Oh, for heaven’s sake. I do not know why I do this to myself. I know what Hegel is like. I know the syrupy solemnity, the fog of capital letters, the little ritual in which a simple thought is dressed up as a cathedral and then locked from the inside. And yet here I am again, pressing play, consenting—gratefully, even—to get through all of his crap, one grandly numbered sentence at a time, like a man paying a tax he despises but refuses to evade on principle.

The particular torment on offer is Philosophy of Mind, and—because modern life insists on adding irony to injury—I encountered it as an audiobook. The cover tells me it is read by Peter Wickham and issued by Ukemi Audiobooks. The chapter marker I can honestly claim to have in front of me is “a. Physical Qualities”, a title that promises sobriety and tends, in Hegel’s hands, to deliver metaphysical bureaucracy: an office in which every sensation must queue for a stamp proving it exists.

A review of Hegel has to begin with a confession. The man is not stupid; he is, in a sense, too clever by half, and in another sense too clever by whole. He has the habits of a mind that cannot bear to leave anything merely where it is. A simple fact is never permitted to remain a simple fact; it must be “sublated”, reorganised, promoted, retired, and then reintroduced under a more impressive name. This is not merely a style; it is a moral posture. It is the posture of someone who regards clarity as a vulgar convenience, like unlabelled drawers or honest mirrors.

And yet, the greatest lure of this book—the reason one returns to it despite knowing better—is that Hegel does not write small. He does not offer a timid little philosophy with its hat in its hand. He offers a system, and a system is at least a form of courage. One can despise the conclusions and still admire the audacity of attempting a complete account of mind, not as a pile of inner episodes but as something that has structure, stages, and a logic to its development. Most modern writing about mind reads like gossip about the brain. Hegel, at least, tries to write a constitution.

The trouble is that he treats consciousness as though it ought to behave like a committee.

At the point signposted by “Physical Qualities”, the work leans into a classical ambition: to show how what seems immediate—colour, sound, warmth, hardness—belongs to a more organised picture of experience. Hegel will not allow “red” to be simply red. He will insist that what appears as a brute given is, when properly understood, already shaped by the form of apprehension, already set within relations, already dependent on a subject that is not a passive bucket receiving impressions but an active principle. The impulse here is not contemptible. A mind that merely registers is not a mind; it is a measuring instrument. There is, in this insistence, a faint and almost accidental respect for the idea that the human being is not a spectator of reality but a participant in the act of knowing it.

But then Hegel does what Hegel always does: he turns a legitimate insight into a sprawling sovereignty claim.

Instead of saying, plainly and without incense, that perception involves selection, integration, and judgement—operations that belong to a living, goal-directed consciousness—he erects an internal empire of concepts. He does not merely analyse experience; he legislates it. And the legislation proceeds as though the world and the mind exist chiefly to provide examples for his terminology. One begins to suspect that the book’s real topic is not mind at all, but the author’s desire to have the final word on everything.
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S. Tominaga, AKA CSW
Jan. 16, 2026
https://x.com/i/status/2011939208374661230

https://t.me/S_Tominaga/5202