I know of only one person who shares my opinion of Hegel: Schopenhauer, who called Hegel the worst, most ignorant, incoherent, empty, pretentious charlatan ever to successfully pass himself off as a philosopher. (See any remark about Hegel in any of Schopenhauer's works in which Hegel is mentioned.)
On the other side, those who considered Hegel to be somewhere between very clever and a world-beating genius include almost everyone whose opinion remotely matters, from Marx to Adorno to some of today's sneakiest anonymous post-postmodern YouTubers... Kierkegaard rejects some aspects of Hegel's system very energetically, but he doesn't call Hegel a fool or a fake the way Schopenhauer does. Kierkegaard clearly sees Hegel as a worthy adversary, who will not be defeated by mere insults.
Even Nietzsche, who has some passing insults for Hegel, seems to regard him as at least interesting. Speaking of having almost everyone disagree with you: When Nietzsche composed his list of "meine Unmoeglichen" ("my impossible ones," that is: "those whom I simply cannot stand") at the beginning of the chapter "Streifzuege eines Unzeitgemaessen" in Goetzendaemmerung, he doesn't list Hegel, but he does list Kant (along with Seneca, Rousseau, Schiller, Dante, Victor Hugo, Liszt, George Sand, Michelet, Carlyle, John Stuart Mill, the brothers Goncourt and Zola), whom almost everyone else whose opinion matters -- including Schopenhauer -- considers to be a stone genius. Time for me to admit: I don't understand Kant nearly well enough to have any opinion about him, and time for me to admit that maybe my hero Nietzsche, who was dead wrong about women and war, didn't understand Kant either. (I'm still just fine with the rest of the list.)
For Schopenhauer (and almost everyone else), Kant was the most brilliant by far of all the philosophers of the preceding century.
Hegel built upon Kant, and so did Schopenhauer.
And Marx built upon Hegel, which means that most Leftists since Marx have built directly or indirectly on Hegel.
What finally made me decide that I had to give Hegel another chance, although the camel's back had been close to breaking already for a while, was Ernst Bloch. He's one of my favorite writers, and he wrote an entire book so extravagantly praising Hegel that I had to throw in the towel and agree to read and re-read some Hegel, this time trying to hold my mind open to the possibility that he's not as bad as Schopenhauer thought.
Or at the very least, I need to re-read that particular book of Bloch's, -- Subjeckt-Objekt. Erlaeuterungen zu Hegel -- slowly and carefully, and try to decide whether I want to approach Hegel again. At this point, I don't really want to. But I'm willing to let Bloch try to change my mind. I probably will read Hegel again. It's not just Bloch, it's everybody except Schopenhauer.
Oh, and I also need to research this fellow Solger. He's mentioned by both Kierkegaard and Bloch, it seems he and Hegel were friends. I've never heard anyone else mention him, but Kierkegaard and Bloch are more than enough.
I recently heard an English philosopher say that, yes, Hegel's prose is terrible, but that his books were actually lecture notes, not intended to be published as books. And this guy was saying that Hegel was brilliant even though his prose was awful. In Subjekt-Objekt, Bloch is having none of this talk about Hegel's prose being awful. Hegel's prose is sometimes difficult, Bloch says, but it's brilliant, full of deep music and blood and guts and Luther. And the thing is: German is Bloch's native language, he's very very good at it. If Bloch says someone writes brilliantly in German, I have to listen, even if that someone is Hegel, whom I'm used to thinking of, agreeing with Schopenhauer, as writing sheer shameless nonsense.
As long as I'm here I may as well defend Schopenhauer and Nietzsche against the usual accusation from my colleagues on the Left, that they were reactionary. Certainly neither of them was progressive, but reactionary? What, exactly, do you think they were reacting against? They were both classless, and both clueless when it came to politics. I see no evidence that either of them was the slightest bit familiar with any socialist philosophy.
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