Intro to Hegel (& Progressive Politics) | Philosophy Tube

[Music] what are you you like me but you want me what are you an object an animal are you looking at me wait if you're looking at me then there's a me I exist and you exist but if there's a me and there's a you then that means there is not me something exists that is the negation of myself and other every time I see you I'm reminded of my negation and if there's more than one being like me and at the end of the day what's left for me to be I'll kill you but if I kill you then you won't be there to look at me and if you're not there to look at me how will I know I'm here I can't kill you but I can make your life miserable it's a stalemate but never forget I could kill you anytime from now on my self-consciousness is rooted in being better than you being able to destroy you at any moment and replace you with someone who looks identical you exist to serve me by reinforcing my conception of myself that's what makes me the master and you the slave wait I could never get rid of you you'll always be there reminding me of my negation with your other nests your whole presence is a totalizing violence to me I need you I need you to recognize me but even if you do I hate you so much your recognition isn't satisfying my whole identity is built around dominating you I need you but you don't need me anymore pot - what the hell was that Hegel's master and slave dialectic it's an odd one to be sure and there's a good reason why I chose to introduce you to it in the way that I just did for now though let's just make sure we didn't miss anything take it as a story featuring two characters and we'll talk about the meaning in a little bit in their initial meeting our two characters self-consciousness is Hegel cause them are each trying to figure out what they themselves are what it means to be a self-consciousness and by discovering somebody else and other they find that they gain a new perspective on that question by discovering and other and seeing themselves through that other's eyes they discover themselves self-consciousness for Hegel isn't an individual achievement the way that it is for for instance descartes self-consciousness arises through interaction with others and how we see ourselves is mediated by how those others see us self-consciousness exists in itself and for itself in that and by the fact that it exists for another self-consciousness that is to say it is only by being acknowledged or recognized each character wants to be recognized by the other and a life-and-death struggle ensues because as we saw to become aware of the other is to become aware of the possibility of your own negation and that can be a scary thing there's this other it's not bound by my will it represents the absence of me does it mean that I'm disposable if there's just another self-consciousness that's like me out there in the world I'm gonna kick its ass in the same way each must aim at the death of the other the others reality is presented to the former as an external other as outside itself it must cancel that externality or in other words me me the French philosopher jean-paul Sartre talked about the nausea of confronting the other he thought it was shameful and fought one of the worst things that could happen to you was to be fixed by the others gays particularly if and we'll be getting into this a little bit later on they see you as something that you don't see yourself as hence his famous quote hell is other people of course he want to kill them beyond just that though Hegel thinks that neither self-consciousness can really know what it is until it's risked losing everything including its life until it's risked throwing all the contingent stuff away the clothing the physical health for property all of it risk losing all of that until you find the thing that you can't throw away and whatever that is that must be what you essentially are for Hegel neither self consciousness can know what it means to be alive until they've faced death if either one of them really killed the other than they'd be screwed because remember recognition can only arise through being recognized by that other but during the struggle one of them values life more than they value being recognized or they just lose the struggle they become afraid and the other becomes the master they arrive at a conception of themselves as dominant over the slave the one who experienced that fear and the slave ends up doing all of their work but the master is never satisfied they've reduced the slave so much now the their recognition doesn't cut it for them anymore what the master really wants is to be recognized by an equal an independent self-consciousness they've risked their life and they get the material rewards but their whole conception of themselves is now bound up in the slave meanwhile the slave is out there in the world working on stuff producing things and as they work they realize that the things they make reflect them they understand the world they're building better than the master does like if you want to know about pyramids you don't ask a pharaoh you ask the slaves that built them the slave also confronts death every day because as a slave they might be killed and replaced at any moment and they realize that death is the true master it comes to us all master or slave that's a much richer conception of what it is to be a self consciousness by working and confronting death the slave arrives at a conception of themselves as an independent being not just an extension of the Masters will or a piece of property but a self consciousness who can say I built the pyramids I built the White House there's a piece of me in this world I built all of this not you I and if I don't work all of this stops in the end the master isn't the one that wins the slave learns what it truly means to be an independent self consciousness and at that point it's only a matter of time before they rise up part three what I know that right now this story is very very abstract and weird don't worry we are gonna get into concrete examples in a moment and it will become clearer just bear with me for right now let's orient ourselves we said this is called the master and slave dialectic so what is dialectics no it's not the Scientology book that's Dianetics dialectics is a method of study where we split the thing that we are studying into opposing or contradictory pieces the idea is that if we want to understand how something works then we should understand the sources of tension within it if we understand the two opposing forces in something and the tension between those forces then we can understand what holds it together and how it might change or react if we were to expose it to certain things for instance finally an example atoms within an atom you have positively charged particles and negatively charged particles protons and electrons if you understand atomic charge and energy levels and so on you can understand what holds an atom together and how it will react with other atoms if you understand the sources of tension within it you can do chemistry you can even exploit those sources of tension and split it apart so dialectics is the study of the unity of opposites vladimir lenin yes that was adam a lenin don't worry about that just now said the condition for the knowledge of all processes in the world in their self movement in a spontaneous development in their real life is the knowledge of them as a unity of opposites these opposites are sometimes called the thesis and the antithesis and when they clash they produce something new called the synthesis but how are we meant to use this is it meant to be literal because in an atom there are also neutrons which don't have a charge in which we didn't really mention and actually the nucleus of an atom is held together by the strong hold your horses personally and this might just be me I find dialectics to be more useful as a metaphor which is why I presented it first and foremost as a piece of theater metaphors are extra useful explaining something in terms of something else a good metaphor should illuminate the thing that we are studying not literally describe all of its aspects take for instance one of the most famous metaphors in the English language but soft what light through yonder window breaks tis the east and Juliet is the Sun actually if Juliet were the Sun Romeo would be incinerated by plasma eruptions of up to 27 million degrees Fahrenheit not to mention cosmic rays oh don't take it so literally what Shakespeare means is she's the center of his world she's his light she brightens his day everything revolves around her notice how these are all metaphors too by the way in other words Romeo is in love so why not just have him count and say I'm in love because what brings you closer to understanding him a flat word for the feeling or a metaphor that illuminates the importance the brilliance the bodily basking in the physical majesty of this girl a good metaphor can bring an idea home to you in a way that flat language just can't always do which is why they're so common not just in art but in science - even in economics which you might think is very cut and drive and actually has [ __ ] loads of metaphors in it strong currency human resources economic growth they're all metaphors but let's get back on track so dialectics the study of the unity of opposites as a metaphor for understanding what exactly well loads of stuff ancient Chinese philosophy yin and yang there's a karna dialectics supposed to illuminate all kinds of stuff about nature and medicine and even ethics understanding the physical world as a unity containing opposing energies if you're a Marxist you can understand society as a unity containing classes with opposing interests that's why we had Lenin earlier on ok we now understand what dialectics is and how to use it so Hegel's specific version the master and slave dialectic what's it all about if it's a metaphor what is it a metaphor for well people have made whole careers out of and cards on the table I'm not a Hagel scholar which is probably why I tend towards using it as a metaphor but what's it all about who is the master supposed to represent and who the save are their literal masters and literal slaves are we talking about the Haitian Revolution or maybe they aren't literal masters and slaves maybe it's about the French Revolution maybe they're supposed to represent workers and capitalists maybe the two characters are supposed to represent nations and it's a play about nationalism nationalism in the face of colonialism maybe it's about men and women and the struggle for gender equality or maybe it's about the trans experience of gender dysphoria maybe it's about body image and the fear of being fat we mentioned masters and slaves a lot is it some kind of kinky sex thing I hope so I mean just look at that face doesn't that look like the face of a man who's into some dirty dirty people have taken Hegel's ideas and use them to talk about all kinds of stuff which is more evidence I think for it being a really great metaphor we could talk all day about the layers of meaning and Juliet is the Sun in her book the rhetoric of economics economists Deirdre McCloskey says the literal translation of a metaphor is never finished but because it's particularly relevant to the tensions in Britain and America today let's talk about part 4 identity politics the term identity politics is sometimes used derisively so want to make it clear that I'm using it here descriptively only to mean political engagement that revolves around an appreciation of the fact that people with shared constructed identities will probably have similar experiences and similar political goals as well if you're gay and your neighbor is gay and you live in a country that has a lot of institutional discrimination against gay people then you have a shared constructed identity your sexuality some shared experiences and probably some similar political goals namely the transformation or abolition of those discriminatory institutions before we go any further here's an important footnote from marina shut up if you're thinking this definition of identity politics describes all most if not all politics then you are correct arguably all politics is identity politics or at least that could be a useful metaphor if that seems like a problem just remember that those two neighbors can also have solidarity and share political goals with other people who have different identities as well remember how in the Hegelian dialectic the two sides wanted recognition from each other while identity politics is sometimes called the politics of recognition oppressed groups get shown an image of themselves over and over that they just can't identify with and so they demand recognition like the Sartre experience fixed by the gaze of the hell that is other people on an individual level this might be something like a trans person being misgendered on a larger level it might be whole demographic so people being constantly portrayed as criminal or deviant or whole country's full of people being portrayed as uncivilized or backward and so the forms of resistance these groups adopt could be seen as a demand for proper recognition you will see me not as a piece of meat whose bodies common property but as a woman you will see me not as a shameful aberration but as prideful you will see me not as a disposable human being or a target but a black person whose life matters the philosopher Charles Taylor writes within these perspectives misrecognition shows not just the lack of due respect it can inflict a grievous wound saddling its victims with a crippling self-hatred due recognition is not just a courtesy we owe people it is a vital human need we might even apply the Hegelian dialectic as a metaphor for rioting in a world where people are made to feel small and inconsequential like a cog in the machine they form a desire to be seen and remind someone Starbucks window display or whatever Starbucks window display has come to represent in that moment that they are a subject has the famous Martin Luther King quote a riot is the language of the unheard we could use the metaphor that way but exactly what demands for her Galleon recognition would translate into in terms of concrete policy proposals is hotly debated not just academically but shall we say practically because misrecognition isn't just offensive it can translate into suffering and even death philosophy professor Nancy Fraser writes when such patterns of disrespect and disesteem are instant utilized for example in law social welfare medicine public education and all the social practices and group mores that structure everyday interaction they impede parity of participation just as surely as do distributive inequities that brings up a very important point which is that demands for recognition can and in many very clever people's opinions should go hand-in-hand with demands for redistribution actual changes in who has material access to money and power as an example if you suddenly make a whole bunch of mainstream movies prominently featuring people from hitherto marginalized groups and that's great and that's important but if those people are also generally severely economically disadvantaged then that alone isn't going to fix it and on the flip side Black Panthers like Kwame Charo was saying in the 60s but replacing capitalism with a more just economic system although it would mean greater racial justice wouldn't on its own solve racism you can have demands for both recognition and redistribution and many contemporary identity politics movements do in fact demand both fraser rights that our efforts to redistribute and our efforts to recognize should interpenetrate well it's about time ollie I was starting to think we were never gonna talk about interpenetration now this is the philosophy tube content I subscribed for [Music] it's very important to note that not all struggles for recognition are necessarily equally good or correct or grounded in reality for instance we could interpret the American civil rights movement as it demand to be recognized grounded in the belief of the Equality of black people we could also maybe interpret the Nazis and the modern-day resurgence of white nationalism as a demand to be recognized as the superior race with the right to dominate all others a belief which is obviously incorrect that's the thing about metaphors you can't always control them and here it's worth talking for a moment about the master in the master-slave dialectic recall that Hegel thinks the master never truly gets recognized by the slave in any satisfying way Hegel thought that the dialectic between master and slave wasn't just unsatisfying but actually unsustainable sooner or later the two moments in a dialectic clash and produce the synthesis something new like matter and antimatter annihilating each other once the master bases their entire identity around dominating the slave it's only gonna end one of two ways for them either they change their mind to get a new identity right quick or they spend their whole lives looking over their shoulder waiting for the slaves to rise up like the Nazis right once you base your entire identity around being the superior master race with the right to dominate all others you're inevitably going to come across a conflict that you can't win so either you change your mind or your mind ends up pasted all over the walls moreover and this fits really interesting once the Masters identity is built around dominating the slave anytime somebody representing the slave is just they're just present and not being dominated it feels like an affront we're gonna be talking a little bit more about Frantz Fanon and a little bit but as a black philosopher from Martinique in France in the 1950s he found that the white French people he came across was so used to thinking of themselves as superior to black people in particular black people from Martinique that just being present in the same train car as him was enough to make some of them feel so put out that they just yelled racial slurs at him pair that to Jim Crow laws in America we could use the Hegelian metaphor to interpret that by saying that white racists were so used to thinking of themselves as the master that the mere sight of a free black person prompted them to demand something as petty as separate water fountains or separate seating areas unwilling or unable to embrace an idea of whiteness that wasn't grounded in racial domination compare it to people today who say that they are fine with gay people as long as they're not shoving it down off-roads pushing a to pro gay agenda they're gaily and metaphor might suggest that they're so used to thinking of straight being the position of master of a gay that merely the free prideful expression of gay sexuality an expression of happiness and human joy feels like a slap in the face or compare it to women being catcalled in the street we might say that some men have a conception of their own masculinity so grounded in the domination of the female other but the mere sight of a free and independent woman prompts them to try and Center that woman's attention on themselves George Chikara Lamar writes for those relegated to non-being and condemned to invisibility to even appear is a violent act because it is violent to the structures of the world and because it will inevitably be treated as such we're gonna be noting in a little bit an important way in which identity politics might differ from what Hegel had in mind but before we embark on the fifth and final part of our Hegel study here's another important footnote from critic and soy enthusiast H bomber guy by the way if you find the Hegelian dialectic to be a useful metaphor then by all means use it if not don't worry about it if you're engaged in political activism or would like to be you probably won't get anywhere by insisting that everyone has to have read Hegel if you find Hegel hard to understand don't worry everyone does there's a really good reason why so many other writers historians philosophers even have dedicated themselves to the task of explaining what Hegel actually meant slavo Dziedzic has built most of his career on this and I mean you're watching a video that's trying to explain it right I mean if it if it was obvious you could have read it have you tried reading it's it's awful luckily thanks to postmodern cultural Marxism somehow Hollywood has tried to adapt the Hegelian dialectic into numerous films designed to explain it a little bit more easily the most popular example of course was the film Blade the titular blade or his more powerful cousin Blade 2 are the children of both humans and vampires and yet they have all of their strengths and none of their weaknesses blade is of course a hybrid of the two groups but more importantly he subverts the idea of the dichotomy between the two and opens up the path to a future where things are completely different Hegel would be proud and that's why blade 2 should have gone Oscar is the best one Guillermo de Torres finest to work it should have made blade kiss a fish or something pop five the zone of non-being Hagel himself was a racist let's get that out in the open and some philosophers have argued that his dialectic isn't always a very good metaphor Hagel assumed that the two sides in the master-slave dialectic meet at least initially as equals and Franz fanon wrote that that actually isn't a very good explanation of race relations particularly race relations following colonialism Fannin was a philosopher and a psychiatrist from Martinique which France invaded in 1635 and has occupied since and throughout his life he became very involved in the struggle against French colonialism particularly in Algeria he eventually went to France and his experiences as a black man and a colonial subject greatly shaped his work Fannin writes that black colonial subjects are disqualified from even entering into the dialectic of recognition in the first place it's precisely because Hegel's version is so abstract that Fannin thought it wasn't really useful for understanding a world so materially shaped by slavery colonization and white supremacy Chikara Lamar puts it like this lacking ontological resistance in the eyes of whites that is not appearing as fully human or worthy of recognition black subjects lack an entry point into the dialectic of recognition itself and a force to enter into a conflict that differs fundamentally from what Hagel had envisioned in Hegel's original dialectic the slave turns away from the master and concentrates on the objects of their labor the things they make that reflect them and help them arrive at a new understanding of themselves what fan unlamented though was that in his experience at least some colonized subjects didn't turn away from the Masters but towards them trying to be more like the white colonizers rather than embracing their own anti colonial black nationalism another point of departure if we try to apply Hegel's dialectic to race might be that in Hegel's version the master knows that they are the master whereas various scholars since then have explored the ways in which white people are kept ignorant of how our whiteness my shape our experiences of the world for these reasons Fannin says the slaves at least wherever we take that metaphor to me in colonized subjects and in finance case black colonized subjects in particular are stuck in the zone of non-being and the dialectic is frozen it doesn't go anywhere or clash or progress it just sticks in order to set it moving again something different is required I had rationalized the world and the world had rejected me on the basis of color prejudice since no agreement was possible on the level of Reason I threw myself back toward unreason namely an anti colonial revolution which is exactly what Fannin took part in in Algeria and which ultimately won our G rear its freedom from France Chikara lamar writes lacking the reciprocity necessary for the dialectic to enter smoothly into motion these disqualified non beings have no choice but to initiate a one-sided struggle to gain it by the way a brief note on the use of the word nationalism there in my country in the dominant political discourses the word nationalism is usually taken to be a bad thing because when we hear nationalism we think of the kind of right-wing Hitler Ku Klux Klan white nationalism however we can see how if our nation was under occupation from a foreign power like for instance Algeria was an assertion of nationhood might be quite a different beast an assertion of Algerian nationhood against France would be a very different kind of a thing from say an assertion of French nationhood against Algeria in that colonial situation it would be a strike against the occupying power rather than a rallying of the oppressors against the oppressed indeed modern white nationalists of that right-wing variety will often falsely try to portray themselves as be seeded victims of all kinds of conspiracy theories for that very reason although fanon argued in favor of anti colonial black nationalism he was also the first person to warn that once led off the chain the forces of nationalism could turn into something quite ugly that held the new nation back and ended up reinforcing and mirroring the oppression of the colonizers falen wasn't the only one to suppose that all Hegel's abstractions could do the little bringing down to earth Marx's whole deal was injecting a little blood and guts economics into all this theatrical farting about trying to figure out how we take a metaphor and use it to make it so that people working in the mills in Manchester don't have to sell their kids to afford food I've done a whole series on Marx before if you're interested and actually there's another criticism of Hegel that we should explore that would apply equally to Marx as well in Hegel's dialectic there's some pretty complex cognitive activity going on we've got the to self consciousness is becoming aware of themselves becoming aware of the other becoming aware of their social positions relative to each other we've got the slave becoming aware of labor and how they build the world around them and because a certain cognitive threshold is required for that this is gonna exclude at least some people with intellectual disabilities in her book the capacity contract scholar Stacey cliff it's implicant argues that pretty much since John Locke we've had a model in mind of the ideal citizen required to participate in a democracy as somebody who can do many of the things that Hegel describes be aware of themselves be aware of others be aware of their social relations be informed about their own position in the world and communicate their desires to change it to others often verbally think about how much information and reflection and communication is needed to be an ideal participant in something like an election and that's something that not everybody although it's a spectrum of course can actually manage despite the fact that people who can't manage it are still capable of having political interests and of being political agents just in ways that aren't as widely recognized there's a similar zone of non-being here and this is a charge we could level not just at Hegel but at liberal politics at conservative politics at Marxist politics and maybe at identity politics as well Orthodox Marxism places a lot of emphasis on workers achieving class consciousness becoming aware of how we are exploited and how our time is nickeled and dimed away in order to generate profit that requires a lot of understanding it's quite a big thing for wrap one's head around it so again there's an element of what simple can calls compulsory capacity similarly identity politics seems to require again knowledge of oneself from one social position relative to others knowledge of history and of power systems and how they reproduced clear articulation of one's own identity and a demand for authentic recognition that at least some people with intellectual disabilities might find difficult to publicly perform in a way that is recognized by everyone else as meeting that threshold which might be even more of a pain if as well as being intellectually disabled they are also women or LGBT or from an oppressed racial minority and therefore could really do with some identity politics simply cannot think that we should throw out capacity based methods of political philosophy entirely just that we need to be open to other ways of doing it as well she talks at length about how people with intellectual disabilities have taught her all sorts of ways of engaging politically that aren't based around a shared cognitive or bodily capacity but based around a shared vulnerability forming communities in relations based not around how much work we can do how much information we can gather and retain or around what we can articulate but around our common needs and I personally find that really interesting saying to somebody you are part of my political community not because you can know a lot of things or do a lot of things or speak English fluently or salute the right flag at the right time but because we both need food shelter health care and love we're all vulnerable so let's hang together and be vulnerable together that is kind of what some versions of identity politics do get at and that again is a very different kind of process from what Hegel had in mind there is so much more we could say all I can really do today is open the Hegel door for you Hegel is difficult and obscure like poetry but like poetry it can be really really illuminating fanon concludes his book black skin white masks with what sounds like poetry and which is itself steeped in metaphor superiority inferiority why not the quite simple attempt to touch the other to feel the other to explain the other to myself was my freedom not given to me then to build the world of the you at the conclusion of this study I want the world to recognize with me the open door of every consciousness thank you so much to microd Netta Marina shutter contra points and h-bomb a guy for marshalling their prodigious talents to serve this nonsense I feel like I've assembled the Avengers and on them to rescue a cat out of a tree you can find links to all their work in the description if you enjoyed this video I have a tip jar at PayPal dot me slash philosophy tube think of it like me putting a hat round at the end of the lecture or patreon.com slash philosophy tube is where you could make a regular donation to help me afford rent and food [Music] you

Channel: Philosophy Tube

Views: 714,155

Keywords: hegel, fanon, lenin, dialectics, master and slave, colonialism, disability

Id: OgNt1C72B_4

Length: 32min 38sec (1958 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 27 2018

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Considering that Chomsky has said that he's tried and failed to understand what the word 'dialectic' means, maybe this video would help him