On The Relevance of Hegelian Dialectic Theory to Present-day Canadian Politics and Culture...


I found this article on the internet this
morning, freshly written in The National Post by Robert Fulford, from the University of Toronto, March 24th, 2008..



What divides us makes us Hegel
Robert Fulford, National Post
Published: Monday, March 24, 2008


Iris Murdoch, a sharp-eyed philosopher before she
began writing her outrageous novels about convoluted
relationships, once suggested a way to learn the real
purpose of a philosopher. You should ask, "What is he
afraid of?"

We know what scared G.F.W. Hegel (1770-1831), the
titan of German idealism. He was terrified at the
prospect of Europe being devastated by irreconcilable
forces. And in the 1950s, when Europe finally made
peace with itself through a common market, one of the
main planners was a great Hegelian theorist, Alexandre
Kojève.

Robert C. Sibley of the Ottawa Citizen has used
Murdoch's question and Hegel's philosophy as a way to
think about modern Canada. For more than a century,
leading Canadian scholars, including our most eminent
philosophers, have applied Hegel's theories. Sibley
draws a clear line from Hegel to Canada and asks the
Canadian version of Murdoch's question: What are
Canadian philosophers afraid of?

Northern Spirits: John Watson, George Grant, and
Charles Taylor - Appropriations of Hegelian Political
Thought (McGill-Queen's University Press), published
last month, began life as Sibley's doctoral thesis in
political science at Carleton University. He's shaped
it as a stimulating analysis of the thinking that
drives Canadian public life.

We know one thing that frightens Sibley himself: He's
afraid of writing badly. His firm, clear prose shows a
devotion to careful craftsmanship and an affection for
third drafts. In itself that's un-Hegelian. Hegel
never for a moment worried about being understood, so
he wasn't concerned when people called his prose the
most impenetrable verbiage ever imposed on helpless
students.

Sibley's three Canadian subjects are well chosen for
their historic reach and their influence on the way
Canadians think about their society.

John Watson (1847-1939), a Queen's University
professor, developed an international reputation in
the 19th century for his Hegelian analysis of the
troubled relations between governments and
individuals. He worked on new approaches to Christian
institutions, preparing the intellectual ground for
the creation of the United Church of Canada in 1925.

George Grant (1918-1988), a distinctly unloved thinker
within Canadian philosophy departments, nevertheless
became for a few years the most prominent Canadian
philosopher. His Lament for a Nation, perhaps the
least understood of all famous Canadian books, helped
jump-start the radical nationalist movement of the
1960s and 1970s.

See FULFORD on Page AL4

And Charles Taylor (1931-), well regarded among
Hegelians everywhere on the planet, has become best
known in Canada for articulating the virtues of
multiculturalism.

Sibley takes us on a guided tour of political culture
in English-speaking Canada, stopping along the way to
exchange words with public figures ranging from
Stephen Leacock to Pierre Trudeau, from Lawren Harris
to Michael Bliss, from Richard Gwyn to Larry Zolf. He
suggests that even Canadians who don't actually read
Hegel are intuitively Hegelian.

His three chosen philosophers have something
remarkable in common: At certain points all of them
have been on top of the news, a surprise to anyone who
imagines that philosophers live private lives behind
university walls.

Watson, aside from helping reorganize Canadian
Protestantism, became a serious proponent of world
government after the First World War. Grant developed
links connecting anti-Americanism, anti-modernism and
Canadian nationalism - links that remain powerful
today. And Taylor deployed Hegel's dialectic, a
philosophy of contradictions and their resolutions, to
argue for Quebec's unique place within the country and
the necessity of a new multiculturalism.

As Sibley maintains, "To read Watson, Grant and Taylor
is to see Hegelian thought alive and acting in the
present, not as some dead philosophical artefact of
the past."

Canada, eternally contested territory, exists by
playing variations on themes by Hegel, the prince of
painful but necessary reconciliation. Careful
political crafting, with Hegelian tools, makes the
country work.

The solutions of Watson, Grant and Taylor indicate
their fears. Iris Murdoch would have no trouble
recognizing that all of these philosophers have been
appalled by the possibility that Canada could dissolve
into fragments and become several nations or be
absorbed by the U.S. One of them decided it happened
long ago: Grant, the eternal pessimist, said, "Canada
has ceased to be a nation," with only legal
formalities awaiting settlement. It's hard to imagine
exactly what he had hoped for, since he never quite
explained when Canada was a nation, but certainly he
was disappointed. Lament for a Nation mourned Canada's
slow disappearance into, as he often put it (in a
phrase borrowed from Kojève), "the universal and
homogeneous state."

All of Sibley's philosophers, at different times, have
responded as Hegelians to the constantly unfolding
crisis of Canadian nationhood as Hegelians. Hegel
provides a framework in which people can recognize
their diversity, permit particular cultures to retain
their distinctive features, but remain within a single
state. As Sibley says, Canadians seem to have grasped
that our regional and ethnic tensions help make us the
country we are, for good or ill.

He quotes Michael Ignatieff's "distinctly Hegelian"
recognition of the arguments at the core of our
political psychology. As Ignatieff puts it, "Canada
just happens to be one of those countries that is
committed, as a condition of its survival, to engage
in a constant act of self-justification and
self-invention." He adds that those who weary of this
endless dialogue are weary of being Canadian.

Is it by collective intuition, I've often wondered,
that Ontario for six decades has almost always
arranged to be governed by a provincial party
different from the one holding power in Ottawa? It
looks like a Hegelian strategy. Brian Mulroney's Meech
Lake scheme promised, in effect, to "settle" the
central French-English conflict in Canada. That was
unrealistic - and unHegelian.

On the cover of Sibley's book, a classic Lawren Harris
painting, North Shore, Lake Superior, neatly
symbolizes the contents. The split trunk of a tree,
partly light and partly dark, suggests the discord
embodied in Canadian life. Sibley quotes Roald
Nasgaard, a former curator at the Art Gallery of
Ontario, who sees Harris's picture as a symbolic
exploration of Canadian identity and a metaphor
responding to the condition of life in the geographic
vastness of Canada.

Northern Spirits, a revealing title for this
remarkably ambitious book, refers to the spirit that
breathes life into an organism and also to spirit as
Hegel expresses it: a dynamic force and the highest
principle of life. Readers who believe they understand
Canada may well finish this book thinking unexpected
thoughts.

National Post

robert.fulford@utoronto.ca