Hi. Thank you for reproducing some text. It presents a problem. I'm looking at Kaufmann's translation, and it's almost unrecognizably different. I did not expect there to be such difference even at the outset.

"For what contents and tone would be appropriate for a preface to a philosophical work? Perhaps a historical statement concerning the tendency and point of view, the general contents and results of the work, an attempt to connect sundry claims and assertions about the truth? Philosophical truth cannot be presented in this manner." (Hegel, Texts and Commentary, Kaufmann 1986, p 6.)

As a practical matter, then, I think Hegel is inaccessible. This isn't remarkable; rather it's the way it is with any author, only in an unusually immediate way with Hegel. Perhaps we can agree to undertake a hermeneutics of this text, in the original sense of "taking counsel with," to approach its meaning.

I think your remark is to the point, if a little anticipatory. I'm not sure we have to re-live the history of philosophy; we merely have to accommodate it - know it - to move beyond it. In particular, Hegel seems to be presenting a dynamic model of the workings of thinking, which dynamism itself will stand in for the particulars of that thinking. Indeed the particulars become quaint details as the dynamism grinds them up in its dialectic teeth.

I propose a rule of sorts. That our discussion at least at the first be directed toward what we read. Already we see that will be problematic. But if we don't use our best sense of the text as it unfolds to us as an aiming device, the who knows where our efforts will land?

Unfortunately, Hegel doesn't seem so easily parsable. I propose we deal with that by regarding much of his verbiage as flourish and rhetoric, a fat that warrants trimming.

I'm looking at Kaufmann's translation, and it's almost unrecognizably different. I did not expect there to be such difference even at the outset. — tim wood

Yeah. I like Kaufmann's better. I was hoping not to have to type out the quotes.

Perhaps we can agree to undertake a hermeneutics of this text, in the original sense of "taking counsel with," to approach its meaning. — tim wood

Right. But I'd personally put stress on what we can make of it for ourselves here in now in our own lives. I've never gotten around to learning German, so I feel disqualified from understanding myself as a scholar who should aim at figuring out what he really meant. For me our English paraphrases/interpretations are central.

I think your remark is to the point, if a little anticipatory. I'm not sure we have to re-live the history of philosophy; we merely have to accommodate it - know it - to move beyond it. In particular, Hegel seems to be presenting a dynamic model of the workings of thinking, which dynamism itself will stand in for the particulars of that thinking. Indeed the particulars become quaint details as the dynamism grinds them up in its dialectic teeth. — tim wood

You're right. I'm jumping ahead. But I like your response here. This is already the kind of thing I have in mind. Something like our own thinking against the background of a difficult influence.

I agree that we have a dynamic model here. I also don't think we have to relive the thinking of philosophy. What I was getting at is not that exactly but rather that empty generalities or summations only make sense against a background of how they were arrived at. If we attach predicates to life or God or truth or whatever and call it a day, we often haven't accomplished much. We have to elaborate. The philosophy gets done or has its content in this elaboration. It's not that prefaces are impossible or non-philosophical in an extreme sense. It's more like the difference between a 20 page summary and the 200 pages that 'derive' these summarizing 20. In short, we do not have lossless compression.

I propose a rule of sorts. That our discussion at least at the first be directed toward what we read. Already we see that will be problematic. But if we don't use our best sense of the text as it unfolds to us as an aiming device, the who knows where our efforts will land?

Unfortunately, Hegel doesn't seem so easily parsable. I propose we deal with that by regarding much of his verbiage as flourish and rhetoric, a fat that warrants trimming. — tim wood

I can live with that rule, but then I'd probably want to jump around more. There is lots of fat and verbiage that I'd want to skip. On the other hand, I have accumulated a nice set of passages that really mean something to me. Starting with the first paragraph was perhaps a misstep. I couldn't help jumping ahead.

Isn't interest in Hegel mostly kind of archeological? I mean, since the rejection of idealism by British and American philosophers, and since the appropriation of Hegel's ideas by Marx, Hegel is no longer a living philosophy in our culture. And for every significant insight, there are thousands of words of tortuous prose. In other words,

As a practical matter, then, I think Hegel is inaccessible. — tim wood

to which I can only agree.

The problem is perhaps with the book chosen. For experts, the PoS seems to contain at leat the seed of everything. That's what I've read. But I usually only enjoyed reading Philosophy of History and the lectures and certain speeches he gave publicly. When he decided to, he could write clearly.

There is an age-old assumption that thinking distinguishes man from the beast. This we shall accept. What makes man nobler than the beast is what he possesses through thought. Whatever is human is so only to the extent that therein thought is active; no matter what its outward appearance may be, if it is human, thought makes it so. In this alone is man distinguished from the beast.

Still, insofar as thought is in this way the essential, the substantial, the active in man, it has to do with an infinite manifold and variety of objects. Thought will be at its best, however, when it is occupied only with what is best in man, with thought itself, where it wants only itself, has to do with itself alone. For, to be occupied with itself is to discover itself by creating itself;’ and this it can do only by manifesting itself. Thought is active only in producing itself; and it produces itself by its very own activity. It is not simply there; it exists only by being its own producer. What it thus produces is philosophy, and what we have to investigate is the series of such productions, the millennial work of thought in bringing itself forth, the voyage of discovery upon which thought embarks in order to discover itself. — Hegel

https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/works/hp/hpintroduction.htm

The first point was that thought, free thought, is in itself essentially concrete. This implies that it is alive, that it moves of itself. The infinite nature of spirit is its own process in itself, which means that it does not rest, that it is essentially productive and exists by producing. More precisely we can understand this movement as development; the concrete as active is essentially self-developing.
...
Customarily we have in regard to what is in itself the high opinion that it is what truly is. To get to know God and the world is to get to know them in themselves. What is in itself, however, is not yet the true but only the abstract; it is the seed of what truly is, the tendency, the being-in-itself of the true. It is something simple, something which, of course, contains in itself multiple qualities, but in the form of simplicity – a content which is still hidden.
...
The big difference consists in this: Man knows what he is, and only when he does so is he actually what he is. Without this, knowing reason is nothing, nor is freedom. Man is essentially reason; man and child, educated and uneducated, each is reason; or rather, the possibility of being reason is present in each, is given. Still, reason is of no use to the child, to the uneducated. It is only a possibility; and yet, not an empty but a real possibility, with its own orientation to fulfillment. Only the adult, the educated, knows through experience that he is what he is. The difference is simply that in the one case reason is present only as a tendency, only in itself, whereas in the other case it is so explicitly, beyond the form of possibility and posited in existence.

The whole difference in world-history is reducible to this difference. All men are rational, and the formal element in this rationality is human freedom; this is man’s nature, it belongs to his essence. Still, among many peoples slavery has existed, to some extent it still does, and people are satisfied with it. Orientals, for example, are men and as such free, and yet they are not free, because they have no consciousness of their freedom but are willing to accept every sort of religious and political despotism. The whole difference between Oriental peoples and those who are not subject to slavery is that the latter know that they are free, that to be free is proper to them.

The former are also in themselves free, but they do not exist as free. This, then, introduces an enormous difference into man’s world-historical situation, whether he is free merely in himself or whether he knows that it is his concept, his vocation, his nature, to be as a free individual.
— Hegel

As I read this, we evolve via self-consciousness. We discover ourselves as freedom. But this means we were potentially free all along.

Well chosen passage! Let me suggest the following re-translation:

There is an age-old assumption that reason distinguishes man from the beast. This we shall accept. What makes man nobler than the beast is what he possesses through reason. Whatever is human is so only to the extent that therein reason is active; no matter what its outward appearance may be, if it is human, reason makes it so. In this alone is man distinguished from the beast.

A passage which is quite in keeping with the spirit of Western philosophy. I say this, because I have doubts about the use of the word 'thought' for what Hegel is trying to convey. Quite why is very hard to explain, but the following quotes from Krishnamurti come to mind:

Can thought see its own limitations, and seeing its own limitation, it brings a different intelligence into being?

Thought is crooked because it can invent anything and see things that are not there. It can perform the most extraordinary tricks, and therefore it cannot be depended upon.

It is really extraordinarily interesting to watch the operation of one's own thinking, just to observe how one thinks, where that reaction we call thinking, springs from. Obviously from memory. Is there a beginning to thought at all? If there is, can we find out its beginning- that is, the beginning of memory, because if we had no memory we would have no thought.

Here there's the recognition that thought, on the one hand is 'crooked', being 'conditioned', and 'the operation of memory'. But there's also the recognition of an 'intelligence' which is directly aware of the whole machinery of thought. So in this philosophy, 'thought' is by its very nature conditioned, it is 'of the order of time'; whereas 'intelligence' is 'that which reads between the lines', i.e. it is insight, apprehension of the real meaning, so is of a different order to discursive thought. (It is close in meaning to the Eastern term jñāna, meaning insight, knowledge or wisdom)

And that can then be compared to the original meaning of nous, which is explained as follows:

Plotinus wishes to speak of a thinking that is not discursive but intuitive, i.e. that it is knowing and what it is knowing are immediately evident to it. There is no gap then between thinking and what is thought--they come together in the same moment, which is no longer a moment among other consecutive moments, one following upon the other. Rather, the moment in which such a thinking takes place is immediately present and without difference from any other moment, i.e. its thought is no longer chronological but eternal.

To even use names, words, to think about such a thinking is already to implicate oneself in a time of separated and consecutive moments (i.e. chronological) and to have already forgotten what it is one wishes to think, namely thinking and what is thought intuitively together.

Plotinus argues: "But if we must introduce these names for what we are seeking, though it is not accurate to do so, let us say again that, speaking accurately, we must not admit even a logical duality in the One, but we are using this present language in order to persuade our opponents, though it involves some deviation from accurate thought...We must be forgiven for the terms we use, if in speaking about Him in order to explain what we mean, we have to use language which we, in strict accuracy, do not admit to be applicable. As if must be understood with every term. ¹"

So, I take Hegel to actually be speaking about something much nearer to nous (and perhaps the 'active intellect' of Aristotle) than what we casually and habitually convey by the use of the general term 'thought'. So I have used the word 'reason' in that top example, because it conveys the idea that we're not simply talking of 'discursive thought' in the sense of an internal dialogue, but in terms of 'the intelligence which sees the meaning of things'.

In respect of his statement about 'orientals', he is plainly reflecting the prejudices of his age, but it's worth noting in passing, that from the 'oriental' viewpoint, the very clever and apparently autonomous Western individual, although democratically and economically free, may yet still be a 'slave to passion', as very few seek to live in the light of the kind of 'reason' that Hegel is speaking of; it is indeed 'the road less travelled'.

So in this philosophy, 'thought' is by its very nature conditioned, it is 'of the order of time'; whereas 'intelligence' is 'that which reads between the lines', i.e. it is insight, apprehension of the real meaning, so is of a different order to discursive thought. — Wayfarer

I like this. I've been trying to say something similar from a phenomenological angle. Experience isn't so neatly conceptual and machine-like. 'Between the lines' gets at this. I have in mind something like the poetic overflow of language, as well as the continuity of language with life.

To even use names, words, to think about such a thinking is already to implicate oneself in a time of separated and consecutive moments (i.e. chronological) and to have already forgotten what it is one wishes to think, namely thinking and what is thought intuitively together.

This reminds me (in a good way) of the flow of life. We rip apart this flow with our categories. But within this flow we aren't subjects looking at objects, etc., but the world itself worlding. We are doings-in-progress. But our quest for some certain system encourages us to build a castle of concepts in a way that ignores our unthematized know-how.

So, I take Hegel to actually be speaking about something much nearer to nous (and perhaps the 'active intellect' of Aristotle) than what we casually and habitually convey by the use of the general term 'thought'. So I have used the word 'reason' in that top example, because it conveys the idea that we're not simply talking of 'discursive thought' in the sense of an internal dialogue, but in terms of 'the intelligence which sees the meaning of things'. — Wayfarer

That's an interesting angle. From my related but different interest in reading between the lines, I find this quote from the preface of the PoS highly significant.

What is “familiarly known” is not properly known, just for the reason that it is “familiar”. When engaged in the process of knowing, it is the commonest form of self-deception, and a deception of other people as well, to assume something to be familiar, and give assent to it on that very account. Knowledge of that sort, with all its talk, never gets from the spot, but has no idea that this is the case. Subject and object, and so on, God, nature, understanding, sensibility, etc., are uncritically presupposed as familiar and something valid, and become fixed points from which to start and to which to return. The process of knowing flits between these secure points, and in consequence goes on merely along the surface. Apprehending and proving consist similarly in seeing whether every one finds what is said corresponding to his idea too, whether it is familiar and seems to him so and so or not. — Hegel

This is already OLP to some degree. The terms we use aren't fixed. He sees that we tend to glide on the mere surface of language. We take the chess pieces for granted. We don't ask why we understand the situation as a chess game in the first place.

In respect of his statement about 'orientals', he is plainly reflecting the prejudices of his age, but it's worth noting in passing, that from the 'oriental' viewpoint, the very clever and apparently autonomous Western individual, although democratically and economically free, may yet still be a 'slave to passion', as very few seek to live in the light of the kind of 'reason' that Hegel is speaking of; it is indeed 'the road less travelled'. — Wayfarer

Actually Hegel was very critical of a certain notion of freedom. I'll try to find the quote in P of History.

In such a time, a people, therefore, necessarily finds a satisfaction in the idea of virtue. Talk about virtue partly accompanies, partly replaces real virtue. On the other hand, pure universal Thought, being universal, is apt to bring the particular and unreflected – faith, confidence, custom – to reflection about itself and its immediate (simple and unreflected) existence. It thus shows up the limitation of unreflected life, partly by giving it reasons on hand by which to secede from its duties, partly by asking about reasons and the connection with universal thought. Then, in not finding the latter, it tries to shatter duty itself as without foundation.

Therewith appears the isolation of the individuals from each other and the whole, their aggressive selfishness and vanity, their seeking of advantage and satisfaction at the expense of the whole. For the inward principle of such isolation (not only produces the content but) the form of subjectivity – selfishness and corruption in the unbound passions and egotistic interests of men. — Hegel

Not the quote I had in mind, cuz only the intro was handy. But as I remember it, Hegel thought that freedom was built on a kind of discipline or socialization. We are 'free' to fulfill our better nature. Something like that!

But within this flow we aren't subjects looking at objects, etc., but the world itself worlding — ff0

Hegel= obscurantist, mystic. Russell did not understand him and it is my view that Hegel did not understand himself most of the time.

Hegel= obscurantist, mystic. Russell did not understand him and it is my view that Hegel did not understand himself most of the time. — charleton

That's pretty silly. Hegel is often as clear as Russell. And Russell could be a real dufus at times. Repeating negative gossip is lazy, man. Not that I really give a damn if you or anyone else respects Hegel. By all means, enjoy your prejudice. I decided not to like David Bowie for awhile once. It was fun.

Most of Hegel is gibberish; clever sounding gibberish. He's as bad as Adorno. I've no need to repeat gossip, and my comments do not rely on that. I've read this stuff.

Ah yes, and others. I like the idea of actually 'looking' at this flow every once in awhile to see if I'm not floating away on a pile of seductive abstractions. I've been manically-ecstatically inspired by certain thinkers in a way that closed me off to other people. My words were the words. In retrospect, they always appeared like oversimplifications. Maybe that's what we always work with, oversimplifications.

To be fair, some of Hegel's prose annoys the crap out of me. But he was sometimes quite clear and even eloquent, at least in translation. I find it hard to take you at your word that you have read much Hegel. Maybe you have. I don't know. But I've railed against thinkers before myself --and then come to love them.

Does the quote below really sound like gibberish to you? It sounds to me like a potent critique of a certain kind of philosophy.

What is “familiarly known” is not properly known, just for the reason that it is “familiar”. When engaged in the process of knowing, it is the commonest form of self-deception, and a deception of other people as well, to assume something to be familiar, and give assent to it on that very account. Knowledge of that sort, with all its talk, never gets from the spot, but has no idea that this is the case. Subject and object, and so on, God, nature, understanding, sensibility, etc., are uncritically presupposed as familiar and something valid, and become fixed points from which to start and to which to return. The process of knowing flits between these secure points, and in consequence goes on merely along the surface. Apprehending and proving consist similarly in seeing whether every one finds what is said corresponding to his idea too, whether it is familiar and seems to him so and so or not. — Hegel

I'd say that quote was ineloquent, and verbose. Something lost in translation if I were being generous. But he's not saying much. "subject and object and so on" REALLY?
I think he's talking about endemic assumptions being deceptive. Why so many words?

As I read it, he's talking about a certain kind of philosopher taking classic metaphysical terms for granted --as if they had fixed meanings that were ready to be put in play. Instead, as I understand him, the meanings of all these terms are dynamically and systematically related. So these points aren't really secure at all. Thinking evolves dialectically as a system, as a whole. To me this is good phenomenology. It digs beneath the crust of convention. It goes back before the first wrong move.

IMV, there are not too many words there. But of course you are welcome to your dislike.

I understand him, the meanings of all these terms are dynamically and systematically related — ff0

Yes, but in all those words he did not manage to get this bit out.
Add your sentence to mine and you have more information than his whole paragraph.
I'm not sure I'd characterise this as phenomenology, but standard metaphysics, this is not about experiencing life but conceptualising it.

I'm not sure I'd characterise this as phenomenology, but standard metaphysics, this is not about experiencing life but conceptualising it. — charleton

Consider the title of the book. No doubt Heidegger was more radically phenomenological. And lots of Hegel is still too metaphysical for my taste. But I think the quoted passage is pretty damned phenomenological. The 'familiar' is the 'how' of our grasping that we take for granted. We tend to focus on the 'what,' the message as opposed to the medium. But here Hegel is pointing at the medium. The water is usually invisible to the fish. He's pointing at the water.

I had copied some quotes from Schopenhauer here, but they're pretty intemperate. Suffice to say, Schopenhauer thought Hegel a windbag, and I do agree that Schopenhauer was a far better prose stylist, and a clearer thinker. But I decided to remove the quotes.

That was an ugly, seemingly covetous moment for Schopenhauer. If memory serves, Schopenhauer more or less ignored the historical. From his 'mystic'-biological perspective, the same thing happened again and again. There was nothing new under the sun. Man didn't change. He had the same illness subject to the same cure generation after generation.

Hegel, on the other hand, understood that he himself was only possible as Hegel because of so much that had come before. Man did change. God himself evolved. The truth evolved. The truth or cure was something like a final stage of the lie, of the illness. Error itself became truth in its tendency to eat itself. If the fool persists in his folly, he shall become wise. If the understanding persists in its ripping-out of partial truths, it will end up with the whole truth. As those partial truths fail, they patch themselves up in a way that accumulates. But this happens in a social context. So truth cannot arrive until different kinds of societies come and go, until the right conceptual language is painstakingly created by a kind of universal mind that only exists in particular philosophers who pass on their work (the current state of Mind) through the 'machine' of language. (Or that's what I got, roughly.)

Actually Schopenhauer somewhat foolishly scheduled his lectures against Hegel's - and nobody showed. He never got over it. That said, I prefer Schopenhauer.

Oh yes. I've read his bio. Even in my first philosophy book (Durant's Story) I think this was mentioned. I find it hard to choose. They both pay attention where the other one does not.

In philosophy as such, in the present, most recent philosophy, is contained all that the work of millennia has produced; it is the result of all that has preceded it. And the same development of Spirit, looked at historically, is the history of philosophy. It is the history of all the developments which Spirit has undergone, a presentation of its moments or stages as they follow one another in time. Philosophy presents the development of thought as it is in and for itself, without addition; the history of philosophy is this development in time. Consequently the history of philosophy is identical with the system of philosophy. — Hegel

As far as I know, no one hammered this idea home like Hegel. I'd be glad to be corrected. The path to truth is the truth itself. But the path (thinker on the path) only recognizes this having gone down the path. He is (potentially) the thing he seeks. His seeking of what hides from him within himself is the unfolding of that same truth. God 'builds' God as God seeks God. And God exists only within finite individuals, as their shared higher thinking and feeling. But individuals and societies are intertwined. So philosophy, distributed throughout these individual minds, grows alongside and dialectically with social practice. The story goes, I think, that a more or less perfect, non-alienating society of saints citizens arrives.

It's a beautiful idea. I don't really expect the end of history. But what a vision!

The 'familiar' is the 'how' of our grasping that we take for granted. — ff0

I do not think he's talking about the how at all. That would bring him in to the realm of psychology if he did. He's talking about shit you absorb, mostly uncritically, the points of reference we take for granted, and that this could be problematic "deceptive".

He's talking about shit you absorb, mostly uncritically, the points of reference we take for granted, and that this could be problematic "deceptive". — charleton

But that's more or less what I meant. The 'how' or the method or the approach is what we take for granted. As I read him, Hegel is criticizing a certain understanding of philosophy that is taken for granted. Within this taken-for-granted paradigm, the 'bad' philosophers do indeed ask questions and doubt things. But what they didn't think to question has them trapped. They questioned the 'what,' the focus of their attention. They argue passionately about God and truth. They do word math with the subject and the object and the who-knows-what. But they assume that these words have fixed, clear meanings. They want to do a kind of theological math, after all, and that's what they'll need language to be like.

They also assume that God or Truth is a frozen already-finished entity. All they have to do is snap the right word-numbers together. But for Hegel the meanings of the words evolve as we do philosophy. Even more radical, we create God (or self-conscious Reality) as we do philosophy. Or God creates himself through us as we try to figure out the truth about God/Reality. God has to misunderstand himself as a fixed object. God has to misunderstand language as a sort of math. Such creative errors are the stairway to reality becoming fully conscious of itself.

It's pretty wild stuff. It's not software for everyday life, but it is 'speculatively' plausible --or just a fascinating dynamic auto-theology.

What is “familiarly known” is not properly known, just for the reason that it is “familiar”. — Hegel

We take the medium (our own manner of taking) for granted. It's a smell that we've become used to. Yet the medium controls what messages are possible. The quote above points backs to our otherwise untested pre-grasp of the situation, which is the foundation of our conscious grasp. I think this squares with what you wrote, though I've thrown in some different metaphors.

Here's Hegel being something of a concept-monger. He sure doesn't like his Divinity vague and indeterminate.

The man who only seeks edification, who wants to envelop in mist the manifold diversity of his earthly existence and thought, and craves after the vague enjoyment of this vague and indeterminate Divinity – he may look where he likes to find this: he will easily find for himself the means to procure something he can rave over and puff himself up withal. But philosophy must beware of wishing to be edifying.

Still less must this kind of contentment, which holds science in contempt, take upon itself to claim that raving obscurantism of this sort is something higher than science. These apocalyptic utterances pretend to occupy the very centre and the deepest depths; they look askance at all definiteness and preciseness of meaning; and they deliberately hold back from conceptual thinking and the constraining necessities of thought, as being the sort of reflection which, they say, can only feel at home in the sphere of finitude.
— Hegel

Sorry, Hegel. That's all you.

They also assume that God or Truth is a frozen already-finished entity. All they have to do is snap the right word-numbers together. But for Hegel the meanings of the words evolve as we do philosophy. Even more radical, we create God (or self-conscious Reality) as we do philosophy. Or God creates himself through us as we try to figure out the truth about God/Reality. God has to misunderstand himself as a fixed object. God has to misunderstand language as a sort of math. Such creative errors are the stairway to reality becoming fully conscious of itself. — ff0

This is all very well and nice, but practicing what you preach is my minimum standard. If he wants to take the skeptical stance, he can't remain a Theist.
And if he thinks he has transcended the problems he lays out then he is deeply arrogant and wrong headed.
What use is Hegel when you have Hume whose skepticism he had till the end?

This is all very well and nice, but practicing what you preach is my minimum standard. If he wants to take the skeptical stance, he can't remain a Theist.
And if he thinks he has transcended the problems he lays out then he is deeply arrogant and wrong headed.
What use is Hegel when you have Hume whose skepticism he had till the end? — charleton

Perhaps you'll agree that his theism (or my rough portrait of an interpretation of it) is far from non-theoretical theism. For many, he might as well be an atheist. Calling self-knowing reality God and insisting that the cruelty in history is necessary for God to become God is far from ordinary theism. Theists tend to want an afterlife and a fixed truth and a fixed moral law. They want the Eternal. Hegel sacrifices all of that. God himself is not outside of time. He needs time. He is born through time. He grows like a tree or a human infant.

It's even 'Satanic,' one might say. Since what we really have here is a ferocious humanism that wears the cloak of tradition. Hegel himself was (roughly, in his own mind) the most updated version of God. Reality knows itself 'rationally' or 'essentially' in human language. The philosopher is reality's self-knowing eye. It's goal is to know itself as freedom, as God. What it overcomes is the traditional theism that projects God outward as a sort of hidden or distant object.


The Trumpet of the Last Judgment by Bruno Bauer is an ironic investigation of the Satanic/humanist core of Hegel's philosophy. It's a great, largely forgotten text.

Calling self-knowing reality God and insisting that the cruelty in history is necessary for God to become God is far from ordinary theism. — ff0

It's still arrogant and lacking in skepticism. He's just inventing his own conceptual certainties by talking about that which is not evident.

It's still arrogant and lacking in skepticism. — charleton

To me he's just a vivid personality. At his best, he's great (for my purposes). At his worst, I can't say. Because I stop reading when I'm bored. We can debate whether he's over-rated, but who cares, really? The whole game of famous names no longer appeals to me much. There's a tendency to make implicit arguments from authority. There's a tendency to let it be known that one has read this or that 'officially great' philosopher. Then one can praise or blame them, implying that one is brilliant enough to understand them or, even better, brilliant enough to understand them and see how they went wrong.
Either praising or blaming seems to depend on a sort of fame worship. No one plays this game much with the unknowns.

That's why I like the idea of just focusing on ideas, independent of their source. Sure, indicate your influences if you must, so it doesn't feel like plagiarism. But I'd at least personally like to get beyond the itch to project my having-read-a-real-lot. As I see it, I don't possess what I can't express in my own English. Once I do possess it, it's independent of the source.

Fair enough.
Have you tried Adorno?