all this got here!” I think to myself as I look up from the book.
I may be forgiven for being facetious. Hegel had a gift for eliciting facetiousness in his readers. Wasn’t it Bertrand Russell who remarked of Hegel’s Logic, “The worse your logic, the more interesting the consequences to which it gives rise”? And wasn’t it Schopenhauer who derisively credited Hegel with “an ontological proof of absolutely everything”?
What can make Hegel seem so preposterous is the way he equates thought with reality. The world, for him, is ultimately a play of concepts. It is the mind coming to know itself. But what could account for the existence of this mind? In what psychic arena, exactly, was Hegel’s dialectical orgy supposed to be taking place?
Flipping to the end of Logic, I begin to divine the answer. This mind bootstraps itself into existence by constituting its own consciousness. Like Aristotle’s God, it is self-thinking thought—only Hegel calls it not “God,” but “Absolute Idea.”
I come upon Hegel’s definition of Absolute Idea: “The Idea, as unity of the Subjective and Objective Idea, is the notion of the Idea—a notion whose object is the Idea as such, and for which the objective is Idea—an Object which embraces all characteristics in its unity.”
Russell called this definition “very obscure.” I think he was being charitable. Hegel’s rhetorical fogginess did not deter French philosophers like Sartre and Merleau-Ponty. They reveled in the air of profundity it gave his dialectic, and emulated it in their own works. For them, Hegel was a model for how an intellectual could “possess the world,” as Sartre put it, by thinking alone.
Today, French thinkers still imbibe Hegel with their mother’s milk—or, at the very latest, as teenagers at the lycée. And here I am, an American weaned on logic of a drier sort, in a state of intellectual prostration after spending just a couple of hours wrestling with his dialectic. Maybe, I think to myself, it is time once again to leave the intellectually inspissate atmosphere of Paris for the clearer metaphysical air of the British Isles.
Or maybe I’m just suffering from the effects of excessive caffeine intake. As a restorative, I decide to order a nice tall glass of my favorite brand of Scotch whiskey—neat. After some minutes, I succeed in attracting the waiter’s attention.
“Un grand verre de Glenfiddich, s’il vous plaît,” I say. “Sans glace.”
“Glen-FEE-DEESH,” the waiter replies unsmilingly, presuming to correct my pronunciation.
It’s definitely time to leave Paris.
12
THE LAST WORD FROM
ALL SOULS
No question is more sublime than why there is a Universe: why there is anything rather than nothing.
—DEREK PARFIT
I always knew that my quest for a resolution to the mystery of Being would bring me back to Oxford. And here I was, standing on the threshold of its most ethereal redoubt, the College of All Souls. I felt a little like Dorothy at the doors to the Emerald City. Inside was a wizard who might well have the final word on the question Why is there something rather than nothing? I hoped he would vouchsafe that word to me. And so he did, after a fashion. What I hadn’t counted on was that I would get a free lunch in the bargain.
ON MY WAY from Paris back to Oxford, I had stopped for a couple of days in London—not for diversion, but to do some serious swotting up. I had made arrangements to stay at the Athenaeum Club, on Pall Mall. I arrived on a Saturday. The club was closed for the weekend. But when I rang the bell, a porter appeared at the door and let me in. He took me through the crepuscular entrance hall and past the grand staircase, above which hung a large clock. When I looked up to see the time, I noticed that the clock had two numerals for seven, but none for eight. Why, I wondered aloud, was that?
“No one really knows, sir,” the porter said, possibly with a wink.
Mystère.
At the rear of the entrance hall was an old and tiny elevator. We took it all the way up to the club’s attic floor. I was then conducted through a maze of narrow hallways to what would be my bedroom. It was on the small side, with a couple of little windows that looked out over the statue of Pallas Athene above the portico of the club onto Waterloo Place. Adjoined to the bedroom, happily, was a capacious bath, with a large old-fashioned tub in the middle.
The Athenaeum Club has