I just wanted to emphasize that this guide is not a summary of Hegel's books. I am just a big fan of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, and I recently went back to his work to rethink his philosophy from the ground up. I wanted to find an avenue where I could share this with my friends and anyone interested in him.

This guide is organized in an order that makes sense to a reader encountering his work for the first time, most of these ideas are drawn from Todd McGowan's recent work, some drawn from Hegel's own sentences, and others drawn from the thinkers who argued with Hegel, corrected him, or fought over what he meant.

Hegel has a lot of contributions to philosophy, and many other fields, and much of the great philosophical ideas of the past two centuries — Marx, Nietzsche, De Beauvoir, Kwame Nkrumah, existentialism, and psychoanalysis — had their beginning in Hegel.

I really enjoy talking and thinking about freedom, emancipation and culture, but what's special about Hegel is that he offers a framework for an "Optimistic pessimism". Hegel is not a philosopher of ultimate, harmonious synthesis; he is a thinker who forces us to reconcile with contradiction, and to see the optimism that lies in the journey and continuous efforts rather than the destination.

Everything below is a variation on a single claim, and it is worth memorizing before anything else:

Contradiction is not a defect in things, or a mistake in our thinking about them, it is the actual structure of being, and freedom is the ability to live inside that structure rather than escape it.

Every time this guide seems to wander into logic, theology, or biography, it is really just approaching that one sentence from a different angle.

One thing you can remember before diving in is that this will occasionally feel harder than it needs to be. That difficulty is not a failure of explanation. It is Hegel's own difficulty and genius. A guide that removes this difficulty wouldn't be teaching Hegel.