Lecture 30: Preface 69-70 Published

We're almost all of the way through the Preface to the Phenomenology -- and that's somewhat of an achievement in itself.  72 out of the 800 plus paragraphs comprising the work.  Not quite one-tenth of the work accomplished.  But. . .  it is a dense and tricky section, and it does purport to provide at least some of the main ideas of the work (Hegel's suspicion of preface, introductions, not to speak of reviews  -- one needs to kind of spit that word out to make it fit Hegel's attitude towards that sort of literary shortcut! -- set aside).

I released installation number 30 earlier this week -- it's been a bit tough to get everything released on time in my main YouTube channel, since I've had some other videos that had to be brought out as well.  It looks now as if if the end of the Preface videos is going to come in early November.



What's particularly interesting about these two paragraphs are two things.  One of these is the biting humor, the standpoint from which Hegel criticizes the standpoint of right-thinking "common sense", encapsulated in his ironic recommendation that one just read reviews, or perhaps even introductions and first paragraphs of philosophical works, in order to osmotically imbibe their essence.

The other is where he drops his pretense of sarcasm -- I don't think this is something Hegel can keep up all that long, actually -- and points out that there is something anti-human to the attitude of common sense.  I'll leave that hanging here, as an invitation to watch the video (or just read the paragraphs) and see why. . .

Lectures 27, 28, and 29 Posted

While doing quite a bit of speaking, writing, and video production, I've gotten a bit behind -- not in actually producing and posting the Half-Hour Hegel video sessions -- but in writing the announcements here and linking to them in the Video Series page. 

We've still got two more installments to do, covering paragraphs 69-72, and then we'll be finished with the lengthy Preface and ready to move into the Introduction.

But, here they are -- the three most recent installments, covering paragraphs 61-68.

• Lecture 27- sec 61-63
• Lecture 28 - sec 64-66
• Lecture 29 - sec 67-68     

Lecture 26: Preface 59-60 Published

We're now just about rounding the last corner in the first lap of the Phenomenology -- the Preface.  Here, Hegel continues contrasting the dialectical approach he champions against the "argumentative" or "ratiocinative" approach in Philosophy.



In these sections he spells out the differences by looking at how some of the traditional classifications or functions of grammar, logic, and enquiry work with both approaches -- focusing on Subject, Predicate, and Accident.  How do we get from any of these to Substance. . .  and Notion or Concept (Begriff)?

Lecture 25: Preface 56-58 Published

This is an interesting set of passages -- not that they aren't all, in the Phenomenology! 

I need to point out that there's a small error at the start of this video -- the very first slide has the previous lecture's (54-55) numbers rather than the present one.  But rest assured, this is indeed paragraphs 56, 57, and 58


One of the key things to look out for here is a new target of Hegel's critique of other, prevalent, but deficient modes of philosophical thinking -- what he calls Räsonieren, translated in Miller by "argumentation", "argumentative thinking", or "ratiocination".  This is the sort of approach that he will later discuss in terms of "skepticism" -- a use of human freedom towards whatever content is being developed or discussed to simply say "no" to it, by means of use of the understanding, though critique, analysis, argument. .  . .

The View Count For the Series So Far

We're now in the seventh month of producing the Half-Hour Hegel video series -- with 24 videos released so far -- and we're getting near to the end of the very first portion of the lectures, that is, finishing up with Hegel's Preface to the Phenomenology.  There's about another 6-8 more yet to come, and then we'll move into the considerably shorter (paragraphs 73-89) Introduction.

YouTube allows one to create groups of videos, so that one can get the "analytics," or rather measurements, for just certain types, or in my case series, of videos, and today I decided to check what those numbers were for the Half-Hour Hegel lectures.

It's quite gratifying -- and a bit surprising -- to see them.  Since February 27 to today, the videos have been viewed about 28,000 times.  The very first one has garnered over 8,000 views, and as one can expect, the numbers scale downwards for the later ones -- they've not been out as long, so they've been viewed less. 

I also look at the "average view duration," which is around 10-15 minutes per video.  What this reflects is that there's some people who watch a video in its entirety, there's some who watch just a part of it, and there's many others who click on for a moment, and then leave (which includes me, when I'm posting the videos in social media!).  Given this average view duration, I think that it makes sense to interpret that raw 28,000 views number as really signifying something more like around 8,000-9,000 views that do indeed watch the whole lecture through.  One might conservatively estimate that perhaps 200-250 people have watched the entire sequence so far, with others dropping out along the way, or just popping in for a video here and there.

The sheer number of time people have spent either watching or listening is pretty staggering to think about -- over 300,000 minutes, roughly 208 full days!  That's a lot of time for people to be engaging the work of a difficult German thinker from two centuries past.  I'm not really sure at this point what to make of this information, I have to admit. . . .