One can see why psychoanalyst Alice Miller drew a causal line from the Grimm child-breaking philosophy to Nazism. All those obedient hands reaching up to salute the Triumph of the Will...
Your musings on Hegel reminded me of Richard Wilbur's poem "The Good Servant," which imagines the servant as a hand, enacting whatever his master does not deign to express himself:
"Nights, when the head to other glory sets,
The hand turns turtle, lying like a lake
Where men with broken nets
Seek, for their master's sake,
All that that lord forgets
Because he would not wake."
It ends with what you might consider a Hegelian image of the servant recognizing his agency: "not impossible campaigns/If I would take my life into my hands."
Loved this!
One can see why psychoanalyst Alice Miller drew a causal line from the Grimm child-breaking philosophy to Nazism. All those obedient hands reaching up to salute the Triumph of the Will...
Your musings on Hegel reminded me of Richard Wilbur's poem "The Good Servant," which imagines the servant as a hand, enacting whatever his master does not deign to express himself:
"Nights, when the head to other glory sets,
The hand turns turtle, lying like a lake
Where men with broken nets
Seek, for their master's sake,
All that that lord forgets
Because he would not wake."
It ends with what you might consider a Hegelian image of the servant recognizing his agency: "not impossible campaigns/If I would take my life into my hands."
Thanks for sharing the poem. So interesting. I draw on Alice Miller's For Your Own Good in making sense of the Grimm story!