Georg Hegel

Wilber's View

Hegel gets the same two-part move Wilber uses on Campbell — deep credit for the insight, a clearly stated diagnosis of the failure — but aimed at a much bigger target: the entire German Idealist movement, of which Wilber treats Hegel as the culminating figure (with the pioneering credit for the underlying synthesis actually going to Schelling, "by a century," Wilber is careful to note). The credit: Hegel essentially rediscovers the non-dual insight independently, on Wilber's reading — the Good is not a future arrival to wait for but is already, eternally, fully accomplished; finite things are inherently unstable and self-transcending, driving Eros toward the infinite; Nature and Mind are both already expressions of the same Spirit that is "awakened" through their integration, not first present here and only later there.

The diagnosis has two parts. First, and most emphasized: Hegel had "no yoga" — no injunctive, reproducible contemplative practice comparable to Zen's zazen that could let others verify his transpersonal claims for themselves, so genuine transrational insight ended up expressed entirely through rational vision-logic, which "condemns Reason to collapsing under a weight it could never carry." Second, and more historical: Idealism's account of nature had no room for thermodynamic entropy, so when 19th-century physics (Carnot, Clausius, Kelvin) split the "two arrows of time" — biology winding up, physics winding down — the entire Idealist edifice lost its "first floor" and collapsed within decades of Hegel's death, clearing the field for the Feuerbach-to-Marx "Dominance of the Descenders" that Wilber treats as flatland modernity's decisive turn. Wilber also credits Hegel, via Habermas, as one of the sharpest critics of the Enlightenment itself — branding it a "vanity of the understanding" — even while diagnosing Hegel's own project as ultimately falling to the same forces it criticized.

In Sex, Ecology, Spirituality

The great far-off spectacular climax… is right now. "The Good," says Hegel, "the absolutely Good, is eternally accomplishing itself in the world; and the result is that it need not wait upon us, but is already in full actuality accomplished."

— Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, ch. 14

And those were precisely the requirements met by Schelling and hammered out by Hegel. Nature and Mind are both taken up and integrated in Spirit, an integration that can occur precisely because the Spirit that is awakened in the integration is the same Spirit that was present throughout the entire process of unfolding and enfolding itself.

— Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, ch. 14

Would that Hegel had remained in poverty (with Plato: "No treatise by me concerning it exists or ever will exist"). But Hegel decided… that Reason could and should develop the tongues of angels. This would have been fine, if Hegel also had more dependable paradigms, more reproducible injunctions, for the developmental unfolding of the higher and transpersonal stages.

— Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, ch. 14

…these intuitions and insights were expressed almost totally in and through vision-logic, and this burdened Reason with a task it could never carry. Particularly with Hegel, the transpersonal and transrational Spirit becomes wholly identified with vision-logic or mature Reason, which condemns Reason to collapsing under a weight it could never carry.

— Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, ch. 14

This completely undercut any sort of idealist or spiritual view of evolution or manifestation in general. The first floor of the magnificent Idealist edifice crumbled, and the higher floors almost immediately followed suit (Idealism would survive in any viable form no more than a few decades after Hegel's death).

— Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, ch. 14

From the very beginning of modernity… there have been its many vocal critics (none more perceptive and brutal than Hegel, for whom the Enlightenment in general, and Kant in particular, was a "vanity of the understanding" and a "monster of arrested development").

— Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, ch. 12

See Also

• great-chain-of-being — the traditional holarchy Hegel and the Idealists attempted to restate in modern, developmental form
• foucault — one of the long line of Enlightenment critics Wilber places after Hegel, from Nietzsche through Heidegger and Derrida
• habermas — Wilber leans on Habermas's own account of what happened to reason "after Hegel"