Hegel

Hegel is meant to be read directly. Reading second hand misses the point.

I have a blog to help.

empyreantrail.wordpress.com/

You're going to do a bit of research into the history of Hegel interpretation so you can see the broad outlines of how he has been received, and see what major positions people have generally found plausible or even possible.

>going to have to do*
I meant to say.

Also, a lot of Hegel's terminology is directly appropriated from Kant, Fichte, Schelling, and often many other things, so an intellectual-historical approach is best.

You have to read Hegel VERY CAREFULLY, thinking "What does that gobbledygook sentence actually MEAN?", while learning his strange way of phrasing certain things (for example, how he talks about Negativity). If he uses a term you simply do not understand, because its meaning is intertextual and he assumes the reader is already familiar with it from the latest Kant cant in German intellectual circles, you just have to know what it means. Or at least form an idea.

The last thing is: Sometimes the meaning just cannot be precisely determined. Even when you have the intellectual history down, and you are carefully reading along and remembering that (you think) Hegel uses "x" to mean "y," sometimes he'll still say shit that throws you for a loop. Good books on Hegel will often engage in exegesis of a passage and frankly admit that the meaning is either vague, or doesn't make much sense if taken in a certain way. So you'll often get something like
>Hegel seems to be saying this here, but that would also seem to contradict or conflict with what he says over here. So he might be saying this, or this, or he might be dithering between these two ideas.

It's really hard to give systematic exegesis of Hegel for exactly this reason. It is, honestly, just very difficult to know where Hegel ultimately stands. Certain major things have to be inferred or decided upon by the reader, given his most likely estimate of Hegel's intentions.

This is why knowing historical interpretations of Hegel is helpful, because when you are building your own, you already know what some very smart people came up with. And it's just as interesting to realise, some of those people came up with really dumb fucking interpretations.

Hyppolite's book is good.

Peter Singer's Very Short Introduction. Masterpiece of interpretation.

>A.W
Hi Ontilogicool.

No one is going to comment on the fact that you typed “roll” instead of “role”?????

Do yourself a favor and watch Gregory Sadler's half hour Hegel videos on YouTube. He talks in depth about every single paragraph in the Phenomenology. You probably should understand Aristotle's Categories beforehand (he also has videos for these) and you can read that book about German Idealism from the Veeky Forums guide Hegel section. If you are really dedicated you can read Hypollite and Kojeve too. Also read this guy's blog to pump yourself up.

Try Marx

oh fuck, just noticed, sorry english isn't my native language

Read him directly, start with the introductions to his lectures on history, religion, and the history of philosophy. After that move on to the introduction to the phenomenology. Use internet ressources like the SEP (mostly to read up on kant, schelling, fichte, etc) and Gregory Sadler's courses on youtube. That should be a solid start.

Thanks a lot :) I'll definitely look into those internet resources