Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit (A Contemporary Reading)

Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit endures as a work of philosophy that inspires dread due to its purported difficulty, while exerting an enigmatic pull both as a dare to readers and as an ever replenishing well of ideas.

The difficulty of reading Hegel is the stuff of legend. Schopenhauer famously called Hegel a “charlatan”, Adorno proclaimed the Phenomenology of Spirit to be “incomprehensible”, while Bertrand Russell deemed Hegel to be “the hardest to understand of all the great philosophers”.

Yet Hegel’s Phenomenology helped shape currents of philosophical and political thought in the 19th century, no less undergirding Marxian thought through the latter’s inversion of idealism into dialectical materialism. Russell founded analytical philosophy by rejecting Hegelian thought. In analytical philosophy circles, Hegel’s name induces grimaces and elicits consternation. Though more recent currents suggest a warming to the utility of his thought, as evinced by Robert Brandom’s interpretive tome: A Spirit of Trust: A Reading of Hegel’s Phenomenology.

Amidst all the brouhaha surrounding the philosopher, the Phenomenology of Spirit continues to inspire scholarship and lay interest, and our precarious historical moment justifies renewed interest in its ideas.

In this meetup we will traverse the landscape of the Phenomenology with a view to draw philosophical insights and interpretations of contemporary relevance. Is Hegel’s system in the Phenomenology compatible with empirical science? Further, is his ostensible embrace of contradiction consistent with formal systems in logic and mathematics or do they form a foil to orthodox Western thought? These are some questions, among a plethora of others, that we will pursue.

My approach tends toward slow reading and interpretive depth as opposed to aiming for breadth while eliding important textual components, but both approaches are welcome. We will attempt to build on the conceptual problems discussed across meetings, recapitulating conceptual cleavages and elements that require continued attention.

We will meet every two weeks, Saturdays, 2pm at Epoch Coffee, 221 W North Loop Blvd · Austin, TX.

Second Meeting (May 31st) : Read -- Introduction (If you're reading the Miller translation, I'd discourage reading reading the paragraph summaries at the end of the book).

Recap: For the first meeting (May 17), we read -- Preface: On Scientific Cognition.

If you're new to the group, you may want to familiarize yourself with the Preface in addition to reading the Introduction, though it's not required. Consulting secondary literature is up to the discretion of the participant.