Recent commentary on The Way of the Stars:
Arts & Humanities Reviews | November 15, 2012
Sibley, Robert C. The Way of the Stars: Journeys on the Camino De Santiago. Univ. of Virginia. 2012. c.184p. bibliog. index. ISBN 9780813933153. REL
The journey along the Camino de Santiago, or the Way of St. James, has been undertaken by countless pilgrims over the centuries. Sibley’s (senior writer, Ottawa Citizen; A Rumour of God) account is primarily a story of his journey of both internal and outward discovery along this route across northern Spain. He prefaces the main text with an account of the second time he travelled the route, with his son Daniel, but this book is about the author’s first such trek.
The text is neatly divided into subjects that encompass the author’s quest: prayer; pain; paths; time; gratitude; gifts; visions; underglimmer; disappearance; and home. Each chapter describes a series of events that encompass its subject matter, upon which the reader can reflect, thus travelling the spiritual miles with Sibley. VERDICT Sibley captures his journey, both existential and physical, succinctly, yet with artistry. Readers will be both engaged and enlightened by this carefully crafted tale.
Annette Haldeman, Dept. of Legislative Svcs. Lib., Annapolis, MD
This journey is about learning to walk the walk; Finding a measure of bliss in the Pyrenees
Ottawa Citizen — Sat. Oct. 27 2012 By Tim Ward
The Way of the Stars: Journeys on the Camino de Santiago Robert Sibley University Press of Virginia
Eight hundred kilometres is a long way to travel by foot. Most people need a pretty powerful reason to begin the Camino de Santiago de Compostela, a six-to eight-week trek over the Pyrenees Mountains and across the north of Spain. The path follows the route of St. James, according to Catholic tradition, and ends at the church where the saint's relics are believed to be interred. For the faithful, the journey is a pilgrimage, a penance, or promise to God fulfilled.
Author (and award-winning Citizen senior writer) Robert Sibley admits he's not quite sure why he put his feet to this formidable task. He's stumped for a minute when filling out a form near the start of the trail that requires checking a box for a motive: Religious? Spiritual? Tourist? He doesn't like to think of himself as a tourist, but he's not a believer either ... so what is he?
It's this quandary that makes Sibley into a modern Everyman. He's not searching for God. That deity feels as medieval to him as the historical path he is about to tread. And yet there is something about a pilgrimage that draws him. Sibley quotes a Zen sage: "Just walk," and thinks this might be the way for him to make the journey meaningful. Yet very soon he finds the walking difficult. His feet blister and bleed as he attempts to cover 20 to 25 kilometres each day. He has to confront the possibility that he might have to quit. For me, it was his vulnerability as a middle-age male facing his waning physical powers that made me want to stick with him on the road.
His feet finally heal, but his legs continue to ache when he walks and cramp when he stops. Days blend together and the scenery, so sharply described at first, now starts to blur. We get quick sketches of others he walks with for an hour or a day: Henrick the Dane and Andrea the Brazilian Bombshell, but we don't really know them. Similarly, Sibley does his duty by the trail's long history, describing important landmarks and events, including a fascinating discourse on how the Camino trail helped to unite medieval Europe. But these passages are not the heart of the book.
To me, the story comes alive when, after many days of walking, everything else in his life seems to drop away. Sibley has flashes of complete, blissful presence, which he describes with poetic clarity.
For example, in one of the funniest scenes in the book, Sibley tries to rescue a lizard that is drowning in a fountain. Attempting to scoop it up with his hat, he slips and lands on his butt in the murky water. He perseveres in his good deed, and as the lizard scuttles off and he's sitting panting and dripping on the grass, Sibley drops into a state a Buddhist would recognize as sa-tori - a moment of pure enlightened bliss.
Another such moment comes at about the halfway mark on the trail, when suddenly his legs stop hurting. He can't believe it at first. The pain has simply ended.
"Ah, you've learned how to walk," Henrick the Dane tells him.
And that is perhaps the greatest insight of the journey: Not a revelation of the divine, just moments of extraordinary beauty, and discovering how to walk the path without much pain.
Tim Ward is the author of What the Buddha Never Taught and Zombies on Kilimanjaro: A Father-Son Journey Above the Clouds.
From Kirkus Reviews:
Sibley's accounts of his trip were originally published as a series of articles in 2000 in the Ottawa Citizen, where the author is an award-winning senior writer. At 57, " an age when memories claimed more and more of [his] waking thoughts," Sibley followed through on a promise that he would take his son Daniel on the Camino de Santiago de Compostela, or the Way of St. James, a journey beginning in France and ending in Spain, after Daniel's college graduation.
He makes clear this isn't a guidebook, instead referring to his story as a "phenomenology of pilgrimage." Sibley occasionally converses with people along the way and during evening stays at hostels, but the bulk of the narrative tracks his internal monologue. He toils with a series of existential issues, ruminating on life's necessities, his desire to conquer the mountains, the trail's rich history and his own long-forgotten memories. He quotes a wide variety of writers, including T.S. Eliot, St. Thomas Aquinas and Pico Iyer, to name just a few.
During the journey, his physical discomfort dissipated and his mind quieted, although his secret hopes that the divine would be revealed remained unfulfilled. Sibley has a finely tuned appreciation for close-to-the-ground details, and his descriptions are deep and sincere without being overly earnest.
Appealing reading for those interested in memoirs about the Camino de Santiago and other epic modern-day treks.
Relating the story of his own pilgrimage in a time of religious disenchantment, and comparing his experiences to those of other pilgrims who have written about the Camino de Santiago, Robert Sibley engages and maintains the reader's interest to the end. Unique and memorable, The Way of the Stars also has a refreshing sense of irony and humor.
—Edward F. Stanton, author of Road of Stars to SantiagoSibley is an extraordinary writer with a unique, distinct voice. If I had not already walked this path or was only pondering undertaking it, his account is winsome enough that I would want to walk it.
—Arthur Boers, author of Living into Focus: Choosing What Matters in an Age of DistractionsSibley reflects on his journey on the famous pilgrimage: both the outward journey along the 500-mile path, and his inward journey of reflection and spiritual rejuvenation.
— US CatholicBooklist Review, September, 2012
Sibley, a journalist and professor, chronicles his first medieval-style pilgrimage along the Spanish Camino, a 750-kilometer route leading to a World Heritage site, the city of Santiago. Bookending that journey is his return years later to retrace it with his grown son. Undertaking the first trek as neither a devout believer nor an expert (though experienced) long-distance trekker, Sibley found his journey filled with emotional, spiritual, social, physical, and intellectual discoveries.
He provides imagistic access of each process, offering readers not so much an armchair travelogue as a meditation on the role such a dedicated journey can play in the life of the traveler. His quick crafting of such scenes as coping with a blood blister, sharing dinner with a woman planning her next pilgrimage (to the Ganges, which is holy to Hindus), and enjoying the simplicity of the quarters set aside for those traveling the Way of the Stars through Spain’s countryside bring the trip alive, offering the reader, as well as the writer, insight on an ancient meditative challenge as it can still be practiced today.
— Francisca GoldsmithThe Ottawa Citizen
A Rumour of God: Rekindling Belief in an Age of Disenchantment
by Robert C. Sibley Novalis, $19.95
By David Warren
Robert Sibley is the sort of writer to whom I ought to be sympathetic. After all, he's a lot like me: a philosophical spirit with religious tendencies who landed in journalism — arguably through no fault of his own — and has thus been occupied for decades "filling the spaces between the advertisements." Moreover, he's been to some of the same places I've been, looked over the same intellectual fields, and thus chewed on some of the same cud. He is more skeptical than most of fashionable thinking, or more precisely, of not thinking. He is most at home when writing about ideas, and has for some time now (like me) been supplying the Citizen with vistas a little broader than daily newspaper readers are accustomed to expect.
He is from the Yukon: perhaps the only part of the cosmos more earnest than Ottawa. This has made him special as a writer — few since Pierre Berton seem to have come from there — and he has kept himself special by refusing to be fully assimilated into urban life down here in the banana belt. The Yukon has more square kilometres than people — about 15 of them for each — and most people live in Whitehorse.
One could easily be reminded of Thoreau and Walden; or of the pioneering era when all Canada was a bit like the Yukon remains today: vast, empty, fearful. (Indeed, Thoreau was a suburbanite by comparison, his Walden Pond only a brief jog from Concord.)
The men and women Canada then produced were of the sort Sibley echoes still: haunted, in a sense, by Nature herself, and unable to take anything for granted.
The most vivid scene in Sibley's new book A Rumour of God is set on a remote Yukon plateau, where, in his youth, Sibley was left by an employer to mind an unoccupied surveying camp for a couple of weeks and keep the bears off the food cache with his Winchester. No bears visited, but under the circumstances, imaginary bears became a dreadful nuisance.
The anecdote is in a chapter on "Solitude" that is at the gravitational centre of the book, with the other chapters revolving around it. In each of the anecdotes he tells throughout, Sibley reports on being essentially alone, and in a relation with the universe directly.
This is true even when he is visiting scenes of earliest childhood, and family graves with his aging mother, while contemplating the notion of "Home." He finds himself, here as elsewhere, looking at himself through himself, as the American philosopher and author Loren Eiseley once did -- like Hamlet, strangely finding himself in the eye sockets of an ancient skull. Many have had such out-of-body experiences, which easily lead to pantheistic visions.
Sibley's book is a kind of autobiography on two tracks. Each of the seven lengthy chapters begins with an "epiphany" from his personal life: an arresting moment, when a person feels he is lifted out of the normal sequence of time. And each then continues on the other track, with an essay on what could be learned from the experience, full of references to poets, philosophers, shrinks and mystics. It thus takes the form of a spiritual diary.
The purpose of the exercise is, in the author's own words, to help readers seek the re-enchantment of life -- to help "rekindle belief" in an age of disenchantment, when the rumours of God are only the Nietzschean ones of His demise.
The book, at its best as memoir, supplies the scent of places far outside the city, and beyond "the cottage country," too, where the presence of the divine becomes nearly palpable. For atheists are aplenty in our urban trenches, but not where a man stands in the presence of his own soul.
Sibley is trying to persuade us to find said "Place" and to take it home; to invest some spiritual or mystical meaning even in the objects and situations of everyday life and for no better reason than to become more real. He recommends that we make deliberate acts of attention to humble things, by becoming "habituated to attention" just as the professional golfer becomes habituated to golf -- and thus, necessarily, dishabituated to the "divertissements" of modern life; the blinking arcade of technological distractions.
Beyond this, Sibley does not proselytize, and the procession of authorities he quotes throughout the essays are from the range of very modern names that were on our lips back in the '70s: Thomas Merton, Basho, Wittgenstein, Kierkegaard and Virginia Woolf make multiple appearances, with the odd awkward moment when Martin Heidegger walks in. But here the author is being faithful to his own intellectual roots.
His pilgrimage along the Camino de Santiago in Spanish Galicia is neatly balanced by recollections from a pilgrimage to Zen temples in Japan. This is mysticism without denominational affiliation, that anyone can buy into, and in the end the "rumour of God" remains a very distant rumble.
That, I think, is not only the weakness but the strength of the book. It suggests an immediate discipline for people who feel otherwise lost, having formed no brand loyalty among the various religions in the marketplace.
It offers to "compare notes" on where to begin, and how, as it were, to get out of the valleys where the blackflies are congregated, and up those Yukon hills.
An enchanting take on re-enchantment
Reviewed by: Graeme Voyer
The plight of modern men and women in the West is to live in a disenchanted world.
What does this mean on the day after Christmas when the masses are ready for another Boxing Day shopping frenzy? What are its consequences? Can this condition be overcome?
These are some of the questions addressed by Ottawa journalist Robert Sibley in this erudite yet accessible collection of essays that deals with profound themes -- nothing less than the spiritual predicament of modernity -- but never loses the quality of what the author describes as a "journalistic inquiry."
Sibley contrasts pre-modern and modern conceptions of nature, showing how the modern project has, along with its many benefits, drained the world of meaning and purpose.
He then argues that the world can be re-enchanted through attunement to the mystical that inheres in everyday experience: cultivation of home as an expression of personal identity; a sense of rootedness in a particular place; the experience of solitude, particularly solitary walking; contemplation of nature and art and literature as an incitement to wonderment.
Sibley's elaboration of these means of enchantment constitutes the bulk of his narrative. While not a convinced theist, Sibley suggests that an awareness of the mystical potential of everyday life makes one more receptive to "rumours of God." Sibley's essays are replete with insights, pertinent literary references and lively anecdotes. Particularly cogent is his account of the importance of place. "Deep ties to places," he writes, "possessing a sense of belonging, are necessary for a truly meaningful and purposeful life." He quotes the French philosopher Simone Weil: "To be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul." However, the homogenizing culture of globalization militates against distinct places.
As Sibley observes, "Drive across Canada or the United States and you see the same big-box stores, motel franchises and fast-food restaurants... It's all very convenient and comfortable, but when every town looks like every other town, well, you are not really seeing these towns as distinct communities, because they no longer possess a unique sense of place."
Sibley urges a recovery of the sense of place through, among other means, diligent attention to historically meaningful buildings, institutions and monuments -- everything that makes a place unique and reflects its organic social life.
Sibley frequently invokes literary figures to reinforce his points. Two of his favourites are 20th-century English novelist Virginia Woolf and 19th-century English poet William Wordsworth. Both of these writers saw and depicted moments of wonder in ordinary experience. While Sibley is a fine writer with a colloquial style, there are a few flaws in his narrative. For example, he uses the verb "foster" an astonishing 28 times. His anecdotes occasionally border on the self-indulgent; in particular, an account of a meal in a Japanese restaurant contains far too much trivial detail.Finally, it should be said that Sibley's intended audience is not people who already have a spiritual dimension in their lives. Rather, his book is aimed at those who, caught up in the rat race, have an inkling that there must be more to life than career, consumption and entertainment. It is for such people that he has written this "exercise in re-enchantment."
Graeme Voyer is a Winnipeg writer.
Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition December 26, 2010 D9
From Science and Story
Wednesday Book Review — A Rumour of God
August 3, 2011 by Arlene Somerton Smith
". . . it is easy to let moments of possible wonder pass by you if you aren’t prepared to recognize them or learn from them."So says Robert C. Sibley in A Rumour of God. Sibley would like us to open the doors of our minds just a crack. He would like us to allow that maybe, just maybe, extraordinary coexists with the ordinary. He would like us to once again (because we used to do it quite readily) recognize moments of possible wonder — "glimpses of the underglimmer" — and learn from them.
In A Rumour of God, Sibley balances stories about his personal experiences of spiritual awareness in the everyday with essays on scholarly historical, theological and philosophical insights into the topics. The alternating story/research pattern of his book makes the experience of reading it feel like taking a bike ride in hilly country. The reader begins with an easy coast down a gentle story slope, lured in by the effortless ride. Then the terrain changes to literary references and theological considerations, and the reader needs to work a little harder. These sections are well researched, thoughtful and necessary to the book, but some of the hills are long and steep, and the reader must coax himself to keep climbing. But just when he thinks he can’t pedal anymore, the crest of the hill appears, the promise of more enchantment beckons, and the reader keeps climbing knowing that soon he will glide down, head thrown back, into the reward of another compelling personal story.
Sibley is at his best when painting word picture stories. The reader can see, feel and smell the sacred places, the homes, and the pilgrim pathways. We hear waves smash on the coastline of Vancouver Island, taste the dust of a prairie graveyard, and ache for the solitude of a Yukon peak. Sibley writes dialogue naturally and captures the characters of the people he meets.
A Rumour of God is both a soul drink for those thirsty for affirmation of their own "glimpses of the underglimmer," and a mind drink for those who need the facts along with the fun. It is a manual for seeking and accepting the presence of deeper meaning in a modern world.
I'm walking, yes indeed
The Telegraph Journal
Published Saturday March 5th, 2011
A Rumour of God, by Ottawa Citizen journalist and political scientist Robert Sibley, is a gallimaufry of sources, citations, impressions, ruminations and allusions. It is, in part, political commentary, philosophical essay, theological reflection and personal memoir. But mostly, it is a sustained meditation, the outpourings of a peripatetic savant (and Sibley does love his walks).
The book is framed by his pilgrimages - and there are many, including most prominently the Camino de Santiago in Spain and the Shikoku no Michi in Japan. It is also peppered with numerous recollections of wilderness trips into the Canadian north and along the coasts of Vancouver Island.
But Sibley's perambulations are not just in the rugged regions of the Canadian landscape; he walks reflectively and with acute antennae feels the pulse and "thisness" of the parks and streets of Ottawa and London, England.
Sibley walks his thoughts and thinks his walks. A creative conjunction.
The essays on topics that would thrill a social anthropologist such as Margaret Visser or a novelist like Jane Urquhart - topics like home, place, solitude, wonder, pilgrimage and "everyday mysticism" - are replete with learned references and personal experiences. It's all nicely packaged in a narrative that eschews professional jargon in favour of an enlightened colloquy with the reader.
Sibley is appalled by the narrow definition of reason that reigns supreme and unquestioned in our society. Disconcerted by our collective poverty of imagination that forecloses spiritual experience, Sibley advances a cogent argument for the recovery of the numinous in the quotidian - "We do not have to surrender to the debilitating boredom of consumerism and the ersatz spectacles of entertainment."
In other words, Sibley is resolved to help us heed the urgings of awe, to attend to the "glimpses of the underglimmer" that open us to the divine embedded in the mundane, and to rebuild a culture that delights in enchantment, the mystical, the ineffable: "Television series such as The X-Files, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Touched by an Angel, Six Feet Under, Angels in America and True Blood; movies like Star Wars, The Matrix, The Lord of the Rings series (based on J.R.R. Tolkien's books) and, more recently, Avatar; books such as the Harry Potter novels and C.S. Lewis's The Chronicles of Narnia - these all speak to a longing for re-enchantment, a desire to counterbalance the rationalization of the world and escape the iron cage of reason."
A Rumour of God is, in goodly measure, a distillation of the research and seminal ideas of a legion of thinkers - some eminent, some obscure, some central and some marginal - and, as a consequence, the "meditation" is frequently encumbered by a displaced gravitas.
But it is never more exuberant nor more compelling than when it is autobiographical. When Sibley draws on his own direct experience his artistic side allows for an expansiveness of vision and richness of prose that combined make for a deeply pleasurable read.
Michael W. Higgins is vice-president for mission and Catholic identity at Sacred Heart University, Fairfield, Conn. He is a former president of St. Thomas University.
What divides us makes us Hegel; Book re-examines the philosophical basis of a nation
National Post, Tuesday, March 25, 2008
by Robert Fulford
Iris Murdoch, a sharp-eyed philosopher before she began writing her outrageous novels about convoluted relationships, once suggested a way to learn the real purpose of a philosopher. You should ask, "What is he afraid of?"
We know what scared G.F.W. Hegel (1770-1831), the titan of German idealism. He was terrified at the prospect of Europe being devastated by irreconcilable forces. And in the 1950s, when Europe finally made peace with itself through a common market, one of the main planners was a great Hegelian theorist, Alexandre Kojeve.
Robert C. Sibley of the Ottawa Citizen has used Murdoch's question and Hegel's philosophy as a way to think about modern Canada. For more than a century, leading Canadian scholars, including our most eminent philosophers, have applied Hegel's theories. Sibley draws a clear line from Hegel to Canada and asks the Canadian version of Murdoch's question:What are Canadian philosophers afraid of?
Northern Spirits: John Watson, George Grant, and Charles Taylor — Appropriations of Hegelian Political Thought (McGill-Queen's University Press), published last month, began life as Sibley's doctoral thesis in political science at Carleton University. He's shaped it as a stimulating analysis of the thinking that drives Canadian public life.
We know one thing that frightens Sibley himself: He's afraid of writing badly. His firm, clear prose shows a devotion to careful craftsmanship and an affection for third drafts. In itself that's un-Hegelian. Hegel never for a moment worried about being understood, so he wasn't concerned when people called his prose the most impenetrable verbiage ever imposed on helpless students.
Sibley's three Canadian subjects are well chosen for their historic reach and their influence on the way Canadians think about their society. John Watson (1847-1939), a Queen's University professor, developed an international reputation in the 19th century for his Hegelian analysis of the troubled relations between governments and individuals. He worked on new approaches to Christian institutions, preparing the intellectual ground for the creation of the United Church of Canada in 1925.George Grant (1918-1988), a distinctly unloved thinker within Canadian philosophy departments, nevertheless became for a few years the most prominent Canadian philosopher. His Lament for a Nation, perhaps the least understood of all famous Canadian books, helped jump-start the radical nationalist movement of the 1960s and 1970s.
And Charles Taylor (1931-), well regarded among Hegelians everywhere on the planet, has become best known in Canada for articulating the virtues of multiculturalism.
Sibley takes us on a guided tour of political culture in English-speaking Canada, stopping along the way to exchange words with public figures ranging from Stephen Leacock to Pierre Trudeau, from Lawren Harris to Michael Bliss, from Richard Gwyn to Larry Zolf. He suggests that even Canadians who don't actually read Hegel are intuitively Hegelian.
His three chosen philosophers have something remarkable in common: At certain points all of them have been on top of the news, a surprise to anyone who imagines that philosophers live private lives behind university walls.
Watson, aside from helping reorganize Canadian Protestantism, became a serious proponent of world government after the First World War. Grant developed links connecting anti-Americanism, anti-modernism and Canadian nationalism — links that remain powerful today. And Taylor deployed Hegel's dialectic, a philosophy of contradictions and their resolutions, to argue for Quebec's unique place within the country and the necessity of a new multiculturalism.
As Sibley maintains, "To read Watson, Grant and Taylor is to see Hegelian thought alive and acting in the present, not as some dead philosophical artifact of the past."
Canada, eternally contested territory, exists by playing variations on themes by Hegel, the price of painful but necessary reconciliation. Careful political crafting, with Hegelian tools, makes the country work.
The solutions of Watson, Grant and Taylor indicate their fears. Iris Murdoch would have no trouble recognizing that all of these philosophers have been appalled by the possibility that Canada could dissolve into fragments and become several nations or be absorbed by the U.S. One of them decided it happened long ago: Grant, the eternal pessimist, said, "Canada has ceased to be a nation," with only legal formalities awaiting settlement. It's hard to imagine exactly what he had hoped for, since he never quite explained when Canada was a nation, but certainly he was disappointed. Lament for a Nation mourned Canada's slow disappearance into, as he often put it (in a phrase borrowed from Kojeve), "the universal and homogeneous state."
All of Sibley's philosophers, at different times, have responded as Hegelians to the constantly unfolding crisis of Canadian nationhood. Hegel provides a framework in which people can recognize their diversity, permit particular cultures to retain their distinctive features but remain within a single state. As Sibley says, Canadians seem to have grasped that our regional and ethnic tensions help make us the country we are, for good or ill.
He quotes Michael Ignatieff's "distinctly Hegelian" recognition of the arguments at the core of our political psychology. As Ignatieff puts it, "Canada just happens to be one of those countries that is committed, as a condition of its survival, to engage in a constant act of self-justification and self-invention." He adds that those who weary of this endless dialogue are weary of being Canadian.
Is it by collective intuition, I've often wondered, that Ontario for six decades has almost always arranged to be governed by a provincial party different from the one holding power in Ottawa? It looks like a Hegelian strategy. Brian Mulroney's Meech Lake scheme promised, in effect, to "settle" the central French-English conflict in Canada. That was unrealistic — and unHegelian.
On the cover of Sibley's book, a classic Lawren Harris painting, North Shore, Lake Superior, neatly symbolizes the contents. The split trunk of a tree, partly light and partly dark, suggests the discord embodied in Canadian life. Sibley quotes Roald Nasgaard, a former curator at the Art Gallery of Ontario, who sees Harris's picture as a symbolic exploration of Canadian identity and a metaphor responding to the condition of life in the geographic vastness of Canada.
Northern Spirits, a revealing title for this remarkably ambitious book, refers to the spirit that breathes life into an organism and also to spirit as Hegel expresses it: a dynamic force and the highest principle of life. Readers who believe they understand Canada may well finish this book thinking unexpected thoughts.
Excerpt from Professor William Christian’s review of Northern Spirits in Canadian Historical Review:
Robert Sibley’s book is not limited to Grant, but to three Canadian Hegelians: John Watson of Queen’s, Grant, and Charles Taylor. Kantianism has often been taken as the founding philosophy of Canada, but Sibley makes a strong case for the importance of Hegelianism.
His argument is interesting and provocative in Grant’s case. Grant never denied that he was a Hegelian when he taught at Dalhousie in the 1950s. In fact, he explicitly expressed the belief that Hegel had reconciled the best of ancient thought with modern thought. It was Strauss, he said, who had taught him that that was not true, and he left Dalhousie to escape the influence of James Doull and his powerful Hegelian intellectual influence.
Northern Spirits is Robert Sibley’s revised doctoral dissertation from Carleton, but since he’s a writer for the Ottawa Citizen you would never guess at its origins: It is cogently and elegantly written. Sibley argues that Grant’s Hegelianism lasted significantly beyond his Dalhousie period. He expressed a belief that Canada was fated to disappear into a universal and homogeneous state. The concept of the universal and homogeneous state was an idea that the French Hegelian Alexandre Kojeve had articulated in the 1930s and whose thesis formed the core of a debate between Strauss and Kojeve, which was the basis of one of Grant’s most important articles ...
Sibley’s stimulating essay shows that Watson, Grant, and Taylor all read Hegel in different but insightful ways. He makes a strong case that Hegel is a philosopher of continuing relevance to Canada.