Ep. 388: Hegel on Culture (Part One)

0:08 Mark: Listening to the Partially Examined Life, a podcast by some guys who are at one point set on doing philosophy for a living, but then thought better of it. Our question for episode 388 is something like, how does culture shape individuals? We're continuing our treatment of the spirit chapter of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, now covering sections 484 through 510, which is the first part of Self alienated Spirit culture. For more information about the text and the podcast, please see partially examinedlife.com this is Mark Linsenmayer perverting every determinateness into

0:39 Seth: its opposite in Madison, Wisconsin, this is Seth Paskin, ignoble. In Austin, Texas, this is Wes Alwan,

0:47 Wes: focused on my own enjoyment, but therefore providing for the enjoyment of all in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

0:53 Seth: Thank you for doing that, Wes.

0:56 Wes: It's the invisible hand.

0:57 Mark: Yeah, we're in the modern world now. Two episodes ago, we're in the Garden of Eden. As far as the ethical life was concerned, that people were at peace with their society, their values flowed unreflectively out of them, out of their culture. And then there was this fall where the two sides of the ethical life, the so called divine law, the family life and the civil life, the community customs, came into explicit conflict. And this sort of alienated people from both of these. And so we had the government, the culture itself became alienated from people.

But on the other hand, people actually emerged as individuals. Before in this harmony, they were mere shadowy figures and now they're full blown self reflective. Well, we'll get to that. But they're individuals that are defined by law as having, as being persons and having legal rights, things like that. So here we are in this new order where culture is something that is alien to us, the government something alien to us. However you, you can choose to obey it. For instance, you know, if you want to get in with it, if you want to be of the noble class, then you should actually try to take as much power, get yourself fixated within that culture, within that society, as high a position as you can and identify with it.

Or maybe you are ignoble and you see it as something that is repressing you. All right, so we're getting into something that sounds a little like Nietzsche with his master slave morality.

2:30 Seth: Yeah, I'd make one comment too, by the way, when you said that people are prior to this like shadowy figures. It's with respect to consciousness or self consciousness, like not like, not like they're wraiths or, you know, or spirits, he's saying that from the perspective of self knowledge and complete, you know, in a kind of form of self possession and self awareness, it's like we were in the Garden of Eden. That's actually. I like that. You know, I like that analogy metaphor or whatever it is that, you know, there's a certain kind of Adam and Eve you wouldn't consider to be kind of like fully formed or fully fledged individuals making conscious choices. And Hegel doesn't think that in the Greek city state or whatever like that, people are like that either, but they begin to start to take steps in that direction here.

3:19 Wes: Yeah. And in 484 he's going backwards a little bit to where we were with what he calls ethical substance, which is the Greek world. And in that case community. Right. Is not something alien to us. The values of that world, we just live them as if they were real and we don't have to think a lot about them being imposed from the top down until there's the fall. Right. Our own sense of self is very, very closely tied to communal identity with alienation. Of course that's not going to be the case, which is to say we're going to become self conscious.

We're going to become more conscious of the difference between our own personal lives and then the life of the quote, unquote, the universal, the lives of others. We saw in where we ended up last time is we got a sort of proto version of alienation in the alienation of selfhood into the emperor. Right. So the individual lost all personal content and the only person is the emperor. And right here I think in some sense, maybe I'm wrong about this is a little bit speculative, but the culture, I think. Yeah. So we ended up with the emperor and now we're going to end up with this relationship not between individuals and the emperor, but individuals and culture.

4:38 Mark: Yeah. This whole people being wraith like it's. I think the question throughout these sections is when history changes, who is doing the acting? People are critical of the great man theory of history and say, no, no, no. You should look at either overall cultural forces. If there wasn't this great man, there'd be a different great man, there'd be somebody else that was doing this or more democratically. There is no such thing as history in this broad narrative sense. It's the action of individuals and we should be paying attention to how the general populace, how the majority of the people live their day to day lives.

And I think Hegel would say, well, it depends on which era of history you're talking about that in this one, Wes, that you were just referring to, where it's the Roman emperors, basically. Well, it really was the Roman emperors who were the movers and shakers. They were the ones that were making the decisions. And in this Garden of Eden place, I was. It's really the culture itself, it is peoples that create values, as Nietzsche would say. So it's the individuals are sort of incidental to it. They're cells, they drop off, they new ones grow in.

You know, it doesn't really matter in terms of the, the overall flow of things. But once you have something more like the modern world, then the individual rises and like we are making decisions and you know, the society as a whole becomes incoherent. It's not even a whole. You know, Hegel wants us to regain now with self consciousness. Seth. Right. We're not as shadowy figures, but with full self consciousness, he wants us still to gain a society that has a will, that has personhood. So there's talk toward the end of the section we read this time of okay, well, you know, the state people are aligning themselves with state power.

They're trying to be the nobility whatnot. But still the state power itself does not have a will. Like as if that is the place that he wants to go, you know, for his complete project to be, to reach fruition.

6:29 Seth: Yeah, I started the project, I've not yet completed it. He uses so many terms and they're very difficult to get arms wrapped around substance, real, actual consciousness, self consciousness, particularity, individuality, universal. And ultimately he's thinking of complete full self consciousness in some way. He's got some idea in his head about what that ultimately looks like. And it involves there's something about substance, there's something about will, there's something about knowledge and self possession and so forth. And so Mark, what you were saying, like, is as long as we're talking about individuals that have some form of identity, that it lacks some essential form of willing or is defined against a universality, a universal that is not complete and whole and also a will, right?

Like ultimately, just like we saw much earlier in the phenomenology of spirit, we need two complete whole self consciousnesses, right? They have to come in contact with each other somehow. And this whole thing is like an unfolding, it's a process of trying to find the right antagonist, so to speak, so that you can have this encounter and become fully self conscious. And so in the case we're talking about here, or maybe it was the section before, but transitioning to this Right. It's like, oh, I'm the male of the family or I'm the female of the family.

And I'm filling this role. I'm filling a role that's defined by divine law or human law or gender. But those are just empty. Divine law and human law and gender don't have their own will. They're not a thing against which I'm creating myself. It's just like a category I fall under, so to speak, or way I get defined. Citizen, citizen of the state, same thing. Right. And then law, he says, is kind of empty of a kind of content that's really critical. That you mentioned a form of will. And so law does change the status of the individual to a different type of individual.

In this case, I guess personhood. Right. Or a person. And the individual now has a choice of whether to fulfill follow the law or not follow the law. So there is a form of willing, but it's still. They're still missing all of these other elements that are necessary in both the law and the individual. But it's a step forward. I think we can see now why he thinks it's a step forward.

9:14 Wes: Let's get into the text. You know, it's also worth pointing out that we historically, you know, as I'm just taking this from commentary, we're going to. We were moving from the Roman Empire to late Rome, medieval society, slash the Enlightenment. So it's just a huge. The Enlightenment before its completion in Germanness and Hegel. So it includes the French Enlightenment, includes the French Revolution. That's the whole section we're moving through now. But it's also worth pointing out that self alienation is an accomplishment. It doesn't simply have a negative connotation here.

It's not, you know, I don't think we should read, be reading Marxian associations into it. Exactly. We become alienated from our nature. Right. When we become encultured, our natural instinctual habits are to just do what we want. But to the extent, right, to be cultured is to be educated. When we educate ourselves, when we go to school, that's the. That we are engaged in the project of self alienation.

10:17 Mark: Yes, yes. That word culture is Bildung, which is supposed to indicate. So the commentators tell me something active. Right. Including education. It's not just culture, this edifice, you know, the great literature and whatever it is, acculturation perhaps.

10:32 Wes: And it's going to break out ultimately into what he's going to call quote unquote, state power and wealth. But we should think of Those in very general terms as the part of culture that demands obedience from us. Right. And that includes law, but other ways in which we are sort of subjected to something in culture. And then the wealth portion involves the way we take from culture and make it our own. And that can include literally, right, anything having to do with self interest and private interests and wealth. But we also, we build ourselves out of the values that we incorporate from culture.

So there's a dynamic of obedience and there's a dynamic of self enhancement and enhancement of the individual. It's almost, you know, there seems to be a sacrifice of the individual to the culture, but also the individual is empowered by the relationship to culture. And so that's the dialectical tension. Then in the latter, the later parts of this we're going to see start to unfold. But here in the beginning at 484, unfortunately, we get a little recap in the worst possible jargonistic, abstract term. So I think we should try to briefly make sense of these next few sections.

But it's a bit of a recap.

11:51 Mark: Yeah, the structure, much like two episodes ago. And again, this is the introduction to. We're going to do two episodes on this culture section. The culture section goes way beyond what we can possibly read. In other words, 100 plus pages beyond that.

12:05 Seth: But there's not that much history left. When he was writing this, where did he take it?

12:10 Mark: We have a few sections that are just right, this general introduction to the giant self alienated spirit culture section as a whole. And then we have a shorter, just. I think it's just one section to start us off on the world of self alienated spirit, which is subdivision within that and then a subdivision within that. We are doing the first two thirds or so of point a culture and its realm of actuality. So that is mostly what we'll talk about. But yes, Wes, let's get through these generalizations and recap.

12:42 Wes: Yeah, so in 484, right. He reminds us that an ethical substance, we did have an antithesis, but it was kept, I guess, implicit. So for instance, we didn't find ourselves initially at war with custom or think of something. A custom is something outside of ourselves. We just operated on it implicitly, as if that were the truth. Oh, this isn't Greek custom. This is reality when I do things in a certain way. So it's not a self conscious relationship to values. And the individual doesn't think of themselves as really cut off from the community or the community is something alien to him.

In the same way that we, you know, that we come to when it gets to the point of self alienation. And that happens in the Roman world. He calls the, you know, where the sort of self and external world, including what's going to become culture, confront themselves is what he calls two unyielding realities. Right. You have the absolutely discrete unit of the self and then the external world confronting it. And then this is actually going to now turn into a kind of dynamic, like a metabolic exchange between these two realities. Instead of just having them opposed, we're going to get culture building the self and the self building culture.

13:59 Seth: Yeah, he has, I put page numbers, this is I think 485. He kind of says substances in this way, spirit, the self conscious unity of the self and essence, each has for the other the significance of alienation. So to what you were just saying, Wes, what is missing in the previous state is alienation. The previous form of spirit is harmonious without a kind of alienation. Which is to say that it doesn't have that motive, tension, the force that would force some kind of recognition or whatever. Which is why when the conflict actually occurs, it just breaks because it doesn't have the means to have any form of self or other recognition that would give it any way of trying to even process what was happening.

14:44 Wes: Yeah, we're kind of immersed in the Greek world. We're immersed in the community. And it's almost like being dissolved into it and not making much of a distinction between ourselves and the community. And then in Rome we get this formal personhood.

14:59 Seth: Yeah.

14:59 Wes: But here, which in a way is. Right, devoid of thickness as we were, as we were talking about, devoid of connection to the community and to the, you know, the substance of ethical life. Here you get both self and substance, but we self consciously now know that they're the two sides. Right. We're not so immersed in the community that we're barely aware of its existence. We, we understand that there's such a thing as culture and that it's, you know, that it's other than me as an individual. That's the point of self consciousness that we rise to with culture and we

15:33 Mark: have a little view forward. So in section 486 he's talking about this. In 45 he had established that because the tension is not merely within ethical substance, but is created this alienation, as you were just saying, Wes, the distinction between the self conscious unity of self and spirit versus the external world. So in 486 it falls apart into a realm in which self consciousness as well as Its object is actual and into another, the realm of pure consciousness, which lying beyond the first, is not a present actuality, but actually exists only for faith. So this sounds like the Kantian distinction between phenomena and.

16:13 Wes: Yeah, so we get our actual social world and that's the world of. Right. Wealth and power and ambition and social standing and anything that we could think of as part of the social world and the culture of this world.

16:26 Mark: So self consciousness is actual and its object, like wealth, status, the things that we are working on, those are all actual.

16:34 Wes: Yeah, so that's the, you know, the part of the actual world to which we have access. And then, yes, there's a beyond, the world of faith. So we're really constructing a divided world there between, you know, whereas ethical spirit and 46. He's saying whereas ethical spirit had this kind of unity. It wasn't like there's an another world of faith beyond this world.

16:55 Seth: The world of.

16:56 Wes: Right. This world isn't intimately connected to the divine. In fact, it's the family that's representative of the divine. The divine gets pushed out in this world. But this is kind of a division within the cultural, I think. Right. There's Christianity, there's faith, but then there's the secular side of this. And what he's going to focus on in these sections is the divisions within the secular. Right. We kind of leave faith aside for what we're going to read until next time.

17:22 Mark: Yeah, right.

17:23 Wes: Yeah.

17:23 Seth: What does actuality. What does that mean here?

17:26 Mark: I thought it was just. It's developed. It's not merely in thought, it's in actuality.

17:31 Seth: Yeah, that's kind of what I thought too, but it just. That sounds strange. So when you say actual, it just means. It's not like when he was talking about the divine law. The divine law isn't actual until somebody acts. I know that that seems like a truism or a tautology, but it's only in thought. So does the law here is an objective. What is present has the significance only of an objective reality, the consciousness of which exists and beyond and with it actuality from an other. Insofar as it is actual, its essence is something other than its own actuality. I don't know.

18:08 Wes: We.

18:08 Seth: Maybe we don't have to answer it. It's just confusing to me.

18:11 Mark: It is confusing. Let me read the last sentence of 485. The present actual world has antithesis directly in its beyond, which is both the thinking of it and its thought form. Just as the beyond has in the present world its actuality. But an actuality alienated from it. So the thinking of it and its thought form, it seemed like the spiritual we exist in culture as we're going to get into today. What you are in culture is your role. Right. You are not a unique individual, special like you only show up in that you are a philosopher, you are a father, you are all these various roles you have, those are what culture assigns to you.

But we do also feel like we have some sort of spirituality, some uniqueness that is merely putting on these roles. And that is the thing that were saying is out there, cannot be captured by culture. So it's like to give a Lacanian that's always helpful comparison. The articulated versus the real, symbolic. The symbolic. Right. So. So your roles are the symbolic order. And then the real, what actually has to be squeezed into that symbolic order gets pushed out into its own. So that's why I'm saying the essence, you, the special soul, that is the Sethness, is projected as something outside, you know, that which cannot be spoken of, that which culture cannot understand.

19:38 Wes: Yeah. So, and it's worth bearing in mind that in a way we have two divisions here. It's going to happen a lot in these sections where he's going to have divisions within divisions within divisions. But right, so we get. Right. Self versus culture and then we get this division within culture between faith or pure insight, as he calls it, and then the secular social world that we actually experience that involves many empirical objects. Right. That isn't just a world of what some of us might call the imagination.

20:11 Seth: Okay, so are we at 486? It's a long one.

20:14 Wes: Yeah. 46. Describes that division between the social world, you know, wealth, power, et cetera, and then faith. Yeah, but did you guys want to say anything more about that?

20:24 Mark: So I have a quote that I pulled out from near the middle. These spiritual worlds, all of whose moments insist on a fixed actuality and a non spiritual existence of their own own will dissolve in pure intellectual insight. This insight as the self that apprehends itself, completes the stage of culture. It apprehends nothing but self and everything itself. That is it comprehends everything, wipes out the objectivity of things and converts all intrinsic being into a being for itself.

20:50 Wes: AKA idealism.

20:52 Seth: Yeah, yeah.

20:53 Mark: In its hostility of faith as the alien realm of essence lying in the beyond. It is the Enlightenment.

20:59 Wes: Yeah, yeah, sorry. And idealism is only one aspect of that. I mean he talks of science in general as well. Right. As the reduction of reality to the. To consciousness, to oneself is the reduction of it to rationality. So when we do science, we're doing the same sort of thing. Idealism is one strand of that turning of the world into ourselves.

21:19 Mark: And ultimately he's going to contrast real religion with mere faith. So mere faith is the conundrum that the Enlightenment puts us in, where it says, look, everything is just. You can figure it out with reason. And so look at these arguments for the existence of God. This one is crappy. This one is crappy. Oh, well, no, you just have to have faith. None of the arguments actually work, you know, so it creates this seemingly unbridgeable division between us and religious things. Whereas what he's ultimately going to be shooting for is something where we recognize that God is a projection that we have created.

It is actually part of culture. It is our own best nature. Right. I'm channeling Feuerbach here. So there's no question of having to prove its existence or feeling that you are in a world where God is lost to you, that God is dead or something. No, no, no. God is just part of a harmonious culture. It's part of that Garden of Eden thing. Right. Just like the divine law was just part of the family. So how can we do this in a modern way? Well, we need to get beyond this division between rationality and faith.

22:29 Seth: So do we think that Hegel characterizes, I don't know, at his point in time, something like 1800 years of Christianity, or maybe let's call it 15, you know, up until the Enlightenment, let's call it 1500 years of Christianity as more like faith than the form of. Like, does religion not emerge until there is the alienation of faith and reason?

22:54 Wes: Yeah, I don't know what we can. Go ahead.

22:56 Mark: Yeah, we have to think back to his earlier theological writings. So Wes and I read a little bit for close reads where he was actually talking about, like, the Sermon on the Mount and things. And it certainly is not presented as if that Jesus was not talking about faith in the same way that Thomas Aquinas, for instance, does. Right. That there's a giant historical gap between that. That maybe the early religions were more like the Garden of Eden stuff that we've been discussing. Where that is. I mean, I guess that's the question. Was there room in the Greek city state with its harmonious, unarticulated relationship to its ethics?

Was there room for evolution in its ethics? Like, I think there was. I think there was still the divine law and the secular law, the human law were both supposed to be dynamic. They're not merely like a Crusted tradition that like, that's exactly the thing that people would object to. So could you have Jesus upsetting the apple cart of traditional Judaism and saying, no, actually that law doesn't make sense, but this law, is that all still compatible with something that you don't have to merely have faith in, but you can just be living it? I don't know.

24:10 Wes: Yeah, we don't. What we're getting in 486 too, is a little bit of a preamble. And, and we're covering huge historical ground. So I don't know what to say about, say, medieval Christianity versus what happens during the Enlightenment and all that.

24:23 Seth: Okay.

24:24 Wes: But he has this famous line about the Enlightenment completing the alienation of the spirit by bringing into the household of faith the tools and the utensils of this world. This is one of these interesting metaphors that Hegel uses. This one is. This one I like. So that unruffled peace that we might have felt via religion is now upset and saying, you know, like Kant, well, we got reason on one side, we got faith on the other. Critique of reason to make room for faith. I think the idea is that that is unworkable. But by the end of the section, he gives us a little foreshadowing into the birth of absolute freedom, which I think has. Will ultimately have something to do with the French Revolution and. And then that'll deconstruct itself. But with 487 now, I think we're going to get down to business.

25:13 Mark: Yeah, yeah, the French Revolution stuff. So that's what ultimately is going to conclude this entire culture part. And that's about. Right. It's called absolute freedom and terror. And so it's not about absolute freedom of the individual. It's about the absolute unmoored character of the culture. The culture is no longer growing out of a tradition. Maybe I've answered my own question about if Jesus really, you know, was. Caused a sharp revolution, then what prevents this revolution from veering off crazily? Right. It's no longer tied to its past. It said the past is fundamentally corrupt. So even though the French Revolution, like it seemed like it was just enacting Enlightenment ideals, which are saying, no more nobility, no more kings, but then, well, do we murder them all?

25:58 Wes: Do we.

25:58 Mark: Do we just, you know, became a

26:00 Wes: frenzy of nihilism and then we murder each other.

26:03 Mark: Yeah, exactly.

26:05 Wes: We don't stop till everyone's murdered. So peace on earth finally.

26:08 Mark: You might think that that's the way that Christianity ultimately went in that you have the Protestants and the Catholics killing each other by the thousands.

26:17 Wes: So in 48, 487, Spirit breaks itself up into two pieces, which seems to have done a lot of. Before. I don't know how this is exactly. It's a new. It's a different way of doing it, but I suppose, but we get. Again, he's drawing this distinction between social life, I think, and then faith or pure consciousness. So maybe, yeah, maybe 487 is still a bit of preamble here.

26:43 Mark: Right. So it's a world of reality or self alienation on the one hand, and that which spirit rising above the first, constructs for itself in the ether of pure consciousness. But the second world, because it's just a mirror of the first, is itself not free of alienation. It is not the self consciousness of absolute being as it is in it for itself, not religion, but just faith so far as this is a flight from the real world and thus is not in and for itself. Right. Faith is a flight from the realm of the present. Again, this completely sounds like Nietzsche here.

27:15 Seth: Yeah, so he says pure consciousness is the element into which spirit raises itself. So spirit has this world of reality, it raises itself into itself, alienates. The raising of itself into pure consciousness is an alienation from the world. But because it's self alienated and pure consciousness is, as you say, Mark, kind of reactively or in opposition, defined in opposition requires that actuality, that reality, the world, it's not for, in and for itself. So he says that's why I'm going to call that faith, suggesting that religion is somehow in and for itself. But then he says a little further down, he says it's not just the element of faith, but equally of the notion. That's come up a couple of times and I kind of glossed it because I didn't feel like I wanted to try to figure out how that was different from anything else. But I wonder if it doesn't have something to do with actuality.

28:20 Mark: Well, I think it's the notion of spirit as self consciousness in and for itself of the whole. So this is the way we're going to eventually get out of the Enlightenment. Sort of the positive side of the Enlightenment is that faith, though in itself is, you know, all the things that Nietzsche would say. It is life despising a flight from reality. But it has within it the key to addressing its own problems, like everything else in this book. So that's, that's all I read that as. It's not telling us the notion of what it's the Notion of his overall project being coming to fruition.

28:56 Wes: Yeah. So we were still in preamble and foreshadowing there. And I made a mistake of saying we were getting down to business. In 47, 488 is where we get down to business. Culture and its realm of actuality. Section a. So in 488, just sometimes I look at my notes and they're just the same sort of gibberish.

29:15 Seth: That's most of mine.

29:18 Wes: These are not even my note. This is like my distilled summation of my notes. Somehow it made sense to me when I wrote it. But anyway.

29:25 Mark: Well, could I give you the. My first. My first point in here is that spirit is a self consciousness is a spiritual essence that knows this essence as an actuality confronting it. So the way I interpret that is instead of just being at harmony with its values, it recognizes that this essence, what my values are, is something that I actually have to consider, right? I'm the being that it questions. My own being, you could say. So that's what the alienation is, is I no longer just live values, I have to consider them, I have to think about them. We as a society have to think about them, what, what we're going to do next.

30:01 Wes: And they, they come from the outside, right? So I understand, right? There's an actuality confronting me and that's my essence. My essence in a way lies. Lies outside of myself in culture. So very different than ethical spirit, which he think he calls here indwelling, right? So if we actualize our self consciousness in this form, we divest ourselves of our personality, as he puts it, or renounce our being for self. And I think that has something to do with the whole process of an enculturation and giving up natural being, right? To divest myself of my natural being is to take on these norms and to have to function according to norms that are in some sense alien to me and involve repression and suppression of my natural instincts and things like that.

And then on the other hand, I enculture myself. But then I'm also producing the world of culture and producing things that I can take for myself that are possessions in a way. I mean, and you can even think of values the same way as I was talking about before. The culture is also a resource. It's also where we. Right. When we have aspirations and ambitions, those play out on the cultural field. When I think I'm asserting my individuality by saying becoming an artist or something like that, it really reflects this dynamic between my submission to the cultural and My attempt to take something from it or for my to.

To make a place for myself within it. But that's the character of the kind of self consciousness that is alienated. Right. Where this type of ambition, I think comes into play.

31:43 Mark: Yeah. At times, I mean, he makes it sound like a zero sum game, like we're all divesting ourselves of our personality. We're stuffing it into this thing, the culture. Now that's where it's at. And we can then, oh, that, that gives us some goals. Like I want to be esteemed profession within the culture. I want to have this money which is purely a cultural creation, stuff like that.

32:05 Wes: He makes this contrast here to legal Right. Right. So we, by alienating ourselves from ourselves, we give ourselves the character of a universal. Which is to say that the universal aspect is that of this is the cultural norms that we take into ourselves. So we become like others. Right. Culturally, you know, language, speaking English as opposed to French is a good example of that. And so that kind of equality, that kind of similarity to other people is not the same as abstract personhood as we get with legal. Right. But Kalkavage, I'm going to recommend to listeners the commentary by Peter Kalkavage on the phenomenology brings up the question of things even as trivial as like civility are those sorts of norms and forms that don't rise to the level of law or the ethical in the strict sense. We conform ourselves to all sorts of norms that might seem trivial but are important.

33:02 Mark: Yeah, that's called the logic of desire. Peter Kalkavage of Paul Dry Books 2007. And I think, yeah, I just finally pulled that up a couple days ago on your recommendation, Wes. And I think I'm going to spend a lot of time with it before next time we talk because I'm not sure I agreed with his analysis of everything I was reading, but at least there a lot of it. It is, you know, as long as the book that it is a commentary on.

33:29 Wes: Yeah. There's another long commentary called Hegel's Ladder and it's just pages and pages per section and it's very enlightening, but it's just too much. And then the Stern that we've mentioned, the Routledge Guide is. Is great, but it's much more synoptic. And so Kalkavage kind of, he's the. Hey, he's the mediating term. He's just right. It's the Goldilocks zone for this. But I think the reason he brings up civility, because there's this bit at the end where Hegel says that, let's see, culture tolerates various types of character. Right. So the non spiritual universality.

Sorry, not culture, but the sphere of legal right, which he's contrasting with culture, the non spiritual universality of the sphere of legal rights. Right. Accepts every natural form of character as well as of existence and justifies them. So you get equality through personhood, but you get tolerance for a wide variety of social or cultural forms. It sounds a little bit like liberal pluralism there. Whereas culture, I think, is more. The universality that comes with it is more strict in a way. Right. Because it demands that you conform to a cultural norm.

34:40 Mark: All right, so we're moving into 489 here. Right. So culture provides the existence and purpose of the individual, the transition of the thought form, of substance into actuality and of the specific individuality into essentiality.

34:55 Seth: Right.

34:55 Mark: So this individuality molds itself by culture into what it intrinsically is, which is interesting. I'm not sure about that word intrinsically there.

35:05 Wes: Yeah. So, you know, it's like the shade of the ironic there. But it's right, because what we intrinsically are should just be what we naturally are, not as what we are culturally constructed to be. But in a sense, what we are. Our essence is to construct ourselves culturally. So to really acquire our essence, acquires this step of enculturation.

35:29 Seth: Well, it's funny you say that because he actually uses the word nature and natural. The words nature and natural.

35:34 Wes: Right.

35:35 Seth: Before that.

35:36 Wes: Yeah, that's what culture is working against.

35:39 Seth: This individual molds itself by culture into what it intrinsically, and only by doing so, it is an intrinsic being that has actual existence. The measure of its culture is the measure of its actuality and power. So maybe what he's saying here is that there's a sense in which, like we. If culture is working against nature and we all are in some way shape or form natural beings, that's like kind of almost like we say we're essentially natural beings, but which is to say

36:14 Wes: biology and instinct and blah, blah, blah, all the things that we can educate ourselves out of.

36:20 Seth: Right. But insofar as we're natural beings, and even though that's our central nature, there's a lack of actuality to it or a lack of reality in the sense that we didn't do any work to become natural beings. We didn't make any choices to become the actual beings. Being natural is like in the Greek state, it's like falling under the universal as opposed to being alienated from the Universal, so to speak, and reacting to it. So culture is also a universal here. But then I take that culture in whatever form of actuality it has, and then I start to make myself into something. And in that way I become that's power and that's my actuality. So I'm not a natural being that might, like I said, we might use the term essential, but it's not my actuality, because there's no conscious choice being made there.

37:18 Wes: There's a bit of a play here, I think, on. Right. The Aristotelian idea of actualization, which would just be natural. Although ultimately in the politics and the ethics there's a right social and cultural element to it. But the paradigmatic example of something being actualized, being at work at being itself, is just to fulfill its species form, which by the end of this, he's going to dis on that. But we go beyond that as human beings. And the forms for us aren't just the species forms, but they're the techne forms that we have in our heads by which we produce cultural artifacts.

And then those artifacts become a new niche, a new environment in which we function, and that form us back in return. Right? We get culturally affected by the artifacts that we ourselves get encultured. And that depends upon the many, many artifacts and products that others have already produced. That's the culture, and that's the thing that so strongly influences me and forms a large of my identity. So it molds me into what. What I intrinsically am, right? And so when he says the measure of its culture is the measure of its actuality and power, the more educated I am, the more powerful I am, the more plugged into culture I am, the more I can make something of myself and fulfill my ambitions within this domain.

38:43 Mark: The word will comes up the first time here. So the purpose. So will belongs to individuals, obviously, but the purpose and content of the will belongs solely to the universal substance itself and can only be a universal. And then he rips on. I think this is just a something he does again and again in the phenomenology, individuality. If individuality is erroneously supposed to be rooted in the particularity of nature and character, then in the actual world there are no individuals and no characters, but everyone is like everyone else. But this presumed individuality really only exists in someone's mind, an imaginary existence which has no abiding place in this world, where only that which externalizes itself and therefore only the universal obtains an actual existence.

So even though we're talking throughout this section about the actual. The social world, that other side, that faith side, that's where, you know, my special setness is. Is my special markedness has been expelled into that thing. And that's just. It's just an imaginary. You think that you're unique, but really you're only actual insofar as you have adopted a role.

39:50 Seth: I was actually looking at the same thing right before Mark commented on. I was going to say the same thing. It's interesting here. It says after we were just talking about nature, and essentially you mold yourself and you overcome or ignore your nature, and it's only what you mold yourself into through culture. He says if individuality is erroneously supposed to be rooted in the particularity of nature and character, then in the actual world there are no individualities and no characters, but everyone is like everyone else. That's right before what Mark had cited before.

So further on, when he's talking about a kind of being and he's talking about essentially species or class or something like that, he's basically saying it's a hollow and pointless thing to talk about. A good kind of oak tree. Right. Or a bad kind of oak tree, or a good woman or a good man. Right. That essentially these categories that you want to use, these natural categories that you want to use to try to describe particularities are meaningless in the face of what the consciousness does to mold itself against culture. And without culture, it sounds like they don't really have much content at all.

41:11 Wes: Yeah, this is a recapitulation of sense certainty. Right. We can't just say something is a particular by pointing at it and contrasting it to the universal. Right. It's only insofar as it's universal that it obtains, as he puts it, actual existence. So you can't say, oh, these are right entities, or what is my individuality? Well, I'm a numerically distinct thing and different in all my properties from you, Seth, and from others, when in fact it's to be a being, to be my own, the particular being that I am, I have to be a type, a kind. That's the only way that my particularity gets instantiated is via universality by way of being some kind or another.

41:56 Mark: Well, that seems like a very profound and important to this work point. To wrap up part one on it, we'll come back next week for part two. Or you can get that in your feed nearly immediately. If you are a partial Examined Life supporter through our website or through Patreon, learn about the various ways to Support us at partiallyexaminelife.com support. Thanks.

42:19 Wes: Thank you.

42:20 Seth: Thanks.