No major philosopher in the Western tradition has been studied so thoroughly, yet understood in so many completely different ways by really smart, well-read people.

Karl Marx read Hegel as a philosopher of the subject's total absorption of the object world. Søren Kierkegaard read the very same system as the dissolution of the individual into an impersonal machine. Martin Heidegger thought Hegel imposed subjectivity onto being without remainder; Jean-Paul Sartre, working from many of the same texts, found a philosopher of mutual recognition between free subjects. Even within contemporary Hegel scholarship the split holds: Robert Pippin reads the Phenomenology of Spirit as fundamentally about subjects achieving clarity about each other through recognition, while Rebecca Comay reads the same book as showing that what binds people together is precisely their failure to recognize one another, a permanent blockage, not an achievement.

These are not small disagreements about emphasis. They are opposed claims about what kind of books Hegel wrote. It would be convenient to blame two centuries of bad readers, but that explanation collapses under its own weight: too many careful, serious thinkers have produced flatly contradictory Hegel's for the fault to sit only with the readers.

There is something about the way Hegel himself wrote that invited this. Todd McGowan's proposed explanation is that Hegel was trying to say something that the philosophical vocabulary of his own era did not exist yet. He was working about a century ahead of the language he needed and this language arrived later, through Sigmund Freud's account of the unconscious. The unconscious is the idea that a subject can be driven by something it cannot consciously acknowledge, working against its own stated intentions.

Freud almost never engaged with Hegel directly, and barely mentions him across his entire body of work, which McGowan suggests may have been a stroke of luck. Instead he built, independently, the conceptual toolkit that makes Hegel's central claim about contradiction sayable in plain terms. The point is that if you find Hegel difficult, you are in the company of everyone who has ever read him seriously. The difficulty is not a sign you're doing it wrong.