PEL News and Previews: Plato’s “Crito” and the Hegel’s Logic Aftershow

0:06 Mark: Hey, this is Mark Linsenmayer with the Partially Examined Life, and I've got some exciting announcements and some clips of things to play for you. First is the formal launch of the second Partially Examined Life spin off podcast. It's called Phi Fic. That's P H I F I C as in Philosophical fiction. And it is our Not School Philosophical Fiction group led by Nathan Hanks, whose voice you've heard many times 10 telling you about not school activities here. They now have three episodes posted. You can find them at fyficpodcast.com or go on iTunes and search for Phi Fic or if you've noticed at partiallyexaminedlife.com if you look under Podcast in the Recent Episodes page for your convenience, you'll see not only the recent Partially Examined Life episodes, but the Phi Fic episodes and the Nakedly Examined Music episodes.

Now, As I said, Phi Fic grew out of our Not School program, which which is alive and well. In addition to the many citizen proposed reading groups that happen all the time, we've been adding some options that have a little more of a traditional educational flavor, just in that there is an actual professor, discussion leader, expert of some sort involved. Now, the flagship effort, among those things right now is the Introductory Readings in Philosophy group, which will have a discussion on Michel de Montaigne, specifically the essays of Cannibals and of the education of children.

Going to be happening on June 5th at 5pm Eastern Time. This will be led again by Brian Wilson, who is a St. John's Annapolis grad who for a long time has run this Combat and classics program that does exactly this kind of discussion. In just a minute here, you are going to hear the first chunk of his first discussion with Partial Examined Life, which was on Plato's dialogue, the Crito. So first you're going to hear him throw out, really, the St. John's method of discussion, some tips for having a productive discussion. And then he asks the opening question.

Now if you haven't read the Crito, that's where Socrates has already been convicted by the Athenian assembly of corrupting the youth and is awaiting execution. And it's kind of clear that if he wanted to, some people could get him off. They could help him escape. And Socrates says no. To do that would be to flout the law. So why is Socrates so attached to the law when he thinks that the government is run by fundamentally ignorant people with mistaken ideas and that he was wrongly convicted, that he was not in fact corrupting the youth? Now, the second thing I want to announce another audience participation thing.

We're going to have another after show. This is on Sunday, June 26, again at 5pm Eastern time. And it's going to be on Simone de Beauvoir's Ethics of Ambiguity, which we're going to be talking about on Partially examined life episodes 140 and 141, soon to be released. Now for the intro readings in philosophy group, the Montaigne thing. You'll want to have read the essays. They're short, they're fun to participate in the after show. You don't have to read anything though really. The book is excellent and it's much easier than our last after show book, which was Hegel's Logic.

And speaking of that last after show, which took place on Easter this past March, you're also going to hear on here a clip of that after show hosted by comedian Danny Lobel, as usual. But our scholar guest this time was a guy named Chris Yeomans from Purdue University, who's written some things about how Hegel is actually a very practical philosopher, has a lot to say about politics, about ethics, about living. Alright, so those are the two clips we're going to play. If you want to hear the full recordings. Become a Partially Examined Life citizen.

You can sign up for our Citizen feed. So all these things go right to your mobile device. So first up here is Brian Wilson with a slew of Partially Examined Life listeners. That's Steve, Kathy, Stacy, Roger, Nick, Justin, James talking about Plato's Crito.

3:36 Guest: Okay guys, so how we're going to try to run this, but you know we're all members of the polis, right? So if you guys want to vote to execute me and do something different, we can do that. But I'm going to try to run this like a St. John seminar where I just ask an opening question and we just go, right. And it's important to think about seminar like we're all on the same team and we're all like on the same basketball team and we're just passing the ball around and whoever's got the best shot, take the shot. So it's really about building on the opening question, asking further questions.

And important in this is so that we're all on the same page, right? Just trying to stick with the text as much as is humanly possible. If there's something in the text which you don't feel like is rational or reasonable in kind of the purest sense, right. This does not make sense, then that's absolutely fair game. And if you have an analogy or a metaphor, you know, even an outside reference, trying to bring that in. But we really want to try to tie it into the reading as closely and as tightly as we can make sense.

4:38 Dylan: Yep.

4:39 Guest: Okay, sounds good. Cool. So I want to start around line 45, 45C. Socrates says, My good Crito, why should we care so much for what the majority think? The most reasonable people, whom one should pay more attention, will believe that things were done as they were done. So I think what Socrates is saying, and he builds further later on this, is with the doctor Trainer analogy, that you shouldn't listen to the majority. You should listen to people that know what they're talking about. But my question is, is this a contradiction with the fact that he was convicted by a jury that was just a majority of the jury and a very small margin?

I'll give you the Cliff Notes that the decision was lost by 30 votes out of probably 500. So the voting was around 280 to 230 in favor of executing them. On the one hand, he says we shouldn't listen to the majority, but on the other hand, he's going to suffer death at the hands of the majority. So my question is, is this a contradiction? He's laying out a contradiction.

I think the argument against it being a contradiction is that it wasn't. The legitimacy of the decision was not that it was a majority. It was that it was the state. And that he says you should do what the state says to do. Sometimes the state's going to do some stuff you don't like, but you have to do what it says because you want the state to be complacent, respected. I think.

6:03 Dylan: Couldn't you see the state as the majority?

6:07 Guest: Well, I think that's pretty clear if you go back to the apology. The state is embodied by the majority. So we had, I think, 500 jurors there, and their job was to embody the majority of the state. So I think you're absolutely right that Socrates really believes that the majority rule and the rule of law is the most important thing, even though he believes that if not the process itself was corrupted. But the trial, he definitely doesn't believe in the results of the trial, his conviction, or his sentence. But because it is the rule of the state and the rule majority, he's going to go ahead and agree with it.

6:47 Dylan: So wouldn't that be a contradiction? Because would the state represent the masses or the. With the will of the people?

6:53 Guest: If it's just that. If it's just like direct democracy, then yeah, you're basically saying that you should hew to the will of the majority, but it isn't a direct democracy. So I guess that's where the contradiction is.

7:07 Dylan: So because the jury's selected rather than,

7:10 Guest: or whatever, like whatever's in between direct democracy and what actually happens legitimizes it.

Right. They become the embodiment of the state.

So is the warden at the jail an embodiment of the state?

No, not in my opinion. The warden of the jail is. He's acting on the will of the state, he's following the law, but he's definitely an individual. And he actually seems willing to break

the law a bit as well. Yeah, that's kind of what I'm leaning towards is, you know, Crito implies that they'll let him out, and he also kind of implies, and Socrates kind of implies that the state will go, yeah, it's fine, you can break out. So it seems like there's something in kind of the written law or the official law versus the unofficial law here. And it seems like Socrates is hewing to this official law. But I'm stuck on this and I'm just, you know, if somebody can clear it up for me, and this is part of the reason why I picked this is because for me at least, it's very confusing, is that Socrates wants to hew, I feel like, to this official law.

But it's a law that was passed down by the majority. Right. I can't get around that. You know, the jury isn't the lawmakers. Right. They're just deciding what's, you know, is this case against his impiety just they didn't make the law, but they're deciding on the application of the law. But you swing those 30 votes and Socrates official position is based on a majority opinion, not on this tightly bound official law. Am I reading that wrong?

I think that it's because the majority has ruled in the court of law. It becomes a statement made by the state. So if you look at 49, I guess it's 49C. It says, nor must one, when wronged, inflict wrong in return, as the majority believe, since one must never do wrong. So what Socrates is saying is that the state is divine, if you will. And just because the majority acted as jurors in a way that he believes is wrong, doesn't mean that he can then inflict another wrong on the state. Two wrongs don't make a right.

Is the state held to that same standard?

9:22 Dylan: Are you trying to point out a distinction between the law and the individuals involved in the law.

9:29 Guest: Yeah, I mean, there's a. In 52a, Socrates lays out kind of his responsibility on the state. And he says right at the beginning. So he's speaking as the law. And this is interesting, actually. Can we do a quick translation check? So 51c. When Socrates begins talking after Crito says, I think they do. Socrates in my translation says, reflect. Now, Socrates, the laws might say. I'm wondering if anybody. I know most everybody's got the Hackett, but if you don't have the Hackett, or maybe if you have like a different version of the Hackett translation. I'm wondering if anybody's got a different translation than the laws might say as that first line.

I think I do have a different translation than you guys.

Yeah, it says, than the laws will say. Yeah. So it's the same. Okay. It's interesting. He didn't say the law makers. He didn't say the rulers. He said the laws. He's giving voice to the laws. Right. As he goes down through here. And so we get to 52A and the laws are saying, yeah, we only propose things. We do not issue savage commands to do whatever we order. We give two alternatives, either to persuade us or to do what we say. So the laws in Socrates explanation, which it seems like it's interesting because he's not doing what he did before with Crito, where he's just talking and he's trying to build a logical case or rational case.

He's now taking on the embodiment speaking as the laws speaking. So there's a level of separation there, which I think is interesting. But the laws have this agreement with the citizen that it is. You either have to do what we say or you have to persuade us. So why doesn't that go both ways? Or maybe it does. And maybe his trial was that opportunity. His trial was to persuade the laws, but it seems like it wasn't to persuade the laws, it was to persuade the jury. So I'm just wondering again if this is more of balance between citizen and state.

I guess.

What's the alternative as a citizen? Right. I think this is spelled out in here, but I'll just bring it up as proof. Discussion. What is the alternative for the citizen? The laws say obey or persuade us to do something different. And I'm wondering if there's a Greek ratio, is one equals one kind of thing. A equals A. Is there a rational counterpoint to that from citizen to state?

Isn't that a child parent relationship that Socrates mentions later?

Yeah, it is. And I'm wondering, and I'm glad you brought that up, because again, he's speaking as the laws. I'm just wondering if there's something interesting from the fact that he's not proposing this. Right. The only thing that he really proposes that he says, I have held this for a long time is in 49B, and we talked about this a little bit earlier, where it's never right to do wrong, even when you're countering an injustice. And he says, Socrates says, I have held it for a long time and still hold it now, that doing wrong is never good, even in response to wrong.

So this reads to me like a turn the other cheek kind of thing. If I'm reading that wrong, then please tell me. But now when he's talking about being the laws, when he's giving voice to the laws, he's saying, you have two options, right? Do what I tell you or persuade me otherwise. So it seems like there might be a contradiction. Well, there's not a contradiction, but that's just how he's laying out potentially, the relationship between man and the state. The state says, you have to do what I say, or you can persuade me. I don't know how you do that necessarily.

But then as a virtuous human being, Socrates holds, I can never do wrong for wrong. And maybe I'm just reading that wrong. Maybe you can balance injustice, but you can't do a wrong to balance injustice.

No, I think that I don't know how ancient Greek democracy works, right? But like in any democracy, right, the citizens are subject to the laws, but they also, in either direct or indirect way, make the laws right. And so Socrates might agree to a certain system where there are certain kinds of contexts where it's okay to address, like, certain laws that are considered unfair, but outside of those contexts, he has an obligation as a citizen to follow the law. So it seems to me when he's talking about the opinions of the majority, in the beginning, the way I read that was just as another way of saying conventional wisdom rather than some kind of reference to the state itself or something like that.

13:51 Dylan: It seemed to me like the argument he was making is that by being part of society, you're complicit in conventions and the rules of society, and then along with what it provides you, that gives a certain sense of duty. I think where he goes wrong, I think he assumes that it would be doing a wrong to go against the state because he's assuming that it'd be an injustice to disobey the laws of the state and that he's kind of tying the law to justice. I'm not sure those go hand in hand since most people would agree that the decision was incorrect in his case.

14:25 Guest: Well, it's even more than that. Right. Because he says if he doesn't abide by the decision of the jury to kill him, then it's the destruction of the state. And that seemed really strange to me as well. Like, how do we get from disobeying to destruction?

14:39 Dylan: Right.

14:40 Guest: That seems like a Kantian argument that you have to do what you would want to see universalized because that's the only way you could get from me. Disobeying to it dies.

Oh, you just went Kant on me.

I have no idea what I'm talking

about, but sounded good. I do that all the time.

14:59 Mark: All right, so you can see how this kind of discussion is a little more relaxed, a little more pedagogical than a typical partially examined life discussion where we all run all over each other and go on different tangents and Brian really knows what he's doing. Again, just go Sign up at partiallyexaminedlife.com for your partially examined life citizenship. You get your member authentication. You log into the site, click the members menu, and you'll see not school study groups, and one of those is intro readings and philosophy. Join that and you'll see a discussion topic on Michel de Montaigne where you can RSVP that you're gonna attend that again.

That's on Sunday, June 5th at 5:00pm Eastern Time. All right, and now for our second clip. Danny Lobel talking with scholar Chris Yeomans in I'm on it. You're gonna hear a guy named Preston Price. The British guy is a friend of the podcast Michael Burgess. You'll hear Alan Cook and Carrie Hillman. Chris gives his background. And then we launch right into the first question, which is about Hegel's position on God. And we also talk a little about metaphysics. Discussion as a whole does get into more of Hegel's practical philosophy. So if you're interested in Hegel, maybe you found our episodes on Hegel's logic confusing.

Most people did. Then this is a really useful after show to get your hands on and listen to the whole thing. We'll see what you think.

16:06 Guest: Chris, thank you very much for being our resident scholar. It's an honor to have you with us today. Let's have you talk a little bit about your background, introduce yourself properly.

I have been banging my head against this text for. For about 15 years now. You'd think I would have it more mastered than I do, but I really do think one of the brilliant things about it, like so many great philosophical texts, is you never feel comfortable with it. Every time through, whether I'm teaching it or in a reading group or in a discussion like this, I see some new angle or some view that was settled before, all of a sudden just runs away from me. And I think, no, wait a minute, that couldn't possibly be correct. So I've been interested in Hegel's logic in a bunch of different ways.

Ways that it's relevant to questions about free will and agency. I've also done some work on how Hegel thinks about mathematics and quantity. It's an inexhaustible text, like I said. Feels like after as much time as I have spent with it, I should understand it better than I do. But every new reading, it seems like there's more that I don't understand.

What have been some recent things that have struck you in revisiting it that you hadn't seen before?

Yeah, well, I mean, this came up actually a good bit in the podcast that you guys did. In all of that preparatory material, there's all this talk of God, and by and large, that drops out when you get to the logic proper. But in that preparatory material, to the encyclopedia logic in particular, it's really front and center. And I don't tend to teach that material when I do this in classes, so I'd kind of forgotten about that, to be honest. That's one thing. Recently a mathematician friend of mine. So I teach at Purdue University in Indiana, and a mathematician there has gotten interested in Hegel, and we've been trying to pour over Hegel's philosophy of mathematics, and there's a lot more there than I thought at first. So those have sort of been two recent things that I've been struck by.

And we're also joined by Preston. Is there anything you want to say about Hegel before we get into it?

18:21 Dylan: I'm really just here to listen to what you guys have to say. And I listen to both the podcast and I've read a bunch of Hegel's Science of Logic. I've read his Phenomenology of Spirit and a bunch of his works, and he's just kind of an enigma to me. So I'm really just here to listen, to learn, maybe ask a few questions.

18:35 Guest: All right, well, that's a good place to start. Well, do you want. Do you have a question that's burning you to begin with, to Kick off the conversation.

Well, a little while ago.

18:44 Mark: What the hell was that about? Sorry, Preston, go ahead.

18:50 Dylan: No, I guess I don't really have anything particular. I guess you guys were talking a little while ago when I was watching the live stream on the channel about Hegel's conversation about God and the Encyclopedia of Logic, which I haven't read. So I'm interested in what Hegel's conception of God because I am a Christian, but I'm more of like a. I'm reading a lot of radical theology death of God Christians lately.

19:07 Guest: And so it is Easter Sunday.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

19:12 Dylan: Some of these Death of God Christians, though, they look at Easter Sunday as like a do not resuscitate Easter Sunday. So God dies on Friday, but he doesn't come back on Sunday.

19:20 Guest: So looking at the guilty of that. But anyway, but thank you.

Okay, so I'll turn it over to Chris and to Mark, if you have anything to say on that.

19:31 Mark: Well, yeah, I was curious about that, too. I want to hear Chris's take on what are his theological views.

19:37 Guest: Yeah. So lots of people think of Hegel's talk about God as being like Spinoza's talk about God. It's not really theological talk. It's not that he endorses a belief in any kind of deity along the lines of what the traditional monotheistic or polytheistic religions, for that matter, were concerned with. But rather, it's just a kind of mark to say, look, as much as you cared about God, you ought to care about nature and substance and the one and so on. Right. So lots of people read Hegel that way. I don't myself think that's right, though. I think by the perspective of lots of contemporary Christian traditions, Hegel's going to end up being heterodox in a variety of ways.

So I used to think that Hegel had what's sometimes called an inclusive Christology. And inclusive Christology more or less says, sure, God was incarnated in Jesus of Nazareth and in Joe from Hebron and in Danny from Edinburgh and everybody else. Right. So I used to think that that's Hegel's view, but in the end, I think there's something a little bit more orthodox that's kind of in the neighborhood. I think he thinks there was something unique about the incarnation of Jesus. So he's a sort of traditional Christian in that way. Where do you get that uniqueness?

Well, so there's some parts, both in the philosophy of religion and in the philosophy of history, where he seems to suggest that none of the rest of us could have this kind of divine, dignified significance that Kant thinks that we have if one person hadn't, as it were, led the way and been unique and extraordinary in this way. But I mean, look, I don't know, is this orthodox Christian thought? I mean, it makes Christ as it were, first among equals. And lots of people might tell you that's heretical. So Hegel's view about God is more orthodox than you might think.

I mean, if you're interested in a good book to read on this in terms of the history of the time, Laurence Dickey's book on Hegel, the Madison historian I really think is quite good. He's very good at tracing out what the different religious options at the time were and the different kinds of debates that were going around. But that's more or less where I've come to think about Hegel on God.

Thank you.

Would it be fair to say that the term God has appears in his phenomenology? By mentioning his entire philosophy, his metaphysics, it should be distinguished from what he personally believed the term meant. Because I'm thinking like it's a placeholder for reality. It strikes me as a kind of placeholder for real stuff. And if you just replace the word God with reality all over the place, you'd get something sensible almost, but maybe not. In his private life, in his private recollections, does he mean something more full bodied than just what's real?

That's an interesting question.

Oh yeah. I'm inclined to see it in the reverse. I'm inclined to think that his philosophical conception is more full bodied than his personal religious observance. There's not a lot of evidence that Hegel was all that interested in the rituals of the church, though. You look at his philosophy of religion and it's all about ritual. It's all about the cultic aspects of religion. He doesn't seem to care at all about the moral guidance of religion. Religion, it's very much a kind of mystical treatment of what kinds of communal ways we have of coming to union with God.

Now this suggests in some way a union with reality, as you're suggesting, right. Maybe this could be substituted. But then it sort of depends on what you mean by reality, right? If you mean union with the most real thing or the most real aspects of reality, then there's something right about that. If you just mean God means the collection of all that is so. Some people read Spinoza this way. I don't think that can be true for Hegel. I mean to use a bit of Kantian jargon here, God, for Hegel, is something like a distributive totality rather than a collective totality.

Right. God or the divine is some feature that is distributed throughout all of us rather than the collection of the whole universe. Right. Or the collection of all the positive properties in the universe, or something like that. So given those caveats, I think you can make a kind of substitution like that. Sure.

24:20 Mark: So maybe this gets us to something like the metaphysics, since that's usually considered

a primary metaphysical question.

I know that I pitched the second half of the episode as we're getting at least the logic of the basic metaphysical terms.

Yeah.

But I'm not sure if that actually amounts to a metaphysics. It doesn't seem like he has a list of, here's my ontology, here are the types of things that exist, this, this, and this. It's more relativist than that. How are we supposed to interpret his metaphysics as a whole? Does he even have one?

24:48 Guest: Yeah, yeah. Well, I mean, so there's two questions here. So first is metaphysics as opposed to what? Right. So in contemporary philosophy, we always contrast metaphysics with epistemology, but you can't really make that contrast in the logic, because there's an objective logic, there's a subjective logic. It turns out the most real thing is subjectivity. So the usual distinction that we draw between metaphysics and epistemology doesn't have much grip on the logic in that way. But on the other hand, I think your point is well taken. Right. I mean, where is the list, as it were, from Hegel, that rivals Aristotle's list of categories or Kant's list of 12? So Hegel has no compunction about complaining about Kant's list of categories.

Why 12?

Why not 13? Where's the derivation here? Right. And you might expect, oh, well, here's 13, or here's 14, or here's Hegel's list. But he seems to go in the opposite direction and say, in fact, list making is the wrong kind of activity to be engaged in when you're doing this kind of metaphysics. There's something less stable, there's something more involved in the world, there's something more dynamic than that kind of procedure. And so the problem with Aristotle or with Kant is not, as it were, they failed to do properly something that needs to be done.

The lesson is, if the most brilliant people in the Western philosophical tradition couldn't do this, maybe that's not the thing we ought to be doing. And maybe Their failures are successes and stuff some ways. So, I mean, it's not an ontology in the sense that, say, Aristotle's categories gives you this list of predicates that you could attach to any substance or something like that. But it is a metaphysics in the sense that it canvases, as it were, the most basic categories that you could use to talk about anything at all. I mean, sometimes I think maybe the term first philosophy is a better way to come at the logic than metaphysics, because it's just so hard to hear metaphysics if you're a contemporary philosopher and not hear not epistemology when somebody says that, right?

I mean, that's just so ingrained in us. But if Hegel's right in the phenomenology, which is a big if, but if he's right in the phenomenology, the distinction between metaphysics and epistemology, between being and knowing, is a really local and context sensitive distinction. It's not the kind of distinction you found a whole philosophy on.

27:32 Mark: What do other folks think? What did you get out of this?

27:36 Guest: One at a time, people. Let's start with Alan.

27:40 Mark: Okay, well, first, there certainly are other people who are have done metaphysics this way, talking about these very general notions of being. I mean, Aristotle in the metaphysics, I mean, he gets into these kinds of very basic questions about what is being. So, I mean, that seems to me to be a precedent here as far as making lists of categories of existence. I mean, the basic structure that Hegel gives us so much is not so much lists as it is these hierarchies of triads. And if you get down to the bottom of all those triads, and since we only read the first little bit of the logic, we didn't get very much of what was given in the official reading for the podcast. But it's my impression that if you read through all the way down to the bottom of all those trees, you do get fairly specific categories of existence.

28:40 Guest: Well, so I wouldn't want to deny that. And I mean, this came out in the second podcast, the Importance of Specificity. Right? So Hegel's emphasis on the understanding, right. In contrast to Schelling, to Romanticism, to views about intuition, right. What matters is being definite about things. So I don't want to give the misleading impression that it's all sort of one thing washing into another and you just sort of let it wash, as it were. But I suppose I would put it, instead of talking about triads, I would say what you get are certain paradigmatic kinds of transitions.

Right. You get certain paradigmatic transferences from one thought to another thought. Right. Or from one content to another thought. I mean, so you guys spent a good amount of time talking about the movement between being and nothing and becoming. And to my mind, if you look in the other parts of Hegel's thinking and so called Hegel system at what he's doing with the logical categories, almost always it's making use of these kinds of dynamic connections. Right. That's what's really doing the work. Right. So what I meant to say, it's not sort of a list making activity.

And by the way, I'm quite sympathetic to reading Aristotle as not really involved in that sort of list making activity in lots of places, the topics, for example, it doesn't strike me that Aristotle's all that concerned in numbering, right. How many of these kinds of predicates there are and so on. What he wants to know is the different kinds of functions that these predicates could have. So I'm sympathetic to that view about Aristotle. But if you look at what Hegel's doing with these categories, what power or function they have in the philosophy of.

Right. For example, it strikes me that it's primarily. Well, if you're thinking about this, then you're going to be led to think about that and think about this other thing too. But what he never does, as it were, is go down a list of things to check off, as it were. Have we covered this area? Have we covered this area? Have we covered this area? Right. It's not, as it were, that the categories of the logic are sort of optional tools that you could pick up here and there. But it is, I think, that certain kinds of transitions are important for certain kinds of phenomena or illuminate certain kinds of phenomena and others don't.

31:21 Mark: Let's talk about those transitions for a second then. So the, the movement that we, as you say, we went on at some length about from being, how being collapses into nothingness, and when you analyze the collapse between those and the alternation, then you get becoming. How is that a metaphysical thing and not something psychological? Even if it's universally psychological, even if he's right, he's giving a correct phenomenological account that when you think of being and you think of nothingness and the fact that there's no quality that the two of these have that would distinguish them one from another.

Right, yeah, that was the argument given. So therefore one collapses into the other. Yeah, I can see how you can make an argument based on the essences of the things, therefore, that they're equivalent. But for you to say, yeah, no, no, no. It's the alternation back and forth between them in your mind that gives you the idea of becoming. Well, so that's something about my mind. How does that tell me anything about the world?

Yeah.

32:15 Guest: So I'll give you two answers, each as unsatisfactory as the other. The first answer is. The first answer is, but the Phenomenology of spirit.

Right.

I take it that the phenomenology of spirit isn't a decisive argument for anything. But here's what it is. The phenomenology of spirit tries to trot out all of the different ways people have tried to make the distinction between subject and object fundamental. And it tries to show for all of these different patterns that Hegel can think of that it isn't right. Now, that's not a decisive argument because there could certainly be some other form of distinguishing between subject, subject and object that Hegel hasn't considered. There could be a new historical form of it, and so on.

I take it the whole point of that book is just to say, look, if I've canvassed all of this, you've got to at least give me that it's reasonable that we could start from a position prior to the distinction between subject and object. Right. So it's a long book just to sort of get one dialectical advantage. So if that's true, then we're supposed to at least think that it's reasonable to think about being nothing and becoming as being thought whatever. Right? As nothing more than what is said in the concept. I mean, he says at some point, I think this is in the greater logic that being and nothing and becoming are in a certain sense, only logical categories.

In retrospect, it's only once you get to determinant being that you really have something that you can work with. And part of the point of being nothing and becoming is just to show you don't really know what you're talking about when you say these things. So anyway, that was the first unsatisfying answer leads to the second unsatisfying answer,

which is just satisfying. By the way, if I may add, we're all feeling fantastically dissatisfied. Kintin youth. We always need to have the least satisfying scholars. You're doing an excellent, excellent job.

I'm glad I fit the bill. And so the second is just supposed to be. Look, all Hegel wants to get out of this really is becoming. All he wants to get out of is this notion that in the most basic categories and concepts there is some kind of instability, there's some kind of dynamism right now, look, Hegel in a certain sense thinks this is a very Aristotelian point. If dynamic power, energy, expression, force are to be the essence of reality, they'd better be the essence of thought as well. And the categories that we have. So the second version of the unsatisfying answer is to say if you can watch how this dynamism plays out and Hegel can give you a construction of the difference between subjectivity and objectivity that isn't a matter of the individual cognizer or individual perception or how appearances get strung together into experience, then that which you only get obviously at the end of the logic.

Thus the unsatisfying nature of this answer is supposed to validate, beginning in that way. So the phenomenology is supposed to make it basically reasonable. And what you get out of that dynamism is supposed to make it plausible in the end.

But again, even less satisfying than the last one.

36:19 Mark: So after shows are super fun if you have any desire to get involved with the next one again, that's on Sunday, September 26th on Simone de Beauvoir. You can again log in, look at the list of discussion groups and there's one there specifically on that after show. All you have to do is join it and then you will receive a link in your email about a half hour before the session on 5pm Eastern that day it will also stream live on video. I should mention that both this and Brian's session, even if you're not assistant, you can watch them in full on YouTube.

I provided the links to those videos in the blog post that corresponds to this recording@partiallyexaminedlife.com now of course the thing we like about the way we do things around here is talking with our peers a la our format for most of our episodes. But of course, as you know, we do not disdain the Academy and having a scholar come along, especially after the fact, to tell us what we did wrong on an after show is a really great compliment to hearing what we did. And likewise you as a listener, if you've got the time, you've got the energy, don't feel like just sitting back passively listening is doing the whole job for you.

So get involved with not school. You can propose as a topic a discussion on any of our past episodes or on anything else on lectures you see on itunes, you and you want other people to go through those with you. And just as we've gotten Brian to help with the intro group. We're actually entering into a somewhat more elaborate relation with a group called the Great Discourses. Not to be confused with the Great Courses, it is also built on a St John's model, on discussions of texts that you have read, but those are made up of multiple sessions and have a little more of the sort of course oriented material while still being very, very low priced and partially examined.

Life citizens are going to get a discount to the courses that the Great Discourses is offering with their July session, which include ones on Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and on Stoicism as a way of life. So keep an eye on partiallyexaminedlife.com in the next month to get more information on how to register, how to get the discount for those. And I also want to reach out to anyone out there that maybe has a philosophy degree or wants to teach philosophy in some way just because it's really damn fun to do that. Give us a buzz@pel@partiallyexaminedlife.com to talk about how maybe you could use our not school system to sell your own services as instructor if there is demand.

We'd really like to become a portal for tutors, for instructors to be able to run all sorts of courses to really give you a lot of options within not school for how you want to pursue your out of school education. So please join with us, participate in the discussions, propose things yourselves, help us brainstorm ways to make this a dynamic, low cost, participatory, valuable resource for all of our listeners or anyone interested in philosophy. So thanks a lot and have a great Memorial Day. So long.