The difficulty in writing about Hegel

In our previous post we promised to undergo a study of Hegel's Logic. Although we have in fact finished reading the Logic, what we noted was the difficulty of writing about this work. This is a result of personal inadequacy, although we wanted to say many things, we could not state anything that we considered really important.

Hegel's philosophy, if we are to do justice to his thought, cannot be considered separately from the history of philosophy. He considered philosophy and the history of philosophy to be essentially the same thing.The stages arrived at by thought in the course of the Logic all have analogies in the history of western philosophy, and Hegel himself draws many of these analogies - between the stage of pure Being and the philosophy of Parmenides, between that of Becoming and Heraclitus, the stage of Being-for-self and the One and Many to atomism. 

Most significantly, the all important transition in the Logic from the absolute substance to the Concept, the leap from necessity to freedom, is also a sublation of the system of Spinoza (And again it is Hegel himself who notes that the stage of the absolute substance corresponds to Spinozism, and the sublation of this to the sublation of Spinozism).

Lacking the full range of philosophical resources to do justice to Hegel, we nevertheless found ourselves drawn to writing about him. Rather than engage in this systematically (a style which would suit the personality of Hegel), we preferred to do it more sporadically and freely (a style which suits our own personality).

We also find ourselves as a matter of course always drawn back inexorably to Marx, and particularly again to Capital. We feel compelled to explore more deeply the interconnections between the Logic and Capital in as thorough a manner as possible, but this involves more work, and more reading of Marx, which takes time.

At present we do have a specific plan to write on a certain aspect of overlap between Marx and Hegel, on which more later.