Hegel, Kierkegaard and the Culture Wars

On how lots of modern arguments go back to a couple of philosophers from two centuries ago.

I have a little theory that most of disagreements and debates of our modern argumentative age, especially about books and films, actually go back not to politics, but to two philosophers from a couple of hundred years ago, who very much disagreed on how we see the world.

In fact, my general, rather optimistic theory is that, Culture Wars would all be over if the Hegelians and the Kierkegaardians, could get together for a good old knees up and try and see it from the Other Fellow’s point of view.

I once heard a joke about a blind man and a deaf man in a bordello, it would be a wonderful illustration, but I can’t for the life of me remember the punchline.

Let’s start with Hegel (1770-1831) [edit: although what I’m about to say applies more the Hegel and his followers who expanded and expounded upon his original ideas. So for ‘Hegel’ read ‘and the others’ throughout]. Hegel thought that people were formed by the society they lived in. Lots of people think something like that. But Hegel went further. He said that you were born a completely blank slate, and that everything about you, every emotion you have, every thought, was a product of your society.

Have you ever experienced love? Or Pity? Or Envy? These are all social constructs. There is no deep, innate thing that all humans share in common. If you experience love, it is because you live in a society that believes in love. Somebody brought up in a completely different society would have a completely different set of emotions.

According to Hegel, there is nothing innate, nothing basically human. So if I were to find myself transported to a different society - let’s say Madagascar in the third millennium BC, I would have nothing at all in common with them.

Everything I believe, however deeply, is just a social construct.

Hegel wondering whether he left the tap running.

What about people who disagree with their society? Well, they are products of that society just as much as the conformists. They’re just disagreeable products. Every society will (said Hegel) produce malcontents, and in the end the number of malcontents will become so high that there will be a big brou-ha-ha and a fight and a new society will form, which will then start producing malcontents, and so on and so until there’s another revolution, and then the process repeats and repeats forever.

Well, that’s roughly it, anyway. Hegel goes round the houses a bit. Isaiah Berlin once said that Hegel’s philosophy was “like a very dark wood, and those who once enter it very seldom come back to tell us what it is that they have seen”.

What’s important from our point of view is that Hegel got taken up by a chap called Karl Marx. Marx made Hegel the philosophical foundation on which he built communism. Even when communism got watered down into socialism, it’s still got Hegel way down there underneath in the basement level.

This has all sorts of perfectly logical outcomes today. Take prison sentences. According to Hegel, a criminal is made by society, created by the system. It therefore seems horribly unjust to lock somebody up for a long time, because the crime is not really their fault, it is the fault of society. Similarly tax. If somebody is making lots of money it’s not really because they’ve earned it. They were produced by society, by the system, which is the same system that allows them to make money. So, the system has the perfect right to take that money straight back.

And it has a great influence on books and art, which I shall come to in a minute, after we’ve had a look at Kierkegaard.

You can tell that Søren Kierkegaard (1813-1855) was a great philosopher because he has a funny line through his name. But he also really, really disagreed with Hegel. Kierkegaard believed that human nature was unchanging and eternal. We are all thrown into the same agonies as our ancestors, or indeed our great aunts. The struggle is always the same. When I am tempted by the thought of nipping to the pub, I am going through the same struggle as Eve with her apple, or Pandora with her box.

The past may look different, but underneath the frilly clothing it is exactly the same. Odysseus pushing off from the Trojan beach is the same as me sidling out of the British Library. What was a joust in one century might be a duel in another, or shootout, or a bar fight, or a particularly barbed exchange on social media, but it is Fundamentally The Same Thing.

We are all fighting the dragon, we are all on the cross, we are all about to sacrifice our firstborn on lonely mountain top (he wrote a whole book about that last one, which, for some reason, I read in a bar in Denver airport waiting for a flight that was forever delayed).

Søren, not sorry.

Now, Kierkegaard never got taken up officially by the right in the way that Hegel was by the left, but he is there de facto. He’s the other way of looking at things. He’s very, very into the idea of individual responsibility. So just as believing Hegel would ultimately lead you to believing in short prison sentences or none at all; believing in Kierkegaard is going to make you into a bit of a hang-’em, whip-’em, flog-’em, hurl-their-tortured-soul-into-the-dark-abyss sort of chap.

And it has a great influence on how you read and write books (or films or plays or whatever).

For Hegel a book has to be set in a particular place and time. Those characters and those emotions could only exist in that society at that date. Bleak House can only be set in London in the 1850s. Only London in the 1850s could produce those people, those social relations, those emotions. Any story is, by its nature, a portrait of a particular society. A story has to contain the particular time and place that allows that story to happen. It cannot be moved.

For Kierkegaard, the opposite is true. A story is only valuable, only true, if it is eternal. Well, a story tied to its time may be… convincing, but it contains nothing profound or important about Human Nature, because what is profound and important about Human Nature is not fixed to any particular place or period, but belongs to the world and to eternity.

This means that Hegelian/lefties and Kierkegaardian/righties think about stories in fundamentally different ways. A Kierkegaardian making his Hollywood pitch says “It’s the classic story! Boy meets girl; boy loses girl; boy gets girl back again.” And when the Hollywood executive says “I love it! But can we set in it in Ancient Rome?” The Kierkegaardian says “Of course.”

But a Hegelian working on a similar script begins by saying “Boy meets girl in Great Yarmouth in 1972.” And then he has to spend at least the first half of the movie portraying exactly what Great Yarmouth was like in 1972 with Edward Heath’s Dash for Growth and everything else. And he ends up making a film that’s not so much about love, as it is about Great Yarmouth in 1972.

I’ve often thought that this is why Hollywood films make so much money worldwide. The Americans, being more right-wing than Europeans, are much more Kierkegaardian. They seek for the universal story that will appeal to largest possible audience, which therefore ends up making the largest possible profit.

The Magnificent Seven was a movie about gunslingers in late C19th Mexico, but it could just as easily be set in another country at another time. Indeed, it was. The Magnificent Seven is just a remake of Seven Samurai which was set in sixteenth century Japan.

Hollywood is always doing this sort of thing. It can take a Jane Austen novel like Emma, which was certainly written as a portrait of Regency society among the landed gentry, and move it to Los Angeles in the 1990s and you get Clueless. And it works. Clueless is, after all, the second greatest movie ever made, after Predator.

On the other hand you have European cinema, which tends to be much more Hegelian. Take La Dolce Vita. That’s a film about Rome in the 1950s. It couldn’t be set anywhere else. There are characters in it, of course, but the film is about Rome, and Roman society. That means that it’s not got an enormous commercial appeal, unless you’re really interested in the sexual mores of 1950s Rome. And, to be fair, they are some rather interesting mores.

Interesting mores.

A good rule of thumb to decide whether a story is Hegelian or Kierkegaardian is to ask yourself how you would describe it to somebody who didn’t know the work at all. So if, somebody asked you what Macbeth was, would you reply:

It’s about a man who kills the king, usurps the throne, and is then consumed by guilt.

Or:

It’s a play about the Scottish upper classes in the eleventh century.

The same goes for Hamlet, which is not just a play about Danish royalty. That’s why Hollywood could grab it, run off to Africa and remake it as The Lion King.

As for Midsummer Night’s Dream, I’m always rather surprised when I remember that it’s set in Athens. It doesn’t feel like a play about Greece.

On the other side you have Dickens, where you would pretty much always give a Hegelian response. Our Mutual Friend is a novel about Victorian London. So is Bleak House. So are… well pretty much all of them, except for Hard Times, which is about a Victorian Northern City, and A Tale of Two Cities, which does exactly what it says on the tin.

Though I’m sure it’s been attempted, I can’t, offhand, think of any Dickens adaptation that has tried to set the story in a different place and time (except for Christmas Carol).

Now, I’m a gentle sort of chap who likes to sit on the fence in the middle of the road keeping one foot in either camp. (I like my metaphors like I like my negronis: well mixed). I like a bit of Dickens and I like a bit of Shakespeare. I lean much further towards the Kierkegaardian, but I don’t mind a bit of Hegel now and then.

The problem comes when you try to read a story in the wrong way, and start looking for the wrong thing.

Take Star Wars. It’s the classic Kierkegaard. It’s about a guy, and an imprisoned princess, and big bad man in black. It’s not even set on earth, but a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away.

But a true Hegelian can’t see it like that. A true Hegelian will insist until he’s blue in the face that Star Wars is really about 1970s America, and that Chewbacca symbolises anxieties about organised labour and that R2D2 has something to do with Second Wave feminism.

This makes the Hegelian look a little bit silly to anybody other than a fellow True Believer.

The Kierkegaardian watches La Dolce Vita and spends his time asking fellow cinema-goers “But why should I care?” This makes him very annoying.

But, vitally, this is also the reason that Hegelians are always trying to get old books kicked out of the syllabus. If a book is only about a particular place and time then it is only relevant to that place and to that time. The world of Dickens is drifting off into the past. It doesn’t matter to us anymore. It’s not relevant.

Hence the constant cavilling against a syllabus filled with Dead White Males. If you believe that Shakespeare plays are only about, can only be about, England at the turn of the seventeenth century, then Shakespeare plays are pretty worthless. You would be completely justified in scrubbing them from the syllabus and replacing them with angry novels about the sexual politics of contemporary suburbia.

But if we all allow for at least a little bit of Kierkegaard and a smidgen of Hegel, we could all get along much better. I don’t expect mass conversions. Hollywood will always be a bit more Kierkegaardian, because that’s where the money is. Academia will always be a bit more Hegelian, because that’s much easier to study, to analyse and to define than the myriad mysteries of Human Nature.

Some people will always believe in social constructs, others in eternal truth. I believe in a bit of both. But, mostly, I just think it’s fascinating that so much of what we get crotchety about today goes back to a couple of philosophers from two centuries ago.

Kierkegaardians arguing with Hegelians about the syllabus.