Episode #066 - Transcript

Thank you for wanting to know more today than you did yesterday, and I hope you love the show.

So, I was checking the demographics of this show in terms of downloads the other day. You know, the page online that tells me where in the world people are downloading this show from—if you guys are even real people. And when I saw where most of the downloads were coming from, I was pleasantly surprised because it actually sets up the opening question of the next few episodes perfectly. Most of the people it turns out that listen to this show, numbers-wise, are from the, well, the hamburger, pizza, and nacho capital of the world. And I’m not talking about Germany or Italy or wherever nachos hail from—some Central or South American country. I’m talking about America, people, the home of the hamburger, America. Most people that listen to this show are from the land of Francis Scott Key, the good old US of A. Which, by the way, means that most people that listen to this show are good Americans. You’re a good American. We listen to talk radio on our way to work. We call in to the Sean Hannity show and tell him that he’s right. We pay our unjust progressive income taxes. When we see an illegal immigrant out front of a Home Depot, we kidnap him and turn him into the INS. We’re good Americans.

But more important that any of that, what makes us good Americans is that we love freedom, don’t we? Freedom. So, let me ask all you great Americans out there an annoyingly philosophically loaded question in keeping with this show, a question that’s going to prove to be extremely important over the next ten or so episodes that we’ll be doing on Hegel and Marx. What is freedom? That’s the question. What is this thing called freedom that we love so much? Now, of course I could never give all the answers to this question in the introduction of our introduction episode on Hegel. But for the sake of getting the wheels turning in this direction, let me give you two popular stances that are answers to the question “What is freedom?”

For some people, freedom is almost synonymous with the ability to seemingly make an autonomous choice. And what I mean by that, for example, is that for some people freedom is the ability to be, say, sitting on your couch. You get a little rumbling in your tummy; you’re hungry. So you evoke your freedom card out of your wallet, and you decide that you’re going to drive down to Taco Bell. And you’re going to get a Cheesy Gordita Crunch. You want Taco Bell. You have a vehicle. You have the money to get Taco Bell. Freedom for this person is the ability to have some behavior, some preference arise in your head—Taco Bell—and having the ability to act on that preference—driving down there and getting it. And it makes sense. Isn’t this what America is all about? Driving to Taco Bell and getting a Cheesy Gordita Crunch at three a.m.?

This person thinks to themselves, “What is freedom? Well, let’s think about what not-freedom is. Somebody who’s unfree, somebody who’s a slave would never be able to make that choice, right? I mean, if you’re a slave and you see a commercial for Taco Bell on the TV and you decide that, look, I really want to go down the street and get some, you don’t have that ability. You’re a slave. You aren’t free. You have to ask someone for permission.” These people say, “Someone who is free wouldn’t have to ask for permission, right? That’s what freedom is.”

Well, another popular way of thinking of freedom would say that this definition that I just gave doesn’t go far enough. It’s not sufficient. They’d say it’s not enough to just have a preference and be able to act on it. That part of being able to make a truly free choice is understanding why you have that preference in the first place. See, this safeguards against a lot of different things. For example, if the only reason you want to go down to Taco Bell and get that food is because you’ve been bombarded by Taco Bell ads relentlessly for the last decade of your life—subliminal messages, crazy TV ads, radio ads, everything—can you really be said to be making a free choice there? Like, if you’re the kind of person that just floats through life doing stuff, not really thinking about why you have the inclinations you do, these people would say on this side that something is lost there that makes you free. You need to understand the “why” behind your preferences.

So, just think about this question, and try to imagine where it might lead if you fall into the second camp of people. Because if you feel that way, then there’s a very real chance that you might be a passenger when it comes to certain things. I mean, we don’t think about everything in our lives, right? We don’t think about why we make every decision we make. You may be being—when it comes to certain issues, maybe they’re insignificant—you may be being driven along and directed by a bunch of different influencers all around you without even realizing it. And if you feel like most people are like this, by the way, which some people do, does it make sense to have some sort of third-party, some group of people—let’s call it the government—does it make sense to have a government that chooses what you do for you? Because let’s be honest, they know what you want to do and what will make you happy more than you do. And you have way too much on your plate to figure stuff like that out.

Anyway, as I said before, today we’re talking about Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, a German philosopher. Lived from 1770-1831. And Hegel’s one of these guys that when people make these lists that they make of who’s the hardest guy to read in the entire Western canon of philosophy, Hegel always makes the top five. Strong performance. Most people just come right out and characterize him as brilliant thinker, but when it comes to writing, nice try, but no, no. For the record, I don’t know if I entirely disagree with this. But who really cares what I think? The reason I’m even telling you is because his work can be incredibly complex, alright? Just brace yourselves. It can be very convoluted. And like I’ve done with every other notoriously convoluted idea in the past, I think it’s valuable to work backwards a little as we’re learning about it.

I’m just going to say it. I’m just going to say what the big, general idea was at the root of the main part of his philosophy. And then, obviously, from there there’s going to be tons of questions, tons of discussions and clarifications that we’ll do over the course of the next few episodes. So, here it goes. Hegel thought that all phenomena—cars, football games, animals, the NRA, even our conscious awareness itself—are all individual aspects of one whole that he called “Geist.” Now, there’s no final consensus on what the best way to translate the word “Geist” is. It’s a word from the German language that’s kind of elusive. It can mean multiple things based on how it’s being used. Some people say “mind.” Some people say “idea.” But most people say that all phenomena, Hegel thought, were aspects of one “Spirit.” Now, that’s Spirit with a capital S.

When I explain this to people, I don’t really like to use the word “spirit” here because—well, for obvious reasons. Practically everyone you’re talking to is going to have some connotation associated with the word “spirit” that they’re going to probably very innocently impose onto what they think Hegel meant by Spirit. Not to mention, there’s so many—I mean, this is one of them, but it’s a popular one—not to mention, there’s so many people out there that hear the word “spirit,” and they instantly just roll their eyes because they align it with medieval superstition, the spirit realm; your spirit animal is a horse, things like that.

So, let’s be careful. Let’s not unfairly confer any characteristics onto this Spirit just yet. But Hegel believes that the Spirit that encompasses everything is constantly—and I’ve seen this written a lot of different ways, but I like this one the best—the Spirit is constantly reintegrating the aspects that comprise it back into itself. Now, if that sounds confusing, don’t worry, it’s kind of what Hegel was going for. It is confusing. Again, yet another point of reference that we’ll explain and return back to over and over again next few episodes. But on that note, I think that the best place to start that sets up the rest of his philosophy well is to talk about something that Hegel had a lot to say on that we’re all actually very familiar with: history.

That’s right: history. Now, I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that we can all agree on one thing here so that we can continue this conversation, alright? That human beings are born and that they inherit all the stuff from the people that came before them. That’s not controversial. They inherit the ideas from previous generations. They inherit the government from previous generations. They inherit the institutions, the cars, the science, the language. They take all this stuff, and throughout the course of their lives, they try to make it better in some way that they see fit. And the process repeats itself. The next people that come along, the next generation, they at least try to make those things that the other people made better, better.

In this way, Hegel says, humans are historical creatures. When you buy a new car, you may not think it’s better than cars in the 80s or 70s or whatever. But the reason it’s ostensibly better to Hegel than the last car is because people that are making this new car are taking into consideration not only all the lessons they’ve learned from making cars in the past; they’re taking into consideration all the mistakes that even Henry Ford made when making cars. They’re leveraging the collective car-making experience of the entire history of the world. And they still make the PT Cruiser. Just kidding. If any of you have PT Cruisers, I’m sorry. It was a joke. I don’t actually hate your car.

Point is, in this same way, we do the same thing with our government, don’t we? We’re constantly trying to make our government better based on the mistakes that every generation of citizens has made in the past and the lessons learned from them. What Hegel’s saying here is that this change—this isn’t just government and cars. This is everything. Hegel calls this process of constant change the dialectic. And by the way, remember Heraclitus all the way back, episode one, I think? You can’t step in the same river twice. The universe is in a constant state of flux. Well, here’s Hegel applying that same general concept to phenomena in the world. It’s also kind of Buddhist too, if you think about it. I don’t mean to pontificate too much, but you know. You’re hot so you put the A/C on. Then it gets too cold on your face, so you put on the heater. You’re constantly in that state. You’re full now, but you’re constantly moving towards hungry and then back and forth and on and on ad infinitum. And we do this with everything.

The difference, I guess, to Hegel, when it comes to societal phenomena is that he thinks we’re actually making progress when we do this stuff. Yeah, it may be two steps forward and one step back sometimes. It may not happen in every area all at once. But Hegel definitely thinks that we’re moving positively towards a very real end here. Now, the obvious question there is, what end? “What end?” you may ask. Well, that’s for another episode. On this episode, let’s talk about how—the “how” of how Hegel thinks progress is made.

Now, first and foremost, Hegel makes it very clear that given the obvious fact that we aren’t living at some sort of evolutionary end point of all of these phenomena, meaning that they will no doubt continue to grow and get better over time—because of that, we shouldn’t look at ourselves as the sum total of everything that’s come before us and then relegate everything that has come before us as garbage that’s not even worthy of consideration. It’s so easy to do this as people living in modern times: to look back at history and see them as primitive apes, right? No, Hegel thinks that no matter how far back you go, every society, every civilization has something that they can teach us, no matter how primitive they may seem to you in today’s world. He says that there’s wisdom in every age, and every age has its strengths and weaknesses, including our own.

For example, what’s a weakness? Well, look, for the sake of conversation, let’s just say that people constantly taking pictures of themselves and their pancakes and putting it on Instagram, you know, constantly carrying a camera around implying that their life is so noteworthy and so spectacular that they need to capture and immortalize every moment of it—let’s just say that that’s an indication of a growing trend of narcissism in our society. Hegel would say that perhaps this is a weakness. And if it is, it might behoove us to look back at history and not only learn our lessons from our contemporaries. In other words, given that there is wisdom in every age, as Hegel says, maybe reading up on the 16th-century samurai culture of Oda Nobunaga would—maybe that would help us understand the true meaning of humility, of honor.

The point is, Hegel thinks that in the same way we should honor the chronological history of cars when making decisions about how to build a new car in today’s world, we should honor the history of society and ideas when determining what is right. And he thinks that if you call yourself a historian, if that’s your profession—historian—your job is ultimately not to do what historians typically do—catalog useless facts—but to glean these very bits of wisdom. What was the essence of the age? What was the essence of the society? You’re supposed to do that if you’re a historian. And if you think about it, this is why we all love Dan Carlin, the podcaster, right? The guy is an absolute master at delivering these messages and lessons that are otherwise hidden in the past.

Anyway, Hegel says that the world makes progress in a sporadic way at times. But the way he sees it is that it generally follows the pattern of what he called the dialectic. Now, when he says this, he has in mind the often-volatile shifts in public opinion on any one given issue. He thought that whenever we have any sort of institution, just given the wide variance between people and their opinions, there’s going to be competing ideas about how it should be. Take healthcare, for instance. Some people think it should be entirely subsidized by the government. Other people think it should be privatized. Both have their reasons for thinking the way that they do.

But one thing’s for certain in the eyes of Hegel. There will be at least three shifts of this pendulum at the top before anyone arrives at a balance that enough people are happy with and progress is ultimately made. He calls these three shifts that always happen the thesis—and that’s the original change that occurs; like in our example someone passes a bill that nationalizes health care—the antithesis—this is the pendulum swinging back in the other direction as Hegel says, as a backlash to the first change; like, for instance, a populist movement that revokes the bill; a new one is instated, etc.—and the synthesis is the final one. This is the eventual balance that the two sides find on the issue. And at this point, once we arrive at the synthesis, then there’s new competing interests. So, that whole process starts over again. This is why it’s constantly in this state.

Now, that process may sound agonizing to you. But maybe the overall point that Hegel’s trying to make is this: we never begin our existence starting with nothing. We’re always, as human beings, standing on the shoulders of giants—the hundreds of generations of progress that came before us where they underwent this very arduous process over and over again and made the progress that we enjoy the fruits of today—that’s the point he’s making. We are all existing at some point along a spectrum: never the start point, never the end point. But we live in a certain context, to Hegel, a context that is constantly changing itself. And Hegel says, everything is this way. Everything.

Wait, everything? You know, this is probably where most people start to take issue with Hegel. It’s one thing to point out that the world is in a constant state of flux. I’m on board with that. But why deal in absolutes? Everything changes like this? There has to be some exception to the rule, right? I mean, I can just hear somebody. “Look, I agree with Hegel up until he used the word ‘everything.’ I mean, what about this door? Is this door that I’m walking through constantly changing? What about this table?” And for that matter, what about consciousness at all? Maybe that’s the best question. I mean, surely when Socrates walked around in the Athenian Agora and berated people about—you know, asking them questions about justice and virtue and whatever—Socrates was a human, right? Surely his fundamental human experience of the world was the same as mine, right? I mean, he just saw different things back then. He lived in antiquity, and I didn’t. Was Socrates’ consciousness the same as mine?

Well, unfortunately, there’s no fast answer to this question when it comes to Hegel. We assume it’s the same. When we imagine ourselves as Socrates, we project our own fundamental way that we perceive reality onto Socrates, right? Imagine being Socrates right now. Imagine being in a toga, smelling terrible, asking people questions, antagonizing them. We basically just imagine ourselves looking through the eyes of Socrates based on our own subjective lens. But is there anything that says that reality needs to be this way? Is it honest or fair to make the assumption that Socrates walked around and perceived things the same way that I do? I mean, given the fact that everything else in the world is constantly evolving and changing—nobody really questions that—what Hegel’s asking here is, why should we assume that how we are consciously aware wouldn’t evolve and shift too?

Now, if this seems to you like Hegel’s just being difficult here or desperately trying to find something to nitpick, keep in mind what he’s responding to. He’s responding to Kant. Remember, this fundamental way that we experience the world is something that Kant talks a lot about. See, to Kant, there are two worlds: the world of things in themselves, and our human experience of that world of things in themselves. And our experience is not only affected by the particular object that our minds and senses are trying to make sense of in the world of things in themselves. But that experience is also shaped by the hardware that we have installed that’s doing the perceiving—our minds.

Kant called these structures of how we think or perceive things categories of our mind. There are several of them: cause, effect, substance—anything that to Kant is involved with this fundamental hardware that we’re using. And for Kant, the basic processes of our mind and consciousness are what he defines as a priori, or prior to any experience that we have. In other words, the thing that we’re looking at in the world of things in themselves may change, but the underlying processes of our mind aren’t changing. No, they are the very requisite to experience at all. So, what Hegel’s saying…