Rick Roderick on Hegel and Modern Life [full length]

okay in our in our last lecture I ended the history of ethics in a way what would be a usual introductory introduction ethics course by discussing Hegel's view of ethics with its what one might call it super concept of freedom the very large concept of freedom as formulating those goals and desires of individuals in whatever given historical period and the idea that freedom represents is to see those goals and obstacles and they're overcoming in that period and to name that activity in those sets of practices freedom now that side of Hegel's philosophy and Hegel is perhaps the most important philosopher in the nineteenth century because the people that I will talk about today at least the first two or three react against Hegel so up Hegel's view was is very important but the Hegel I gave you the other day is a very radical Hegel where freedom is the central notion but there's another side to Hegel as many of you may have suspected if you've looked at articles like Fukuyama's at the end of history something like that there's another side of Hegel a more conservative side that argues that while his view remains historical that history is as it were the context within which all activities truth and so on gets its meaning in which human beings become what he calls spirit the conservative Hegel that VAT reading of Hegel he argues that the culmination of this long historical process is something like the Prussian state are on an updated reading like fukuyama's and this is one that I think it perfectly fits what George Bush means by the new world order it means that history proper is at an end this is a very strange notion because we still I think to some extent think historically history proper is at an end because his the human race has found the right ideas namely liberal democracy by which we mean the televised pseudo state to try to speak and VCRs once you have an economy that produces VCRs and stuff and a pseudo stated that that gives you the satisfaction of lording it over the rest of the planet with you know a social system that doesn't work history's reached its end and there are no more battles over Big Ideas that's the point that as long as the Cold War was going on there were ideologies and battles between them socialism capitalism and so on but with the end of the Cold War this is the updated version of Hegel's argument well now that's interesting already because it needed to be updated since Hegel thought it was over in the 19th century this more recent article argues that history ended in the 20th century only to have the Gulf War come along and if there's one sure sign in Hegel's philosophy the history isn't over of course it's a war because they're embodied people and struggle with different views about what freedom is and how to live so now I don't have to be another update about it being over so I'm very skeptical about that claim and also the conservative Hegel for other reasons would not be my favorite in any case reacting to the philosophy of Hegel were a whole set of intellectuals and he has an ambiguous legacy there were right wing the galleons and left wing the galleons in fact one of the origins of right wing left wing was not simply where people sat in a French theater although that's another origin of the word one has to do with these two schools of readings of Hegel the right wings of galleons took Hegel to be fundamentally right and their only task was to apply his method of Investigation to subject after subject in other words you know just investigate the Prussian state spell out explicitly where what he hadn't quite said enough of said enough about the other school of her galleons were the left wing galleons one of whom later became very famous and and he will be the first person I'll discuss today as we move beyond what I consider to be rather narrow rather than narrow ethical concerns while the problems we discussed in the last few lectures I consider important they are much narrower concerns than the best kind of social arrangements within which human beings can realize their character and so on and those that lead to a whole larger set of issues so those are the ones we'll discuss today those are the ones that were raised by Hegel under the word freedom and as I say the most famous left-wing regalian to take up the challenge of giving a richer concept of freedom i've already mentioned was a Karl Marx Marx's name of course is not used much anymore you know I mean this is this is supposed to be what happened in the last 15 years is that definitively his view of the world has been refuted and so on and I would like to warn against these these relatively premature judgments especially in the long scope of history after all communism is an ideology in the Soviet Union the first communist state began in 1917 and it is hardly a long historical run to go from 1917 to 1989 and to win hearts and minds in two-thirds of the world and then all and be over like that that is the kind of historical view a culture might have if that cultures view of history was based on mini-series because then you could go well that was kind of like a miniseries in this longer story but as a matter of just historical fact the text of Marx is a classic text William Bennett agrees it's a classic it's in the great book so it's there you go it's a classic okay no no more argument needed right Bennett you know bushes hashes man says it's a classic so it's a classic and then in the historical sense it's still an ambiguous legacy because throughout the history of Marxism based on this hog alien mode of thought in which concepts change as people change there was an ongoing criticism which as we know today in Eastern Europe has led to the overthrow of certain governments an ongoing criticism within the communist states of communism that didn't appear obvious to us over here until these dramatic events as though they hadn't been prepared for by a long historical process of criticism of course that we were blinded to that on our side of the border for our well Ian reasons for strictly Orwellian reasons but now we see by this period of history we see that there were quite important social movements movements that do to name do deserve the name democratic movements in a way that very few movements in this country deserve the night I mean a movement that's serious for democracy in the United States would have to be either associated with dangerous African Americans with strange ideas that have made bizarre off-the-record remarks or something or else up in some other way ghettoized a real movements for democracy are oddly enough most threatening in nominal democracies that's a principle of a Galleon discourse in other words if you live by an ideology the most dangerous ideology to you as your own because someone may expect you to do what you say so in that sense communist ideology as many of you know was never a real threat in the United States right very few communists got elected to Senate and so on is it's not not really popular on the other hand our own ideologies of democracy freedom and equality have been a great danger to our own society so that's a dialectical treason leads me in to Marx and Marxist criticism of capitalism because there's a wide misunderstanding and I need to explain why criticism of capitalism is a criticism of Hegel because for Hegel if that was the highest expression of humanity was this was this advent of capitalism the liberal democratic state and so on then a criticism of that state you know which had been based on the previous French Revolution and so on would be a criticism not just of Hegel but of the state of affairs his philosophy represented and that was Marx's real point not just merely to interpret Hegel or criticizing but you use him as a vehicle to criticize the actual state in terms of the degree to which it at first it's an internal criticism it's a criticism of the gap between the promises of the bushwa state and its practices and that criticism is launched in terms of the economy the argument is rather elegant and rather simple and I'm not a mean that Marx has many complicated arguments I'm going to stick to a few from this book the economic and philosophical scripts of 1844 Marx it's a it's an inexpensive little book the problem is is that the democratic state is and Marx uses a rather strong word here in contradiction with the imperatives of the capitalist economy now I'm not sure many people would even want to disagree with that anymore I think that we're used to living in a sort of televised environment in which contradictions don't bother us as much as they used to they just make us twinge in other words we'll see a huge picture of rubble on TV and a spokesman will be saying there was no rubble in the rubbles behind you and and we're used to that now and we're you know we've lived through periods where Richard Nixon would come on TV it's like I am NOT a liar then his eyes would drift off you know so we're more used to contradiction than they were and take it less seriously we expect it in fact certain cultural artifacts of our period like twin peaks' make a joke out of our ability to accept contradiction they use it in a way as a kind of irony on our society that we can accept it with with very little difficulty but this wasn't true in this period so it was an important criticism if Marx could show that the imperatives of the economy to accumulate human labor which for Marx was the key to capital not accumulating money because money was a medium right that was used to accumulate living labor that's what is the fundamental meaning of the alienation of Labor for Marx to put it in its in really basic terms it's this the secret to capitalism is moving from a society and this is why it has epical implications that I'd like to draw leaving in a society where the question is what are you to a society in which the question is what do you own or have what do you do in the sense of a career a job or whatever once human beings are Reedus cribe din that way they're read ascribed in terms of their work time which is not voluntary I mean Reagan recognizes that right he distinguishes volunteerism from work he's that smart and we all know when were at work we're not volunteering and one way you can know no matter how much you love your job everybody always tells me I love my job that very few people when they're given two months off its full pay decide to come in every day and work their butt off it's just we Americans may love their jobs but they may also have deep psychological reasons to believe that compensatory thing namely that they do really love it they may in fact be devious in some respect it's deeper than a conscious one that which we'll discuss we get to Freud so for Marx the crime as it were that capital commits and it's not a creature I shouldn't even use the word crime because it's purely systemic and it has dual effects one of which is incredibly positive the negative effect it has is to reduce the rich amount of human needs to needs that can simply be bought and sold on a marketplace in other words to make us understand our needs in terms of marketable needs and this is this is almost a boring lecture now because our need for love compassion understanding for social relations and so many other needs now are all merchandise Abul I mean even if you were even the one of the kinkiest things people used to do we just have intimate sexual conversations with one another now that's telephone eyes did you put it on your visa right I mean they just think of that one example about telephone sex this is how far capitalism can go in rationalizing what at one time was a very intimate personal exchange without the mediation of money into one that becomes marketable so if you're watching us I on television late at night which I sometimes do it's got all those stupid B movies on it then Here Come on a whole stream of lovely young men and women saying call me up five dollars a minute so if you're lonely sad tired want a friend there's one on the market that's the way in which Marx saw relations as it were between things because commodities are things even when it's us you know if you're in a room full of people who sell insurance and you're trying to hire one of them and you're the executive you're choosing between commodities now someone will immediately object of course one of the people there may have a better personality great that means that that's a feature of that commodity that's attractive to you as a buyer why that's why the person may get the job so for Marx that was the violence it committed was it not only commodified our relations but our lives and and put the pursuit of things in the in the place of our whole host and I mean in place of a whole host of other needs desires in fact the desire just for social relations themselves which today is is a real desire just to desire for a genuine social relation or to one or two genuine social relations so now that was the bad part on the social relations side for Marx that's where capitalism was at loggerheads with the great ideals of freedom and so on is because such human beings under such an economic system because of competition with one another for what jobs were available in order to survive within such an economy where the world working could only be called free labor as a kind of a joke in other words that whether we work or not whether we make that as a choice is sort of a joke right well I can choose not to work well the streets last night is this city froze were full of people who I'm sure many didn't choose not to work right I doubt that a lot of them are lazy like Jesse Jackson I don't think that that's the problem with poor people is that they're lazy but in any case if you choose not to work you may very well find yourself under a bridge at night one way you can find out by the way this is simple to cut through a lot of the crap you usually hear about class analysis and there are no there are no classes in America here's a little empirical test for the audience to try don't work for eight years stop working and if really bad things happen to you you were in the working class if at the end of the day at the end of eight years everything's fine and dandy you still got a house and a car at a nice place to live and a lot of nice friends then you were okay otherwise you were in the working class but if you stop working for that long and you're in deep trouble you are what you are a worker and didn't know it that's the nice empirical test and I challenge any of you to try it someone who denies that their classes can always give this one a shot it's a way to find out if there are really find out so those are some of the downsides classes are produced with unequal power social relations become as it were reified frozen phony if you will the upside is the upside that we're Marx I think praises capitalism in terms beyond those ever used by William Buckley as a system that had produced from nature more wonders more technological wonders than the whole previous history of the world had seen in other words the good things capitalism did was to build railways medicines and even more importantly new needs see many of you may think that all this sort of negative talks kind of old left-wing all whining after Bush you shouldn't wind like that if we should be really happy about it you know a thousand points of light that vision thing but the upside of this is that new needs get produced and for Marx that was a revolutionary process because the system would never as productive as it is there'd be no way it could ever catch up to the level of need produced by it have you ever noticed that now think about here's another example to think about please remember how good stereo sounded when you first got it instead of mono Y mono just play just learn one sort of flat music and mono sounded okay when you first got it because it was better than that scratchy thing like this and you got your first stereo and it was so exciting and nobody even mentioned that the types you played on your stereo had a little hiss in them but now to just put a tape in something you hear that hiss and you think about your friends that have a CD and they don't have that hiss there's a new need now for his music all around music a whole new need now apologists for the system want to say well that need you know we didn't create that need well that seems highly dubious think of commodities like the hula hoop does anyone remember the great hula hoop movement in the United States where people went around demanding hula hoops and then the capitalists which will make them for you well no no that movement didn't occur say then when there was no social movement called hula hoop movement he went around hula hoops or deaf hula hoops are death now some some jackleg with you know I'll bet you if we make these things like this put out a few records people will be sweating and the next thing you know people needed them and you just have to be nostalgic not to say they needed I mean I heard someone the other day in the in the video story I need this VCR and it was just as dramatic a statement for that person as someone in one of the third-world countries that we plunder saying I need rice beans listen you need so capitalism's upside is it creates vast new technological abilities which extend the power of the human species extended until we can like to you know go to the moon build a CD that doesn't hiss and so on that's the upside of the system now the problem Marx saw was that those two imperatives can come into contradiction the imperative on the one hand of the economy which are now I'm going to state in its blunt Wall Street farm which is to make a profit which you do by accumulating labor capital goods land and so on that imperative to create a profit versus versus the imperative to fulfill all these new needs so for example and this is another classic example solar energy which is technologically available and so it comes in conflict with the imperative however for profit there's there's there ways to make it and when you hear these words you know you have a contradiction of the kind Marx discussed when you hear the words we have that technology but it's not cost-effective that phrase means we have the social forces of production to build it but it is not consistent with our social relations based on profit that's all not being cost effective means it doesn't mean the technology isn't better won't meet more needs won't be safer won't be better for the environment it just quite simply means that you have a contradiction between social relations that need have these needs and the way that they're controlled by an economy that wants profit and solar energy is only one among many similar examples you know it's there's all of these sort of old truck drivers stories about the ball bearings they use it NASA I don't know if any of those are true you always hear these sort of stories well it now so they have ball bearings that are practically frictionless if we add them in our cars we'd get seven thousand miles a gallon well I don't know if that's true but it could be because clearly our technology we get to the moon we could build a better ball bearing that would like triple gas gas mileage since that seems fairly clear that that's within the capability of our technology and much else besides that won't be pursued because it's in contradiction with these economic imperatives now what does all this have to do with the kind of lives people lead and morality well everything because as I tried to argue throughout the course you give one society sort of Greek tragedy the theater and so on and Greek ideals is a sort of model for how they live and you get one kind of human being Renaissance arts you get another kind of human being and other human projects and then you get the Brady Bunch you get another kind of human being and another set of human projects now the vicious way to describe that situation is ideology but it's an empty term it simply means that if you want to know how someone thinks look at how they dress who they hang out with where they live right the kinds of folks they went to school with so how big is their bank account and you'll pretty much know where they're coming from which is the banal West Texas way of stating Marxist theory of ideology and it's right it's true you pretty much do and it's not a rigid theory it's not like you're never surprised but you're rarely surprised it's the best rough generalization about social relations that I know of and it is it's supposed to remind us that moral dilemmas of the kind I discussed last time which now I'm going to distance myself from by calling them merely philosophical dilemmas have to be understood and this is the point I want to draw from Marx today in terms of being different for different classes in other words depending on what social situation you come out of a moral dilemma may be quite different the moral dilemma about whether to steal you know an extra 25,000 on your tax return is a different kind of moral dilemma than the moral dilemma about whether you're going to rob a 7-eleven to have enough food for the next month and you'd have to be a moral imbecile not to see that there are important differences right between those decisions they may both be decisions concerning theft but they're important moral differences based on those decisions simply by virtue of something that to us today seems I think slightly unfair circumstance I mean in our country it's really horrible to say this but to call someone poor is not an insult you haven't say anything about them you've talked about their circumstances so wonderful line in a play by Tennessee Williams where Deborah Carr and her old father who's the poet the play is not of the iguana I think some of you may have seen it she and her father come up and they go yes we're pouring because we you say it as though you're proud of it she goes I'm neither proud nor ashamed it's not what we are it's just what has happened to us it's really a hard way to think in our country because one way we allow ourselves and now I'm going to stray from Marx for a moment because I just use his text I'm not I don't really care if it's right because I think that to the extent we get something out of books what we want to get is something out of them that we can use and I haven't found any books where I can use all of it or even most of it I certainly true with this one too but just to stray from that from the text of Marx just a little bit in our country one of the ways that we can stand to have a society that's so opulent and it's impossible to drive into this city and not feel it into the Washington DC and see the Pentagon and these amazing buildings and then just see the bridges lined with people sleeping under it at night how do we accept it as people who think that we're still human how do we accept it and begin even cynically to accept it well part of the reason for that at least part of the reason is that at some level we must believe and it's now back to this freedom thing again that it was their own sort of choices that got up there so they're sort of in some sense to blame for being there now I'll admit that no one ever quite spells it out that clearly but in political discourse in our country the implication is fairly clear the implication was there and we accepted it for years when Ronald Reagan used to hold up the one ads in front of TV well they don't have to be there look yeah have you ever looked at the one ads and what's on it you know they're like fourteen jobs if you want in this dollar porn business okay there's a job for you twenty eight or nine jobs at McDonald's and for the rest of them you have to be able to read that puts a lot of people under bridges already right at night so a notion of freedom and a society can become so callous to the minimal demands of what Marx called human requirements human requirements is not utopian to demand human requirements that's the standard objection to any time you use the word Marx so that's why I'm sort of getting away from it now must be utopia no it's not utopian to demand in a world with this kind of technology with that that as a moral demand of society feed clothe and house its people a society that doesn't do it with the kind of technology and the wealth we have is beneath contempt and makes a mockery of all the previous history of civilization and to the extent that were silent in among such brigands we are brigands too it's despicable it's disgusting and we've lived with it and it seems like it's getting more support every day I don't know looks like we're in a very dark time well Marx is not exactly the figure to illuminate that time because he himself became and his texts the use of it in another part of the world like I like I have been sort of implying in my political remarks just as some of the great texts of democracy Jefferson and others have been misused in this country in hideous ways I think it's more than obvious now in Eastern Europe in China and the Soviet Union that the forms of what I call state capitalism over there had very little to do with the work of Marx I had a student friend visit the Soviet Union and the least visited place there and this was back in the Khrushchev period when they were not quite so you know stirred up the least visited place in the Soviet Union was the Marx Lenin Institute where all the books were he would read that stuff in fact a lot of the books had already been removed by Stalinist the one that would the ones that would really upset people I mean the book here the one that I've discussed has an account of the alienation of Labor that wouldn't go over very well in Stalin's Russia because the fundamental insight here is that if you are working your fanny off on a shop floor in Kiev it's hard to know how you're in a worker's paradise when someone in Detroit's working their fanny off there the view that from the bottom up is the one that seems to me plausible under both conditions something important about your humanity's being lost under both conditions and when we look at the conditions I'm discussing today we're not looking at abstract moral conditions I'm not offering a grand abstract theory of them I'm trying to give something like a rough account of the fabric of daily life a rough account of it because it's too rich especially in this country once you get off the interstate the fabric of daily life is very rich something like the distinction I'd want to make between a sort of theoretical approach and an approach more rooted in daily life to the issues that we'll be discussing I'm just laying some of them out now is the difference between driving cross-country on the interstate or flying over it and then occasionally taking the back roads this is very interesting driving through the south but it's also interesting driving through the Midwest because the United States is not the kind of country you notice how after Hagel we've started giving a theory of the present and stuff see that was what we promised we'd do is that philosophy at its best should be our time comprehended in thought that keeps it from being what Nietzsche says sort of a museum of ideas says you know which is built for loafers in the garden of knowledge well for philosophy to be more than that sort of Museum of ideas built for loafers in the garden of knowledge it needs to give an intransigent account of conditions in the present now it could be wrong okay I told you I was a fallibilist but I'm saying that could be wrong but that should be that shouldn't be decided by slogans or TV commercials or by Willie Horton dyads but by debate by argument among a public body public you know citizens talking and arguing now the further problem and this is a problem that marks in part is implicated in is the way in which political discourse has as it were dried up and narrowed the things about which we can debate the topics which are open for alternatives and for other explanations and descriptions and this is the deep sense in which I have used the word pseudo democracy instead of democracy throughout because even in even in its Greek form where it was limited only to Greeks who were citizens not slaves or not foreigners even there the institutions of representation where people could be recalled much quicker this is hard to recall someone who once they get in this city not many people get come back we didn't like it and again why not well because in the current situation as many events that have just happened I think indicate political power and economic power are deeply interlocked it seems to me hardly accidental that most of the people in the Senate are millionaires I think all but what one or two there are millionaires is that just an accident an accidental relation most of them white guys notice that accidental relation no see that's the kind of prima facie evidence one should look at they should you should go well that just looks like a bunch of white guys it's some really rich club in New York well it is like them in fact when they go to New York it is them now that's not a conspiracy theory because all of them appear on TV and tell you they're running your lives so it's not a conspiracy though deep inside marks house and it's really an important one is that whatever anything by the way this is not a sufficient condition for what we would like to call a good or excellent human life but it's a necessary condition necessary but not sufficient is that you not have your life reduced to total poverty that's just in other words it's not enough to just be free from constraints you can't be just reduced to penury and then say that that person has a free life and on the other hand you can't have your life reduced to work no matter how high the wage and have it be a really excellent life that reduction of life to work itself cripples life and cripples the challenge to become something else larger other and it's only in that sense that we've started with these philosophical ideals because each one of them points the way it projects other than right other than simply being the person who sold the most tires who pushed the most papers through the largest office each one of them in that regard let me refer back to a really old one Alexander the Great on finding a skeptic in the streets a really famous philosopher and this guy was really just totally otherworldly all he did was just think and lay in the streets knees really dirty and some of Alexander the Great's officers and by the way Alexander the Great did better than George Bush ever will conquered the whole world you know he's like 26 or so younger than Dan Quayle probably just as sharp and he sees this old philosopher lying in the streets and he says well if I wasn't Alexander I would want to be that man the reason is that they both had extreme and extremely interesting projects it's hard for us to even have a sense for a project like that now because our projects have been reduced to a series of bills petty annoyances and in our spare time the search for what little meaning is left over from all that busyness and chatter that goes into that process now this is not I mean I'm aiming it at this audience because we're here so please don't get confused I'm not a foreign agent I don't know a government in the world where I couldn't couldn't say similar things and in most governments some worse now I don't want any complacency about my lecture or that to be viewed as me pulling back from what I've said because it is no argument and it never has been to say our tribe is a little better than everybody else's so that's fine you know why that's no argument don't you well if you're among tribes of savages and you only lop off 20,000 heads a year as opposed to 19 that's no lopping off heads argument even if you are the greatest tribe in the world a claim that we believe a prior are true in any case now to try to summarize these sort of far-ranging in sort of nasty anti-republican polemics here or whatever left-wing talk what I've been trying to fill out today for you as a richer notion of freedom in which we recognize that before moral problems really come up in the sent the philosophical sense before they really come up there are conditions for human life that have to be fulfilled which I call necessary human requirements they're not sufficient to live a good life but they're necessary among them are food shelter ordinary healthcare real exciting huh so that's not as much fun as conte but they're real important because without that it's hard to follow the categorical imperative you know it's easier to follow a ham sandwich without that so that's necessary but not a sufficient condition for a good life it's also and this is a more this is a more radical claim it's also necessary but not a sufficient condition that one have the freedom in one's life to pursue other goals than work and in a strong sense I'm not talking about getting a hobby but a life not reduced to work not reduced to work a life where you when you go to a cocktail party and they go they don't know what are you they go what do you do and you don't have to answer with your job description which is another way of asking who are you in a metaphysical sense right that's the counts for a lot of the feel Donahue shows women show up in a embarrass to go I'm a home worker I work at home why would that be a problem well in a capitalist economy it's a terrible problem and here's why because housework is unwaged and since we value labour by the wage it brings it's not surprising that that an old person in arrest homes ability to tell a beautiful story is not valued because it's not waged you go to an old folks home this is I mean we ought to realize this where we'll all be that will either be old or will face another alternative that's unpleasant because old folks home that's unwaged labor they're whittling and they're storytelling not valued in our culture in our society it's not waged housework no matter how many kids you raise not really valued I mean I'll come on they'll say something about you on the Today Show if you live to be a hundred loose women live to be a hundred mad nine kids you get a little clap that's it other than that very little social value all that unwaged labor to the the reason it's not valued is because it's not waged Donald Trump you know he opens a hotel huge wage huge wage huge value to his labor well what the hell did he do talk to Merv Griffith in a room for three minutes and that's more valuable than some old man who's lived of 90 years worth of experience and can tell a story about his life in which you might find a human meaning a society that produces that situation is pathological it neither highest nor deserves a very long existence

Channel: The Partially Examined Life

Views: 91,063

Rating: 4.8933334 out of 5

Keywords: rick, roderick, philosophy, GWF, Hegel, Marx, philosopher, full, length, marxism, Karl Marx (Philosopher)

Id: 2MsNyR-epBM

Length: 40min 44sec (2444 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 25 2012

Reddit Comments

[u/Smokebeard]

Rick Roderick is a serious hero to me. Even his off-topic rambling has more substance and relatability than many more traditional academic philosophers. Damn shame he's not around anymore. I'd kill to have met and learned from him. Interesting reading about him. He would help students plan protests and other assemblies, let students who weren't even Duke students sit in on his classes, gave students an A by default so that he could assure that those who showed up did so for their fulfillment, not simply for a grade. A really rad dude.

[u/twoandseven]

Really wish there were more academics like him. Here are more of his lectures available for download: http://www.wimpywombat.net/rick-roderick/

[u/Bronesby]

I've said it before: RICK F'n RODERICK cutting, sniper-like delivery of self & social philosophy