Hegel: Foundations

Seven dialogues into the thought of G. W. F. Hegel

A course on the thought of G. W. F. Hegel.

Course outline

1. The World-Soul on Horseback — Jena, October 1806: Napoleon rides beneath my window while the Phenomenology's last pages sit in my coat. Who I am, where I came from, and why philosophy must comprehend its own time.
2. The Age Torn in Half — The wound my philosophy answers: Kant's gap, the Enlightenment's crisis of reason, the longing for Greece, and a freedom that uproots everything it touches.
3. The Dialectic: Thinking Without a Parachute — The method itself: begin with nothing presupposed, watch pure being turn into nothing and both into becoming — and learn why contradiction is an engine, not an error.
4. Master and Slave — Desire, the struggle to the death, and the great reversal: why the master's victory is hollow and the slave's labor is the road to freedom.
5. Geist: The I That Is a We — Spirit is not a ghost. What I mean by Geist: the shared life of mutually recognizing selves — language, customs, institutions — the element you have breathed since birth.
6. Freedom's Architecture — and the Terror — The Philosophy of Right: why doing-as-you-please is not yet freedom; family, civil society, and state as freedom made actual — and the Revolution's descent into Terror as the proof by catastrophe.
7. Reason in History — and the Owl at Dusk — World history as the progress of the consciousness of freedom: the slaughter-bench, the cunning of reason, the world-historical individuals — and the racist pages of my own lectures, read without…

Part of the Symposium course library.