Ideas - The philosophy behind why humans are so self-conscious

Episode Date: May 28, 2025

For centuries, Western philosophers have contemplated the question: “Who am I?” To get to the answer, 19th-century German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel suggests, start by replacing the “I” with “we.” His philosophy looks at why we should care what others think of us because people’s perspectives play a huge part in how we see ourselves and how we look at the world. His theory is that traits and habits from the people around us impact what we see in ourselves.

At Desjardins Insurance, we know that when you're a building contractor, your company's foundation needs to be strong. That's why our agents go the extra mile to understand your business and provide tailored solutions for all its unique needs. You put your heart into your company, so we put our heart into making sure it's protected. Get insurance that's really big on care. Find an agent today at Desjardins.com slash business coverage. This is a CBC Podcast. Hi there, I'm Nala Ayaad. Before we get into today's show, I'd like to ask you for a favor.

If you enjoy ideas, please hit the follow button on whatever app you're using. We've got some fascinating conversations coming up that you won't want to miss. And if you already follow the show, perhaps you can also leave us a rating and a review. It goes a long way to helping ideas reach more listeners like you. Okay, now on to today's show. It is a natural idea that in philosophy, before we come to deal with the thing itself, namely with the actual cognition of what in truth is, it is necessary first to come to the point about cognition, which is regarded as the instrument by which we take possession of the absolute or as the medium through which we take possession of the absolute

or as the medium through which we catch sight of it. It's been said that the challenge in reading Hegel is that we can understand what he says overall, but not his individual sentences. The concern seems justified on the one hand that there may be various kinds of cognition, by a wrong choice among them, and on the other hand, that sin which nature and limits, we shall get hold of clouds of error instead of the heaven of truth. Hegel's sentences run into each other,

creating a wall of words that feels impenetrable, not only to ordinary readers, but even to scholars. What is more, this concern must surely turn into the conviction. The whole enterprise of securing for consciousness, which is in itself through cognition, is absurd in its concept. Cognition and the absolute, there lies a boundary that completely divides them. The excerpts you're hearing, as read by Ideas producer Nahid Mustafa, are from Hegel's most famous work,

The Phenomenology of Spirit. It's not immediately clear what the book is even about. For if cognition is the instrument of gaining possession of the absolute essence, it's obvious that the application of an instrument to a thing, leave it as it is for itself, but rather affects a forming and alteration of our activity, but a sort of passive medium through which the light of truth reaches us, then again we do not receive the truth as it is in itself, but only as it is through and in this medium. But not everyone thinks Hegel's work is hopelessly impenetrable.

My name is Shannon Hoff and I'm associate professor of philosophy at Memorial University in St. John's, Newfoundland. I'm also an amateur musician and a parent and yeah. And Hegel is your friend. And Hegel is my friend. Philosopher Shannon Hoff wants to convince us that while Hegel's language may be difficult to understand, his thinking is useful in navigating our tumultuous times. We're calling this episode, Everyday Hegel. And by the way, throughout this episode, you'll also hear Hoff's music, which she uses as a way to think about philosophy. Serendipity to simply walk out on the street, hear the birds all cheering for you and the

sun so fondly keeping you warm. Simply walk out on the street, hear the leaves rustling their greetings and the sun so fondly keeping you warm. Serendipity, serendipity, the world is my perspective, I feel that it's fair to say that when we think accessible thinker, we don't think Hegel, but you disagree. Can you tell me about why you disagree with that potentially? Well, I think actually Hegel is very inaccessible. So it's not that I disagree, it's that I want to make him accessible.

I think that it's really worthwhile to make this material accessible. I think that the ideas that he has are incredibly powerful and transformative, and I don't think they should get lost for people who don't have the capacity to interpret them. So one of the passions that motivates me is to make it accessible when it's not. And to generally do that for philosophy as such, you know, I teach obviously a lot of philosophy classes, and most of the students aren't majors, you know, they have no idea that philosophy could possibly be interesting, and I want to make it available to them. You know, I want to make it available to non-experts. Why do you think that is this idea that philosophy, capital P, is something that most of us don't

need to interact with or don't need to be concerned about despite the fact that we all do have a relationship with philosophy as we move through life? Yeah, I think it might have to do somewhat with a sort of waning sense of the significance of the humanities in general. Where we grapple with who we are, what reality is, what our relationships with other people are, how best to describe these things. You know, that kind of reflection isn't quite accessible to us except for maybe within the university. And I think that the fact of the matter is that once we try to make philosophy accessible

or philosophy sort of known in its capacity to really help us think through our own lives and our relationships and our experience and our history and our families and our relationship to ourselves, it can really be explosive. I forgot the original question. Well, the original question being that we sort of, you know, as a kind of everyday part of our lives, feel sort of alienated from this idea of philosophy writ large. And yet it is something that we do think about, even if we don't call it that. I mean, this idea of also making it accessible, do you think there's a sense possibly that making things accessible makes them pedestrian? And

then somehow it's kind of lost its its its glamour and luster because You know the great masses are also participating Yeah, I think there is a tendency to think that way and one of them one of the important things that I think one of the things that I think is important is to to get at the kernel of a philosophical insight and Give people a connection to it through their own experience, by looking at something in their own experience and then saying how that philosophical idea speaks to that thing inside of their experience, and then giving them the connection to the idea. And so the entry point is the accessible thing, and then once they have the connection to the idea, they can see the idea in its profundity

and its complexity. So it's not the case that I think any of the profundity is necessarily lost. To make a connection with someone requires simplicity. But once you have that connection, you can do a lot of complex and interesting things with it. You can show them, I mean, they finally, in a sense, have an entryway into the idea. And then you can play with that idea and talk more about it. For that reason, the differences between estrangement and coming to be self-equal

are likewise only this movement of self-sublation. For while what is self-equal, which is supposed simply to estrange itself, or to become its opposite, is itself an abstraction, or is already itself the estranged. Its estranging is in that way thereby a sublation of what it is, and is therefore the sublation of its estrangement." And so just to go back to something you said right at the start, you know, Hegel is a powerful thinker but an inaccessible thinker. So give me the elevator pitch. Why is Hegel a good contemporary companion?

Well, one of the things that Hegel does is he's what we call a systematic philosopher. So he gives, you know, he wants to talk about everything. He wants to talk about history, he wants to talk about reason, he wants to talk about emotion, he wants to talk about science, he wants to talk about art, religion. And the fact is that when you do that, so we, you know, contemporary thinkers might look at that and say, he thinks he can know everything, right? He's this sort of absolutist who's closing the book on all of reality and saying, I got it, here it is, right? But I think a lost and more productive way of thinking about it is that you kind of have

a check. You know, if you go down one avenue, let's say, what is science, or you go down another avenue and say, what is reason? Hegel provides other avenues. So he sort of puts the brakes on any sort of overemphasis on any particular piece. So we are observers of the world, but we're also, which is something he discusses in, for instance, the phenomenology of spirit in the section of called consciousness. But we're also beings who have a relationship to ourselves, and we need to explore what

that means and maybe what kind of limits it puts on our conception of ourselves as observers of the world, right? So systematic philosophy, in a sense, lets you know what know in what ways area A is connected to area B, right? And gives a kind of whole picture so that you don't risk overemphasizing any particular piece. The other thing I guess that Hegel provides for thinking about contemporary life or the reason I think that he's a powerful contemporary thinker or a powerful thinker for

the contemporary situation is Is largely his emphasis on interpersonal relations, you know He is a thinker of human beings as with each other And what does it mean to be together and what are the different dimensions of together being right? One thing is that, you know, who we are and how we look at the world, how we look at ourselves is something that's forged in some sense by other people, right? So the way that another person takes me up, for instance, a parent, right, it's the most dramatic example, in a way, they are implanting

their perspective into mine. The way that another person values me or doesn't value me has an impact on how I see myself. So one of the things that Hegel does so powerfully is he talks about the permeability of perspectives to each other. Other people are inside of us, you know. The way they look at us, what they count, what they count as important, that's shaping what we count as important, how we look at ourselves, how we look at reality. And so, you know, Hegel's basic idea is that the human being is originally interpersonal. You know, self-consciousness doesn't exist except with other self-consciousnesses, is

how he puts it. And what that also means is that we're determinate, you know, we bear the traits and the habits and the orientation of the specific people that are around us at any given time. And those people are going to be families, they're going to be cultures, they're going to be linguistic communities, they're going to be traditions, they're going to be faith traditions, they're going to be groups. And so in all these different ways, you know, who we are is super-determinant, super-historically situated. And that's the only way we actually emerge as humans. And we're in some sense using the determinate resources at our disposal to get any view

of a larger reality, let's say, other cultures, other humans, other families, other kinds of people that we're not familiar with. And so we have to go through that determinacy in order to get this bigger picture, let's say, if we want to think about, well, who are humans in general? Or how should I relate to this unfamiliar human community? We have to go through the language we speak, go through the habits we have, the emotional orientation to the world we may be inherited from our parents, etc. So I think that he puts thinking in its place almost by saying, hey, you're thinking from

a particular situation, a particular interpersonal group, a particular culture. Take that seriously. How does that change your thinking? How does it shape it? So I mean, I think these are eternal truths, right, about the human situation. And bringing them to bear on our contemporary situation with our contemporary challenges, particularly the social challenges, is really productive. It's really, I think it's really helpful for thinking through our contemporary challenges. And I mean, there are other ways to go, other thinkers to use and so

on, but this happens to be the one that I happen to find. So as the non-expert in this conversation, the one who is talking to you because I also want to learn. What you've just outlined on the usefulness of Hegel sounds almost like a kind of therapeutic intervention in this kind of rugged individualism that a lot of us kind of grew up with, this idea that you make it on your own, like the self-made man, you succeed or fail by your own efforts. Am I creating a kind of presentist model of Hegel?

Is that the danger of what I'm doing? Or how do you feel about that sort of outlining of his position with this kind of thing that we really, really value in sort of contemporary capitalism, which is we're all individuals striving individually. I think you've nailed it. That is probably one of the most significant pieces of his philosophy, which makes him, I think, always a little bit wary of the so-called modern

revolution, right? This discovery of subjectivity, this, I mean, not that it wasn't discovered beforehand, but it really gets its articulation in the modern era, right? What is it to be an I? What is it to be free? And so Hegel really, clearly, like, no one would really reject, no one who inherits that history could really, I think, honestly say, I'll give that up, you know, my eyeness isn't significant, I don't need to be free, I don't need to be treated as an equal under the law, etc. So he takes all that and takes it

seriously and values it, but he's just critical of the idea that that's all, right? That we could possibly be construed as these abstract eyes. And he, like many other thinkers in the largely phenomenological tradition, tries to tease out the different aspects of human existence. And one of the most significant supplements he would like to add to the eye is just this awareness that it's from somewhere, it is somewhere, it's situated somewhere, it's in relation with other beings, it's forged in the perspectives of other people. And we have to care, if we care about the eye, right, which we purportedly do, we have

to care about its relations, we have to care about its world, we have to care about its materiality. The I comes from free activity, as Hegel says, is thingly. It's worldly. Like whenever you're doing something, you're interacting with stuff. You're interacting with nature. You're interacting with being. It's not like the I is this abstract mind, right?

The I is a material being. And we don't support the I. We don't support the I in its abstraction, in its freedom. If we don't take care of its relations, which are relations with the personal and the non-personal world, right? The natural, the material, the interpersonal, the social, the cultural, the familial, the historical. So Hegel's just, you know, the familial, the historical. So Hegel's just not reductive, right? An I is not itself.

The I is not I. I is not equal to I, right? Things are much more complicated than that. And modern individualism is reductive. And it's not that its goal is bad, it's not that, you know, Hegel's as interested in supporting the eye. But you don't support the eye if you deny the conditions in which it's forged. So Hegel's eye is more of an eye plus plus. Yeah.

You've got a book coming out, How to Read Hegel Now. What work is the now doing? What are you seeing specifically around you in the work that you're doing and the relationships that you have that you think Hegel can offer something or can offer some thinking on? What's the now part of this? Right. I've always been interested in issues of justice and exclusion and oppression due to my own personal history, perhaps. And so I think that Hegel has a lot of resources for speaking to issues of oppression and exclusion

and justice and injustice. And so in the book, I've taken four ideas in Hegel, the idea of recognition, the idea of ethical life, the idea of conscience, and the idea of objective spirit or materiality in general. And I think that in each of those ideas, there are points of connection with contemporary people who are talking about political problems. So the now is those contemporary figures and the contemporary articulation of those problems. So with the idea of recognition, for instance, I talk about France Vennon and the issue of racist colonialism.

And also I talk about Jessica Benjamin and the issue of misrecognition as it occurs in terms of a sexist kind of inheritance, a sexist history. So, and then with regard to the other ideas, I turn also to different theorists of colonialism, theorists of capitalism, theorists of disability and ableism, you know, more or less briefly and more or less in a kind of stance of learning sometimes. But the thing is that my interest is in using Hegel. Like I'm not worshipping the guy, right? I mean, sure, I take him to be a pal.

But I think that there are powerful ideas here. And I don't think that they should get lost just because he himself maybe wasn't alive to some of those issues. So my interest is to mobilize them because I care about the contemporary problems, not because I care in particular about Hegel. And so the now is, you know, the problems that we might encounter in the domains of sexism, racism, colonialism, capitalism, ableism. I have a body I don't know what it knows I see it sharing Secrets with objects privately In their own tongue In their own tongue And other people One of the things I found interesting in your own background is the way that you grew up. And looking at Hegel, you know,

one of the things that occurs to me is that when we live in a community or we live in a society anywhere really where there's a lot of homogeneity in thinking, even if there's a spectrum, that the idea that one must somehow get outside of that, can you talk about, because that's a very convoluted question I just asked you, but can you talk about your own upbringing and why you think that Hegel had something to offer you as a way potentially out of that, if that's what you were looking for? Right. Yeah.

I was brought up in a very homogeneous environment, basically a Dutch Christian Reformed community. So a lot of Dutch people came to settle in southern Ontario and they believe that education is essentially religious, no matter what kind of education it is. And so they were very insistent on setting up their religious schools and religious universities and so on. And so I were very insistent on setting up their religious schools and religious universities and so on. And so I went through that, I grew up in that community. And one of the challenging things at that point was their refusal to allow women to

fill positions of authority in the church. And it always struck me as so problematic because, you know, I was, you know, sort of an intellectual, an artist at a young age, and it seemed just absolute quackery that, you know, the boys who were fooling around around me were going to be, and me who was sort of serious about things, you know, the boys who were fooling around around me were going to be, and me who was sort of serious about things, you know, they were going to be in charge when we grew up, you know. So my earliest fantasy was the feminist fantasy of being a pastor, you know, like just doing

the thing that I was not strictly speaking sanctioned to do inside of that community. And I was really attentive to, I guess just really uncomfortable with the various exclusions that seemed operative in that community. Just as someone who was excluded from it myself, it sort of made me, in some sense, it made me more alive to other forms of exclusion. You know, I was really sort of disturbed by the anti-gay kind of sentiment that was operative and circulating, and I did some early things in my life that were in opposition to that. And in that context. And it's obviously an extremely white community because it's Dutch. And there

was just kind of a, I guess I was just so, it just seems so intellectually dishonest, right? You know, you can pretend that this is all of reality, but it's not. Like like what do you do about everything that's outside? Right? How do you do you just plug your ears and stop up your eyes and like pretend it doesn't exist? So it just seemed, it seemed like there, it seems to me that there are two ways of being a community, you know, there, there's a defensive and putting up the wall sort of way. And there's a like, clearly, we mean something to each other. These practices and institutions and the history that we have together is meaningful. Can we live this determinacy in a way that is open, open to in conversation with what is outside of it? You know, and

I didn't particularly think that the community was living, I thought the community was living the first way and it could be living in the second way. The interesting thing about Hegel is that, you know, he really articulates the fact that you're going to have determinate communities, right? Do you live them as walls or do you live them as doors, right? Do you live that determinacy in a way that's honest about the determinacy of other cultures and communities? Or do you live in a way that's dishonest about that? So yeah, just the, you know, there's a lot of good that came to me from being a part of that community. But there was a serious dissatisfaction and a sense of the injustice that the community was capable of that also struck me as I was growing up.

You're listening to Everyday Hegel on Ideas with producer Nahid Mustafa. Ideas is a podcast and a broadcast heard on CBC Radio 1 in Canada, on US Public Radio, across North America, on SiriusXM, in Australia, on ABC Radio National and around the world at cbc.ca slash ideas. Find us on the CBC News app and wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Nala Ayaid. Controlling. Controlling Man. At Desjardins Insurance, we know that when you're a building contractor, your company's foundation needs to be strong.

That's why our agents go the extra mile to understand your business and provide tailored solutions for all its unique needs. You put your heart into your company, so we put our heart into making sure it's protected. Get insurance that's really big on care. Find an agent today at Desjardins.com slash business coverage. Are you thinking about spending your travel loonies here in Canada this year?

If you are, where should you go? My name is Matt Galloway, and here at The Current, we ask Canadians to reveal their favorite destinations. Tens of thousands of people weighed in. Listeners like you voted for a top 10. Spoiler alert, more than half of that list is between St. Andrews, New Brunswick and Bonneviste and Newfoundland.

So there's a pretty good chance you're heading east. You can find and follow The Current on your favorite podcast app for more. And if you head on the road, don't forget to bring us, we're pretty good company on a road trip. I have been betrayed, I have been betrayed Yet where are those who failed me? I've been let down, I've been let down Yet the only trace of it is my own shabby heart I want to shift to, just for a second, the performance part of the work that you do, the music that you make. Talk to me about the music that you make.

Yeah, this was very exciting. I've been a musician my whole life. I come from a musical family. We all had to do piano lessons. I studied classical piano for a long time. And then at a certain point, I started being in rock bands, you know, mostly in grad school. And then when I came to Toronto, I started this sort of avant-garde country band. And like the music scene in Toronto is just wonderful. I particularly like the improvised music scene. And I went

on sabbatical for the year 2023. And what I wanted to do during that sabbatical was just think about, like, just visit the question, what form should philosophy take? You know, I think that lots of us just obey the forms that are available to us. You know, we think, well, we got to write a philosophy essay, of course, it's got to look like this, because that's how it always looks. Or I got to write a write a novel. This is how people write a novel.

I mean, novelists tend to be more experimental with form, but, or, you know, I have to do a radio show. This is how radio shows are conducted, right? We just operate as though how things have been done in the past are going to be, should be the way that we do them in the future. We don't even often think about it. And so I wanted to reserve for myself the question, how do I want to do philosophy? And then I also wanted to write some music. I'd written a little bit of music, but I hadn't really done that. And I thought, what better way to try to have a nice time in my sabbatical and explore this different thing?

And then I realized that the two were actually related, right? That music was a way of supplementing philosophy or doing philosophy even, because I just kept writing songs about the things that I was thinking about philosophically. And I really love the challenge of, like I think everyone should subject themselves to the standard of clarity.

Like how am I going to express this profound idea in a clear way? And the musical form really imposes that challenge, right? Like how do you do it in an image? And how do you do it in four-four time? And how do you do it in 16, you know, lines or 12 lines of words? And so I just found myself really taking to that. And just having some versatility with music

and having some versatility with words and realizing that the two could actually combine in ways that worked. I mean, I didn't know I was going to like what I made. And I like what I made, and I like what I made. What I have is my self-query I'll take the stand What I have is my self-query What will she say? She say her shabby heart Hagle takes a holistic view of human self-consciousness, and he begins with the idea, something we've already talked a little bit about, the idea of perspective. But we haven't really broken it down. We haven't really talked about what does Hgel mean by the idea of perspective, the perspective

that each individual owns and develops. How does Hegel talk about perspective? Well, one of the things that he says, as you might imagine, he says many things about it. One of the things that he says is that perspective is real, right? So sometimes philosophers might say, well, we can't get the real object because our perspective is getting in the way and our perspective is interfering with what we see. And Hegel says, it's like you're implying there that a perspective isn't also a piece of the reality that we're trying to see, right?

So perspective is a real thing. What is it? And just even that assertion that it's a real, you know, your perspective is as real as the microphone in front of you, right? And so that's the first thing. A perspective is real. If we didn't have perspective, we wouldn't have objects, right? So it's not that the perspective gets in the way of grabbing the object or knowing the object. The perspective is the only way we have an object.

And those are really, you know, philosophically powerful points and points that, you know, are important in any kind of complex philosophical discussion of knowledge. Then he just says, again, like the rest of the phenomenological tradition, this real thing, what else can we say about it? Well, we can say that it emerges at a particular time. It has to be cultivated by other people. How it will orient itself to reality is going to be shaped by the first perspective, so to speak, that encounter it, that care for it. And, you know, it can be expanded.

It can be expanded and it's expanded mostly by other people, whether it's in a book, in a radio show, in interaction, encounter with otherness. And another thing that he says about it is why it is the way that it is, is a question in a sense that can't be exhaustively answered. Because the very means or tools by which we try to answer that question are tools that we got from specific people at a specific time, right? So the tools themselves by which we would, you know, reflect upon ourselves and who we are, are already determinate in ways that we can't comprehend.

So a perspective in some sense is not self-transparent. And that's one of the things I think that he gets across particularly well with the notion of ethical life, where he talks about the situatedness of human individuals. And so talk a little bit about that. I mean, one of the things that, you know, when you talk about perspective, especially the business that I'm in in journalism, there's a range of words that people will use that sort of maybe mean the same thing, but they're on a spectrum. So there's perspective, there's bias, there's fairness, there's judgment, there's all of

these things. But often perspective is treated as something that must be mitigated, right? And so you have one of the common refrains, the common complaints that journalism in the very sort of contemporary age is a kind of both sides-ism. You know, let's understand the thing by giving equal time to two sides.

And one of the ways that it's really been talked about, you know, in the past is around science, you know, especially around climate change. Give the climate denier, climate change denier, the same amount of time as the climate scientist, because it's all just perspective. And everyone's perspective is as valuable as another's perspective, which may not be a way that we actually live our lives. But for some reason, that became a sort of a commonality in journalism and possibly in academia as well. How do you think about that? This idea that perspective in sort of popular conversation is something to be mitigated or something to be

molded because perspective in and of itself is somehow a lack of judgment or bias. Right. Yeah, no, this is a, I mean, I think that there are a lot of interesting things to say about this issue and that it's possible to give a good answer to this question. And though it's quite a difficult issue, you know, first of all, there's the need to acknowledge the reality of perspective. And to be clear, like, Hegel doesn't really use that term perspective exactly. So it is always the case in a way that we look from somewhere and the thing upon which we look in a way shows itself to us in a way that is a pairing with our perspective upon it.

And so we can't see everything and we can't see everything in all the ways, you know, but the fact is that another person is another way of seeing, is another orientation to the world and through that other person, we can expand our perspective. So like I can't see my back, let's say, but someone else can see my back, right? And tell me about it. But there's, I think the difference, I think the criterion is this, you know, there are perspectives that are open to the reality of the perspectives of others, and there are perspectives that are closed, right? There are perspectives that take themselves to be absolute, and there are perspectives

that understand that they're not absolute, but that the only way to get to what is truer or more real is through perspective, right? So there are perspectives that in principle are committed to upholding and affirming the perspectives of others, and there are perspectives that are not. And those perspectives that are not aren't necessarily going to help very much in arriving at what is truer or more real. As it indulges in this subterfuge, what this conjecturing has in mind is the true thought that being as such is not the truth of spirit at all, and this thought straight away demolishes

such a subterfuge. The fact is, I guess, that there are ways of inhabiting the world again that take each of us to be parts of a whole, right? And that there are ways, and in some sense, are trying to get through the part that they are to develop a fuller perspective upon something and recognize the importance of other people in that project.

And there are ways of inhabiting the world that say, I'm gonna take the world and just for myself. And that kind of inhabitation of the world isn't particularly helpful in developing an account of what is true. So I think there is a criterion. Do you inhabit your piece of the world? Do you inhabit the world that you project through your perspective in a way that really is committed to figuring things out with other people who are also committed to doing that

with you? Or do you, you know, sort of greedily take what you can from that world and disavow the fact that it is also there for other people. So I think the people who are sort of working together in the faith that the other person's perspective is potentially will help them see things better and working on something together is the criterion, right? We all have to be committed in a sense to this, to the fact that we have to move through our own perspectives and the fact that we're getting a larger sense of the reality of stuff from other people.

Hegel thinks of freedom as a vital and key aspect of world making, of being able to share perspective. And I don't know if this is a direct quote or this was a paraphrase that you were using. Nothing is more common and more reductive than the idea that we have to restrict our freedom in relation to the freedom of other people. You have yourself because of the freedom of other people. What does he mean? Yeah, this is a really, I think, a wonderful little phrase he has that really criticizes or speaks to the reductive character of contemporary, more conservative construals of freedom. Everything around us is everything that we're using, everything

through which we are enacting our freedom is due to the exercise of the freedom of other people, right? All the technology in this room is human ingenuity, right? It's human beings sort of saying, I'm going to go beyond the thing that is and make something, like pursue what could be, right? And that's freedom just manifesting itself. And that again results in this phenomenon that is available to us now in the mobilization of our own freedom. So human agency is so like, human agents are just intertwined with each other, right?

Most everything that we find meaningful in our lives is due to the free agency of another person. And so it would be absolutely nonsense if you would say, I need to be protected from the freedom of other people. What would that, you know, so go dig yourself a hole in the ground I need to be protected from the freedom of other people. So go dig yourself a hole in the ground and sit in it because that's what that stance would amount to, right? The freedom of other people is manifest in material reality. And we're interacting with that reality all the time and enacting our own.

The reality of freedom is a very, very intricate and interesting reality. In fact, I just taught a course last semester, a graduate seminar, on the idea of freedom in Sartre and Merleau-Ponty and Beauvoir, these existential thinkers. I mean, you should see what they do with the idea of freedom. It's so interesting and it's so intricate and it's so rich. And freedom is not what we think it is, right? That's basically what the class was about. It's like, and if you talk about it incorrectly, if you talk about it reductively, you're going to miss all these different elements, you know, materiality, body, emotion, other people.

You know, the fact that you're inside of it before you knew what was happening. You were already freely making your life before you actively took up the project of freedom. That's a big one. You know, we're stuck with the lives we have because of freedom. So Sartre says freedom is terrifying. Freedom can make it such that the person you will become is different from the person you are now. And those two people could have totally different views about who you should be.

And that's you separated from yourself. You're separated from yourself by your freedom, right? There's so many interesting and complicated things to say about freedom. And it's a great thing to talk about. And as Hegel says, yeah, it's the thing. That's what you see. That's what history is. It's human beings being free. But not in this weird, reductive, individualist kind of self-defensive, self-protective way, right? In this intricate, interpersonal, intermaterial way. One of the interesting things is that, and the thing that the existentialists are particularly interested in thematizing, is how we evade it.

How we fail to own up to this freedom, how we fail to sort of acknowledge that at any moment I could make this different. When I talk about this with my students, I'm sort of like, you could walk up, you could stand up and leave this room. You don't have to live this way. And if you pretend that you do, you're in disavowal of your own freedom. And the other aspect that the existentialists like to focus on is the fact that when you do something in freedom, you make something determinate.

So freedom is always becoming specific, right? What's operative there is the centrality to the human drama of coming to terms with the perspectives of other people without allowing your own to be effaced. And that kind of balance is the thing that he says is logically required by who we are as perspectives, right? I wanna fly in your flight path Feel your motion, settle behind your eye Follow your fingers, track your body See the world you see, following your flight I'm going to ask you as a final question to do one more channeling of Hegel. Let's imagine Hegel gazing out over the planet and witnessing what's going on, authoritarianism, fascism, genocide, inequality of all kinds, climate change. What do you think he would say?

I think we would read a much different Hegel. So the Hegel that we read in the 19th century is not sort of aware of these things. They're not part of his bread and butter, right? They're not a part of his everyday life. And I think that the Hegel who would speak now would sound much more consonant with the people who are concerned about these issues. Because in some ways, you know, when Hegel talks about other people, at least when he's reported to talk about other cultures, we just have student

notes about that stuff for the most part. He doesn't say things that sound very nice, you know, he says things that sound racist. But so that's just an example. But I think Hegel's a smart guy, you know, he would be, and he thinks thinking is historical. So I think he would be caught up to the times. And you know, basically, these are all phenomena of not acknowledging the significance and the importance of people being attached to their communities, their sense of belonging, right? That's what genocide is a refusal of. That's what colonialism is a

refusal of, this importance of belonging, this importance of that indefinable attachment that we have to the way things hang together for us. Hegel's a materialist sort of. He's talking about how action emerges from interaction with stuff, how action gets translated into the stuff of the material world, how ideas and materiality are inextricably interwoven. And there's a critique of climate change in that model of how we interact with materiality, how materiality feeds us and feeds ideas and how ideas shape materiality. So I mean, he would probably just stick to describing what the logic of things requires. And we, as translators, would say, and this is how this model of the human being or this

model of the objective world and so on, would speak to the problems that we have, right? We'd still have to do the work of translation because he's trying to just give us the bare bones, right? And that's why I was trying to read him now, right? What does he have to say to this particular, to these particular kinds of problems? I guess in my own work, the thing that has been most, the thing that I've come to think of Hegel as most capable of speaking of is the idea of what it is like to be a cultural being, to be living inside of another culture, and to relate to and to communicate with cultures outside of one's own. And also, where, so this, and that's really construed in his conception of ethical life, like we,

that is who we are. We are cultural beings. But also how to within any given culture that there are mechanisms of critique of that culture. And one of those mechanisms is individuals are always conscious, no matter whether you want to suppress that or not, right? They're always enacting their culture in a way that is transformative. And so that whole relationship between belonging and critique, I think, is the thing that he has the most capacity, at least in terms of my own interest, to speak to. And that really is relevant for issues of colonialism, issues of relation relating to difference, issues of aggressive incursion upon other cultures, issues of Western imperialism, the way that we enact our ideals, right, let's say ideals

of freedom and equality and whatever, is always going to be, you know, determinate. It's always going to be specific to a particular world and the people in that world, they know it, right? You know, the ideals don't really mean much without their expression, without making them concrete. And Hegel in calling attention to the necessary concreteness of these ideas inside of particular world, are the ones who need to be equipped to do the actualization. So you Westerners don't need to jump in here and make your ideals real. So it's a powerful way, I think, of enacting critique in the way that Fanon does, like grappling

with this idea that these ideals, which he also cares about, freedom and equality, have always been, you know, the liberals outside of his world, the Westerners outside of his world have not taken seriously the issues of concretization, where a people, in a sense, has to be its own in the activity of making these concrete. The difficulty is figuring out how you could construct reality in terms that would express those ideals. And you could say that some pieces of the West, at least, have done a pretty poor job of making those ideals real. And the question

for us is not, you know, I mean, we figured out basically ideals at the level of conceptuality. The question for us is how to figure out the translation. Like what kind of world does this ideal require? What kind of world would actually mean freedom? And actually that reminds me that we haven't quite figured out the conceptuality of the thing. Like if we think of freedom, for instance, in this impoverished sense that we were talking about before. But the main point here, I think, is that that translation from ideal to reality is a really fraught one and it can go in so many different directions. And that's where the challenge lies.

You were listening to Everyday Hegel. This episode was produced by Naheed Mustafa. Thank you to Shannon Hop, Associate Professor of Philosophy at Memorial University in St. John's, Newfoundland. Music courtesy of Shannon Hoff. The band is called The Little Phrase. Our web producer is Lisa Ayuso. Technical producer, Danielle Dubal.

The senior producer is Nikola Lukcic. The executive producer of Ideas is Greg Kelly, and I'm Nala Ayed.