Hegel as symbolist poet of metaphysics

Hegel has three styles. Aphoristic (harking back to his school-teacher days), esoteric and exoteric (auto-hermeneutic).  The auto-hermeneutic texts (such as the Lessons on the History of Philosophy) are a kind of solution and key to the riddle of his aphorisms and esoteric texts.  

Another way to look at Hegel is to consider him to have been much like both a symbolist poet (where things are referred to never plainly and directly but by traces, associations, symbols and small details - as in Mallarmé) and a master craftsman of word puzzles (in the style of the charades of his day and even more in the manner of the later crossword). 

What Hegel (who had a pedantic and encylopedic knowledge of contemporary culture) did was take common places (topoi), ordinary 'platitudes', quite hum-drum  down-to-earth facts concerning philosophy, science, art, history, law,  and political science, and dress them up as enticing tantalizing riddles and puzzles with an oracular, abstract, convoluted but polished, idiosyncratic baroque literary style (already prevalent in Kant, Fichte and Schelling), at once suggestively illuminating and opaque.

There is something of a magician and showman in Hegel, in how he pulls one concept out of the hat of another seemingly unrelated concept. The secret to Hegel is the invariable platitude and down-to-earthness in his loftiest abstractions,  the familiarity and homeliness of the solution of his most daunting riddles.

Hegel has a lot to say about language and is relevant to the philosophy of language. He illustrates how the mind copes with reality by elaborating a kind of 'poem of the world', a mathesis universalis, a characteristica, but not based on mathematical logic. Hegel is about the shift of perspective of linguistic engagement, a perpetually self-conscious transcendence which refutes its own act of transcending. 

There is also irony (a Shakespearean one) in Hegel and a constant Alice-through-the-looking glass gibe at transcendence. Transcendence is (according to Hegel) the ignorant's maze, by attempting to escape you end up at the doorstep of what you meant to escape: the Heraclitean flux, the river of change persists by changing, that is by changing away from change. casting foam, a symbol, an illusion, a reflection (cf. the doctrine of Schein).  Hegel is scepticism laughing at itself (Nephelokokkugia). The absolute idea is just consciousness become at home with its own flux having laid the pretension of transcendence to rest (and the dualism between the theoretical and the practical).

Hegel is an encylopaedic parody of all human knowledge (cf. Jarry's pataphysics or even Hamann whom Hegel wrote about...).

The lesson Hegel's philosophy teaches us is that we do not possess a language adequate for a philosophy or science of consciousness and an attempt to use ordinary language cannot amount to much beyond  'language games' - and these can be fun, harmless,  even therapeutical or eye-opening,  but in other instances harmful. Another merit of Hegel is giving far more weighty and valid illustration of what a language game can amount to as compared to the Wittgensteinian account. Behaviorism and frenology both merit derision and scorn.

 

Preach away Hegel from thy wooden pulpit,
Let it squeak like the planks of a ship !
Preach away, catching the winds of Spirit,
Conveying meaning and motion
To an undulating adulating crowd.

Outside the armies march on,
Canons explode and laws are decreed.
What will be must be:
Minerva's cerebrations celebrate indifference
From an Olympian dais of unthought-of thoughts.