Great Minds - Part 4 - Hegel: The Phenomenology of Geist

[Music] georg hegel was one of the greatest philosophers in the german idealist tradition and he is remarkable in philosophy because he is the last of the great system builders since hegel's demise no one has taken up the mantle or has taken up the challenge of trying to include all of reality and all of existence in one comprehensive system so even if hegel fails in his attempt to create a completely comprehensive account of the human condition you have to give him a certain degree of credit for trying what may be impossible he is trying to construct a coherent explanation or account of the external world of nature the internal world of consciousness and experience and the process by which the by which consciousness develops in historical time so what he does is take the idealist tradition that comes from greece into the enlightenment and historicizes it and tries to construct a system around that historical development of the human mind or the human psyche or as he would put it the geist now before i go any further it's worth noting that hegel's original training his original education was in theology and for those of you who find hegel very difficult reading like me i mean hegel is very difficult reading the easiest access the best entree to hegel's writings would be can be found in his early theological writings uh when i was in graduate school i had a particularly difficult time trying to get my way through the phenomenology and through the philosophy of write and through some other of hegel's writings and i went to a professor of philosophy and i said professor i know what these words mean specifically and individually in english and when i go back to the german i know what these individual words mean but when i put them into these 100 or 120 word sentences i have no idea what i'm being told it becomes opaque to me and i can't get through it in other words i just don't have the mental power to figure out what's going on here is it me or is it hegel and he said go to the early theological writings particularly for those of you with a background in theology it will make a great deal of hegel's subsequent work more transparent it at least connects you to a book you might know the bible and when you can get a sense of hegel's peculiar readings of something like that his typical or characteristic intellectual moves it will eventually make the rest of his work more accessible so just a help to those of you that actually want to follow the path into the hegelian writings start with his early work his theological writings that's the best way to handle it at the end of the lecture i'd like to discuss the influence of theology on hegel whether this is theological or anti-theological arguably the most difficult problem in deciding what to make of his philosophy a second point that should be made early on in any lecture on hegel is about thesis synthesis and antithesis everybody talks about this in every book on hegel forget it i mean it's there it occasionally crops up in hegel's writings but it is not a dominant element in his work triads are dominant in other words three of everything if hegel writes about any given thing he will split into three parts and three component parts and three parts of that and three parts of that on add infinitum until he runs out of ink his typical intellectual moves to break things into three parts and i guess you can go back and in a pro-christian way kind of force this into that thesis antithesis mold and perhaps that's a fair reading of hegel but he doesn't himself explicitly use this thesis antithesis synthesis model or at least explicitly so so i'd say the triads are more important breaking things up into threes then the over emphasis on this thesis antithesis synthesis now in order to talk about hegel i have to drop back to kant as is the case with all of 19th century german philosophy they are all standing in the shadow of kant and the erosion of the kantian synthesis the breakup of kante and particularly kant's understanding of the ding on zik is the source of the most important and fruitful developments in early 19th century german philosophy it's the breakup of continuism that generates german idealism here i'm thinking about ficta and shelling in particular but also as the final stage in that hegel and of course there are three of them all right let's think about the problem of consciousness that's a big kantian issue and khan said that we can't know the ding on zik in other words we can't know things in themselves we only know the external phenomenal world as it is mediated by the a priori forms of cognition those of you that have some knowledge about this understand that the a priori forms are the necessary intermediaries between us and the real external world the ding on sick things in themselves are accessible to the mind of god in kant's view but not accessible to our understanding because we must experience the world as individuals experience it so instead of experiencing the podium directly the the ding on zik i experienced the podium through the lens or through the form of space time causality number being negation all that kind of business here's a problem that emerges and the early idealists fixed in shelling in particular latch onto this and this is going to be the basis of their criticism of kant they say look professor kant you have told us that two of the a priori forms of human cognition are being and negation right they're built right in to the human psyche and you say that these a priori forms prevent us from getting direct unmediated access to the ding on zikh that which means essentially the dingonsic the thing in itself is unknowable if it is unknowable how can you attribute it attribute the predicate of being to it in other words how do you know they are at all if we can't know the thing in itself then how do we know that there is a thing in itself and the answer is if you stop and think about kant's delimiting of the possible scope of human knowledge it is simply not possible to have grounds for saying that there exists a ding on zikh so what the great idealist particular fixed and shelling do is say we have to get rid of this ding on zik now that sounds easy and it sounds like it's not too much of a problem but actually this generates an intractable and very difficult set of philosophical problems and it's it's a labor even for me to get across you what the problem would be so i mean bear with me as we kind of have small excursions here we have this podium and i'm perceiving it through the forms of cognition the a prior reforms and apparently that's the only way i can experience the world and i can never get access to this ding on zich victon shelling say well i have no grounds for believing that the content of the world is out there and i merely formulate it in other words if you think about the a priori forms of human cognition and their relation to the ding on zik they relate to each other as content relates to form the content of our experience is these ding and unzich or if you want to take the whole world as one big ding on zig all right that's the content of human experience the form is the a priori categories of thought we take this stuff and we sort of impose this kind of psychic cookie cutter on it so they're all shaped using space and time and causality and number and being and negation and the rest of the categories now here's the problem if we eliminate the ding on zik then that means essentially that there's no external reality in other words the mind creates the form of human experience but if there's no ding on zik to be formulated no matter no content then that means that there is no external world that the mind creates everything both the content and the form of human cognition can you see the difficulty there kant wanted to hold on to the idea of the ding on zik because it prevented him from falling back into a sort of idealistic solipsism see the difficulty apparently not so let me try it a little bit further what we experience is a sort of content it's out there and we stick it into these forms of the a priori forms of cognition if there is no ding on zika out there for us to formulate then that means that we add to our experience not just the form shape time number causality but also the stuff that is being formed see how that makes sense so what that means this explains the transition from kant's philosophy which is sometimes described as an uh sort of idealist philosophy but i think it's a slight misstatement i would say that kant's philosophy is a critical philosophy that states what the limits of metaphysics are what the limits of the human mind are and it is not as explicitly wedded to idealism as victor and shelling will become it's by holding on to the ding on zick holding on to an external reality that kant allows for there to be something else other than us other than mind so when victor and shelling get rid of the ding on zick and hegel incidentally wrote one of his early works on the idealism and the systems of fiction and shelling the problem we're going to have is the problem that's native and intrinsic to all idealism the problem of solipsism it's bad enough that our that our mind creates the form of consciousness if it creates the content too then there's nothing out there besides us and we're all alone here in this magical show this set of experiences and we create that in other words there's nothing external to us it's just us and perhaps not even us it's probably just me right i don't know about you people right in other words i see you out there but really you're no different phenomenally than chairs and tables right you make noise you act in certain ways and well no ding on zick i'm creating you along with everything else right so the problem is that when we lose the ding on zikh either we get rid of we junk the whole kantian project or we collapse into a radical kind of idealism and all idealism has the same problem i mean certainly if the same problem that emerges in descartes how do you know about this external world or is there an external world so this is the problem that victor and shelling are formulated formulate and never really get around in other words they see that the ding on zig has to go because by kant's own understanding by his own system you can't attribute being to it but if we don't know these these digging on zika if we can't attribute being to them then we get just us mind creates both the form and the content of consciousness and there's nothing external to it hegel wants to explain this and get us out of this terrible mess and that's his problem what he does is something like this it's a very interesting maneuver i don't know the extent to which it's successful but it's certainly an intriguing thought he says yes the world is a product of mind obviously that's true there is no ding on zik the key thing is that you think it's the product of your little mind don't you nay your little mind and all this other stuff is the product of one big mind a giant collective subject called the geist now geist is a particularly difficult word because it doesn't have any translation into english whenever we translate hegel into english the best they can do is to is to translate guys to spirit or as mind those are the the typical the most typical translations neither of them work very well and this is one of the difficult problems of moving from an untranslatable word around which hegel's so his system follows and trying to explain it to you best i can do is to show what first of all why it is that they translated this spirit or mind it's something internal it's something psychic it's something non-material it is somehow prior to material nature to the external world the difficulty with describing it as spirit which is one translation is that it has a sort of mystical resonance to it a an overtly religious resonance which is not entirely misapplied but gives one a sense that it's perhaps a little gooier than it need be in other words geist is meant to be a little less mystical than our our talk about spiritual things usually is a geist is meant to be quite concrete in addition when we try and translate geist's mind as in the bailly translation of uh of the phenomenology the problem is that mind just clearly doesn't work it's very clear that some of the time he's not talking about mind when he's using the term geist so bailey himself decides you know i'm going to get rid of that he calls it the phenomenology of mind in the title and then switches back and forth from spirit to mind to something else because nothing really translates this very well so i think the best we can do think a little bit about the etymology of the word and how it carries over into english it gives you some idea of the the connotations which are not irrelevant to this question there are at least three english words that have the same root as geist first was ghost and that would refer back to the spiritual element here there's some ghostly psychic mental attitude towards this or mental element in this and the result is that you get a sense that this is somehow not material right that it is a ghost but that by itself won't give you the whole idea because this is meant not just to be real unlike ghosts but ultimate reality capital r reality permanent truth another word that's connected with geist is the idea of geyser you know like at yellowstone park those things that regularly blow out that hot water well if you think about the regularity and the periodic predictability of a geyser as a natural upwelling of something intrinsic and subterranean it gives you some sense of what the geist is in other words there's some acorn that generates the oak of reality there's something built into the geist which by its very nature explodes generates up and out it has its own internal force and it operates by its own internal laws so in some ways the emergence of geist is something regular and predictable and intrinsic to itself like a geyser just something to think about the final thing that's relevant and this i think is the the word that's most closely connected with kegels jesus of geist is our word gist as in the gist of an argument the essence of an argument do you get the gist of what i'm saying that's very closely connected with hegel's idea of geist the gist of an argument connected with the idea of a geyser connected with the idea of a ghost give you some of the connotations some of the ideas of what geist means when you link it up with poor translations like spirit and mind the difficulty with english is that it just doesn't translate certain german ideas very well i mean heidegger's design is another it doesn't translate so when you're working through this always keep in mind the fact that you may part of your difficulty in reading this may come from the fact that we don't have any one word that immediately accounts for what geist is and since geist is the center of his system you'll have to pay particular attention to that now the problem of accounting for consciousness in the absence of the ding on zich in the apparent absence of an external world is what the phenomenology of geist is all about in other words it's a it's an attempt at a hegelian solution to a kantian problem and the problem is how is it possible or what intelligibility can be lent to the idea that mind creates everything well once you lose the ding on zik then there is only mind generating the form and content of consciousness but this mind is not static as kant would have us believe kant thinks that the a primary forms are built in kind of hardwired into the psyche and there's no choice there's no change there's no alteration hegel believes that the actual categories of human cognition develop over time so there is a temporal dynamism here which allows for change and allows for the growth of consciousness and by implication this growth of consciousness is teleological it goes from one point to another it has a beginning point and has an end point the opening point will turn out to be the finitude of consciousness and the end point will turn out to be infinite consciousness and this is the progress of the geist through history this development of consciousness is in fact the development of self-consciousness remember that there's nothing else besides yourself you're generating the whole world so what else could it be but the development of subconscious nothing else but you and your consciousness or the consciousness of the geist as a whole and you are a small fragment of that so what we are looking here at here in the phenomenology of geist is first of all a phenomenology remember when we or you can look forward to husserl the idea of a phenomenology means that appearance is reality in other words the world as we experience it is what it is there's no ding on sick there's no second level that we can't get access to what this podium seems to be is exactly what this podium is what human history on the development of the human psyche is is the human psyche itself there's nothing underneath or apart or separate from the world is what it is and if we look at it rationally it will disclose itself rationally to us this is why think about it if the world is mind or if reality is mind or if reality is geist then naturally since the content of mind or geist is rationality what could the world be but a rational process assuming that it's temporal and dynamic it changes over time so this is what the apparently very obscure and implausible proposition that the world is a rational process that's what it means in other words the world is the development of mind and which means that mind is temporalized what the phenomenology then turns out to be is a record or an interpretation or an analysis of the coming to be of the appearance of knowledge the development of knowledge over time so it's a philosophy of history but it's also a kind of speculative psychology of sort of philosophical psychology in other words hegel constantly i mean first of all don't try this at home in other words if you are intending to read hegel i think that this is about the last thing you should read not because it isn't a wonderful book but because you just won't make any sense out of it as a beginning student of philosophy after you've read all the other books that you covered in the course then you may want to come back to hegel and then you'll have a very good time with it but you'll find it very daunting and difficult if you try it first up the reason why is that hegel is arguably the best read i mean god that i cover in the course of the history of philosophy in other words he has an amazing encyclopedic mind he is fluent in almost all disciplines and when he is wrong he is grandly wrong but he has a magnificent mind and there are very few people that in addition to having great intellectual gifts are as learned and as well read as hegel um the elusiveness of his book the many illusions that he makes in passing which he expects us to know is one of the things that impede us from understanding the phenomenology is referring to just about everything in creation since he knows the entire history of western philosophy and is well versed in western art and western religion and the whole kind of culture of the west what he does then is look at these phases of culture historically and say to himself what kind of spirit would hold such a belief as that and how long would they hold it for and why would they hold it and why would they give it up in other words is it really arbitrary and contingent is it a random set of changes that the history of philosophy undergoes or is there something unifying and something that holds it together and hegel says yes that is exactly what it is the whole history of philosophy is the coming to self knowledge of the geist and what it and it comes to this knowledge starting with just the external world and its own understanding and comprehension of that world and moves in a gradual dialectical progression generating contradictions and generating impasses and these contradictions and impasses turn out to be fruitful because they by creating an impasse they ratchet consciousness up ratchet the geist up into its next level the finitude and limitation of human self-consciousness or human self-understanding gradually progresses through the process of contradiction to ever higher levels and the end the telos the purpose of these cogitations is to come to complete uncontradictory and absolute final self-consciousness this can be viewed as the reconciliation of god and man or the reconciliation of human beings with themselves depending on what sort of a reading the right wing of the left-wing reading you're going to give it i'll discuss it a little bit later but the idea here is that hegel is describing the spiritual odyssey of western man and because hegel believes that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny he is also talking about his own spiritual odyssey from an early naive pre-philosophical view to the position he finds himself in at the end of his life where he believes perhaps mistakenly that the entire history of western thought leads up to him and his writing desk there's a line up leave it in the encyclopedia where he says my pen is writing the thoughts of god well that doesn't it's not so far-fetched since after all the geist is becoming self-conscious and the cutting edge of time is right here and now and it turns out to be him so one of the difficulties of all philosophers of history is that they necessarily view the world as if it led up to them where else could it lead all right so that's one of the difficulties the kind of tendency towards omniscience that we see in hegel it's built into this kind of a project about the history of philosophy you could read the phenomenology of geist as being what the germans called a bildungsroman a novel of development or a novel of maturation this is the way the big collective subject the big person the big mind the big geist turns into what it necessarily had to be built into hegel's conception is the is the aristotelian idea of entoleki entalaki means natural purpose acorns naturally want to be oaks right babies naturally want to be adults the geist naturally wants to be completely omniscient completely self-conscious and since it generates the entire world when it is completely conscious of itself it is completely conscious of everything that could be conscious of it is essentially divine it is the mind of god so you can see the echoes of that early religious training here in this longing for final knowledge in this desire for god's omniscience and hegel alas couches this in very difficult prose but many of the ideas are quite subtle and well thought out and if you can hack your way through this book you will find it extremely rewarding now let's think about let's take this apart a little bit further since reality is constructed by mind or geist we don't have a ding on zik that means that the real is rational because mind is rational or geist is rational and it's also the case that rationality is necessarily connected up with the idea of freedom in other words freedom and rationality are always co-extensive think go back to kant think about the idea of autonomy to be free is also to be rational is all to be also to be autonomous if any you know the foundations of the metaphysics of morals so for the whole german intellectual tradition there is a connection that goes back to the early greeks of freedom and rationality and also freedom and teleology and rationality in other words this conception of reason not only tells us how the world works but it also tells us why the world works that way you know it tells us about purposes not just events it is normative ultimately so this is a special and it's an elaborate conception of rationality which allows us to discern purposes or ends within the world around us the process by which one contradiction is undermined by its alternative or its antithesis and turned into a third thing that collapses or and and holds on to what is desirable and true in the earlier ideas is called uh in english it's translated as sublation but since no one uses that word in regular everyday english give you an idea of what sublation means in german it's auf heibon which means to raise up and there are lots of other different connected meanings to it that's an everyday word in german i mean when you drop something on the floor you hate it out i mean you pick it up but beyond that um it also has connotations of cancellation of destruction somehow and it also connotes a certain sense of preservation of maintenance of holding on to something too so because of this felicitous overlapping of ideas in german hegel gets a lot of mileage out of this now what goes on in the process of human history then is a process of this sublation of keeping what is true in a particular stage of human conscious development moving on finding the contradictions thinking that that stage through reaching its limits finding its contradictions and its flaws and then keeping what's true getting rid of the flaws and moving on to a second second stage of development which answers those questions which solve some of those problems but which alas generates a new set of problems we think our way through these new set of problems and move up to the next stage that is the sense in which this is dialectical this is geist talking to itself there's nothing else to talk to of course it's talking to itself it's the whole of reality so what we have then is the gradual working out of contradictions the bursting of the brown's affinity understanding and this process necessarily reaches its teleological end in infinitude in the lack of contradictions in kind of parmenide in unity so the process begins with sense and perception and hegel makes the argument familiar to kantians that known objects presuppose knowing subjects and the categories by which we know the world are objective not subjective and this is just the starting point of our knowledge of the world because not only do we know this dead matter out here we all or if there is an out here we also know other people and we define our consciousness and we define our identity with regard to other people and in many aspects this is the most entertaining and intriguing part of this book it's called the dialectic of master enslave and this dialectic of master and slave is the one that's most influential in the marxist readings of hegel and the idea is this that in the earliest and most primitive stages of consciousness some people are willing to risk their lives to dominate other people and what they long for is not so much work from other people or kind of some kind of obedience what they want is recognition they want others to recognize their power this is a very roundabout way of saying that identity is socially constructed and that there is something built right into human beings a sort of lust for power or domination which has paradoxical effects this is incidentally the generation of the beginning of history in other words when we move from our sense perception of the world to our attempt to dominate other people that's the beginning of history and it's also analogous in the bible to the fall of man it's the beginning of sin in the beginning of alienation from marxists well this dialectic of master and wave emerges and what we get here is that some masters people who are willing to put their life on the line and risk their life in order to dominate others well some of them are victorious and kill their opponents and some and the ones that are victorious get to lord it over all others those who don't want to risk their lives who think this is a foolish project they become slaves they submit to the master this happens all over the world here's the idea and here's where the cunning of history comes in by becoming a master the master does not liberate himself in fact quite the opposite he makes himself dependent upon the slave by becoming enslaved the slave does not become shackled to the master in fact he becomes free because he's the one that connects with nature and produces all the things that he needs and all the things that the master needs in other words the slave doesn't need the master the master needs the slave the one who's really enslaved is the master it's a tremendous irony it's a very powerful thought he's right too right you never see masters running away from their slaves right and here's the reason why it's a deep thought i mean it's a tremendous insight and the point here is that ironically the slave meets the negativity of nature and is forced to confront nature develops his own skill develops his own internal elements and as a result achieves as much liberation as possible in that stage this set of ironic contradictions where the master is is dependent and the slave is free this cunning of history this terrible irony generates another intriguing stage called the unhappy consciousness the unhappy consciousness is the conscience of the fact that we have not achieved the freedom we long for in this first phrase and they are true and this the unhappy consciousness attempts to achieve freedom by a combination of resignation and dependence upon the self in other words don't depend upon slaves don't depend upon others don't depend upon the external world what you can count on is you and this in the history of philosophy is called stoicism it's a brilliant reading of stoicism particularly for those of you that know the history of philosophy that are aware of the fact that in roman philosophy the two greatest stoics are epictetus and aurelius a master an emperor and a slave right in other words the elusiveness is what makes this so difficult you have to know a lot about the history of philosophy before you can see what he's gesturing at is aurelius and epictetus right so the next stage of the unhappy consciousness so the first age of the unhappy country is stoicism the difficulty is as the romans quickly find out that this is not a satisfactory solution either we cannot completely depend upon ourself unless we have real solid genuine knowledge about the world but as if you look back at marcus aurelius he's not quite sure if the gods exist or not or if he's just nature you know adam's in the void there are many things which perplexed aurelius and he keeps on persuading himself that don't worry about it just stick to your duty stick to your duty stick to your duty and don't worry about that and this is a man that obviously is worried about it which is why he spends all his time reassuring himself well the next phase and you have to know a little bit more about the philosophy in rome the phase after stoicism when they take stoicism to its logical extension when you don't get that genuine knowledge it's called skepticism and here i think he has in mind lucy and the skeptic right you have to know a lot about the history of philosophy to know what hegel is driving at he assumes that you've read all this stuff before and can put it all together right which tells you something about german high culture by the time he was writing an impressive set of achievements so the next stage of the unhappy consciousness is skepticism and skepticism just leads to despair it leads to the internal breakup of rome no doubt but as an element in the human psyche if you take skepticism seriously you take it the whole way it's the end of speech it's the end of thinking it's the end of talking the project of philosophy has failed human self-consciousness has come up to an in a gap we can't bridge this sets the stage for christianity which is the religion of spirit this is not an accident that what supersedes this is a universal gut religion in which geist is recognized for the first time the universality of humanity is recognized for the first time but alas it's not recognized in a philosophical way because hegel holds the view that religion is a precursor to an early primitive pictorial form of philosophy they agree in that they both refer to uh absolute spirit to parts of the the essential the essential marrow of the geist but the point is that christianity or any religion is necessarily a pictorial representation of geist it is not philosophy itself it's just clear from hegel's discussion of this why it is christianity supersedes roman skepticism and stoicism a very intriguing reading you have to be impressed with that now here he breaks off and moves into another section and i guess i should point out here that although hegel is a great a great idealist philosopher and a profound intellect the phenomenology of mine is not a well-organized book remember that he was writing it just as napoleon was coming through yena right destroying the holy roman empire which had been around for the previous thousand years and hagel didn't even know if he was going to get to the publisher he's mailing it off just as you know the cannons are blowing up and houses are being torn down and soldiers are coming through so there is a rumor afloat that there's some deep structure here and this is a terribly well organized book actually it's a wretchedly organized book the difficulty is is that while he was writing it under very very difficult circumstances the amazing thing is that he got it written at all so from christianity he breaks off now into a section called objective uh geist and what objective geist is is not the individual but society and the so and the social rules the social organization of society like kant hegel believes that there is no freedom without law in other words for kant and hegel freedom is not the dubious and contingent freedom of uh robinson crusoe in order to be free you have to be autonomous autonomous self-laud you have to create a set of rules for yourself and obey them and impose them on yourself that is for example what the family does that's the first stage in the development of objective geist the second stage in the development after the family is civil society another set of laws which control you and the third and final stage is the state which is why hegel is often read as being a sort of state worshiper in fact he is just saying that this is the last stage in the development of objective spirit it is necessary to the further development of human capacities particularly the human capacity for self-knowledge now art when it's correlated with these changes in objective geist and this is one of the deepest points of hegel is a representation of the tension between these things it's quite extraordinary if any of you know sophocles play antigone the conflict between antigone and creon is the conflict between the gods of the family the first and earliest stage of objective geist and the laws of the state the last development of objective geist in other words these conflicts emerge not just in the history of politics but also in the history of art within the content of art itself the later development of this conflict will be the conflict in among the moderns between the individual and society go have a look at the sorrows of young verter and see how the individual comes the cropper when he meets society think of how virtue gets turned out of the soiree that he wants to stay in art is also an element in absolute spirit in other words when we bring together uh subjective spirit and objective spirit when we bring together these two elements of geist what we will get is what hegel calls absolute spirit and these are the realms in which human beings come to their highest peak of self-consciousness and like everything else in hegel there are three parts of absolute spirit art religion and philosophy and i've always found this a very deep interpretation as well in other words i think that it is probably accurate to say that the greatest achievements of the human mind have been in the realm of art religion and philosophy it is hard to think of anything that has greater consequence for us so i think that while a good bit of this is procrustean and there are quite a few jumps and leaps to be made here there is considerable insight to be gained if you will look at it in the right spirit now let's look at art first of all uh absolute spirit the first stage of episode spirit is art and art itself goes through three phases like everything else in hegel we got the symbolic phase primitive mimetic gestures like cave painting one would assume um the symbolic phase which or the symbolic is first and then the second is the classical phase and the classical phase starts out with myths about the gods and ends up being ironic the gods get shrunk down to human size those of you who know the history of greek tragedy know what a deep interpretation this is if you know the movement from aeschylus the uh the moral rigor and seriousness of the auristaia to the gradual loss of that moral orientation that we begin to see in sophocles to the complete abandonment of it in euripides i mean all of your buddhi's characters are really neurotic and he's he's involved with the deus ex machina and he doesn't take the god seriously there is clearly a movement from god's to heroes to mere men men who are human all too human you can see it right through the history of greek god in particular right and if you go back to homer you can hook that up as being the earlier phase still symbolic still referring back to the gods and if you move on beyond jupiter's what are you going to get aristophanes in the development of comedy that's human all too human we get a gradual reduction in our self-conception from these myths to ourself and now hegel's going to move us up in the opposite direction so we can come to know ourselves as we really are the final development of art is romantic art and the reason why romantic art is important is because it does is absorb the christian emphasis on the self and the importance of the individual and by absorbing that christian emphasis on the self and the significance of the individual consider any of goethe's works as the best example of that um what he says is that this is the next phase in the development of human self-consciousness and that these phases are necessary you cannot have this important consent this conception of the self represented in art until you get these earlier necessary phases it's like climbing the rungs of a ladder so that's art as the first phase in the development of absolute spirit the second phase is religion now why religion is different from art because religion is just the sensuous representation of the form of the world of reality religion is a sort of pictorial representation of reality in other words the reason why jesus teaches in parables is because it is an attempt not to be logically rigorous it is an attempt to give you a picture of what virtue is and it is the most accessible to people who don't spend all their time in the library the way hegel did so clearly this is a necessary precondition to creating a philosophical culture which will allow for the construction of something like hegel's phenomenology of geist so religion is a pictorial kind of a primitive representation of true geistlic self-knowledge and it develops from primitive nature worship to the highest religion in uh hegel's view which is christianity which is the christian which is the religion in which geist is made universal but still represented in pictures and the good a good analogy or a good way to think about this movement from pictorial religious understanding of the geist and the true non-pictorial direct apprehension of the geist is something like the golden rule in the gospels you will find that in more than one place jesus enjoins us to follow the golden rule to do unto others as you would have them do unto you and he gives it in various kinds of nice parables it takes the you know the form of say things like the beatitudes or the various parables that we see in the gospel where it explains that you ought to love your neighbor as you love yourself that's a very kind of primitive and metaphorical way poetic way of talking about this it is not unreasonable to describe kant's categorical imperative as the golden rule dressed up in its logical sunday best right in other words the idea that the content of it is no different at all if you go and look at the categorical imperative what it tells you is act such that you could will that the maximum reaction should become a universal law of nature which says treat other people like you want to be treated it's more jesus the difference is that this is not represented in parables this is organized in a directly logical cognitive way the difference between religion and philosophy is not what we understand but rather how we understand it religion is pictorial symbolic metaphorical representative direct logical reasonable apprehension geistlic apprehension is philosophy that's why it's the final stage in the human apprehension of itself now there are many many consequences and implications to this set of doctrines and i can't do justice to the significance of hegelian philosophy or even just the phenomenology of geist in one lecture but one topic that is worthy of consideration because of its subsequent importance for the history of philosophy is how we are to read this what we are to think about this business because at the end of hagel's phenomenology of geist he says that the guys coming to self-consciousness in phenomenology in philosophy in this book is what he called the golgotha of absolute spirit for those of you who are not familiar with the term golgotha it is the place where jesus gets crucified right it is the point at which heaven connects to earth now the difficulty here is that this is ambiguous perhaps intentionally ambiguous but i think it's just hegel being hegel right in other words i don't think most of his ambiguities are intentional just he's got to fire this often he doesn't know how to write sentences less than 100 words so i'm inclined to say that the fact that this has been read in two diametrically different ways is something we have to live with it's basic to this kind of understanding of the world and we don't know that if this i mean if this is if this book at the end of the philosophy or the phenomenology of geist if it is the golgotha of absolute spirit does that mean it's the death of god does that mean it's the death of absolute spirit or does that mean it's the end of the finitude of absolute spirit and that means it becomes infinite and rather than dead it becomes perfected in other words is this the vindication of religion or is this the abolition of religion it's not clear not only is it not clear but hegel says some very peculiar things left what we call the left wing or young hegelian reading treats hegel as an atheist they emphasize the phenomenology as opposed to the logic and the encyclopedia and they hold on to the idea of dialectic and change and they particularly make use of hegel's statement that god is dead now it may surprise you that nietzsche did not introduce that into western philosophy hegel thought that up i think that hagel never for that nisha never forgave him but he actually said that god is dead but that doesn't mean that he's an atheist hagal also said i am a lutheran right and well that's enigmatic how are we supposed to think about that well you might want to finesse the idea of god being dead saying well what that means what dead means is that we move from the symbol to our rational cognitive understanding in other words we've gone beyond religion but we sublated it we preserved the essence the core of religion and gave it a more satisfactory logical form that's the right wing reading in other words that's the sense in which hegel could be called a lutheran you could treat god as dead as meaning god is dead and what happens then in the course of history is not the ultimate reconciliation of god and man the connection of our finite minds to the infinite perfect non-contradictory mind it could be seen as human beings loss of alienation that got introduced in the master slave dialectic in other words the end of history then might be read in an atheistic way at the end of the phenomenology as saying what happens is not a reconciliation of god and man but a reconciliation of man and himself that had been alienated from the earliest point in which hershoff in which domination and the master and slave dialectic emerges so we have always been partial and incomplete and finite in our understanding the end of this understanding is an infinite final complete understanding of ourselves because after all there's nothing else to understand this can be seen as a reconciliation of god and man if that's the case then that means that this is logically analogous to the book of the apocalypse it's the end of the world if it is seen as being not a logical apocalypse but as a strictly atheistic this worldly view that what it means is that human beings finally have human being finally is we are no longer the fragmented disjointed horror that human history discloses us to be it is not clear which one of these is true i leave it to your reading to try and figure out how to negotiate this maze i would say in closing both of these readings are persuasive and both these readings are important i am inclined to think that hegel was in fact a religious believer and was in fact a lutheran in fact meant this to indicate a sort of logical apocalypse the reconciliation of god and man i think that while that is probably closer to hegel's actual intentions and so far i'm able to discern them at all i would say that it hasn't been the most fruitful reading in other words sometimes misreadings can be very useful and very thoughtful and i think that the left-wing misreading the treatment of this is an atheistic system i think that's been extraordinarily fruitful this is certainly marx's favorite part of hegel right because that means that this dialectic and masters of master and slave is the origin of domination hair shaft hierarchy and that means alienation and then he'll read the reconciliation of god man the elimination of alienation as being the telos of history the global proletarian revolution makes a certain amount of sense the reason why ultimately we can't or we can't come to any final answer as to how we're supposed to interpret the phenomenology whether we are supposed to interpret the rec uh the geist's self-understanding and the the guy's coming to self-knowledge as either a theistic or an atheistic proposition is because as wilhelm delta said at the end of the 19th century the generation that could read hegel is dead

Channel: Michael Sugrue

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Keywords: Michael Sugrue, Dr. Michael Sugrue, Lecture, History, Philosophy, Western Culture, Western Intellectual Tradition, Great Minds, Hegel, The Phenomenology of Geist

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Length: 44min 42sec (2682 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 01 2020