Ep. 389: Hegel on Wealth and Power (Part Two)

0:07 Mark: You're listening to the Partially Examined Life, episode 389, part 2. We've been discussing the wealth vs. State Power section in Self Alienated Spirit Culture. We are up to what, five, 19 or so? Yeah.

0:25 Wes: Then we still have to do 519 and that's a. Yeah. Substantial one. As opposed to the thin other thin ones.

0:32 Mark: Right. So I know I left us with the question about how wealth becomes ensouled or why it needs to become ensouled. Back in 5:15. That wealth, which is Only for itself develops an intrinsic being of its own. Wealth receives a spirit of its own. I guess I can only, you know, in the context I'm going to have to say it is the reassertion of wealth as the nobles have it. So it's not that the king needs to be double ensouled, he's already ensouled as state power. But now that he's giving largesse, I mean at least that's, that's where we were going is that we somehow need to get self consciousness back to the people who are receiving the money. And they do this because they're pissed off about how it makes them dependent.

1:22 Wes: So yeah, I mean just, just one more thing about 5:15. He's associating the lack of substance and wealth with the fact that it just is something consumed. So it's sort of like his objects of desire idea where you just negate it and it disappears. So it is rather. Right, so there's no intrinsic being of its own. It is rather the canceling of it requires to be ensouled. And then the movement of its reflection consists in this. That wealth, which is only for itself develops an intrinsic being of its own. You probably already read that that instead of being a canceled essence, it develops an essential being receives within a spirit of its own.

And then this is probably why we're confused. The form of this movement has already been set forth in detail. So we don't have to characterize its content. So we don't really get what the movement is between wealth as something that is just consumed and how it is that it might have an essential be treated as having an essential being.

2:21 Seth: Yeah, actually he goes into more detail about that in 5:19.

2:24 Mark: Well, let's get to it.

2:26 Seth: Okay, so this is going to sound like a recapitulation. The spirit of wealth was an essenceless being for self, something to be sacrificed for others. But by imparting itself, it becomes intrinsic being. It in fulfilling its destiny, which is to sacrifice itself, it rids itself of the singleness which characterizes its merely self centered enjoyment. And as such subordinated individuality. It is universality or essence. What it imparts, what it gives to others is being for self and we

2:55 Wes: should say being for the self. Right, in the sense of enjoyment which he's, he's made that identification in previous sections.

3:01 Seth: So yeah, I'll skip down just a little bit. He says basically like it's the power that knows itself to be independent and arbitrary and at the same time knows that what it dispenses is the self of another. Wealth thus shares its dejection with the recipient. But in place of rebellion appears arrogance.

3:19 Wes: Right, so. So here, I mean, he's talking as if wealth and the monarch are kind of the same thing.

3:24 Mark: Yeah, it's the monarch qua. The giving spirit of wealth.

3:28 Wes: Yeah. So the monarch, and we know noble consciousness has become dejected in its dependence on the wealth. And now the monarch is going to become arrogant in the sense that it's. It fancies. It has by the gift of a meal, acquired the self of another's eye and thereby gain for itself the submission of that other's innermost being. And it overlooks the inner rebellion of the other. So the wealth or the monarch, it gets too big for its britches. It's the one on which the other depends.

3:54 Seth: Yeah. And it, when the arrogance makes wealth essentially think that it's more than it is. Like wealth becomes a thing through the giving because it thinks that it is giving being for self to individuals. And that's the flaw or the mistake of the arrogance. Yeah.

4:11 Mark: So it overlooks the inner being of the nobles of the other. It overlooks the fact that all restraints have been cast off, overlooks the state of sheer disruption in which the self identity of being for self having been divided against itself, all identity, all existence is disrupted. Skipping down. It stands on the edge of this innermost abyss of this bottomless depth in which all stability and substance has vanished. And in this depth it sees nothing but a common thing, a plaything of its whims, an accident of its caprice. Its spirit is a subjective opinion wholly devoid of essentiality, a superficiality from which spirit has fled.

4:45 Wes: So it's not so good to be the king.

4:47 Mark: You're standing on the edge of an abyss.

4:50 Wes: Yeah.

4:50 Mark: Yes. In that film he's rejoicing how he can play human chess with people and does not realize that the, in this case the actual French revolution is right at his feet. That he's inspiring through his assholishness.

5:05 Wes: I realize he looks exactly like the piss boy. To go deeper, he looks like the ignoble rebellious consciousness that he's dealing with.

5:15 Seth: Yeah, well, and it's also, you know, it should. The attentive reader listener will hear the echoes of the Lord and bondage Lord and bondsman, section 2. It's not understanding the function of the system and how the system is propping him or her up. Now I don't know too, if what would you say? Like what would be. Would a non arrogant dispensation of wealth in exchange for Flattery be a sustainable model? I think not. So we do have to kind of think about, I think Hegel was looking at this and you know, seeing that it didn't survive, it wasn't sustainable, it didn't last.

And so the question is why? Why did that happen? How do we diagnose this, you know, with. From within the construct of this absolute, this spiritual dialectic, if you will. But it's a great model for just thinking about the way relations between individuals happen too and like how resentment comes up and all that. I mean it's just, it's so rich.

6:16 Mark: A non arrogant disposition of largesse and receipt of flattery would be God, right? Isn't that the model? God gives us all the good things, we praise God, but this doesn't make God arrogant. He's not the kind of creature that could do that.

6:32 Seth: Well, but what God gives I would assume would be a little better than wealth. It's still worldly.

6:37 Wes: Yes, but it's the generalization of this idea of dependency. I mean Milton plays with this in Paradise Lost where basically Satan's grievance towards God is just. He doesn't want to depend on God for everything, including his being. Right. It's like rebelling against our own ontological foundation. And it recapitulates itself at many levels, right? With our parents who are our creators, with the state, with God. So yeah, this psychological dynamic can be universalized and of course we can rebel against God. And maybe it's part of some Christian doctrine that we, that we are always in rebellion in some sense and that we're merely trying to overcome it without ever fully succeeding.

This is why God, I think, gets replaced with a persecutory cabal and conspiracy theories. Or it's the thought experiment that Descartes is engaged in where God gets replaced with an evil deceiver or something like that, because it's a fantasy that we can bring the omnipotence of God into ourselves by making ourselves the omniscient ones. So there's this tendency for people to get grandiose and it's most pronounced say in paranoid schizophrenia where it's like I am God but everyone is persecuting me. So it gets flipped. God cannot be on the outside, God must be on the inside.

So rebellion. I'm just going through all those associations to get at, you know, this concept of rebellion.

8:01 Mark: So 5, 20, we reintroduce language and you know, we talked about language as flattery of the monarch. Well now flattery as something directed toward wealth. You give wealth A sense of essential significance, but you also thereby gain possession of it. So even more so than the sovereign, where you could think, hey sovereign, you're only king because I'm calling you king, because everybody's calling you king. I'm really the one with the power here. Well, we absolutely know that with wealth, that wealth, you know, we're actually getting the wealth by saying how great the wealth is or how great the spirit of giving is.

8:39 Wes: Yeah, I think here also, and this is part of what's influential on Marx is the. He calls this base flattery. Right. So there's the flattery, there's the heroic flattery that creates the monarch, socially constructs them, so to speak. And I think base flattery is what creates wealth. In other words, it's fetish. It's what Marx will call fetishization. Fetishization of the commodity where we pretend as if this socially constructed value is really intrinsic essential value. So here's the way he puts it, the language of flattery. But a base flattery for what it pronounces to be, in essence, it knows to be expendable, to be without any intrinsic being.

So we're pretending that something that actually has no intrinsic value is intrinsically valuable, I think. And likewise, I think we can do. I mean, we can go Marx route and talk about the relationship to the monarch in a similar way. Right. If we identify wealth with the giving spirit of the monarch. So it's as if that's real beneficence, that it can actually give me being for self that can give me something substantial when it can't. And then he goes on to say, it's right, it lacks the reciprocity of service. Going back to the heroism of service, service was something that could create a kind of identity between the inn itself and the pure self, create an identity between the one who's doing the serving and the one who's served.

Wealth doesn't do that because of this aspect of rebelling. So that's the sense in which self consciousness actually becomes identical with rebellion, becomes identical with what he's going to call disruption. There's no more unity with. Right. In the. In Greek society it was with the ethical substance. You had a certain kind of unity. In this case there was a tenuous unity with state power. Now that is going to be gone and that's our transition into culture.

10:34 Mark: Yes. And I had bolded here, the language of this disrupted consciousness is the perfect language and the authentic existence spirit of this entire world of culture. So that's Hegel's condemnation of all this grubbing after money and power and sucking up to the king. And it's just disruption. It is alienation through and through.

10:58 Wes: Hipster irony is what we're headed towards. Right. The witticisms of the nihilism of sophisticated people in culture.

11:07 Mark: We praise this stuff because, you know, we in. In action, we want it. You know, we're not being priestly rejecters of wealth and power, but we know that it is full of. We know that it is nothing in itself has no value in itself. Is. Is just a fiction. And that is a very keen way of recognizing the absurd in the existentialist sense. Right. Not in some. The basis of the human condition being absurd, but our condition in this kind of society that values these things is fundamentally absurd.

11:39 Wes: He ends by saying that being for self has its own being for self as an object that is other as well as its own self. Which just sounds like the same sort of thing we're always hearing the spirit of this real world of culture is spirit that is conscious of itself in its truth and in itself notion that's kind of opaque. I suppose it's. It's just a preamble to what's coming.

12:04 Mark: But yeah, what is. I mean we still have a bunch left, but I feel like we've told the main story here.

12:11 Seth: The.

12:12 Mark: The thing that it seems like he's gradually introducing.

12:15 Seth: Right.

12:15 Mark: Where the section after this called Faith and Pure Insight, which we did read for this time, but there's no way we're going to get to it here. So we're going to talk about it in a. In a future episode, we decided. But it seems we're preparing the ground for that by talking about like now that we have this cynical. I recognize that we're living in an absurd world. Well, let's contrast with the tranquil honest consciousness that is not self aware, the plain mind.

12:44 Wes: Right. 521 is really going to introduce in more detail or 521 onwards we're going to get more detail about perverse consciousness, perverse spirit and its medley of wisdom and folly. The way it perverts sentiment, the way it uses language. Right. So we're still on about language. It's just we've moved from flattery to base flattery to this kind of deflationary nihilistic wit that as Mark was saying gets. Is put in contrast to like the earnest, like the uncle in Rameau's. I was going to say Rambo's because Mark put that in my head. Rameau's nephew, the philosopher, the person who wants to Be an advocate of virtue and an advocate of realism. Wow. I was thinking of Sam Harris. That's probably too pejorative an association.

13:36 Mark: No, Sam Harris, he is not cynical. He is like trying to state it as it is.

13:41 Wes: No, I'm saying he's the opposite. He's. He's the earnest one. But I mean, we're thinking here, yeah, earnest philosophers and people who want to adhere to some idea of objectivity and moral reality. Non relativistic, as opposed to the witty cafe beret wearing nihilists who just say, yeah, it's all. And everything's socially constructed and there's, you know, everything's relative and one thing, you know, dissolves into its opposite, which in a way is a perversion of the Hegelian dialectic. So the trajectory here is that that's going to kind of defeat itself in the end and lead into the distinction between faith and pure insight, or faith and reason.

14:27 Seth: I feel like Wes just called me a pervert.

14:29 Wes: We're all perverts in culture, my friend. It's a compliment. It's a way of saying a culture.

14:36 Mark: Yeah. So we referred earlier to this idea that good and bad could become turned around. But this was not really explained other than, well, you could be from the point of view of power and then wealth as distinct from state, power as distributed would be bad. But if you're on the side of your self interest, then the common good, the wealth being pulled from you personally and put into the common coffer, that would seem bad. But that's very easily. Nobody's going to be cynical about that just by saying the common good and the good of myself as an individual are different locuses of good loci, good. But here, supposedly this is a more undermining thought here.

15:18 Wes: So he starts. 521, right. It is the absolute and universal inversion and alienation of the actual world and thought. I take this. He's talking about the notion here, right? Sort of the implicit thing that's now going to be unfolded. It is pure culture. What is learned in this world is that neither the actuality of power and wealth nor their specific notions, good and bad, or the consciousness of good and bad, the noble and the ignoble consciousnesses, possesses truth. On the contrary, all these moments become inverted, one changing into another, and each is the opposite of itself.

And this is what leads to the right. The witty nihilist, which again you could say to Hegel, well, you're the one. You're the one who convinced us of all that. All these things changing into the other. But for Hegel, right, to take notice of that and despair is to. Is just to stop short the path towards the absolute.

16:09 Seth: Correct? Yeah. And this, I think, also it's. Again, it's a little drop here. It's like none of these things, you know, possess truth. The question being, you know, like, what would it mean to possess truth? What would be the result of that? Well, it would be some kind of an anchor that would stop the movement, or perhaps it would actually be the end of the dialectic at all. So I think what we have to think about here is there's this moment where the power structure and the people who are subject to the power structure both come to the realization that what they thought was good could be bad, and what they thought was bad could be good.

And so you can see where an inversion like this or this back and forth, which we really didn't have until we got to wealth and state power, because we didn't have notions. I don't think, I don't recall from the first part of the phenomenology whether the idea of a notion shows up.

17:08 Wes: No, it shows up from the very beginning.

17:10 Seth: Is it? Yeah, but a consciousness, like a notion of good and bad. And the consciousness of good and bad. Sorry, that's what I was meaning to drive. It doesn't matter.

17:18 Mark: No, I mean, this is a great question because here's the first time notion was a technical term. Notion was the blueprint to whatever something is going to evolve in. But now he's using the specific notions good and bad, as if in a concept. You know, that's the way we would have used before we talked about Hegel. Like, you know, Socrates is asking, what is justice? Well, we must have a notion of justice and that. We just have to use the dialectic to ferret out, you know, something. It's full blown. What is the full blown thing? It's truth, I guess.

17:53 Wes: The absolute. Yeah, but we're trying to get at it in its concrete detail. Right. So the notion is like Minos, this kind of fuzzy thing that we're chasing. And. And to engage in the dialectic and the process of philosophy and truth seeking is to flesh it out into absolute knowledge. So notions are always incomplete, which is why notions of good and bad are going to jump into each other. You get reversed into each other.

18:17 Seth: Yes, but in this particular context, if I remember correctly, there's a kind of judgment that's associated as well. The notion of good or bad is a judgment that such a thing is good or such a thing is bad. And then part of the dialectic here is the inversion of those values where you start thinking wealth or power is good and you sacrifice yourself to it. And then you start to think that it's bad because it's oppressive, and then you come back. So it's important that we have judgments of at least good and bad in order to be able to. Because really, if you can't value something, there would be no motivation to overturn it or to feel any particular way about it, being subjected to it, or being the one doing the subjecting.

Anyway, I think to get to the point of this particular section. Right. Is we can understand how if you feel like you don't have a basis for judging any one thing to be good or bad, or you can judge anything to be both good and bad, then you understand it's going to get a lot more fleshed out. But trying to lay the groundwork for the listener, you're going to get, in his case, not even nihilism. I'm sorry, not even relativism. But like nihilism, where it's just everything can turn into its Other things come and pass, you know, it just doesn't. There's no place to find truth and there's no place to find self in anything.

And that's not simply annoying, which apparently it is in Rambo's Nephew, but for Hegel, that's terrifying.

19:54 Mark: We're just going to call it Rambo's Nephews Even next time when we're doing it, we're just going to call it Rambos. It's Rameau's. Rameau's.

20:01 Wes: Yeah, sorry, but Rambo's Nephew would be an exciting film anyway. Yeah, so we're getting nihilism here, right? So like for instance, the idea that we can reduce altruistic feeling sentiment to selfishness, something that even Hume rejects, for instance, even Hume think, doesn't think that makes sense. But we're tempted towards that. I mean, for Hegel specifically, it's about, well, the state power is good in the sense of the common good. It's bad in the sense of its oppression. You know, when we intend to our own good, it's. You could cast it as selfish or you could cast it as well, this is something that's necessary to preserve my individuality and enjoyment as a natural part of life and blah, blah, blah.

And now we might see those things as tradeoffs, and they are fundamental trade offs. I mean, these are things that drive politics. Is our taxes oppressive or are they necessary for the common good? For instance, it's not clear to me, why this needs to degenerate into nihilism. It's. One might see them just as trade offs. And of course Hegel would say they need to, in the sense of the necessity of his dialectic. But ultimately that's not the end point. But that is the end of this section for 5, 21, where he says that from a formal standpoint, everything is outwardly the reverse of what it is for itself.

So an example of that is self interest. It might feel good for me, but to someone else it looks selfish. So it's bad from the external point of view, good from the internal view, to give a very simple example of that. So that leads to a nihilism where, well, there's a loss of being, being for self, a new sort of self alienation, and the result is a new type of language. Let's. I just wanted to get the flavor of this, how he puts it. So it exists in the universal talk and destructive judgment which strips of their significance all those moments which are supposed to count as the true being and as actual members of the whole, right, good and bad, and is equally this nihilistic game which it plays with itself.

This judging and talking is therefore what is true and invincible. While it overpowers everything, it is solely with this alone that one has truly to do with in this actual world. Whereas the honest individual takes each moment to be an abiding essentiality, and is the uneducated thoughtlessness of not knowing that it is equally doing the reverse. The disruptive consciousness, however, is consciousness of the perversion, and moreover the absolute perversion. Okay, that wasn't as helpful as I thought it would be. I thought we got the flavor here of the witty.

The clever and witty language. Oh, that's at the very end. What prevails in it is the notion which brings together in a unity the thoughts which in the honest individual life are apart, good and bad, for instance. And its language is therefore clever and witty. So good and bad or relative and just the same, ultimately it might be

22:49 Mark: worth stopping and sort of trying to think about what Hegel's actual view is. Right, Wes, you were just pointing at. It seems like Hegel himself is undermining our faith in ethics by saying ethics is not universal, it is dependent on the social conditions at the time. So that sounds like it's a straightforward. He's a social relativist. But on the other hand, there's some historical conditions that are more advanced objectively than others, that are better than others, that are getting closer to the truth. So it's ethical relativism is just hidden by an overall historical determinism that is toward the good, toward the positive.

So it is interesting somebody was asking on YouTube based on one of our past discussions here, like, do the dead have rights for Hegel? And. Well, it depends. When you're talking about in that particular moment when it was the home morality, the divine law says what you have to do with the dead. Well, in that sense, the dead have rights, but rights have not come up. Rights don't come up until the next stage of personhood. So in that sense, nobody has rights. It was just we didn't need rights because everybody knew what you were supposed to do.

It's only when we have an alienation that you need rights, so that, you know, to provide a place that secular law is not supposed to trample on you.

24:10 Wes: He does use, I think, the phrase like the rights of the departed, but it's figurative in a way.

24:16 Mark: From the point of view of divine law.

24:18 Wes: Yeah, from the point of view, yes. I think he says at a certain point, that's the only right that exists at that point. Right for ethical substance. There's no rights for persons in general, but the dead person is the one, is the only one with rights in the loose sense.

24:34 Mark: Yeah. If you said that was Hegel's overall ethical view, that would be weird and monstrous. So, no, no, it's just a moment. And at this moment, yeah, you could get on board with what Trump is telling you. Trump gives you a full array of this is what's good, this is what bad. When these people die, it's good that they died. I'm happy that they died. When this person dies, Chuck Norris dies. Oh, that's too bad. He was such a great man. It's entirely moral clarity. And you could jump on that bus and just adopt it wholesale. But anybody who is clever, who is witty, realizes that, no, no, this is just individuals trying to create values by just saying stuff.

If you say something enough, it becomes true. That is actually the way values work is. If we as a society say stuff enough, well, then that becomes the right thing in that society. And at this point, just as in the present day, at this point of the text, there are conflicting things such that the astute person will not just see in one particular moral judgment an abiding essentiality, but will see it as merely something that will out of somebody else's mouth or in some other circumstance, you're going to deliver basically the opposite moral judgment.

And so it's just all bullshit.

25:51 Wes: Yeah, I think for, you know, ultimately, with absolute knowledge and the absolute, we're going to get firm value distinctions. So. Well, that's going to be his critique of Kantian morality, I think. But ultimately, yeah, you got to get to the end. But in this case, yeah, we have. Which we'll never do. How ironic that like, we'll never know what the absolute is and what the answer is. It's like reading a novel knowing we're just stop before the climax.

26:17 Mark: But it is. He's a master of the cliffhanger. If you can get past the horrible style that makes you want to stop immediately. If you can actually get in the flow such that you wouldn't mind reading more than like, the curiosity to know what his actual view is will drive you. Whereas a regular philosopher would just stay up front, here's my view, and then go on to give a lot of details that you could just skip.

26:41 Wes: Every sentence is a cliffhanger because it's like, what the hell is he talking about? Maybe I'll find out. Just keep reading, keep reading. And then once you read the last sentence, everything suddenly just clicks and it's crystal clarity.

26:56 Seth: We truly don't spend enough time actually reading sentences from the book. People would.

27:01 Wes: I think we've done a fair amount of that today. Actually. I just read way too much from 5:21.

27:07 Seth: Yeah, I'm saying in general we don't. But I was thinking about this, talking to somebody about this and I was like, I can't even read this without secondary literature. I said, there are very, very. I was like, we've been doing this for a long time and there's only a handful of times where I was like, I just can't. Like, you gotta have. I have to read secondary literature. And this phenomenology of spirit is one of them. Lacan was another one. But I feel like there are a number of secondary literature texts that do a pretty good job of elaborating.

But I feel like there's a project here of giving a very simple, maybe even one of those three minute philosophy cartoon versions of the Phenomenology of Spirit. And then extrapolate, since apparently the Prussian state didn't actually finalize the actuality, substance, self, consciousness, reality, true and truth of spirit. Like, we need to add a few chapters to this dialectic. But I will say so I was looking at 523 and 524. So you have established the confused, the nephew, the.

28:21 Wes: Well, could we just. We didn't talk about 522. Can I just mention that very Briefly.

28:25 Seth: Yeah, go ahead.

28:25 Wes: Just because that's where he actually quotes Rameau's Rambo's Rameau's Rameau's nephew. And he gives. Right. We get this comparison of the perverse spirits talk there. It's language to this musician who heat up and mix together 30 airs of French, Italian, French, tragic comic of every sort. The falsetto tone frantic and soothed, imperious and mocking by turns. So yeah, that's the kind of substance of what the witty, cynical, nihilistic talk of the perverse spirit of the perverse consciousness is like. It's, you know, any attempt at frankness or sentiment. It scoffs at, it plays with feelings, it runs up and down feelings like they're a scale and alternately is admiring of them or contemptuous. Sounds a little bit like Kierkegaard's aesthetic person.

29:20 Mark: Yep, just think of that. Yep.

29:21 Wes: So sorry. Yeah, Seth. 523. We'll get more elaboration here.

29:26 Seth: Yeah. So, well, in 523 he's basically says, okay, so you can imagine that personality, right, that was just described. And then he says reverse consciousness. Yeah, the perverse consciousness. It disturbs me to think that you guys associate that with aesthetic. But then he says, if we contrast with the speech of this mind which is fully aware of its confused state, the speech of that simple consciousness of the true and the good, we find that in the face of the frank and self conscious eloquence of the educated mind, it can be no more than taciturn. To the latter, it can say nothing that it does not already know and say, so this would be some version of the serious or the earnest man. This is a plain mind and the issue is that it wants to oppose the perverse educated.

30:19 Mark: Yes, now he's using educated as synonym for perverse.

30:22 Seth: But it's unable to do so because a, it doesn't have any level of self awareness about where it stands vis a vis the educated or perverse mind. And also there's nothing it can say to convince because the educated or perverse mind is just going to say, yeah, yeah, yeah, I already know that.

30:40 Wes: Yeah. I mean, ultimately, I think the simple consciousness is actually trying to make some attempts at nuance, actually. Right. By saying, look, yes, things are complicated and there's good and bad are in this dialectical relationship, but good doesn't lose its value by being associated or mixed with bad. It's just part of nature. You know, you can kind of reminisce in a little bit of an Augustinian theodicy there that you could do it for, do it for good and Bad and then. But all of this, right, the perverse consciousness and its cynicism can just say, well, you know, yeah, you're not saying anything I haven't already said.

And what's more, you're making a bad a condition of the good. And in that sense it's like you're saying that the essence of the good is the reverse of itself. The essence of the good is the bad. So it's a little bit vague, but it's. The simple consciousness can just get defeated every time. If it tries to play perverse consciousness's game, it's better off saying nothing.

31:38 Seth: Yeah, well, and the other thing is this is going to get us to. So in section in 524, he starts to get into the mechanism that's ultimately going to launch. But the problem is at this point, the simple consciousness doesn't have access to something like a universal, that it needs to counteract the nihilism. So it will say, yeah, but what about so and so he was a good person, what about this? That worked. And then the perverse person just says, yeah, but then he died and his sons destroyed his legacy. Or no, but what about this terrible person? Because really where we're ultimately the simple person is be the one who's going to give birth or is going to reach out for faith, for something beyond.

Because they're still arguing about the worldly. And so he says in section 524, finally, should the plain mind demand the dissolution of this whole world of perversion, it cannot even demand of the individual that he remove himself from it. This is my favorite line for even Diogenes in his tub is conditioned by it. And to make this demand of the individual is just what is reckoned to be bad vis a vis to care for himself qua individual. So they're having an argument about the goodness or badness of the world and the actual that they're in as individuals.

And there's no way to win that fight because there are bad and there will always be bad and you will always go back and forth, right?

33:01 Wes: So the bad is self interest is a condition of our survival. Like, the point is that even Diogenes must take care of himself to some extent, right? Their cynics are famous for not taking care of themselves very well and being poor and all that stuff and living in a bathtub or whatever, but they're doing enough so they don't die. So they got to be self interested to some extent. And that's the sense in which, right, the bad is the Condition of the good. We don't even get to, you know, being virtuous, as the cynics were supposed to, like Diogenes were supposed to be, if we can't take care of ourselves long enough to live to be virtuous.

So. And then the next step he takes is a kind of a jab at Rousseau where you can just. You can't say, well, let's return to the simplicity of the natural heart, to animal consciousness, to innocence. Right. To being noble, noble savages. In other words, this is a direct jab at Rousseau. That's not the solution either. And in the end, what we need is a movement forward in the dialectic to some higher level of consciousness.

33:58 Mark: I'll just throw in that this did make me want to actually read the Social Contract through this podcast or close reads or something, because, well, we did

34:07 Wes: an episode on the.

34:08 Mark: No, we did the very beginning of it. We did the. His Origin of inequality was the main thing we covered. And we said the Social Contract is too boring, or, you know, it was more boring. So we just did the very beginning of it. But from what I understand, like, Solomon describes Rousseau as Hegel's hero throughout this. And so Rousseau knew full well that you can't go back. Like, in fact, Hegel is just channeling Rousseau throughout this section. So I think that's a much better comparison than the Beauvoir, because the Beauvoir makes it sound like if you're the simple consciousness, you are being the serious man, you're making a fundamental mistake.

And that the more developed ones, yes, there's still pitfalls they can fall into, but they are more existentially aware and further down the line. Whereas he does seem to be saying that there's something about the simple person that is actually going to bear fruit just as much as the nihilistic person. Both of them are sort of necessary things that are going to bring us forward moments to bring us forward into this consideration of faith.

35:11 Wes: Synthesized. Yeah.

35:13 Mark: Yes.

35:13 Wes: Yeah. I don't fully trust Solomon on this just because of other commentaries. I'm not saying he's wrong or the commentaries are right, but I suspect he's in dialectical tension with Rousseau. He loves Rousseau and he doesn't love her. So, no. Anyway. But, yeah, we can't go back to the natural heart, and we need some higher level, which, yeah, ultimately is synthesis. Right. We don't leave behind. We're not just going to reject perverse consciousness and simple consciousness or one or the other. They get integrated into the next moment, which is faith. And reason, the battle between faith and reason.

35:47 Mark: Well, I had a note in 5:25 that it's like Socratic irony. So this quote at the end, spirit that has come to itself, has directed its gaze to the world of actuality, still has there its purpose in an immediate content. But in the other case, its gaze is in part turned only inward and negatively against it. In part it's turned away from the world toward heaven and its object is the beyond of this world. So, right. Once you want you to say all is vanity, then 526 he's going to say explicitly the vanity itself is vanity.

36:20 Wes: Exactly, exactly. Yeah. It's just like you doubt the doubt in the beginning of this. The phenomenology, cynicism and nihilism are kind of self defeating, just like relativism. And so it sort of becomes the acid wash in which it dissolves itself. Right. And that's how we get to this positing of a beyond for faith or rationalistic scientific interest in reducing the world to the self, which is to say reducing the world to the rational, to our own concepts. We make that when perverse consciousness defeats itself, we make this movement to the next step where earnestness kind of. Well, both earnestness and perversity kind of manifest themselves in these two different interests. And reason and faith.

37:08 Mark: Yeah. So Kierkegaard said that modern irony is too nihilistic, but Socratic irony was sort of in the service of heaven. I am rejecting your stupid definition of justice or piety or whatever toward some open ended perfect definition that we'll perhaps never get to. But that orients us away from the immediate things of this world.

37:34 Wes: Well, we can see. Yeah, yeah, we can see how faith integrates perverse consciousness. Right. Because it's reverse consciousness is, is there's a skeptical element to it where we can't really know anything and nothing really matters. And faith says, okay, well that's true in, in this world. But I can direct my faith to this other world. And even though that other world isn't knowable, my faith gives me a legitimate connection to it. So I preserve both the earnestness with respect to the faith's object, the other world, the beyond. And then the perverse consciousness is sort of cynicism with respect to this world bifurcate. The attitudes bifurcate us into the earnest and the cynical attitudes get bifurcated in these into faith and reason.

38:22 Mark: So the nihilistic person, this is in 526. Right. Sort of is well acquainted with the human condition in this kind of society of how the self has been ripped apart. This ethical substance, the spirit itself has been ripped apart. And this produces all sorts of anguish, but does not know how to. It knows the substantial from the side of the disunion and conflict which are united within the substantial itself, but not from the side of this union. It understands very well how to pass judgment on. It has lost the ability to comprehend it. So that's part of the absurd is like, I can't. I see that this is a contradiction, but I don't know how to understand it. That there is some synthesis that is available. So ultimately, Hegel is not going to be, you know, an absurdist in the manner of Camus. That's just a moment. But there is a way to resolve this.

39:15 Wes: This in a way is. Is a recapitulation of what's become come before. Because it, in a way, the perverse consciousness is self consciousness depends on knowing things as vanity. And so it becomes a vanity producer, right? In the way. Same way an artisan produces objects in which, you know, the slave for can find themselves and gets its own consciousness mirrored back to it. Perverse consciousness does the same. And its artifacts are power and wealth, right? It devotes itself to those ends. Hegel says. Then it realizes that, well, power and wealth actually have power over me.

And then the witty talk is an attempt to transcend that. To be witty talk is an irony, I think, Mark, you're spot on with thinking about irony here. That's really what this is all about. Because irony is an attempted transcendence. It's got the kind of nihilistic side to it, but it's also as a form of transcendence, it points to the more to faith in a. In a beyond. But anyway, the first step is that perverse consciousness tries to transcend its dependence on wealth and power with witty talk and say, I'm above all this, right? That playful witty talk in a way involves that same fantasy of not being dependent on anything because I'm not taking anything seriously, right?

That's where we start to get faith and pure insight or reason.

40:40 Mark: All right, Seth, give you. It seems like we. At the end of these episodes, you have some epiphany and then we end up going overtime. So start that now. Start your epiphany, because we're in the final section here.

40:53 Seth: I can't remember if I've said this before, but it's the realization that I've had. Is that the epiphany is that this. You know, we're trying to read this naively as A work in philosophy in a trend of traditional sense. And, you know, we're like, well, is this descriptive of history? Is he trying to explain how history unfolded? Is he trying to explain the developmental track of an individual human being and the idea of speaking about consciousness in the abstract or the idea that spirit. You know, there's a cliche where everybody's always putting the word absolute in front of spirit when they make fun of Hegel or talk about Hegel.

And that he's trying to. It's a joke that he thought that the Prussian state was the end all of be all. But I think it's doing a real disservice because I think Hegel is just onto something fundamentally and radically important that is disguised in some sense by his bizarre language. But that he's talking. His way of speaking is animist. And I mean that in the sense of, like when people used to think that there were spirits in the trees and they talked about things as being vibrant and alive. And he thinks of culture, power, wealth. When he talks about these things, he's talking about them as having a kind of existence, a kind of life of their own.

And it's alien to us nowadays, but I think it's actually really powerful and insightful because he's like, there's a way that things interact. There's a life that things have outside of us, like culture, and there's a way that we interact with those things and a way that we define ourselves against those things. And I think he's providing a really extended and interesting conversation about that could be read psychologically, it could be read, you know, socially, or what have you. And it makes me want to use this structure to look at contemporary culture.

Like, how have things changed? Is there another thing now that has subs, you know, that has actuality but not substance, or as being for itself and gets consumed in its use or whatever, and somehow becomes a foil for us. That's different. So, yeah, I love it, but it's a struggle. I wish it wasn't so hard. Maybe that should be. My job is to make Hegel easy. Hegel for beginners Peter Singer wrote the

43:24 Wes: very short introduction to Hegel. It's good, but, you know, it's 100 pages, so it's ultimately, you're not going to pick up the phenomenology afterwards and go, oh, okay.

43:34 Mark: Yeah. I feel like there's a lot of gems in these individual movements within here, so I'm glad that we're focusing on them. This is definitely not just simply One story. And I don't know how these will sort of persist in my philosophical imagination after this.

43:51 Wes: Right.

43:51 Mark: Do they. Do they really apply or do they only just apply within the context of this particular progression? I've found it easy enough to. Again, even though he's talking about the monarchy here, if Trump has done one good thing, he's provided a real life, real time model for us of something that's more like the monarchy, just in the way that his supporters deal with him, the whole dynamics of the thing. Of course he's not like the acknowledged by all of society king, but you know, you got a lot of power as president and then if you have enough people sort of buying in as if you were a king, even if they don't want to use that word, this seems very, very relevant to me.

So I'm happy to work forward for this recording. We read further than this section into the next one on faith, but we have decided that that was interesting enough that we want to devote probably two more discussions on this and hopefully Dylan will join us for that. However, next time we are going to. If you wondering why we keep dropping this Rameau's Nephew, that's a work by Denis Diderot. So we're going to actually read that for next time and hopefully Dylan will be back with us for that. So that of intrinsic interest, we just have never done Diderot.

He's been recommended to us several times, but also directly relevant to this progress we're making here. And a break for people that just don't want us to hear us talk about Hegel this many times in a row.

45:20 Wes: But don't confuse it with Rambo's Nephew, which is a really good film's nephew. And they go kill a lot of people together so someone wrongs them.

45:32 Seth: Something wrong?

45:34 Wes: Witty talk is not enough wrong by

45:36 Seth: a small town sheriff.

45:37 Wes: Yes, they do a lot of witty machine gun use, spraying not words but bullets all over the place.

45:44 Mark: Can it now be Rambo's like a grand nephew or something? Stallone is really goddamn old.

45:50 Wes: Yeah, that's for merely a nephew. That's a good point. Rambo's nephew is probably in the 60s as well. They already did that movie, right? With a bunch of old guys, Old action guys. The old man or sign. I know what it's called.

46:03 Mark: All right, thanks everybody for listening. We appreciate your submissions of ideas peltiallyexaminedlife.com or contact us through Patreon, through Facebook, through X or Instagram or any of the other ways you can follow us in most of those places. Thanks, everybody, and good night.

46:20 Wes: Good night.

46:21 Seth: Good night.