Was Schopenhauer right about Hegel?

t. adult argument

t. assblasted existentialist who gets upset when his favourite self-help novels are mocked
It's not that continentals should be dismissed, but their style should definitely not be emulated. Defending yourself from critique by being hard to understand and leaving your works open to multiple intrepretations is poor form.

First and foremost, everything can be misinterpreted and reinterpreted.

Secondly, A lot of these philosophical treatises weren't written to be obscure deliberately, only Kant ever admitted to doing this for the sake of it. Even he had works that aren't that popular today that aren't as obscure as his main philosophical works like his "scientific" and Aesthetic writings.

The problem with philosophy and older philosophical works in general is they were written at a different time and with a different culture, in the midst of a very different series arguments than those today and in a nexus of different intellectual influences than those at the present, so they become obscure by extension and time. Hegel was actually considered a popularizer of philosophy during his day and was pretty renowned for a professor at that time. Which is one of the reasons he had so many contemporary dedicated haters he had a bunch of students and proxy popularizers of his own view that people felt almost stifled by his influence.

Today when I open up the Phenomenology of Spiirt after reading every one of his other works, reading some of the people who influenced him, some of the people he influenced and secondary sources attempting to elaborate on his philosophy, I still have a hard time and I'm somewhat of a specialist as someone who studied this academically. Part of it is just impossible to understand because we live almost in a completely different world from the one that book was written,. it also had to be reinterpreted from highly stressed German and French words into English so I can read it here and brought up to date with out of use words and phrases and sometimes if the book is higher end it will attempt more modern and comprehensive footnotes on top of the initial ones. All this makes the broader concepts he was trying to elaborate on harder to understand and obscure and almost none of it involves his intentions.

Obscurantism is, when all is said and done, an attempt by the uneducated to appear intelligent. Lacan, Hegel, and all the rest built their whole careers around their insecurities about knowing nothing, being able to do nothing.

Compare Hegel to Hume or Hobbes, or even Nietzsche. The latter genuinely tried to understand the world, and the put forward reasonable metaphysical perspectives. They were rational, educated men who could speak intelligently about a wide variety of subjects, and their works (at least those of Hume and Hobbes) can more properly be understood as basic research, rather than what we understand as philosophy in modern times.

Hegel, in contrast, has the understanding of a fucking child
He could've been a script writer for fucking Stargate.

Then why can I understand Plato? Hegel wrote 200 years ago, when most of our modern ideas were already entrenched; he wasn't some Atlantean from 100.000BC.

Here is a list of people who lived much earlier than Hegel and can be understood by a modern reader:

Let's take a passage from Phaedo:

You might agree of disagree with the proto-Gnostic idea of philosophy giving your "perfect" knowledge, but at least you can discern what the nigga is saying. In fact, we can safely say that being understood was the goal where.

Now compare this to Hegele droning on about shit:

The very fact that you think Plato or Aristotle are understandable by today's standards kinda disqualifies you. Barely anything of it has relevance to era of pomo/noschlomo

Of course, but the writer should seek to convey their ideas with maximal distinction and clarity.

Very deontological of him, but if you read Descartes' answers to the Objections to his Meditations for example he often powers through on pure sophistry. Kant is not an isolated case.

Fair points - but the gulf between their worlds and words and ours should not be insurmountable, especially since Ancients writing in dead languages manage to convey their ideas far more clearly.

More obscurantism… and an attempt at making your field appear more prestigious than it is, I assume.

Post-modernism is the failure of the Enlightenment, nothing more.

Greek philosophy was distorted during christian era, which has ended only 200 years ago and does seem to die off in great pains so those ideas seem more legible than modern ones.

A lot of people with lower and higher varying degrees of knowledge to you would call every single one of those philosophers and their works "obscure." Part of the reason why is obscure can mean a lot of things, but to not bemoan the point and be pedantic I'll take that you and the other poster generally mean "Hard to understand."

Even by simplifying things down to this contention, here is a vast gulf of what "understanding" might mean, I don't really know you or your level of knowledge so you might be a platonic scholar of note or you might be someone who read the Phaedo once and felt like you had a basic understanding or at the very least an understanding better than that commensurate with your readings of Hegel. I can tell you after a class on just the book the Republic there are a lot of details a lay reader might miss in that one book of Plato about the Culture of Athens and broader Greece, the nature of the interlocutors involved, their connections to each other or appearances in the other dialogues of Plato and their literal place in history. The broader contentions and ideas of the work, how they fit in with philosophical ideas that came before and after. Then I can list a hundred and twenty other different things here but I think you get the point.

On some level I get what you mean, it's easy to feel you have a bullet point idea of Plato's philosophy and the concepts within, but a lot of that feeling is cultivated by a history of interpretations and reinterpretations of his ideas and a telephone game of rewriting his works from non originals and simplifying them over time. It helped that these ideas were literally at the start of the philosophical dialogue at least according to Hegel's interpretation of history (What the passage is referring to
) and therefore platonic concepts are somewhat simple and easy to understand.

I guarantee if I look into an academic database I will find varying interpretations of that section of Plato. Some by no names and some by the most famous philosophers in history. Part of whats great about philosophy is new philosophies and philosophical ideas give us an additional lens to look at the old ones.

Ironically I find/found Descartes pretty easy to read but this is a good illustration of the point at the top of my post here. It probably helps that I can also read French now so my experience is also different in that sense from yours.

And by Islamic and Roman Scholars before that.

i already know how you're going to respond to this, but seriously just shut the fuck up. to write off thinkers as essential to philosophy today as lacan, hegel, and "the rest" (other authors you have a hard time understanding, i'm assuming?) as people who've built their careers around their 'insecurities' is just so fucking childish of you. why don't you try and tell me what about lacanian theory is flawed rather than saying "i dont understand so it bad lol"

you utter fucking philistine. "basic research?" what on earth are you talking about? what separates the work of hume or nietzsche from "philosophy in modern times" (as if it's some kind of homogeneous field) beside the fact you feel you get one better than the other?

hegel can be reasonably approached by anyone that takes their reading seriously, and isn't merely searching for words to coincide with their pathetic 'rational, scientific' ideological lens, which is what i highly suspect you are doing.

*i was wrong to say easily, hegel is a very difficult author. this still does nothing to negate the value of his thought.

So what's your take on the central point of the Meditations? What is Descartes trying to achieve?

Lacan is a complete intellectual failure and people like him have dragged philosophy into shame. He's the reason you get laughed at today if you claim to be a philosopher.

You show how little you understand about the world in which you claim to be an expert. Philosophy developed as a pre-science; as an attempt to analyze the world. It gave birth to physics, sociology, political science, metaphysics, and ethics. This all means nothing to you, because you think that 20th-century French intellectual masturbation is the be-all, end-all of human thought. The modern """""philosopher""""" fear rational inquiry because his thought is simple-minded and incoherent. Thus he retreats into rhetorical complexity and meaninglessness to preserve a veneer of respectability. "If nobody can understand what I'm talking about, people won't notice that I'm talking shit".

Russell already said as much:

It's the same thing that separates Euler's work on graph theory from Deepak Chopra's claims that the moon doesn't exist because of quantum physics.

The former is an instance of someone clearly knowledgeable trying to piece together something for which the theory didn't yet exist, the latter is someone using fancy words about things he doesn't understand to bamboozle people.

I understand it very well. Lacan's entire body of work can be summarized as "I'm alienated from the modern world, fuck you, mom and dad".

What's "pathetic" about trying to systematically understand the world? Of course I know you'd can't do it, therefore it must be worthless.

Not at all. I'm talking about deliberately not making sense, or of clothing simple ideas behind needlessly verbose and bombastic phrasing.

A very clear sign of cultural decay. This is true in the limited sense that you can find nuances in people's writing, but you really implicitly give up on the idea that anything can be understood, or that anyone had a clear intent in anything. In a way, this illustrates the bankruptcy to which the field of philosophy has come. It used to be central project in the human quest for knowledge, but as more and more fields have branched off from it, less and less of it has remained. Little is left nowadays but hoity-toity autofellators who are trying desperately to convince the world that they have something interesting to say, though they themselves can't quite clearly express what that is.

pomo BTFO

I think it comes down to people who want to spread knowledge and those who want to challenge people to think for themselves while reading. Also, those who make it obscure is probably due to some mild autism, which requires them to use specific words which specify very small differences and nuances. Whether you agree with this or not, is up to you.

The point according to Descartes is to have a foundation for the basis of his philosophy, he settles on his thoughts because lel cant doubt my doubts and then starts branching on to more things. Que Cartesian dualism and all it's problems. There is probably some gray area here and there but that is the generally accepted interpretation and the one that most philosophers thought was an insurmountable puzzle until Wittgenstein and Heidegger.

Except I would argue this was happening long before I assume someone like yourself would say we were "decaying." In fact I think it's a fundamental part of knowledge acquisition to reexamine and reinterpret old ideas to see if they're still useful.

By "decay" I don't mean "tranny bathrooms", I mean the ossification of the philosophical tradition during the era of the scholastics. Those people were fundamentally incapable of producing anything new and instead endlessly recycled works they had inherited.

The last true philosophers were Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, and Kierkegaard, but they were only the last twitch of a decaying culture that had long lost its ability to innovate in the field of philosophy. Nowadays, we are left with absurdist nonsense (Continental Philosophy) or the endless regurgitation of the classics. There will never again be a new Plato, or a Descartes. The people with the potential exist, but they have moved on to other fields.

Plato is pretty straightforward. But someone like Aristotle in Metaphysics can be pretty tough. I'm willing to give Hegel the benefit of the doubt - he had actual philosophical ideas (which Schopenhauer incidentally did not believe) but he could have written in a much clearer way.