How Hegel helped end Jim Crow: On America's philosopher King

The greatest political leader and hero of my lifetime, Martin Luther King, was trained as a philosopher whose doctoral work was on Hegel. He was not only a Black leader, and not only a religious leader; he was also a radical intellectual who belonged to a European (if also an American) intellectual tradition. True to the American tradition of Emerson and others, he clearly saw no distinction between elites and common people or masses when it comes to the world of ideas and thought.

King's doctoral work on Hegel situates him in the same tradition of French intellectuals like Jean-Paul Sartre, Henri Lefebvre, Guy Debord, and today’s Alain Badiou for whom Hegel was a major inspiration.
He is remembered for championing notions of love and non-violence that are of course absolutely “Christian” in accordance with that religion’s most foundational and important texts and thinkers. But since a radical politics is always in some sense based in both love and anger, or affirmation and dissent, just as it may counter intellectual prejudices and not just, as in the rhetoric of so many “leaders,” appeal to them, that King’s thought would have a basis in Hegel is not surprising. To change a society or ourselves, or both, requires a work, and this is partly a “labor of the concept,” a thinking not just about what is but about how it is thought (for Hegel these are inseparable). True affirmations involves negations also, just as to be loved is not to be flattered and not criticized. Moses and Jesus had lots of anger, and their God too was, surprisingly, said to love. Indeed, part of the significance of Hegel is his so-called rationalism, according to which what is important about the state of mind anyone may be or be said to be in is not how it feels, to them or others, but what it means and thus says, and also wants, for what a state of mind is and is about is what it thinks and asserts or claims to be importantly or relevantly true.

It is because everyone is a thinker, trying to make sense of our experience of the world we live in, that democratic political processes are possible, that people can make history and not just be made by it, just as art can be, as French filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard has put it, "a form that thinks" and not just "a thought that forms," speaking unsettlingly or even, like King, prophetically, to what we care about and not just the empty enjoyment of meaningless “likes” and their consumerist false democracy. It is because of this that something like revolutions, or whatever name new political sequences will be given, are possible; and it is because of this that they are necessary.

The "intellectuals" who are "men (and women) of the left" have two axiomatic propositions:
1) We recognize no true, essential, or inevitable difference on the plane of thinking between elites and "masses," or common people without a formal higher education (or a theoretical understanding of political thought, art, or anything else).
2) "We want everything." We do not think "privilege" as a limit. Only as consequence of some other need can we want or need the "privileged" to have less; what is essential is that the poor, or less privileged, and the precariat have more. And maybe also what the substance of things wanted is.
3) Like many Americans, we may well chafe at limitations (as in ideologies of scarcity and austerity, or over-wrought claims for authority, as in various and automatically legitimated cultural militarisms). It may be true that black and white people on the liberal left divide between wanting the government to help us more or interfere with us less. But that is a detail. (Why can we not have both?) We refuse all oppression and affirm our potentialities, including those that can only be realized in or through collective processes, and even if those are less congregated than networked. (We need a better functioning public sphere, one not given over, like most social media, to marketing and surveillance tailored to it).

Politics is not something you buy, or even do, but something you make. It does not reference what is, as in the eternal recourse of cynics with their blind conservatism that knows everything and thinks nothing, justifying whatever is or is done on the basis of some blind principles of necessity or operativity seeming to rest only on something else that is as if given. Knowing all this, often automatically, but not caring enough for the hard and at times painful and risky work of thinking. A true politics (which depends only on the resources of people and not those of government and representatives) appeals instead to what can be, and works to construct it, a work that is equally theoretical and practical. (And so too it does not merely "apply" theory to practice).

Doubtless some reflections of this kind are faciltated by a dialectical thinking such as both the European Marxist left and some American thinkers like King found in Hegel.

As someone with a degree and interest in philosophy, I find his example encouraging in this as in other ways. Let's be King's disciples; he needs better ones. Let's talk and think and argue about, but also actively decide, what his legacy means. Obama's statement that "There is not a black America and a white America but only a United States of America" names both a starting point and a departure, in Hegel's terms a posited presupposition, like traumatic experience in psychoanalysis, which is first grasped and named and so constituted as such in a retroactive event that names and conceptualizes or thinks it in relation to the need of the present situation.

We should want not to "make America great again" but to make it work well for all of us for what will be both a repetition and a novelty. All non-dialectical thinking works in categorical oppositions where a predicate A either fully applies or does not: It is (absolutely) A or absolutely not-A. Hegelian dialectics treats predicates as both true and not true. "Black lives matter" is a dialectical statement in this way. It is true (as what must be) because it is not (wholly) true (as what is today the case). And of course that is the scandal. (More complex examples exist, but in each case the dialectical proposition, as the one subjected to the poetic logic of an “unconscious,” means more than it says, and so says more than it seems to, once analyzed; with dialectic, ambiguity becomes definite in meaning as it is unfolded qua the thought or “said.”)
If reality is dialectical, its truth requires a thought; thought is not reduced to perception but required by it. If it is not dialectical, it is merely found and represented, like facts in our culture that fetishes empiricist ideas (rejected widely now in philosophy of science) of "fact," which is why Americans who crave the continuing education of citizens tend to flock to natural science and psychology and sometimes history, and read or watch admired experts tell them How It Is, such knowledge seeming to promise mastery and in fact offering the comfort of a knowledge whose perverse form is seeing the Other’s guilty secret and declaring with manic pleasure that you do). In the representational paradigm of thought, injustice in discourse comes to rest on the undecidable truth or falsity of the discourse in representing things that are there or are not; “Nature, or Being, make up your mind!" These represented little deities are absolute and cannot be questioned or interpreted. Lacking all ambiguity, they either are or are not, are there are or not. The name must have a referent. It would be scandal if it did not. Or if it named a soul who was a "man without qualities," like God in Western traditions, who may not be an object of dialectics because he is the producer of Being and not part of it. (And so may be permitted predicates that are adjectival or metaphorical, but not conceptual and subject to thought rather than mere observant description). Also, the non-dialectical thinker (who is only an observer and not a participant, who sees things but does not think them, assuming that is possible) can never be held to account, which is why in general American professionals, who tend in fact to have contempt for the hapless masses subject to their authority, are never responsible for the consequences of their actions upon them, their actions being based on apparently true judgments grounded on their professional competence, which entitles them to make ostensibly true statements, answering to no reason, as they are not truly in "the space of reasons" as American philosopher Wilfrid Sellars put it, but only that of judgment based on trained expertise and discourses of professions or institutions that are part of it. There are in the end two forms of knowledge: by authority or by work. Scientist, artist, and citizen work to understand things and conceptually grasp or think them most usefully.

Because there people talk more and often better, lacking the WASP cult of prudent but silent action, the informal Black American subculture is often not only more liberal but, remarkably, more democratic than the larger one. Even with their self-congratulatory talk about the American Revolution or whatnot, we white people often “get” what it is to be a citizen in a democratic and liberal culture surprisingly little, compared to what is possible for all us Americans.

Let's work to remake America, in both a repetition or return and the construction of something wholly new. And as part of this, let's rethink America and think her anew. All of us.