How Much Background Do You Need?

One of the Hegel-related blogs I read regularly is The Empyrean Trail, written by Anthony Wolf, who also goes by the pleasingly fanciful moniker of A.W. Hegel.  I like what I've read so far, and a recent piece - An anecdote on the myth that Hegel is impossible without background - has spurred me to do some thinking, and as you can see here, a bit of writing today.

He's raising a very important question, one that does come up from time to time as comments on the Half Hour Hegel videos - just how much preparation does one need in order to be able to successfully read and understand G.W.F. Hegel's works?  Here's how Anthony puts it:

One of the most annoying points I encounter repeatedly when it comes to engaging Hegel for a newcomer is the repetition that Hegel is very, VERY, difficult. So difficult, in fact, that if you have not had at least four years of your life dealing with learning at least the continental movement from Hume to Kant to Fichte to Schelling to… ever increasing background qualifications, you have no hope in properly understanding anything Hegel has to say. That’s not even counting the difficulty of learning Hegel’s terminology itself and the obscure logic of dialectics. So… just hold on until you’ve made it through undergrad, there is no shame in admitting that Hegel is too hard for you.