Ep. 387: Hegel on Law (Part One)

0:07 Mark: You're 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 387 is how does law relate to society? We're continuing our treatment of the Spirit chapter of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, now covering sections 464 through 483, which is subsection B, ethical action, human and divine knowledge, guilt, destiny, plus subsection C, legal status. This is Mark Linsenmayer declaring through my deeds that the ethical be actual in Madison, Wisconsin.

0:40 Seth: This is Seth Paskin, Lord of the world in Austin, Texas.

0:44 Wes: This is Wes Alwan, still waiting to receive my due as a particular individuality in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

0:51 Dylan: And this is Dylan Casey stoically building an actual world by abstracting an intrinsic reality in Madison, Wisconsin.

0:58 Wes: Seth shows his. From the end of the section that the Lord, Lord of the world and mine, I took from the very first sentence shows you how well prepared I was to give up. I did a set this time I forgot.

1:13 Mark: So I thought, even though we're starting officially on 464 and I should write, three of us recorded a part three to the previous episode that was only for supporters. If you didn't hear that, you didn't miss anything. I mean, we went into more detail, but we've already told the basic story, which is how law is interpreted in two ways, right? That makes up spirit, the so called divine law and the human law. And on rethinking this, I was thinking maybe we should sort of start with this as a review topic. I was thinking divine law, both of these actually come from the cultural zeitgeist, right?

But he talks about divine law as the subconscious one. So it's sort of the raw feeling that you should be treated with dignity or that there's some rightness that needs to be enacted in the world. And this gets interpreted and codified as human law, right? Not just the law passed by the legislature, but just custom that are like actually acknowledged and enforced by people. So manners and you could even go to school and learn manners. These are things people are aware of. And ideally these two things feed each other. So, right? The explicit law, the human law, is supposed to reflect the gut level feelings of morality.

And likewise, you know, if you weren't raised with people telling you, you know, do this, do that, this is the right way to be, this is the polite way to be, you wouldn't have this gut feeling at all. So these, the divine law and the human law in that sense, feed each other. And by the end of this is where they get alienated, you know, because probably you yourself, the listeners, are thinking, well, the latest thing the Trump administration has pass past does not reflect my deep moral convictions. Well, that's because for you at least, the explicit law has become alienated from these sort of unconscious gut things.

What do you think of that as sort of, you know, a general secular interpretation of this?

3:10 Wes: Yeah, I'm trying to think about the extent to which what is unconscious in the divine law, which he associates with the family and even ultimately with women, Right?

3:21 Mark: Yep.

3:22 Wes: How much of that gets raised to the level of being encoded in the human law? It wasn't really clear to me. But your point about them feeding each other and supposing and depending on each other as well, taken. That's where he ends up at 463. Right. They validate each other. They connect in men and women. Men mediate this downward movement and women mediate this upward movement. So the upward movement, right, is producing people, producing young men who will go out into the world and become citizens. And then the downward movement is the return for burial, I think. But it must be something else as well, psychologically. So the marriage bond is sort of the middle term here. We know how Hegel loves middle terms and that holds the ethical world together. But, Mark. Yeah. I'd have to think more about your particular interpretation of all that.

4:13 Dylan: But this way of talking about it, it makes me think of, I don't want to say trope exactly, but the notion that women are the moral foundation of the family, that they are the rock for community for the men who go out and participate in citizenry. Tocqueville talked about women being the foundation of morality for the American republic. And I guess the added part there is the piece of how that's supposed to get us back to religion and the divine.

4:42 Mark: Well, I like the idea if somebody like Stephen Miller has been caught up in his agenda of how he thinks the world should be and these sort of high level ideas that might involve setting aside some of traditional morality to actually get this larger, greater good done. If you could then confront him like Stephen, what would your mom think of the way that you just talked about these people, of this thing, this policy you just enacted? Is that the sort of compassionate, you know, she cared for you in a very direct way. I mean, hopefully, maybe she was a bad mom, but, you know, she was a good mom.

So it seems like that is a thing that you could appeal to cut through the most manly men and their manly values to like, can you actually get back in touch with that compassionate child part of yourself? That was the thing that gave you the moral impetus in the first place, that enabled you to adopt these more abstract values.

5:36 Dylan: But in the context of Hegel, right, this is Creon and Antigone, right?

5:41 Mark: Well, this is. Yeah, this is what we're going to get to. Creon, Antigone are going to come up. Cain and Abel are going to come up, Oedipus is going to come up. And I think these are all presented as Hegel's, I guess, doing poetry or he's at least using metaphor, right? Because this, even though he's talking about Antigone, he barely actually uses the word Antigone. And clearly this is supposed to be, to represent a moment in history inevitable in all cultures, which by the very nature of culture, dividing itself up into a higher explicit, self conscious set of mores and an implicit, unconscious, raw ethical feeling that at some point those are going to come apart in a dramatic way and that is going to be the dissolution of the harmonious.

You know, you could say historically what he's talking about is Greek tribalism. But if this is going to work, if this is going to make sense as a book about the phenomenology of the spirit as a whole, it can't just be talking about that historical moment. It has to be talking about something universal.

6:40 Wes: There's a fundamental dynamic within the ethical order that's apparently a peaceful and beautiful equilibrium. Right? And yet it's not, it doesn't stay that way. And so we can't, it's not possible to stay at this point where this, there's this harmony between individuality and universality. Right, between the individual and the social body as a whole, because he associates the family with individuality. And we're going to see that again in this, these next sections that we're reading. So I would think about it, if one wanted to think about this in general terms, think about the conflict between individuality and the collective and the way in which we might think that that was, wow, that was really reconciled in ancient Greece.

Why did that fall apart? And Hegel says, well, it was necessary. Look at these internal dynamics, look at how they necessarily come into conflict and then push us into. Right. Another division which is going to be between the emperor and the supposedly equal subjects in Rome. And then that is going to push us to something else.

7:43 Dylan: So, yeah, this basic conflict, I like the way you put it, Wes. I mean there, the basic conflict between just individuals and their Community. And I don't think it's so hard to see that whether you pick your family allegiance to your town's allegiance. And you have something that happened in the compromises that you have to make to live together in a town and the forces that lead to challenge. I mean, in Antigone, it's, she wants to bury her brother and the town, the leader of the town says, we're not going to do that because he broke the town law. So you have the duties to have to your family, and you have the duties you have to your community. And you can come up with lots of examples of where that runs into conflict.

8:29 Wes: This is what the Godfather is all about, that movie.

8:31 Dylan: Yeah.

8:32 Wes: This begins with, you know, I couldn't get justice from America, from the American justice system for this. So let's use our old Sicilian tribal loyalty values to, to get the justice that we can get from this hypocritical system.

8:47 Mark: Yeah, I did want to comment on justice in section 462 before we, you know, move to the actually assigned stuff this time. We did not last time, even in our part three, talk about in this happy equilibrium, what justice is supposed to do. So in the middle of 462 is the justice of human law, which brings back into the universal the element of being for self, which has broken away from the balanced whole. So in other words, the transgressor, if you go off and assert yourself, I'm going to be selfish, I'm going to steal, I'm going to break the law in whatever way, then justice will bring you back.

9:21 Seth: Right?

9:22 Mark: It will by the punishment, it will make the deed done. It will make, you know, it's part of the metabolism of society that its parts drift off and are pulled back forcibly.

9:33 Seth: Yeah.

9:33 Wes: And I, I don't think it has to be crime here. It can just be non conformity or, well, any assertion of individuality. But maybe I'm wrong about that. That was your impression. It was about crime. Human law basically brings independent actors back into harmony with the universal. So when somebody dies, the family, he recapitulates this idea that the family has to perform what seemingly is a merely natural event. Right. We all die. It's part of nature into something meaningful through a burial ritual, so that we can treat death as something willed and meaningful rather than merely accidental.

10:11 Dylan: And at the bottom of 277, I guess it's most of the way through 462, you have the individual himself is the power of the netherworld. It is his Erinys, his Fury which wreaks vengeance. His individuality, his blood still lives on in the household. His substance has an enduring reality. So I know that it's been Antigone, but that's like straight out of Oresteia.

10:33 Wes: Right?

10:34 Dylan: And so you have justice brought down by the gods to. By Athena. To say, no, we're not going to have the good of the community demands that we let go of the fact that Orestes killed his mother. But this is still a bad thing. And so we're going to bury the Furies underneath the city. And the balance of the city is on top of the blood and the vengeance of the Furies. And it'll break out if it's not sort of tended to.

11:07 Mark: Right. I think that when we discuss that in the context of Nussbaum, her book on anger, I think that's where we brought it up. We were saying that that's where the divine law, the vengeance, the tribal ethic gets converted to a social ethic so that it is no longer. But here he says the conversion cannot be complete. That you're always going to, as you just said, fine, we'll let the state have a crack at it. But as Wes just put it, like, if it doesn't, then we're going to bring back the mob justice. But the point is, in either case, it is not a matter of taking it out of divine hands and putting it in human hands. It was in human hands in the first place. Even if it's the Furies breaking loose, it is the victim and the victim's relatives. Right? If we're saying this, it was a murder or something that are going to

11:55 Seth: be the agents of the fury in that particular section. 462. What caught me was what's at the end on page 278 where he says, what has simply happened becomes rather a work deliberately done in order that the mere being of the wrong, its ultimate form may also be something willed and thus something agreeable. And for all of the allegorical aspects of this text, I kind of. And this flows into the section on legal status to me was that I got the impression that what Hegel's implying here, or maybe not implying, but also talking about, is that the ethical consciousness with the divine law and the human law, the individuals that exist in the ethical consciousness, so to speak, aren't fully self actualized like actors.

The tension exists not just because the laws conflict, but because the individuals that represent those laws, so to speak, men and women, or in this case, Creon, Antigone, or whoever you want Aren't really acting fully out of choice and deliberate will. And so there's later on when he starts talking about content and the content of it, you know, such and such versus the. What has to happen is that there has to become. There's just no willing going on here. It's more like we're actors, that human beings are actors in a play playing out roles. And so even though there's a kind of harmony, because there's nothing.

This full realization of the self that it's ultimately going to have to be overcome or sublimated or whatever the correct term is.

13:47 Mark: Sure. It's like there are these sociological laws that determine. I mean, maybe not every individual, but, like, the general direction of society is going to go this way. And. Yeah, I like that. You read that quote at the end there. It sounded like Wes, you were just saying that he was repeating here his thing about burial. But I thought he was generalizing it, that any case of injustice, we're not. You know, it sounds like, well, that's just errant actors doing things that are not within society's plan. But no, no, if we punish them, if we bring them back into the fold, we make this an intentional action of the society. We sanctify. We say, okay, well, it's. The scales are balanced now. It's okay. We put our mark of approval on it. Not that we like that you did wrong, but, you know, the ultimate outcome.

14:36 Dylan: Yeah.

14:36 Wes: I've been sitting here staring at this, trying to reconcile my reading with yours, because I think you must be right. But it's difficult for me because it, you know, he says the wrong which can be inflicted on the individual in the ethical realm is simply this. That something merely happens to him, which is death caused by nature. Right. The power which inflicts this wrong on the conscious individual of making him into a mere thing is nature. Right. We die because of nature. It is the universality not of the community, but of the abstract universality of mere being.

Right. That's what wrongs us, Takes us back into its abstract universality, which is to say nothingness. And the individual, in avenging the wrong he has suffered, does not turn against the former, which is nature. Basically, he takes it out on the community, like he attacks the community. So, and then this idea of what simply happens becoming a work deliberately done. Right, that does recapitulate the idea of what happens with burial. So how do we give this a reading in terms of transgression and then the writing of the wrong?

15:36 Mark: Well, I like Seth's determinism Comment that like, even when it is a murderer who maybe you want to say, made a choice to kill you, it's still nature. It's still, you know, somebody's gonna kill you. So, you know, if it's not a person.

15:52 Wes: So the sociological explanation just.

15:54 Dylan: Yeah.

15:55 Wes: Reduces everything to determinism. Is that the idea?

15:58 Mark: That's a possibility.

15:59 Seth: It's a possibility. I mean, that's kind of the direction I was going.

16:02 Dylan: Yeah, but I mean, isn't the individual saying that you did a wrong by making that murder by killing my family member, you're violating a natural law by violating their life and taking on for yourself when they should die? Right. I mean, the reply, well, you know, you shouldn't feel so bad or be upset about the fact that I murdered your family member because, you know, look, we all die and it's just nature, you know, you're going to die anyway. Somebody's going to, you know, big whoop. That's not the response. That's not the way the person who is saying that you committed a murder is going to understand that the naturalism of death.

16:45 Wes: So the analogy would be the what's comparable to burial is the righting of the wrong as the justice that's delivered, the thing that makes it something deliberately done rather than something that is just happen. So there's something about achieving justice that undoes the helplessness of having some transgression done against you. You can feel like you've become empowered again by the act of retaliation or justice.

17:12 Seth: He actually, I think later on he uses the term actuality. So in a weird way, the human law is written down, so it's actual even when not enacted. Like it has an actuality outside of its being done. But the divine law is, in a weird way, just a potentiality until there's a deed, a specific deed. And it's an interesting idea. Right? So if in, you know, if we're going to use this, stick with this case. If Antigone buries her brother, that deed sort of actualizes the law that doesn't really exist before. Then if she doesn't act in a way, there is no divine law. Like it doesn't exist. It doesn't have any reality to it. And that's another one of the differences between the two. The deed somehow makes the thing real in the case of the natural law. And that has something to do with that intentionality and the conscious choice as well.

18:12 Mark: Let's get into it. So the main part that we were assigned today, the sub. Subheading is ethical action. Period, human divine knowledge, period, guilt and destiny, period. So all three of those things are going to come in the next 10 pages or so, which we've been talking about ethical action. And part of it is what these things, right? Why does knowledge come into it? Well, are you aware of what your motivations are? Are you aware of what the right is? Are you aware specifically of the other type of law? So if Creon is representing the secular law, the human law, and Antigone is representing the divine law, when they commit their acts.

So Antigone buries her brother, as we were saying, in defiance of the human law that says, your brother attacked the city. You're not allowed to do that. We're going to leave his corpse for the crow. And she said, but she knows perfectly well that there was an edict against this, and yet she does it out of. I mean, I think we're probably going to say, like, yeah, she just this. She's of the opinion that this divine law trumps whatever Creon, you know, bullshit he happened to have said that day. According to Hegel's analysis, she actually feels and is aware, you know, unconsciously.

You know, you can't. Because these two kinds of law feed on each other. They're really one thing that is just divided, that if you commit yourself wholly to being the advocate of one of them and then you commit the act, you're still going to have reverberations from the other side.

19:43 Wes: And.

19:43 Mark: And so there's going to be guilt, there's going to be crime involved, even though she didn't think she was doing a crime. And this is just some destiny, it seems like. I mean, we could take that as the determinism that we're talking about before, but it just seems. It's more like destiny in terms of the dialectic. Like a conflict of this sort is eventually going to happen, and there is going to be a general sense of guilt. Right. It's sort of like getting kicked out of the Garden of Eden, right? That the two kinds of law were in harmony with each other. They were feeding each other. Someone strayed, justice brought them back. Everything ends up getting sanctified. Even though it seems like there's still a lot of suffering and accidents, there's still a lot of actual death going on and wrongdoing and things, but still it was kept, and now it becomes alienated.

20:25 Wes: So that's an overview of the. The whole thing right through B. Yeah, okay. Yeah. And 464. I mean, the way it starts. And I think this kind of ties into Your idea of social explanations? Because it. It sounds like the. There's a sense in which each person at, whether they're, you know, on the side of human law or on the side of the divine law, they are just enacting their social roles. And I think he's going to even use that. That phrase at some point. Not in this section, but later on. So I don't think I'm just reading into this, but. Right. So self consciousness has not yet received its due as a particular individuality.

20:59 Dylan: Why?

21:01 Wes: Because on the one hand, it's acting merely as the universal will, which I take to be the human law, and the other as consanguinity, which is blood relation. Right. Which is. So I take that to be the divine law. So the individual only counts as a shadow unreality because they are simply enacting one social role or another. The universal is acting through them. When they finally do act as an individual, it's going to disrupt the harmony between the two spheres, between the divine law and the human law. And that's ultimately going to lead us down on this trajectory that we're going to.

21:37 Dylan: Yeah, so I think that's right, Wes, but. But you make, especially the way you framed it. Why is it that we would. We say that the individual acting in this case, you know, in the particular example would be Antigone is the disruptor of the balance. Or when we say it that way, we say it because there's sort of kind of a timeline aspect to it. But it could just as easily be said that, well, the instigator or the standard bearer for the human law is also an instigator of the imbalance, because the fact is, it's a manifestation of the tension. The balance is intrinsically unbalanced.

22:20 Wes: Yeah. So were you saying that action belongs on the side of Creon as well, not just Antigone?

22:27 Dylan: Yeah, I'm saying it doesn't seem wrong to say that the disruption of the balance is because Antigone refuses to or commits a transgression. But of course she would understand it as Creon committing a transgression that she is reacting to. And it seems to me that if I take really seriously the dialectic that Hegel's talking about and that what he's. He has two sides of it, and there's a tension between them that ends up having to get resolved. And those two sides, either of them can be, quote unquote, transgressing. The inherent balance. Because the inherent balance between the individual and the community is a fiction in the first Place.

23:05 Wes: I think part of the reason, you know, he's. I think my initial reading of this was that there was action on both sides in a way, and it was this reciprocal thing. But it is true that he associates the family with individuality and in part because the way people are relating to each other. Right. They're not just relating to each other as citizens, but as individuals. Right. You're my family member is more of an individual to me than someone outside of the family, which is not just to say it's because I'm more fond of them or whatever, I'm loyal to them.

There's something larger than that for Hegel, I think. But anyway, that's reflected in this duty of burying a dead person, that very individual relation. So I think probably it's the assertion. Antigone's. I'm just, you know, now that you said that, Dylan, I'm thinking, well, yeah, it must probably be Antigone's particular assertion of her will that represents primarily the action of the individual.

24:00 Seth: Well, there's a part a little further on. I think it's.467. Is that it? I don't want to dig through the text, but he's talking about both laws are maintained in the ethical consciousness, but it sides with one, namely the human law in this case. And he says that sets up. I think it uses the term farce or something of duty against duty, the idea that what's happening here is the duty to the state versus the duty to God or the duty to the family. And he ridicules that as a kind of a false conflict or a false confrontation. But the gist of it is that the movement that's happening is that human and divine law are both necessary to complete the ethical consciousness in its true being or its full spirit, the ethical substance.

But it chooses to side with one of them as if that can be its completeness, as if that could be the absolute for it. And that's the mistake that is made, is it sort of essentially chooses one part of itself over another, even though both parts are essential. And it's through that conflict, you set up this false conflict between two different duties. And what happens is you come to realize that what you thought was complete about the human law isn't, and what you thought was incomplete or failing about the divine law also isn't.

25:26 Wes: Yeah, there's something special here, right in this Greek ethical situation where human law isn't simply abstract and impersonal as it's going to be under Roman law. And that is because of this divine law element, right? The divine law is not simply in opposition. He even says it's the essence, right? So he'll say ethical substance expresses its essence in individual action. So there's this again, this dynamic between individuality and universality. Universality can't do without individuality. Concepts without what are blind. What did Kant say?

We need the content anyway. And if you think about what a nation is, later on he'll get to the nation. There's something about the. He calls it the unconscious solidarity of the nation which is grounded in the familial, right? So once this kind of familial divine law principles overcome, then you get this very bleached out version of the human law, right? This blanched insubstantial version of the human law. Because unfortunately the divine law sort of got devoured in the process. That's my kind of overview of the arc of this whole section.

26:36 Mark: Just because it's relevant. I'll correct your Google Concepts without intuitions are empty. Intuitions without concepts are blind.

26:44 Wes: There you go.

26:45 Mark: So yeah, that does seem to apply here, right. That there's something about. If you're just, I'm a law abiding citizen. Well, what is the law? Is the law actually connected to your base moral intuitions, which is what I was characterizing divine to be. If not, then there's an issue there. So yeah, 465 there's a. The way Seth just put it is, you know, that there are two duties that are in conflict. And that is correct. But he specifically says that's not what I'm saying. Just because he wants to. He has a little picky thing about duty. So you could think about within human law you have two duties, right?

You're a soldier, but you also have another, I want to say a family conflict or whatever, but it could even just be like qua member of your political party and qua member, you know, actual official within the state. So their official duties, like that's not the kind of thing that he's talking about. It's not kind of conflict of duty and it's not a conflict between passion and duty. Right. It's not a mere should I be ethical do my duty or should I just do whatever I want to? And he's. And he has this subtle point about how any duty can be converted to a passion and vice versa.

Right. You could say I really like having ice cream. And you could make an ethic out of that and say like I'm going to have ice cream every day. It is My duty to have ice cream every day. My duty to myself, to self care. That's a duty. That's an ethical.

28:13 Wes: Or I'm a Hatfield and I want to get a revenge on a McCoy and that's justice, right?

28:18 Mark: Yes, yes.

28:19 Wes: I can turn any kind of passion like that into.

28:21 Mark: Right.

28:22 Wes: It's my duty to get revenge.

28:23 Mark: Just to add the little subtlety to what, what Seth was saying in terms of like this one kind of conflict between duties, between the divine and the human. Like that's the one that ultimately wrecks society by reducing the normative force of either kind of law. Like once you realize, like I've been an advocate for the partisan of this one half of the law, and yet this has led me to commit this crime that I feel guilty about because I do recognize as a member of society that both of these actually have a hold of me. Well then neither one has a hold on you and you end up. So with the fall of society, it's the rise of the individual. So this is sort of a, you know, as with all Hegel progressions, a mixed blessing that you actually get real autonomous individuals making moral decisions at this point, not just unconsciously following the mores of the time.

29:16 Wes: Well, in the beginning it seemed to me that it's. It's unconscious, right? There's no caprice, no struggle, no indecision. The making and the testing of the law has been given up. And that's why it's not a duty versus duty thing. It's not like two people who are conscious of their, of what they're enacting ethically coming into conflict is people who are just doing it very self consciously. They're very identified with their role in ethical life and they just see it as. I'm in the right. The claims are absolute from their perspective. So by the end of the section, right, you have these two absolute claims standing in opposition to each other, embodied in Creon and Antigone.

But really in man and woman, I think he mentions the two sexes, right. It's that the male and female principles each have their own absolute claim, or at the very least the divine and the human law. And in that sense they expose each other as something, right. They both can't have, they both can't be absolute. So they expose each other's claim to absoluteness as something that's hollow.

30:19 Dylan: Yes, that all sounds right. But it does seem to me that the, I mean, understanding Hegel, that this balance, this notion of the absolute, that you're utterly confident and so you're going through the actions, the activity of your ethical life in alignment, that's ultimately going to be the end. Right. You just have to have the right kind of alignment. Right. There's going to be. He's still a unity guy in the end. He's not going to be living with tension all the time. And it's not going to be a tale of tolerating ambiguity and the trials and tribulations of the unresolvable necessary tension between individuals and communities.

It's going to be resolving them into another harmony at a different level. So that the experience of absolute clarity that Creon or Antigone have, even though they get revealed as being wrong or incomplete in their own way that I'll call it place of contentment and resolution, is ultimately the thing that he's going to go to achieve. And it's not any different than other kinds of resolutions, the resolution of habit into action, where you're not constantly trying to invoke habit. Right. There's all kinds of other ones.

31:36 Mark: Yeah. Well, let's figure out if we. Because I was seeing this, you just said a new harmony. So even at the end of464, where he's summarizing this conflict, it becomes the negative movement or the eternal necessity of a dreadful fate which engulfs in the abyss of its single nature, divine and human law alike, as well as the two self consciousnesses in which these powers have their existence.

31:57 Wes: Right.

31:57 Mark: Both Creon and Antigone die in the play.

31:59 Seth: Right.

32:00 Mark: Whether they are not they do, you know, we no longer respect either law and for us passes over into the absolute being for self of the purely individual self consciousness. So I was kind of thinking about this is existentialism, the types of law that we thought were binding on us. So the new harmony, if there is one, is actually the individual in agony as he is going to eventually say, you know, who, as we know from Hegel, is just going to end up being kind of incomplete without a full being, a cell in the geist, an individual who is left to his own devices and doomed to choice and no real guidance that that is. It's not a new harmony, it's the next stage, but it's not a new harmony.

32:41 Wes: Yeah, I mean, it is, I think, and it'll be an equilibrium point that will also then again get disrupted. But yeah, we're on our way to alienation, Mark. I think that's your point. Right. But the equilibrium point I think will be the. The Roman Republic, where you get all the power vested in the. And the Lord and Then, you know, recapitulates lord and bondage, and the person, the citizen, turns out to be something very empty and formal. So I would see that as a new kind of equilibrium state for a while. But it's certainly. I think the harmony doesn't really come until the very, very end.

33:15 Dylan: Yeah, I'm getting ahead of myself. You're right that there are multiple stages of equilibrium and dissolution left and right.

33:24 Wes: Now we're on the trajectory of saying how Greek society falls apart. So this point where the harmony that was the beautiful ethical life of the Greeks is now being disrupted. And at the end of the 465, he says, well, and this is inevitable, right. This isn't just some contingent thing. Oh, it's too bad Antigone showed up, otherwise we would have been good forever. He says that. Right. This is about the sexes. Nature, not the accident of circumstances or choice assigns one sex to one law, the other to the other law. So the very division between sexes tells us that this is grounded in nature, this is necessary, and that the dialectic was always going to do this.

34:08 Mark: So I'm wondering if we should kind of skip over a little bit this knowledge stuff. I think we've kind of said, Seth was saying before, you know, when you commit the act, then the motivation is brought to consciousness in a way that it wasn't before.

34:22 Wes: Right.

34:23 Mark: Particularly with the divine law. When Antigone, you know, it wasn't like. Again, I think it's a very unnatural reading of Antigone to say. Antigone just saw the divine law as clearly as anybody would see the human law in the form of a custom. Right. Of the burial customs like those are actually part of the explicit. It's not unconscious at all. But this is just. Hegel's reading of it is that when she committed this deed, then this thing came to the surface and the contradiction was made manifest in a way that it wasn't when it was just divine law was just an implicit command that could conflict with the state's law.

34:56 Wes: 466 just recapitulates this idea that divine and human law cancel each other out because each side is taking it as absolute. Each ethical agent recognizes only one as binding. And they're sort of. He even mentions this character. Right. So each actor is. Is fixed in their. Their character according to which law they adhere to and to each it seems right. It doesn't seem like, oh, from Antigone's perspective, it's not he has one duty and I have one duty. And nor is that Creon's perspective. It's just I have a duty. And look at this person who's being defiant. They're an arbitrary force of insubordination. They have no legitimate authority. There is no claim on their side. The claim is on all on my side and right. It seems, you know, one side will seem willful rebellion, criminal insolence. So that leads to an inevitable canceling out. There can be no simple reconciliation.

35:54 Seth: Yeah, there's a nice line in the middle of that section. Innocence therefore is merely non action, like the mere being of a stone, not even that of a child.

36:04 Mark: Well, there's also a nice a referring to. The ethical consciousness is essentially character because it is decisively only for one or the other of the two powers. So bringing in the notion of character. And we're gonna have personality being the thing that ultimately comes out as this self autonomous individual at the end of here. So it'd be interesting to think about how character and personality relate because I

36:28 Wes: think personality, it might be one of these cases where it would have been better translated as personhood, which is something much more abstract and content free. Right. Than character. Character is the thick self, personhood is the thin self. But we can wait and argue about that when the time comes.

36:46 Mark: There's some nice phrasing in here.

36:47 Wes: Right.

36:48 Mark: The ethical consciousness that is taking just one aside, has drunk from the cup of substance, has forgotten all the one sidedness of being for self. It's drowned in the stygian water. All essentiality of its own and independent to the objective actual world. Sorry, where are you reading this is in 467.

37:06 Wes: Ah, yes, one of these, one of these long and. And difficulties sections. Yeah. So I think in. And there's a sense in which. Well, he says there's a conscious unconscious split in ethical substance.

37:20 Seth: Right.

37:20 Wes: Which is to say community. And that manifests itself in the. In a split within the. The individual. Because the individual knows what he or she does and then also doesn't. Or no, maybe the split is between what it knows and what it doesn't.

37:36 Mark: I mean this is the thing that we've been just glossing over is that how is it that once Antigone does the deed, according to his analysis, that she then becomes. She doesn't just stay self righteous, that she somehow is stained with guilt for having transgressed, like, but she doesn't recognize that other law. She shouldn't be stained with guilt in the ordinary sense at all. Oh, but this is like a cosmic guilt. It is self consciousness's own essence to divide you know, that's what self consciousness was, is sort of creating a second self consciousness and looking at yourself, defining yourself that way, using other people, using the general culture to gain depth on yourself.

So even though she's trying to be, and both of them are trying to be a mere partisan, a mere personality or a mere character, they end up, you can't avoid the other side. I don't know if I buy this, but this is what's being said, right?

38:31 Wes: In 468, you can't avoid the other side. Say what that means, right?

38:36 Mark: So I, the ethical actor, so certain of my righteousness by becoming self conscious, give up the specific quality of ethical life, right? I'm no longer certain about my rightness. I'm divided into the active principle and into the reality over against it, which is negative, right? So the deed becomes guilt and crime by following one law, violated the other. This is at least how I interpreted in the middle of 468.

39:01 Dylan: But this has to be true for the sequence of the dialectic to work as Hegel is talking about. It is the individual, the ethical consciousness in the individual and the human component, those representatives or those people or entities, all of them have to have in them the ability to recognize the other. So in that way, each of these stages is sort of individual manifestations, right? Antigone has to be able to ultimately recognize the claim that Creon has, and Creon has to ultimately be able to recognize Antigone, otherwise there's no possible resolution, right? It's just pointing to them as being, as manifesting one side or the other. The man has to be able to recognize the woman, and the woman has to be able to recognize the man.

39:58 Seth: Well, a way I would characterize what Dylan said is there's no tension without that, and without the tension, there's no moving forward. And this relates back to neither Antigone nor Creon can anticipate prior to the deed. So it's guilt. This is one of the things that I think is really just fascinating and brilliant about this analysis is this actuality that happens when the deed is accomplished. This movement from. It's just the divine law is not written down. It's not even a thing. It has no reality until somebody acts and does something, quote unquote, in the name of the divine law, right?

Or in the. And that deed essentially makes it real. But then also, you can't have guilt without a deed. In a weird way, you can't be guilty of something without having done something. So there's no way that prior to this conflict that either Antigone or Creon could somehow say, well, actually, let's avoid. I see what's coming. And let's avoid this conflict and have a resolution in some other manner. And that's what Dylan was saying too, about, you know, like, duty versus duty. They're just acting out of character if they don't recognize the other, because whatever they might say ahead of time, after the fact, they both have a kind of unhappy conscience, right?

Or a. A guilty conscience. And it's that act of guilt that then propels the recognition. Oh, wait a second. There's legitimacy to the other side. There is something to it. There is a reconciliation that I need to do. I still feel like I was doing the right thing, but it's like kind of like being. Recognizing that you're in a no win situation. It's not like there's right and wrong and you're absolutely secure in your judgment that what you did was right. It's a recognition that there's validity on both sides. Both of these things are part of you.

Both of these things are necessary.

41:51 Mark: Well, and if we don't buy that, the individuals involved would come to this realization and acknowledge their personal guilt, the way toward the end of 468, it is not this particular individual who acts in his guilty, whereas this self, he is only an unreal shadow and he exists merely as a universal self. An individuality is purely the formal moment of the action as such, the content being the. Okay, this is. So this is what you were saying before, Seth, in terms of. We're called calling determinism. But, you know, when an individual acts, they are acting because the spirit is acting through them. And so the guilt is really a collective social guilt. When this conflict has come to a head, who cares if Antigone herself repents and decides, oh, you know, actually, Creon, you had a point. It's the group that comes to this realization.

42:43 Seth: Guilt is the possibility that there's something more beyond character that points towards personality.

42:48 Wes: I think part of the point here is that guilt is an inevitable result of action because action always produces the thing acted against it. Always action in the true sense of ethical action. He talks about an alien reality here. It's automatically alienating. I think you guys are right. He starts the section off by saying, right, it's not just individual consciousnesses that are aligning with one side or the other. That ethical substance, the community, already exists as double and individual action just manifests the conflict that is already there. But the guilt is inevitably a result of right. You go from just being certain of your ethical position. This is. I'm in the absolute right. There is no other conception of duty. I've got a fulfill this law. And then you find out that there's something that stands in opposition to it, inevitably, and then that is guilt.

43:45 Mark: Let's let that be the last word for part one. Please come back for part two next week. Or if you're a partially examined life supporter, options for doing that@pledexaminelife.com if you're supported through our website or Patreon, then the part two should be in your feed very shortly, if not already. Thanks.

44:03 Wes: Thanks.

44:04 Seth: Thank you.

44:04 Wes: Thank you.