If I could characterize Hegel with one word, it would be: unpredictable.  Hegel always has the hot take.  He is predictably unpredictable.  Just when you think you understand him, just when you think you know him, you read another sentence from his work that forces you to reconsider everything you thought you understood.

I've said before that Hegel's entire project is the critique of romanticism, that critique for Hegel means immanent critique- thus, so to speak, romanticism's critique of romanticism- and that - brilliantly! - when he zeroes in on romanticism, the essence of Hegel's discussion of romanticism focuses on irony, the irony of the romantic.  Even here, Hegel is being a romantic, because what he seeks is, you might say, poetic justice.  He wants romanticism to be hoisted by its own petard, like the person who is punished in the afterlife in a brilliant, torturous way - the ironic twist that turns everything back on them - "contrapasso".  What makes him a romantic is not just that he wants this to happen to the romantic, but that he believes that this is the fate of the romantic, and of romanticism.

What is ironic about romantics is that they are so predictable.  Everything about romanticism stems from their desperate desire to be unpredictable (that's why they resist managerialism, etc.) and yet this very process produces the most predictable drivel.

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