Procrastinating Instead of Reading Hegel

As I mentioned in my previous blog post, I'm feeling more and more of a need -- a duty? A Stoic obligation? -- to re-examine Hegel, whom for a long time I had summarily dismissed, following Schopenhauer's example. I feel like I'm going to have to read some Hegel, and I don't want to. I open up a volume of Hegel to a random page, read a random sentence, and much more often than not, I am appalled, I think Ach Du meine Fresse, Schopenhauer was right, how can people take this guy seriously, let alone place him so centrally in the intellectual history of modernity?! But they do.

Fortunately, I have the option of procrastinating, of putting off the actual reading of Hegel by spending a lot of time reading about Hegel. In my previous post I mentioned Ernst Bloch's book about Hegel, Subjekt/Objekt. i did not mention that Subjekt/Objekt, in the suhrkamp taschenbuch edition I have (st 12, 16.25 Tausend 1972) is 525 pages long.

Then I have a Reclam edition of Hegel's Philosophie der Geschichte from 1961, which I must have gotten around 1992, of whose 612 pages pages 3 through 34 are covered by an introduction by the formidable Theodor Litt, and 35 through 37 by a note on the text by an F Brunstaed, who, I'm sorry, Sir or Madam, is unknown to me. The note on the text is in very small type.

And then I have a copy of Phaenomenologie des Geistes, 2nd, expanded and newly arranged printing of an Ullstein paperback which runs to 911 pages, of which less than half, pages 13 to 447, are actually by Hegel. The rest is pieces about Phaenomenologie des Geistes by Lukacs, Goehler, Haym, Findlay, Wahl, Hyppolite, Marx, Marcuse and Bloch, although the 38 pages by Bloch are from Subjekt/Objekt, so I can't really count them twice. I got this copy of Phaenomenologie des Geistes back in the 1980's, as an undergraduate, when Hegel was still nothing more than a name which rang a very faint bell. Hegel was mentioned on the cover of Bronowski's book The Western Intellectual Tradition, and I suppose I didn't know more about him than was said on the cover of that book. I read some chapters of Bronowski's book for classes, and a few more on my own, but not the chapter on Hegel.

I realize that it's cheating to read Bloch's book, and the pieces by Lukacs, Goehler, Haym, Findlay, Wahl, Hyppolite, Marx, Marcuse, before reading Hegel. The latter are placed after Hegel's text in the Ullstein paperback to underscore this point. The many references to Hegel in Adorno's Negative Dialektik, a copy of which I obtained in Berlin in 2004, are likewise intended for readers who have already read Hegel. I'm procrastinating before even cheating by reading these secondary texts first, by going into such detail about the physical volumes I have, by writing this blog post and complaining, but you already noticed that.

I don't even know how big Hegel's oeuvre is. Are the two volumes I have a third of the whole thing, a fifth, a tenth, even less than that? It seems that editions of his collected tend to run to about 20 volumes. If the volumes are about the same length, then I have about a tenth of it here before me. I feel like a kid who hates peas, who has a huge pile of peas in front of him, which he is expected to eat, supposedly for his own good. And so, I'm going to cheat, and read some of the stuff you're supposed to read after reading Hegel, before reading Hegel.

It would be swell if reading Hegel suddenly opened up my mind in huge unexpected ways and helped me make sense of the whole of humanity and life itself. That would truly be awesome. But I'm not holding my breath. It would be a pleasant surprise if I came away from this thinking that Hegel was not a huge horse's ass and one of the most overrated authors in the history of writing, along with Susan Sontag.