Hegel’s reputation precedes him, he’s widely regarded as difficult, it could be language or translation difficulties or the conceptual difficulties he is dealing with, and to be fair trying to make sense of. I opened a copy of Hegel's Logic the other day which has been sitting on my bookshelves for years. In his introduction Hegel's writes:
'We can assume nothing and assert nothing dogmatically; nor can we make a beginning: and a beginning, as primary and underived, makes an assumption, or rather is an assumption. It seems as if it were impossible to make a beginning at all'.
Even Hegel does not know where to begin, maybe he's human after all. Where does my Post begin? In previous posts I have started with a song, more precisely one of my own songs written long ago. I found that this works quite well for me, but with reservations. Oscar Wilde wrote that 'All criticism is a form of autobiography.' But I don't set out to write a memoir. Wilde implies that this happens anyway, what I write begins with me but hopes to go beyond me, to move from my subjective experience into the objective world.
As an autodidact I will not have footnotes, references and bibliographies. There is also the temptation to divide myself into serious me and trivial me, and change hats accordingly. I have grown up and lived with popular culture, it would seem false for me to switch that off and say, 'now I'm going to be serious'. I think it would be worse though, to try to be a pop intellectual.
So where to begin? I wanted some free images for my Substack, and I searched on line for 'free library pictures', I got lots of pictures of libraries! As self-improvement is one of my themes, maybe this was a sign. So, I’m going to write about autodidact-ism. To begin with 'autodidact' is a silly word rarely used, to me it sounds comical, and I use it with tongue in cheek. I first came across the word in Sartre's novel Nausea, where there is a character described as 'The autodidact' who sets out to read every book in the library in alphabetical order. Clearly this is a strange thing to do, and as it turns out The Autodidact is quite strange (I won't give away the plot).
When I was younger there was a culture of self-improvement and learning, there were always a multitude of local authority funded evening classes. In our vocabulary there were terms like 'the intelligent layman' or ' the man on the Clapham Omnibus'. These were intelligent engaged citizens who were assumed to be capable of following difficult or complicated arguments or world affair. On the other side of the scale was the public intellectual, often academics or churchmen who would address board questions of society and morality for a general audience.
I didn't particularly enjoy school, but I did used to go to the public library and find philosophy books. I did go to university, but it didn't occur to me to apply for philosophy, playing safe and staying with my A'level subjects. So, as I went to university am I really a genuine autodidact and not a fraud? This is not a problem, autodidacts can be educated people, but they read around the subject, follow their own interests or study on their own something that is not their specialty. A few years after I left university, I did in fact start a philosophy university degree. I was working, I was going to a lot of political meetings and my course was three evenings a week. As Wilde (again) said 'socialism takes up too many evenings'. I gave up the degree, however, I also had the idea that the learning was more important than the qualification. I did several courses over the years for which there was no qualification, or where a qualification was optional.
Learning for its own sake is part of the autodidact’s 'code', this seems like an unfashionable idea today. In many ways in the West our societies have become professionalised, to be a philosopher, for example, you would have to provide certification to prove that that is what you are, you would have to provide data showing how many books and papers you have written over a given time period, and you might even get a job on an ethics committee advising ministers, civil servants or business leaders on the rights and wrongs of their activities, as if a philosopher is equipped to tell you right from wrong.
Our universities seem to have lost their way and their purpose. it is always the case that the arts and humanities are susceptible to the influence of politics and ideology, today it is difficult to find a space for independent thought, but as autodidacts we will continue doing what we do, we might even be able an example to others!