More Reading About Hegel

When you're up to your ass in alligators, it's easy to forget that you came there to drain the swamp. Reading various philosophers' opinions about various other philosophers is fun -- for me, it can be a huge amount of fun -- but a couple of days ago, I began to re-approach Hegel, through the filter of the opinions of others, because Hegel set out to change the world, and many people say he did. Marx, the most prominent follower of Hegel, was even more explicit about wanting to change the world, and the most famous follower of Marx, Lenin, who was most certainly a philosopher, reading the entire course of Western philosophy in many languages and writing a huge amount himself of what can only be called philosophy, also led the Russian Revolution.

But how many other philosophers have been political leaders on Lenin's scale? I can't think of any. And whatever you think of Lenin, he was succeeded by Stalin, who is highly thought-of by very few.

Did Lenin really name Stalin to be his successor, or did Stalin falsify the record to make it seem so? (Did Caesar really name Octavian/Augustus as his successor, or did Octavian/Augustus cheat his way into that?)

On pp 382-83 of Subjekt -- Objekt, his book about Hegel, Ernst Bloch says that Lenin wrote, in 1914, that whoever had not thoroughly studied and completely grasped the entire logical system of Hegel, could not thoroughly understand Marx' Kapital and especially the first chapter of Kapital. "Folglich hat nach einem halben Jahrhundert keiner von den Marxisten Marx begriffen." ("It follows that, after half a century, none of the Marxists has understood Marx.")

Yes, I have a copy of Das Kapital, untranslated, right here. Band 23, Volume 23, of the Werke von Marx und Engels, the collected works, published in (East) Berlin in 1977. Das 1. Kapitel, the first chapter, covers pages 49 through 98 in this edition. No, I didn't think I had already thoroughly understood this long first chapter before reading that Ernst Bloch quoted Lenin to the effect that I most assuredly had not as yet.

I can't read everything. And I never really did consider myself a Marxist anyway, even before my first contact with postmodernism made me pretty sure that I'd been a postmodernist for a while, and therefore not a Marxist, since you can't be a postmodernist and a Marxist at the same time, despite Jordan Peterson's dire warnings about supposed throngs of postmodern Marxists swarming over our college campuses in order to destroy out lives and enslave us. Have you ever read the first chapter of Das Kapital, translated or not? It's really quite something. I'm not sure I really want to try to read it again, let alone carefully study all of Hegel just so that I can read that one chapter again with greater comprehension.

I haven't read any Lenin. I hear he's quite good. Haven't read any Trotsky either. My reading comprehension in Russian is not good, but of course, both Lenin and Trotsky are available in translations.

Where was I? Maybe that's the title I should've given to this blog post. Where was I? Who am I? Where did all of these figurative alligators come from? What the Hell am I trying to prove? If I'm trying to prove that I'm even half the reader either Marx or Lenin was, it would be best to just stop right now. They've got me beat, and I don't say that about many people, living or dead.

I'm still enjoying Bloch's book in which he praises Hegel to the skies, and, paradoxically, I still don't want to read Hegel. I still can't take Spengler seriously, although I still enjoy going through the index of his Untergang des Abendlandes (Decline of the West) to see what he has to say about this or that person. I've been doing that in the past couple of days because there are numerous references to Spengler in Bloch's indexes.

Where am I going? I don't know, but I'm enjoying this journey, and maybe it will eventually actually prove to be of some worth.