"But should one not say then that Hegel already at the beginning of his work presupposes and anticipates what he wants to achieve only at the end? Certainly this must be said. Indeed, whoever wishes to understand anything of his work must say that again and again. The attempt to diminish this `fact'--as we would like to call it--show, furthermore, how little this work has been understood. . . . For it pertains to the essential character of philosophy that wherever philosophy sets to work in terms of its basic question and becomes a work, it already anticipates precisely that which it says later." (p. 30).
These lectures on Hegel's first major work "constitutes the lecture course given by Heidegger at the University of Freiburg during the winter semester of 1930/31. The German edition, edited by Ingtraud Goerland, was published in 1980 by Vittorio Klostermann Verlag." (p. viii). Normally publication dates matter little in philosophy, and the English translation did not appear until 1988, but the publication in German in 1980 might be considered an answer to specific questions raised by hotshot American philosopher and Princeton professor Walter Kaufmann, near the end of his life, who published a three-volume set in 1980 called Discovering the Mind, after some of the ideas were presented in 1974 and the first draft was completed in 1976, in which Hegel was considered too rushed to be considered philosophical: "especially in his first book he came to write at such a pace that he put fleeting thoughts and doubtful notions down on paper and then had to send them to the printer without any opportunity to rethink what he had written." (DM, V. I, pp. 255-256). Volume II made the same points regarding the publication of Heidegger's first original work, only half a system in which "Heidegger secularized Christian preaching about guilt, dread, and death, but claimed to break with two thousand years of Western thought." (DM, VII, p. xvi). Privately, in "an unpublished letter that Heidegger had written to Karl Loewith on August 19, 1921" (DM, VII, p. 170), Heidegger had written "but it must be added that I am no philosopher, and I do not imagine that I am doing anything remotely comparable; that is not my intention. . . . I am a `Christian theologian.' " (DM, VII, p. 171).
It should be obvious that Heidegger was capable of recognizing systems and identifying them quite easily. In HEGEL'S PHENOMENOLOGY OF SPIRIT, he has titles in his Contents that call out: "the System of Science," "1. The system of the phenomenology and of the encyclopedia," "2. Hegel's conception of a system of science," "b) Absolute and relative knowledge. Philosophy as the system of science," "4. The inner mission of the phenomenology of spirit as the first part of the system." Such an understanding of systems is entirely philosophical, and Heidegger's defense of his BEING AND TIME in the final few pages of these lectures is entirely philosophical in nature. He was not supposed to be writing about himself, but about the philosophical "problematic of `being and time' " (pp. 146-147) which previously flared up "for the first and only time, namely, in Kant--people refuse to see the problem and speak rather of my arbitrarily reading my own views into Kant. There is something peculiar about the lack of understanding in our contemporaries by virtue of which one can become famous all of a sudden, and indeed in a dubious sense." (p. 147). That he could complain about being famous as a philosopher already in 1931, before any notoriety from political scandals could make the picture as messy as a German mentality would be a few years later, tends to show that Heidegger had a better grasp of philosophical matters than any of his competitors, of whom only Karl Jaspers, the famous doctor-philosopher whose books include one on GENERAL PSYCHOPATHOLOGY, springs to mind as truly great.
Heidegger pictures Hegel's first book as a process of creeping up on absolute knowledge. "Hence, the work ends with the short section DD, which is entitled `Absolute Knowledge.' " (pp. 32-33). This leads up to the main assignment:
"In this lecture course I presuppose such a first reading of the entire work. If such a reading has not taken place or does not take place in the next few weeks, there is no sense in sitting here: You cheat not only me but yourselves. However, the first reading is not a guarantee that with the second reading we really understand the work. Perhaps the first reading must be frequently repeated, which is only to say that the first reading is utterly indispensable." (p. 36).