"Hegel put me off by his language, as arrogant as it was laborious; I regarded him with downright mistrust. He seemed to me like a man who was caged in the edifice of his own words and was pompously gesticulating in prison." Carl G. Jung My thoughts are that Hegel was full of shit and employed that tactic of not being clear to make of himself great, by pretending and creating a language that if nobody could understood it was because they weren't smart enough to understand and made himself into a riddle on purpose. And maybe that is the main influence some nasty intellectuals got from him, elements of deception. Besides some few useful concepts. That's just my theory based on the reflection I quoted.
There is nothing more intellectually dishonest than Marxism. Marx stole his work from the French Socialist, and Father of the Libertarian Socialist school, Joseph-Pierre proudhon. Marx took his works, and degenerated them into a self-destructive and self-loathing jealous ideology.
@@nils191 Whoo that's a very passionate response. As much respect as I have for Proudhon, he was not 'the last philosopher' and never will be. While I personally believe Proudhon's 'anarchist' politics to be superior to the Communism that grew from Marxism-Leninism, that's no reason to discard the works of Marx, and all the wonderful work done in response to him.
@@kothostovI mean it was good for me since I had no job, was in CC , found out I excel more with digital courses even if I enjoy in person so all A’s through that year and 2021 😂
@@AbdallahTeach watch the video and read the comment I replied to. If you don't understand Hegel that's fine but I'm not explaining it in a youtube comment.
+Skippo If you're good at critical and creative thinking, then it comes easy. If you study philosophy just to study someone else's ideas, then it won't. You won't necessarily get rich off of it either way unless you cultivate above par communication and speaking skills.
EduardoPavezGoye It's true. Marx made much use of this idea, but later he was taught as dogma and the idea of the dielectic was used but not understood well.
Satoshi Chomsky I was actually hoping for that. I want to become more familiar with Marxism and the modern Left, so I have gradually been working back. But to understand Marx, one must understand Hegel, and to understand Hegel one must understand Kant. The video is good, but I think a few minutes on contextualising Hegel would be better - to show where he sat among his contemporaries (or the tradition he was a part of) and his impact. It was a very short comment on his Dialectics, which is probably his greatest contribution to Western thought!
Dee Gee as a hegelian-marxist I think you don't really need to undertand Hegel to understand Marx. sure, it helps, but the problems and questions Hegel rises are totally different from the ones Marx was worried about. Marx is more an economist who happened to use certain elements from Hegel, but you can understand it pretty much reading him directly. Hegel is a different beast who takes years and years to tame and whose work has no practical use in "real life". ;)
As a German I have to say, that Hegel´s language is pure beauty. It might tend to drown in its own complexity at first sight, but if you read it again and again it unfolds to a thunderstorm of both, lyrical depth and precision. You would lose that quality by simplifying it.
It's a great philosophy and profound like any other philosophy and even has its own books, although 1% of the time the words that don't make sense are a bit odd, especially that part that feels normal but gives you a heightened feeling, which is odd.
I would urge any fan of philosophy to learn german, it might take a long time to reach the levels of depth that is presented in philosophical ststements, but it would be a major adavantage to comprehend those profound people in their own tongue, plus you can flex in german with complex literal terms which I do
or when a 9 year-old boy dresses up like a drag queen and wears lipstick it's called "brave". I never imagined that the sexualization of children would be called that, but such are the times.
"Hegel, a banal, void, disgusting and ignorant charlatan who mixes insanity and nonsense with unprecedented arrogance, what his partisans convey as if it were immortal wisdom held to be true by idiots ... condemned to ruin a whole generation of intellectuals " - Schopenhauer
Even though I know little about Hegel, I'm quite sure that one of the most valuable lessons that his work can teach you is the fact that we need each other to know what we are and develop our "true" self-consciousness. This video should have explained this as well.
hegel’s concept is literally just a perspective of dominance. “am i greater or lesser than [object/person]?” “how does it benefit me” “what is my relationship to it?” he makes it sound complicated largely because his writing is not clear or concise, a sign of midwittery.
The idea that I like the most in Hegel’s philosophy is about the relationships, when he says that a relationship is the projection of the self in the other that determine the relation. That idea had followed me ever since I read about it.
Lol “it may only be by the time we reach the 2020s that we find the right balance of extremes.” This aged very well. As an American, I can say that we have not reached a balance.
my coworker from Germany swore by Hegel and I wasn’t able to comprehend what he saw in his philosophy. Anyway after searching for a while I found this video to describe his philosophy (I could only remember his names started with an ‘H’). It’s still not easily comprehendable but it sounds like he is biting a little off of aristotle who said things have a mean. Anything in excess or lacking is not balanced and thus we have to find a balance in everything.
Could you please put subtitles on your videos? For deaf or hearing-impared people, for non-native speakers who want to learn English with your lectures.
I discovered that if I could identify and silence my reaction of annoyance and resistance at reading what appeared to be the same sentence only structured slightly differently over and over again, and then learned to not try so hard to keep all concepts from the start of a paragraph, in a place in my mind where I could consciously remember them all and follow the the links and associations that were being made, then suddenly, reading a page became like the written equivalent of a magic-eye picture of the kind that forms a 3d image when you disengage your standard focus reflex and allow the edges to blur... Not in a pictorial sense like using text characters to render an image but within my mind if the words moved at a steady pace and weren't held back then a blurring of meaning began to take place and I learned that it didn't matter if the concepts fell away into the back of my awareness as they would be contained in the next sentence too... the writing style was doing the job normally done by the 'working memory' or biological version of 'RAM' in the brain which, instead of doing that task as per usual, my conscious awareness had the image of some simple but definitely 3 dimensional geometric shapes forming. It was quite unlike any other book I read and I really wish I had not tried so hard to force it to make sense at every step in the standard way, when I first picked it up, because that was exhausting! If you follow my meaning..!
+Graham Loines This is excellent. People assume that Hegel was being cryptic on purpose. But I think his language speaks to us on a different level- one that requires a well-trained mind to read into. Just as I wouldn't dismiss Calculus because the average person who doesn't have a solid grasp on Algebra doesn't understand it, so too is it irrational to dismiss Hegel because many people have a hard time understanding him. He wrote of many different concepts that the video didn't touch on. Studying Hegel is an exercise of the mind and intellect. It teaches us that philosophy should be read carefully and analyzed critically, instead of mindlessly consumed.
+Graham Loines Reading this is like listening to a one-sided conversation where one person rambles on delineating their ideas in a flowing manner and at the same time without pausing in order to form a single coherent thought but rather create an entire idea much like a painter brushing on a canvas without once lifting their hand to pause for a moment which is not to say an inherently bad thing rather it can be quite tedious to read as it challenges the reader to keep up with the pace with writer without stopping for a moments breath in order to ponder on the writer's soliloquy. [this is challenging to do, but fun. I should do this more often to piss off my professors]
KikomochiMendoza I have received similar feedback before! It's quite similar to criticism of Hegel's style... but also a potential hazard with attempts at posting conversationally in a RU-vid comments section... I think! I'm not an academic and recognise that there are certain structural elements lacking which, would perhaps be habitually included by someone who is regularly submitting work for formal assessment. But... I do enjoy delineating in a flowing way when the mood takes me, especially if I'm ranting... long sentences, sparsely, perhaps incorrectly punctuated, to invite the reader to perform some mental agility in order to keep up, without letting up, relentlessly moving forward but implying that a pause is coming up only to fly right past the opportunity, just to see if the reader managed to keep up and then as I am recalibrating my sense of direction, so as to allow adjustments to my trajectory and slamming on the brakes if necessary (maybe too late... ) without warning... and sliding spectacularly close to the limit.... waiting for the next check-point to come into view (I might just make it after all.... it's gonna be close though...) and then hitting the accelerator as soon as I'm pointing in the right direction... and repeating the process until I have visited each checkpoint and I feel fully expressed! Sometimes it ends up making sense and other times it's just a mess... I can laugh at it either way, and as no grades are going to be affected, might as well write in the way that i like and all the better if it's unexpected! Perhaps I'll install Grammarly sometime in the near future if I am likely to write more regularly... Make it all a little easier on the reader... What do you think...? Good idea?... :)
An advice to everyone who wishes to read Hegel's greatest book The Phenomenology Of The Spirit; you should start first with his other book, Philosophy Of History, where he sees ancient empires as moments in the evolution of the Total Spirit, and this is the golden key to his imposing and magestic phenomenological conception. After reading his lectures on the history of Philosophy and his aesthetic theory, go straight to Logic part 1and 2. Don't be overwhelmed by the title, it's really a great read, in it he talks about great cultural events; empty logical categories have no meaning for Hegel. Wish you good luck sisters and brothers, read Hegel for he is the summit of western metaphysics.
Hegel's prose obviously didn't work for me. I gave it a try and, without understanding most of it, I came to think of him as just a metaphysical rambler. Interesting, but too dense for me to sift through casually. Anyway, this video clears things up nicely. Thanks! By the way, there's a fellow on RU-vid called Dr Gregory Sadler who does a weekly series delving into The Phenomenology of Spirit. His videos are a little beyond me at the present moment but some of you may be interested in his in-depth reading.
The Manifold Curiosity To be honest with you and everyone, sure this video INTERPRETS his philosophy in a nice manner, but it doesn't -of course- begin to engulf its entirety at any good level. Hegel's philosophy goes way beyond this and in many ways diverges from the narrator's perspectives. With all respect to Alain (who is nonetheless a great speaker), this just falls into an interpretation of the thinker -and this applies to each philosopher and author they cover- and accommodates the thought into their convenience (with the 'optimist' philosophy they are trying to shove).
Just take Schopenhauer instead and you will be happy. Schopenhauer is all about logical reasoning, Hegel is about magical thinking, which is NOT philosophical at all.
@@esmolol4091 THE FUCK! Have you even bothered to open "The science of Logic"? Damn it with all these overgeneralizations of one of the most rigorous people to ever walk the earth. That is what our society lacks today in non-analytical fields..RIGOUR
Hegelian taught us so much more. He taught us about systems and how to create and maintain those systems. He taught us about social media and trends before anyone else as well I believe. Especially with indespensable terms like Zeitgeist.
absolute knowledge is by far one of the coolest parts of philosophy. his ideas about synthesis and analysis are very important to know when your trying to write or be creative.
I have been a long time lurker of this channel, I just wanted to comment and let yal kno how much I appreciate you guys and gals who work to put up these videos! It has helped coup better with my self and all that is around me! Philosophy is awesome!!
I believe Hegel's prose is really hard to grasp. However, it is not unnecessary as some of you have argued. Hegel's work is way more than just a couple of points. He tried to critically overcome Kant's ideas in order to give us a new comprehension of the world around us. When Hegel argued about history, he doesn't believe exactly that it could be just "useful" to look back and remember something. For him, concepts and reality itself gain meaningful content through processes. In other words, things are now as they are because they were what they were. This idea is specially important for him, because points out that the study of history, in regards to the observer works as a play in a theater in which the observer already knows the end of it. Those who study history, while they do it, know what is going to happen. But the notion of knowing the resolution lets you see the intricate connection between two facts and the possibility of deeper relation between them. Through that, he proposes dialectics as a method of understanding that deeper connection between history and man as a result of history. Because he believed, against Kant assumption, that because things are not presented to us (humans) directly though our senses, it doesn't mean that we can't have access to that other side of reality (absolute). So, in his works, he tries to build reality through his method, in a way in which you can only understand the entirety by observing its entirety. Many readers and academics who work with Hegel will tell you that once you reach the last chapter of the Phenomonology of the Spirit, things just clicked, and a second reading is immediately necessary, for those things that did not make any sense suddenly are comprehensible. And that is not Hegel's prose fault, is is a particular circular way of presenting ideas at the same time than a method. A method that is not easy to understand, but is full of tools to better comprehend reality as an object which resides in society at the same time that society in reality. As Hegel said "philosophy can only be learned by doing philosophy." A last thing. Hegel was a Liberal who argued, during the french revolution, that the principle of Monarchy was the best way to care for liberty and individual rights. You can be in favor or against that idea, but Hegel thought of it because of the particularities of its time. He was profoundly Liberal. The stories say that when he was a Teacher, he used to gather at night with his students to hold conversations about liberty and the french revolution in a time when those practices were strongly prohibited. And one day, one of his students was caught and imprison for divulge Liberal ideas on a public space. As a result, Hegel and his students went on a boat, every other night, to speak to this student imprisoned to speak about Liberal ideas and the news regarding the french in latin (in order to avoid being caught).
I recommend the Philosophy of History for newcomers; the writing here is significantly more accessible than his other works, such as Logic and the Phenomenology
If you are interested in Hegels view on history, I recommend you the tragedy of man by Imre Madách, a relatively short drama where Lucifer attempts to make Adam commit suicide by showing him the future of humanity. It has a bit bitter feeling because of the plot, but it is a good presentation of the thesis-antithesis-synthesis system.
Fascinating premise; although Lucifer can't see the future. We fail to grasp the spiritual drama that took place in the garden, so people tend to fictionalize it.
This video is horrible. Not only does it shit on hegel immediately with no reasoning as to why "it's hard to read cause it just is!!" he then makes no mention of tautology nor thesis/antithesis/synthesis. Disgusting.
You should uhhh first read the ancient greek philosophy. Then you should read Descartes, Kant, and Martin Luther (yes, the guy who led the protestant reformation). Only then do you have a real basis to start reading Hegel.
Thanks, I borrowed the book History of Philosophy by Bertrand Russell but I never finished it. Maybe I will return to that book before continuing, recently I've been into kierkegaard though
Hegel isn't THAT hard to read. At least in german i guess. It's definetly convoluted and at times a bit frustrating but i like the sense of satisfaction i get when i think i understood his point finally.
I really agree with the second idea. We are really protective when it comes to our ideas so if we learn from things we dislike, we are more easily able to transition to the correct statement.
every description in these videos is utilitarian. which is ok, but there was more to kant and hegel than practical applications. i understand that this channel is meant to popularize philosophy, so rarely does The School of Life get into the nitty gritty- attempting a rounded out general conception of the philosopher.. However, I still watch these videos if I need to take a breath above water and get to the core positions of these philosophers, and how they still influence us.
I have read all comments and can say that in 7 minutes is not possible interpret his contribution. I have studied 45 years his books. He did help me to understand history. His Philosophy of history is the best one, because he did use four Aristotelian questions. He did give the best answers ( freedom is the purpose, volition and knowledge are means, the state is the form, etc)! Renegation ( negation of negation) is the best interpretation of nsturl and social processes. We need links that people
but 45 yrs is too much. one never knows how long will stay. I read and taught Hegel last semester and I understood him and my student were pleased...And now in middle of composing my own system of thought...wait!
Your first two sentences are so full of arrogance, you in-contributing nothing. Make your own channel and do it better than the school of life.. or help, but don't start with arrogance.
Hegel's work is an attempt at scientific analysis of the eternal present moment. He treated consciousness as having evolved through a succession of primitive forms along with the human body, and saw our consciousness as defined by the archaic structures upon which it was built. The will to dominate was his particular displeasure of mankind, to which he proposed we raise our collective spirit with a will to morality, which he believed to be fundamental knowledge a-priori, possible in all humans possessing reason.
Oh, absolutely. The historical context of 'knowledge' is an evolving form built upon antecedent schools and conveyed through multiple conduits, including the Bible and scientific empiricism. The reference points in the content of our character started before literacy. Morality is the skeletal structure upon which the meat of discussion is placed.
I'm taking the History and Theory of Architecture at Harvardx and have absolutely NO IDEA what the prof is describing about Hegel. Thanks for this video; it clears a lot of things up for me.
Learn from those you disagree with and you'll learn things you nevernknew about, and maybe you'll find more reasons to disagree with [them] even more. So, win-win!
Hagel's work was badly written brilliance that dealt with the truly undefinable greyness of morality and ideas. His prophetic work shows that progress is never really straight forward. I hope society more appreciates his work so that we can learn to steady ourselves within a utopia of logic and reason.
I just noticed. This is pretty much one of the only channels on youtube that doesn't remind you to "LIKE, COMMENT, AND SUBSCRIBE!" at the end of the video.
You guys are on the top of a mountain, with an idea so fresh and in need as never before. I just hope that as many people as possible can enjoy and make good use of this condensed and well interpreted wisdom you sharing with the world. Good job good people, please go on informing :)
Hegels had an intelligibility problem his students faced with the challenge of editing his writings we can all agree that like we can all agree his insights are truths valuable to any nation to learn from old history to create new and better societies. Absolutely inspiring for any leader.
Just FYI - you are mistaken and are NOT referring to Hegelian dialectics. From Wikipedia: The triad thesis, antithesis, synthesis (German: These, Antithese, Synthese; originally:[1] Thesis, Antithesis, Synthesis) is often used to describe the thought of German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel.[2] Hegel never used the term himself. It originated with Johann Fichte.[1]
This is one clear piece of knowledge. I wish I could have seen in during my second semester. although, I got the idea but not with this clarity. It explains everything so clearly. I was just able to identify the wires with matching colours, and now it is connected. Thank u so much
A proper comprehension of the Hegelian philosophical corpus revolves around understanding Kant, Heraclitus (specifically him of all the Presocratics), Parmenides, and Spinoza (Fichte and Schelling optional but recommended). Essentially, the gist is that opposites are CO-POSITING, or CO-INSTANTIATING. This is furthermore logically necessitated- but not by the logic you know as "If Socrates is a man, than he is human". The DIALECTICAL LOGIC is precisely that opposites MUST exist to contrast the other. So, hot NECESSARILY co-instantiates its opposite, cold owing to the very nature of heat. Then, as they are SUBLATED (Aufheben), what results is a term which doesn't just 'unite' them in some sort of synthesis, but rather acts as a new perspective, in which the preceding moments seem 'immature' or 'lacking' compared to the current perspective. Something the video might have saw fit to point out about Hegel's metaphysics is precisely that what is real is not merely 'abstract ideas' suspended in some mental reliquary, but the concrete (konkret). It seems ironic merely because Hegel's philosophy is so obfuscatory that it would appear more 'abstract' and 'removed' but Hegel actually means the opposite.
***** Yeah, and I would even say you can´t understand Marx´ philosophy without knowing Hegel, because Marx made some mistakes we only can understand by knowing dialectic.
+Andrew Rubner I think it also depends on the translation. Marx is very easy to read in Dutch, Kant is still very understandable but Hegel is just awful. I heard it's better in English though.
Hegel was a rabid racist, an apologist of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade and even critical of English steps to abolish it, under the claim that it was morally defensible. All of Hegel's arguments (in this regard) are based on unscientific information, fantasies and conjecture. It's unfortunate, but the video uploader did not mention his other notorious book (depending on which side of the fence you're sitting, anyway) , _Philosophy of History_, a highly racist text. On a cursory review of lists of pioneers of scientific racism, Hegel's name will most definitly appear. This video is a romanticized - or light - view of the man. He did not apply, universally, of the the virtues extolled in this video, for which he is lauded.
