There was a moment for me (second and only full read-through) when the style 'clicked' and it was (relatively) smooth sailing from there. It's strange. He's often talking about things on a very basic level. The weird phrasing kind of jumbles up the default, sedimented, non-basic way of thinking about things and makes the basic ideas accesible again. That seems like a convenient apology but I certainly don't feel the same way about Hegel, or Husserl or Derrida or Lacan. Heidegger actually flows for me.

Yeah, I hate Heidegger's style, but the 'continental' way of writing is ultimately Hegel's fault. It just becomes ubiquitous following Heidegger.

One of the second-generation continentals, I forget who it was, had this great quote about being proud of mastering Heidegger's jargon, as if it gave he and his friends some sort of intellectual hermetic power, and that that feeling dissipated with time.

Same. There's something about Heidegger's writing which I found particularly lucid and brilliant - though it takes sometime to get used to. I don't feel the same way about Husserl, early Merleau-Ponty, late Levinas, and especially Hegel and Derrida, though.

I think most of the claims against Heidegger are over-exaggerated. I'm glad there's more interest now-a-days in Continental Philosophy than there was twenty years ago from the AP tradition.

Do you have any sense of where Hegel's style came from? It's baffling to me. I haven't read Fichte. Is it Fichte?

No. Fichte is the clearest German Idealist.

Then where?? It's such a strange phenomenon.

No. People point to Kant, but Kant to me is like Husserl – overly academic and self-conscious about rigor. To read Kant and Husserl, you just need to sit down and go through word by word with patience. That does not work with Hegel, to put it simply.

In the Phenomenology, Hegel has a brief defense of his own writing style at some point during the Preface. I don't think it's convincing. You can have the cynical Schopenhauer view...but I think it's more likely he felt unable to express his own depth. The continental-philosopher-as-prophet predates Hegel, but Hegel develops the appropriate linguistic flair for it.

Heidegger is odd. When he wants to, he can be masterfully clear, and then, just as you think you've got a handle on things, he completely switches it up. His Introduction To Metaphysics is one of the best examples of this I think: the first 3 or 4 chapters are lovely to read, and then all of a sudden he starts taking about Antigone and it all goes to hell. Same with his essay on 'What Is A Thing?'. First half of the essay is admirably clear, then he starts talking about the Earth and the Sky and again, the whole thing just goes tits up, stylistically. B&T is both at turns.

I'm not sure. Late and middle Schelling also gets very mystical, so I'm not sure if we can blame it entirely on Hegel. Holderlin, Hegel, and Schelling must've had a conversation one day back in their university to make their philosophy impenetrable. Plus they were all into mysticism.

I never thought about this before, but it may be a bleeding of the style of German theology into mainstream philosophy. I haven't read enough of it to make the connection, though it seems like a plausible avenue.

That's an interesting angle -and would make total sense, but I don't have the background to verify it either.

As long as it contributes to the grand theory that Protestants ruined everything.

To be honest, and I don't think it's the greatest defense there is, but I do think that obviously what Heidegger had to overcome required a completely different framework of thinking, and a new vocabulary. It's the only way of getting past the older substance ontology of the ancients, the absolute subjectivity of the German Idealists (and the world as being a projection of the subject), and the older conceptions of time as a spatalized continuum of 'nows'.

The problem is he refuses to use too many examples in B&T to illustrate his points. I think it might be partially due him denying easy access into his own philosophy for others to give easy criticism of his work. That and sense his project is largely hermeneutical, he obviously wants his readers to have a good understanding of the history of philosophy before unraveling his work. The best way to do this is to force readers to read slowly, and meticulously - to pay attention to why he's using different words.

I was raised half-protestant, half-catholic (we switched churches once a year as part of a very strange marital compromise) The protestant families were more attractive but the catholics put on a better show.

And if there's a teen pregnancy mishap, the Protestant girl is already halfway to aborting it. *thumbs up*

I was at a high school party and the almost archetypally beautiful daughter of the most prominent protestant family was there and she said "ok hot people get the good beer." and then decided who was hot. It was v moving.

Not gonna lie, got an erection just reading that.

I haven't read the Stambaugh translation, but the Macquarie/Robinson instead. I found it to be fine, very lucid in fact, once you get used to the neologistic expressions and forms of expression (which I think are also very necessary to Heidegger's thought). A fairly great work in my view.

I also don't have a problem with Hegel, but his work is infinitely denser and more allusive than Heidegger's, and commensurately even more rewarding, more comprehensive and just greater. Don't know about Husserl, but I agree with csalisbury about Derrida and Lacan; I'm not confident they are profound enough to be worth the effort. Not so sure about Deleuze, either.

I have a real soft spot for Deleuze. I will admit that I got into Deleuze when I used to smoke a lot of weed. I can't defend his prose - which is as dense, allusive, and elliptical as the best of the french thinkers - but he's so much more fun! He's also got some geuinely interesting ideas buried under the unfortunate style. He seems like he just doesn't give a shit though (he doesnt take the philosopher thing too seriously I mean) which endears him to me way more than Hegel or Derrida

THOUGH, I will say his "Kant's critical philosophy' is the best, most lucid introduction to Kant out there. No bullshit, super readable, incredibly insightful.

G A Magee ( in Hegel and the Hermetic Tradition) writes that scholars generally agree that Hegel was exposed to the kind of mysticism inherent in Swabiam Pietism. According to Magee "Robert Scneider writes that Hegel and Schelling inhabited an entirely different " conceptual world" ( Begriffswelt) from that of Enlightenment rationalism and mechanism. Theirs was that of the " ancient categories of chemical ( i.e., alchemical)-biological philosophy of nature", stemming from "Oetinger, Böhme, van Helmont, Boyle, Fludd, Paracelsus, Agrippa von Nettesheim, Telesio and others...This philosophy of nature was still alive in Würtemburg during Hegel and Schelling's youth"....There was certainly easy access in Würtemburg to theosophic literature. Important works by Oetinger and P.M. Hahn were still being brought out in the 1708s and 1790s. Schneider notes that the works of Paracelsus and Bohme, as well as numerous alchemical works, were plentiful in Old Würtemburg".

The thesis of Magee's book is that Hegel began as and remained to the end very much a hermetic thinker. So far his arguments have been convincing.



I think this is just about right. Think theosophy, though, as well as theology.

I've been meaning to give Difference and Repetition another go (my previous attempt was half-hearted at best) because, according to some accounts I have come across, it is very much related to themes found in Hegel (although probably more by way of exploring very different orientations than of any similarity between the trajectories of the two thinkers).

For my perception, Hegel and Derrida took philosophy seriously in very different ways. Hegel, for me, is the genuine article; Derrida seems to be more of a 'celebrity philosopher'.

I think Derrida had a single genuine insight and then made a career of playing with that insight in the silliest ways. Difference and Repetition, I think, has many profound things to say about individuation. Deleuze was a great synthesizier of other's ideas. But he got trapped in the parisian bullshit. I wish wish wish he had come of age in a different milieu.

I suspect you got that right. 8-)

Oh yeah, Hegel and Schelling liked their Jacob Boehme and Meister Eckhart. Probably have to read both of those thinkers to understand them.

For my perception, Hegel and Derrida took philosophy seriously in very different ways. Hegel, for me, is the genuine article; Derrida seems to be more of a 'celebrity philosopher'. — John

I like Derrida's face. I like his vibe in interviews. I really like The White Mythology, too. (If metaphysics is metaphorical, then metaphor is metaphysical. That's my take-home.) But his ideas seem far less ambitious and essential than Hegel's. Really, Kojeve had me feeling like a rational mystic. It lit up my world. It was a beautiful translation and type-setting too.

I haven't read The White Mythology. I'm not sure what it could mean to say metaphysics is metaphorical or the converse. I have long thought of metaphysics as the pure logic of possibility. I don't doubt that Derrida is somehow brilliant, but I've tried, oh how I've tried, and I just cannot seem to penetrate the thicket. If I had more time at the moment I'd be tempted to join the Derrida reading group; because from what I do know, his early works (such as the one on Husserl's phenomenology they will be reading and discussing) are far more accessible than the later.

I read Introduction to the Reading of Hegel a few years ago, and I remember enjoying it, in particular the discussion of the master/slave dialectic. I have heard Kojeve was very influential: apparently Hyppolite (himself very influential on the postmoderns), Sartre and some of the postmoderns themselves attended his lectures. Perhaps he is largely responsible for the predominately materialist interpretations of Hegel that are almost universally orthodoxical in l'academie, and which I have long been somewhat skeptical about. The Magee book I am presently reading is convincing so far, and is reinforcing my skepticism.

I'm not sure what it could mean to say metaphysics is metaphorical or the converse. — John

There's a tradition of thinking "analogy as the core of cognition." Lakoff, Norman O. Brown, Vico, and Rorty come to mind. Derrida quotes Anatole France in the essay. Look to the etymology of abstract terms. I used to do this, very taken with metaphor as a central function. Where Mathematics Comes From was especially relevant and convincing to me. Here's this, just in case it tickles your mind:

Derrida's White Mythology offers a penetrating critique of the common paradigm involving the nature of concepts, posing the following questions: “Is there metaphor in the text of philosophy, and if so, how?” Here, the history of philosophy is characterized as an economy, a kind of "usury" where meaning and valuation are understood as metaphorical processes involving “gain and loss.” ...
The “usury” of the sign (the coin) signifies the passage from the physical to the metaphysical. Abstractions now become “worn out” metaphors; they seem like defaced coins, their original, finite values now replaced by a vague or rough idea of the meaning-images that may have been present in the originals.
Such is the movement which simultaneously creates and masks the construction of concepts. Concepts, whose real origins have been forgotten, now only yield an empty sort of philosophical promise – that of “the absolute”, the universalized, unlimited “surplus value” achieved by the eradication of the sensory or momentarily given. Derrida reads this process along a negative Hegelian line: the metaphysicians are most attracted to “concepts in the negative, ab-solute, in-finite, non-Being” (WM 121). That is, their love of the most abstract concept, made that way “by long and universal use”, reveals a preference for the construction of a metaphysics of Being. — IEP

But he makes a case that metaphor usurps a "metaphysical" role as a master/explanatory/reducing concept.

I read Introduction to the Reading of Hegel a few years ago, and I remember enjoying it, in particular the discussion of the master/slave dialectic....Perhaps he is largely responsible for the predominately materialist interpretations of Hegel that are almost universally orthodoxical in l'academie, and which I have long been somewhat skeptical about. — John

I think he did forge a new, French Hegel. In any case, I still think Kojeve is gold. But then I really liked Solomon's From Hegel to Existentialism, too.

You can have the cynical Schopenhauer view...but I think it's more likely he felt unable to express his own depth. — The Great Whatever

I think you're right. The Phen. was rushed, too, if memory serves. I've read his early theological writings. They are quite clear, quite enjoyable. He also gave stirring and clear speeches, recorded in Wiedmann, if I'm spelling that right. But maybe Phen. was raw Hegel just giving birth to ideas he hadn't organized yet under a time constraint.

His Introduction To Metaphysics is one of the best examples of this I think: the first 3 or 4 chapters are lovely to read, and then all of a sudden he starts taking about Antigone and it all goes to hell. — StreetlightX

Thanks for the tip. I'll check that one out.