Only revered by those who don't understand him. I appreciate his introspection, but that is it. His philosophy was full of flaws, worthless, and a steaming pile of poo (and I have read it - the original). He wasn't the genious everyone made out. I think i might become a philosopher. If Hegel can do it then I definitely can. Hopefully I won't set up a model for authoritarianism in the process. Goddam awful.

Difficult but worth the effort.

Did not put forward thesis/antithesis/synthesis. Instead the dialectic involves determinate negation; that is if you know A is false you don't just know not A but have some idea of a B that would meet the defects in idea A, but once you have B you find defects in it, which leads to C and so on. New conception involves the positive aspects of old conceptions and is more complete, best metaphor is that it is on a higher plane. Center left politically, a nationalist in a sense but staunchly against anti-semitism. However, is probably a racist by modern standards. Often laughably wrong, but sometimes brilliant and an important philosopher who is once again getting his due in the English speaking world.

Believed he solved nearly all philosophical problems while lying awake at night writing a theis (on his left mental screen),an anti-thesis(on his right mental screen), then eliminate controdictions and adding creative insite forming a synthisis. Genius Lutheran who made massive prayer experiments showing their efficiency, he said 'the only way to know God is through meditation', improved the education system, but I don't like his extreme-nationalism and 'order by terror' Hegal is ussually mislabeled an Athiest or Panthiest (yet he belived in a fully immanent and trancendent creator he called the Abosolute Spirit), falsely labled a Marxist (yet he rejected all Socialist ideals. Marx used his hard-line ideas but wrote books againt him). His politics although has some center wing ideal like free-speech is mostly derived from the Ultra-nationalism of his hero Napolean Bonaparte and the far right ecconomics of Fichte. Although an anti-racist, his system adding racism was tried by the Nazi's

I'll admit up front that I don't know much about Hegel, but was recently thinking that this whole thesis/antithesis idea seems like crap to me. There is certainly a grain of truth in it -- social phenomena trigger reactions, which leads to some tug-of-war type battles between people with different interests or perspectives. But the more I think about it, this seems like one of these tautological constructs that can take any evidence and make it fit the model. And it leads to a wrong-headed sort of determinism (which obviously caused havoc in the hands of Marx), when in reality the kind of "anti-thesis" that emerges is never preordained, but depends on the judgment and effort of individual humans. There's a famous story of how Churchill was struck by a taxi sometime in the mid-1930s while in the U.S. - he was alright, but if he'd lived, certainly the manner in which the world responded to nazism would have been different, and led to a different synthesis in the end. Maybe this is a superficial reading of Hegel by a guy who actually never read him, but I've gotta give a "2" based on my cliff notes understanding of his work.