On Reading Hegel
In the beginning, one is never quite sure whether one is being conned.
I have thrown Hegel across rooms more often than any other author.
No other author have I had to hide from myself as often.
Stream-of-consciousness philosophy. Almost impenetrable in an analytical age. Just when you think you have found something to grasp on to …
A painful, mind-bending slippery slope that folds in on itself.
But then, with time …
… the light. Perhaps.
How many people truly understand Hegel?
Lecture Course in Hegel’s Science of Logic by Richard Dien Winfield: http://archive.org/details/LectureCourseInHegelsScienceOfLogic-RichardDienWinfield
I would tend to agree with you regarding Hegel. There are so many goddamned readings of his body of work, which lend themselves to a wide range of concrete positions–anti-realist constructivism; conceptual realist; monistic idealism– that one wonders where in the f*** the “real” Hegel is in all of this, and even whether he was ever there to begin with.
Yes! And it’s not like reading him in the original German is of much help. Kaufmann writes somewhere that Hegel was looking to imitate Kant’s (i.e. obscure/pedantic) writing style. But then, I’m not sure whether I trust much of what Kaufmann writes about Hegel, as he openly professes to dislike Hegel’s philosophy. I have trouble imagining *anyone* getting deeply to grips with Hegel’s philosophy while disliking it.
There’s also the possibility that it’s inherently challenging to bring across Hegel’s philosophical system in a well-structured way. That might be because his system is – in Bertrand Russell’s words – put forward by a philosopher who, “From his early interest in mysticism […] retained a belief in the unreality of separateness.”