Extraordinary Comments

bob wrote:

The multiplicity of Hegels alone should be proof enough for the existence of parallel universes.

Parallel incomplete self-consistent universals. My Hegel describes the "revel." The literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin spoke of the "carnival." He was mainly interested in explaining why Dostoevsky's fiction seems so much more "alive" than anyone else's, and developed the idea of a "polyvocal" writing, then set about explaining how each main character in a Dostoevskian novel represents a self-contained universal perspective that seems to make perfect complete sense on its own terms, yet conflicts with each of the others, often disastrously: Ivan makes perfect sense to Ivan, and to us when we try to see the world from Ivan's perspective, but the same is true for the perspectives of Fyodor, Dmitry, Alyosha, Smerdyakov... That multiplicity of unities is also the "whole," or every human being's experience of the whole, and the resulting discord, suffering, and dissatisfaction equate with the fallenness of the world, as an index of the imperfection of human understanding, and, for Dostoevsky, the necessity of Christian faith.

Modernity presents a series of attempts to impose "false wholes" - of which the latest and greatest might be democratic capitalism and its double, post-modern nihilism - leading to catastrophe. The whole is always bigger than any individual's ability to comprehend it. This perception is also fundamental, incidentally, to cybernetics and the turn away from attempting to program artificial intelligence: The environment always bigger than its reduction to language, no matter how clever or complex. The ancients, or some of the ancients, also understood this. My Hegel was comfortable with the notion and fascinated by its implications. The syndrome among his critics is to attempt to treat his writing as though it is and must be what Bakhtin opposed to polyvocalic: monological, which is the approach of the vast majority of writers and thinkers. Each of the Karamazovs is a hubristic monologist in a polyvocalic universe. The true monologue could be spoken only by God or, perhaps for a my-Hegelian, revealed immanently, since any new revelation, since it is significant and meaningful, must change the very ground and purpose of revelation. For the revelation to stand as a revelation, the universe revealed in the revelation can no longer be the same as the universe prior to the revelation. To say otherwise would be to say that the revelation was insignificant, and thus no revelation at all.