Rev Left Radio - Intro to German Idealism: Kant, Fichte, Schelling, & Hegel

Episode Date: July 31, 2022

Matthew Segall is Assistant Professor in the Philosophy, Cosmology, and Consciousness Program at the California Institute of Integral Studies. He joins Breht to discuss the philosophical movement known as German Idealism, its major figures, its historical context, its legacy, and its continued relevance.   Learn more about Matthew and his work: https://footnotes2plato.com/   Listen to Matt's previous appearance on Rev Left here: https://revolutionaryleftradio.libsyn.com/whitehead   Outro Song: Dead of Night by Orville Peck ---------------------- Support Rev Left Radio: https://www.patreon.com/RevLeftRadio     Support Rev Left Radio: https://www.patreon.com/RevLeftRadio  

Hello everybody and welcome back to Rev Left Radio. On today's episode, I have back on the show, Matt Segal, the professor of philosophy and was actually on our episode a few months back about Alfred North Whitehead and process philosophy. Really loved that episode. I know a lot of our audience loved that episode, so I knew right away I wanted to have him back. And one of his other areas of expertise and specialization is on German idealism. And obviously German idealism culminates in Hegel leads to Marxism, and I thought it would be wonderful to explore that pre-Marx German idealist, you know, hot house of ideas from Kant through Ficta and Schelling all the way up to Hegel. And so that's what we do.

We focus on what is German idealism, who were the main thinkers and what were their contributions, what in Kant's work started the German idealist sort of reaction to Kant's work. carrying forward of certain Kantian ideas and then like what the ultimate legacy of German idealism has been not only within philosophy but even more broadly into the political and social world and what these ideas can still teach us today why they're still relevant today so we kind of run the entire gamut on this topic and it's absolutely fascinating and I could not have asked for a single better guest to walk us through the rather complex world of German idealism and all the specific philosophers within it, then Matt, whether you are completely oblivious as to what even German idealism is, or you're somebody who has actually studied

it pretty extensively, I'm confident that you'll get something out of this episode. And that's kind of the goal of this show is to create episodes on topics that are both accessible to the amateur or the layperson, as well as invigorating or interesting to the more seasoned veteran. And I think we accomplished that with this episode today. So without further ado, here is my discussion with Professor Matt Siegel on German Idealism. Enjoy. Yeah, I'm Matt Siegel.

I am a, by day, a assistant professor at California Institute of Integral Studies. And also a process philosopher and I engage in philosophy. you know as a kind of spiritual practice it's it's really my core sense of identity not just a sort of profession though i do enjoy teaching not enjoys the wrong word i love teaching it's really a calling um and so yeah excited to to be in dialogue with you again here on rev left brett so thanks for having me yeah uh honor and a pleasure to have you back on i knew after our first uh little episode that i'd have to have you back on i think we pretty much settled on you coming back on by the end of that episode.

And for those that don't know, I had you on to talk about Alfred North Whitehead and process philosophy. So I'll link to that episode that we had you on previously in the show notes to this one as well. So if anybody likes this episode, they can go and directly get more of you and I talking about this stuff. But today we're going to be focusing on, I think it's fair to say, another one of your specializations or an area of more or less expertise on your part, which is German

idealism. And of course, people listening to a show like this are probably somewhat aware that this involves Hegel and thus is a sort of prerequisite or a prelude to the work of Karl Marx. But I don't know if a lot of people have a deep grasp on this movement itself of German idealism. Now, we did do an episode on our sister podcast, Red Menace, where we talked about Schopenhauer and Nietzsche relatively recently. And I will touch on Schopenhauer a little bit as an adjacent figure in German idealism. But if you're interested in that, you can always go check out our episode on Red Menace, where we cover that more in depth. But to start this conversation, you know, sort of an introductory question to help orient

people to the rest of this conversation is a simple question. What is German idealism? And maybe after, let's just handle that first. And then we'll talk about idealism specifically after that. So, yeah, what is German idealism? Sure. Well, it's this moment in the history of philosophy. that we could date roughly from the time Emmanuel Kant published the critique of Pure Reason,

the first edition in 1781, and we could say, you know, that it extends to the death of shelling in the 1850s or the last lectures he gave in the 1840s. But some scholars, like Eckhart Forrester, have suggested in a book by the same title that the title being the 25 years of philosophy that really the the meat of this particular mutation let's say in the history of philosophy was 1781 with consverse critique and then climaxing in 1806 1807 with Hegel's phenomenology of spirit and his Hegel's sort of declaration that the history of philosophy had come to an end that the Kantian transcendental project had in fact come to fruition in his own work.

And so from Kant through Ficta and Schelling and Hegel, those are usually the four main figures that are considered when one dives into German idealism. Obviously, there are many different forms of idealism. I think what's characteristic or essential to, the German idealist form of it, is that it's a pursuit of what they call the absolute, the unconditioned, the literally unthingable, where a thing would be like an object that is determined by categories of our understanding and conditioned by space and time,

which for Kant were forms of our intuition, somehow the absolute, all that stuff that would be, say, part of our representational consciousness, but it also goes beyond that because we need to include our own knowing in that which we are claiming to know such that there's a kind of synthesis or, yeah, absolute integration of knowing and being, thought and being, which is a, you know, ancient, a set of philosophical notions, which are ancient, and the German idealists are trying to reconcile the two. Kant, I guess, as we'll see as we get into this more, kind of severs thought from being in a way, and Hegel finds a way after Kant with this deeper, critical awareness of the way that knowledge can construct its

objects, Hegel's able to bring thought and being back together in dialectical fashion in a really ingenious way. So that's kind of a quick summary of what German idealism is all about. Yeah, and if some of that went over your head, don't worry, we're going to dive deeper into it. Let's even get even more introductory with the term idealism. In the world of politics and Marxist philosophy, it certainly means something in the terms of colloquial. speech, right? It means something very different. That person's an idealist. They have utopian ideas, right? That's kind of how, you know, it's used interchangeably at like the folk level. But something is a little different here. And maybe people that have a deep

understanding of what idealism means in Marxism have a grasp here. But just in philosophy generally, before we get into Kant and, you know, Hegel's version of it, what is meant in philosophy by idealism in simplest terms? Well, so like you said, you know, colloquially, I, to be an idealist is to be kind of an optimistic person who thinks it's all going to work out in the end or, you know, striving towards a utopian vision. But in philosophy, I'd say in the most general sense, an idealist is one for whom, one way or another, the world is inside the mind. And that the mind is the most generic category in terms of where, you know, the mind is the most generic category in terms of which everything else in reality must be understood, right? So everything in one way

or another correlates to the mind to the human subject, though human subjectivity becomes more relevant for modern idealists, whereas ancient idealists weren't quite as subjective. For them, mind was very much sort of coterminous with the cosmos. But, yeah, in general, idealism just means that mind is the master category, right? And everything else is to be understood in terms of mind as an appearance in mind or a thought, an idea in mind or something like that. So Plato, right, idealist. Aristotle, you could say was more empirical, but still thinks in an idealist way. He's a neoplatonist, right?

And most of the history of philosophy, aside from the materialists and atomists that, you know, in ancient Greece were already doing their thing, I'd say the predominant school of thought in the history of philosophy until more recent times has been idealism, right? So it's quite a prominent approach historically. Absolutely. And in the context of philosophy, one of the things that my mind goes to when I hear idealism is like the radical articulation of idealism from the philosopher Barclay, for example, where, you know, to put it in hyper-simplistic terms, everything that we see in the so-called

material world is actually existing in the mind of God and a question like, well, what happens to the forest when nobody's looking at it? Does it disappear? You know, Barclay's conclusion to that was actually it continues to remain there because, you know, God's sort of mentation holds it in place more or less. So you can see how this idea of idealism taken to extreme, various extremes could come to the conclusion of something like there is no material world. It's actually all in the mind of God or once God is dead. You could shift that into the starting point of our philosophical investigation is the mind and how it receives things. And that leads well and leads well into this next question which is about Kant because one of Kant's major concepts was the or

major sort of philosophical postures was transcendental idealism, and certainly German idealists were interacting with that. So let's kind of, let's dive into that a little bit. Can you talk about Kant's impact on the emergence of German idealism and what the German idealists after Kant were wrestling with in his work? Yeah, I can try. It's so, it's so huge. Kant is just such a pivotal figure. So, you know, Kant was really a quite interdisciplinary thinker. He was a philosopher, but also a scientist, and, you know, published hypotheses about, you know, the formation of the solar system, and he was a geographer and, you know, a moral thinker, obviously. And so late in his life, I think he was in his 60s, he undertakes this new

project, what he calls critical philosophy or transcendental philosophy. And he was, in a sense, jolted into this project after reading one of the other British empiricists, you mentioned Barclay, Kant read David Hume. I think his essay concerning human understanding. And that, Hume's criticisms of the idea of necessary connection or causality were in a way, as Kant read them, a major threat to science to this new hypothetical-deductive method

that was, you know, typified by Isaac Newton and his laws of physics and laws of motion. Kant understood the Newtonian paradigm as deeply as anyone alive at the time. And in the late 1700s, when he was writing these critiques, Newton's perspective on the physical world was reigning supreme. And it seemed like all the important questions to be asked about how matter moves through space and time were on the verge of being answered and that the whole thing would be wrapped up soon. And so when Kant encountered David Hume's criticism of this idea of necessary connection, if causation, as Hume points out, is more a matter of our own habitual conventional association of perceptions, if, If really there is, if we have no empirical basis for saying that this event now is connected to that event tomorrow, if we can't at least claim any necessity between such connections, if they're purely contingent, right, just because something has happened in the past doesn't mean it will always happen that way in the future, according to Hume.

you know, Kant realized that this kind of undermines science's own epistemological presupposition. So he sets to work in an attempt to shore up science and to justify the possibility of necessary and universal knowledge of nature. At the same time that Kant wants to shore up, you know, science and its access to laws of nature, Kant's also worried that the scientific method is potentially going to trespass into the realms of the human soul and human consciousness and human freedom, right? Because if everything can be explained in this more or less mathematical, mechanical way, why isn't the human being explainable in such terms as well? And if the human being can be explained mechanically, if our own consciousness can be reduced to the motion of our body, which as a body in space and time must obey the same laws of nature as everything else, right, caught worried this would undermine our freedom and our capacity for moral responsibility, for moral action, right?

So he's both trying to defend science and at the same time trying to protect this notion of freedom, to make freedom a because he felt freedom was a sort of presupposition for our social and political lives and for our moral existence, right, he wanted to protect it. So these are his two tasks. And he sets to work in the critique, and I think it's in the preface of the first critique. He said he found it necessary to limit our knowledge of nature in order to leave room for freedom. And so what does he mean by limiting knowledge? Well, in order to circumvent Hume's criticisms of necessary connection,

Kant grants that in our empirical experience we have no reason to assume causality, but he says already baked into our experience through the senses, pre-installed, as it were, are these certain a priori, categories, including causality. And so for Kant, it is the nature of the human mind. The human mind is organized such that we can't even experience anything at all without presupposing the idea of causality, the category of causality or necessary connection. And so what this ends up forcing us to do in Kant's terms is understand science, natural science, in a very different way, rather than the human, and Kant develops this analogy in the critique of pure reason,

rather than the human being a sort of pupil waiting for nature to teach it something, he says, no, the human scientist is more like a judge who compels the witness to answer the questions as he or she has framed them, right? And so it's not so much that we discover laws of nature, is that we've become conscious of the way in which our mind has to organize nature. So what were laws of nature before Kant become laws of mind, if you want, or categories of our own thought process through which nature is made into something which could even be experienced, right?

So Kant calls this his Copernican revolution in philosophy. So another analogy, and Kant does try to help us. understand what he's up to using these analogies. And he refers to Copernicus here and his astronomical paradigm shift, right, shifting from the Ptolemaic geocentric perspective to a heliocentric perspective for Copernicus, you know, this was a matter of becoming aware of the motion of the observer as a factor in the equations or, you know, the geometric model that we use to explain the solar system. And if we, in Copernicus's view, throw ourselves into motion,

throw the Earth into motion, we can really simplify the geometry of the solar system, right? The Earth's in motion around the sun, rather than everything orbiting around the Earth. For Kant, this is analogous to what he's up to because he's trying to raise to consciousness, the activity of our own mind, of our own subjectivity, whereas what he would call the dogmatic philosophers were unaware of the way that their own subjectivity was shaping their experience of the objective world. Kant wants to show us how this subjective activity

is in fact constitutive of and in some ways shaping the objects that we think we are aware of in our sensory experience, so that there's always already a conceptual overlay on our experience of nature. And so Kant calls this his Copernican revolution. Some interpreters have kind of joked that it's actually a Ptolemaic counter-revolution because Kant, you know, whereas Copernicus threw us out of the center, put this through the subject into motion and the earth is just another planet orbiting the sun, Kant in a way puts the subject back at the center. And so it's almost a Ptolemaic counter-revolution in the sense that now human subjectivity becomes the center

around which all knowledge of nature must be said to orbit, right? Because the, again, the laws of nature are in fact byproducts of the laws of our own understanding and the forms of intuition, the way that our senses are organized to bring forth space and time, right? Before Kant, scientists assume space and time are out there, and to a large extent, you know, because idealism has been eclipsed by a materialist way of looking at the universe. Nowadays, we don't take Kant very seriously. Well, modern science is both Kantian and not Kantian at the same time. There's a lot of confusion nowadays, which maybe we'll get to. But for Kant, space and time are not out there, right, in a mind and independent universe. Space and time are

brought forth by our own sensory organization. And so this whole setup of this transcendental view of human subjectivity and our relationship to scientific knowledge, for Kant, again, right, it was an attempt to limit knowledge to protect freedom. But the German idealists like Ficta and Schelling and Hegel who follow in Kant's wake, they kind of take these limits and, you know, as I've said in some of my writing on this, they turn these limits into like a slingshot to launch themselves into speculative territories, which couldn't have even been imagined before Kant. And so Kant did live long enough to, you know, see some of the work of these figures, Ficta and Shelling in particular, and he wasn't all that excited about it because, again, you know, he wanted

to limit our knowledge, and these German idealists who followed in his wake really expanded what it was possible for human beings to claim to know up to and including God, right? So how's that for setting up? Really, really good. Yeah, no, that was incredibly wonderful summary of it. And just to kind of recapitulate that summary in ways that I think about it is, you know, basically just to understand that the Kant idea here is like you, and you said it's probably better than me in so many ways.

But I always thought about it as like we bring to experience this cognitive apparatus, you know, that that structures the way we experience reality. So as you said, you know, space, time, and causality are not wholly objective things out there in the cosmos that we simply passively. observe, but actually our mind structures, the cosmos such that these things are how we organize, our orientation to the rest of reality. So, you know, you're coming into it with this sort of cognitive apparatus that makes sense of things, and that is supposed to be his response in so many ways to Hume's radical

criticism or skepticism that, you know, even something as taken for granted as causality thing one causes thing B to happen, even that is something. that we bring to the table, not something that already exists. And then it gets into this whole thing about appearances versus things in themselves and that breakdown. But I think, yeah, that's one of the best, just basic breakdowns of Kantian philosophy that I've ever come across myself. So I really appreciate that. And it really allows us to move into these individual German idealist thinkers and some of their contributions, because they're all a little different. You know, they all have the same starting point more or less, but they all kind of take it an interesting

new direction. So I guess let's go in that direction. And let's start with Johann Ficta. Who was Ficta? And what were his sort of central contributions to German idealism and philosophy? Well, he's kind of an unlikely philosopher. I think he came from a kind of working class background and was lucky enough to be noticed by a wealthy gentleman in his hometown who paid for his education and uh ficta um was a spinnosis i believe early in his in his philosophical um calling but encountered emmanuel conn's work um and it transformed him um out of it it relieved him of his commitment to this sort of more what would be called a dogmatic form of philosophizing uh and he took up this transcendental method and ran with it. He, in fact, walked from his hometown. It was

far to walk all the way to Connicksburg to visit Kant to talk to this new master of the transcendental method, right? And initially, Kant was kind of dismissive. Ficta wasn't dissuaded, though. He got a hotel room in town and started riding and, you know, delivered this essay to Kant on a sort of critique of revelation and an attempt to ground morality rationally and Kant loved it so much that he published it and didn't include an author. Everyone thought it was Kant that wrote this. It was so good. And so when Kant explained that, nope, this was actually this fellow Ficta, he, Ficta shot

to fame and very shortly there after. Gerza, who was responsible for appointments at the University of Vienna, outside of Weimar, was found Ficta and appointed him professor of philosophy there. And he began to teach this new transcendental form of philosophy, which for Fycta was rooted in the principle of the self, the self, though not as a, a sort of fact or object or even a subject, but the self as an act, an activity, something that we as individuals bring about through a free deed of some kind. And much of Ficta's work is an attempt to direct his students to this activity within themselves. And, you know, Ficta wrote

you know, several editions of a text typically published as a science of knowledge is its translation, Wissenschafs Lera, in German, which is an, I would say, more of a almost conceptually articulated meditative exercise, right? So it can at first appear like a strange form of self-generating logic or something, but Ficta's really trying to, to direct us to attend or pay attention to the activity of attention itself in a way, right? So it's this recursive, meditative injunction, right, directing us to attend to ourselves in a new way. And, you know, he has these exercises he would do with his students where he would say, like, put down your pen, look at the wall. now look at yourself looking at the wall

who is now doing the looking he would ask his students and this was just his attempt to spark this awakening and it's kind of almost a satori experience I know zen meditation involves staring at the wall as well and so ficta is rediscovering a Zen meditative technique here

to induce a kind of philosophical satari and what Kant established was, you know, the transcendental conditions of our knowledge of the phenomenal world, right? And for Kant, as you already mentioned, is an important fact about Kant's new transcendental philosophy. I didn't mention initially this boundary between the phenomenal and the numinal realm or the realm of things in themselves, which we cannot know, says Kant. Ficta was not happy with this boundary. nor was he happy with the way that Kant sort of just assumes as given the set of categories

that the mind has to determine its experience of the world, right? For Kant, there are 12 categories in four classes of three each. We don't need to go into them. I mean, causality is one of them, substance and so on. They're almost the same as Aristotle's categories. And so for FICTA, it's like, well, where did these categories come from? And what FICTA tries to do is develop a generative logic, whereby just through the initial activity of a self becoming conscious of itself,

that these various categories could be generated almost autonomously out of this self-activity, if you want. And so FICTA's science of knowledge is an attempt to, show the genesis of these categories and of space and time, rather than just as Kant does, assuming them as given. And Ficta, after teaching a few years at the University of Vienna, you know, you have to understand the political context here. This was like 1794, 95, 96, you know, the French Revolution was breaking out

across the Rhine in France, and the German princes were kind of scared of something similar happening, and Ficta was philosophizing and almost preaching about freedom and how we can create our own laws and categories, as it were, through the activity of our free thinking. And this was threatening to the governments of what we now call Germany in Prussia. And so eventually he was accused of atheism, which isn't exactly true. It's kind of like Spinoza being accused of atheism. It's like, you know, it's clearly an ideologically, politically driven label in either case. But Ficta was chased out of town, accused of atheism.

and, you know, had to sort of retreat to teaching on his own. I think he did go to another university in the early, the first decade of the 1800s, but for the most part, you know, was kind of marginalized by this accusation of atheism. But his really dynamic and inspiring philosophy was what Drew Schelling, into this new Kantian transcendental mode of doing philosophy and and Hegel as well. So, you know, I don't want to, I'll wait for your next question, but, you know, clearly Ficta is sort of taking this Kantian fire and pouring gasoline all over it, and it just exploded.

And so German idealism proper was certainly off and running at this point. Yeah. That is so interesting and so many things we can bring up there. just to restate one of the main things that Ficta is doing and did was, as you said, explaining where these categories that Kant takes for granted, they try to explain where they come from. And then the other thing you said about some of the experiments of self-consciousness that he would play with, yeah, it's very interesting.

It has very interesting parallels in, as you and I often get into our philosophy discussions, lead to discussions of other things like Buddhism. but this idea of like, you know, it's in Advaita Vendanta, it's in a Zoghchen, it's in various schools of Buddhism, it's always present in like people who present themselves as non-dualists when it comes to meditation techniques and stuff, which is this idea of looking for the looker, you know, looking for what is looking or, you know, when you're thinking a thought to try to look for the thinker, even in some ways, like I heard of this one thing, I forget who was behind it, but the headless way of like if you're looking out over let's say a scenic outlay of mountains and you know your attention is fully functioning outwardly towards the object that you're perceiving and then just within yourself you do this very subtle shift of now look for what's looking you know put your attention where the attention is coming from and it's sort of like switching it so you know you sort of are looking outward but but trying to direct your gaze in some sense

back into the locus of attention. And this for some people in the Buddhist tradition can give rise to a sensation of having no head or the subject-object duality collapsing, at least for a moment, if done right. Now, you know, I've tried this many times to this sort of shortcut to this object-subject or object delusion, but it doesn't really quite work for me, but some people swear by it. But it's a very interesting Buddhist idea of trying to find the center of a attention with your own attention. And it's sort of out of the frustration of that, that some revelations within Buddhism

can arise. But yeah, do you have any thoughts on any of that? Yeah. Well, it's, it might at first seem paradoxical to say that Ficta, the philosopher of the self, isn't any way, you know, converging with the Buddhist point of view, wherein, you know, and Atta, right, there is no self. But I think, as is often the case with these mystical. insights you can only describe them elliptically or paradoxically or in a contradictory kind of way right

and so what for ficta is described as the self which with a capital s we have to keep in mind it's it's an activity for ficta not a being not a substance right and so what the buddhists are denying when they say there is no self i think is something like a substantial self um which is just sort of there, you know, through each moment of our lives, it's just there in the background, having experience. That's not what Ficta means by the self. He doesn't mean something substantial. He means an activity, right? And so, but on the other hand, I really think Ficta probably is closer to a sort of, you know, Vedic or Advaita Vedanta kind of perspective where, you know, we can talk about the Jiva, the Atman, and Brahman,

where the Jiva would be akin to something like the empirical self or the empirical ego, which is the subject that thinks it's separate from the phenomenal world and the objects of that world. The transcendental ego is what Kant was talking about and what Ficta really amplifies, which is the activity which actually brings forth those objects. so you're no longer presupposing a split. And so this is where Ficta and Kant do part ways. I mentioned the phenomenal numinal division,

and Ficta didn't like that division. He wanted us to be able to access the things in themselves, because after all, for Ficta, the mind, the ego, the activity of selfing, if you want, is what is creating the objects of the empirical world, as well as creating self. And there really is nothing beyond this creative activity of the self. The thing in itself for Ficta becomes this very activity that he is trying to point us to.

So rather than thinking of it as contended to, and there are moments in Kant where he clearly grasps what the transcendental ego really is and how it's different from the empirical ego, right? but ficta really amplifies this insight such that there's no division anymore between phenomena and numina in ficta and sometimes he gets caricatured for being a kind of solipsist because it's as if he's saying the whole world is in my mind

or that my imagination is what's responsible for generating everything that I experience including other people but that's not that is a caricature of ficta that's not what he's saying in some ways he was really pointing to a kind of intersubjectivity in that whatever the transcendental ego is it's in some way a kind of social ego in the sense that you know ficta when he describes how we come to consciousness of ourselves he he talks about the the self

needing to be checked by or to meet some resistance outside of itself in order to become self-conscious. If it was the only self, if it didn't mean any resistance, if it weren't checked by something, it would never become aware of itself, right? So for FICTA, there's this dialectical way in which we need others to become conscious of ourselves. And there's a necessity for an ethical community that would allow each of us to become self-conscious. because we can only do so again by being recognized by other conscious selves. And so, you know, there's a lot of steps involved here for Ficta to come to this insight, but he's not a solopsist.

He's very attuned to the way in which human beings, as we develop from infancy into adulthood, need one another in order to become moral agents, right? So it's not just a separate individual subject, that can become a moral agent. Like we very much need to be recognized by other moral subjects to ourselves be moral subjects.

And so we're bound up in this dialectical process. But for FICTA, there really is no world outside of our moral activity within the human community. And so one way of putting this is to say that while it's obviously impossible, for us right now as human beings to like you know control the weather or prevent an asteroid from hitting the earth or all these ways in which it seems like there's a real world out there

that doesn't care about us but ficta would say even though we can't control all of that yet even though our freedom is limited by all of that he thinks that eventually we can overcome those limits by exerting our human will um nature even if it is not now this way should be such that nature becomes like a stage for the exercise of our freedom or a medium through which our freedom as humans can be exercised. And if you look at the, you know, last few centuries and what like industrial civilization has done to the planet, we seem to be very much moving in that kind of a direction, though there are some signs of, you know, the earth, sort of, some blowback from the you know earth from earth's ecologies uh that would um that would um that would

definitely uh inhibit human freedom like things like climate change right and so you could say that the ecological catastrophe that's unfolding now is calling fict as bluff is how i've put it um in the sense that human freedom is not unlimited uh in the sense that you know the rest of the community of non-human life on this planet and nature generally doesn't have some say in how you know the universe unfolds so yeah that's that's so interesting and certainly there could be an argument to kind of back up ficta on this point that there's like an immature approach to trying to dominate nature that still comes from a place of presumed separateness you know that that dominates and seeks to control nature but from a fundamental viewpoint of separateness whereas

as a more mature humanity, perhaps in the future, you know, could envive a sort of more dialectical approach, deconstruct that illusion of separateness. And you could imagine a future where humans are much more integrated into their local ecologies, but also have more control over nature. Maybe the climate is more under our control, certainly technologies that allow us to push away asteroids become increasingly under our control. And maybe there's a more mature form humanity can take that might not completely be able for us to ever control nature in that way, but to engage with and in some instances control it, but from a place that understands that you're a part of it, that humanity hasn't quite reached yet.

Yeah, totally. Because from a biological point of view, every organism, human or not, is in some way involved in this project of transforming its environment to suit its own needs, right? this is like niche niche construction and so really life has always been engaged in this process of

you know transforming its environment in order to afford itself more freedom and humans are just an especially pronounced example of that and it's almost like we got we got too good at transforming our environment

we became too powerful in practical terms technologically speaking too quickly before our let's say contemplative and moral and philosophical understanding of what we were doing could catch up and so now we need to catch up absolutely before time runs out but yeah you can see in all of this the sort of proto-dialectics this the self and other being inexorably intertwined the self as an activity more than a static being, these are all threads that Hegel would later pick up and run with and we'll get into that for sure. But was one last question on Ficta, was he thinking and explaining his philosophy

in terms of dialectics or does that not really come on the scene as a concept until Hegel fully fleshes it out? Because certainly it's proto-dialectical compared to what's coming before him in some ways. Would you agree with that? Oh yeah. I mean, you know, Kant was already doing some dialectical thinking, though he was critical of that he didn't think dialectics could give us the kind of knowledge that, you know, dogmatic metaphysicians would claim. And but Ficta takes the transcendental approach that Kant inaugurates and shows, you know, a deeper form of dialectical thinking. Um, you know, in so many ways, what for Hegel is elaborated as the master slave, uh, dialectic, um, the Lord Bondsman dialectic, if you prefer, is,

it's already implicit in ficta. You know, the more you study the precursors to Hegel, you know, Ficta and Schelling, and Greta also is an important, he wasn't just, you know, an administrator. He was himself a deep thinker, poet, obviously, that people know that about him, but he was a scientist. And his new approach to science, his study of plant morphology, and plant metamorphosis in particular, very important for Hegel, very important for shelling, and it was dialectical as well. So, you know, Hegel is the great systematizer, and yeah, he's a genius in his own right,

of course, but he's really systematizing the insights of the other thinkers in his sort of intellectual ecology. Yeah. And that's a wonderful way to think about the history of ideas, too, is like to discard this great man of history idea where, like, you know, these brilliant geniuses, you know, created more or less out of whole cloth, these amazing ideas and jumps in human understanding in the realm of philosophy when it's much more, you know, like this movement through many, many thinkers' brains are like

the nodes through which these ideas get developed and articulated and made more sophisticated and refined. And then eventually a figure like Hegel takes all this stuff that's been brewing and does something great with it. But, you know, certainly these ideas are in circulation that make a Hegel even possible. you know that make a marks down the road even possible and so I just enjoy thinking about the history of ideas in that sense but yeah let's go ahead and move on from Ficta to Schelling so obviously Schelling is another one of the main four heads if you will

of German idealism and he is sort of if Ficta is the bridge from Kant toward Hegel you know Schelling is one of the planks in that bridge if you will so who was Frederick Schelling what was his relationship to Ficta and what were his contributions to German idealism. So Schelling was the son of a, you know, theologian and had exposure to, you know, the Western philosophical tradition and, you know, languages, Hebrew and Greek and Latin from a very early age and was very precocious. When Schelling started, He started seminary. He was 15, and he was roommates at the time with Hegel, as well as the poet, Holderl. And they were five years older than Schelling. So he's skipping some grades here. And by the time, you know, Schelling's moving close to graduation. He's like 19, I believe. He meets Ficta, starts reading Ficta's work.

and writes his own essays on the ego or the eye, the self, as this transcendental principle, out of which all philosophy can be spun and is a collaborator of FICTAs through the 1790s, the second half of the 1790s. Schelling's appointed to the University of Vienna as a professor when he's early 20s, 21, 22 maybe, by Gerta again. Gerta did this after meeting Schelling, reading one of his early essays on the philosophy of nature. Gertrta became a kind of father figure for Schelling, helping Schelling get more in touch with. the experimental sciences and encouraging shelling to study, you know, experimental science and

to do experiments himself. They did some of Gertes' experiments with color and observations of plants together. And so shelling by the late 1790s, early 1800s, is increasingly coming into his own and articulating a perspective that ficta recognized was intention with his own because shelling wasn't happy balancing the entirety of the world on the fulcrum of the self shelling was convinced that nature needed to be treated as self-organizing, that nature didn't depend upon the mind to give it its lawfulness and its organizing impetus, if you want, its life. It has a life of its own. And so, you know, whereas Kant and Ficta were both asking this basic question, you know,

what must the mind be such that nature can appear to it in the way that it does? For Shelling, the question becomes, no, what must nature be such that mind could have emerged from it? So he's kind of inverting the Kantian question, but this isn't a return to pre-Contian dogmatism because Shelling's carrying forward the transcendental method. it's just rather than saying that mind is the a priori condition. Shelling says, and this is a direct quote, nature is a priori, right? So what must nature be? What are the natural conditions that would make something like a self-conscious mind possible?

Right. And for Shelling, you know, the mind is not only free in its ability to act practically and morally, but the mind is also scientific in its ability to know the world. So how are our knowledge and freedom emergent from nature? Well, you know, for showing, this meant, of course, nature can't be a machine. Nature can't be a mere mechanism, as Kant had assumed, even though for Kant what was mechanistic was the appearance of nature, right, the phenomenal world determined by our category,

for Kant was mechanical. For Schelling, that's not accurate anymore. And he really builds on Kant's own work in his third and final critique, the critique of judgment, 1790 that was published. Kant really begins to, you know, certainly advance the transcendental perspective, but his advanced with some of his earlier presuppositions, because, for example, in that third critique, Kant talks about organisms and really inaugurates the study of self-organizing systems, he says, oh, wait a minute, organisms are an example of objects in the sensory world, which do not abide by the mechanical laws of causality. Because in an organism, rather than the effect being external to the cause and sort of linear way, in an organism,

the cause and the effect are circular, right? Organisms in being self-organizing are such that the parts that we can, you know, analyze in an organism are the way they are because of their relationship to all the other parts in that organism, and all of the parts produce themselves for the sake of a whole. So there's a kind of wholeness in the organic world that cannot be explained as though it was just parts outside of parts colliding, according to mechanical laws of causality. So Kant's already recognizing this, that in the organic world, down to even the simplest blade of grass, he says, there's a, somehow like the, it's almost as if the numinal world

is breaking through the phenomenal veil in the living world. And Kant declares there will never be a Newton. of even a mere blade of grass, which is to say there will never be a mechanical explanation. In principle, there will never be a mechanical explanation for the organic world. Shelling picks this up and runs with it and says that nature as a whole is a kind of self-organizing system, and it doesn't need the mind to tell it how to behave, because the mind is itself an emergent product of nature. Now, this might sound a lot like modern day sort of, you know, materialist accounts of what consciousness is.

And I think that's not what Schelling is pointing to, because the modern accounts think nature as a whole is basically mechanical and somehow organism, like biology and consciousness emerge out of that. Shelling would have thought that's totally incoherent. In some ways, life and consciousness had to be there from the beginning. And so what he'll say is, visible nature is invisible mind, right? Mind is invisible nature.

And it's been there from the beginning. It's just that earlier in the dynamic unfolding of nature through these series of evolutionary stages, at earlier stages, the mind was less visible. It was more inchoate or implicit, and that the human being is the unfolding, the making explicit of what was there all along, And so for Schelling, human consciousness becomes like the highest potency, the highest power, the highest potential of nature, right?

And when we look back and study nature, we're not a subject separate from a bunch of objects, right? We are nature itself philosophizing. So Schelling's understanding of nature is it's not a philosophy about nature. it is nature he's striving to articulate a perspective whereby we come to see ourselves as nature itself philosophizing yeah that is absolutely fascinating shelling is one of those thinkers that i know very little about coming into this conversation um just to drill down on this idea that you know nature or what nature is the invisible mind and mind has always been in nature but does it i mean is it like a i'm thinking like david chalmers pantheism where some

level of mind is prevalent or is present even in the rock or the seemingly unconscious things around us and then at a certain level of organization you could have something like human consciousness but that the prerequisites for human consciousness are built into the fabric of the cosmos is that something like what schelling is saying or am i missing something crucial here yeah it's a kind of panpsychism i think that's fair um but you know there's a way in which shelling is again not leaving behind the transcendental method and I feel like sometimes nowadays like with Chalmers when he gives voice to he's not himself a panpsychist right but when he gives voice to that perspective as one which given how hard

the hard problem of consciousness is we should take panpsychism seriously just as we should take dualism seriously which I think is Chalmers preferred position but other panps nowadays like Philip Goff, I think, there's a sense in which they're kind of reverting to a pre-Contin dogmatism, which again, you know, given the limitations of the scientific method, as trauma frames it, like we can't actually scientifically access that dimension of the world or that aspect of the brain, which would be the consciousness part. It just doesn't show up when we're looking, you know, at the brain, these contemporary panpsychists will say,

ah, therefore we metaphysically have to say that, you know, consciousness is there from the beginning or that consciousness is just something else entirely. And I think Schelling's trying to bring on board this whole Kantian transcendental maneuver where we're trying to understand the conditions of the possibility of our own experience. And that, I feel, often gets missed by some of the approaches and psychism nowadays. Like, we really need to recharge philosophy. I feel like the batteries have run down since this moment, the German idealist moment, let's say, where thinking reached such a high pitch that insights were gained,

that, you know, a few hundred years later, we're kind of, We're not as clear as they were on what the real issues are. We're not thinking as dynamically and actively as they were. And so this is why we still have so much to learn from them. Like philosophy is running on really drained batteries right now. You know, it's what drew me to dream on idealism was really just this effort. And it's not just me, right? There's a, I think, a resurgence of interest in all of these thinkers.

I mean, Hegel and Khan have always been important. But Ficta and Schellinger finally have. having their, you know, day in the limelight because people are searching for inspiration. I think there's a growing recognition that, yeah, the batteries are running low right now. Absolutely. One more question on this, just to deeply or try to more deeply understand shellings taking over from Kant. You know, if we take this idea of Kant having, as I put it earlier, this cognitive apparatus through which it's inherent in the mind.

The mind structures reality. Schelling is saying something a little different, but is he basically keeping that notion, that things like space and time, causality, substance, that they are structured by the mind. It's just that the mind is produced by nature in such a way that it's a little different than Kant,

or is he getting rid of that idea of this cognitive apparatus, quote, unquote, altogether? He's not getting rid of it altogether, but he's recognizing that a lot of what Kant is describing in the first critique is mind, and, you know, Conn doesn't realize this, this is Shelling's addition to what Kant was doing, the mind that Kant is unveiling the structures of, the categories of understanding of, and so on, that this is an evolutionary product, right, of a natural process whereby, you know, in so many ways, like,

Shelling is trying to pursue philosophy from the perspective of the absolute. And what does that mean? Shelling didn't want to accept that philosophy has to begin with the sort of finite subjective perspective, like as if we have to begin philosophizing from this alienated point of view as a subject separate from objects. Kant's basically beginning there, right? accepting this more or less common sense point of view that like we have um our reflective mind and we have our sensory experience and you know cont admits we don't really know how the two relate he speculates it might have something to do with this mysterious power of the imagination

which plays a prominent role in the first critique actually and then in the second or in the first edition of the first critique and then the second the second edition a few years later Kant kind of removes a lot of this stuff about the imagination as the common root of the understanding and sensibility, right? Whereas, you know, Schelling really wants to begin philosophizing from, you could say the perspective of this common root, which is the power of creative imagination, which is before this split into subject and object. which is before the split into nature as at the sum total of appearances and mind as,

you know, that which Kant said is determining those appearances. Shelling wants to go before that to the creative imagination, but you may as well just call it the divine imagination. Fichta, Schelling, and Hegel are, to put it crudely, adopting a divine perspective, God's perspective on reality. Um, but it's, it's, it's a heretical understanding of God because, you know, in, in the typical, um, Catholic or Protestant approach to these questions, the human being is not supposed to identify themselves with God, but these idealist philosophers are saying, well, if we're going to do philosophy, we can't pretend like we're not trying to take God's perspective. This is different from a Newtonian God's eye view, so called. um in that for newton remember he's just trying to figure out the laws that would arrange the objects for the german idealist they're seeking an absolute perspective that's not just about how objects

are arranged but how subjects come to perceive objects as so arranged and so it's like another layer of dialectical depth below this you know standard critique of newton as seeking a god's eye view of the universe right they're seeking a god's eye view of the universe right they're seeking a god's eye you not only of the universe but of the consciousness which knows that universe but it is you know it's to philosophize that of the absolute is a kind of theosis right it's a becoming divine yeah yeah wow that's absolutely fascinating and this idea too that shelling has of human consciousness as a product of nature's evolutionary processes this is pre-darwin right oh yeah Yeah, yeah, fascinating.

Yeah, I mean, Darwin, again, we have this great man theory of history that, you know, makes us think that Darwin just emerged whole cloth out of nothing. There was lots of evolutionary thinking going on prior to Darwin. Darwin didn't even use the word evolution. He talked about transformism because evolution was associated with a particular school of thought in embryology, pre-formationism. which was opposed to the other school of thought and embryology, the epigenetic approach. You don't need to get into that, but the point is there was a lot of evolutionary thinking going on

right around the turn into the 1800s from the 1700s, and that Darwin was in many ways applying this much broader shift in worldview towards a more historical evolutionary understanding applying that to the origin of species, which is a special case of what for the German idealist was a much more shelling in particular, a cosmological process of evolution. And that cosmological process of evolution or that absolute, you know, divine point of view certainly has a sort of culmination in the work of Hegel and the idea of the absolute spirit. So let's go ahead and move in that direction, you know, thinking in this idea, this way of German idealism, sort of culminating in the work of Hegel. Can you talk about the development of idealism from Kant to Hegel and why Hegel's work had such a huge impact in the world of philosophy and beyond?

Yeah, so similarly with Ficta and Shelling, even though Hegel was five years older than Shelling, the two were they were collaborators and, you know, Hegel didn't have a university appointment and I think it was like a private tutor while Shelling was teaching at the University of Yenna and, you know, Shelling was. recognized the genius of Hegel early on and they were the editors of a journal together and you know Hegel in what was that 1801 I think he publishes this essay um on the difference between shelling and ficta's systems of philosophy and hegel takes shellings side in this because this dispute between shelling and ficta had boiled over and we can read this in the letters that Ficta and Shelling were writing to each other. And, you know, so Hegel and Shelling, not only friends, philosophical collaborators, but then, you know, Hegel's a late bloomer, right?

And so he's coming into his own a little bit older than Schelling, the precocious, you know, like teenage professor. And, you know, in 1806, he's giving lectures on the history of, philosophy, and he's, again, meeting with Gerta and understanding the, Gerta's new method of science, which Gerta calls gentle empiricism, developing a kind of way of participating in the phenomena that one is studying. And, you know, Gertes' favorite subject to study was the plant world and Hegel in the preface to the phenomenology of spirit uses this analogy to plants to describe what he's going to undertake in this text, the phenomenology of spirit, which is a reading of the

history of philosophy as a whole in the process of development and that each of the phases of development it moves through might appear to contradict one another. A thesis contradicted by an antithesis, just as the fruit seems to contradict the blossom out of which it emerges. But Hegel points out how without the blossom, the fruit never could have come to be. And so what it first seems contradictory, they're in fact necessary stages along the way to a more holistic or integrated truth. And so Hegel is basically taking Gertes' understanding of plant metamorphosis, applying it to the history of philosophy and showing how different philosophical positions or shapes of consciousness, as he comes to call them, grow together, even when they appear to contradict each other, into this ultimate perspective or absolute knowledge, which at the end of the phenomenology,

hegel claims to have surmounted he thinks history itself at least in ideal form has come to an end in the sense that we now understand what freedom is we understand what nature is at least again in thought right it's not that a lot of people think hegel's crazy because he thought history came to an end when he wrote this really dense largely incomprehensible work of philosophy and here we are a few hundred years later and things have definitely continued um but the idea is not that he literally actually brought history to an end but that the form of thinking that he reveals by detailing this historical process of the metamorphosis through these different shapes of consciousness that each one builds on the one prior until it reaches this culmination of an integrated perspective on the whole, Hegel doesn't think we can get any further than this, at least again in the realm of thought, right? Thought has thought itself to the end. And for a few hundred years now, we've been debating whether that's true. And

you can't understand any 20th century philosophy, you know, particularly continental philosophy, but even, you know, in the anglosphere, a reaction against Hegel. I mean, everyone's reacting against Hegel. But the thing is, Hegel is the master of contradiction. So, like, you think he didn't already work into his system that you were going to try to contradict it? Like, that's the whole point of his method. So can you really get away from Hegel? Lots of attempts have been made.

And, you know, I love Michelle Foucault. line about how we have to be careful imagining that we finally escaped Hegel and his dialectic because as soon as we begin to feel like we've broken free of his grasp, we turn the corner and find him standing there laughing at us, right? And was it Nietzsche or maybe it was Nietzsche who said the only way to refute Hegel is to laugh? I don't know if that was Nietzsche, I'm blanking on who it would. But, you know, the idea is you can't refute Hagel philosophically. You can just sort of become disinterested in his approach and move on to something else.

Yeah. So, yeah, so the, in the idea of like, you know, this terrible term, the end of history or whatever, it's culmination in Hegel, is it basically, and this is sort of my idea of I'm certainly no expert or nowhere near an expert on Hegel, but that it's like the, absolute spirit has comprehended itself for the first time in Hegel's thought, and that's what's actually meant by this, is like the whole structure of the evolution of thinking itself is sort of captured in the work of Hegel, or am I way off base here? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it sounds grandiose to put it that way, and it's, it's in a scalable, it's grandiose, the claim he's making,

no matter how we try to spin it. But what he's really trying to point out towards the end of the phenomenology is like all the historical conditions necessary for him to be able to think in this way, right? All of the ethical customs and political structures and the whole, you know, history of thought, like all of it and religion also, like all of it had to be there to support the perspective that he is, this meta perspective that he is claiming to have achieved. And so it's not just like his accomplishment right he's saying uh if you read my book this can be your accomplice and understand it um this can be your accomplishment too right so he's not claiming the unique uh to have uniquely achieved this like secret um answer to everything it's it's more that uh the conditions have

ripened socially and spiritually and uh psychologically so as to make this sort of absolute knowing possible. And he's just the one who happened to be the articulator of it, but not the sole creator of it or owner of it in any sense. Right. And he would say that

what he is achieving in the realm of spirit and like intellectual reflection, Napoleon is achieving who was marching into Yaina just as he was finishing this book is achieving in the political domain.

of actual you know actual life so it's you know often the german idealists are thoughts who have achieved spiritually what the french were trying to achieve politically right and so it's this like more inward reflection of what outwardly was was going on with the french revolution and napoleon later that is very interesting to think about yeah france and germany you know covering both sides of that coin, France through political action and Germany through its, you know, thinking and deep philosophy. Yeah. Yeah. And you could say, you could say that England, the UK, the Britain was was accomplishing this in the realm of economics with the industry, you know, getting the industrial revolution up and running. Yeah, fascinating. So then, and this probably helps make even more sense of Hegel's work for those that are still, you know, grappling with it. But who, who. were the, we know Marx as this started off as this left Hegelian, but can you talk about who

the right and left Hegelians were and what they each sort of took or emphasized from Hegel's work? Yeah. Well, this whole typology of right and left Hegelians comes from the left Hegelians. And so there weren't any conservative or right Hegelians who referred to themselves as such. But these were the theologians and philosophers, mostly at the University of Berlin, who were aligned with the existing order politically, and who felt that Hegel's account of the role of the state in human life was such that, you know, again, it had been, this order had been achieved and that this sort of, you know, more or less like constitutional monarchy kind of situation was the best we could do and they didn't want or expect

further changes certainly no revolutions were necessary right they they thought history had reached a point where the existing political order was as good as we could do right the left Hagellians um Marx most you know prominent among them thought that no the what Hegel saw again in the realm of thought or ideally speaking had yet to be actualized and that to actualize it for individuals to truly be free in their social relations to one another further changes were needed right to the state apparatus because yeah the dialectic of history was not yet completed. And so this is where you get that conservative, progressive split. You know, where did Hegel really land on this? I'm not sure. I think

there was a sense, there's a sense in which as you grow older, you know, unless you've fully devoted your life to radical politics, you tend to become more conservative. And, you know, Hegel was married on property and was well respected by the princes, had this nice professorship at the University of Berlin. Like, he's not trying to rock the boat, right? So I think it's very easy to understand why the other professors at the time and theologians, you know, we're kind of content with the existing social order,

whereas the students, the young Higalians or left Higalians, were not quite as committed to the existing social order, right? You're younger, you don't own property. You're not established in your career in the existing society and order. So, you know, you're more willing to see its flaws and to try to bring about social change. Taylor's all his time. And yeah, and then the conservative aspect of aging, like as you alluded to so well, is not just by the age, you know, the fact of aging, but is that you tend to, especially if

your middle class are above that, you've carved out a relatively comfortable place in society based on the rules and structures and mores as they currently are. And, you know, you build up property and money and investments. You're much more just deeply, you know, tied to the status quo as it exists. And of course, younger people are much more willing to buck that trend. And we're kind of running an experiment here in the U.S. with millennials and Gen Ziers of, you know, people are less sure that we'll ever own a house, that will ever own property, this economy will ever work for us. And so I wonder how that's going to impact, you know, this cliché of as you age, you get, you get more conservative. It's going to be interesting to watch. But the basic idea here

is that the right Hagellians playing on, taking on board much of Hagell's work, use it to defend the status quo. And the left Higalians are saying, this is. an open-ended ongoing thing and you know we need to emphasize that more progress is needed so that's that's pretty intuitively understood by hopefully people in my audience yeah yeah and i want to talk a little bit really quickly we don't have to spend too much time on this but obviously there's this infamous rivalry that popped up between schelling and hagel as time went on they started off as as roommates and friends and then the rivalry i'm just wondering if this rivalry was interpersonal mostly and then given an intellectual sheen or if this was an intellectual dispute, you know, proper and that played out in this rivalry.

Well, it's interesting that dichotomy between intellectual and personal, I think for the circle of friends in Iena, you know, when they were all younger, that division is impossible to maintain. And, like, the personal and the intellectual were fused. It's often referred to as the romantic circle, you know, which included Schelling and Navalis and Hegel was there. And the Schlegel brothers, Friedrich and Wilhelm and Gerta, Holderlin, Ficta. So they're all going to parties and drinking and philosophizing. And I think it was Friedrich Schlegel who came up with this term SIM, S-Y-M-M-S-Y-M. philosophy, Sim philosophy to describe the way in which, you know, the ideas were flowing between them in this unbroken, creative way that, you know, there's, yeah, like no way to separate

the personal and the intellectual. But, you know, Schelling and Hegel, after being roommates, after being part of this circle in Yenna, collaborating on a journal, when Hegel writes the phenomenology, there's a little bit of a dig at, if not shelling, then at least some of the lesser lights among his followers. There's a sort of caricatured rendition of what shelling at the time was calling his identity philosophy as what Hegel refers to as a knight in which all cows are black. In other words, a conception of the absolute where everything was undifferentiated. Hegel thought this was an immature conception of the absolute. Shelling thought when Hegel wrote a letter to share a copy of the phenomenology was Shelling,

Schelling's response was, hey, you think you might make it clearer in your preface that you're not talking about me? And I believe Hegel never wrote back. And for a while, people assume they just never spoke again. But there's some evidence in a letter that Hegel wrote to his wife. I'm forgetting if it was Hegel's letter or Shelling's letter. One of them wrote a letter to their wife in the 1830, late 1820s it must have been, because Hegel dies in 1831, that they just randomly happened to meet at a bathhouse. And they got along, like, nothing had ever happened.

like best friends again. And so what, it seems that maybe this intellectually, everyone assumed that they hated each other. And indeed, later, shelling will be very critical of Hegel's system, that their personal connection was still there. They just, you know, didn't have occasion to see each other much. But yeah, in his late lectures at the University of Berlin, after Hegel has passed away,

shelling levels pretty severe critical. critiques of Hegel's approach to philosophy, which Schelling calls negative philosophy, and opposes it to his own mature approach called positive philosophy. And this critique of Hegel was, you know, lectures attended by Kierkegaard and Bakunin and Engels was there, and Marx was very eager to hear from Engels about what Schelling was saying. There's a lot of excitement initially, but, you know, Schelling's critiques of Hegel have been very influential. I mean, you see, you know, in Derrida's work, he's pretty much going with Schelling's interpretation of Hegel's logic, and Kierkegaard picks up

Schelling's critique of Hegel, and so very influential, if not always cited. But then what Schelling tried to do with his own positive philosophy was largely I don't know, it was in the wrong season. He was trying to revive a philosophy of mythology and revelation and consider what he called the mythological process to be a necessary precursor to the Christian revelation

and this new mode of philosophizing out of experience rather than trying to seek out something a priori or logical that would precede experience, which is what he critiques Hegel's logic for really trying to do. And so they definitely, you know, Shelling gets the last word, right? Just by virtue of living longer than Hegel. But it's only later with the emergence of psychoanalysis, Freud and Jung, and the whole depth psychology movement, that you get a,

a deeper understanding of what Schelling was up to with these late lectures on the philosophy of mythology. You know, talking, like basically it's a, you could construe it in Jungian terms as Schelling's attempt to understand the collective unconscious and these archetypal powers that shape us and that are kind of accrued through history and so on.

So, you know, it took a while for Schelling's, late philosophy to kind of catch on and again it's not often cited but if you read you know shelling's philosophy of mythology it's like oh this is this is

you know 50 60 70 years earlier than young who started saying a lot of the same things so that's fascinating yeah I never even never knew about this connection between shelling and the later

development of psychoanalysis. That's absolutely fascinating. And it actually leads really good into this next question because, you know, one of the things we stressed over on Red Menace when we did the Arthur Schopenhauer and Frederick Nietzsche episode was that, you know, these ideas were picked up by, you know, psychoanalytic thinkers like Freud and taken in new direction. So you can kind of draw a straight line in some ways, like specifically around the idea of the will, morphing over time into the unconscious from Arthur Schopenhauer through to Freud as Nietzsche being the sort of bridge. So it's interesting to think of Schelling also contributing in some ways to especially the Jungian articulation of psychoanalysis.

And for anybody listening, if you're interested in that, we just did an episode with Todd McGowan on Lacan, which is really fascinating as well. So people can go check that out if you're into psychoanalysis in particular. But let's talk about Arthur Schopenhauer a little bit because it's certainly standard and we've made the point many times to think of Kant, Ficta, Schelling, and Hegel as the sort of Mount Rushmore of German idealism. But Arthur Schopenhauer does get mentioned in relation to these thinkers and is often brought up as a fifth representative, if you will, of German idealism. He certainly had, you know, kind of like Kierkegaard beef with Hegel and saw himself in confrontation with a Gaelian philosophy. But where does Schopenhauer fit into all of this and what makes him different from the others such that he wouldn't be mentioned in the top four routinely?

Yeah, it's unfortunate that, you know, the way that the knowledge industry can create these sorts of divisions, but, you know, he was not, I don't think he had like a standard academic position, right? So he was, you know, critical of this more professorial, highfalutin intellectual approach, writing that's largely. largely incomprehensible to anyone but the closest students who, you know, I'm sure Schopenhauer would imagine, were just pretending to understand it to get closer to the teacher. And so, like, you know, Schopenhauer is very critical of all these dynamics and the fame won by first Schelling and then Hegel really ate at him. And, you know, he would schedule his lectures at the same time as Hegel's and an attempt to steal Hegel's students, but it never worked.

He was bitter. He wanted what they had, basically. You could say that. In some ways, yeah. But, you know, obviously Schopenhauer is almost like Nietzsche before Nietzsche, you know. And when Nietzsche found Schopenhauer, he just fell in love because it was exactly all the things that Nietzsche was critical love. But, yeah, this approach to understanding the Kantian numinal, phenomenal divide by really taking the will. and recognizing how it's more or less unconscious

and not simply a power held by the subject but the driving force of all evolution that everything we see around us is in some sense a petrified will or the form left in the wake of this will, this thirsting, this craving, you know, that Chauvinauer interprets in Buddhist terms as the source of suffering.

And so it's this, you know, one of the earliest, um, conscious attempts to synthesize the deep wisdom of, of East and West. And it's just, uh, it's a powerhouse philosophy, um, that can really, you know, inspire, inspire people. You know, I'm, I'm not, uh, you know, I've, I've, I've, read the world as will in representation, but, um, not a deep, as deepest student of Schopenhours, um, even though I certainly find his work to be inspiring and insightful. You know, it's, again, like this tremendous early integration of East and West. Absolutely. I really love that phrase of the notion of the petrified will of looking at nature and the wake of the will moving through it. That's a fascinating and rather beautiful image.

But, yeah, so major thinkers, we've mentioned them, like Nietzsche, like Marx and many others, emerged intellectually out of German idealism, while also in many ways confronting it and taking aspects of it in radically different directions. Can you talk about Marx in particular and how he comes out of and reacts to German idealism, sort of what he takes and what he rejects from it as he moves forward? Yeah. You know, well, everyone knows that, as Marx put it, he tried to stand Hegel on his. Well, he puts Hegel on his head, but really Hegel on his feet because he would think that, you know, Hegel's too top-heavy and was as if, you know, only a head floating through the world. And that rather than just interpreting the world, Hegel admitted, right, the philosopher is like the owl of the nerva, it flies at dusk, and can only interpret history in reverse.

And Marx was like, well, that's not very useful to me as a political, activist and revolutionary agitator, like, I need a philosophy that can change the world. And so it's, yeah, just taking Hegel's philosophy and allowing the dialect to continue, so we get dialectical materialism, which is, is it really materialism? Well, it's, it's, you know, Engels and Marx both recognize. the dialectical relationship that mind and nature are are in with each other such that it's I don't think the kind of crass or simple-minded materialism it's it's a conception of the human being as you know in some sense a this this potent source of world transformation

And that the social relationships that Hegel thought had reached a point in economic relationships, a point of stability and completion, you know, for Marx get critiqued and broken open into a revolutionary political project. And so the people don't often, I mean, your average person nowadays is not reading Kant, is not reading Hegel. And yet, if you look at the last 150 years or so, these ideas have definitely shaped history. You know, beginning in the 1840s and then, you know, through the 20th, century, what Marx does with the dialectical conception of history is, yeah, it's world transforming, right?

And so what the state is and what the role that the state should play, who should be in control of the state, you know, all of these questions get thrown up into the air, and we're very much still trying to sort them. out. So we're at a point now, like, yeah, Marx lived and died and had his impact, but we're still very much in the thrall of, you know, answering the questions that he was asking and understanding the critiques he was making. And, you know, so what did he do with Hegel? Well, he made Hegel relevant to a progressive political project. And, you know, that relevance is very much a live issue for us right now.

Yeah, I do very much see, like, this radical intervention by Marx taking decades and, you know, perhaps centuries to fully permeate society. But, you know, even in 2020, 2022, whatever, certain things that Marx set in motion are put on the table, back when he was, you know, doing his work, sort of get taken up whether knowingly or not often unconsciously and not knowingly as more or less like common sense in the political sphere. And obviously it's not like his big philosophical ideas like historical materialism or a dialectical approach or anything like that. But, you know, people have to wrestle with class.

They have to talk about it. Even conservative politicians now, I mean, even 30 years ago, 20 years ago, I remember, you know, being a socialist pre-Obama or during Obama, and just even explicitly talking about class was sort of different. It was novel. It doesn't really, we're all a family. What's the point of this stuff? Certainly people were always carrying that torch.

But in mainstream political discourse, it was sort of anathema to think in those terms. And that's radically changed as capitalism itself has entered a new stage of rapaciousness and irrationality. People are sort of coming to pseudo-Marxist conclusions in a sort of common sense way. So it's very interesting to see how the impact of Marx permeates through time and where that will eventually lead in the future. But one thing I want to just kind of pull out of everything you said there, am I right to think that now that you've said it in this way, that Marx's famous quote that the philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world, the point is to change it, is in so many ways a direct response to Hegel's owl of Minerva? Or is it not so direct?

because it seems like the perfect, you know, juxtaposition to that idea. You know, I'm not a Marx scholar, but I've always understood that to be a direct response to Hegel. I mean, I'm sure it could be inclusive of a lot of other philosophy, but just in the sense that Hegel very much was a backward-looking or saw the role of philosophy to give expression to what has already occurred, right, rather than trying to change history. I would be surprised if Marx wasn't, you know, aiming that at Hegel. Directly, yeah. And wasn't it, wasn't it Kierkegaard that says life can only be understood backwards but must be lived forwards?

Yeah, sounds like something. I always love that. I always love that quote. Well, let's go ahead and zooming out from Marx in his last two questions here as we wrap up this conversation, which has been absolutely fascinating. I've learned a lot in this conversation. But zooming out from Marx in particular, what has the impact of German idealism ultimately been and what thinkers and movements after it can be traced back to it or

obviously influenced by it? Yeah. Well, you know, like I said, you can't understand 20th century continental philosophy at all without a grounding in German idealism. So all of existentialism, all of phenomenology is grappling with the earthquake, you know, trying to pick up the pieces after the explosion of German idealism. And even in the, you know, Anglo-American school of philosophy with like the rise of analytic philosophy in the early 20th century in reaction to British idealism, which was basically Hegelianism, that that, you know, again, as a reaction against Hegelianism, emphasizing all the things that you might think of it was downplaying it's obviously influenced by

this this same idealist moment so when I think though beyond just like academic philosophy in and think about our political and ecological situation like how can we not be grappling with these deep questions about mind and nature and their relationship and how can we not be grappling with, you know, the role of free individuals in a state or in a society, the sorts of paradoxes and contradictions that arise in the midst of political discourse are intractable unless we're capable of thinking dialectically. And from my point of view, whether we're a Marxist or not, we need to be able to grapple with the limits of rational discourse, right?

Like it's quite obvious that so often we can't argue our political opponents out of their worldview because worldview, like the shape of consciousness that is informing a political party or political ideology, it goes much deeper than discursive reason, right? um there's there's there's there's there's religion there's intuition and so i think the the german idealists recognize this even though you know hegel says the real is the rational the rational is the real i think he recognizes the embeddedness of um human rationality and and um intellect in uh culture and in uh you know these these religious uh having these religious dimensions. And so I think when we see the political turmoil and the

increasing polarization, it's on the one hand, an extremely dangerous situation, but on the other hand, a tremendous opportunity. Because when the opposites grow so intensely opposed to one another when polarization reaches such a fever pitch, if you take Hegel seriously, it's a good sign that a sublation or synthesis is about to occur. Now, the thing is, though, you know, Hegelian interpretations of history. In Marxist interpretations, too, to the extent that they are Hegelian, can sometimes make the end justify the means, if you know what I mean, so that what might sound all uh you know philosophically um you know neat and tidy like sublation like wow isn't that a or synthesis of of a thesis and an antithesis it sounds like um so beautiful

but in the actual historical fact you know the synthesis could take uh millions of people being slaughtered in in a war or um you know et cetera or or uh or uh attempt at establishing a communist state that kills millions of people, right? So there's a way in which the tension created by the opposites before the synthesis is brought forth, it's not always a pretty picture. I mean, history is a slaughter bench for this reason. And Hegel's approach to history is to say that reason works in mysterious ways. He called it the cunning of reason, right?

and the loss of many individual lives could serve. And I don't know if I buy this, but this seems to me to be the Higalian perspective. The loss of many individual lives serves the emergence of the absolute spirit at the end of the historical process. So I think we have to reckon with that aspect of these Higalian interpretations because it seems to me that often Higalians throughout Higalians, throughout history, you know, like the St. Louis School of American Idealism,

like Galians, would interpret the Civil War in America much like this, like that the Civil War was the negative moment that allowed us to better understand, and slavery too, like the negative moment that allowed us to better understand actual freedom. In other words, it's almost as if they're saying slavery and this Civil War when 600,000 people died was necessary for this hierarchy. realization and that's a little that's tricky you know to make a claim like that yeah absolutely i think that's a very measured and justified position and this ends justifying the means thing i i do think of it in some ways like you know as like the shadow side of of communism you know like if there is this

idea that you know history is fully on your side you fully grasp what needs to happen this whatever this terrible event is justified in terms of where it's leading um you know that's the something that we should be suspicious of in ourselves and in others and realize that people aren't dispendable in that way and you are not necessarily fully, you know, comprehending the, the ins and outs and nuances of your historical moment and some humility at the very least is needed. But this idea that things look really bad right now, but it is a sort of intensification of contradiction that inevitably needs to happen. It does tamper down my pessimism. I feel like I've often said like the 2020s are going to be absolutely brutal as these contradictions that are ravaging specifically

American society, but the world at large become more and more acute. It's going to create more chaos. I don't know exactly what direction or how that chaos is going to play out, but I know it's going to be terrible for many, many people. But it's almost like that does need to happen. for us to come out the other end but the hubris that says yes this needs to happen and i'm going to and i know where this is going so let me take over whatever that hubris needs to be tempered uh by humility for sure so yeah so like to the question what was the impact of german idealism the entire realm of philosophy after a german idealism is at least in some way informed influence inspired by it even the the most contradictory counter german idealist movements within

philosophy are still reacting to it. And then I think you also answered the question of why these thinkers and this work is still valuable today because many of the issues they were wrestling with are just as if not more potently on the table today than as they were then. So, yeah, I really appreciate that. Do you have anything else to say with regards to either of those before we wrap up? Well, just to say, I think the danger of our moment is how susceptible, because of how isolated and alienated we all are. We're alienated from nature. We're alienated from each other.

We're alienated even psychologically from ourselves. The risk is that we become captured by ideology because ideology gives us a simple, certain answer to all of these questions. It makes us feel like we're part of something bigger, that we're important and we know the answer. That is a deadly, deadly mistake to make. And so we need humility, which doesn't mean that we don't have convictions that are stemming from deeply held values and visions of how the world could be.

It's just that once you start allowing the end to justify the means, you've lost the script, right? You've fallen into a form of ideological possession. And this does, is, you know, ideological possession can happen across the political spectrum. You could be captured by centristism as an ideological, you know, position, right? So, or on left or right.

I think what we're really needing right now, and this is so hard to articulate, you know, and we could spend a whole other episode going into this. But if Hegel is really correct about the nature of truth, which is that the whole truth contains these moments of apparent contradiction within it. Like if you stop short at any particular phase in the development of truth and you fixate on that particular phase, that's ideological capture. You have to stay with the dialectic and be willing to learn and not think that if a whole section, of society like stands opposed to and disagrees with your point of view and you know won't be convinced by any rational argument or evidence you could show them that's a sign that we're

still caught in a developmental dialectical process and so you know we're trying to come to some sort of consensus as a species about who we are and what we are to be doing here and we can only do that if we're willing to learn from one another, even across what may seem like, you know, unbridgedable political divisions, if we stop talking to each other and start demonizing each other, we're just going to repeat the 20th century over again, right? And let's not do that. Please. Yeah, absolutely. I think that is incredibly well said. I totally agree with it. And this idea of ideological possession is important like you know like let's say the marxist ideology for example is a tool bag we use to try to change the world for the better but to be wholly captured by any singular

ideology actually and i see this a lot in politic politics left right and center especially as things get more intense that political ideology is sort of picked up as a you know a religious fervor like you know 200 years ago would have been the catholics versus the protestants and now it's like this left subgroup versus this right subgroup or whatever it may be and a lot of the same pathologies that come from religious dogmatism can grab you in this ideological possession if it's not tempered by humility and I think a collectivity so you know there's no way that one individual and this happens a lot on the left right one person with their head up their ass thinks that they are the sole possessor of the exact right ideas and the right things to do next to usher in you know

socialism or whatever and everybody who disagrees with them is somehow a sciop or a CIA plant or acting in bad faith. And that level of narcissism is a huge canary in the coal mine with regards to ideological possession in yourself and others. And by having that humility and working in a collectivity, you are often, I think, tempered from the worst elements of that ideological possession by other people checking you about by just being rooted in the real world. I mean, a lot of people just sit online all day long and their brains float off into, you know, fairy tale words, you know, sandcastles in the sky. And that's dangerous mentally, emotionally, and I think, politically as well. So be aware of that and yourself and others. Yeah. Yeah. And just, you know,

a final thing I'll say is there's ingenious intellectual critiques of this or that, you know, mode of political and economic organization and ingenious attempts to construct alternatives, which would provide a more equitable distribution of goods and services and wealth and so on. But what works on paper doesn't always work in real life. And like the political domain is less about facts and reason than it is about frames and feelings, and we really need to take that on board as intellectuals who are politically engaged and active and care about social justice and economic justice and racial justice that, like, politics, if you want to do facts and logic, like, get into science or math.

Politics is about frames, by which I mean stories, narratives, worldview, and feelings. And so if you want to bridge divides between you and your political opponents, try to drop into the emotional and the feeling domains to understand, why does this person feel threatened by me? Why is this person's political philosophy? Like what is the insecurity at the level of emotion and feeling that's driving this person's political opinions? Because we're never going to get through to each other if we're just arguing at the surface level. of our verbalized political affiliations and ideas. The divisions are much deeper than that. Yeah.

Could not have said it better. I completely agree. And one of the things I think spiritual practice offers is this as you deeply go into your own mind and emotional world and how it works and your structure of feeling and you observe and become close with it and understand it, you understand other people's structure of feeling and how their mind and emotions. work and it really disabuses you of this notion that politics is this realm of logic and facts and all I need to do is construct the perfect argument to win this person over. No, you need to

understand their structure of feeling how certain political developments threaten their sense of self, for example, and how you can appeal to them in a way that takes that into consideration instead of just hitting them over the head with your set of facts first there. So I really appreciate that. Yeah, just ask people who you know you disagree with politically. like just start like asking them what's their story like what's your story be interested in them as people and I think it's like the back door into a political conversation that might be much more fruitful absolutely and it lets down their guard if you're not coming out of the gate hot and trying to beat them in a debate but actually you're striving ultimately to understand them they let down

a lot of their guards and they'll be much more open to to ideas that might be anathema to what they currently hold so it's just more effective too yeah all right well Well, this is a great, great conversation. I love having you on. I'm definitely going to have you back on again. Before I let you go, can you just let listeners know where they can find you, your work, or maybe any recommendations you like to toss out there?

Yeah. My blog and website, well, you'll find all my stuff, is footnotes to Plato.com. That's numeral two. And I'm on Twitter. You can find me, same handle, Footnotes to Plato. on YouTube. Again, same handle.

And people who want to go deeper into German idealism, a book I would recommend as a great secondary source. Two books I'll recommend. Frederick Beisers, German Idealism, The Struggle Against Subjectivism is the subtitle. And then another book that I mentioned earlier by Eckhart Forrester, The 25 Years of Philosophy, A Systematic Reconstruction. those are two really great secondary sources no replacement for reading the primary sources

but you definitely need a guide if you're coming at this stuff for the first time so check those books out yeah secondary sources can be very helpful ways to orient yourself before diving into the primary text all right well thank you so much man i'll link to as much of that in the show notes as possible and we'll absolutely have you back on as soon as possible to talk about million other things that you and i are both interested in so thank you so much for coming on My pleasure, Brett. Great to be with you. Dead of night, strange canyon road, strange look in your eyes. You shut them as we fly, as we fly.

Stark hollow town, cars and city lights. baby let's get high spend a Johnny's car and shit you another night we laugh until we cry you say go fast I say hold on tight in the dead of mind

dead night See the boys as they walk on by See the boys as they walk on by As they walk on by As they walk on by walk on by As they walk on It's enough to make the young man

Six summers down Another dreamless night You're not by my side Side my side, scratch on the moon like a familiar smile Staying on my mind some other town, someone has his life Dead in the night In the night We see the poises they walk on back.

See the voices they walk on life. As they walk on by As they walk on by As they walk on by As they walk on It's enough to look at young bad ...toe... ...the...

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