The Regrettable Century
The old forms of the Left are moribund and the new forms are stupid. We're making a podcast that discusses the need to organize a Dialectical Pessimism and develop a salvage project capable of sparking a new workers' movement for socialism. A clean, honest, and unsentimental melancholy is required; we are cultivating one and would like to share it with you.
“The challenge of modernity is to live without illusions and without becoming disillusioned. I’m a pessimist because of intelligence, but an optimist because of will.”
-- Antonio Gramsci
The Regrettable Century
Freedom Stumbles On: Hegel and the Slaughter-Bench of History (Featuring Mir)
The boys (featuring the return of Mir) kick back on the slaughter-bench to discuss Hegel's philosophy of history by discussing Terry Pinkard's article "The Spirit of History."
The Spirit of History by Terry Pinkard
https://aeon.co/essays/what-is-history-nobody-gave-a-deeper-answer-than-hegel
Hello and welcome to the Redible Century. We have a special guest today. Well, first of all, it's Chris and Jason, but we have a special guest today. Well, first of all it's Chris and Jason, but we have a special guest today, and by guest I mean he's sort of the return of an at-large member of the Regrettable Century, and that would be Mir from Sweden. Say hello, mir.
Speaker 1:Hello, comrades in Christ.
Speaker 2:All right, mir is back in rotation and we're glad to have him, and he's here to help us talk about Hegel, and specifically, we read this article that we thought was worth going into in some detail, called the Spirit of History, by Terry Pinkard, who is a philosophy professor from Georgetown University, and I think he is kind of a famous Hegel scholar, if I remember.
Speaker 1:Yes, he's one of the three or four big Hegel scholars. He has written a detailed exploration of the phenomenology of spirit, basically where he goes through the whole book chapter by chapter, not paragraph by paragraph, but almost like it's a 600 page long book yeah, no, it looks like you wrote a biography as well.
Speaker 2:Yeah, sorry.
Speaker 3:Yeah, pinkard is a person who, uh, knowing that he wrote this article makes it, should make one say, oh, this is worth reading because it's the author.
Speaker 1:I should also say that there are a couple of dividing lines among Hegel scholars, and this author falls down on the more sociological view of Hegel, who claims that Hegel basically is a sociologist, a sociologist of history, while there are others who treat Hegel more as a classical philosopher who deals with metaphysics and also epistemology and ontology, and you can't find thisological claims out of hegel, so that's important to keep in mind, that he's he's on the far end in these debates, so we get a very precise point, yeah.
Speaker 3:If it was like 1840, pinkard would be like in the company of people like Feuerbach, and he would be young Hegelian. Yeah, so he would not become a Marxist, though, but he would be one of the people that Marx would have to say this guy has it almost right, but not quite.
Speaker 2:Yeah, If you were to ask me which side I fall on the side of Hegel's sociology or Hegel's metaphysics I would say yes.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yes, well, and I think that is the correct answer and I think we will get more into this with this article, but I think you get really one side view of Hegel and also of the Enlightenment.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So I think that to be properly Hegelian, you would definitely need to be both of the things that Hegel was trying to implement here, which would be the dialectical synthesis of the sociological perspective and the metaphysical perspective, which is just yeah, you'd be able to hold them both, recognizing them as separate and in contradiction and tension with each other, and still maintain that they're both true yes, okay.
Speaker 2:So, um, jason suggested that we do this along the lines of the Varn model, which is where we go through it in detail. It's not a super long article.
Speaker 3:Yeah, ideally it won't take us several episodes to go through it.
Speaker 2:Well, okay, so we have the tendency to ramble right and to get sidetracked, but Varn definitely exacerbates that tendency I have no idea what you're talking about.
Speaker 1:I have no idea and we exacerbate that tendency.
Speaker 2:I have no idea what you're talking about I have no idea, and we exacerbate that tendency in him. It's like we don't have. When it's just the three of us and Varn, it's just Varn and the two of us, there's nobody to check us and to get us back on track. So we just every once in a while we remember oh crap, we've been doing this for two hours and we're only a quarter of the way through it. We should get back on track.
Speaker 3:We'll spend like 45 minutes on the first two sentences of an article.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and, in my opinion, when I go back and listen to those, I'm like okay, these are all good conversations. I like this. This is like listening to people have a conversation about something interesting. What it's not, however, is like an exposition that you could take notes and listen to and follow along like it's an educational podcast or something. If that's what people are listening for, then they're generally pretty disappointed, but I think there is value in both. So, that being said, let's hop in.
Speaker 3:Yeah, so that being said, let's hop in. Yeah, before we get started, I took these notes down. I feel like I wanted to just kind of encapsulate my reasoning anyways. Oh, go for it. Understanding periodic revisiting of Hegel and Hegelian philosophy as it relates to, and also as it does not relate to, the project of communism and our projects in the regrettable century. So I wrote why study, slash talk about Hegel, especially at this point? And I wrote mostly because I think it's important to get a clear sense of why things are the way that they are, how they came to be this way and how they might come to be different, and thus to guard against LARPing and or succumbing to absolute despair, slash nihilism, which is, you know, that's our purpose anyways.
Speaker 2:That's the two poles of American leftism.
Speaker 3:Yeah, LARPing on one side and nihilism on the other.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:And then, what's more, maintaining or even just achieving clarity might even help us think about things in new ways, in ways which are actually helpful and useful, and again, thus not larping or being nihilistic. So that's why I think we should read this article well, okay absolutely.
Speaker 1:And I would like to add that if we, by some sort of leftist project, believe that we are in need of philosophy and cannot be naive positivists or whatever, and that we need the humanities, we need philosophy, we need to understand it, then Hegel, basically I agree with. Well, first of all, it was Foucault who claimed that all of philosophy are footnotes to Plato. But I agree with both Zizek and L'Ambattu when they claim that, yeah, but since Hegel, all of philosophy has been footnotes to Hegel.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I mean, all of those footnotes are footnotes to the introduction, the preface to Hegel. Yeah, I mean, all of those footnotes are footnotes to the introduction, the preface to Hegel.
Speaker 1:Yes and well like. Also in a quite direct and materialist way. Like all the major philosophical schools are directly descended from Hegel. The Anglo-Saxon positivist comes from Popper, who wasn't Hegelian in his youth and his positivism was a direct reaction to his youthful Existentialism is out of Hegel. The same thing with post-colonial thought comes directly out of Hegel's feminist thoughts through not only Jude Butler but also Simone de Bois, and so on and so on.
Speaker 2:Right on.
Speaker 1:You can't avoid it.
Speaker 2:I agree, okay, okay, let's get started, and you can stop me when you want to interject Something, just like Just yell really loud.
Speaker 3:I was going to say we could just get air horns, except for that makes it sound like Weird. Whenever you say something really cool, it's when we go.
Speaker 2:Uh oh, the lights just flickered. I thought the power was about to go out.
Speaker 3:All right, let's get started and see how much we can get before your power goes out yeah history, or at least the study of it, is in bad shape these days.
Speaker 2:Almost everyone agrees that knowing history is important, but in the united states, except at the most elite schools, the study of history is in free fall. Our age, except at the most elite schools, the study of history is in free fall. Our age seems to share the skepticism voiced by the German philosopher G W F Hegel when he said that the only lesson history teaches us is that nobody ever learned anything from history. Absolutely. In one of my courses, when I first got to, uh, the university that I'm at now, we we were supposed to write like why do, why should people study history? And we're supposed to present our answers to the class. And several people who went before me said oh, it's so that we learn. We learn history so that we don't repeat it. And, uh, I quoted Hegel when I started my presentation about why we should learn history, and that was the quote that I used.
Speaker 1:He has another really interesting quote about history, and that is that history is a slaughter bench.
Speaker 2:That's my favorite. We're going to talk about that a little bit too. Why this is back to the article, sorry. Why the present is always new and the future is untested, leading many to sympathize with the American businessman Henry Ford's pronouncement in 1921 that history is more or less bunk. Yet the very same Hegel also argued that although things do indeed always seem unprecedented, history does actually give us a clue as to our ultimate ends.
Speaker 3:That's a pretty good indication that you, uh, are in need of revisiting your your worldview, if you take your philosophical cues from henry ford right, right, unless you're like, uh, in the us or scandinavia I guess, if you're- elon musk, it might, that might ring true yeah, yeah, except for, except for that Elon Musk loves juice.
Speaker 2:Now, remember, that's true. Yeah.
Speaker 1:And he loves LARPing Rome. Yeah, without understanding it.
Speaker 3:It's weird, because he used to love LARPing, uh, like Karl Marx, he used to love pretending like he understood what it meant and even like that he was kind of the real socialist.
Speaker 2:Oh yeah.
Speaker 3:Yeah of the real socialist, oh yeah, yeah. I don't know if he was better or worse than he was, just he was funnier but had less of a direct social impact, so maybe, maybe he's worse now well, I mean, he takes more drugs now and people who take those specific drugs become really uninteresting well, he's, uh certainly more dangerous now than he used to be, as he, like you know, rips the guts out of the.
Speaker 2:You know all of the institutions that make up the American government he also blows up a spaceship every couple of weeks but here is Sweden.
Speaker 1:I just want to make a shout out to our comrades. We have been in a 500 day long strike and blockade against tesla oh wow, nice, well, okay.
Speaker 2:So there's an accelerationist demon on my shoulder that's going like, yeah, elon, destroy the american empire. And then there's the other part. That's like a dad that has to raise a child here and I'm like, oh man, I would like there to be some Social Security for me and for my daughter, you know, but anyway, well, moving on.
Speaker 3:It's almost like history is a slaughter bench.
Speaker 2:It's almost like that.
Speaker 1:I think this last sentence is quite interesting and worth following a bit upon. Although things do indeed always seem unprecedented Although things do indeed always seem unprecedented, history does actually give us a clue to our ultimate ends, Right? Should we dive into that now or wait with?
Speaker 2:it. Go for it. Yeah, do it now.
Speaker 1:Well, I think that one of the things to see that for most people, like even people who don't study history, seems quite disparating these days, is that things are falling apart again and that we are returning to something old in the guise of something new, or something new in the guise of something old, the rise of the robber barons, like, if we're speaking politically, if we're speaking more sociologically, the total defragmentation of our institutions and of even the polite trade that institutions are supposed to serve us.
Speaker 3:Yeah, that's why I really like the. Uh, what is this called the tagline? There's like the, there's the title and then underneath it there's a kind of a little brief, uh sort of synopsis of the point of the article. Whatever it says, hegel's search for the universal patterns of history revealed a paradox Freedom is coming into being, but it is never guaranteed.
Speaker 2:Right, yeah, which? Yeah, it's funny that everyone's or not everyone, I would say like the, I would say people who have a very cursory understanding of Hegel, people who pretend to understand.
Speaker 3:Hegel.
Speaker 2:There we go. People who pretend to understand Hegel, whose understanding is cursory, see him as the ultimate teleologist right, Like he is, the Whig historian extraordinaire, which is incorrect, and there is a certain amount of determinism in Hegel right.
Speaker 1:That, I think, is justified, if you understand Hegel right, absolutely.
Speaker 2:I think it's justified if you understand Hegel, but he is not as teleological as people think that he is and think that Marx is. As a result, Absolutely.
Speaker 1:I think that it was Koshchei who claimed that, for Hegel, absolute freedom is the freedom to choose your own necessity.
Speaker 3:I like that.
Speaker 2:Who was it that said that Hegel's idea of freedom is the freedom to obey a policeman?
Speaker 1:That sounds like Popper.
Speaker 2:I don't think it is Popper, but he is an American. I don't think it is Popper, but he is an American. I forget which one he is.
Speaker 3:That's because, you know, it kind of makes sense in a certain sense If you take Hegel's notion of the working out and the unfolding of spirit, which is to say human consciousness on a social level. The unfolding of spirit, which is to say human consciousness on a social level, in that the, the construction of the state as the guarantor of freedom, as both the product of the purpose of and the product of and the guarantor of freedom. There's a, there's a version of that that says like oh yeah, hegel says that God is the state on earth and so Hegel's freedom is just to obey a cop. But that's only true if you cannot conceive of the administration of human activity as anything more than it already is. And if that's the case, then I would say that you haven't actually understood, undertaken to understand, hegel at all.
Speaker 1:It was Russell who said that about the policeman by.
Speaker 3:By the way, russell uh, I might.
Speaker 1:I'm drawing a blank russell, the uh, what's his first name? Quite famous british philosopher of history, burton russell oh, oh, burton russell, that makes sense, let's see if we can get into the second paragraph well, yes, but like and the second paragraph yeah, we can go on to the second paragraph and then tie it back to this question about history does actually give us a clue as to our ultimate end, because that's I think that that's a clear statement of hegel. But what does that actually mean? Is it's a big?
Speaker 3:it's a big and important question yeah, I would say, that's even the question one one of them.
Speaker 2:One of them okay, that one step. Okay, we are a peculiar species. What is it to be the creatures that we are is always a problem for us, in part because we make ourselves into kinds of creatures, into the kinds of creatures that we are, and because we explore this in all the different ways we live out our lives, individually and collectively. The study of history involves not only telling stories or piling up facts. In its larger structure, it is in the account of humanity, experimentally seeking to understand itself in all the myriad ways in which it gives shape to itself in daily life, and also how historical change is intimately linked to changes in our basic self-understanding. As Hegel put it in a series of lectures in 1822 to 1830, we are peculiarly our own products, and the philosophical study of history is a study of how we shapeshifted ourselves across time.
Speaker 3:See, that's important, I think, because for people who talk from a position of you know, people who purport to be Marxists, the idea is that human nature is kind of something which we already we know and we just have to get back to it by advancing forward, and that's kind of correct. But also there's something implied here that's much deeper, much more metaphysical. This idea of us taking into our own hands our conception of ourselves and then working out the best ways in order to be that conception, so like in older generations of mystics, would refer to the descent into heaven, the fall from Eden and the return to Eden as this process by which we become conscious and deliberate in our ascension, as opposed to before, when we were just almost like zoo animals. We're just almost like zoo animals, and Hegel is just putting a lot of detail into that and talking about the ways in which we have this notion and we test it, and we are constantly just trying to work out this basic notion all throughout history.
Speaker 1:Well, yes, and like. The basic idea here is that we are both at the same time the object and the subject of history. Yeah, and Hegel had studied scholastic philosophy very, very thoroughly, and I think that that shows here. It is almost an ecclesiology. We see here Humanity is the object of God's love, but also the subject under God's love. We are in a process of co-creation and that co-creation is the.
Speaker 1:And here comes my critique with this line of reading of Hegel as well, like that he so completely demystifies Hegel. That for Hegel, for me it is quite clear that what he's speaking about is our freedom within God, freedom within freedom in a more religious sense as well as a political sense, to be both subject and object of love at the same time. That is one point I think that is really important here, subject and object, but also as a clue to our ultimate ends. Here the author makes a hint of that. Okay, we can have an ultimate end in a theological sense, or we can view the study of history as a study of larger structures. And in studying these larger structures we can perhaps not mathematically precisely understand that, well, we will all achieve the classless society by that date, or even at all but that there is a probability that by understanding these historical metastructures, the inner gram of history, we can have a better understanding of where things probably are heading Not with certainty, but probably.
Speaker 2:No one ever conceived of a more sophisticated and dynamic philosophical history than Hegel. His system is built around three fundamental ideas. First, the key to human agency is self-consciousness. For people to be doing anything in any real human sense is to know what we are doing as we do it. This applies even when we are not explicitly thinking about what we are doing. Here's a simple example. As you're reading this, suppose you get a text message from a friend. What are you doing? You immediately reply. I'm reading a piece on Hegel.
Speaker 2:You knew that you were doing what you were doing without having to separate the act of thinking about it or drawing conclusions Without any further thought. You knew that you were not skydiving, taking a bath, gardening or doing a crossword. You did not look around and infer from the evidence. You did not need any particular introspection. In fact, in Hegelian terms, when you are doing something and you do not know at all what you are doing, you're not really doing anything at all. Instead, stuff is just happening. To be sure, sometimes we are only vaguely aware of what we are doing. However, even our often more distance reflective self-consciousness is itself only a further realization of the deeper and distinctly Hegelian self-relation. All consciousness is self-relation.
Speaker 3:All consciousness is self-consciousness I think that's more profound than, uh, we might want to think at first when we say uh, all consciousness is self-consciousness, like okay, fine, duh. But that's a profound proposition and it's a relatively uh, well, at least at the time unique, especially in the era in which, well, there's a certain kind of enlightenment philosophy that everything's a product of natural processes, everything is kind of mechanistically determined. And Hegel is saying, in a certain sense, he's saying I think and therefore I am.
Speaker 2:Sure, maybe this is just my, my dad instincts kicking in, but, um, I think that this, this makes me think of when we were kids and mom or dad would be like what are you doing? We'd be like, oh no, they get all mad at us about it.
Speaker 2:You remember yeah and uh. Why did you do that? I don't know anyway. So, so for me it will be like you know. I will ask my child, like you know what's going on? What are you doing? I don't know, anyway. So for me it will be like you know. I will ask my child, like you know what's going on, what are you doing? I don't know. It's like well, so that means you're doing nothing and stuff is just happening. You know, you need to conceive of what it is that you are doing and act upon the world in a conscious manner.
Speaker 3:Well, yes, yeah, because it's about agency.
Speaker 1:It is about agency, but it's also about waking up from our unconscious everyday slumber. We do things out of habit, certain things, certain rituals, which carry within them a history or a process. I don't think it's a coincidence that here we can see the origins of psychoanalysis Freud was profoundly influenced by Feuerbach, and Feuerbach was a Hegelian. What we're dealing with here is that all consciousness is self-consciousness. Okay, what does that mean In psychological practice, for example?
Speaker 1:Well, that means that you have to understand the history and the social nature of your afflictions. So in our afflictions, in our neurosis, in our anxieties, we carry within us hardened social relationships, either from our families or from our community, or religious practices or whatever there may be. And in order to be fully free, we have to become conscious of what we are doing. That is Zizek's holistic ideology. We have to become conscious of ideology that all the small practices in our everyday life embody ideology. The famous three models of toilets in different parts of the world, like that. That is, I think, what Hegel is speaking about here, like these hardened social histories.
Speaker 3:Right, and I feel like this is why I think that if you take Hegel's overall philosophy and his basic propositions to be true in like a literal sense, to be literally true, even if you weren't a communist, even if you were not influenced by the work of Guy Debord, I feel like you would have to. You have to look around the society right now and say this is a society which is moving away from this self-consciousness, as more and more of life is just automatic and rote and you just don't really think about what you're doing at all. This is this society has stopped producing the self, the personal awareness. It's being retarded as a result of something. And so fine, if it's not capitalism, what is it? Because it's definitely not the end of history in the way that I think. A lot of people think that Fukuyama meant it.
Speaker 1:No, I mean whatever compartmentalized, that consciousness of how these actions and our relationships are interconnected is not only incentivized against but becomes almost physically impossible within our current system.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean, I've joked around about this a lot, but that it seems as though that Hegel was right until the end of the 20th century and then, since that point forward, the dialectic has stalled out and you have to insert some marks into Hegel in order to be able to understand the stalling of the dialectic, and that would be this sort of idea of the common ruin of the contending classes. Right, yeah, so yeah.
Speaker 1:I mean, there is a different reading, like a dark hagel, where, like, yes, we are seeing history unfold and what we are seeing now is the natural progression of the Enlightenment of impulses from far earlier than that, and it's just leading us to a ruin.
Speaker 2:The idea that the Weltgeistzufuhrer would be Trump and Putin. Right yeah, they're the ones leading us into the brave new world. Like pushing history forward and, honestly, like there's something to that.
Speaker 1:Oh yeah, I think so too.
Speaker 2:I think that if you look at the way that the face of geopolitics has changed like that over the past month and a half, two months, you know, since trump's inauguration where, like nato is tottering, the eu looks, is in like serious crisis and, you know, russia and the united states are uh, uh, reaching rapprochement while we're like antagonizing canada in the eu, you know, I mean, it's so.
Speaker 3:Yes, I, I, there is something to that absolutely, but anyway, yeah it's like okay, in 1789 you have kind of the, the beginnings of a new uh mode, a new uh vehicle for the working out of freedom, for the absolute, which is the nation as states, as playing the role that previously only heroes like individuals, like Alexander the Great might have played, a similar role as being the repository of history, the world spirit on horseback.
Speaker 3:And then nations take the place, which is a more collective, more social version of this, which is to say a more clear articulation of a broader conception of freedom, a more full articulation of freedom. And sometimes, and for a little while, it kind of took Bonaparte to play that role to help whatever nations and so on. Later on in history it moves from nations to become classes, which means a good. I mean, really most of the people in the world play a role now, and also the USSR kind of played the role, just like Bonaparte played the individual role to the French Revolution's national social role, the USSR plays the role of the nations relative to the classes and so on. So, whatever, if the dialectics are solved out, in the words of Ian Malcolm in Jurassic Park, life finds a way.
Speaker 1:Jurassic Park, life finds a way, well, or I mean because this is Heidegger's reading of Hegel that Hegel was right, but the dialectics is leading us into ruin and extermination of humankind by acting against our social nature.
Speaker 2:You're making me agree with Heidegger.
Speaker 3:I do that sometimes it's okay. I do too.
Speaker 1:I mean, it makes me really uncomfortable. And that's also the Frankfurt School wouldn't go as far. But sad Dorno in his more dark moments would Well the dialectic of enlightenment is exactly what Heidegger is talking about here.
Speaker 2:It's a similar idea, yes, and I think Karel Kosik does the same thing, but he is heavily influenced by Heidegger, the Czech Marxist, philosopher, marxist, hegelian, heideggerian, whatever.
Speaker 3:If we take seriously this idea that the idea is being worked out over and over again antagonism, the contradiction between the labor and capital, or between liberalism and communism and fascism, or any other of these different ways of understanding these oppositional conceptions if we take seriously that these are all kind of the same idea working itself out, refining itself, it would only make sense that we could find something in Heidegger to say oh, that's kind of right, just as much as even in Julius Evola, like very little, but there's still something still worth knowing, wait wait what's worth knowing in Julius Evola?
Speaker 3:Are we in the Kali Yuga right now? Is that?
Speaker 2:similar to the stallali Yuga right now, that's. Is that similar to the stalling of the dialectic?
Speaker 1:Well, I mean yeah we have this cyclic view of history. It's like there is certainly a lot of sociological truth to cyclic theories of history. Then it's like in four generations and not in 4,000 years, but that's another thing.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I mean like I wouldn't want to take that too far. I just mean like anything that's very intellectually rigorous and worked out and is very serious and deeply felt is worth knowing about and taking seriously and engaging with, because even if it's something abhorrent and to be rejected, you shouldn't reject it based on not knowing what it is.
Speaker 2:Oh yeah, I absolutely agree with that and I think that that's probably I don't know how many times, how many examples I can pick of like that I could pick to illustrate this point that have happened to me personally where I mentioned having read or understanding the philosophy of this or that bad person and people are like, oh, why would you want to read that?
Speaker 2:Well as a person who as a person who reads fascists as a job, you know. Yeah, I mean it's. It's really funny Like, uh, I've I. I mentioned to people that I've read Mein Kampf twice and they're like, oh, why would you do that? I was like, well, first of all, it's not even twice, probably more like three times. The first time I read it I was like a little nerd that wanted to read history stuff when I was like in my early, late teens, early 20s. And then I've read it twice as a scholar because it was required in two different classes. But people are like, why would you read this? I mean, why wouldn't you? Why wouldn't you want to understand one of the most important people in the history of the world, even if he was terrible? Why wouldn't you want to understand that right?
Speaker 1:Well, I mean, the argument against reading my con fist. That is really badly written and boring. Yes, is really badly written and boring. Yes, it is badly written and boring.
Speaker 2:But there are narrative parts of it that are interesting, like when he's not expounding his pseudo philosophy, when he's like discussing like the days of struggle of the Nazi party or whatever. That stuff is kind of interesting. Yeah, to hear him talk about what led up to the, the putsch, or whatever I mean anyway. So it's just like, uh, I've also read joseph goebbels's diaries and I've read anse rohm's diaries and it's all incredibly interesting because, like knowing what the worst people in history were thinking and why they did what they did, actually I think is important.
Speaker 3:It's a big part of understanding why things happened, why things might happen a different way, how we can affect these things and, ultimately, to break free of this cul-de-sac in which we're forced between either LARPing or else nihilism.
Speaker 1:cul-de-sac in which we're forced between either LARPing or else nihilism. Well, and it's also, if we're to bring this back to the text, which we should do it's also important, if we're speaking about self-consciousness, to see what patterns of thoughts, of emotions, of spiritual flows, spiritual leanings, emotional strings that you can find in those texts that resonate with you and where the danger therein lies. It's an important part of growing as a person in self-consciousness, yeah, to identify the darkness within and really struggle with it absolutely yeah, okay, before anyone calls me out, no, I haven't read all 24 volumes of goblins's diaries.
Speaker 2:I've read bits and pieces here and there I have one collected like selected, uh, the best of goblins collation of some of his diaries anyway. So let's uh get back to the text then. Uh, are we on?
Speaker 1:secondly, we are. It is a mistake to think is no, we're on, we're on.
Speaker 2:Secondly, oh, okay. Secondly, hegel thought that self-consciousness is always a matter of locating ourselves in a kind of social space of I and we. Saying I or saying we is just speaking from one of two sides of the same dialectical coin. In many cases we seems to add up to lots of instances of I think or I do, but in its most fundamental sense we is just as basic as I. Each individual self-consciousness is fundamentally social. The generality of we manifests itself in the individual acts of each of us, but we is itself nothing apart from the individual acts of singular flesh and blood agents. When I know what it is that I am doing, I am also aware that what I am doing is, so to speak, the way we do it.
Speaker 3:This is such a beautifully encapsulated and truncated I mean, it's like many, many pages that I think a lot of people get tripped up on this distinction between the universal and the particular, and how one set of rules, laws, whatever norms, can be right in one sense and wrong in the other sense, and yet both are equally dependent upon each other. And so, to me, this is the fundamental flaw with liberalism in the long run. To me, this is the fundamental flaw with liberalism in the long run. In the early stages, in the initial impulses of liberalism, it's the loosing, the setting free of the I of the individual, which is a necessary thing.
Speaker 3:The long-term result of it, though, is the lack of recognition of the other individuals, uh, and thus of the social, and that's how, uh, you know like, liberalism can be uh, in in this stage in history, is eating itself, because the sum total of of a liberal conception of emancipation is absolute freedom from coercion, freedom from responsibility, freedom from everything. And uh, freedom from responsibility, freedom from everything, and we should just say it's an impossibility. So there is always a social, there is always an individual. Those are always mediated, there is always universal, and there's always a particular mediated between the two the recognition of this and the trying to grasp this mediation, this process is, whether we know it or not, that's what we're all doing.
Speaker 1:Yes, another school of philosophy that is brought out of this specific paragraph. Previously I talked a bit about how psychoanalysis came out of Feuerbach. Through that idea of self-consciousness, this relation between I and thou, between I and we, is something that Jewish philosophy picked up during the Weimar years, and in both Germany and France particularly. I'm thinking about Martin Buber and Immanuel.
Speaker 1:Marx, oh right right the I and the I. Here I completely agree with what is said here. I think that for Hegel the only way and as I read Hegel that the I and thou is the relationship of recognition. There is the only way that we can come into contact with the Geist, that our reflection and reciprocity with other persons and our recognition of that dependency and how our subject is constituted upon dependency of ourselves and of others and the structures that we together build, is the way in which we recognize the movement of history. And through recognizing our own part as agents in history and in the world we can also come to know the Geist God. So what he's claiming here on a metaphysical level is as well, that because Hegel was a Christian, when he's speaking about the Geist he's speaking about the Holy Spirit that the only way to know God is through another person I'm thinking about Victor Hugo.
Speaker 3:To love another person is to see the face of God. Yeah, exactly, well, right, and like. I know that you know this, I know that everyone here knows this, but just in case anybody doesn't know this, for Hegel, the Holy Spirit is not just something that happens to you, that God is not just a disembodied out there entity. That Victor Hugo quote is very important. The recognition, the I don't want to call it the inaction, but the utilization, whatever. The Communion, the communion with the divine is an intentional act of the human intellect and it doesn't only happen in moments of worship, although that's a maybe the purest way, but like when maestro recard talks about the necessity of detachment from the, from the world, in order to get into a place where you're the most capable of receiving this direct communion with divinity.
Speaker 1:That is not to say that unless you are meditating and praying, fasting, whatever that, you're not doing so You're always doing so, exactly You're always doing so Exactly, and we are doing so at our purest form and this Master Eckhart would agree upon when we are doing so together with others. That's the whole point of the communion in the Catholic Church, or the sign of the cross, union in the Catholic church, or the sign of the cross, like one of these rituals that many people do but do not know what they're mean. It's about the horizontal integration between God and you and between people who live now, have lived and lived in the future. It's horizontal and it's horizontal. It's horizontal. And what's the name in English? Vertical, vertical, vertical, exactly.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I wish that people could see Mir doing the sign of the cross while explaining it, just because I feel like that's such a helpful visual guide, in the same way that I'm always like trying to explain the circles Loopty loops. Well, yeah, in the beginning is now and ever shall be yeah, in matthew 18, 20, you know it's when two or more are gathered in my name. I'm there among you, it's.
Speaker 3:That's quite literally the point yes there's no such thing as a purely only individual, either life I mean physical life or spiritual life. Even the desert mystics, even the early church fathers, there's always this eventuality of coming back into the fold.
Speaker 1:Exactly, and the symbol and the reality of that meeting with the other and meeting with God, of coming back into the fold, is the breaking of bread and the drinking of wine. But it's also a physical communion where different people in a concrete congregation eat the same bread physical bread and then also are sharing in that act with all the people that have done that in history and will ever do so right, that's the actual purpose of the mass.
Speaker 3:we forget that it's like. This is what you're supposed to do. It's a holy day of obligation. Why there are holy days of obligation. Why is that? I mean, I guess this is not a theological discussion exactly, but every philosophical and political discussion is also a theological discussion.
Speaker 2:Especially if it's Hegel, especially if it's Hegel.
Speaker 3:Yeah, especially if it's Hegel Also. I really like this next paragraph is also kind of a truncated way of basically recapitulating what we already just said.
Speaker 2:Let me read it real quick and then if we need to add anything else to it, we can. Otherwise we could just move on. It is a mistake to think that one side of the coin is more important. I is not merely a point without further content, absorbed completely within a social space, nor is we, the social space, merely the addition of lots of individual I's. Without practitioners, there is no practice. Without the practice, there are no practitioners. This is sometimes hard to see. Often the I tries to separate itself from the we and rebel against it. Think of existentialism. Sometimes the I tries to separate itself from the we and rebel against it. Think of existentialism. Sometimes the I tries to absorb itself fully into the we. Think of what totalitarians dream about. Sometimes the I tries to stage, manage the recognition it seeks from the we by pretending to be what it isn't. Think of con artists. All of these deficient forms of I and we make their various appearances in history.
Speaker 3:I just really like that. Yeah, I also in that first sentence I also wanted to say, or as Lennon says, the party is more than just the sum total of its parts. It's a complex sum.
Speaker 2:Do you want me to?
Speaker 3:keep reading. I don't really have anything further to add to that.
Speaker 2:Yeah, we kind of preempted the discussion of that paragraph. I think it's cool, though, yeah, yeah. Third, for humans, just as with any species, there are ways in which things can go better or worse for individuals within the species. Trees without the right soil do not flourish as the trees they could be. Wolves without the right environment cannot reign. Environmental range cannot become the wolves that they could be, cannot reign environmental range cannot become the wolves that they could be.
Speaker 2:Similarly, self-conscious humans build familial, social, cultural and political environments that make it possible to become new, different and better versions of ourselves. But what we can make of ourselves depends on what we are. In history, your great-great-grandparents never dreamed of being computer coders. Medieval villages did not aspire to become mid-level managers in global trash collecting firms. Who I am is always bound up with what we do, but it is a mistake to take our individual acts simply as singular applications of something like general rules. It is better to say that we exemplify, in better or worse ways, what it is for us to really be us, for example, in friendship, chess playing, vegetable chopping or citizenship. The generality of practice sets the terms in which I can flourish as any one of these things, yet it is I who set the way in which I exemplify the practice, and we all participate in seeing how well the two I and we converge and diverge.
Speaker 1:What I think is the main point here. This long paragraph really deals with one thing. One point is human flourishing and the other point is that human flourishing is historically bound, and those are two different points. Sure, I would also say that within the first notion of human flourishing is preconceived an ethic. What he's speaking about there is virtue ethics, or virtue ethics as we understand it, contemporary.
Speaker 1:I'm thinking about this notion that a human flourishing can occur and is somehow bounded up in human nature, that there are better or worse ways of being a human. It's basically the argument that Alistair MacIntyre or Martha Nussbaum have been making for many, many years. Yes, and the second point is that different societies allow different statues to flourish and repress others. And within Catholic catechesis there is this idea that most sins are indeed virtues but that have taken up a too large part of your life, a disordered virtue, large part of your life, a disordered virtue. And the Enlightenment's idea of individuality and expressing yourself is a virtue, also in the classical sense of the word. But when that virtue, when that virtue isn't contained within a functioning ecosystem of other virtues or take up too much space, it becomes almost like a cancer.
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah, I mean to put it really simply without parameters, without constraints, social constraints. Really simply, um, without parameters, without constraints, social constraints, freedom is, uh. Absolute freedom in that sense is, uh is anything, but it's actually the constraints which enable the freedom in the first place and also, um, this paragraph makes made just made me think about, uh.
Speaker 3:When we talk about uh, what it means for for something to be a social construct. It's like that's true of everything. Yes, things are social constructs, whether they're good or bad social constructs, and whether they should be socially deconstructed and then reconstructed or whatever. That's a discussion worth having. But saying something is a social construct doesn't really say anything other than I kind of, but I don't really understand what is is.
Speaker 1:Yes, like yeah, everything is a social construct. But in order to construct something, you have to build it out of something. Exactly right and like our society today. Whether you call it capitalism or modernity, I think those are two radically different ways and they are radically different things who are equally bad.
Speaker 2:So, like social constructs become material, force because they are ideas that have been seized upon by the masses, forced because they are ideas that have been seized upon by the masses well, yes, and they are constructed of living realities, usually social or biological right.
Speaker 1:If a social construction doesn't have a biological imperative or a social or economical foundation to stand on, it would just be a house falling down from an airplane and it would smash into the ground.
Speaker 2:It needs a foundation yeah, right, okay, yeah, um. Third, as self-conscious social individuals, we reshape our lives, giving new meanings to old things, from sex and food to complicated table manners, so that we may acquire new sets of habits, round off the contours of our animal life in surprising ways, settle down and then move on. This is rarely an entirely peaceful process. We exist as individuals with social identities in the social spaces that we mutually institute and keep in place. We're just going over what we just said, right? Some of those social relations are based on raw force, subjection and humiliation, such as relations between masters and slaves. Warfare is common. History, hegel said, looks like a vast slaughter bench on which the lives and happiness of millions have been sacrificed.
Speaker 1:I have written in the margins here. It's not always peaceful. That's the understatement of the year Right.
Speaker 2:Not always peaceful.
Speaker 3:Well, I mean, this is a when we say revolutions are the locomotives of history.
Speaker 1:This is another way of saying it's not always peaceful yeah, I mean, I think here you can really see his, the author's, political, political leanings, like he, yeah he, he really downplays the struggle in hegel, like here yeah, it's not always peaceful, but sometimes we can perhaps come together and figure this stuff, but no, never, it is always a struggle it is always a struggle although I do think there's something to say about uh, although I do think there's something to say about trying to hope for it to be peaceful.
Speaker 3:Oh, yeah, but also to expect and to be prepared for it to not be.
Speaker 1:And I mean things can be extremely not peaceful but not physically violent, like anyone who has ever been to a party meeting or a conference or a board meeting or anything like that. That's not peaceful. People are at each other's throats, but usually they don't kill each other.
Speaker 3:Usually they don't, that's right.
Speaker 2:I would say that life under capitalism is extremely not peaceful, but not necessarily physically violent. There's the violence of poverty and exploitation. That is just inherent in the system, is absolutely not peaceful. That is just inherent in the system is absolutely not peaceful. You know, being threatened with starvation or being or losing your health care for switching jobs or trying to switch jobs and not being able to, is certainly not peaceful, right? So like, yeah, I absolutely, I understand, I agree with what you're saying and in fact that's I don't know if you listened to the episode yet or not, but when we talked about, like, if it's possible to be a Christian and a Marxist, I guess we did that one about a couple of weeks ago the author's conclusion who was? Do you remember the author's name? Jason?
Speaker 1:I've read that article. Yeah, I've read that article. Yeah anyway.
Speaker 2:His conclusion was is that capitalism is inherently unchristian because it is a state of constant war of man against man war of all against all war of all against all. Right, exactly. So, yeah, I have more than a few books to pick with that article.
Speaker 1:War of Olgainstall right, yeah, that's exactly so. Yeah, okay, I have more than a few books to pick with that article, but the main point stands. I do not know if that means what he thinks it means.
Speaker 2:With what means, what he thinks it means Well like.
Speaker 1:there is a great tradition within Christianity of believing that, yeah, capitalism sucks, but so does every other system, and this world is laid under sin and there's really no way around it. That is a valid reading of the Christian tradition. Sure, that doesn't mean that you're not obligated to try to change it, but it doesn't necessarily lead to the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism or even the belief that exploitative relationships are possible to overcome in this world.
Speaker 2:that exploitative relationships are possible to overcome in this world. Well, I don't even think that the idea of implementing socialism 100% thinks that it means that all exploitative relationships and all strife will be done away with. It's just working towards communism. Is the point of socialism right? And communism is a thing that takes what generations to implement. If you read is, is one reading of marx right to walk away like?
Speaker 1:impatient about it. It he thought that we might need a couple of months of dictatorship, but not longer, because then the institutions would ostrify and we would have what happened in Russia. So that's a major theme in the socialist tradition that for Marx it was a couple of months, for Lenin it was a couple of that. For Marx it was a couple of months, for Lenin it was a couple of years. For Stalin it was a couple of decades. The time span seems to expand.
Speaker 2:Right, okay, next paragraph.
Speaker 3:We're not going to get through all this, we're getting close to halfway through yeah, well, we should stop at halfway through.
Speaker 2:Yeah, because I was supposed to be done by around three ish, but we, uh, we had some technical difficulties, one of them being that I forgot we were starting at one. Uh, I was supposed to give us two hours to be able to do this, but instead I screwed it up. Anyway, as the way in which the species self-conscious life interprets and reinterprets itself Okay, sorry, starting over as the way in which the species self-conscious life interprets and reinterprets itself history seems a bit depressing at first. There's another understatement of the century, understation, understatement of the millennia. Entire civilization and ways of life come to be and pass away. Old ways of living vanish. Nothing seems stable.
Speaker 2:Hegel's daring philosophical approach, philosophical proposal insisted that we see this procession as manifesting the ways in which each individual form of human social life generates tensions and strains within itself. When these tensions become so great that such a way of living finally makes no sense to the participants, life rapidly becomes uninhabitable. Once it becomes uninhabitable, it breaks down, falls apart and eventually gives way to another form of life. The new form of life emerges as the people living in the cultural rubble of the breakdown pick up the pieces of what is still working, discard the parts that no longer work and fashion something new out of the breakdown. They build a society that develops itself until its own internal strains and stresses lead it into breakdown, after which a new form of life emerges out of it. All told, this aspect of history constitutes the changing shape of self-conscious life itself.
Speaker 2:Hegel chose the German term Geist, rendered as mind or spirit, depending on the translator, to capture that. Depending on the translator, it should be both right. I think yeah, on the translator to capture that. Depending on the translator, it should be both right. I think, um, yeah. As geist moves through history, it takes on different shapes as it imagines itself in different ways, and thus, for those thinking about it, a moving target, the story of breakdown and renewal. In hegel's dialectic of history and also geist, is god yeah like he guy you know is God yeah.
Speaker 1:Like he, he, he, he forget this all the time.
Speaker 2:Geist is God, geist is mind, geist is spirit. Right Anyway.
Speaker 3:So for Hegel, these are all the same thing.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yes, um. So this paragraph here has a sort of like um, decadence theory, decadence and breakdown theory sort of understanding of the world, which I don't think is entirely incorrect.
Speaker 1:No.
Speaker 2:But he puts this caveat here like, things don't eventually just break down and become a new way of life on their own all the time. Sometimes, you know, it is possible for humans to take agency and start to change the society as the breakdown is happening, but it takes. He is absolutely correct in stating that it takes the old way of being as being completely untenable for that to be done. Right. So once the old way becomes unbearable and things have gotten so far along in the breakdown, in this process of like social cannibalism, like what we're living through right now, who knows how much longer this will last. It could last for several decades, but we're in a process of like the cannibalization of the parts of our society that make it livable or habitable. Right. So eventually there comes a breaking point, and if there were institutions of conscious revolutionaries, that breaking point could be inserted by the will of the actors that are existing through it, right, right.
Speaker 3:It's like, as Lennon said, for a revolution to take place, it's usually insufficient for the lower classes to not want to live in the old way. It is also necessary that the upper classes should be unable to live in the old way.
Speaker 2:Yes, that is essentially what I was trying to say. My subconscious knew that was Lennon.
Speaker 1:My biggest question to this is yes, we know that this was true historically. I'm thinking about Walter Benjamin's the Angel of History, the Rubble Right. Today, the state apparatuses have means of their disposal, both in social and military and economical technologies that were unfathomable just a generation ago.
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 1:What I sometimes fear is that they could hang on to a decaying corpse forever with these technologies.
Speaker 2:Well, I agree, I think that they could hang on to the decaying corpse, for, I mean, I somewhat agree for a very, very, very long time. Well, I don't know.
Speaker 1:Because we are dealing with the end of humanity in the rates of climate development, nuclear war, so on and so forth. Sure, sure.
Speaker 2:Like it's easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.
Speaker 3:Yeah. And the reason why this all might result in the common ruin of the contending classes.
Speaker 2:Yeah, exactly yeah, that's always the caveat that I interject when we're talking about stuff like this. But should we oh go ahead? Sorry From the ruin of the contending classes? You know? I mean when we talk about the end of the world, it is very unlikely that it will be the end of humanity so in the ruins of the contending classes, there's always hope.
Speaker 3:Yeah, that's not a bad place to call.
Speaker 2:Uh, to call an end to it.
Speaker 3:Yeah, because we're at 56 minutes on this recording and then I think we've got another 15 or 20 before that we are at an hour and 20 total, although there's like a really you know good 10 minutes or 15 minutes of just me and I waiting for you to come back yeah, okay, so 25 minutes more than when you do cups, yeah yeah, so we'll be lucky if this ends up being like 45 or 50 minutes long uh.
Speaker 2:So this is a perfect place to stop it too, because it's where the next big capital letter starts.
Speaker 1:So I think that's the second half of the uh yeah, the article another essay that I would like to recommend it is a bit longer uh is susan brockmore's's Hegel and Haiti oh yeah, I actually okay.
Speaker 2:So I read a book called I think it's called the Half has Never Been Told. It's about the American slave system and how, basically, how integral southern slavery was to the American economy and how, essentially, getting rid of slavery set back cotton production for almost for like 50 years. Cotton was not as effectively and efficiently harvested until the 1920s when an automatic cotton harvester was invented. So by removing slavery, the world cotton production shifted from the United States being the biggest and best provider to it being between the United States and India and several other places. Right, so that was what the book was about, and in it she talks about the utter indifference of white Europeans and Americans to the plight of the slaves, and then she mentions Hegel as being one of these. No, no, no, that mentions Hegel as being one of these people that writes about revolution but didn't even take the Haitian revolution into consideration. And I was like and I was assigned this book. I know, I know I was assigned this book. And then I went and I was like this is incorrect, because I know that the master slave dialectic in Hegel is directly referencing what happens in Haiti. So I went and I read the Susan Buck Morse article. And then I, you know, I was only supposed to write a one page like review of this book but I ended up writing like a three page refutation of the book and I submitted it. I submitted the one page review and then I submitted my three page refutation of it and then he made me get up and argue my case in front of the class because he liked it so much.
Speaker 2:But yeah, anyway, so like, yeah, there's this idea, and you look in the book where she quotes Susan Buckmore's and I was like I know, susan Buckmore's doesn't say that, doesn't say that. So I went back and I looked and I said it is assumed in many instances that Hegel's later negative view of Africans he didn't say black people in general, he said Africans as being non-historic peoples because of their domination by, you know, european colonials means that he was indifferent on Haiti. But and then you know, but the author of that book stopped before the but you know, anyway, it was really. But yeah, I did read that article and it's very good, that is all to say. It's very good and yes, it would be worth reading. I'm going to stop this recording so it can upload to the server. Thank you.