The British philosopher Bertrand Russell described him as “the hardest to understand of the great philosophers”.

David Hume could out-consume Wilhelm Freiderich Hegel

Hume was a much better writer.

I always kind of assumed he was indecipherable because his original writings were in German. Everything I’ve ever tried to read in translation from German has been incredibly dense and hard to follow.

And Wittgenstein was a beery swine

Who was just as sloshed as Schlegel

I’m pretty sure there’s a version that replaces “Wilhelm Friedrich” with “Schopenhauer and”

The Philosopher’s Song

Some translations of Nietzsche and Schopenhauer are quite good. They were better writers

A greater part of the problem is that much of Hegel's work is transcripts of lectures for people who also spoke the highly technical philosophical language he did. The lay audience was not the intended reader.

I love reddit sometimes....

I drink therefore I am...

They also lived in different time periods and had different audiences.

Schopenhauer was a contemporary of Hegel's

And Schopenhauer invented the word "hegelei" to basically describe incredibly smart sounding bullshit. The word was then used by Nietzsche and others to describe the same thing. Still in use today, though not as much anymore.

I can’t find an English article but here’s the German wiki for it. Maybe readable with a translator.

https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hegelei

I can only imagine how hard it is to translate; my 341 logic class is dense enough.

Hegel assumes a high amount of knowledge of early 19th-century German philosophy, and many of his technical terms are untranslatable. He especially loved compound words.

In North-West Germany "Hegel" has become a slang insult, used sarcastically and non-maliciously.

"Was für ein Hegel!" (or in dialect, "Watt'n Hegel!") is said about someone to call them a sort of buffoon. "What a Hegel you are."