Friend Hegel revisited (one of these days)

"Why read Hegel? 

It is a good question, one no Hegel scholar should shirk. After all, the burden of proof lies heavily on his or her shoulders. For Hegel's texts are not exactly exciting or enticing. Notoriously, they are written in some of the worst prose in the history of philosophy. Their language is dense, obscure and impenetrable. Reading Hegel is often a trying and exhausting experience, the intellectual equivalent of chewing gravel. 'And for what?' a prospective student might well ask. To avoid such an ordeal, he or she will be tempted to invoke the maxim of one of Hegel's old enemies whenever he lost patience with a tiresome book: 'Life is short!'" — Hegel (The Routledge Philosophers) by Frederick Beiser

Well exactly. Life is short. Who wants to chew gravel?

But…

Whenever I paraphrase my understanding of Hegel in class, as a historical optimist with progressive values and great confidence in humanity's long march to universal freedom and the ultimate triumph of rational "Geist," I find myself in strong sympathy. I really should revisit Friend Hegel (as my old Mizzou teacher Alex von Schoenborn in the 70s, and Michael Prowse later, called him), I think to myself. 

Alex was the mentor who encouraged me to attend grad school and said I wrote like T.S. Eliot, though I'm still not sure what to make of that.

And Prowse said

“To the degree that we are thinking beings, Hegel says, we have to consider ourselves as part of a larger whole and not as neatly individuated। He calls this mental whole Geist, or Spirit, and tries to work out the rules by which it develops through time… Hegel didn’t regard Geist as something that stands apart from, or above, human individuals. He saw it rather as the forms of thought that are realised in human minds… What Hegel does better than most philosophers is explain how individuals are linked together and why it is important to commit oneself to the pursuit of the general or common good.”

That all sounds great.

But my tolerance for gravelly prose is thin. And it's more fun to rehearse some of WJ's "Hegelisms" than to plow through the gravel.

There is a reconciliation!
Reconciliation—econciliation!
By God, how that hurts! By God, how it does n't hurt!
Reconciliation of two extremes.
By George, nothing but othing!
That sounds like nonsense, but it is pure onsense!
Thought deeper than speech——!
Medical school; divinity school, school! SCHOOL! Oh my

God, oh God, oh God! 

Oh God. Only a George Burns can save us now.

But still…

If there's world enough and time, I'll try. I'll put Phenomenology of Spirit in the stack, just below War and Peace and Crime and Punishment.

And above Being and Time. Don't think I'll have time for Ulysses, whose author said his ideal reader would devote a lifetime to reading him. And I might, except for the likelihood that I've only got one of those.

Funny, after recently reading Checkout 19 I seem to have a fresh compulsion to compile lists of book titles. So many books...