Ep. 275: Hegel’s Project in “The Phenomenology of Spirit” (Part One)

0:09 Mark: Life, a podcast by some guys were at one point set on doing philosophy for a living, but then thought better of it. Our question for episode 275 is something like, how does one do philosophy? We read the introduction of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit from 1807. For more information, please visit partiallyexaminedlife.com this is Mark Linsenmayer, intruder upon the immanent rhythm of the Notion, in Madison, Wisconsin.

0:35 Wes: This is Wes Alwan, Just As Much Subject as Substance, in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

0:41 Dylan: This is Dylan Casey, shaping My Concrete self into a Simple Determinateness in Madison, Wisconsin.

0:50 Seth: In the preface to A Partially Examined Life podcast, it's customary for the hosts to provide a pithy self descriptor based on the reading. But with regards to this podcast, that seems not only superfluous, but in light of the subject nature, even inappropriate and counterproductive, therefore. Seth Paskin, Austin, Texas.

1:14 Mark: Hey, fellas. We had a longer than usual break between episodes, so we could get supercharged on this, but I think we did that to varying degrees or do extra wakeboarding, depending.

1:26 Dylan: You got the case?

1:29 Mark: Yes. Dylan and I were on vacation together because we're part of the same extended family, if people didn't know. And I did all my reading on that. And Dylan did not.

1:41 Dylan: I did not.

1:42 Mark: And Seth, you were just traveling too, right?

1:44 Seth: We went to Mexico for a vacation, and then we went to Florida for a wedding over the weekend back in June.

1:51 Mark: And did Hegel accompany you on these trips?

1:54 Seth: No, Fichte was on the beach with me in Mexico, and I want to say Schelling Schelling was at the wedding. I think that's how it lined up, but I have not been traveling otherwise.

2:06 Mark: All right, so Hegel didn't go anywhere cool. What about you, Wes?

2:10 Wes: I'd been to Virginia on vacation and to my brother's house in New Jersey. And yes, I've been reading German Idealism and Secondary Sources and wherever I go.

2:23 Mark: So we were debating what exactly we should read of this book. We had some old episodes on some chapters near the beginning, but not at the beginning. And I think we sort of assumed we'll just read the beginning on our own, but we really didn't refer to this stuff right away in the old episodes. And it seemed appropriate to do that now. Now that we've done Fichte and Schelling. In fact, if you haven't listened to those, because Hegel's a name you recognize and you didn't recognize those names, just go back, because I think A lot of the point of doing this now is to use the insight into the point of view, the vocabulary that was going on, those figures, to understand Hegel's methodology.

And we have an interesting division here between the introduction, which he wrote first, which is difficult but not crazy, and then the preface, which comes before the introduction in the book, which he wrote last, after the entire book. And according to some commentators, you can't even understand the preface at all until you've read the whole book, which I think is an overstatement, but it is definitely more difficult than the introduction, even though it is almost somewhat overlapping material. Just about like what this book is going to be about, what his methodology is, but with more complicated language that he worked out subsequently.

3:36 Wes: It does actually kind of outline the whole project. Even though he says that would be pointless. That's like the very first paragraph. It's an inappropriate, pointless thing to do for a philosophical book. But then he goes ahead and does

3:48 Dylan: it, which is why it's 50 pages long.

3:51 Wes: Yeah, it is very, very difficult for just beginning it. And I think, you know, I couldn't have done this without looking at secondary stuff. So I found, just for listeners, especially helpful is a Hegel dictionary. It's in the Blackwell Philosophy series, and it's by. I think it's Michael Inwood, who is absolutely superb, and he has a translation and commentary as well, and the commentary is superb, so I can't recommend him enough. And then there's, as an overall commentary, Terry Pinkard's Hegel's Phenomenology. The Sociality of Reason, I think, is, I would say, the best commentary I found.

So you have to do a close reading of the text as well, obviously, but I think in this case it helps to come to it with as much ammunition as possible. And Fichte and Schelling are very helpful. I think we got with Fichte, we got a nice, in a way, summation of his philosophy at a kind of general high level. And then Schelling. We just got into the weeds. I think both of those two different things are helpful because even though we didn't get through much Schelling, just getting the flavor of that and getting into the beginning of the system of transcendental idealism.

I thought about that a lot while reading Hegel, especially since he really slams both of them, but especially Schelling in the preface. I mean, just ruthlessly, for no good reason, ridicules these guys. He's very allergic to their version of idealism.

5:14 Mark: So is it even possible for us to kind of in A. A non jargony way explain what the method is that we get out of these two very different documents at the beginning of this big book.

5:27 Wes: I think we should start with the introduction.

5:28 Mark: Well, so you're saying. No, that we need to go right into the text. Definitely. In our discussion today, we're going to start in the introduction, not the preface.

5:35 Wes: But you're talking about a high level.

5:37 Mark: I'm just wondering if it's even possible. We got out of Schelling the idea in our second Schelling episode that what philosophy was all about was exploring what self consciousness is. And there is some of that that is left in Hegel, that it ends up being the spirit of the world that manifests itself through intellectual history. That manifests itself very literally as philosophy ends up being God knowing himself. And so us doing philosophy are being part of God discovering itself.

6:10 Wes: So Hegel, like Fichte and Schelling, is very preoccupied with the problem created by Kant. And that is the impossibility of metaphysics, which is what the critical philosophy establishes. Right. We're limited to knowledge of appearances and our experience. It's really the hard sciences that we can call knowledge. Philosophy is speculative. Unless you're involved in that critique, you couldn't call it knowledge per se. And these guys want to get back to that. They want to get back to being able to talk about God, being able to talk about speculative metaphysics and ultimately being able to talk about things in themselves.

The thing that Kant seems to have barred us from talking about. So we saw, and Fichte wanted to say, these guys are all pivoting off of. There's lots and lots of critiques of Kant's positing of things in themselves. And we saw with Fichte, his way around this was to say that the world in itself is posited by the ego. Self consciousness requires it. It's a function of self consciousness to posit the external world, not just the forms of consciousness like space and time and causality, but the data itself. And then Schelling. We got a very Fichtean account of that from Schelling.

But the methodology there is in a way too speculative for Hegel. It involves this direct intuition, something that Hegel's going to criticize in the preface of God. And it does away with. It gets very, very abstract. You know, this whole idea of A equals A and all that stuff. And Hegel wants, in a way to get us back down to earth. And ultimately he wants to be able to do what he does in logic. He wants to talk in very Aristotelian terms about being and the way towards that, the innovation here is to say, well, why don't we look at previous epistemological theories as appearances themselves?

Why don't we do the Kant treatment, but think of the theories as the phenomena? That is the fundamental innovation that's going on here. And what Hegel is suggesting is that if we treat the theories, the history of epistemology, the different shapes, which you call shapes of consciousness, as they develop historically, different ways of knowing, different conceptions of knowledge, if we study those as phenomena, if we look at those as phenomenologists and watch the way they, one unfolds out of the other dialectically because of the internal inconsistencies and contradictions of the previous stage, then once that whole series is complete and we can kind of give the summative account of that, we can break out of the Kantian shell of being confined to the world of appearances.

Oddly enough, if we step back and we take epistemology as our object, we're going to break free and we're going to get to what he calls absolute spirit and a true, scientific, comprehensive knowledge of the quote, unquote absolute, which we can talk about what that is.

9:02 Mark: Any subsequent points I would make, let's actually get into the text of the introduction, but I do maybe want to point out a little of his venom in the preface. The very first thing that he seems to be against is we called our second Fichte episode his idealist theology. And you could interpret him in a mystical way that we just, ooh, am I part of the everyday acting in the world among material things, or am I the spiritual self that is acting in the eternal world right now? And so you can see, especially since Fichte wrote the Vocation of Man, it's a popular book that insofar as that caught on, that the way that people would be getting into it is like the way they get into Emerson.

This transcendental talk of I can just kind of close my eyes and use my intellectual intuition and hey, I'm part of God now. We're all part of God. You know, it lends itself to sloganeering in a way that Hegel was very hostile to. And so for somebody who's notorious for such abstractions, Hegel hates abstract. He hates, because that's what a slogan is, is like an abstraction. And you, you only really get the idea, even if in a sense, that picture that I described, Fichte, is correct, for you to actually understand what that sense is requires, like, detailed, not just sketching out the details of a theory.

It's not like doing derivations or theorems in the way that Schelling is trying to pull it out. But it is something more like everyday philosophical analysis of theories and historical movements. So we've gotten that example from our previous treatment of Hegel's phenomenology, which we then talked about in many, many other episodes of how self consciousness develops out of recognition by other people. And so that's a concrete observation in psychology. We got a version of it, Lacan, that's real philosophy. It's actually not just method. So it's ironic that of course, we're going to spend the whole time today just talking about method.

But he did do it for 70 pages, even though he says at the beginning it's stupid to talk about method before you actually get into it.

11:08 Dylan: One thing I would. I would add on is I hadn't read Hegel in a long time and I was never really struck when I did read them. So it just reveals. I just didn't understand him at all about how much he's really engaging and trying to resolve a whole litany of, I'll call it classic dichotomies in philosophy and trying to come up with a solution that synthesizes and resolves them all. Being and becoming whole and part subject and object. He's got all of that in his sights that he's trying to resolve in a way that maintains, you know, how do we get objectivity while maintaining a subjective disposition?

How do we get constant change and flux while still having something concrete in the world? Those kinds of problems and you have littered throughout the history of philosophy, coming down on one side or the other, coming down on everything's flux, or everything's being, or everything's the good, or it's all one, or it's all a whole bunch of stuff. And seems to me one of the things he's trying to do is resolve all those dichotomies. As Wes, you put it, as in his sights was recovering the possibility of metaphysics after Kant gets rid of it. And then part of that resolution is to show that you can get a metaphysics that encompasses and solves all those

12:32 Mark: problems by relating them. So like Parmenides versus Heraclitus, is everything stable or has everything changed? Well, both, depending on the point of view, depending on the context.

12:41 Dylan: That's exactly right. Is it subject? Is everything subjective and all comes out of our brains and is generated by our minds, or is it something that exists out there that we have to discover? Well, it's really? Both.

12:52 Wes: Yeah. Ultimately these things converge, right?

12:55 Mark: Yes, exactly.

12:55 Wes: Yeah. So he wants to, in a way, show that subject and object converge. So he's going to prove idealism, in a sense. But that's a long, laborious process. That's the whole phenomenology. At the very end, with absolute knowledge, we can comprehend how it is that mind and object are not these things that are radically alien to each other.

13:15 Dylan: I'm not trying to minimize the work done. I'm just trying to say that his sights are very high. The game that he's hunting is huge.

13:23 Wes: That's his criticism of Schelling, by the way. And he emphasizes laboriousness. No, it's not just immediate intuition or it's not what the Romantics want to do with, you know, I feel God, or whatever you. You know. Or it's in beauty. It's an aesthetic experience. This is like we are scientists or metaphysicians. This is like long, hard fought process and it involves detailed historical explication.

13:44 Dylan: One thing that maybe we can put a tab on for talking about later is, and I hope it's not, it maybe is just pedantic. But whether or not he seems like a real idealist in the end, in the sense of an idealist being someone who says that it's all in our heads, it's all generated out of our minds. And maybe that's just the pejorative definition of idealism.

14:07 Wes: It's definitely not that. Yeah.

14:09 Mark: Seth, any opening thoughts before we just get into the text here, section 73.

14:14 Seth: Well, I had another one of these experiences where it was an eye opening. The idea that he's taking issue with the approach of just declaring something like the self or God or the subject, and that the word itself is empty, but already by using it, we have presuppositions. And that he wants to talk about movement and activity becoming. That's at once, I guess you could call it metaphorical in some sense, the description of the way things process, the way this unfolds, but also historical. And so much stuff started popping into my head from heidegger in the 20th century. And I was just like. It's like I'm finally, after 30 years, starting to get some sense of how important Hegel is to the 20th century of philosophy and how not reckoning with him earlier was maybe not the best thing for my philosophical Bildung.

15:12 Mark: I'm sure I've told you at some point, Frithjof Bergmann, being the guy who introduced me to Hegel and also being somebody who escaped the Nazis, he just Thought Heidegger was entirely derivative of Hegel, such that you shouldn't even bother to read Heidegger. Heidegger is a fraud. Heidegger loses the fundamental openness in epistemology that Hegel captured.

15:34 Seth: You know what? In 10 years, I may very well agree with Frithjof's assessment. I don't know. That's if I take the trouble to go revisit Heidegger, which I don't think is gonna happen.

15:43 Wes: Should we read Heidegger's commentary on the phenomenology of spirit?

15:48 Mark: I'm interested in Heidegger's commentary on Nietzsche. I know we've talked about Heidegger's Nietzsche being sort of its own animal, but this is all putting off the inevitable.

15:58 Wes: Exactly.

15:59 Mark: So introduction starts on in the Miller. It's page 46, section 73. The nice thing that there's all these sections that are often a paragraph, sometimes they're a full page, but it does break it up into nice chunks.

16:14 Wes: So he starts by talking about this natural assumption, which someone would say is not so natural, but it's kind of skeptical assumption, or it's especially the Kantian assumption, which is that before we get down to knowing things, before we get down to science in the full sense, we have to stop ourselves and conduct a critique of pure reason, let's say. Or we have to look at the nature, the scope, the limits of our cognitive faculties. And the worry is that because cognition is a medium or because it's an instrument of a sort, that it's going to distort reality and interfere with the thing that we want to do, which is, as he puts it, to have cognition of what truly is, which is to say the absolute, which we should probably pause a little bit and reflect on. On what we're talking about with the absolute. Yeah.

17:09 Dylan: He says if cognition is the instrument for getting hold of absolute being, it is obvious that the use of an instrument on a thing certainly does not let it be what it is for itself, but rather sets out to reshape and alter it.

17:22 Mark: Yeah. So are we going to start with epistemology, like Descartes, like Kant? Because it seems for a lot of philosophers, if you decide to start there, you never get past there.

17:31 Wes: Exactly.

17:32 Seth: Yes.

17:32 Mark: So let's instead not assume that and just try to talk about stuff. And we'll figure out, once we've kind of done enough philosophical analysis of the world, of the absolute, of whatever it is we're trying. That philosophy is trying to give an account of an account of knowledge, is going to come out of that. It just. There's no reason that we should just assume one at the outset. And that's what he essentially thinks Kant is doing. That if you basically take the skeptical challenge seriously and say, oh well, because the stick looks bent in water, I guess maybe all of our senses are just wrong.

And there's this unbridgeable gap between the world of our experience and the world as it is error free behind what we would get if we didn't have this tool of knowledge filtering and blocking things and shaping itself to its own ends. Like Hegel just asks us, why would we assume that? Why not mistrust the mistrust of science? The fear of error is in fact the error. Let's just start by just trying to just ignore that kind of consideration and just describe what we seem to encounter when we analyze things.

18:41 Wes: So yeah, that mistrust, the mistrust line comes. That's in the next section, section 74. But that line is the one thing I always remembered from phenomenology, from reading it decades ago, was the whole idea of mistrusting the mistrust. And I didn't fully understand that until this reading. I think it's true. The natural outcome of epistemology is to be cut off, in a Kantian way, from things in themselves. You get this unbridgeable gulf between cognition and the absolute, where absolute could mean God or objects of metaphysics, things in themselves, Spinozan substance in general.

And of course, the Kantian skepticism is not the same thing as ancient skepticism and things being bent. It's the idea that objectivity requires that the world be constructed by our categories and spatial and temporal intuitions before we begin to analyze it. Hegel's solution is not going to be to say, well, we shouldn't do epistemology, because a lot of the book is epistemology. His solution is to say we should do the history of epistemology, we should do the phenomenology of epistemology, and watch epistemological theories unfold, or at least that's part of it, and transcend epistemology in that way.

And that, strangely enough, cognition of the absolute just is doing that. So the distinction between first philosophy and epistemology, or metaphysics and epistemology will actually collapse in the end in the way that the distinction between subject and object will collapse.

20:09 Dylan: Philosophy itself ends up being a historical project. I guess it would help me. So maybe it help listeners just to understand better when we say that Kant's solution to the problem of skepticism is to Jettison metaphysics in order to save science and say something about concrete understanding of the world. What does it mean to have jettisoned metaphysics when there's a lot of things about talking about how we understand the world and categories and stuff like that? I guess we're just saying that that's all epistemology. It's not metaphysics. That is, it's not talking about how the world is. It's just talking about how we understand the world.

20:48 Wes: Yeah, Aristotle, in a way, when he talks about categories, is doing metaphysics. He's talking about the fundamental structure of the world, which ultimately is what Hegel's going to do in his logic. Kant, though, says, no, that's all just in the mind. That's all epistemological.

21:02 Dylan: One man's epistemology is another man's metaphysics. And it just depends upon whether or not you think it applies to the world or just to our minds.

21:09 Mark: Well, see, I always had this problem in our Kant episodes of how we talk about scientific activity, because it's not metaphysics and it's not epistemology in any obvious way either. And I just think about the distinction between ancient atomism, right? The world is ultimately atoms. I like, Wes, your description of what the absolute might be, because for an ancient atomist, Democritus Lucretius, the world is atoms. I'm doing my metaphysics now. I'm not doing science, I'm doing metaphysics because I can't test the atom. There are ways that he tried to relate it to macro phenomena and make it what we would call scientific.

And when a modern chemist talked about atoms, there is the idea that there could be something below that. Right? There could be quarks. Well, what's below the quarks? Is it superstring? And I think that modern physicists still takes themselves to be doing roughly, cosmology. Right? That's what metaphysics was. But there's still the admission that there could always be a lower layer. And where metaphysics is pretentious enough to say, I want to actually talk about the lower layer, and maybe the lower layer is God or something like that. So there's an openness.

Whereas however far the scientist drills down, they're not going to say, well, I've hit God. A good scientist is never going to say that. It's always going to be somehow related to, well, this is the best theory that I can come up with to explain all this macro phenomena. So I'm creating models is what I'm doing. So that's not epistemology, but it is a way of organizing the data that are presented to us. I guess I'm just thinking that whereas a Kantian, a scientist with Kantian intuitions, with exceptions of the basic Kantian framework, is going to say, well, all this organizing of appearances, that's working with the world of phenomenology.

That is what natural science is. It is not epistemology, but it's definitely not metaphysics either. Whereas Hegel, I think, is willing to, at least at first, bracket that question of idealism versus realism. And so he's not merely being a dogmatist, as Schelling would say, and just like jumping ahead. Yes, of course, atoms are real and they're in the real world and they're independent of the minds, and they existed far before any human beings walked on the earth. He's just putting that aside. It is. Okay, this is the way I interpret it. Anyway, for.

According to Hegel, for you just to talk about science without ruling out the fact that you're doing metaphysics, because there ends up being a continuity. There is no sharp distinction between the phenomenal world and the noumenal world. So there is just a continuity between the things that we can experience and discover and whatever lower layers might lie in there.

23:42 Wes: Yeah, I mean, I think that's right. Although we should keep in mind that when Hegel uses the word science, he really just means metaphysics.

23:49 Mark: Yes.

23:50 Wes: So he's not thinking principally about the natural sciences. Science is what allows you to cognize the absolute, so to speak.

23:56 Dylan: So he's thinking about science in terms of knowing.

23:58 Wes: Yeah, or knowing is better. You know, we should think philosophical. Knowing is what we're. Yeah.

24:03 Mark: So I think that really follows Schellings Project. Right.

24:08 Wes: Yeah, it's science.

24:09 Mark: Capital S is the whole philosophical enterprise. But you can have, you know, Schelling had his whole book on the natural sciences, so there's definitely room for. I just don't know what the vocabulary that they use for actually talking about chemistry say.

24:23 Wes: Yeah, but for the metaphysicians, you want to drill down to the bedrock, so to speak. And you can do that mereologically or conceptually. Right. So you can drill down on spatial phenomena to get atoms or to get substance. Right. The thing that underlies all the predicates or the attributes. Or you can go backwards in time and say, God is cosmologically the beginning of all creation. He's the cause, the unmoved mover. Or you can combine those things in a Leibnizian way or in a Spinozan way. With the substance that underlies everything is God and is nature, and we are all actually properties of that or modes of that, so to speak.

Our minds are modes of the one big substance. These are all first causes, or these are all things that don't depend on anything else. And from a scientific point of view or epistemologically, they're the ultimate building blocks, right? The ultimate explanatory particles, so to speak. From a subjective point of view, you could say, well, what's going to be my first principle for building up my system? And you get something like the cogito and Descartes, right? You say, well, what do I have immediate certain access to? It's my own consciousness.

So you can see these two different approaches to the absolute coming together in the idealists, because they are concerned a lot with Spinoza as well, where you say, okay, what Spinoza was just calling substance, that absolutely is just what we're going to call a super subject, the one big consciousness of God. Those two things have to somehow come together. So that's one way of articulating a direction of idealism and how it's related to metaphysics and how it's moving beyond Kant's transcendental idealism. Kant says there is a mind independent reality that we can't know.

It's not just we're making up all the appearances. And when scientists do science, they are, yes, just treating the phenomena, but they're still doing science. They're still grasping reality in the sense that there is data coming from the things in themselves affecting us. And the appearances we're dealing with are systematically related to the things in themselves structurally. But Fichte, Schelling, Hegel do not like that sort of account. They want to get to the point where we can say we know, we directly know the absolute or things in themselves.

26:43 Mark: I just need to do a terminology insertion. I don't think we've got to the point where we've said mereological enough to assume people. It just means part whole stuff, part whole relations.

26:53 Wes: I meant to use a say naturalistically.

26:55 Mark: I'm sure we'll do a whole episode on mereology before too long.

26:59 Wes: Stewart Umphrey would be the guy for that. What book did we do? We didn't do his parts and wholes book. Whole's book, right?

27:05 Dylan: No, we. We did his natural kinds.

27:08 Wes: Natural kinds? Yeah. So he has a whole book on parts and wholes.

27:13 Mark: So are we still on 73 or 74?

27:16 Dylan: We can move to 74, but I

27:19 Wes: think, Mark, you already summarized it. Well, right. Why not mistrust the mistrust? Yeah.

27:23 Mark: Let's just read the quote, though.

27:25 Seth: Yeah.

27:25 Mark: Meanwhile, if the fear of falling into error sets up a mistrust of science, which in the absence of such scruples, gets on with the work itself and actually cognizes something, it is hard to see why we should not turn around and mistrust this very mistrust. Should we not be concerned as to whether this fear of error is just the error itself? Indeed, this fear takes something a great deal, in fact, for granted as truth, supporting its scruples and inferences on what is itself in need of prior scrutiny to see if it is true. So just the model of what knowledge is is an instrument or as a medium.

In both, these things would be distorting reality in some way. So several of these sections are just about how it doesn't make any sense to think about how the medium of my knowledge is distorting things. How do I somehow figure out what that distortion is added and run it through a filter to remove the distortion and get reality in itself? He just thinks that is a process that doesn't make any sense.

28:20 Wes: We just end up where we started, which is not knowing anything. Right? If we just subtract because the distortion is what's available to us. Right. The appearance of phenomenon is what's available. If we get rid of the distortion, we get rid of the phenomena. But what he's saying here is why not apply our skepticism to our epistemological activity itself? Right? If we're going to be skeptical about our knowledge of objects, why don't we be skeptical about our access to our own minds, about our access to the appearances? Why should we assume that a consciousness is immediately available to us, that the phenomena as constructed are immediately available to us, that there is this big gulf between phenomena and things in themselves?

He's saying we're actually making a lot of assumptions here. And later on he's going to say, you know, we treat these words, subject and object and God and this and that, as if we know what we're talking about beforehand. As if these are fixed points for inquiry, or that we just intuitively understand what we're talking about there, and we can let sort of inquiry proceed on those assumptions. He's saying, let's just doubt all those assumptions. In which case you do not start with skepticism in the typical sense of skepticism of the object world.

You start with super skepticism. So that it's still skepticism as he's going to explain, but it's a much more Productive form.

29:41 Dylan: I just wanted to emphasize the way the skepticism is. Skepticism about the fact that we actually know our minds. In some ways it's a consequence of Descartes cogito, right? That's the thing that I know the best. He's basically saying, well, that's not true. And then part of the result of that skepticism is, well, we begin to doubt the world. And so you end up with one branch of idealism. I do like the other piece right here a lot. To me, I read it because of. It's my habit. I read it pragmatically, right. This iterative kind of thing he invents

30:16 Wes: pragmatism in this reading. I mean, this is absolutely.

30:20 Seth: Help me understand that.

30:22 Dylan: Well, I think the summary is just the stance in this section of mistrusting the mistrust. And so, as Mark was saying, you basically say, look, I'm solving problems all the time, and I hold in a certain way the fact that I'm partly right and I'm trusting my intuitions. But then when I find that something isn't jiving, then I refine those concepts that govern my intuition and I go back and forth. And partly I'm saying that there is something absolute out in the world. And I take that for granted, but not in a unsceptical way. And I understand that I have access to those things in the world, but not in an unproblematic way. And so my subjectivity is fruitful and true, and the objectivity of the world is available and true. And I'm constantly iterating in a historical and developmental way on trying to figure that out. That is the process of my intellect and my spirit.

31:22 Wes: And as we see this unfold in this introduction, he's going to say the way we course. Correct. He calls this experience. Right. What you're just talking about, Dylan. And the way we do that is he says exactly the same thing William James said in that I think it was. Was it the will to believe. Whatever William James's critique of the thing in itself was, he's just. It's very, very close. And he just says we can't compare our knowledge of the object to the thing in itself, obviously, because the thing in itself is accessible. So when we do course correct, that happens within consciousness. It's kind of a coherentist theory of knowledge where we're comparing experiences to experiences. Those are the things that collide or cohere or inconsistent or lead dialectically to new positions. That's the strongly pragmatist element here, which

32:11 Dylan: you might go as far as to say is Hegel's work is a candidate for a foundation of pragmatism. Pragmatism is often criticized as not really being a philosophy, but being a proto philosophy. But Hegel's trying to sort of solve the problem that would be recognized by a pragmatist.

32:30 Mark: That's funny, Dylan. I was about to say that he's an anti foundationalist, and you're saying he's actually foundational about pragmatism.

32:38 Dylan: Yes. Yeah, I think he is.

32:40 Mark: Maybe those two things are not in conflict. Because if the idea of pragmatism is that, just get in and do it. Come up with your theories, come up with your observations. And when you see something that is wrong with those, in other words, there's something about your model, your theory, that collides with some other perception that you have some other theory that you have some reason to believe, then you work that out. You don't sweep everything off the board and say, what is the one starting point? You don't even do it like Schelling did it and say it's self consciousness, Even though, again, Hegel's system ends up having a lot of the same character as Schelling's in that this attitude toward nature that treats it like an intelligence, as if we can explore nature by getting inside it in some way.

You know, imaginatively inside it. And that's the way we figure out, you know. So there's a lot that he has in common with Schelling, but foundationalism is not part of it.

33:35 Wes: He does have a starting point. Right. And he has a big advantage, which is that he thinks he's reached the end point of an epistemological development that allows him to look back on it. So his phenomena are the epistemological theories that have preceded him. That's a starting point. And what he's saying is we simply have to observe. But as he points out, the foundationalism is kind of backwards. For him. The absolute is a result. That's one of his big innovations, which is to say you don't get the foundation till the very end. You're building backwards. Once the whole development is completed and we get absolute spirit, there's your foundation. But it's a result of something that's very much like organic development into an oak tree or something like that.

34:19 Dylan: Yeah, I mean, it's a funny kind of foundationalism.

34:21 Wes: I'm playing with words there. Yeah, don't take that too seriously.

34:24 Dylan: Well, no, no, but what I mean is that there's two ways, right? One is that there is the thing that the whole progress of science with a big S. And that conceptual evolution, right? This iterative thing that's happening. Sort of humanity that's going towards a kind of end. And then there's also the account of that activity. That's what I'm thinking of as sort of the foundational account of how it's working.

34:50 Mark: Yeah, the actual chronological starting point. The first chapter of this is going to be called sense certainty. But he refers to it here in section 28 is natural consciousness. Natural consciousness will show itself to be only the notion of knowledge. Or in other words, not to be real knowledge. But since it directly takes itself to be real knowledge, this path has a negative significance for it. And what is in fact the realization of the notion counts for it rather as a loss of its own self. For it does lose its truth on this path. In other words, natural consciousness you can kind of take as if you never did any philosophy.

What would you take knowledge to be? You know, there's all this stuff all around me and I'm absolutely sure that it's there. And there's no skeptical question entering into anything. But that is not foundational in that I take this to be absolutely firm. Like we're going to reject it almost immediately. We're going to start in that pre philosophical standpoint and move from it not by deducing things from that, but by showing how it is wrong in an interesting way. It is wrong in a way that directs us to the next better theory, which is going to direct us in the way it's wrong to the next better theory, et cetera.

And that'll eventually.

35:59 Wes: We don't refute it as phenomenologists, we watch it refute itself. We watch the history of epistemology unfold. Although Hegel will give a much higher level conceptual explanation of what's actually going on. So with sense certainty, which is just the idea that we have this direct, immediate access to sensory particulars, he's going to show that actually that access is through universals. Even when we say this right, even ostension, this is a universal. It could apply to multiple things. So we start out with a viewpoint, and then we find internal contradictions in that viewpoint.

So that contradiction naturally leads us to the next shape of consciousness, the next position, which is perception, where there's this distinction between an underlying substance and the qualities, inheritance or whatever. So these theories. It's like we're watching a plant grow. Hegel's phenomenologist is just he's going to say, let's just watch one theory grow out of the other. We don't have to do anything, we don't have to test, we don't have to apply an external criteria. We're just going to watch this stuff happen. And that's where he thinks he has a big leg up on the foundationalists.

37:11 Dylan: So I'm wondering if Seth felt persuaded about the account of this being related to pragmatism.

37:17 Seth: I understand why you said it and your explanation was clear. I do suspect not with any strong textual evidence, but just the pragmatism that Hegel's exhibiting is methodological, less than something like he doesn't have in mind a coherence theory of truth. He has in mind a method, as Wes just said, of looking at the organic development of cognition, which in your recapitulated Heidegger, right, is historical epochs. This is the period when the world is seen this way and human beings understand their essence this way. And then something happens and we're no longer created in the image of God.

We're subjects, and then now we're socially determined or we're creatures of reason or whatever. And so each of these historical phases, the pragmatic aspect in Hegel is, is understanding that these things are not the end all. Like I said, they're not the end. They're the way in which Heidegger would say being unfolds right, or being is in this historical epoch. But it's. They change. And they don't just change in any, any old fashioned way. And that's another piece of Hegel. There's an internal structured movement that Hegel's looking to uncover.

It's not simply that the religious point of view, that God is eternal and whatever and we're created in his image, didn't encounter facts in the world. It's not just any old thing that would cause a worldview like that or a cognition to break. It's not just a fact that doesn't accord with the system of facts that exist already. It's that somehow it encounters something which forces it to reflect upon itself and recognize the limits of what it's capable of doing, or recognize an internal inconsistency or some kind of contradiction or something like that.

And then that specific moment is what moves you forward in the direction of the next cognition. So people grapple with it and then somebody comes up, like Descartes comes up with the idea of the transcendental ego as a solution, as a resolution, if you will, or it's the synthetic output of that thing.

39:41 Wes: So yeah, Hegel likes the word positive.

39:44 Seth: He likes the word negative too.

39:45 Wes: You get a determinant and you get, well, the positive is a determinant. Negation to be confusing. But yeah, yeah, maybe it's worth reading from 76 where he will make what I think is such an interesting and cool transition, which is really the core insight which Seth, you've just been describing. But he'll say we could treat these skeptical doubts as adventitious and arbitrary. He goes on to discuss some different approaches that he might take that he doesn't really want to take. He doesn't want to just say, here's the answer, these guys are wrong.

Here's my theory. I'm going to defend it against rival theories and show you why it's right. Instead, he says we should treat the inquiry itself in philosophical history, the development of science as a phenomenon to be studied. So he says, but science, just because it comes on the scene, is itself an appearance in coming on the scene. It is not yet science and it's developed an unfolded truth. In this connection, it makes no difference whether we think of science as the appearance because it comes on the scene alongside another mode of knowledge, or whether we call that other untrue knowledge its manifestation.

In any case, science must liberate itself from the semblance and it can do so only by turning against it, which we're going to find out what all that means.

41:00 Seth: What is the last it there? It can only do so by turning against by the previous theory.

41:06 Mark: I actually have a bit of 78 highlighted right in front of me that I've been waiting, which almost continues later in 78. The skepticism that is directed against the whole range of phenomenal consciousness. On the other hand, in other words, this is what you were talking about, Wes, that instead of being skeptical about the existence of objects in the world, let's be skeptical about cosmological theories. As you were just saying, the theories themselves come as appearances. The skepticism against those things renders the spirit for the first time competent to examine what truth is.

It brings about a state of despair about all the so called natural ideas, thoughts and opinions, et cetera, with which the consciousness that sets about examination of truth straight away is still filled and hampered, so that it's in fact incapable of carrying out what it wants to undertake. So even Locke, an empiricist, was considering like, do we have innate ideas? If we did have innate ideas, then we would use them to build upon. Oh well, we don't have innate ideas. Well, we have to at least have, like, epistemological structures those are innate, and we can build our system of epistemology on that.

And it sounds like Hegel is just throwing all that kind of foundationalism away.

42:18 Wes: Yeah, that's why he calls it the path of despair. Right. Because skepticism, oddly enough, is quite certain of itself in the sense that for Descartes, the skepticism is methodological. And what we get out of that is this ultimate certain access to our own inner lives through our own consciousness. That's the typical way of doubt. It ends up being a way of establishing a foundational certitude. He's going to say, we're going to be super skeptics. We're going to go down this path of despair. And there's an integrity to that that you don't get in the typical skepticism, which really lapses into what he'll call self certainty later on in the book.

43:01 Mark: I would like us to keep pushing forward.

43:04 Wes: Let's do it. We should just talk a little bit about the notion, I guess that's in 78. He talks. Yeah. So this is the first section where he talks about the notion.

43:13 Mark: Natural consciousness will show itself to be only the notion of knowledge, not to be real knowledge. You were saying that the notion is like the teleological plan. It is the acorn that has the blueprint of the entire oak tree in it.

43:24 Wes: It's knowledge in its inchoate form or its incipient form. And Hegel himself directly makes these comparisons. This isn't speculation. The notion is sort of like the developmental plan. It's the plan of development towards which knowledge is tending. And so the notion of knowledge contrasts to what we'll get at the end of that development, which is absolute knowledge or knowledge of the absolute. In the same way that the acorn is not yet the oak tree, but in a way it contains the oak tree inside of it. You can see there's kind of a meno aspect to this.

Right. As well. We have a kind of vague notion of something before it's fully articulated. So there's two sides to this. There's this natural side and mental side. There's the comparison to natural organic growth, and then there's the conceptual side in which we start out with a vague notion of something that gets ultimately fully articulated.

44:22 Mark: The term appears right before that in 76 as well. So he's talking about how everybody just dashes into philosophy using terms like objective and subjective and cognition and absolute. Not one. We use the one much anymore. But for his time, Assuming these are all familiar, and he says for to give the impression that their meaning is generally well known or that their notion is comprehensive looks more like an attempt to avoid the main problem, which is precisely to provide this notion. I think drilling in and saying it's a teleological plan is maybe too specific. I mean, it just. McGriff, it means concept. It's just kind of like what this is really about.

44:58 Wes: I have to disagree. There's a big book ahead of us. Well, we're not going to read all of it, but it's clear from commentaries and from looking forward what notion means. It's a very specific term of art.

45:09 Mark: Okay, well, at this point in the book, I think you could read this perfectly well and understand enough what he's saying by just like the notion is going to be the big idea. The theme of what is going on here and the teleological plan. Well, that does end up being what his entire theory of knowledge is. But he's not assuming you understand that from the beginning. That would be assuming a notion of the notion. You don't really know what the notion is.

45:34 Wes: He has a whole jargon and terminology, which is he's assuming a lot in part of the reader. I mean, it is unfortunate the amount he assumes. It's very dense reading. And it's impossible for me to understand what he meant by notion without really. I mean, there's some hints, like I said. He does directly talk about the growth as refutation, for instance. And there are other hints in here, but without doing a little research, I find it baffling.

45:58 Mark: Can we look at 80?

46:00 Wes: Well, 79. He's basically going to say that the doubt is kind of the engine of the development of science. So this kind of super skepticism that he's engaged in, and it will, of its own accord, progress from one shape of consciousness, one type of knowing, to another, one configuration to another. And that. That's not purely negative. It's determinate negation. You get a positive result with each new form of consciousness. Which is what's different from the typical skeptic, right? He just says, or typical philosopher just says, that's wrong. For Hegel, this is growth.

It's not just different positions. One's wrong, the other's right. These different theories are organically related to each other. One grows out of the other. And when you identify a defect in one of the theories, it's not just like, that's untrue. Let's throw away this theory. You've actually helped it. You push it on to the next stage of growth, of development. That's 79 if you want to get to 80.

46:54 Mark: Is there anything in our actual experience that reflects that? I'm thinking about, like when you learn something about somebody's personality and you learn, you know, I thought you were one kind of person, but actually you were lying about this chief thing. It's not just that you discover, oh, this is now a false person. It's like you're actually getting to know them better. That thing that they were presenting as a facade, that is a legitimate part of their personality. It's just that you're now seeing the layer that is underneath. So it ends up this lie that you've discovered.

Say someone is presenting themselves as very morally upright and you find actually they have all these kinks merely throwing away the facade and saying, oh, the kink, that perverse self, that's who you really are. Well, that's maybe a better representation if you needed a one word way of describing this person. But really it is both the layers and discovering the negation pushes it in a particular way.

47:48 Dylan: I think any kind of figuring out falls in this category, any kind of troubleshooting at all. What I really love about what he's doing here, he's clarifying what bad skepticism is, which is kind of a nanny, nanny, boo boo kind of attitude about philosophy that you just are constantly pointing out how X, Y or Z can't work, but never providing anything positive or there's never any positive aspect of it. But when you're figuring something out, this notion of determinate negation or determinate nothingness is you're actually gaining something out of it. That's the way in which we figure things out by excluding something positively so that we know now something more than we did before.

48:27 Seth: I have the same feeling. I was just going to say something similar, but with a different example. He's talking about this skepticism that's hollow, bare abstraction of nothingness or emptiness. So that's like saying you find out that you're mistaken. You see the stick in water and it looks bent and you say it straight and you go, oh my God, I can't trust any of my perceptions. I have to doubt everything. You get this abstract, contentless doubt. But if you said this one particular perception that I have, you go and you question that one particular perception and you learn about refraction in the water or whatever, and it's specific. You can question and negate that perception and bring it to bear. You're not questioning everything abstractly.

49:15 Mark: So we're almost time wise at the end of part one here. I think that if we can just talk about 80, we actually have given a pretty good account of Hegel's overall methodology. It's just 80 here is talking about the goal. What are we actually getting here? The goal is as necessarily fixed for knowledge as the serial progression. It is the point where knowledge no longer needs to go beyond itself, where knowledge finds itself, where notion corresponds to object and object to notion. So in other words, that does sound like the blueprint thing.

49:48 Wes: What he's doing is very creative because normally we're thinking in correspondence terms or in Kantian terms. Hey, does the concept correspond to the object? Do they fit together in some way? He's thinking of this developmentally. The object develops according to the notion to become correspondent to it, like the organic growth. And the goal is set by the notion. Right. He's telling us we're going to watch all these different forms of knowledge unfold. How do we know when we get to the end? But go ahead, Mark. Did you want to read more of that?

50:16 Mark: We could probably go sentence by sentence through this. Hence the progress toward the goal is also unhalting and short of it, no dissatisfaction is to be found at any of the stations on the way. This, I think, is fundamentally false. I think like the good parts of Hegel's phenomenology, the thing that he is known for is not the last chapter on the absolute. It's not this whole circle that he's describing. It is some of the individual philosophical insights. So it is the friends you make along the way. It's not the destination.

50:46 Wes: Well, he's saying that for internally, to those positions, like if I'm in the sense certainty stage, I don't get satisfaction because I discover that there's a contradiction inherent in my theory, that the idea that I can know individual sensory particulars as immediate and direct is actually predicated on the use of universal terms and language. That's where satisfaction fails. It's more complicated than that. I have a theory of knowledge there, right, about access to particulars. But that theory is predicated on something that contradicts it. The use of universals to know well.

51:23 Mark: And that insight that seems like we've had whole episodes about the myth of the given, for instance, and we count that as a victory. Like I really. Wow, this is enlightening. So if what he's going to give us in this book is a series of these things, yes, he can say that each one gets subsumed and somehow you end up moving to discussions out of even the obvious realm of epistemological theory, to what we are doing in the master and slave and how people, you know, the growth of self and then talking about politics. It would take a much broader reading of this text and a critique of the steps along the way.

But I think it is a historical commonplace in the analysis of this book. That, of course, all the steps do not inevitably lead to the other steps. Of course, the project as a whole, as a piece of seamless logic, where each stage leads inevitably to the next one through the whole book, is very hard to take seriously. Let's put it that way.

52:16 Wes: I take it seriously, even if it doesn't ultimately work. I mean, you've read a lot more

52:22 Mark: recently to get the higher level, so maybe I should. Well, I mean, no.

52:25 Wes: I mean, I'm not saying that it. Of course, I'm sure a million holes can be poked in the project, but even in this introduction, there's lots of things you can quibble with. But the idea in and of itself is grand and fascinating and insightful, regardless of ultimately fails. That's the way I look at it.

52:41 Seth: You should keep going.

52:42 Mark: Whatever is confined within the limits of a natural life cannot, by its own efforts, go beyond its immediate existence. But it is driven beyond it by something else. In this uprooting entails its death. So this analogy between an organism and an idea that is just part and parcel of his.

53:00 Wes: The analogy is not complete. Consciousness is actually different, you know, he's saying, despite the fact that I'm using the notion there's a difference here. Consciousness is its notion, right?

53:10 Mark: Consciousness, however, is explicitly the notion of itself. Hence it is something that goes beyond limits. And since these limits are its own, it is something that goes beyond itself. This sounds exactly like Schelling. With the positing of a single particular, the beyond is also established for consciousness, even if it is only alongside the limited object, as in the case of spatial intuition.

53:30 Wes: My interpretation of this is that. So this is like the fiction positing of the world, right? Or the positing of the thing in itself. The way consciousness always goes beyond itself is it posits this alien other outside of itself. It goes beyond its limits, right? It says, there is the thing in itself outside of me. As we progress, we'll see how complicated this gets. Because that distinction that we make is still within consciousness. It's still for us. But despite the fact that we make the distinction in consciousness, we're positing something that is radically other, an object outside of consciousness.

And that's the way in which we go beyond our limits. So when we posit a single particular, I think this whole idea of even if it is only alongside the limited object, as in the case of spatial. I might be wrong about this, but I took the alongside sort of to be the thing in itself behind the phenomenon, and that's what leads to dissatisfaction. So he'll say, thus consciousness suffers this violence at its own hands. It spoils its own limited satisfaction. How do we spoil our limited satisfaction? Well, we say, hey, there's objects out there beyond consciousness, and I'm related to them.

And then we say, oh, no, wait a minute, that doesn't work because I can only know my relationship to them. I can only know my thoughts about them, and the satisfaction is instantly spoiled.

54:51 Mark: I think that might be too specific a interpretation of a general schema that he's. You know. So this is why I'm reading it as a little more like Schelling did it, which is that there's just something, there's some object. Whenever you posit an object, there is a beyond in some sense. And so you don't have to necessarily bring in the Kantian terminology or just something. There will be something. We could just take pleasure in the. That we have grasped, that we have posited. But because it posits itself as having transcendence, then we have created a limit and a space beyond the limit. And that is frustrating to us.

55:27 Seth: The following couple of sentences. He uses emotive language. It's not by accident that he's talking about desire, satisfaction, anxiety, and, you know, sentimentality. Each one of those things, I think, describes, just as you mentioned, this movement where the self posits something outside of itself, an external, an object, and then says, yay, I have something I can know now I have something I can be in relation to. And then realizes, oh, wait a second, I can't actually know it. That's still just part of me. And this satisfaction that I thought I had at knowledge of something real and actual is mediated by my own experience.

So my satisfaction is frustrated because what it really wants is to know that object and to know it with certainty. So then, you know, he says, when consciousness feels this violence, its anxiety may well make it retreat from the truth and strive to hold on to what it is in danger of losing. But it can find no peace, right? And he goes on to then say, it can try to remain an unthinking inertia, right? But that thought will trouble that thoughtlessness. Or if it tries to be sentimental, Entrench itself in sentimentality that finds everything to be good in its kind, then this suffers violence at the hands of reason.

Right. Because even if you entrust everything that the world is exactly as God intended it and everything has a meaning. Right. Your reason will disabuse you of that at some point.

57:06 Mark: Well, I think he's also responding to what I was just saying about the steps along the way do provide satisfaction. No, he's saying reason, because it's merely a step, is going to ultimately say it's not good. Keep going.

57:18 Seth: No, exactly. Fear of the truth may lead consciousness to hide behind a pretension that its burning zeal for truth makes it difficult or impossible to find any other truth but the unique truth of vanity, the conceit which understands how to belittle every truth in order to turn back into itself and gloat over its own understanding, which knows how to dissolve every thought and always find the same barren ego instead of any content.

57:42 Mark: Is this shelling that.

57:43 Wes: He's.

57:43 Mark: No. Ripping on? No. Okay.

57:45 Wes: This is kind of the cynical skeptic who can just say, hey, I'm getting satisfaction out of destroying all your theories. Or it's kind of the parody of the sophistical Socrates, right. Who's just there to negate.

57:57 Seth: Or it's the straw idealist, the Berkeleyan.

58:01 Wes: Well, I'm not so sure. I think Berkeley has a positive theory, and it's. Yeah, maybe you're right.

58:06 Seth: Just the straw version of Berkeley.

58:08 Wes: Depends on how you interpret the same barren ego. But, yeah, it's possible. I mean, I guess it's possible. Schelling, too, Mark, because that is in line with his criticisms of Schelling, that we're just left with this abstract ego. But I think it's important to say the dissatisfaction is the engine of all this. It's the way the things developmentally unfold. And so when he says that the consciousness is explicitly the notion of itself, it's its own notion in the way. Right. A plan is not identical to its notion. It's guided by. But developmentally guided by the notion.

But he's going to say, is it a manifestation? Yeah, in a way, yeah. And it develops according to it. But he's going to. I think what he's saying here is that consciousness is development. And the engine of development just is what consciousness is. And the engine of that, the engine of its dissatisfaction is just this subject, object, distinction, this positing of an alien other. In a way, that's the notion, the positing of another from consciousness. And that's just what consciousness is. You don't have consciousness without that.

59:14 Mark: Well, if you can rest in peace with that, then you can just say goodbye to us. If you feel further compelled to keep moving forward. In this text, even though we've given, you know, an outline of the method, if you want to get some more details, you're gonna have to listen to part two of this episode. That's gonna be the next thing in your feed. I'll see you over there.