Discovering Hegel: First impressions

March 4, 2008 in Reading
Tags: Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit

Reading a book review of Judith Butler’s in History and Theory on a book about Hegel in France in the 20th C., I was struck by just how important he was, particularly for the generation of scholars who were Derrida’s teachers in Paris.  Just think, Jean Wahl, Jean Hyppolite, Alexandre Kojeve… So I went to the library and started reading the Phenomenology of Spirit.

What a startling and humbling experience, reading the first few pages!  Only a page or two in and one is rebuked for the flippancy with which one thinks one might be able to evaluate this or that thinker.  The warnings of the ways in which knowledge might seem to be so, but which are only illusions or but the preface to such a knowledge.

To judge a thing that has substance and solid worth is quite easy, to comprehend it is much harder, and to blend judgement and comprehension in a definitive description is the hardest thing of all. (s.3)

Reading the Preface, then, I was struck by its demands – which include the demand to not take the preface itself seriously, that this is merely the preliminary.  Obvious, of course, but do we not forget this?  Do we not give the programmatic statements of a preface a weight we do not accord the rest, even though we struggle through the rest?

In our time pressed culture, where things are endlessly weighed, valued and calculated and considered in terms of their use value, do we not find it so much easier to skip to aims and conclusions?  Where is the becoming?

These are, of course, preliminary thoughts.  I’ve not read far in the Preface at all.  All I have at the moment is a sense of a huge edifice and perhaps a necessity of negotiating it.