HEGEL THE CONSUMMATE NEOPLATONIST Philip Stanfield !i The Sparring Antennae Galaxies ‘The counter-thrust brings together, and from tones at variance comes perfect attunement, and all things come to pass through conflict.’ Heraclitus, The Art and Thought of Heraclitus, LXXV !ii ‘…it is the inner which stirs us; we are in the case of one who sees his own reflection but not realising whence it comes goes in pursuit of it.’ Plotinus, The Enneads, V.8.2 ‘I therefore openly avowed myself the pupil of that mighty thinker…The mystification which the dialectic suffers in Hegel’s hands by no means prevents him from being the first to present its general forms of motion in a comprehensive and conscious manner. With him it is standing on its head. It must be inverted, in order to discover the rational kernel within the mystical shell. In its mystified form, the dialectic became the fashion in Germany, because it seemed to transfigure and glorify what exists. In its rational form it is a scandal and an abomination to the bourgeoisie and its doctrinaire spokesmen, because it includes in its positive understanding of what exists a simultaneous recognition of its negation, its inevitable destruction; because it regards every historically developed form as being in a fluid state, in motion, and therefore grasps its transient aspect as well; and because it does not let itself be impressed by anything, being in its very essence critical and revolutionary.’ Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1, Postface to the Second Edition 1873 ‘…not a single professor of political economy, who may be capable of very valuable contributions in the field of factual and specialised investigations, can be trusted one iota when it comes to the general theory of political economy. For in modern society the latter is as much a partisan science as is epistemology. Taken as a whole, the professors of economics are nothing but learned salesmen of the capitalist class, while the professors of philosophy are learned salesmen of the theologians.’ Vladimir Lenin, Materialism and Empirio-criticism: Critical Comments on a Reactionary Philosophy, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1975, 321-322 !iii Processed in a sick convict culture that as much prides itself on toadying to the interests of first British and now U.S. capital (to the Americans who fought for and won their independence from the British) – from the skirts of Mother Britannia to the coat-tails of Uncle Sam – as it is a racist bully in its region. A culture overseen by ideologues who claim to be the upholders of the highest values of secularism but in fact whose function is to never lose control of the ideas and whose treacherous, thieving elements, in addition to their greed, are ruthless in pursuing that end and by vicious, vindictive authoritarians, protected by their mates and their system. Australians, know your place and all will be well. A people who have everything and yet, basking in their ‘decency’ - the narrow bounds of which belief are used so effectively to control them - so readily behave, personally and through their representatives, far worse than as though they have nothing. Ask the first Australians. Ask the mere handful of refugees trying to find safety here, including those fleeing from devastation participated in by Australians. Ask the elderly. Till the end of my life I will salute Jørn Utzon for his bigness of spirit and vision that ‘laid-back’, ‘down to earth’ (cynical) Australians are so suspicious of, that so provokes them (despite the now obligatory student-recruitment blather to the contrary pumped out by competing universities), resulting in his fleeing from this nation and for refusing to ever be drawn back by the embarrassed provincial rabble (still attempting to demean his Opera House by proposing to raise petty cash from sleepovers in it – why not in St Mary’s or Parliament House, symbols of the authority so reassuring to Australians?) that his departure exposed. 22.11.2017 !iv Email to the Chair of Philosophy at the University of Sydney 21.04.15 Hello Professor Benitez, Last semester my pursuit academically of a most profound influence on Western culture which I have focused on for the previous thirty two years came to an end, with my failure to complete and submit my Honours thesis on the mystic Hegel. That focus, an obsession, has dominated my life at the expense of all else - it is what I have lived for. I send you this email to explain why I failed to submit my thesis and in so doing to emphatically reject any shame associated with that failure, particularly after more than three decades of total commitment, and to raise with you an immeasurably greater failure by academic philosophers, a failure which I have struggled against for the entirety of that period at both this university and UNSW. When I began my first degree in 1982 at the then City Art Institute (now the College of Fine Arts, UNSW) I quickly came to see that there was something seriously lacking in the theory of art being taught, that it was superficial and incorrect. I also believed that whatever it was that was missing from the tuition and literature pervaded Western culture and when recognised, would be the basis for an entire cultural re-reading, an honest re-reading. I wrote a long essay which I titled ‘The Poverty of Art’ in which I attempted to work out what that influence was and serialised it in the student publication. The only response was when I was asked on one occasion by the editor what I thought of her reduction of the font size to such a degree that the text could not be read. Since then this interest has become an obsession, one that has, until the decline of that stage of capitalist ideology known as postmodernism when a slowly increasing number of academics began looking for something ’new’, gone against the ideological grain - as an overt example, when I was in 3rd year Fine Arts at this university in 1988 my tutor warned me to stop writing as I was doing otherwise ‘they’ would come down on me. I went into the Honours year with that threat hanging over my head. In 1992 I began a Masters by research thesis titled ’Neoplatonism and the Cubist Aesthetic' at CoFA. For three years, in breach of the regulations, the College failed to provide me with a supervisor. I was patronised with the appellation ‘autodidact’ and advised to read a beginners book on philosophy by an academic who I was told was an ‘expert' on Plato, who refused to supervise me and who, on my asking him, admitted total ignorance of an entire subject area of a chapter in that book he recommended to me, by Danto - a chapter on neurophilosophy. This was during the heyday of postmodernism - itself suffused with mysticism. !v I went to the main campus of UNSW and also came to this university looking for supervision from academic philosophers or at least some support, someone who could help me. On 08.01.93 I met with George Markus who didn’t like what I was saying regarding the impact of mysticism on Western culture and told me that he didn’t ‘support my project’. On 05.04.93 I met with David Armstrong who kindly suggested that I ‘start at the beginning’. Both of them showed not the slightest awareness of the fundamental significance of mysticism in Western culture to the present. I had similar experiences meeting with Philip Cam (30.11.92) and Peter Slezak (07.12.92) at UNSW. Slezak said he thought ‘we had finished with idealism’. In 1998 you approved my attending your course on Plato and Aristotle (which I paid to do because my eventual supervisor at CoFA would not authorise my attending the course). I did not submit my essay for it because my supervisor was putting increasing pressure on me to complete my thesis. In your lecture on 05.03.98 you said ‘There are strains of mysticism in Plato’ and in your lecture on 12.03.98 you said that Plato tried to get under the language to the real things. At the end of that lecture I asked you “What can you say about the concepts of ‘contemplation’ and ‘intuition’ in regard to Platonism and Neoplatonism?” You replied ‘It is an awfully big question. It requires a long answer.’ You acknowledged that you did not know much about Neoplatonism. Disgusted with my experiences at CoFA over years, culminating in the refusal of my supervisor and his partner, the course co-ordinator, contrary to all the supporting evidence, to allow me to upgrade to a PhD, I left the course. After so many years, I was not prepared to do a partial thesis. I wanted to give up on my vision because it had cost me so much but I could not - I had made significant headway in understanding what this influence was and is in Western culture and I have never lost sight of either its significance or potential. As a way of resuming my commitment, I enrolled in courses at the Centre for Continuing Education and the WEA, particularly courses run by Kerry Sanders. In those courses covering a wide range of philosophers, I argued for the influence of mysticism, particularly Neoplatonism, in Western culture and philosophy. Not only did Sanders show not the slightest knowledge of Neoplatonism (in her University Preparation Course on the two dates allocated for her tuition of Neoplatonism she never even mentioned it), she spectacularly expressed the standard academic hostility to it in her class on 22.05.08 when, in quoting Derrida’s denial in response to a question regarding the influence of Neoplatonism on his philosophy, she added slowly, with emphasis, ‘you complete fuckwit’.