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Hegel's Ladder, A Commentary on Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, Volume 1: The Pilgrimage of Spirit
A two-volume set. Print edition available in cloth only.Awarded the Nicholas Hoare/Renaud-Bray Canadian Philosophical Association Book Prize, 2001From the Hegel's Ladder aspires to be . . . a ‘literal commentary’ on Die Phänomenologie des Geistes . . . . It was the conscious goal of my thirty-year struggle with Hegel to write an explanatory commentary on this book; and with its completion I regard my own ‘working’ career as concluded. . . . The prevailing habit of commentators . . . is founded on the general consensus of opinion that whatever else it may be, Hegel’s Phenomenology is not the logical ‘Science’ that he believed it was. This is the received view that I want to overthrow. But if I am right, then an acceptably continuous chain of argument, paragraph by paragraph, ought to be discoverable in the text.
674 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1997
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December 27, 2023Who amongst us doesn’t love Hegel? I know I do. I’ve read his ‘The Phenomenology of Spirit’ (PoS) three times. It reads like poetry. This book takes the poetry out and dissects it with paragraph by paragraph disquisitions while providing context, contemporary relationships and relative historical relevance from Hegel’s time period and from recent times.
The author does get lost in the forest by only seeing the trees. I like being entertained and edified by Hegel with his original Hegelian poetry but know better than to ever drop my guard when reading Hegel and always know better than to ever take him too seriously. This author commits that primal sin and takes Hegel completely seriously and at times deserves ‘a boxing about the ears’ as Hegel’s proverbial ‘naughty boy’ does.
I like this book overall very much but it is dense and pontificates on the words that make up the paragraph and sometimes unfortunately gets lost within its own seriousness and forgets that there is an overall philosophy (or ‘science of experience’) that is fun. I prefer the ‘Bernstein Tapes’ on the PoS that is also freely available on the net. The Tapes are an actual class taught on the PoS and get at what Hegel meant overall better than what this book does.
I think Hegel is always worth reading. I think this book would be universally liked by those who like Hegel, but for those who haven’t yet read Hegel I would recommend Hegel instead of this book. This book is freely available on the net at Hegel's Ladder Volume II or near that URL (there are two volumes).
In this book the author commented on the ‘nonsense of Toynbee’ derived from Hegel. I’m currently reading Toynbee and I see Hegel oozing out of him and I agree with this author: Toynbee is nonsense (though, in spite of the ‘nonsense’ I’m finding myself loving Toynbee because of 101 other weird things, but that’s for another book review).
I recently read Feuerbach ‘The Essence of Christianity’ and Popper’s ‘Open Society and Its Enemies’. Hegel does kill God and I think he is the first to say ‘God is dead’ (oddly and weirdly, I’m thinking H.S. Harris is a believer by the way he frames Hegel). The first time I read Hegel it was clear to me that he was not a believer and that ‘God was created by man not man created by God’ as Feuerbach would later say and that Hegel hypothetically fundamentally would say that ‘I know God exist because when I pray to God I always know I am speaking to myself’. Popper will connect Plato and Hegel to the right (Fascist) and left (Marxist) wing Hegelians, and Popper didn’t like Hegel mostly because Popper values liberty of the individual (‘libertarianism’) above the community of the ethnic or social class of the right/left wing Hegelians with their culmination and reification of a nation state. A narcissist such as Trump will never recognize a other as a person and will always lack love and will default into an ‘I’ and ‘them’ and not ‘us’ state of mind. Hegel can be misapplied as a foundation for Fascism and this book gives enough of those kinds of interpretations for the reader to put the pieces together for themselves. The author mostly only bad mouths the ‘socialist’ (Marxist), but Hitler most certainly was influenced by Plato and Hegel (just read his ‘Mein Kampf’, or Popper to see the connections).
There are too many rich avenues to comment overall about specific things that were mentioned in this book. I’ll give just one big theme: I enjoyed the TV show ‘Fleabag’, and my favorite scene is when Fleabag is in the bar talking to an acquaintance and says ‘people are assholes’, and her acquaintance says ‘yes but life is only good because of the others’. That theme from ‘Fleabag’ is a big part of what Hegel and this book tries to explicate. Sartre is completely wrong when he says “L’enfer, c’est les autres” (‘Hell is other people’). (IMO, Sartre is a shallow philosopher and his book ‘Being and Nothingness’ shows that, but one thing he does incredibly well is explaining Hegel in that book while unfortunately butchering Heidegger completely (Dreyfus says that about Heidegger too in his lecture on Division II of ‘Being and Time’). BTW, Sartre definitely saw the connections between what he was saying and what Hegel said. Sometime when you have the time check out the play ‘No Exit’ on Youtube for how Sartre saw Hegel’s dialectic and why Sartre’s interpretation lays an egg today).
We are nothing without others and without others in our world we will be no better than a narcissist trapped within their own Fascist hateful self-recursive epistemological loop. I strongly suspect that Trump has never read Hegel (j/k, I know Trump has never read a book except with the one possible exception being a book on Hitler’s speeches or ‘Mein Kampf’ by Adolf Hitler). I know I’m just making a wild guess about Trump’s literacy, but his fascist tendencies most likely come from his narcissism and his belief in his fake news as reality not from his readings of Hegel.
The one thing less satisfying for me than reading an actual book is reading a book on a Kindle App or on a computer in PDF. Fortunately for me, I no longer read actual books. I ended up finding a free PDF copy of Volume I and II of this book that normally goes for $160 and put it into the Voice Dream app on my Iphone and listened to it on my daily bike ride (I ride a lot everyday). Riding the bike and listening to this book (over 1500 pages or 70 hours) over the last month and a half wasn’t a bad use of my time at all.
The author does get lost in the forest by only seeing the trees. I like being entertained and edified by Hegel with his original Hegelian poetry but know better than to ever drop my guard when reading Hegel and always know better than to ever take him too seriously. This author commits that primal sin and takes Hegel completely seriously and at times deserves ‘a boxing about the ears’ as Hegel’s proverbial ‘naughty boy’ does.
I like this book overall very much but it is dense and pontificates on the words that make up the paragraph and sometimes unfortunately gets lost within its own seriousness and forgets that there is an overall philosophy (or ‘science of experience’) that is fun. I prefer the ‘Bernstein Tapes’ on the PoS that is also freely available on the net. The Tapes are an actual class taught on the PoS and get at what Hegel meant overall better than what this book does.
I think Hegel is always worth reading. I think this book would be universally liked by those who like Hegel, but for those who haven’t yet read Hegel I would recommend Hegel instead of this book. This book is freely available on the net at Hegel's Ladder Volume II or near that URL (there are two volumes).
In this book the author commented on the ‘nonsense of Toynbee’ derived from Hegel. I’m currently reading Toynbee and I see Hegel oozing out of him and I agree with this author: Toynbee is nonsense (though, in spite of the ‘nonsense’ I’m finding myself loving Toynbee because of 101 other weird things, but that’s for another book review).
I recently read Feuerbach ‘The Essence of Christianity’ and Popper’s ‘Open Society and Its Enemies’. Hegel does kill God and I think he is the first to say ‘God is dead’ (oddly and weirdly, I’m thinking H.S. Harris is a believer by the way he frames Hegel). The first time I read Hegel it was clear to me that he was not a believer and that ‘God was created by man not man created by God’ as Feuerbach would later say and that Hegel hypothetically fundamentally would say that ‘I know God exist because when I pray to God I always know I am speaking to myself’. Popper will connect Plato and Hegel to the right (Fascist) and left (Marxist) wing Hegelians, and Popper didn’t like Hegel mostly because Popper values liberty of the individual (‘libertarianism’) above the community of the ethnic or social class of the right/left wing Hegelians with their culmination and reification of a nation state. A narcissist such as Trump will never recognize a other as a person and will always lack love and will default into an ‘I’ and ‘them’ and not ‘us’ state of mind. Hegel can be misapplied as a foundation for Fascism and this book gives enough of those kinds of interpretations for the reader to put the pieces together for themselves. The author mostly only bad mouths the ‘socialist’ (Marxist), but Hitler most certainly was influenced by Plato and Hegel (just read his ‘Mein Kampf’, or Popper to see the connections).
There are too many rich avenues to comment overall about specific things that were mentioned in this book. I’ll give just one big theme: I enjoyed the TV show ‘Fleabag’, and my favorite scene is when Fleabag is in the bar talking to an acquaintance and says ‘people are assholes’, and her acquaintance says ‘yes but life is only good because of the others’. That theme from ‘Fleabag’ is a big part of what Hegel and this book tries to explicate. Sartre is completely wrong when he says “L’enfer, c’est les autres” (‘Hell is other people’). (IMO, Sartre is a shallow philosopher and his book ‘Being and Nothingness’ shows that, but one thing he does incredibly well is explaining Hegel in that book while unfortunately butchering Heidegger completely (Dreyfus says that about Heidegger too in his lecture on Division II of ‘Being and Time’). BTW, Sartre definitely saw the connections between what he was saying and what Hegel said. Sometime when you have the time check out the play ‘No Exit’ on Youtube for how Sartre saw Hegel’s dialectic and why Sartre’s interpretation lays an egg today).
We are nothing without others and without others in our world we will be no better than a narcissist trapped within their own Fascist hateful self-recursive epistemological loop. I strongly suspect that Trump has never read Hegel (j/k, I know Trump has never read a book except with the one possible exception being a book on Hitler’s speeches or ‘Mein Kampf’ by Adolf Hitler). I know I’m just making a wild guess about Trump’s literacy, but his fascist tendencies most likely come from his narcissism and his belief in his fake news as reality not from his readings of Hegel.
The one thing less satisfying for me than reading an actual book is reading a book on a Kindle App or on a computer in PDF. Fortunately for me, I no longer read actual books. I ended up finding a free PDF copy of Volume I and II of this book that normally goes for $160 and put it into the Voice Dream app on my Iphone and listened to it on my daily bike ride (I ride a lot everyday). Riding the bike and listening to this book (over 1500 pages or 70 hours) over the last month and a half wasn’t a bad use of my time at all.
March 29, 2023
Most comprehensive and detailed commentary on Hegel's Phenomenology I have found thus far. The research that must have gone behind writing this work is impressive!
Want to read
October 13, 2012I will probably read this instead of the Phenomenology. And I will probably not read all of this. If any.
February 21, 2021
So one of my undergrad professors knew Harris pretty well, I was very interested to learn that Harris sat down with Hegel's library (i.e. every book that Hegel had read) and read all of them to understand Hegel better . . . that's dedication lol.
Want to read
January 28, 2016Damn this is really pricey
October 1, 2019
This is an extremely helpful, line-by-line commentary on the Phenomenology. Harris provides the intellectual context that makes this work so opaque to contemporary English readers.
June 20, 2023
My personal favorite commentary to read alongside Hegel’S Phenomenology
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews