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"When philosophy paints its grey in grey then has a shape of life grown old. By philosophy's grey in grey it cannot be rejuvenated but only understood. The owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of dusk." -- G.W.F. Hegel, 'Preface', Philosophy of Right.
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'Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainity and agitation distinquish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones ... All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned.' Marx

Reading Hegel's Phenomenology « Previous | |Next »
June 30, 2005

Someone has been reading Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit. How about that, eh? People are actually engaging with this text.

I should say 'struggling' rather than reading, as the reading is a struggle to make sense of what one is reading. It is made difficult because the text challenges one's own presuppositions that have developed from living in an empiricist culture.

I had been intending to struggle with this text during my holidays to sharpen up the mind. It is kinda like pianists doing the scales.

Here is a little passage from the very difficult and dense Preface that I remember:

"Truth and falsehood as commonly understood belong to those sharply defined ideas which claim a completely fixed nature of their own, one standing in solid isolation on this side, the other on that, without any community between them. Against that view it must be pointed out, that truth is not like stamped coin that is issued ready from the mint and so can be taken up and used..." (para.39)

You can read passages of Hegel not understanding a thing. You fall into despair. How can I ever make sense of this stuff? This is impossible. Nobody should be allowed to write like that etc etc.

When you re-read it, slowly, working to understand what the passage is saying line by line, then it does not seem so alien on the surface. Feeling a bit more confident you rea d it. Okay, you say to yourself, that wasn't too bad. So you read on.

Then you hit a passage that sort of clicks:

"Dogmatism as a way of thinking, whether in ordinary knowledge or in the study of philosophy, is nothing else but the view that truth consists in a proposition, which is a fixed and final result, or again which is directly known. To questions like, "When was Caesar born?". "How many feet make a furlongs", etc., a straight answer ought to be given; just as it is absolutely true that the square of the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the squares of the other two sides of a right-angled triangle. But the nature of a so-called truth of that sort is different from the nature of philosophical truth."

You may not know what Hegel means by philosophical truth, but you get the idea of truth as a proposition. Then you think of early Betrand Russell and the origins of analytic philosophy, logic and the philosophy of language----and away you go chasing hares through the tangled undergrowth.

But you come back to the idea that there is another kind of truth to the one accepted by mathematics, empiricism and science. Suddenly a different world opens up. You gulp, as you realize you are going to start on a philosophical journey that is going to take you to some very strange lands. You know that the experience of reading The Phenomenology is going to change you. You are going to be quite different as a result of the experience.

It took half an hour to read a couple of paragraphs--about half a page. Only several hundred to go.

That's Hegel.

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| Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 11:57 PM | | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (2)
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Comments

Comments

You might find these lectures on Hegel helpful:

http://eha.no-ip.org/tiki/tiki-index.php?page=The+Bernstein+Tapes

Thanks for the blogs.

Adrian

Adrian,
thanks for that. I've just checked the link. There is a redirection as the url has changed.

This is the new url for J.M. Bernstein's Seminar on The Phenomenology of Spirit given in the mid-1990s.

Alas I do not have the MP3 software. So I can only access the notes. No. I've accessed the seminar on the Introduction through Windows Media player.

This is good stuff. It makes me realize that I only have an intuitive grasp on this material. I don't have this deep philosophical grasp. Listening to the Seminar I just nod. Bernstein has a very good grasp on the story of the Phenomenology. His interpretatiion is outlining a hermeneutical philosophy of being involved in a conventional world of meanings that structure my consciousness, but which is dependent on the consciousness of the subject.

Hell, I wish I could have attended this seminar. There was nothing like this being offered in Australia during the 1990s.