Crisis
Most analytic philosophers treat philosophy as a puzzle. They are obsessed with defining their terms, and figuring out what the meaning of “is” is. They try to figure out logic and set paradoxes in the afternoon and when they go home at night rest easy assured that morality and life are self evident. If they cannot solve their problems they may be frustrated but their life is still in order. The philosopher Hammond once said that when you cut open the books that analytic philosophers write, dust will come out. Their problems don’t touch life.
Hegel and Nietzsche were two philosophers who saw philosophy as directly influencing all of life. Both of these philosophers saw knowledge as an activity. They believed that we didn’t have knowledge to stand back and observe the world, but to live within it. That real philosophical problems effected the way we lived and thought about ourselves. They can give us hints into how and why our world changes. When you cut their books, blood will come out.
Consequently both thought that philosophy came not from wonder but from crisis. When man begins to lose his place in the world, when our truths break down internally, and when the question “Why?” finds no answer, the world undergoes paradigm shifts. However Nietzsche and Hegel had a different idea about where we were going.
G.W.F. Hegel
In Hegel’s first and best book the “Phenomenology of the Spirit“, he argued that the history of man and his place in the world was the history of repeated failures. History for Hegel is the movement of one kind of consciousness to another. Each way of seeing the world that man forms turns out to be one sided and begins to break down internally. Crisis erupts. In sketching out these failures of man to find the truth he promises to take us on a “road [that] can therefor be regarded as the pathway of doubt, or more precisely as the way of despair.”  When our ideas about who we are and what is true fall away, we are devastated. Hegel says we are progressing toward a goal, a final truth and the progress towards this goal is “unhalting”. However “short of it [the goal] no satisfaction is to be found along the way.” We are forever marching toward a goal that we repeatedly fall short of, and our whole world breaks down again and again. Despair and suffering will not leave us until we finish this quest. Paradigm shifts were nothing to be taken lightly in Hegel’s view. However we learn through these failures and each also contains a part of the truth, pushing us forward towards our goal. At our goal, we have discovered the ideal way to exist and live in the world, and happiness finally comes to us. Hegel was optimist about the final outcome of history.
Nietzsche too believed that when the world changed there was a crisis in the dominant culture of the time. Nietzsche was a philologist and was especially interested in ancient Greek culture. He saw the time of Socrates as a time of a great transition. In one of his most powerful books Twilight of the Idols, Nietzsche talks about Socrates as being a sick and anti-Greek decadent. He says that Socrates was overly rational and used his dialectic as a kind of revenge on everyone around him. However Nietzsche sees something fascinating in that Socrates was able to get himself taken seriously by others.
Nietzsche
“Honest things, like honest men, do not carry their reasons in their hands like that. It is indecent to show all five fingers. What must first be proved is worth little. Wherever authority still forms part of good bearing, where one does not give reasons but commands, the dialectician is a kind of buffoon: one laughs at him, one does not take him seriously. Socrates was the buffoon who got himself taken seriously: what really happened there?”
Nietzsche knew that in stable times there was no need to explain and reason things out. Things appeared natural and normal to everyone and didn’t need to be justified. When there was a need to know “Why?” the crisis had begun.
“But Socrates guessed even more. He saw through his noble Athenians; he comprehended that his own case, his idiosyncrasy, was no longer exceptional. The same kind of degeneration was quietly developing everywhere: old Athens was coming to an end. And Socrates understood that all the world needed him – his means, his cure, his personal artifice of self-preservation. Everywhere the instincts were in anarchy; everywhere one was within five paces of excess: monstrum in animo was the general danger. “
Nietzsche saw that the “instincts” of the Greeks were out of control. That they could no longer preserve their way of life. The danger had been with them for some time and they shifted to a more rational, and for Nietzsche weaker and decadent lifestyle. Jesus and the success of Christianity in Europe was the same story for Nietzsche, brought about by a sickness and weakening of the culture.
Nietzsche unlike Hegel sees no progress in history. He often sees man sliding farther and farther down into decadence. We are not leading to a goal, or headed toward any kind of truth or perfect way to live in the world. Nietzsche warned that we would be descending down to a kind of man who can no longer do great things, and create profound art.
Both Hegel and Nietzsche saw the movement of history and philosophy to be part of a series of breakdowns of the dominant culture. We will always have time for logic puzzles, but real philosophy comes from a life consuming problem or crisis. It is nothing that can or will be ignored.
