To understand Hegel, first you have to understand Hegel.
My (33F) husband’s (35M) career in academic philosophy is ruining our marriage
My husband and I are both academics. We’ve been married for 3 years, and been together for 6. He is an academic philosopher and I am a physicist. He has recently expressed displeasure that I’ve never seriously engaged with his work. Now, I’ve read a bit of the classics of philosophy, but my husband’s work is more in what I’m told is called the “continental” tradition. Unfortunately, everything he’s shown me has just seems completely insane.
Here’s the problem: his work apparently involves claims about physics that are just wrong, and wrong in a very embarrassing way! I’ll admit, I’m a terrible person, but I had never read his thesis before. I tried reading it and it’s riddled with talk about for instance the necessary relationship between matter having “extension” and possessing mass. He also talks about the “shape” of fundamental particles. This is obviously nonsensical/wrong; electrons have mass and are point particles (they don’t take up space really). In the thesis and some other papers he wrote he seems to think of himself as “scientific” and a “materialist” but his entire idea of what these words mean is stuck in like, outdated 19th century ideas about atoms as little billiard balls flying around in space. I’ve gently tried to help him and explain how he might start to engage seriously with contemporary physics (he has never read a book on the subject and is by his own admission “bad at math”), but he just gets angry with me and explains that Hegel’s system is presuppositional and the basis for all possible rational thought so there is no need at all to read other texts in the first place (I have no idea what this means). He will throw out terms like “speculative propositions” but when I ask him to explain what this means or give me examples he just starts giving me more inscrutable jargon that makes no sense. On top of that, he will repeatedly say German phrases or terms that he uses (and pronounces) incorrectly (I am a native speaker) or nonsensically. He claims to understand the language (he doesn’t) and tells me that Hegel can only be understood “in the original German” but he clearly can’t read the language and when I’ve tried to read the original texts they make even less sense.
On top of this, his obsession with Hegel himself has reached the point of creepiness. At one point he literally told me that all other work either agrees with Hegel so is redundant, or disagrees with Hegel and is wrong. He keeps a framed picture of Hegel on the nightstand in our bedroom. In fact, he even changed his phone’s background from a picture of me to this same picture of Hegel. I feel like I am competing with a 200 year old philosopher for my husband’s attention.
Recently we got in a huge fight because he was trying to demonstrate an example of the Hegelian concept of the “unity of opposites” (whatever that means) by claiming that right and left hands are opposite but also identical. I told him this is just wrong and that right and left hands are not “identical” in any meaningful sense (chirality is a basic concept in geometry/group theory: left and right hands are not superimposable). He kept putting his hands together and tried to show how they were “identical” and kept failing (because they’re not) and then got angry and stormed out of the house. I haven’t seen him since (this was about a day ago) and texted him and haven’t heard back.
What do I do Reddit? Do I just let this go? It’s immensely frustrating that my account of my own field is not being taken seriously. He asked me to engage with his work, so I did. But it seems like he won’t repay me in kind. He has told me repeatedly that Hegel makes empirical science unnecessary and implied that my work is a waste of time and that I should just be studying German idealism instead and read people like “Fichte” and “Schelling” (who are apparently very popular in Germany but I’ve never heard of them). Why is it okay for him to belittle my field but I can’t offer mild criticism of his?
TL;DR: My husband’s academic work is embarrassingly wrong and can’t take any criticism.
- Reminds me of Maoists trying to explain atomic physics with a very poor understanding of Dialectical materialism
2.Wasnt Hegel also wrong about physics in his own time too? Or am I thinking of someone else like Locke?
3.I thought the person in the post was literally describing hegel for a minute, and so now I want one of these but instead it’s an AITA post about Tolstoy and his wife
Lol. This has to be some copypasta parody. But in any case it’s hilarious. I have spoken to some philosophy majors who also infuriated me beyond belief with their pretentious pseudo-scientific waffling.
It helps to have some structured guide into Hegel, like a class or book club or something, otherwise Losurdo, Stalin’s diamat and hismat, or Engel’s Anti-Duhring are all good places to read first then go back to the OG.
I’ve had luck with both a calc class irl and especially a rando mysticism class I took on coursera having some discussion on Hegel’s dialectics and if you started the synthesis-thesis-antithesis around those professors they’d have meltdowns about Fichte to the point of booting students.
he do be like that, maybe Hegel, the freedom of moderns philosophical biography from Domenico Losurdo could help you.
![Hegel? Hegel what the hell are you talking about? (Im gonna have a stroke reading this I'm so stupid [ TT w TT ] )](https://lemmygrad.ml/pictrs/image/b438a8b0-2d65-46db-82e2-f48d7df86bd5.jpeg){kind=link}