Patreon Pitch Video for Half Hour Hegel

Although I sent the Half Hour Hegel project Patreon page public about a week and a half back, one of the typical elements of a Patreon campaign was still missing . . .  until today -- a short video describing the project for potential patrons.

I finally bit the bullet, worked my way through the shots and edits, and brought the finished video out today.  It's quite a bit longer than what Patreon suggests for such videos, but on the other hand, it's also much, much shorter than my usual videos, so I think it ought to be quite all right for the purposes of the project.

We Begin the Section "Perception"

We're now starting a new section, "Perception," the second in the very first part of the Phenomenology, "Consciousness" -- and the first video is now available.   It's a bit of a long one, coming in at about 37 minutes, but close enough to 30, I suppose to still be called "Half Hour Hegel."

At the end of all of the dialectical twists and turns in the previous section, "Sense Certainty," Hegel had brought us to the point where we could see that the real truth of experience, of what appears to be immediate sensation, is the Universal.  That culminated in a shift of focus to Perception, which grasps universals in the sensible particulars. 

Launching A Patreon Campaign For Half Hour Hegel!

Since I first started shooting the Half Hour Hegel videos a little over a year ago, I've had quite a few people express their gratitude for the work I put into them -- and a number of them have sent in donations to support the project.  Over the last several months, we came to a decision at ReasonIO that we'd move away from the rather ad hoc Paypal donation link to something a bit more fully thought through -- and here it is: 

The Half Hour Hegel Patreon Page  

(click it - if just to check it out)

Patreon is something like the better-known Kickstarter and Indiegogo -- a "crowdfunding" site, but unlike those two, which tend to be used to support single-product projects, Patreon allows people to contribute per product (in this case, per video), making it ideal for artists, musicians, cartoonists, podcasters, video-content-producers -- even for philosophers.

Sense Certainty Is Finished!

The final video installment of the section Sense Certainty is now finished and released!  That means that we've now passed a new milestone of sorts -- getting through one of the sections of the text proper (as opposed to the Preface and Introduction)

It ended up requiring six videos total -- about 3 hours -- to get through the 21 paragraphs in this section.  When I think back to the semester-long Hegel course I took as a graduate student two decades back, I believe that we might have spent about an hour or so on this section -- though the professor noted that when he'd taken his Hegel, it was a year-long course, allowing the study to proceed at a much more leisurely pace.

Three hours of video for this section seems like a decent amount for a contemporary student who'd like to be able to work their way through the Phenomenology on their own, using the series as a resource.  It's doable in, say, a weekend, leaving time for a person to reread, reflect, argue with oneself, argue with Hegel, and so forth . . . .

In any case, it's now on to the 21 paragraphs of the following section, "Perception" . . . .

Making Our Way Through Sense Certainty

Sense Certainty is a fairly short, and -- at least in relation to some of the material coming up (e.g. Force and the Understanding) -- pretty straightforward section of the Phenomenology of Spirit.  For those who have been following along through the Preface and the Introduction, and have been wondering, "when are we going to get to something not just about method, about specific shapes of consciousness?", you get some of that in Sense Certainty.

Hegel is indeed starting out at -- or quickly getting into -- what might appear a rather high level of generality or abstraction.  But there's a good reason for this.  When we start at what we think to be the exact opposite end of things, with what is most concrete, what is immediately present, what we experience, it turns out that when we look more closely at this seemingly basic truth, matters are not at all that simple -- there's mediation going on, and if we follow along, we get to witness some dialectical development.  That's already taken place, and continually takes place -- we're just not aware of it until we start paying closer attention.

At present, I've produced four video installments for this section:

• Lecture 39 - sec. 90-93
• Lecture 40 - sec. 94-97
• Lecture 41 - sec. 98-101  
• Lecture 42 - sec. 102-105

By the end of February, I'll have produced, uploaded, and released two more -- and with those, we will be finished with Sense Certainty, and ready to move into the next section, Perception.