Milan Kundera's Juxtaposition of Hegel and Nietzsche
I CAME across an interesting distinction that the Czech writer, Milan Kundera, makes between Hegel and Nietzsche and it relates to the tendency of the former to systematise everything to suit the demanding rigours of his dialectical-conceptual programme. As Kundera points out,
“in his desire to fill in his system, Hegel describes every detail, square by square, inch by inch, so that his Aesthetics comes across as a collaboration between an eagle and hundreds of heroic spiders spinning webs to cover all the crannies.”
Conversely, Nietzsche's own style is decidedly non-systemic and his aphorisms are famous for revealing the sudden flashes of inspiration that allowed him to “philosophise with a hammer”. Kundera says of Nietzsche that his
“refusal of systematic thought has another consequence: an immense broadening of theme; barriers between the various philosophical disciplines, which have kept the real world from being seen in its full range, are fallen, and from then on everything human can become the object of a philosopher's thought. That too brings philosophy nearer the novel: for the first time philosophy is pondering not epistemology, not aesthetics or ethics, the phenomenology of mind or the critique of reason, etc., but everything human.”
The compartmentalisation of which Kundera speaks has enabled various thinkers to contain their philosophical discourse within certain parameters. By doing so, both students and critics alike are expected to observe the carefully placed road signs that ferry the intellectual traveller along a set of established cerebral highways and ensure that they do not wander off the beaten track. The case with Hegel, as we have seen, involves the accumulation of as many concepts as possible within a single analytical credo. Although the link between absolutism and the spider kingdom has yet to be explored, to claim is to control.