The Hegelian World Spirit

This article is based on this Dutch article of Martijn Benders

Let me get straight to the point. Can someone explain to me why this is an improvement over Biden?

The dementia is equally distressing, especially at such an early age. People are becoming demented at increasingly younger ages, and that, too, is related to genetic degeneration caused by toxic food.

Not that the opposing party is any better. Read how a shady radical group like Opus Dei essentially directs Trump:

Article in the Guardian

And since we are again being led by the USA, we are not only very Christian but also radically Christian. It’s no wonder that a radical Christian figure plays a central role in the Dutch Foundation for Literature. They never really left.

Brill

Founded in 1683, Brill is a publishing house with a rich history and a strong international focus. The company’s head office is in the Netherlands.

Yesterday I tried to find a specific book, and to my amazement, this ‘Brill’ asked for 149 euros for an ebook by a Russian author who never published that book with them. Check it out here.

What would Mikhail Lifshitz have thought of this parasitic variant of ‘copyright’? I imagine that 150 years after my death, some person asks for 150 euros for one of my books that he has translated, while these days you can translate stuff in no time using Artificial Intelligence. Luckily, I was able to download the same book via SCRIPD for free. No, not a different translation, exactly the same one. Which makes the sales strategy even more demented: but BRILL has it all figured out, we are going to be flooded with demented people who will pay 150 euros for an ebook without question. True Dutch Vision!

(By the way, when we open the book we read that “This publication was funded by Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, Moscow as part of its Field Research project ‘If our soup can could speak …’, a three-year research project on Mikhail Lifshitz and his role in the Soviet Sixties” – the translation was therefore already paid for by the Russians, making the sales strategy even more…remarkable.)

In the preface of the book, Lifshitz is portrayed as a communist hardliner who fiercely opposed modernism. I also read another book by Lifshitz about Marx, another law student, by the way, just like Lenin was a law student. However, Lifshitz’s book made Marx out to be a law student with a great interest in and admiration for the fine arts, which are defined in a classically colonial way. Lenin had a huge dislike for Mayakovski and from that hatred of modernism Lifshitz’s ‘most controversial work’ would have emerged.

As he himself confessed, Marx made determined efforts to suppress his inclination to write poetry; the temptation remained with him, however, for many years. As late as 1841, he published two of his early poems in Atheniium 2. The conflict between the urge to write poetry and the stern necessity of finding an answer in the field of science to the problems of life constituted the first crisis in Marx’s intellectual development. The outcome of this inner battle was a complete renunciation of poetry and a conversion to the philosophy of Hegel, with its doctrine of the inevitable decadence of art in modern times.

Hegel. But, but…Hegel was a fervent supporter of the Habsburg monarchy, wasn’t he? Hegel’s idea of the ‘Spirit’ that moves through history and realizes itself in the world provided a philosophical foundation for Marx’s later theories on historical materialism.

But these essentially have a religious basis. I am not alone in this observation: Nietzsche observed the same about Hegel:

“The Hegelian concept of the ‘world spirit’ that marches through history is a dangerous illusion that deprives humans of their own creativity and responsibility” (from Twilight of the Idols).

The Holy Spirit marches through history, and whatever happens is a kind of reflection of this spirit, a way to get to know itself.

That leads to the idea of a person torturing his fellow man to get to know himself better. That’s the Hegelian machine spirit in a nutshell. Okay, back to Lifshitz. After reading a few chapters, he indeed proves to be a fervent opponent of modernist art and a great lover of classically colonial art, such as the idyllic family scenes of Manet. This preference for classical colonialism was thus enormously prevalent in communism: why? Because these people have something in common with the Jehovah’s Witness: propagandistic images inherently have something classically colonial about them. But why couldn’t the art of these white educated men have its own revolution?

Marx was a Newtonian reductionist who reduced almost everything to a form of capital, except…beauty! That was, of course, priceless! And so, the strict communist Lifshitz dedicates an entire book to the beautiful art taste of the Great Leader.

Marx viewed the decline of art in capitalist society as a progressive phenomenon, a necessary phase in the dialectical development of society.

Look, almost literally Hegel: the world spirit destroys art to understand itself better, and then follows, in the distant future, the improvement; it can’t be otherwise, because the World Spirit is, of course, just another name for the Good God.

Sadly, I haven’t noticed much of that. Instead, I see a lot of psychopaths in the news practicing self-knowledge through the torture of people.

Yes, ‘modern art’ is more philosophy than art. It is a philosophy expressing the dominance of power and facts over lucid thinking and poetic contemplation of the world. The brutal demolition of real forms stands for an outburst of blind embittered volition. It is the slave’s revenge, his make-believe liberation from the yoke of necessity, a simple pressure valve. If it were only a pressure valve! There is a fatal connection between the slavish form of protest and oppression itself. According to all the newest aesthetic theories, art’s effect is hypnotic: it traumatizes or on the contrary blunts or calms a consciousness that no longer has any life of its own. In short, it is the art of a suggestible crowd at the ready to run after the emperor’s chariot. In the face of such a program, my vote goes to the most mediocre, derivative academicism, since that is the lesser evil. But it goes without saying that my ideal lies elsewhere, as the reader can guess.

Thus spoke Lifshitz at the end of his 1968 book The Crisis of Ugliness. These are words that Thierry Baudet could have spoken. I’ve just saved you 150 euros.

The Hegelian world spirit, the machine spirit variant of the Good God, and ultra-conservative colonialism are at the heart of this ‘machine revolution’ that Platonov, a great lover of machines, warmly embraced.

Yesterday, I saw someone on the news excitedly discussing the Olympic rowers, saying, ‘they were so good, they were like machines!’

Then it occurred to me that sport indeed has precisely that as its goal: the pleasure of making the body an infallible machine. But can you maintain that without a good dose of beauty-serotonin? I can imagine that if you let writers be tortured en masse to better know yourself as the world spirit, the beautiful family Jehovah art can become a kind of anesthetic.

You understand: I am certainly no Hegelian. And thus, no fan of that lesser evil of Lifschitz, practiced from that ivory tower of mediocre academism.

Do I perhaps not want to know myself through the PFTAS in the sea waves?