/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.10321742]

Do I really need to read Hegel in order to understand Marx? I tried reading Phenomenology and it was unintelligible nonsense.

[Anonymous No.10321767]

>>10321742
>will limiting my understanding of a subject inhibit my understanding of it

[Anonymous No.10321819]

no, but you're dumb so you won't get anything out of anyone who matters. stick to genretrash, brainlet.

[Anonymous No.10321862]

>>10321742
Yes it will. But you're right, Hegel is unintelligible nonsense. A good solution would be to read the book on Hegel wrote by Charles Taylor, it's quite well written and provide enough on Hegel's philosophy to make Marx easier to read.

[Anonymous No.10321867]

>>10321742
>Should I read this unintelligible nonsense in order to read that intelligible nonsense

[Anonymous No.10321892]

>>10321862
>Taylor dilutes Hegel as much as humanly possible so fucking braintarded anglos can understand him without thinking dialectically or doing any real scholarship
>almost zero reference to other german idealists and the brunt of their work which directly influenced Hegel, because anglos can't handle more than one foreigner at a time
>anglos now call it the "best book on Hegel"
>mfw

[Anonymous No.10321897]

>>10321742
Where do I start with Jung? I heard you can get hurt if you jump right into his more complex works.

[Anonymous No.10321912]

The main thing you have to understand from/about Hegel to understand Marx is the historically and dialectically progressing, self-contained and self-referential life of Spirit (culture, collective consciousness, way of life, etc). Hegel's account of human history is an account of a natural and necessary ascent through various stages, by means of the implicit contradictions of a given stage giving rise to new and higher formulation, that contain and transcend the older formulation in a way that cancels the contradictions (but also reveals new contradictions).

Feuerbach takes this method and applies it to a progressive history of religion, for example, as mankind crudely externalising humanistic virtues and then perfecting their articulation until ultimately rejoining with them. Marx responds to that as well, but goes beyond Feuerbach's "materialism," which was a critique of Hegel, by showing that Feuerbach still situates the locus of the dialectical contradictions (which propel history) within spirit, within man's self-understanding. Feuerbach had materialized Hegel by naturalizing the historical process somewhat, but Marx REALLY relocates the engine of history to the material base. For Feuerbach, religion vanishes once Spirit (again, basically culture) collectively pushes its self-understanding to the point that religion is no longer necessary, and assimilates the externalized virtues. Marx says, no, the continued existence of religion only shows that the ACTUAL contradictions, within the real social and economic relations of real society (not in some illusory "Spirit" dominated by luminaries of the ruling class), still exist, and still warrant religion in the first place.

If you understand this shift, if you understand how Feuerbach materialized Hegel and Marx materialized Feuerbach, you basically get the gist. Marx is MAINLY taking this dialectical approach and applying it to the now-familiar materialist history that is Marxism, though he's doing a lot of other things as well of course.

You should definitely be well-versed in early modern political economy, like Marx was, if you want to get the most out of Marx. It's not so much the theories that matter, but what the 18th century took for granted as the "stuff" of political economy, the subtle assumptions they had about what society and economy were. Hegel was influenced by these as well, incidentally.

[Anonymous No.10321916]

>>10321892
>>almost zero reference to other german idealists and the brunt of their work which directly influenced Hegel, because anglos can't handle more than one foreigner at a time

The entire first hundred pages are a painstaking reconstruction of the "expressivist" paradigm from Spinoza and post-Kantian idealism that Hegel was synthesizing. It's almost tedious in how thorough it is. You have to read 60 pages of Taylor explaining difficult shit like Fichte before you even get to the Hegel.

Did you read it?