Hegel: Texts & Commentary

Hegel has long been known as being an incomprehensible German philosopher, much like his predecessor Kant, and many others who followed, such as Heidegger and Husserl- sure to confound the casual reader and give even dedicated students headaches. In Hegel: Text and Commentary, famed translator and philosopher Walter Kaufmann, who so skillfully cleansed Nietzsche's bad name after the fallout of WW II, attempts to provide running commentary on Hegel's Preface to the Phenomenology of Spirit, which attempts to introduce Hegel's philosophy in a readable manner.Kaufmann's notes are helpful in deciphering Hegel's work, but they still fall a bit short, at least for the casual reader. Unlike the eminently readable Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, and Kierkegaard, Hegel, even with a good translator and guide, is still very difficult material. I'd recommend that anyone studying Hegel's philosophy without prior knowledge of his system also pick up a copy of Fichte's "Vocation of Man", the direct predecessor to Hegel's work. Fichte's philosophy provides the foundation for understanding Hegel's, and makes deciphering his dense prose decidedly easier.

This is the work in which Hegel called the absolute that night in which all cows are black. Those people who think that philosophy is impossibly complicated might start by looking at Walter Kaufmann's comments on how bad the other translations and comments on this amazingly swift work by Hegel have been. The other bit of humor here is Hegel attacking philosophy in a way that can only seem to be a personal attack on the views of Schelling, and then Walter Kaufmann thinks Hegel lied when he told Schelling in a letter that he wasn't thinking of him personally when he was writing about how superficial philosophy seems to people who only read the stuff. What is truly astounding is how inspired people feel when they right this kind of stuff. Religion and poetry seem to be competing for inspiration that can claim to be as deep, but religious doctrines and poetic theories get rated along with stale philosophies in this kind of search for an absolute, which really might seem like a night in which all cows are black the first time through this. It helps to have a few other books around to help comprehend this stuff by putting Hegel in a context where this summary of what his first two major works might be about (he wrote his LOGIC later) strives for some importance. This could be as close to official German university philosophy as any student would ever understand, but Hegel might be found complaining here that students don't understand a lot of this any more than other people.