Genesis and Structure of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit Book

To read Hegel's 'Phenomenology of Spirit' ['PoS'] is to love it. I've never read a book that grabbed me from the first paragraph onward as that book did. It has an ebb and flow that scratches the itch of that part of the mind that lies beyond the ordinary and takes one beyond the appearance of reality and transcends one to the thoughts between the thoughts such that it makes one realize that authenticity must be jealous of irony. I would say if one revels in sentences such as the absolute notion is the concept of the concept and if one prefers thinking about thinking instead of dwelling in the mundane Hegel's 'PoS' is a must read and books such as this one are too.

Hyppolite's take on Hegel is Hegelian. He'll write in the same fashion as Hegel does and will explain using an abstract to get at an abstract and then tell you the universal as it is related to the specific down to the individual. I speak Hegelise. I wish others that I met did too. That way I could cut through their bullshit and get to the substance of matters and meaning. Alas, regretfully Hegel is so last century, but, nevertheless, he is relevant to today.

Can one read this book without having first read Hegel's 'PoS'? Yes, an emphatic yes would be the answer. There is one warning. Make those two warnings. Hyppolite thinks Hegel's 'Science of Logic' is necessary and ultimately links Hegel back to that. I think one doesn't need the seriousness of the 'Science of Logic' (I've read it; it strikes me as if Hegel was taking himself way too seriously). Hyppolite keeps the Hegalise in this book and will dissect each chapter by using the original Hegalian speak. If Hegel's patois confuses you in its original form, it will just as likely confuse you in this version.

I've read Hyppolite's 'Marx and Hegel' which is referred to frequently within this book. From this book and that book I have the suspicion that Hyppolite misconstrues Hegel's religiosity. I think Feuerbach and his 'Essence of Christianity' which is quoted extensively in this book by way of contrast to what Hyppolite thought Hegel meant gets Hegel's religiousity more correct than Hyppolite did. One of the keys to understanding Hegel and for which Hyppolite seems to disagree with is to realize that it is with certainty that God exists within us and He is me because every time I pray to God I hear that prayer because I am only praying to myself. Man created God in their own image not God created Man in His image. Avicenna's 'floating man' with its inherent soul is antithetical to what Hegel is getting at.

It doesn't really matter where one enters their study of Hegel's 'PoS'. Hegel is well worth the effort. One can read Harris' 'Hegel's Ladder', or this book, or 'PoS' itself. All are equally challenging reads but well worthwhile. Hegel is just as relevant today no matter which form one chooses to ingest him by. Our actions, our thoughts and our meaning get convoluted by our experiences, culture, class, nation, and it us up to us to find our own authentic meaning, and it helps to have Hegel as your guide. (Dante plays a surprisingly large part within this book and even a larger part within Harris' 'Hegel's Ladder'. As Virgil and Beatrice were Dante's guide, it's okay for other's to be our guide for reconciling our actions with our thoughts and discovering our non-alienated meaning).

Bryan Magee in his excellent book 'Philosophy of Schopenhauer' makes the point that Schopenhauer had more in common with Hegel than was commonly thought. Hitler's monstrous autobiography listed his 3 most favorite Germans as Goethe, Luther and Frederick the Great. The first two make major appearances in this book, and it's clear from 'Mein Kampf' that Hitler would have put Hegel on his short list of favorite Germans. To understand Trump and his fascism and especially his narcissism, it really helps to understand Hegel, for within Hegel the narcissist's denial of the other as a real human being means that the narcissist can never see the other as anything but an object to be used. Torture and saying such things as 'there needs to be more torture' as Trump did during the campaign of 2016, for example, would mean nothing for those with no sense of the other as human beings, mocking the disable or making fun of fat people (as Trump did last night, 8/15/2019), all of that kind of behavior is easily understandable as undesirable and would easily be understandable for its perversion of being human within the Hegelian dialectic. In order to have meaning, one must first recognize the other as another.

As for me, I love a good book that speaks abstractly about the abstraction of an abstract and never really talks down to the reader because they assume the reader wants to understand and determine one's own meaning. This book, Hegel's 'PoS', and Harris' 'Hegel's Ladder' all do that for those who value scratching that hard to get at itch in the hidden recesses of one's own mind.