How to Get the Gist of Hegel

Hegel. Ugh. Why bother? Lots of reasons. Obscure, perhaps, but lots of reasons. I'll give you a few. The whole idea of "self-actualization" probably stems from some of his insights.

Instructions

Difficulty: Challenging

Things You’ll Need:

• Some Hegel texts (available by Internet or in a library).

1. Robert Solomon PERSONAL BACKGROUND: I started reading Hegel in 1980. His "Philosophy of Right" (Philosophie des Rechts) was so confusing and mentally challenging that I literally had to create a system of symbols and colors just to track his terms and their significance. Today they have a comfortable home in my heart and life, but it was hellish work. (And that's just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to examining his "corpus," or collection of works.) Robert Solomon and Charles Taylor are good, relatively accessible interpreters.
2. IDENTITY. We all struggle with it. Hegel struggled with all the big problems: morality, politics, art, mortality, history. Morality he suggests really consists of two branches: social norms ("Sittlichkeit" in German) and absolutes (Moralitaet). We live by norms, normally (see? Ha! of course we do...), and yet we are compelled to believe there is something more significant to our existence.
3. People Everywhere IDENTITY 2: Each of us has the psycho-philosophical burden of figuring out who we are. How do we do this? There's not a formula, and that may be (might be) Hegel's shortcoming: trying to come up with one. You work through issues all the time, think about history and art, and where "you" make sense in this complicated world. History, thinks Hegel, undergoes episodic shifts of tremendous significance. There was Christianity, there was Art, and today there is Science. You're caught up in a tremendous drama, whether you know it or not, and your individual existence is not as important as things like, say, the continuation of the Species (homo sapiens).
4. Charles Taylor's Book on Hegel PIPE DOWN AND STAND UP. You're not that important. (Sorry.) As Danny DeVito announces to all of us in "The Big Kahuna," "the world will spin without you." (Little need to dispute that absolute fact, even if you're cryogenically frozen and hoping for another lifetime here. What happens when the sun burns out? [Which it certain will.]) Sorry to be a bit depressing, but . . . that's Hegel!
5. SEMINAL MOMENT: Hegel allegedly witnessed Napoleon's descent upon his city, Jena (in 1803). Far above the battle, he saw the troops in formation and had a "moment of clarity." There are world-historic figures, and then there is the rest of us. World-historic figures alter human consciousness. This later, in the history of thought, gets interpreted in psychological terms filtered finely and continuously by scientific experimentation. Napoleon wasn't just taking over Jena while Hegel deposited his only copy of a manuscript in a mailbox. He was changing the way people think. It's not "me," it's "you." It's not "you." It's "us." It's not "us." It's the "Weltgeist" (World Spirit.) We are more than the sum of our parts, and this realization makes us strive for the longer good. Heady stuff, as I said at the outset, and perhaps not worth the effort. But maybe it is.

Tips & Warnings

• Never read original philosophy for more than an hour straight.
• On an elevator at Columbia University, distinguished philosopher Charles Larmore and I were engaged in a Hegel-discussion, and he said to me: "Well, I'm not sure Hegel is worth the effort." That was tongue-in-cheek. He's read his Hegel, and so have I, and it's not dissimilar to actually reading the Old Testament genealogies and wondering about why these are so important, so significant. Be patient. It might only make sense 30 years from now, and I hope you're around to witness that day and, not to be overly dramatic, but also in a very different world. Hegel can be your ally here if you tuck him into your brain somewhere.
• When I wrote, "the longer good," that was not a typo. It's not the "larger good of the species," but the longer good of it. What does that mean? Teleology: thinking into the future.
• Schopenhauer (another "great" philosopher worth troubling your mind over) scheduled his classes at the same time as Hegel's, knowing that nobody would show up. Then he could go home and play his flute and play with his cats. Schopenhauer was a Buddhist, ultimately, and if you read between the lines, in an indirect sense so was Hegel. But Hegel had a German mindset. Schopenhauer more nearly abandoned it. (See the latter's, THE WILL AS REPRESENTATION AND IDEA.)