Hegel's The Phenomenology of Spirit Reading Group Thread #1

". THE knowledge, which is at the start or immediately our object, can be nothing else than just that which is immediate knowledge, knowledge of the immediate, of what is. We have, in dealing with it, to proceed, too, in an immediate way, to accept what is given, not altering anything in it as it is presented before us, and keeping mere apprehension (Auffassen) free from conceptual comprehension (Begreifen)." Thoughts on this passage?

Hegel assumes immediate knowledge exists. This is his first of many presuppositions. I feel like I've been lied to.

What is your problem with that? I don't want to jump ahead in the text but I feel like his philosophy works to explain why.

I don't actually have a problem with making presuppositions. If you don't make any, you can't do anything. It's just that Hegel says specifically that his system is presuppositionless. It's not like later he proves this presupposition wrong, he just comes to the conclusion that sense-certainty is not only knowledge of things (not their attributes, just that they are) but that the things themselves are sensuous universals.

you forgot gravity's rainbow, the first reading group of the year, which flamed out not long after bananas after "omg the prose" posters drove out anyone making actual analysis
but is right. phenomenology is way too fucking hard for you idiots. stick to watching sadler.

How is starting from natural consciousness a presupposition? He's not positing it; it's there already, we have to take it as given.

My Categories group completely failed and it's a short text. I have no faith at all that these will work.

I really like the idea of these groups, but these groups never come to anything if the people running them don't, well, try to run them. Providing resources helps, sure, and you've done that, but what about "opening questions" to help focus discussion, or even an attempt to provide a summary, even if inadequate, to see if anyone else recognizes what they read or not.

But also, for Hegel, a reading this large is no good. The Preface alone could be split into two readings at least, or put off until after finishing the book, being a kind of summary of the whole thing that's more intelligible afterwards rather than before.

I've been studying the Phenomenology for the past couple months. I'm almost done the preface. This isn't even the first work of Hegel I've read, I already went through the smaller logic over the better part of last year. Maybe you could cover the whole preface, doing 4-5 sections a week, but even that is ambitious for this type of thing. Unless you just want to "read it" for the psude credit.

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I think something like this would work only by going literally section by section.

isn't Veeky Forums for the humanities?

Was Hegel a gnostic totalitarian?

no

I agree, it's a good presupposition. It's about as natural as "A = A" or "A and not A cannot both be true" or "A is true or Not A is true." That being said, it's still a presupposition, and it's possible to develop systems that don't take the existence of immediate knowledge as true. For example, Kant claims all our knowledge is mediate, and that we never get immediate knowledge.

Is the preface something you MUST read beforehand? I was thinking I could come back to it after reading Consciousness part for this thread.

Also: Is his lectures on aesthetics a good place to start? I noticed he uses quite a bit of epistemology in it that I wouldn't know, but I might be mistaken.

Hegel looks like Zizek with a clean shave

Is Hegel less impenetrable if you read Kant first?

You'd think so

So how the hell do I actually start with Hegel?

don't forget Ficciones

No.
Just start reading phenomenology of spirit and, unironically, check out Gregory Sadler's Half-Hour Hegel series. After you've watched about 70 episodes you'll be able to understand Hegel on your own.

Hegel is a waste of time. If he had something interesting to say, someone would have figured out how to say it clearly by now. Even more of a waste of time if you don't know Kant pretty well.

Go read some Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Hume, Sidgwick, or Frege instead.

You will not last three weeks. I guarantee it. I put $100 on it.

This year, the following ambitious reading groups have been proposed: Finnegan's Wake (I'm going to leave the apostrophe since I automatically wrote it so there we are), Capital V. 1, Anti-Oedipus, and one or two others on similar lines (difficult, modern books concerned with philosophy). None have lasted, and most importantly, /none have even come close to actually getting partway into the book that they propose to read, into the meat of discussion, as it were/. Yours is not the exception. Even the recently proposed discussion threads for Aristotle's very short (if dense) Categories has failed carried its relatively modest, proposed task to completion.

Part of what's going on is that people just want to meme rather than actually read. But more charitably, I've come to recognize, quite simply, that among people who /do/ actually read, they've either already read the thing and seek "students" who aren't ready yet, or else the people who aren't ready yet would like to get around to whatever the project is but they're not fully committed /right now/, or the over-riding mood to just plain read X on general principles hasn't yet struck them for whatever reason, etc (this mood to just plain read X on general principles is of course a real thing, as the readers know).

Basically unless you're in such-and-such graduate class or whatever the process of actually reading your difficult famous book of choice is usually, at best, something that can only be discussed with people /who have already read it/. I'm convinced that the real rarity with difficult books is that two or more people in the same milleu wish in good faith to read and discuss together and see the thing through to completion /as first-time or nth-time readers/, and this gets rarer the minute you step outside actual RL academic settings, and propose to tackle longer, more complex books. This is basically why lit book club threads fail. Even if you really are up for it /right now/, or over the next few months, almost no one else is. That is why your thread will almost certainly fail.

Now prove me wrong and get my $100bux. This is your "week zero". To collect, you must have three modestly successful threads (weeks 1, 2, 3) on archival record, spaced reasonably between today and April 7, a little more than three weeks from today (I'm giving you wiggle room to make my point). You must also lose the tripcode, becasue tripcodes are for faggots.

moby dick last year same story. Group went on up to half of the book, then I created 3 threads about it that 404'd with 0 replies. Finished it on my own like 2 weeks before schedule

>Veeky Forums
>ridden with amerifats and ang*os™
>reading ANYTHING that is not a watered-down textbook on second literature about a book
>let alone even TRYING to tackle such complex, specific problems solving works as anti-oedipus, das capital, phenomenology of spirit

I wouldn't know, I'm not done the book. Hegel by Charles Taylor is a great companion book for the Phenomenology though. The introduction is fantastic for placing his system in the cultural/historical matrix of thought that was the German Enlightenment.

>i tried doing a capital reading group
are you commie scum, user?

DESU, with Hegel no matter where you start you have to force yourself through a period of utter disorientation before you start being able to orient yourself in his thinking. The preface and the introduction give you a good idea of what Hegel is trying to do with PoS in the grand scheme of things, and that can be invaluable when you're reading the main text and, while you think you understand what Hegel is saying, you don't know what level of interpretation to use. On the other hand, it's the most dense part of the book, so you might just give up entirely if you push yourself too hard.

How far are you guys? I'm struggling to take it all in

My only recommendation is to read several translations of it, if you're using ebooks.
The standard Oxford one by Miller has summaries/interpretations of every passage, they're useful.
The one on marxists.org is older but clearer a lot of the time.
And there's one brand new by Terry Pinkard, which might be the best right now.

They all use the same passage numbers so it's easy to switch.
If you're seriously struggling with the Preface, there's a heavy commentary of it by Yirmiyahu Yovel as well as general intro to Hegel.

One think that might legitimately help is drawing pictures. I'm not saying that to be a dick or to belittle, having a sense of what Hegel is considering as the objects of consciousness and what the relationships between those objects are is something that is made clearer in picture form. Eventually you're able to sort of make the pictures in your head.

I dislike the analysis by Findlay, it's just useless half the time.

>safety-first curiosity about how the machine works
does this not articulate the dialectical necessity of marx to complete hegel