My Experience Reading Hegel

I don’t pretend to understand Hegel. I’ve read little of him and my understanding is tenuous. I haven’t even read any of the major canonical works of Hegel, like the Science of Logic and the Phenomenology of Spirit. I've read his early, unpublished works, the 1802 System der Sittlichkeit (System of Ethical Life) and the 1804–5 Jena System, alongside portions of some shorter works, such as “Who Thinks Abstractly?” and “The Spirit of Christianity and its Fate”. So what I am presenting here is a series of impressionistic notes, not about Hegel, but my experience of reading Hegel.

For me there are three stages in reading Hegel. At the first stage, I am totally unable to parse Hegel’s sentences. It's because Hegel demands close attention to the syntax of his sentences that few philosophers insist on. Seriously reading him is akin to reading a difficult work of literature. I often got stumped by what a pronoun or grammatical particle was referring to, the sentences can be that tangled. That’s why I like to joke that to understand Hegel properly you should be drilled in diagramming sentences. It doesn’t help, of course, that I’m reading Hegel in English, with the German syntax fit into an English straitjacket. I certainly can’t tell if the translator has mangled Hegel’s already punishing syntax.

I can parse Hegel’s sentences at the next stage. The syntax falls into place but sometimes I feel like I'm reading variations of “colorless green ideas sleep furiously” or even “the gostak distims the goshes”. Other times I can make out the sense of individual sentences, but what I miss is the movement of the whole. I can’t linger on one sentence. I’m jumpy and my eyes slide onto the next, but no overall sense presents itself to me. It is at Stage 3 where sense and syntax finally combine. Here I can finally grasp the movement of Hegel’s concepts in my own words.

Hegel’s style is different from someone like Kant. I read the Critique of Pure Reason and it was like reading a mathematics textbook: you start off with the premises and common notions and slowly work through the implications, even if it is not formal in the same way that mathematics is. The sentences are the containers of Kant’s arguments, instead of being their substance. The difficulty of reading Kant is the tedium of working through each operation. If you lose your thread, you have to start all over again, but for Hegel there is often no thread in the first place to follow.

That I've numbered the stages might seem to imply that the stages follow one another in proper succession. That hasn’t been the case in my experience. Often I stare uncomprehending at the text, even after I've read through commentary, until something clicks. That lets me jump straight to Stage 3 from Stage 1, until I end up losing the thread and slip back into Stage 2. I end up impatiently meandering through the rest of the text.

That was my experience reading the System of Ethical Life, which was the first long-form Hegel I had attempted. Incomprehensible, it sent me back to H. S. Harris’ introduction. It was after a while, dejected and having given up, that I decided to glance at the text again and the pieces suddenly fit. It was exciting as I could follow the thread through Hegel’s tangle all the way through the first sub-division “Absolute Ethical Life On The Basis of Relation”. It didn’t stay with me for the following subdivisions, “The Negative or Freedom or Transgression” and “Ethical Life”, though it was no longer meaningless. I muddled through it without feeling completely lost.

These stages can repeat. Later I would find myself reading Gillian Rose’s Hegel Contra Sociology, which discusses this text at some length, and made me glance at a few pages of H. S. Harris’ discussion of it in Hegel's Development: Night Thoughts (Jena 1801-1806). It gave me an obscure desire to check out the System of Ethical Life once again, and the first few pages presented themselves with an absolute clarity, ten times more than my last attempt at it. It wasn’t that I had learned more about Hegel that allowed me to understand what was going on here, though that helped. If I were to explain how it felt, it was that I grasped a thread in Hegel’s writing that was distinct from my experience reading Rose and Harris. I didn’t end up reading more, though, so I don’t know how much of it I would have been able to make my way through this time around.

This luck didn’t stick with me when I was reading Hegel’s Jena System (comprising a Logic and a Metaphysics). I puzzled over the incomprehensible first few pages (it didn’t help that the first few pages of the manuscript are missing, together with a few more scattered pages.) I followed Hegel’s thread through the headings “Quality, “Quantity” and “Quantum”. I might have been able to work through “Infinity”, and so finish up “Simple Connection” in the Logic. Disappointingly I found the rest of the text incomprehensible, even if I could parse out each sentence. Sometimes an idea or two would jump out at me, but that’s it. I’m still embarrassed by this, and I wish that I had more patience and focus with me, and I really hope that I can make up for it by re-reading this, I would like it to go better. Perhaps I really will have to read a few pages a day with detailed notes, and take months to finish it. That’s for another time.

Hegel isn’t the only one I've had a similar experience with, though not at this level. I’ve had similar experiences reading Gilles Deleuze and Jacques Derrida. It is doubly interesting having this experience reading a work on Hegel himself. The work I have in mind is Alexandre Koyré’s essay “Hegel at Jena”. ¹ Koyré’s name might strike the reader as familiar, and he is best-known among English-speaking audiences as a philosopher and a historian of science. Thomas Kuhn mentions Koyré as a precursor in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, though they are philosophically quite distinct.

“Hegel at Jena” washed over me at first. It concerns the unpublished writings from Hegel’s time at Jena. Hegel's earliest unpublished works, which are often on religious subjects and soaked in Romanticism, were written in Tübingen and Frankfurt, covering the years 1788 to 1800. He was in Jena from 1801 to 1807, the period culminating the publication of the Phenomenology of Spirit, and then the works he is well-known for. It is this “Jena period”, comprising some published essays and unpublished drafts (including the System of Ethical Life and the Jena System containing the Logic and Metaphysics) that Koyré was so interested in excavating, being sandwiched between Hegel’s juvenile writing published in Early Theological Writings and his mature published work in the Science of Logic and the Phenomenology. It was exhausting and I retained at first vague notions and sentiments, which annoyed me afterward. It certainly didn’t help that Koyré included two long quotations from Hegel’s Jena Logic.

I remember finding the quotations impossible to parse, and so I guiltily skimmed and then skipped over them. Koyré’s apology that bookended the first excursion into Hegel made me feel slightly better about skipping it, though it still annoyed me.

I have tried to translate Hegel’s text as faithfully as possible, nonetheless without wishful thinking as to the value of this ‘‘translation.’’ I apologize to the reader who might very well find it incomprehensible: and indeed, it is so. But to tell the truth, Hegel’s text itself, which I have cited in extenso and to which I will be able to refer, is more or less as incomprehensible as our translation. ²

It was when I found myself reading it again, while taking notes, that I realized how sharp the essay was. Even this intimidating passage from Hegel was something I was now able to annotate closely … until I hit a snag and dropped down to Stage 2. I can pinpoint the exact moment of the transition, because it is there that my detailed paragraph-by-paragraph notes abruptly break off and become more impressionistic, not strictly following the text.

I've come to realize how crucial those early groping readings where nothing sticks are. A surface reading can seed my brain as the words sink into my gray matter, unconsciously. A single tortured reading minus comprehension ends up priming me to unlock bursts of Stage 3. Now this applies to a great many philosophers, but maybe Hegel is the exemplar. Hegel in my opinion is a literary philosopher, the one who approaches philosophy like a novelist. No wonder Jacques Derrida called Hegel the philosopher of the book, while Jean Hyppolite considered the Phenomenology to be the Bildungsroman of Spirit.

Koyré makes the observation that Hegel “thinks ‘in circles’ while we think ‘in straight lines’”. ³ Hegel penserait « en cercle » tandis que nous, nous penserions « en ligne droite ». It isn’t just a matter of “understanding” Hegel, translating him into common parlance. If only Hegel were simpler, if only we didn’t have to uncover the secret message of his work! There is often a desire for a hidden key that would unlock what was promised by the title of J. M. Stirling’s 1865 book The Secret of Hegel.

It is this impression of magic, of mystery, that made some speak of ‘‘the secret of Hegel,’’ that made us say that Hegel did not reveal to us the principles of his method and that, having masterfully practiced the dialectical method, he did not do anything to teach it. ⁴

The opacity of Hegel is itself something that is to be accepted and understood on its own terms, through the patience involved in untangling his movements. It is this patience, for example, that allows you to unite both sides of the abrupt transitions in his work and at the same time grasp the necessity of this abruptness.

The popular pedagogical approach to philosophy is misleading when it involves the extraction of a set of concepts from a certain philosopher or canon of philosophers, which is then applied to a set of given problems and situations. This is most prevalent in the popular academic reception of Gilles Deleuze. It is a matter of “explaining” a set of concepts, like “dialectic”, “spirit” with examples, such that the concepts motivate the examples and the examples motivate the concepts, forming a self-satisfying hermetically sealed loop. What this two-tier dualism of concept and example misses, of course, is that the application of a concept to some example itself has a conceptual logic to it.

What is instead involved in philosophy is the construction of an intuition, which in my opinion Koyré draws out beautifully in his comparison of Hegel’s discussion of time in the Jena Logic with his discussions of it.

It is way more correct, more careful, more orderly, divided in paragraphs as will the Encyclopedia later be. Hegel no longer writes for himself, for noting and fixing an intuition. He thinks of his listeners; he also thinks of his readers; for if it had already been a long time that he had the desire to do so, he then also had the hope of being able to finally publish his System. The style is more dry, more ‘‘abstract,’’ resembling further what one is used to calling ‘‘dialectic.’’ ⁵

The older philosophers had “waste books” and notebooks with their scattered inscriptions, which show an astonishing amount of thought and wit, despite written for a single person only. Lichtenberg, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, even Descartes are examples. This is lost when it no longer becomes a matter of “noting and fixing an intuition”.

I've always adored Slavoj Žižek, and he has been my introduction to Hegel. I don’t think that I would have gotten any interest in Hegel without him. All this is despite the fact that he has become “slop”, repeating himself, plaigarizing his old arguments. Is he not the prime example of the pedagogue? After all, he does prefer the later Hegel to the Hegel of the Jena period, and thinks of the dryness as an improvement. Žižek himself is astonishingly dry despite being entertaining with his philosophical pyrotechnics. His essays are fun to read because of how predictable he is. We all know that he will bring the topic back to the couple Hegel-Lacan. What suffuses his writing is his reliance on a “stupid” Hegelian formula that nevertheless in his hands becomes quite productive.

Žižek’s inversion of rhetoric, taking the “worse” option as part of a wager, and the use of Hegelianism-as-paradox that comes in a flash have quite a pedagogical function. I come out of reading Žižek with given twists of thought in my head that are quite “applicable”; that for example antagonism should be seen not as undermining totality but is rather included in it … Žižek uses it as a huge hammer to bash in all the nails he can find. Consider his argument in The Metastases of Enjoyment, where he explains his obsession with using examples from popular culture. Žižek the philosopher is his own first student.

I resort to these examples above all in order to avoid pseudo-Lacanian jargon, and to achieve the greatest possible clarity not only for my readers but also for myself—the idiot for whom I endeavour to formulate a theoretical point as clearly as possible is ultimately myself … In a somewhat homologous way, I am convinced of my proper grasp of some Lacanian concept only when I can translate it successfully into the inherent imbecility of popular culture. ⁶

If I were to partition the Hegelians I've read in two groups, lines and circles, I am afraid that I would have to put Žižek among the lines. Joining him are Adrian Johnston, the analytic Hegelian Robert Brandom, and his neo-rationalist followers Reza Negarestani and Pete Wolfendale. Among the circles I would have to include Gillian Rose, Alexandre Koyré, perhaps H. S. Harris. Reading them I sometimes have the apprehension of something like this circle, and it is this circle that ultimately constitutes my experience of reading Hegel.

Diagrams from Alexandre Kojève’s lectures on Hegel