preliminary thoughts on a reread of Hegel’s Logic

I’ve been digging back into the Science of Logic for the first time in awhile. I find that it can be good to leave gaps of some years between reading books of this magnitude, because we can then see how we ourselves have changed over the years, along with the obvious point that one needs a certain mental freshness to appreciate a philosophy book fully.

For example, in 2005 I reread the whole of Sein und Zeit for the first time since graduate school. (I’d read it far too many times at that stage, and went back to it only when writing Heidegger Explained.) This exercise allowed me to notice that I’d changed my mind about one thing in particular– the analytic of Dasein’s everydayness is quite a bit better than I had found it in graduate school. The reason for my earlier view is pretty clear: I was fighting hard at that stage against rampant Dasein-centric readings of Heidegger, and this led me to be somewhat unfair toward his concrete analyses of Dasein, which do include some genuine anthropological insights. (But I still think Max Scheler may be better in that respect, as stated in Tool-Being.)

As for Hegel, I’ll reserve final judgment until I’m all the way back through the text, and that’s going to take quite a few months since there will be multiple projects demanding my attention in the meantime. But here are the things I’ve noticed so far:

*It’s a much faster read now than it was in graduate school; then it was like pulling teeth. The lesson: reading very difficult philosophy texts does become easier, as long as you keep doing it without long pauses.

*I think The Phenomenology of Spirit is probably a better book. Given how long the Logic is, and given its understandably lofty claims concerning its own mission, we may tend to assume that the book is more intricate than it actually is. In fact, it contains a fairly stripped-down argument, which is somewhat concealed by the extensive sidebars in between. I hadn’t remembered it quite that way.

*Hegel is a lot more acerbic than we remember. When we’re reading classic authors centuries later, we take it for granted that they’re classics, and thus we might not notice when they say some incredibly haughty things, because we’re used to feeling like they have the right to talk this way. But if you force yourself to remember that he was basically just a high school principal in Nuremberg when writing the Logic, some of his dismissiveness can be really jaw-dropping. I’m not saying I wish it were absent: in many ways it makes for a clearer reading experience. I’m just saying it’s remarkable that he spoke that way at that stage of his career.

*His handling of the thing-in-itself is a bit cavalier. Yes, I realize that by the time of the Logic he thought this issue was well behind him, and I know he ad some predecessors had already dealt with it at length. But there’s still a quick triumphalism about the topic that often makes it feel underdeveloped.

*He’s not a great writer on the section-by-section level, but on the level of individual turns of phrase and powerful one-line uppercuts, he’s among the very best.