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I think the 5th chapter of The Phenomenology of Spirit is brilliant and rewards re-reading. In fact, I think I'll re-read it this evening. It's been a couple of decades.

I think Hegel is wrong, but he's wrong brilliantly and even helpfully.

I do NOT think that he tried to make philosophy the cookbook that he is accused of making it. I do think that often the lesser followers of a philosopher, even those who do not professedly turn him on his head, are more liable to a kind of spiritually blind defense of the philosopher's "system" which ends up making the system an idol and entirely misses the truth which the philosopher himself meant the system to serve and to portray.

I think SOME academics and those who try to take the life, love, and blood out of study, who are committed to study as an astringent and life-denying activity end up missing the point and tossing around amazing judgments and condemnations based not on what this or that writer actually said but on their extrapolation of philosophical musings into books of instructions. Some don't need Barron's Outlines or Cliff notes because they bring that approach to anything they read.

Can you tell I'm a tad peeved by this article? Having read (in March of 1971, as I recall -- get my my Geritol with a tequila chaser, please) Hegel's early explicitly Christian stuff, while I say again that I think he turns out to be wrong, I am not going to through him under the bus, at least not with the enthusiasm of this writer.

I pulled out his “The Phenomenology of Mind” and scanned a few chapters. Chapter VI, on Spirit strikes me as more humanist in perspective than Christian.

“Reason is spirit, when its certainty of being all reality has been raised to the level of truth, and reason is consciously aware of itself as its own world, and of the world as itself.”

IMHO, definitely not the human spirit of Pauline or Johanine writings.

I think Hegel is wrong, but he's wrong brilliantly and even helpfully.... while I say again that I think he turns out to be wrong, I am not going to through him under the bus, at least not with the enthusiasm of this writer.

You'll have noted that the main source of this article is Eric Vöegelin, for whom the present writer has particular enthusiasm. Vöegelin has well acknowledged Hegel's towering genius, as for instance here:

In the construction of [Hegel's] system, it is true, the Second Reality ... prevails and badly deforms the existence of the philosopher and spiritualist. But Hegel does not always construct his system. He can write brilliant commonsense studies on politics, as well as literary essays which reveal him as a master of the German language and a great man of letters. Moreover, the systematic works themselves are filled with excellent philosophical and historical analyses which can stand for themselves, unaffected in their integrity by the system into which they are built.

Elsewhere Vöegelin states that the Phänomenologie ought to be required reading for every doctoral candidate in philosophy.

In short, Vöegelin is an admirer of Hegel. He takes him to task, however, for the "magical" aspects of his work, which Hegel himself put there of course. And so, Vöegelin comes to characterize Hegel as "the coexistence of two selves, as an existence divided into a true and false self holding one another in such balance that neither the one nor the other ever becomes completely dominant. Neither does the true self become strong enough to break the system, nor does the false self become strong enough to transform Hegel into a murderous revolutionary or a psychiatric case." ["On Hegel: A Study in Sorcery," p. 217.]

I don't think Vöegelin has thrown Hegel under the bus. Neither was that the intent of the present writer.

Thanks ever so much for writing, MadDawg!