Unrewarding/stupid ways to read Hegel

1. As a dialectician that merely shows the determinations of spirit in the forms of thesis, antithesis, synthesis. That is, as a thinker that just partitioned up phenomena into three parts, the third of which resolved the discordance between the first and the second (which is the mere opposite of the first). In other words, a thinker of the formula: given A, (A + -A) = B. Still a prevelant view of Hegel, even among Hegelians. It is this view that leads such a prominent thinkher as Robert Charles Solomon to declare the dialectic arbitrary in the Phenomenology of Spirit in his book In the Spirit of Hegel: Solomon would rather junk a whole mode of thought (speculative thinking via the dialectic) than actually combat the misunderstanding prevalent in America that takes Hegel as this thesis, antithesis, synthesis thinker.
Why this is stupid: It completely erases negativity from the dialectic. The antithesis of the thesis is not merely the opposite of the antithesis. It is its negation. That is, given the basic phenomenon of of being, if we posit being as a thesis, nothing is not the antithesis because nothing is the opposite of being. rather, it is what happens when being grounds itself in itself as itself to the point that it can no longer be called "being." This is nothing. Furthermore, the synthesis of being and nothing is becoming not because becoming is something that interposes itself between being and nothing as a sort of "compromise" that will resolve both terms into one. Rather, it is again the grounding of nothing in itself (which was the grounding of being in itself) such that it can no longer be called "nothing," or, more accurately, "nothing-that-once-was-being." The truth of this is seen perhaps most clearly in Hegel's reflections on space and time, which I'll elaborate later (with the help of Heidegger and Derrida). In the meantime, this quote of Hegel's is enough to refute this view.

The progress [of the philosophical development of spirit or of the thinking of its various determinations] does not consist merely in the derivation of an other, or in the effected transition into a genuine other... the beginning of philosophy is the foundation which is present and preserved throughout the entire subsequent development, remaining completely immanent in its further determinations.
-Science of Logic, 71.

In short, if negativity were a mere "making-opposite" there would be only the genuine transition into a complete other with respect to the thesis: the antithesis would strictly speaking only be the thesis that was othered. Hegel shows that it is in the retaining of the beginning element that othered itself through its own self grounding of itself as itself that constitutes progress. Only through the grounding of something as itself is there progress, is their othering.

2. As--and this is how Zizek puts it in his Looking Awry (that is how prevalent this view is)--as the thinker or even "stager" of various existential modes of being and their possible development into each other through the negation of their presuppositions. It should be noted that this is the view of perhaps the most influential interpreter of Hegel of modern times, Alexandre Kojeve, but only when Kojeve is reading Hegel at his worst, when he is trying to make Hegel fashionable or at least relevant by considering him through a Heideggerian lens. Kojeve has a great understanding of Hegel, but he makes Hegel mean most when he sticks most to the issue of time in Hegel--and it is significant that time is the reflection of negativity for Hegel, thus making sticking close to a proper conception of negativity in general a good rule for reading Hegel. Jean Hippolyte probably puts it best when he says that the transition in a book like the Phenomenology from sense-consciousness to absolute knowledge is not a tracing of the history of the development of a person: the Phenomenology, nor Hegel's other works, have nothing to do with history in the sense of a history of man or of an individual consciousness or an individual element of spirit. What is at issue for Hegel always is how knowledge determines itself and forms itself. What are the possible forms of knowledge and, on the other side, the known that is necessary for that knowledge to maintain that form? this is always the question for Hegel. Thus when Hegel is talking about "sense-consciousness," or the "beautiful soul," he is not talking about a particular point of view and then exposing the presuppositions of this view that will be necessary for any progress of this point of view to appear, as Zizek says. Hegel is looking at constellations of the way a subject and an object relate to each other in a spiritual form of knowing, that is, in a mode of knowledge. On a larger scale, he is also investigating the developments of that knowledge itself, even beyond the distinction between subject and object or knower and known.

3. As the most "Romantic" of philosophers. Contra to this, I'd say it is better to think of him as only part-Romantic. As Heidegger shows, Hegel is first and foremost a return to Greek and especially early Greek thinking. Continually pointing to his contemporary, Napoleon, says very little when one starts to see the influence of the ideas of Aristotle on Hegel. Take the typical example of a "Romantic" notion of Hegel's: his remark that Napoleon was history on horseback. This idea originates in a conception of history as an expression of spirit, and the conflicts that states engage in as an expression of that spirit in right. Underlying this view is, more than any "Romantic" conception of the state, an Aristotelian and Platonic conception of the polis as the actor in history and the primary actor in bringing about happiness for a people. I don't mean to deny the Romantic in Hegel entirely of course: this remark on Napoleon and especially the book on the Philosophy of Right is an exceptional Romantic document, and really can only be understood in the context of Romantic German historicism and the fascination with the classical. What I am suggesting, however, it is is profitable (as Heidegger found out) to think of Hegel first and foremost as a reader of the Greeks rather than a philosopher reacting to his turbulent time. It makes the discipline of his thought come out more.