Explain Hegel to me in an understandable way

[Anonymous No.20851189]

>Certain theories of history (e.g. that of Hegel), treat human history as divided into distinct epochs with their own internal logics
Why is Phenomenology of Spirit titled that way then, when it follows that Phenomenology of Spirit can only at best be a phenomenology of the particular spirit of its particular era?
Seems to be mostly of historical value, then.

What's the philosophical value of a work which claims that extra-temporal (objective) knowledge is impossible and then nevertheless tries to provide an objective explanation of the human Spirit?
Isn't absolute idealism then (defined as such), self-contradictory and completely worthless as a philosophy? Didn't Wittgenstein kinda BTFO Hegel?

And yeah it's the same OP who made that other thread.

[Anonymous No.20851204]

>>20851189
1.Hegel doesn't have theory of history
2.The title is explained in the preface of the PoS
3.Your other questions are already explained in the preface
4. Read Hegel

[Anonymous No.20851217]

>>20851204
what's up with the proselytizing? assume I'm a naive child, like I'm Socrates

[Anonymous No.20851235]

>>20851217
I did

[Anonymous No.20851245]

>>20851235
Clearly you did not, Anonymous, for if you did, you would not give me such a difficult book to read. You would explain it in your own words. You're escaping rhetorically, and that means you're arguing in bad faith. Do you understand what I'm trying to tell you here?

[Anonymous No.20851270]

>>20851245
Why do you say it's a difficult book to read? If it was indeed difficult you would not have read it and if you did not read it you wouldn't know it was a difficult book.

[Anonymous No.20851272]

>>20851270
I'm afraid that argument unfortunately does not follow, Anonymous.

[Anonymous No.20851344]

>>20851272
Read hegel

[Anonymous No.20851347]

>>20851344
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thought-terminating_cliché

[Anonymous No.20851440]

>>20851189
the seed is the tree is the fruit

[Anonymous No.20851444]

>>20851189

[Anonymous No.20851446]

>>20851440
what is the seed?

what is the fruit?

[Anonymous No.20851457]

>>20851446
so u take horizontal chronological time and you turn it vertical and you have an infinite moment of eternal schizophrenia

[Anonymous No.20851469]

>>20851457
>What's the philosophical value of a work which claims that extra-temporal (objective) knowledge is impossible and then nevertheless tries to provide an objective explanation of the human Spirit?
>Isn't absolute idealism then (defined as such), self-contradictory and completely worthless as a philosophy? Didn't Wittgenstein kinda BTFO Hegel?

[Anonymous No.20851522]

>>20851440
Define "is"

[Anonymous No.20851528]

The spirit is a supernatural phenomenon which is tied to the era in which it resides dying and living with it.

[Anonymous No.20851530]

>>20851528
>spirit dies
>>20851522
>>20851469
pointless

[Anonymous No.20851536]

>>20851530
It's not pointless. There is seed in my testicles right now and yet none of it will go on to a be a metaphorical tree or fruit. So they're not even the same in terms of temporal succession, not to mention it's clear that the entirety of the seed's future existence is not even contained within itself. So the seed "is" the tree in the same way that the soil "is" the tree.

[Anonymous No.20851541]

>>20851530
yes it does, just like how god is dead
stop greentexting you schizo troll

[Pneumatique No.20851551]

>>20851541
>you schizo troll
NTA but you seem to have an anxiety regarding Logos. you see any implication of there being Logos as schizophrenia. you unironically need to repent in front of Plato, you've been corrupted by sophistry
>>20851536
good way to show the absurdity of Hegel
>>20851189
good way to show the inherent contradiction in Hegel

any enlightened individual knows that no philosopher ever came even close to perfection except for Plato, and even he wasn't perfect (as a philosopher, as a man he was the GOAT). everyone is inferior to Plato except maybe for Wittgenstein

[Anonymous No.20851626]

>>20851551
extremely based lover of plato
>>20851536
fair enough but just because you call it a seed doesn’t mean it’s not a fruit
>>20851541
>greentexting

[Anonymous No.20851630]

>>20851189

Just read Beiser's book on Hegel. It's the best TL;DR I've found on Hegel that isn't written by a brainlet trying to project their own ideas onto Big H.

[Anonymous No.20851646]

>>20851630
Son of Socrates OP here

I see you've read the book. I see it also wasn't a good enough TLDR for you to answer my questions.

[Anonymous No.20851871]

I've read the phenomenology of spirit as part of a uni course. What's the problem, exactly?

[Anonymous No.20851880]

>>20851871
what's your problem with understanding the problem so clearly laid out? i don't want to repeat myself a third time

[Anonymous No.20851920]

>>20851880
Oh, you're a disingenious troll, I'm out.

[Anonymous No.20851942]

>>20851920
looks more like I short-circuited the actual troll lol

[Anonymous No.20852328]

>>20851204
>1.Hegel doesn't have theory of history
he literally wrote an entire book on it lmao

[Anonymous No.20852557]

>>20851189

a lot of your questions would simply be answered by reading hegel.

I will spoonfeed you a few answers though

>it's at best the phenomenology of a particular spirit of a particular era
What makes you say this in the first place? It's because you are comparing eras together. How are you able to compare eras together? Well first, it would be based on concepts in your current era. Then you would extend those concepts into the past in a certain way. In what way is that exactly? It seems like something that people have done in every era, too.

Hegel tries to get at the underlying processes that allow you to make those kinds of comparisons.


>objective knowledge is impossible but here's an objective explanation
think of it as a merger between the subjective/objective distinction. For instance: how would you explain a government? Is it objective or is it subjective? It clearly employs both. The reason Hegel prefers reducing it all to objectivity is because he thinks this is how we interact with the world. When we perceive a tree, we don't think of ourselves thinking about the tree - we really do see a tree "out there in the world". Merging the distinction is a big point of the phenomenology.

>did wittgenstein btfo hegel
not really. him and Russell just went against the Hegelian norm because they saw that speaking Hegelese was causing more problems than it was solving.

[Anonymous No.20852569]

>>20852557
i should clarify by saying that hegel also means something very specific when he talks about things being "objective", and that doesn't exactly map onto our existing definition of the word. to get at it, you would need to read hegel

[Anonymous No.20852587]

>>20852557
>What makes you say this in the first place?
He himself said that he's just a product of his era and will be seen as such in the future
>think of it as a merger between the subjective/objective distinction.
so is it objective or not? is Hegel scientific? does his theory hold any predictive power?
>because they saw that speaking Hegelese was causing more problems than it was solving.
you don't see any issue in that?

insofar as I understand the self-contradicting nature of Hegel, he really is worthless in and of himself. though he is useful if you expand upon him, which I do

[Anonymous No.20852633]

>>20851189
You're coming in with a lot of presumptions about what Hegel says and it doesn't seem like they are even good starting places.

It is argued that PhS isn't even a coherent whole. Even if it is, the project got bloated over time, and then had to be rushed to completion.

It is definetly not only a theory of history, or a theory of the spirit of a certain era. That's a bad misunderstanding about what the work is even about.

Hegel was following his friend Schelling in trying to resolve the apparent dualism and incoherence of Kant's noumenal/subjective distinction. In this sense, the book's main purpose was to propose an epistemology and an ontology. Indeed, there are some Hegel scholars, although I think they are misguided, who say all of PhS is really just a manifesto against radical skepticism and against epistemological realism. Hegel has a circular, fallibleist epistemology and he wants to include the thinking subject within logic (this attempt comes in later works). These guys have a point in the Hegel is definetly doing this, but that's not all he is doing in PhS.

He is also advancing a metaphysics and makes an ontological argument about the emergence of our world of becoming through the resolution of essential contradictions. Here he is highly influenced by the mystic Jacob Boehme and Fichte and Schelling's prior work that is in the same vein.

The theory of history you are referring too flows from the dialectical Hegel develops based on the aforementioned concepts that underpin his ontology. Neo-Marxist commentaries like to play down the ontology and, frankly, religious elements here, and focus on the theory of history as distinct. You'll see this in Fukuyama's take on Hegel, which he gets via Kojeve. This is an error. The dialectical at work in history is the same one underpinning Hegel's ontology, and his conception of freedom laid out in The Philosophy of Right.

I can't offer a brief summary of Hegel because he was really the last systematic philosopher. He is trying to do everything, epistemology, metaphysics, philosophy of mind, philosophy of history, etc.

There is no simple answer, and I'll just get called retarded anyhow because there are many Hegelian schools that try to shift what Hegel really meant by reading selectively.

What I can tell you is that are are some pretty good sources:

Dorrien - Kantian Reason and Hegelian Spirit, although written by a theologian, is the best primer on the era I've found and focuses heavily on philosophy. It will give you a background in Kant, Schelling, Fichte, as well as a review of Hegel.

Harris - Hegel's Ladder. This is a tough commentary, but don't let the detailed historical intro filter you. It's very continental and "artistic," but it still represents a very good treatment of PhS . It goes paragraph by paragraph and summarizes each paragraph for you in plainer English.

Kallavage - The Logic of Desire. A more accessible commentary on PhS than Harris.

[Anonymous No.20852644]

>>20852633
Also read the SEP article on Hegelian Dialectical. The one on Hegel is good too.

Berstein Tapes had an entire year long course on PhS but it isn't the easiest to follow.

The Great Courses modern phil course has two decent overviews of Hegel, but I wouldn't get it just for that. But they're free on audible sometimes, or if you just signed up, or you could torrent it.

[Anonymous No.20852649]

>>20852633
>He is also advancing a metaphysics and makes an ontological argument about the emergence of our world of becoming through the resolution of essential contradictions.
that's such a cop out tho. the contradictions aren't essential at all. they disappear and never return. the world stabilizes around the golden mean, or what the Greeks would call the golden principle, or Logos

what is the golden principle?
what is Logos?
Hegel failed to answer that, and his project was thus a failure and really quite an embarrassment. plain and simple

[Anonymous No.20852657]

>>20852587
>he himself said he's a product of his era
>self contradicting nature of hegel
These are features of describing anything that he talks about.

>is he scientific?
his theory is too predictive if anything, by saying that any claim and theory you make about the world will itself have contradictions that will only be resolved in future theories. he describes the chase of knowledge.

you might claim that this isn't particularly profound, but that goes against previous ideas about how philosophy/science is able to get at eternal objective truths. that matter isn't even settled today

[Pneumatique No.20852659]

>>20852657
>his theory is too predictive if anything, by saying that any claim and theory you make about the world will itself have contradictions that will only be resolved in future theories. he describes the chase of knowledge.
>you might claim that this isn't particularly profound, but that goes against previous ideas about how philosophy/science is able to get at eternal objective truths. that matter isn't even settled today
Sorry for this interjection, but I must:

This is all solved by pneumatics

[Anonymous No.20852710]

>>20852649
The contradictions don't disappear, they are sublated and incorporated into new definitions. Being and nothing resolve into becoming, the continual coming into being and passing away of our world.

Liberal democracy isn't the liberal state of Hegel's day. Every liberal democracy now has laws against child labor, rights to organize and have unions, primary education, some form of pensions, and welfare programs. The contradictions of great inequalities in early liberal states, how inequality tends to erode democracy, spawned socialism. Socialism was sublated into the liberal state. So too nationalism has been sublated into liberal states. We now appeal to X group of people being allowed to choose for themselves. It isn't enough to have a vote, a people must have their own state. Colonial empires couldn't resolve the problems of colonialism just by letting the colonies vote, they needed independence. Sublation is key.

A = A. The dialectical is endless cycles of reification on this essential fact from Schelling.

Logos is the rational principles that drive the dialectical, the logic of the system. That is defined. If you reject the rationality of the world you're left with radical skepticism because nothing necessarily follows from anything else, the principal of implosion and the principal of explosion.

You can't out argue someone who denies logic on their terms, but PhS offers and affective therapy for the radical skeptic.

>>20851189
In what way do you think Wittgenstein "BTFO" Hegel? I'm curious about this because it's an odd take, especially when it doesn't seem like, by your own admission, you understand Hegel at all.

[Anonymous No.20852714]

>>20852659
why aren't you posting under your tripcode?

[Anonymous No.20852849]

>>20851217
>assume I'm a naive child, like I'm Socrates
I banish you from my sight, you lack the potential and intelligence of Meno. And while I am a midwife of philosophy, a midwife cannot help birth that which is not pregnant. I'm going to try get Alcibiades to slobber my knob

[Anonymous No.20852906]

everyone thinks they can boil hegel down into a caricature but as soon as you seriously engage with his philosophy you inevitably realize hegel reached the summit of positive intelligence. and you also realize that your absolute ignorance and your screeching against hegel can be recapitulated as a movement towards knowing. the self-evidence of hegel cannot be borne lightly

[Anonymous No.20852935]

>>20851444
this is such a pseud take. anyone who knows anything deeply knows that they can’t explain it to a casual in a reasonable amount of time. this is why you should never ask a grad student what they’re studying.

[Anonymous No.20852945]

>>20852328
the only books hegel actually wrote were PoS and SoL, the rest were compiled by students.

[Anonymous No.20853028]

>>20852906
There is not a single agreement of what Hegel does, if the people interested in him don’t know what Hegel is about, well, might as well analyze him from an artistic and not philosophical point of view.

[Anonymous No.20853112]

>>20853028
there are plenty of agreements among anyone who isn't retarded, ie, actually scholars. The same is true of quantum mechanics: every retard has their own take, scholars understand the based takes

[Anonymous No.20853172]

>>20853028
this is simply not true. there are a lot of different interpretations of hegel, sure, but you're a fool if you think a philosopher is measured by whether or not his philosophy lets itself be pinned down conclusively. knowing is a movement, and so we should not be seduced by thoughts which stand still - as clearly you have been

[Anonymous No.20853194]

>>20852945
I didn't want to complicate the point. but yes he had extensive lectures on the philosophy of history.

[Anonymous No.20853299]

>>20851189
History is over, it's ended. Therefore we can know it. That means we can now have absolute knowledge as a faculty, whereas the Greeks and medievals couldn't. Their thought is historically conditioned. Hegel's is not, and if you follow his teachings, you too can achieve absolute wisdom.

Now is this true? I doubt it, but I'm willing to give it a try. I've got the Miller translation of the Phenomenology, and I'm working through Kojeve's introduction, with Kalkavage's commentary and Miller's commentary as supplementary aids.

[Anonymous No.20853593]

>>20853299
That combo will only lead you into deception Anon.

Read Hegel with Harris and Magee, and after the first time you read the Preface (read it again afterwards), before the introduction, read Jacob Boehme's The Signature in All Things. You should probably eat a bunch of hashish before you start too.

[Anonymous No.20853661]

>>20851189
What's your math background? Have you done upper undergraduate calculus and linear algebra and had at least some exposure to abstract maths?

Are you familiar at all with type theory and topology?

What about inference, actual inference, not frequentist abominations?

This will determine my response. You need to start with The Logic.

[Anonymous No.20853684]

>>20852906
It's pretty amazing how he can inspire your most floaty, hard to pin down, airy continentals so much, but also get your rigour obsessed logician/mathematician types looking for an (absolute) grounding in his system. Seems to be popular with cosmologists too.

[Anonymous No.20854087]

>>20853661

[Anonymous No.20854098]

>>20852935
>this is such a pseud take
Dude, it was fucking Einstein. You aren't exactly creating any new breakthroughs here

[Anonymous No.20854148]

>>20852710
it seems like a cop out still. barely any meaning is provided. Hegel is continental but his contribution is barely better than analytic shit. it's just a bunch of platitudes