I have been saying this for years- that Darwin was not the founder of the evolutionary theory or model- but is held up today like many icons, as a poltical tool- someone to worriship and fallow – a savior.

I read a book about Leibniz and the author talked about how Leibniz found the theory of evolution “very useful”–

Leibniz was born 100 years before Darwin.

Even the Bible has an evolutionary (simple to complex) emergence of life. So how could the simple day thought of connecting all life forms elude all men for thousands of years?

It didn’t.

A lot of Hegel is about describing thought and being and then pointing to the fact that we are in the state of being while thinking about being itself- which calls into question if we are truly able to understand what being is – since he are beings how can we know what not being is? And so forth.

To a large extent it is very pointless. Too me the state of being is experience – that is not a two fold things but in my experience I exist and describe my existing simultaneously – hence Hegel’s system of analyses is to me not useful except as perhaps some kind of intellectual exercise- like a novel.

I think it is in Hegel’s nonsensical philosophy that Communists and socialists find refuge- as they can use it to educate and control people’s minds. Hegel’s work is so esoteric that it is difficult to really criticise it (though it can be done) as one has to accept his philsophy before they can appreciate it. It is almost like a religion .Of course there is not much in it – that is overtly socialist -a t least from what I have read. But one could say it is a clasicaly liberal philosphy as Hegel’s system does not have clearly defined rules- and hence one can sort of go where one wants with it- at times you feel as though you are reading something that was written off of the top of one’s head- made up as he went along. I think it is in that that the fairy tale of scoialism finds refuge.

But at least the man was a bit of a free thinker. I can still appreciate the art even if it is not sceintifically sound.

What I meant is that if you honestly read Hegel’s work (not secondary sources) it can be somewhat opaque.

I don’t there is very many Hegelians in the world anymore. John Dewey was one for a time and I believe Francis Fukuyama has been described as a Hegelian.

P.S. I have since changed my mind (after reading arguments against it) on the virtues of socialized medicine.

No educated person, not even the most ignorant, could suppose I mean to arrogate to myself the origination of the doctrine that species had not been independently created. The only novelty in my work is the attempt to explain how species became modified, and to a certain extent how the theory of descent explains certain large classes of facts; and in these respects I received no assistance from my predecessors

–Charles DArwin, Letter to Rev Baden Powell

I know very little about Hegel, but I do know that his ideas regarding the principles of history being useful for knowing the future were critisied by C.S.Lewis and Popper. Wikipedia on Poppers argument: “The objection [Popper] makes is that historicist positions, by claiming that there is an inevitable and deterministic pattern to history, abrogate the democratic responsibility of each one of us to make our own free contributions to the evolution of society, and hence lead to totalitarianism.”

C.S.Lewis on Historicism

The Poverty of Historicism by Popper

Historicism on wikipedia

Also, it does sometimes happen that misguided metatheories can, at times, breed derivative paradigms that surpass the original. It is a phenomenon that I have never been able to fully explain. It’s a little like bad parents who get lucky and just happen to raise good children. John Paul II, for example, was able to take “phenomenology,” which is basically just another form of anti-intellectual subjectivism, and use it to dramatize the inherent dignity of the human person.

Still, I submit that the reverse is almost always the case. Ideas have consequences, and, to me, after Kant and Darwin, Hegel ranks high on the list of perpetrators of bad ideas. Kant tried to solve Hume’s non-problem about causation by reintroducing Descartes subtectivism, and Hegel tried to solve Kant’s non-problem of skepticism by proposing process idealism. Those events turned out to be big problems for a Western culture that decided to take them seriously.

I don’t think I’m smart enough to discern who and what Hegel is. Or if his work his totally bad or what.

British popularizer of philosophy and former SDP M.P. Bryan Magee (wrote a wonderful introduction to philosophy) thought he was the progenitor of Fascism and Communism.

So who knows.

http://darwiniana.com/2009/03/.....nd-darwin/

http://darwiniana.com/2009/03/.....ic-effect/

In fact, Steve Fuller’s social constructivism is Hegel’s thesis/antithesis philosophy applied to sociology. Social constructivism uses the same principle of mutual causality, meaning that, just as all of history is driven by a kind of a dialectic conflict of opposites, all truth is “created” in context, through some communicative process such as “symbolic interaction.

Marx borrowed from this same idea of mutual causation by applying the dialectic to matter, hence we have “dialectical materialism.” While Hegel’s dialectic spirit seems to be the opposite of Marx’s dialectical materialism, both end up militating against reason by denying the possibility of unchanging truth, which means that both ultimately contribute to leftist ideas. Anytime ultimate reality is described in dialectical, mutually causative terms, truth becomes a process, which means, of course, that it is no longer truth.

The theory of mutual causation CAN be used profitably in lower level analyses to avoid simplistic linear thinking on any matter in which a multiplicity of causes is responsible for many events. One such example would be Pareto’s 80/20 principle; another would be “systems theory.” The problem is when this idea is elevated to the level of metaphysics or accepted as a complete theory of knowledge. That’s when the trouble starts and leftist relativism rears its ugly head.