What does your mind seek?
Where is your heart?
If you give your heart to each and every thing,
you lead it nowhere: you destroy your heart.
Can anything be found on earth?
I started this website a little over two months ago and after taking a decent bit of notes, I now have a much more intuitive grasp of how much of a time commitment it is to take extensive notes on individual books in my library. I also have a much better idea of how much effort is expended in the struggle to come to terms with only one philosopher, let alone an entire period. With this in mind, I've decided to save my effort for works of philosophy or secondary I consider particularly important and I will once again return to reading certain books without any notes to be taken. I'll still underline books obviously and if I come to appreciate them more at a later time I'll consider them ripe for note-taking and upload my annotations. Another reason I'm doing this is because after taking a bit to internalize it, I'm now a lot cooler with the idea that as much as it should be obvious to me, you can't just read any work of philosophy once and expect to come away with a good reading. Everything that I now add to my library are things that I expect to read 2 or 3 more times when time affords me the luxury.
After getting to the chapter on Perception in Hegel's Phenomenology and having a much better time during the second go-around, I've decided to file everything else in philosophy that I've been reading as 'light reading' and focus my note-taking efforts on Hegelian philosophy for a bit, although I do intend to finish my notes on Scharfstein. After I finish Kalkavage's book I think I'll go ahead and order a physical copy of Hegel's Lectures on the Philosophy of World History and then start reading his Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences in preperation for the rest of his lectures and then finally the Science of Logic, which I hope reading fruitfully to be one of my crowning achievements. Another thing I'm doing to sidetrack myself is I'm taking the time to read Lewis Vaughn's Writing Philosophy 2nd Edition so that when I get around to writing articles or blog posts on this website I can substantially improve their overall quality.
In case anyone's wondering why I'm placing such an emphasis of my effort on Hegel, it's because alongside Capital I really want to read Marx's Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right along with his Paris Manuscripts and the Grundrisse, and also the chapter in the German Ideology where he's shitting on Max Stirner (which is hilariously more than half the book). I'm also quite curious about his disagreements with Proudhon and Bakunin which I'm sure will relate in some way to disagreements over the interpretation of Hegel. The texts that Marx considered worthy for publication I think are totally okay to read for any activist or revolutionary who wants to begin their crucible in class struggle, but the texts that he didn't consider fit for publication I find myself quite interested in, but I can't imagine they're particularly ripe for anyone who hasn't taught themselves quite a bit of Hegel, which is most people. At some point I'd really enjoy undertaking a study of Lenin's Philosophical Notebooks, held in Vol. 38 of his Collected Works, specifically his writings on Hegel's Science of Logic. I don't necessarily consider the study of Hegel right for everyone, in fact, I think it's quite weird that I bother, but for my very particular interests I find the effort necessary to come to grips with him indispensable.
Another reason I have too many damn things to read is that although I'm becoming somewhat of a Hegel specialist, it's not just Hegel that fascinates me, but the entire period of German Idealism in general. I really hope I end up with the time to read Kant's Three Critiques and I've also developed a bit of interest in Fichte and Schelling. I've even developed an interest in the less well known thinkers of the period like Hamann, Herder, Schiller, Novalis, Schlegel (the other 'egel'), and I hope to read Holderin as well. I find myself less interested in Post-Hegelian philosophy if it isn't Marx but I think undertaking a study of Kierkegaard and Schopenhauer would be worth the time. Although I don't expect to end up a proto-existentialist by any means. If I can come to grips with German Idealism I think I'll be able to make myself a non-temporal philosophical contemporary of Marx and the Young Hegelians, from there I don't know what I'll end up doing or working on.
I also hope to read Thucydides and Herodotus as well as a variety of other Greek and Roman writers, at some point I also plan to return to the Iliad with a different translation and finally read the Odyssey which I've been neglecting for too long. I consider it a shame that I haven't set aside time for Dante's Divine Comedy. For some reason, I feel incredibly guilty when I'm reading works of literature rather than works of philosophy, even though the connection between the two is terribly fascinating. Another thing I plan for a little bit of light reading at some point is a biography of Robespierre along with my slim collection of his writings. I only have so much time to read and life to live, unfortunately. That's enough for one night, signing out once again and returning to my Hegelian cataract surgery.