Are you reading the Science of Logic? It's not a good introduction to Hegel, let alone philosophy. Start here instead: https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/works/ol/encycind.htm Also (cliche I know) browse around https://plato.stanford.edu/ for broad overviews on certain topics.

Contrary to everyone here I would encourage you to go further. Understanding dialectics is a necessity for any Marxist--here you will perhaps be interested in Lenin's Philosophical Notebooks. To really understand dialectics, and be able to make the transformation to its material ground would put you in a position to understand Marxism better than 99% of today's "Marxists"

I spent the first year or two of the pandemic walking around outside while listening to podcasts about hegel and other marx-related philosophers (like Why Theory and the sadly defunct Red Library). The issue here is that a lot of podcasts that discuss Hegel are lib, but I still feel like I got a lot out of it, although I kind of shuddered when you were like “what the fuck does he mean by ‘notion’?” Because yeah, what does he actually mean by that?

Sometimes I would get up in the morning and drink some coffee and read a page or two of the Phenomenology and google everything that confused me. I didn’t get too far but it was still pretty rewarding.

I think there's very little reason to read Hegel unless you're a scholar. It will not help you understand anything. He's a notoriously obtuse writer.

In my opinion, unless you are an academic or at least an exceptionally academic type, there is no reason to read Hegel's works, the guy did not write very clearly. If you are looking for a more readable book about dialectics, I would consider Bertell Ollman's Dance of the Dialectic.

What's your background in philosophy? Hegel is notoriously difficult to parse. What's your current understanding of dialectics?

The preface is easily the easiest part to read, imo (aside from some individual smaller sections later). If you Google a few words you can probably get through it.

Edit: I think I understood most of the preface at some point, but now I only remember when he compares the history of intellectual development to the growth of a plant, which I found to be very helpful for appreciating the concept of historical progressiveness.

For Marxism, you also might be better off with just looking at the application by Marxist authors, particularly Marx, Engels, and Mao.

However, I think being interested in any philosophical writer is legitimate and shouldn't be discouraged, so I'll point out that there is a philosophy PhD on YouTube who made a 379 part series discussing all of the Phenomenology of Spirit in order, called "Half Hour Hegel." No, I'm not saying that you need to watch all 190+ hours, just that it could be worth checking out the first episode or two to see if that's helpful.

Also Jesus Christ that dude is such a poster. The sheer volume of videos is wild for what he does.

I just wanted to better understand dialectics lmao

You're better off reading Daoist works like the Dao De Jing and the Zhuangzi with the understanding that they were written in China during the Warring States period. That or reading the Vietnamese textbooks translated by Luna Oi.. In practice, Hegel is only understandable once you have a decent grasp of dialectical materialism through Marxism. You read Hegel after understanding Marx to deepen your understanding of Marx that you already have. Hegel is not good for pedagogy.

Learn dialectics from an easier teacher. Check out how it's laid out in Constructive Criticism under the Dialectical Materialism section, which separately breaks down Dialectics and Materialism.

Edit: I thought I was on a .world community, you may be past this lol.

well, a curated introduction might be a way to get into it, kinda like cliffnotes and then you can go from there.. Philosophize This podcast has several episodes on Hegel. sometimes the writing (of anything) is just a product of its time and is hard to understand nowadays due to sentence structure and vocabulary. nothing wrong with using tips and tricks here and there to digest something as complicated as philosophical writing

The Phenomenology? Yeah that preface is a piece of work. There's a lecture series on Youtube that might help but it's almost 200 hours long. If you're reading it only because you're trying to understand dialectics/dialectical materialism then I think you're better off saving it for later. Find a writer who engages with the dialectical (materialist) method that you can mostly keep up with and enjoy reading and start from there instead. So that might be, say, The Dialectical Biologist, or Capital, or Thought and Language. Ilyenkov has written some pretty good introductory and history essays on dialectics, too...

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