/lit/ - Literature

You gotta know everything before you can know anything

>>12081113
this

>>12081113
This is why Hegel is a pseud.

does anyone have the vince mcmahon meme with wittgenstein quotations?
>>12081086
prerequisites are for college courses anon.
if you find that your intellectual apprehension of Hegel (or whoever) integrates seemlessly with your perceptual apprehension of the world, that is... well..pretty fucking sublime. it's the highest level of awareness desu. not unlike the experience of reading a religious text that profoundly affects your interpretation of the world and life itself.

>>12081086
If you're reading PoR, you really only need familiarity with Kant's Groundwork. This is assuming you can read dense philosophical literature already.

>>12081086
>Hegel draws me in because I can see his truth in literally everything I examine
And what truth is that?

Pre-requisites for Hegel
Fragments from Heraclitus, Parmenides.
Plato's Crito, Meno, Phaedo, Symposium, Republic, Parmenides, Timaeus.
Aristotle's Organon, Nicomachean Ethics, On the Soul, Metaphysics.
Boehme's Aurora (just the Preface is fine)
Descartes' Discourse on Method, Meditations on the First Principle
Spinoza's Ethics
Locke's Esssay Concerning Human Understanding
Leibniz's Meditations on Knowledge, Truth and Ideas, Monadology, Discourse on Metaphysics
Berkeley's A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge.
Hume's Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding.
Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, Groundwork for the Metaphysic of Morals, Critique of Practical Reason, Critique of Judgment
Fichte's Wissenschaftlehre or The Vocation of Man
Schelling's System of Transcendental Idealism
And then Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, Encyclopedia of Philosophical Sciences, Philosophy of History, Philosophy of Right, Lectures on Aesthetics.
Hegel's Philosophy of Right was to some degree influenced by Rousseau's variation on the social contract theory, in addition to Kant's Philosophy of Law. Both of them mostly repeated what Hobbes and Locke wrote about, and what the American Founding Fathers and the French Revolutionary leaders put into practice. It's not really all that necessary to read these works, unless you're really into political philosophy.

>>12081086
This anons got the right idea >>12082768
But he took the start with the Greeks meme too literally and isn't going far back enough. Start with pic related.

>>12082768
I hate when people just list off a bunch of philosophers because there's never any rhyme or reason. For example, why would you have to read On the Soul but the Physics? You could do this with any philosopher names. Read the Groundwork and Critiques but don't bother with the
Prolegomena for some reason.

>>12082801
I read the Prolegomena halfway while reading the Critique of Pure Reason, and it left me even more confused than I already was.
I read the Physics after the Metaphysics, and I saw little to nothing in the former that wasn't present and explained in the latter.

>>12082801
Heraclitus is the philosopher of flux, change.
Parmenides introduces the concept of the One and creates the art of dialectic.
Plato advances the concept of the One as compatible with the many, impulses the use of dialectic, introduces ethics to philosophy, and explains the difference between matter and idea.
Aristotle creates logic, turns Heraclitus' change and Parmenides' One into becoming and being, states the difference between necessity and contingency, potency and actuality, and turns ethics into a classification of virtues.
Descartes begins by wondering whether anything at all exists, and ends by acknowledging the existence of a world outside of his mind by the means of reason.
Spinoza brings Platonist-style pantheism back on the table, and uses it to create his own system explaining the existence of things, the distinction between God and humans, and human psychology, breaking with the centuries' old tradition of using philosophy merely as a way of rationalising Church doctrines.
Locke uses a mild form of empiricism to explain ideas as originated from experience.
Leibniz revives the Pythagorean monad in the form of the soul, which is conditioned by its surroundings, and reflects God's glory with its unique perspective on the universe, and states the a priori-a posteriori distinction.
Berkeley claims that ideas are more real than things, and that only what can be known through experience is real, except for God's own existence, which is an idea that comes directly from Him.
Hume separates ideas from impressions, and asserts that one can never know whether causes and effects are necessarily linked by nature or if they merely happen to be casually related by the mind (problem of causality)
Kant creates the analytic-synthetic distinction, acknowledges the difference between reason and the understanding, revises Aristotle's categories by leaving out the ones that come from a posteriori knowledge and adding a few subcategories to them, solves Hume's causality problem by stating that knowledge of causes and effects is a priori, outlines the immanent-transcendent distinction, founds deontological ethics, defines the Sublime as separate from the beautiful, establishes the bridge between moral duty and beauty, and delimits both pure reason and judgement.
Fichte declares the not-self to be posited inside of the self and links practical reason to pure reason by the means of consciousness.
Schelling brings up the concept of the Absolute as being defined by difference, not sameness, and builds a philosophy of nature on top of transcendental idealism.

>>12081180
Based

Dude. . do whippets bro. . Trust me.

>>12081086
Welcome to your new home: my cringe compilation!

Hegel doesn't exist in a void. He is one of the greatest pastiche artists in history and to understand him you have to understand the discourses he was taking up, and how he was changing them or thought he was changing them by doing so.

Hegel is perpetually trendy because he has a reputation for being gnomic and impenetrable. People put the cart before the horse, assuming his ideas must be a big deal because people talk about him so much, without realizing that those other people talk about him so much because they assumed he must be a big deal because people talk about him so much, and so on.

Very few people actually say anything meaningful about Hegel or understand Hegel at all. The majority of commentators on Hegel are actually commentators on the "literature" you feel is a waste of time, that is, on interpretations of Hegel that have become a kind of pseudo-Hegel and that are more accessible. So there are "Hegelians" who are actually horrible readers of Hegel, or who might not even read Hegel at all or only read the Phenomenology, but who have soaked up vaguely 20th-century left-Hegelian commentaries on Hegel by osmosis and now think in terms of pseudo-Hegelian commonplaces like negativity and dialectical historicity and so on, without actually being able to ground these commonplaces in a concrete hermeneutic engagement with Hegel's texts. They are historically deracinated.

If you're going to waste your life half-reading or pretend reading philosophers, so you can have a few fancy buzzwords to spout off at parties, at least pick something more fertile. Nietzsche can be read as a psychological essayist and aphorist even if you don't understand philosophy. Every generation seems to have a decently respectable strain of neo-Hellenistic quietists out there, reading the Stoics and Epicureans as palliative pop psychology. I would only recommend pretend-reading Hegel, like so many people on /lit/ seem to do, if you're a college twitter leftist and you want to be able to keep up with their deracinated ahistorical use of pseudo-Hegelian jargon.

>>12083201
Shut up and read this
https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k4808659w/f15.image.texteImage

>>12083201
This almost put me to sleep.

>>12081086
Literally everything and you also need 300 IQ or you will become a tranny, communist, fascist or philosophy phd

>>12081180
Funny you say that because it did cross my mind when I started reading the Phenomenology "Is this how a religious experience feels?"
You get me.
>>12082768
>>12083056
Thanks for the list my dude. Do you think secondary summaries of these are enough to get all the references?
>>12083201
I couldn't care less about social signalling.

>>12083201
>Nietzsche can be read as a psychological essayist and aphorist even if you don't understand philosophy.

That's the absolute last thing I'd recommend. You can read Wittgenstein while ignoring the vast majority of previous philosophy, but to read Nietzsche as a series of quotes and not understand the philosophy he is criticizing leads to all kinds of awful blowhards.

>>12081086
You need to know Kant and to even grasp Kant you need to know the entire Canon starting with the Greeks.

>>12082673
I AM THE CONCEPT

Only prerequisite is Schopenhauer.

Honestly anon don't bother with prerequisites.
Instead, start with Hegel's three-volume history of philosophy. Hegel isn't really dealing with Kant as Kant, but rather his own reconfiguration of Kant, which you won't get much just by slogging through the critiques.

Rather than meditating on the fragments of Heraclitus you'd be better off reading Pinkard's bio of Hegel and Magee's Hegel and the Hermetic Tradition. Will give much better context.

>>12084124
You could probably learn about Aristotelian metaphysics, Aristotelian logic, Lockean ideas, and Berkeley's subjective idealism without having to touch upon their works, but I wouldn't suggest you to do that with Heraclitus, Parmenides, Plato, Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Hume, or Kant.
The surviving fragments from Heraclitus and Parmenides are extremely short, and can be read in less than an hour. They are mostly aphorisms and poems.
Few people have actually understood Heraclitus correctly. Socrates recognized himself as uncapable of deciphring Heraclitus. Hegel had a very unique interpretation of him. Nietzsche thought he understood Heraclitus, but completely skipped out on the Logos.
Plato's dialogues are worth reading because of their characters, situations, drama, and bits of humor. What little we know of everyday life and the kind of people who lived in Ancient Athens comes, to some extent, from Aristophanes' Comedies and Plato's Dialogues.
Aristotle is extremely detailed, systematic, and often repetitive. If you do read him, he will help train you for Kant and Hegel's much more complex and extremely abstract styles of writing.
Descartes' Discourse on Method and Meditations are quite short, and extremely friendly for any kind of reader. You might be able to read summaries of his works that contain some of his most important arguments, but his examples and the details given in his works are what make people want to believe what he says.
Spinoza and Leibniz are gold-mines for people who love logic and metaphysics. Their works are extremely well-arranged and have lots of important details on theology, the soul, reason, human emotions, etc. one would not be able to see or know about by reading secondary sources on them, which will very often emphasise one aspect of their philosophical systems over everything else.
Hume is one of the English language's best essay writers of all time, and should be regarded as an example of how to state your opinion without looking too meek or submissive.
Kant's Critique of Pure Reason is extremely complex, and I've never read a single secondary source on it that could actually explain all of its main points as well as Kant himself could.
The Critique of Practical Reason is also quite complex, but is a third as long, and much more repetitive than the first.
The Critique of Judgement builds upon the concepts of pure reason and practical reason explained in the other two critiques to present Kant's aesthetics and teleology. The aesthetics part is extremely enticing due to its contrasting descriptions of beautiful phenomena and the Sublime as something generated within the mind as a response to things that are not naturally pleasant, but somehow stir up some kind of emotion within us that make us want to bow our souls down before its magnificence.
1/2

The teleology part is, to some degree, a rehash of the first Critique's explanation for belief in unity and the second Critique's explanation for the existence of God through practical reason but not pure reason, but in this case attempting to justify teleology as complementary to mechanism in the explanation of nature's purpose.
Kant's teleology is best left if understood through a secondary source.
Fichte's Science of Knowledge is the first step away from Kant's critiques and towards pure idealism. Schelling's interpretation of it is what led to the System of Transcendental Idealism.
Hegel's break with Schelling regarding the definition of the Absolute is what drove him to write The Phenomenology of Spirit. If you actually get to understand Fichte and Schelling, you will, no doubt, be able to pass through The Phenomenology of Spirit and Hegel's other works as if they had been written in crystal-clear language.
2/2

>>12082768
>>12083056
>no Aquinas
lol

+ no Proclus LMAO