If you'd allow me to have a serious discussion, I'd like to ask a question. How does someone seriously get into philosophers like Hegel and Schopenhauer and anyone else who has that dense, highly intellectualized writing? Maybe some of you can read it with ease (although I'd imagine many of you just claim you can read it to seem smart), but do most people just avoid reading those actual texts and just read about them from reputable sources?
>>8293369
I honestly think the easiest way to comprehend those texts in this day and age is to start on some kind of a religious yet secular path. It helps with abstraction. I can understand starting with the greeks but point remains that the greeks themselves had a particular vernacular specific to their times, and the words they used weren't necessarily employed in the same way they are today. You want to learn the philosophical dialect. So read the Bible, the Avesta, some Upanishads, the Quran, then some classical literature, then read some Greek philosophy and familiarize yourself to some of their issues. Philosophy is and ought to be timeless, so the problems all these texts try to address (if read on a phil. basis rather than a sociological one) should be pertinent today as much as they were before. Myths too. Greek myths are fantastic if only by how they somehow seem to mend the human psyche. Allow yourself to read too much into matters, develop your own dialect, parallel to the accepted one. There is something thoroughly mystical about philosophy, if only because it tries to push language to its outer bounds and points at the obscure. In such spirit, familiarize yourself with your own inapparent depths.
tldr, What the hell do I know?
Any ultra dense text is an effort of multiple readings. Sometimes spaced out over years as you connect the parts.
It's more of a study than a reading
You read it. Go back and start trying to fill in the parts you are most lost about. Read it again, repeat.
>>8293369
Just watch a 5 minute youtube video and pretend you know everything about their ideas.
>>8293369
Start with the Greeks.
It's better to look at their influences, tackle the text head on (and interpret it yourself) and then look at other interpretations. That way you aren't filling yourself up with other people's knowledge and avoiding tackling the actual subject.
It requires reading a lot of secondary stuff, getting immersed in the lingo and especially in the milieu
No one reads Kant or Hegel "cold." Even their use of terms requires at least some secondary apparatus to explain them. Kant's use of "intuition" is from the German word and conflicts with common English use. Hegel has a dozen terms like this, or terms where the German pun is missing in English. They are both responding to antecedent epistemological problems, and part of understanding the extent to which they solve or break from those problems is, obviously, knowing about them to begin with.
Understanding Kant and Hegel also requires understanding their major interpreters and interpretative traditions. There is no consensus over what the Phenomenology is, or what many of Hegel's final positions are. Contrary to what some might say, there is no effective consensus about Kant, or even about the importance or substance of his project. There are four major schools on what the fuck the transcendental schema is. No one agrees over how Kant's later aesthetic writings fit into his first critique. Fichte is notoriously obscure. Ambiguities are insanely common in Schiller and Schelling. All post-Hegelian neo-Kantians ("Back to Kant," Marburg, Baden) and neo-Hegelians go flying all over the fucking map while claiming to be the authentic interpretations.
Philosophy is best understood historically and hermeneutically. This is because 80% of the real meaning of the text is tacit, not contained in the text but in its milieu. You need to generally immerse yourself in the horizon of the work and the author, and of its subsequent interpreters, over a fairly long period of time. There is no perfect method for doing this, but it picks up speed exponentially as you go along. When you start, you will be clacking two stones together: the original texts (where every other word makes no fucking sense), and the secondary texts (which are imperfect, often presume knowledge you don't have, often one-sidedly interpret). But once you do this enough, you'll find that your repertoire of tacit knowledge has grown far faster than you would have anticipated.
Reading philosophy seriously is frustrating because for the beginning half of it, you get 10% return for a 100% investment of effort. But once you pass a certain threshold, you hit a critical mass of hermeneutic understanding, some kind of exponential explosion of linkages takes place, and you'll find yourself "understanding Kant better than he understood himself" (to paraphrase Kant on Plato).
>>8293398
>Any ultra dense text is an effort of multiple readings.
This is bad advice that becomes decent advice if we remove the words "ultra dense"
>>8293437
Also, just as an example of the kind of tacit knowledge you gain from generally approaching the work hermeneutically: The fact that I know, passively and unconsciously, and from having read examples of it dozens of times just here and there, that scholarly ambiguity is totally normal, really helps my confidence in reading (e.g.) Kant.
I've bummed around in enough secondary literature to have seen many examples of scholars freely admitting that Kant is ambiguous, confusing, maybe even mistaken or stupid in many places. You can't really go looking for these references, but you naturally encounter them, and they naturally enter your critical apparatus for approaching the texts. Kant is human, and honestly, a bit of a dick too. That significantly deflates the pressure to "GET" Kant and allows you to read him properly.
Now imagine that there are a hundred other heuristics like this that I can't even articulate because they're much more subtle and simply part of "how I read." That's the benefit of approaching it hermeneutically. You gain those hundred things imperceptibly.
Same for any other tradition. Just using German idealism as an example.
"How do some people have attention spans and discipline?" is not a serious discussion
>>8293369
Honestly, get a degree in philosophy from a very good department. Preferably a PhD. This is more true for Hegel than Schopenhauer
Sophie's World?
