Ep. 386: Hegel on Society (Part Two)

0:07 Mark: You are listening to the Partially examined life, episode 386, part two, discussing Hegel's phenomenology of spirit. The spirit section, sections 438 through 463 and we've given a lot of summary and a lot of context and a lot of where is this going? But as far as getting through the actual text, I think you've gotten through three of the sections. Are we up to.

0:31 Wes: Yeah, maybe we can try to be more synoptic, but yeah, yeah. 441. Spirit manifests itself as the ethical life of a nation.

0:39 Mark: Yep. The Sittlichkeit, the communal life. Yep.

0:42 Wes: But we have to move beyond that. We have to move beyond the. Does he use the word beautiful here?

0:48 Mark: The beauty of ethical life. Yes.

0:51 Seth: Yeah. He says it must advance to the consciousness of what it is immediately. Must leave behind it the beauty of ethical life by passing through a series of shapes attained to a knowledge of itself.

1:03 Wes: So the beauty of ethical life, I think from Commentary, basically, is just this stage of living without questioning. Right. Living in custom without having reflectively questioned it yet. And the whole Antigone movement, which we're going to get a preamble to here, this conflict between what the state demands and what the family might demand of me. I got to bury my brother. Creon won't let me. That internal contradiction is going to move us out of this beautiful stage where there seems to become some kind of harmony between the demands of the state and the demands of the family. The divine law.

1:35 Mark: Yeah. So 442 and 443 are the end of this introductory section. So to say, where we're headed in this whole 150 pages or whatever it is of the spirit section is the living ethical world. Spirit in its truth. We have spirit in its immediacy. Right. That's always the preliminary stage. We're just living according to custom. The Spirit in its truth is a society that really understands what it is doing, that is doing self conscious planning. This is my interpretation. Instead of just letting, oh, the customs are just what we've adopted, we need to actually deliberately have a society. So maybe the American founding would be something that would qualify as like a deliberate plan for government, maybe the first one in history. So.

2:23 Wes: So we often claim, yeah, so we go from spontaneous ethical life into formal legal systems and that gives us this split between. Right. Ultimately he'll say culture and faith, basically. But ultimately, at the end of the section, we get this collapse back. Right. So we get this division between culture and faith, and then it collapses back into individual moral conscience, which replaces, I think, God in a way, as the essential thing, God of the community as the essential thing. So in a weird way, it's almost like what has been external as ethical substance, as living in custom gets split, but then gets internalized as moral conscience. So now I'm not simply relying on the community in my action. I can rely on a maxim. I can just do the Kantian thing. I don't have to appeal to custom.

3:18 Dylan: Yeah. So at the end, he ties that, that dissolution into the Enlightenment itself. So it makes it sort of historical where both these worlds are confounded and revolutionized by the insight and the diffusion of that insight known as the Enlightenment. And the realm which was divided, expanded into this world and beyond. And then you get the return to self consciousness, which grasp itself as the essentiality and essence of the actual self. So that sounds like individuality. Individualism.

3:47 Wes: And the two worlds are the realm of culture in the harsh reality of its objective element. Over and against the realm, it traces the world of belief or faith. Said at an epistemological level, it sounds like Kant. And it's like the. The harsh reality of the objective element is just the thing in itself is beyond our grasp. But at a theological level, right. It's that God is beyond our grasp and we can only have faith in him. And I think that's part of the. Part of the harsh reality. Just the being cut off in whatever sense from reality.

4:18 Mark: See, I thought we'd overcome the being cut off. And the way that spirit is divided in the section that we're going to get to is about the dynamics. In fact, he refers to these as not in conflict, but as feeding each other. So that the realm of. Of faith is really the subterranean unconscious, but still cultural thought of what is right and wrong. But then this gets stirred up and you know, actual political leaders make this into laws. And so that's where like both of these things are very natural. But. And if they lose track of how they relate to each other, then something is.

Has gone wrong. Right. That the legal should always keep in mind that it is merely an articulation of the subconscious what the society's mores are. And likewise, the mores should realize that they're the. The merely unarticulated form of what has eventually become law. So there's no alienation in either of those. In both of these. In fact, Kantian morality is a previous.

5:24 Wes: Well, there's certainly alienation in the Enlightenment. I mean, he's retracing his steps here from law to the division between culture and faith. And then we get to the Enlightenment. So. Right, Mark, this is.

5:36 Seth: Isn't this a recapitulation of the alienation still exists? So in 441, the last sentence, he says These shapes, however, are distinguished from the previous ones. He's talking about sense perception, consciousness, reason, all that sense certainty. I'm sorry, are distinguished from the previous ones by the fact that they are real spirits, actualities in the strict meaning of the word. And instead of being shapes merely of consciousness, are shapes of a world. So this dynamic, the same tension between the individual and the universal, but really this alienation, the subjectivity, objectivity, tension, whatever, which was played out in consciousness, is now being played out in the world actuality, but the dynamics are the same.

That was one of the things actually that I thought the Routledge was really great at, is just talking about. He's just turning the crank. Like everything, it's the same kind of conflict over and over again, just in different contexts, because you need that engine to drive things forward.

6:36 Wes: Alienation keeps cropping up over and over again. When we thought we had some kind of resolution, it doesn't go away until we get to absolute spirit. And then of course Feuerbach will come along and say, oh, alienation, not gone yet. And then Marx will come along and say, oh, not yet. Right. So Hegel thinks at the end of it, he solves the problem of alienation. But until then, I think it's kind of the engine of the dialectic.

6:58 Mark: I still want to say that. So actually reading the text here, spirit, which henceforth divided within itself, traces one of its worlds, the realm of culture, in the harsh reality of its objective element. That's not, it's not a harsh reality because the thing in itself is fundamentally divorced from us. It's not. No, it's just that it is actually in the world. You have to pass laws for real people who are in concrete situations, which are hard, they're deflect, they're beset by hardships. Whereas the realm of faith, the realm of essential being, that is more.

I don't even care, you know, if the world is fair or whatever. Like I just, I have this sense of fairness within me, right? The. The abstract. So in both cases we should not be alienated. We should realize that these are part of one self feeding circuit, that the culture feeds the law and the law feeds the culture. And we are not supposed to be alienated them.

7:51 Seth: Right?

7:51 Mark: This is not Stirner. You guys had read where it was saying any kind of law is alienated. And then we went through Kant and Korsgaard to say, oh no, actually, if I'm part of it, if it's actually my. If I'm somehow in the mechanism that is coming up with these Laws, then I'm not alienated from them. But for Hegel, that cannot be on the individual level. It is not my individual will. That is like. That's a stage that we've already passed in the previous parts of this book. It has to be the social. So you don't ever grow out of the social to something more general. Like Kantian morality is the. The mature version of this. Kantian morality was the immature version of this. The mature version of this has to be something new that is not yet my just, you know, deferring to unreflectively to my customs, but to working with my customs and delving into what their ideals are going to be.

8:47 Wes: Yeah. At the end of this section, it sounds like Kantian morality. Right. So the Enlightenment, this world and the beyond returns into self consciousness, which is now the form of morality, grasps itself as the essentiality and essence of the actual self. It no longer places its world and its ground outside of itself. That's alienation. Right. That's the way we, when we began with the two worlds. That's a form of alienation, but it lets its everything fade into itself. And as conscience is spirit, that is certain of itself. But conscience is not going to be the solution. Ultimately it temporarily resolves the tension between culture and faith. But you know, right, between this, you know, between external law and then faith. But it doesn't solve it.

9:28 Mark: So 443, very short one. The ethical world, the world which is rent asunder into this world and a beyond in the moral view of the world are thus the spirits whose process and return into the simple self consciousness of spirit are now to be developed. So yeah, what do we think of that? Run that being rent asunder.

9:47 Wes: Ultimately individual moral, conscience and religion are going to have to be reconciled. And that's where we get absolute spiritual.

9:54 Mark: Yep. All right, so that was the introductory section. Here is the introductory section of the next bit, which is one level down in the outline. The true Spirit, the ethical order.

10:03 Wes: It's funny, Mark, because I wasn't even thinking of the section except for the numbers. It's just all. Sure, just don't even pay attention to the titles.

10:12 Dylan: Like even as I'm listening to us talk about this and even the words that I'm saying myself, do you have the experience that when we read this aloud and then we say what it means, it seems like that's not possible. That's true. Like the words that he has written down are just. It's just so weird.

10:34 Seth: Yes.

10:34 Dylan: It's not that we're not giving. It's just. There's nothing plain about what he's saying. Nothing at all. Like, the whole way he's speaking, we're making sense of it.

10:43 Wes: But, yeah, I mean, we can continue to, as time permits, to get the flavor of the weirdness by reading some of these quotations, right?

10:50 Dylan: Well, we've been doing a pretty good job of making it seem pretty weird. This is my.

10:55 Seth: This is part of the experience of reading Hegel. So it's a thing in philosophy, right? Somebody writes something totally abstruse or complex or hard or complicated. How often do we talk about how much we love people who are great writers? We gushed over Korsgaard, right? We gushed over. And it's like. So you bust through the wall and you're like, let me see if there's. If he's actually saying something or if this is just. All right. And I feel like with Hegel, he's actually saying something. And I want desperately. I want desperately to find another language for it.

But it's not that we're trying to. We have to find a new way to say what he's saying or put it in contemporary terms. It's that you have to kind of. I feel like if you get in the groove, like, you get a picture in your mind or you get a grasp of how he's talking and what you know, you say like, okay, I think I've got a vibe on what spirit is, right? Or what I think spirit is. Then you can kind of get into the flow. But then he'll bust out a couple sentences where he'll say, oh, yeah, no, this is spirit in its absolute truth. And you're like, ah, shit, I don't have a Rosetta Stone for that, right?

I don't have the key for that. But, yes, as I was reading this, I was like, could you come up with that two page or that little outline? Could you recapitulate the entirety of his argument in a very concrete and simple way? Maybe somebody has. I don't know.

12:18 Mark: For each of these sections, I tend to, in my notes, break it down into bullet points, like distinct points that are being made. And some of it might just be. I paste in a sentence or even a paragraph. But usually it's like, something that I can understand. So in 444, the first bullet point is spirit qua. Consciousness always forces its moments apart. So this is just how he is defined. I don't think it's a matter of, like, oh, he shouldn't use the word consciousness. For that, because that has a very ordinary meaning for us. And this is a weird, like, why would consciousness be something that forces its moments apart?

But this is the way he is, this is his technical terminology, that for something to be consciousness, well, that means it has a noesis and a noema, as Husserl would say. It has a subject end and an object end. And so just by being consciousness, it is a single thing, but yet it identifies that there are two little parts of it. There are always two moments of it apart. So you could focus on one, you could focus on the other, you could focus on the whole thing. So that sort of makes sense to me as one of the six points that I came out of here. And it's just often it is something like that that he's already said so many other times in the text.

It's just that he's reminding you because he knows his language is so strange in this section.

13:38 Wes: He's talking about action. Right. So we can think of this epistemologically or ethically. Mark, you gave the epistemological version of this. But yeah, we divide into consciousness and into substance and consciousness of the substance, where the substance in this case is going to turn out to be the end or the goal, which is something kind of universal. And it stands over and against the individualized reality, as he says, which is going to be the particular action of the particular individual. So when we act, we might be doing a particular thing, but there's.

If it's ethical, there's something universal or general in the goal of that. So we get the universal, particular split within the structure of the ethical. So I don't think he's discarding that part of Kant, for instance, but the latter, it raises to the former and acts ethically the form, it brings down to the latter and realizes the end. So the particular act is getting beamed up to the universal, but the universal is also beaming down the end. So it brings into existence a unity of itself and the substance as its own work. I'll let someone else translate that last sentence.

14:48 Seth: Well, yeah, I think if I was going to try to. We're going to start calling these. I'm going to try to Casey it. So this is where I try to take the sentence, take it in. So when an individual, or in an individual situation, ethical situation, meaning where you know, you're in a community of self consciousnesses or, and you act on each other, you act towards each other, these actions simultaneously, these actions have purposes. So they have ends in sight, they have goals, you do something with the expectation that something else is going to happen.

And the specific action situation is kind of the individualized instance. You could think of it as like in a parallel to the previous section. It's like an object. And then the ends towards which it's trying to go is kind of like an attribute or kind of like the universal property that. That. Except that in this context it doesn't work like a property because we're not talking about substance and attribute. It's just the universal is the goal. The particular situation is the individual. Right. Or the specific concrete. And that actually instantiates itself as it happens.

So in other words, it's not like the goal is floating out there like a Platonic ideal. In acting, the situation gets created and essentially the goal comes into being in the specific situation. But of course, the specific situation, there are many specific situations that could have that goal. So it's also reaching out to it.

16:28 Wes: Yeah, I mean, I think of this in terms of abstract ideals being made instantiated in real life in the act. Because it's there in spirit already in a way. Spirit is acting through us. So spirit brings into existence the unity of itself and substance as its own work. Which is to say it. It acts through us. And creating specific ethical actions to bring a unity between itself where the universal resides and objective reality. Ethical acts, in a way are acts of unification.

17:00 Seth: They're also acts of creation. Unification and creation.

17:03 Dylan: Yeah. What's very, very confusing about it is while we're articulating it as there's this connection between what Mark say, noesis and noema, that there is the individual, the object and then the subject are connected to one another and. Or we have the language of talking about the embeddedness of us as individuals in a community and the community being made up of individuals. But then there's also the language of that's higher of it acting like this, like spirit itself acting. And that there's like this whole other. It's practically ontological or entity realm that has nothing to do with either one.

That it's just like the universe is doing this. And this is where I get tripped up. I'm like. Where I'm not sure about the analysis itself because the other analysis where you're talking about the sort of back and forth and the reflexive nature of the interaction between us as individuals and our communities and back and forth and the untangling of that and that there's tensions that all interpreting what he's talking about in that language helps. Okay. And it makes it seem Sensible. But then there's all this other language which acts as if that's an interpretive framework for something that he's talking about some kind of other organism, which is the universe.

18:33 Mark: Yeah, well, so the thing that is still ambiguous to me, as you said, I've been talking about spirit, and he's explicitly talking about spirit as the spirit of a culture. But there has to be some relationship between a culture and the universal culture, God. You know, this is where we're ultimately going in the book. Why after the culture section, we have a religious section. And then absolute knowing is God knowing himself. So I think this. This ambiguity is entirely intentional. But I think it's kind of like I was saying, you know, you think that you're making an individual ethical decision, but you are, in fact making a implicit reference to the universal.

And you're right, Wes, that this is a very Kantian move. He has specific critiques of Kantian morality as Kantian, as Kant spells it out, and they're actually very similar to the ones. Right. If you think the categorical imperative is entirely just a formal. I'm just using just a form of my will, and I can see whether it contradicts itself. But when you actually try to apply it in a particular situation, you start thinking about the particular circumstances. So it's not thou shalt not steal. Well, what constitutes stealing if the, you know, are the Indians, if they're stealing back the land, you know, what constitutes, what makes.

You know. You can't assume that property rights are somehow fundamental in the structure of the universe. So you have to actually look at historical contingencies to try to universalize any particular maxim. But you're still definitely referring to something greater than yourself.

19:57 Seth: That.

19:58 Mark: That, from your point of view, is the universal. So individual, rational is the universal. You are using the language of reason. You're using these socially constructed, but, you know, ultimately somehow based in the nature of the universe tools. Whenever you, as an individual are making decisions. So you could say, oh, like, as. Just as a metaphor. It's like the spirit, the universal, that is making decisions through me. It's just that he wants to say that's not a mere metaphor. That's literally what's happening when you describe it on the individual level. You are engaging in metaphysical, metaphorical thinking. You are actually just an abstraction from the social, from the mass of humanity.

20:38 Wes: Yeah, for Kant, it's right. It's universal in the sense of the will, not contradicting itself as it universalizes. It's very arid and dry and devoid of Content. But here the universal is spirit is God. And it's concretizing itself in our actions. It's unifying itself. It's bringing itself down to. Down to concrete reality. And then it's going to get the split in the next section between the human law and the divine law. Ethical substance, the community, whatever you want to call it, will split and individuals will find themselves identifying with one as opposed to the other. Right. Doing the Antigone thing and being concerned about the family or doing the Creon thing and being concerned about the state.

21:23 Mark: I just, I'm going to emphasize throughout here, even though he's using religious language, you can and should secularize all of it. And you know, we spent all that time with Feuerbach who, who says whenever we talk about God, we're just projecting something about humanity. And I think that again, I can't remember was he arguing against Hegel in saying that or was he elaborating Hegel in saying that? But I read it into Hegel.

21:48 Wes: I think Hegel is religious. I just think, right. Spirit is ambiguous because it's God in one sense. But then as you pointed out, Mark, it's also some specific culture manifestation.

21:58 Dylan: Right?

21:58 Wes: When God becomes concrete, he becomes culture, and that's a particular thing. So the whole problem of particular versus universal crops up there. And you can use spirit to refer to these different levels, I think. But at its most abstract, I would say it's God or most general.

22:15 Seth: May I suggest that we go to section 446?

22:18 Wes: Well, I just put us into 445, which I gave a very quick summary of. If people are good with that, then yeah, we can go to 446. But that's just the division between human law and divine law cropping up.

22:30 Seth: Right. And it's a seminal moment for spirit in its own self realization. But it also does it without awareness that it's ultimately going to crash.

22:40 Mark: Self consciousness is doing this, right? Dividing itself into these two ethical substances, human and divine law. It is ignorant of what it does and on the other hand knows what it does, a knowledge which for that reason is a deceptive knowledge. So I wrote bad faith next to that. Right. I think I know what the ethical law is, but I also know there's something arbitrary in my thinking. I know this. At the very least, I know that there's an apparent law to hand I could appeal to instead.

23:07 Seth: Yeah, yeah. That's another way to articulate the. Let's call it the stasis, the home being at home, bad faith. Or bad conscience is a way of like being at home in the world is just ultimately not sustainable. Right. Or it's not sustainable unless when it comes into conflict with its own untruth.

23:26 Dylan: I think.

23:27 Wes: Right. Antigone isn't really acting in bad faith. Nor is Creon, I think is what the. I'm not trying to contradict anyone. I'm just thinking out loud here and

23:35 Seth: I was not intending to say that this bad faith applies. Mark brought it up. I was just trying.

23:39 Wes: Yeah, I'm just more responding to Mark.

23:41 Seth: It's the way to explain how the Greek society could have the opinion appearance of being settled.

23:47 Wes: I think when he says one of these power and you know, the consciousness confronting the substance assigns to itself according to its nature. One of these powers. When he said an individual person, when dealing with the demands of the community, will tend to go towards the divine or the human law. And in doing so, knowing is on the one hand ignorant of what it does and on the other hand knows what it does. I think it thinks it knows what it does. That's a very kind of tepid reading. I know, but I think Antigone in a way knows what she's doing in upholding the divine law. But in another sense she's ignorant because she's not really self conscious of this split and what it means and of the fact that Creon in a way has just as. Or the. Sorry to keep referring to Antigone, but you know. Right. That the human law has just as much of a claim on her as the divine law.

24:36 Seth: Yeah. Wes, why do you keep talking about Antigone? I don't get it.

24:39 Wes: I mean, he should be talking about it more explicitly here instead of waiting. It's just like he's giving us. Let me just say it. A bunch of elusive stuff and then I'll fill you in on the details. Well, I guess, yeah, we start with the universal and then we get concrete.

24:54 Mark: So interestingly, the bad faith is not necessarily Antigone or Creon. It is self consciousness, self consciousness itself in dividing itself into divine law. And human law is in bad faith with itself because it is self consciousness. It knows that it is doing this. So this is again the anthropomorphism that Dylan was being confounded by. And it's very weird here, but you could say, and I think Solomon says this, that it's not that Creon and Antigone are in bad faith, that they're fooling themselves, but they're not realizing that they're calling to mind the law.

Of from their sphere, that each sphere of law implicates the other. Right. That you could not have human law without the unconscious, what Hegel's calling divine law, and vice versa. So that you should just sort of get further away from your particular little point of view where you have siloed yourself within one of these types and realize that they are symbiotic, that they work together.

25:58 Wes: Yeah. I don't want to argue over this, but I had trouble seeing it as bad faith, even if Solomon says that. But. Yeah, because each. Each in a way, is earnest.

26:06 Mark: But yeah, Solomon doesn't say that. That's just still me.

26:09 Wes: Maybe I'm not fully understanding it, but.

26:11 Dylan: Yeah, I guess it depends upon how you're taking Hegel to be understanding it. I mean, the reading that. The notion that Creon and Antigone, or there's this tension between the individual as representing, you know, and their appeal to faith and the appeal to the community, that there's a tension between that. That reading of either Antigone or the Oresteia itself. So I don't think those are unusual. I think those are like the standard reading. Right. And that the Greek. That the resolution that you get in the Oresteia with Athena, like sort of bringing things together and developing, you know, justice and putting the furies in the.

The ground and having a new rendition for how you have a community together that acknowledges the underpinning of the meaning of individuals and their needs and what that sort of resolution of that tension is. Or you do it with Creon and Antigone, where each is a earnest partisan of their point of view that needs to get resolved in some other way and that the tragedy of Antigone is the tragedy being told. There's in their earnestness. Those aren't crazy readings. I don't think of it. To me, what's weird is the notion that that whole thing is understood as, oh, there's this spirit that has been going through this thing that sundered itself into these two points of view.

And if you read it that way, you would say that might be some kind of notion of post hoc bad faith on the spirit, on the case of absolute spirit, that it separated itself into these two things. You know, this is the. To me, the weirdness that's, like, infused in it. There's all this stuff that makes a lot of sense, but there's this gigantic, overarching wholeness that Hegel brings along with it.

28:08 Wes: Yeah, it's a larger theological question of why God would create the world. Why does he need sensuous being. Why does he need materiality and desire and all those things when he just had a happy nice thing going up there in heaven with. With the angels, right?

28:24 Mark: I wouldn't normally call it God being in bad faith with himself. We certainly didn't say that in the plot. It's just that Hegel himself said in this one line, a knowledge which for this reason is deceptive knowledge. That's the only reason I was focusing on that.

28:37 Seth: Dylan, to your point, if you were to conceive of the universe as an organic, or at least the world as we understand it, you know, as an organic being that was sort of like growing, evolving and coming to a form of self realization, this might be the kind of narrative you would use. So if that's the story you were trying to tell. And then specifically with respect to Greek society and this tension between the human and the divine law, I may be playing a little loose with the story here, but to me, he's using the Greek society and the Antigone story to talk about a more general situation, which is essentially the transition from a kind of like pre civil society which is governed by nature, the laws of nature, whatever those might be, divine law.

And then as human beings come. Come into civil society and start establishing laws that they create and adjudicate amongst themselves, you still have this fidelity and this expectation that other laws apply, and they kind of still do because the law doesn't cover everything, right. And there are still going to be. I mean, if you think about this, I've been thinking about this a lot this week since we've been reading, right. So if you imagine that there's, you know, you have this whatever, omerta, right? Or some kind of eye for an eye, blood law, where retribution for a crime, you know, you kill my brother, I kill, you know, your brother kind of a thing.

And the transition from that to, nope, I'm going to take the hands off and I'm going to allow the state to adjudicate that. Like that transition doesn't just happen overnight, right? That there's. There are going to be these lingering. And even now, if you think about fucking the United States right now, the tension between the divine. You know, there are people that think that the divine takes precedent over human law in the United States. Right. It's part of the reason we're struggling where we are. So this tension exists and you don't have to think about it, it's a nice clean division and it gets gendered in the Antigone story.

But I Think it exists in many places, all over. And it kind of. I'm not sure we've moved past it. As far as the Hegelian stage is concerned.

31:09 Wes: Are you associating divine law, the family law, with sort of tribal loyalty? Because it's. I didn't know whether to make that association.

31:18 Seth: I am, I am. And I think even more primitively, because we've seen this lots of times, like a lot of people, you know the philosophy. The family is always kind of like the primary unit. And if you were to right now say, well, what are the responsibilities that the parent has to the child and the child has to the parent, many, many, many of those are not encoded in human law. And we've seen attention, like used to be okay to spank your kids or beat them or whatever, and now that's not okay. Right. And the human law will intervene. But that's a place where those two things come into contact. The human law says you have to send your kids to school, and the resolution is homeschooling. Right. Or whatever.

31:58 Wes: So it's the divine law says, you know, I must bury my brother. Or we could take another example. I have these certain obligations to my family. You know, I've got to protect my kids or something like that. And no matter what happens, I don't care what the government says. If the government is going to do something that is going to hurt my family members, then I have to privilege my loyalty to my family.

32:24 Seth: Every other police procedural has somebody acting the police, begging them to let them solve the case and don't. And that tension is very, very much alive and well.

32:38 Dylan: There's a great Bruce Springsteen song off of Nebraska where the whole narrative is there's one brother who's a police officer, and the other brother gets into trouble and kills somebody in a bar, and the cop follows him to the state line and just lets him go.

32:55 Wes: You got a doom for your brother?

32:57 Dylan: No, I mean, that's exactly one of the lines. If I was. Had it more in my head, I'd be able to give you the line.

33:02 Wes: But it's basically so the character in that song is observing the law of individuality as opposed to the law of universality. To give us 440, section. 400 and forty.

33:11 Seth: There you go. And it's. Of course, I'm saying that it still exists, but it's much messier here. Right. The reason why Hegel's talking about it here is that in his eyes, the structure of the Greek society, it was very neatly. I mean, we should kind of talk about that because he does spell it out over the last of these sections before talking about Antigone in general in 446, right.

33:34 Wes: Just as we went from sense certainty, simple being, to a thing that has properties, right, to perception. We go from immediate certainty in some ethical situation, which may be some sort of universal law, to something that is really, I think Mark was making this point before, and that's what section 446 is about, is context dependent or in particular depends on one's relationships to people. That's where the family comes in. Right. So also to the immediate certainty of a real ethical situation becomes a given action is an actual situation with many ethical connections.

And I'm reading into this because this is going to become an antithesis of individuality, universality, and the law of individuality versus that of universality. The way I understand it, if we're going to relate it to family versus state, is how am I related to the particular people involved? If he's not my brother, he's not getting dropped at the state line, he's being taken to jail.

34:37 Seth: Yeah.

34:37 Mark: It's not clear to me in this section if he's yet talking about something that concrete or whether he is trying to say, just point out the difference between, as you were saying, sort of your gut reaction, the ethical perception of a given action, which of course, right. You're using, whether you know it implicitly or not, you're using social mores passes over it into the actual situation where it gets right. So the first of these, the ethical perception of given action, the superfluous plurality of properties, concentrates into the essential antithesis of individuality and universality.

So is that referring to the sort of Kantian and even Sartre runs with this, that whenever you make a decision, you might think you're just making this ethical decision based on the individual circumstance. Like, hey, I just see what's in front of me and this is what I'm supposed to do. But I'm positing a universal law. I'm making some sort of reference to the universal in a way that I might not realize, right? So that's why the individuality.

35:43 Wes: Well, he's making this comparison to perception, right? Where the plurality of properties and that whole thing with the properties versus the substance underlying it sort of turned into a universal individual dichotomy and problem. And here he's saying still more for ethical perception, which is the purified substantial consciousness. Does the plurality of ethical moments become a duality of a law of individuality and a Law of universal. So just as. As we get a problem in the epistemology of universal particular, or as he wants to put it, individual, we get the universal individual problem in the ethical and the.

I guess the epistemological problem. Right. Is. Yeah, it's right. The participation problem in Plato, if we want to think about it in a simple way, how did the individual and the universal connect? But in the ethical situation, I take that as a more acute problem because the. It's right, because it's ought and it's unclear how a universal prescription might apply in some individual particular context.

36:50 Mark: Well, that. Yeah, this is what's confusing me is it's a law of individuality and a law of universality. Because earlier in the phenomenology, in these ethics sections, he talks about more the Kantian case of, hey, I want to make an exception for myself. I'm not making any law. I'm just saying, like, this is what I want to do right now. I want to pursue my pleasure or whatever. And that as, you know, the Kantian and Hegel comes along and says, no, no, you're actually engaging in law, like thinking when you do that, you're positing that everybody should pursue their own pleasure. Everybody. You know, you're doing something universal like that. But here it has to be two different. It's not just the individual as an exception versus the law. It's a law of individuality, which seems like it contradicts itself.

37:31 Wes: It's that of the family.

37:32 Mark: Yes, yes. So as you were just saying. So, yeah, so if I'm considering stealing bread to give to my starving family, am I considering do not steal the universal social law, the one that's on the books, or am I consider help out my family? That is the particular. It's still a law. You should always help out your family when they're starving. But it is the particular one referring to my family.

37:55 Wes: I think that's exactly what he means. Yeah.

37:57 Seth: Okay.

37:57 Wes: Sorry, Seth, I know you're about to disagree.

38:00 Seth: Yeah, I have a different reading, but do you guys want to get hung up on this point or you want to keep going?

38:04 Mark: No, we were agreeing, so please disagree, Seth.

38:07 Seth: All right, so in that section, he says a given action is an actual situation with many ethical connections for the former, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. He says still more for ethical perception, which is the purified. You already read that the law of individuality and the law of universality. So think about this when in the course of the first part of the book, he's talking about consciousness and self perception and all that. Right. He talks about the individual and the universal here.

38:38 Wes: He says, yeah, the substance properties dichotomy resolves itself into the individual versus the universal. Right, because properties are universal.

38:46 Seth: Right. So we have the same structure and same substance here. But he needs to articulate it without saying the individual and the universal. Right. Because if just quickly step Forward to the first sentence of447. In the essence we are considering here, individuality has the meaning of self consciousness in general, not of a particular contingent consciousness. So this I think what he's saying is in the ethical, you break into the law of individuality and the law of universality just means not like. I understand totally why you say law of individuality seems like a self contradiction because it be like saying the law of the individual.

What he's saying is that as ethical substance in this case, spirit is going to have to break itself into a structure where there is this interaction between a thing and a collection of those things, a citizen and a nation. Right. As he says, I think in the next447,448. So he doesn't want to talk about a specific individual or reference because we're not talking about the abstract shapes of an individual consciousness. So we're not talking about the individuals encountering objects in the world here. What we're talking about is a totally different structure that still has the shape of one and many.

And so the law of individuality and the law of universal, I think is just to say that the ethical structure, the shape will always be this interaction between A1 and A many.

40:29 Wes: Well, that's a very abstract way of putting it. Mark and I were trying to concretize it, but I think I said something

40:36 Mark: wrong at the end of what I was saying just in that the law of the individual would mean that the woman who is preferring her children, because you know, this is who he's gonna. Is about her children, about them specifically. But he actually says specifically later in a very weird passage, that her concern is for her children qua children, not qua individuals in her particular.

41:00 Wes: In. In the sort of ethical relations that arise within the family would. So that's the particular context he's talking about. Yeah.

41:09 Seth: You're saying that the woman is the individual and the man is the universal. And that's not. I don't think that's sustainable as a reading.

41:15 Wes: No, I think it's the opposite, isn't it? But we'll find out. We'll find out. But he does associate one with the other. But I think in447. Right. He culminates him saying as actual substance, it is a nation.

41:27 Dylan: Yes.

41:28 Wes: Wow. Feels like a sudden left turn. Not exactly, but it's just suddenly we get a mention of the nation.

41:34 Seth: But I think that should say community, not nation.

41:37 Dylan: Yeah.

41:37 Wes: Or tribe or. Yeah.

41:38 Seth: Maybe even the Greek polis isn't a nation. It's the wrong word.

41:42 Wes: But he's also using the word citizens. So as actual consciousness, it is the citizens of that nation. So. But yeah, individuality has the meaning of self consciousness in general, not of a particular individual ethical substance, which I take to be community. His actual substance, absolute spirit. Spirit realized in the plurality of existent consciousnesses which where. Where he is talking about contingent individuals there. Right. But again, it's the communal consciousness realized in the individual consciousnesses. The spirit is the community. Anyway, I don't want to just keep

42:16 Mark: reading, but yeah, what wasn't nationhood at the time sort of being discovered as the real expression of community? Because, like, there are all these little Germans groups and they're like, hey, let's have the German nation. That'll actually capture the geist that unites all of us. And we had the same thing in Italy that for a long time it wasn't a unified country, that I feel like that this particular use of nation is only going to be used when in this particular historical circumstance when the nation is supposed to capture something.

42:47 Wes: Yes. It's more than the state as a legal arrangement. It's something where we have a shared culture and maybe even ethnicity. So it is to me a bit sinister. It is. This just does. This does lead into trend in Germany, which did not go well.

43:03 Dylan: But.

43:03 Wes: Yeah, so. But it's ultimately, it's fundamentally communitarian.

43:06 Mark: But yeah, yeah. Something that we're still fighting over now in terms of like, if you say America is built on this idea, like, it's not just that these states are united because they're contiguous. And so we can argue about like, well, anybody that wants to sign on to that idea should just be able to be part of America and it doesn't matter if they speak something other than English and have different. You know, we're a nation of immigrants. We're not a blood and soil nation. So what nation means is not blood and soil in that context.

43:36 Wes: That was Rorty's argument in 448, though

43:39 Dylan: he continues this notion that spirit, this dichotomy or this duality within spirit, where he says spirit can be called human law. And it has two forms, the universal form. It's known law and custom and in the form of individuality, the actual certainty of itself and the individuals as such.

44:00 Wes: Which is. Yeah, it gets instantiated in government. Right. I think the overall upshot of this is. Yeah, custom is. Is the universal law. And then individually we get the government and so you.

44:12 Dylan: So something Antigone on the one hand and Creon on the other.

44:16 Wes: Yeah, exactly. And the government, the concreteness of it. It's more concrete than custom. Right. Custom is. There's kind of an invisibility to it. But you can walk into the, you know, a government office and it has all these formal roles and it gives it an air of. Of authority and the legitimacy that I think in a way supplants custom.

44:38 Mark: Sorry, you guys are not all of 448 is about human law. Right. 449. He's going to contrast this divine law. So it's not that the human law is the known law and that's what the government says versus the custom. And one of these is the individual. One of these is the. Like these are all. This is a dialect, a dichotomy within human law, within the government. So it is.

45:04 Wes: But it starts out as custom.

45:05 Mark: Yes, yes. Well, and I've been stating this wrong because just to simplify things that like as if the divine law was the unarticulated customs. And then what the actual government says is, you know, the articulated known to itself. But actually Sittlichkeit is both of these are part of human law. And whereas the divine law is something supposed to be even more subterranean than known customs, it's supposed to be the group psychological basis that gives rise to known customs. Something like that. That's why we refer to it as divine, because we don't know where it comes from.

45:41 Wes: Yeah, that's an important distinction. Yeah, yeah.

45:44 Seth: So in 450, if then the community is that substance conscious of what it actually does, which is to say it's being for self, individual being for self. The other side, divine law has the form of immediate substance or substance that simply is. So the latter. Right. Is thus on the one hand, the inner notion or the general possibility of the ethical sphere in general. Divine law is just. It's intuitive. It's the notion of ethical action. It's just the possibility of action. But being the human law actually makes it possible. Not makes possible, but takes place, so to speak, through an act of self consciousness. Because. And that's the difference.

46:31 Wes: I think this is why we were kind of associating divine law with custom. Even though divine Law, as Mark points out, is, is narrower than that because that, that cut in the previous section, the custom and government distinction arose within human law. But now, you know, in 449 he moves on to this contrast between the human law and specifically the government in opposition to the divine law of the family. And then here. Yeah, Seth, as you point out, he's associating the family divine law with something that's intuitive, which sounds a lot more like custom. Right, as opposed to the self conscious law of the government. Yeah, but I think what he's saying here is divine law is something, it's just, it's not self conscious, it's intuitive.

47:18 Mark: And he's going to contrast through the next section the divine law, the human family relations as ethical from mere natural love relations, which it seems like every other thinker that we would read where would say, oh, we've got these natural love relations, but then we sort of develop ethics out of that. And so the whole ethics Sittlichkeit is above board. But he wants to say no, no, actually within the family, within the unarticulated, there's an ethical component and a merely emotional natural component. And the ethical one is what is important for providing the ground for explicit communal living.

47:58 Wes: Yeah, it starts out with this conflict between the human law and then natural familial bonds. But then he'll say like the family unit is an ethical unit not because of bonds of love. And then he'll argue just what Mark said, right. That the ethical relation, it's got to be non contingent. Right. So it just can't rely on particular bonds of love between people. It's to the extent that it's universal, it's got to be non contingent. And then that's where we get this weird turn into deadness. Right. So it's qua universal. It has something to do with. Well, I'll let someone else take up that. Right. The unreal impotent shadow. The individual is an unreal impotent shadow until he's a citizen.

48:41 Seth: So the first thing he says, Wes says that, that the. If the family is the first. I think one way to think about this, the family is the first communal unit. And we know that community is necessary for this transition to the ethical. So the family has, let's just call it an ethical structure just by nature. Right. But of course it's not fully ethical because it's not a nation or community and legislative and all that nonsense. So as Wes said, you think, oh well, why is it, why is the family an ethical unit? And it's like your first instinct might be to say, well, because family members love each other in a way just by nature, in a way that they don't other people.

Right? And he says, well no, because love isn't enough or love is not the thing. And why is that the case? Because Hegel's all about the one and the many, the individual and the universal. So it's like he can't explain the ethical structure of the family with two individuals in relation to each other. So the individual has to be in relation to the family as a whole. So he says the ethical connection between members of the family is not that of feeling or the relationship of love. It must be placed in the relation of the individual member of the family to the whole family as the substance.

So that the end and content of what he does and actually is, is solely for the family. Yep. So he says, but the conscious end motivating the action of this whole, so far as it is directed towards that whole, is itself the individual. In other words, the way I'm reading this is the individual has an ethical relationship to the family that is not driven by love, but is driven by some kind of a concern for the family as a whole. And yet it manifests itself as just individual action, individual motivation, so to speak. Like it's not collective. And it turn.

It doesn't manifest itself in coordinated action in the way that it does in a larger non familial community.

50:45 Wes: So I was taking the section to say it seems like the end of action in the family is the end and it's just a part whole relation between individual and the family and the parts serve of the whole. But then he says, but it, but this just as makes much makes the individual the conscious end of action. And then he talks a bit, you know, about wealth and power. So it seems like the family is a formative in influence. It ends up sending people out into the world, at least men. And in other words, it puts people into the larger community, the place of the, of the human law, where one pursues one's own individual interests as well as to some extent.

So you get trained into a virtue within the family that is not for the sake of the family, but for the sake of the community. And then that ironically expels you from the family. Right. Once you're ripe, you fall from the tree, so to speak. And then so thus, quote, the positive end of the peculiar to the family is the individual as such.

51:49 Dylan: Right.

51:49 Wes: Which I take to be. Yeah, the training that you get within the family that Helps you become part of. Of the community.

51:56 Seth: Yeah. And if you wanted to, you could probably decode that in terms of the whole individual universal tension resolution for the male anyway, which we do need to talk about. Hegel's quite self aware that women did not get the same opportunities as men. And so before anybody gets excited about that. But it also provides a model. That's the other thing. If the ethical in the family was determined solely by love, there would be no model for going out and seeking the end of a whole, the true, true universal. And there might not be any motivation to go out at all. Right. So the family has to provide the structure, but also the means for the men to overcome that structure and go out in Greek society in this context, with Hegel talking all the qualifiers, he'll

52:45 Wes: end this by saying the deed are. We're finishing. Maybe just to foreshadow.

52:50 Mark: Yeah. To give the last hint that we're gonna. This is gonna be weird. And that involves death.

52:56 Wes: The deed then, which embraces the entire existence of the blood relation, does not concern the citizen free, does not belong to the family nor the individual who's to become a citizen and will cease to count as this particular individual. It has as its object and content this particular individual who belongs to the family but is taken as a universal being freed from being his sensuous individual reality. So it no longer. The deed, no longer concerns the living, but the dead, because it is only a citizen that he. You're only substantial as a citizen and before that as a just simply qua. Member of the family. You're an unreal, impotent shadow. So, yeah, this is weird and it's setting us up in a way to think about what it means to be insistent on burying one's brother.

53:40 Mark: So I. I thought it was a nice. You could almost use this as a eulogy describing what the dead is in his weird language is an individual who, after a long succession of separate disconnected experiences, concentrates himself into a single completed shape, the corpse, and has raised himself out of the unrest of the accidents of life into the calm of simple universality.

54:03 Wes: I think in a way this simple, the single completed shape is just the community. Right?

54:07 Mark: Yes.

54:08 Wes: What we. The species, in a sense, is preserved even in the individual's death. And in a way. Right. The individual's death conserve the species or the universal, the form, the way of life.

54:19 Dylan: Yeah.

54:19 Mark: He's going to have other things to say later about corpses. Right. You're simply an object for another when you're dead. But it is sort of you know, that the group expels individuals. That's what spirit does. It just, you know, ejects them out, using the woman as the media, as the middle term to give birth to things. And then it takes back into the mass of spirit when you die.

54:42 Wes: She's an escape pod for spirit. I'm sorry.

54:46 Seth: It's a funny little passage. I don't know. I'm gonna have to wait, I guess, to talk about it. But it's like the way to attain universality, finally. The way to resolve the tension is to die. Then you become simple universality.

54:59 Wes: Leaves of grass, Seth. Leaves of grass.

55:01 Mark: Yeah. Well, you think about the custom spirit as being really the accumulated ancestor, accomplishments. So, yeah, that's what. What spirit is. Every time you act, you're feeding spirit, and that's what remains after you die.

55:18 Seth: But it's also an interesting thing to say, like to just note that responsibility, like who has responsibility for the dead when someone dies? Right. Saying citizens don't care. It's not my job. Right, Mark, if you die, it's not my job to come and find you and bury you and make sure that you're honored. That's your family's job.

55:38 Mark: They're just going to lead me to the crows, the potters.

55:42 Seth: I think we all know how they feel about you.

55:44 Wes: Yeah, but that is a really interesting thing. You point out, Seth, that, yeah, the state's responsibility does cease to the person at that point. The state doesn't bury you except under special circumstances.

55:55 Mark: Well, the state says that the family has to deal with it. But if there is no family, then, yes, it has mechanisms. You know, it's like everybody has to have health insurance or the hospitals have to treat you. But if you don't have health, you

56:09 Seth: know, so don't think you're thinking about it in terms of legally. Mark, Mark, you're stuck in the human law. This is what's weird, right? He's saying. He's talking about ethics. He's talking about the ethical relation, community. When you die, you are no longer in an ethical relationship with the community. Citizens have no relationship, no ethical relationship with the dead. But the family does. That's the weird thing.

56:35 Mark: All right, so we'll get to that next time. We'll continue working through this and we will have read the rest of this general. The ethical world, human and divine law, man and woman or. No, sorry. We'll have read the whole of the true spirit, the ethical order, through sections subsections B and C of this to add, and whether it takes us us two hours or three hours or four hours to get through. We'll at least finish all that so you'll get the whole Antigone story and everything. Thanks for supporting us. You can of course send us more ideas of what we should talk about pel@pledificexaminedlife.com or comment on the blog post associated with this episode or any episode@PartiallyExaminedLife.com we hope you are financially supporting us.

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