Reviews for The Limits Of Disenchantment

The average rating for The Limits Of Disenchantment based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2014-08-25 00:00:00 George Hardin What a complete embarrassment this book is. Hegel wrote lots of philosophy, he has been interpreted and followed and reinterpreted by many, many other philosophers of all persuasions - from Marxists to Existentialists to Fascists and just about everything in between. He did much to move philosophy away from being the study of dead logical forms by focusing on becoming, by focusing on change and development as key concerns of philosophy. He did much to move philosophy from a study of 'things' to a study of 'processes'. For that alone we owe him much. This book is far more interested in telling you over and over again how hard Hegel is to read and how he was building a huge metaphysical system (not meant as a compliment). About the only thing you will learn from this book is that, in part, Hegel's metaphysical system was built on the Triad - thesis, antithesis and synthesis. I'm not going to say this is irrelevant to Hegel's dialectic - but to present it as virtually all Hegel had to say on the subject is to make Hegel's dialectic a dead schema of no interest whatsoever. That the dialectic obsessed Marx and that he based the first chapters of Capital on on a straight application of this method would seem incomprehensible from the explanation presented in this book. It is difficult to know what the point of this book is. Clearly, it is seeking to dissuade readers from ever opening any of Hegel's works. Now, I'm sure many people would consider this a worthwhile aim in itself - but I suspect that is not what people would expect the book to be about from its title. You might be lead to the mistaken belief that this is a book that will give you an introduction (however brief) to Hegel's philosophy. But like the book in this series on Kant you will learn much more about Hegel's life than about his philosophy. And also like the work on Kant - there is lots of psycho-babble about Hegel and his sister and speculation of repressed sexual feeling. Now, years ago I read a book that said Freud's over estimation of the role of sex as a motivator may have come from his addiction to opium. The theory being that opium increases the desire but diminishes the performance and so left (as Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure refers to him) The Frude Dude in a perpetual state of sexual frustration. I can see that this might have something interesting to say about Freud's theories (and at least it is a turning of the tables in a way that is amusing), but to spend so much time discussing Hegel's possible incestuous feelings towards his sister - or rather, hers towards him - pretty clearly points to the level this book is pitched. My advice is not to waste your time.

Review # 2 was written on 2016-11-25 00:00:00 Aaron Floky HAPPILY, HEGEL kept a diary during his formative years which chronicled in nauseating detail every thought, experience, conversation, snippet of insight gleamed from his voracious readings of any book he could slap his paws on. On any given day an entry would catalogue an exact itinerary of his comings and goings, including detailed opinions on any theater showing or musical performance he happened to catch as well as painfully purple descriptions of the weather. And if for some unforeseen reason a day's entry was lacking his usual microscopic notation, he would shamefully scrawl out an exhaustive reasoning for why he had failed in maintaining his gargantuan expectations of his own pedantry. shared a sickly symbiotic relationship with his sister which only ended in tragedy for the poor woman who could never accept other women in her brother's life; all of this leading to her spending the last years of her brother's happy marriage as a raving, immobile mass on a couch until she took her own cue from Hamlet's Ophelia and drowned herself in despair over her brother's death. constructed a crystal palace in his mind and called it a philosophy of everything. Based on the seemingly simple notion that to strive to think about something of course will lead you to also think of its opposite, nothing (in other words, you can't think of happy without also thinking of sad); and that to compose a truth one must find the synthesis of the two (in the case of something and nothing, the synthesis would be being). With this tinkertoy equation in mind Hegel filled page after page with axioms like Lincoln logs, creating a tower which only ever reached nowhere. wrote in a butchery of German, a mutilation of syntax, a masturbation of muddled thoughts; and in return was rewarded with baffled applause, sycophantic academic kowtowing, and a crown of intellectual celebrity that was placed upon his downward turned brow (after all, he always was a bookish man). was absolutely loathed by the pragmatic sourpuss Schopenhauer. wrote insufferable love letters to his future wife in the same awful rhetoric-drunk (that is, his own liberal - to possibly stretch the term past politeness - sense of rhetoric) prose that packed his bloated buch, The Phenomenology of Spirit which allegedly explains his claim to fame, the dialectical system. gave terribly boring and wholly impenetrable lectures that forced migraines upon even his most fervent admirers, and, in fact, was only ever considered an interesting and lively speaker during his final lecture, which was actually just a symptom of the early fevers of a fatal bout with cholera. died without knowing that his philosophy, which squashed the individual and tried to seek beauty in the hegemony of authority, would go on to inspire the monsters who put people in furnaces by the millions and painted the sky with ash, because he would have been appalled that his bad poetry of his own thoughts (which were never based on any real reason) would have eventually caused such atrocities. And so it's important to remember that within the crystal palace of his mind, Hegel only ever composed, happily, for Hegel.