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.

A Bit of Hegel-Related Humor

It's not that frequent that one finds some decently witty humor poking fun at Hegel -- I suppose that would be something I could do a search for, when I find some spare time.  But here's one bit I came across today, from Slate Star Codex -- it's not exclusively Hegel, of course, but then again, I think he'd have no problem sharing some space with the other philosophers whose works and thought he himself discussed.  The piece is called A Philosopher Walks Into a Coffee Shop

Here's the joke:

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel goes up to the counter and gives a tremendously long custom order in German, specifying exactly how much of each sort of syrup he wants, various espresso shots, cream in exactly the right pattern, and a bunch of toppings, all added in a specific order at a specific temperature. The barista can’t follow him, so just gives up and hands him a small plain coffee. He walks away. The people behind him in line are very impressed with his apparent expertise, and they all order the same thing Hegel got. The barista gives each of them a small plain coffee, and they all remark on how delicious it tastes and what a remarkable coffee connoisseur that Hegel is. “The Hegel” becomes a new Starbucks special and is wildly popular for the next seventy years.

There is a certain truth to it. . .  (Hegel readers will get that pun)

First New Video Installment of the Year

This new video marks several firsts in the Half-Hour Hegel series.  It is, after all, the very first video installment that I've shot, edited, and uploaded in this new year of 2015.  I'd hoped to get moving right after the start of the year, but teaching two intensive 4-week online Ethics classes -- which started in late December, and ended only on the 16th of January -- demanded a lot of time and energy that would have otherwise been spent on other projects, or even on a bit of relaxation and renewal.  so, I'm just getting this first video out today.

There's another important first as well.  So far, believe it or not, we've just been examining and discussing the materials preliminary to the Phenomenology itself -- the long, quite convoluted, but exciting Preface -- and the shorter, more straightforward Introduction.  Those took between them 38 video installments to cover -- almost 20 hours of Half-Hour Hegel!  Now, we're actually moving into the content of the book, starting with the very first portion -- Consciousness -- and the first section of that -- Sense Certainty.



Stylistically, I've decided to stick with more or less the same format as I used for the earlier portions of the series -- that's been working well so far, and the less I have to focus on style, the more I can focus on content -- but with each new section, I change the introductory music, and move to a different color-scheme for the slides I incorporate into the videos (I'll stick with variations on that dark red for the rest of Consciousness).

It feels good to have gotten this far into the text -- it's been almost a year since I started this series, and there's still about another 7/8 of the text to work through, paragraph by paragraph, a bit of a daunting prospect!  But we're now actually in the work itself, getting our hands dirty mucking around in the middle of the dialectic -- it's all pretty much uphill from here, but we've got some great vistas to look forward to.  So, I'm pretty pleased to have started digging into this particular section!

In the Meantime, A Bit of Fun. . .

I'm gearing up for a new round of reading and commentary of Hegel's Phenomenology, starting a bit after the halfway point of January -- we'll be starting the section on Consciousness, with the seemingly pristine origin point of Sense-Certainty!

What has been holding me back from jumping right in is that I've been teaching three online classes that started back in December.  Two of them are intensive 4-week Ethics classes, and those are just about to finish up this week.  I've managed to stay on top of grading, so I hope that by the end of this weekend, I'll be entirely done with those two.

For the other, a 10-week World Views and Values class, I've been producing brand new content about one week ahead of my students -- 6 videos a week, 4 2000-3000 word lessons on main ideas, 3-4 handouts -- so that has been taking a lot of my time and energy away from Hegel-related matters.  But soon. . . .