So I should probably read The Phenomenology of the Spirit before I read this, huh?

So I should probably read The Phenomenology of the Spirit before I read this, huh?

Nah he's a charlatan. Schop was right. Hegel is bullshit.

nigga keeps talking about spirit and ideas and i'm having a hard time totally understanding his definitions of these things because i'm a dumbass and decided to start here with hegel because i like history and thought the premise of the work sounded interesting

Not necessarily. Hegel's writings on history are pretty digestible if you have basic knowledge of Idealism and a vague sense of what Hegel's on about. Much, much more digestible than the Phenomenology, which is notoriously obscure and which even Hegel said was a product of the time in his life that he wrote it. It's still ideal to read the Phenomenology, but I sincerely doubt anyone reads it before skimming over Hegel's other stuff. The Introduction to Phil. of History is most commonly given as an accessible intro to him, I think, actually.

So I should definitely read Critique of Pure Reason at least.

You're only lacking very basic water legs in German and Greek Idealism. Just fuck around on Wikipedia / Stanford / Internet Encyclopaedia of Philosophy for an hour and you'll get most of it.

Okay awesome, my go to is usually Stanford's philosophy resource. I'll hit it up.

he's a charlatan but I can break him down a bit

Hegel's 'spirit' is like Marx's material - it is the driving force behind history, behind change, et cetera.

Hegel's 'ideas' is literally like, ideas. Hegel thinks every exists as an idea. He is not a nominalist - you will not find a definition of 'spirit' or 'idea' - because Hegel thinks ideas exist through intuition, an intuition that grasps the edges of the essence of these ideas. This is taking a page from Aristotle/Plato - you can't fully define any term, but you can at least give an intuition of it.

Hegel is mainly a continuation of Aristotle's work. Like Aristotle, Hegel thinks that concepts progress (and unlike Plato, who thinks everything degenerates). Hegel thinks that the spirit/essence of things reaches its full 'potential' (potentiality) when everything it could have been has the ability to express itself. This is why Hegel likes nationalism. Nations don't reach their potential if the can't dominate other nations.

Hegel's 'spirit' has its roots in Kant. Hegel thinks that the world is always rational. Everything around us is the current extension of rational thought. This is taken from a few pages of Kant, where Kant observes that every statement of logic that is proved through pure deduction can be disproved on the same premises. Hegel's like 'oh if thats the case, then the truth is in the middle, because some bullshit'. And that's the dialectic. The thesis (conservative view), synthesis (status quo ideology), antithesis (liberal view)..

Hegel used this mode of thought to prove things like.... Magnets are caused by iron ore increasing in weight. Like what the fuck?
He was kind of a nobody until the Prussian king started paying him to write a state philosophy.
His writing style is usually a few sentences of absolute bullshit, and then an amazing conclusion to his reasoning, in attempt to prove the utility of his technique.

...That does sort of sound like bullshit. I'm still going to read it, but let me ask you this - do you know of any superior philosophers of history? I know Foucault is considered a philosopher of history, but I'm also under the impression that about half the time his ideas of history are just plain wrong.

read some philosophy of science first. But you won't find any key to the secrets of the world: No one has ever devised a method of accurately predicting the future in a macro scale through information of the past.