As I said, a coward.

Goddam ! Im fulll of envy for anyone who can say they 'like' the Science of Logic. Its a virtuoso performance, I greatly admired the concentration of the man who wrote it, I learnt from things I still hardly understood even after I learnt them, but I couldnt say I 'liked' it.

Gil:

Just as I am full of suspicion for anyone who has anything positive to say about this literary waste of space (other than it burns well), or that logical incompetent, Hegel (other than he had the decency to die -- alas 45 years too late).

And, I rather think Comrade Red would tell a different story today --his comment above was written 3 years ago.

Could someone please recommend a book giving a general overview and introduction to Hegel from a a left interpretation?

Perhaps the best Marxist introduction is Herbert Marcuse's 'Reason and Revolution', but easily the best introduction to Hegel is Frederick Beiser's 'Hegel':

http://www.amazon.com/Reason-Revolut...1310274&sr=1-1

http://www.amazon.com/Hegel-Routledg...1310352&sr=1-1

But, since Hegel badly screwed up, my advice is don't bother.

I have never read Hegel. Is it crucial for a Revolutionary to read Hegel. I have been involved with the Marxist movement for ages and have not seen it necessary to stop everything and pick up Hegel to be 'enlightened'.

DJF: Avoid Hegel at all costs.

You can be an excellent revolutionary without reading a page of his work.

So how exactly do you know that it is "crucial" for a revolutionary to read Hegel if you yourself have not read him? You can't know from experience, so...

You're guessing!

Reading Hegel is irrelevant to being a "revolutionary" or not. It's not a litmus test.

The justification for it is that you'll understand "change" or "the logic of change", but if that were the case why not study differential calculus! Unlike dialectics, you actually can reproduce results and get correct answers.

Plus you get to model reality with accuracy.

More than we can say about dialectics sadly enough...

THis much of Rosa's view I agree with. Baiser's is a good book, but not particularly left wing. Nor should it be.

Richard Norman's Hegel's Phenomenology is quite good. I know someone who found Terry Pinkard's German Philosophy 1760-1860 quite good and while its far from perfect, I thgouth it was very reasonable and placed Hegel quite nicely in context.

I think you mean Beiser.

Anyway, those books (about Hegel) are themselves a total waste of paper -- about as much use as if someone were to write a commentary on Martian telephone directories.

On second thoughts, even less...

I asked a question. Is it crucial to read Hegel? I didnt put a question mark but I think Rosa my question.

What you seem to be saying is I havent read it so should I give up? Is that what your saying?

The very opposite, actually.

I'm saying don't bother reading Hegel!

Most people use it as a "purity test"...or worse as a way to "prove" some idea as "correct".

"Oh you haven't read Hegel? So of course you couldn't understand how ingenius/correct/infallible this idea is!"

Hegel is not "required reading" for revolutionaries or scientists...or anyone for that matter.

All dialectics really allows you to do is put words together in an algorithmic manner that sound intelligent.

"Ah, by the interpenetration of the negation of the negation, we see Spirit manifests itself as Being for this very instance of...blah blah blah"

There is a difference between sounding like you know your shit and actually knowing your shit!

Dialectics is a tool for the former.

So if you want to be pretentious, read Hegel. But it is by no means what makes one a "serious revolutionary".

That was my entire point. Since you haven't read Hegel, you wouldn't know one way or the other. So asserting that "serious revolutionaries read Hegel" would be a guess.

I doubt even most revolutionaries who use dialectical materialism in their theoretical work (Chairman Prachanda, for example) have read Hegel.

Hegel is a relic. You confuse the required reading for a philosopher to required reading for a revolutionary.

I assume your logic is that since Marx was inspired by Hegel, that must mean in order to understand Marx you have to understand Hegel. I disagree. If you had to understand *any* of Marx's direct influences before you understood Marx himself, I would definitely say it is Feuerbach over Hegel whose method is more important to understand.

At any rate, ComradeRed is right. The only *real* reason to study Hegel is to be pretentious.

I don't understand why Hegel was so popular with Marx and Marxists.

I do not know much about Hegel, but 1. He was religious 2. he held that the Strongest states were sanction by God to do whatever they want 3. the prussian state was the best state ever and allowed the best form of freedom 4. Hegel was a nationalist.

It's just weird, because we are ultimately secular, anti-empire, internationalist and generally see states as a necessary evil and ultimately anti-state.

how did Marx get his ideas of freedom from Hegel? Because Hegel's freedom seems messed up.

In his lectures, Hegel was the first to portray the process of history as a gradual movement toward absolute truth and each philosophical system as a determinate stage in that process. Bourgeois philosophy since Hegel has not been able to assimilate the real achievements in the field of logic. Hegelianism developed rather along the lines of the cultivation of the formal and mystical tendencies in Hegelian philosophy. Hegel’s philosophy, critically reworked from a materialist position, is one the theoretical sources of Marxist-Leninist philosophy—dialectical materialism. In this regard, Hegel’s works to this day remain the best school for dialectical thought, as the teachings of Marx, Engels, and Lenin demonstrate.

Hegel gives to the universal schema of the world spirit’s creative activity the name absolute idea, and the “science of logic” is defined as the scientific theoretical self-consciousness of the absolute idea. The absolute idea is revealed in its universality in the form of a system of categories, beginning with the most general and meager of determinations—being, nonbeing, immediate existence, quality, quantity—and ending with concrete, manifoldly determined concepts such as actuality, chemism, organism, and knowledge.

In “Phenomenology of the Mind”, Hegel develops the basic principles of his philosophical conception. The spiritual culture of humanity was first presented here in its lawlike development as the gradual realization of the creative force of “world reason.” Expressing itself in cultural forms that successively replace one another, the superpersonal spirit simultaneously gains knowledge of itself as the creator of these forms. The spiritual development of the individual reproduces, in abbreviated form, the stages of the attainment of self-knowledge by the “world spirit,” beginning with the act of naming objects perceived by the senses and ending with “absolute knowledge,” that is, knowledge of those forms and laws that direct the whole process of spiritual development from within—the development of science, morality, religion, art, and legal and political systems. Absolute knowledge, which crows the phenomenological history of the spirit, is nothing more than logic. Thus, the culminating chapter of the "Phenomenology of Mind" introduces a program for the critical reorganization of logic as science, a program that was realized by Hegel in his later works.

In his logic, Hegel deifies real human thought which he investigates as an aspect of universal, logical forms and laws, revealed through the entire process of history, Declaring thought to be subject, that is, the sole creator of all spiritual wealth developed in the course of history and interpreting thought as an eternal, timeless schema of creative activity in general, Hegel brings the concept of the idea close to the concept of god. But unlike the theistic god, the idea takes on consciousness, will, and individually only in man, while outside and prior to man it is realized as an internal necessity in conformity with law.

Using the dialectical method which he created, Hegel critically reinterprets all spheres of contemporary culture—science, morals, aesthetics, and so on. In the course of this he discovers everywhere an intense dialectic, a process of perpetual negation of every newly attained state of mind by the next state, which meanwhile has been ripening in its depths. The future ripens inside the present as concrete, immanent contradictions whose determinateness presupposes and defines the mode of its resolution. A sharply critical analysis of the condition of contemporary science and its concepts is interwoven in Hegel with critical reproduction and philosophical justification of a number of the dogmas and prejudices of the consciousness of his own time. This contradiction permeates not only the logic but also other parts of the Hegelian system—namely, his philosophy of nature and philosophy of mind, which constitute the second and third parts of his “Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences”.

Hegel's philosophy of mind is further developed in "Philosophy of Right", and in the posthumous lectures on the philosophy of history, aesthetics, and on the philosophy of religion, and on the history of philosophy. Thus, in his philosophy of nature, Hegel, critically analyzing the mechanistic views of 18th century science, expresses many ideas that anticipate the subsequent development of thought in the natural sciences (for example, the idea of the reciprocal relation of time and space and the mutual transitions of their determinations and the idea of the “immanent purposiveness” characteristic of a living organism.) But at the same time, Hegel denies to nature a dialectical development. Since he views the past only from the standpoint of those dialectical collisions that led to the maturation of the present, that is, of the contemporary world, which is uncritically conceived as the crown and goal of the process, Hegel completes his philosophy of history with an idealized portrayal of the Prussian constitutional monarchy, his philosophy of right with an idealized portrayal of the bourgeois consciousness of law and right and philosophy of religion with an apologia for Protestantism.

According to the Hegelian schema, mind first awakens to self-consciousness within man in the form of word, speech, and language. Instruments of labor, material culture, and civilization appear as later, derivative forms of embodiment of the same creative force of mind, of the “concept”. The point of departure for this development is thus seen in the capacity of man (as the “finite mind”) to know himself through the assimilation of all that wealth of images that hitherto has been contained in mind as involuntarily arising inner states of which men were not conscious.

The category of contradiction as the unity of mutually exclusive opposites which at the same time mutually presupposes each other (polar concepts) occupies a central position in the Hegelian dialectic. Contradiction is here understood as the “motor”, the inner impulse of the development of mind in general. The movement ascends from the “abstract to the concrete”, to a result even fuller, more manifoldly differentiated within itself, and therefore closer to the truth. It is not enough, according to Hegel, to understand contradiction only as an antimony, an aporia, that is, as a logically unresolved contradiction: the contradiction must be taken together with its resolution as part of a deeper and more concrete understanding, where the initial antimony is simultaneously realized and disappears.

THe purpose of reading Hegel is to develop a capacity to to criticise the dominant philosophical ideologies of our time which act as an obstacle to clear revolutionary thinking. Does it work well ? Not really. Is it better than nothing ? Yes. Are there many honest and earnest revolutionaries who retain deep weaknesses as revolutionaries because they retain the philosophical perspectives which our capitalist society makes appear self evident...yes. To them reading Hegel seems pretentious, whereas it is just pathetic. Pathetic because the revolutionary movement is so weak and must scrounge around for any resource it can find.

Thanks for that Sky -- unfortunatley for the mysterions (who believe this Hegelian guff, or even worse, its inverted form in 'materialist dialectics'), I have demolished Hegel's core arguments here:

http://homepage.ntlworld.com/rosa.l/Outline_of_Hegel's_errors_01.htm


And in more detail here:

http://homepage.ntlworld.com/rosa.l/page%2008_02.htm#What-Are-Dialectical-Contradictions

Gil:

Too bad he tried to criticise the confused by means of the incomprehensible then, isn't it?

BCS:

They were really drawn from Rousseau and Kant -- Hegel just mystified everything.

There are far better reasons to study Hegel - one of the main sources of Marxism - than to be 'pretentious'. Let's not try to pass off philistine intellectual laziness for anything else.

'It is impossible to fully grasp Marx's Capital, and especially its first chapter, if you have not studied through and understood the whole of Hegel's Logic.'
- Lenin