Hegel

He is the most influential philosopher of the 19th century and in the top 5 most influential philosophers of all time. In reaction to his thought marxism, existentialism, historicism, pragmatism, phenomenology, and even positivism will arise. But who is Hegel and why is he such a big deal? In this technical assessment, we unpack the central elements of his philosophy.*Follow Zach:*https://www.instagram.com/zachlee_isppc/https://twitter.com/zacharytleehttps://isppc.org/0:00 The Polarizing Influence of Hegel in Modern Philosophy3:33 Understanding Hegel: A Challenging Dive Into Philosophy4:58 Hegel's Philosophy: Balancing Enlightenment Rationality and German Tradition10:30 Hegel's Philosophy: Uniting Infinite and Finite Realities16:54 Hegel's Embrace of Contradiction and Coherence Theory of Truth20:00 Hegel's Evolving God and the Dialectic of Geist23:56 Understanding Self Through Relationships and Opposing Perspectives25:08 Understanding Hegelian Dialectics Through Thesis, Antithesis, and Synthesis28:44 Understanding Hegel's Philosophy Through Oneism and Dualism33:35 Mutual Dependence Between Lord and Bond Servant34:05 Hegel's Historicism and the Evolution of World Spirit36:43 Hegel's Reinterpretation of Christianity and Its Impact on Society38:57 Hegel's Political Philosophy and Its Complexities42:26 Hegel's Philosophy: Contradictions, God, And The Dialectical Process45:59 Hegel's Controversial Views on Race and Cultural Progress48:43 Exploring Hegel's Complex Legacy and Influence in Philosophy

Episode Transcript

(00:07):
Hello, and welcome to another edition of Ideological.
I'm your host, Zach Lee, and today we are talking about a
figure that you might not know aton about, but his influence is
absolutely enormous. Like, I cannot emphasize to you
enough what a big deal this guy is.
He's bigger than like, I'm trying to think of someone huge

(00:28):
today. He's bigger than Taylor Swift,
who is very, very popular. He makes Taylor Swift look like
a blonde girl that just sings songs to teenagers, which
actually I think is what she is.Anyway, just kidding.
She is a big fan of the show. Taylor.
Hey, call me back. Hope you're doing great.
She's got her Swifties. We've got, I don't know,

(00:49):
Idealogs or Lee lovers or something.
Think of a fun name that we can call those that love the show.
Anyway, today we are talking about a guy who's even bigger
than Taylor Swift, even bigger than The Rock even.
We're talking about Giorg Wilhelm Friedrich Hagel.
I know you sound so excited. You look excited.
Everyone wants to talk about Hagel.

(01:10):
Who is this guy? Why is he a big deal?
Why is he important? He is one of the most
influential philosophers of all time.
He's certainly the most influential philosopher of the
19th century, and he's probably in the top five most influential
philosophers of all time. So he's there with the big boys.
You're right. If I, if I were to take the
probably the most influential, not saying right or wrong, but
influential philosophers in history, it's probably Plato,

(01:33):
Aristotle, Descartes, Kant, and Hagel.
So we're going to be talking about him.
His thought, whether people agreed with it or disagreed with
it, would give birth to Marxism,existentialism, historicism,
pragmatism, phenomenology, and even positivism.
And so his influence is enormous.
Isaiah Berlin, the philosopher and sociologist, said this of

(01:56):
Hegel. Listen to listen to this praise.
And then a guy named Arthur Schopenhauer, who's a German
philosopher that hates Hegel. We're we're going to see, let's
listen to some good and the bad as we start thinking about who
this Hegel character is. Isaiah Berlin said no thinker
has ever exercised such a powerful influence on the
intellectual and political history of the modern world as

(02:16):
Hegel. Whoa, that's high praise.
But he also has his critics. Listen to this.
Arthur Schopenhauer is just he He's this cynical, pessimistic
philosopher. Here's what he's going to say
about Hagel. Listen to this.
This is a total slam, right? Like when somebody gets owned on
social media, this is it, he says.
Hagel, who for political and indeed mistaken purposes, was

(02:39):
from above dubbed a great philosopher, A commonplace,
inane, loathsome, repulsive and ignorant charlatan, who with
unparalleled effrontery, compiled a system of crazy
nonsense that was trumpeted abroad as immortal wisdom by his
mercenary followers and was actually regarded as such by
blockheads. Whereby such a complete course

(03:01):
of admiration arose as had neverbefore been known.
The extensive intellectual activity that was forcibly
usurped by such a man resulted in the mental ruin of a whole
generation of scholars. Holy shit.
OK, so that's Hegel has a huge influence whether you love him
or hate him. Now, before we get into this

(03:21):
lesson, let me give you a warning here.
This is not a disclaimer. I'm not going to talk about
anything too inappropriate. You know, this is going to be a
very difficult technical lesson.You should probably skip it.
Some of the other episodes are so much more fun.
If you are a super nerd, you'll love this.
If you've had some training and philosophy, hopefully at the
graduate level, but at least at the undergraduate level, you'll

(03:42):
probably love this. If you're still a virgin, you'll
probably love this. But if you're somebody that this
is not your jam, just skip it. This will be more technical.
There is no way to make Hegel accessible.
So I will do my best. A lot of times students complain
about how difficult he is to read and what he's saying and
all that. So I'm going to do my best to

(04:03):
summarize this and, but keep in mind, if this is not your jam,
skip it. He's a big deal.
You should up your jam, but I get it, All right.
So know that this is going to bedifficult.
I've used a bunch of resources as I always do.
A special thank you, though, to Frederick Beiser at Syracuse
University. I found that his research on

(04:23):
Hagel has even challenged my ownthinking on Hagel.
It's changed my mind on a few things.
So I always want to give a shoutout.
He and I are homies. You know, we hang out and listen
to Taylor Swift together. So let's talk about Hagel.
Or you can. Now's your chance to get away.
If this is too much for the restof you, the elites, here we go.
Let's talk about his early life.He was born, OK?

(04:45):
He hasn't always existed. He's not eternal.
He was born on August 27th, 1770, in Stuttgart.
His dad was a civil servant. His mom died when he was 11,
which is sad. And several generations of
Hagels had been Protestant ministers.
Hagel, though, would never consistently embrace and live in
a Lutheran way in his faith or his actions.

(05:05):
We're actually going to see that.
He's a pretty big critic of the traditional way of doing
Christianity. Although he's not an atheist,
He's very strongly A theist, andwe'll talk about that in a
second. He began Latin school at the age
of five. No big deal.
He studied at a Protestant seminary called the Tubinger
Stiffed, OK, which was affiliated with Tubingen.
Today, Tubingen and the University of Tubingen is kind

(05:27):
of a big, big deal. This is not the same thing, but
there was a light affiliation back then.
But he's starting out at a Protestant seminary.
A lot of major philosophers willstart studying theology first
and then kind of convert over tophilosophy.
Heidegger does a similar thing. He was roommates with the
philosopher Friedrich Schelling and the poet Friedrich
Holderlen. OK, so I don't know if you know

(05:49):
these names. This is like the ultimate like
roommate situation. It's like if, if Kobe and
Michael Jordan and LeBron James were all roommates.
That's kind of what's going on here at this seminary.
They start this book club. They read all these ancient
works in Greek. It's it's a big deal.
You'll, you'll notice, by the way, just just as a pause,
Germany will come to prominence as a major intellectual and

(06:13):
philosophical powerhouse, but they're late to the game.
During the Enlightenment, it's really England and France that
are the major players. They're the ones putting out the
Voltaire's and the Dieter Rose and the the John Locke's and all
these kind of things. Or the UK rather, because it's
Scotland and Ireland and stuff are involved and Germany doesn't
have as much to say. They've got some figures.
They've got people like Leibnitz, who's culturally

(06:34):
German, although he writes most of his major works in French.
From about Kant onwards, the Germans will take over.
Germany was this collection of feudal Dutchies for the longest
time. And so they kind of have a
little man syndrome. And so they're eventually
they're going to produce, you know, Kant and Hegel and
Schopenhauer and Schelling and Ficta and Nietzsche and like all

(06:56):
these major players are going tobe German.
So this episode brought to you by Germany, Germany, we love
war. OK, so he's a weird guy.
Hegel, he is gross looking. He kind of looks like he kind of
looks like if an owl was caught in a rainstorm.
That's kind of how he looks all the time.

(07:17):
He struggled with melancholy. He had a son with his cleaning
lady, so at least he's had sex at least once.
He had pet parrots and thought that drinking wine daily was
good for his health. I actually read somewhere that
he his doctor gave him this thing saying that he could drink
wine for his health so he didn'thave to pay taxes on wine, which
is awesome. He is an academic.

(07:39):
He was a professor at a philosophy at the University of
Vienna, the University of Heidelberg, and the University
of Berlin. He was, however.
However, that's ironic in what I'm about to say what I'm about
to say. He was a horrible lecturer.
He stuttered horrible, he stuttered, he moved in a jerky
manner. He gasped for breath.

(07:59):
You know how like like fat people sleep and then they're
just like or whatever, right? So and he over repeated the word
also also also in German over and over again.
So he's kind of, he's kind of Tourette's when he speaks,
right? So he's speaking and then he
gets back and he's twitchy. So he's, I know that's not PC,

(08:20):
but I don't care. I'll do what I want.
So he's a weird guy, weird lecturer.
The following people, though, were his students.
Ludwig Feuerbach, the psychologist who's going to say
that humans create God by projecting our needs of like a
daddy figure onto the sky. Karl Marx, pay attention to

(08:41):
that. That's going to be very
important. Marx explicitly turns Hagel on
his head. I'll have another lesson on Marx
where I basically show that he does not understand Hagel.
You cannot divorce Hagel's thought from his metaphysics,
period. And anybody that thinks you can,
you should make fun of and you should, I don't know, just post
negative things about them online.

(09:01):
And Bruno Bauer, OK Soren Kierkegaard had Hegelian
professors, although he's Danish, but he would become a
strong critic of Hagel. But as far as people that were
directly students, Feuerbach, Marx and Bauer, he died.
Hagel did. He's not still alive.
Again, he's not immortal. On November the 14th in 1831 in
Berlin at the age of just 61, OK, what is his goal again?

(09:22):
Pay attention, slap yourself because this guy's a big deal.
But it's very, his philosophy isvery difficult.
You kind of have to read a bunchof Hegel to read any of Hegel.
OK, let me tell you what he's trying to do.
He is trying to keep the political freedom that comes out
of the French Revolution. He's trying to keep the reason
and the rationality of the Enlightenment.

(09:43):
But he wants to do it in a German way.
What does that mean? It means he's wearing lederhosen
and eating, you know, Wienerschnitzels or something.
No, what it means is he wants totake the rationality of the
Enlightenment. He wants to take the idea of
progress and advancement, but hewants to maintain a view of
religion in God, and he wants tomaintain a view of community.

(10:06):
Some Enlightenment thinker thinkers, if you think of guys
like Diderot, are like getting rid of God altogether, but
they're very individualistic. Hegel wants to take what's good
in the Enlightenment but make itwithin a community in kind of
this Prussian German area where he lives.
But he also wants to maintain some sort of view in God.
After all, he's German, and it'suniquely German to kind of

(10:27):
follow in the footsteps of Luther and have some sort of
God. He wants to create a philosophy
also of everything. So again, let me tell you again
why why Hegel's a big deal. Some philosophers are known for
just impacting a few areas of philosophy.
Maybe they just talk about metaphysics.
They just talk about logic. They just talk about ethics.
Hegel is doing Big Boy philosophy anthology.

(10:49):
Big Boy philosophy though, OK. He wants to have a system that
encompasses literally everything.
God, history, our minds, community, politics, ethics.
He is doing big boy, Put your pants on, pull up those
lederhosen. He, he's doing big boy
philosophy. The goal is to become more free

(11:12):
and more self aware for humans and for God.
He wants to find a way that's about to get technical.
He wants to find a way to unite Kant's separation between the
numina and the phenomena. And he wants to find a way to
link the infinite and the finite.
OK, bear with me. Hegel's difficult, but I'm here
to help you. My driving passion in life is to

(11:33):
take big concepts and make them accessible to the average
person. So if you're below average,
there's other podcasts for you. But if you're average, you can
do this. Kant separated the numina.
That's a thing as it is in and of itself, my phone, as it is in
and of itself. From the phenomena which is my
experience of the phone, we cannot access the numina.

(11:56):
I cannot access this desk, I cannot access this phone,
whatever directly. My mind, my cognitive apparatus
is going to lay a grid of thingsonto the pneuma.
I can't experience it directly. It's got to go through my mind.
So my mind, and this is responding to Hume, is going to
is going to take things like time, space, causation,
substance, and it's going to layit on the things so that I can

(12:19):
have phenomena. Hegel wants to find a way to
link those together because after all, how can you know
anything about the numina if it all has to go through the
cognitive apparatus of your mind?
Also, he wants to unite the infinite and the finite.
OK, bear with me. Hey, listen, pay attention.

(12:39):
Go do some push ups, something. Wake yourself up.
Listen, what I'm about to say, if we're talking about all
reality, we're talking about infinite.
That includes the absolute, the undefined, God, infinite.
But there's also things that arefinite, things that are not
infinite. Desks, chairs, humans, politics,

(13:00):
etcetera. He wants to have a system that
will have both, because the infinite is supposed to
encompass everything. Infinite means everything that
there is, right? But if if infinite takes on the
finite, there's a contradiction.If the infinite excludes the
finite, then now the infinite isfinite.

(13:22):
It's limited because there's this finite that doesn't fall
within its circle. So if you think of the infinite
as a circle, the finite should fit within that.
But that's a contradiction. But if the infinite is a circle,
but there's another circle out here of the finite, then it's
not really infinite because there's something that it
doesn't include, and it's supposed to include the whole
thing. Can Hegel solve that problem?

(13:44):
Again, love him or hate him, youcan't not deal with him if
you're a thinker. If you live post the 19th
century, which I'm assuming 100%of people watching this do, then
you got to deal with Hegel. OK?
That's what he's trying to do. He uses difficult language.
What What he's going to say is this is a very famous dictum.

(14:04):
I think this comes from the philosophy, right?
I need to look up again where this is from.
But he's got this saying, which is the rational is the real and
the real is the rational. So let me explain what that
means. When he says the real is the
rational, what he means is there's a good reason for
whatever there is in that. There's reason in present
institutions. When he says the rational is the
real, what he means is the standards of reason will be

(14:24):
realized in history. Reason is a a self actualizing
end. OK, we'll talk more about that
in a second. All right, If you're already
confused, you know, like Zach, you said infinite.
I didn't even know finite was a word.
What does this mean, Zach? You're being so prolixed, you're
pontificating. You're using all these.
Just buckle up because Hagel is extremely difficult to
understand. So let me just say this, this is

(14:45):
a big complaint against Hagel. He is very difficult to
understand. That's true.
I'm not the only one that thinksthat everyone thinks that this
is a common complaint with Hagel.
Again, back to Arthur Schopenhauer, a guy who hates
Hagel. He's like his nemesis.
They're both, they're both professors.
And Schopenhauer is kind of jealous that people like Hagel.
But he says this about Hagel. Listen to this.
You want to talk about an ultimate like smack talk, listen

(15:07):
to this. But the height of audacity in
serving up sheer nonsense, in stringing together senseless and
extravagant mazes of words such as had previously only been
heard in mad houses, was finallyreached in Hegel and became the
instrument of the most ponderousgeneral mystification that has

(15:28):
ever taken place, with the result which will appear
fabulous to posterity and will remain as a lasting monument of
German stupidity. Let's just take a break.
Let's just take a break. If anyone's ever said something
mean to you, it's probably not that good.
Hegel's extremely hard to interpret.

(15:48):
He repeats the same thing over and over and over again.
He uses all this technical jargon.
He has his own kind of dictionary that you have to
learn to really be able to understand.
Hegel. Reading his most well known
work, Phenomenology of Spirit, is like chewing gravel.
OK, so now that we know who he is, what he's trying to do, we
we understand He's very difficult to understand.
Let me give you his major ideas and help you out.

(16:10):
I'm your boy. I'm, I'm your Hegelian wingman.
If you're trying to pick him up at a bar, I'm going to help you
out. OK, Major ideas #1 the
unification of contradicting ideas.
Most scholars when I say this will disagree with me, but I'm
right. OK, Hegel does embrace

(16:31):
contradiction. He just says that he's not doing
that. If you understand that for most
philosophers, they're trying to not have a contradiction, what
is a contradiction? It's where you say that both
something is and is not in the same time and in the same way
you're contradicting yourself. It breaks the law of non
contradiction. You cannot say that something
both is and is not, and it mean those terms in the same way at
the same time. That doesn't make any sense.

(16:51):
It's a contradiction. It's what a falsehood is.
My view and the view of other scholars is that Hegel does
embrace contradiction. Now the reason a lot of guys
will critique me on this is they'll say Hegel's trying to
avoid contradiction. Contradiction means you're
wrong. Agreed.
Hegel would say something like this.
He he doesn't say it this way explicitly because he's not
clear, but you know, he would say so I I would say a

(17:13):
contradiction is A and not A at the same time.
That's a contradiction, A and minus, not then a.
He would say that those are justtwo different sides of totality.
If we're talking about everything that is, there's it's
thing and it's negation. So those aren't a contradiction.
So he's going to say it's not a contradiction.
Other scholars will defend him and say it's not a
contradiction. I think if you take his thought

(17:34):
to its logical end, he embraces contradiction.
The reason you need to understand that is it will make
it much easier to when you just realize that he's contradicting
himself, you'd be like, OK, I atleast understand what he's
trying to say. It's got to be wrong, but I
understand it. OK, And I'm not saying it is
wrong. I'm just saying I think
contradiction is a big part of his philosophy.
He does not see it that way at all, and a lot of scholars would

(17:55):
say he does not see it that way.I think that if you drag out his
philosophy to its implications, it is contradictory.
But let me give you some words out of his own mouth in case you
don't believe me. This one comes from
phenomenology of spirit. He says this the more
conventional group opinion gets fixated on the antithesis of
truth and falsity, meaning they're too focused on true and
false binary, the more it tends to expect a given philosophical

(18:18):
system to be either accepted or contradicted, and hence it finds
only acceptance or rejection. It does not comprehend the
diversity of philosophical systems as the progressive
unfolding of truth, but rather sees it in simple disagreements.
He's saying the other system is to take it or leave it.
I'm trying to encompass the entire thing.
And if that's not so explicit enough and philosophy of mind.
He says this ordinary logic is therefore an error of supposing

(18:42):
that mind is something that completely excludes
contradiction from itself. On the contrary, all
consciousness contains a unity and separation, hence a
contradiction. So he's agreeing with me that
he's contradicting things, he just doesn't think it's a
traditional contradiction, that it's wrong.
It's just a way of embracing thewhole, which includes things and
its separation. Anyway, if you understand, if

(19:05):
you stop trying to make him so consistent, he'll make more
sense. That's all I'm trying to say.
For for most of history, people have held what is called a
correspondence theory of truth. What does that mean?
A sentence is true. A proposition is true if it
matches reality. If there's a cat sitting on the
mat and I say there's a cat sitting on the mat, that's true.
If I say there's not a cat sitting on the mat, that's
false. To say what is that it is and

(19:26):
what's not that it's not, is true, to quote Aristotle.
OK, Hagel is not playing in thatgame.
Hagel is going to propose and not propose.
Other people had mentioned this too, but he's going to function
in more of what is called a coherence theory of truth.
Truth is when the entire system fits with itself, when the parts

(19:47):
of the system fit with other parts in the system, not
necessarily with how things are in reality.
Think of it like a spider's web.All the parts are overlapping
and you can't pull one thread onthe spider web without it moving
the whole web. That is more his his style when
it comes to truth. OK, it's going to get worse.
Are you ready #2 the dialectic of Geist?

(20:10):
Zach, what the hell did you justsay?
The dialectic of Geist? This is this point #2 is Hegel's
philosophy. So pay attention.
If you're like, what are we talking about?
Cats are on mats. You said something about Taylor
Swift. Don't kill yourself.
Pay attention. Here's what Here's what we're
gonna do. We're gonna break it down.
Hang in there. Listen to this lecture several
times. Send it to your friends.

(20:33):
Let's talk about this idea. The dialectic of Geist is the
central theme of Hegel's philosophy.
Let's, let's, let's take these terms in reverse order.
When he uses the German word Geist, or sometimes he says
Zeldgeist, world mind. Geist means spirit mind, you
know, ethereal world spirit God.It's linked to human culture and

(20:56):
human mind and human ideas. That's what Geist means, OK,
Think God slash world spirit. Don't think of the
judeo-christian God, OK? He's not thinking of a personal
judeo-christian God like in Judaism, Christianity or, or
Islam or something like this. His God is the formal and final
cause of all things. It's God knowing himself in the

(21:18):
other, it's it involves this collective subjectivity of
mankind. When we think of a famous
murder, OJ Simpson, and we thinkof his trial, it's the people
versus OJ Simpson. What do you mean by the people?
We mean like a collective consciousness, right?
The values of the society, the way that people think about
things. Hegel will use phrases like

(21:41):
being in itself. That's just something that
exists or being for itself. That's something that knows that
it exists. So this is being in itself.
I'm being for itself because I know that I exist.
He's not exactly a pantheist either, because that would get
rid of the changing shapes in the evolution of Geist.
Zach, what are you saying? Let me say it this way, God, For

(22:03):
Hegel to come to full self realization, to full self
actualization, to fully know himself, to fully be God, he has
to have his other. That's creation and God evolves
as the world evolves and they involve evolve together.
So God is continually learning more about himself by finding
himself in the other creation throughout world history.

(22:26):
Let me give you a little definition of this that I made.
We're not going to put it on thescreen.
Just listen, listen, look at these, look at these green eyes,
this green shirt. Listen.
God and the world are intimatelylinked and both evolve over
history and ideas. Positive, but eventually leads
to a contradiction and distinction between that idea
and its negation or its separation.
This then leads to a fuller new idea that encompasses both the

(22:48):
idea and it's opposing idea. So God comes to a greater self
realization over time to the interactions of history.
To say it more simply, God needshumans just as much as humans
need God. To give you a quote from Hegel,
without the world, God is not God.
We're going to talk about this in just a second when we move to
dialectic. OK, so that's his view of God,

(23:09):
this ever evolving world spirit that grows as humanity and
collective consciousness grows. The word dialectic, What does
this word mean? This is a big theme for Hegel.
Dialectic means different thingsthroughout philosophical
history. For the Greeks it was typically
just logical conversation back and forth was dialectic.
For Kant, the term took on a different meaning.

(23:30):
It's where like reason tries to go beyond the bounds of what it
can know and runs into some problems.
That's dialectic for Kant. For Hegel, it is the changing
and evolving of everything. It's realizing it's inner
necessity and movement that flows or follows from its
concept. Let me give you an example.
This is not a great example, butI'm going to give you some good

(23:52):
examples in a second, some of which even Hegel uses himself.
Let me give you an example. Again, this is not perfect.
Take an example of marriage. I think that I know myself, but
I don't truly know myself. I don't truly know what love is
unless there's an other. There has to be an other to love
my wife, and throughout marriageI actually realize myself more

(24:14):
by seeing myself in the other and she does with me.
Love has to have this other. So there's this individual and
its opposite and this other. And those things aren't bad.
They're not just total separation.
It's almost like a spiral where I find out more about her and
she finds out more about me as we go.
Or to say it another way, if you're a Democrat or a
Republican, you will learn more about your position, not by

(24:36):
doing what you're doing, which is just following your stuff in
your echo chamber and trying to read retweet to own the the libs
or the cons or whatever. You'll find more about your
position by arguing with somebody who holds the opposite
position in the other. You'll both grow.
OK, here's the way that it's traditionally explained with
Hagel. And this is not exactly correct.
So this is a crass oversimplification and this

(24:58):
language is not really from Hegel anyway.
But follow me because it is a helpful, it is a helpful tool
that people use in pedagogy in explaining this idea.
What people will say is when it comes to Hegelian dialectic that
there is a thesis, there's an idea put forward.
That's what a thesis is. There's it's antithesis, it's
opposite. And then those two things come
together and create a synthesis.And then that becomes a new

(25:22):
thesis. And then there's a new
antithesis and then a new synthesis.
So you're making these steps forward as you go.
God makes these steps forward, as do humans as we evolve in our
relationship to one another. Now, the idea of synthesis and
thesis, antithesis, synthesis, that is not the the kind of
language that you'll get in Hegel that way.

(25:44):
He does mention some of those terms.
So what people generally say is that that comes from a guy named
Fichta. I have had trouble finding
anywhere where Ficta does that. So that's just kind of a helpful
way to to describe these guys using language that perhaps is
not the thing they're mainly going to harp on anyway.
What does that mean? Let me give you an example.
It means that throughout the evolving world spirit,

(26:06):
throughout history, as history progresses, there's an end,
there's a goal for God and for history, full self realization
and full self actualization. You have a unity, there's a
thesis, you have difference, andthen you have unity and
difference. So you have a thesis,
antithesis, synthesis, or to give an example that he uses,
which is helpful, in a family, you have unity.

(26:26):
People are working together, they're trying to do what's best
for the family. There's a unity in civil
society, though, you have difference, right?
You have individualism. People are just pursuing their
own things. That'd be the antithesis to
family. The synthesis would be the
state. In the state, you have
difference. You have individuals pursuing
their own ends, but they're alsodoing what's best for the

(26:47):
community. That's a great way to think of
dialectic. You have subjective mind,
objective mind, and their mergerand absolute mind.
If you're still confused, let megive you another example that
Hegel uses explicitly, the Christian idea of the Trinity.
Now again, Hegel is not a traditional orthodox Christian,
but he uses the Trinity as an example.
With the Trinity you have God, There's only one unity, God, but

(27:10):
God is 3 persons, Father, Son, and Spirit.
So you have difference, you haveseparate separation.
For Hegel, theologians wouldn't call it that, but for Hegel you
have unity, you have separation,you have unity, you have
difference. And then you have the the
synthesis, the Trinity, that there's one God who's three
persons, but each person's fullyGod, but each person's not the

(27:31):
other person. And so you say, well, that's a
contradiction. And he's like, no, it, it just
takes into account the whole system.
It's a paradox. OK, So he uses the Trinity as an
example of kind of this again, not exactly his language thesis,
antithesis, antithesis and synthesis.
OK, let me give you 2 quotes, 1 from 1 from Hegel, and then one

(27:53):
from a professor who is Hegelianor a Hegel scholar rather.
Hegel says this. Zach, what are you saying?
Go listen, go do a line of Coke real quick.
Get some of that sweet nose candy, get some of that stripper
glitter and and then wake up andcome back.
Listen to this quote. This is what Hegel says in
Philosophy of mind about this. He says God, IE the truth as

(28:16):
mind, and regards mind not as something quiescent remaining in
empty uniformity, but it's something which necessarily
enters the process of distinguishing itself from
itself or positing its other, and which comes to itself only
through this other and by the preserving sublation of this
other, not by abandoning it. So he's saying God comes to

(28:39):
greater self realization throughthis other, not by getting rid
of it, but by this merger. Let me give you another quote
here. This is from Michael Inwood.
He's a a philosophy professor atOxford.
He says this pure being, being with no specifications is
equivalent to nothing and passesover into nothing.
Nothing, however, is equivalent to being, so it passes back into

(29:01):
being. This oscillation between the two
amounts to becoming, but becoming subsides and congeals
into design. That's a German word that means
like being there or specificallydeterminate being, A fusion of
being and nothing. Clear as mud.
I understand what he's saying. The question is, is it utter
nonsense? Is it a contradiction in the

(29:22):
logical sense and therefore false?
That's the question that you need to try to answer.
OK, that's number two. I got a few more.
That's the hardest one. That's the main part of Hegel's
philosophy. If you understand that, you
don't understand Hegel, don't understand Hegel, doesn't
understand Hegel, But you're getting closer.
Number 31 ISM, one ISM. This is certainly not a phrase

(29:42):
that Hegel uses. This comes from a philosopher.
His name is Van Till. There are a bunch of different
ways of viewing the world. This is an oversimplification,
but think for a second of two ISM versus one ISM. 2 ISM is
that the world is typically divided.
There's a duality here. We have a tendency to think,
especially coming out of the Enlightenment, that the world's

(30:03):
divided into subject and object.That's like can't.
Or that it's divided into mind, things that are immaterial and
body, things that are material. That's Descartes.
Or we have a tendency to think it's divided between self and
other. There's a tendency for us to
think there's difference. OK, two ISM, God is different
than creation. Man is different than woman.
Heterosexuality is a man and a woman, these different things.

(30:28):
There's binary stuff, there's true and false, there's good and
bad. That's the the traditional
worldview, pre modern, the pre the modern era, but also in the
modern era and enlightenment. OK, that's that's the way most
people view the world. One ISM is where you get rid of
that duality. You have a tendency to blur the
lines, blurred lines. You have a tendency to blend

(30:49):
these lines and the infinite andthe finite merge.
God and creation merge, which iswhy God and the world are
evolving in tandem with each other.
It's why in our our cultural context today, why you see, for
example, homosexuality promoted.It's one ISM, it's unity without
the difference. Good and bad are too binary.

(31:09):
We don't see those as as different categories or true and
false. Nothing's true.
We become subjective. This all relates to our
metaphysics. It relates to whether or not we
see the, the kind of A2 ISM or A1 ISM framework.
Very interesting, very helpful. I think for understanding Hegel,
Hegel is pushing towards the oneISM.
Also, what Hegel's trying to do is he uses the he uses the word

(31:30):
notion. What is notion for him?
It's truth. It's it's the idea of something
that's seen in relation to everything else to, to the
whole. Let me say it another way again,
I'm doing my best. You're doing great.
Hang in there. He's tricky.
Hegel's tricky, but this will bethe easiest introduction to
Hegel you ever. If you just try to jump in and
start reading what you should do, he'll crush you.
He will crush you under the weight of his.

(31:52):
What is the word that Ron Bergenuses?
Obsolescence or whatever. OK, so the Enlightenment taught
us to view individual objects kind of in a vacuum.
OK, Like, we're just going to look at this biological thing.
We're just going to look at thisconcept.
We're just going to look at politics.
For Hegel to know something truly, you have to know

(32:14):
everything about it. You have to know it from the
view of God himself. So I can look at my desk and
say, oh, it's made of wood and it has extension and I can rap
on it. It has by I don't mean rap, I
mean like hit with my knuckles. It has solidity.
But really the tables in relation to the goal of a table
and it's relation to the floor 'cause that's what holds it up

(32:34):
and it's relation to its purposeof helping me put stuff on or on
which I put stuff. It's related to the concept of
the only way to truly know the table is to know it from God's
perspective in relation to everything else in the universe.
OK, so there is a one ISM there that he's focusing on both
metaphysically and epistemologically.
Say it another way. My self consciousness can only

(32:57):
be known in relation to another self consciousness.
Hegel gives this famous demonstration of a Lord and a
bondservant. Who needs whom?
OK, the Lord. The bondservant thinks he needs
the Lord because the Lord provides him with his food and
his protection. He lives on the Lord's land,
etcetera. But the Lord also needs the
bondservant because the bondservant makes his meals and

(33:19):
dresses him and works the ground.
In fact, the the Lord is actually separated.
He's alienated from his work. You see an echo of Mark's here
because he doesn't work the ground like the bondservant
does. And so, you know, really what
has to happen is there has to bethis.
The Lord finds out more about himself in the bondservant, and
the bondservant finds out more about himself in the Lord.

(33:40):
You need the 2. Together there'll be a clash of
cultures. The bondservant could rebel and
only find freedom when the Lord and the bondservant are fighting
on common ground. Anyway, one ISM #4 historicism.
What is historicism? There's a bunch of different
definitions here. For our purposes, you just need
to know this one's values and cultures are the result of where

(34:02):
they are in history. It's not.
Now, by the way, I'm not saying that Hagel agrees with this.
Let me explain. Because Hagel, Hagel always
wants to have his cake and eat it too.
He always wants to hold two things together.
He critiques historicism becausehe does think that there are
these important objective things.
But he also promotes historicismbecause there's such a focus on
what's going on now in history. So what is historicism?

(34:25):
There's not these objective standards that everyone can just
appeal to. We're partially, you know, we're
partially dependent upon the time and culture in which we
live, our values, what we think about the world or whatever come
to us from the time and history and culture in which we live.
He doesn't mean that there's nota common goal of guys there is,

(34:48):
but it's it does mean that that these things are ever evolving
and changing for us now. So to say another way, he's not
the father of historicism. Other people held this before
Hegel. He's going to be a big promoter
of it because he's going to linkGod and history because God
evolves throughout history. You can't do theology or
metaphysics without history as well.

(35:09):
Now, most of us don't know this is happening.
So I'm just going about my day. You know, I'm drinking my Red
Bull, then I'm drinking alcohol and I don't know if I have a
high or a low. And I'm hanging with my wife and
I'm making jokes and I'm doing all this research for you.
You're getting a free graduate level education on some of these
courses and I'm doing all the work for you.
You're welcome. By the way, you should retweet

(35:30):
me more. Yeah.
And I'm just living my life. And I don't know that I'm being
used by Geist to bring world history to its end.
But there are some figures for Hegel who do know that, OK,
these these like world historical individuals, these
like major players. He, he he thinks I've got think
of somebody like Socrates or Martin Luther or Caesar or

(35:51):
Napoleon. Hegel's got a big hard on for
some of these guys. These are guys that kind of
realize what they're doing. They're helping bring world
history forward. They see like the goal, whereas
most people don't see it. So he does see these like super
elite people, these intellectuals.
When it comes to the goal of world spirit, the beltgeist #5

(36:14):
it's got to get a little bit easier.
Who you've made it through most of the difficult things.
You've done a great job. OK, get you the Hagel T-shirt
again. He looks like a baby bird that
has been out in a rainstorm that's also on drugs.
OK, He's very scary looking in some of his picture.
He looks like, you know, the story of Hansel and Gretel.
He probably looks like the witch.
If the witch was a man. Is that called a warlock a

(36:34):
witch? Oh, I don't know.
All right. A redefinition of Christianity.
You cannot. Listen, I'm going to say this
very strongly. You cannot try to divorce
Hegel's views from his view of God in metaphysics.
You can't do it. He does not like orthodox
Christianity though. Is he an opponent or is he a

(36:56):
friend of Christianity? He's primarily an opponent, but
he's a friend. As far as theism and a new
interpretation of Christianity. He's not an atheist.
OK. The people that primarily follow
Hegel today are atheistic, whichhe would have thought they were
insane because the system doesn't work without some sort
of theistic view. Anyway, let me tell you what he
doesn't like about Christianity.Christianity puts the focus on

(37:17):
the next life. The goal of this life is really
to is really to to know God and be saved and believe in Jesus so
that you can be saved in the next life.
That's the goal. This life doesn't have as much
value. Who cares if you have money?
Who cares if you live a good life and maximize your
potential? All that's vanity anyway.

(37:38):
You're going to die. What matters is the next World.
So he thinks Christianity is detrimental to the world.
You're not going to change it. You're not going to move world
history forward. You're not really going to be
your best. You're not going to actualize
all your talents. You're busy giving your money
away to the poor and trying to be humble and meek.
You're not going to you're not going to excel with the
traditional view of Christianity.

(37:58):
In his view, Jesus to keep himself from being tainted by
the world withdrawals. He doesn't change the things
practically, He provides a meansof salvation.
So who cares what's going on politically, etcetera.
Again, you'll hear a lot of religious people today use the
same kind of language. Put your hope in heaven, stop
caring about politics, blah blah, blah.
They don't realize that they areplaying into Hegel's trap.
OK, the God of Christianity is transcendent over nature.

(38:20):
Here's what Hegel wants. Hegel wants a God that is
imminent, that is useful now, that also allows us to find
higher value this side of eternity.
Hegel thinks that humans find their value as they work
together within the state, as they work together within the
nation. They're able to participate in

(38:41):
democracy. They're able to grow an
education. They're able to push history
forward, which is what Geist wants.
And so in his mind, traditional Christianity cannot do that.
And so he that that's kind of his reinterpretation of
Christianity. He will separate, separate when
it comes to ethics, these two German ideas.
One is moralitate, which you know, is our internal moral

(39:02):
rules. This goes back to like Kant
trying to act from this duty internally, etcetera.
And Hegel will criticize that and he's going to focus on what
is called zitlikite, which is ethical life, like in the
community and custom and society, so meaning internal
ethical life. Other thinkers have, he's trying
to focus on this external community ethical life, which

(39:22):
finds its fulfillment in the state.
Speaking of the state politics, Hagel wanted a constitutional
monarchy. So I'm going to just summarize
his politics. His politics have been very
influential, whether you love itor hate it.
Again, he tries to take everything.
He's like, let's have individualrights, but also community.
Let's have some state involvement, but not too much.
He he, he tries to again, do some things that you can't

(39:43):
always hold together. But let me summarize it for you.
You're welcome. He wanted a constitutional
monarchy. On the one hand, he's not a
laissez faire capitalist. On the other hand, though he's
not a communist, he didn't thinkthere could be a universal world
government Contra certain forms of communism.
The best way to think of Hegel, by the way, this is kind of a
dialectic. You've got laissez faire

(40:04):
capitalism, a thesis, antithesis, communism, and then
synthesis, kind of a proto socialism.
He was kind of the best way to think of him.
And again, this is anachronistic, but it's kind of
a proto socialist. The difference though is he
wanted trade guilds, like back in the Middle Ages you'd have a
Guild if you were a blacksmith or you were a Weaver or a
farmer. You'd work together with other
people in your trade. He wanted the guilds to be able

(40:24):
to help guide society and talk to the government instead of
just having the power in the hands of the government.
That way there could be more interaction with them and the
people. Anyway, he didn't like direct
democracy because people are dumb.
Anytime someone's like, yeah, I'm pro democracy, just
democracy, democracy. What you have to say is so you
think people could vote in slavery as long as they got more

(40:45):
votes? You don't want pure democracy.
That's the tyranny of the majority.
You want to make sure individualrights are protected even when
people try to vote them away with democracy.
OK, so rights have to trump that, OK.
He thought that people would were dumb, didn't really know
what was best for them, so didn't love direct democracy.
He thought this, this is very important for understanding
Hegel's political view because he does hold a view of of

(41:08):
positive rights. We have a tendency coming out of
the Enlightenment to think of rights as individualism and
negative liberty. Right, the right to be left
alone, the right to have people not get in your way.
That's what the government owes you, negative rights.
For Hegel, he doesn't think thatthat's the truest form of life.
The truest form of life is in the state.
It's in the community. It's within your cultural

(41:28):
zeitgeist, Zeitgeist again. And so you find your highest
freedom by being part of community, not by just pure
individualism. Now can community rights
therefore over shadow individualrights?
This is where he runs into some problems and again some
contradictions. After Hegel you have left and

(41:49):
right wing wing leaning Hegelians.
The reason that there are some right wing leaning Hegelians,
which sounds crazy, is because Hegel's view is that the way the
world is, is how it has to be sothat spirit can evolve and reach
its ultimate fulfillment. So yes, you have to go through
bad things. You have to have the wars, you
have to have individuals that kind of get sacrificed on the
altar of history. You have to have that.

(42:10):
And so things are the way they should be.
That's conservative. That's right wing.
Most of those kind of people will kind of fade away and it
will primarily be though the left wing Hegelians that will
end up owning the day. And then especially with
Marxism, which is as far left wing Hegelian as you can get,
although it's not technical trueHegel.
Anyway, we'll talk about that ona lecture on Marx.

(42:32):
OK, I just need a brain. Let me just that was a lot.
OK, that was a lot. That's it's infuriating.
It's difficult. I hope that some of that makes
sense. Let's summarize and then let's
talk about some problems with Hagel.
And then we're going to be done.And then you can reward
yourself. Go get yourself a, a Cadbury
cream egg, you know, really treat yourself today.
You, you've worked hard. Let's summarize.

(42:54):
I'm going to summarize all of Hagel's philosophy in four
sentences. Are you ready?
This comes from a guy named Darren Staloff.
He's a professor of philosophy at the University of Florida.
So this is not mine. This is his.
These are going to be very incredible statements that do
accurate, accurately capture Hegel's thought, and yet they're
completely impossible to understand #1 History is the

(43:19):
dialectical process whereby spirit comes to know itself and
realizes its idea #2 freedom is the idea of spirit, and spirit
is reason in and for itself. Three, the means of this
realization or cunning of reasonis the passions of the
individual as both subject and object of history, and its form
is the state #4 the national spirit is a moment in the

(43:43):
development of the world spirit.And for each such moment As for
all, the owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the setting
of dusk. Fantastic.
What does it mean? It just means what we've been
talking about. God and the world are evolving
as one finds greater self realization in the other.
You have to do that because you have to take into account the

(44:05):
whole of reality. You can't separate it or you're
not understanding all of it. You can only understand the
finite in relation to the infinite.
You can only understand a subject in relation to the
object. You have to have both.
Hegel's not, Oh well, he is crazy, he's mad, but he, he,
this is a smart idea. Right or wrong, it's he's not a
fool. So any this only comes to the

(44:27):
end. Minerva only spreads its wings
only with the setting of dusk. It only comes to full self
realization for God as the end goal.
All right. Problems with hegel #1 his
system is full of contradictions.
For me, that's kind of the killer.
That's kind of the, the, I understand what he's trying to

(44:47):
do. I think that is the biggest
Achilles heel of his system. Does he truly embrace
contradiction? If he doesn't, he could be
right, but if he does, he must be wrong.
So that's something to wrestle with.
Are these real contradictions, or do they just appear to us to
be a contradiction because we'replaying a different game than
Hagel? It's a good way to ask the
question #2 another problem withHagel, because his system is a

(45:10):
whole. If you disagree with a major
part of it, the other parts start to crumble.
So in the analytic traditional philosophy, people start with a
premise and they build on top ofit.
It's very foundationalist. In the continental tradition,
though, there's a tendency to just kind of start talking and
bring in an entire worldview. Well, if you disagree with
Hegel's worldview, you're going to disagree with him.

(45:30):
If you, for example, are an atheist, you're going to say
Hegel is completely wrong. He has to be wrong.
This is why it makes no sense for Mark to be Hegelian or Mark
my buddy Mark. Mark's to be Hegelian because
you he's an atheist. You can't be Hegelian to be an
atheist because you need God forthe system to work.
Personal things #3 he's, he sayssome things that are kind of

(45:53):
racisty. Now this again, we, we don't
want to do an ad hominem. We don't want to say his
philosophy is wrong because he'sa racist.
But this is interesting. Everybody, by the way, before
the modern era, we would see is a racist today.
But let me read you this very interesting passage from
Philosophy of Mind. We're not going to put it on the
screen. We're just going to read it.
These are his words, not mine. So don't get mad at me.
He says I would never say this. He said Negroes are to be

(46:15):
regarded as a notion of childrenwho remain immersed in their
uninterested and indifferent naivete.
They are sold and let themselvesbe sold without any reflection
on what this is, on whether thisis right or not.
Their religion has something childlike about it.
They sense a higher being, but they do not keep a firm hold on
it. It passes only fleetingly
through their heads. This higher being they transfer

(46:36):
to the first stone they come across, thus making it their
fetish, and they discard this fetish if it fails to help them
entirely good nature and harmless.
When in a state of calm they canbecome suddenly agitated and
then commit the most frightful cruelties.
They cannot be denied a capacityfor education.
Not only have they here and there adopted Christianity with
the greatest gratitude and spoken with emotion of the

(46:57):
freedom they have acquired through Christianity after a
long spiritual servitude, but inHaiti they've even formed a
state on Christian principles. But they do not show an inner
impulse towards culture in theirnative country.
The most shocking despotism prevails there.
They do not attain to the feeling of man's personality.
Their mind is entirely dormant and it remains sunk within
itself. It makes no progress and thus

(47:18):
corresponds to the compact, undifferentiated mass of the
African land. Yikes.
Here he's talking about world history and he's talking about
how there are different culturesthat as Geist progresses, goes
through different races and cultures.
Then he says this about Caucasians.
Just in case you're thinking I'mmisinterpreting him.

(47:40):
No, he says some bad things. Yep.
I don't support this by the way,either of these things.
I this is I distance. I hear by distance.
This is not my view. This is Hegel's view.
It is the Caucasian race. Notice he says race though, not
just culture. It is the Caucasian race that
mine first attains to absolute unity with itself.
Here, for the first time, mind enters into complete opposition
to naturalness, apprehends itself and its absolute

(48:03):
independence, breaks feet free from the oscillation between 1
extreme and the other, achieves self determination, self
development and thereby producesworld history.
The Mongols, as we have already mentioned, have for their
character only the outward storming activity of an
inundation which dies away as quickly as it came.
Acts only destructively constructs nothing produces no

(48:23):
advance in world history. We didn't talk about that.
But he also says some harsh things against what he calls the
Mongols. This advance comes about only
through the Caucasian race. So you get some of the kind of
what foreshadows the Nietzscheanblonde beasts of German
superiority there. So that's a problem #4 he's not
a good scientist, OK? He didn't believe in evolution.

(48:47):
He disparaged Newton's views on motion.
He held Aristotle's views of there only being 4 substances
and he made a case that there must necessarily be 4 planets
around the sun. And then lastly, he is a
terrible writer and communicator.
Here's the question with which Iwant to leave you for Hegel,
because this is this is a big question.
Is he as brilliant as history has said that he is?

(49:10):
Is he this major player? He he's certainly a major player
in influence. Should he be?
Or does he hide some bad ideas in this very difficult to
understand language? Here's my view.
I think people that just dismissHegel because, and they just
say, and I've heard a lot of, you know, but you'll especially

(49:30):
get this with like undergraduatephilosophy students, they'll say
something like Hegel's just hiding really advanced stuff.
Or I'm sorry, he's just hiding really bad arguments with his
just difficult language so that you can't pin him down.
I think that's too naive. I think it's a little too
dismissive. I think there's some truth
there, right? Like, I, I feel like you can

(49:51):
condense everything Hagel wants to say in probably 50 pages and
not thousands. Hagel, I think, is writing this
way intentionally, though. He's not trying to do the
traditional Descartes binary thing.
So I think he knows what he's doing with that.
So is their critique valid? To some extent, yes, but it's
too simple. Hegel, I think, is very smart.
He's very well read. He knows a bunch about
philosophy. I think he is probably a great

(50:13):
mind. He could have been a greater
mind had he said it clearly. But had he said it clearly, it
would be going against the very project that he's trying to do.
So that's my view of Hegel. I hope that you've enjoyed it.
Thanks for tuning in to Ideological.
We've got other episodes. I'm about to do one on pirates
and other things. Like they won't all be this
difficult. This one's difficult because I
want to give you what I like about our show is I like that

(50:35):
there's some heady academic things, but I also like that
there's fun things in culture. Most podcasts don't do both.
I like that there is me teaching, but also interviews.
So again, Tooting my own horn. Toot, toot.
I hope you will too. Does that mean to toot toot a
horn for me? Don't toot my horn Anyway, so
thanks for tuning in. Good to see you.

(50:57):
I can't see you. You can see me enjoy Hegel.
Go read some Hegel today. All right, we'll see you next
time.