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Other philosophy communities have only interpreted the world in various ways. The point, however, is to change it. [ x ]

"I thunk it so I dunk it." - Descartes

Short Attention Span Reading Group: summary, list of previous discussions, schedule

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Felt cocky, so i tried reading Hegel (hexbear.net)

submitted 6 days ago by Big@hexbear.net to c/philosophy@hexbear.net

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And boy howdy does my head hurt.

I'm almost through the preface, and i have NO clue what he's talking about.

So far, the only thing I've gotten is something about how a result is determined by the path that lead to it, and that a negation is not a destruction of something but just a further step forward.

But I have no fucking clue about his other concepts like Notion, Subjective/Objective, what he means by Science or how to piece it all together.

It really feels like walking in, mid conversation, in a foreign language.

Is the rest of the book easier to read, or should I just call it quits here?

I just wanted to better understand dialectics lmao

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[–] mmmari@lemmy.zip 12 points 6 days ago (2 children)

well, a curated introduction might be a way to get into it, kinda like cliffnotes and then you can go from there.. Philosophize This podcast has several episodes on Hegel. sometimes the writing (of anything) is just a product of its time and is hard to understand nowadays due to sentence structure and vocabulary. nothing wrong with using tips and tricks here and there to digest something as complicated as philosophical writing

[–] Johnny_Arson@hexbear.net 11 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago)

sometimes the writing (of anything) is just a product of its time and is hard to understand nowadays due to sentence structure and vocabulary

In the case of Hegel this is compounded by his deliberately obtuse writing style.

It's like how scientific names in biology got really hard to pronounce because a bunch of nerds that named the things engaged in Latin vocabulary brinkmanship (at least according to my professor when I was studying evolutionary biology).

[–] TreadOnMe@hexbear.net 3 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago)

It also doesn't help that because he was writing in German, there are these kind of compound phrase-words that are extremely hard to translate into English (because he is essentially making up new words in German). The closest English equivalent is kind of how I do it which is to just put dashs between things (such as phrase-word) but even that isn't an exact representation, at least according to my friend who is fluent in German and has read Hegel.

He also deliberately engages in using these phrase-words for a long time in a purely metaphorical sense, before going 'actually I meant all of this literally, now go back and read the last 100 pages with that in mind, despite me giving you no indication that that was the case prior in the text.' And then in the next section he will use something extremely literally before going, 'lol jk it was a metaphor the whole time.'

And it is extremely easy to miss that change if your eyes have glazed over from reading Hegel too long. Which is why you can kind of argue about it forever.

Truely infuriating writing style