Review of 'Phenomenology of spirit' on 'Goodreads'
3 stars
The world in which Hegel chose to be a mystic rather than a thinker might have been preferable, yet all the more unimaginable.
If only he had enough wit to write simply instead with an absolute determination not to be understood, more people might actually find his works informative. If one can suffer through Hegel's unnecessarily contrived writing and endless theologizing, one can come out of the whole experience with an almost enlightened understanding of the world.
Hegel does not present you with this work, he confronts you with it. If you are able to decipher the words, what he is saying might just blow your mind if you were never before presented with these concepts.
First, Hegel invents a whole new dialectical method to explain the way he arrived at his conclusions. Affirmation through negation. Everything is to be negated to facilitate growth, but what Hegel points out rightly, …
The world in which Hegel chose to be a mystic rather than a thinker might have been preferable, yet all the more unimaginable.
If only he had enough wit to write simply instead with an absolute determination not to be understood, more people might actually find his works informative. If one can suffer through Hegel's unnecessarily contrived writing and endless theologizing, one can come out of the whole experience with an almost enlightened understanding of the world.
Hegel does not present you with this work, he confronts you with it. If you are able to decipher the words, what he is saying might just blow your mind if you were never before presented with these concepts.
First, Hegel invents a whole new dialectical method to explain the way he arrived at his conclusions. Affirmation through negation. Everything is to be negated to facilitate growth, but what Hegel points out rightly, is that each part of the process is as equally important as any other. In truth, what Hegel is attempting to do with this work is transform our understanding of contingency as a mere coincidence into contingency as a necessity. If we are to understand this, then we are to study how to turn our perception contingency into an understanding of its necessity.
Second, I love how Hegel takes on the argument that in the search for the truth, we cannot ignore a human subject in that whole process. We make our experience, it is not merely fed to us, therefore, our role in the whole process cannot be ignored.
Third, the master-slave dialectic is brilliant in its conclusions, yet it could have been argued much much better.
Lastly, there is already Marx in Hegel. What I mean is that Hegel already uses words that could easily be associated with the material rather than abstract, but he is simply too preoccupied with this movement of consciousness towards the absolute knowledge, godhood, that he fails to take notice of it.
I will never read this book again, no, thank you, no, sir.
