"Only one man ever understood me, and he didn't understand me."
-- G.W.F Hegel
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This sentence defies not only Aristolean logic but Hegel's own 'dialectic logic' as well!!!
If A is not B, then A cannot be B at the same time. This is Aristole's logic of 'non-identity'.
However, as stated above, the sentence defies Hegel's own dialectic logic as well.
The only way that A can both not be B and be B at the same time is if the two categories overlap such as in a sentence like this:
'Only one man understood me, and even he didn't completely understand me.
But this is not what Hegel said.
Thus, the only conclusion that I can come up with is this: Hegel did not wish to be understood; he was simply messing with our heads.
Sometimes -- oftentimes -- great philosophers can get away with this sort of 'cognitive convulutionism' or 'mental mysticism' because we have come to expect them to be brilliant and profound. We let them play the 'tantalizing topdog' while we play the 'underachieving underdog'.
We exercise to death and destroy thousands of brain cells trying to rack our brains, to turn our brains inside out, upside down, and side to side in order to figure out what a philosopher like Hegel here is saying. What on God's earth he meant by it. For the truly obsessed -- the Hegelian scholars -- it might become an all encompassing passion. Read his life history and you might finally understand what he meant here.
The truth is far more simple. The sentence means nothing.
If it had been said by anyone else but a great philosopher it would have been buried in the dust of time. Never to resurface again. But instead, the sentence keeps re-appearing over and over again, in philosophy classes, on the internet, on Flicker, like some ancient Chinese puzzle that only those with an IQ of over 150 can maybe -- with the greatest of efforts -- figure out.
'If only I can wrack my brain again just one more time, maybe I can finally understand what Hegel is saying here'. Meanwhile, Hegel is laughing in his grave, shaking his head from side to side, saying 'Gotcha! Gotcha all!!! Even from my grave, I am your master and you are my slave!'
Wittgenstein did the same thing with Bertrand Russell when he drove Russell 'over the deep end' by convincing him that there was a 'hippo in the room'. At this moment in time, Wittgenstein became Russell's 'master' and Russell became Wittgenstein's 'slave'.
Fritz Perls used to say in some instances it is important that we 'lose our minds and come to our senses'.
Or put another way -- in General Semantics terminology:
Come down the abstraction ladder young man or woman; don't go further up it!!! Let the philosopher or theorist come down to earth and come to you; don't try to chase him into philosophical outer space!! Or at least expect that he will 'dialectically meet you half way'. Don't turn him into your master, and you into his slave. This is my extension of one of Bacon's 'False Idols' -- 'Idols of Abstraction'.
Always remain -- grounded. Don't let Hegel or Kant or Wittgenstein or Freud chase you into outer space
This I learned from Alfred Korzybski and S.I. Hayakawa. (Language in Thought and Action, 1949, 1972, 1991). Don't follow 'smoke and mirrors'!!
-- dgb, August 9th, 2009.
