Re: [xmca] the young person and their fate

Andy-- There is a literature about this topic. By chance I have been reading
about
Hegel's life trajectory as well and the standard story is similar to what
you lay out.
You ask:
aren't
we all still trying to achieve the same things we wanted when we were
young? Doesn't a look into someone's youthful ideals tell us something
about what they are driving at in their later, more nuanced and mature work?

I think it would be helpful if you took some sort of starting point, such
as, the teenage
years about which there is an enormous literature on idealization associated
with
cognitive change. Erik Erikson, Joseph Adelson, Vygotsky..........

Hegel certainly appears to be a LOT more conservative in his old age, not to
say
reactionary. So the challenge will be how his life experience change the
manifestation
of an early-set of ideals, if that is what you want to argue.
mike

On 5/30/07, Andy Blunden <ablunden@mira.net> wrote:
>
> I am writing something about the "Young Hegel" at the moment and I have
> come up against a difficulty which maybe one of you wonderful
> developmental
> psychologists could help me with.
> Hegel's youthful works, e.g. what he wrote before the age of 37, are much
> more transparent in terms of his political and moral objectives, what he
> is
> fighting for, who he is against and who he is for, etc., etc. His later
> works are of course, notoriously arcane philosophical texts, that seem to
> concern nothing but philosophy, and then his last works, directed to the
> general public, appear quite conservative.
> It seems self-evident to me that what he really valued, what was wanted to
> change about the world, his ideals and so on, as a youth, did not go away
> when he was older, even though his scientific ideas obviously did change.
> Surely this true of all of us (apart form the occasional turn-coat);
> aren't
> we all still trying to achieve the same things we wanted when we were
> young? Doesn't a look into someone's youthful ideals tell us something
> about what they are driving at in their later, more nuanced and mature
> work?
> But I have no idea how such a claim can be justified?
> Can it?
>
> Andy
>
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Received on Thu May 31 10:50 PDT 2007