Ep. 386: Hegel on Society (Part One)

0:07 Mark: You are listening to the Partially Examined Life, a podcast by some guys who at one point set on doing philosophy for a living, but then thought better of it. Our question for episode 386 is something like what is society? We read the beginning of the spirit section from Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel's the Phenomenology of spirit, published in 1807. Specifically, we read sections 438 through 463. For more information about the text in the podcast, please see partiallyexaminedlife.com this is Mark Linsonmeyer, rending asunder universal being. To take my share from it.

0:41 Seth: In Madison, Wisconsin, this is Seth Paskin, not yet having liberated my being from my negative unity.

0:48 Wes: In Austin, Texas, this is Wes Alwan by day and unshaken righteous self identity by night, a fragmented being. In Cambridge mess, Massachusetts, this is Dylan Casey.

1:00 Dylan: Considering that as a citizen of a nation, I'm part of spirit as an actual consciousness medicine, Wisconsin.

1:06 Mark: We have at last returned to this whirlwind of a book that we've treated several years ago. Last although I did actually, since this is news to you guys, probably put Wes and I recorded a close reads on the unhappy consciousness section. Actually, it's going to take us about five hours to get through the whole thing of that. But through the first couple of sections of that where we actually investigated the three translations, I put that in the public feed. So if people are not just ignoring everything that doesn't have a pel next to it in the public feed, then they will have gotten a real taste of how difficult this text is.

And the beginning of the section we assigned ourselves, which is just kind of what is spirit. We finally, halfway into the book, get to find out what spirit is that is in the title and find out that all the earlier sections that we covered are just some sort of abstractions from within spirit, but sort of presuppose that, yeah, we're spirit. But then we start sort of on a subsection within that where we start getting the story and I think we're going to do a second episode after this where we continue the story of how society is made up of two kinds of rules.

This sort of divine order and the secular order and what this has to do with the relationship between man and woman. And eventually we'll talk about Antigone. That's my something short of an outline.

2:29 Wes: Yeah, the divine order having to do, as we'll see with the family, the divine laws, he calls it. And then what you call the secular order, Mark having to do with what he calls the human law, what we normally think of as law, and then familial law, I think really turns out to be a rather thin concept in the. In the sense that it's. It primarily, at least in this section, seems to involve burial rights and what it is that we might owe the individual within the family context, which has a lot to do with death, weirdly. But yeah, this. This beginning section is just horrifically difficult. And Dylan, I think Dylan went into an immediate state of despair on these first two sections. It just takes an incredible amount of time to decipher with like, secondary sources.

3:18 Mark: And.

3:19 Dylan: Yeah, yeah, I have to say that part of the problem for me when I jumped into it was just jumping into it. There's something, you know, truly stupid about not reorienting yourself and trying to start reading Spirit where it starts off, because I just didn't have any clue about

3:36 Wes: where I was at.

3:37 Dylan: I think it's very challenging language. And I was helped out a lot by this Rutledge guy that Wes put us onto. And I just make a side comment about that. I think that there is a two page summary of the entire phenomenology of spirit in that book at the beginning, which is right now. It's on my short list for most brilliant, incredibly concise summaries of something very hard. It's outstanding. So that book is incredibly helpful in this way. And in a way, I learned more about the scope of what Hegel was doing, especially in the phenomenology spirit, than I had before because I never really fully gotten the clarity of his effectively evolutionary account of consciousness that's going on here.

And that's sort of embedded in the entire phenomenology of spirit. I. I didn't completely get it. I kind of felt that way. But anyway, it's very, very challenging and I'll be interested to see both what we get out that part of it and the specific analysis he has of Antigone. And that'll also be interesting to see how we go on that.

4:51 Mark: So this Rutledge guidebook to Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit is by Roger Stern. It is from 2001 originally. This version that we looked at second edition, is from 2013. I also used as last time in the Spirit of Hegel by Robert C. Solomon, just because he was our advisor, I use that. So in both cases, I think, Wes, you were a little misleading in saying, oh, you're having trouble with these first few sections that are so hard read the Rutledge and this Will decode it? No, he just sort of skips over those. He goes right to the actual story that we're going to get to with Antigone, which is described, you know, in the arc of the spirit chapter of the book, which is very, very long as being.

Well, you know, finally we got to a point where people felt at home in society. It was a peaceful time. And he's going to equate that to ancient Greece. And then there was some sort of fall. And so in not next episode, but if we were to do more episodes after that, we would hear about how the fall affected things and how the Enlightenment contains a lot of alienation, which now it's the purpose of this book and the current spirit of the times to overcome, to make us feel, in a modern way, at home in the world again. But this ancient part was, you know, at home in the world.

I don't know. That didn't help me to decode sentence for sentence, the first few sentences, the first few sections, where we actually hear what a spirit is.

6:21 Wes: Yeah, it's really more about. I think it was helpful to reorient me to the context and. Which is not to say it deciphered these first few sections, but it made it, you know, when I came back to reread them, it. It made it a little bit better. And then I had to do a lot of other work to finally figure them out. And then I was pleasantly surprised to find out. Okay, it gets better.

6:42 Mark: Seth, you seem like you were enjoying the Rutledge.

6:45 Seth: Yeah, I mean, basically, I had the same exact experience as Dylan. I read the first paragraph and I was like, nope, can't just jump back into this thing. I got to ease into it, and I started the Rutledge just to try to get oriented. And I was just going to kind of read the introduction and then jump into the spirit section, but I thought I would just read a little bit into the beginning, and it was so compelling, I ended up reading all the way up and through. So I read about 160 or 170 pages of it, and it's that good. I thought it was so good, I actually looked up the guy because I was going to send him an email, as I often do, to people who we read, and I say, oh, I really enjoyed your book.

And unfortunately, he died two years ago. Had a brain cancer, brain aneurysm, something like that. But he was apparently quite well known for his Hegel scholarship and all that. And like Dylan, I think what's nice about it is it's not just like, here's how to break this down and interpret this right, or here's the references he's making. It's like he tries to give interpretive framework that makes it seem like it's a coherent project that's consistent and carried through. And it really positions him as doing something spectacularly. I don't even know what the right word is.

Just my takeaway. Even though this work is not where Hegel answers the big question at the end and it was supposed to be preparatory, it really gets you thinking. He really positions Hegel as having kind of created this notion of phenomenology and this dialectic and how he's using it. And it really makes you realize how brilliant Hegel was, even if you can't necessarily tell it from the writing in this book.

8:30 Mark: Well, I had a parallel experience in trying to figure out, right. I didn't want to just as Dylan said, just jump into the middle of a book and feel like I don't know what's going on. So not only did I. I talked a little bit of the master slave and the self consciousness stuff to my students about a month ago. This, you know, sort of use this as a. A taking off point. And I got for that experience the first time the audio version of the Miller, which you think this is a book that is impossible to enjoy in an audio format. And I think it is, but not if it's the second or third or fifth time that you're hearing it.

And so I started at the beginning and I listened all the way through, through that part, then through the intervening parts. So there's this long chapter on reason that we skipped. And I thought the reason chapter just going into this was all about philosophy of science. And of course, the science of his time was more primitive. And I know that there's a chapter, a section within that, even on Phrenology. Right. Does the outer shape of the skull reflect the inner nature of the person, the inner beauty of the person? This seems like kind of interesting, but like something that is safely skippable.

I wanted to get to the meat. But I didn't realize that the whole second half of the reason chapter is about practical reason is about ethics. So had I known that in advance, I might have suggested that we start there. But still, there's quite a lot of stuff. But I read. So Solomon has a chapter not on spirit and not on reason, but on half of the spirit chapter on the philosophy of science and then on just ethics in general. So I read all the way, you know, the Preparatory stuff to get us up to spirit. And the overall story there that I think really is essential for understanding what spirit is, is that you might have thought that the fundamental metaphysical unit is the individual person.

Right, let's do psychology. And all these things earlier in the phenomenology are sort of abstractions on psychology. You know, a whole person doesn't experience things like they do in the sense certainty or the perception chapter, even the force of the understanding chapter, because we have self consciousness. But once you get to self consciousness, then you're talking about a whole person. But the whole person, for Hegel, is not the fundamental metaphysical unit. It is the group, the society. This is what the Geist is. So every time you think you know, you are independently reflecting on something, you're independently figuring out, you know, you're having an ethical intuition, for instance, you're actually drawing on information tools from the group.

There is no every time you think you are an individual. You know, I just care about myself. I only care about my own pleasure. Maybe I doubt that the whole external world exists, or I'm a stoic and only, you know, my judgments about my virtue matter and what other people think doesn't matter. You are fooling yourself. You are in fact sort of a Kantian type of argument in that you might say, I can just be selfish, I can lie to people. But hey, I'm making use of this social practice of promise keeping, of truth telling, and I'm engaging in a practical contradiction.

So Hegel is giving a version of that kind of argument again and again and again, and he even uses it against Kantian morality itself. So that you think you are referring to something actually universal, but what you're actually referring to is the norms of the group that you belong to. So that's where we. That gets us up to the point that we're going to start today where we are spirit. We are finally in a group that is aware of what it is, aware that it has a government, it makes laws for itself. It is like an actual harmonious unit.

12:03 Dylan: Yeah.

12:04 Wes: And it's helpful just to know that when he uses the phrase ethical substance, right in the section, he's referring really to the community at this point. And I. And it always helps me to think in terms of his kind of Spinozan heritage where, right, the substance is just God and we are modes of that. But I think in these first two sections, he's kind of giving a bit of a recapitulation of his story. And his story, I think, is just one of repeatedly spirit Finding itself in the world. Right. Treating the world as something found or given. So for instance, as in science, the laws of nature, and then realizing that the laws actually come from within it, but doing so in a way that's limited and one sided until what it's finding is actually a more concrete, communal version of that.

Not just the finding of abstract reason out there in the world. But that's the first sentence here. Reason is spirit. When it's certainty of being all reality has been raised truth. And it is conscious of itself as its own world and of the world as itself, which. Right. One version of that, one insufficient version of that is just idealism. He wants something more robust. But it's going to be that same idea.

13:23 Dylan: Yeah, I find it very challenging here in the quote that you just read. Wes is a good example of it. When he says reason is spirit, when certainty of being is of being all reality. There's this very bizarre kind of anthropomorphized language where reason is a thing or a be or an entity that's like a person or whatever. It's so weird and it's so hard for me to get my head around, like, what the f are you talking about? I don't even understand like the sentences you're saying when you use a word like reason, when you say reason is spirit. Like I just found it so bizarre.

So that's where this context of getting sort of the. That I had a lot of help with the Rutledge, especially that overall summary. And then going through, honestly, he has section by section, like one line, summaries of every section in the whole book that are just basically. And this is what it talks about. And I found it super helpful because I realized, at least for me and you, is that Hegel is articulating the consciousness or the experience of knowing the world in a very, very evolutionary way. Because he starts with sense certainty and he's working all the way up to absolute spirit.

And to me, all I could think of when I was reading this then became was that was ontogeny, capitulates phylogeny, right? Is that it's just like a articulation of stages of humanity going through as well as individual people and literally an evolution of human interaction with the world and each other that in the end gets to a true understanding of the world. I think that's the way Hegel would say it. I could only begin to understand this way of talking about reason and spirit in this sort of anthropomorphized way by thinking of it that way.

15:32 Wes: Yeah, I think one way to think of it, you know, if someone were to use. Because one sort of subcategory of reason is science, right, and someone making some sort of general statement about science, then it's similar. But, you know, as Dylan, you point out, it. That doesn't take us all the way because there is something personified about it. He is talking about consciousness in general.

15:52 Dylan: Reason is an activity. So when we say reason is spirit, it's like I have to imagine the thing doing the reasoning thing. If you say a subcategory of reason is science, it's a subcategory of reason is the activity of doing scientific thinking.

16:08 Wes: Well, but also. And part of the point of this little section here is we are always finding ourself in the world. So, for instance, when we go out and we do science, sorry, I've already given this description, you know, but we find some sort of scientific law and say, oh, that's out there, that's a law of nature. But then we find out it's some aspect of our own reason. And so when he gives this little, you know, thing about the pure category coming up in the next section, the coming to be of spirit was indicated in the immediately preceding movement in which the object of consciousness, the pure category, rose to the notion of reason.

I think that again, has something to do like the peer category has something to do with this kind of preliminary identification of being in reality that does not rise to the level of the identification of the individual conscious with the communal consciousness, which is much more concrete in that it's lived out in laws and norms of an actual society. Right? So the idealist looks at everything and says, oh, everything is ideas. And then in science, you're looking at things in terms of natural categories and scientific laws and then getting the point of failure, which is where phrenology comes in.

It doesn't quite work. And then we move on to the social identification.

17:20 Mark: One of the ways that I thought about reasons spanning all of reality or spirit being certain that it is all of reality, is that we're all in the same. This idea I mentioned being at home in. So the question is, are you in a fundamentally alien world? Is this a world that has fundamental divisions where some things are completely off limits to other things? So we just talked to Graham Harmon, who follows Kant, and thinking that the inner natures of things are fundamentally hidden from us. We are not at home in that world. We are separated from things.

We can only know their surfaces, whereas if reason. So we talk a lot about Scientism, science thinking that. Not that it has described the whole world, of course, science is still learning things, but that the whole world is the scientific domain. So reason is here, spirit is thinking that it is everything by saying everything in the world is determined by. Is within this realm. So it's easy to see how reason, right. This is what Kant criticizes is reason thinks it can go everywhere, that it can come up with arguments about God. Why you would think spirit, if spirit is fundamentally like the customs of a society, like, why would you think that can go everywhere?

Like a society is localized, it is a finite group of individuals. But if a spirit, you know, a particular kind of way of being in society, thinks it's at home in the world, it's that it understands that our interpretations of everything are through this social lens. And, and ultimately. Right. The value interpretations in particular are definitively given by the judgments of this society. Right. Which when I put it that way, it makes it sound like not. Not like this is a peaceful, nice way to be. But this is a mad overreach, right? We also say scientism is a mad overreach.

Like the humanities have things to say that science. But to say that my culture right now, that exists at this one point in time, I'm comfortable. And I think it's actually not just a delusion, but it's the truth that its verdict, the. The lens that it gives me to view every possible thing past and present and future in the world is determined. And that's good. But yet this is what spirit is as a group that is self conscious of its own group being. I mean, am I mischaracterizing this?

19:56 Seth: I don't think that's a mischaracterization. So since you kind of circled back a little bit, thinking about when we read the first part of the book, what was that like 13 years ago, or whatever it was we got into. Is this supposed to be descriptive of the way that human beings actually evolve or develop as children to adults? Or is this allegorical or whatever the case may be? And you know, when I first started learning about Hegel in like graduate school, right, Everybody said, what is spirit? What is spirit? And, and talking about Hegel's idea that history is a progression and that spirit's developing, right.

Until it gets to absolute spirit or what have you. So you tend to think of it as something impersonal, right? Or something. But I think as Dylan said, if you marry the idea that he's thinking about it in terms of development and you begin to just think of spirit in the same way that you would think about an individual human being. If you were trying to trace the development of an individual, like from the first part of the book, then it kind of starts to make a little more sense. And then it's also why it feels like you're personifying spirit, because it's like spirit is kind of like reified.

It's an individual thing that's developing and learning and becoming self aware through in particular beings. He says he uses this all the time, right? Through particular beings and through particular beings in relationship with each other and through reason and through perception, and through all these things, through religion, it's coming to, it's evolving and it's becoming. It's like a child growing up to become an adult. Now, of course, human beings don't end up perfect before they die. So there's a part where the analogy breaks down. If you want to read Hegel as saying that there's going to attain some state of complete perfection.

But the analogous movement that I was thinking is if you ever study mythology, or if we go back to like Hesiod and, you know, Greek mythology, the creation stories, they start with chaos and nothing, right? And out of which will come some kind of Ur God, an earth, right, A sky, something like that. And you have these kind of like fundamental forces, sea, ocean, whatever. And each progressive generation of gods in the mythology tend to hone and sharpen and become more specific and tied to more, you know, and become more personified, if you will, and actually even embodied.

And in some sense that's kind of how I feel. What he's doing, the phenomenology of spirit when he's talking about spirit is it's kind of going from this undifferent, differentiated, chaotic self. And it's through human beings, through the world, whatever, coming to realize itself, coming to its own form of self consciousness in the same way that an individual, particular human being does.

22:57 Dylan: Part of the way that that gets articulated is this is at each stage you end up having a tension or a contradiction or some kind of impasse that gets resolved. This is sort of the dialectic at work, right? You end up at a point where you need to resolve that tension by making another step along this evolutionary path. And that to me ends up getting us eventually to the kind of analysis that he's making of ancient, of ancient Greece and through Antigone as a tension that is resolved, that needs to get resolved, but just lays there as a tension between the individual and the community, between the family and the city. That has to get resolved in the end.

23:49 Mark: Yeah. So related to this, let me just refine what I was trying to say before by saying spirit thinks it's everything that it has. It's not again, like science, when it thinks that it can cover explain everything that it thinks it actually has currently an explanation of everything. I think likewise, when a society sees itself as extending over everything, it thinks it has a hermeneutic that which it can interpret anything that would come at it. So that's a much more modest. And in fact there are built into this. It's not just like what are the laws right now?

It has within it a teleology of law. Law is definitely something that is dynamic for Hegel. So you might say that the American founding, okay, we have our Constitution, but the Constitution has within it. And the way that we at least liberal justices treat it is something, you know, that we want to have a more and more perfect union. So it has ideals in it. We realize that we're not necessarily living up to our ideals, that the current laws that we have in the books are not necessary. So there is room in this. I became aware as I was reading the Solomon that like for Nietzsche, there are different commentators that interpret him, Hegel, as an asshole, as in this case, a fascist.

Right? Everybody get in line. When you're an individual, you are falling, you are being unethical, you are falling short of the spirit. You need to. Everybody needs to think the same. But Hegel understands that what makes spirit actual, even though I said society is the basic metaphysical unit, is of course you have to have people in societies. And as we know, every time you get a group of people in a room, especially a group of philosophers, you have that many different opinions. So it's the dynamics of the different opinions. It's just that again, where these opinions come from, the range in which they can go, they're always by reference to the society that they are members of.

So we've talked about this in many ways that like the new atheists are. Well, they're really just theologians of a different stripe. The way that they argue has the same sort of fervency and appeals to, even though they don't call it faith, appeals to faith, as so it's like even the people who are arguing against the status quo are still members of the status quo. So the spirit is that status quo. And what we're going to get here is the relation between two different strands that give rise to disagreement within this status quo. One of which is, as we've Said, you know, what he's calling the divine law.

Solomon says you don't have to call it the divine law. That's just a weird, archaic, just a quirk. But it doesn't actually refer to anything given by the gods or something like. That's very clear in Hegel. It is just a certain strand of, you know, not very self reflective ethical thinking versus the laws that are explicitly given by the legislature, which is self reflective in that a bunch of people actually came together or a king or somebody actually came together and wrote these down. So you have these, this sort of explicit law and then the implicit law.

Both of these are parts of this overall ethical world, which the term is sichlichkeit, which Solomon says you should just really call communal life. As soon as you get people together, then they have this structure of laws that they live by, some of which are explicitly articulated, but are always reflecting upon, supposedly growing out of an unarticulated ground. You know, things that sentiments that the people have. So we want to jump into. We've been using the term section ambiguously in that when Wes keeps saying the first two sections, that is the introduction to the spirit section and then the introduction to the first subsection of the spirit section called the True Spirit, the ethical order, and then it's a little after that.

27:42 Wes: So it's by two sections, I mean 438 and 439.

27:45 Mark: Oh, that's what you were talking about. I thought you were talking about the two introductory sections as opposed to then. Now we get into the ethical world, Human and divine law, man and woman, which is BB A, capital A, small A. So we have, you know, the work that we assigned ourselves today is broken up into those three, let's say, chunks, the introduction to the Spirit, the introduction to the True Spirit, the Ethical Order, and then actually starting on this story about the ethical world. But yeah, say what you wanted to finish up on the, the beginning, Wes.

28:17 Wes: Well, I don't know how much we want to get into the details and I would, you know, I kind of made a stab at the pure category. And other people might get their chime in on what that means, but I think the overall arc of the first section438 here is just that, you know, look, we've seen the ways in which we come to find ourselves in the world in these kind of weird, idealistic, you know, our idealism ways where we say, oh, the category of causality, that comes from my own mind. But for Hegel, of course, if it comes from your own mind, it Also does come from reality as well.

There's a certain unity there. But we want more than that. We want the kind of unity where the, the individual finds himself in social reality, not just in cognitive reality. So it's not just these cognitive categories in my mind line up with the. With what's out there in the world. It's that the sort of ethical laws that are out there are in some sense in me as well. So that's the general. But we could get into the details of. Yeah. How does he step through it in this section? But yeah.

29:23 Mark: Well, do you feel like he's made this move? Right. Kant thinks that the categories of the understanding are just fixed by not even just human psychology, but you know, the psychology of rational beings. We don't really know if aliens could see things as non causal or non temporal or whatever. But how Hegel is often characterized, or at least Heidegger is characterized, is with the idea of hermeneutics. That the categories are not fixed for all humanity, but are determined by a particular zeitgeist. Right. That they are socially determined social construction.

Is that what we're seeing? Or are we seeing that Hegel is still saying that there's no. The phenomenology of spirit? It's not that spirit could go so many different ways, you know, depending on the contingencies of history, such that the Chinese spirit is going to see things in a fundamentally different way than the Greek spirit. It seems like he's saying also, even though I don't think he actually mentions ancient Greece in what we read. Is that right?

30:19 Wes: He doesn't explicitly mention it.

30:21 Dylan: No.

30:22 Wes: I mean, yeah, it's going to become more explicit.

30:24 Dylan: It's referred to in the previous section before spirit there's some reference to it and then there's more later.

30:31 Mark: It seems like even if he is talking about, as both our commentators say, ancient Greece here as being sort of the model of a bright shining moment in which spirit was at peace for itself before there was this fall to modernity. That this is supposed to be something fundamental that would happen in any society so that you'd have the equivalent in ancient China or the equivalent in ancient India. You know, I'm not totally sure about this.

30:54 Wes: It's a moment at which people are. They're not alienated from their own customs.

30:59 Mark: Yeah.

31:00 Wes: Yet. Right. Because they're not reflecting on them. They just live them as if they were real. So if this ritual, if that's what you're supposed to do, well, that's just natural. That's not. You Know just what we did historically, and maybe someone else does something different.

31:13 Mark: Sounds like Confucianism to me.

31:15 Dylan: Yeah, yeah.

31:16 Wes: And there's an internal contradiction. And it's not just that, you know, foreigners are coming to the port of Piraeus and saying, oh, look, people do different things differently elsewhere. So now Athens is going, flourishes. It becomes more reflective in part because it becomes more aware of the other. Right. The internal contradiction is this conflict between the divine law or the law of the family and the law of the larger community. All we need is that internal contradiction for things to break down in ancient Greek society and for us to go somewhere else.

31:46 Dylan: And that contradiction isn't a fall. So you use that word a couple times, Mark. But I didn't get the sense that it was that there's a fall from that. I understood it there being a tension that is inevitable along this path that gets resolved by modernity, which then has its own tensions that have to get resolved, but as opposed to there being. And the reason I bring this up is that I don't have any sense at all that there is a purity of the arrangement in ancient Greece that then is corrupted, that we must return to. But it's a relative balance that is only there because of a kind of naivete that becomes apparent as a tension just in that I think he would say inevitable conflict along the progress of Geist.

32:38 Seth: I agree with Dylan on that. I mean, it's. I think it seems pretty clear that it's not like this is not the fall from the Garden of Eden. It's just you reach a. This is a point at which it seems. What he says actually in the text is it seems like spirit is at home. It seems like it's figured its place out. It kind of knows what's going on. And as long as there's no conflict between the divine and the human law, then it can maintain that illusion. But of course, contained within it are the seeds. And to your point, Dylan, I think I've decided to kind of read this as a story that Hegel's telling a story in order to illustrate a point that it's.

33:23 Dylan: It's.

33:24 Seth: It's not so much an argument. It's not intended to be historically accurate or whatever. And I think the Hegelian point of view would be. If I told this story from the perspective of the east that I would tell, it might not be the same story, because there's obviously no Greek society in, let's say, China. But there certainly were traditional roles. There certainly is a tension between civil Life and domestic life. And the story would be slightly similar, but the tensions would be the same. And the ultimate need to resolve those tensions, I think would be the same.

33:58 Mark: So he does think that for the first time, when we're talking about spirit, we're talking about the actual. So everything before that, like the master slave thing, that was some sort of myth that is supposed to boil down some element in the human psyche and the makeup of the human self. But we don't think that the first societies were one person approaching another one and having a fight to the death. But I think he is trying from here on out to give something that is reflective of history. Now, the actual interpretation of that history. I think this might be a Stern versus Solomon thing, and it has to do with parts that we haven't read yet.

In other words, is this a fall, or is this just a part of the development that's supposed to happen? And does. Has modernity worked out a balance, as you were seen to be saying, Dylan? I just haven't read far enough to know. Like, I thought he thought that modernity is all alienated and messed up. And now me, with this book, I, Hegel, am gonna work out that balance that allows us to not go back to the way that ancient Greece was, but to make a modern version of it. And that way, it's not that different from what a lot of the other sort of from the Renaissance, from when the time when the Greeks were rediscovered, like, and then Nietzsche in particular, like, oh, isn't.

Isn't the way that they looked at morality, Isn't that so awesome? And people are still doing this now, the Ava brand that we read, you know, we have so much to learn from the Greeks. Can't we make this inform our modern way of approaching things to get over the alien, the obvious alienation that is everywhere around us in modern life? And I know, I know Hegel's critical of the Enlightenment in particular, just to

35:38 Dylan: correct you so as not to misinterpret what I said. I didn't say that Hegel was a partisan of the resolution of modernity as having no tension. There's a tension that he has to resolve in modernity. Of course. That's what's there too. I'm just saying that the resolution of the Greek tension is not one of a fall. It is this whole thing, this whole dialectical progression are progressive tensions that get resolved over and over again. Now it's.

36:09 Wes: You make an interesting point.

36:10 Dylan: Is part of his resolution of the tension of modernity to go back somehow I didn't get the. There's something informed by every stage, by the previous stages. Yeah.

36:21 Wes: So hopefully we'll get into alienated consciousness, which comes shortly after this because it's. It sounds like a sexier section and we can get into the whole. Yeah, we're so alienated in modernity. And I guess Hegel writing this book didn't solve the problem unless we're nationalists under one interpretation and become lovers of the state. But anyway. But yeah, the kinds of contradictions I think are here that we see in alienation, they're just not as self conscious. We're just not as aware of them at this point. So in this, you know, in 439, if we're ready to move on to that, this is kind of the point he makes. The, the ethical substance. Right. The community, it's not aware of its own, its ethics, is not really grounded in reflection or choice, but in custom. So, you know, and something's going to have to happen to raise that to the level of self consciousness as we move along.

37:16 Seth: Yeah. He says. Does he say here or is it a little bit later where he talks? He uses the word choice.

37:21 Wes: Yeah, I think it's here.

37:22 Seth: Yeah. What's important is at this stage, the whole concept of custom is you haven't reasoned through. You do it because that's what people do. You don't have a reflective relationship with the custom. Where you said, okay, I've investigated all other customs and I've come up with a rational reason for why I'm going to follow this custom. You're not making a choice and I guess you can pull out from that. That's part of the critical development is that to be a fully realized ethical actor, you have to be able to make ethical choices as opposed to just do what you're told.

38:00 Wes: At this point. He has this really interesting way of putting this. That substance is the starting point and the goal or the end of all action. So I think we can read that as being people unreflectively have these customs and action comes out of that. So in a way it's almost like the community performs the action to the extent that we are habituated with that custom and then by enacting those customs, we in a way keep the community alive. It's our work. So he says this substance is equally the universal work produced by the action of all and each as their unity and identity.

For it is the being for self, the self action, the being for self, having a lot to do with the internal structure that produces the Unity of a thing as opposed to the external determinations outside of it. As substance, Spirit is unshaken, righteous self identity. I just love, love this line, so I'm going to read it. But as being for self, it is a fragmented being, self sacrificing and benevolent, in which which each accomplishes his own work, rends us under the universal being and takes from it his own chair. So speaking of the. The fall, it's almost like you get this image of God being right, you know, unshaken, righteous self identity, God as community, but fragments, he fragments himself to create these other individuals, us human beings.

And that's the sense in which he is self sacrificing. And so then we in doing our own work are also individuals in our work. So in a way we're building the community with our work. But as action. Right. It sunders us into individuals. So we get a picture of attention here. Right. Which is just already there. It's an inevitable relationship between form and matter. Supposed to, so to speak, or the universal and the particular. Which is sort of the story of this book. This tension between the universal particular and the particular and the, the contradictions and the dynamics that push things forward because of that.

40:06 Mark: Yeah. So this is the weirdness of making the group, making spirit. The metaphysically central thing is how do you then explain individuals? Again, for spirit to exist, for a society to exist, there have to be people in it. But whenever the people reflect on themselves as individuals, what they're really, they need to see themselves through the realm of the universal, through the realm of the social, because everything that they think has been fed into them in some way through sociality. But when we use this, it does sound very theological talk.

I had a quote a little bit earlier than what you read, Wes highlighted Spirit being the substance and the universal self identical and abiding essence is the unmoved solid ground and starting point for the action of all. And it is their purpose and goal. The in itself of every self consciousness expressed in thought. So every goal that you as an individual have was fed to you by society. You, you are a cell of society. But what, what is the nature of spirit is, as you were just saying, Wes, in these other quotes, is it carves out individuals, it creates a fragmented being that then is self sacrificing and benevolent.

In that these individuals, if they're acting ethically, are acting in harmony with each other. But so spirit has, has attained this multiplicity of points of view in itself. In other words, there are multiple people.

41:33 Wes: Yeah.

41:33 Mark: The resolution of. Into individual Beings is the movement and soul of substance and the resultant universal being. So even in creating the individuals, those individuals are universal being. Right. You are much more than a specific Wes or Seth or Dylan. You are man.

41:51 Wes: And we work, you know, with the worker bees who work to sustain it. So it's this weird.

41:57 Mark: Yep.

41:57 Wes: Idea where being fragments itself, but in fragmenting itself, the fragments become the little worker bees that continue to produce the universal, just in a new form where there's more internal structure to being. But yeah, once you've fragmented and become more interesting and textured and structured, and then the fragments to have to do some work to, you know, being at work, being itself, to continue to make the thing what it won.

42:24 Seth: I'm just. I keep rereading this passage, Wes, that you just read and the first couple sentences of 440, and he says spirit is the self supporting, absolute, real being. All previous shapes of consciousness are abstract forms of it.

42:43 Mark: Yeah.

42:44 Seth: So there's in the ethical. In this section where spirit, this movement, let's just call it. It's like spirit comes to the realization, maybe, or spirit comes.

42:58 Dylan: It's.

42:59 Seth: Maybe it's an actual taking place as opposed to a realization. But when, I guess when spirit becomes or realizes that it's a universal being with substance, but as being for self, it's fragmented into these individuals. In other words, it's just like you said, that tension between the individual in particular. But really it's the realization that the Spinoza thing, we're all part of. Right. So prior to this, spirit hasn't been in a position to understand that beings and consciousness. Let's stop saying being, that all of consciousness is part of itself and so it's been abstract.

43:40 Mark: Well, all consciousness is part of spirit.

43:42 Seth: Right. But I'm saying that reason, sense, certainty, perception. Right. What's implied by this is there's a lack of real being in those. There's something. He emphasizes the term substance. It's almost as though spirit. I don't, and I don't know if we're allowed to use spirit and consciousness interchangeably. That's a tough one.

44:01 Mark: But no, because spirit is self consciousness in a group. Spirit is the group fundamentally. But you're right. All these past things when we thought we were talking about like an individual doing phenomenology and reflecting on, hey, I'm seeing a glass. Is that glass just a particular or am I using a universal? We're doing these sort of Lockean, phenomenological, Cartesian. But all that is like an abstraction. No human being could actually Be. So it's not full on phenomenology where I, a human being sitting in a chair, am contemplating this. That was supposed to be. Imagine a stripped down human being. That is merely the faculty of perception. What is that like?

44:41 Seth: No, no, you're right, but. So this is like many things in philosophy. When you say it, it sounds trite and cliched or obvious, but he's essentially saying real being requires others, real being requires community. It's when you realize that all the particular individual beings are part of this universal being. That's the time when something concretizes and there's a kind of a realization and a depth that we haven't had prior to now. Which is to say the ethical is not abstract. Right. Which comes straight from practical reason.

45:18 Wes: He does say here that the isolating. Right. So all of these previous shapes of consciousness, which he's referring to the earlier parts of the book. Right. As you pointed out with sense certainty, perception, etc. They are analyses of spirit. And he says the isolation, the isolating, these moments presuppose spirit and subsist therein. And spirit is a concrete existence. So even though we as individuals are not aware of it. Right. Spirit itself is always this concrete thing and then we are just looking at pieces of it. And the mistake that we make over and over again.

I think he thinks in these, these insufficient, more abstract moments is we always forget, as he'll say, spirit holds fast to the moment of fleet of a being, an objectively existent actuality to itself, and ignores the fact that this actuality is its own being for self. So we look at something out there and we forget in one way or another that our mental categories are actually. It's not just this distinction between my mental categories and the world out there, the thing in itself that when I find causality out there, for instance, or let's say when I find causality in the world, I'm finding myself, but I'm also finding the world at the same time.

46:28 Mark: Let's make that the last word for part one here. Please come back for part two. If you're a partial examined life supporter through partiallyexaminedlife.com support, then you can get that in your feed within minutes, probably. Or at least tomorrow, depending on when I post it. Otherwise you have to wait till next week. Thanks everybody.