Rev Left Radio - Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit: Dialectics, Consciousness, and Freedom

Episode Date: September 1, 2026

Breht sits down with philosopher Colin Bodayle for a wide-ranging exploration of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, one of the most influential and notoriously difficult works in modern philosophy. Together they unpack Hegel's account of consciousness, contradiction, freedom, recognition, history, and the dialectical movement through which human beings come to understand themselves and the world. Along the way, the conversation traces Hegel's immense influence on Marx and considers why his philosophy remains so important for anyone trying to think seriously about liberation, social transformation, and the development of human consciousness. ---------------------------------------------------------- Check out our Summer RLR Merch HERE Learn more about Rev Left HERE Check out Unlearning Capitalism for more political educational resources  

Hello everybody and welcome back to Rev Left Radio. All right, on today's episode, we have a three-plus hour episode walking through Hegel's phenomenology of spirit with philosophy professor, friend and comrade Colin Bodale, who is a philosophy professor from Villanova just recently got his PhD in philosophy, specializes in Hegel, German idealism, etc. Wanted to have him on to walk people through this crucial text,

not only for philosophy in general, but for Marxist, right? Because Marxism is a development upon Hegelianism. And we talk about those connections and those nuances, especially towards the end. We get into a fascinating conversation of what exactly Marx leaves and takes from Hegel and how we should think about Hegelian philosophy as Marxists. It gets much, much more nuanced and complex than Marx turned Hegel on his head. It turned idealism into materialism.

That's a part of it, but that's just a friend. first glance and we get deep into the actual details of what that looks like, what can be kept from him. And I think ultimately, people will walk away realizing that we take on board and we should take on board a lot more Hegelianism than we sometimes flatter ourselves to think. So this is a really fun conversation. I do want to say Hegel is notoriously difficult, probably a top one or two most difficult philosophers to read the primary sources of. It's almost like you have to understand Hagel before you can read Hagel. So there's that there's that issue we're going to work through. And then the second thing is that, you know, how do you cover a text as dense and complete as the

phenomenology of spirit? And so the approach that we took in a de facto way, it wasn't even necessarily planned, but the way that we did this is that the first part of the conversation is a sort of sweeping run through of the basic structure of the whole text. And then we turn around and we examine all the complexities and nuances, the master slave dialectic, figures like, you know, you. Kosev and Phanaan and Marx and Angles and Darwin and materialism versus idealism and consciousness and Kants and Spinoza and some of those figures are brought in more or less immediately into the text. But for the first I would say 45 minutes, it is this sweeping sort of going through the basic structure and flow of what is covered in the whole text and then we start analyzing it.

That first part can be dense, right? And I want people who really are interested in understanding this stuff and who want the payoff of the rest of the conversation to kind of stick it out through that first part. Absorb as much as you can, but realize that after we get the whole thing on the table, we're going to come back through it. We're going to articulate the nuances of it. We're going to pull out many, many examples. And we're going to make it increasingly more digestible. So that first sweep is magisterial. It's a lot.

And I understand especially if you don't have a philosophy background, you might be kind of. compelled to be like, I'm kind of lost and I might just turn this thing off. I promise you, if you stick through this, that part of it and you absorb it just as much as you can, not everything, absorb what you can. The rest of the conversation will make that effort worth it. And to understand challenging concepts, to understand philosophy, especially at this level, it requires being deeply challenged. It requires getting lost most of the time. It requires a buck ton of things going over your head. That is just the process of learning, of deep of grasping something complex is that the first several passes are going to be very fucking difficult.

And still for me, there's so much within Hagle that I don't understand. Naively, you might listen to me and Colin speak and be like, wow, Brett has a, Brett really understands everything there is to understand about Hagle. No, the fuck, I don't. I'm still a student of philosophy. I always will be. There is no final place where I understand, even a singular thinker completely. There's stuff about marks I still have yet to learn.

Nuances of marks that I don't fully comprehend. true for everybody. So come in humbly, accept a challenge, and I promise you, if you listen to this whole conversation, it will have massive payoff. And I think that from a Marxist perspective, even if you've studied Hegel or listened to secondary sources and lectures on Hegel, we draw out stuff that will be genuinely new and that will be intellectually pleasurable to engage with and learn from. So keep that in mind, go through it. Whenever I have a big episode like this, I put a little prelude to the conversation that's basically encouraging people to stick with it, and you will come out the other side,

having a deeper understanding of both Hegel and Marks, truly. If you listen to this whole thing, and again, you don't have to understand every single syllable of it. There are perhaps paragraphs and whole chunks that will be very difficult to understand, if at all. That is normal. That is part of the process. Don't let that turn you off.

So I'm very excited to share this conversation. And as always, Rev Left Radio, has and always will be 100% listener funded. We are true DIY independent media, grassroots, organic intellectual type shit, and we depend on the continued existence of the show on our supporters. You can do that on Patreon. You can do that at Buy Me a Coffee. You can buy our new merch design that we worked with our Comrade Coffee Stain Comics to

create this really cool design. I'm working on a couple other designs right now to put on there. So if you don't want to join the Patreon, you don't want to do the one-time donation. You want something tangible in return. you can go to the store, buy a cool-ass shirt or a hat or a tank top, and a few dollars from that purchase, which we try to keep the cost down as much we can. A few dollars from that purchase will go into supporting the show. The best way you can support the show is obviously patreon.com,

and in exchange for $5 a month, you get bonus episodes, you get our community Zoom calls, our RevLeft Situation Room, songer readings that I do. I'm trying for the first time this month to do a Rev. movie club where we watch. I think we're going to try to watch the Young Marks by Raoul Peck and watch it together in a Zoom call, watch the whole movie, and then have a discussion of the movie afterwards. So those are some of the perks you can get on the Patreon proper.

But there's lots of ways to support the show. And if you don't want to do any of that, just sharing the show, posting about it on social media, sharing with a friend who's interested in this stuff, leaving a positive review. Those are all genuine ways that you can also help support the show. All right. Without further ado, here's my conversation. with Colin Baudale on Hegel's phenomenology of spirit. Hey, my name's Colin Bodale.

I'm a professor of philosophy and a PhD in philosophy from Villanabe University. And I write mostly about Hegel and Marx and German idealism. And I'm excited to be here today. It's an honor to have you back on the show, my friend. I know that we've been in contact and kind of working towards another episode together. And recently, I've kind of committed myself. just out of organic interest, but also, you know, just out of, like, I think, necessity to deepen my understanding of Hegel. So I've been doing some work on the main feed on Hegel, trying to explain it

to others. I've been, you know, doing a lot of research in my personal life. And I wanted a, you know, a proper philosopher to come on and help walk through specifically one text, right, to try to do an episode covering all of Hegel. That's incredibly complicated. So narrowing it to one text is still incredibly complicated, but I think it's really fun, really interesting, worthwhile. You and I think we can do it justice, and that's going to be covering phenomenology of spirit. Perhaps his most well-known text, I don't know if you would disagree with that, but certainly a very important text in the history of philosophy. And for anybody, I always like to really put this up front, anybody who is a Marxist has a Hegelian understanding of history and dialectical and historical

materialism, while Marx and Angles took Hegel, inverted Hegel, materialized Hegel, the basic structure of the logic of dialectic and historical materialism does come out of Hegel. So I think it sort of behooves Marxists who are interested in theoretical depth and philosophical knowledge to wrestle with and deepen their understanding of Hegel. Does that all sound right? absolutely um now it is a challenge to read hagel i mean this is like you know it's jumping right to hagel before doing other philosophy is like jumping right to quantum physics before you do algebra but if you could if you can put in the time and the effort and get that philosophical uh background for it it can be really really rewarding and it's i mean it'll it'll teach you to think like nothing

else i think um and that's why i really like it yeah no absolutely and um I was wondering if you could kind of tell people, just remind people for those who might have missed our first episode, your background in philosophy and kind of what you specialize in. Yeah. So my background in philosophy is that I just finished my PhD at Villanova, where I defended my dissertation on contradiction and dialectical method focusing on Hegel's Science of Logic, which is his other magnum opus, and Marx's capital. I wrote my dissertation with friend of the show, Gabriel Rockhill, as my advisor. And so, you know, I'm about to to start the world of teaching with a PhD and going on the job market and all of that right now. And yeah, I've been, I guess I first read Hegel's sophomore year of undergrad when I was 19. And I read the phenomenology spirit alongside, I think the class also had Kirkegaard and Marx.

And it was actually reading Hegel and the Master'slave dialectic that I think converted me over to the left. Before that, I was, like, kind of vague anarchist, where my politics was kind of based on sex pestle's lyrics and as opposed to, like, you know, like, you know, and some kind of more individualistic stuff. But I think it was really thinking through originally Hegel, actually, and alienation and things like that, that I was like, you know, this, this system of exploiting people for labor is not exactly dignifying or human, or, you know, allows someone to, like, really kind of feel. free or human. And so, yeah, Hegel has been with me since then. And then when I started graduate school in 2016, I kind of was like, I think I'm going to just like really focus on Hegel. I already know German and can, you know, I've been reading difficult texts for a while. And so I started that focus 10 years ago. And now, you know, hopefully we'll have a book coming out on Hegel soon. So this is kind of like my main scholarly focus is understanding Hagle.

Oh, yeah. Huge shout out to Gabriel Rockhill. Of course, we've had him on the show. Most listeners will be familiar with him. It's very cool that sort of he's like your mentor in that space. That's awesome. And my experience with philosophy, obviously, I have a bachelor's degree. I went into a PhD program in my 20s.

I couldn't make it work financially. I had young children at that time dropped out. But I've always obviously maintained a huge interest in philosophy. And, you know, something that I've noticed in myself and is like this sort of, philosophy is always a partner with me in life and I come back to thinkers over time. It's like, you know, as an undergrad, I first encountered some of these figures, you know, Hegel and Kierkegaard and, you know, those type of figures. Sort of you go a first glance, you try to comprehend some of the core aspects of it and perhaps

you do. A few years later, maybe you focus on other things for a while. You come back to these thinkers, deepen your understanding, you know, leave them for a while, come back. again, deepen your understanding, and I feel like there's like this spiral where I return to these thinkers over time, and each time I do, my knowledge of them deepens over time. It's very hard to kind of go in cold to one of these thinkers, especially Hegel, and just kind of fully take on board and understand what he's saying. It's probably impossible to do that the first time. And so there's this way, there's a spiral sort of imagery I have in my head of returning to thinkers over and over again. and each pass, I deepen my understanding.

And so I hope this episode can perhaps contribute to that process that others may be going through as well. Yeah, absolutely. And Hegel is one of those. I mean, you know, like whenever I'm reading, say, Descartes, who I teach for quite frequently, and I find something in Descartes I had never noticed before. I'm really excited. Oh, yeah. There is never a moment of reading Hegel that I don't find something I've never noticed before.

You know what I mean? Like every reading is very new and very interesting. And there's sincere intellectual pleasure. There is a thrill, like a deep dopamine hit you can't get from anything else when something clicks or connection is made. Like just recently, my sort of connections that I've started exploring between just Spinoza and Hegel in particular, you know, just like the intellectual satisfaction and pleasure that I get by like grasping something really grasping in and its connections, it's really unparalleled in life, I think. absolutely all right well let's get into the the goal of this is like we're going to go into hagel's phenomenology of spirit we're going to walk people kind of through it as best we can it's it's a big text there's lots of other sources out there if you want to deepen your understanding this is

simultaneously sort of an intro to haggle's phenomenology of spirit for people who don't have you know philosophical background necessarily but are interested in this stuff while also maintaining you know i believe like real sincere depth and and knowledge of like the nuances and complexities of Higalian philosophy, which is always kind of a difficult balance to walk sometimes, explaining it to somebody for the first time while also maintaining the philosophical integrity of the work. And so I guess, you know, that's what teaching philosophy is and that's what we're going to try to do today. So let's just go ahead and get into it. The first question I have, and I try to formulate these questions fairly precisely, but I leave them open enough that you can

take them in any direction that you wish. Hegel presents consciousness as something that develops through contradictions within its own ways of understanding the world. Can you talk about the basic journey that consciousness itself undergoes in the phenomenology of spirit and what Hegel is ultimately trying to show us through that journey? Yeah. So it's interesting because with Hegel, there's like, and with all of his books, really, there's not always even just a wide agreement about what the book is even about, right? There's lots of different. styles of reading Hegel. There's the whole like left versus right,

Higelian saying there are more Kantian readers, there are more spinozistic readers, there are more metaphysical readers, more historical readers, they're dialectical materialist readers. But generally speaking, Hegel has a number of ways of describing this book. He calls it the exposition.

The word here is Darshdahlung, which is like, you mean like, you know, presentation as well or like, like, like, you know, like when Schelling says, is like, like, there's a book like, it's like presentation on my system, Dachdalum, of how knowing or cognition, sometimes it's translated as knowledge, but it's like a verb here. Like, so like our power of knowing makes its appearance.

And that's where that phenomenon, phenomenology part comes in. So it's like, you are kind of like watching a kind of hypothetical consciousness go through this process of learning what knowing is. Another term he uses is the path of the natural consciousness, which presses forward to true knowledge, and that the way the soul, which journeys through the series of its own configuration, as though they were,

unconfigurations, as though they were stations appointed for it by its own nature, so that it may purify itself for the life of the spirit and achieve finally through completed experience of itself, the awareness of what it really is in itself. So like there's this language of like waste stations like on, I don't know like on the path of Christ or something. Like he uses the term like way of despair via Dolorusa of like an education that's

consciousness correcting itself or our ability of knowing correcting itself. Some things about the narrative structure of this book. There are like multiple kind of character. or perspectives in it. So like the main character, if you were to, because I think it is helpful to think of this book as like, almost like a novel without, you know,

any fiction in it and just kind of concepts. There's like a main character, as it were, that Hegel calls the natural consciousness. And at each like, section, there is the natural consciousness who's committed to a certain position on what it means to know something,

like a certain epistemology. And then there's, is a perspective that he's like for us he usually is the term for us um sometimes people will call this the phenomenological observer but it's like hagel and like the people reading who can see what's going on whenever the natural consciousness falls into errors and contradictions and um that's this kind of like twofold perspective throughout the book the basic problem of the book and again there are different ways of reading this problem, but going off the introduction is something like this. If the human mind is an instrument for knowing, right, like we have a mind,

it has a power to know things, and we conceive of it as an instrument. And we use that instrument on an object of knowledge. And the object of knowledge being, we could think about the thing in itself from Kant, which I'll go into I'll give a little thing about Kant or Spinoza's substance, the absolute, the thing outside of us that we want to know, then if we use an instrument on something, doesn't that change the thing? Meaning we can only know the world and the terms that we make it make sense to us and not reality as it is outside of us. Because if we try to subtract what we add to things and the ways that our mind might reshape reality and trying to know it, then by

subtracting it, we just, the object returns to something that we can't know anymore. He gives the other example of a medium where it's like, or if like the mind is a filter that everything has to pass through, then like if we remove the filtering, it's like not in the mind

anymore, right? Like we can't, there's no object. And this I think is going, addressing an epistemological problem, epistemology being like the study of how we know things. That is really, I think, one of the big focuses of the movement that Hegel is a part of

called German idealism. And the German idealists are really interested in Kant's system. They call it, you know, post-contient philosophy. And the possibility of taking Kant's system and unifying it according to a single principle and reconciling the perceived points of tension and contradictions in Kant. So I'm going to give that kind of

Kantian background, if that's, if that is all right. And then go to the structure of the book and how, Hegel is going to try to approach this problem. Absolutely. Because in a lot of ways, you know, Hegel is kind of responding to and perhaps resolving Kant, right? Right, exactly.

So Kant is like stepping into philosophy. And I don't remember if we talked too much about this during the Spinoza episode, last time I was here. But there's this pantheism controversy in Germany where essentially to be a Spinozist was considered atheism because Spinoza says God is substance and material and does nothing, you know, it doesn't really have an effect on, like he's just kind of doing his thing. No, nope, uh, human anthropomorphic qualities.

And so it was seen as atheism. But there is like this, this rumor that Lessing, who is a famous German intellectual, confessed to being a Spinozist on his deathbed. And it led to this whole controversy between one side of people who thought faith and reason are compatible. Nothing that science will disqual. discover will ever undermine faith. And another side that says, no, science is going to destroy faith, lead to nihilism, destroy all morality, all values, and we'll just be, you know, like basically Marquis de Saad,

just nothing, it's all fake, it's all made up fictions. And so Conn kind of steps in to try to resolve this debate between the people who say science and enlightenment is going to lead to nihilism. We need to kind of have a kind of romantic kind of leap of faith into Christianity. and the people who are saying, trying to defend that kind of scholastic perspective of faith and reason being in harmony. And so what Kant wants to do is determine the limits of cognition.

He wants to say, what is my mind actually capable of grasping through science? And then what is there beyond the possibility of cognition that's left over? And so Kant has his three critiques, the critique of pure reason, the critique of practical reason, and the critique of the power of judgment. and each of those critiques address is a specific question.

And these are the Kant's big three questions. What can I know? What should I do? And what can I hope for? And so Kant says, what you can know is how things objectively appear to us in terms of space and time and understood through the lens of the categories that our mind uses to make sense of things. You know, things like number, cause and effect,

quality, quantity, like all of these categories are 12 of them. I don't think I can list them off the top of my head. I could probably think of them all, but I didn't write them down just now. But there are 12 of them. I'm sure it's on Wikipedia. But what we can't know is how things exist in themselves, outside of space and time.

Because space and time for Kant are what he calls, a priori intuitions, but you could think about it as ways that the mind filters reality. Because Kant's whole moves to say that instead of me, like, stamping, or sorry, instead of me like trying to like look at the world and make a concept to like match it, he wants to argue that like we have these, this concept, this mind, the mind has these ideas and this structure and that like reality,

uh, has to like speak our language for us to get in contact with it. But this leads to this whole problem of if all I can know is things is how they appear to me in terms of space and time, which are, you know, filters of my mind and the categories that I can only apply based on the way my intuition is structured, what about the thing in itself? What about the thing about behind the appearance?

The cause of the appearance. Because Khan is very strict that these are separate things. Like, what we deal with is how, as appearances. We don't deal with like the real actual objects. Those are inaccessible. And so Kant's argument is that whenever we try to make claims about reality in itself, or whenever we try to reason with concepts without using something that we can observe as our basis, we fall into what he calls a dialectic evolution.

And there is a kind of dialectic incont2 where things become contradictory and we end up seeing that there are equal weight to two unreconsolable positions. So let me give an example of like two different ways of reasoning. So you might look at space and time and, you know, I mean, I mean, Kant, you know, there's some modifications to be made with Einstein and stuff. But you might, like, reason that, you know, the way things look and the way that causes work, there was a big bang at the beginning of the universe. But that big bang would have occurred, you know, at a point in space and time, you know,

taking relativity into account and all of that, right? So it's something that's like a possible observable, even though we couldn't be there. That's very different than saying God created the universe, right? Because God's not within space and time. And so Kant distinguishes between these kinds of reasoning that involves actually using objects of possible experience versus just using a concept by itself. Or if you just took causality on its own without any kind of observable and just said, what if, you know, what caused that, what caused that, what caused that, what caused that, what caused that, what caused that, was caused that. That's when you get to, you know, the classic arguments for the existence of God. and Kant would say that you actually run into a kind of

a contradiction or anantimy where you do this where you can't actually keep asking why without running into a problem and the this error is a result of us trying to apply our go beyond our limits of reason and apply categories to things that we have no access to in experience so we don't have anything to reason with

we don't have anything to apply our categories to And so this is like another kind of justification for this gap between appearances, between how things appear to us in terms that we can understand them and how they might be outside of that. On the other hand, we have the second question, what should I do? And if you've taken an ethics class, you know that con has this categorical imperative, which says, you know, I should only do things that I would wish to be a universal law. Basically, what if everybody did that, but a little bit more philosophically rigorous, right? So if everybody cuts in line, to use my favorite example, or if I cut in line, everybody else has to stay in line for me to cut in front of them. If everybody cuts, there's no more line, no more cutting. Right.

This is his. If everybody made promises and broke them, then it would undermine the very concept of a promise. If everybody cut in line, it would undermine the very concept of a line. It's not even that it would be morally chaotic, but also it would just undermine epistemologically its own sort of like concept, right? exactly right like if everybody lies i can't trick anybody anymore like you know um and so every time you you do something wrong quoting con you're making an exception for yourself um now the big issue with deont that's the the school of ethics that is associated with cont with duty based ethics which look at choices and not consequences right because this is ultimately i'm making a choice

I'm recognizing that if I choose to a law that makes a rule that makes an exception for myself that that's wrong as a principle but it's not outcomes. I'm not like trying to balance life and death or something like that. There's this famous example of an axe murderer who comes up and says, you know, where's that kid? And Kant says you should tell him the truth.

And yeah, his, you know, a lot of us would probably not do that. But Conn, I think has a point here that, like, the reason you're lying to the acts of murder is because you're not really respecting their ability to make a choice. You're not really respecting their freedom. You're not trusting them with the truth. Probably rightly so. But, you know what I mean? Like, there's an idea of human dignity there that's like, oh, you're too immature to decide whether or not you should commit a murder.

Or I'm not going to try to reason with you or convince you not to do it. I'm just going to lie to you. Right. Whereas an ethical consequentialist would say an action is ethical or unethical. based on the consequences of that action. Therefore, you know, you would lie to the ex-murderer because the consequences of telling them the truth might mean that child gets, you know, hunted down and murdered.

Right, exactly. And then you get into that debate between Conteans and consequentialists where the contian says, I have certainty. I 100% always know what the right thing to do is because I can just use the categorical comparative, whereas the consequentialist has to actually accurately predict the future, right? you have to actually know with some reasonable degree of certainty, but you can't have 100% certainty

that your actions are actually going to produce a better outcome. So that gets to that third question of what can I hope for, which is how Kant addresses this whole problem of like, how can you not know the outcomes? And this is how Kant tries to actually reconcile this theoretical and practical divide. And that's one of the big problems of German idealism, is how do we bring the theoretical and practical together? And Kant has this solution,

and it doesn't actually bring them together, but it shows how we can think them together. And it's this idea that, well, there's this space we've cleared out of the things in themselves, right? There's this stuff we can't fundamentally know. We can't know what things are like outside of how they appear to us. And so there are a number of things that Khan is able to argue are thinkable and are morally worth believing, even though they're improvable. One of them is free will. can we know if we have free woe?

Well, we can't observe it, can we? Right? Like, I've never seen my free will. Right. But we have this idea of freedom of somebody, which for, for Khan is, is this ability to choose to act according to the categorical and parables. So, like, determine yourself by a concept as opposed to just kind of, you're, like, feeling your selfishness.

But we can't ever know if we're actually doing this. I mean, you think about, like, somebody who's an opportunist, right? Like, in politics? well like I mean we all have done these like inner soul searching it's like am I really doing this because I care is there some kind of ego behind this like you know is this secret selfishness like am I you know am I am I am I helping people out because I it makes me feel good and feel important or am I doing it because I care about the people and Convincyate like you can never know

this you can't see your own soul you can't know if you're pure but you can hope that you're getting better So that's one of the things you can hope for. And then second, he says, you know, we don't know if things are getting better. Like, what if everybody acted according to the catapal-comparato all the time and just the earthquakes and floods, you know, just like chaos happened? And he says, but we can, and I think this is like very similar to Gramsci's revolutionary optimism. And he says, but we should hope that God is steering things towards a better purpose and that he's going to actually reward the good people in the end. and punish the wicked

because if we don't have this hope, we're not going to be moral for very much longer. And he actually considers example Spinoza here. He's like, Spinoza, like, you know, was clearly, he considered Spinoza an atheist, because Spinoza was clearly a righteous dude, good person. But even him, like, when presented with enough despair, would have probably gotten discouraged and given up hope.

And so for Kant, there's this realm beyond that we get through what he calls the moral postulates. There's this realm beyond reason of things in themselves that we can fill with ideas like freedom and ideas like God, there being a purpose or teleology to the world, that things are getting better, that we're getting better, that we're able to like, you know, be free beings that can develop, you know, develop. better virtues. And this whole, this whole sphere is like kept open to keep this debate between faith and reason settled, right? Because you can basically have this position where like, okay, I believe in science.

I accept everything that the sciences tell me about the universe. But that doesn't stop me from like having faith that, you know, I can make myself into a better person and that God's looking out for me and that, you know, there's progress that the world's getting better. and that, you know, or believing that I have the free will to act. I mean, we kind of like act like we do anyway, right? So, like, there's kind of a practical, like, that's less of a hope thing.

That's more of just like, okay, you show yourself to believe that you have free will. So like practically speaking, you've kind of proven this to be a core thing that you have. And so Hegel's critique in the phenomenology spirit and kind of as part of this German idealist tradition is wanting to get rid of this dual, between the sensible and the super sensible, of having, you know, a realm of nature and a realm of freedom, the realm of nature being governed by necessity, by determined causal forces, and then a realm of freedom where we have the choice to act, say, according to the critical comparative, to reconcile theoretical and practical philosophy. And this is a, and to do away with the concept of the thing in itself, which the German idealists don't like, because it's, as we'll

see it. It makes us kind of unhappy for there to be like a limit to our knowing. Yeah, it stands outside our knowing and makes it impossible to truly to truly come to what Hegel perhaps would later call absolute knowing. Like there's a, there's just a limit. It's like a limiting point on human knowledge straight up and you have to just accept that there's that barrier there that you can never get past. Exactly. And so Hegel's move is typically to point out that, We're kind of the ones who had manufactured this beyond in the first place. Like, we think we can't get beyond ourselves because we can place a star. But he's like, you can't place a star so far that you could never reach it.

Like, he put it there in the first place. Like, you're the one who has posited this limit. And, like, you have to kind of know that you did it. But you're kind of, like, switching back and forth between, like, I mean, like, if you're just telling yourself this, like, don't you know that you're telling yourself this? And so Hegel's move is to answer this question using this unique dialectical way of analysis that he really develops in this book and then continues to use throughout his career. And the way a dialectical analysis works is that I'll go into the specifics of how it works in the phenomenology.

The phenomenology tests different concepts of what knowing is or what cognition is and what kind of cognition gives us certainty and what cognition takes to be beyond that certainty or to be a knowable. And in each case, what Hegel aims to show is that there's a gap between what consciousness believes itself to be certain of

and what is actually it like kind of practically shows to be true in the attempt to know itself that there's a gap between its certainty and truth and it's not until this moment of absolute knowing which we'll you know talk about at some point later that this certainty and truth

are united with each other right so you can be certain of something and think like I'm like 100% sure about this but truth for Hegel is always like the whole like do you have the whole picture And so here's the structure of the work. So there's a preface, which is technically a preface to Hegel's whole system as it was conceived at this time. And that preface is, I think, kind of a great work in its own right.

And we're kind of reading, I think, as its own kind of independent thing, but then also taking the phenomenology into account. Because he wrote it later after the publisher wanted him to write the preface. We have an introduction which lays out the method. and then there are these different Hegel sometimes calls the moments or nodes and the first is and each of these is like a kind of a stage you could say

from the bottom up right starting from like core basic phenomena of consciousness in its most basic form building up from there correct right exactly more and more concretely and so the first is consciousness And consciousness is, I am aware of an object, right?

So it's like me dealing with like, okay, like there's a tree in front of me. Or there's a piece of salt, I guess is one of his examples, I think. Right? Or like, you know, there's, I'm looking at forces. I'm trying to understand gravity. I'm trying to understand electricity. There's an object. The second stage is self-consciousness.

Now the object is me. I'm trying to figure out what I am. Then the next stage is reason. This is kind of a combination of consciousness and self-consciousness. But this is this perspective of like enlightenment. I guess you could say like the idealist perspective. And I think it's possible. I think that I'm not 100.

I think there is a debate about this, but it's possible that Hague originally intended the phenomenology to end with reason. That's how the phenomenology ends in the later encyclopedia version of the work, is a shorter version, which I'm not sure how accessible that is, because it doesn't go into as much detail as this, but it's worth knowing that there are shorter versions of this work, too, that Hegel mainly prepared for his students. But Reason was originally where it started. And Reason is like, has multiple stages that repeat earlier stages. And then we have Spirit. And Spirit is like the mind of a certain, like, community and history logically ordered. So we have

and then finally religion and religion is like a kind of like counter move to spirit where spirit looks at the like human community's cognition and its attempt to know itself whereas like religion looks at our various attempts to represent the beyond to represent God to represent what we can't you know what we hope for from the conteen perspective and then finally, spoiler, God dies on the cross and then we're in absolutely knowing. And then each of these stages,

so consciousness, self-consciousness, reason, spirit, religion, there's a retroactive or recursive or epicycle kind of move. Or, yeah, I guess maybe it's a better term is just like repeated narrative structure, a non-linear narrative structure in the sense that there's a,

there's a return to the beginning. So consciousness goes through three stages. And then at the end, Hegel says, forget sweat it knows and kind of starts again at the beginning. And so there's like that movement of like returning the beginning. And each of the stages like begins with a kind of standpoint of like kind of being immediacy, what's like right in front of me, what I can just like grasp as static and not necessarily in relation to anything else. The second stage being something more of a determination of that's mediated or has to do with

the relationships between things or what's like essential to them. And then finally a standpoint that starts to shift from that standpoint of interaction and relation to actually a standpoint of conceptualizing, assigning laws and rules to things and working with the concept and ultimately usually ending in a kind of preview of absolute knowing. Not always the case, but usually, especially at the end of, say, force and the understanding, there's this kind of like moment that you're like, oh, this kind of sounds like absolute knowing. And then it's like, oh, yeah, and then we forgot and go back. And so if we started like consciousness, Hegel here begins with the most basic form of consciousness that

he calls sense certainty, which is like, okay, so, you know, from a kind of skeptical standpoint, I want to know what I can be certain of. And sense certainty says, all I can know is the here and now. There's a tree in front of me. Right? There's a there are, it is night, it is day. These very, very basic, like, here and now claims.

Can't trust memory, can't trust the future, all of these things. And Hegel will say, okay, what happens when we actually try to carry out sense certainty? And here it's quite interesting because you see some of the, the dialect, that Hagle will later develop in the logic, which is like, okay, so I want to say that what certain is now, well, it's over already, right? And what since certainty takes as its object

is actually something fleeting. And there's like a move where like when I actually say now that by the time I say it, the now has changed. And by the time the listener heard it, like they're hearing almost like at a different now, Yet there's like the same meaning in both cases. And so he says like, you know, I point out the now.

I assert it to be the truth. When I pointed out, though, it's already something that has been. So I set aside the first truth and say, okay, now it's not now anymore. It's a now that's has been. And so, but what has been, you know, is not. And so, well, ultimately what happens to be true here is, that all of these these these things are an ever-changing now and that in order to point out now or this or here or day or night or tree or any of these things i have to use language and language

already holds more than um sense certainty takes to be the truth that language um you know if i say like All I can know are absolutely singular entities. That in saying absolutely singular entities, that phrase, that describes a type of thing, right? All of these absolutely singular entities, right? It's simultaneously singular and universal. Right. Even your concept of a tree is like I'm experiencing a tree in the linguistic conceptual term tree is is like the universal idea of tree as applied to this instance

and you're already well beyond the raw immediate experience of actually imagining the tree because the moment you try to put it into conceptual or linguistic frameworks that moment has literally already passed and now you're playing at a higher level of like conceptual elaboration. Yeah, exactly, exactly. And like, yeah, you could say like, the only thing we can know are things that are one.

Well, it's like you just said things that are one. Is that more than one thing? You know, like, and so there's this kind of, this way that he says that, like, language even betrays sense certainty here. That he says, when we say this thing or this particular man or this individual thing,

we're using universals. Right. So now sense certainty as a perspective of this natural consciousness, or if this was a skeptical exercise, right? The conclusion would be, okay, so we can't even know sense certainty, right? This certainty is not even, you know, what it says to be. Anybody who says, oh, we can have radically, you know, knowledge of, like, pure unfiltered immediacy is wrong because, like, clearly we have to use concepts like the concept of pure unfiltered immediacy, like, which can refer to multiple types

of knowledge, like, to even understand or articulate anything about it. And so there is like you can see how there's already like a kind of skeptical argument that we learn here right? Like if someone was to one-sidedly assert a claim about knowledge being what's uncertainty is we have the kind of defense against that.

But the Hegelian move is to flip that negative result upside down and to turn into something positive. And that's to say that like what we learn from this is that we actually have more knowledge than sense certainty thinks. The real way to know things is by using universals to talk about them, right? Categorizing them that we take what is present to be universal, to be a type of thing, right? Like this is red, this is blue, this is, you know, this tastes this way, this taste that way.

Right, or it's like salty, this is sweet. And so that's this first kind of sublation or shift to that higher stage of perception. perception is since certainty wants to know the this it wants to know the immediate it wants to know the radically singular without adding anything to it without thinking anything about it in trying to do that it fails because it always says categories and perceptions like cool so what we do to know things is say categories that's that that like sublation or alphabung that's like the revaluation it's like what was just a failure becomes the new model of success And that's what's really cool about Hegel.

And it doesn't go away in the logic. The logic has that same kind of mechanism of like we encountered a failure. We're going to just like reevaluate that failure and put a positive spin on it. And so then we get, you know, to perception. Now we're talking about things and properties, right? So we have a new way of conceiving the world, a new way of certainty. Okay, like this is salty. This is sweet.

This is square. Right. this is red, this is blue. But then we get a new problem, a new problem with certainty, which is like, okay, well, it has these many properties, but it's one thing, right?

So then is it my senses? Because I have five senses and, you know, possibly more ways of getting information than that that are dividing things into multiple properties when it's really one thing. Or do I just have like a bunch of different, like, right?

Do I have like a bunch of like light coming into my eyes and color? and then I happen to also be hearing sound and my brain combines them into one thing and there's really different things. So there becomes this new dialectical problem of like, okay, so what side of this these things that are one object

but have many properties? What side of that is me and what side of that is the object? And so that's perception as a new dialectic, a new contradiction. And, you know, Hegel has to run through these and it's like a process of motion of actually like this natural consciousness is trying to carry out like making sense of how something can be both one and many at the same time have one object with many properties and the move here

again is to unify this this relationship between what something is in itself and what it is for somebody else you know um in a sense it's to say that both of them are kind of interconnected sides of the same coin right so if something is thing is appears a certain way for me, like if something is taste salty to me, that's also not just me. That has something to do with how the object is in itself. And if the object appears to have something in itself apart from me, its way of like holding itself back is a way that it appears for me as well, right? Like it's like, it's like, it's something that is, um, it's holds itself back for me. It's like a way of, it's like presenting itself through an absence.

So that, that failure becomes a new positive moment, which is that what we need to do is understand things as forces. And I won't try to summarize force the understanding. It's the hardest chapter, one of the hardest chapters of the book, absolutely knowing is probably comparable. I did write a paper on this in 2016, my first year of undergrad that I was pretty proud of. You know, I've come a long way since then, but we get into this discussion of these forces. So it's not just things having a relationship to my perception, but actually how do the things relate to each other? Then how does my brain come in like or my mind come in and add like use laws to make sense of them,

to look at the universal interactions like laws of gravity, laws of motion, laws of electricity and magnetism, things like that. And then that gets us to that end where what we recognize is that what's going on when we make these laws, when we try to put things together and unify them. And there's, you know, this crazy section at the end called the inverted world where Hagle says that, you know, everything is the opposite of itself, very dialectical passage. You know, like north is south, south is north. Sweet is sour sweet.

And what this comes down to is this recognition of things of this unity of opposites. Fundamental principle of dialectics that, you know, people like Engels talk about. And but also this recognition. that what allows us to understand the unity of opposites is our own self-consciousness, is the fact that who we are, what a mind is, is something that's able to bring together contradictory moments, that a mind in a way is itself a contradiction. Because like, in knowing myself, right, and like self-knowledge is like a kind of, I have a difference between myself and my object, yet it's a difference that it's a difference

that is no difference. And this is like one of the big principles of Hagel. So we get to that end. And then there's this return to the beginning. A new standpoint of immediacy. Start with desire, right? Or sorry, new object now. Now it's not, I'm not trying to know some, you know,

thing in the world outside of me. I'm trying to know myself. What kind of thing am I? We have one that's immediate, like sense certainty. What am I at first? I'm like hungry. I'm like desire things, right? And then, you know, I fulfill the desire, then I get hungry again, right?

This cycle of desire. Then it goes into the master slave dialectic, which we'll talk about in detail. The stoicism, skepticism, unhappy consciousness, different ways of understanding. One's self and one's relationship to other people. Then a shift to reason, which again has like a repetitive structure where there is like kind of like a weird overlap. I won't go into too much details about. The reason section is fascinating too. Especially the first chapter, observing reason, has a section.

I probably should point this out too because people will probably raise their eyebrows at these sections. It starts with using reason to try to observe the world around us. And then we try to observe ourselves as like static, immediate empirical observables. and we end up like completely flopping at trying to do it because it's like wait like what kind of stable thing could explain human essence well is it like the stars like when you were born like your astrological signs and like is it your is it your palm um is it your face like you're a beautiful person so you must be a good person oh you're an ugly person so you must be a bad person?

Or is it like you're lump in your skull? And so then Hegel actually goes into this critique that was, I think, important for his time period, a critique of phrenology, which is this racist science that claims that people, criminology is like lumps in your skull. And Hegel has an interesting, like, critique here where he's like, you know, if somebody says to you, I can see you have the face of a rogue, you should punch him in the face. Because like, and then he's like, and then you're actually like proving to them. that what matters is actions. It's not what, you know, this, it's not your IQ test. It's not the lump in your skull. It's not some kind of like racial identity or whatever stars in the sky when you're born or your face. It's what you do that makes you human being.

So it's this, it's this attempt to try to look inward at the self and fix it as a sort of static object that you can understand completely. In that process of trying to do that, it utterly fails and fall apart because, The self is, consciousness itself is always, you know, correct me if I'm wrong here, but that's always in motion. That's always flowing. That's always a state of process of becoming and therefore that attempt to fix and turn it into an object that you can ponder or understand fails precisely because it must give way to a deeper understanding of the self as this dynamic unfolding process itself. Exactly. Yeah, and like, similarly, phrenology says, if somebody says you're a lump in the skull, you should give them a lump in the skull,

you know, bash their head in. It's like, I don't know, it's like M&M where he's like, it's like, you think that because I talk about killing someone in a song, it means I'm going to do it while I'm killing you. Like, but ultimately, yeah, it's exactly that. Well, who we are is activity. And like the skull is like an interesting symbolism here because that's a dead thing that you're trying to use to explain a living thing.

And racial essentialism, like racism, like these people are like this, these people are like this is this exact sort of thing. And we see it in the modern world today where people are like, you know, European Western civilization are like this and they're like that. And it's the same sort of infantile attempt to fix some sort of static essence to two people, right? Exactly. And like Hegel, like his point is one, like you said, like what we are is activity. On the other hand, what determines our activity? There are so many things. And you're going to pick like the like the this one thing and fixate on it like how do you know that there's any connection between like these two things you can like you know and i think fanon and sartra go into this and more deal

you can make up any kind of story like this um you can make up like uh i have a disposition to alcohol alcoholism that's why i'm drinking or i have a disposition to alcoholism that's why i'm not drinking it's like wait which you know like um it's like at the end of the day like you make decisions and like you can't just pin them down to a static thing that happened when you were like born or I guess like it I dived into the science of phrenology once just to see what Hegel was critiquing because I wrote paper right once and it's like they did like weirdly think it's like when you're a baby somehow it gets shaped based off of like your like action in the womb I think but that's all like very strange and weird but it's essentially that you're you're not explaining what humans actually are which is our activity and yeah and I think maybe a more modern conceptual version of that. I think you already pointed it out, which is astrology, which is, you know, the way that the stars were organized when I was born is somehow determinative of my personality traits.

And you get into this funny situation where you're like, well, I'm fickle as a person and can't commit to things because I'm a whatever, a cancer or a Leo. And so you're like explaining away your activity by fixing it to this static thing that you can't overcome, whether it's my star sign or it's my genetic predisposition or my chemical imbalance. It is this, it's the same sort of attempt that is once your, once your consciousness has moved beyond that, you look back on that and you can see it as like kind of pathetic and infantile. Yeah, absolutely. And like, like anything that's fixed, Hago would say can be changed because we can form new habits, right? Like, we can shape ourselves through own activity. And so there's a sense in

which like you can remold yourself, right? To some degree. Like there are some things that are obviously like, like firmly biological and can't be fixed. Like, right? Like if you, um, if like, I'm not trying to discourage anyone from like, you know, taking like, you know, medication for something. Like, or, um, you know, right? Like, or, you know, an illness or something.

Like, obviously these are, these are things that you can't just will your way out of. But the idea that like your choices, I think is where he's really getting at. can somehow be reduced to a lump in the skull or IQ test or whatever. The only, funnily enough, this is why he thinks palm reading is a more refined stage of consciousness than astrology. It's because at least it looks at the hand and you work with your hands, so it's close to action, right? I sleep on my back because it's good for the spine and rehearsal. Now a psychic Who reads her own palms and personal

She keeps her fish shut tight And she sleeps on a side Well, maybe she knows something I don't know But like at the end of the day What matters is the deed What matters is what you do Like the proof of And the same thing with any intention

As I'll talk about later with like Moral philosophy is like The only proof of you being a good person Is what you do The only proof of you being a great artist is whether you make good art, right? And you can see how this is very influential on existentialism to you. Existence precedes essence being an idea in Sartre where it's like, you know, you don't have a fixed nature. You define yourself through your actions.

Hegel is very much a believer that people define themselves through their actions. And that people have the potential to like define themselves in all kinds of ways. Quickly, I just want to just want to interject there like, yeah, the Sartre. notion of acting in bad faith is precisely abandoning the responsibility for your actions, for your choices, for your responses to the world by referencing some static state of affairs. And one of the famous examples is like Nazis on trial with the Nuremberg saying, I was just following orders. Sartre explicitly points that out as like, we know what he would call bad faith, which is this attempt to abandon your responsibility

and your choices to some static state of. affairs that you can't control. Exactly, yeah. And so phrenology, astrology, all of these things are examples, ultimately, I think, a bad faith. Yes. Of trying to deny your own freedom by pointing to something outside of yourself and denying that living, existing being that you are. Hagle has a off-color joke at the end of this section, too, where he says it's like, it's like nature has taught this to us by combining in the same organ the capacity for urination and the capacity for generation.

And so that there's like a sense in which like the phrenologists are just at the stage of urination are not actually moving, doing anything creative or productive. And I think it's also kind of funny that that's in there. You know, and it goes into this discussion of action. there's there's like discussions of like a lot of literature in here including like faust by gerta which you know hegel knew gerta um they corresponded with each other he would always address address him as like your excellency or something like that um obviously like somebody that he really admired um and then this this discussion of the individuality which takes itself to be real and for itself just looking at the the headline but real individuality

that's where he starts to kind of gives his first critique of Kant's categorical comparative which is actually really cool and I think kind of interesting. And he basically, it's usually called the empty formalism objection. We're basically like, Hegel thinks that there are kind of like, there's a kind of ground to being able to say that something is against the categorical imperative. And he uses this example, which I think we personally would like, or do like, which is this example of property, right?

So, like, theft violates the categorical imperative. because if you steal, if you're allowed to steal people's property, then everybody's allowed to take whatever they want, which would mean there's no more property and no more theft, right? So there'd be no more property. And it's like, cool, right? No more abolished property?

All right. Yeah. Right? But there's like a property is like the ground here. And he's like, I don't think Rousseau would be like down with us. I think Rousseau would say that like, you know, you could imagine like a kind of anarchist formulation, like property itself is stuff.

right like it's like if you're saying like this is my own private thing you're taking away from like the common uh property right right and so you could see how like you could turn cons categorical upside upside down yeah and so then there's that the shift again to a higher stage and i'm going to summarize this uh and just hit some of the highlights you know that might interest your reader um we go to spirit or mind now this is just the german word geist um and geist is a complicated word but you know I encourage people. There are people who read it very theologically and very kind of like,

you know, woo, there's the world spirit. And this is all an incarnation of the world spirit. I think it just, you know, I try to read it more down to earth.

Like it's, he's talking about mind, but he's talking about mind in a kind of like more humanity's way. The German word for humanities is geist's vision shop. So like the science of spirit, the science of mind. And so it's like,

it's about like, the kind of like spirit of a people, the mind of a people, the culture of a people, the kind of like worldview, maybe you could say, of a group of people? Could I step in here and offer my understanding of this?

When Hagle is talking about consciousness and, you know, what he's trying to do in the phenomenology of spirit as far as I understand it is kind of confronting or the way that consciousness by confronting the contradictions in its own way of understanding reality. So educates itself from, as you were already explaining, a naive certainty,

to increasingly evolved standpoints where it eventually can grasp itself, society, history, etc. As part of one unconnected hole that is in development. So if that's what he's doing, by consciousness, you know, by spirit, by phenomenology of mind or geist, he is talking about like this, this universal sort of theoretical consciousness. but everything he says also applies to like kind of an individual. Like an individual's consciousness evolves in this way.

A society and a specific culture's consciousness develops in this way. And perhaps humanity as a whole's consciousness develops in the same dialectical fashion. So you can kind of move from like the low category of the individual, the medium category of a given culture and society to like the higher category of humanity as a whole. And perhaps there's a cosmic or natural. consciousness even above humanity's consciousness and the dialectical development and this sort of process of development still holds at every level like the particular ways in which it manifests are different obviously an individual's consciousness matures uh in a way that is different than a whole society's consciousness evolves but consciousness itself is the main thing and it's

applicable to those different layers of analysis and that's also at the same time why this is idealism, right? It's fun, it's locus of, of, um, development is consciousness itself. And so that's why it's idealist, but it's also why it applies to these various levels of consciousness. But I mean, first of all, does that all sound right? Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I think that's a great way of putting it to think about that. Because I, yeah, I think that's true. And like, yeah, like, Spirit, Hegel sometimes defines it as the eye that is we and the we that is I. Exactly. But, but at the same time, and this is where it gets tricky and I could be wrong here. since this process is from the bottom up, that sometimes when we abstract in our minds and we think about, even like thinking about the big bangs, when we think about the structure of the universe, when we think about big consciousness, it's almost like we assume, we attempt to assume a God's eye perspective.

Like we can look down and see this process happen. Or sometimes if you think about geist or spirit, you might expand it out to like this godlike consciousness above all. But actually, I think what Hegel is saying is that that God's eye perspective doesn't actually exist, that consciousness itself emerges from the bottom up and sort of ratchets itself up or climbs its own ladder as it constructs it upward. So that there is no, you can't abstract out to some genuinely God's eye perspective necessarily, but that consciousness itself develops in this way. And as it develops, it ladders up to the population. possibility of maybe that God's eyes consciousness, but that has, that's the process of becoming. It's not something that is already present and then looks down and watches itself climb towards it.

Does that make sense? Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Yeah, because sometimes you get a reading. I think, I think Heide reads Hegel this way. And I don't necessarily agree with it, that it's like, this is all the activity of the gods eye point of view that we're watching. And I don't necessarily buy that reading. There are plenty of very intelligent readers of Hegel who have defended it. But I think I agree with you a lot more that it's like we're building our way up. There will be a kind of, you know, I mean, there's a religion chapter, right? There will be some discussion of God in the God's eye view.

But I think ultimately what Hegel will be concluding is trying to emanatize that. Yes. And to show that like that, right, because he, you know, he's a pretty optimistic, you know, believer in the enlightenment, right? Like, what do you mean? I can't know things. Like, you know. So, yeah, I think, I think that's a good way of putting it.

And whereas, to go back to what you're saying about Kant, whereas Kant says there's this thing in itself, thing in itself, reality as it actually exists. And then our mind brings a certain sort of structure, a cognitive apparatus to existing reality that kind of by virtue of having to interpret it also distorts it and limits what we can possibly know. So there is like, there remains in Kant, this division between subject and object ultimately. Hagle rectifies that and says that this process of becoming actually kind of closes the dialectic of subject object itself. And this interplay, this dialectical interplay between consciousness or subjectivity and the objective world, as it rises up through the ladder of consciousness, to use a crude metaphor, it resolves that split. Kant says that split can never be resolved.

And Hagle kind of says kind of, yes, it can. And this is how that is resolved. the subject object are two sides of the same coin and when you reach high enough levels of consciousness you understand that those two sides are of the same coin and there is no fundamental split. Is that also right? Yeah and one thing I'd mention is like con does have exactly what you described as a god's eye perspective what he calls the perspective of of intellectual intuition and it would be kind of a model of the divine intellect and he thinks that we can you know there is a sense in which you

want to be careful saying Kant says we can't resolve it okay conn does think we can resolve it but we it's just in thought like it's like a thought experiment resolution of like here's like ideas we could come with up with of a possible resolution but he doesn't think we like we can like know like know it like does that make sense like there's like a like a thought resolution which is this idea

of a mind of God Okay, okay. That we just create out of our needs of reason to show us our own limits kind of thing, which is, yeah, it's very strange. But it'd be like a being that could like instantly grasp the, like, we know things in terms of the laws of like physics and stuff. This being knows the law of you and the law of me and like the law of like almost like the monads in each thing. And so that would be like Kant's God's eye view. And I think Hegel would say that that viewpoint is not necessary if we've achieved absolute knowing for extreme. complex reasons.

But yeah, like, I would say like, yeah, that, that's, that's like part of it, um, exactly on the point that there is this gap in comment. Um, there's this, this inaccessible numina or thing in itself or object we can't know. And that, that, that Hagle is trying to reconcile that and ultimately bring that, um, immunitized that, or to say that this God's eye view is not something that, you know, is, is something that we can pause beyond, beyond us for reasons, uh, that will, go into, I think, later. But to go through, finish the summary, so Spirit has, like, engages in, like,

different, like, kind of historical forms of cognition. There's this, the first is, like, this what do you call Zitlishkite, this idea of, like, this someone's just translated as ethical substance, but it's like this idea that the Greeks solve values is something kind of immediate in the world. It's a really great analysis of Antigone in there by Sophocles, the Greek tragedy. there's this brief discussion of the Roman Empire kind of a flyover stage

and then we get to this this culture of the Enlightenment in this section called culture German word here is building which has this also sense of liken the word culture of like cultivation of like you know you see the word build there

and so what's interesting about culture is that it goes into this battle between the Enlightenment and super But the final stage of culture is the French Revolution and the terror and the you know like there's a moment where there is a dialectal the kind of dialectical necessity of chopping the king's head off just saying and It is an interesting analysis of the the French Revolution Now Hegel does have some some points that are kind of critical mainly of left infighting which I mean you know like

Probably shouldn't be fighting each other so much so I mean me, you know, like, yeah, so he thinks that, yeah, he kind of has a kind of critique of the French Revolution where he thinks that if freedom is defined in too abstract of a way of absolute freedom, that this can result in a kind of, and not given content, but this can result in basically the revolutionaries all kind of turning on each other and killing each other. And so I think it is interesting to read. And then there's this shift into what he calls spirit that assertiveness himself of itself or morality. And this is a shift into like, so if culture is the French, then this is a shift into the Germans.

You have like kind of like Greeks like pit stop at the Romans, French Germans. And so this is this goes to this kind of myth that the Germans like, I don't know, I don't know how plausible it is. But it sounds ideological to me as a Marxist. I'm a little suspicious. The idea that the Germans didn't have a revolution, a bourgeois. revolution as quickly as others because they already had their inner revolution with Martin Luther. Hmm. Interesting. Yeah. But here we have another analysis of Kant going to the Kant what I can help for stuff. I actually have a paper published in idealistic studies about this, these arguments.

But essentially here Hegel calls into question Kant's idea of postulating a god who steers things towards the like progress um you know it's critical of the idea of this gap between freedom and nature and then it's critical of this idea of like our like needing to believe in like are um like becoming more and more morally perfect and his what he's kind of critical of here is this idea of like it it only works if you can't know like faith only works if you can't know like predestination only works if you can't know because if God is making like if God's steering the world towards a better society right now like right you'd probably just chill yeah yeah right you wouldn't do anything you wouldn't act

but um you don't know it so you're kind of just making it up hegel said like like literally con't you're just making up the idea of god so that you don't get discouraged acting and then like forgetting that you made it up, but also saying like, but it can't be known because if it were known, then we wouldn't act either.

And I think Hegel's position is more like, no, like if you want the world to be better, then change it. Right? Like, if you want to bring about a world where there's a connection

between whether people are, the good people are good and people are happy, you need to make that world. Like, and also like, like, actions are not so fruit. all the time. Like, we can do things.

There's this discussion of the beautiful soul, which I want to write a paper about, soon for a popular audience. I think it's really interesting concept. The beautiful soul, you might hear people mention Hegel's beautiful soul. This is the person who does not act because they're afraid of getting their hands dirty. This is the person who, you know, from our perspective, says, oh, you know, that's not a perfectly democratic revolution. so I hope it fails, right? Many such cases.

Many such cases. And then ultimately this ends with this kind of forgiveness moment, where this moment of like, yeah, you're pointing out like I'm a horrible person. You're calling me an opportunist, whatever, like, but so are you. Right? Come on. Like, bro, it's just like, like nobody is innocent here. Like nobody's perfect, you know?

Like, and you kind of throw yourself like, you know, know at the mercy of another person with the hope that they'll you know return that kind of reciprocal moment of like hey look we're both humans we're both just trying to get through it you know um and this that's where this moment of of spirit first entering he's like he's like when when people like kind of mutually forgive each other and accept each other for who they are and you know this is a fundamentally kind of Christian idea he he he flirts with Christianity a lot um how christian he is as a debate um but this this idea of of forgiveness he actually says like God's present there with those people.

Then we have to go back to the beginning again and go to religion. And religion looks at this same kind of movement where instead of it being our activity and our culture of finally culminating in this moment of forgiveness where we both say yay and release each other and absolute spirit is present, we look at different ways that human beings have tried to represent the beyond above themselves. So starting with like sun worship, the plant and animals. religion, the animals, I think, eat the plants from what I remember. It's been a while since I looked at this, the demiurge. And then there's like the Greek religions initially, but there's this

discussion of art and different attempts to actually represent the absolute or represent God through art. It's like the sphinx and like all of these things. And it's like, the Greeks finally get it. They're like, oh, let's just like use the shape of a human being. And then finally, they're revealed religion, an actual human being, who is the incarnate God, dies on a cross, literally, like dead. And God is dead, the absolute is dead, the beyond is dead. And yet there's this move that Hegel wants to do. It's very kind of interesting and kind of heretical reading of religion. Well, on the one hand, he wants to actually, like, unite these opposites and say that, like, God is like in a way just as evil as human beings in like his selfishness of demanding unquestioning obedient.

So it like completes something in God in a weird way. But this this kind of like conclusion is this moment of like of Holy Spirit I think which is like God present amongst the community of believers. And so like when two or more gathered like the absolute is present there. And Hegel is using this. He says that what this is is representation. It's picture thinking. It's not like these are concepts and conceptual configurations that religion is like kind of imagining. It's almost like a like a dream or something that mirrors conceptual relations.

And that's where it ends. I think Zijsjik has a joke that, you know, it's like Holy Spirit is Communist Party, but I don't know. And then so it ends with this absolute knowing. And that's the final chapter. and that's the hardest one, but that's the one that that kind of goes back over quickly what has happened

and introduces us to this new type of knowing, this dialectal type of knowing, which in a way has always been present throughout the phenomenology, but is also going to be the basis for the logic, which no longer has that subject object gap.

We're no longer trying to see, hey, just when I think being, is that like being being, or like being in itself or like the appearance of being. It's like that's no longer a problem. What we're going to do is just look at our concepts and figure out how our concepts, what are the contradictions within the concepts themselves

when we relate them to themselves? And when we look at them, the oppositions in our concepts, like how do they interact with each other? So it's still dialectical. There's still that skeptical moment, but it's not, it's no longer an experience of consciousness.

It's just like, let's think being, what's contained in that concept. Yeah. So there is that long summary of the of the phenomenology spirit. And the goal of this whole thing is to get to the standpoint of absolute knowing, which is the point where consciousness no longer needs to go beyond itself to understand its own certainty,

like where it can no longer posit some inaccessible thing in itself or super sensible or beyond or absolute beyond, what is in self-consciousness, what we can know according of the concept. Okay, so a few things I want to visit in that whole scaffolding that we've built up. One, you were just talking about art, religion, and then ultimately philosophy, and these are kind of, you know, three points at a certain, three points of development of absolute spirit coming to know itself. The movement is basically from like raw images to, to, sort of symbolic representation

to grasping the concept itself, art, religion, philosophy. And so throughout the process of humanity's consciousness developing, you mentioned the Sphinx. I would also maybe point to like early cave drawings on the walls from our primitive

ancestors, the pyramids, these forms of sensuous, immediate sort of raw experience forms of trying to wrestle with this. And then it moves up to religion as you're saying, which kind of begins to present this process symbolically or representationally, Christ, God coming down to earth, being crucified on the cross.

And in Hegel himself, and through this process of philosophy, Spinoza, Kant, etc., this is coming to the point where you're moving beyond the artistic sort of representation, the presentation of this process sensually, perhaps, beyond religion, doing it symbolically with representation and into actual concrete concepts of self-knowing, of coming to understand this process in Hegel himself. There's sort of this crescendo of this process becoming known philosophically. It's no longer, I don't know if sublimated is the right word here, but it's no longer put through these lower forms of understanding, sort of representational, symbolic, whatever, and comes to know itself concretely through conceptual grasping of itself.

is is that right and is that like the importance of art for a religion and philosophy throughout history? Yeah, yeah. So like there's a sense in which if you go to like Hegel's like encyclopedia and this is a point of debate I think some people have with Hegel is like, um, that like when he does like the stages of culture like it's like art, religion, philosophy just like you said. And there's a sense in which like Hegel thinks that philosophy is higher and more

complexness and leaps behind those visual things. And so that's where you get this whole like death of art idea that some people talk about. This is a beef that Heidegger and Hegel have with each other where Heidegger wants to insist that like poetry and art are like somehow on par with philosophy. But I think like one way to think about it is like whenever we try to, you know, a lot of art today as opposed to art, you know, in the Middle Ages or something. So much of the art is about not like what's literally there immediately, but about what it makes you think, right?

What concepts can you use to make sense of it, right? And like an intelligent art critic of somebody who's like, I don't know. Like, I mean, you go to art school and you like probably like read like the lows and stuff, right? Like, you know, like you're, there's a sense in which philosophy is, is, uh, make sense of a lot of art past a certain point. And so that art, like philosophy has this, um, this kind of higher standpoint for Hegel, precisely like you said, because it's, it's eliminated all the representation, the picture thinking as a way the sensuous immediacy.

Like we're not, we don't need a picture or a religion to tell us the truth because we have concepts. We have our minds. We have the ability to think. You know what I mean? So religion is this essential step that is respected and known for or sort of appreciated for the role it's played historically, utterly essential. But that it is sort of ultimately superseded. It's literally, well, it's not to be taken literally. And so there's a way in which Hegel both glorifies and acknowledges and has deep respect for Christianity,

but also a way in which he's sort of implicitly and perhaps explicitly saying that we have gone beyond it. Yeah. And it's, I mean, it's a huge debate. It's the split between the right and left Hagellians that, you know, Marx and Engels kind of jumped into that was going on right after Hegel's death. How religious was Hegel? There's one story I really like that one of my teachers, William Desmond. He wrote a book, he was on my dissertation committee too and he wrote a book called Hegel's God the counterfeit double. Now Desmond is a devout Catholic

and has his own kind of philosophy developed kind of based on German idealism and his own Catholicism and he's a kind of a Catholic critic of Hegel who says like you know like this is not really Christianity at all and you know I you know in my dissertation from a more dialectical and historical materialist perspective was like saying

yeah and I kind of agree like it doesn't doesn't seem like there's it seems like religion is a stage on the way to you to philosophy for for hagel but it seems that he's not exactly very devout but there's a story that desmond tells of i think it's like from one of hagel's biographers where hagel's wife asked him his opinion on or maybe it was either his wife or his priest was like what's your opinion on the you know do you think do you believe in like life after death like do you believe in the immortality of the soul and hagel pointed at the bible without saying a word like that was that was was his response. He was just like, yeah, he was just like, Bible. Yeah. And Hegel's wife was apparently

really upset when she looked at like her husband's early writings and saw how they were pretty like anti-Christian. And so I don't know, like Hegel had, you know, was married to a very devout Christian woman. You know, maybe, and it was illegal to not to, to be an atheist. Ficta got kicked out. He got exiled for his, fire from the university in exile. So, you know, there's a lot of people who point to a climate of self-censorship about matters of religion and equivocation within the people themselves. So they're like, well, yeah, I'm a Christian.

You know, God is substance, right? God's nature. You know, Spinoza's kind of version of Christianity. And so I think that there's a sense in which it's really a question of how Christian Hegel is. And you read Feuerbach, who's a big influence, he was a young Higalian, you know, corresponded with Hagell, big influence on Marx.

When Forre Borg makes this critique of Hagell, it's like, well, there's still this like kind of Christian core, even though it's a sublated Christianity to Hagle. And so he, he still, I think, recognizes that Hagle is, is probably on the, more atheistic or spinosistic side of things. But because he like passes through Christianity on the way, that's like one of Fourierbach's objections.

Bruno Bauer is another figure and I'll mention him when we get to some of the questions about Marx but he was a young Hagellian who wrote a book called The Last Trumpet of Judgment I think is the name of it Let me find the exact title. It's amazing It is called The Last Trumpet of Judgment against Hegel

The Atheist and Antichrist, an ultimatum. Nice. And there's a quote, let me read a quote from it that I have as an epigraph on my dissertation here. We firmly believe that the book of revelations when it speaks of the beast has Hegel the antichrist and mine. So this book is a false flag attack on Hegel. Brno Bauer actually thinks that Hegel is an atheist and wants to promote an atheistic greeting

of Hegel. But he can't do that legally. So he pretends to be a Christian critic of Hegel and attacks the right Hegelians. from the further to the right under a false flag attack be like y'all think haggles a Christian he's the antichrist that's awesome but really bowers like and that's based but he's like not saying it that's hilarious dude I thought the language the whole language of the book

is amazing um it's it's kind of hard to track down like I think I had to do into library loan to get it um but uh yeah so um there you know there are these these debates uh which are quite interesting about Hegel's relationship to religion. And yeah, I'm not convinced he's, I think he thinks Christianity's cool because he thinks the Trinity is dialectical. Yes.

And I think he wants his wife to not leave him if he becomes an atheist. But, I mean, he kind of finds himself in a similar position that, you know, Spinoza did, where Sinoza in the Jewish community is articulating this philosophical understanding of God that to the orthodox religious mind

seems antithetical, seems atheistic. You know, from from Hegel's perspective, I don't pretend to resolve this debate by any means, but there's a way in which this development of the absolute spirit kind of, by definition, maybe negates this idea that there is a creator God standing outside of this process, watching it happen, and certainly the naive or mainstream view of Christianity

and the way that God, you know, creates the universe, puts humanity there, let's the human drama sort of play out. People go to hell or heaven based on their moral choices. That certainly I feel like is too simplistic for Hegel. So perhaps he has this elevated understanding of God that a mainstream Christian would just see as blasphemy. Yeah, absolutely.

Which is not to say that there are not many intelligent people who are Christians who develop their theology out of Hegel. It's not necessarily how I'm reading them, though. Totally. And now on the while we're on the subject, I just want to mention that. One criticism I do have of Hegel is like when he gets to talking about religions, like making a tier list of religions like where one like evolves into, I'm not.

That's a little cringe for me. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Because yeah, I'm, but Hegel was somebody who I think he read one of Lesing's book, Nathan the Wise, when he was younger, which is a book about religious tolerance. And, you know, he bought for Jewish people. to have full political rights. You know, was he always like, you know, he, of course, fell into many stereotypical views of his time, but, you know, I think he at least, like, had a more tolerant perspective on religion,

despite being, I think, maybe Christian-centric in a way that could be also classified as Eurocentric. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Okay, I have another thing to throw out there before we move on. Yeah, absolutely. Which we're going to get to the master slave dialectic, I think, next, because you covered, I believe you covered the dialectic and how contradiction functions as this productive, propulsive drive forward for consciousness. And I think people that listen to the show and have an understanding of dialectics understand

the role that contradiction plays within it. But one of the things I'm personally very interested in is that these, you know, what Hagell calls these world historical figures. And that phraseology, world historical, has been taken up by Marxist. We often use that phrase in various ways. Hegel is using it as like, it's very, very, fascinating the way that you know he calls it the cunning of reason the way that absolute spirit uses individuals individual passion individual desire individuals high level of ambition and uses them as

sort of pieces on a broader chessboard to advance history and one of the classic examples of course was his contemporary napoleon who when as napoleon is writing after the french revolution everybody knows napoleon rises as this figure of the french revolution that simultaneously ends it by becoming the emperor of France, but also carries the ideals of the French Revolution and basically the nascent form of nation states and the state form and modern liberal modernity, basically throughout the rest of Europe at the edge of a bayonet, right? But he's living at this time where Napoleonic wars are occurring. And I think there's a moment in Hegel's life where I think in Jena or something, he sees Napoleon ride through on

on horseback leading the French army and, you know, says, you know, Napoleon is history on horseback or world history, world spirit on horseback. Napoleon himself, obviously, much like Caesar before him, these world historical figures, they don't know from the point of view of absolute spirit, certainly, that they're carrying out a historical mission. They're driven internally by their own, you know, insatiable desire for whatever power, ambition. I mean, Napoleon is conquering and dominating his enemies, you know, he's not necessarily conceiving of himself in Hagellian terms. Caesar is assassinated brutally, and Napoleon ends up exiled and living out the rest of his life on St. Helena Island in the middle of the Atlantic far, far, far away from Europe and its political

machinations. There's a way in which it's almost like absolute spirit, uses these figures and for the development of human history and then discards them. And they don't understand themselves as pawns in this world historical development, perhaps. They understand themselves, of course, as we all do through our own sort of internal lives. But can you talk a little bit about the cunning of reason and whether or not you think I'm more or less correct about how I'm understanding Hegel's understanding of world historical figures? Yeah. So one thing I would like to add, because I think it's a very fascinating. story to add here is that not only did he see um so well so hegel was under siege in yenna

by napoleon's army army while writing the phenomenology of spirit oh okay cool not only that he was like in trouble because he was taking a long time to write it and he had taken out a loan from the publisher to to write it and he was like the publisher's like i need a copy or you're going to be like in debt slavery to me like so he's literally just like frantically writing this book in a city under siege and then having each chapter when he finishes it finishes it smuggled over enemy lines the one copy of that chapter wow um and before he does that he like actually like writes starts writing the next chapter to remind himself where he left off and thankfully every chapter made it over enemy lines.

He writes absolute knowing, puts it in his pocket because this army's broken through into the city, and just like, I'm going to go look, you know, people go watch battles back then. He's just like walking around, goes back to his place and it's been destroyed and ransacked.

So luckily he kept it in his pocket the whole time. Wow. Yeah. But yeah, the ruse of reasons really interesting. And like, yeah, I think it comes up in here, it's in the spiritual animal kingdom, I think, from what I remember, like, around that time, like, um, that there's this sense in which, like, if you think about, I think

it can be interesting, like, zoom back for a little bit and think about, um, like, like animals from a kind of Higalian slash interracitilian perspective. So like, when animals reproduce with each other or humans even, right, like, the reasons they're doing it is probably just like, feels good kind of thing, right? But or whatever, you know, desire to have children in, like, very individualistic things. And this is what brings individuals together to reproduce. Yet that brings about a concept. Like the species is a concept that's kept into existence.

You know, Hegel didn't believe in evolution, unfortunately. I mean, well, he's unfortunate. I mean, Marx writes that he's like, he's like, Hegel would have loved evolution. He just lived before Darwin, unfortunately. Hegel rejects evolution based on the evidence. yet available at the time for it, because evolution was talked about prior to Darwin. True. But, you know, so, but, but he, he nevertheless notices that these individual actions of the

animals that are done for a seemingly all, a different purpose, happens to bring about a lawful continuation of a concept, the species. And so I think similarly, like, um, the ruse of reason, uh, is like, like you said, like people act from all kinds of like different motivation, some of them selfish motivation. and yet it brings about this um this uh this kind of i mean it's like it is an invisible hand kind of thing right like um and i think that's really interesting to think about when hegel's writing like at these these you know early stages of capitalism that there is a kind of sense in which our individual actions that are done for selfish reasons take on a life of their own and develop

into their own kind of like lawful um their own kind of lawful patterns right like uh like marx talks about how economies function this way right like these individual exchanges become part of this larger system that cannot be in our actual like hands right like it's it's larger than any individual's actions within it and yet it has it's like kind of organized lawfulness to it um and so yeah I think too, like when he talks about, you know, the beautiful soul versus the person who, who acts, that like when you act, you expose your deed to the light of the world and that it brings about something. And that's something that, you know, something that has universal, universality to it. So someone like Napoleon acting for whatever reason, but bringing about freedom for people who were able to adopt certain elements of the, of the, uh, the French revolution inspired system, right? like ending certain feudal ties. And so, yeah, I think there's a sense in which, like, Hegel is very much against the kind of moralism that focuses on whether the individual is good when looking at history,

because at the end of the day, like history uses all kinds of people to bring about these giant historical shifts. And it's a question, too, of like, you know, is this kind of kind of like teleology, like some kind of like destiny kind of situations, some kind of like logic outside of people's control, or is this something that we reconstruct after the fact? Hegel says in the philosophy, right, that the Al of Minerva flies at dusk, that reason always arrives too late, looking upon the world after the fact, right? You think about somebody like Hegel, like, how contingent is it?

That like, like, he got lucky and none of these pages got stolen. And now we have the phenomenology of the spirit. And think of everything that, like, developed after that, you know, that coin, right? It is really quite fascinating to think about that. The necessity of this radical contingency in history, that these things that seem to be so like circumstantial and individual and contingent display, you know, in retrospect at least, this larger kind of necessity to them. Yeah.

And I think about, you know, marks and angles kind of forging dialectical. and historical materialism, that no other time in history could that have been able to be emerged through the minds of individuals. It's not that these are brilliant thinkers standing outside of time. They're very contingent in their historical lineage that they're after Hegel. And only being after Hegel could you formulate dialectical and historical materialism in that way. You know, you mentioned the Alive Minerva. I always also think Kierkegaard, a very different thing. and anti-Hagelian did not like Hangel. Schopenauer was also a famous hater of Hagle.

But Kierkegaard has that famous quote, you know, that life can only be lived forward, but can only be understood backwards. And it's kind of that same idea that the process occurs and only at dusk, at the end of a certain phase of a process, can you look back and understand it? And on a separate note or a related note, Hagle himself, just like Napoleon and Caesar

and other world historical figures, is a world historical figure, but is unique in that perhaps he is the first one that grasps himself as, you know, a manifestation of absolute spirit, that he is being used in this way to articulate a higher level of knowing than has ever been grasped before. So do you agree with that? Yeah, yeah. That's a good point. And reminds me of like, you know, at the end of Hegel's history of philosophy, I remember reading for the first time and expecting Hegel to be the last.

person listed, right? Yeah. Like, because Bertrand Russell does that in his history of philosophy. He's like, and then the final philosophy is my logical atomism, which I think is correct. Hegel doesn't do that. He, like, after doing shelling, he's just like, and now we've seen that there really is just one philosophy. And it expresses itself at different points of different sides.

And it's like, okay, he did kind of end with himself by saying, but he wasn't like, let's add Hegel to the list. He's just like, you know, here we go, the one philosophy that's, you know, continually articulated itself through different voices, but I think he sees himself as an expression of that one philosophy at the same time, right? And in a way that you can't really take personal credit for it. Based on his own logic, it's not like an ego inflating thing. Like, I am the genius. It's like, no, I am the vehicle through which this happened to be expressed at this time. Yeah, exactly. And probably Schopenhauer is shaking his fist at Hegel somewhere, thinking of him as arrogant,

but I don't know. Like, from what I've read at Hegel's personal life, he seemed to be pretty down to earth. And what I know of Schopenhauer's personal life, he was very arrogant. Yeah, very arrogant. And reactionary. Yeah, for sure. And it had a lot of personal issues because, you know, like, he would famously stage, they worked at the same, I think, believe

University for a time. And he would stage his lectures at the exact same time as Hageles, and Hagles would be overflowing into the hallways. And like three people would show up for Schopenhauer. So, there's a personal dimension there as well. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Very funny. Yeah. Bertrand Russell's

history of Western philosophy passage on Marx is absolute garbage just so everybody knows Yeah, yeah I hated it. I hated it when I read it. Yeah, I think it's a Yeah, his one on Hegel is better than Carl Popper's But it's, I mean, he just recounts the British

Idealist reading of Hegel Which is, but I mean, it's, it's kind of comical, I think, at times I do quote it sometimes as a joke But it's certainly not as bad as Carl Popper just didn't read Hegel. He just says, like, stand them. Yeah, and he like accuses Hegel of being, he's like, Hegel is evil, either like, um,

a complete, you know, idiot or just diabolically evil and purposely trying to deceit everyone. I think he's diabolically evil and trying to purposely deceit everyone. It's like, give me a break. Shut up. But, you know, Cold War propaganda to do against the thing. Absolutely. Absolutely.

Um, okay, well, anything else to say? Are you ready to move into the master slave dialect? Yeah, let's move into the master slave. Okay. Question number two. The master slave dialectic is probably the most famous perhaps section of the phenomenology. I think many people have at least heard of it. I recently on the Patreon put it an episode with a fanani in perspective on the master slave dialectic in the colonial situation, which people might be interested in.

But what problem is, is Hegel trying to solve through this encounter? And what does it tell us about, you know, these various forms of this process, recognition, domination dependence and the very formation of self-consciousness itself. Yeah. So just to put out there just the general idea, for me to be aware of myself, for me to be self-conscious, for me to have myself as an object,

Hegel thinks that this has to be mediated, mediated being like brought about by, in a kind of like, way of logical necessity. So mediated by another self-conscious being. That for me to recognize myself, I need another person as like a mirror

to see myself. That to exist, I have to exist in a way that I am recognized by other people as who I am. And that I, in a way, our identity depends not just on what we take ourselves to be,

but what other people take us to be as well. And so the way he describes this, the first sentence here of the master slave dialectic, which is not the most accurate translation here, unfortunately, self-consciousness exists in and for itself when and by the fact that it exists in and for itself for another. That is, it exists only in being, the word here is, Anarchent recognized, acknowledged, that recognition existing in and for oneself, both for oneself and for another, in and for oneself, meaning what like one really actually is, and for oneself, meaning what one takes oneself to be, that this kind of existence, this kind of

self-knowledge has to include and is only possible and reflected through the knowledge other people have of us. So he says that this has a like two-fold there are a series of contradictions that are brought about by this and I'm going to try to give like kind of interpersonal examples to illustrate them.

So one of them is that like we both lose ourselves in another person, but also, like, lose the other person insofar as we only see ourselves reflected into them. So if I am a person who's obsessed with what other people think about me, and so I become, like, a people pleaser, then I, like, lose myself, right? I've lost my own identity, my own individuality, because I'm letting other people, people's, like, wants or expectations of me define who I am, because I just care about what other people think about me. But I also, like, I'm not even accessing those other people, too, right, in their own individuality, because I'm just using them as a window for kind of my own, like, feeling, you know,

my own sense of self-work, my own, like, feeling good about myself. So I don't actually see them. I'm just, like, reflected in them. So there's, like, this dilemma of, like, it's like, how can we make a situation where I am myself, you see me as I really am, and I see that you see me as I really am. While at the same time seeing who you are, like really are, like, and you seeing that I see you as you really are, right? And, you know, there are these different contradictions that emerge like, you know, if I say like, oh, I just don't care about what other people think, I'm going to be myself,

right? Then, like, when people say this, like, oh, I don't care what other people think. First of all, those people always do you think, care about what other people think. Always. Right? But they're also like self-oblivious at that point, right? You're not actually achieving some kind of secure individuality. You're like, oh, I don't care about what other people think about me.

It's like you're just like not, you're like losing any kind of truth you could have about yourself. And when I teach, you know, I teach some of these ideas usually through Sartre and, you know, bring in the Hegel, you know, with my undergrads. But I was thinking of this, this person I went to college with. who really wanted to be like a pop singer, like a Britney Spears type pop singer. And she had been on like American Idol, but she was one of the ones that they kind of made fun of on the show. Yeah.

And she's very, I think, oblivious to this and like very much, you know, full of her own, you know, project. And so everybody on my college campus decided that for some reason, it would be a good idea to ironically pretend that she was the pop singer that she thought she was to make fun of her. But she had no idea that they were being ironic. And so, right, from her perspective, how she existed for herself, right? Her self-consciousness for herself was, I'm making it, right?

Look at, I'm bringing crowds, like, all the people from the college are coming to my concerts, right? But how she exists in herself, for herself had no truth. Because in herself, this is a kind of delusion, right? Like a delusion of grandeur on her part. and the other people who making fun of her know this, right? And they, um, this, this, uh, this cell, there's not a reciprocal exchange of recognition here. There is a lack of certainty. And so like there are, there's parts of ourselves that we can only access through the lens of other people,

that we can't have an I versus, I equals I. Like, I am myself. I think therefore I am without there being an eye that we recognize, somebody like first like points at you and says you. Another example I use, and this is a variation on once Archer uses, is like, you know, imagine you're, you know, like in the library alone, like early in the day, you're watching a movie on your laptop. And suddenly you realize there's somebody else in the room with you looking at you.

You know that feeling when you were like drawn out of immersion in a movie and like all of a sudden you're like, oh, I'm a person. I'm here. Like there's somebody watching me. That's like this idea of. like self-consciousness only existing when you are an object for another person. And I think existentialism is very great at, you know, fleshing out the kind of phenomenology of this, both Sartre and Fanon, being another great thinker of this.

And so that's where this, this structure of self-consciousness works. And importantly, too, it's like, it has to be a double movement for it has, for it to work. they can't be one-sided movement where one person gets the recognition, that both people have to give each other the recognition of being both like certain of themselves and that being really who they are. And it goes back to like the idea of like, you know, Hegel being like the preface and the deed, right? You know, the phrenologist says like, oh, who you are is a lump on the skull. And it's like, no, you are your actions. But actions are public, right? Actions make you who you are because they're recognized as such.

they are exposed to the light of day. And so this structure, right, so, you know, just like in previous modes of the phenomenology, there's a kind of conception of a type of cognition. This conception is recognition, which is that mutual recognition where it's like, I exist in for myself, reflected through another. The other exists in and for themselves reflected through me. and then there's this attempt to like, okay, he says here on like 185,

paragraph 185 of the beginning, we have to now see how this process of this pure notion of recognition of the duplicating self-consciousness in its oneness appears in self-consciousness. So like, what's the experience of actually carrying this out? And it turns into this kind of Hobbesian like, like battle to the death.

Like, and that's like, the one of the, like, the complicated things about this is like this is a double movement. It can't be a one-sided recognition, right? It has to be a two-sided conversation. It's like a chicken fight almost where like, you know, like the two people like drive their cars each other and one of them flinches first and that's the loser. And so, you know, this is a point that Phenon emphasizes of, you know, by risking your life,

you in a way prove your existence, right? Like if you don't stake your life on something, that there's a sense in which you don't have humanity. That's like one point that he, the sonan mentions a lot. And this is, you know, an idea from this, this reunion of Hegel.

And so, like, it's in this kind of like, battle for recognition, which is not about, you know, it's not about like a battle over resources. It's like a battle over ego or glory, to use a Hobbesian term for it. Both sides. want to be acknowledged by the other as the dominant, the essential one, right?

As I'm, you know, I'm the, I'm the tough guy here, whatever, right? So, um, they have this, this battle to the death, which is ultimately a dead end. Because, like, if each side does what the other does, you just have two dead bodies at that point. You know, if people, you know, nobody flinches when you drive, you know, the chicken fight, where the people drive the cars at each other, you just have two, you know, crashed cars and dead people at that point. But one of the sides in this life and death struggle

like flinches, or more specifically, they recognize that recognition, right, like being recognized by another person. And you can think dignity here, like recognized as a human being with rights, that you have to be alive to actually get recognition. They recognize that life is more essential. And so they submit.

And this becomes this lopsided relationship with the master and the slave. The slave takes over the side of life, of keeping themselves alive by working. And the master gains the recognition, right, of being that having that, you know, feeling of worth, of being like, oh, I am, you know, recognized. by the other. But this relationship is ultimately one-sided, right? Because everybody sucks up to the boss, right? The master through this victory has that recognition, but it's ultimately a false recognition

because it's the recognition of their subordinate, you know, under duress. Now, I think it's interesting to bring in some historical acts. aspects here to think about where Hagel's coming from with this dialectic. So there's one famous argument by Susan Buck Morris who argues that Hegel may have read about the Haitian Revolution before writing this and that he was influenced by

the Haitian Revolution. I think that would be really cool. And I think that this has mentioned a lot because people think it would be really cool. I haven't looked at the article in sometimes, so, you know, I haven't gone back and read it since I've learned more about Hegel. But Hegel does talk about the Haitian Revolution, and he has positive things to say about it. Now, he does, you know, Hegel is very much product of his time, says, you know, many things that play into harmful stereotypes and unquestioned your essential assumptions about black and indigenous people.

But he does unequivocally reject the idea that race has anything to do with a person's like Kabat. for intelligence and that it's he just basically like yeah people emphasize race just because they want to oppress other people it's like yeah like right like that's that's why it was made up Hagle right like to justify forms of oppression and you know it's it's unfortunate that Hagle didn't question a lot of the racist assumptions that he was

that receiving from anthropologists at the time but he does praise the Haitian revolution in the philosophy of history and he does describe a life and death struggle specifically where the Haitian ran at the soldiers into the line of fire and were gunned down in thousands, trying to take rifles away to free themselves. And he even says that like, that like when your life is regarded as not having dignity, when it's not recognized, then you'll risk it for that dignity. Now, it seems that, you know, at least there's a connection between the master's late

dialectic and Haiti. Whether he had it in mind before he wrote it is another question. But I think there's another source that is almost like certainly informing this. And that's Hegel's own kind of class consciousness and lived experience. So Hegel was a right after he graduated seminary, he was a private tutor for this guy named von Stiegler. And this guy was just total reactionary, right? Hay did the French Revolution. Hegel loved the French Revolution.

this guy had like this giant library didn't read any of the books right just very very everything Hegel was against and Hegel came from a pretty like enlightenment like like an enlightenment family like his mother taught him

his mother died unfortunately when he was very young but his mother like taught him Latin at like three or something like that so he already went into Latin school at age five like already knowing conjugations and stuff so hyper-educated person and so his family like while they didn't have any formal social status they had social status by on account of being like so well educated right so like they could like hang out with the upper sides of society just because they're like oh those people the haggles they're really

you know intellectuals they're cool to have around but when he's working as a private tutor all of a sudden he finds that he has a master right like he has um like this guy is an aristocrat and he's like basically a servant to this guy who is a total reactionary and kind of dumb. Same thing. And it's like the worst boss you could have. And the servant, it's not like he's getting along with the servants because they think like they're like, dude, you're not one of us.

You're not like part of the working class. Like chill out. Like you know, like, aren't you like you got social status? And so like he this position is kind of just, you know, where you're basically just taking rich people around and making them making sure it's like, okay, do you know what these arc pieces are so you don't make a fool of yourself? like just like giving giving them the kind of basic knowledge so that they can appear, you know, to be, you know, have the knowledge required of somebody of their status. And Hegel, like, talks about this a lot and he talks about like there's nothing worse than being, you know, smarter than your master if you're a servant.

And he seems to think that the French treat their servants with respect and dignity. I don't know if that's true. Probably not. He probably just read that at like one of Voltaire's novels or something. But he seems to think that like the French servants, they're like best friends. with their like their masters and they're like you know consulted for their advice and opinions and stuff like that so I think that that's another clear like uh influence here because he calls it you know the the words and are not actually master and slave I think that just rolls off the tongue better so that's what you call it but it's um her shaft and neckshaft so it's like lordship and bondage is how it's translated here or lordship and servitude and it is more about that feudal kind of aristocratic way

of viewing things where, you know, the aristocrat gets all this recognition from the underlings. Just like, you know, um, Von Stiegler, like, Hegel has to like treat him like a lord and probably address him with titles and stuff. But I'm sure that like, Hegel was like, you know, shitting on this dude behind his back, right? So it's not like that was very authentic, right? So there's not like that, there's no truth to that connection. And I think that's ultimately what the, the kind of like move here is is that like

the um objectively speaking it seems like the master obtains recognition and dignity and respect in all of these things um that they formally have because they have to be addressed this way but it has no truth to it because it's not like the master

can have no certainty at all right like if you're um if you're ever in a position of power over someone there's always like you have be a little suspicious of everything they say because you're like but they are incentivized to suck up to me absolutely yeah i'm a funny example i'm watching the new season of house of the dragon or whatever and it's obviously feudal arrangements you know and there's always like you have to you know my lord my grace like you know and even when they are you have to take any and all forms of abuse and insult

from your higher up and you have to take it with bowing your head and yes your grace and you have to walk out of the room. And so there's that element of complete subordination. But underneath that is always a sort of resentment, a bitterness, a dislike, behind their backs. They're, you know, talked much more negatively about, et cetera. So the respect and, and servility that is on display and that the master ostensibly gets is undermined by the act itself. Like, yes, the person does the thing. They say your grace. They bow their head. They take the insult. But, you know, your power isn't really there because they fucking hate you. They resent that.

They're bitter about it. And so that is like, the, that's the dialectic that undermines the supposed superior position of the, of the master in this,

in this dialectic, right? Right, exactly. And that's why those, like, aristocrat, like the king has a joker, right? Or a jester, right? Exactly. Because the jester could make fun of him.

And he's like, oh, finally, I get to see myself. Reflected back at me through, like, a roast, I guess, right? Yes. And so, um, this the situation of is also one of you know exploitation so the um the side of life like basically like

working to make objects uh belongs to the side of the slave whereas the satisfaction of desire like the side of like actually enjoying the fruits of these things goes to the master right and so this is like you can see a kind of structure of alienated labor here and this was it was really thinking through this that I think like made me change a lot of my views when I was you know younger and first read this on you know like what freedom really was and how freedom can basically just like led me to the conclusion it's like oh yeah freedom cannot exist when there's this kind of expropriation of of labor from workers like this it just um it really like somehow like this not marks in although I read marks in the same class but like more so this book uh did that for me

for somehow. And, you know, I probably would have a more nuanced, I certainly have a more nuanced to count now than I did then. But, um, can I say some things about this? Yeah, absolutely. Bounce these ideas off you. I think you're, I think anybody that's a Marxist can clearly see that this dialectic is, is taken on board by Marx and the boss worker relationship, among other relationships, colonize, colonizer, we can go down the list. But in the capitalist context, there's this, there is this dynamic at play in the, boss and the worker. And socialism is this recognition that, you know, we often even have this in our slogans that the bosses need us, right? Capital needs workers. But socialism presents the idea that

there is a possibility, there is a real world where the workers don't need the bosses. They don't need the capitalist overseeing their work. They can democratically self-manage. And it's precisely because it's the workers themselves who do the labor upon which the profit accumulation of the capitalist, the very structural position of the capitalist itself is built upon. And you know, you can't have capitalist a boss without workers. You know, that undermines itself as a category. But in real practical life, the worker is subservient, subservient to the boss. And the boss sits above the worker. The worker does the actual labor. The boss gets, as you said, the products of that toil and brings it into themselves. But in that process, they make themselves utterly and

completely dependent on the thing they're supposedly superior to. And the inversion is that the worker themselves, while practically and daily subservient to the boss, actually holds the superior position because they're the ones that actually transform the world through labor. They're the ones that actually make things and develop things in the first place. And so that I think is the dialectic being argued in Hegel explicitly and is it's just basically taken on wholesale by marks yeah yeah it's um it's uh it's really interesting to because like yeah yeah you just made me think of like what would the opposite look like isn't that what i've never read atlas shrug but isn't it like the billioners go on strike yeah exactly yeah right right like okay um right like um but yeah

like you're exactly right like this um the the the master wants like recognition at this kind of ideological level and thinks that they are the independent essential side of this relationship but the true the true independence the inner independence is in the objective or apparent dependent right the person who is the person who is the person who is being subjugated is the one who actually has the power over life and death, the one who actually is, like, the master's clueless without. Like, they're the ones actually doing everything. And I think, like, yeah, maybe Hegel's idea of the French servant would be, like, one who, like, they actually have this kind of, like, dialogue because the French, like, somehow in Hegel's view, like, no, like,

it's like, well, I mean, if I don't have this guy, I can't do anything. So I'm going to treat it like a human being, which they probably didn't in France, I would imagine. But, um, uh, and yeah, like, it's interesting. about Marx here. Because it's like, you'd think he would mention Hegel's master's slave dialectic more in his

actual writings, but I've never really found many references to it. But you can't help but read this and not see class struggle, like clearly at work here. And so, yeah, what ultimately, like, leads

to the transition out of this relationship is work is labor because like labor is what um is when we like take conception in our mind and make it make it real and it involves like thinking and in thinking while working and while having to actually like hold desire and check that's like one other aspect of this as well like like like having to like you know even like in the example you mentioned is i think a good one where it's like having to like hold your tongue even when you're like oh i really want to smart off to this person um always a hard thing for me to do. That's why I became a professor, which is advertised as something where you have the freedom

to say whatever you want. As we're learning very clearly under the Trump administration, not always the case. But there's this sense in which you can, this sense in which you encounter this inner life. And that's the transition to this next stage of stoicism, skepticism, and unhappy consciousness of like, I'm going to like, like, you know, Epictetus is one of the great Stoics and he was like the slaves. I'm going to like move into my own mind and think. Do you want me to mention a few things about Marx in relation to the master slave dialectic? Yeah, please do, please do.

And then I have one more thing to say about to kind of summarize it. But yeah, please. Awesome. Yeah. So on this, on the subject of like labor, like Mark says that like both humans and animals labor in capital. as I'm sure many of your readers know, the spiders build the webs, the birds build the nests,

the humans build a house. The difference is that the human being build the house in their head before they build it in the world. Yeah, or build it on a piece of paper before they build it in the world. And so there's something very important that Marx finds in Hegel

and Engels finds at Hegel of the fact that we can, through human action, we take a concept in our head and we give it reality. like angles even says like this is the answer to the thing in itself like practice is like what puts it makes our concepts match the world that by doing something on the basis of a plan

I've proven I've proven my idea by putting it into existence now seriously I've never found an instance where Marx conceives of the stroke or directly says you know my inspiration for the struggle for the bourgeoisie and proletariat is the master slave dialectic this mostly comes from a guy named Alexander Kojev. I'm sure you've heard of. He gave a famous series of lectures on Hagel's phenomenology, especially on the master slave dialectic in the 1930s

in France. He was Russian. I believe he was a KGB agent, which is like, what a crazy way to be undercover. It's like, please ignore the Russian Marxist teaching Hegel. Certainly no KGB here, right? But like he has a

reading of the master slave dialectic that is, I think, very influential on phenomenon. and influenced, I think, by Heidegger a lot. Very interesting read. And he takes some of these ideas up. But I did find, finally, an allusion to the master's slave, Daglectic in Marx, and it's in capital and a footnote. But it's not about the relationship between classes.

It's about the relationship between commodities. And so he says, in a certain sense, humans are in the same situation as commodities, as we never enter into the world in possession of a mirror, nor as a fictian philosopher who can say, I am I, a person first season recognizes themselves in another person. So this is one of the cool things about Marx's very, I mean, he's the best reader of Hegel.

There's a John Hippolyte, who is like the standard commentator on Hegel, says at some point, Marx is the best reader of Hegel. And I think it's because he could read it so closely and find these kinds of ways of connection. connecting things. But in capital, a commodity can only express itself in the form of an equivalent. I can't measure a commodity in terms of itself. Like, I can't measure the value of linen in terms of linen. Or, you know, to jump to a higher stage, I can't say, like, well, how much, how much money is $20 worth $20? Like, it's worth $20, right? That's not a, you can't just, you can't measure

money in money. You'd have to measure it in its purchasing power. And so the value for Marx can only be come visible when one commodity is reflected into another commodity either in terms of or look you know it's cash equivalent in terms of the you know the money form and but at the same time just like the master slave you can't like it's a double movement but you cannot have both simultaneously um at the same time right because 20 linen equals one coat and one coat equals 20 linen but the like order of operations matter like one has to be the measure and one has to be the measured. And it's only by like putting something outside of the series,

money that allows me to measure all the commodities. But then money can't be measured anymore or gold or whatever unless we like look at money and like as expressing all of the commodities and what they can they can measure. Now the commodities have nothing measuring them but they're all measuring money. And so there is like a version of the master slave dialectic of like, reflective of things only making sense as what they are when they are reflected into another as a mirror except its commodities and not people. That's really good.

That's really good. I never thought about it in those terms. I was always on the proletariat versus the bourgeoisie master slave dialectic, but that's that's really good. And yeah, Marx doesn't explicitly say it. It's just he is Hegelian in his approach. And yeah, he takes these things and applies them in these really fascinating and deeply, you know, illuminating, demystifying ways,

just uses the tools of Hegel without constantly saying, I'm using this thing from Hegel. So that's why another reason why I think for the unconvinced person listening, that understanding Hegel is really important, not to go out and be an activist, to go organized, to politically educate, but if you want to really understand the theory and the philosophy, it's incredibly just, I think, essential, if not, just on its own face, fascinating.

And I love the species being discussion. and the way Marx talks about humans being unique and our abstracting of the final product in the imaginary and then the realization of that imaginary and the concrete. I work as a tradesman. So we are handed blueprints. It's just an empty field and then we get blueprints. And then we take the blueprints and we go build the actual thing,

the actual structural wires and steel and pipe and PVC and bring to life the abstract idea contained within the blueprint. and that's just an example of exactly, you know, what you're talking about. While, of course, we're under the boss worker dialectic and, you know, within a union in particular, there's this level of class consciousness that has dignity within it, wherein there's always a continuous sort of pushback against the bosses. There's always an ambient class consciousness and hostility to the management and the higher-ups that I've never felt in all my many, many, many non-union jobs, which I love about being in the union.

Like, there's a genuine way in which, you know, the union people don't take any fucking shit and are always aware that they want to ram us harder. They want to work us harder. You know, they want to push, push, push, and we have to constantly be pushing back. I just wanted to say that. But the main point I want to make about the master slave dialectic before we leave this part is, yes, like, don't take it too literally. I mean, there is a literal application here, of course.

but I think more broadly it's this what Hegel is getting at is this model of unequal recognition in like social relations much more broadly than just the slave and master dynamic it's not it's not meant to be taken as a literal account of slavery I don't think and in the in the in the aspect of his broader work I think he's talking about this stage of development

where self-consciousness discovers as you were talking about you know, very elegantly. It's need for recognition from another and then the master slave relation kind of showing what happens when that recognition is one-sided and hierarchical. What that looks like in feudalism, in the in the boss worker relationship, in the colonized colonizer relationship, we can extrapolate and apply it in those ways. But that contradiction that we're exploring where it's actually the slave or the worker or the colonized that transforms through their actual thinking ability and their material concrete

engagement with the world actually becomes, you know, the essential piece of that dialectic while the other sits above it and just enjoys the, you know, the products of that toil and all the problems that come with it. That's a critique in a serious way, I think, of the hierarchy of class society. At least it could be understood in that way. And those contradictions, I think, think according to Hegel is what pushes consciousness itself toward the idea that genuine freedom requires mutual recognition between equals. And you were talking about this relationship to existentialism earlier. And Simone de Beauvoir is a wonderful existential thinker, not just as is often portrayed perhaps as Sartre's partner, but in her own right, a genuinely deep philosophical and

political thinker and she you know makes this point very explicit and within existentialism that you know freedom can only be obtained for me when others are free too like there that is the i think the right conclusion to make from an analysis and extrapolation of the master slave dialectic and that i think fits well with a post-class society vision for what humanity can be if absolute spirit is moving towards freedom in this way if that freedom requires mutual recognition between equals, the dismantling of the one-sided and hierarchical master-slave relationship, then the outcome of that historically would eventually have to be the overcoming of class society itself, because in every iteration of class society, there is this

one-sided and hierarchical master-slave dialectic manifesting in different iterations, right? as a feudal lord and the peasant or the literal master plantation owner and the slave or the actual boss and the worker in every iteration of class society this dialectic falls into the one-sided and hierarchical thing and so in the pursuit of freedom as the unfolding of absolute spirit it would make sense why Marx would take that idea and have the vision of communism on the horizon of human development yeah absolutely and like and maybe it's just that haigle did not get to that, you know, the material side of capitalism to the same way as Marx. And so I think he, you know, stays in that kind of liberal position.

And you mentioned, like, there are like, there are so many ways that you can apply this, this dialectic, any, any kind of relationship where there's the potential for hierarchy or something like this. I was thinking teacher and student is another one, right? A lot of people use the example of love as well. like relationships can be one-sided, right? Where one person, you know, says what the other person wants to hear and, you know, or something like that or, you know, there's uneven, uneven labor.

Paula Fierre is another, is another great person to take up Hegelian ideas of, of recognition and apply them. But in his case specifically to coming up with a, a revolutionary model of education that does away with that hierarchy between teacher and student. So I wanted to mention that as well. And yeah, in relation to unions, I'm now in a union in one of my jobs too. And it's like, wow, this is so cool. I feel so like empowered by this.

Absolutely. It's like we got to go to City Hall and like yellow people and like has signs and like City All was like took us seriously as a force. And I was like, wow, this is so cool. Absolutely. There's real dignity in it. There's real dignity in it. Yeah, absolutely.

Okay, so let's go ahead and move into more or less the last question here. there's a million, you know, questions we could explore. There's a million different angles to talk about disagreements to explore. There's much more to Hegel himself. Perhaps you can come back on in a future episode and talk about his logic or, you know, other aspects of his work to fill out this picture. But we've really covered the flow and the structure of the phenomenology of spirit. We've talked about the details of implications for society, for history, for our own conscious development. the master slave dialectic.

I think one more thing I would want to hit on before we wrap up is this notion of negation of sublation. It's perhaps core to dialectics more broadly, so I think it's worth working through. So the phenomenology of spirit repeatedly shows a form of consciousness, discovering the world, that the world is not what it initially thought that it was, only for that failure to produce a richer understanding. What does Hegel mean by determinant negation or sublation? And how do these concepts help us understand his distinctive idea of progress via contradiction? Yeah, so these are important terms in Hegel and sometimes very misunderstood.

So I want to make sure we can get some clarity on them. So the first word is sublation, and this is a translation of the German word alfhebel. And this can also be in a verb form of alf Haven. And sometimes it's split like haped alf. But what it, it has these contradictory meanings that Hegel wants to invoke, which said it means to preserve and to negate. So both to like cancel out, but also to keep. Like, which seems the exact opposites.

And then also has this connotation of like uplifting all it once. And there are a couple of interesting, like, uses in, like, everyday German for this. One that struck me that I thought was interesting was, you know, like, an algebra where there's, like, two sides of equation and you will cancel out the sides to make it, like, even. Alphabung. So, yeah, but if you think about it, you're, like, kind of preserving the equality while, like, canceling off the sides. Totally. Another one that comes from Kant, because Kant uses Alphabetum, too, not always in the, you know, not certainly with, with the Higalian, like, dialectical connotations, but whenever you talk about, like, resolution is usually al-Hevong.

But, like, you could think about two forces canceling each other out, two things pressing on each other, like, and preventing all motion. So the total amount of, like, motion might be zero, or, like, the total amount of, like, force if it's, like, equally, they're equally pressing each other and canceling out the forces might be zero. But it's a different zero than if there were no forces, right? Mm-hmm. Because there's something that's been canceled there.

there's a negative. There's something that's like, it's like if the answer is zero, zero is still an answer, right? It's not, the answer is not nothing or no answer. Another example I like comes from Lenin as well, where he talks about in the imperialism,

the highest stage of capitalism, that the law of competition, like the competition that determines capitalism is sublated in the monopoly stage of imperialism. But he's not denying that competition is not something fundamental. like, right? Like competition is still like imminently determining like Elon Musk and Amazon, all these people,

even though they've reached the stage that nobody can compete with them, right? Like it's like a sublated law. But Lenin says that non-competition between monopolies doesn't abolish the law of competition, but it kind of like hovers over it. So I think that that's a really great tangible example of sublation. The great thing about the Marxist tradition is that we can look at examples that are not as abstract that are really concrete of sublation. So another example of a sublation that I like would be, you know, like someone like Descartes who says, like, we can, what we know is whatever seems to be the case.

So we at least know that it seems to be. But already the term seems cancels out it being, right? Because you're saying, well, it's not exactly what is the case. And so Hegel will call this like a sublated immediacy. but basically sublation is when something is negated, when something is cancelled out by something else, but it's not reduced to nothing. It's still like the thing is still affected by the fact

that something is being canceled out. And you can think about it maybe as something like showing like the order of operations, matter. And determinate negation is like very close to sublation. So if we bring them both into like I'm not I don't want to use the terms as equivocal to each other, but they're very close to each other. Because He goes sometimes like use it.

Like he uses a sublation very casually at times when you're just talking about an operation being a sublation. Like it's not it's not like always like where you get the like, okay, thesis synthesis, which everyone hopefully knows is never, you know, never really, never ever in Hegel. but like oh and then we have the sublation like it's not like there's a specific stage it's like this is the sublation stage it's kind of just a word he uses to describe a certain type

of negation that preserves does not you know like preserves that result preserves whatever is being negated in the same way that like in the Lenin example that a monopoly it's not like there's no more competition just like it that has been like

put out of action by the fact that there's a monopoly and so what's a terminate and negation is, on the other hand, well, first of all, let me say what determination is by saying what it is not, which I just realized it's an ironic way to put it. What it's not is that. What it's not is Spinoza's all determination is negation, or at least if it is, if there's a connection, it's, it's not in the way people typically want to say it. Determination, determined negation is not the idea that you can only say what something is by pointing out what it's not. Now, you frequently, find this in the kind of older, you know, no offense, these people, boomer, like, objectively, that's their generation, readers of Hagel, where an analytic philosophy readings of Hagel,

where it's like, okay, to know what something is, we have to say what it's not. Now, Hagel does think you can find out what something is by saying what it's not. That's a pretty common viewpoint in this time period, though. Determined a negation is the idea, actually, that contradictions and negations are always to be understood as results of specific determinations. So one example from someone you've also had on your show, Grand Priest, the liar paradox, like a classical paradox, this sentence is false.

Produces a paradox because if this sentence is false is false, then it's true. If it's true, then it's false. Objectively speaking, the fact that there is a paradox here is the result of that specific determination, self-negation. right and if you you're like wait i'm going to figure out which one it is true or false then you're missing something right because that's how it's like actually determined and so hegel's critique of skepticism because skepticism also uses dialectic um dialectic being this this process

of showing how things turn into their opposites how things have inner contradictions in them skepticism sees that there are you know contradictions or in cons case intent enemies that prevent us from having knowledge or make things questionable, right? So someone like Zeno, who's not necessarily a skeptic, but is making a kind of skeptical argument, says, okay, motion means that something's in two places at once, and that's a contradiction, so there must be no such thing as motion. Skepticism doesn't recognize as that there's a contradictory result, but then it just stops, and it says, okay, so we can't know anything. It doesn't put a positive spin on that

contradiction. It doesn't realize that we just learn something, right? We just learn that these determinations produce a contradiction. We just learn that these determinations are objectively contradictory. Determinate negation is the kind of process that allows dialectic to be an engine of philosophical progress for Hegel. It adds a kind of memory to what we're doing. So just generally speaking, I think one of Hegel's big insights is the recognition that self-negating things, like a concept that negates itself, that excludes itself,

similar to the paradoxes that we find later in logic, like Russell's paradox, the set that contains all sets, except the set that contains itself, right? There's an exclusion of itself. That these produce a contradiction that makes them turn into their opposite. It's easier to see this in the logic,

where you start with being, what is being? I mean, yeah, it's like, You can't even say, right? Well, it's nothing. Right? So there's like a move where something turns into its opposite. Determine a negation is what lets that be a progress.

Because once something has been, so in the case of the, you know, the logic, once we recognize that being, being completely empty and having no content of its own, because everything we can say, you know, we can say everything, everything is, is nothing. And nothing, we ask, well, what is nothing? or we're already treating it like a being, so nothing is being, once we recognize that there's this movement into the opposite of being into nothing or nothing into being, that determined a negation recognize that there's an order of operations, that something that has passed through a negation is like a more concrete concept because we have actually looked at it through a process of turning into its opposite.

So like, there's one example of a joke of like Sartra going into a coffee shop and asking for tea without milk. And the guy says, sorry, Mr. we don't have any milk. Would you like it without cream instead?

Right? And so like the idea being that it matters what it's without, like what is the object that's being negated here. And I think it's an important lesson in politics too,

like to think about like how even in, you know, negating rival positions that you're acknowledging them and you're like giving them some kind of and also probably being determined

by, the positions that you're critical against versus the positions that you're trying to build coalitions with. But this kind of memory is what allows there to be in advance because a being that has passed through this stage of nothing is a more complex concept that Higel calls coming into being. It's being that's a result of nothing. And so that's where this engine comes.

And so if we look at like the phenomenology, perception is the determinant negation of sense certainty. sense certainty encounters a contradiction. It wants to say this individual thing, but has to use the phrase this individual thing, which can apply to all kinds of things. So there's a, and it's trying to not mix any of its own concepts

or knowledge into reality, yet it's performatively doing this. That result of like, I can't actually know things this way becomes this positive spin because I can, but I can know things doing the exact same thing that was a problem earlier. Or to take an example that's, I think,

a little bit clearer and less like in the text, or, you know, like in the details of the text, Hegel's view of the contradictions in time and motion. The ancient skeptics say time in motion is contradictory, so they're not real. Everything's one. Permanetti's right. Hegel says time in motion are contradictory, so looks like there are real contradictions, right? Putting a positive spin on what seems skeptical. Um, you know, when Kant says, all we can know is appearances. We can't know anything beyond that. Hegel says, like, damn right.

And good thing, because if things didn't take on a form where they could appear to us, we couldn't find them. Wouldn't be able to have food. They actually have to necessarily have a form of appearance, but he says, like, this is a higher stage because then we have a thing and it's a relation to us now. This is something that Marx, I think, takes very seriously in capital. And throughout his work as well, I'm working on a paper on that as well. His concept of appearance is very hegelian and that he recognizes that in our, you know, commodities can't just like, like in our economy, they have to take on a form of appearance to become intelligible and enter into market relations.

And that's where like value comes in and all these things. And so there's a sense in which, um, what determinant negation is is to understand that whenever we encounter a contradiction or negation, that this is, that this is. not an end or a stopping point, but that this is the result of a specific set of determinations and that we've learned something new and that we've actually reached a higher stage of consciousness. And that by putting a positive spin on that, we can build an entire system that develops from the most abstract to the most concrete. Another idea Marx takes, right? Because he starts with the most abstract thing, the commodity.

that's that's the basis of every kind of relationship that we have in capitalism and it's first because it's the most general and then he shows how that develops into more and more complex social arrangements in a in that dialectical manner where each higher stages is is actually a kind of resolution of a contradiction found within the previous one resolution not meaning that we've made it non-contradictory now but we've actually recognized that the truth is a point of ten. tension or contradiction between two opposites. Just like perception is not, how do we solve the issue of, I'm trying to know individual things, but all I have to know them is universals. And it's just like, know the individual things with the individuals, right?

Like, just put them together, right? They're not, you know, it's not, these things, you know, you don't have this one-sided viewpoint that they can't, like, be understood together. Or when it comes to time in motion, it's like, well, doesn't this mean, you know, two things can be in two,

places at once when they're moving. It's like, well, I mean, in cartoons, like, don't we draw them this way when they're moving already? Like, how is it that, you know, I, he goes, like, reason's a lot more powerful than you think it is. If you think reason can't grasp contradictions, we grasp contradictions all the time. How do you even know things are contradictory in the first place if your, your reason can't grasp contradictions? You even says this about, like, you know, some people might call this mysticism. He's just like, Well, the things that people thought were mystical were just, like, things they thought they couldn't grasp because they didn't have dialectics. Right?

When I learned about, like, yeah, there's like this interesting, Hagle himself comes out of a culture that gave rise to figures like Meister Eckhart. And there is this mystical element that, yeah, as you said, before the dialectic is mystical in the colloquial sense of like super mysterious and opaque. but there's a way in which Hegel works through it in a way that you could say that there's genuine elements of mysticism within Hegel but they're no longer mystified

like he demystifies mysticism and like you know that is like you know nature and or history waking up to itself and the dissolution of subject object dichotomies this is like in some respect core aspects of of Christian mysticism, of Buddhism, of forms of, you know, Hindu mysticism in the Upanishads.

And I always thought that there's an interesting and fascinating relationship there. Marx, of course, criticizes Hegel for his mystical shell, right? Extracting the rational kernel from the mystical shell. So there's a way in which Hegel is and isn't mystical, perhaps. I don't know. I'm still wrestling with that connection, that relationship. it, but it's an interesting aspect of this. Yeah, that's an interesting,

psych. There's so much ink that spilled over the rational kernel and mystical shell a bit. I'm sure you're familiar with the Althusair take on it in contradiction and overdetermination. I have a little bit of a beef with Althusia there because in the essay, he omits the word foundations from that quote of where he says, the my dialectic is in terms of its foundations exactly the opposite of Hegel which is very different from saying

my dialectic is the exact opposite of Hegel and then Althezer puts the word Grun Laga foundation in parentheses and translate it as principle or princip and I'm like that is not that word Wow interesting You know interesting Not the first time I found a little bit of

Sloppingist French philosophy but what's interesting though is that Bruno Bauer actually uses this term rational kernel in his the trumpet of judgment the essay with where he calls Hegel the Antichrist and he says that the rational kernel of Hegel is ficti in self-consciousness that Hegel's an atheist and really what seems like it's talking about God and the Trinity and all this stuff is that the truth is is that you know God is this beyond this kind of we don't didn't talk about it, but unhappy consciousness, um, where we've placed this, we've placed ourselves beyond ourselves to be like, woe is me. I'm going to just say everything is, um, a product of the divine.

And that, that this is ultimately just our own consciousness that we're denying. Um, Bruno Bauer says, like, the truth is of fig of Hagell when you remove the mystical shell is this rational kernel of fictian self-consciousness. Mark says it has to be inverted, boyerbach, Hegel needs to be turned into a materialist before we can extract that rational kernel of dialectics from its mystical shell. So that's how I read it. And so I think that that is a pretty traditional reading

of Marx took dialectics and made it materialist. But I think it's interesting, too, to look at how he takes up that language from, from those young Hegelians that, you know, you would take, you know, have these enormous bar tabs with at the Hempel's wine bar and the police spying on them while Engels is, although Marx and Engels were never there at the same time,

but these caricatures that he later drew of these people and through you seeing Engel's drawings. But let me ask you this then. Marx's inversion of Hegel, despite the nuances and complexities of the disagreements around it, an example of imminent critique of using the logic of Hegel to invert Hegel's idealism into materialism and also follows this negation and sublime,

form where, you know, Hagel's explicit idealism is the thing that is negated. The dialectical, logical structure of it is the thing that is preserved and it's sublated into, if I'm using that term correctly, into the

materialist dialectic and historical materialism of Marx. So is that a correct way to understand the process and the way Marx utilized the logic of Hegel himself to invert him? Yeah, I think it's like the way I see it is like

Marks learned how to think like a Higalian. He actually said like he found like I forget maybe somebody gave it to him like it might have been LaSalle or someone like that. One of it one of his like his his like homies I guess gave him like like let like

lent him a copy the logic or he somehow like reacquired it or something and he was like reading it and then he's like wow I do know I rethought some things I need to go write capital or maybe you know what a bit earlier works that builds the ideas of capital like critique of political economy. And so I think it's really this method that he takes from Hegel and learns from the logic and learns how to apply.

Now, the cool thing about the logic is that it's not connected to history in the same way. So there is a lot of the logic that is just about concepts in thought in a way that is not necessarily as idealistic as, you know, this is like Lenin's surprise with the logic at how much materialism was already there. Yeah, well, I believe that your story about getting that Hegel text, that he had lent out back to him. I believe I remember that as him being in the process of writing capital. 13 years after he lent that book out, he gets it back while he's in the British Museum writing or the library writing capital and then takes a detour from his writing to

reread Hegel and then comes back to Capitol. Does that sound right? That sounds right. Fascinating to think about that. Yeah, you probably have better sources on this than me. I just remember reading the letter. because I went through, you know, the correspondence with angles to see the Hegel references. But yeah, that sounds right to me.

Let me ask you this follow-up. Determinate negation and its relationship to sublation. Is that what gets reduced to this thesis antithesis synthesis? In a way. So there's a really helpful passage in the shorter logic where he gives this three-part description of his method. Or he says, my method is, has three moments. abstract, dialectical and speculative. And I think that that's where it comes from.

And so they, but like what's the problem with it is that, because you really find this in the, like the British idealist, especially this thesis, antithesis, synthesis thing. Yes. Is that if you look at the way that like the logic works and I think to some degree the, I mean, the phenomenology spirit is a different work at the same time. The logic, um, there's, except for being nothing. becoming, but in a way still in that, like there's always like two sides that are opposites,

right? There's being and nothing and each side turns into its opposite. Being turns into nothing and nothing turns into being. And that's the dialectical moment. And then the speculative moment is that revaluation. And I think this is what people would say is a synthesis, that recognition of the unity and difference of the opposites. But something a lot of people I don't think have noticed is.

that the reason that the way that he has a unity and difference of opposites is that one unity being and nothing are the same but two difference being is the same as nothing and nothing is the same as being because determined and negation one is the result of nothing that results from being one's the unity of being nothing that results from from being one's the unity of being and nothing that results from nothing and so yeah i think it's like far more complex than that thesis synthesis synthesis there are a few people who use the language like his like you know back in the 30s their 40s or whatever and um i guess not the 40s there was no i think one book on hagel in the 40s in english but the 50s and you know before that with the british dealism some people use it you do

get a a hint of dialectic but i think it is like it is a term that a set of terms that really just freezes the dialectic yeah because when hagel uses the way synthesis in reference to his dialectic I think it would be more accurate to say that the moment of synthesis occurs in the dialectical moment because analysis is about like Hegel says this method is both analytic and synthetic simultaneously, 100% both because in the analysis of each side of an opposition. So the analysis of being, for example, or the analysis of, I mean, it's a little more complicated with the phenomenology, but like the analysis of how you would carry out something like recognition or sense certainty, like how you would carry that out.

The opposite emerges in that analysis. So it's an analysis because it's just looking at what's contained within that one category or conception of consciousness. But a synthesis because it produces synthetically a new category, namely the opposite category because it negates itself and produces the opposite. And so the synthesis, like weirdly is like not. the combination of the two, it's the production of like another one. Because that's like, you know, in a weird way, like synthesis is like combining and analysis is just like working with multiple

factors, whereas like analysis is just like what's contained within this one thing. And Hegel wants to say that his analysis is just as much synthesis because it, the analysis produces the opposite. Right, right. And then creates that relationship. Okay. I see that. And I also kind of understand a way in which the thesis antithesis synthesis would be helpful in like a very introductory way to try to get somebody in the thinking in the direction of dialectics. Like I understand why it would be employed. But when it's reified and taken up as essential to Hegel or like this is the way that is now taught at higher levels, that's when it becomes like very unhelpful and wrinkles out a lot of nuance and complexity. And really,

becomes, as you said, too static to actually be dialectical. Yeah. But I understand the impulse to try, like, if you're just teaching, like, a freshman undergrad class and you're trying to get them to think in this way where it might be helpful, but it has to be jettisoned very quickly or else it becomes a problem. Yeah, and I think the reason for the error is because so many people focus, because it's simple on the being, nothing becoming thing. Mm-hmm.

And Hegel does start with just being because he knows he can generate nothing out of it, right? but if he started with being and nothing like i don't think mark starts that way mark starts with the kind of unity of opposites already the commodity and then backtracks and says okay it's it's a combination of these use value and exchange value and then he shows how those turn into each other right like um like he he kind of already says like okay this thing i'm going to analyze it the bigger concept it contains the opposition now let's look at how that opposition becomes dialectical and each turns into its size so he starts starts as a whereas with an opposition between use value and exchange value,

whereas Hegel's like, I'm going to start with being, and then we get nothing and then becoming. And so I think that people are like, okay, we can do being. That's the thesis. Nothing. That's the antithesis. And then becoming, that's the synthesis. Where I think it, then you miss that moment of like,

because really what you need is like thesis, being and nothing. Antithesis, being is nothing, nothing is being. and then synthesis like this is becoming, which has these two sides, which is coming to be ceasing to be, which is the being to nothing and nothing to being, right? Like, um,

it's, and so yeah, I just, I worry about the, the rigidity of that. But maybe just to like, like, like things become their opposites and they are synthesized,

a unified, a unity of opposites. I'm not sure. Yeah. Yeah. Let me ask you this question as we, as we geared towards the end here. And this is kind of off our,

our outline. But I'm really interested for Marxists listening to this, right? We all know the idea of, you know, Marx stood Hegel on his head. We all understand Hegel's idealist, Marxist, that's the fundamental sort of shift away from Hegel and towards Marxism. I'm wondering, maybe in your own thoughts, what is really, I mean, aside from just the big words of idealism and materialism and the broad philosophical trends they represent, what is actually left or lost in Hegel when we're, shift to Marx? And is there a way in which, if it is just the foundation flipping, right, that you can preserve the possibility of the idea of the dialectic of reason, of freedom, of rationality itself? Is there a way in which you could be a Marxist? You fundamentally

emphasize the materialist aspect as the starting point, but you can make room for the idea of absolute spirit of the development of consciousness in this way? It seems to me like, there's perhaps a way in which if subject and object are ultimately reconciled, if materialism and idealism are just two aspects of a more singular process, that there could be something where, yes, we start with the material. It's the foundational thing. But there is also a development in consciousness, you know, and that development in consciousness is inexorably tied to and rooted, perhaps, in the material development of human society. So I don't know. That's a lot of, lot at throwing at you. I just want your

general thoughts. And if there is anything that Marx is genuinely fully jettison from Hagell, what would that thing be? Well, the last question is easy to answer because we can start with like Haguel, the more racist parts of Hagle. Sure. Right?

Totally. But besides those, so I think like when Hagle actually gets to well, it's weird. Like sometimes when he gets to history, he says stuff, it's like, that's kind of materialist sounding. Right. Because he's like, like,

Eagle is aware that there is a, like, you know, it's not like you think, thought everything exists in the human head. Yeah. But I think like, um, well, one thing that's missing in Hegel is evolution.

Darwin, right? And so materialists would say, the species that currently exists haven't always existed. Um, you know, one thing that Engel says is really important is the Kant-la-place hypothesis.

And it's weird that Kant of all people was the person who discovered how the solar system was formed. Yeah, that is weird. Yeah, like, of all people, he's just like, oh, yeah. And so the solar system, by the way, was not created, like, on the whatever day of creation by God. It was formed out of, like, these nebulous clouds. And it's like, and Hegel was fully aware of this.

But, like, Engels really thinks that that, like, really changed. a lot of people's minds, like, to think, like, this planet has not always existed, right? Right. And so evolution would be, like, that other thing, like, the idea that's, like, these species, there are species that don't exist anymore that did exist. And our own existence is evolution. And then the idea that there are laws of history in the sense that Marx points out that our economic laws rooted in our basic ability to keep ourselves alive, to keep ourselves

fed, and how we divide labor. as well as obviously like hegel never did an analysis of capitalist political economy and you know maybe there's a few illusions to adam smith somewhere right but there's no there's no there's no he didn't write he wasn't a Marxist right like that that is a thing too um but yeah I think it's really that materialist foundation like I remember like for a long time um in philosophy it was it was like I'm reading these people and they like these you know like idealists and I like I really think they're on or something there's something missing from their analysis there's something that's like not quite true about it and I remember. And I remember. red marks. I was like, oh yeah, that's what it is. Like, hey, there's no material foundation to any of this. So building on that, let me, let me throw this at you, because I think you're onto something here with, and emphasizing Darwin is precisely correct. Consciousness itself, especially if we're coming from this bottom up model, not this top down model or consciousness already existing, something like that, consciousness itself

emerges through the very materialist process of biological evolution. In that sense, the material literally comes first. in the emergence of consciousness. And so if we're flipping the foundation, we're saying, yes, it's not the consciousness that comes first and then material reality flows from it. Material reality, as proven by Darwin in the form of human life

in the literal emergence of individual consciousness, comes from a material basis and gives rise to consciousness. While that says that, you know, Marx is flipping Hegel on his head in the materialist idealist dynamic, it still preserves the, I think, obvious facts. that consciousness itself also develops in a dialectical process. Hegel's not wrong about that,

but the starting point is not consciousness itself. The starting point is, in this case, biological, chemical, material, reality that has its own evolutionary process that eventually gives rise to consciousness, which is an emergent property, perhaps, of a more material process. Yeah, and obviously materialist, like, we're not the reductive material. of the analytic philosophy like there there is like consciousness is important and it's not like everything

conscious is determined by matter like consciousness determines matter as well right like I mean why else are we advocating for like economic planning that's literally consciousness is like we're going to like plan the matter rationally

right like yeah and so like there is like that weird moment in angles I don't know if you remember it where he like basically says that like like evolution would be destined to produce consciousness and I'm always like why did you think that because because that doesn't seem like yeah that seems like I'm there with angles on that maybe you know we discover extraterrestrials then I might could change my opinion about that but um there just seems to be like we've learned that there's so much

contingency like you know like brave the meteor I never wiped up the dinosaurs Right, there'd be no phenomenology spirit And I don't know what I'd be reading at that point, right? You know? So it's like those kinds of radical contingencies That I think really like can pose some problems for Hegel I think that yeah, like the Another thing that's really an issue is that I think if you start from an idealist starting point

It's really hard to avoid the traps of Syrian types of liberalism and reformism You take Hegel on the issue of slavery obviously Higel, like any sensible person was like, no, we should not do this to human beings. This is ridiculous. Needs to be abolished. But he was a reformist about it, right? He, which is, which he was a, like I said, like depends on what country we're thinking about. But like, as far as America was concerned, that was the wrong position.

Because like slavery could only be abolished in America through a revolution. The Civil War, you know, you know, be. understood kind of like like Du Bois understands it as a a dictatorship of the proletariat like a literal like like seizing of a seizing of of private prop expropriation of people who own people as private property right and so like I think um like the the the idealist perspective can lead itself blend itself towards seeing course a kind of progressive liberalism as opposed to um because you tend to see history as, yeah, and a type of class consciousness that goes with,

you know, one thing that Mark says earlier on in his early writings on Hegel that I think is spot on is, you know, he talks about Hegel's right to recognize labor as like the essence of human beings, but he remains narrowly focused on intellectual labor. Aside from a few points, like the master's slave dialect. Like there's all these moments of materialism in Hegel. And that perspective of idealism, one point that Lukash makes that I really like,

he makes this in an essay called The Grand Hotel Abyss that I've been working on, a translation of that like the petty bourgeois intellectuals, whenever like something happens in the world, like people who are intellectuals are the ones who have answers, right? But because they have these answers so fast and because they have these answers so fast and because they can explain these things, they fall into this era of believing that their ideas are what are responsible for the changes in the world. Right, right.

Right? Really, they're ideologists. They're just producing explanations for the things that are happening in the world for material reasons. Not to say that ideas can influence history. Of course they can, but like there's a sense in which I think that Hegelian perspective can lend itself, if not like, revamped in a materialist way, can lend itself to thinking, oh, what we need to do is

is this push better ideas, right? Push the idea of freedom. Yeah. And, you know, one way I used to explain Hegel a lot is like, you know, from Hegel's perspective, you could look at something like the Declaration of Independence, right?

Where it says, you know, all men are created equal and say, well, this is a concept, but this concept has no reality because it has not been realized materially. That's how Hegel would. understand it. Because there's slavery, right? Right.

And, you know, certainly, to this day, there's forms of class oppression in America. And I mean, people, I mean, it's getting even to the point where, you know, these ice and all of these things. Like, clearly this is not matching that concept. And so Hegel would say this is a false concept. It has not realized itself. And you see Du Bois, like in his early days because Du Bois read Hegel a lot, like thinking about this, like, idea of like, this promised, like, not being fulfilled. The Marxist position is completely different.

It's like, well, this is just a justification that the ruling class came up for their power, like came up with their power. It's like, of course they didn't like mean the slaves and they said all men are free, right? Like they wrote about themselves. They just meant nobody should be a king, right? And so like looking at ideas as a product of their material conditions, I think is often a superior form of, of a, I remember telling my partner at the time like this difference between Hagle and Marx, you know, it's like Marx would say,

the idea that all men are created equal is just something that the ruling class came up with to oppress people and to hide the fact that they're pressing people in and she said well isn't that one obviously right i'm like oh yeah i mean hegel's still pretty good too like yeah yeah it's obviously right um yeah no like yeah you know haigle says the al of minerva spreads its wings at dusk not at dawn and you know that is like actually a critique of idealism perhaps um but i think you're you're also right to emphasize the way that idealism cashes out in actual political reality, a liberal that will say, you know, be the change you want to see in the world is fundamentally saying changing your consciousness is the prior thing. And then the material

changing of the world, the concrete changing of the world comes later. We know that's not true. A conservative version of that is like Jordan Peterson's clean up your room. Like before you criticize society, before you seek to change it, make sure you're perfectly right as well. And it's like we're starting with the individual and the individual's consciousness. And then we think political change emerges from that when that's obviously not the case but neither is it the case that merely rearranging the material dynamics of society automatically shifts everybody's consciousness of course i would argue that the you know the material uh world and consciousness and subjectivity co they're co-evolving i think the material is the is the foundation of that evolutionary process

it is the first instance if you will but then once the thing starts going that there's a dialectical relationship between subjectivity and objectivity itself. And so a big part of my work on RevLeft is this advocating of it's not just our political changing of the world, but that's essential. But along with that, we are also inevitably being changed and can become conscious of the ways in which we need to continue and perpetuate that inner subjective change along with the radical transformation of the world. So keeping that material prior and foundational, but then realizing that both are at play, both are evolving together, I think kind of perhaps resolve some of that confusion or that contradiction to some extent.

Oh yeah, absolutely. And like, you know, a left is not going to survive unless the people who are, you know, the theoretically advanced portion of it do that inner work too, right? I mean, think about all these scandals that keep happening because, I mean, you know, these, you know, often like male people on the left aren't doing that inner work of criticize, self-criticizing their own kind of, you know, misogyny or, you know, people not criticizing, self-criticizing or trying to get to get at the like psychological root of other types of prejudices, whether it's like transphobia, obelphobia, racism. and like you know does that does that inner work does that like interpersonal side of things change the material reality no but if you're going to be leaders of a movement you know changing that material reality you better do that in our work you know and and there can be no changes in that material reality without a theory too of of changing it right like we can't be you know we don't we can't like be utopians and have some kind of

perfectly laid out model, but educating ourselves theoretically is how you, you know, is that thing again that I mentioned about where Marx talks about how the human being builds the house in their head before they act, right? We have that capacity to think and to plan and to strategize and to form ideas and then implement them in action. And that's another side that's very explicit in Hagle, it's very materialist, is this whole theory of action and like this importance of it's not just your concepts, but whether your concepts have been realized through practice, that's a super important thing.

And you can't, you know, it's not, you can't be, you know, like the, the Marxist version of Calvin, it's just sitting around waiting for like the, the predetermined outcome, right? Yeah. No, absolutely. The way, yeah, the way I would put it is

that lack of a subjective development, the lack of taking that inner work seriously, acts as a limiting principle on your attempt to change the material world. In the same way that you're saying like unexamined misogyny in left-wing spaces that are attempting to make change in the world, that unexamined inner work and that undone inner work is exactly what explodes that possibility, that limits that possibility of you going out and changing the world.

If you're trying to build a socialist world with a capitalist subjectivity, and you think that just going out and trying, trying to change the outward world is enough to change the inside world. That's not it. You've got to do work on both fronts simultaneously. And, you know, there are a lot of, like, not just the more explicit cases of, like, racism and misogyny in left-wing spaces that really limit those, what those spaces are able to do,

but just the baseline hyper-individualistic, egoic subjectivity of capitalism, in many different ways in which it manifests, act as a limiting principle. on what organizations can do. And so we have to do work on that. We have to recognize that. We have to break out of that. We have to be ruthlessly critical of ourselves inwardly and our own limitations in the way that we are held back

by the subjectivity we've been conditioned with as we work in the material world. And this is a communal process. You don't just do this in isolation. You don't change the world in isolation. You don't change yourself in isolation. This has to be a communal project where everybody's genuinely open

invested in both at the same time. And I think that is, you know, the way forward. And I'm doing a speech at the socialism conference soon working off of Che's concept of the new man or the new person under socialism, where he's basically making this argument as well, that there's a subjective dimension to revolution. And if we don't take it seriously, if we think that's just somehow pulled along like a tube behind a boat from the material changing of the world, we will limit what we can do in the material world. So I think that's just somehow pulled along. I think that's just a little bit. I'm That's what we're both trying to say in our own way. Yeah.

And I think another thing, like, too, on top of this, like, there's so many good lessons in Hegel about this. Like, the, um, the, doing that inner work is so important, but also, like, being connected with a group that is engaged in practice, right? Because, like, I think, like, you were just mentioning how we internalize these, these capitalistic values. And, you know, one way that people do it, usually more of the liberal, like, progressive side is through consumerism, right?

It's like, oh, well, I've got my hybrid. I'm doing my part, right? You know, like, you know, I've got the, the Che Guevara T-shirt. So, I mean, I do have a Che Guevara T-shirt, I must admit, but like, I do enjoy, enjoy wearing it. But the, but, you know, right? Like, it's like, that's not like, you know, maybe I'm, like, doing some free advertising for Che or something, but like, you know, it's not, that, that is a logic of capitalism. And another way that I see a lot, especially in online spaces that I just wanted to mention is like, when it becomes a more of, an identity and belonging to an identity group than about liberating everyone, right? When it becomes, oh, you know, I'm a Marxist, I don't, I don't hang out with you because you're a liberal.

It's like, okay, most of the people that are going to be susceptible to, like, building a revolutionary movement are liberals. Like, that's like the fat, like, right? Like, the people in your union, we're at your workplace are probably all liberals right now. If not conservative reactionaries. Yeah. Like, it's like, yeah, right. This is the opposite one. And it's like, we need to go to the proletariat who are hard, outwearing conservative reaction.

He's like, no, that's not happening. I'm sorry. I was born in Texas. I know, like, how reactionary people can get. But, um, but, um, but being, and then being, you know, the infighting too, like, becoming too focused on like, oh, I'm like, you know, ML blank, blank, blank letters, right? You know, like, this is my position on these things. And it's like, at the end of the day, we need to work together.

We need to build coalitions and not, it doesn't need to turn into an identity. where you just link up with, here are all the people who agree with me on exactly every single position. And, you know, don't say the exact, you know, don't even like, you know, say anything or work with anybody who slightly disagrees with me. But thinking about this in terms of like, what can we do to actually win this? Right. And I don't think it's about, you know, necessarily treating leftism like a subculture where

you become a beautiful soul where it's like, you know, look at me. I have the perfect, I have the perfect set of views, right? You know. Yes. And that's what Lenin was criticizing in left-wing communism and infantile disorder. That hyper purity politic where it's like, I refuse to engage with the impure. You're a liberal. I can't fuck with you.

Unions are conservative. I'm not going in there. You know, whatever. All the different ways in which you try to extract yourself from the impure and you become dogged or dogmatic and rigid and sectarian, only associate with people who already believe exactly what you believe. That is what Lenin is critiquing on one side. and then there's obviously right opportunism, the bigger structural problem on the right side, and you don't want to fall into either error.

And of course, rigid dogmatism and rigid sectarianism is a product of an insane ego. It's like an ego disease. It's like, I know what's right. I already figured it out. And if you don't exactly align with what I already have figured out, you're wrong, you're blah, blah, blah, revisionist, blah, blah, blah. I can't work with you. Don't even talk to me.

In fact, you're an enemy to everything I believe in. That is just ego insanity. And so, like, we have to overcome that. We have to work in the concrete world of messy politics. And that's not always comfortable. That requires humility. And that requires you to acknowledge the fact that despite all you've learned, you are still learning.

Other people have knowledge you don't have. The other people have experience that you don't have. And to go into these spaces with your principles intact, for sure, but also with the humility and an openness, to be able to relate to people, to talk to people, to bring people towards you through convincing them, not through beating them over the head with a book or with your ideas. That's actually how you make progress.

And it's a lot easier and a lot more egoically satisfying to just recoil into a perfectly constructed microsect of you and your three buddies who think exactly the same and get absolutely nothing done. Right. Yeah, absolutely. And like, yeah, as far as educating and reading goes, like, I think so much is to be gained. This is kind of very Higalian read opposition stuff. Like, read your enemies all the time. Yes. read your enemies read different tendencies

because you got to know what you're fighting and you got to know where people that our potential allies are coming from so very important stuff amen all right well that is a I think a great episode I really hope people you know enjoy this learn something from it there's a you know if you're interested in this

there's a million sources you can continue to pursue to deepen your understanding of Hegel no single pass through Hegel is going to lock in your complete understanding. The thinkers like this deserve and require multiple engagements at multiple different levels and from multiple different angles. But Colin, I really, really appreciate you being so generous with your time and your knowledge and doing this episode with me.

I knew it was going to be a lot of fun and it even exceeded my expectation. So thank you so much. And before I let you go, if you have any final words, anything you want to point people towards, anything like that, please use this time now to do so. Well, thank you so much. It's a, it's a huge pleasure and huge honor. Like, you know, I've been a fan of the show for some time now. I've learned so much from the, from the show. And, you know, there's some, you know, episodes that listen to multiple times. So, you know, huge fan. So huge honor to be here. You know, as, you know, I love talking about Hegel. I'd love to help anybody, you know, with recommendations on that process, you know, so feel free, you know, if you're stuck on, you know, hagel. or looking for where to get started with it, you know, feel free to reach out. I am no longer on Twitter. It's become too chaotic.

But, you know, like Instagram and substack, I think you're probably two places that are easier to reach me. And, you know, I've got some subtext articles on Hegel that should hopefully, you know, help with more general audience level kind of introduction stuff. So. Cool. Yeah. Awesome. Well, I'll link to that in the show notes, your Instagram, your substack. I think you have a link tree that points to different parts of your work as well. So I'll link to that. Listeners can, you know, reach out to you, ask any follow-up questions,

reach out to you for further resources, et cetera. And, you know, we had a Spinoza app. We've had a Hegel app now. And I hope to have you back on to do many more episodes in the future because I really appreciate our conversation. Thank you so much.