Hegelian Crash Outs

    I have signed up to join a free reading group/lecture on Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit. It is a three month commitment that happens twice a week (peak unemployment activity I know). I am very excited to go! I am interested in continental philosophy and want to better understand one of the most important influences on Marx and Marxism, but I also have a kind of unhealthy fetishism of knowledge, especially obtuse and difficult ones. That is, I crave the prestige that comes with "having read Hegel."  

The big H himself, drawn with the lasso fill tool.

     The instructor recommended that I read the introduction and the translator's preface by Terry Pinkard, as well as the preface and introduction by the Heg-dog himself. Upon finishing the portions by Pinkard and starting Hegel's preface, I am immediately filled with fear and regret. Even though the course states that no prior experience with German idealism is necessary, I still feel that it might be too hasty to go straight to Hegel without having first read my Descartes, Hume, Spinoza, Kant and the like. I knew it would be difficult and I would struggle with the famously opaque text, but to actually confront a wall of incomprehensible text, to read every sentence in a 539 pages book at least three times, really shook me out of my romantic dark academia fantasy and into the reality of my inadequacy. 

    From this, I thought about REALLY understanding the ins and outs of Western philosophy, about sinking my teeth into the entire canon, from Socrates to Derrida. How long is that going to take? Even if I get an okay grasp of Hegel, which would take me maybe 10 years (idk), I would open guys like Heidegger and be faced with the same experience of needing to get used to a totally foreign way of talking, and have to throw in another 10 or so years to understand it. After that it can be Lacan, or Deleuze, or Derrida...by the time I have a cursory understanding of all of these guys I would be 100 years old. 

    I think beneath all these frankly stupid fantasies and anxieties is a very instrumental view of reading and knowledge. I think a lot of men suffer from this kind of attitude that views reading as valuable only as far as it can be transform into something concretely useful in one's life. It is a view of text as only a vehicle for the facts and ideas that are the true goals of reading. It is the logic behind those books apps that uses AI to summarize the main ideas of a book to you so you can pretend you've read it; it is also the logic behind my inability to enjoy reading fiction and my preference for "useful" non-fiction books. (I feel like this is a gendered thing but I'm not sure.)

     I think I need to just suck it up and try my best and go to the lectures. It will be fun. It will be fine. I will learn how to work with Hegel. I will learn how to tackle difficult philosophers. It is fine if I'm wrong about Hegel. It's fine if I only get to Derrida when I'm 90. It's okay. It'll be helpful and interesting. No one will laugh at me. (I should also just read some fiction...)