Ep. 387: Hegel on Law (Part Two)

0:07 Mark: You're listening to the Partially Examined Life, episode 387, part 2. We're still discussing Hegel on spirit. We are up to section 469, I believe. I think we've sort of said. But we haven't given this. This Oedipus metaphor.

0:22 Wes: Yeah. Here he builds upon this idea of guilt as we were discussing 468, where guilt first comes up. Here he's going to say these two. We're going to make the unconscious conscious, but we only do that by producing this other one who has been wronged and is retaliating against us. So the two laws, the human and the divine law, are essentially connected. And carrying out one sort of activates the other in opposition. So the agent who's been unconscious of that other side, once they act, they become conscious of it, and they become conscious of it in the form of their crime, in the form of their guilt. So, yeah. So what's the remind me of the Oedipus reference here?

1:06 Mark: Just that, like the realization that Oedipus has done something wrong. The unconscious power snares the doer in the act. The accomplished deed is a removal of the antithesis between the knowing self, the actually confronting, and the actuality confronting it. The doer cannot deny the crime or his guilt.

1:26 Wes: Yeah. So you're saying an implicit Oedipus reference.

1:30 Mark: I thought it was explicit, but I don't see the word Oedipus there.

1:34 Wes: But does he use the name? Okay, I'm just.

1:36 Mark: He says the son does not recognize the father in the man who has wronged him and whom he slays, nor his mother in the queen whom he makes his wife. That's not ambiguous.

1:45 Dylan: I think he's just hinting gently.

1:48 Wes: Well, my notes have Oedipus in it, but I'm having trouble seeing it in this paragraph because all my highlights.

1:53 Mark: The name is not here as Usual he assumes you know the story.

1:58 Dylan: If you don't think that's explicit enough.

2:00 Mark: No, it is explicit.

2:01 Wes: I'm just curious. No, I have it in mind. I immediately translated, Oedipus doesn't recognize his father and the man he kills or his mother and the woman he marries. I recognize that, but I just was coming back to this. Curious if he actually uses the. The name. But of course he doesn't. But, you know, this is as explicit as Hegel gets, though, as with a reference.

2:24 Dylan: Yes. Seth earlier talked about this as. That there's this kind of poetical thing, and I guess it feels like, just as a comment, it feels like a kind of ecstatic stream of thought from a pulpit when I'm reading this. Like a poetical trance that he's gone into.

2:44 Wes: Yeah, it's frustrating. I think it's an act of genius. I think I've concluded, yes, this is. This is all an act of genius. But it's. It's frustrating to read. And it, you know, I noticed, like, even as I start paraphrasing, you know, in my notes, even if I'm still speaking Hegelese, I'm still improving it dramatically, just syntactically and in terms of ambiguous pronouns, clarity. It's just. It's not hard to improve it and to see he's doing an amazing job of being a genius, but he's not doing a good job at communicating it. But. Yeah, yeah, but I feel like when you get caught up in such a high level of thinking.

Right. He's noticing this really interesting parallel between ontology and the social order, or social ontology. Right. This conflict between universal in particular, with which we started the. The book that shows up socially, that is inherently a part of the ethical. So it's really. It cues us in to how deep the things we experience in the ethical world are, how they're grounded in something much deeper. They're grounded in the nature of being, it's itself. So someone who's trying to think that abstractly, he doesn't have time to communicate it properly.

3:52 Dylan: Yeah, well.

3:53 Mark: And if this sounds really weird, just to refresh people.

3:56 Seth: Right.

3:57 Mark: When you act, aren't you just acting yourself as an individual? No, no, no. Because you're using some maxim. You're drawing on something. So this is a Kantian thought. Sartre runs with it. Hegel is running with it here as well. Hegel would put it at spirit acting through you. But Kant would put it that you are positing that everyone should act like this. So you are always Acting from a universal point of view insofar as you are at least acting ethically at all.

4:25 Dylan: Well, that's interesting putting it that way, because you're just saying that to act ethically is to act with the presumption of the universal as opposed to. So it would never be possible to have an individual ethic.

4:37 Mark: Right. So every time you think that you're being all individual, you are fooling yourself.

4:43 Wes: Yeah. In 471, right. We lose individual identity suddenly because of the acknowledgement. Because we now know. Because now we have become conscious of the other side. We're no longer just submerged in the ethical role that we were fulfilling our law. You know, even if we say, yeah, the other side is bs, right, we can't be as confident in our own law. And so then there's this fallback into pathos and into character. Right? So the. The thing that was supposed to be an action and an action in terms of. Representative of some social roles, now just representative of individual character and feeling. So it's reduced to a mere feeling or inner attitude. How does he. That's my notes. How does he put it in 471?

5:32 Mark: The substance does appear, it is true, in the individuality as his pathos. And the individuality appears as that which animates the substance and hence stands above it. But the substance is a pathos, is at the same time his character. I found this very difficult passage.

5:49 Wes: The ethical individuality is directly and intrinsically one with this. This his universal aspect existed in it alone and is incapable of surviving, destruct, destruction of this ethical power by. By its opposite. To me, this. The arc of this section is just this loss of individual identity, but because it collapses. Right? Individuality in the truest existential sense. But it's no longer because we are defined in terms of social roles, because we're defined in terms of our individual character and pathos. And that's. Because that's a direct result of becoming guilty and aware of the other, the opposing side.

6:24 Seth: I think this ties back to. You're right, it's still in the arc west of the move from determined character versus willing personality or something like that, that movement. There's a section earlier, slightly earlier, where he talks about a kind of universal individuality versus this particular individual. So almost like the concept of individuality versus an actual specific individual person. And that the transition out of the ethical is the transition from this abstract universal individuality to particularity. And that seems to be. What's. What he's talking about here is that in that deed Right.

The character, this universal individuality, I know it's an oxymoron, but is destroyed. And what happens is that the individual is then kind of thrown back on themselves to become a particular individual. And that's where this pathos sort of emerges. And that's how we're going to get to the possibility of personality and individuality that we see in the later section of the law.

7:39 Wes: In acknowledging the opposite law, the other ceases to be for him his substance. And instead of attaining actuality, it has become an unreality, a sentiment or disposition. So, you know, that Antigone, she's just. She's crazy. She's, you know, she's just worked up, right? That's what the other becomes for Creon. And she can say that this is about their obstinance again, right? They're merely being a force of nature or, or in some kind of arbitrary force as opposed to standing for something. So Creon is just a abuser of power and Antigone is just stubborn.

That's pathos here and that's part of the dynamics of the actual play, right? These are characters in a play and they're. It's all about feeling, right? This is why Plato wanted to banish the, the, the poets from the. The city, because we. Because of the dangerousness of our identification with one form of pathos or another. And I'm going to continue to pronounce it in the hybrid. Marcus pointed out that this is a hybrid between British and American pronunciation.

8:45 Mark: I just was wondering because I never actually knew. I thought it was like these Greek words. Like, well, people pronounce the Greek words however they want because, you know, we don't know how the ancient Greeks pronounce them, but it's either pathos or pathos.

8:56 Wes: It's ancient Greek. It's pathos. And the accent would be on the path.

9:01 Dylan: Pathos.

9:02 Wes: All right, so 472, we get more pathos now. I can't even remember how to pronounce.

9:11 Mark: We don't care. So, yeah, reading about 5, 6 lines down into page 285. The equal essentiality of both, right? The two types of law as motivations and their indifferent existence alongside each other means that they are without a self in the deed. They exist as beings with a self, but with a diverse self. And this contradicts the unity of self, of the self, and constitutes their unrighteousness and necessary destruction. So clearly we're not talking about an individual. This individual does not have a self. It is the individual Self is supposed to be. The unified self of spirit is supposed to be. The whole ethical thing is just spirit acting in its unified way. But because it has these two strands, then the spirit no longer has a coherent single self. It has a diverse self. In other words, multiple people with different points of view.

10:06 Wes: I think though. Well, maybe I'm going to find out I'm wrong here, but I think that's true. But also reading it at the individual level, we get a split, I thought, between consciousness and unconsciousness. Here again, doesn't he mention that in

10:20 Dylan: step 473, the conflict of the ethical order and self consciousness with unconscious nature? Or am I missing what you were?

10:28 Wes: Well, I think I have it in 472 as well. Unless my notes. Just read ahead to them.

10:34 Dylan: Well, at the bottom of 472, the victory of one power and its character and the defeat of the other.

10:39 Wes: One character, like the other, is split up into a conscious and an unconscious part. So I would take both Creon and Antigone to be split now. And since each itself calls forth this opposition, and it's not knowing is through the deed its own affair, each is responsible for the guilt which destroys it. Right. So divine law calls up human law and vice versa. Creon calls up Antigone and vice vice versa. They inevitably posit or produce one another. Only. Only in the downfall of both sides alike is absolute right accomplished. And the ethical substance is the negative power which engulfs both sides, that is omnipotent and righteous. Destiny steps on the scene. This is like big plot point in this session. Suddenly, here comes destiny, which is what happens to Oedipus. He can't outrun the inevitability of guilt. He can't outrun the inevitability.

11:30 Mark: You think any theaters at some point were like, you know, at the end of Antigone, the end of it. It's too depressing. Can you just have Creon and Antigone hook up? Just. Just change.

11:41 Wes: You know, they're actually. Isn't he her uncle?

11:44 Mark: Yeah. I mean, maybe.

11:45 Wes: No, this Creon.

11:47 Mark: I don't know.

11:47 Seth: I don't remember.

11:48 Wes: They are related in some way, but

11:50 Mark: anyway, doesn't stop him. Oedipus just says, this is the new way. This is the Targaryen way.

11:57 Wes: Yeah, like. Like father, like daughter.

12:00 Seth: This is the harmony that needs to be disturbed through detention.

12:04 Wes: Keep it in the family. Keep it in the family.

12:06 Mark: 473, yeah.

12:08 Wes: Now he expands this conflict to one between the natural and the contingent and the ethical. And then we get to the point where the government, which is a unitary thing, won't tolerate the contingency of these two battling brothers because it imperils the community. So they mutually destroy one another, which is to say the community and the individual are mutually destroyed.

12:33 Mark: I was reading this as Cain and Abel, but obviously they're two brothers in Antigone, you know, before the action starts in the play. So. But I think it works equally well.

12:43 Wes: Well, they have been. No, I think this is important because the brothers have been fighting over who's going to be king of the community. And that's how Polynices is killed. So he's killed by. Well, they both die. So I took this as. Yeah, this, this reference to the battling brothers. Is this between those two brothers?

13:02 Seth: This is interesting. So this page 285, section 473 PDF 321. The youth comes away from the unconscious spirit of the family and becomes the individuality of the community. But that he still belongs to the nature from which he wrenched himself free is evidenced by the fact that he emerges in the contingent form of two brothers. So the youth becomes two brothers, each of whom, with equal right, takes possession of the community. The inequality of the earlier and later birth, birth and inequality, which is a natural difference, has no importance for them when they enter the ethical life of the community.

13:41 Mark: Yeah, so this seems more fundamental than, you know, that the particular story of Antigone or even Cain and Abel, that is the mere, the mere fact of multiplicity. It's like the master slave, you know, just when two individuals appear on the scene, there's going to be some sort of right. The government as a unitary soul or the self of the national spirit, does not tolerate a duality of individuality.

14:06 Seth: Well, I was just thinking, like, when you think in terms of. He's talking about birth order. So if you think in terms of like the natural law, the divine law, the law, the family, the oldest son becomes the head of the household, inherits all of the goods, blah, blah, blah. But he's saying, but when, at this level of government that we're talking about, if they both brothers, if an older and a younger brother, first and second son, go out into the community, they're both citizens by right. But later on, right, birth order is going to matter for the social, it is going to matter for government, because once you have the divine right of kings and the lineage of royal houses, the first son is going to become the king. And so it actually will matter. There's going to be this evolution. So I felt like he's actually setting that up to some extent in this section.

15:01 Wes: So I do want to just highlight the very. This is very explicitly represent the reference to the. The two brothers, Polynices and Eteocles. How do you pronounce it? And then as Mark points out, yeah, there's a much more fundamental right, as always, that it's a metaphor for something much more fundamental. But the. He'll say here the birth order is not actually ethically significant. I forget which one is older. I assume it's Eteocles. But it. These two brothers that they represent the kind of duality of individuality and the. The fact that it's a natural accident.

But the individual is a natural accident. And the government as a unitary soul of national spirit can't tolerate that. They can't tolerate individuality in this sense. And the fact that they both in a way have an equal right to the state. That's the whole point of mentioning that it's the birth order is ethically significant is that Hegel wants to emphasize the way in which they both have an equal right. We can't just say one had a right and the other didn't. I think that's a stretch. But that's necessary to his story. Right. Otherwise you can't just have this battle between two contingencies where the ethics is irrelevant.

So their equal right to the state destroys them both. Polynices is the one that was the attacker in the way. And so he becomes the attacker of the community. And Eteocles has. Is the one who has the right on his side. But ultimately each is wrong. Each destroys each other. Yeah, right. The one who has refused the burial honor, Polynices, he's refused it because in a sense he's attacking spirit. He who wantonly attacked the spirit's highest form of consciousness, the spirit of the community, must be stripped of the honor of his entire unfinished being.

The honor due to the spirit of the departed. So that's the burial denial. I know that's not very clear, but the section is very, you know, it's very unclear.

16:52 Mark: No, yeah, I mean you read just about all of the section there. So 474. I have. Divine law is the essential power cannot be destroyed by self conscious spirit. Secular law, the divine law stands up to the secular through the bloodless shade. Right. The actual person who's actually subject to both the secular seems to win over the divine law because. Right. The divine is just weakness and darkness, unconsciousness. But the outwardly actual, the secular law, which is taken away from the Inner world, its honor and power is, in doing so, consumed its own essence. Right. Because the publicly manifest spirit has its root in the power of the netherworld. I feel like we've said this.

17:33 Wes: Yeah. So in overcoming the individuality in the family, Right. Spirit, self conscious spirit, consumes its own essence, which turns out to be the unconscious solidarity of the nation. So this is what I was mentioning before. You sort of you rob the political order of this folk solidarity. Once you overcome the divine law. Right. It's just going to be a republic now or whatever. It's not going to be a true nation once you do this.

18:01 Mark: I was thinking throughout this of H.L. Hart from our philosophy of Law episode that, you know, what makes law efficacious for him is that we have internalized it. It's not just some alienated thing imposed upon us, but something that we are, you know. So that's, I think, the point about the divine law being rooted in us and it having a necessary connection to secular law. And if it doesn't, if the human law has become divorced from that, then that's where alienation takes place. And that necessarily happens in the modern world. If only because there are so many people that you can't, per Rousseau, actually have the human law be the general will representing the deep moral convictions of every single member of the community. It's just not going to happen. Too much diversity for that.

18:50 Wes: In 475, we're going to get to. Part of the gist of this is that the suppression of the divine law and along with it, womankind is the representative of the divine law, is. Will be the destruction of the community because it leads to war in part. Right. And the contingencies of physical strength. And we can't. It's a contingency in a matter of luck. I think he uses the word luck here, at least later on. The suppression of one side is ultimately self defeating. And part of this is womankind endorses the power of youth against wisdom, against the conservative element in society. Women are corrupting the youth. Not exactly.

19:28 Dylan: It's.

19:29 Wes: She. She values the youthful son that she's gonna send out into the world to become a citizen. But ultimately it becomes something subversive. Rock and roll, for instance. Youth culture. So the family and the divine law become this instrument of the youthful subversion of the traditional.

19:49 Seth: I think we talked about this a little bit last time, or maybe I did, that the family is critical right to the nation in the sense that the family has to produce the citizens. And so there's this again, a kind of inherent tension where the family is sort of different from and at odds with the nation, yet at the same time secured by it. People depart the family, men depart the family to enter the life of the nation, ultimately return to the family, but still have to return to the family because they have to create new family members. And the women of the family sort of participate vicariously, if you will, in some sense through their sons.

And, you know, he acknowledges that this is not like a true, complete kind of fulfillment. It's not the same as actually going out and participating. And that's. That's problematic. But it's just this. And so again, they're not going to be static in the sense that there will eventually. Right. It makes sense that there would be a tension and that you would have youth rebellion in some sort. Because the same tension that exists between the parents and the children is going to manifest between the children as the representation of the family and the state.

21:06 Wes: The young men who have been turned out now become sort of the vehicles of the life of spirit, I think. So he'll say, in a sense that the. Because you suppress the divine law, the dynamism within that, the work that's done, the. The energy of that gets channeled into these youth who are being injected into society. And society, in a way, lives through their youth. Youth in the sense of their military prowess. And so in the way they become the concentrated vehicles of spirit of the thickness that's been lost by the community. In a way, it's a last dash effort to say, ah, war.

And so he'll say, let's see, the brave youth in whom the woman finds her pleasure. The suppressed principle of corruption now has his day and his worth is openly acknowledged. Now it is physical strength and what appears as a matter of luck that decides the existence of ethical life and spiritual necessity. And I took this ultimately to be a reference to war. Because the existence of ethical life rests on strength and luck. The decision is already made that its downfall has come. You can't simply rely on this form of power. The living spirits of the nation succumb through their own individuality and perish in universal community whose simple universality is soulless and dead and is alive only in the single individual qua single.

The ethical shape of spirit is vanished and another takes its place.

22:34 Mark: Yeah, this is explicitly about war, which he refers to at the top of 289. The absolute freedom of the ethical self from every existential form present in its actual and authentic existence. So again, we're kind of like the master slave thing that war is the. I'm trying to think of what the blacksmithing analogy is, but the fire in which you are plunged in the forge.

22:57 Wes: Yes, the forge war makes the individual systems of property and personal independence, as well as the personality that is visual himself, feel the power of the negative. This negativity is prominent in war as that which preserves the whole. Right, yeah. So you have a master. He makes a direct comparison later on. But yeah, this is a master slave dynamic which is meant to preserve the whole but produces downfall. And so the, you know, in 476, the vanishing of the nation or the destruction of the community will lead to the thinning, what I would call the thinning of the individual himself. He loses like the community, he's going to lose his. His thickness and get closer to being the person, which is a term of contempt.

23:40 Mark: Yeah, yeah, that's funny. It's like the using the word competent, which I like to see as a compliment, but then I was using that in some work setting like that sounds like merely competent, you know, so it's like if you're. You're just a person. Right, right. So a person should sound like, oh, that's the locus of all value. That's the Kantian, you know, treat everybody as a person. But if you are merely a person and don't have any specific characteristics that are admirable or noteworthy, then that's a very thin indeed.

24:13 Wes: He sets up this opposition here between the natural and unconscious tranquility of the nation, which I take to be the nation, and the tranquility of self consciousness. And these two, because they are in contradiction, lead again to this destruction of the nation which vanishes into the individual. And then the individual takes on this formal universality and what he calls an immediate attitude towards the law. Right. Which is very much like the. I mean it's going to be Rome, but it's very much like the Kantian attitude towards the law, which is not as something which is part of me. Right. That's in my bones, but just this thing out, out there. It's a formal thing to be, to be obeyed.

25:02 Mark: I'm not sure why you're saying that's Kantian, because Kant ultimately, per Korsgaard is about internalizing that, but it is the alienated version moment.

25:11 Wes: Well, he's going to make similar accusations towards, towards Kant. Right. Because we're not. It's all just rat, you know, it's a very old, you know, very, very tried and true accusation against Kant. Oh, it's all Cold. It's all about rationality and what's not self contradictory. And with the law and all that.

25:28 Mark: Yes. So the last part of this, the substance is no longer a living spirit dwelling in each person, but instead, quote, the simple compactness of their individuality has been shattered into a multitude of separate atoms.

25:40 Wes: Yeah. So this word atomization, which becomes a big part, right. Of post Marxian cultural commentary. Hannah Arendt uses it. I was surprised that it's right or it's already right here in Hegel. It's just being picked up from him. And the whole theme of what we're going to get to now with legal status has a lot to do with atomization.

25:58 Mark: Yes. So our final topic here, this section C, legal status, which we sort of just added because we had, you know, we didn't have enough pages without this. But it does complete the story, Right. We've set up that alienation has happened. So what do we have? We have. They see what's left is the soulless community. Right. The community has ceased to be the unconscious substance of individuals. Individuals now have the value of selves and substances possessing a separate being for self. So I actually like this, right, that this is the individual, the liberal modern individual who is not beholden to merely act out the dictates of spirit, but who can make their own decisions. But yet this is something Hegel thinks is contemptible and incomplete.

26:45 Wes: I mean, it sounds like a success in a way. Right. Because he'll say the familial individual has emerged from his unreal existence right. Into self certainty as substance. But there's a downside at this point.

26:59 Dylan: It feels like we're at the Enlightenment, we're at the birth of liberal democracy, or liberalism is something we recognize. Hegel doesn't live in a world of liberal democracy himself. Right. But it feels like a kind of communitarian critique of the foundations of the problem of individuality and liberalism and that all you end up is within selves. I mean, if I just sort of take on Sandel or any number of other communitarian critiques of the problem of the thinness of self in a liberal society, it's in that Hegel just, you know, in whatever it is, 1812, saying that's the problem with liberalism is it's not going to succeed because it's not tied down enough.

27:47 Mark: Would have been interesting if we had that discussion with Sandel after having just read this and we're bringing into his like, oh, yeah, you're right, the, the people in the community have to be hooked up to the divine law. Like that would not really rhetorically help his position.

28:01 Wes: But it is the. Yeah, we need something, you know, that is the whole communitarian critique. Right. We need to be more like a family. We need more divine law. But yeah, I mean, I. I do think we are on track to Rome here and the Roman Republic. It's not exactly what we would call liberal democracy, but it is very focused on ideas like freedom and rights and the citizens, really the rights of the aristocracy. But so it does. I think you're right. It prefigures a critique of liberalism. But I imagine we're probably going to get a more explicit critique in the alienation section, which is about the Enlightenment specifically.

28:41 Dylan: Yeah. And his consequence is the terror of the French Revolution is the problem.

28:46 Mark: Yeah. Eventually that's going to be the end of the whole spirit chapter.

28:50 Dylan: That's what happens when you have too much rock and roll and too much individuality. As you get the terror of the French Revolution and lots of beheadings.

28:57 Mark: At least the individual is not the mirror shadow that the individual was in the previous stage. That is just acting out spirit now, you know, this is. The individual has withdrawn into the certainty of himself. He is that substance as the positive universal. He has emerged from the family, from his unreal existence. Right. That's so it sounds like he's saying a positive thing there.

29:22 Wes: Yeah. And then it sounds like he continues with this. There's something positive, but there's something negative. Right. So in 478, the individual has become in and for itself, but also is an abstract universality and a rigid, unyielding self. And this is what's going to give rise to the Emperor. Right. Because of the Lord of the world, as Seth reminded us, because all the content, all the thickness is going to get ejected outward, all the power into one particular personality. Hey, I'm just a citizen of the Republic, right. I'm not a full thick person. Where does the thickness go? It ends up going, going into one guy.

30:08 Mark: I want to dwell for another second just on something from 477 here. Just that.

30:12 Wes: Right.

30:12 Mark: He we had said previously, destiny has swallowed up the powers and the shapes of the ethical world. Right. The two, the unconscious divine law and the secular law, they were destined to conflict in this explosive way. So the power of the ethical world is the substance reflected into its simple unitary nature. But that being which is reflected back into itself, that very necessity of blank destiny is nothing else but the I of self consciousness. That is a profoundly weird thing to say. To say that just because destiny sort of set up the conditions for the building of the. The I, the single individual divorced from spirit. So the I is the very necessity of blank destiny. I mean, is it just. Am I just saying it's the necessary causal result of destiny or is it, can we say stronger than the eye is the destiny or the necessity of destiny?

31:08 Wes: I think there's a good analytic philosophy paper to be written on this.

31:13 Mark: I don't think so. I think the analytic philosopher would say this is nonsense.

31:16 Wes: Is he saying it's constitutive or is it causal? Yes, if it's constituted, the analytic philosopher probably say it's nonsense.

31:27 Seth: Yeah.

31:28 Wes: Is the I nothing but the necessity of destiny or is it just an inevitable result? Probably just an inevitable result.

31:37 Mark: I mean, at least it rhetorically supports the Roman Emperor, sees himself as a living God, as the embodiment of destiny. Right. As the one who no longer in the master slave situation, he's the ultimate master, has no resistance from anything. So he's not actually going to develop a self reflective, active self, but you know, has emerged to be in this position as a result of destiny.

32:02 Dylan: Or is it his density?

32:04 Seth: He is thick.

32:05 Mark: I am the law.

32:07 Wes: So in 479 we get a comparison to lordship and bondage. So just as self consciousness emerges from lordship and bondage, here we have this true sense of independence that is much more advanced than the Stoics. Independence. Right. The Stoic is just. Is all about, well, the. For purposes of value, the world doesn't matter to me. It's all about my particular ethical character which degenerates, as I'll point out here, into skepticism. Where nothing. Right. Nothing is outside of me is real. Those are two kind of degraded or corrupt forms of independence. But here we get something truer and much more like what emerges after the lordship and bondage struggle. And it has, you know, its significance, its positive significance is right. Rights.

32:55 Dylan: Right.

32:56 Wes: We get something recognized here. That's why there's the parallel to the recognition of lordship and bondage. What's recognized in persons are rights.

33:05 Mark: Yeah. If there's one thing that I feel like I really gotten out of this revisiting Hegel, it is that I didn't understand well enough the lordship and bondage section that I had started with, you know, the first thing I learned about this book, because I thought that what come out of that is a full self. And I didn't take him at his word that no, no, you don't come out with a full self. You get the Stoic self You get a little fragment of something that is not connected to spirit. It's not motivated by anything. It says the rest of the world doesn't matter.

So it is denying a really huge part of itself. And it's only now in the spirit section that he's talking about actual people with personalities in a real society. And it's only at this stage of the spirit where we get, you know, actually self conscious individuals. So you thought maybe out of lordship and bondage you could just gain self conscious now, now you're a person. But no, we have to have another 100 pages in between or, you know, 300 pages.

33:59 Wes: I mean, I do think he uses. Right. He does say it's self consciousness. But as we learn, right. There's many, many different kinds of self consciousness. And, and he's used the word, the phrase self consciousness over and over again in the previous parts of just the section that we're reading. And it always turns out to be. It's a disappointing version of self consciousness.

34:19 Mark: It's almost as if your self consciousness always involves only partial examination. Until you become the absolute spirit. So that is where we're going with this podcast is eventually the asymptotal end of this podcast will be, yeah, when

34:40 Wes: we're 80 or whenever it is that we decide to shut it down, we can just have an episode where we declare victory, full examination.

34:49 Seth: I declare self consciousness. I declare absolute self consciousness in the true substance of the spirit. So I think we should actually, you know, he does speak somewhat extensively about the analogy between what happens when he was talking about Stoicism and what's happening here. So it might pay to turn to that.

35:11 Wes: Yeah, he goes into that in 480. Right. More of that. So this last form of independence that we're getting recapitulates the development of Stoic independence. Right. And the development of that into the absolute independence of skepticism. But it gives us these legal rights which make the person an empty unit and where the content is all set free. Right. And we know it's going to go into the emperor. It's this formal legal right and it has no content like skepticism. And he makes this really interesting comparison between right in skepticism. All we have is this kind of.

We have property. It's almost like property rights under capitalism or whatever because it's. Or liberalism. It's empty property because it's all just illusory appearances. Appearances are commodities. It's empty. But again, at the end of this section, he's going to make this point about there is a positive value and that's in the recognition of rights. But the person loses their content and ironically it goes into someone who's going to suppress all their rights.

36:13 Seth: I do want to say something just about the language you guys are using. Positive and negative, positive and negative. Like, I think he's.

36:21 Wes: I'm directly quoting, by the way, just so you know.

36:24 Seth: No, no, I know, but I want to talk about the way he's using it because it sounds like when you're like, oh, and he hates this. He hates liberal democracy and he hates this and he hates that. He's describing this movement and it's like this thing. I think he's trying to make sure that you're cautious and aware that the movement towards something that you might perceive as being the resolution of the answer mark. Like, oh, after Lordship and Bondage, we have self consciousness. And he's like, and no, no, no, you know, we have a form. He's like this self consciousness still has problems.

He's just trying to talk about positive and negative to create the tension for movement. But ultimately, you know, he's just basically trying to be cautious and saying like every stage we're moving to has a problem within it or has a contradiction inherent in it that's going to force us to move on from it. So don't get too hung up. Don't think that this is the last. As if in reading the book you didn't realize there were so many more pages left, you know, but just in case, just in case it's an audiobook and you're not sure the positive value

37:25 Wes: in the case of legal right consists in its being mine as something whose validity is recognized and actual. And at the end he'll say consciousness of right, therefore, and the very fact of being recognized as having validity experiences rather the loss of its reality. And it's complete inessentiality. And to describe an individual as a person is an expression of contempt. And why? Because the actual content or the specific character of what is mine is not contained in this empty form and does not concern it. It's going to end up in the emperor, so you can be a person all you like. So it's positive. I mean, as Seth keep pointing out, there's something positive about it, but also something negative. Rights are recognized in the Republic, but. But it creates a kind of power vacuum which makes the collapse into empire inevitable.

38:14 Dylan: The reason for that is that the individual doesn't actually have rights that make it have any content to them because the rights are bestowed, the rights are in the end owned the content of them is owned by the state. Is that the deal?

38:34 Wes: I think it's because people are atomized and thin and they have communitarian longings. And the only way they get that back in this circumstance is through identification with a strongman, through nationalism.

38:45 Dylan: Okay, can get that. But the reason that this is happening in the realm of rights, where I would think that, well, part of what you're getting as an individual with rights is you are getting more content. But the deal is that actually it's a thinning out. Having individuals have rights is really a kind of agent of their atomization. They're being reduced to rights in this kind of abstract way and as opposed to being whole beings. And so this is what I mean by the rights is in this way, the rights that individuals have, their very atomization is. I mean, I'm reading it as a consequence of. Well, it's being bestowed in some way on them by the community as on the nation. And the nation is holding all of the content.

39:39 Wes: Yeah, I think right to have your rights recognized, there's something positive in that. But it's also to be recognized as an end in yourself or as a person is to be only recognized in that thin version of yourself. It's not to be recognized in your full content fullness or whatever, as fully having content, as having that little spark that you get out of the divine law. And I think it's a loss of community. It's a loss of national solidarity in its true form. And then, okay, where's the content? Well, we need to find a strong leader to put that content into.

40:16 Mark: Yeah. Can we just clarify a little more this form versus content distinction that we're saying that these rights are merely formal properties. Merely formal. I thought, Dylan, what you were kind of saying is like, unless you give it content, unless you say you have property rights to xyz, then the sovereign can always come along and say, oh, sure, you have property rights, but you know, this particular property is all mine. You have rights, but at my sufferance or something like that. That. That's a way of saying that you have. They're merely formal, empty, without some actual, implementable, protectable measures of redress if the sovereign violates them.

40:59 Wes: But you, in being recognized as a person, are not being recognized as mark, and you're not even being recognized as the true Roman, that you are the inheritor of all Roman glories and Caesar's conquests and things like that. You're not recognized as the citizen in the. In the older sense of the citizen. Of a nation, a Volk, certain type with certain traditions and all that stuff that people complain that you lose in something that's more liberal.

41:30 Mark: Okay, so the content is the cultural content and the recognition that goes with that.

41:34 Wes: All right, yeah, that's my reading.

41:36 Mark: It seems like there's probably something more technical for Hegel, but I'm not exactly sure because earlier I was seeing what this, the difference between. He was like, well, the form in this divine versus human law is between self consciousness and the unconscious, but the content is between divine and human law. So that was one place. He made that within our reading for this time. But it seems now he's moved on to something else. I was trying to stuff those together and say what form is for him in the abstract.

42:06 Wes: In 481, the dispersed content gets kind of gathered together. It's almost like dust from stars. Right. Gathering to. Or what is it? Hydrogen and dust gets gathered together to make stars, but it gets gathered into one point, which is the emperor, who in a way becomes a symbolic representation of the rigid and empty self. It's also soulless dispersion of the content into a sheer multiplicity of personal atoms gathered into a single point alien to them and soulless as well.

42:35 Dylan: The leader, cut off from this multiplicity, the solitary self, this is the Lord is in fact an unreal impotent self.

42:43 Wes: He becomes impotent because he becomes the tyrant. And subject to his own destructive desire, his monstrous excesses, he becomes a Nero or a Caligula.

42:52 Dylan: A Caligula, Yeah.

42:54 Mark: Yeah. So I don't think it's that the, this, the content of spirit has been dispersed into personal atoms. Right. That's the starting point with the breakdown from the Antigone whole thing. And you're just saying, Wes, that then they're gathered up into the general will. But I think that the. The sovereign is claiming that they're gathered up into his person, but his person is not the general will in Rousseau's sense of like, that would be in a well functioning, harmonious society. This is the alienated soulless. So you can't both say the content of spirit that was distributed has been now been gathered up, but also say that that gathering is merely soulless and doesn't have any spirit in it. Like it is a pantomime of gathering.

43:35 Wes: Yeah, I didn't say general will. And to be gathered into the Emperor. Right. There is a lot of content to that. And that is. Right. The glories of Julius Caesar. Of course, he doesn't make it, but he is a Nascent emperor. And what was it that was so exciting about him? It was about. All about conquest and the glory of Rome and what that represented. And he's. There's a cult of personality ultimately that got transferred to his nephew, Octavius Augustus Caesar. So there is a lot of content in the emperor. But at bottom it becomes something soulless. And I think that has a lot to do with the devolution into the mere appetite and desire of the. The emperor.

44:13 Dylan: Yeah. And it's also that the. It's the opportunity for a thick individual personality, a genuine community, isn't there? It's an illusion of that. There's the attractiveness of the Julius Caesar.

44:30 Wes: Right.

44:30 Dylan: And a kind of partaking of it, but a vicariousness. But it's not anywhere near the same thing as actually being a citizen. That's a full member of the community, participating in the ethical life of the community and founding that ethical life.

44:47 Seth: It's also if your absolute spirit, from the perspective of spirit having that realized in just one atom as opposed to all the atoms, is impoverished.

45:01 Dylan: Exactly.

45:01 Seth: So, yeah, this is a necessary step because we have to go through this to create. I mean, in this sense the. The emperor is in a sense like the first creation of. It's like it's the development of self consciousness. And you know, as these stages we go through, it's not that every single possible manifestation or realization, actualization of self consciousness happens in all individuals simultaneously. So yeah, this is a positive development in some sense, but it's still lacking. We would like to have a nation of emperors. Right.

45:38 Wes: In 482, in fact, he destroys his subjects. He further atomizes them, I think, because they become the subjects, become the objects of his destructive appetites. He robs them of their. Their essence. He destroys their personality. They become without substance. They become merely formal selves in relation to something alienated. Right. So alienation continues. And this is that same story where the thing that you think you've solved the problem with some relationship to something above you, but that turns out to be just something from which you're alienated.

And as we course, as we know from young Hegelians in Feuerbach, that story can be continued indefinitely. Right. Because you can say, well, the Hegelian God that we end up with is also not good enough. It's something from which we're alienated. Only when we get to Marx, right. Can we figure out how to not be alienated. But yeah, here the Lord just ends up being this, another alien being, and we are merely formal selves in relationship

46:37 Mark: to it and to each other. Right. The individual citizens exist in a merely negative relationship both to one another and to him who is their bond of connection or continuity. So this Hannah Arendt on totalitarianism occurred to me very. Right.

46:51 Seth: That you were Freud on the group.

46:53 Wes: Yeah, yeah. She makes this connection very explicitly. It's atomization is the thing that is a big factor that leads to totalitarianism and is reinforced by totalitarianism.

47:03 Mark: Although Freud. In the group, you at least get to be in solidarity and connected with your fellow group members. Right. Whereas for Arendt, totalitarianism.

47:12 Seth: But it's mediated through the. The individual leader is my. That was the only thing I was saying.

47:16 Mark: Yeah, but I guess the question is, are you alienated in. In a Freudian group, you're not necessarily alienated from the leader. Like, hopefully you're not alienated from the leader.

47:24 Dylan: That's the.

47:25 Mark: The whole point is that, like you, I believe in Jesus and therefore I have.

47:29 Seth: You're alienated from yourself. You're alienated from your own individual desires because you adopt the desire of the group as personified by the leader.

47:39 Wes: Speaking of which, that's the way it ends in 483, with alienation from the self. This truth consists in the fact that this universally acknowledged authority of self consciousness is the reality from which it is alienated. Okay, that's the emperor. This acknowledgment of its authority is the universal actuality of the self. But this actuality is directly the perversion of the self as well. It is the loss of its essence, the actuality of the self that did not exist in the ethical world back in the good old days with harmony. Right has been won. So that's the positive part of this. But it's been won by its return into the person. What in the former was harmoniously, one now emerges in a developed form, but is alienated from itself. So we didn't really have the full individual in the Greek order. Now we get. We get an actual individual, but only at the cost of alienation.

48:30 Seth: Right. And that actual individual, the emperor, the reason he parallels it with the. It's like being. Remember when we were talking about Stoicism? It's like, great. The Stoicism recognizes an individual and creates it, but creates solipsism. This is another form of solipsism or another form of skepticism with respect to. Except instead of it being to the world and appearances and objects, it's two people, or not people per se, but other individuals. The similar kind of structure.

49:01 Mark: All right, let's wrap it up. So we discussed right before we had this recording, do we want to keep going through Hegel? Some of us want to keep going through Hegel. So this podcast, our next episode will be on the next section, Self alienated spirit culture. And probably we'll need another two full episodes for that. So if we do that, it'll be four Hegels in a row. Dylan, I know you're jumping off the train as far as the Hegel goes. And we'll be back when we're done with our Hegel. Maybe we can have a nightcap before you come, you know, during your absence so people don't miss you too much

49:36 Wes: jumping off the Hegel Express or probably more accurately, the local. The Hegel local that stops at all

49:44 Mark: the stops that Seth was like, well, we don't have to keep going on the podcast, but I'm going to keep going on my own because I'm so excited. Excited about this.

49:50 Seth: Let me just say something to that real quick. I think he's onto something really, really, really deep and fundamental. And the fact that he did it, when he did it, and pursued it with such persistence and consistency. I recognize that the language is very convoluted and confusing and all this, but I feel like, I guess it did change the course of philosophy, obviously. But I'm surprised that maybe it was just because he's as hard to read as he is that it wasn't more impactful, it wasn't like more fundamentally earth shattering to subsequent philosophy.

50:29 Wes: I mean, the continental philosophy is. It's just all about beating this dead horse of alienation, right? This, to read this, it's like it, you know, really dramatically improves one's reading of Marx and all critical theory, all the stuff that comes in this tradition, post structuralism as a version of Hegelian idealism, you know, all that stuff, everything in continental philosophy is informed by this.

50:53 Seth: Totally agree. I'm just saying, like, how are there aspects of philosophy that are not touched by this? How did we have a non continental tradition that just completely ignores this? That's what I don't understand because I

51:05 Wes: think it's like that because there's also atomic facts. Some of us like the atoms. We want to see them dispersed.

51:14 Mark: I think we have to return to Bradley and Russell if we want to get that story. Dylan, do you have a closing for us before you exit Hegel world about your experience?

51:25 Dylan: So I get the kind of profundity of the insights, particularly the psychological insights that you can unearth out of it. And there's something compelling and interesting about the evolutionary story that he's telling. Besides the challenge of the language. In the end, I find it. I mean, distasteful might be the right word. I don't.

51:52 Wes: It's in poor taste.

51:54 Dylan: I think that his universality and his quest has the same kind of destructive, megalomaniacal kind of view of the world as this unity that I see that he has incredibly perceptive insights into psychology and the relationship between the community and individual and faith and reason and the Enlightenment. But he just still keeps this pursuit of a unifying nature that while I can admit the communitarian kind of critique and how do we have full selves and have a full community, it's so monolithic in the end that I have a hard time. That's what I find, just distasteful of it.

And then part of that has the whole evolutionary story he has. I still don't. I mean, not saying that I don't get it isn't quite right. That's why keeping this word distasteful, this whole notion, the weirdness of the spirit and what the spirit is and this evolution from the beginning of time. It's really, really weird. It's just deeply, fundamentally weird about the way in which he's talking about this. It's religious. I mean, the way he talks about Geist and the story that he's telling. It could be like Genesis, the way he talks about it and even his tone about it.

So that's my last word. In the end, I look at him like, okay, in parts of this, he's like those pictures of Tolstoy that you see like this long haired, raving kind of author. That's what he's like. That's what he feels like. That's not what his picture is from when he was painted back in 1820. But he's a lunatic. He's a lunatic.

53:40 Wes: Yeah. Let me just say one word. Yeah. I mean, I think what we know about him from his biography and reaction people to him is he actually did not come across that way. It's very.

53:51 Dylan: Okay, that's great.

53:53 Wes: Beloved teacher and much clearer as a teacher. And you can even see it as and encyclopedia and the footnotes and things he. He can be clear.

54:01 Dylan: That's. That's wonderful. That's wonderful. This book does not feel that way.

54:06 Mark: Yeah. I would encourage folks to become paying supporters of. Of the close reads project that Wes and I did five hours just on the Unhappy Consciousness section and really came to grips with his style. And I think one of the things that we were running into is that you have to take everybody, everything, and look at it through an epistemic lens, a political lens, a religious lens, a literary lens, like that. All of these historical work. Yes, yes. That he is talking in such generality that his seemingly hopelessly abstract language just means that I'm trying to say multiple things here with any given section.

So what we talked about today is not just about Antigone. It's about the whole. Just the nature of law itself. And that is not something that he can. As many words as he use. He doesn't really fill that in and say explicitly. You gotta, you know, apply these multiple hermeneutics at the same time. It's just that that is how, at least I found the best way to read it is to sort of return to it with these different. How can I generalize this? How can I make this more than what it's saying or more than the, you know, specifically religious, for instance, interpretation that certain words that he's using in this section suggest?

All right, well, thanks for making it this far for you guys. For the listeners, email us peltialexamine life.

55:24 Seth: Com.

55:24 Mark: Check out the blog posts associated with this episode where I try to sum things up. Feel free to reach out to us in any way. Follow us on the various social media. Good night, everybody.

55:33 Seth: Good night.