Haunted By Hegel

 

Why Read Hegel?

Because genius stimulates genius.

Because he believed that world history was nothing but the progress of the consciousness of freedom. Never mind whether he had warrant to believe this; his belief evidenced a longing, and it is the longing that matters. For longing can be contagious.

Read Hegel because he read Kant critically and judiciously: adopting and rejecting the Transcendental philosophy in a lucid spirit.

Read Hegel because he recognized that Spinoza is indispensable.

And Read Hegel critically: his Eurocentric and Christian (albeit heterodox) biases are on full display and, beneath them, a liberal form of White Supremacy--the form that reigns to this day in Euro-America because it is baked in to the structures of cultural and intellectual life.

Read Hegel to understand how prevalent those biases are; read Hegel to learn how to recognize them when they are disguised as Reason or Science.

Read Hegel to transcend him, dialectically.