Hegel offered by such liberal luminaries as Bertrand Russell and Karl Popper. In The Open Society and its Enemies, Popper dismisses Hegel as a Prussian clown who brought about a debasement of reason in Germany. He derides his conception of the state as a “despicable perversion” of everything that is decent. And he describes him as the “missing link” between Plato and modern totalitarianism. Assuming Popper to be right, I struck Hegel off my list. Why bother with somebody whose doctrines were responsible for much of the misery of the 20th century?
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