Attempts to Read The Phenomenology of Mind

A long time ago, when I was younger and my brain allegedly worked faster, I attempted to read the Critique of Pure Reason and gave up, put off by the sheer unreadability of the thing. I decided that I would go to my grave never having read it, got over it and moved on. Recently I have been attempting (no other verb will do) The Phenomenology of Mind. I have read The Philosophy of History and The Philosophy of Right, I've even flipped the pages on the Aesthetics and that looks readable, but the Phenomenology leaves me confused.

Why bother reading it at all? First, for much the same reason that you should sit through all Wagner's operas at least once: Hegel is to philosophy what Wagner is to music. You don't have to like it, use it or even understand all the finer points, but you do need to have experienced it. Second, there's a chance that Hegel really was trying an approach to the human experience of knowledge that is worth understanding.

Since the early Eighties, philosophers haven't really bothered with the older problems of epistemology. The philosophy of science taught us all that the old discussion of defining knowledge, belief, justification and evidence are not as important as explaining why Quantum Electrodynamics is a serious scientific theory, evolutionary psychology is pseudo-science, classical dynamics is useful engineering (while being false physics), epidemiology is a shoddy and confused misuse of everything from statistics to the taxpayer's money, and why String Theory is just on the right side of speculative theorising while phrenology isn't. It's fair to say that before Popper, philosophers thought about knowledge as a personal possession, while after it, they recognised that it's theories and their methodological status that matter, not what's in people's heads or how it got there.

Hegel wanted to describe the experience of knowing and understanding and of the interaction of concepts. He saw knowledge as a process, not as a book of words: knowledge is something people do as well as have. This is an interesting approach, taken by Imre Lakatos in Proofs and Refutations, where he describes informal (that is, as actually done by mathematicians) mathematics as a process of proposing proofs and counterexamples for theorems. Lakatos, as a good post-Popperian, is talking about theories; Hegel is still inside our heads.

No-one has to read the Phenomenology, it's just that you're missing a lot of context if you don't. The catch is that the bloody thing is practically unreadable. Where Kant leaves you gasping for oxygen, Hegel leaves you dizzy. There's a slight possibility that it's all a fraud written under the influence of nitrous oxide or some other substance (he wouldn't be the only one – Freud wrote under the influence of good medical cocaine). Or there's a chance he's saying something genuinely different that even German has trouble expressing.

But here's the thing: I have an utterly clear conscience about not reading the Critique of Pure Reason, whereas I don't about leaving the Phenomenology on the shelf. Continental philosophers all made the effort and all got something out of it - even if it was nothing Hegel may have put there. It influenced and informed their thinking - and I guess I'd like to share in that.