As a general rule, we should treat our intellectual opponents with the utmost charity and respect. After all, we are all fallible and presumably united in a common pursuit of truth. BUT (I bet you knew that was coming) when one is continually subjected to ponderous drivel and endless preachments from an opponent whose severely limited abilities belie his lofty reputation and whose pseudo-scholarship is bought and paid for by an interested and wealthy patron, one understandably reaches a breaking point. The great philosopher Arthur Schopenauer evidently reached such a point when he wrote of the Prussian State’s favored philosopher:
Hegel, installed from above by the powers that be, as the certified Great Philosopher, was a flat-headed, insipid, nauseating, illiterate charlatan, who reached the pinnacle of audacity in scribbling together and dishing up the craziest mystifying nonsense. This nonsense has been noisily proclaimed as immortal wisdom by mercenary followers and readily accepted as such by all fools, who thus joined in as a perfect chorus of admiration as had ever been heard before. The extensive field of spiritual influence with which Hegel was furnished by those in power has enabled him to achieve the intellectual corruption of a whole generation. (Quoted in Karl R. Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies, Vol. 2, pp. 32-33.)
HT to Max Raskin.



{ 14 comments }
What’s wrong with interested and wealthy patrons? Without them we wouldn’t have been introduced to Mises and Rothbard.
I see your point, Joe. But I was not using “interested” in the more current sense of intellectually curious about and supportive of the search for knowledge, but in the older sense of possessing a pecuniary or political motive in promoting a particular doctrine. In this case, the Prussian State was the interested and wealthy patron who subsidized and promoted, and stood to benefit from, Hegel’s work.
“Without them we wouldn’t have….”
Not necessarily, Joe.
I’m quibbling, of course, and appreciate that ‘wealthy anybody’ is no less deserving of praise than anyone else.
But if someone doesn’t do something, there is always another way.
Always infinite possibilities.
Cheers.
Who’s the target of these remarks?
What’s most depressing about this quote is that despite that Schopenhauer is so right, Hegel is still much more widely read and studied. Of course, all of this research and commentary hasn’t lead to any understanding of Hegel. He’s still as opaque as ever, and every Hegel scholar has their own perspective on what exactly (if anything) he’s saying. Schopenhauer on the other hand fell into the unfortunate vice of explaining his philosophy with crisp clearness and in an admirably lucid style.
Which, so sadly, immediately raises everyone’s suspicions.
Louis, besides Hegel, no one in particular, intellectual windbags in general, who are proliferating in academia today. Back in the 1970s or 1980s, the JPE presented on its back cover a quote from H. L Mencken eviscerating the intellectual windbag Thorstein Veblen. The quote was sent in, I believe, by Milton Friedman. In his memoir, Notes and Recollections, Ludwig von Mises presented a blistering characterization of Werner Sombart, a leading “professional” German economist of the early twentieth century. Mises described him as a pompous and venal charlatan and Marxist-turned-Nazi synpathizer who eventually claimed that the Fuehrer took his orders directly from God.
What is funny is when they get caught though…
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/4449651.stm
That is not a isolated case either. There have been quite a few fake papers to make it easily past any sort of peer review process.
Another one:
http://www.physics.nyu.edu/faculty/sokal/lingua_franca_v4/lingua_franca_v4.html
A sample from his paper “Transgrassing the Boundries”
_h_i_l_a_r_i_o_u_s_
I believe in Celtic Fairies. One is my muse.
Classical Liberalism Has To Fight Off The Ego-Driven.
Like attracts like. The State at its origin is a corruption of the spirit of the age – when mankind reached the developmental stage of nationhood in the evolution of civilization. Its underlying and distorted motivation was the lust for power by those who were ego-driven.
It is not difficult to see why the perverse ego-driven interpreters and ego-driven interventionists would meld together with the goals of the State just like it is not difficult to see why the State seeks out these evil-minded imposters. The descent into proverbial hell for humankind is directly the result of the ego-driven-derived State and the ego-driven interpreters and interventionists – Hegel and Marx and Keynes – to name a few.
“There was Hegel. He was a profound thinker and his writings are a treasury of stimulating ideas.” (Human Action, p. 72)
Mises continues:
“but he was laboring under the delusion that Geist, the absolute, revealed itself through his words.”Context matters, huh?
I do not see why context matters here. The only point is that Hegel was a profound thinker who is worth reading. Just because one can see serious flaws with a particular thinker’s ideas does not mean it is not a valuable exercise to study his work, which is what Schopenhauer’s statement suggests.
“…a flat-headed, insipid, nauseating, illiterate charlatan, who reached the pinnacle of audacity in scribbling together and dishing up the craziest mystifying nonsense.” Now that’s what I call a verbal dirk of the highest order, an appropriate description of J. M. Keynes or Paul Krugman.
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