Second Installment on the Section "Perception"

A few days ago, I managed to carve out enough time to make good (for once!) to bring out one Hegel video roughly each week.  We've now moved past the literary beachhead and are making some decent progress marching through the section "Perception, or The Thing and Deception".  The putatively immediate object, or rather experience explored earlier in Sense Certainty has given way to something more complex and also in some sense more concrete, less abstract -- that's the main direction we'll be going in, by the way, as we get deeper and deeper into the work, towards perspectives that are more and more concrete (though. . .  they're going to deal with concrete universals!)



In this section -- and as we explore this Gestalt, this stage of consciousness -- it is now a matter of looking at (and looking at our looking) the Thing and its properties.  Hegel might be using what appears a rather dull example -- salt, with its whiteness, and cubicality, and tartness, and . . .  --  and I'm following suit often enough with the ubiquitous piece of chalk that's either in my hand or in my pocket -- but what is going on is quite exciting if you follow it through!

Passed First Patreon Milestone

Last night, we passed one of the "milestones" I'd set for the Half Hour Hegel Patreon page.  I'd committed that, if enough patrons pledged that we reached $25 per video, I'd remove all of the advertising from every one of the videos in the Half Hour Hegel series -- past, present, and future.

We're now up to 8 patrons, and combined they've committed to $31 per video -- a show of support and appreciation for a philosophical project that is really great to witness!  That not only more than surpasses any ad revenue the video series earns -- it's also pretty cool to be able to put a face and a name to each supporter of this work, rather than just have everyone lumped into an anonymous aggregation of advertising numbers and terms.

When I sat down and worked out what it takes to produce one half-hour video on my end, it ended up involving somewhere around 4-5 hours worth of work.  The actual filming of 30 minutes worth of footage requires a good bit more than half an hour.   Preparing for the filming -- rereading, thinking, planning, even writing on the chalkboard, takes up a surprising amount of time.  Then, there's creating the slides, the whole editing process, uploading the video, and entering in all of the information. 

The next milestone arrives at the $50 per video mark.  At that level, what I'm committed to doing is stepping up the pace of video-production from the roughly four videos per month to six videos per month -- that would effectively get the entire project accomplished in 2/3 of the time allotted, reducing the projected 4 to 5 years to about 3 to 3 1/2 years.  I suspect that, at the current rate of new patron commitments to the project, I probably should plan to hit that mark this upcoming month!

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.