how to into hegel

bump for interest.

I'm finally tackling Hegel in earnest too, reading Kojeve and Hippolyte alongside the Phenomenology, and right now reading The Philosophy of Right. Going to be taking a class on the latter with Robert Pippin, starting in two days, so hopefully I will be prepared.

I also have his gargantuan Logic checked out, along with Houlgate's book on it. Not sure how that's gonna go, but I imagine it will involve anal tearing.

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>>9295451
I'm jealous, even of the anal tearing. If you're going to get your ass wrecked it might as well be by the world-spirit. Hope you enjoy the class tho!

I guess I could take my usual approach, which is to just fling myself on a stack of PDFs like a wild man until things start to click but I figured it might be better to try a systematic approach.

Was never really a Hegel guy before, not sure why I'm feeling the pull now. I know there's the Sadler lectures too but I felt like reading. Probably because I've been depressed af recently and learning about a new dead European guy usually cheers me up and takes me out of my own head.

>>9295494
Hegel is definitely a good bottomless well to jump into from what I can tell. I'm sort of doing the same thing, retreating into an inner exile and reading a couple authors like him, to recuperate from being a complete failure in the normie world.

I'm sure you've already done it, but the Stanford Encyclopaedia article on Hegel is pretty good for giving an historical overview of his interpreters. I know what you mean by the stack of PDFs approach, but I've gotten more wary of that approach as I've realised just how much redundancy and incompetence there can be in secondary literature. It's a fine balance between looking for those "click" moments in secondary scholarship, and avoiding the mountains of books that are reiterating errors three generations out of fashion.

I feel like reading a lot of Heidegger and German idealism in a scattered and haphazard way has made this second attempt at Hegel a lot easier. Aristotle is really helpful too, just a basic understanding of his metaphysics of hylomorphism and potential/actuality.

>>9295589
Just to clarify, I meant to add that the way German idealism + Heidegger has helped me to read Hegel is that I find myself "thinking morphologically," in terms of organic and dialectical metaphors. That was a big click moment for me.

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>>9295589
>>9295599

Yeah, I'm all about primary sources these days myself. When I refer to a stack of PDFs I mean, as much as possible, the ones written by the actual author. I'm with you on w/r/t secondary literature. And the SEP is a good look also.

I got into Heidgger bigly a few years back and did the same thing. Had at least one genuine moment-of-zen experience when what he was saying about the technological mode started to hit me. I felt like I was fucking levitating, it was such a trip. Truly, truly corny, I admit. But maybe that's why I like reading this stuff.

>retreating into an inner exile and reading a couple authors like him, to recuperate from being a complete failure in the normie world.
Yup. This. I'm in that place also. I think this is what was getting me in the Kojeve book: I'm looking at a reality of very boring Work going forward, but there's something appealing about taking the bull by the horns. Rather than be depressed about it, try and get philosophical about it. I've been reading a lot of Lacan too for similar reasons, trying to orient myself towards a world of radical contingency. I hate radical contingency and immensely prefer boredom.

>I meant to add that the way German idealism + Heidegger has helped me to read Hegel is that I find myself "thinking morphologically," in terms of organic and dialectical metaphors. That was a big click moment for me.
Would you mind elaborating on this one? As much as you can, some of this shit is ineffable. But this sounds interesting, am genuinely curious.

>>9295342
Kojeve is a hack fool who ruined several generations of French philosophers with this lecture
just read Heidegger

>>9295676
>moment-of-zen experience
Nah I fucking feel you man. I'm guessing you're the Girard guy, then? You've got me reading Baudrillard a lot again.

I have this thing where an author makes me see something in a truly "new" way, and when it happens, it's like I realise all at once how "stuck" I had been with my exhausted ("gray on gray," like Hegel says, maybe?) set of conceptual resources for imagining that thing, and I re-remember that novel conceptions are possible. I can't really describe it. It's like my nature is always to fall back into assuming my current conceptual field is the only field that could possibly exist, and then a Hegel or a Heidegger just comes along and plunks down something that transforms the topography itself rather than simply adding a new ontical datum to consider.

>work
Just try to remember that Hegel and Kant were glorified workaday schoolteachers until their 50s. So were a lot of others. The most brilliant philosopher I know, a guy I'm convinced is going to publish a landmark thing, has been miserable working as a desk clerk for 40 years.

>Would you mind elaborating on this one?
I'm not even sure. I think I just tend to think of everything in visual and structural metaphors? Usually when I figure something out, like Kant's architectonic or Heidegger's hierarchy of ontology, it's through some kind of inner transformation in my way of picturing the thing (and all its internal logics), holistically, which causes my concept of that thing to "gel" so that I can then call it up as a Gestalt reflexively. Reading Hegel badly, early on, helped me to visualise the dialectical interrelation of subject-object in generating ontology, which helped me to visualise progressive world-disclosure in Heidegger, which is now helping me visualise Hegel again. I recently finally had an epiphany that helped me to understand Husserl by reading Brentano and realising how (I think?) Husserl visualised the possibility of observing phenomenal intentionality as it occurs. Same kind of thing with trying to picture Marx's dialectical process vs. the surface Erscheinungsform - which I only "clicked" on because of the David Harvey lectures.

I also have this really weird fucking thing where, associated with the Gestalt, I remember where I was when I realised it. With the Husserl thing I was at a specific spot on a footpath in the park, and with the David Harvey thing I was in a specific part of the library basement (listening to the lecture).

Do you ever get this shit?

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>>9295812
I'm that guy. A less interesting version atm because of the need to study Boring Work Shit instead of reading my favorite awesome continental stuff.

Baudrillard's just too much fun. I've enjoyed reading Cool Memories of late. The man just refused to allow himself to be seduced, and I find his aristocratic sense of difference way, way more interesting than irony. As most of /lit/ does these days, I think. He would have turned up his nose at Peterson but beyond a certain horizon it is necessary to believe in something, to suspend the Awesome Critical Powers. He mentions this somewhere, about theory and cowardice. An interesting man and hardly the boilerplate pomo nihilist he is believed to be.

Anyways.

>It's like my nature is always to fall back into assuming my current conceptual field is the only field that could possibly exist, and then a Hegel or a Heidegger just comes along and plunks down something that transforms the topography itself rather than simply adding a new ontical datum to consider.
Das it mane. You *want* it to be the only field that could possibly exist. From personal experience the momentary periods when I have believed that this was the case I was usually miserable. It seems to be better *not* to know exactly what's going on...it tends to make life somewhat repetitive and dull.

>Just try to remember that Hegel and Kant were glorified workaday schoolteachers until their 50s. So were a lot of others. The most brilliant philosopher I know, a guy I'm convinced is going to publish a landmark thing, has been miserable working as a desk clerk for 40 years.
This too is a good point. I hope your guy publishes that landmark thing. 40 years of misery deserves a positive turnaround. Zizek said a while back that writing books was basically all that prevented him from killing himself. A lot of philosophers get depressed, go insane, are unbearably lonely...it's easy to forget sometimes, when you read something written with such absolute clarity, the prices these guys paid. I've been reading some stuff on Lacan also and his personal life appears to have been a total mess.

(cont'd)

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>>9295812
Sorry, phone rang.

I've had my mind blown a couple of times in ways that I'll never forget. Always associated with philosophy. Reading the Republic and feeling like I had acquired a Tweety Bird head: there was just all this Justice in there. The Stoics too, when I think I understood what was meant by Reason; this primed me for a lot of other stuff that was to come, that up until that point I had simply been doing cosmic maintenance, trying to remain at the centre of the universe, signs corresponding perfectly to symbols, all this. And making life unbelievably hard for myself and many others around me by failing to actually hear, or see, anything other than myself. That episode happened in conjunction with some other ego-shredding work training though. But it was a real 2001-style moment, I literally stood on the bed of my hotel room and just stared at the walls going, Oh My God, It Really Is True. It was like a pilot light had come on in my head.

Then being blowed real good at varying points along the way afterwards. I didn't really understand what philosophy was; I have a cousin who was a hotshot academic, ultra-smart, PhD at 30, the whole enchilada. And in the meantime I was working on a dumb fantasy novel that I didn't realize was actually all about philosophy, even though there was no Derrida in it. Once I realized that what I was thinking about 24/7 actually was philosophy, that philosophy wasn't something you were *supposed* to keep at arm's length and talk about as if it *didn't* concern you, everything changed. And all at once I had something to do with the jumbo-sized butterflies in my stomach.

So ever since then I've been tracking down those moments. Lacan and the Big Other; Lacan gets me out of a lot of internal foxholes. Baudrillard with SE&D, deferred wages and death. Deleuze and repetition. Girard, violence and mimesis. Various others. And, like you, I do remember where I was, what I was doing. I remembered walking around in a daze when Heidegger clicked: "the metaphysics of production." That one fucking stunned me, maybe the grand-daddy of them all. How everyone around me was in this haste to bring things into production for Some Reason - myself as well - and holy fuck, how much you could accomplish by just allowing the other person to speak, by just *waiting* for a thing to happen, allowing something else to present or reveal itself. I always knew this was fundamentally correct (for myself, at least) as a kind of comportment in the world, but...well, anyways.

And somehow, after all of this...no Hegel! Craziness. So I'm really looking forward to this.