What the fuck is a Hegel?

every fucking time hegel comes up

>thinking that's what hegel meant

what the fuck did hegel mean. what is phenomenology. if you're so fucking cool, if you're such a good hegelian and it totally gets you laid, drop the elevator pitch you give to undergrads you're trying to bang when they ask you what you're studying.

why should I read this shit

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marxists.anu.edu.au/archive/marx/works/1857/letters/57_08_15.htm
marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/jewish-question/
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He really is the final boss of philosophy.

Not even memeing, I picked up a philosophy major just so I can understand the Phenomenology of Spirit.

If you do end up reading his stuff, for God's sake don't pay much adherence to the so called modern day "Hegelians" like Zizek. They heavily distort and misinterpret Hegel for the sake of advancing their own perverse ideologies.

>That look of crazed sense of doom

Hegel is a charlatan, an intellectual Caliban. He's not worth reading at all.

insert quote of hagel saying only one person understands him and he's not sure he fully does actually

>an intellectual Caliban

see it just keeps happening. everyone memes a little bit but nobody has anything of substance to say. wikipedia articles are opaque. it seems to be philosophical mysticism par excellence, but when you mention marx or zizek a few hegelians come out from under their rocks to murmur and chant
>marx is bastardized hegel
>zizek has perverted hegel
and all I can take away from that is that hegel is a self-supported church of tautologies and syllogisms, and his priests want to shore up support and funding from shitty logic fetishist philosophy departments across the anglosphere rather than see him consigned to "literature" or humanities with the rest of those zany eurofags.

>everyone memes a little bit but nobody has anything of substance to say

this place in a nutshell. you can't come here and expect to learn about philosophy. all you have here is people who have a little bit of familiarity who can't explain anything but want to feel like they know stuff and spout memes. What I'm trying to say is, if you make conclusions about great philosophers based on Veeky Forums posts instead of at legit sources you're dumb.

I didn't think anyone in the modern age still identified as Hegelians.

Hegel just said that whatever happens at the end of history (ie. what the last society will look like) he will have predicted and will have been an extension of his philosophy.

What does he say the last society will look like? Well, it will have the perfect balance of public and private. It will be so awesome it will literally feel God-like. He says the Prussian state comes pretty damn close.

Basically his writing is intentionally obscure enough for anyone's vision of their ideal state to correspond with Hegel's prophecies. Which is why you can have any interpretation of Hegel and some douchebag Hegelian student will say "MUH HEGEL PRE-EMPTED THIS. S-STOP BEING MEAN TO HEGEL!"

Added to this is his idea that history will have big cataclysms but in the grand scheme of things everything gets better/more rational.

So when you're leading a revolution, kill a bunch of people, and then realize your newly created state is a piece of shit...well, that's just one step closer to the actual best/final state of society.

Hegel can never be falsified. Any society can qualify as the Absolute if you're good enough with language. And then you can always say "It's coming real soon, guys, just trust me" when your half-dozen failed states/revolution are shit.

But of course... Hegel "meant" something that isn't embarrassing and retarded, right? I'm just misinterpreting Hegel. Hegel "pre-empted" that I'd be a "wikipedia scholar."

yfw I just pre-empted every douchebag Hegelian defense of this schizo egotist

Pretty much Hegel is seeking to undo all the past errors in philosophy by just showing us how one should proceed if they were able to see the logical structure of their thoughts in his work the phenomenology of spirit.

There is a lot he doesn't explicitly refer to, for instance the question may be raised why did he begin with sense certainty and what is the content of his critique of it? Well you can't understand that simply internally to the phenomenology because it requires you to be immersed into the philosophical climate. The whole structure of basing knowledge in sense certainty comes to us from the conclusion of the first of Descartes' meditations(which Hegel takes to be the most common sense starting point, and it really is). Then knowing this, you have to pay attention to how we got there in the first place - Descartes wants to doubt the immediate to find the foundations - what Hegel does is then show how in more ways than one sense certainty is not a foundation because it is still a universal concept. This does two things, undermine the very process of the motion from immediacy to foundations as found in many skeptical works and take us from this particular philosophical position to the platonism and paradoxically humean position we find sketched out in perception that intends to solve the problem of universal and particular by both addressing the concept of selfhood and the concept of thinghood.

It goes further and further. The pattern you find repeats itself, you have something that you postulate is true - you describe it as clearly as possible to make it clear exactly what is being said - then you show exactly in what way this definition betrays itself. What you find is that the description is both false and true for you, you can't choose which so you postulate that the truth doesn't consist of either side of this tension but that the tension itself is the basic character of reality and so serves as the basis for the ultimate description of reality. What previously constituted the falsity of your position is taken to now be the truth of reality. In this way the past position is preserved and not falsified, your new position develops out of the deadlock of the old and is given the same treatment.

A few things to note, Hegel doesn't refer to specific things because he wants to give a general treatment since a lot of forms of thought you find repeated in philosophy.

On dialectics. People will say a lot of stupid things about it but honestly just pick up some Plato and you will see dialectics. The reason it is given a special consideration with regards to Hegel is because he has refined the technique so well. If there are any rules for him I would say that dialectics takes into account the totality of a topic and nothing else, it makes no assumptions except that there is a truth and based on this lever it seeks to unfold the path to knowledge.

No one should even respond to posts like this. If you haven't read him then don't talk.

Zizek is just Zizek and Marx I think shouldn't have even bothered with Hegelian philosophy. His critique of political economy really really really didn't need it, I mean I can't stress that enough holy shit.

If you want to understand the phenomenology you need either 50 years and an education in the entire history of philosophy or you can try and get the laymans guide and read Houlgate, Hyppolite and, no joke, Magee. I don't recommend Kojeve, a lot of people are actively interpreting Hegel which is stupid. You should only stick to those who try to unearth what he might have meant.

So what youre saying is that Hegel bases his entire philosophy on ignoring the law of contradiction.

No wonder Tis' utter nonsense

>2016
>nonparaconsistent pleb

>hegel is a self-supported church of tautologies and syllogisms
Hey Wittgenstein

>His critique of political economy really really really didn't need it, I mean I can't stress that enough holy shit.
As always, the one proclaiming that others know too little knows too little himself.

>There is a lot he doesn't explicitly refer to, for instance the question may be raised why did he begin with sense certainty and what is the content of his critique of it? Well you can't understand that simply internally to the phenomenology because it requires you to be immersed into the philosophical climate.
I can tell the thesis of the dude you want as your doctoral supervisor.

>what is negativity
To postulate truth is to postulate the possibility of falsity.

I mean, seriously mate? Hegel changes the hypothesis by negating it in order to avoid the contradiction that it presents. If you can't follow then you're just not cut out for it.

Idiot, you don't need to fucking define the complete parameters of every conceptual object in your ontology to develop a theoretical framework to describe capitalism. It's an absolute waste of time and exactly why no one can get to the bottom of the LTV today.

He's not far off in a sense, a lot of Kierkegaard's beef with Hegel is around the lack of making your own choice and a general denial of will. And part of Kierkegaard's answer to that is the law of excluded middle.

>Idiot, you don't need to fucking define the complete parameters of every conceptual object in your ontology to develop a theoretical framework to describe capitalism.
Then rather than say "Marx didn't need to do that" as if it wasn't central to his whole project, say you think Marx was outright wrong.

on the contrary...

>on the contrary...
And the synthesis is...?

>synthesis

Thesis: there are no Hegelians anymore
Antithesis: Zizek is a contemporary Hegelian
Synthesis: if there is currently even 1 Hegelian it is not Zizek

To quote Hegel himself "Badda-Bing-Badda-Boom"

Positions arent black and white brah, the fact is you cant have this kewl tension that is the reality once you discredit your previous position. All youve done is to ascertain a new true position with less elements, since you found certain ones to be false.

He didn't need to do it, if you actually pay attention his critiques of individual thinkers and past ideas is very short and obvious. When he's trying to construct answers to questions is where things get down right retarded. For instance, it's clear enough for him to show why Say's law is a baseless assertion but then creating a theory of profit is mired in pure obfuscation riddle with dialectical twists and turns. He could simply propose a scientific theory and make quantitative demonstrations. What we get are some equations sure but a whole load of philosophical premises that make it impossible to scrutinise and specious, question begging assertions that nothing but labour could be the source of value because the essence of social production ... is labour.

And if you think obfuscation isn't part of the game I can show you to a letter where he admits to Engels that he makes use of it to make his propositions impossible to disprove.

In other words "I think Marx was wrong".

Post the Engels thing anyway, it sounds interesting and I haven't seen it.

Just so you know none of these positions belong to Hegel, his job is to show that they're false. The new position coming out of the past is his way to show how philosophy can authentically develop through skepticism by the simply process of negation.

He's applying the principle of charity, and it's funny that you say positions aren't black and white because what you describe is black and white thinking(which he criticises in the preface) as though anyone can conceptualise the truth of the universe in one thought and expect to test it once and go home without development. If you look at the history of science, exactly what he describes is what happens. I mean you can think of it as very similar to Kuhn's description of science.

I think Marx was right, I just don't think political economy needs to bother with dialectics. You can describe dynamic systems in ordinary language.

>It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic.
marxists.anu.edu.au/archive/marx/works/1857/letters/57_08_15.htm

I don't think that quite says what you think (dialektik is often just used to mean "reasoning through talking" or some such, and that seems to be the sense there: he'll just use his words and argue his way out). Zizek does seem to have an opinion similar to what you're thinking with Hegel, but that's because part of Hegel is about admitting to yourself you can be corrected and develop your ideas, and so being "wrong", having been accepted, is no big deal.

I have no idea what the relation between his method and those ethical considerations are. What he denies is the form in which the contradiction arises, you don't only have the option of saying yes or no to the objects presented but you are able to make the subjective turn and say no along another dimension. Hegel's entire work is seeing the importance of and implicit prevalence the Kantian turn in the history of philosophy and further extending it as method ad infinitum.

>What the fuck is a Hegel?

it's the rarest pokemon dude

It's hardly fair to mention that letter. It's a reference to the military column he was writing for Engels.

there's no reason to put any serious effort here

>you don't only have the option of saying yes or no to the objects presented but you are able to make the subjective turn and say no along another dimension.
I think it's fair to say that Hegel wanted a way of reasoning that destroyed the kind of paradoxes that lead to that classical aporia (not always but mostly), but Kierkegaard felt that true paradoxical-ness was important to being a person and making an actual choice in things. In a sense in destroying paradox Hegel destroyed choice. Or true choice or whatever.

You need to see between the lines user. Jewry, not even once.

Ironically, Marx had a very similar view on Jews to you /pol/tards. You are arguing with your own.

I don't know why but I felt he was being ironic about the anti-semitism, like a trope on the popular image of the Jew, it just seems... so blatantly stupid and unlike the man.

He's worse in his private letters and tones the anti-semitism down if anything in his public discourses.

Even the public stuff you could very much play a game of /pol/ or Marx tho:
>The Jew has emancipated himself in a Jewish manner, not only because he has acquired financial power, but also because, through him and also apart from him, money has become a world power and the practical Jewish spirit has become the practical spirit of the Christian nations. The Jews have emancipated themselves insofar as the Christians have become Jews.

marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/jewish-question/

To me he comes across as overzealous and desperate, trying to get in on the in crowd: he's a Jew trying to prove he's not a Jew by being more anti-semitic than anyone else.

I forgot the letter quote, the rest of the letter is quite bad and he keeps using the term Jewish Nigger too, but I can't find a longer translation easily:
>It is now perfectly clear to me that, as the shape of his head and the growth of his hair indicate, he is descendant from the negroes who joined in the flight of Moses from Egypt (unless his mother or grandmother on the father’s side was crossed with a nigger). Now this union of Jewishness to Germanness on a negro basis was bound to produce an extraordinary hybrid. The importunity of the fellow is also niggerlike.

That's probably why this place has always defeated my best efforts to get anything worthwhile out of it.

I still make the mistake of trying sometimes.

But how exactly does your new position get shit out of the dialectical tension?

>I think Marx was right

He was clueless about money.

He was very Stirnerite about money, he thought everyone else's already belonged to him.

huehuehuehuehue kys

he is completly irrelevant

read

>not read travel literature
>mfw

his ideas, simply put, are dangerous to society
whether or not you agree with them is secondary

Leo Strauss says that young, fascist Germans wanted to live in a world with meaningful sacrifice, a world where Great hearts and souls could beat and breathe; Hegel believes in a world where the countless fallen on the battlefields have died for naught but the progress of history towards its inevitable conclusion- not as sacrifices, but as cattle on the slaughter-bench of history. Hegel doesn't believe in Great Men, he believes in 'World Historical Figures' who through no volition of their own and up channeling the zeitgeist of their times, as unknowing pawns of History [chess master].

Hegel's world is one without meaning or agency for individuals.