How could we summarize hegel's philosophy? i read several articles and attended several seminaries...

Spirit confronting itself as Spirit

Mankind reaching a point where they can fully understand themselves as Mankind and comprehend (and possibly direct? under strict guidance from Spirit) ts own course in history.

S P I R I T

I hate cheap answers like this. So emblematic of Veeky Forums bullshitters. Obviously it's better to read the books, but since you know what Hegel would want why don't you tell us a bit about them? How the fuck is one supposed to discuss literature if every answer is "read it." That's like half of every thread on this piece of shit board

Parmenides 2: Bigger, Longer, and Uncut

Hegel is an extremely complex writer and you can't just summarize him real quick like you can with Kierkegaard or Socrates.

ok I'll try because that's a legit question

Spirit needs to negate itself in order to become conscious of itself. That's the "dialectic" part you're aware of. For instance, if I work in order to stay alive (let's say I build a shed), as a worker I negate my own spirit since that kind of work is mainly something material, involving physical skills. Also what makes me work is something biological (not spiritual). However the result is that I become conscious of my own spirit since I can contemplate myself through the shed (wow not bad, I'm smart, I'm skillful).

This process is the same everywhere. It's what explains historical events, politics, language, the arts etc.

Now what it all implies (and I guess that's the main part) is that reality is, for a large part, what it should be (and it keeps actually becoming what it should be). Reality, that is, what is real, is for a large part what it should be, that is, something rational, spiritual, even "moral" in some way. The events that may seem absurd or terrible or unfair (wars) may only be the negative moment needed for spirit to advance by transforming the world, by making itself self-conscious, by making freedom real (cos yeah if you're conscious that men are spiritual then they should be free).

"For a large part" only, though - rocks do not accomplish anything related to spirit, unless a spiritual being transforms them. A stupid war in a stupid country that brings nothing positive may obviously not be "rational", but then also it's not actually "real", it's just something that could have happened or not, so who cares.

Plato had a notion of the Ideal as something existing completely separate from our reality, which is only a shadow of the true reality- the eternal, unchanging world of ideas. You may catch a glimpse of this world through reason but you will never reach it. The French Revolution had a great impact on Hegel. It was as if History, driven by rational progress towards ever increasing freedom, had been set into motion. ''The Real is Rational and the Rational will be Real''- Hegel can sound pretty messianic at times, harking back to esoteric strains of protestant theology and forwards to Marx. He was also heir to Aristotle's ideas of organic development- actuality, potentiality and the unfolding of the telos- and Heraclitus' dialectical logic. Hegel attempts to think beyond what is thinkable, beyond static A=A logic, towards thinking as a kinetic ever changing process.

i dont have to read hegel now right?

thanks!

>tfw the juggernaut of Critical Reason you unleashed upon the world ends up wrecking your beloved Prussian State, brings about communism (via marx) and makes everyone into trannies(via butler and frankfurt school).

>can't just summarize him real quick like you can with Kierkegaard or Socrates.

Bait or mental retardation? Perhaps we'll never know.

This is a good explanation

Finally a good Hegel post on Veeky Forums.

Still dont get it.

Marx's dialectic is far more coherent than this babble.

thats because marx's shit is watered down garbage for psueds, it's literally "hegel for the working class"

ok buddy.

tell me more about the spirit of the shit leaving your sphincter then

this thread inspired me to go read some hegel, brb

Read his lectures.

Are there any good charts for reading Hegel without secondary sources?

Hell, where do people collect these charts? I've got a lot of philosophy to read.

hey its me, and funnily enough i actually just finished reading his 'introductory lectures on aesthetics'

i'm really depressed because he effectively said that art was 'over' (at least in the sense of the beautiful/the sublime), and i think he's right.

In related news, I finally got somebody on /pol/ to describe Hegelian Dialectic to me.

He copypasted the first two paragraphs of Stanford's philosophy dictionary on Hegel, then added a single line at the bottom basically saying "hegelian dialectics lets the people in power choose the synthesis and which parts of philosophy to use."

So that was disappointing, but I got what I wanted finally.

Don't read Hegel without secondary sources, it's a pointless effort and I think every Hegel scholar would tell you the same. When reading the Phenemenology i've had times where I didn't even understand the commentary, it's hard enough as it is.

I mean, i'm a marxist and I would agree that marx watered down hegel. But I think marx was smart enough that he did it intentionally to fit hegel into his project.

took me 10 minutes at minimum and reading them 4-5 times to digest each passage in the Phenomenology and that was after 2000 pages of secondary literature and some lectures. some shit just won't click until 400 pages later, and others will never click.

when i read hegel, after expending enough mental effort on a particular section (which often amounts to skimming an absolutely baffling assertion two or three times), i like to press on and assume that it will become clear later, which it often does.

Hegel is probably much better to re-read than to read.

I feel like his quote "Nothing great in the world has ever been accomplished without passion" shows a lot about his central philosophy, which is about the absence of physical motivation and significance alongside humanity and our progress. It's all about emotion and thought.

his Idea is God and his Dialectic the Trinity
it's one of many 'secular' attempts to embrace the otherworldly, Plato's attempt holding the pre-eminent place in western thought.

He seeks for us to achieve the height of our self-knowledge, just as Christianity sought for us to uncover our true nature. In the end the goal is to turn our eyes towards God's illuminating light.

good. how do you re-read without reading?

>and i think he's right.

Of course he is right. Just look at vaporwave. It is realistically original(could not exists in a different era), but it is literally old music. Irony has won and killed everything.

beyond that, I think we've transcended art to the point where (as he claimed) prose is the only form left which can actually perfect our self-knowledge.

Unfortunately, the confusion which has resulted from the Death of God has led to a resurgence of hideous symbolic art, and the determinists who cant come to grips with their own ideology degrade literature with their petty moralizing nonsense.

Brutalist and modern architecture are the only 'good' things (from the Hegelian perspective) that 'determinism' has ever produced, and even thats not even authentic because form isnt completely subservient to function. Determinists aren't yet self-aware enough to move on to sculpture, much less painting, music, or poetry. Besides, even if they were to, what could they represent that isn't just a shitty copy of nature (which anyways would inevitably have God lurking just outside the frame)? Hegel would have been repulsed.

'Determinist' art is probably just a Yelp review with 360 pictures of the food all taken at different angles with a Canon 5D.

Irony is bad too though. Also inb4 some fag gets buttblasted because James Joyce or someone else was an atheist. That's not the point. Give the art school version of Sam Harris a chunk of marble and see what comes of it.

because you read the books before you discuss them m'boy

the moment you can derive a system from his thought, what marx did. is the only way to talk about hegel and not sound retarded to people begging for simplified answers. this is why marx is hot. the same way harry potter is hot as an amalgation of fantasy archetypes fitting for the current geist.

It topped out with Abstract Expressionism but people still make art, just not transcendent painting.

I don't think vaporwave is all that ironic at its core, even if a lot of people interpret it to be ironic. Irony is overrated and not all that prevalent. It's a kind of shorthand for superiority complex

What about deadpan photography, Conceptual art, appropriation art, generative art, process art, Arte Povera, land art, environmental art, New Realism, etc., even surrealism ... basically anything that can be summed up as 'postmodernism'?

They're all the avant-garde of artistic thought, which still exists despite the mass marketing of art common today. The refusal of the art object, in favour of ideas, serialization, arrangement, measurement; not representation in a painting but just presentation. Things have meaning just because they are. Not a copy of nature, it is nature.