I couldn’t find any Solomon lectures on Hegel, but here’s one introducing Edmund Husserl, which I think is apt now that we’ve covered Hegel’s “phenomenology,” so you can reflect on the difference:
Maybe the only reference to Hegel here is the discussion of Husserl’s rejection of historicism, though I think it should be clear that “historicist” is would be an over-simplification when explaining Hegel. Hegel shared what Solomon describes here as Husserl’s rejection of “naturalism.” Unlike an empiricist, Husserl is explicitly in the business of discovering essential truths, though for Hegel this seems more difficult, as one seeming necessity at one phase of development in the Phenomenology of Spirit can end up being inadequately grasped and in need of improvement. Likewise, though, for Husserl, throughout the course of the Cartesian Meditations, I think you could argue that the phenomenological grasp gets more adequate: the contribution of other people doesn’t enter into it until near the end of the work, though that ends up being an essential factor in experience, and certainly one of the primordial ones as far as our non-reflective experience goes. This very same progression shows up in Hegel, where the early part of the book reflects in a Cartesian way on my experience right here-right now, and this works forward, adding more elements to in some way reconstruct/simulate/analyze more fully our actual experience.
-Mark Linsenmayer
Disappointed to find this video no longer exists, wouldn’t mind a heads-up if it does somewhere else.