Episode #067 - Transcript

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

So, what Hegel’s saying is—just kidding. First, first, guys, I’d like to apologize for the audio cutting off last episode. I got a lot of emails from people about it, and some were really mad at me. Some thought I was doing like a next-level Quentin Tarantino ending to the episode thing, like I was leaving a cliffhanger for people for next episode.  Unfortunately, neither were true. It was much less glamorous. I’m not that creative. The reality is I just didn’t have enough hard drive space on my computer. So, when I exported the file it just got cut off like with ten minutes of audio left off.

That said, what I was trying to say at the end of last episode was, look, by now you guys know how this show operates, right? You guys know my style of teaching. I think so much of having any of this information stick with you or resonate with you is to give the information a historical or emotional context. So much of understanding any of this philosophy that could easily be reduced down into just a bunch of random facts that you don’t care about—it lies in understanding what questions the people were responding to during their time period. What questions were important to ask for them? Because as we’ve seen before, as we’ve done in the past, as we saw in the hermeneutics episode, it’s so easy to project our own modern biases onto these people living in the past, to encroach upon them.

And look, aside from it being intellectually dishonest for us to do that, there’s a selfish motivation here. When we project our own modern biases onto the past, it often leads to a lot of confusion when we’re trying to understand what they were even talking about. Now, as I was saying at the end of last episode before I was rudely interrupted by my hard drive is that in Hegel, we are seeing the next development in what we already know as a long, long conversation that we’ve been having over centuries when it comes to epistemology. The question remains, can we arrive at a solid means of arriving at knowledge about particulars in the world? And if we can, what does that process of knowledge look like?

We’ve seen this discussion for a long time now. Leibniz and Hume with Hume’s fork, or in the case of Leibniz there’s the idea that all statements about what we can say that we know in this world can ultimately be distilled down into one of two types of statements. One, if you’ll remember, were what Leibniz called truths of reason. These are things that are true by virtue of the definition of them themselves. To call into question whether these things are true or not true is to be ignorant of the definition of the things. These are things like “All squares have four sides,” “All bachelors are unmarried.” It seems pretty reasonable to say that these things are true. The second type of statement were what Leibniz called truths of fact. These are things that are immediately, empirically verifiable. These would be things like, “The light is on in the other room right now, and you got to go turn it off.” Things that when we’re making a claim that there is validity to them, there is an immediate experiment or a means of verifying the validity of that thing that we can go and do right now. In this case, I guess, it would be walking into the other room and saying that the light is on.

So, if this is the State of the Knowledge Address that the philosopher president’s giving at the time, then if philosophy concerns itself with eventually finding something true or useful to us—I hope it does at least—then if this is true, where does that leave all the philosophers? Well, if this is true, if what Leibniz and Hume are saying is true, they’re basically heading to the unemployment line, right? I mean, think about it. If the only two types of truths are really truths of reason and truths of fact, then a philosopher essentially becomes somebody who, A, either really analyzes words—you know, words like “bachelor” and “square” and what they mean—or, B, they spend all their time empirically verifying things through experiment. Wait a second, that’s what scientists do. They’re not philosophers.

So, at this point the question becomes, was this truly the situation? Was David Hume right? Did he truly reduce philosophy to rubble like he said he did? But as we know, along came Immanuel Kant who makes the claim that there are more types of truths that we can intuit. He called these synthetic a priori propositions. And he makes this famous distinction that if we’re going to try to arrive at knowledge about anything, then an important part of that process needs to be understanding this lens that we view the world through. Because once we realize that, Kant thought—that there’s a major difference between what the world truly is and the world as we experience it—then the task of arriving at knowledge becomes different. It becomes pretty straightforward. Because if the only problem we have when getting to this slippery thing called knowledge is just this darn, confangled lens that we all have, well, then, philosophy—at least in epistemology—can concern itself with trying to augment or compensate for that lens so we can arrive at what things truly are—arrive at knowledge about the world of things in themselves.

Now, what Hegel’s doing during his time in many respects is sort of riding the wave of Kant. He’s responding to the ripple effect of Kant’s philosophy. See, Hegel looks at what Kant is saying with this world of things in themselves that he talks about and how it’s essentially a waste of time that we’re never going to have access to. Hegel looks at that, and he’s pretty apprehensive about getting on board with that idea. I mean, can you really blame him, though? That’s not that exciting—the world of things in themselves that we can never get to. What, we’re never going to know anything about what the world truly is simply by virtue of these mental faculties that we have duct taped around our head? That’s not very fun. No, Hegel saw this as a form of radical skepticism. And he wouldn’t have much patience for it, especially considering all of the assumptions that he thought Kant was unfairly making as well.

Let me put it this way: if the question that Hegel’s responding to is Kant’s take on whether consciousness or human experience can actually lead to knowledge, then Hegel’s saying that it absolutely can. See, Hegel says that the problem with what Kant is doing here is that what he’s doing fundamentally is looking at the world in terms of his experience of some object and then its relationship to the more real thing out there somewhere—that real thing that’s producing the phenomena that he’s experiencing. Well, if that sounds a little confusing, let me give you an example. Like, when I look at this microphone in front of me, if I said, “Okay, this microphone that I’m seeing is not the microphone as it truly is but merely a crude depiction that my mind and senses have produced of this more real thing out there in the world of things in themselves somewhere,” if I spoke in these sort of Kantian terms about the microphone, Hegel would say, well, why does that have to be the case? Why does that have to be the case?

Hegel would ask, why do we need to assume all that stuff? Just theoretically speaking, of course, why is it contrary to reason to assume something else? Maybe what we have access to when we look at that microphone is all that there is. Maybe there isn’t this world of things in themselves that we’re assuming is out there. What if this consciousness of the world that we see—what if that’s all that there is? What if instead of there being this hardwired lens that’s messing everything up that we need to account for—not letting us see what’s really out there, just out of our grasp—what if everything were just relations or moments over the course of a long, slow process of change that we’re all a part of too? He’s escaping this Kantian problem by talking about consciousness in different terms. This is a very creative way of approaching the same problem that Kant thought he was speaking definitively about, right?

By the way, real quick, if this seems like Hegel’s nitpicking here, if it seems like he just has some axe to grind with Kant and he’s desperately trying to find something to refute, one interesting thing to consider is just how much time Hegel may have saved us with this insight. Philosophy at this stage is all about finding assumptions. You could say that it still is. The fact that Hegel can look at the philosophy of Immanuel Kant and uncover the assumptions that even he has made—the guy that rebuked David Hume—that’s mind-blowing to me. Now, on that same note, you may ask yourself, “Why is all this speculation by Hegel even necessary? Why does he need to ruin everything? Why does he need to question Kant’s famous distinction by coming up with an entirely novel way of approaching our cognition of the world around us?”

Well, as a wise teacher once told me, always consider the opportunity cost. In other words, just imagine for a second if Hegel’s right, okay? And I get that we don’t totally understand his system yet, but it should be very apparent by now that it’s a much, much different way of thinking than Kant or Newton had, right? Imagine if Hegel’s right. Now, imagine if Hegel never said anything about these potential assumptions that were being made. What’s at stake there? We could ostensibly spend hundreds and hundreds of years as thinkers completely lost, blindly assuming that the only thing philosophy should concern itself with are inquiries concerning how to compensate for this flawed lens that we have to view the world through, right? Think of how many years could have been wasted. Now, of course, there’s no way to know the true opportunity cost of Hegel not saying this stuff. But one thing’s for certain: as modern folk that have the privilege of looking at history retrospectively, we have a very unique position here because we can appreciate just how much human thought can at least potentially spend hundreds or thousands of years in the dark in light of a single brazen assumption being made. And this, I think, is the true genius of Hegel even if you’re somebody that doesn’t agree with his theories.

Now, that said, once Hegel makes it clear that he takes issue with a lot of the assumptions that Kant is making, it’s not like his job is done there. No, you can’t just say that everyone else is wrong and still be respected as a philosopher. He needs to lay out a definitive way of arriving at knowledge himself, right? You need to replace the theories that you overthrow. So, what he does is actually really clever. Hegel sets up his theory by laying out a ton of what he thinks are naïve, misguided theories of knowledge that preceded him by earlier philosophers. He really does start at the beginning, and maybe we should too. Hegel asks even the most basic questions you can ask about knowledge, like, if we’re going to be looking for knowledge at all, where would it be?

Well, a popular place to start, historically speaking during the time of Hegel, would be something that Hegel referred to as either sense-immediacy or sense-certainty, depending on the translation. See, there’s been a long debate by this time between rationalists and empiricists about where knowledge actually comes from. And one other way to phrase this ongoing debate between people who thought it came from experience or reason is to say that knowledge either comes from matter—that’d be the empiricists—or mind—that’d be the rationalists. Now, Kant, as we know by now, tried to find a connection in this perceived dichotomy. And he said that the meaning of objects that we perceive is derived actually from concepts that are, figuratively speaking, in between mind and matter. He connected them. In this way, you know, hoity toity philosophy people typically say that raw information that comes into our senses is always “mediated.” It’s a good word. It’s a philosophically loaded word. We should remember it. It’s mediated by concepts, because without these concepts of our mind, we’d never be able to make sense of all that raw information flurrying into our eyes, ears, and noses.

It's from here that Hegel lays out what he calls the three modes of consciousness. And he does it in a way that pretty ingeniously shows that although these three modes are the typical ways that philosophers in his time try to use to justify their theories for how knowledge is even possible, he shows that they’re all ultimately contingent on something else, something bigger—a fact that he would later use to make a case for his theory of epistemology. So, just to flex our philosophy muscles today to prime us for future discussions on Hegel, it might be worth talking about them a bit.

The first mode of consciousness, and one of the most common means people use to justify their theories of knowledge, Hegel refers to as “meaning,” or sense-certainty as we said before. So, what this means is, if you fancy yourself a person that’s in the pursuit of knowledge about anything, one method that you might think is a worthwhile endeavor is by using your immediate sensory experience to arrive at that knowledge. It’s understandable why somebody might go to their senses as a starting point, right? I mean, there’s not many people out there that are skeptical enough or miserable enough to doubt the fact that we’re all sensing stuff all the time, right? For example, when I look at this microphone sitting in front of me, it seems pretty reasonable for me to conclude that I have at least some knowledge about certain properties of that microphone or the fact that that microphone exists at all. And I’m arriving at this inference based on the fact that I’m perceiving immediate sensory experience of that microphone. That’s what I’m using as the basis for this “knowledge.”

But this sort of thing in itself is not good enough. No, the knowledge that Hegel’s going for is more specific than just any kind of knowledge. It’s sort of the Holy Grail when it comes to knowledge in the field of epistemology at this stage in history. What Hegel’s looking for is knowledge of particulars. Now, let me explain what he means. When philosophy people are sitting around talking about the nature of knowledge and they’re talking amongst themselves at their weird, surrealist-knowledge philosopher parties, generic knowledge talk is not good enough for them. It’s not specific enough for them to talk about just garden-variety knowledge of an object. So, what they often do is break it down in terms of its individual components. And they talk about whether they have knowledge of these things. The thinking here is, sure, we may not be able to have justified knowledge of an entire blender sitting in my kitchen. But man, we certainly know about certain properties of that blender, right? That’s got to mean something.

Let me give you an example of one of these conversations that might happen at these sadistic, twisted philosopher parties. Never go to them. We’ve actually talked about all this stuff on this show before. We just haven’t phrased it in these fancy, philosophical terms. We’re talking about the difference between universals and particulars, okay? Whenever you’re observing an object and you’re trying to understand it better, universals are qualities of that object—usually related to some adjective, by the way—that many other objects may share too, qualities not only held by that object. For example, the blender may possess the universal quality of redness or greenness or roundness. These are examples of universals that we might have knowledge of. It’s a Christmas-themed blender, by the way. Now, another way knowledge of objects might be broken down is in terms of particulars. Particulars are individual things or objects that are specific in their own right, but they possess universals like redness or roundness, what have you.

Now, the significance of this is that if we’re looking for any reliable means of arriving at knowledge whatever the theory is—Plato’s, Hegel’s, Kant’s—it needs to have a certain level of independence to it. It needs to stand alone as its own theory, not relying on other assumptions or theories or laws as a baseline that it builds off of. Because then those things can be called into question, and then the process just repeats itself. Well, Hegel points out that if you want to be the kind of person that claims that sense-certainty is a reliable means of arriving at knowledge, then ultimately, Hegel thinks you’re destined to fail, because no matter what you do, even if your senses were providing you with reliable knowledge—which Hegel doesn’t agree with—but even if they were, at that point, you are only in possession of knowledge of the past, never of the present. Hegel says that sense-certainty doesn’t give you truth of being but truth of has-been.

So, in other words, every object, whether it’s immediately identifiable to our senses or not, is constantly changing. Hegel uses the example of nighttime. He says that if you’re outside and it’s the middle of the night and your senses tell you that it’s nighttime, well, is that truly knowledge of the world that you have? No, Hegel says, stay outside for another 12 hours and that “knowledge” that you have about the world is magically not valid anymore. And that’s because it’s the nature of consciousness and the objects of consciousness to constantly be in a state of change: moving and shifting, ebbing and flowing; shifting towards an end that Hegel—well, Hegel writes extensively about it. We’re not going to talk about it on this show.

The point is that we know existence is not some static, unchanging reality, right? No matter how intuitive that might seem to us when we look around and it seems like nothing’s changing—no. This world, to Hegel, just like Heraclitus said so many centuries ago, is in a constant state of flux. And when Hegel begins to break down this fundamental process that we use when trying to acquire knowledge about anything, you start to see where he’s coming from with this what-used-to-seem-crazy theory about everything being an intrinsic part of this Geist thing that we talked about last episode.

So, in another section of this work that we’re talking about, he’s talking about the mode of consciousness that he refers to as “perception.” And he asks the question, what are we doing specifically whenever we look at an object and we try to categorize it or acquire knowledge about it? Well, what we’re doing, Hegel says, is engaging in a process of finding relationships between things, objects. He uses the example of salt. Let’s say we’re looking at a saltshaker. We’d like to think, Hegel says, that whenever we look at a saltshaker full of salt and we try to arrive at knowledge about that saltshaker that we’re doing good, iron-clad science. We see with our eyes and our microscope that the salt is white. We can do a double-blind taste test, and our tastebuds will tell us that the salt is bitter as opposed to sweet. We can even see the clean, glass canister that the salt is in, and we can feel that this canister is hard as opposed to soft. But what Hegel wants us to realize is that yet again this is not a reliable means of arriving at knowledge, because just like in the case of sense-certainty, this is not a self-sufficient, independent way of arriving at knowledge.

Now, at that point you may say, “Wait a second, what? Wait, I don’t get that. Hold on, Hegel. I mean, I didn’t get any help from my friends when I saw that the saltshaker was hard and that it was white. And it’s not like a had a team of people look at that saltshaker and arrive at these things. No, I personally sat down. I looked at the saltshaker. I made these inferences and arrived at knowledge about it. That is a self-sufficient way of arriving at knowledge, Hegel.”

But what Hegel would ask is, were you really alone in your pursuit there? Was your method of arriving at the fact that the salt was white and bitter and in a hard container—was that something that you did independent of everything else? Hegel would say, no, that to even use the terms that you did to make sense of the salt—to even use the ways that you did of organizing what that thing is—is to reference something else as the basis for this knowledge, which obviously brings a whole dirty, human element into what we’re doing if we’re trying to arrive at a theory of knowledge. Muddles things up a bit, right?

Let me explain what he means here. See, to Hegel, to even make the claim that the salt in that saltshaker is white—that implies that you had at least some conception of the fact that darker things exist. You’re comparing the hue of that salt to the conglomeration of all the hues of everything that you’ve ever seen in your conscious experience in your life. And that goes for bitterness. That goes for hardness. It goes with everything. The fact is, for Hegel, that salt only has differentiating qualities when it’s compared in relation to all the other things that you’ve been conscious of before. And in this way, that salt, and everything else for that matter, is primarily an object of consciousness. All of these things are really objects of consciousness.

Why do we need to assume like Kant did that there’s some allusive world of things in themselves out there that we can’t access? Whenever you’re talking about anything and trying to acquire knowledge about it, Hegel would say that all you’re really ever doing is talking about that thing as it exists in your perception. These objects, these phenomena—these things aren’t just magically standing alone out there. No, as conscious creatures perceiving this stuff, we’re adding all of that. We’re adding all of these universals and these concepts. We’re adding them to the perception in order to make sense of it.

And in that same way, Hegel asks, who are we to determine what a thing in itself is? Who are we to say that the saltshaker, the confines of that glass canister, is where that saltshaker begins and ends? It seems pretty arbitrary. Do we have any business making that claim? Why does the saltshaker end there? If I pour out some salt onto my food and I eat it, for some reason I accept the fact that the salt that was once part of that saltshaker canister is now a part of me. But why should I assume that that saltshaker and me are different things at all?

There’s many questions.

But if you’re a quick thinker, which I know almost everybody listening to this show is, you’ve probably realized a few things about Hegel: that although Hegel has made some interesting points about how we organize our objects of perception, he hasn’t really talked about exactly what he thinks consciousness is or how that in any way relates to the long soliloquy I gave last episode about history or the freedom question that I gave last episode.

Well, rest assured, next episode your questions will be answered. And I guarantee you, by the end of it you will have a solid understanding of one of the most difficult philosophers to comprehend in the history of the world, Hegel.

Thank you for listening. I'll talk to you next time.