Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel / Hermann Hesse / David R Smith
This volume, entitled 'Within,' is part of MetaMad Book’s 'Philosophical Pairings' series, which attempts to translate interesting foreign language works into English and then pair them up in clever ways. This edition contains a new translation of Hegel’s Preface to the Phenomenology of Spirit (Vorwort zur Phänomenologie des Geistes), which is a concise description of Hegel’s overall project in the 630 or so pages of the Phenomenology that follows it. I consider the Preface to be (to quote Hermione Granger) 'a bit of light reading.' The second offering in this volume is a new translation of Hermann Hesse’s self-described' Indian poem,' Siddartha. As explained in Beyond (2024) the first book in this series, I am exploring the AI-based translation services of a company called deepl.com. DeepL claims to be the world’s most accurate and nuanced machine translation. They specifically claim to be better than Google translate. This technological marvel (or technological terror, to invoke Darth Vader) provides a wonderful opportunity to output new versions of older works, which in turn feeds directly into my desire to fill the world with books and reading, stamping out the abuses of the social media age. We should all read more, by which I mean an actual book made of paper, and look at our phones less. At a minimum it will im-prove our intellect and soften our heart. We know, certainly, that the social media world deadens the intellect and hardens the heart. So let us read instead!This book contains two new translations from the original German into English.
