March 24, 2025 • 71 mins
The boys (featuring the return of Mir) kick back on the slaughter-bench to discuss Hegel's philosophy of history by discussing Terry Pinkard's article "The Spirit of History."
The Spirit of History by Terry Pinkard
https://aeon.co/essays/what-is-history-nobody-gave-a-deeper-answer-than-hegel
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 2 (00:18):
Hello and welcome to the Redible Century.
We have a special guest today.
Well, first of all, it's Chrisand Jason, but we have a special
guest today.
Well, first of all it's Chrisand Jason, but we have a special
guest today, and by guest Imean he's sort of the return of
an at-large member of theRegrettable Century, and that
would be Mir from Sweden.
Say hello, mir.
Speaker 1 (00:38):
Hello, comrades in Christ.
Speaker 2 (00:42):
All right, mir is back in rotation and we're glad
to have him, and he's here tohelp us talk about Hegel, and
specifically, we read thisarticle that we thought was
worth going into in some detail,called the Spirit of History,
by Terry Pinkard, who is aphilosophy professor from
(01:07):
Georgetown University, and Ithink he is kind of a famous
Hegel scholar, if I remember.
Speaker 1 (01:13):
Yes, he's one of the three or four big Hegel scholars
.
He has written a detailedexploration of the phenomenology
of spirit, basically where hegoes through the whole book
chapter by chapter, notparagraph by paragraph, but
almost like it's a 600 page longbook yeah, no, it looks like
(01:37):
you wrote a biography as well.
Speaker 2 (01:38):
Yeah, sorry.
Speaker 3 (01:39):
Yeah, pinkard is a person who, uh, knowing that he
wrote this article makes it,should make one say, oh, this is
worth reading because it's theauthor.
Speaker 1 (01:49):
I should also say that there are a couple of
dividing lines among Hegelscholars, and this author falls
down on the more sociologicalview of Hegel, who claims that
Hegel basically is a sociologist, a sociologist of history,
(02:11):
while there are others who treatHegel more as a classical
philosopher who deals withmetaphysics and also
epistemology and ontology, andyou can't find thisological
(02:48):
claims out of hegel, so that'simportant to keep in mind, that
he's he's on the far end inthese debates, so we get a very
precise point, yeah.
Speaker 3 (03:04):
If it was like 1840, pinkard would be like in the
company of people like Feuerbach, and he would be young Hegelian
.
Yeah, so he would not become aMarxist, though, but he would be
one of the people that Marxwould have to say this guy has
it almost right, but not quite.
Speaker 2 (03:20):
Yeah, If you were to ask me which side I fall on the
side of Hegel's sociology orHegel's metaphysics I would say
yes.
Speaker 1 (03:29):
Yeah, yes, well, and I think that is the correct
answer and I think we will getmore into this with this article
, but I think you get really oneside view of Hegel and also of
the Enlightenment.
Speaker 2 (03:47):
Yeah.
So I think that to be properlyHegelian, you would definitely
need to be both of the thingsthat Hegel was trying to
implement here, which would bethe dialectical synthesis of the
sociological perspective andthe metaphysical perspective,
which is just yeah, you'd beable to hold them both,
(04:09):
recognizing them as separate andin contradiction and tension
with each other, and stillmaintain that they're both true
yes, okay.
So, um, jason suggested that wedo this along the lines of the
Varn model, which is where we gothrough it in detail.
It's not a super long article.
Speaker 3 (04:28):
Yeah, ideally it won't take us several episodes
to go through it.
Speaker 2 (04:32):
Well, okay, so we have the tendency to ramble
right and to get sidetracked,but Varn definitely exacerbates
that tendency I have no ideawhat you're talking about.
Speaker 1 (04:43):
I have no idea and we exacerbate that tendency.
Speaker 2 (04:44):
I have no idea what you're talking about I have no
idea, and we exacerbate thattendency in him.
It's like we don't have.
When it's just the three of usand Varn, it's just Varn and the
two of us, there's nobody tocheck us and to get us back on
track.
So we just every once in awhile we remember oh crap, we've
been doing this for two hoursand we're only a quarter of the
way through it.
We should get back on track.
Speaker 3 (05:05):
We'll spend like 45 minutes on the first two
sentences of an article.
Speaker 2 (05:10):
Yeah, and, in my opinion, when I go back and
listen to those, I'm like okay,these are all good conversations
.
I like this.
This is like listening topeople have a conversation about
something interesting.
What it's not, however, is likean exposition that you could
take notes and listen to andfollow along like it's an
educational podcast or something.
(05:30):
If that's what people arelistening for, then they're
generally pretty disappointed,but I think there is value in
both.
So, that being said, let's hopin.
Speaker 3 (05:44):
Yeah, so that being said, let's hop in.
Yeah, before we get started, Itook these notes down.
I feel like I wanted to justkind of encapsulate my reasoning
anyways.
Oh, go for it.
(06:05):
Understanding periodicrevisiting of Hegel and Hegelian
philosophy as it relates to,and also as it does not relate
to, the project of communism andour projects in the regrettable
century.
So I wrote why study, slashtalk about Hegel, especially at
this point?
And I wrote mostly because Ithink it's important to get a
clear sense of why things arethe way that they are, how they
came to be this way and how theymight come to be different, and
(06:26):
thus to guard against LARPingand or succumbing to absolute
despair, slash nihilism, whichis, you know, that's our purpose
anyways.
Speaker 2 (06:35):
That's the two poles of American leftism.
Speaker 3 (06:37):
Yeah, LARPing on one side and nihilism on the other.
Speaker 2 (06:40):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (06:41):
And then, what's more , maintaining or even just
achieving clarity might evenhelp us think about things in
new ways, in ways which areactually helpful and useful, and
again, thus not larping orbeing nihilistic.
So that's why I think we shouldread this article well, okay
absolutely.
Speaker 1 (07:00):
And I would like to add that if we, by some sort of
leftist project, believe that weare in need of philosophy and
cannot be naive positivists orwhatever, and that we need the
humanities, we need philosophy,we need to understand it, then
(07:21):
Hegel, basically I agree with.
Well, first of all, it wasFoucault who claimed that all of
philosophy are footnotes toPlato.
But I agree with both Zizek andL'Ambattu when they claim that,
yeah, but since Hegel, all ofphilosophy has been footnotes to
Hegel.
Speaker 3 (07:41):
Yeah, I mean, all of those footnotes are footnotes to
the introduction, the prefaceto Hegel.
Yeah, I mean, all of thosefootnotes are footnotes to the
introduction, the preface toHegel.
Speaker 1 (07:48):
Yes and well like.
Also in a quite direct andmaterialist way.
Like all the majorphilosophical schools are
directly descended from Hegel.
The Anglo-Saxon positivistcomes from Popper, who wasn't
Hegelian in his youth and hispositivism was a direct reaction
(08:13):
to his youthful Existentialismis out of Hegel.
The same thing withpost-colonial thought comes
directly out of Hegel's feministthoughts through not only Jude
(08:35):
Butler but also Simone de Bois,and so on and so on.
Speaker 2 (08:39):
Right on.
Speaker 1 (08:40):
You can't avoid it.
Speaker 2 (08:43):
I agree, okay, okay, let's get started, and you can
stop me when you want tointerject Something, just like
Just yell really loud.
Speaker 3 (08:54):
I was going to say we could just get air horns,
except for that makes it soundlike Weird.
Whenever you say somethingreally cool, it's when we go.
Speaker 2 (09:03):
Uh oh, the lights just flickered.
I thought the power was aboutto go out.
Speaker 3 (09:09):
All right, let's get started and see how much we can
get before your power goes outyeah history, or at least the
study of it, is in bad shapethese days.
Speaker 2 (09:17):
Almost everyone agrees that knowing history is
important, but in the unitedstates, except at the most elite
schools, the study of historyis in free fall.
Our age, except at the mostelite schools, the study of
history is in free fall.
Our age seems to share theskepticism voiced by the German
philosopher G W F Hegel when hesaid that the only lesson
history teaches us is thatnobody ever learned anything
from history.
(09:37):
Absolutely.
In one of my courses, when Ifirst got to, uh, the university
that I'm at now, we we weresupposed to write like why do,
why should people study history?
And we're supposed to presentour answers to the class.
And several people who wentbefore me said oh, it's so that
(09:58):
we learn.
We learn history so that wedon't repeat it.
And, uh, I quoted Hegel when Istarted my presentation about
why we should learn history, andthat was the quote that I used.
Speaker 1 (10:09):
He has another really interesting quote about history
, and that is that history is aslaughter bench.
Speaker 2 (10:16):
That's my favorite.
We're going to talk about thata little bit too.
Why this is back to the article, sorry.
Why the present is always newand the future is untested,
leading many to sympathize withthe American businessman Henry
Ford's pronouncement in 1921that history is more or less
bunk.
Yet the very same Hegel alsoargued that although things do
(10:38):
indeed always seem unprecedented, history does actually give us
a clue as to our ultimate ends.
Speaker 3 (10:45):
That's a pretty good indication that you, uh, are in
need of revisiting your yourworldview, if you take your
philosophical cues from henryford right, right, unless you're
like, uh, in the us orscandinavia I guess, if you're-
elon musk, it might, that mightring true yeah, yeah, except for
, except for that Elon Muskloves juice.
Speaker 2 (11:04):
Now, remember, that's true.
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (11:06):
And he loves LARPing Rome.
Yeah, without understanding it.
Speaker 3 (11:11):
It's weird, because he used to love LARPing, uh,
like Karl Marx, he used to lovepretending like he understood
what it meant and even like thathe was kind of the real
socialist.
Speaker 2 (11:21):
Oh yeah.
Speaker 3 (11:26):
Yeah of the real socialist, oh yeah, yeah.
I don't know if he was betteror worse than he was, just he
was funnier but had less of adirect social impact, so maybe,
maybe he's worse now well, Imean, he takes more drugs now
and people who take thosespecific drugs become really
uninteresting well, he's, uhcertainly more dangerous now
than he used to be, as he, likeyou know, rips the guts out of
the.
Speaker 2 (11:46):
You know all of the institutions that make up the
American government he alsoblows up a spaceship every
couple of weeks but here isSweden.
Speaker 1 (11:57):
I just want to make a shout out to our comrades.
We have been in a 500 day longstrike and blockade against
tesla oh wow, nice, well, okay.
Speaker 2 (12:09):
So there's an accelerationist demon on my
shoulder that's going like, yeah, elon, destroy the american
empire.
And then there's the other part.
That's like a dad that has toraise a child here and I'm like,
oh man, I would like there tobe some Social Security for me
and for my daughter, you know,but anyway, well, moving on.
Speaker 3 (12:28):
It's almost like history is a slaughter bench.
Speaker 2 (12:31):
It's almost like that .
Speaker 1 (12:33):
I think this last sentence is quite interesting
and worth following a bit upon.
Although things do indeedalways seem unprecedented
Although things do indeed alwaysseem unprecedented, history
does actually give us a clue toour ultimate ends, Right?
Should we dive into that now orwait with?
Speaker 2 (12:55):
it.
Go for it.
Yeah, do it now.
Speaker 1 (13:09):
Well, I think that one of the things to see that
for most people, like evenpeople who don't study history,
seems quite disparating thesedays, is that things are falling
apart again and that we arereturning to something old in
(13:32):
the guise of something new, orsomething new in the guise of
something old, the rise of therobber barons, like, if we're
speaking politically, if we'respeaking more sociologically,
(13:52):
the total defragmentation of ourinstitutions and of even the
polite trade that institutionsare supposed to serve us.
Speaker 3 (14:07):
Yeah, that's why I really like the.
Uh, what is this called thetagline?
There's like the, there's thetitle and then underneath it
there's a kind of a little brief, uh sort of synopsis of the
point of the article.
Whatever it says, hegel'ssearch for the universal
patterns of history revealed aparadox Freedom is coming into
being, but it is neverguaranteed.
Speaker 2 (14:27):
Right, yeah, which?
Yeah, it's funny thateveryone's or not everyone, I
would say like the, I would saypeople who have a very cursory
understanding of Hegel, peoplewho pretend to understand.
Speaker 3 (14:40):
Hegel.
Speaker 2 (14:41):
There we go.
People who pretend tounderstand Hegel, whose
understanding is cursory, seehim as the ultimate teleologist
right, Like he is, the Whighistorian extraordinaire, which
is incorrect, and there is acertain amount of determinism in
(15:01):
Hegel right.
Speaker 1 (15:02):
That, I think, is justified, if you understand
Hegel right, absolutely.
Speaker 2 (15:04):
I think it's justified if you understand
Hegel, but he is not asteleological as people think
that he is and think that Marxis.
As a result, Absolutely.
Speaker 1 (15:19):
I think that it was Koshchei who claimed that, for
Hegel, absolute freedom is thefreedom to choose your own
necessity.
Speaker 3 (15:32):
I like that.
Speaker 2 (15:34):
Who was it that said that Hegel's idea of freedom is
the freedom to obey a policeman?
Speaker 1 (15:40):
That sounds like Popper.
Speaker 2 (15:43):
I don't think it is Popper, but he is an American.
I don't think it is Popper, buthe is an American.
I forget which one he is.
Speaker 3 (15:50):
That's because, you know, it kind of makes sense in
a certain sense If you takeHegel's notion of the working
out and the unfolding of spirit,which is to say human
consciousness on a social level.
The unfolding of spirit, whichis to say human consciousness on
a social level, in that the,the construction of the state as
the guarantor of freedom, asboth the product of the purpose
(16:12):
of and the product of and theguarantor of freedom.
There's a, there's a version ofthat that says like oh yeah,
hegel says that God is the stateon earth and so Hegel's freedom
is just to obey a cop.
But that's only true if youcannot conceive of the
administration of human activityas anything more than it
(16:33):
already is.
And if that's the case, then Iwould say that you haven't
actually understood, undertakento understand, hegel at all.
Speaker 1 (16:41):
It was Russell who said that about the policeman by
.
Speaker 3 (16:45):
By the way, russell uh, I might.
Speaker 1 (16:49):
I'm drawing a blank russell, the uh, what's his
first name?
Quite famous britishphilosopher of history, burton
russell oh, oh, burton russell,that makes sense, let's see if
we can get into the secondparagraph well, yes, but like
and the second paragraph yeah,we can go on to the second
(17:13):
paragraph and then tie it backto this question about history
does actually give us a clue asto our ultimate end, because
that's I think that that's aclear statement of hegel.
But what does that actuallymean?
Is it's a big?
Speaker 3 (17:33):
it's a big and important question yeah, I would
say, that's even the questionone one of them.
Speaker 2 (17:40):
One of them okay, that one step.
Okay, we are a peculiar species.
What is it to be the creaturesthat we are is always a problem
for us, in part because we makeourselves into kinds of
creatures, into the kinds ofcreatures that we are, and
because we explore this in allthe different ways we live out
our lives, individually andcollectively.
(18:01):
The study of history involvesnot only telling stories or
piling up facts.
In its larger structure, it isin the account of humanity,
experimentally seeking tounderstand itself in all the
myriad ways in which it givesshape to itself in daily life,
and also how historical changeis intimately linked to changes
in our basic self-understanding.
As Hegel put it in a series oflectures in 1822 to 1830, we are
(18:26):
peculiarly our own products,and the philosophical study of
history is a study of how weshapeshifted ourselves across
time.
Speaker 3 (18:36):
See, that's important , I think, because for people
who talk from a position of youknow, people who purport to be
Marxists, the idea is that humannature is kind of something
which we already we know and wejust have to get back to it by
(18:58):
advancing forward, and that'skind of correct.
But also there's somethingimplied here that's much deeper,
much more metaphysical.
This idea of us taking into ourown hands our conception of
ourselves and then working outthe best ways in order to be
that conception, so like inolder generations of mystics,
(19:23):
would refer to the descent intoheaven, the fall from Eden and
the return to Eden as thisprocess by which we become
conscious and deliberate in ourascension, as opposed to before,
when we were just almost likezoo animals.
We're just almost like zooanimals, and Hegel is just
(19:47):
putting a lot of detail intothat and talking about the ways
in which we have this notion andwe test it, and we are
constantly just trying to workout this basic notion all
throughout history.
Speaker 1 (19:58):
Well, yes, and like.
The basic idea here is that weare both at the same time the
object and the subject ofhistory.
Yeah, and Hegel had studiedscholastic philosophy very, very
thoroughly, and I think thatthat shows here.
(20:18):
It is almost an ecclesiology.
We see here Humanity is theobject of God's love, but also
the subject under God's love.
We are in a process ofco-creation and that co-creation
(20:42):
is the.
And here comes my critique withthis line of reading of Hegel as
well, like that he socompletely demystifies Hegel.
That for Hegel, for me it isquite clear that what he's
speaking about is our freedomwithin God, freedom within
(21:05):
freedom in a more religioussense as well as a political
sense, to be both subject andobject of love at the same time.
That is one point I think thatis really important here,
subject and object, but also asa clue to our ultimate ends.
(21:27):
Here the author makes a hint ofthat.
Okay, we can have an ultimateend in a theological sense, or
we can view the study of historyas a study of larger structures
.
And in studying these largerstructures we can perhaps not
(21:55):
mathematically preciselyunderstand that, well, we will
all achieve the classlesssociety by that date, or even at
all but that there is aprobability that by
understanding these historicalmetastructures, the inner gram
(22:17):
of history, we can have a betterunderstanding of where things
probably are heading Not withcertainty, but probably.
Speaker 2 (22:31):
No one ever conceived of a more sophisticated and
dynamic philosophical historythan Hegel.
His system is built aroundthree fundamental ideas.
First, the key to human agencyis self-consciousness.
For people to be doing anythingin any real human sense is to
know what we are doing as we doit.
This applies even when we arenot explicitly thinking about
(22:53):
what we are doing.
Here's a simple example.
As you're reading this, supposeyou get a text message from a
friend.
What are you doing?
You immediately reply.
I'm reading a piece on Hegel.
You knew that you were doingwhat you were doing without
having to separate the act ofthinking about it or drawing
conclusions Without any furtherthought.
You knew that you were notskydiving, taking a bath,
(23:14):
gardening or doing a crossword.
You did not look around andinfer from the evidence.
You did not need any particularintrospection.
In fact, in Hegelian terms,when you are doing something and
you do not know at all what youare doing, you're not really
doing anything at all.
Instead, stuff is justhappening.
To be sure, sometimes we areonly vaguely aware of what we
are doing.
(23:34):
However, even our often moredistance reflective
self-consciousness is itselfonly a further realization of
the deeper and distinctlyHegelian self-relation.
All consciousness isself-relation.
Speaker 3 (23:44):
All consciousness is self-consciousness I think
that's more profound than, uh,we might want to think at first
when we say uh, allconsciousness is
self-consciousness, like okay,fine, duh.
But that's a profoundproposition and it's a
relatively uh, well, at least atthe time unique, especially in
(24:06):
the era in which, well, there'sa certain kind of enlightenment
philosophy that everything's aproduct of natural processes,
everything is kind ofmechanistically determined.
And Hegel is saying, in acertain sense, he's saying I
think and therefore I am.
Speaker 2 (24:24):
Sure, maybe this is just my, my dad instincts
kicking in, but, um, I thinkthat this, this makes me think
of when we were kids and mom ordad would be like what are you
doing?
We'd be like, oh no, they getall mad at us about it.
You remember yeah and uh.
Why did you do that?
I don't know anyway.
So, so for me it will be likeyou know.
(24:45):
I will ask my child, like youknow what's going on?
What are you doing?
I don't know, anyway.
So for me it will be like youknow.
I will ask my child, like youknow what's going on, what are
you doing?
I don't know.
It's like well, so that meansyou're doing nothing and stuff
is just happening.
You know, you need to conceiveof what it is that you are doing
and act upon the world in aconscious manner.
Speaker 3 (24:59):
Well, yes, yeah, because it's about agency.
Speaker 1 (25:02):
It is about agency, but it's also about waking up
from our unconscious everydayslumber.
We do things out of habit,certain things, certain rituals,
(25:35):
which carry within them ahistory or a process.
I don't think it's acoincidence that here we can see
the origins of psychoanalysisFreud was profoundly influenced
by Feuerbach, and Feuerbach wasa Hegelian.
What we're dealing with here isthat all consciousness is
self-consciousness.
Okay, what does that mean Inpsychological practice, for
(25:56):
example?
Well, that means that you haveto understand the history and
the social nature of yourafflictions.
So in our afflictions, in ourneurosis, in our anxieties, we
carry within us hardened socialrelationships, either from our
(26:22):
families or from our community,or religious practices or
whatever there may be.
And in order to be fully free,we have to become conscious of
what we are doing.
That is Zizek's holisticideology.
(26:44):
We have to become conscious ofideology that all the small
practices in our everyday lifeembody ideology.
The famous three models oftoilets in different parts of
the world, like that.
That is, I think, what Hegel isspeaking about here, like these
(27:07):
hardened social histories.
Speaker 3 (27:13):
Right, and I feel like this is why I think that if
you take Hegel's overallphilosophy and his basic
propositions to be true in likea literal sense, to be literally
true, even if you weren't acommunist, even if you were not
influenced by the work of GuyDebord, I feel like you would
(27:35):
have to.
You have to look around thesociety right now and say this
is a society which is movingaway from this
self-consciousness, as more andmore of life is just automatic
and rote and you just don'treally think about what you're
doing at all.
This is this society hasstopped producing the self, the
(28:02):
personal awareness.
It's being retarded as a resultof something.
And so fine, if it's notcapitalism, what is it?
Because it's definitely not theend of history in the way that
I think.
A lot of people think thatFukuyama meant it.
Speaker 1 (28:19):
No, I mean whatever compartmentalized, that
consciousness of how theseactions and our relationships
(28:39):
are interconnected is not onlyincentivized against but becomes
almost physically impossiblewithin our current system.
Speaker 2 (28:50):
Yeah, I mean, I've joked around about this a lot,
but that it seems as though thatHegel was right until the end
of the 20th century and then,since that point forward, the
dialectic has stalled out andyou have to insert some marks
into Hegel in order to be ableto understand the stalling of
(29:14):
the dialectic, and that would bethis sort of idea of the common
ruin of the contending classes.
Right, yeah, so yeah.
Speaker 1 (29:24):
I mean, there is a different reading, like a dark
hagel, where, like, yes, we areseeing history unfold and what
we are seeing now is the naturalprogression of the
Enlightenment of impulses fromfar earlier than that, and it's
(29:44):
just leading us to a ruin.
Speaker 2 (29:48):
The idea that the Weltgeistzufuhrer would be Trump
and Putin.
Right yeah, they're the onesleading us into the brave new
world.
Like pushing history forwardand, honestly, like there's
something to that.
Speaker 1 (30:06):
Oh yeah, I think so too.
Speaker 2 (30:08):
I think that if you look at the way that the face of
geopolitics has changed likethat over the past month and a
half, two months, you know,since trump's inauguration where
, like nato is tottering, the eulooks, is in like serious
crisis and, you know, russia andthe united states are uh, uh,
(30:30):
reaching rapprochement whilewe're like antagonizing canada
in the eu, you know, I mean,it's so.
Speaker 3 (30:38):
Yes, I, I, there is something to that absolutely,
but anyway, yeah it's like okay,in 1789 you have kind of the,
the beginnings of a new uh mode,a new uh vehicle for the
working out of freedom, for theabsolute, which is the nation as
(31:02):
states, as playing the rolethat previously only heroes like
individuals, like Alexander theGreat might have played, a
similar role as being therepository of history, the world
spirit on horseback.
And then nations take the place,which is a more collective,
more social version of this,which is to say a more clear
(31:24):
articulation of a broaderconception of freedom, a more
full articulation of freedom.
And sometimes, and for a littlewhile, it kind of took
Bonaparte to play that role tohelp whatever nations and so on.
Later on in history it movesfrom nations to become classes,
which means a good.
(31:45):
I mean, really most of thepeople in the world play a role
now, and also the USSR kind ofplayed the role, just like
Bonaparte played the individualrole to the French Revolution's
national social role, the USSRplays the role of the nations
relative to the classes and soon.
So, whatever, if the dialecticsare solved out, in the words of
(32:09):
Ian Malcolm in Jurassic Park,life finds a way.
Speaker 1 (32:14):
Jurassic Park, life finds a way, well, or I mean
because this is Heidegger'sreading of Hegel that Hegel was
right, but the dialectics isleading us into ruin and
extermination of humankind byacting against our social nature
(32:37):
.
Speaker 2 (32:39):
You're making me agree with Heidegger.
Speaker 3 (32:41):
I do that sometimes it's okay.
I do too.
Speaker 1 (32:45):
I mean, it makes me really uncomfortable.
And that's also the FrankfurtSchool wouldn't go as far.
But sad Dorno in his more darkmoments would Well the dialectic
of enlightenment is exactlywhat Heidegger is talking about
(33:06):
here.
Speaker 2 (33:06):
It's a similar idea, yes, and I think Karel Kosik
does the same thing, but he isheavily influenced by Heidegger,
the Czech Marxist, philosopher,marxist, hegelian, heideggerian
, whatever.
Speaker 3 (33:23):
If we take seriously this idea that the idea is being
worked out over and over againantagonism, the contradiction
between the labor and capital,or between liberalism and
communism and fascism, or anyother of these different ways of
(33:44):
understanding theseoppositional conceptions if we
take seriously that these areall kind of the same idea
working itself out, refiningitself, it would only make sense
that we could find something inHeidegger to say oh, that's
kind of right, just as much aseven in Julius Evola, like very
(34:05):
little, but there's stillsomething still worth knowing,
wait wait what's worth knowingin Julius Evola?
Are we in the Kali Yuga rightnow?
Is that?
Speaker 2 (34:14):
similar to the stallali Yuga right now, that's.
Is that similar to the stallingof the dialectic?
Speaker 1 (34:20):
Well, I mean yeah we have this cyclic view of history
.
It's like there is certainly alot of sociological truth to
cyclic theories of history.
Then it's like in fourgenerations and not in 4,000
years, but that's another thing.
Speaker 3 (34:40):
Yeah, I mean like I wouldn't want to take that too
far.
I just mean like anythingthat's very intellectually
rigorous and worked out and isvery serious and deeply felt is
worth knowing about and takingseriously and engaging with,
because even if it's somethingabhorrent and to be rejected,
you shouldn't reject it based onnot knowing what it is.
Speaker 2 (35:02):
Oh yeah, I absolutely agree with that and I think
that that's probably I don'tknow how many times, how many
examples I can pick of like thatI could pick to illustrate this
point that have happened to mepersonally where I mentioned
having read or understanding thephilosophy of this or that bad
person and people are like, oh,why would you want to read that?
(35:24):
Well as a person who as a personwho reads fascists as a job,
you know.
Yeah, I mean it's.
It's really funny Like, uh,I've I.
I mentioned to people that I'veread Mein Kampf twice and
they're like, oh, why would youdo that?
I was like, well, first of all,it's not even twice, probably
(35:45):
more like three times.
The first time I read it I waslike a little nerd that wanted
to read history stuff when I waslike in my early, late teens,
early 20s.
And then I've read it twice asa scholar because it was
required in two differentclasses.
But people are like, why wouldyou read this?
I mean, why wouldn't you?
Why wouldn't you want tounderstand one of the most
(36:05):
important people in the historyof the world, even if he was
terrible?
Why wouldn't you want tounderstand that right?
Speaker 1 (36:10):
Well, I mean, the argument against reading my con
fist.
That is really badly writtenand boring.
Yes, is really badly writtenand boring.
Yes, it is badly written andboring.
Speaker 2 (36:20):
But there are narrative parts of it that are
interesting, like when he's notexpounding his pseudo philosophy
, when he's like discussing likethe days of struggle of the
Nazi party or whatever.
That stuff is kind ofinteresting.
Yeah, to hear him talk aboutwhat led up to the, the putsch,
(36:41):
or whatever I mean anyway.
So it's just like, uh, I'vealso read joseph goebbels's
diaries and I've read anserohm's diaries and it's all
incredibly interesting because,like knowing what the worst
people in history were thinkingand why they did what they did,
actually I think is important.
Speaker 3 (37:01):
It's a big part of understanding why things
happened, why things mighthappen a different way, how we
can affect these things and,ultimately, to break free of
this cul-de-sac in which we'reforced between either LARPing or
else nihilism.
Speaker 1 (37:16):
cul-de-sac in which we're forced between either
LARPing or else nihilism.
Well, and it's also, if we'reto bring this back to the text,
which we should do it's alsoimportant, if we're speaking
about self-consciousness, to seewhat patterns of thoughts, of
emotions, of spiritual flows,spiritual leanings, emotional
(37:42):
strings that you can find inthose texts that resonate with
you and where the danger thereinlies.
It's an important part ofgrowing as a person in
self-consciousness, yeah, toidentify the darkness within and
(38:04):
really struggle with itabsolutely yeah, okay, before
anyone calls me out, no, Ihaven't read all 24 volumes of
goblins's diaries.
Speaker 2 (38:14):
I've read bits and pieces here and there I have one
collected like selected, uh,the best of goblins collation of
some of his diaries anyway.
So let's uh get back to thetext then.
Uh, are we on?
Speaker 1 (38:28):
secondly, we are.
It is a mistake to think is no,we're on, we're on.
Speaker 2 (38:36):
Secondly, oh, okay.
Secondly, hegel thought thatself-consciousness is always a
matter of locating ourselves ina kind of social space of I and
we.
Saying I or saying we is justspeaking from one of two sides
of the same dialectical coin.
In many cases we seems to addup to lots of instances of I
think or I do, but in its mostfundamental sense we is just as
(39:01):
basic as I.
Each individualself-consciousness is
fundamentally social.
The generality of we manifestsitself in the individual acts of
each of us, but we is itselfnothing apart from the
individual acts of singularflesh and blood agents.
When I know what it is that Iam doing, I am also aware that
what I am doing is, so to speak,the way we do it.
Speaker 3 (39:24):
This is such a beautifully encapsulated and
truncated I mean, it's like many, many pages that I think a lot
of people get tripped up on thisdistinction between the
universal and the particular,and how one set of rules, laws,
whatever norms, can be right inone sense and wrong in the other
(39:46):
sense, and yet both are equallydependent upon each other.
And so, to me, this is thefundamental flaw with liberalism
in the long run.
To me, this is the fundamentalflaw with liberalism in the long
run.
In the early stages, in theinitial impulses of liberalism,
it's the loosing, the settingfree of the I of the individual,
(40:07):
which is a necessary thing.
The long-term result of it,though, is the lack of
recognition of the otherindividuals, uh, and thus of the
social, and that's how, uh, youknow like, liberalism can be uh
, in in this stage in history,is eating itself, because the
sum total of of a liberalconception of emancipation is
(40:31):
absolute freedom from coercion,freedom from responsibility,
freedom from everything.
And uh, freedom fromresponsibility, freedom from
everything, and we should justsay it's an impossibility.
So there is always a social,there is always an individual.
Those are always mediated,there is always universal, and
there's always a particularmediated between the two the
(40:52):
recognition of this and thetrying to grasp this mediation,
this process is, whether we knowit or not, that's what we're
all doing.
Speaker 1 (41:01):
Yes, another school of philosophy that is brought
out of this specific paragraph.
Previously I talked a bit abouthow psychoanalysis came out of
Feuerbach.
Through that idea ofself-consciousness, this
(41:21):
relation between I and thou,between I and we, is something
that Jewish philosophy picked upduring the Weimar years, and in
both Germany and Franceparticularly.
I'm thinking about Martin Buberand Immanuel.
(41:42):
Marx, oh right right the I andthe I.
Here I completely agree withwhat is said here.
I think that for Hegel the onlyway and as I read Hegel that
the I and thou is therelationship of recognition.
(42:05):
There is the only way that wecan come into contact with the
Geist, that our reflection andreciprocity with other persons
and our recognition of thatdependency and how our subject
(42:29):
is constituted upon dependencyof ourselves and of others and
the structures that we togetherbuild, is the way in which we
recognize the movement ofhistory.
And through recognizing our ownpart as agents in history and
(42:53):
in the world we can also come toknow the Geist God.
So what he's claiming here on ametaphysical level is as well,
that because Hegel was aChristian, when he's speaking
about the Geist he's speakingabout the Holy Spirit that the
only way to know God is throughanother person I'm thinking
(43:18):
about Victor Hugo.
Speaker 3 (43:20):
To love another person is to see the face of God
.
Yeah, exactly, well, right, andlike.
I know that you know this, Iknow that everyone here knows
this, but just in case anybodydoesn't know this, for Hegel,
the Holy Spirit is not justsomething that happens to you,
that God is not just adisembodied out there entity.
(43:44):
That Victor Hugo quote is veryimportant.
The recognition, the I don'twant to call it the inaction,
but the utilization, whatever.
The Communion, the communionwith the divine is an
intentional act of the humanintellect and it doesn't only
(44:04):
happen in moments of worship,although that's a maybe the
purest way, but like whenmaestro recard talks about the
necessity of detachment from the, from the world, in order to
get into a place where you'rethe most capable of receiving
this direct communion withdivinity.
Speaker 1 (44:26):
That is not to say that unless you are meditating
and praying, fasting, whateverthat, you're not doing so You're
always doing so, exactly You'realways doing so Exactly, and we
are doing so at our purest formand this Master Eckhart would
agree upon when we are doing sotogether with others.
That's the whole point of thecommunion in the Catholic Church
(44:53):
, or the sign of the cross,union in the Catholic church, or
the sign of the cross, like oneof these rituals that many
people do but do not know whatthey're mean.
It's about the horizontalintegration between God and you
and between people who live now,have lived and lived in the
future.
It's horizontal and it'shorizontal.
(45:17):
It's horizontal.
And what's the name in English?
Vertical, vertical, vertical,exactly.
Speaker 3 (45:24):
Yeah, I wish that people could see Mir doing the
sign of the cross whileexplaining it, just because I
feel like that's such a helpfulvisual guide, in the same way
that I'm always like trying toexplain the circles Loopty loops
.
Well, yeah, in the beginning isnow and ever shall be yeah, in
matthew 18, 20, you know it'swhen two or more are gathered in
(45:47):
my name.
I'm there among you, it's.
That's quite literally the pointyes there's no such thing as a
purely only individual, eitherlife I mean physical life or
spiritual life.
Even the desert mystics, eventhe early church fathers,
(46:07):
there's always this eventualityof coming back into the fold.
Speaker 1 (46:11):
Exactly, and the symbol and the reality of that
meeting with the other andmeeting with God, of coming back
into the fold, is the breakingof bread and the drinking of
wine.
(46:31):
But it's also a physicalcommunion where different people
in a concrete congregation eatthe same bread physical bread
and then also are sharing inthat act with all the people
that have done that in historyand will ever do so right,
(46:54):
that's the actual purpose of themass.
Speaker 3 (46:56):
we forget that it's like.
This is what you're supposed todo.
It's a holy day of obligation.
Why there are holy days ofobligation.
Why is that?
I mean, I guess this is not atheological discussion exactly,
but every philosophical andpolitical discussion is also a
theological discussion.
Speaker 2 (47:14):
Especially if it's Hegel, especially if it's Hegel.
Speaker 3 (47:16):
Yeah, especially if it's Hegel Also.
I really like this nextparagraph is also kind of a
truncated way of basicallyrecapitulating what we already
just said.
Speaker 2 (47:24):
Let me read it real quick and then if we need to add
anything else to it, we can.
Otherwise we could just move on.
It is a mistake to think thatone side of the coin is more
important.
I is not merely a point withoutfurther content, absorbed
completely within a social space, nor is we, the social space,
merely the addition of lots ofindividual I's.
Without practitioners, there isno practice.
(47:46):
Without the practice, there areno practitioners.
This is sometimes hard to see.
Often the I tries to separateitself from the we and rebel
against it.
Think of existentialism.
Sometimes the I tries toseparate itself from the we and
rebel against it.
Think of existentialism.
Sometimes the I tries to absorbitself fully into the we.
Think of what totalitariansdream about.
Sometimes the I tries to stage,manage the recognition it seeks
from the we by pretending to bewhat it isn't.
(48:08):
Think of con artists.
All of these deficient forms ofI and we make their various
appearances in history.
Speaker 3 (48:16):
I just really like that.
Yeah, I also in that firstsentence I also wanted to say,
or as Lennon says, the party ismore than just the sum total of
its parts.
It's a complex sum.
Speaker 2 (48:28):
Do you want me to?
Speaker 3 (48:28):
keep reading.
I don't really have anythingfurther to add to that.
Speaker 2 (48:32):
Yeah, we kind of preempted the discussion of that
paragraph.
I think it's cool, though, yeah, yeah.
Third, for humans, just as withany species, there are ways in
which things can go better orworse for individuals within the
species.
Trees without the right soil donot flourish as the trees they
could be.
Wolves without the rightenvironment cannot reign.
(48:52):
Environmental range cannotbecome the wolves that they
could be, cannot reignenvironmental range cannot
become the wolves that theycould be.
Similarly, self-conscious humansbuild familial, social,
cultural and politicalenvironments that make it
possible to become new,different and better versions of
ourselves.
But what we can make ofourselves depends on what we are
.
In history, yourgreat-great-grandparents never
dreamed of being computer coders.
(49:13):
Medieval villages did notaspire to become mid-level
managers in global trashcollecting firms.
Who I am is always bound upwith what we do, but it is a
mistake to take our individualacts simply as singular
applications of something likegeneral rules.
It is better to say that weexemplify, in better or worse
ways, what it is for us toreally be us, for example, in
(49:38):
friendship, chess playing,vegetable chopping or
citizenship.
The generality of practice setsthe terms in which I can
flourish as any one of thesethings, yet it is I who set the
way in which I exemplify thepractice, and we all participate
in seeing how well the two Iand we converge and diverge.
Speaker 1 (49:58):
What I think is the main point here.
This long paragraph reallydeals with one thing.
One point is human flourishingand the other point is that
human flourishing ishistorically bound, and those
(50:21):
are two different points.
Sure, I would also say thatwithin the first notion of human
flourishing is preconceived anethic.
What he's speaking about thereis virtue ethics, or virtue
ethics as we understand it,contemporary.
I'm thinking about this notionthat a human flourishing can
(50:46):
occur and is somehow bounded upin human nature, that there are
better or worse ways of being ahuman.
It's basically the argumentthat Alistair MacIntyre or
Martha Nussbaum have been makingfor many, many years.
Yes, and the second point isthat different societies allow
(51:11):
different statues to flourishand repress others.
And within Catholic catechesisthere is this idea that most
sins are indeed virtues but thathave taken up a too large part
(51:32):
of your life, a disorderedvirtue, large part of your life,
a disordered virtue.
And the Enlightenment's idea ofindividuality and expressing
yourself is a virtue, also inthe classical sense of the word.
But when that virtue, when thatvirtue isn't contained within a
(51:57):
functioning ecosystem of othervirtues or take up too much
space, it becomes almost like acancer.
Speaker 3 (52:09):
Yeah, yeah, I mean to put it really simply without
parameters, without constraints,social constraints.
Really simply, um, withoutparameters, without constraints,
social constraints, freedom is,uh.
Absolute freedom in that senseis, uh is anything, but it's
actually the constraints whichenable the freedom in the first
place and also, um, thisparagraph makes made just made
(52:30):
me think about, uh.
When we talk about uh, what itmeans for for something to be a
social construct.
It's like that's true ofeverything.
Yes, things are socialconstructs, whether they're good
or bad social constructs, andwhether they should be socially
deconstructed and thenreconstructed or whatever.
That's a discussion worthhaving.
But saying something is asocial construct doesn't really
(52:52):
say anything other than I kindof, but I don't really
understand what is is.
Speaker 1 (52:59):
Yes, like yeah, everything is a social construct
.
But in order to constructsomething, you have to build it
out of something.
Exactly right and like oursociety today.
Whether you call it capitalismor modernity, I think those are
two radically different ways andthey are radically different
(53:22):
things who are equally bad.
Speaker 2 (53:29):
So, like social constructs become material,
force because they are ideasthat have been seized upon by
the masses, forced because theyare ideas that have been seized
upon by the masses well, yes,and they are constructed of
living realities, usually socialor biological right.
Speaker 1 (53:48):
If a social construction doesn't have a
biological imperative or asocial or economical foundation
to stand on, it would just be ahouse falling down from an
airplane and it would smash intothe ground.
Speaker 2 (54:07):
It needs a foundation yeah, right, okay, yeah, um.
Third, as self-conscious socialindividuals, we reshape our
lives, giving new meanings toold things, from sex and food to
complicated table manners, sothat we may acquire new sets of
habits, round off the contoursof our animal life in surprising
(54:30):
ways, settle down and then moveon.
This is rarely an entirelypeaceful process.
We exist as individuals withsocial identities in the social
spaces that we mutuallyinstitute and keep in place.
We're just going over what wejust said, right?
Some of those social relationsare based on raw force,
subjection and humiliation, suchas relations between masters
(54:52):
and slaves.
Warfare is common.
History, hegel said, looks likea vast slaughter bench on which
the lives and happiness ofmillions have been sacrificed.
Speaker 1 (55:02):
I have written in the margins here.
It's not always peaceful.
That's the understatement ofthe year Right.
Speaker 2 (55:11):
Not always peaceful.
Speaker 3 (55:13):
Well, I mean, this is a when we say revolutions are
the locomotives of history.
Speaker 1 (55:19):
This is another way of saying it's not always
peaceful yeah, I mean, I thinkhere you can really see his, the
author's, political, politicalleanings, like he, yeah he, he
really downplays the struggle inhegel, like here yeah, it's not
(55:41):
always peaceful, but sometimeswe can perhaps come together and
figure this stuff, but no,never, it is always a struggle
it is always a struggle althoughI do think there's something to
say about uh, although I dothink there's something to say
about trying to hope for it tobe peaceful.
Speaker 3 (55:59):
Oh, yeah, but also to expect and to be prepared for
it to not be.
Speaker 1 (56:04):
And I mean things can be extremely not peaceful but
not physically violent, likeanyone who has ever been to a
party meeting or a conference ora board meeting or anything
like that.
That's not peaceful.
People are at each other'sthroats, but usually they don't
(56:28):
kill each other.
Speaker 3 (56:29):
Usually they don't, that's right.
Speaker 2 (56:31):
I would say that life under capitalism is extremely
not peaceful, but notnecessarily physically violent.
There's the violence of povertyand exploitation.
That is just inherent in thesystem, is absolutely not
peaceful.
That is just inherent in thesystem is absolutely not
peaceful.
You know, being threatened withstarvation or being or losing
(56:59):
your health care for switchingjobs or trying to switch jobs
and not being able to, iscertainly not peaceful, right?
So like, yeah, I absolutely, Iunderstand, I agree with what
you're saying and in fact that'sI don't know if you listened to
the episode yet or not, butwhen we talked about, like, if
it's possible to be a Christianand a Marxist, I guess we did
that one about a couple of weeksago the author's conclusion who
(57:22):
was?
Do you remember the author'sname?
Jason?
Speaker 1 (57:27):
I've read that article.
Yeah, I've read that article.
Yeah anyway.
Speaker 2 (57:31):
His conclusion was is that capitalism is inherently
unchristian because it is astate of constant war of man
against man war of all againstall war of all against all.
Right, exactly.
So, yeah, I have more than afew books to pick with that
article.
Speaker 1 (57:50):
War of Olgainstall right, yeah, that's exactly so.
Yeah, okay, I have more than afew books to pick with that
article, but the main pointstands.
I do not know if that meanswhat he thinks it means.
Speaker 2 (58:04):
With what means, what he thinks it means Well like.
Speaker 1 (58:07):
there is a great tradition within Christianity of
believing that, yeah,capitalism sucks, but so does
every other system, and thisworld is laid under sin and
there's really no way around it.
That is a valid reading of theChristian tradition.
(58:28):
Sure, that doesn't mean thatyou're not obligated to try to
change it, but it doesn'tnecessarily lead to the
revolutionary overthrow ofcapitalism or even the belief
that exploitative relationshipsare possible to overcome in this
(58:48):
world.
Speaker 2 (58:49):
that exploitative relationships are possible to
overcome in this world.
Well, I don't even think thatthe idea of implementing
socialism 100% thinks that itmeans that all exploitative
relationships and all strifewill be done away with.
It's just working towardscommunism.
(59:11):
Is the point of socialism right?
And communism is a thing thattakes what generations to
implement.
If you read is, is one readingof marx right to walk away like?
Speaker 1 (59:26):
impatient about it.
It he thought that we mightneed a couple of months of
dictatorship, but not longer,because then the institutions
would ostrify and we would havewhat happened in Russia.
So that's a major theme in thesocialist tradition that for
(59:48):
Marx it was a couple of months,for Lenin it was a couple of
that.
For Marx it was a couple ofmonths, for Lenin it was a
couple of years.
For Stalin it was a couple ofdecades.
The time span seems to expand.
Speaker 2 (01:00:07):
Right, okay, next paragraph.
Speaker 3 (01:00:10):
We're not going to get through all this, we're
getting close to halfway throughyeah, well, we should stop at
halfway through.
Speaker 2 (01:00:15):
Yeah, because I was supposed to be done by around
three ish, but we, uh, we hadsome technical difficulties, one
of them being that I forgot wewere starting at one.
Uh, I was supposed to give ustwo hours to be able to do this,
but instead I screwed it up.
Anyway, as the way in which thespecies self-conscious life
(01:00:39):
interprets and reinterpretsitself Okay, sorry, starting
over as the way in which thespecies self-conscious life
interprets and reinterpretsitself history seems a bit
depressing at first.
There's another understatementof the century, understation,
understatement of the millennia.
Entire civilization and ways oflife come to be and pass away.
(01:01:01):
Old ways of living vanish.
Nothing seems stable.
Hegel's daring philosophicalapproach, philosophical proposal
insisted that we see thisprocession as manifesting the
ways in which each individualform of human social life
generates tensions and strainswithin itself.
When these tensions become sogreat that such a way of living
(01:01:22):
finally makes no sense to theparticipants, life rapidly
becomes uninhabitable.
Once it becomes uninhabitable,it breaks down, falls apart and
eventually gives way to anotherform of life.
The new form of life emerges asthe people living in the
cultural rubble of the breakdownpick up the pieces of what is
still working, discard the partsthat no longer work and fashion
(01:01:43):
something new out of thebreakdown.
They build a society thatdevelops itself until its own
internal strains and stresseslead it into breakdown, after
which a new form of life emergesout of it.
All told, this aspect ofhistory constitutes the changing
shape of self-conscious lifeitself.
Hegel chose the German termGeist, rendered as mind or
(01:02:03):
spirit, depending on thetranslator, to capture that.
Depending on the translator, itshould be both right.
I think yeah, on the translatorto capture that.
Depending on the translator, itshould be both right.
I think, um, yeah.
As geist moves through history,it takes on different shapes as
it imagines itself in differentways, and thus, for those
thinking about it, a movingtarget, the story of breakdown
and renewal.
In hegel's dialectic of historyand also geist, is god yeah
(01:02:25):
like he guy you know is God yeah.
Speaker 1 (01:02:28):
Like he, he, he, he forget this all the time.
Speaker 2 (01:02:30):
Geist is God, geist is mind, geist is spirit.
Right Anyway.
Speaker 3 (01:02:36):
So for Hegel, these are all the same thing.
Speaker 2 (01:02:38):
Yeah, yes, um.
So this paragraph here has asort of like um, decadence
theory, decadence and breakdowntheory sort of understanding of
the world, which I don't thinkis entirely incorrect.
Speaker 1 (01:02:55):
No.
Speaker 2 (01:02:56):
But he puts this caveat here like, things don't
eventually just break down andbecome a new way of life on
their own all the time.
Sometimes, you know, it ispossible for humans to take
agency and start to change thesociety as the breakdown is
(01:03:17):
happening, but it takes.
He is absolutely correct instating that it takes the old
way of being as being completelyuntenable for that to be done.
Right.
So once the old way becomesunbearable and things have
(01:03:40):
gotten so far along in thebreakdown, in this process of
like social cannibalism, likewhat we're living through right
now, who knows how much longerthis will last.
It could last for severaldecades, but we're in a process
of like the cannibalization ofthe parts of our society that
(01:04:03):
make it livable or habitable.
Right.
So eventually there comes abreaking point, and if there
were institutions of consciousrevolutionaries, that breaking
point could be inserted by thewill of the actors that are
existing through it, right,right.
Speaker 3 (01:04:25):
It's like, as Lennon said, for a revolution to take
place, it's usually insufficientfor the lower classes to not
want to live in the old way.
It is also necessary that theupper classes should be unable
to live in the old way.
Speaker 2 (01:04:37):
Yes, that is essentially what I was trying to
say.
My subconscious knew that wasLennon.
Speaker 1 (01:04:47):
My biggest question to this is yes, we know that
this was true historically.
I'm thinking about WalterBenjamin's the Angel of History,
the Rubble Right.
Today, the state apparatuseshave means of their disposal,
(01:05:16):
both in social and military andeconomical technologies that
were unfathomable just ageneration ago.
Speaker 2 (01:05:30):
Yes.
Speaker 1 (01:05:36):
What I sometimes fear is that they could hang on to a
decaying corpse forever withthese technologies.
Speaker 2 (01:05:50):
Well, I agree, I think that they could hang on to
the decaying corpse, for, Imean, I somewhat agree for a
very, very, very long time.
Well, I don't know.
Speaker 1 (01:06:06):
Because we are dealing with the end of humanity
in the rates of climatedevelopment, nuclear war, so on
and so forth.
Sure, sure.
Speaker 2 (01:06:18):
Like it's easier to imagine the end of the world
than the end of capitalism.
Speaker 3 (01:06:21):
Yeah.
And the reason why this allmight result in the common ruin
of the contending classes.
Speaker 2 (01:06:28):
Yeah, exactly yeah, that's always the caveat that I
interject when we're talkingabout stuff like this.
But should we oh go ahead?
Sorry From the ruin of thecontending classes?
You know?
I mean when we talk about theend of the world, it is very
(01:06:55):
unlikely that it will be the endof humanity so in the ruins of
the contending classes, there'salways hope.
Speaker 3 (01:07:03):
Yeah, that's not a bad place to call.
Speaker 2 (01:07:04):
Uh, to call an end to it.
Speaker 3 (01:07:05):
Yeah, because we're at 56 minutes on this recording
and then I think we've gotanother 15 or 20 before that we
are at an hour and 20 total,although there's like a really
you know good 10 minutes or 15minutes of just me and I waiting
for you to come back yeah, okay, so 25 minutes more than when
you do cups, yeah yeah, so we'llbe lucky if this ends up being
(01:07:27):
like 45 or 50 minutes long uh.
Speaker 2 (01:07:31):
So this is a perfect place to stop it too, because
it's where the next big capitalletter starts.
Speaker 1 (01:07:36):
So I think that's the second half of the uh yeah, the
article another essay that Iwould like to recommend it is a
bit longer uh is susanbrockmore's's Hegel and Haiti oh
yeah, I actually okay.
Speaker 2 (01:07:52):
So I read a book called I think it's called the
Half has Never Been Told.
It's about the American slavesystem and how, basically, how
integral southern slavery was tothe American economy and how,
essentially, getting rid ofslavery set back cotton
(01:08:16):
production for almost for like50 years.
Cotton was not as effectivelyand efficiently harvested until
the 1920s when an automaticcotton harvester was invented.
So by removing slavery, theworld cotton production shifted
(01:08:40):
from the United States being thebiggest and best provider to it
being between the United Statesand India and several other
places.
Right, so that was what thebook was about, and in it she
talks about the utterindifference of white Europeans
and Americans to the plight ofthe slaves, and then she
(01:09:00):
mentions Hegel as being one ofthese.
No, no, no, that mentions Hegelas being one of these people
that writes about revolution butdidn't even take the Haitian
revolution into consideration.
And I was like and I wasassigned this book.
I know, I know I was assignedthis book.
(01:09:21):
And then I went and I was likethis is incorrect, because I
know that the master slavedialectic in Hegel is directly
referencing what happens inHaiti.
So I went and I read the SusanBuck Morse article.
And then I, you know, I wasonly supposed to write a one
page like review of this bookbut I ended up writing like a
(01:09:41):
three page refutation of thebook and I submitted it.
I submitted the one page reviewand then I submitted my three
page refutation of it and thenhe made me get up and argue my
case in front of the classbecause he liked it so much.
But yeah, anyway, so like, yeah,there's this idea, and you look
in the book where she quotesSusan Buckmore's and I was like
(01:10:02):
I know, susan Buckmore's doesn'tsay that, doesn't say that.
So I went back and I looked andI said it is assumed in many
instances that Hegel's laternegative view of Africans he
didn't say black people ingeneral, he said Africans as
being non-historic peoplesbecause of their domination by,
you know, european colonialsmeans that he was indifferent on
(01:10:31):
Haiti.
But and then you know, but theauthor of that book stopped
before the but you know, anyway,it was really.
But yeah, I did read thatarticle and it's very good, that
is all to say.
It's very good and yes, itwould be worth reading.
(01:11:16):
I'm going to stop thisrecording so it can upload to
the server.
Thank you.
Hello and welcome to the Redible Century.
We have a special guest today.
Well, first of all, it's Chrisand Jason, but we have a special
guest today.
Well, first of all it's Chrisand Jason, but we have a special
guest today, and by guest Imean he's sort of the return of
an at-large member of theRegrettable Century, and that
would be Mir from Sweden.
Say hello, mir.
Speaker 1 (00:38):
Hello, comrades in Christ.
Speaker 2 (00:42):
All right, mir is back in rotation and we're glad
to have him, and he's here tohelp us talk about Hegel, and
specifically, we read thisarticle that we thought was
worth going into in some detail,called the Spirit of History,
by Terry Pinkard, who is aphilosophy professor from
(01:07):
Georgetown University, and Ithink he is kind of a famous
Hegel scholar, if I remember.
Speaker 1 (01:13):
Yes, he's one of the three or four big Hegel scholars
.
He has written a detailedexploration of the phenomenology
of spirit, basically where hegoes through the whole book
chapter by chapter, notparagraph by paragraph, but
almost like it's a 600 page longbook yeah, no, it looks like
(01:37):
you wrote a biography as well.
Speaker 2 (01:38):
Yeah, sorry.
Speaker 3 (01:39):
Yeah, pinkard is a person who, uh, knowing that he
wrote this article makes it,should make one say, oh, this is
worth reading because it's theauthor.
Speaker 1 (01:49):
I should also say that there are a couple of
dividing lines among Hegelscholars, and this author falls
down on the more sociologicalview of Hegel, who claims that
Hegel basically is a sociologist, a sociologist of history,
(02:11):
while there are others who treatHegel more as a classical
philosopher who deals withmetaphysics and also
epistemology and ontology, andyou can't find thisological
(02:48):
claims out of hegel, so that'simportant to keep in mind, that
he's he's on the far end inthese debates, so we get a very
precise point, yeah.
Speaker 3 (03:04):
If it was like 1840, pinkard would be like in the
company of people like Feuerbach, and he would be young Hegelian
.
Yeah, so he would not become aMarxist, though, but he would be
one of the people that Marxwould have to say this guy has
it almost right, but not quite.
Speaker 2 (03:20):
Yeah, If you were to ask me which side I fall on the
side of Hegel's sociology orHegel's metaphysics I would say
yes.
Speaker 1 (03:29):
Yeah, yes, well, and I think that is the correct
answer and I think we will getmore into this with this article
, but I think you get really oneside view of Hegel and also of
the Enlightenment.
Speaker 2 (03:47):
Yeah.
So I think that to be properlyHegelian, you would definitely
need to be both of the thingsthat Hegel was trying to
implement here, which would bethe dialectical synthesis of the
sociological perspective andthe metaphysical perspective,
which is just yeah, you'd beable to hold them both,
(04:09):
recognizing them as separate andin contradiction and tension
with each other, and stillmaintain that they're both true
yes, okay.
So, um, jason suggested that wedo this along the lines of the
Varn model, which is where we gothrough it in detail.
It's not a super long article.
Speaker 3 (04:28):
Yeah, ideally it won't take us several episodes
to go through it.
Speaker 2 (04:32):
Well, okay, so we have the tendency to ramble
right and to get sidetracked,but Varn definitely exacerbates
that tendency I have no ideawhat you're talking about.
Speaker 1 (04:43):
I have no idea and we exacerbate that tendency.
Speaker 2 (04:44):
I have no idea what you're talking about I have no
idea, and we exacerbate thattendency in him.
It's like we don't have.
When it's just the three of usand Varn, it's just Varn and the
two of us, there's nobody tocheck us and to get us back on
track.
So we just every once in awhile we remember oh crap, we've
been doing this for two hoursand we're only a quarter of the
way through it.
We should get back on track.
Speaker 3 (05:05):
We'll spend like 45 minutes on the first two
sentences of an article.
Speaker 2 (05:10):
Yeah, and, in my opinion, when I go back and
listen to those, I'm like okay,these are all good conversations
.
I like this.
This is like listening topeople have a conversation about
something interesting.
What it's not, however, is likean exposition that you could
take notes and listen to andfollow along like it's an
educational podcast or something.
(05:30):
If that's what people arelistening for, then they're
generally pretty disappointed,but I think there is value in
both.
So, that being said, let's hopin.
Speaker 3 (05:44):
Yeah, so that being said, let's hop in.
Yeah, before we get started, Itook these notes down.
I feel like I wanted to justkind of encapsulate my reasoning
anyways.
Oh, go for it.
(06:05):
Understanding periodicrevisiting of Hegel and Hegelian
philosophy as it relates to,and also as it does not relate
to, the project of communism andour projects in the regrettable
century.
So I wrote why study, slashtalk about Hegel, especially at
this point?
And I wrote mostly because Ithink it's important to get a
clear sense of why things arethe way that they are, how they
came to be this way and how theymight come to be different, and
(06:26):
thus to guard against LARPingand or succumbing to absolute
despair, slash nihilism, whichis, you know, that's our purpose
anyways.
Speaker 2 (06:35):
That's the two poles of American leftism.
Speaker 3 (06:37):
Yeah, LARPing on one side and nihilism on the other.
Speaker 2 (06:40):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (06:41):
And then, what's more , maintaining or even just
achieving clarity might evenhelp us think about things in
new ways, in ways which areactually helpful and useful, and
again, thus not larping orbeing nihilistic.
So that's why I think we shouldread this article well, okay
absolutely.
Speaker 1 (07:00):
And I would like to add that if we, by some sort of
leftist project, believe that weare in need of philosophy and
cannot be naive positivists orwhatever, and that we need the
humanities, we need philosophy,we need to understand it, then
(07:21):
Hegel, basically I agree with.
Well, first of all, it wasFoucault who claimed that all of
philosophy are footnotes toPlato.
But I agree with both Zizek andL'Ambattu when they claim that,
yeah, but since Hegel, all ofphilosophy has been footnotes to
Hegel.
Speaker 3 (07:41):
Yeah, I mean, all of those footnotes are footnotes to
the introduction, the prefaceto Hegel.
Yeah, I mean, all of thosefootnotes are footnotes to the
introduction, the preface toHegel.
Speaker 1 (07:48):
Yes and well like.
Also in a quite direct andmaterialist way.
Like all the majorphilosophical schools are
directly descended from Hegel.
The Anglo-Saxon positivistcomes from Popper, who wasn't
Hegelian in his youth and hispositivism was a direct reaction
(08:13):
to his youthful Existentialismis out of Hegel.
The same thing withpost-colonial thought comes
directly out of Hegel's feministthoughts through not only Jude
(08:35):
Butler but also Simone de Bois,and so on and so on.
Speaker 2 (08:39):
Right on.
Speaker 1 (08:40):
You can't avoid it.
Speaker 2 (08:43):
I agree, okay, okay, let's get started, and you can
stop me when you want tointerject Something, just like
Just yell really loud.
Speaker 3 (08:54):
I was going to say we could just get air horns,
except for that makes it soundlike Weird.
Whenever you say somethingreally cool, it's when we go.
Speaker 2 (09:03):
Uh oh, the lights just flickered.
I thought the power was aboutto go out.
Speaker 3 (09:09):
All right, let's get started and see how much we can
get before your power goes outyeah history, or at least the
study of it, is in bad shapethese days.
Speaker 2 (09:17):
Almost everyone agrees that knowing history is
important, but in the unitedstates, except at the most elite
schools, the study of historyis in free fall.
Our age, except at the mostelite schools, the study of
history is in free fall.
Our age seems to share theskepticism voiced by the German
philosopher G W F Hegel when hesaid that the only lesson
history teaches us is thatnobody ever learned anything
from history.
(09:37):
Absolutely.
In one of my courses, when Ifirst got to, uh, the university
that I'm at now, we we weresupposed to write like why do,
why should people study history?
And we're supposed to presentour answers to the class.
And several people who wentbefore me said oh, it's so that
(09:58):
we learn.
We learn history so that wedon't repeat it.
And, uh, I quoted Hegel when Istarted my presentation about
why we should learn history, andthat was the quote that I used.
Speaker 1 (10:09):
He has another really interesting quote about history
, and that is that history is aslaughter bench.
Speaker 2 (10:16):
That's my favorite.
We're going to talk about thata little bit too.
Why this is back to the article, sorry.
Why the present is always newand the future is untested,
leading many to sympathize withthe American businessman Henry
Ford's pronouncement in 1921that history is more or less
bunk.
Yet the very same Hegel alsoargued that although things do
(10:38):
indeed always seem unprecedented, history does actually give us
a clue as to our ultimate ends.
Speaker 3 (10:45):
That's a pretty good indication that you, uh, are in
need of revisiting your yourworldview, if you take your
philosophical cues from henryford right, right, unless you're
like, uh, in the us orscandinavia I guess, if you're-
elon musk, it might, that mightring true yeah, yeah, except for
, except for that Elon Muskloves juice.
Speaker 2 (11:04):
Now, remember, that's true.
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (11:06):
And he loves LARPing Rome.
Yeah, without understanding it.
Speaker 3 (11:11):
It's weird, because he used to love LARPing, uh,
like Karl Marx, he used to lovepretending like he understood
what it meant and even like thathe was kind of the real
socialist.
Speaker 2 (11:21):
Oh yeah.
Speaker 3 (11:26):
Yeah of the real socialist, oh yeah, yeah.
I don't know if he was betteror worse than he was, just he
was funnier but had less of adirect social impact, so maybe,
maybe he's worse now well, Imean, he takes more drugs now
and people who take thosespecific drugs become really
uninteresting well, he's, uhcertainly more dangerous now
than he used to be, as he, likeyou know, rips the guts out of
the.
Speaker 2 (11:46):
You know all of the institutions that make up the
American government he alsoblows up a spaceship every
couple of weeks but here isSweden.
Speaker 1 (11:57):
I just want to make a shout out to our comrades.
We have been in a 500 day longstrike and blockade against
tesla oh wow, nice, well, okay.
Speaker 2 (12:09):
So there's an accelerationist demon on my
shoulder that's going like, yeah, elon, destroy the american
empire.
And then there's the other part.
That's like a dad that has toraise a child here and I'm like,
oh man, I would like there tobe some Social Security for me
and for my daughter, you know,but anyway, well, moving on.
Speaker 3 (12:28):
It's almost like history is a slaughter bench.
Speaker 2 (12:31):
It's almost like that .
Speaker 1 (12:33):
I think this last sentence is quite interesting
and worth following a bit upon.
Although things do indeedalways seem unprecedented
Although things do indeed alwaysseem unprecedented, history
does actually give us a clue toour ultimate ends, Right?
Should we dive into that now orwait with?
Speaker 2 (12:55):
it.
Go for it.
Yeah, do it now.
Speaker 1 (13:09):
Well, I think that one of the things to see that
for most people, like evenpeople who don't study history,
seems quite disparating thesedays, is that things are falling
apart again and that we arereturning to something old in
(13:32):
the guise of something new, orsomething new in the guise of
something old, the rise of therobber barons, like, if we're
speaking politically, if we'respeaking more sociologically,
(13:52):
the total defragmentation of ourinstitutions and of even the
polite trade that institutionsare supposed to serve us.
Speaker 3 (14:07):
Yeah, that's why I really like the.
Uh, what is this called thetagline?
There's like the, there's thetitle and then underneath it
there's a kind of a little brief, uh sort of synopsis of the
point of the article.
Whatever it says, hegel'ssearch for the universal
patterns of history revealed aparadox Freedom is coming into
being, but it is neverguaranteed.
Speaker 2 (14:27):
Right, yeah, which?
Yeah, it's funny thateveryone's or not everyone, I
would say like the, I would saypeople who have a very cursory
understanding of Hegel, peoplewho pretend to understand.
Speaker 3 (14:40):
Hegel.
Speaker 2 (14:41):
There we go.
People who pretend tounderstand Hegel, whose
understanding is cursory, seehim as the ultimate teleologist
right, Like he is, the Whighistorian extraordinaire, which
is incorrect, and there is acertain amount of determinism in
(15:01):
Hegel right.
Speaker 1 (15:02):
That, I think, is justified, if you understand
Hegel right, absolutely.
Speaker 2 (15:04):
I think it's justified if you understand
Hegel, but he is not asteleological as people think
that he is and think that Marxis.
As a result, Absolutely.
Speaker 1 (15:19):
I think that it was Koshchei who claimed that, for
Hegel, absolute freedom is thefreedom to choose your own
necessity.
Speaker 3 (15:32):
I like that.
Speaker 2 (15:34):
Who was it that said that Hegel's idea of freedom is
the freedom to obey a policeman?
Speaker 1 (15:40):
That sounds like Popper.
Speaker 2 (15:43):
I don't think it is Popper, but he is an American.
I don't think it is Popper, buthe is an American.
I forget which one he is.
Speaker 3 (15:50):
That's because, you know, it kind of makes sense in
a certain sense If you takeHegel's notion of the working
out and the unfolding of spirit,which is to say human
consciousness on a social level.
The unfolding of spirit, whichis to say human consciousness on
a social level, in that the,the construction of the state as
the guarantor of freedom, asboth the product of the purpose
(16:12):
of and the product of and theguarantor of freedom.
There's a, there's a version ofthat that says like oh yeah,
hegel says that God is the stateon earth and so Hegel's freedom
is just to obey a cop.
But that's only true if youcannot conceive of the
administration of human activityas anything more than it
(16:33):
already is.
And if that's the case, then Iwould say that you haven't
actually understood, undertakento understand, hegel at all.
Speaker 1 (16:41):
It was Russell who said that about the policeman by
.
Speaker 3 (16:45):
By the way, russell uh, I might.
Speaker 1 (16:49):
I'm drawing a blank russell, the uh, what's his
first name?
Quite famous britishphilosopher of history, burton
russell oh, oh, burton russell,that makes sense, let's see if
we can get into the secondparagraph well, yes, but like
and the second paragraph yeah,we can go on to the second
(17:13):
paragraph and then tie it backto this question about history
does actually give us a clue asto our ultimate end, because
that's I think that that's aclear statement of hegel.
But what does that actuallymean?
Is it's a big?
Speaker 3 (17:33):
it's a big and important question yeah, I would
say, that's even the questionone one of them.
Speaker 2 (17:40):
One of them okay, that one step.
Okay, we are a peculiar species.
What is it to be the creaturesthat we are is always a problem
for us, in part because we makeourselves into kinds of
creatures, into the kinds ofcreatures that we are, and
because we explore this in allthe different ways we live out
our lives, individually andcollectively.
(18:01):
The study of history involvesnot only telling stories or
piling up facts.
In its larger structure, it isin the account of humanity,
experimentally seeking tounderstand itself in all the
myriad ways in which it givesshape to itself in daily life,
and also how historical changeis intimately linked to changes
in our basic self-understanding.
As Hegel put it in a series oflectures in 1822 to 1830, we are
(18:26):
peculiarly our own products,and the philosophical study of
history is a study of how weshapeshifted ourselves across
time.
Speaker 3 (18:36):
See, that's important , I think, because for people
who talk from a position of youknow, people who purport to be
Marxists, the idea is that humannature is kind of something
which we already we know and wejust have to get back to it by
(18:58):
advancing forward, and that'skind of correct.
But also there's somethingimplied here that's much deeper,
much more metaphysical.
This idea of us taking into ourown hands our conception of
ourselves and then working outthe best ways in order to be
that conception, so like inolder generations of mystics,
(19:23):
would refer to the descent intoheaven, the fall from Eden and
the return to Eden as thisprocess by which we become
conscious and deliberate in ourascension, as opposed to before,
when we were just almost likezoo animals.
We're just almost like zooanimals, and Hegel is just
(19:47):
putting a lot of detail intothat and talking about the ways
in which we have this notion andwe test it, and we are
constantly just trying to workout this basic notion all
throughout history.
Speaker 1 (19:58):
Well, yes, and like.
The basic idea here is that weare both at the same time the
object and the subject ofhistory.
Yeah, and Hegel had studiedscholastic philosophy very, very
thoroughly, and I think thatthat shows here.
(20:18):
It is almost an ecclesiology.
We see here Humanity is theobject of God's love, but also
the subject under God's love.
We are in a process ofco-creation and that co-creation
(20:42):
is the.
And here comes my critique withthis line of reading of Hegel as
well, like that he socompletely demystifies Hegel.
That for Hegel, for me it isquite clear that what he's
speaking about is our freedomwithin God, freedom within
(21:05):
freedom in a more religioussense as well as a political
sense, to be both subject andobject of love at the same time.
That is one point I think thatis really important here,
subject and object, but also asa clue to our ultimate ends.
(21:27):
Here the author makes a hint ofthat.
Okay, we can have an ultimateend in a theological sense, or
we can view the study of historyas a study of larger structures
.
And in studying these largerstructures we can perhaps not
(21:55):
mathematically preciselyunderstand that, well, we will
all achieve the classlesssociety by that date, or even at
all but that there is aprobability that by
understanding these historicalmetastructures, the inner gram
(22:17):
of history, we can have a betterunderstanding of where things
probably are heading Not withcertainty, but probably.
Speaker 2 (22:31):
No one ever conceived of a more sophisticated and
dynamic philosophical historythan Hegel.
His system is built aroundthree fundamental ideas.
First, the key to human agencyis self-consciousness.
For people to be doing anythingin any real human sense is to
know what we are doing as we doit.
This applies even when we arenot explicitly thinking about
(22:53):
what we are doing.
Here's a simple example.
As you're reading this, supposeyou get a text message from a
friend.
What are you doing?
You immediately reply.
I'm reading a piece on Hegel.
You knew that you were doingwhat you were doing without
having to separate the act ofthinking about it or drawing
conclusions Without any furtherthought.
You knew that you were notskydiving, taking a bath,
(23:14):
gardening or doing a crossword.
You did not look around andinfer from the evidence.
You did not need any particularintrospection.
In fact, in Hegelian terms,when you are doing something and
you do not know at all what youare doing, you're not really
doing anything at all.
Instead, stuff is justhappening.
To be sure, sometimes we areonly vaguely aware of what we
are doing.
(23:34):
However, even our often moredistance reflective
self-consciousness is itselfonly a further realization of
the deeper and distinctlyHegelian self-relation.
All consciousness isself-relation.
Speaker 3 (23:44):
All consciousness is self-consciousness I think
that's more profound than, uh,we might want to think at first
when we say uh, allconsciousness is
self-consciousness, like okay,fine, duh.
But that's a profoundproposition and it's a
relatively uh, well, at least atthe time unique, especially in
(24:06):
the era in which, well, there'sa certain kind of enlightenment
philosophy that everything's aproduct of natural processes,
everything is kind ofmechanistically determined.
And Hegel is saying, in acertain sense, he's saying I
think and therefore I am.
Speaker 2 (24:24):
Sure, maybe this is just my, my dad instincts
kicking in, but, um, I thinkthat this, this makes me think
of when we were kids and mom ordad would be like what are you
doing?
We'd be like, oh no, they getall mad at us about it.
You remember yeah and uh.
Why did you do that?
I don't know anyway.
So, so for me it will be likeyou know.
(24:45):
I will ask my child, like youknow what's going on?
What are you doing?
I don't know, anyway.
So for me it will be like youknow.
I will ask my child, like youknow what's going on, what are
you doing?
I don't know.
It's like well, so that meansyou're doing nothing and stuff
is just happening.
You know, you need to conceiveof what it is that you are doing
and act upon the world in aconscious manner.
Speaker 3 (24:59):
Well, yes, yeah, because it's about agency.
Speaker 1 (25:02):
It is about agency, but it's also about waking up
from our unconscious everydayslumber.
We do things out of habit,certain things, certain rituals,
(25:35):
which carry within them ahistory or a process.
I don't think it's acoincidence that here we can see
the origins of psychoanalysisFreud was profoundly influenced
by Feuerbach, and Feuerbach wasa Hegelian.
What we're dealing with here isthat all consciousness is
self-consciousness.
Okay, what does that mean Inpsychological practice, for
(25:56):
example?
Well, that means that you haveto understand the history and
the social nature of yourafflictions.
So in our afflictions, in ourneurosis, in our anxieties, we
carry within us hardened socialrelationships, either from our
(26:22):
families or from our community,or religious practices or
whatever there may be.
And in order to be fully free,we have to become conscious of
what we are doing.
That is Zizek's holisticideology.
(26:44):
We have to become conscious ofideology that all the small
practices in our everyday lifeembody ideology.
The famous three models oftoilets in different parts of
the world, like that.
That is, I think, what Hegel isspeaking about here, like these
(27:07):
hardened social histories.
Speaker 3 (27:13):
Right, and I feel like this is why I think that if
you take Hegel's overallphilosophy and his basic
propositions to be true in likea literal sense, to be literally
true, even if you weren't acommunist, even if you were not
influenced by the work of GuyDebord, I feel like you would
(27:35):
have to.
You have to look around thesociety right now and say this
is a society which is movingaway from this
self-consciousness, as more andmore of life is just automatic
and rote and you just don'treally think about what you're
doing at all.
This is this society hasstopped producing the self, the
(28:02):
personal awareness.
It's being retarded as a resultof something.
And so fine, if it's notcapitalism, what is it?
Because it's definitely not theend of history in the way that
I think.
A lot of people think thatFukuyama meant it.
Speaker 1 (28:19):
No, I mean whatever compartmentalized, that
consciousness of how theseactions and our relationships
(28:39):
are interconnected is not onlyincentivized against but becomes
almost physically impossiblewithin our current system.
Speaker 2 (28:50):
Yeah, I mean, I've joked around about this a lot,
but that it seems as though thatHegel was right until the end
of the 20th century and then,since that point forward, the
dialectic has stalled out andyou have to insert some marks
into Hegel in order to be ableto understand the stalling of
(29:14):
the dialectic, and that would bethis sort of idea of the common
ruin of the contending classes.
Right, yeah, so yeah.
Speaker 1 (29:24):
I mean, there is a different reading, like a dark
hagel, where, like, yes, we areseeing history unfold and what
we are seeing now is the naturalprogression of the
Enlightenment of impulses fromfar earlier than that, and it's
(29:44):
just leading us to a ruin.
Speaker 2 (29:48):
The idea that the Weltgeistzufuhrer would be Trump
and Putin.
Right yeah, they're the onesleading us into the brave new
world.
Like pushing history forwardand, honestly, like there's
something to that.
Speaker 1 (30:06):
Oh yeah, I think so too.
Speaker 2 (30:08):
I think that if you look at the way that the face of
geopolitics has changed likethat over the past month and a
half, two months, you know,since trump's inauguration where
, like nato is tottering, the eulooks, is in like serious
crisis and, you know, russia andthe united states are uh, uh,
(30:30):
reaching rapprochement whilewe're like antagonizing canada
in the eu, you know, I mean,it's so.
Speaker 3 (30:38):
Yes, I, I, there is something to that absolutely,
but anyway, yeah it's like okay,in 1789 you have kind of the,
the beginnings of a new uh mode,a new uh vehicle for the
working out of freedom, for theabsolute, which is the nation as
(31:02):
states, as playing the rolethat previously only heroes like
individuals, like Alexander theGreat might have played, a
similar role as being therepository of history, the world
spirit on horseback.
And then nations take the place,which is a more collective,
more social version of this,which is to say a more clear
(31:24):
articulation of a broaderconception of freedom, a more
full articulation of freedom.
And sometimes, and for a littlewhile, it kind of took
Bonaparte to play that role tohelp whatever nations and so on.
Later on in history it movesfrom nations to become classes,
which means a good.
(31:45):
I mean, really most of thepeople in the world play a role
now, and also the USSR kind ofplayed the role, just like
Bonaparte played the individualrole to the French Revolution's
national social role, the USSRplays the role of the nations
relative to the classes and soon.
So, whatever, if the dialecticsare solved out, in the words of
(32:09):
Ian Malcolm in Jurassic Park,life finds a way.
Speaker 1 (32:14):
Jurassic Park, life finds a way, well, or I mean
because this is Heidegger'sreading of Hegel that Hegel was
right, but the dialectics isleading us into ruin and
extermination of humankind byacting against our social nature
(32:37):
.
Speaker 2 (32:39):
You're making me agree with Heidegger.
Speaker 3 (32:41):
I do that sometimes it's okay.
I do too.
Speaker 1 (32:45):
I mean, it makes me really uncomfortable.
And that's also the FrankfurtSchool wouldn't go as far.
But sad Dorno in his more darkmoments would Well the dialectic
of enlightenment is exactlywhat Heidegger is talking about
(33:06):
here.
Speaker 2 (33:06):
It's a similar idea, yes, and I think Karel Kosik
does the same thing, but he isheavily influenced by Heidegger,
the Czech Marxist, philosopher,marxist, hegelian, heideggerian
, whatever.
Speaker 3 (33:23):
If we take seriously this idea that the idea is being
worked out over and over againantagonism, the contradiction
between the labor and capital,or between liberalism and
communism and fascism, or anyother of these different ways of
(33:44):
understanding theseoppositional conceptions if we
take seriously that these areall kind of the same idea
working itself out, refiningitself, it would only make sense
that we could find something inHeidegger to say oh, that's
kind of right, just as much aseven in Julius Evola, like very
(34:05):
little, but there's stillsomething still worth knowing,
wait wait what's worth knowingin Julius Evola?
Are we in the Kali Yuga rightnow?
Is that?
Speaker 2 (34:14):
similar to the stallali Yuga right now, that's.
Is that similar to the stallingof the dialectic?
Speaker 1 (34:20):
Well, I mean yeah we have this cyclic view of history
.
It's like there is certainly alot of sociological truth to
cyclic theories of history.
Then it's like in fourgenerations and not in 4,000
years, but that's another thing.
Speaker 3 (34:40):
Yeah, I mean like I wouldn't want to take that too
far.
I just mean like anythingthat's very intellectually
rigorous and worked out and isvery serious and deeply felt is
worth knowing about and takingseriously and engaging with,
because even if it's somethingabhorrent and to be rejected,
you shouldn't reject it based onnot knowing what it is.
Speaker 2 (35:02):
Oh yeah, I absolutely agree with that and I think
that that's probably I don'tknow how many times, how many
examples I can pick of like thatI could pick to illustrate this
point that have happened to mepersonally where I mentioned
having read or understanding thephilosophy of this or that bad
person and people are like, oh,why would you want to read that?
(35:24):
Well as a person who as a personwho reads fascists as a job,
you know.
Yeah, I mean it's.
It's really funny Like, uh,I've I.
I mentioned to people that I'veread Mein Kampf twice and
they're like, oh, why would youdo that?
I was like, well, first of all,it's not even twice, probably
(35:45):
more like three times.
The first time I read it I waslike a little nerd that wanted
to read history stuff when I waslike in my early, late teens,
early 20s.
And then I've read it twice asa scholar because it was
required in two differentclasses.
But people are like, why wouldyou read this?
I mean, why wouldn't you?
Why wouldn't you want tounderstand one of the most
(36:05):
important people in the historyof the world, even if he was
terrible?
Why wouldn't you want tounderstand that right?
Speaker 1 (36:10):
Well, I mean, the argument against reading my con
fist.
That is really badly writtenand boring.
Yes, is really badly writtenand boring.
Yes, it is badly written andboring.
Speaker 2 (36:20):
But there are narrative parts of it that are
interesting, like when he's notexpounding his pseudo philosophy
, when he's like discussing likethe days of struggle of the
Nazi party or whatever.
That stuff is kind ofinteresting.
Yeah, to hear him talk aboutwhat led up to the, the putsch,
(36:41):
or whatever I mean anyway.
So it's just like, uh, I'vealso read joseph goebbels's
diaries and I've read anserohm's diaries and it's all
incredibly interesting because,like knowing what the worst
people in history were thinkingand why they did what they did,
actually I think is important.
Speaker 3 (37:01):
It's a big part of understanding why things
happened, why things mighthappen a different way, how we
can affect these things and,ultimately, to break free of
this cul-de-sac in which we'reforced between either LARPing or
else nihilism.
Speaker 1 (37:16):
cul-de-sac in which we're forced between either
LARPing or else nihilism.
Well, and it's also, if we'reto bring this back to the text,
which we should do it's alsoimportant, if we're speaking
about self-consciousness, to seewhat patterns of thoughts, of
emotions, of spiritual flows,spiritual leanings, emotional
(37:42):
strings that you can find inthose texts that resonate with
you and where the danger thereinlies.
It's an important part ofgrowing as a person in
self-consciousness, yeah, toidentify the darkness within and
(38:04):
really struggle with itabsolutely yeah, okay, before
anyone calls me out, no, Ihaven't read all 24 volumes of
goblins's diaries.
Speaker 2 (38:14):
I've read bits and pieces here and there I have one
collected like selected, uh,the best of goblins collation of
some of his diaries anyway.
So let's uh get back to thetext then.
Uh, are we on?
Speaker 1 (38:28):
secondly, we are.
It is a mistake to think is no,we're on, we're on.
Speaker 2 (38:36):
Secondly, oh, okay.
Secondly, hegel thought thatself-consciousness is always a
matter of locating ourselves ina kind of social space of I and
we.
Saying I or saying we is justspeaking from one of two sides
of the same dialectical coin.
In many cases we seems to addup to lots of instances of I
think or I do, but in its mostfundamental sense we is just as
(39:01):
basic as I.
Each individualself-consciousness is
fundamentally social.
The generality of we manifestsitself in the individual acts of
each of us, but we is itselfnothing apart from the
individual acts of singularflesh and blood agents.
When I know what it is that Iam doing, I am also aware that
what I am doing is, so to speak,the way we do it.
Speaker 3 (39:24):
This is such a beautifully encapsulated and
truncated I mean, it's like many, many pages that I think a lot
of people get tripped up on thisdistinction between the
universal and the particular,and how one set of rules, laws,
whatever norms, can be right inone sense and wrong in the other
(39:46):
sense, and yet both are equallydependent upon each other.
And so, to me, this is thefundamental flaw with liberalism
in the long run.
To me, this is the fundamentalflaw with liberalism in the long
run.
In the early stages, in theinitial impulses of liberalism,
it's the loosing, the settingfree of the I of the individual,
(40:07):
which is a necessary thing.
The long-term result of it,though, is the lack of
recognition of the otherindividuals, uh, and thus of the
social, and that's how, uh, youknow like, liberalism can be uh
, in in this stage in history,is eating itself, because the
sum total of of a liberalconception of emancipation is
(40:31):
absolute freedom from coercion,freedom from responsibility,
freedom from everything.
And uh, freedom fromresponsibility, freedom from
everything, and we should justsay it's an impossibility.
So there is always a social,there is always an individual.
Those are always mediated,there is always universal, and
there's always a particularmediated between the two the
(40:52):
recognition of this and thetrying to grasp this mediation,
this process is, whether we knowit or not, that's what we're
all doing.
Speaker 1 (41:01):
Yes, another school of philosophy that is brought
out of this specific paragraph.
Previously I talked a bit abouthow psychoanalysis came out of
Feuerbach.
Through that idea ofself-consciousness, this
(41:21):
relation between I and thou,between I and we, is something
that Jewish philosophy picked upduring the Weimar years, and in
both Germany and Franceparticularly.
I'm thinking about Martin Buberand Immanuel.
(41:42):
Marx, oh right right the I andthe I.
Here I completely agree withwhat is said here.
I think that for Hegel the onlyway and as I read Hegel that
the I and thou is therelationship of recognition.
(42:05):
There is the only way that wecan come into contact with the
Geist, that our reflection andreciprocity with other persons
and our recognition of thatdependency and how our subject
(42:29):
is constituted upon dependencyof ourselves and of others and
the structures that we togetherbuild, is the way in which we
recognize the movement ofhistory.
And through recognizing our ownpart as agents in history and
(42:53):
in the world we can also come toknow the Geist God.
So what he's claiming here on ametaphysical level is as well,
that because Hegel was aChristian, when he's speaking
about the Geist he's speakingabout the Holy Spirit that the
only way to know God is throughanother person I'm thinking
(43:18):
about Victor Hugo.
Speaker 3 (43:20):
To love another person is to see the face of God
.
Yeah, exactly, well, right, andlike.
I know that you know this, Iknow that everyone here knows
this, but just in case anybodydoesn't know this, for Hegel,
the Holy Spirit is not justsomething that happens to you,
that God is not just adisembodied out there entity.
(43:44):
That Victor Hugo quote is veryimportant.
The recognition, the I don'twant to call it the inaction,
but the utilization, whatever.
The Communion, the communionwith the divine is an
intentional act of the humanintellect and it doesn't only
(44:04):
happen in moments of worship,although that's a maybe the
purest way, but like whenmaestro recard talks about the
necessity of detachment from the, from the world, in order to
get into a place where you'rethe most capable of receiving
this direct communion withdivinity.
Speaker 1 (44:26):
That is not to say that unless you are meditating
and praying, fasting, whateverthat, you're not doing so You're
always doing so, exactly You'realways doing so Exactly, and we
are doing so at our purest formand this Master Eckhart would
agree upon when we are doing sotogether with others.
That's the whole point of thecommunion in the Catholic Church
(44:53):
, or the sign of the cross,union in the Catholic church, or
the sign of the cross, like oneof these rituals that many
people do but do not know whatthey're mean.
It's about the horizontalintegration between God and you
and between people who live now,have lived and lived in the
future.
It's horizontal and it'shorizontal.
(45:17):
It's horizontal.
And what's the name in English?
Vertical, vertical, vertical,exactly.
Speaker 3 (45:24):
Yeah, I wish that people could see Mir doing the
sign of the cross whileexplaining it, just because I
feel like that's such a helpfulvisual guide, in the same way
that I'm always like trying toexplain the circles Loopty loops
.
Well, yeah, in the beginning isnow and ever shall be yeah, in
matthew 18, 20, you know it'swhen two or more are gathered in
(45:47):
my name.
I'm there among you, it's.
That's quite literally the pointyes there's no such thing as a
purely only individual, eitherlife I mean physical life or
spiritual life.
Even the desert mystics, eventhe early church fathers,
(46:07):
there's always this eventualityof coming back into the fold.
Speaker 1 (46:11):
Exactly, and the symbol and the reality of that
meeting with the other andmeeting with God, of coming back
into the fold, is the breakingof bread and the drinking of
wine.
(46:31):
But it's also a physicalcommunion where different people
in a concrete congregation eatthe same bread physical bread
and then also are sharing inthat act with all the people
that have done that in historyand will ever do so right,
(46:54):
that's the actual purpose of themass.
Speaker 3 (46:56):
we forget that it's like.
This is what you're supposed todo.
It's a holy day of obligation.
Why there are holy days ofobligation.
Why is that?
I mean, I guess this is not atheological discussion exactly,
but every philosophical andpolitical discussion is also a
theological discussion.
Speaker 2 (47:14):
Especially if it's Hegel, especially if it's Hegel.
Speaker 3 (47:16):
Yeah, especially if it's Hegel Also.
I really like this nextparagraph is also kind of a
truncated way of basicallyrecapitulating what we already
just said.
Speaker 2 (47:24):
Let me read it real quick and then if we need to add
anything else to it, we can.
Otherwise we could just move on.
It is a mistake to think thatone side of the coin is more
important.
I is not merely a point withoutfurther content, absorbed
completely within a social space, nor is we, the social space,
merely the addition of lots ofindividual I's.
Without practitioners, there isno practice.
(47:46):
Without the practice, there areno practitioners.
This is sometimes hard to see.
Often the I tries to separateitself from the we and rebel
against it.
Think of existentialism.
Sometimes the I tries toseparate itself from the we and
rebel against it.
Think of existentialism.
Sometimes the I tries to absorbitself fully into the we.
Think of what totalitariansdream about.
Sometimes the I tries to stage,manage the recognition it seeks
from the we by pretending to bewhat it isn't.
(48:08):
Think of con artists.
All of these deficient forms ofI and we make their various
appearances in history.
Speaker 3 (48:16):
I just really like that.
Yeah, I also in that firstsentence I also wanted to say,
or as Lennon says, the party ismore than just the sum total of
its parts.
It's a complex sum.
Speaker 2 (48:28):
Do you want me to?
Speaker 3 (48:28):
keep reading.
I don't really have anythingfurther to add to that.
Speaker 2 (48:32):
Yeah, we kind of preempted the discussion of that
paragraph.
I think it's cool, though, yeah, yeah.
Third, for humans, just as withany species, there are ways in
which things can go better orworse for individuals within the
species.
Trees without the right soil donot flourish as the trees they
could be.
Wolves without the rightenvironment cannot reign.
(48:52):
Environmental range cannotbecome the wolves that they
could be, cannot reignenvironmental range cannot
become the wolves that theycould be.
Similarly, self-conscious humansbuild familial, social,
cultural and politicalenvironments that make it
possible to become new,different and better versions of
ourselves.
But what we can make ofourselves depends on what we are
.
In history, yourgreat-great-grandparents never
dreamed of being computer coders.
(49:13):
Medieval villages did notaspire to become mid-level
managers in global trashcollecting firms.
Who I am is always bound upwith what we do, but it is a
mistake to take our individualacts simply as singular
applications of something likegeneral rules.
It is better to say that weexemplify, in better or worse
ways, what it is for us toreally be us, for example, in
(49:38):
friendship, chess playing,vegetable chopping or
citizenship.
The generality of practice setsthe terms in which I can
flourish as any one of thesethings, yet it is I who set the
way in which I exemplify thepractice, and we all participate
in seeing how well the two Iand we converge and diverge.
Speaker 1 (49:58):
What I think is the main point here.
This long paragraph reallydeals with one thing.
One point is human flourishingand the other point is that
human flourishing ishistorically bound, and those
(50:21):
are two different points.
Sure, I would also say thatwithin the first notion of human
flourishing is preconceived anethic.
What he's speaking about thereis virtue ethics, or virtue
ethics as we understand it,contemporary.
I'm thinking about this notionthat a human flourishing can
(50:46):
occur and is somehow bounded upin human nature, that there are
better or worse ways of being ahuman.
It's basically the argumentthat Alistair MacIntyre or
Martha Nussbaum have been makingfor many, many years.
Yes, and the second point isthat different societies allow
(51:11):
different statues to flourishand repress others.
And within Catholic catechesisthere is this idea that most
sins are indeed virtues but thathave taken up a too large part
(51:32):
of your life, a disorderedvirtue, large part of your life,
a disordered virtue.
And the Enlightenment's idea ofindividuality and expressing
yourself is a virtue, also inthe classical sense of the word.
But when that virtue, when thatvirtue isn't contained within a
(51:57):
functioning ecosystem of othervirtues or take up too much
space, it becomes almost like acancer.
Speaker 3 (52:09):
Yeah, yeah, I mean to put it really simply without
parameters, without constraints,social constraints.
Really simply, um, withoutparameters, without constraints,
social constraints, freedom is,uh.
Absolute freedom in that senseis, uh is anything, but it's
actually the constraints whichenable the freedom in the first
place and also, um, thisparagraph makes made just made
(52:30):
me think about, uh.
When we talk about uh, what itmeans for for something to be a
social construct.
It's like that's true ofeverything.
Yes, things are socialconstructs, whether they're good
or bad social constructs, andwhether they should be socially
deconstructed and thenreconstructed or whatever.
That's a discussion worthhaving.
But saying something is asocial construct doesn't really
(52:52):
say anything other than I kindof, but I don't really
understand what is is.
Speaker 1 (52:59):
Yes, like yeah, everything is a social construct
.
But in order to constructsomething, you have to build it
out of something.
Exactly right and like oursociety today.
Whether you call it capitalismor modernity, I think those are
two radically different ways andthey are radically different
(53:22):
things who are equally bad.
Speaker 2 (53:29):
So, like social constructs become material,
force because they are ideasthat have been seized upon by
the masses, forced because theyare ideas that have been seized
upon by the masses well, yes,and they are constructed of
living realities, usually socialor biological right.
Speaker 1 (53:48):
If a social construction doesn't have a
biological imperative or asocial or economical foundation
to stand on, it would just be ahouse falling down from an
airplane and it would smash intothe ground.
Speaker 2 (54:07):
It needs a foundation yeah, right, okay, yeah, um.
Third, as self-conscious socialindividuals, we reshape our
lives, giving new meanings toold things, from sex and food to
complicated table manners, sothat we may acquire new sets of
habits, round off the contoursof our animal life in surprising
(54:30):
ways, settle down and then moveon.
This is rarely an entirelypeaceful process.
We exist as individuals withsocial identities in the social
spaces that we mutuallyinstitute and keep in place.
We're just going over what wejust said, right?
Some of those social relationsare based on raw force,
subjection and humiliation, suchas relations between masters
(54:52):
and slaves.
Warfare is common.
History, hegel said, looks likea vast slaughter bench on which
the lives and happiness ofmillions have been sacrificed.
Speaker 1 (55:02):
I have written in the margins here.
It's not always peaceful.
That's the understatement ofthe year Right.
Speaker 2 (55:11):
Not always peaceful.
Speaker 3 (55:13):
Well, I mean, this is a when we say revolutions are
the locomotives of history.
Speaker 1 (55:19):
This is another way of saying it's not always
peaceful yeah, I mean, I thinkhere you can really see his, the
author's, political, politicalleanings, like he, yeah he, he
really downplays the struggle inhegel, like here yeah, it's not
(55:41):
always peaceful, but sometimeswe can perhaps come together and
figure this stuff, but no,never, it is always a struggle
it is always a struggle althoughI do think there's something to
say about uh, although I dothink there's something to say
about trying to hope for it tobe peaceful.
Speaker 3 (55:59):
Oh, yeah, but also to expect and to be prepared for
it to not be.
Speaker 1 (56:04):
And I mean things can be extremely not peaceful but
not physically violent, likeanyone who has ever been to a
party meeting or a conference ora board meeting or anything
like that.
That's not peaceful.
People are at each other'sthroats, but usually they don't
(56:28):
kill each other.
Speaker 3 (56:29):
Usually they don't, that's right.
Speaker 2 (56:31):
I would say that life under capitalism is extremely
not peaceful, but notnecessarily physically violent.
There's the violence of povertyand exploitation.
That is just inherent in thesystem, is absolutely not
peaceful.
That is just inherent in thesystem is absolutely not
peaceful.
You know, being threatened withstarvation or being or losing
(56:59):
your health care for switchingjobs or trying to switch jobs
and not being able to, iscertainly not peaceful, right?
So like, yeah, I absolutely, Iunderstand, I agree with what
you're saying and in fact that'sI don't know if you listened to
the episode yet or not, butwhen we talked about, like, if
it's possible to be a Christianand a Marxist, I guess we did
that one about a couple of weeksago the author's conclusion who
(57:22):
was?
Do you remember the author'sname?
Jason?
Speaker 1 (57:27):
I've read that article.
Yeah, I've read that article.
Yeah anyway.
Speaker 2 (57:31):
His conclusion was is that capitalism is inherently
unchristian because it is astate of constant war of man
against man war of all againstall war of all against all.
Right, exactly.
So, yeah, I have more than afew books to pick with that
article.
Speaker 1 (57:50):
War of Olgainstall right, yeah, that's exactly so.
Yeah, okay, I have more than afew books to pick with that
article, but the main pointstands.
I do not know if that meanswhat he thinks it means.
Speaker 2 (58:04):
With what means, what he thinks it means Well like.
Speaker 1 (58:07):
there is a great tradition within Christianity of
believing that, yeah,capitalism sucks, but so does
every other system, and thisworld is laid under sin and
there's really no way around it.
That is a valid reading of theChristian tradition.
(58:28):
Sure, that doesn't mean thatyou're not obligated to try to
change it, but it doesn'tnecessarily lead to the
revolutionary overthrow ofcapitalism or even the belief
that exploitative relationshipsare possible to overcome in this
(58:48):
world.
Speaker 2 (58:49):
that exploitative relationships are possible to
overcome in this world.
Well, I don't even think thatthe idea of implementing
socialism 100% thinks that itmeans that all exploitative
relationships and all strifewill be done away with.
It's just working towardscommunism.
(59:11):
Is the point of socialism right?
And communism is a thing thattakes what generations to
implement.
If you read is, is one readingof marx right to walk away like?
Speaker 1 (59:26):
impatient about it.
It he thought that we mightneed a couple of months of
dictatorship, but not longer,because then the institutions
would ostrify and we would havewhat happened in Russia.
So that's a major theme in thesocialist tradition that for
(59:48):
Marx it was a couple of months,for Lenin it was a couple of
that.
For Marx it was a couple ofmonths, for Lenin it was a
couple of years.
For Stalin it was a couple ofdecades.
The time span seems to expand.
Speaker 2 (01:00:07):
Right, okay, next paragraph.
Speaker 3 (01:00:10):
We're not going to get through all this, we're
getting close to halfway throughyeah, well, we should stop at
halfway through.
Speaker 2 (01:00:15):
Yeah, because I was supposed to be done by around
three ish, but we, uh, we hadsome technical difficulties, one
of them being that I forgot wewere starting at one.
Uh, I was supposed to give ustwo hours to be able to do this,
but instead I screwed it up.
Anyway, as the way in which thespecies self-conscious life
(01:00:39):
interprets and reinterpretsitself Okay, sorry, starting
over as the way in which thespecies self-conscious life
interprets and reinterpretsitself history seems a bit
depressing at first.
There's another understatementof the century, understation,
understatement of the millennia.
Entire civilization and ways oflife come to be and pass away.
(01:01:01):
Old ways of living vanish.
Nothing seems stable.
Hegel's daring philosophicalapproach, philosophical proposal
insisted that we see thisprocession as manifesting the
ways in which each individualform of human social life
generates tensions and strainswithin itself.
When these tensions become sogreat that such a way of living
(01:01:22):
finally makes no sense to theparticipants, life rapidly
becomes uninhabitable.
Once it becomes uninhabitable,it breaks down, falls apart and
eventually gives way to anotherform of life.
The new form of life emerges asthe people living in the
cultural rubble of the breakdownpick up the pieces of what is
still working, discard the partsthat no longer work and fashion
(01:01:43):
something new out of thebreakdown.
They build a society thatdevelops itself until its own
internal strains and stresseslead it into breakdown, after
which a new form of life emergesout of it.
All told, this aspect ofhistory constitutes the changing
shape of self-conscious lifeitself.
Hegel chose the German termGeist, rendered as mind or
(01:02:03):
spirit, depending on thetranslator, to capture that.
Depending on the translator, itshould be both right.
I think yeah, on the translatorto capture that.
Depending on the translator, itshould be both right.
I think, um, yeah.
As geist moves through history,it takes on different shapes as
it imagines itself in differentways, and thus, for those
thinking about it, a movingtarget, the story of breakdown
and renewal.
In hegel's dialectic of historyand also geist, is god yeah
(01:02:25):
like he guy you know is God yeah.
Speaker 1 (01:02:28):
Like he, he, he, he forget this all the time.
Speaker 2 (01:02:30):
Geist is God, geist is mind, geist is spirit.
Right Anyway.
Speaker 3 (01:02:36):
So for Hegel, these are all the same thing.
Speaker 2 (01:02:38):
Yeah, yes, um.
So this paragraph here has asort of like um, decadence
theory, decadence and breakdowntheory sort of understanding of
the world, which I don't thinkis entirely incorrect.
Speaker 1 (01:02:55):
No.
Speaker 2 (01:02:56):
But he puts this caveat here like, things don't
eventually just break down andbecome a new way of life on
their own all the time.
Sometimes, you know, it ispossible for humans to take
agency and start to change thesociety as the breakdown is
(01:03:17):
happening, but it takes.
He is absolutely correct instating that it takes the old
way of being as being completelyuntenable for that to be done.
Right.
So once the old way becomesunbearable and things have
(01:03:40):
gotten so far along in thebreakdown, in this process of
like social cannibalism, likewhat we're living through right
now, who knows how much longerthis will last.
It could last for severaldecades, but we're in a process
of like the cannibalization ofthe parts of our society that
(01:04:03):
make it livable or habitable.
Right.
So eventually there comes abreaking point, and if there
were institutions of consciousrevolutionaries, that breaking
point could be inserted by thewill of the actors that are
existing through it, right,right.
Speaker 3 (01:04:25):
It's like, as Lennon said, for a revolution to take
place, it's usually insufficientfor the lower classes to not
want to live in the old way.
It is also necessary that theupper classes should be unable
to live in the old way.
Speaker 2 (01:04:37):
Yes, that is essentially what I was trying to
say.
My subconscious knew that wasLennon.
Speaker 1 (01:04:47):
My biggest question to this is yes, we know that
this was true historically.
I'm thinking about WalterBenjamin's the Angel of History,
the Rubble Right.
Today, the state apparatuseshave means of their disposal,
(01:05:16):
both in social and military andeconomical technologies that
were unfathomable just ageneration ago.
Speaker 2 (01:05:30):
Yes.
Speaker 1 (01:05:36):
What I sometimes fear is that they could hang on to a
decaying corpse forever withthese technologies.
Speaker 2 (01:05:50):
Well, I agree, I think that they could hang on to
the decaying corpse, for, Imean, I somewhat agree for a
very, very, very long time.
Well, I don't know.
Speaker 1 (01:06:06):
Because we are dealing with the end of humanity
in the rates of climatedevelopment, nuclear war, so on
and so forth.
Sure, sure.
Speaker 2 (01:06:18):
Like it's easier to imagine the end of the world
than the end of capitalism.
Speaker 3 (01:06:21):
Yeah.
And the reason why this allmight result in the common ruin
of the contending classes.
Speaker 2 (01:06:28):
Yeah, exactly yeah, that's always the caveat that I
interject when we're talkingabout stuff like this.
But should we oh go ahead?
Sorry From the ruin of thecontending classes?
You know?
I mean when we talk about theend of the world, it is very
(01:06:55):
unlikely that it will be the endof humanity so in the ruins of
the contending classes, there'salways hope.
Speaker 3 (01:07:03):
Yeah, that's not a bad place to call.
Speaker 2 (01:07:04):
Uh, to call an end to it.
Speaker 3 (01:07:05):
Yeah, because we're at 56 minutes on this recording
and then I think we've gotanother 15 or 20 before that we
are at an hour and 20 total,although there's like a really
you know good 10 minutes or 15minutes of just me and I waiting
for you to come back yeah, okay, so 25 minutes more than when
you do cups, yeah yeah, so we'llbe lucky if this ends up being
(01:07:27):
like 45 or 50 minutes long uh.
Speaker 2 (01:07:31):
So this is a perfect place to stop it too, because
it's where the next big capitalletter starts.
Speaker 1 (01:07:36):
So I think that's the second half of the uh yeah, the
article another essay that Iwould like to recommend it is a
bit longer uh is susanbrockmore's's Hegel and Haiti oh
yeah, I actually okay.
Speaker 2 (01:07:52):
So I read a book called I think it's called the
Half has Never Been Told.
It's about the American slavesystem and how, basically, how
integral southern slavery was tothe American economy and how,
essentially, getting rid ofslavery set back cotton
(01:08:16):
production for almost for like50 years.
Cotton was not as effectivelyand efficiently harvested until
the 1920s when an automaticcotton harvester was invented.
So by removing slavery, theworld cotton production shifted
(01:08:40):
from the United States being thebiggest and best provider to it
being between the United Statesand India and several other
places.
Right, so that was what thebook was about, and in it she
talks about the utterindifference of white Europeans
and Americans to the plight ofthe slaves, and then she
(01:09:00):
mentions Hegel as being one ofthese.
No, no, no, that mentions Hegelas being one of these people
that writes about revolution butdidn't even take the Haitian
revolution into consideration.
And I was like and I wasassigned this book.
I know, I know I was assignedthis book.
(01:09:21):
And then I went and I was likethis is incorrect, because I
know that the master slavedialectic in Hegel is directly
referencing what happens inHaiti.
So I went and I read the SusanBuck Morse article.
And then I, you know, I wasonly supposed to write a one
page like review of this bookbut I ended up writing like a
(01:09:41):
three page refutation of thebook and I submitted it.
I submitted the one page reviewand then I submitted my three
page refutation of it and thenhe made me get up and argue my
case in front of the classbecause he liked it so much.
But yeah, anyway, so like, yeah,there's this idea, and you look
in the book where she quotesSusan Buckmore's and I was like
(01:10:02):
I know, susan Buckmore's doesn'tsay that, doesn't say that.
So I went back and I looked andI said it is assumed in many
instances that Hegel's laternegative view of Africans he
didn't say black people ingeneral, he said Africans as
being non-historic peoplesbecause of their domination by,
you know, european colonialsmeans that he was indifferent on
(01:10:31):
Haiti.
But and then you know, but theauthor of that book stopped
before the but you know, anyway,it was really.
But yeah, I did read thatarticle and it's very good, that
is all to say.
It's very good and yes, itwould be worth reading.
(01:11:16):
I'm going to stop thisrecording so it can upload to
the server.
Thank you.
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