Hegel

alright ladies and gentlemen thanks for coming out thanks for finding me even though I lied to you about the date haha so it was not on Thursday as you discovered but from now on it will be the third Thursday of every month the third Thursday of every month so they they changed the date on me because this room was booked for another project was double-booked and so they moved me so anyway I apologize for that but thanks for finding out and coming this evening but again there will be third Thursday of every month and next month will be Schopenhauer so very exciting but tonight Hegel now Hegel Wow Hegel um the question to think I would ask you to think in historical context with Hegel is why didn't apollyon crown himself Emperor this is this is it seems like we think about him ago of course he did because that's what you do with power you take over you make yourself first innocent and then you make yourself Emperor well I think if we think about Hegel and the Galleon ideas you'll see that it's much more complex than that and that really napoleon did it because he's not hegel hegel wouldn't have fallen for that it ended up being a big mistake on Napoleon's part for many reasons but to get a sense of Hegel and Hegel's ideas we have to figure out sort of Hegel's life is very important and can't cos life was not that important because he basically sat in a room and did philosophy but Hegel lived in a particular time and place being German a little Germany I say Jeremy it's not Germany at this point this is this is the key he's born here to 1770 in Stuttgart and Stuttgart is sort of a free city in the middle of vertibird which is sort of a state if you want to call it that a district that's ruled by a Duke and the Duke ruled other territories as well and this was all negotiated through the Holy Roman Empire so this is what's weird for us to try to get our minds around if you were raised at a citizen of Stuttgart you had different legal rights and obligations and opportunities than if you were born and raised outside of the city of Stuttgart or if you were in born in the neighboring Duchy so the religion in your principality was determined by the religion of the Duke or count or whomever was controlling your region unless you were in one of these free cities in which sometimes they had a different religion altogether but basically everybody had to follow along with whatever the rules were but the rules vary dramatically just from location to location in the city out of the city next dukedom over and this was constantly being negotiated through the Holy Roman Empire and so it was this bizarre collection of centuries of accumulated contracts and legal structures and obligations and who pays taxes and who doesn't pay taxes and which religion do you belong to and which families count and which families don't count and just to us is like unimaginable how complex this was but this is what everybody lived with your power your identity your obligations your legal structures grew out of where you born Noble or not he was not born as a noble family were you born in a free city or not if you worry a totally different way of life than people who weren't are you in the jurisdictions of Catholic or Protestant religious leaders some people were some people weren't some people were relatively free of them so you have this weird system where everybody's identity is determined by your place in society which is basically where you were born so all these gradations from Nobles all the way down to peasants who again peasants at this point you're born in the countryside you have essentially no rights certainly don't have the rights of someone born in a city so he's he's raising this he's in a family of just distinguished middle-class people not like they had what they called the non noble notables so the nobles did intend to run cities they tended to be run by sort of business people and hereditary hierarchy and so the countryside generally run by the nobles the cities generally run by people that were they called again non note non noble notables these were the fans out there some of these cities had elections but it just so happened that they always elected the same family to the same offices for generations it's coincidence right and so you know that that your place in society was determined that way but as you can see 1789 is the French Revolution so he's born in 1770 he gets an excellent education at every level his mother was highly educated particularly for a woman of her generation of that period I taught him Latins which suggests that he knew she knew Latin so she was highly educated it's not clear historically why but we've got an excellent education at home from his mom and they went to the best essentially the best schools you could go to and then he goes off to the tubing and cemetery seminary which is to say where if you wanted to be educated this is where you went you went to seminary so they had these universities they called them but they were basically Theological institutions with the occasional teaching of a mathematics class or something and in this case Protestant so as a Protestant University run by the Theological Seminary almost completely and when you went there this is what's hard for us to imagine again he had to sign a contract that said if he didn't become ordained if he failed or something went wrong his father would be on the hook to reimburse the college for its costs also when he graduated he would be placed in a job he would be placed as a minister to wherever they wanted to assign him he was contractually obligated to do that and so you know it was very again highly structured but as you can see French Revolution coming the Enlightenment ideals are in the air human liberty human freedom equality fraternity the stir is starting up and Hegel was in tune with this from day one very interested in enlightenment ideals very interested in of revolutionary politics all of these movements are starting to come in to the German principalities this you know just sort of social political communal unrest and so bizarrely this young Hegel finds himself in a repressive medieval protestant seminary he has no particular interest in religion in fact he's very much more interested in revolutionary politics and the Enlightenment and yet what does he have to study for the seminary because that's what you study for and not studying for it would be he had financial obligations on his on his father this is this weird tension in mix and famously when he shows up there he makes two friends Holdren and shelling which if you're gonna be a 19th century German and you had just happened to run into two Powell's to roommate with in college holding and shelling are a good choice two of the most important intellectuals of their generation well three of course because it was also Hegel just happen to run into each other there and like wow this is great we're having a big time life is fun everything is going on so he does okay there he did he was incarcerated for a while brother they actually had a prison cell on campus so if you broke the rules they imprisoned you you know so I mean it was it's all this medieval right so this is this is what's hard for us to imagine is that the institutions that he was occupying were medieval and then Reformation right sort of Calvinist Protestant Lutheran all these tensions at the same time that you've got the revolution going on so it's this bizarre mix of like Oh liberty and fraternity and if you come back late to your dorm room we put you in a prison cell for three days with no food and water right and all by the way your contract Lee obligated to teach in any seminary position that we give you you know so it's just these weird like interconnecting mixing periods all going on and so he graduates finally and he does well you know you he pretended to be sick it appears so he could skip out a lot of this but now what do you do so it turns out that there weren't a lot of seminary positions which was fine as far as Hegel is concerned because it meant he was unlikely to be placed in one so he did what any educated person of his social status would do at this time and that has become a private tutor for a wealthy family but this is weird again so he goes from a seminary that he's not particularly interested in to being a tutor which is basically a servant in the house of a noble now he's anti Nobles he's also from sort of a middle upper middle class family and he finds himself suddenly being a servant in the noble house so this is not a recipe for everybody getting along really well and he struggled with this because he's like why am i a servant just because this person is noble vaughan they have the vaughan in their name so they're noble I'm a servant and I have to serve them even though I'm from a middle-class background and I'm much better educated they are by far vastly better educated than they are and so the tensions right now to all the social fabric and the social tension and again at the same time the French Revolution is going on and so the model that it does not have to be this way this is the key this is awakened in his mind has been has been fermenting there and then the revolution happens and all over Germany radicals and and thinkers get excited like oh we can throw off the burden we can throw off the yoke we can be equal we can be free we can be liberated ah problem well then who are we so the tension there is and nobody this is the struggle it basically continues to today Hegel is a significant thinker because he's one of the first thinkers who had to wrestle with this fundamental question of identity if your identity is not that you're a noble person because we're getting rid of the note originally and the French Revolution get rid of all the nobles then where do you get your identity from many many of the wealthy burgeois Zi as we call them were striving to be a noble this was the goal so they knew what they are working for it wasn't becoming Noble then they would know who they were or if like Khan's family you remember and it cannot can't haggle family you are a member of a city a free city then you took your identity from being a member of a free city you know you read I'm a guardian I'm a I'm a person who has the legal obligations and standing and protections of my free city and there's like the variation of this was just unimaginable but just sort of as a general principle like you know sort of free issue city is what we're gonna get rid of those right there's no special classifications anymore another classic example is when he was a student generally speaking the students were not subject to the laws of the places where the universities were because they were from all other places and which meant that if the students committed a crime the cities couldn't do anything about it and so famous did you know the German students were famous for rioting and dueling and drinking and fighting and they'd kill people and they had run back to the University and barricade themselves in their town officials couldn't come in and you know so this whole notion of town and gown I mean they really took it like like with swords and fire and you know grim stuff they were going at it but as a student you're untouchable by the city of issues but you are subject to the university authorities so a rule like turning a library book in might be a lot worse than like beating up somebody in town because those people can't do anything about that but the university could get you in trouble right so these just strange inner weavings so there's Hegel trying to think about this she's like okay everything is changing French Revolution Nobles are on you know are failing they're losing this seems to be liberating more free thought more opportunity to explore but then of course the French Revolution turns into the terror and the elements of reaction within Germany are like right this is what we warned you about you throw away all the shackles of control and authority and what do you get blood in the streets people being beheaded chaos terror you don't want that you want to look back and reimpose the order that was but then of course other factions are like hey we felt great when we got rid of the nobles and then during the Napoleonic years but you know French Revolution and the Napoleonic years were 25 years 20 years of unrest you know treaties new controllers new districts being drawn new government structures the nobles are out the nobles are back in a different Nobles in charge peace of yet you know just just change change change change uh and and Hegel is sitting in the middle of this he's really trying to come to grips with it but not in a simplistic way one of the important things about Hegel his prose is very turgid very thick and difficult but what he was trying to do is not go oh the French Revolution is the greatest thing that's ever happened that's perfect just whatever they do is good and he wasn't saying everything about German history is bad he was continually focused on people in like how do we create a structure in the world where people can actually have meaning and values without it being imposed by a king or a pope or a Duke or a city charter he just said that that is ridiculous you are not a city charter you are not this you're a Duke that's a stupid way to think of yourself if you're not a Duke it's you shouldn't think of yourself as less than a Duke and so he comes up with a whole series of ideas look at some quotes here oh and let me keep going here just through the timeline so then in 1804 Napoleon declares himself Emperor now now this is key because for many of the people have been real Pro French Revolution they thought Oh grave he overthrows the old system he gets everything going we get democracy we get represented Oh God and then what does he do crowned himself Emperor just meet the new boss same as the old boss and they're really frustrated did this isn't Barr Hagel too much because he wasn't as shocked by it as other people work because yeah he wasn't totally bought into it like oh this is gonna be perfect it's gonna be utopia he's like no this is gonna be problematic and complex and who knows but it's part of me the reason Napoleon did this it's cuz he okay peace is sort of settled he's won now how do you maintain it and in napoleon's mind the best way to maintain it was to try to negotiate with and meet the forms of the existing political structure this is not crazy they'll only respect me if I'm noble well I'll be the Emperor the top noble I'll found a dynasty I'll marry into the ruling families and then what we've achieved with the French Revolution will be saved it will be secure and we'll be able to put it into place and we'll can have some peace that's sustainable here yay but this is because he was looking back to the old methods of creating value and identity and power structure and this is why Hegel is such a great figure because same time but Hegel was not looking back he's looking forward he's the first real modernist thinker because he grew up in this period he grew up with all of the power structures and he went you know no there's got to be a better way and so the problems that we think about and struggle with Hegel is pretty much one of the first people to really sit down and think about him and struggle with him in the way that we do he didn't look back he didn't say oh the past is where you go to do he says no you can't do that anymore so a couple of great quotes if you look at the last one um this is maybe the best one he says in this way the idea is elevated to spirit we'll talk about this whole spirit thing because it's crucial the principle of absolute being for itself or a freedom wherein the determination is precisely this that as such man has an infinite Worth so rule number one for Hegel and by the way this is really newish on the scene the sort of Kant's idea run mad that every individual has infinite Worth nobody is more valuable than anybody else every individual this is new in the world because remember the old system that he grew up in everybody is structured by their place where you're born who you're related to who you're married to who your ancestors are what city you're in what obligations you have what rights do you and everybody was different what structures you know was hugely vastly unimaginably complex and variable it was like no you can't do that no no everybody everybody is of infinite worth at least theoretically or potentially and he says this because his theory of philosophy and of history as we'll talk about is he says this with self consciousness then we have now passed into the native land of truth into the Kingdom where it is at home we have to see how the form or attitude of self consciousness in the first instance appears when we consider this new form and type of knowledge the knowledge of self and relation to that which preceded it namely the knowledge of another we find indeed that this ladder is vanished but that it's moment have at the same time been preserved and the lost consists in this that those moments are here present as they are implicit as they are in themselves by the way he goes on like this it's really hard to read Hegel but without the the being which the meaning dealt with particularly in the universality of perception opposed to it as also the empty inter region of understanding there are no longer present as the stan shil elements but as moments of self-consciousness ie as abstractions or difference which are at the same time of no account for consciousness itself or not different at all and are purely vanishing entities right what the hell is that supposed to mean one this is why it's hard to read Hegel he did this on purpose by the way his earliest writings are really clear and then when he thought no I want to be a thinker who's taken seriously and work at the University you decide I had to write like COD Syria I mean litter than and he changed this style to this this is one reason you want to go back in punch con you know but it's just like wow so but what he's saying here is thought what sets human beings apart thought and what's the purest form of thought it's thinking about ourselves self consciousness self awareness self introspection this is the most human thing to possess your own mind and to be able to reason with it makes you a sovereign subject of the universe by the way we'll talk about this not just it makes you an entity essentially equivalent of God you are you become a being of importance of infinite importance that's why he says this self-awareness self-consciousness the capacity to reason and think about your own thoughts now people now complain about this all this infinite regress right you're thinking about your thoughts you're thinking about thinking about your thoughts you but Hegel was fine with that it's like look if you when you begin to think about how you think now now you are a completely actualized person because now you can control your thinking having thoughts good controlling your thoughts being able to reason ah that is great now we've begun so much so that he's famous for his philosophy of history and he has a history of philosophy all of this titles are the same history philosophy philosophy of history a history of the philosophy of history an introduction to the history of the philosophy of history you're like oh please let's get some new words but but if the the next quote here is from the phonology Spirit he says history is conscious self meditating process spirit emptied out into time but this externalization this canosa's is equally an externalization of itself the negative is the negative itself thus absorbs itself it has sunk in the night of its self-consciousness but in the night it vanished our existence is preserved and this transformed existence the former one but now reborn of the spirits knowledge is the new existence a new world and a new shape of spirit what the hell does that mean so you become aware you are the self conscious individual and for current the working out of the individuals awareness is the working out of history all that has all that matters in history to Kant art I'm sorry Hegel all that matters to Hegel in history is the growing capacity of the individual to reason and to have the freedom to act upon and express that capacity this is this core driver so how then do you avoid this sort of isolated individuals who have no contact with anybody and everybody makes up their own universe etc which is basically where Kant leaves you remember the last time from Khan I mentioned this can't says well we really have no access to the actual world so God might exist out there but we would never know it so that's fine and most people are like we're not that fine with that right we really do want to have some contact with the outside world Khan says well just reason be fine with that right know most pieces are Hegel certain wasn't what Hegel said is what you're really doing when you're thinking by there's very platonic this is a platonic idea is you were connecting with the spirit of the universe there's a universal spirit and when you most fully begin to think and reflect and reason you're tapping into an expression of the spirit of the universe which he keeps calling the spirit occasionally he'll call it God but this seems mostly not to get in trouble with the religious authorities he'd constantly struggled with this we're talking about a little bit but it this this is the idea that he clearly believed this he's thought there is universal reason there is meaning in the universe we'll call that spirit let me it's the question of why does math work math works because there is some sort of logical system in the universe just call that spirit why does life exist there is some order and structure in the universe let's call that spirit does it sort of he just says let you know you look around you see it you see order you see structure you see reason you see logic it seems to work life is around us so whatever is driving that whatever start that is spirit and what we're doing in history and what we're doing individually when we are free and when we are thinking is we're basically joining that because we're all aspects of it and we're sort of joining it with our individual capacities and so it's this kind of weird movie makes where he says when you're being your most individual most liberated most free most reasonable most self-reflective is when you're actually tapping into the universal spirit because this is what the universal spirit does that manifests itself through us through the world so that way there's both individuality plus structure so it's sort of a strange argument but it has this look a lot of people accuse them of being a pantheist meaning this doesn't seem very godlike I mean it seemed spirity but not godlike and so again charges that he struggled with his whole life and so he conceptualized again in Flast quote here the history of loss begins where thought and freedom comes into existence where it cuts itself loose from immersion and unit with nature constitute itself for itself we're thinking goes into itself and remains itself from the historical point of view the emergence of spirit is intimately connected with the flower of political liberty and political Liberty Liberty within the state begins where the individual feels himself to be an individual so you can't have individuals if you don't have liberty and you can't have Liberty if you don't have some structure to have Liberty within and you can't have Liberty to think without all that so what history is and the history of philosophy is tracking this is the evolution of our capacity to express individual will within political structures that promote and support it IE YT so excited about the french revolution new opportunity for liberty new opportunity for individual self-expression but within a structure and so wondering that Hegel could return to consistently and whyis a lot of people will say like this is where nihilism says oh you know get rid of everything or people say they're libertarians well we don't want government Hagel is like well that's silly just makes no sense because you need a structure in which to be free that you can't do you you have to have some sort of polis some sort of system you're a part of that allows you to express yourself if you have no rebounds or rules or guidelines then your did you just have chaos you have no definition that's the and he said this is this is that's anarchy not freedom because for instance I mean the example I always like to use is language right people say oh you know you make your own world it's like yeah make your own language don't speak a language wait language is really convenient because it allows us to communicate with other people and not being able to communicate with other people is incredibly not free if you don't believe me just go to a country you don't speak the language and even the simplest attempts at self-expression are getting things done becomes unbelievably difficult it's not that's not freedom and so but Hegel did not shy away from the really difficult problem to solve how do you give people structure without repressing them how do you give people liberty but systems ha you know any whether he worked it out or not I I would I would say probably not but he recognizes as the core problem and thought and worked about this incessantly hundreds thousands of pages trying to work this out but notice it's the same problem we have today it's exactly what we're arguing about debating working on today he said you you you know how do we structure a system that allows people to be free without imposing too much of a system on people that takes away their liberty it's a really tricky problem yeah and and he's often accused of being like an apologist for the Prussian state he was absolutely not an apologist for the Prussian state he would ended up teaching at the University of Berlin which is sort of the capital of the Prussian state and one of its leading gems and so there he is and he was constantly in trouble because he was a famous philosopher by this time in his life lots of notoriety which made him sort of a crown jewel right you want to have famous philosophers it makes you look good and important then now of course no one cares but then it did but everyone was suspicious that hey this universal Liberty for individuals this is not like what the Prussian state is promoting but the beauty of this system is he wrote such dense complicated material he was always able to explain away this so they would say oh so at one point in one of his lectures he said something very derogatory about the Catholic Church now this is Prussian state but he said to me so now this runs you afoul of the you know laws against slandering religion and so they wrote him a letter and you know said hey you know why you're in trouble and so he got this beautiful letter about how well you know I went to a prostitue Maneri on the believer in Luther and it's not really my fault of the Catholic Church is so messed up and you know and so it was this beautiful sort of as if he was the shining defender of Lutheranism which of course the Prussians can't attack him on but really they were always right in their suspicions about him and in fact the second he died the person they hired to replace him showing actually who knew from his childhood which is odd they said what we want you to do is stomp out Hegelian ism because they knew they didn't know exactly why but they knew was really bad but he was certainly not an apologist for the Prussian state by any stretch of the imagination what he was trying to do was work out this core problem that he lived this is the problem that Napoleon did not solve Napoleon conquerors has territory has land has what how do I maintain it he looked to the past make myself an emperor get a bunch of Nobles marry the noble families cuz that's how things had always been done as far as he knew that was his experience of the world Hegel lived in the same world but he said yeah that's done the French Revolution and the ideals more importantly of the French Revolution of the Enlightenment of human liberty are here and they're not going away we're not going to go back if we have to start trying to think about how to make this work not about trying to go back but this creates all kinds of interesting problems again that we still live with today for one and it's hard for us to imagine again because we live in Hegel's world if you're an aristocracy or a king or a prince or a pharaoh or any of these an emperor and China you will believe in fixation the world is frozen it is the correct way I mean we might build a bridge we might do this might fight a war but it doesn't change anything the nobles will still be the nobles the structure is going to still be the structure this is so true that it wasn't until like the sixteenth century in Europe that they even started to keep dates right so historians are always pissed off because like a victory will be given in battle will be given to like five successive kings I know I will that battle was not fought by five kings it was fought by one of them in this hundred and seventy year period but we don't know which because they kept except every king won the battle and it turns out that they didn't care about history in the sense of progress or change what was important as the king wins battles here's a famous battle so our King won it even though it was fought someplace else three hundred years ago doesn't matter Kings fight battles see our whole notion of history as a sequence of events that lead to a sequence no that is not how it used to be written and not how used to be recorded what mattered was that the new king was the old king the new pope was the old pope just it's a different person it's the position that mattered and the position does not change and so what Hagel starts talking about this progress of the Spirit the evolution of individual what he does is he puts history in motion he says no history is a dynamic evolving changing process ideas influence ideas there's growth there's change new structures now he was he believed it was called teleology he thought history was going someplace he thought it was getting better and better the Spirit is manifesting itself in better ways over time now of course that's arguable people tend not to be teleological these days but the whole notion that history is evolving and changing and growing see that that's Hegelian it's underway it's it's it's moving and it's shaping us and theoretically we can shape it that's totally new even if it caught their turn everybody if you look and read it everybody's trying to fix things platonic eternal forms right the eternal forms never change so all you're trying to do is get in touch with those eternal positions there's you know Kings are you know King whatever John the 750 second you know it's not changing it's staying the same so that continual process of imagining the world as fixed and unchanging Hegel just blows a hole in it that's why people are so excited about this you mean history is dynamic and he said not only its history dynamic the kind of society you live in shapes you influences how you think how you behave how you act so different people at different times have different life processes now this just seems obvious to us we just go course obviously this is so true now it was apparently wasn't true to anybody until Hegel it's an idea that's coming out of this time period but Hegel articulates it probably most clearly and certainly at most length but but this this dynamic notion that basically anthropology exists I mean he made these arguments that said things like look to understand what somebody's thinking you don't need to know just what they're arguing for or arguing against you need to know why they're arguing it you need to know what kind of systems they're in what those systems suggest and reject him because otherwise he says you just have no clear sense of who they are or what they're talking about and again resilient sound revelatory to us it just seems obvious except for it was not obvious to these people it was new Hegel basically took all of world history and made it alive gave it dynamism gave it activity change direction development and I mean people got really excited about the history of everything because it wasn't just a catalogue of events or a frozen narrative about oh we have the Bible there's another example one if you're if you're during the Christian theological history which is you know 90% of the medieval histories it was like you took any event in the world and you said how does this fit into the Bible well that's just what do you mean how does it fit into the how does it fit into a book that was written 2,000 years before the event what the hell are you talking about know that to them there was like no clearly the Bible is the narrative and everything has to fit into the narrative of the Bible now in this sense of prophecy by the way wasn't it wasn't like oh this was prophesized no the narrative is fixed you just need to know where the events of your era occur and fit within that narrative so where are we when they like is fleeing from Egypt what are you talking about right for us we can't even because it's like well but the Bible was written before the events they can't go back right that's that's that's a Galleon idea that the events come in a sequence that they influence each other that to understand the process of those influences creates new ideas new opportunities new kinds of people who look at the world in different ways hegel hegel hegel hegel he's the philosopher who really went crazy with this he says a living dynamic culturally diverse historically rich world which is of course why he was people were like we love this idea art for instance he said look art is one of those great places where the individual and the spirit is mediated in whatever the medium is and he's like when you have a beautiful work of art what you're really saying is for people at a particular time some manifestation of the individual and the spirit creates something that resonates because it speaks to their collectivities to their sort of world and structure he said the problem though is when you get all this Liberty is you don't have an agree anymore you can't have a unified sense of what's great when you have lots and lots of freed people you know it's this very modern idea right this is one things we struggle with now well that look at Hegel worked that out couple hundred years ago he's like look once you liberate people and reduce the amount of structure keeping them down they're not gonna agree about things a lot of the agreement in the world is going to go away and he said so what will create a sense of community in part will be the arguing about what you should be doing not and you can't impose it on free people it just pisses them off you can't have no rules because that's just chaos and Anarchy and people can't think or organize themselves but what you can't have is a whole bunch of debates about how you create meaning and structures so in one hand he just said people are gonna find this hugely fulfilling which is of course our problem right but it's better than being oppressed in in various ways and so he actually recognized that the dynamism of the ongoing debate makes the system which is crazy for someone who was born in Stuttgart in the 1700s that had this hierarchical legalistic you know you know Kohli Roman Imperial legal system no but and he's like yeah no that's no good you don't want that fixity somehow he embraced like the chaos that we still struggle with today little see chaos that's a sort of the continual struggle for how do we make meaning he's like yeah yes because when you ask yourself how do you make meaning what you're thinking about how you think and when you think about how you think you're being the most human you can possibly be that's that is the end of it but again back to the spirit thing which is crucial to keep in mind is it wasn't isolating and didn't make you a monadic in the in the alien system because you really did believe in this universal spirit it's Neoplatonism I mean like pure Neoplatonism that you could access and I won I always think it sounds a little crazy but then you think about it what's the kind of things we say people say oh it's it's spiritual we still use that language Geist is the German word by the way that's being translated as spiritualism guys so you've returned that hurt words ight Geist right the spirit of the times and we and it's true certain time certain places just have a different feel this is yet that is a manifestation of this universal order that must exist because we have life and we must be able to access it Conor Hegel argues opposed to comp he says no we can access it we can access it with our hearts we can access where there are emotions and we feel it and we know it when we encounter it we go ah yeah that moves me that's powerful how can it move me well because it has access to this universal force that pervades everything and so it doesn't create this chaos so but it is a complex thing and so people complain about the complexity of Hegel which is fair but part of the complexity comes from his unwillingness to just oversimplify to just say oh here's a new social order that's gonna make everything nice he's like no I don't think there you can do that free people can't do that all they can do is come up with a whole bunch of competing social concepts which they argue out amongst themselves and you call that order but again it's a dynamic order it's the making of the order that brings us together essentially and so what what Hegel left us with and again this is because they call them the first - philosopher this is a couple of key issues one that that you are of infinite worth that you are this representation of huge potential everybody is now we may not realize it that's different but we at least have the potential and that potential should be respected by your political institutions and by everything else - that the structures you grow up in have a huge determining effect on how you think how you act and who you are and again this is new you are not born with your identity which is the old system your parents were peasants you're born a peasant you're a peasant we know who you are you're peasant I mean that's a class 90% of people that's all you need to know about somebody Hegel's like no the individual is a dynamic thing involve the dynamic processes that shape and grow and part of that is self-reflective shaping and remaking and the more you liberate the person to remake themselves the greater they have the capacity to express their individual you know infinite value and so that that's the goal of all political and social structures is to maximize the opportunity for people to shape themselves but again basically you can think of this as the birth of psychology because you really just said you have to have this deep understanding appreciation and attention to human psychology emotional development in cultural environment everything that the the the term of artist sort is building in German is is it's this idea that you create these world pictures and and you educate people into being the best version of themselves so by the people with the debates never change it turns out or rarely change in history so one of the big fights that Hegel was involved in is at the university was saying look the university should be designed to make the best possible people to help people be the best possible people they can be not get jobs and so yeah I know he was in continual he was in continual battle with the medical scientific on the growing power of science now right coming on and and legal departments the the law schools who were saying no no what are you talking all this philosophy art nonsense these people need make jobs to make money to work for the state to make everything work well and so they can be wealthy and that good and halos like no that's absolutely a terrible idea the idea is to make people and help people become the best possible versions of themselves it was a self-improvement sort of opportunity that you're trying to give people and you can't force it on them there wasn't a UH you sit there and do this and then you'll be this kind of person because it's totally opposed to that kind of dogmatic training there was how do we help people liberate their mind so they can make remake themselves themselves but in fact that was the goal of the university and so that tradition that struggle is still here today right me we have this problem today given school white people go to school to get a job right this is this is always the answer it's financial benefits but then they say oh then why do we make them take whatever some sort of history class well we wanted to be good citizens rarely do we say why don't we just want them to be the best possible version of themselves they can be that just sounds sort of not very something I don't know what sounds like a waste of taxpayer money right right that somehow having people improve themselves is not a good use of taxpayer money you know so but that it's it's an ongoing debate but the debate was back then as well once they shifted out of oh the purpose of an education they say you can become either a seminarian or a lawyer who works for the powers that be then you go well what is the purpose of an education why why do we have these institutions of higher education what are they doing so again another debate that Hagel was deeply involved with us still going on today and it shows no sign of stopping and so often when people complain about this it's good to remember yeah that we've been complaining about this argument several hundred years old so don't expect to be resolved any time soon by the way and and it just probably keep going so he created the huge interest in human psychology here II conceptualized the understanding of art when do you have the Hegelian idea of art by the way which is our I did art from any place in the world at any time can become great during the Renaissance and tradition you looked at the classic from the past and you said that is great art the ability of us to approach that is the greatness of our art so this is why the Gothic art was hailed classicism the Gothic artists cathedrals they were trying to make Roman and Greek architecture and sculptures they just weren't very good at it so they were failed classical artists because we know what good art is it's fixed it's one thing and it doesn't change it's universal Hegel comes along and says no no no no no at any time art can be great because it can match the spirit of the times it can bring something new into the world by new cultures and new societies and new ideas that expresses the interest and abilities of new kinds of people and so that's why our museums are filled with art from all kinds of different time periods and all over the world because we can go oh yeah a 14th century jade piece from South America is amazing and beautiful it can be realized not they weren't like messing up trying to copy Greek stuff right the Aztecs didn't sort of blow it like we were trying to do a Roman Colosseum and we ended up with sort of a step pyramid you know that there wasn't it wasn't that sort of things like no that was amazing work that expressed then again this just seems dead obvious to us but probably the most popular lecture series he gave me was very popular lecture was on the history of philosophy of art because of this because it told people hey by the way the entire world history of art is yours and it's valuable go explore it it all could be meaningful and great and wonderful take a look at it there's a way of understanding that will open up its greatness to you and again we just say this for granted it's like oh of course but historically this is not of course it's not accurate historically people are like oh no that's this is good art that's bad art those people were there didn't know what they were doing these people did but again it's the same problem so now what we have is an unending an insoluble debate about what makes good art that's it you've launched the modern problem every single time and the modern problem is once you stop saying this is good art it's so fact where everything else is bad art how do you deal with the multiplicity how do you not just end up with chaos so well when you think about Hegel and you and if you've heard about Hegel by the way synthesis antithesis the Hegel never said that it's one of those interesting things it's probably from flower box he implies something like this but really it's much more complicated for that he wasn't just saying you get this happens and that's a response to that and those two things fused and produce something new no he's like history is this dynamic ongoing growing complex subtle amazing process you you gave it life you were live a fight it so when you think about Hegel and if you try to read Hegel good on you I mean I think he does reward reading but it's just really slow it's just like the quotes that we read but keep this in mind that he did bring all these ideas and concepts that we take for granted as just being the way things are of course art is great of course history is alive of course a psychology of individuals matter of course people have value but important remember that this is not a given was not historically standard that's something that we've inherited and we've inherited in large part a lot of that from Hegel I mean didn't invent all of it but he was the great spokesman the great promoter and his influence then is so great by the way I can't remember the name there's a French philosopher of the 20th century who said the problem with doing philosophical research and arguments today is no matter what path you go down when you get to the end of it you find Hegel there smiling at you right and it there's this is this really truth because he's difficult and subtle and complex and wrote lots and lots of long stuff and then students published lots of his lectures so we have all of that as well but at the end of it he created this response that didn't say oh crown myself Emperor he said no no look to a new future to the world we inhabit where you do have complexity and chaos and challenge but you have human liberty and opportunity and dynamism and so imagine a living powerful world of conflict and ideas and so that's the Hegelian world that we've inherited so thank you very much Hegel [Applause]

Channel: Wes Cecil

Views: 12,926

Rating: 4.9087949 out of 5

Keywords: wes cecil, humane arts, hegel, philsophy, germany, Spirit, freedom, history of philosophy

Id: CNhCCXlaR2s

Length: 54min 0sec (3240 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 15 2019