Reading Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit is a lot like reading Joyce's Ulysses. Sure, you can do it without a guide, but why? This book is the guide to use. It explains in clear, lucid English what Hegel is trying to get across, what ideas Hegel is wrestling with. The interpretation is crisp and engaging. This book makes it both possible and worthwhile to wrestle with the Phenomenology yourself.

Recommended for everyone trying to understand Hegel.

This book is cited as one of the best exegesis of Hegel's 'Phenomenology of the Mind'. As all classics of German philosophers, Hegel's masterpiece is almost inaccessible. I¡¯ve heard that Hegel¡¯s Phenomenology of the Mind is one of the three most abstruse works in the Western philosophy. The other two are Heidegger¡¯s ¡®Being and Time¡¯ and Whitehead¡¯s ¡®Process and Reality¡¯. These works are thorny to comprehend, not to mention just to read through, for the originality of the idea presented in the works. So they are littered with the neologism even their contemporaries never heard of. The established terminology is not suitable to articulate totally novel thoughts. Hegel¡¯s work is not the exception in this regard. The Phenomenology of the Mind is regarded as the culmination of German idealism: Hegel presented his answer in the works to the enigma Kant put in ¡®The Critique of the Pure Reason¡¯, ¡®Ding an Sich (Thing in itself)¡¯. And the answer was the unknown framework at that time. That kind of thought can¡¯t be put in terminology at hand, but should be minted with coined word on its own. But such wording can¡¯t be easy to grasp for the author himself must be not satisfied with his own wording. This book is about the terminology of Hegel¡¯s Phenomenology of the Mind. The author explains organizing concepts appeared in the ¡®Preface¡¯ and ¡®Introduction¡¯. The preface and introduction of Hegel¡¯s Phenomenology of the Mind is notorious for its inaccessibility. Those parts don¡¯t introduce readers to anything, but recap all of the following chapters in its own neologism. That lengthy introduction could be understood only if you finished the last page of the book. Actually the introduction is the conclusion of the book. Hegel¡¯s stance in the ¡®Introduction¡¯ could be reached only through the incremental logical ascending of the following chapters. Terminology in the ¡®Introduction¡¯ could appear only when that kind of argumentation finished. So usually they are recommended to read the ¡®Introduction¡¯ as conclusion. But such feature is a good point to get the gist of the book. So the author of this exegesis positioned there to overview Hegel¡¯s world. W. Marx¡¯s approach seems effective. It¡¯s the good spot not only to outline Hegel¡¯s points, but also to compare Hegel with other German idealists like Kant, Fichte and Scheling, and such comparison is the best way to understand Hegel. This is the strategy W. Marx took and it seems he make it. But this book is not that easy to follow if you have not preliminary knowledge of Kant, at least. This book is not a primer for beginners but for at least graduate student. Anyway I haven¡¯t seen other book that explains better Hegel than this book.

This work is a wonderful interpretation of Hegel's phenomenology. It is concise, but not brief. In some ways, it is more valuable than Hegel's Phenomenology itself. Highly recommended for the layperson and undergraduate.

Daniel Berthold-Bond explains why, in Hegel's Philosophy of Mind (part 3 of the Encyclopedia), madness is logically prior to reason. The answer lies in the extreme negavity of consciousness. Mad destruction is required before the subject can build a symbolic existence. The work is heavily Lacanian without any evidence in the footnotes that this was consciously intended. The book does much to make the under-recognized connections between the thought of Hegel and Lacan. The book is extremely well written and is one of the finest contributions to Hegelian interpretation in recent times.

Simpson's book provides a provocative and interesting reading of several important sections of the Phenomenology of Spirit, that treats this text as a whole as a study in the "logic" of induction. He does not consider Hegel's work to be "inductive" in the modern (Lockeian) sense of adding facts upon facts in order to arrive at general conclusions. Rather, Simpson claims that Hegel's argument in the Phenomenology progresses as we (the readers) come to learn from experience what it means to learn from experience. In other words, Simpson aims to show that within Hegel's Phenomenology the concept of induction itself develops inductively. Simpson concludes by indicating briefly the way in which the "inductive" argument that he traces throughout Hegel's text both supports and coincides with the "deductive" side of Hegel's argument that is more often the focus of commentators.

Simpson's thesis - that Hegel's text traces a pathway whereby the capacity for conscious experiencing is shown to develop in response to progressively more sophisticated attempts to articulate and unify experience - receives a capable and insightful defense here. In addition, his study as a whole provides a worthwhile and interesting perspective from which to reexamine Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit. His focus on the way in which Hegel's philosophy responds to and develops out of an active concern with actual experience should also provide a strong theoretical basis from which to approach the question of the way in which Hegel's other systematic writings on nature, history, art, religion and politics were informed by and developed in response to Hegel's own scientific, cultural, religious and political experiences. Above all, it is only in light of such investigations that, as it seems to me, we can address adequately the question of the ways in which Hegel's philosophy is relevant today.

This is a vey unusual study with a neat research task and a fascinating twist, as it takes up the story of a factory inspector mentioned in Marx's Capital and examines the little know world of these inspectors as they struggled heroically with the British Industrial system of the nineteenth century in all its grotesque and almost endless resistance to even the simplest reform. A picture is worth a thousand words, and this portrait of the collision of the industrial class, from child labor to the plight of chimney sweeps, in the saga of exploitation makes crystal clear, where more ideological harangues fail, the issues that drove the industrial civilization into its twentieth century crisis. In the process the author uncovers an invisible Hegelian strain in Marx's later work and takes up the unusual and very enlightening task of delving into Hegel's views on the 'universal class' and their influence on Marx. This side of Hegel is seldom seen for what it is, and, agree or not, beggars the usual view of Hegel as an easy apologist for classical liberalism.

Hegel: A Feminist Revision by Kimberly Hutchings (Polity Press) Hegel is a significant reference point for many feminist philosophers and there is already a considerable body of feminist scholarship which engages with Hegel. In Hegel: A Feminist Revision, Hutchings examines the philosophical connections and debates between Hegelian thought and feminist philosophy. However, Hutchings does not simply to catalogue ways in which Hegel figures in different feminist philosophical arguments. Instead Hutchings demonstrates that Hegel's thought has something to contribute to significant philosophical arguments within feminism over sexual difference, epistemology and moral and political theory. The fulfilment of claim clearly requires both the articulation of a particular perspective within feminist philosophy and a specific interpretation of Hegel's thought. Feminist philosophy is not a uniform body of thought and my characterization of feminist debates will reflect a perspective which some feminist philosophers would want to reject. Similarly, Hutchings' interpretation of Hegel is a contestable, left-Hegelian one with which other feminist philosophers and Hegelian scholars will find plent to contest This means that the persuasiveness of any of the arguments in Hegel: A Feminist Revision depends on the extent to which readers recognize and identify with the kind of feminist philosophy and the kind of Hegelian philosophy that Hutchings articulates and defends. It should be clear from the outset, however, that Hutchings does not argue that Hegel himself was in any sense a feminist. It is patently obvious from his own remarks on sexual difference that, even in the context of his own time, Hegel's attitude to women was patriarchal and at times misogynist. If Hegel's work is useful to feminist philosophers it is in spit of his own ideological position on the `woman question'.
Hegel famously complained of the inability of Prefaces or Introductions to accomplish the intellectual journey on which a book is designed to take a reader. In line with this complaint, in this review one can only assert the main claims about feminist philosophy and Hegel. The heart of the argument is the claim that Hegel is battling with the same conceptual conundrum that constitute debates in feminist philosophy. Central is the conundrum of how to escape the conceptual binary oppositions (between culture and nature, reason and emotion, autonomy and heteronomy, universal and particular, ideal and real) which have associated women with the denigrated term and prescribed the exclusion of women from the practices of both philosophy and politics. As Hutchings expoundas it, feminist philosophy can be defined as a project to think the world differently, but one which is forever prey to a tendency to lapse back into the terms it is seeking to transcend. This is particularly clear in debates internal to feminist philosophy, in which the difficulty of "thinking differently" becomes apparent in feminist characterizations of opposing positions. Hutchings argues that Hegel prefigures the reductive pattern of internal philosophical debates within feminism in his account of the temptations of modern thought to lapse into onesidedness and exclusivity in his Phenomenology of Spirit and Science of Logic. In addition, Hutchings argues that Hegel provides a resource for resisting the temptations of modernist transcendence, through his insistence on the inseparability of being from truth and his historicization of both being and truth. Having made this argument, Hutchings puts forth an account of its implications for feminist ontology, epistemology and moral and political theory. The later part of the book attempts to show how a Hegelian feminism would respond to contemporary feminist debates about knowledge, morality and politics.

Horst Altaus has done here an excellent job. We are curious about philosophers as men and women because philosophy is somewhat more intimate than science, and Hegel was present at a time of rapid change: during the Napoleonic wars, he saw first hand his "dialectic" in which the German states were turned topsy-turvy by world souls on horseback.

Altaus intersperses his chapters with readable digests of Hegel's major works.

There is the obligatory comment about Hegel's complex style, combined with rather patronizing praise of the simplicity and elegance of a minor work on the Württemburg constitution: for we often find that to ascribe the label "difficult" to the style or the man committs what psychologists call a fundamental attribution error.

For we find that Hegel could use, in his minor work, a style appropriate to the theme. It is said that the style should be appropriate to the audience as if that was something we could control, but Hegel's troubles with getting enough students to attend his lectures, documented by Altaus, show both that operationalism of this sort was not his cup of tea, and that it is less fundamental than the duty of the author towards reality.

People are difficult and their style is difficult when they try to impress (although anyone who today uses a difficult style merely to impress aliterate administrators and deans needs his head examined), but perhaps more often when they find themselves wrestling, like Jacob, with angels.

Hegel wrote simply when writing on mere constitutions, as did John Adams. But his larger theme required on his part a couple of barrels of books, dragged about Germany by primitive transportation, and while his ethnocentrism is obvious, Hegel's philosophy of history remains in some ways up to date.

Hegel's texts have the curious property that they share with Kant that unlike mathematical or scientific works, one gets the impression that "if this stuff is true, not only could it not be otherwise, its-being-put-otherwise would not make any sense at all. On the other hand, however, if this stuff is false, it is not false, but without any sensible meaning, whatsoever."

IF the struggle for recognition is the motor of consciousness and of history, then any alternative story is gibberish, which is interesting, for Hegel's story is confusing enough.

And, it's gibberish precisely because of its proposed theme, which is everything.

Science considers the alternate worlds and chooses the true world, but the alternate worlds can be pictured. True philosophy on the other hand, is concerned with the only world, whether we interpret that as the set or join of all possible worlds, or a world in which all possibilities will come to pass.

This alone I think generates the "complex bad" style of Kant and of Hegel.

Hegel should be read by philosophers of consciousness, and Althaus is a good introduction: for contemporary theorists may be making fundamental mistakes.

IF our consciousness is formed by the Other from day one, then this would predict that fetal alcohol syndrome victims and children deprived of contact with their others have no consciousness as we experience it from the inside.

It means that "scientific" explanations of consciousness that hypostatize individual minds are doomed. No model of consciousness makes sense if it "works" in a world populated by only one consciousness. Just as mathematics requires existence assertions, consciousness requires a stronger assertion: in the beginning there is neither zero nor one but two (Madonna and child.)

Horst includes more patronizing material on Hegel's scientific views which he shared with Goethe. They may seem to Altaus to be a dead end but forms of them survive in deep ecology. They were replaced by reductionism which, paradoxically, points of Thomas Kuhn's Oedipal destruction of old paradigms and technical whizbang as its own ultimate ratio regium. It is a reductionism which is unable to master complexity because its gesture is a hand-wave, from simple initial conditions to complex results, that in an idealist gesture ignores labor.

It is clear that like many intellectuals, Hegel compromised himself later in life by becoming an ideologue for the Prussian state. But while the dialectic is not a license for easy self-contradiction (as Hegel's friend Goethe feared) there is a genuine dialectic between the hero of the chapter on lordship and bondage in the Phenomenology of Mind, and the apologist for a state church.

For all other things being equal, we would like to live in a society that reflected our deepest needs and one that did not demand principled retirement. But history, as I write, staggers on.

Althaus shows that Hegel, as many attackers have said, may have compromised himself by at the end of his life, identifying the World Spirit with the Prussian state.

This is, of course, ethnocentrism run amuck. But Hegel's views were not evaluative. As Altaus shows, he was concerned with description of a sort that would sensibly relate individual psychology to history.

Hegel's poltical philosophy gives no basis whatsoever for resistance to a state, or paradoxically it can be reread as revolutionary counsel.

For if one lives in the best state, or even one that merely is the state in which the world spirit has set up shop for good or ill, revolution is either evil or futile, or both. If the state is the home of a benign world spirit, Casper the Friendly Weltgeist, then resistance is evil.

But if (as commentators after Hegel have noted, especially Adorno) Hegel provides no reason why the world spirit may not be perceived as bad or evil in its effects on our lives, revolution is futile and evil, being futile, everything else being considered.

In short, reading the biography of the later Hegel illustrates how old age can be lethal for philosophy. The later Marx showed some of the same intellectual decay as his carbuncles got the better of him. As T. S. Eliot wrote, "do not tell us of the wisdom of old men, but rather of their folly."

As a mystery novelist with my first novel in its initial release, I have found that reading a variety of works helps me in my writing. I first came in contact with the works of Hegel as an undergraduate at Claremont McKenna College. Hegel's thoughts have provided foundations for political movements ranging from the far right to the far left, and this work, an excellent translation, provides insight into this thinker's thoughts. Excellent work. A classic in every sense of the word.

This is the work in which Hegel called the absolute that night in which all cows are black. Those people who think that philosophy is impossibly complicated might start by looking at Walter Kaufmann's comments on how bad the other translations and comments on this amazingly swift work by Hegel have been. The other bit of humor here is Hegel attacking philosophy in a way that can only seem to be a personal attack on the views of Schelling, and then Walter Kaufmann thinks Hegel lied when he told Schelling in a letter that he wasn't thinking of him personally when he was writing about how superficial philosophy seems to people who only read the stuff. What is truly astounding is how inspired people feel when they right this kind of stuff. Religion and poetry seem to be competing for inspiration that can claim to be as deep, but religious doctrines and poetic theories get rated along with stale philosophies in this kind of search for an absolute, which really might seem like a night in which all cows are black the first time through this. It helps to have a few other books around to help comprehend this stuff by putting Hegel in a context where this summary of what his first two major works might be about (he wrote his LOGIC later) strives for some importance. This could be as close to official German university philosophy as any student would ever understand, but Hegel might be found complaining here that students don't understand a lot of this any more than other people.