How may I live? pt. 1

Hegelian philosophy, as far as I can understand it, is concerned with harmonising everyone and everything with the ideal of the universal. That is to say, there is an eternally over-arching thing that Hegel calls the universal. It's "powered", as it were, by the spirit that results when people are together in community, and what it does is coerce everything else into some kind of unity or synthesis with itself. Conversely, the task of the individual is to rear himself into the universal, and the better that one is able to do that, the more one has succeeded at life and is a partaker of and contributor to the spirit of the world-community.

Hegel is supposed to be one of the hardest writers to understand, thanks to a combination of vagueness, made-up words and definitions, and a habit of almost flippantly interchanging terms. Despite all this, even when I read him for the first time, I felt at least a latent sense of familiarity with Hegel and his championing of the universal. It may be difficult at times to understand him, but it is never a problem for me to relate to Hegel.

The draw to be a part of the universal is one that I've felt strongly and often, one that has tugged on all of us, I'm sure. It's the desire to be ethical, to feel like we belong, to live in harmony with nature. Living out the Hegelian ideal will build a unified society of people all clamoring to most perfectly exemplify the universal, treating others the way they'd like to be treated. If everyone recognises that there is a universal that we can and ought to strive towards, then everyone gets to go through life with their own personal progress bar, and that sounds like an appealing thing to have.

When I read Hegel, I find myself wondering how well I would do in such a a community, whether my progress bar would more or less developed than the rest of moral-examplar peers. Ironically the desire to be ethical gives birth to a spirit of competition. I want to better exemplify, out-moral and draw closer to the universal ideal than the next person. I doubt that this was the spirit that Hegel intended, and I don't think that I'm alone in this feeling.

But to what lengths must one go to exemplify the universal? And how far can I be expected to go before I overstep my position as one among many of the community? Even the best, strongest link, if it starts encroaching on another, is no longer contributing to the strength of the chain. And if I presume to want to make all the other links as strong as me, then I'm no longer any closer to the universal than they are, and all I have to show for my effort is a smug self-satisfaction that is, again, likely outside the moral code.

When I read Kierkegaard, on the other hand, I read about a lonely road, an unmediated existence that is in direct, absolute confrontation with God, with life, with pain, with joy. Kierkegaard tells me that we stand in an absolute relation to the absolute, and if it is any other way, then all of the previous discussions (including Hegel's in particular) on God, faith and ethics are worthless.

More on Kierkegaard later.