Episode 15: Hegel on History

0:08 Mark: You're listening to the Partially Examined Life, a philosophy podcast by some guys who at one point set on doing philosophy for a living, but then thought better of it. My name is Mark Linsenmayer, effusing the wisdom of the ages to you from the frozen reaches of Madison, Wisconsin.

0:19 Seth: This is Seth Paskin calling you from the balmy latitudes of Austin, Texas.

0:25 Wes: This is Wes Alwan participating from the balmy regions of my room, Boston, Massachusetts,

0:35 Mark: participating. I love that our question for episode number 15 is something like, how should a philosopher approach the study of history? Which the fact that I had to use the word philosopher in there means that this is not a question that a normal person would care about, because the reading that we chose for this week doesn't actually tell you a hell of a lot about history, but more about the author himself. It is the introduction to the philosophy of history taken from lectures by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, and you get a link to an online version of that reading, plus a link to what I consider a better translation in a paperback version that you could purchase at our website, partiallyexaminedlife.com Here are the ground rules we've established for running these here discussions.

Number one, we don't assume that our audience knows anything about any of this, and when it comes to Hegel, there is a whole lot to not know. Number two, no gratuitous name dropping. We're interested in ideas, not with fetishizing a bunch of dead philosophers. If we have a point to make, we're just gonna make it and not say, for instance, you would know what I'm talking about if you had read Strom Thurmond's the Techniques and Styles of Interpretive Dance. And number three, we shall be rigorous and exact in all that we say, except in the case where not doing so seems like it would be more entertaining.

All right, so I was hardly able to spit out the intro there without Seth exploding in his joy over Hegel. So go ahead, Seth.

2:06 Seth: So, first off, I have a couple of things. The first thing is I am the one who's doing the editing on the previous episode. And in my introduction to that episode, I predicted that the Texas Longhorns would be winning the national championship as we recorded it shortly before that happened. I'm here to officially say that congratulations to Alabama Crimson Tide, and we are all extremely disappointed at the outcome of the game. But not to take anything away from them, they played a great game. But I felt compelled, I should say reason demanded that I course correct as the unfolding of the world Historical spirit did not exactly occur in the way that I had anticipated.

So I have been extremely busy and did not like pre order a copy of the book from Amazon to get to shipping and all that kind of stuff. I just figured this week, no problem, I'll run to Barnes and Noble or one of the used booksellers around town or Borders, because surely there's a bunch of copies of Hegel's Introduction to the Philosophy of History floating around a large university town. Let me tell you how incorrect I was. There is literally a, I'm gonna say shelf and a half of philosophy books at any major bookseller anymore, including the used bookstores.

And of Hegel's works, the only one that remains is that sort of grotesque peach colored version of the phenomenology of spirit and otherwise there is nothing. So I think for all intents and purposes, Americans have given up on reading philosophy in general, but they have certainly given up on reading Hegel.

3:54 Mark: Doesn't that say something more about patterns of book selling that we people who would read this kind of thing are just more likely to go to the Internet than dig around somewhere?

4:05 Wes: Wasn't he a Nazi or something?

4:08 Mark: Hey, speaking of before his time, I have a book selling story to tell you that I went to, this is in Austin I believe, and we went to some sort of outlet, some sort of like factory discount place for books and they had in the like how to write section, like you know, how to put a sentence together, that kind of thing. Heidegger's basic writings.

4:31 Seth: Because that is awesome.

4:35 Mark: I just want to see the person who like is trying to get their resume a little more polished, picking up that as a guidebook.

4:42 Wes: Right? Strunk and White's Elements of Style.

4:45 Unknown speaker: Yes.

4:46 Seth: When do you use the apostrophe on it? Das dasein der Intervenzein. Fantastic.

4:56 Mark: Oh, oh, oh. Hey, we should give some kind of basic history of this guy, in other words, like where he stands in the historical framework of the world. He was after Kant. It was a little before Nietzsche. There you go.

5:13 Wes: That's all you need to know. Yeah, that's my context.

5:15 Seth: Well, here's the other thing you need. So he was a university professor, like all of them. He was around during the French Revolution and was very enthusiastic. He felt that was a very important world historical event. He was actually a fan of the French in general, I think. And you can't study philosophy either academically or even informally without coming across him. Somehow he stands, even to those who know only his name, he stands as some kind of monumental figure in the history of philosophy in much the same way as Kant does. Hate him or love him. That's my 2 cents.

5:58 Mark: I didn't know previously that the people that taught me Hegel were in fact revisionists on Hegel. But I was looking at the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article about Hegel that says that most of the people, the Hegel scholars, as of, you know, the end of his life and the beginning of the 20th century and all that, the people that we talked about Hegel, Hegelian's FH Bradley, in the context of our Wittgenstein episode, is somebody that Wittgenstein and Russell were trying to dethrone. So there's that version of Hegel that they were arguing against, which is really sort of the mature Hegel, who is very, you know, has this emphasis on this weird notion of logic that is not what logicians would consider logic today, but also seems very theistic, seems very traditional in certain ways.

Even though he was after Kant, maybe he was saying, ah, Kant says you can't know anything about the in itself, about God and immortality and whatever. But no, no, Hegel's all about the absolute spirit and us as manifestations of God and kind of sounding like Leibniz and things like that. We've got this picture of the mature Hegel, which is mostly what we're going to be talking about today, because these lectures are toward the end of his life. In fact, there is no book that he wrote called the Philosophy of History or Introduction to Philosophy of History.

It's just these are lectures he gave, which is. It turns out that these are an easier way into his system than some other things, probably because they're lectures and you can't be such an obscure ass when you're talking to people as you can in a book, right? Like, if you have to actually face these students, even if they're your, you know, the peon students out there, you still have to try to sound slightly clear.

7:38 Seth: So does that mean that by doing a podcast with three clowns like us, we can be more. More ass like than somebody writing a book and less ass like than somebody with an audience?

7:49 Mark: I suppose, but we get to actually answer each other and will not feel shy about doing so. But actually, this side of Hegel is not something that I learned in school. What I was taught was actually more the Phenomenology of Spirit, which is his first book, looking more at his concrete notions of the development of the self. We've talked a little about that. Maybe the thing he's most Famous for, apart from the dialectic, is this the master slave. So something that's supposed to tell us about how self consciousness develops. So he's like one of the early guys.

And in fact the term phenomenology, that's in phenomenology of spirit, you know, there's a giant movement of phenomenology after him. They didn't mean quite the same thing that he meant by it. They were. I think we talked about this before. They were trying to describe experience as it occurs to us in itself. As opposed to those naughty empiricists who are talking about my perceiving green is my perceiving sense data and you know, making up all these sort of theoretical terms that we'll talk about when we talk about Hume and Locke and those guys.

So these phenomenologists were supposed to be just describing the phenomena as they are occurring, sort of as free of theory as possible. And which of course gets you into discussion of how theory influences the way you describe things. But in any case, Hegel was giving an early version of this and in fact it was sort of a more broad version because it's not even like phenomena as they appear to a single subject. Right. They're kind of phenomena as they appear to consciousness in general, to spirit, which is a more diffuse, weirder notion. Which is probably what we should start by talking about, Right?

9:24 Seth: Yes.

9:25 Mark: So he talks about history as the progression of the actor on the stage of history. Of course there are individuals and there are nations, but really all these boil down to is the world spirit coming to self consciousness of itself.

9:43 Seth: That's kind of.

9:44 Mark: I just thought to start with the weirdest possible thing, which is also what the phenomenology, again his way earliest book, whereas the history is the latest, is also about the very same thing, except it's approached from a very different style where it sort of starts with, you know, from the ground up describing, you know, starting with sense data and then concepts and kind of doing this epistemological study kind of like Kant does. So this revisionist view of Hegel that I was taught really focuses more on his epistemology, his psychology, that kind of stuff. Whereas his mature thought he really liked to talk a lot about. Philosophy of Right is a much more painful. Is his last actual book. Right is all about politics and it's much more painful than the philosophy of history 1. But they're certainly related.

10:34 Seth: Mm.

10:35 Mark: And they all have to do with this notion of spirit. Or Geist is the German. Right.

10:42 Seth: Yes. So I think we should point out that the first, I don't know, I would say 40 or 50 pages of the Philosophy of History is actually quite readable, I think, relatively speaking. And one of the things that's key is that he points out at some point early on that this was my favorite. He's trying to explain what he's gonna do and why he's doing it. And he says, I'm sorry. He says that, listen, what I'm gonna do here is show you that the idea or reason is the true, eternal and absolutely powerful essence that reveals itself in the world. And the world is nothing else but this revealed in its honor and glory. And this thesis has been proved by philosophy. And he says, I'm not obliged to make any demands upon your faith that you believe that. I'll just tell you that I've already done all the work and I know it to be a fact. So you can just take my word for it.

11:44 Mark: Well, and after you read the 500 page book, that is after the introduction, which I didn't even glance at, did you guys?

11:52 Seth: No, no. But I thought it was kind of funny because he basically in the first, just pages just completely unloads on people and then says, but we're going to take a lot of this on faith because I've proved it elsewhere. So I'm just going to kind of explain it to you here. I just have this image of the earnest students in the class. You know when you have that moment when you first take a seminar where the professor just lays something out and you think, oh my God, I am so in over my head. I'm so out of my element. And you don't realize, you know, that that's purposely done from a rhetorical perspective to take the arrogance out of you.

Just imagine him delivering this in person. But the purpose of the book is for him tell us about this thing he wants to call universal history. And universal history is going to be an explanation of how not the world in the sense of the physical world, but the world of the spirit, which you can think of as mind or consciousness to some extent culture, in fact progresses from a state of what we might call unreason or brutishness to towards reason. And that it moves in a. If not linear, at least it grows and progresses. And that he believed that a study of the history of the world would show this progression towards this ideal end that would be brought about by reason, which he described as freedom.

So there's this absolute liberty, absolute freedom, which is the end goal of the world spirit revealing itself. And that if we look and do a history of the world, we will be able to see that. Now, what that actually means is difficult to understand, but that's the purpose of the work.

13:49 Mark: He doesn't mean by freedom what you think. No, you listeners.

13:52 Seth: Yeah.

13:53 Wes: He doesn't mean liberty, you know, in the sense of what he calls caprice and the state of nature, freedoms that Hobbes talks about. He means freedoms insofar as they are aligned with the higher goals of spirit and ultimately the state. Right.

14:10 Seth: And reason. I mean, the key is that reason

14:13 Wes: is instantiated by the state.

14:15 Seth: Yes, reason. The key is that it's freedom to be completely. I don't want to say rational because that implies something else, but it's the freedom dictated by reason, which is a weird thing to say.

14:27 Wes: Well, I don't think this is a new idea and I think we've talked about this before with Kant and perhaps Leibniz, because the typical go around for the whole problem of free will, right, is to talk about freedom as adherence to some set of principles over another because it becomes incoherent just to say, well, you know, free will must mean that I can arbitrarily do what I want as if there's a tear in the fabric of the space time continuum and I'm not part of the deterministic universe. There's that whole problem. So free will becomes. Not that there's no such thing as contingency and deterministic forces which manifest themselves in individuals and their passions. It's just that your actions become aligned with particular set of laws. So in Kant's case, with the groundwork reading we did, the workaround was that the laws came from oneself. In this case, the laws come from reason.

15:24 Mark: It's the same way Kant says it.

15:26 Wes: It's another iteration of what, what Kant said. So yeah, it's.

15:28 Mark: But it relativizes him, right, because the laws here are not universal laws. They are something that come from the society in which you are living in and they align with the ethics and actual legal laws of society, of that particular society.

15:47 Wes: Right. But you get gradations here. So the society can be more or less free. It's not all or nothing. And so, you know, some particular state may have set of laws which are, they're freer than the despotism, say, of the, you know, the early, I guess, Asians that he talks about. But they're not the grand ending in which the state has perfected itself.

16:12 Seth: I guess I was just going to say I don't want to Jump to. He doesn't introduce the concept of the state until quite a bit on in the. The essay. I just wondered if you maybe want to do a little pre work on his talking about different kinds of history and so forth. Do we need to. To go over that? The original reflective, philosophical does that even.

16:31 Mark: So chapter one is what. What Seth is talking about? No, I don't think that's helpful.

16:36 Wes: It's. It really is boring.

16:38 Mark: He's saying, why do people write history? You could be writing it just like. Like Herodotus writing about what's going on at the time. Or you could be writing reflective history, which is hoping to learn from the past, like Machiavelli was doing in our last episode. Or history of art. It could be just getting at some particular aspect of it. But he's interested in philosophical history, which I thought the only interesting part of that was. Well, philosophical history is supposed to be analytic in some important way. And he warns us against doing what a lot of German historians he's.

He accuses of doing, which is imposing some narrative on existence on. On events that have already occurred. And of course, the narrative makes Germany the most awesome endpoint of all that has happened before. Yeah, and he warns us against that. But yet it's hard for me to see then as he goes to this, the rest of this reading, how he's not doing that himself, given that he just to jump ahead a little, given that he thinks that seemingly the best kind of state, that's the end point of history that gives the maximum freedom is the constitutional monarchy.

Awesome. Okay, so that's chapter one. So we go to chapter two.

17:54 Seth: All right, fair enough.

17:56 Mark: So that's when he introduces what you were talking about Seth, as the thing he clobbers his students over the head with by saying reason is the engine that drives all history, which seems to be the most obviously controversial point in there. And that causes me to want to dismiss him entirely, frankly. But he at least explains in this chapter a little of what he might mean, which is you could say that, you know, reason runs the universe, like Anaxagoras. Right. We talked about in our physics episode, which is just to say that natural phenomena follow natural laws, which doesn't mean that the natural phenomena look to the natural laws and say, oh, we better follow those. It's just you can use mathematical law, mathematical formula or something like that, something law like to describe things.

18:43 Wes: Right.

18:44 Mark: And so he doesn't mean that, but

18:46 Wes: that's a sense in which we can see that. I mean, there's an uncontroversial sense of in which reason guides history. Right. In that natural law sense.

18:55 Seth: Yeah.

18:56 Mark: He's trying to distinguish what by explaining these other versions like distinguish his own view, which is not entirely opposed to that Anaxagoras version. The second one is that history is run by Providence.

19:10 Wes: Right.

19:10 Mark: You could, if you, if you have religious faith, you could say God is leading man ever closer toward heaven or something. But the thing he's critical about that is people. And he does believe that because this absolute spirit, it's God. He spells that out. Sorry, spoiler alert. He puts it, he mentions it right there. I'm not jumping ahead here, but he criticized that people that believe in Providence, they would not presume to think they can know Providence because of how could you know what God thinks? But no, the thing he wants to argue for is that the world of spirit, right, the world of self conscious beings or beings with some sort of intelligence as opposed to natural phenomena moves in law like ways that sort of according to his logic, the logic of internal logic of ideas that's kind of like Anaxagoras's but a little different.

That we'll talk about the, the his dialectic again, but that it moves toward sort of like Providence. But if we analyze the movement of history in the past, you know, by using his logic as a tool, we can figure out where it's going. So we can be, yes, it's where God wants the world to go, but we can know that. And not because, you know, we read the Bible really closely or something, but because we use the conceptual tools that Hegel has worked out earlier and coming up with his logic to look at past events.

20:39 Wes: Yeah. You know, one way of thinking about this too is in terms of that conflict that we addressed in the groundwork of the metaphysics of Morals reading where we talked about the sort of analog to natural law, which was this internal moral law that comes from within and that so you have this kingdom of ends where everyone does what they ought to do, which is completely hypothetical in Kant system. Right. It's in or it's heaven, it doesn't exist on this world. And then you have the merely natural world where everything must happen. And so for I think you, you could see Hegel as sort of I'm going to write all the history in between those two poles and show how we're progressing towards that, let's say kingdom of ends where instead of being merely this set of internal laws that that's never actualized, in fact we get closer and closer to actualizing them.

And Then in this case, instead of it coming from the, you know, this transcendental ego, it comes from this collective Geist.

21:47 Seth: Let me make a suggestion as an entry point. Why don't we kind of look a little bit at what he says about the. About world and what the world is, and maybe that will help at least put some boundaries. So I think early on in. In the second part of the essay, he talks about the world, including what he calls the physical and the psychical. And so you shouldn't read psychical as psychological, but essentially he's delineating between sort of nature, which is the world of matter or things, physical nature, and then the realm of spirit, which is somehow related to mind, consciousness.

Let's just leave it at that for now. In fact, I think he says in the essay it has to remain abstract and vague for now. But one of the things that he said that I thought was actually quite interesting, particularly coming off of this recent Philosophy of Physics episode that we did, is that he says physical nature is a rational system. Now, we don't need to worry about reason as it instantiates itself in nature as far as our exposition of history. But just as an aside, he says the principle of physical nature is unity. That physical nature is composed of parts that exclude each other and seek ideal unity in an indivisible point.

And this he. He sort of builds off of the idea of gravity. So his idea is all things tend towards a single point. You know, every. All physical things tend towards a single point. They all want to join together was kind of the. That's what you need to read into this. I think that they're all separate and dis from each other and they all want to join together into unity, but they. They can't. That's the ultimate striving of physical nature. What he says is that in opposition, spirit already has that unity in itself and that he sort of further describes that unity in itself as a form of freedom, meaning your existence depends only upon yourself.

So basically, things in the world, matter rely on other things in the world and they cannot exist independently. Therefore they're not quote, unquote free, but spirit. This abstract idea of spirit has freedom precisely because its existence depends only on itself. It is a unity unto itself.

24:27 Wes: This. I love this passage, by the way, the use of the concept of gravity, which, by the way, for readers who are using the PDF, because I'm using it, it's page 31. And the concept as well of this mass and there's a center of gravity and everything is sort of pushing in towards that. And that's, that would be the unity if it were reducible to that point, which would also be its destruction. So he says it exhibit itself as self destructive, as verging toward its opposite and indivisible point. So and if it could attain it, it would be matter no longer.

It would have perished. It strives after the ideal, after the realization of its idea. For in unity it exists ideally spirit on the contrary, already is the center of itself and so on. I mean, how are we to make sense of spirit already having that unity? I suppose you could say because it's anything non material has no parts. It's sort of like the Leibnizian simple, the monad, where it's the partless point. And actually this, this is reminiscent of Leibniz because for Leibniz it is almost the physical point which is the spiritual unity. Right.

25:43 Seth: So anyway, the easy, the easy answer is to replace the word spirit with the word God, as Mark suggested earlier. But I think we don't truly understand kind of what the implication of that is until he starts talking about actuality and potentiality later on.

25:56 Mark: Well, clearly he's this notion, even though it's pretty uniquely his, is grown out of some of the philosophers he read. So Leibniz again, which we talked about another episode, has this notion that all mind is kind of of the same stuff, but God is just the infinite kind of that stuff. Right. And mind is sort of a coating over every time there is something that's sort of self organizing. Like it could be a molecule of water. Right. There's a, there's a, a mind, a monad. It's not a really developed kind of monad like us, but so you could call that a soul or a spirit or something and that.

26:36 Wes: But it's not self conscious. It's not spirit in the sense of self conscious.

26:40 Mark: Yeah, right. But they all reflect each other and they're all ultimately part of the same thing. And just if they could just get beyond their own finitude, then they would see that they're all part of God. Right. So that's kind of a version of Leibniz. Anyway, so Hegel's running with that. He's also running with the Platonic notion. We haven't read Plato talking about this yet, but if you know anything about Plato and his set of forms that sort of the, there's, there's these, the world of ideas is in some way objective and maybe even more real than, you know, the gross matter that is around us.

And it all has to do with the universality of concepts that when we. When I say dog, I'm not referring to just this one dog here. I'm referring to dogness. And that's a universal concept that when we all say that, we're all saying the same thing. No matter what ideas are in our individual heads, we're kind of making use of this concept. That is not. I mean, you can give different metaphysical explanations for it. It doesn't have to be, you know, something that existed before human minds existed for Hegel, like it does for, For. For Plato. But he's.

He's running with that too. And so he, he. And again, like Kant when he talks about ethical notions like whenever we make. And, and actually even the same goes for aesthetic notions. Like when I say this is good, I'm not saying it is good to me. I'm not saying it seems good to me. I'm making this universal proclamation. It is good. I'm saying something universal about it. And so I'm kind of calling in the universal. You know, however you want to interpret the truth of my claim, you know, by looking at who I am and what circumstances I'm saying it in.

The language that we use is inherently universal. So in that sense, it's like we're all. Mind is reaching out to the infinite in this way, to the universal.

28:35 Seth: The key is that there's a connection between what we might call human consciousness or the part of us that actually does conceptual, creates concepts about the world and interacts with the world and some sort of abstracted world or abstracted space where there are concepts or concepts of concepts or something along those lines. And Hegel has to rely on that same connection. I mean, he's that definition of spirit as being a unity in itself that relies only on itself for its own existence. He spins into a form of self consciousness. Namely, he says that the two things that are distinguished are the fact that.

That I know and what I know, that in self consciousness these are merged into one because, you know, it knows itself. And he's going to need to tie that into human consciousness when he starts talking later about how spirit manifests itself in the world. Right. So he's doing the same move like you said. He's doing the same move that Plato did. He's doing the same move that Kant did. He's doing the same move that all these guys did. He's just got a new vocabulary for it and he's applying it in a different space.

29:45 Mark: Yep. And I know that. I've read a lot of people when they talk about Hegel, they address his historicity. Not just that he's writing about history, but that even though he has this notion that we're jumping toward the objective, somehow we're getting beyond our individual subjective selves when we talk about ethical things, he wants to stress that that's not like Kant says, because we're, you know, jumping toward basic truths of reason or you know, toward Platonic forms, but that it's something that is, is social.

30:19 Seth: Yeah, good point.

30:20 Mark: Social creation. And that somehow just by using reason, by being a self conscious being. Right. Sort of, he mixes those together a lot that reason and freedom and self consciousness. It's kind of like you're just going through your day pushed along by things, but once you stop and, and look at yourself and look at why you were just doing it, well, that gives you the freedom to do something else. That gives you the freedom to apply a principle to your action in the way that that's, you know, how Kant talks about reason governing you, that you're not just letting yourself be pushed by your desires.

30:55 Wes: Right.

30:56 Mark: So he, he has that same kind of thing. But instead of as for Kant, that getting at reason is getting at this universal thing, well, for Hegel it's not quite universal. It's larger than us, but it has more to do with something that's been defined by our culture, whether explicitly or sort of as the next step that our culture is going to take or the intellectual life of the culture is going to take.

31:20 Seth: So you use the term culture, Mark, and I just have a little bit of an issue with that only because even though I think you're right in the sense that that's how he was thinking, you know, and he was certainly thinking of certain types of culture and all that, the language he uses about man or human beings, he's trying to abstract a little bit and not be necessarily so culturally bound, even though he clearly had something in mind. I think if we're going to interpret it, I want to go to the text just for a second to kind of talk about that because I think it's probably very confusing right now and probably doesn't make a lot of sense to people about what we actually mean when we're talking about development in history or unfolding in history.

And one of the examples he gives, I think covers what you're saying, Mark, about sort of cultural, social change being a reflection as well as this kind of self consciousness to human beings. And he mentions at one point, not too far along, that this would be somewhere around page 33, he talks about the quote unquote Orientals or the Chinese having this idea that a single man can be free. And then the Greeks and the Romans.

32:26 Mark: Right, the. To just clarify. So it's the emperor. The emperor is the only one that can be free. Yes, I'm sorry, everybody else is just their servants and have to obey.

32:35 Seth: Right. And that the Greeks and Romans had consciousness of freedom. More. They had more consciousness of freedom than the Chinese because there are some that are free, but they still held slaves. And then he says Christianity introduces the idea that man as such or man as man is free. But that is just the introduction of the principle. And it still is going to take a long time in the course of history to actually work that out in reality. But to try to get a sense of what he means by reason and spirit unfolding itself in the world. He believed that these were stages of almost evolution, if you will.

It's certainly stages of world historical change and that they demonstrated a movement from the sovereign, which he talks at some point, at length, later, to sort of an aristocracy or a state where there are certain members that are free, but you still have others that aren't. And it's moving towards this position where once you recognize that all human beings, men as such, are free, you'll end up building some kind of social structure and government that acknowledges that and that manifests it. And that's a demonstration. That's an example of what he's talking about.

34:02 Wes: The idea to hold this in opposition to is just the idea that things unfold according to natural law. Right. So you might think of, yes, history in fact is directed and determined, but. And you could take the initial conditions and figure out the way everything's going to end based on the way everything begins and on the laws of physics that govern everything. But for Hegel, there's a sort of, I guess you'd call it teleological principle. There's an end above that guiding everything. So that, you know, one way to look at it is this example of again, the seed that he uses where he says, and this is right near where you were reading seth on page 31, the germ or the seed contains in itself the whole nature of the tree.

So that there's a sense in which, I guess you could think, you could say there's this DNA to history or blueprint, which sort of transcends even natural law. And that blueprint has to do with the development of freedom through greater and greater self consciousness. Whether you think of it as abstractly or in its particular cultural manifestations.

35:14 Seth: Yeah, that's where he says that essentially spirit with a capital S contains within itself its self contained unity, all of the potential that it will actualize in the world throughout the course of history until it reaches its natural conclusion, which is its end point.

35:36 Wes: You know, and I think here of, there's a theodicy here. He's justifying the ways of God to man. Given all the atrocities of history, there's, there's some higher purpose. It's like he's trying to explain creation in some sense. What's the point of this self contained spirit, God creating anything in the first place? And one of the classical ideas I think is that spirit remains abstract. There's no bodies in heaven. Right. There's no carnality, there's no sensuousness, there's no physicality. And to reach the fullest self comprehension involves creating this mirror in nature and then coming to know oneself, to actualize oneself through this progression towards self consciousness in this instantiated physical universe.

36:19 Seth: Yeah, there's a. Wes, that's, there's a nice, there's a nice, you know, me finding the poetic right. Here's my, here's my contribution. This is a direct quote from the PDF, page 35. But even regarding history as the slaughter bench at which the happiness of peoples, the wisdom of states and the virtue of individuals have been victimized, the question involuntarily arises to what principle, to what final aim these enormous sacrifices have been offered. Yeah, better be one, right? Yeah.

36:51 Wes: Slaughter bench. Right.

36:53 Mark: That's because the primary obvious objection when somebody says reason is ruled by history is like, well, why is it sucks so much so far? Like it really doesn't seem like it's progressing. Seems like things are better in the good old days or, you know, whatever.

37:08 Seth: Yeah, and he's, he's, and he's writing this shortly after the French Revolution, which was horrific, absolutely horrific. I mean in terms of, you know, slaughter bench. He has to believe that something.

37:19 Wes: Yeah. And even some of his heroes like Napoleon, Right. They do horrible things even though they're, they're bringing history to its next stage. Each development, I guess, because of the negation of the previous stage, it could only come about through some sort of violence. There's an inevitability. If there's going to be change and becoming and there's going to be destruction.

37:41 Seth: Well, that actually is a good segue. So what we had been talking about was sort of this first section where he talks about the characteristics of the nature of spirit, the Abstract nature. So we just kind of have to go along with this idea that spirit is this abstract unity that wants to unfold itself in the world through history to some sort of end. And it has a characteristic that makes you think of consciousness or self consciousness, which is where you make the linkage into the transcendental ego and so forth. But the question becomes then if you even take that on faith, which I know Mark would never do.

38:26 Mark: Well, that's. That's the. That's the absolute spirit part of it. Like spirit itself is supposed to be something we are intimately familiar with. It is the mental.

38:35 Seth: I'm talking about absolute spirit.

38:36 Mark: Okay, but if.

38:37 Seth: All right, because west started talking about these great figures in history and the question becomes, okay, well, how does this absolute spirit plan to actually unfold in the world and change the world in history, since it can't actually. It actually isn't phenomenal or has any kind of physical essence or anything like that? How is it going to drive change and make the world unfold the way it wants? What is the means by which spirit is going to unfold as freedom in the world?

39:10 Mark: Why? Tell us?

39:14 Seth: Well, in no other way than through the actions and activity of men. Oh, and how does that work?

39:22 Mark: I thought it was gonna be something cooler than that.

39:24 Seth: No, unfortunately not.

39:26 Mark: Lasers, cosmic rays.

39:29 Wes: Yeah, it seems like an awfully inefficient way to do things.

39:33 Seth: Oh, and. And it is. And when he starts to explain it, it becomes even, like, more tragic. Right, because he says. He says that the truth is, is that people act out of passion or need or self interest. And that that in itself stands in opposition to the quote, unquote limitations of justice or morality, which is to say reason. Right. This is what we're going to find out later on is that reason actually means justice and morality and government.

40:03 Mark: If they act in self interest, which is different than acting in passion.

40:07 Seth: Correct? Well, yeah, he meant. He uses passions, so. Not passion with a capital P, but the passions like acting out of self interest in the way that we think of acting out of self interest in our state of nature. Discussion from Hobbes, for example, that human beings have a will to do something that's in their self interest and that stands opposed. It's the active force that drives the world and drives human behavior. But it actually stands in opposition to where we ultimately want to be, which is in this moral perfect government at some point.

40:45 Mark: Okay. I think he has a more subtle version of argument about selfishness, but we can talk about that in a bit. Certainly if you're acting purely out of your. Your animal interests, then you are not doing anything of historical noting. You're not driving history to its next place.

40:59 Seth: No, no, no. What I'm saying is that the motor, the engine that. That's pulling the train is human activity that originally is driven from this, driven out of this place of self interest. The human will is the motive force that drives human beings to act.

41:17 Wes: Right. But it's on page 36 in the middle. The motive power that puts them in operation and gives them determined existence is the need, instinct, inclination and passion of man. And this is where he's talking about will.

41:30 Mark: Okay. You are bringing up his sort of subtle argument about what selfishness is. What could be in our self interest is just. Or what we are passionate about means. We just. We take an interest in something. And when we take an interest in something, it could be something that is really purely personal and of no interest to anybody else. And that's not going to drive history forward. But we could also take an interest in promoting freedom. Or we could take an interest. You could essentially claim something as part of ourself. Right, right. And that could be anything.

And that the people who grab onto these universal claims, who grab onto these ethical claims and take a passion in and make them part of themselves, those are the ones that really drive history. Those are the ones that are the. The world historical individuals. Right. If they're, if they're doing that and they're also in a, you know, position of power to be able to actually affect anything.

42:21 Seth: Yeah, yeah, yeah. We were going to get there, but.

42:23 Wes: And of course they're not. They're not taking on these passions by virtue of obligation or it's that their passions happen to align more with, let's say, freedom. You know, so it's still. It's still personal in some sense. It's just that at each stage these people emerge whose personal passions align with freedom and the larger collective goal.

42:44 Mark: Right. I just stress this because this was like the big thing in my revisionist teaching of Hegel that I got from Frithjof Bergmann at University of Michigan was the big emphasis was on this. We talked about this before in terms of Hobbes, that if you're. If the way you talk about ethics is, oh, everybody is selfish, therefore you can't really act ethically or something like that. That just misses the point. It misunderstands what selfish is. It pictures us all as primarily these atomic units that have these, you know, little balls of greed that are reaching out toward you when in fact that's not how the self is created.

We don't start out as self conscious. Self consciousness is something that is achieved. We don't have self interests until we figure out, until we gain enough of a sense of self to then point at something and say that is part of me. And so you could have a sense of self that encompasses your family, that encompasses your society, that encompasses the ethical itself. There really is quite a lot of people. It's hard to argue that everybody does something things pure that have self interest in a narrow sense when through history so many people have died in religious wars fighting for ideas.

Is God in the bread or not the Protestant versus Catholic Anyway. So that's the short version of that, right?

44:03 Wes: One other way of saying that is that our desires are culturally conditioned or that they are influenced by the desires of the other. What other people want or what society says I should want. That becomes a huge factor in what my passions are, right, which is tied

44:20 Mark: into what your self conception is. Again getting back to that the master slave thing that I said Hegel was famous for. What that's about is about how we define ourselves. And we define ourselves through mutual recognition that I can't just decide who I am and what my interests are. It's because my teachers, my parents, my siblings, everybody I run into treats me certain ways. That is what gets me to actually maybe look at myself and sort of figure out they form the self that self consciousness starts on.

44:51 Wes: Right. Because my fundamental desire is for the desire of the other and that dyad. So my self consciousness depends upon having recognition from others.

45:01 Mark: Right.

45:01 Wes: In turn, that recognition is predicated on my valuing things which those others value

45:08 Mark: and, and also resistance from others. So in particular in this, in this view of the master and slave, it's actually it's not the master who gains self consciousness because all the slaves are obeying him. In fact, that's kind of like not having resistance. Like I can just reach through, you know, my slaves and make them like my arms and my legs and my tools. That doesn't give me a sense of myself. It's the slave who sort of being thwarted and being put in a corner by the master. That's the one who has this ability to then gain a sense of self.

And we saw that exactly with Nietzsche too. So the master and slave morality, the masters don't become self reflective. The slaves are the ones who are, are stymied at every point and turn inward. And even though it's in a poisonous way for Nietzsche, but they're the ones who gain self consciousness and really intelligence in all that makes sense, you know, people. Interesting. So, so it's all this, it's the same story.

45:59 Wes: Yeah.

46:00 Mark: So if you, if you have too much homogeneity again going back, that's why Hegel's ripping on the Chinese because he thinks he says really freaking obnoxious things about the Chinese and later about the Native Americans like, and just about, and about India that, oh, even though they have all this, I don't want to jump ahead too much, but even though they have all this culture, it's not really history because they're not really self conscious, because they don't, you know, because ultimately they don't have the same notion of freedom that we do.

46:27 Seth: Wow. I feel like I pushed a button. I don't know. I, I, I was trying to say something very innocuous. But because, I mean, I think it's, it's an important point for me just to say absolute spirit has to have some kind of agency in the world. And that agency happens to be human activity or human beings, but not just blind, brutish, self interested human activity. What happens is that you get a few people here and there, maybe more than a few that become reflective, are self conscious in the sense, in a kind of, I want to say, imitating or mirroring the self conscious unity of the spirit in their own conscious mind who strive to do something.

They have an idea, they catch a glimpse of the, you know, the idea of spirit and they say, oh well, I need to unify this state like Caesar, right? Who becomes the autocrat or Napoleon or somebody. And they don't, they aren't consciously trying to instantiate the end goal idea of spirit, but they're partaking somehow. They're reflecting without consciously being aware of it. And it's those people who, this is how spirit advances itself. And I wanted to ask you guys about this that it seems, is this the origin of the great man theory of history or was it, was it somewhere else and he just appropriated it this way?

48:02 Wes: But I think it's the origin of the opposite of that. Because the great men here are pushed on by the idea, right? They're pushed on by a more fundamental force, cultural force, right?

48:16 Mark: If they, if they didn't do it, somebody else would.

48:18 Wes: It's not like some individual comes in and carves up and imprints himself on the world. He's merely a manifestation of these inevitable spirit, spirit developments.

48:29 Seth: But the actual work, the actual work of moving forward history, whether it's done by this, this individual or that individual is still done by an individual.

48:38 Mark: Of course.

48:38 Wes: Yeah, yeah.

48:39 Mark: He talks about these world historical individuals. It's not clear to me that only world historical individuals can advance things. I mean, I don't think it's an accident that he thinks, you know, even you need a, even though you want a freedom, you want a constitutional monarchy because you want some individual at the head who's pushing things forward. It just wasn't clear to me that he meant that all changes are because of some individual teaching the rest of us or whether they're can just be mass movements, that there's no one particular person that's pushing it forward.

49:12 Wes: Mark, do you want to be reassured that you're advancing things as well?

49:16 Mark: I just, I'm wondering exactly how much of like you were saying, like an elitist doofus is. I keep feeling like we should talk more to understand this about dialectic. Because the reason that society will always go a certain direction, you know, whoever it is that's running it, and it might not happen right now if there is not a powerful person, if there's not one of these world historical individuals there to make it his passion to advance it in this way and teach the rest of us that that's the, you know, the new way that we should think about things.

But it's something about the internal logic of the ideas themselves. And Machiavelli kind of talked this way too, that he thought certain kinds of government would inevitably. A monarchy is, is inevitably going to lead to despotism. And that because that's sort of just, it's just going to happen. It's just internal to the logic of the type of thing itself. Like that when you get people in a certain situation, in a certain setup, things are going to evolve in a certain way. And you could figure out that out. You know, for Machiavelli it's just because he's seen that happening enough times.

But for, for Hegel, it seems like if you just look at the idea itself, you'll be able to see what's going to come next if you really have an understanding of it. And he thinks this is, this is true just across the entirety of all spiritual matters. Right. In his logic, anything mental is going to have this sort of self propulsive nature and it follows the progression of the dialectic. So should we talk a little bit about sort of some examples of dialectic and things, even if they're not from this reading and.

50:54 Wes: Yeah, could you do that?

50:55 Mark: Well, so I was reading a little about his logic and so like I Guess the beginning of his logic. He starts by considering just being abstract. And he says, well, if you think of being, to even sort of formulate that of a concept, then you have to have the notion of nothingness as it's not its opposite, but it's contrary. And then once you sort of think of nothingness, then that rolls you. I mean, you can't just think of absolute nothingness. There has to be, again, something just sort of distinguishing from it. But. And this distinguishing between being and nothingness gives rise to the synthesis between the two of them, which is particularity.

So it's not just being in general, it's a particular being. And so there's. There's his prime first example, sort of prior to all other possible ways of thinking, is this movement from being to nothingness to particularity. So that's the thesis, the antithesis and the synthesis.

51:49 Unknown speaker: Yeah.

51:49 Wes: There's the old problem of when we describe things as changing, we have to grapple with this problem of how they are not the same thing as they were in the past and yet are in some sense. So there's the nothingness, there's negation of something that was. And yet the new entity. Also it contains both the previous iteration as well as its negation.

52:16 Mark: Right.

52:17 Wes: That's.

52:17 Mark: That's really what the synth. So you could talk about this in terms of the progression of, you know, art forms. You know, maybe everybody is. Is, you know, trying to do very realistic pictures of things. And so people start reacting against that. Like, no, I want to, you know, draw angels. I don't want to draw baskets of fruit anymore. And then somebody, when they get tired of that, they'll maybe be a form that, you know, has. Has the. The good elements of realism, but then also the good elements of the fantasy. So maybe that's where expressionism might come from.

That we can draw realistic things, but we can infuse, you know, the. What. What drove us to want to draw fantasy in the first place. Right. Some of our emotional life. So that's definitely that. I think the kind of example that he might use to talk about a dialectical progression in the history. And. And I can. Once you start looking at that, like, look at trends in music, look at trends in, you know, what. So we. And then we had, in the early 70s, in the late 60s and early 70s, and then punk was this reaction against that. But then you had New Wave, which was kind of like taking advantage of.

Of both or, you know, retaining the good elements of. Of the intelligence that was in prog. But then also you know, acknowledging that punk had a point and trying not to be all snooty about it. So you get the talking heads.

53:36 Wes: Yeah. One way to look at this is the what's pushing forward one stage to the next. Each stage or phase has to have some sort of internal contradiction, that sort of tension that is going to lead to a new development. There's an engine there and that otherwise it would simply remain static. And that engine has something to do with internal tension.

54:03 Mark: Right. So politically, I mean, he thinks that the first kind of political relations are somebody dominating somebody else. So you like how he describes China, that you have a despotic relationship, and then the reaction to that is eventually people get sick of that or they rebel. They could fall into chaos. Well, okay, so the synthesis of those is something like the constitutional monarchy is let's keep what was cool about having one person at the head, but acknowledge why people would rebel against that and do something so that they're represented as well.

So again, going back to the progression of history, then if you say, like, why did Napoleon or Caesar or whatever do what they did? Well, they were really strong, passionate individuals, maybe even just pursuing their own dreams of glory. But that was the next thing sort of on the list that was coming down the pike. They just happen to be the one that took the bull by horns and did it. I mean, what do you guys think of that?

55:06 Wes: I guess the question is, Seth, how is it that this individual, great man or great human being, let's say, takes the reins of the historical forces and effects this change, but along a predetermined

55:19 Mark: route, I guess, is what.

55:21 Seth: So we take, for example, the Roman Republic, and we say there are contradictions inherent in this form of government that essentially sowed the seeds of its own destruction. And in opposition to a republic is a despotic state or an autocracy or whatever, the tyranny. And so it was necessary that the republic fall and that this despotic form of government come into play, and Caesar happened to be the guy who made it happen. But from a world historical perspective, the events were playing out the way they needed to play out in order for the next stage of evolution to happen.

It doesn't mean that an autocratic state was the next stage of evolution. It just means that in order for something to become, the republic had to, in essence, not necessarily be destroyed, but it had to encounter its opposite, get synthesized into this new form of government. Or perhaps when Caesar dies, then you get this new form of government. In that sense, I guess you could say it could have been Caesar, it could have been Brutus, it could have been anybody. But from a world historical perspective, what needed to unfold was that the Republic needed to be disbanded in favor of this other form of government, which it's always.

56:32 Mark: When you raise historical examples, then we as people who are not as up on history as we should be, don't feel comfortable contradicting them. Like, yeah, I know enough about Caesar and what happened. Do I know enough to say it could have gone some other way?

56:48 Unknown speaker: No.

56:49 Mark: So even when I'm thinking about Hitler, okay, there are all these elements in Germany that were sort of going toward evil, tyranny. Does that mean it had to happen? Or could it have just been diffused and have it never happen? Maybe have it just skip that stage and go straight to where Germany is now? Again, I don't quite know enough about Pre World War II Germany to say what had to happen at that. But it seems to me awfully random and contingent. And for Hegel to, as I think he really is implying that the particular geist of that nation had to go some particular way, just. It seems silly to me.

57:24 Seth: I kind of agree. I like the idea of using this as an interpretive tool to look at what happened and described it. But history just seems to be filled with so many accidents that. And near misses and things like that that changed the course. One way would be to say, well, of course it had to happen that way. That Hannibal decided not to attack Rome after winning the victory at wherever the hell it was up in northern Italy. And instead of taking the initiative, he was conservative and that ultimately sealed his fate. Well, that was because he wasn't connected to the absolute spirit and bringing on the world historical change that needed to happen.

Yeah, hindsight, hindsight. But I agree with you, Mark, that it just seems like you would have to interpret many, many, many events in history that appear to be completely random and accidental as motivated by absolute spirit that maybe has a sense of humor or play about it. Because it is not this inevitable, clearly constructed march of progress forward that is obvious at every step in retrospect to anybody except him.

58:27 Wes: Although, you know, it was. This whole idea was hugely influential through Marx. You know, Marx, in a sense, was an optimist. And this idea of progress is there as well. It's an application of Hegel to say that there's this inevitable transition from feudalism to capitalism to communism, let's say, where the thesis and antithesis has to do with tensions between social relations and class structure and then the underlying economic and Technological development. So when technology reaches a certain point, feudalism as a social arrangement doesn't make any sense anymore.

And inevitably the synthesis becomes capitalism. Let's say that sort of determinism, it's not completely implausible. I'm not saying I believe in it, but I'm not saying it's completely implausible that there's a directedness, directedness based on certain tensions between certain elements of history, say the economic, material, substrate of things, and then culture or class relations and stuff like that.

59:26 Seth: I agree with the idea that any system, any political system, any social system, any government ultimately contains within itself its own dissolution. Nothing is permanent. And I agree that you can say we can see how cultures interact and cultural forces come into play that change the way governments and people and so forth interact. And you can go back and say we understand how the advent of industrialism combined with certain characteristics of peasantry and the geography and this blah, blah, blah of central Europe resulted in X, Y and Z. And that without saying A, that it was inevitably that it roll out that way.

And without saying that, that is striving in any way, shape or form towards a goal. If Marx was doing the math, and the math was that clear, he would have seen that a certain kind of socialism was going to inevitably lead to not dictatorship of the proletariat, but Stalinism or some form of totalitarianism.

1:00:24 Wes: Well, I think Marx would say we haven't reached the historical stage yet in those. Okay, well, those were sorts of. Those were illusory. They may have called themselves communism, but they weren't.

1:00:35 Mark: You're right. It's kind of when you're looking at what the necessary changes in history are, it's because you're looking at some tension and saying, something's gotta give. So you might look at this America and like some of the half of it is really conservative and half is liberal. Eventually they're gonna go to war. And there are plenty of people in our country, the extremists on one side, I won't say one side or the other. The extremists on one side that think that that is inevitable and there will eventually be a race war or the civil war reunite. But no, there are plenty of ways that attention can be kicked down the road or resolved in part or diffused enough so the system can keep going indefinitely. It could even just last long enough until that particular tension becomes irrelevant.

1:01:18 Wes: Just to play devil's advocate, let's just take the very specific case of feudalism. Wasn't it inevitable that that fall Apart as technology and other economic forces develop or material conditions develop, that social relation can't really survive that. Isn't that inevitable?

1:01:33 Mark: Right, but where. Where would it go? Like if you have a very powerful government that instead of letting individual capitalists in the first place develop, you know, the way feudalism developed into capitalism with lots of independent capitalists, if right away the king became the only capitalist, that's another way that feudalism could have fallen apart. And the way it has fallen, did fall apart in some different parts of the country, of the Middle east or. I don't know that much about it, but.

1:02:00 Wes: Yeah, but I'm just saying that the

1:02:02 Mark: progression from feudalism to capitalism is not inevitable in the way that it actually happened here in the West.

1:02:06 Wes: No, I'm not saying in a specific way, but I'm saying that could we say that history could be stuck at feudalism forever? I want to say that no, there's no circumstance under which it would stall at feudalism so that there are internal tensions.

1:02:21 Seth: That's a specific example. And in the case of feudalism, you're talking about an economic system that became untenable with the advent of certain kinds of technology and the whole idea of peasantry and working the land and feudal estates.

1:02:34 Wes: I would say it's a social system that became incompatible with the underlying economics.

1:02:41 Seth: Yeah, but I'm saying take that out of the equation of the way it worked. Now, at some point, when somebody developed a tractor, it was going to end. Feudalism was not going to survive technology, even if the reason it changed was because of social changes.

1:02:52 Wes: That's what I'm saying.

1:02:53 Mark: And you can say things about like China's desire to keep its people in the dark and, you know, off of the Internet and stuff. Really, how long can that keep up? Eventually it's just gonna be impossible. They won't be able to close all the doors. Anybody who wants to get anything from anywhere in the world will be able to do it.

1:03:10 Wes: But I want to keep arguing, just as devil's advocate, because I don't really. For this directedness of history and for this inevitable changes towards a.

1:03:20 Seth: So, Wes, why does it have to be towards something? Why does it have to be directed? Why can't it just have direction without being direct? It is moving. Nobody's denying that there's change and evolution and all that. It's just to assert that it's towards something.

1:03:34 Wes: But isn't capitalism a more advanced state than feudalism? And isn't democracy, let's say, or a constitutional monarchy to take hegel's case, more advanced than tyranny, Something like that.

1:03:45 Seth: If you're going to answer that, then you got to have some criteria by which you're judging it, which Hegel obviously does. And he thinks that feudalism was less free than this constitutional monarchy. And, and theoretically we could say the same thing about our representative democracy, that we are more free than serfs were and peasants were. And so we are more evolved, we are further along and we get the iPad. But I mean, you know, ultimately I could also say that it's simply a difference.

1:04:13 Wes: You don't want to take sides here. Feudalism versus capitalism. You don't want to unequivocally come down on one side or the other.

1:04:19 Mark: Feudalism rules. Feudalism forever.

1:04:23 Wes: Man as a Dungeons and Dragons lover.

1:04:26 Seth: Here's the difference. I'll take sides if you tell me what role I get to play in feudalism. I know what my role is here. If you tell me I get to be on the top of the food chain, then I'll take feudalism any day of the week. I'd certainly love to be the guy with the premature or whatever.

1:04:40 Wes: That's that master slave thing again, which

1:04:43 Seth: is I would have no problems about trading in my self consciousness for land and service.

1:04:50 Wes: You're completely impoverished as a feudal lord. Completely impoverished.

1:04:55 Seth: I know.

1:04:56 Mark: If you're going to talk about that particular duality, I would want to talk more generally about sort of elitism versus everybody ism. How do you want to say it? You could think of this progression toward freedom as a matter of, you know, as time goes on, more and more the individual will gain prominence, will have an intellectual place in the world. So it won't just be the upper crust that are making all the decisions and coming up with all the ideas and producing all the art and then the rabble that is just getting by. Like it seems like a pretty natural progression in history that there will be no more rabble. But then again, there are social forces working to keep rabble. Right. To keep large portions of the world impoverished. I wish that there was this directedness toward greater freedom in this way, but I just don't. I'm not so optimistic about it.

1:05:47 Wes: Yeah. And I, you know, believe me, I'm a huge pessimist about that too. And I'm a, normally I'm a big advocate of, oh, nothing ever really changes and everything's, you know, it's just as bad now in different ways as it was. But what I'm fascinated by is we are comfortable talking about, let's say Biological evolution, even if we know that that's directed by purely natural forces, but we still think of it as an evolution. And whether you think it's legitimate or not, this is what I'm putting up for discussion. We still think of one stage as more advanced than the other. There may be something normative there. I don't know. I think Hegel. It's a social or historical version of evolution where inevitably the organism, let's say, becomes more capable and more adapted to more circumstances and more functional in a lot of ways.

1:06:34 Seth: So, anyway, yeah, I can't go with you down that path.

1:06:37 Wes: Why?

1:06:38 Seth: Because evolution as a concept talks about the way that organisms change in response to their environment. And part of their environment is other organisms. So the reason we think we're better than dinosaurs is because we have bigger brains and opposable thumbs. Because at some point we realized that in order to be able to kill other organisms and eat them more efficiently and so forth, we had to develop this capacity. But there's nothing that suggests that we are headed towards any kind of fulfilling any kind of evolutionary destiny. The Star Trekian thing, where you ultimately just become pure brain or pure energy or whatever. There's nothing that suggests that. And it's very possible that our environment.

1:07:19 Wes: I think. No, I think there is. I understand what you're saying. There's not. Fittest is the wrong term because it's merely a matter of how much you can reproduce relative to a certain environment. And fit in one environment is unfit in another. But what I'm saying is that there actually is a progression towards organisms like human beings for which the environment becomes less and less relevant. They become. We've developed functions or functionality which allows us to thrive in any environment. There's not an environment that's going to come along. That's true.

1:07:49 Mark: Weren't you about to write something about the Road? Isn't the Road an example? The Cormac McCarthy novel and the movie was made of it, of an environment that people cannot live in.

1:07:59 Wes: Nothing.

1:08:00 Mark: We are not independent of our environment.

1:08:02 Wes: No, I'm not saying that. You're talking.

1:08:04 Mark: You're talking about we're more independent.

1:08:06 Seth: You're talking. You're talking about our ability to overcome the harshness of the physical environment. Temperature fluctuation.

1:08:13 Wes: I'm still talking about biological evolution. What I'm saying is that there's a directedness. It's not merely jumping around the development from, let's say, single cell to human beings is a directedness in the sense that human beings are much more adapted to a more general variety of environments than let's say a single cell which is very environment dependent.

1:08:36 Seth: Okay, I can go with that. You say that the goal of evolution is somehow, I mean, I still think you have to posit some kind of endgame or at least some abstract end goal. And if you say that the point of evolution is that organisms adapt and the most adaptable organism is the one that thrives, then you're sort of led to the conclusion that the purpose or the goal of evolution is to create adaptability and that the infinitely adaptable organism, if it's ever created, will be the end state of evolution. And that human beings are definitely more adaptable than single celled organisms or one eyed cats or dolphins or whatever.

1:09:16 Mark: I don't know, I feel like I should at least pretend that I am the scientist who knows something about natural selection, who would jump in at this point and say this is all a completely bullshit way of talking about evolution and that the whole point is that all animals have been evolving all the way around and the diversity of species means there are many different directions that one could go and successfully adapt. So that the ringworm, that has been exactly the same for umpteen million years, that's because that was a really awesome way that it adapted. It's like saying we're new versions of chimps. No, no, in fact chimps have been evolving just as long as we have. They just went a little different direction anyway. But I do, I do accept your point that we're more general, I'll give you that.

1:09:59 Wes: I mean this is something I actually do. I mean I, you know, as a hobby, evolve. You know, I, that I know that it's, I'm not simply bullshitting, it's not most biologists. I mean, you know, there's going to be camps, but yes, of course there are really. You know, sharks haven't changed in a long, long time because they have a great evolutionary setup relative to their environment.

1:10:20 Seth: But what they're saying is the environment hasn't changed.

1:10:23 Wes: Yes, look, I fully understand that the objection to saying to using fitness is an evaluative term when again fit in one situation could be unfit relative to another environment. What I'm talking about is a larger picture where you can talk about the variety of environments in which an organism can function. There's a huge significance and I think most biologists, you know, at least the ones who write popular books, think there's a huge significance to the development of say a large brain. It's not just that a large brain is Good for this particular environment.

The large brain is unique in that it's so adapted to so many environments that it creates a super dominant species, which is what human beings are. It's not just, oh, we've got this little niche and we're doing well in that niche. No, human beings completely dominate. They're an exception in some sense. And someone like Hegel might come along and say, well, it's just a case in point. Exactly what I'm saying.

1:11:22 Seth: Yeah.

1:11:22 Wes: He presupposes development towards self consciousness. That's written into even evolution.

1:11:29 Seth: I want to stop talking about evolution.

1:11:31 Mark: Yeah, no, I feel like I could just out of contrariness, like, you know, the fact that we're more adaptable to more environments, but yet still, like if something changes in our atmosphere and we have a slightly different chemical composition, then we all die. And maybe a lot of the other organisms do just fine through that change. But that doesn't diminish the point that you're trying to make. So let's just. We'll give it to you.

1:11:54 Seth: Yeah, I, I think to get back to Hegel and get back to the text a little bit, that Mark's criticism is solid. You can look at the way things went and you can easily imagine that they could have gone a different way and that the circumstances that made them go the way that they went are rarely inevitable and that there's no calculus and no logic that allows you to be predictive. Nobody who was alive at Hegel's time or who reads Hegel and understands Hegel and tries to apply the Hegelian dialectic to history to come up with this, can predict what's going to happen in the future. And I think that right there kind of is the ultimate arbiter about this.

1:12:30 Wes: It's not about being able to predict what happens in the future. It's whether in principle it can be predicted. If you were a scientific determinist, you would say, well, if I knew the initial conditions during the Big Bang and I knew all the variables and all the principles of physics that go into things.

1:12:43 Seth: I'm telling you, he said, just listen to this.

1:12:46 Wes: In, in principle, then you would say, yes, then I would be able to predict the whole unfolding of history. Now that would be a natural cause scenario. And of course, what Hegel's asserting is something different. He's saying there's a teleology here, let's say, or a spirit cause.

1:13:03 Mark: It's a dialectical cause forming. You're supposed to be able to use your skill in doing dialectical analysis to figure out what's going to be the antithesis of what's going on right now. I mean you really are supposed to be able to apply this dialectical analysis at any level. Like at the individual level. You know, two people, you know, will you and your co workers get along? Sort of. Or the, or the movement of societies from one form of government to another. Or the movement of. He predicts. Right. In his book, you know, history is moving to the west, the. That the United States would be the history of the future and the place where history is going on.

1:13:39 Wes: I don't know that Hegel thinks there's predictive value because Hegel only comes along at the right historical moment. His insights, according to his very own account, they couldn't have come along 100 or 200 years before. His insights are a product also of his time.

1:13:53 Mark: Sure.

1:13:54 Wes: Of a certain development in self consciousness.

1:13:56 Mark: Yep, yep, that's true. You know, we should finish some of his picture about the manifestations of spirit as the state and his idea of relation between the state and the religion and the ethics of the culture. Because these were some of the things that sort of set my teeth most on edge while I was going through it, as well as what constitutes a historical culture versus these prehistorical cultures. What did you think of his notion that you can't have freedom, you can't have culture, you can't have self consciousness without the state and that the state is a manifestation of the religion of a culture.

He thinks that the state and religion are really tied together and the ethics, which seems a very old fashioned notion to at least me now we have a definite separation of church and state. As much as somebody might want to argue that we are a Christian nation or something, that all just seems. There's something distinct from that, that.

1:14:51 Wes: Do you hate the troops? Is that what you're trying to say?

1:14:53 Mark: I do hate the troops. I hate when the troops stay in my house without. Oh, I'm sorry, they can't do that because the fourth Amendment.

1:15:01 Wes: Yeah.

1:15:02 Seth: I want to say that the. Aye yai yai. It's when he starts talking about. He's finished up the summary of the means by which spirit is going to realize itself in the world. And he wants to talk about the shape that it assumes freedom.

1:15:20 Mark: Are you still in part two?

1:15:21 Seth: No, no, no. I'm saying this is chapter three. Yeah. The positive existence of reason. He somehow thinks that the state is necessary in order for there to be the union, as he calls it, of the subjective with the rational will. In other Words. The only place where human consciousness and human willing can combine with abstract reason to give us what we need is in the state where the individual has and enjoys his freedom, but on the condition of his recognizing, believing in and willing that which is common to the whole. But this is not to be understood as if the subjective will of the social unit is attained, attains gratification and enjoyment through the common will.

1:16:05 Mark: Right. That's why he doesn't like democracy.

1:16:07 Seth: Right.

1:16:08 Mark: It's not that for every decision that's made, we want to toll up everybody's individual opinions because then. And that would determine what the group does, because that's not the state as having its own independent will. It really has to be something that represents us individually, but it's above and beyond us.

1:16:23 Seth: Right. And he also says that, and this is will echo back with things that we've done before on this cast. He says we're not talking about a situation either where everybody's being limited by the state in their ability to attain their will, just to get a small space of liberty for each.

1:16:42 Wes: They're reconciled and present one identical homogenous whole.

1:16:46 Seth: Yep. Somehow he thinks that the state will express the rational will of spirit in such a way and human beings will be expressing their own individual in such a way that they come into harmony and all the wills will be in sync. Individual will and then collective will and then the absolute will. They will all, I guess, be aiming at the same thing.

1:17:09 Wes: The state mandates that you buy an iPad, but everyone wants one anyway. So. Sorry,

1:17:18 Seth: I don't even really understand how that could be possible. I say it and the words make sense to me.

1:17:24 Unknown speaker: Right.

1:17:24 Seth: But I don't have no conception of what that would even mean or how that would look.

1:17:28 Mark: A quote that he has in here, he says, to the state belong the individual citizens. Each individual is the child of his people and likewise the child of his time. Insofar as the state is seen to be to be in the process of developing, no one is left behind by his time, nor can he overstep it. So people that look like geniuses, philosophical or artistic or political geniuses, they're still saying something that is already in the content of the geist of that. That group think. So obviously there's diversity because those are people that may teach us things, but you can't really say something outside of your. The cultural milieu.

1:18:04 Wes: Yeah. And there are certainly particular things which people would say that they're passionate about and which 99% of people. You know, it's like polling people and asking them if. If they think that freedom is a good idea or something like that. You know, it reminds me of. Of people talking about freedom. Freedom, freedom, you know, that is. Or democracy. That's a near universal value in our country. How many people are gonna speak against that? That is the spirit of the times. And yet people would think of it as their personal passion. They wouldn't think, oh, I've just been brainwashed or influenced by the culture. This is their subjective will aligning with the state.

1:18:42 Mark: Right. So again, he really sees this close tie between the religion and the state. And in fact, so the state is sort of founded on the. But then the state should be used to put somewhere. He says, bushels and bushels of religion on people. You should use the state.

1:19:03 Unknown speaker: Yeah.

1:19:03 Mark: Okay. Having arrived at the correct conviction that the state rests on religion, religion can take the position that the state is already there. Then in order to maintain the state, religion must be brought in in buckets and bushels to be impressed on people's minds.

1:19:16 Wes: Sounds very Machiavellian.

1:19:18 Mark: Right. It is entirely correct that people should be trained in religion, but not in something that is not yet there. So. And likewise, he says it's silly to sort of talk about what's the best kind of government, as if now we can all vote and maybe we'll vote to have a different kind of government than we currently have, because that's not gonna happen. Like, those things are very tied together. So I guess you'd have to say that the US with this disconnect between religion and the state is pretty dysfunctional. You think? Or it's just the next phase that according to the. His analysis coming from his time, it would be dysfunctional. But that's only because we've achieved a new stage in history where things are different.

1:19:57 Wes: Well, and it's also, it's a question of what you are going to call a religion, which I think becomes a very difficult question. Like, again, you know, people talk about democracy and freedom and those sorts of things with a religious fervor. It's something that few people would question. I don't know if it counts or not. I'm just putting that out there as

1:20:14 Seth: a. I'm sorry, I mean, isn't in this context, isn't he really using the word religion to function as a. For his need for morality? The state has to have like law, morality and government. So isn't that really the function of religion is so that the state doesn't have morality per se? Religion functions almost like an organ of the state. To provide the necessary morality.

1:20:36 Mark: Morality, but also the concept of authority, I would think, because he makes a distinction a lot between Catholicism and Protestantism. And I understood that to mean that Catholicism is much more. By having the Pope at its center, it's much less inclined to emphasize the individual's freedom, whereas Protestantism is emphasizing your personal relationship with God, not you standing under the priest who has to interpret everything. So it's not just the morality. It's also. It's going to determine your relationship to authority and thereby what kind of authority they should have and how many rights you should have under.

1:21:12 Seth: But wait, what? Isn't that what the monarch is for? I mean, the Constitution doesn't provide the kind of authority that he thinks is necessary. And he has that section where he talks about why a constitution creates the state as an abstraction and that that's important. You don't want the state to be embodied in an individual.

1:21:29 Mark: Sure.

1:21:30 Seth: Or in any kind of body or anything like that. So the Constitution is the perfect, but it doesn't provide any either real world or moral authority. There's no authority in it. It's just simply an abstraction of the codes and the set of laws and the values and so forth. So you still do need some kind of a body there, but you don't want it to be a sovereign per se, or a democracy, God forbid.

1:21:53 Mark: And his objection to democracy is because it ultimately can't get anything done. It doesn't have any direction because the masses can sort of. You can get 51 votes either way on a whim. It could change from moment to moment. So it makes the state directionless. He explicitly talks in here about forms of government where you had to have unanimous decisions for everything. And in that case, nothing gets done. Like government just falls apart instantly.

1:22:15 Seth: Yeah, Well, I think his complaint about democracy was. That's where he mentions Rousseau, where he says that democracy really represents oppression of the minority and that that's not really what he's looking for either. It's very strange because in a certain sense there's no way you would have elections or there wouldn't be public debate. Because somehow, you know, guys, I. I'm trying to think of some way to make sense of this. And there's a section on page 55 where he talks about freedom of nature versus freedom in the state. He does. He does say that it is.

It does appear to be contradictory. Like, he's like, I know that saying that you find liberty and freedom in obeying the state doesn't make sense, but let me tell you why that works. What I got out of it was the state of nature never really existed. But even if it did, it's not a state of freedom. It's a state of injustice and violence. And that injustice and violence is what gets limited by the state, not your reason and that it's only in the state where you can experience self consciousness, where you can essentially come to terms with your own existence and in a weird way, I guess only rely on yourself for your own existence.

He's talking about an abstract or not an abstract. A real world instantiation of a place where people are completely free to be

1:23:36 Wes: self aware, but also the state of nature you're subject to your. I know you were just saying this, but there's a slavery to one's whims and one's passions. Right? That's not a. That's a picture of liberty, but it's not a picture of freedom in the larger sense.

1:23:50 Seth: Right.

1:23:50 Wes: It's a complete reversal. It's not like we're free in the state of nature and then we give it up in society. It's now we're slavish during the nasty and brutish time. And then in society we develop the. This is an idea like, you know, we develop the capacity to have some sort of meaningful freedom which again always means obedience to some law or another. You know, for Kant it was towards these laws given by oneself. For Hegel it's the state insofar as it is the collective self, let's say.

1:24:18 Mark: So he really wants to talk about the state as an individual sort of attaining self consciousness, attaining actualization of what it was in concept. And this, you know, really struck a chord with me in terms of. Of America. So we have these constitutional documents of freedom and opportunity and things. But you can see, you could interpret our history through the Civil Rights act and through slowly actually recognizing all of the citizens as full citizens that we are sort of, we're on the step of. Oh if only more of those conservatives would die off, then we could fulfill what we were on paper in the first place.

And so he would have even the same thing again in his constitutional monarchy or whatever. That, that each society is going to have kind of its own mission that's defined by its character. And that's what it's like working itself through over time, which is going to imply some conflict. Even if you have a monarchy that's supposed to be looking out for everybody and representing everybody and letting everybody have their freedom, safe from the harms of others in the social contract like you Were talking about there's still going to be some kind of impetus forward or else you're just living through habit and the society is just stagnant and will eventually fall to the wayside.

1:25:27 Wes: Yeah. And you know, there were tremendous tensions during the signing of the Constitution. Of course it wasn't as if America simply embraced slavery. There were huge tensions that ultimately led to the Civil War. But they were there from the beginning. And I only know this because I saw an episode of drunk history on funnyordie.com have you ever?

1:25:47 Mark: I watched the drunk history ones. Yes.

1:25:48 Wes: Oh my God, they're amazing. They get someone really. I don't know if you've seen it, Seth, but for the, for the audience, they get someone really, really drunk and then have them tell about some historical event and then they have it enacted out word for word. So if someone's burping or vomiting, then Ben Franklin is gonna burp or vomit or do whatever the narrator is doing. So someone was telling a story of Washington slaves and I found slavery at the time and how Washington had a runaway slave who tried to get back. But then as well he releases all the slaves and he makes this excuse about how.

Well, the only reason I didn't release them during my lifetime is because my wife had slaves and they would have missed each other. She wasn't willing to release her, so I couldn't release this interesting stuff. And then I found that this autobiography that I'm reading right now from. From the Revolutionary War onwards, there were large populations of free blacks in the United States in various parts. But anyway, he was free and then he was abducted and made a slave for 12 years. And then he wrote this autobiography, 12 Years a Slave. I'm just thinking of the sorts of tensions there that are, you know, these dynamic tensions that'll lead to the next progression.

1:26:52 Mark: I thought 12 years a slave, wasn't that the story you wrote about grad school?

1:27:00 Wes: Very good.

1:27:00 Mark: Ta ta.

1:27:03 Wes: Well, I'm glad that all of that long tangent led to set you up so well.

1:27:11 Seth: One of the things that as soon as you start talking about state and a government and all that is that the interaction between states has a large effect on how the states themselves govern themselves. And this idea that there will be this sort of static self contained state full of self conscious subjects, spirit actually existing in the world, if it was ever possible, it certainly isn't possible now. When you think about global interaction, we would have to move to a single world government, a single world state, which means reconciling the fact that the Chinese and the Indians haven't been moving forward as fast as they need to be compared to us, you know, on Hegel's account.

On Hegel's account, yes. Because the United States is going to have to come to grips with the fact that pretty soon the finite amount of the world's resources are going to be earmarked and we will no longer be able to continue our life of consumption as we have. And we're going to be in a different position vis a vis other nations in the world as we vie for these natural resources and as we continue to do things that impact the environment, our own immediate surroundings and so forth.

1:28:22 Wes: Communism is inevitable.

1:28:25 Seth: Well, I'm not so sure. I mean, the Chinese have their own issues to deal with, but we are certainly going to come head to head with them. We became a consumer culture faster than anybody else and we're better at it than anybody else. But believe me, they'll beat us.

1:28:39 Wes: Actually, their per capita GDP is now higher than the United States is. It just saw that stat. Well, good for them quickly becoming a consumer society. But I think there's short term stuff and then there's Star Trek. What are things going to look like in 100,000 years? And when we're dealing with Klingons and stuff.

1:29:00 Mark: All right, let me, let me say something. I feel like this emphasis on the state as the thing that is driving the spirit of a society seems just really overblown. And again, maybe this is more our modern sensibility talking through me than anything else. But the culture is so much bigger than who the government is. There's so many more things adding up to that. Certainly in our culture, when the means of communication are not owned by the government, when there's just all sorts of different entities, many of them corporate, but just, you know, other voices that can easily be heard by us and that are feeding into our intellectual climate that are not the state.

1:29:39 Wes: And maybe I think he means something larger than that by the state, though, but he.

1:29:44 Mark: No, he means actual. We need a monarch in particular because we need some actual one dude who is like being the personality of the state at any given time.

1:29:53 Wes: He's talking about the state on page 68. Summing up what has been said of the state, we find that we have been led to call its vital principle as actuating the individuals who compose it. Morality. The state, its laws, its arrangements constitute the rights of its members. Its natural features, its mountains, air and waters, are their country, their fatherland, their outward material property, the history of this state, their deeds, what their Ancestors have produced belongs to them and lives in their memory. All is their possession, just as they are possessed by it, for it constitutes their existence, their being. That sounds like a very robust notion of state where there's a heavy cultural element, is there? And you get that German fatherland thing, which is scary, right?

1:30:40 Mark: Well, it's just. Yeah, it's this old nationalism that's only half alive because our country is so big that, you know, I'm not gonna have that sort of attachment to all the rivers and streams of the entire United States. Like, it's gonna be a fairly restricted area that I'm particularly familiar with. I'm not gonna be that much more in love with the badlands of South Dakota than I'm gonna be some equivalent thing in Canada.

1:31:06 Wes: Certainly that's because you hate the troops

1:31:10 Mark: and I.

1:31:11 Unknown speaker: And.

1:31:11 Mark: Well, no, but this is, this is something conservatives stress too.

1:31:16 Wes: Don't you think? There are a lot of people who do feel sentimental about all those things, about everything.

1:31:22 Mark: Just, I would think, you know, some of the most patriotic people as, as, as we former Texans or current Texans know, are the Texans who really have this Texas nationalism. It's not even US nationalism. And to me, there's something even more authentic about that. At least you're. When you're talking about a smaller something that is more the size of the kind of state that he had in mind, that's something you actually can be authentically sentimental about and not just abstractly sentimental about. Like, do you really feel that much? Yes. There's a common cultural background and a certain bond that, you know, I and the American citizens in Hawaii and American citizens Alaska have. So there is a commonality there. But is it any deeper than, say, just English speaking people who watch a lot of the same TV shows that we watch, you know, which includes not just America or.

1:32:15 Wes: Jump in on this because, you know, there are a lot of just overtly nationalistic people in the United States. There's people who take it very seriously. It drives, you know, one half of the political expression in this country, like, very, very souped up nationalism. I think even for those of us who consider ourselves very critical of our country or, you know, on the left. You know, I've been in situations where I get in conversations with people from other countries who start expressing criticisms that normally I would think were accurate, but then suddenly my ear is pricked up and more attuned to nuances and I start feeling understood.

And it's amazing to me how quickly I can actually start to feel that identity, that national identity kick in. It's not merely about TV shows and this and that. There is a. What it means to be an American. There is a common identity. Don't you think I've offended you once again?

1:33:07 Mark: I thought. I thought I had granted that, but I guess I'm just. I don't place the same importance on it as he seems to. That this is not. It does not exhaust what we think of as culture. To me, culture is something both larger and smaller than being an American. There's so many subcultures that we form our identity and so much of that just, again, has to do. You can just interpret it as the melting pot that America is or. But it has just as much to do with the modern age and how you can sort of pick your subcultures to identify with. And so everybody has seen the same geeky movies or whatever. The thing is that. Or knows about nascar, whatever. The thing is that drives you, that makes you feel connection with other people.

1:33:48 Wes: Yeah, I don't know. I mean, I think that's a. That's a hard question. What. At what level and what kinds of subculture subgroup are you tied most strongly to? Then there's your family, of course, which is like the sort of mini nation, the prototype for the nation.

1:34:01 Mark: Well, it's funny what he says about family, that. That's like pre social because, I mean, maybe it's just until the. The kids are old enough to object, but obviously he doesn't have a lot of. He's not like giving any credence, any respect for the woman's role in it because he sees that a family is kind of. You can just treat it as a unit because you don't have to consider them as individuals. They're just all together unified in their will, presumably under the dominance of the. Of the man, though he doesn't say it that way, but the. That seemed pretty clearly what it looked like. That's why individual members of the family don't have rights versus each other. Like, what kind of relationships do you have, Hegel? You don't have a. You and your wife don't have rights toward each other in some important way?

1:34:42 Wes: Well, growing. I mean, as a child, of course, it's Right.

1:34:45 Mark: Right.

1:34:46 Wes: You're living under a tyranny. There's no doubt about that.

1:34:48 Seth: Benevolent or not, the family is not an appropriate structure for the state.

1:34:56 Mark: Well, and then he. And he even goes beyond that. Like talks about the communities led by the priest as being kind of like the pseudo father that. That's not a state either. That's just an extension of the family. Even though you can see how that leads up to the state. It's prehistory for the state.

1:35:11 Seth: That's right. Models based on family rely on feelings for the father slash monarch. And we can't have people have feelings for the state. That's not going to work.

1:35:20 Wes: So it sounds like the cohesiveness and the sentimentality for those. Those other groups is actually. That's. The state is defined against that. Right.

1:35:28 Mark: Well, it's not enough to make it. To give it an actual separate unity or something, to make it an actualized self consciousness. I'm starting to just spout crap now because it's getting late and Hegel's getting on my nerves and trying to live in his world. And it's hard. It's a rough place.

1:35:49 Seth: Let's do the roundup then. Point one. There's this mysterious force that drives world history, manifests itself in the world. I'm gonna have to say I could find a way to get on board with that. Although probably not in the same way as he is.

1:36:05 Mark: Two, how can you get on board with that?

1:36:07 Seth: Because I can come up with some sense of mystical or tie into the quantum physics thing. And I could find a way to make it work.

1:36:14 Mark: So for your personal. The way you think about it yourself, you're okay with that?

1:36:17 Seth: The way I think about it myself, I could come up with some concept of some kind of underlying principle that motivates, that gets expressed in the world. Look, I studied Heidegger. What can I tell you? There's a lot of. You see a lot of. There's a lot of echoes in Heidegger of this kind of stuff.

1:36:36 Mark: You know what I mean? If you just read Heidegger.

1:36:38 Seth: Yeah, I just try not to name drop. I've made a bunch of notes so that when we do talk about them, the idea that there's an end though, like a rational end, that history is a march of progress towards some sort of goal. I cannot get on board with. I don't believe. I believe.

1:36:54 Wes: That's what I thought you were saying you were on board with.

1:36:56 Seth: No, I'm on board with the idea that there is some sort of a force that motivates action and changes history, but not for any particular end.

1:37:06 Wes: Well, what's the mystical element there if it's not.

1:37:09 Mark: Because if it's God, then God would have an end in mind. Right? So if it's.

1:37:13 Seth: Yeah, no, I. Well, we.

1:37:14 Wes: I was gonna accuse you of being a cultural intelligent design person.

1:37:18 Seth: No, no, no. I mean, you could think of an immanent principle instead of a transcendent principle, so that. Well, no, no, not necessarily. I mean, if you think in terms of truth, that there's a principle that changes world historical epochs and to show a different face of the world to you, to make things appear differently than they are, to expose, to hide and show truths, different kinds of truths, but not necessarily for the purpose of getting you to an absolute truth. It's just you go through these world historical epochs and the world looks different to the people that live in those

1:37:54 Mark: epochs, but it's just going to keep evolving till the sun expands.

1:37:58 Seth: And it's not necessarily evolution. It's not evolution screws, it's not evolution. It's just change. I actually liked some of the stuff he had to say early on. I thought he was very readable in this text compared to some of his other texts. I think there's some interesting work we could have done to focus on his talk about state of nature in opposition to some of the stuff we read. And of course I found the one piece of poetic language that's in there. But I'm just going to end and leave with this one comment that he quotes. No man is a hero to his valet. Not because he is not a hero, but because the latter is a valet.

1:38:41 Mark: I'll let you go last, Wes, because I want to say the two things that you just identified, one of which you agreed with and one of which you didn't. I'll take the opposite tack on that.

1:38:49 Seth: Okay.

1:38:50 Mark: I don't buy the sort of necessary immanent push of history. I think there are so many different things that come up that can push history one way or the other within a given society, within a given art movement, within a given science. It's. It's not random. It's just that there are too many agencies. There's no one directing principle. And I don't think anything like Hegel's logic can enable you to predict the movement of these things, even in principle. However, I think there is something, if you talk about the ultimate end of history or something, in some ways, like there's only one direction to go.

Like, I buy his picture of the beginning of society as despotic as people taking power over one another. And though I'm not optimistic that things are progressing right now so that you're going to have more and more emphasis on the individual worldwide, you know, universal education, and everybody really being as up to speed as our cultural elite, I think that's the way things eventually Just have to go. It might take hundreds of thousands of years, but there's just no other. We could go up and go down and go up and go down. But either we're all going to be extinguished or it will eventually reach a very high level like that.

And once you get there, I don't know if you can turn it around and go back the other direction unless you have a catastrophic event.

1:40:10 Wes: I feel like I should be the synthesis between you two. You two guys now. Awesome. I don't think I can do that. When you were talking there, Mark, I was thinking about entropy. And there's a sort of directedness in that sense even to the physical universe. Things are speaking of evolution, I guess it's going in the larger sense in opposite direction. Things are ultimately falling apart. But if you apply that culturally, you know again I'm thinking of Marx where it's as if all these class distinctions are ultimately being wiped out. Everything is sort of dissolving down into a certain kind of soup.

You know, maybe that's what the state ultimately is doing to the individual. I don't know. I really don't know. I'd have to. I have to think more about this idea of progression and this overarching spirit principle. And I have to say at one level it appeals to me, I have to admit. And I'm not willing to discard of any of it outright. Even the craziest stuff.

1:41:05 Mark: I don't know if it helps to analyze history. I guess that's what. When I'm reading this as an introduction to the philosophy of history and okay, fine. I didn't actually read the rest of the book after the introduction. So I can't really dismiss it. But it sure doesn't make me hopeful that he's going to have lots of illuminating things that they about history. One of my brother in laws is a. Not Dylan, but another one is a. It was a history PhD and it was forced to read this at some point. And I don't think it was particularly made his study of history any more illuminated.

1:41:36 Seth: Well, because it's not about. It's not a study of history.

1:41:39 Wes: Right.

1:41:39 Mark: It's supposed to give you a key to unlocking and understanding history in a way that you would not otherwise. And I don't think it does that.

1:41:46 Seth: I think it just tells you. I don't think that's what it's supposed to give you a key to unlocking spirit.

1:41:52 Mark: No, but it's understanding history as the unfolding of spirit.

1:41:55 Seth: Yeah, history.

1:41:56 Mark: That's how that. That having this idea of spirit and understanding, his logic and his conception of spirit is supposed to give you insight into historical events.

1:42:04 Wes: I don't know, because he acknowledges, on the face of it, there's a lot of chaos and counter examples and you're not going to necessarily see the progression he's talking about. Doesn't he give you that caveat?

1:42:13 Mark: Well, he says, but if you. If you put forth an alleged counter example, it's going to be just the kind of counterexample that proves the rule. And he gives of like, oh, we think that there's a teleological thing within the human genome and within human development that will all have brains and two arms and two legs. And if you bring forth some sort of. Abortion is the word that my translation uses that, you know, doesn't have a brain and things and say, look, that's not what a human is. In fact, that even makes it clearer that what you have brought forward is not a human. It does not. We can be even more confident about the teleology involved. So.

1:42:50 Wes: Yeah, but. But clearly he's not restricting all of it and saying that you shall only do this type of universal history. He's philosophical universal history there, you know, the average historian is. Is doing something much different. They're doing actual history. Not bullshitting about the philosophy of history.

1:43:06 Seth: Bullshitting about it.

1:43:07 Wes: But I like that. I prefer the bull. I mean, I love history, too. All right, well, as far as an activity, I prefer bullshitting about it. Preferably be on a podcast next.

1:43:16 Mark: Next time. We're actually going to do to some degree an applied use of Hegel's analysis of history, specifically in the history of art. So we were going to read some essays by Arthur Danto, who is a modern American philosopher, very well known in the area of aesthetics. Some works from his book the Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art, which he came out with in 1986, though a lot of the essays in there from a little earlier, the essay by that name. So the first one in there, the End of Art, is the most famous one in there. Maybe, maybe we'll get to the second essay, which is the appreciation and interpretation of works of art.

So we get to talk about all the crazy stuff that was going on in the modern art world from the 60s forward, where people were putting up a snow shovel and saying in a museum and signing and saying, look, that's art. And that was sort of the reductio ad absurdum of art very often discussed in these aesthetics classes. So unfortunately, since that's a modern reading. You have to to buy the book if you want to read along. Okay. So be sure to look@PartiallyExaminedLife.com for some announcements for a lot of cool stuff being posted in the blog. Like my weekly music blog that I'm sure you guys read all the time.

1:44:31 Seth: Yeah, I read at least the first paragraph of everything you post, Mark.

1:44:39 Mark: Go on discuss. We have a Facebook page with some discussions on it. You should give us some feedback on how we're doing, whether you like the three person ones, whether we're gonna have some more guests in some upcoming episodes. Maybe you want to be a guest. Maybe you should post a lot of intelligent things about stuff that we've already posted to make us want to contact you and say, hey, why don't you be a guest? Though we will probably not do that, but we might. That's the only way in is to prove to us that you are awesome. So good night to everybody as far as I'm concerned.

1:45:11 Seth: Good night.

1:45:13 Wes: Good night.

1:45:14 Unknown speaker: In this cold I feel something wrong in my nose on my lips and tong. Kiss this dog I just miss the that wrong I forget I'm starting to slip that far too much too often Feel my frozen eyeball soften Feel my blood it's slowing down Lose my sense of sense of center areas I should not enter Beckon me to hang inside them no another ready tried them yeah. Asked myself am I really here Can I help feeling what I feel.

1:46:26 Seth: I I I I I I I

1:46:31 Unknown speaker: Don't arrest myself don't attack myself don't believe feet on spite myself but the snor the climb is beating me and I will add in time that's cheating me Take a pen take a pen to spell out the abrasions Even then, even then I'm asking for invasions of rocks and stones and sticks and bones and things that might have hurt me in the past Come around they come around and the irritation flash and I know yes I know what they're chasing for in this weather my life looks mis or some some regrets just won't leave in this cold I believe Waiting for some slim reprieve I

1:47:19 Mark: starting to

1:47:20 Unknown speaker: feel my fingers turning rotten Relive actions best for cotton coming back to sink on me Feeling pressure on my shoulders shouldn't have a nappy all day long I've grown to think of me Wipe that stupid wink off me by now.