From Philosophy to Philology Intellectual and Social Aspects of Change in Late Imperial China Book

Not an easy read, and not a good book to start with Hegel. If you love German idealism history this book is a must.

Is funny because the whole subject of the book starts with Kant (all German idealism including Hegel, except Schelling, despised Kant). Kant leaves open a door in the critique of pure reason regarding the spontaneity of the intellect. This pure form of apperception, which Kant is not sure if call "spontaneity", is the condition to which all objects of our intuition must be subjected. With this pure form is that we can apply the categories to the objects, but, and a BIG BUT, only as phenomena.

The German idealism is like a naughty boy that disobeys dad: “who is Kant to tell us that it only applies to phenomena? There must be something more, something that allows us to go beyond, even to the thing in itself.”

Of course Fichte, Reinhold, Schelling were young fellows that didn’t like to take orders, even less from an old and grumpy guy. But as all naughty boys, they were wrong all the time (Hegel was the only one that found something interesting about Kant's discovery, but only with the help of Aristotle).

Fichte tries to use the “intellectual intuition”, the supreme power that could create things and is only allowed to God, and gave the power to the “I”. Obviously, he only constructs logical and subjective nonsense (as surely Kant also found himself, that was why he forbade that use), Hegel mocks this solution in the book.

Schelling, smart and well known in greek philosophy, uses his dialectic knowledge to destroy Fichte's assumption and start again with the absolute, a new and more powerful version of Spinoza substance. The “absolute” is the bridge that connects the intellect with the things, the subject with the object. But even this solution is still not satisfactory.

Hegel knows that if anyone can connect the points then also will have the system, the elusive prize that Kant never allowed himself to have.

The book is dark, but if you read the letters between Schelling-Fichte and Schelling-Hegel you’ll understand why the horrible style: envy, hypocrisy, a lot of “good feelings”, nothing of the jargon that they use in their books. Hegel knew that he was in a duel with his fellows, in this book he kills Fichte to ingratiate Schelling (Hegel was looking for a job), later he will attack in the night where all cows are dark.

Hegel’s style tries to be darker than Schelling’s style, only to show that he also knows how to walk the walk. But the repetitions are terrible, he wrote the same point again and again and again, only changing the words to be darker than before (Schopenhauer didn’t know about this book, lucky Hegel because Schopenhauer would be more than happy to use it and show exactly why Hegel was a quack)

Besides that is a good primer to a more advanced reading of Hegel (please do not start Here, you can do well starting with the lectures of philosophy history by Hegel, especially the final course about Jacobi, Kant, Fichte, and Schelling)

More mature Hegel surely would like to destroy the book, but only a century later it was read again. Good read, only for strong palates.