The Classical

Recently, I’ve been getting back into philosophy. Rather than going heavily into the real thing I’ve been dipping my toe in the water by reading Nigel Warburton’s Little History of Philosophy. I enjoyed the chapters on Plato and Aristotle. Locke and Hume are also rather interesting. I’m quite taken by Kant’s idea that there is the noumenal world (the real world) which we can’t access and the phenomenal world, which is what we access through experience. However, today I’ve been reading the chapters on Hegel, Kierkegaard and Schopenhauer and they, especially Hegel, made me feel empty. Hegel is just idealist nonsense. Not quite as bad as Spinoza but I hate grand metaphysics based on spurious assumptions. Hegel seems to think that the world is careering towards an end point where we are getting freer and freer in terms of this thing that he calls Geist. It’s total nonsense. I can see now why the early analytic philosophers were so turned off by Hegel and his followers in Britain such as Green and Bradley. This sort of metaphysics is so unscientific and frankly baloney. The next chapter is on Marx, who was influenced by Hegel in terms of historical determinism. I’m really turned off by Marx, critical theory and post-modernism in general. I watched a video about Foucault and though he has some interesting ideas, I find the rejection of modernism to be unfruitful. There is such a thing as goodness in the classical, Aristotelian sense and we should all aspire to it. Truth is not relative. The only post-modern philsopher I really like is Wittgenstein but it’s debatable whether he is really post-modernist in his later period because he comes from the analytic side. Sure his later work is unsystematic and not particularly clear but he doesn’t commit to the idea of relative truth or anything as bonkers as Foucault. I think from now on, I’m going to read mostly analytic philosophy, a bit of Ancient philosophy, Wittgenstein and maybe Kant. Kant seems to still make quite a lot of sense and is perhaps the starting point for the modern era. I’m going to eschew Hegel and the like. The only post-Marxist thinker I find engaging is Gramsci. His whole idea of hegemony being rooted in culture is persuasive and Gramscian political theory is a side-hustle of mine to the analytic approach.