Hegel wrote about Canada simply as soon as, within the Lectures on the Philosophy of Historical past, and what he stated comes all the way down to: principally innocent. His most important concern in that passage is the long run energy of the USA; having famous that the poor group of the American colonies prevented them from conquering Canada, he then provides that Canada and Mexico “current no severe risk” to the US, after which strikes on. It’s scarcely extra consideration than Rousseau’s dismissal of Canada as “just a few acres of snow”; just like the fictional Hitchhiker’s Information to the Galaxy discussing Earth, Hegel pauses on Canada solely lengthy sufficient to say “you don’t want to fret about it.”
And but, as Robert Sibley notes in starting his fascinating Northern Spirits, English Canadian philosophers have had a deep, abiding and persevering with curiosity in Hegel, unrequited as it could be – an curiosity not typically shared by different international locations within the anglophone West. Canadian Hegelianism seems to be its personal philosophical custom – one which’s performed a big position in my own philosophical formation. It is just within the twenty first century that folks like Sibley have began writing about this Canadian Hegelianism, but it surely’s been round for longer.
The earliest main determine in Canadian Hegelianism is John Watson (1847-1939). Watson’s curiosity in Hegel was common for his day: he inherited his Hegelianism instantly from his trainer Edward Caird, one of many British Idealists in vogue within the late nineteenth century. Watson additionally corresponded with the St. Louis Hegelians and printed of their journal. (Do you know there have been St. Louis Hegelians?)
Watson taught at Queen’s University, a stone’s throw from my childhood residence, and left his mark on it as the pinnacle of the philosophy division for almost fifty years; the primary building for arts and philosophy at Queen’s is known as after him to today. However his concepts lay dormant for some time, and maybe for good purpose. I definitely discover Watson’s views relatively unsympathetic; he took up Hegel’s holism to argue that Canada had its correct position as part of the entire that was the British Empire, relatively than an impartial “little Canada” that would stand by itself. To me he’s most attention-grabbing as part of the philosophical tradition within the place the place I grew up.
The shortage of curiosity in Watson’s concepts after his demise mirrored a normal pattern within the first half of the Twentieth century. The analytic motion in anglophone philosophy tended to discredit Hegel and his followers; thus the British Idealists and St. Louis Hegelians left no actual heirs. Even in Canada, there have been few vital Hegelian thinkers within the mid-Twentieth century, the one exception being the Hegelian Marxism of C.B. Macpherson. As much as that time, I feel, Canadian philosophy’s relationship to Hegel was pretty commonplace for the English-speaking world.
It’s within the late twentieth century that one thing totally different began to occur. From concerning the Seventies onward, arguably the three most necessary thinkers in Canadian phliosophy all had deep Hegelian influences. This was bucking a world pattern. The mainstream of anglophone philosophy all over the world remained staunchly devoted to the analytical method. Within the UK and particularly the US, the “continental” dissidents tended to favour the French postmodernism of Derrida and Foucault, defining itself with Heidegger and towards Hegel. It’s prior to now half-century that Canadian Hegelianism actually got here to differentiate itself.
The three Canadian thinkers in query are Charles Taylor, George Grant, and James Doull. Taylor doubtless wants little introduction to a philosophical viewers: he is likely one of the most necessary philosophers pondering by means of qualitative individualism (which he calls the ethics of authenticity), in addition to the politics of multicultural societies. Grant is just not very well-known exterior of Canada, however inside Canada he was one of many main public intellectuals of the late Twentieth century, as his Lament for a Nation spoke on to the perennial English Canadian fear about what precisely Canada is and means.
Doull – a buddy of Grant’s – is the least well-known of the three, as a result of he wrote little or no; his affect carries on above all by means of his college students, a 3rd era of whom contains the chair of Doull’s old department and the founder of a new university in Georgia. Not directly he’s additionally left his stamp on me: earlier than I discovered Buddhism, my philosophy had been largely Hegelian, in ways in which owe an incredible deal to my lifelong friend who studied in Doull’s division. I’d in all probability be a lot much less of a Hegelian if I weren’t Canadian.
Taylor, Grant and Doull share a deep Hegelian inheritance with Watson and Macpherson. Taylor started his scholarly profession with a book on Hegel that continues to be among the finest introductions to Hegel’s thought, and got here again to Hegel in varied methods all through that profession. Doull, at all times a classicist, targeted on Hegel’s oft-neglected classical inheritance, drawing out the concepts of Plato, Aristotle, Augustine and the Neoplatonists in Hegelian terms; the journals Animus and Dionysius keep on his Hegelian method to the classics. Grant in the end got here to reject Hegel in favour of a extra Straussian Platonism, however his early works are deeply Hegelian, in a approach reflecting Watson’s direct affect: his grandfather George Monro Grant was the principal of Queen’s College on the time when Watson’s affect there was at its peak. And he maintained a seamless curiosity in Hegel by means of his friendship with Doull.
Like Watson, all three are involved with the character of Canada and its position on the earth, and Hegel helps them suppose this by means of. Grant takes up Watson’s view that Canada distinguishes itself by means of being part of the British Commonwealth, and is pessimistic that within the Twentieth century Canada largely given this up by turning into nearer to the USA. (In that, Watson and Grant have an attention-grabbing kinship with the Uruguayan thinker José Enrique Rodó, who feared the affect of the USA and admired the British monarchy as a bulwark towards it.) Doull has the extra optimistic view that each Canada and the US nonetheless hew to Hegel’s superb of civic (relatively than ethnic) nationalism, Canada managing significantly nicely by together with two founding nations inside it. Taylor’s bilingual and bicultural Québec upbringing leads him to suppose philosophically by means of Québec nationalism; his idea for doing so is “the politics of recognition“, which he will get from Hegel’s Lordship and Bondage section. In a really Hegelian method, the three all take into consideration the concept of Canada in methods whose implications go nicely past Canada itself. And this century’s spate of latest Canadian books reflecting on Canadian Hegelianism, not simply by Sibley however by Robert Meynell, Ian Angus, and Susan Dodd and Neil Robertson, recommend that Canadian Hegelian custom will proceed to flourish within the years forward.
