/lit/ - Literature

I read every work of Kant, Fichte, Schelling, and everything in-between, including Hegel and Schelling's brief journal and all of Hegel's early writings and essays prior to reading PoS. I read both volumes of Harris's Hegel's Ladder in its entirety along side PoS. At this point I have finished the Science of Logic, Philosophy of Right, and Philosophy of History.

Disagreeing with Hegel isn't being filtered by him. But here are the facts about PoS,

Hegel is not non-sense nor obscurantist babble. But he combines three things which make it appear so:

1. Hegel's language is highly technical. If he says immediate, mediate, universal, particular, singular, ground, posit, essence, reflect, objective, subjective, infinite, finite, contingent, necesary - he is speaking in terms of his own logic as outlined in SoL. A proposition may appear to have a seemingly random conclusion if you don't already have a grasp of his logic, as the specific connection of proposition to conclusion is here implicit in categories he's set up elsewhere.

2. Hegel's style is much like Fichte and Reinhold, in that in some cases his conclusions actually don't follow necessarily from the propositions even when his own logic is taken into account. When you read someone like Fichte you often get the sense of "That's one way it could be, but it's not necessary, it COULD be otherwise". Even if you fully understand Hegel's systematic logic, the assumption that Hegel is always right will confuse you when he isn't, and you'll be left with the feeling that you must be missing something. Sometimes you are missing something but absolutely he oversteps all the time and often is just wrong.

3. Hegel is sometimes obscure in his application. When Hegel is talking abstractly and formally it's often not obvious what content he has in mind. FIchte did this aswell but usually followed up at the end, e.g, after using "x" and "y" in abstract relations to one another for 20 pages without telling you what these are, he will eventually say "and x is space, and y is time". But Hegel will be abstract sometimes without consummating it. Most of these areas are still contentious in their interpretations.

all of that said, PoS is overall a pretty bad work. Kierkegaard is 100% spot on when he said,

"If Hegel had written the whole of his logic and then said, in the preface or some other place, that it was merely an experiment in thought in which he had even begged the question in many places, then he would certainly have been the greatest thinker who had ever lived. As it is, he is merely comic.”

>>15806151
Everyone wants to co-opt Hegel into their positions. There's the "Hegel made NO metaphysical claims!" camp, the Marxist bent camp, weird analytic interpretations, highly religious interpretations, etc
Even Giovanni... who I admire as a flawless translator and brilliant Hegel scholar, has strong biases.

Harris has the strongest understanding of Hegel's influences and intellectual growth through every period. See his two definitive works on Hegel's history "Hegel's Development" (Towards the Sunlight // Night Thoughts). Harris was the only secondary that I read that did not "interpret" anything outside of Hegel's own time and history. Every clarification of Hegel's positions were based on Hegel's other lectures, works, and the positions of people close to Hegel. If you want to see how Hegel has influenced other people, read Kojeve or whoever, but if you want to know Hegel as Hegel you must stay with Harris.

just the opinion of a dabbler btw, I'm not an academic