Hegel for Radicals: Part III – Phenomenology of Spirit

A 10-week course with Alex Steinberg that will introduce what is living in Hegel for those who want to change the world.

It has often been said that that Marx “turned Hegel on his head.”  In this series we will explore the meaning of that phrase and its implications for those of us who are confronting problems of a world on fire.  The problems we face today in this epoch of the decay of capitalism, imperialism, war, a global pandemic, economic crisis, the return of fascism, climate change are unprecedented.

This class series is a continuation of the series from the Fall of 2022 where we introduced Hegel’s mysterious book, The Phenomenology of Spirit.  No prior experience with studying Hegel is expected or required.  We will make the Phenomenology less mysterious as we go along and try to tease out the revolutionary implications in the thought of Hegel and explain their significance for our time.

To accommodate new students and to re-acquaint continuing students the first sessions will consist of a review in which we will summarize the Introduction to the Phenomenology of Spirit and the first four chapters, on Sense Certainty, Perception, the Understanding, The Master-Slave Dialectic, and Stoicism, Skepticism and the Unhappy Consciousness.

We will be reading Terry Pinkard’s translation of the Phenomenology, published by Cambridge University Press. A free version is available online.

Alex Steinberg is an independent scholar. He has taught on topics such as the Philosophy of Heidegger and Nazism, Marxism and Humanism, and Hegel’s Philosophy of History at various alternative educational institutions and informally. He was a Conference Presenter at the First International Conference on Trotsky in Havana, Cuba. Alex has been also involved with the governance of WBAI radio in New York and its parent organization, Pacifica, most recently as the Chair of the Pacifica National Board from 2019–2021.