Hegel

Allen Wood
Every serious philosopher should realize that Hegel was the outcome of the German idealist movement that Kant had begun.

Ken Taylor
Dialectic…

John Perry
Zeitgeist…

Ken Taylor
The End of History…

John Perry
The Philosophy of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel—one of the most profound thinkers of the 19th century.

Allen Wood
It’s Hegel’s view that the human spirit in history is both trying to realize its idea of itself and in the process of that it changes what it is.

Ken Taylor
Hegel: profound and obscure.

Allen Wood
Hegel’s famous saying was that the rational is actual and the actual is rational. He thinks even human bad behavior plays a rational role in history.

John Perry
Our guest is Allen Wood from Stanford University.

Allen Wood
You could say that for Hegel, history ends in the present.

Ken Taylor
The philosophy of Hegel – coming up on Philosophy Talk, after the news.

Ken Taylor
Welcome to Philosophy Talk, the program that questions, everything…

John Perry
…except your intelligence. I’m John Perry.

Ken Taylor
And I’m Ken Taylor. We’re coming to you from the studios of 91.7. KALW—local, innovative public radio for San Francisco.

John Perry
But we’re continuing conversations that began at Philosophers Corner on the Stanford campus.

Ken Taylor
And from that oasis of thought they migrate to this oasis of the air, and from the air to the internet via our blog—I don’t know what kind of oasis that—is the blog dot Philosophy Talk dot ORG. And now you can listen to the best of Philosophy Talk anytime, anywhere by downloading one of our podcasts. So John, we’re gonna talk about Hegel today. I hope you’re an expert on Hegel, because my acquaintance with Hegel is, well sparse.

John Perry
Well Ken, you’re going to be disappointed. I think we need to be honest with our listeners: we’re not going to do our usual job of brilliantly setting up the whole show drawing on our vast knowledge of all aspects of the problem concerned, because you and I were educated in graduate school at a time and in places where Hegel was not much taught or much thought of. We were taught in analytical places and Hegel was, you know, the Antichrist of analytical philosophy or something.

Ken Taylor
Yeah, you know, Richard Rorty has this remark, I don’t know what it means exactly, but he says, the problem with analytical philosophy, the kind that you and I cut our teeth on, is that we’re stuck in a Kantian moment. And the great thing about the literary critics is that they’ve advanced to a Hegelian moment. And maybe Alan Wood, our guest, can explain that to us. But you know, I have to tell you something else, though. I’m writing this big book on normativity, and I go around giving talks on it, and people tell me that I’m a Hegelian. So I don’t know what they mean by that,but I’ve decided that I’m going to devote myself to understanding Hagel for part of my summer.

John Perry
Well, I think that’s good. And I’ll go you halfway—I’m going to actually buy a copy of “The Phenomenology of the Spirit” and leave it around to read when I’ve got really important things to do.

Ken Taylor
Oh, that’s part of your structured procrastination, procrastination. But I do think there are a lot of important ideas in Hegel. I mean, this view about history and the development of consciousness, that the growth and decay of normative community over time—you can tell a historical narrative about that, and the way ideas come about and change and converge on something kind of true and deeper and more absolute. I mean, he’s got lots of ideas, you know. He did influence lots of subsequent philosophers, not just continental philosophers, but the pragmatist are in one way kind of Hegelians in a certain sense.

John Perry
Well, you know, if you think about our colleague Richard Rorty’s remark, it’s kind of thrilling to think of this coming hour as as that moment in our our development of analytical philosophers where we go from being stuck in about 1789, When Kant wrote “The Critique of Pure Reason” and get updated to, I don’t know what, 1810 or whatever it was, when Hegel wrote “The Phenomenology of Spirit.” Many people would say we’re still a little bit behind the times, but at any rate. To make this huge transition from being stuck and kinda stuck in Hegel, I hope that we have some experts to help.

Well, Alan’s gonna help us and our Roving Philosophical Reporter went out and talked to someone who knows a lot about both Hegel and history. She files this report.

Polly Stryker
Hegel is one of the more difficult philosophers for people to understand. According to John McCumber, president of the Hegel Society of America, everyone views Hegelian philosophy differently—even members of the Hegel Society.

John McCumber
He’s been defined as Aristotle plus mediation. And what that means is that Aristotle has this huge encyclopedic system, not just philosophy, and incompetence, biology and, and politics and all kinds of things. Hegel has taken over a lot of that content. But the modern side of Hegel is that he develops each part of it out of the previous parts. So the more complex parts such as policy, or political society, will presuppose his discussion of biology and chemistry and things like that. So he’s tried to relate everything together to this huge, enormous philosophical system, probably the largest anybody’s ever actually created.

Polly Stryker
McCumber is also a professor of Germanic languages at UCLA. He told me that Hegel is as much a philosopher of language as anything.

John McCumber
Talking about words. He’s not doing philosophy of language, the way it’s done today, which is focuses on sentences. But he’s talking about lexicographically. He’s talking about the words that we use, he’s trying to provide definitions. And I think that’s really what he sees absolute knowledge as being the only thing that we can avoid surprises, because we stipulate the meaning. But anything else will welcome surprises because we’d never know anything fully.

Polly Stryker
I asked him how Hegel saw history.

John McCumber
My general view is a highly diversified view. He thinks that history is a learning process in which ideas are tried out, you know, it’s kind of Darwinian, there’s hundreds of ideas and A few of them work out and then they’re built upon by subsequent generations. So that’s not the idea that there’s some sort of gigantic absolute being that is realizing itself through history. That’s a more traditional view of Hegel

Speaker 3
Hegel’s view of history had a huge impact on the thinking of Karl Mar.,

John McCumber
There are similarities in their diagnosis of the times, for both of them dialectic basically just means looking at everything in time. This too shall pass. Nothing is eternal, for which it follows For Marx, a capitalism is going to cease to exist someday. And the question is how, and then he thinks he can predict what’s going to happen. There’ll be a revolution, and we’ll go through various stages, and then you’ll have this wonderful situation with the government with his way and so forth. Hegel thinks everything is going to give way and nothing is going to last forever. But he does not think the dialectics for anything else can tell you how that’s going to happen.

Polly Stryker
Can we blame Hegel for having any part and what became communism or totalitarianism?

John McCumber
I don’t know if you can pin it on him. I would like it if you could. But you know, there’s so many twists and turns from Hegel, then you get Marx saying, there’s going to be a real revolution, which Hegel doesn’t try to say. And then you get Lenin trying to say this revolution can be steered and guided by a particular cadre of elite people. And then you’ve got Stalin taking over that CADRE and I think is a lot of jumps from Hegel to that.

Polly Stryker
What’s Hegel best known for?

John McCumber
I think he’s best known for his strenuous attempt to get an overview of the entire human enterprise and the all of human history, our religion, science, everything.

Polly Stryker
For Philosophy Talk, I’m Polly Stryker.

John Perry
Thanks, Polly, for that very interesting report, and thanks to her guest John McCumber. I’m John Perry, with me is Ken Taylor.

Ken Taylor
And we’re joined today by Allen Wood, back for a repeat visit on Philosophy Talk. Before he was talking to us about baseball today, we’ve got Hegel. He’s a professor of philosophy at Stanford University, author of “Hegel’s Ethical Thought” and editor and translator of many of Hegel’s work. Allen, welcome back to Philosophy Talk.

Allen Wood
Thanks.

John Perry
Well, Alan, it’s good to have you back. And I know a lot more about baseball and I do about Hegel, I’ll have to admit, so you’re gonna have to help. Hegel is indeed the philosopher, I probably had the most trouble getting a grip on of all of the ones that are considered truly great, most of whom I’ve really tried to dig into. In a nutshell, tell us what about Hegel every one or at least every serious philosopher should know.

Allen Wood
Well, every serious philosopher should realize that Hegel was the outcome, and was seen by everyone at the time as the outcome of the movement that they thought in Germany that Kant had begun. The German idealists movement was from the beginning thought of as something that was in process. And Hegel’s mature system came to be seen as the culmination of it.

Ken Taylor
How many helped me with that idea? I mean, okay, so, I know a fair amount about Kant, I know, you know, everything about Kant. I guess it has to do with Kant’s idea about phenomenon and noumenon. And how we can, we can know the phenomenal world and we’ve got this new Middle World that we think only it’s like the limit of the phenomena, but we can’t know anything about it. Right? I gather when people were dissatisfied with—

Allen Wood
Well Hegel even thought that there was an incoherence in the idea that we, that there were objects that we could think but could not know, because he thought that just thinking of an object was a kind of knowledge. And so if you were to say of an object that you could, couldn’t know it, you’d have to be over on the other side of the line. And look back in order to say that and that means that the claim that there are things we can’t know is unintelligible.

John Perry
Now, when I hear the word idealism, as you just said, he was the culmination of German idealism. My mind, you know, focusing maybe on my old friend Barclay and Hume, people like that isn’t idealism. idealism is the idea that the world is basically spiritual or mind like, did Hegel believe that?

Allen Wood
Hegel thought that there isn’t any one category or set of categories or ways of conceptualizing the world that works for all purposes. But he did think that there were more and less adequate ways of conceptualizing it, and the highest way would be to conceptualize it as what he called mind or spirit. But it wouldn’t be right to think of Hagel as believing with Barkley that the only realities are minds and ideas. That’s certainly not he’s about as far from that view as you could get.

Ken Taylor
Let me let me take you let me take you to quite slightly different topic for a while. I want to talk about you said, Hegel is the culmination of this kind of post Conte and grappling with what they regarded as Khan’s incomplete project. Tell me something about that time and about what was driving people and who was and where Hegel fit in. And I’ll just has helped me put Hegel in his philosophical times a little bit more.

Allen Wood
They were, that was a time after the French Revolution, in which they were enormous social changes. And people were trying to conceptualize these philosophically, it was a very commonly held view that what the French had done in the political realm the Germans were to do in the philosophical realm.

Ken Taylor
But what is that? Give me that analogy.

Allen Wood
Well, the idea is, the French were bringing about a new political world, and the Germans were supposed to bring about a new world in the realm of thought. And Hegel was trying to do that through a single encompassing system.

Ken Taylor
And what was supposed to be the great advantage of this new realm of thought and how it was supposed to solve the problems of the old or supersede the old?

Allen Wood
Well what the way that Hegel would have, would have conceptualized this, I think, is that we’re trying most of all, to understand ourselves in the society that we’re a part of, that we understand that society as rational. And that makes us free, because now we do what we’re doing in the society. And we do it knowing what we’re doing and understanding it correctly.

Ken Taylor
Okay, so I’m not quite sure I’ve got this picture. So we’re in a time of great ferment, great social change, all kinds of old institutions are falling away, and we’re looking for some kind of philosophical underpinnings for those and Hegel is going to provide them is that the idea—democratic polity and all that?

Allen Wood
Well, it wasn’t in Hegel’s view as of just about anyone in that time. Democracy isn’t a word he would have used. Hegel was a constitutional monarchist. He believed in representative institutions, he believed in a market economy. He had a certain rather encompassing conception of what the modern state should be after the French Revolution. And it was one that involved the freedom of individuals their rights. It also involved certain kinds of social unity and solidarity, that a lot of people wouldn’t probably favor now.

John Perry
So basically, we have individual freedom, we have some representative institutions. But at the top, we have a constitutional monarchy. So I’m seeing the connection between Hegel and modern Republican neoconservatives because this is essentially what we’re evolving into, I guess we’re going to shift back and forth between various bushes.

Allen Wood
Well, one of the ways in which Hegel would not like contemporary conservatism is that he while he thought there should be a market economy, he thought the economy should be fairly strictly regulated by the state, because he was worried that it would lead to all kinds of discrepancies between rich and poor. And he was very much worried by the arising of a class of people who didn’t feel connected or in any kind of solidarity with the society as a whole.

Ken Taylor
This is where Marx first got the idea from alienation? did he just cribbed that from Hegel,

Allen Wood
I think there is a there’s the beginnings in Hegel of the Marxian idea of the proletariat as a revolutionary class. Hegel didn’t want to see it that way, because he wanted to see the contemporary society as one in which we could feel at home and understand ourselves rationally. Both Hegel and Marx thought that it was very common for people not to be able to understand themselves rationally in the society they lived in. Marx thought that you couldn’t understand yourself rationally and accept life in this society and Hegel thought you could.

John Perry
Just a couple of words about Hegel’s personal life. Was he from a rich family or poor family, a Protestant family, a Catholic family, where didhe come from?

Allen Wood
He came from Southwest Germany. His father was a middle class civil servant. He was a Protestant. And he was a middle class, civil servants son and who became a civil servant because an academic in those days, was a civil servant.

Ken Taylor
You’re listening to Philosophy Talk. Our subject today is the philosophy of Georg Hegel. Our guest is Allen Wood from Stanford University.

John Perry
We’ve been talking about the life and times of Hegel and some of the basic reasons he’s important. In the next segment, we’ll delve further into his view of reality, concepts and contradiction. You can join by calling 415-841-4134. Outside the Bay Area, toll free 1-800-525-9917

Ken Taylor
Reality, concepts, and contradictions—Hegel’s view and your views, when Philosophy Talk continues.

John Perry
Jack Barry Realtors is proud to support Philosophy Talk.  Jack Berry real realtors.com. 415-564-0225. Real estate services for your business or home since 1969.

Ricard Wagner, “Ride of the Valkyries.” Wagner was inspired by Hegelian thought. This is Philosophy Talk. And I’m John Perry.

Ken Taylor
And I’m Ken Taylor. Our topic today is Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Have you been touched by the writings of Hegel? Reading it over the fireside? Give us your thoughts about Hegel.

John Perry
The number is 415-841-4134. That’s 415-841-4134. Outside the Bay Area, call toll free at 1-800-525-9917. And from all around the world, even from China, you can send us email at comments@philosophytalk.org.

Ken Taylor
Our guest is Allen Wood from Stanford University, and we’ve got a caller on the line—Esther in San Francisco, welcome to Philosophy Talk. What’s your comment or question?

Esther
Well, I’m anxious to hear more about this term Zeitgeist. And how, how Hegel sort of related to that, and I’m wondering, specifically, it sounds like this idea of social, sort of a social community of, of, I don’t know, I can’t decide if if the term would be sort of political thought, or spiritual underpinnings and wondering if your guests can maybe flesh that out a little bit. I originally was going to ask if, what Hegel what relationship Hegel might have had to Spinoza, if any, but I think I’m more interested in the social, political, and/or spiritual components.

Ken Taylor
Okay Esther, thanks. You’re allowed to change your mind. So let’s talk about Hegel’s social and political. Let me press this question a little bit. It’s because you said something about wanting us to feel at home and the society we’re in and wanting to feel we’re rational. Hegel is gonna get has this project of rationalizing, in a way, the society we’re in and rationalizing our feeling of home and but you know, history is a mess. Society is a mess. The one the society I live in is the outcome. Take the french french revolution, you know, and especially at certain points in that whole thing. It’s just a mess. It’s just a struggle for power over this power hungry group over that power hungry group. What’s this thing about rationalizing society and making us feel at home in this historical mess, this whirl and twirl?

Allen Wood
Well, Hegel’s famous saying was that the rational is actual and the actual is rational. When he said that he didn’t mean that everything that exists is rational. He thought that the basic structure of the world including the basic structure of society was rational. But there are accidents that happen to people and he thinks it’s a necessary truth about us, that we are subject to these accidents. If if someone’s relative were to be run over by a truck. That’s just an accidental fact. There’s nothing rational about that. Hegel will differ from some people who tried to justify God’s ways by saying that there must have been some secret purpose to that. Hegel’s answer on the other hand is this is simply an aspect of the world that is, falls outside the rational outside the actual, it’s merely the transitory and contingent, what he was trying to do in philosophy is to get us to understand the essentials of society of nature, that makes sense that make rational sense.

Ken Taylor
So this was—tell me more about this. So, is it that the development of society over time, the growth of social social formations and cultural formations is like the all the work of reason is that the view that, you know, you see reason working itself out over time and giving rise to this cultural formation within that cultural formation? And that social organization? I mean, tell me about that.

Allen Wood
That’s right, yes. Reason operates through stages. Each stage has its own kind of society, which Hegel would call a form of ethical life. Each society has its own way of thinking about art, religion, and philosophy. And societies go through periods of growth, maturity, decline. And then there are often tumultuous radical periods in which things change very rapidly. Hegel is trying to develop a theory of history on which you can make sense of these changes.

John Perry
Now we’ve got some email that is right on that this is from Polly in Pomona, and she says, my understanding of Hegel, was it his fundamental idea was that history proceeds in this triad thesis, antithesis, synthesis. Wasn’t that his main idea? And can you explain it?

Allen Wood
Well, that terminology thesis, antithesis, synthesis was used by some of Hegel’s predecessors, fixed and shelling, but Hegel never use them except what he was describing the views of fixed and shelling. When somebody describes Hegel in that way, they are actually telling you something that they’re not attending to, namely, that they probably haven’t read Hegel.

John Perry
So take that, Polly in Ponoma. But we hope you keep listening to Philosophy Talk.

Ken Taylor
Walk me through a little bit of a concrete example about social and historical development and how we can see it as different stages of reason. I mean, pick your favorite example.

Allen Wood
The most important thing about the modern world for Hegel is the emergence of a new kind of institution which Hegel calls civil society. Civil society starts with the market economy. But it’s not just that, for Hegel, it’s a set of social identities and roles that are connected with your economic activity, and that connect people to each other and to society. Hegel didn’t think that there was such an institution in earlier stages. And he connected the idea of civil society with the idea of individuals as free subjects who choose their own mode of life. And it’s the emergence of the individual in the modern world that comes along with it.

Ken Taylor
So the individual as a free subject who chooses his or her own life, that’s a certain kind of his cultural formation at a certain point of history. And before that, there were no individuals who chose their own lives? I mean, maybe people didn’t think of that.

Allen Wood
People didn’t value individuality, in Hegel’s view, until the modern world. They didn’t build the evaluation of individuality into their social structure.

Ken Taylor
Were our pre modern, pre—were non modern precursors, were they mistaken, benighted? Or or did our event coming to value individuality, thereby make it to be valued?

Allen Wood
Well, it’s Hegel’s view that the human spirit in history is both trying to realize its idea of itself. And in the process of that it changes what it is it changes the idea that it should realize. So it’s not that people in the past simply didn’t know something about themselves. It’s that they, in the past, they hadn’t yet become what it takes to value an individual.

John Perry
You’re listening to Philosophy Talk, join us—within the 415 Area code 841-4134. That’s 841-4134 Outside the Bay Area, 1-800-525-9917. Here’s your chance to learn about Hegel, something you’ve probably always wanted to do.

Ken Taylor
You make that what you just said, makes Hegel sound like a kind of relativist in people who do not see themselves as free individuals freely choosing their lives who lived on a know in some kind of feudal order. It was not the case that they were free individuals freely choosing their lives and People who lived in a civil society with a market economy became by their own valuing something different. So it’s kind of there’s a kind of relativism there. And a kind of kind of, I don’t know, historical social constitution of stuff.

Allen Wood
Well, there’s some truth to that if you would have put to Hegel, the question whether his philosophy is relativistic, he would say have said, definitely not. He thinks that the way we look at things in the modern world is a deeper and truer way of looking at them than people were capable of in past societies. And so he doesn’t think that it’s that they’re all just different and not commensurable. He thinks that the modern world understands things more rationally.

John Perry
So we’ve got an email here. This is from a fella named Jack, who’s on Gower Street, University College London not far from where Marx worked out some of his ideas. And he says, listening to your excellent Philosophy Talk program on the internet. Could you say a little bit more about Hegel’s concept of dialectic and how it relates to Marx’s idea of dialectical materialism?

Allen Wood
Yeah, well, maybe I should say the term dialectical materialism was never used by Marx or by Engels, Joe. Well, that is a Marxist. Hegel’s dialectic is perhaps best thought of as a way of that he thinks different categories or concepts, show their limitations and develop into others in his system of speculative logic. He wants to develop all the different repertoire of concepts that we have. And he doesn’t think that any of them apply universally everywhere. Some of them give you a deeper understanding of reality than others. And the way that you derive them is by finding that they show their limitations when they run into philosophical contradictions. And you resolve the contradictions by moving on to the next concept.

Ken Taylor
You’re listening to Philosophy Talk, we’re talking about Hegel with Alan would join our discussion. 415-841-4134 That’s 415-841-4134 Outside the Bay Area 1-800-525-9997. Although Hegel is a hardcore philosopher to read, he’s a really profound guy and Alan is helping us see into the depths of Hegel. Ed in Berkeley is on the line. Welcome to Philosophy Talk, Ed.

Ed
I’m afraid to go forward I share with my colleague in London Yes, yes. I don’t know anything at all about Hegel. I think it’s thesis antithesis, synthesis. And so I hesitate to ask, but I was going to ask, but I’ll kind of, well, I’ll ask my original question and perverted into something more possibly more interesting. What’s the difference between a deconstructionist concept and an A thesis, but he didn’t have the guts. He just use somebody else’s. So maybe we can compare it to Heisenberg’s problem about knowledge versus evolution that Darwin said he sounds like there’s a little bit of both of those in there.

John Perry
So Ed asks—he’s apologizing for formulating this question before before we learned about the thesis, antithesis, synthesis not really being Hegel’s idea. But he says, Isn’t isn’t this notion of thesis that somehow they’re in Hegel, similar to the deconstruction this ideas?

Allen Wood
Well, many deconstructionists think of themselves as Hig aliens, they are not the first in the 20th century to try to get the Hig alien idea that thought falls into contradictions and in coherences, but to leave out the thought that it that it can resolve these at a higher level. And I would say that that’s the way deconstructionist like a lot of earlier aliens in the 20th century differ from Hegel himself.

Ken Taylor
I think of tell me if this is a crazy thought, I think of pragmatist, as kind of like aliens without Galeon metaphysics. That is, they think, inquiry is, is walk through a space of possibilities. There’s lots of wrong turns, there’s some right turns, I mean, and we get to an EPI, quote, end of inquiry, we get to a point of convergence in which it’s all done. And we can now tell a story retrospectively about what that walk was like, and which turns were wrong turns in which turns were right turns. But before we get to that endpoint, we can’t tell any such story, but it’s just trying out and then projects come crashing down and we try it again. And some project comes crashing down. But they’ve got that kind of story without kind of the absolute Spirit coming to know itself. Is that a crazy thought?

Allen Wood
No, I think that’s actually fairly close. One way in which Hegel would differ from the pragmatists Is that he thinks that there is a principle reason for make trying to make our understanding of history converge at the best understanding of the present that we can come up with.

John Perry
So, so speaking of the pragmatists back in that same area era was Hosea Royce and I used to read Hosea rice. And maybe that’s where I came to many misconceptions about German idealism, because for Hosea Royce, the absolute spirit was really spirit, right. I mean, that was a real mover and shaker in universities. That’s how I remember it. We live in this world of mind, but use the term absolute spirit with Hegel. But he doesn’t mean that by it, I take it.

Allen Wood
Well, what Hegel means by absolute spirit. He’s the religious name for it is God. But Hegel’s views about God are not very orthodox. Maybe this is the point at which to address the question that the earlier caller had about Hegel and Spinoza. Both Hegel and Spinoza think that there is really only one ultimate reality. And you could call it God. But there isn’t any room for separating absolutely God off from the world, the world isn’t some separate thing that God creates. I think you could describe Hegel’s view by saying that God is the fact that the world has a rational structure, right? There is no separate God.

Ken Taylor
I want to go back to Hegel. He seems political stuff, because he seems like a deeply conservative philosopher and away. We’ve got a caller on the line—Randall and Oakland who has a question, I think, pertinent to this issue. Welcome to Philosophy Talk, Randall.

Randall
Thank you. Thank you. I love Hegel sounds like a Unitarian kinda.

Ken Taylor
Sort of. What’s your question or comment?

Randall
My question is a little more specific. It’s dealing with what what did Hegel think about the institution of marriage because during the his era, I’m sure that institution was very hard and specific and concrete.

Ken Taylor
Hegel has lots of things about the family.

Allen Wood
He has quite a bit to say about that some things in relative to his time, were progressive in that he didn’t, he didn’t accept the idea of arranged marriages that had to do with the broader feudal extended family. His conception of the family was the bourgeois nuclear family. This is part of his emphasis on civil society. But from the standpoint of contemporary feminism, Hegel was a very conservative, he thought that the place of the woman was to rule over the household and the place of the man was to go out into the world. This is he was simply conceptualizing the institution of marriage as it was in his time.

John Perry
Well now, Fichte got fired from that job that Hegel later had for being an atheist and then shelling left because he was running off with another man’s wife. Did Hegel do ever do anything kind of radical and interesting in his life?

Allen Wood
Well, he did have an illegitimate child by his married landlady. And this was part of his reason for leaving Aina behind after the Battle of Vienna.

John Perry
Pretty seamy professorship.

Ken Taylor
Really, really quickly, though, backpack and family and merit and marriage and, and back to also the civil society in the market economy. Marx thought that the market economy was would destroy things like family, he says this thing in the Communist Manifesto, capitalism destroys all relationships between man and man except the calculations of raw self interest or something like that. Right? Is there any thought like that in Hegel, that because the market economy regard we become free autonomous self choosing individuals, and because family is another kind of source of constraint, that they can’t really coexist? Is there any thought?

Allen Wood
Well, this is one reason that Hegel wanted the market economy to be structured around a set of customary social roles, so that you don’t have just atomistic homo economic because Hegel is quite hostile to the idea of a society in which people were seen as simply self interested Adams. His defense of the market economy was one in which both state regulation and other social institutions connected to the market would moderate its influence and keep it from being what Marx is afraid.

Ken Taylor
You’re listening to Philosophy Talk. We’re discussing Hegel with Allen Wood from Stanford University.

John Perry
We’ve been examining Hegel’s views of reality and the development of concepts. In the next segment, we’ll synthesize some of this by tackling Hegel’s ideas Zeitgeist and the progress of history

Ken Taylor
Tech guys, history, your calls and emails—when Philosophy Talk continues.

The Propellerheads
It’s all just a little bit of history repeating.

John Perry
The Propellerheads featuring Miss Shirley Bassey and “History Repeating.” I’m John Perry, this is Philosophy Talks, the program that questions everything…

Ken Taylor
…except your intelligence. I’m Ken Taylor. We’re discussing the philosophy of Hegel. And we’re about to launch into his philosophy of history. What do you think about history—Is history just one big mess? You know, the powerful winning out over the weak things going astray? Or is there a progression to history? Is history reason working itself out of out over time? Join us by calling 415-841-4134 That’s 415-841-4134

John Perry
Outside the Bay Area, call toll free at 1-800-525-9917. And finally, you can email us comments@philosophytalk.org. Our guest is our colleague from Stanford, Allen Wood.

Ken Taylor
We’ve got lots of lines open. So give us a call. Allen, look, I don’t know about this thing about the end of history Fukuyama wrote his book, “The End of History,” supposedly inspired by by Hegel, I tend to think of history as a mess, as just a mess, a constant struggle, sometimes reason triumphs, sometimes illusion, sometimes superstition. What makes Hegel believe that history is kind of reason working itself out?

Allen Wood
Well, about the end of history. I would say that, that the idea that Hegel believed in an end of history isn’t something you’ll find in Hegel, it’s something you’ll find in a Russian emigre to France named Alexander Khrushchev, who wrote lectures on Hegel’s phenomenology in the 1930s 1930s. And that’s what Fukuyama is reacting to.

Ken Taylor
So this is kind of pseudo-Hegel.

Allen Wood
Yes, it’s pseudo Hegel. Hegel does think that we are limited in what we can know about society. And in fact about everything else. By the historical present, the future is something which we cannot really properly conceive or know anything about. So you could say that, well, maybe it sounds trivial, but for Hegel, the history ends in the present.

Ken Taylor
Right, but he doesn’t he does have a view, is it mean, he wrote a book called reason in history? Right? It’s not right. Yeah. And he does have a view, as I understand it, that history is, in some sense, the work of reason, the work of the work of spirit, coming to self knowledge, if you look at history, I mean, it looks to me like just a mess. It’s kind of accidental. Who wins? Who loses? I mean, we could have lived in a world in which Hitler triumph and then how would that look? would that look like the work of reason? That’s this, the work of power?

Allen Wood
Well, Hegel doesn’t think that history is just accidents and just bad behavior. He thinks even human bad behavior plays a rational role in history. Some of his most radical ideas are about the way what he calls world historical individuals. People like Julius Caesar and Napoleon, bring about radical change in history. He thinks that they are morally very bad people, but there are unconscious purposes working through their actions. Why does he think though? Well, because he thinks that at each stage in history, there is a set of norms, what he calls ethical life and the The only way that a new form of society can be brought about is through tearing down the old and it takes these ambitious, passionate, unprincipled men to do that.

Ken Taylor
Yeah, you’re listening to Philosophy Talk, we’re talking about the philosophy of Georg Hegel with Allen Wood of Stanford University. Give us a call 415-841-4134. That’s 415-841-4134. And we’ve got a caller on the line—Sue in San Francisco. Welcome to philosophy talk, Sue.

Sue
I do believe that you can predict the future that history really does repeat itself. And that winners do right history. And that you introduce this topic by saying Is it true that the wealthy and the elite do win out over others? I’ve just finished researching a book since 4000 BC, and it appears to me that whether you’re the leaders, religiously, politically, or scientifically, that you seem to take on this fascist mindset that seems to want to win and that we’ve become a society a world that is addicted to control. I know it’s a trite phrase right now. But I think it has some merit.

John Perry
You sound a little pessimistic.

Ken Taylor
Well, I do I am. I like I said, I’ve been studying history for the last nine years. And I value kindness greatly now, much more than I ever did before, especially from people who have money, and I come from a family with some wealth.

Thank you. Sue, I think I share your dark vision, pessimistic vision of history, and it’s in the dynamics of it. It seems to me that, Alan, can you convince me in the head game in a few minutes, using arguments from Hegel, that the dynamic of history really is a dynamic of reason, kind of walking through a space of possibilities and settling on?

John Perry
Well, let me just ask a preliminary question. He talks about history, are we talking about the actual accidental morass of events? Are we talking about history is what we construct looking back picking and choosing among those things in order to make sense? The last is a work of reason. But that’s no big surprise, right?

Allen Wood
Well, that’s the second thing is our way of gaining some kind of intelligibility out of the first kind of thing. And as I said a while ago, Hegel thinks there is a certain realm of contingency accident, human error, human bad behavior, that we can’t make rational sense of.

Ken Taylor
But here, okay, so here’s the way I can accept Hegel. Taking off from Sue’s remark the winners write the history. And and here’s the kind of what humans do when they write the history when they tell a narrative of their own coming to be, they tell a narrative that makes that’s a narrative of progress toward them, right? And deviations away from them are our history of mistakes. So whoever writes the history will tell it in a progressive way. Right. But if somebody else had one, you know, if the slaveholders had won the Civil War, they would tell a story about how the slaveholding South ultimately triumph. And that was the work of reason. So it’s all just rationalization. It’s not really anything deeper. Could Hegel accept that?

Allen Wood
Well, you could have people writing history and getting it wrong. Hegel’s idea is that you can comprehend history, you can see how things got to be where they are, and you can make rational sense of it.

Ken Taylor
But wait a minute, you said to me, you kind of accepted this kind of reading of Hegel as having a relativistic side, right? Because the guys who didn’t cognize themselves as free autonomous being choosing their lives. They weren’t free autonomous beings choosing their lives. So now we who have come to see ourselves, and they have thereby made ourselves this, when we tell the story, we’ll tell it in our own terms. But if those guys had told the story, they tell it in their terms, and the terms would be completely different. Right? Well, isn’t it we kind of hostage isn’t the kind of rational outcome of history kind of hostage to—

Allen Wood
If we can tell a rational story leading to the way things were, that is supposed to give us a reason for thinking that they couldn’t have turned out otherwise.

John Perry
So we’ve got an email here, Alan, from an analytical philosopher Peter in Oakland. To summarize, he says, Look, Hegel sounds very interesting. Lots of interesting ideas. They sound mostly like spiritual musings. But as analytical philosophers, aren’t we supposed to hear some arguments is he got any arguments that we should believe this big theory he’s got.

Allen Wood
If you look at a book like the phenomenology of spirit, the standards of argument that Hegel sets for himself are extremely high. He thinks he’s running through all the possible wrong ways of looking at the world and showing how each one destroys itself. Now, it’s another question whether Hegel succeeds in executing argumentatively everything that but of course, that’s a big question with respect to Descartes or Kant or anybody else.

Ken Taylor
I just got this is dark or email or their self identified as an analytic philosopher, I’m gonna take you back and tell me if you if you understand what Rorty meant. See, he already says the problem with analytic philosopher and with our email or his we’re all stuck in this content moment. And literary critics have Trint and literary criticism has transcended analytic philosophy and it’s the really the now the new queen of the humanities or something and they’re in a Hegelian moment what. Do you know what Rorthy meant?

Allen Wood
I don’t want to be in a position of interpreting Rorty, but I do think that he, he accepts a picture that a lot of both Chaldeans and aliens accept that I don’t that you have to choose between the two. I don’t want to choose between the two, I think they are part of the same project.

Ken Taylor
What would this choice—What’s this choice about, choosing between Kant and Hegel by the by people?

Allen Wood
That’s a very big question. You do it. And it’s often it’s often that the Chaldeans think you should be more modest about what you think you can know and The Hague aliens think that there’s absolutely no limits to this. So the element of truth in what Rudy says, if I can put it in my own way, would be that Hegel thinks that you can conceptualize and understand the world in all sorts of ways, including those of the natural sciences. And those are the social sciences and those of the humanities. But Hegel thinks that there is a priority among them, and that the more adequate ones are the ones that have to do with the humanities, I put it broadly. And that I think, is probably what already has in mind.

John Perry
You know, I think I can get to that same point by remaining stuck in my own moment, which is a human moment. I don’t even go to go to God, human, a lot of room for the knowledge involved in the humanities, in my humble opinion.

Ken Taylor
Allen, on that note, I’m gonna have to thank you for joining us. It’s been a really great conversation.

Allen Wood
Okay well, thank you. I’ve enjoyed it too.

Ken Taylor
Our guest has been Allen Wood, Professor of Philosophy from Stanford University, friend and colleague, author of “Hegel’s Ethical Thought” and editor and translator of many of Hegel’s writings.

John Perry
We want to thank all the callers we didn’t get a chance to talk to, and I’ve just got a pile of interesting email we didn’t get a chance to get to thanks a lot. Sometimes we read your email and has influence on us even if we can’t work it in.

Ken Taylor
The reason we didn’t get to some of that email is because they send it to the ideas address rather than the comments address. So don’t make that mistake again, guys, okay? So John, what did what did we learn today? Are you wiser? Maybe you’ve synthesized the antithesis?

John Perry
Well, I, you know, just on the hypothetical supposition that I thought that Hegel said thesis antithesis, synthesis, I won’t ever say it again. Nor will I. I also learned that Marx didn’t call himself a dialectical materialist. I also learned that Hegel is fascinating and I get better get busy and get up to speed on Hegel.

Ken Taylor
Yeah, you know what I think? I don’t think I am a Hegelian. But I think I have views like Hegel’s without Hegel’s mistakes. So you know what, if you really want to learn the truth, the Hegelian sordid truth, read my book when it’s done.

John Perry
We’re gonna have to get you some self-esteem lessons, Ken.

Ken Taylor
Anyway, this conversation continues at our blog, the blog.philosophytalk.org, where our motto is Cogito ergo Blogo—I think, therefore I blog.

John Perry
And you can download podcasts of our program from our website as well. We’ve spent the last hour investigating the life and times of Hegel. But to wrap it all up in a nice little package, we leave the last word to Ian Shoales, the Sixty-Second Philosopher.

Ian Shoales
Ian Shoales… In 1989, Francis Fukuyama wrote an essay called “The End of History” for the neoconservative journal “The National Interest.” In it he claimed that democracy has won against all other forms of governance, the world won’t be clear sailing war on terror or anyone but as he puts it, quote, liberal democracy may constitute the endpoint of mankind’s ideological evolution. Unquote. Fukuyama stated Georg Hegel, from whom the concept of an into history derives history had to have an end purpose Hegel believed would lead to what he called a bad infinity. But Fukuyama took his view of Hegel from a Russian philosopher named Alexander cohesity, who called himself a Marxist of the right. So this is Hegel is filtered through Fukuyama Foucault heavy through Marx. Democracy may mark the Hague alien end of history, but others have made Hegel the cause of both Marxism and fascism. He’s also been called a metaphysician, a pantheist, the precursor of existentialism, a gnostic, the first holistic philosopher and apologist for Marx and worse, Karl Popper called Hegel’s philosophy bombastic and mystifying, Kant Bertrand Russell said he was the hardest to understand the great philosophers Hagos colleagues, Schopenhauer said quote, the height of audacity and serving up pure nonsense and stringing together senseless and extravagant mazes of words, such as had only been previously known in Mad houses was finally reached in Hegel, unquote. But he could have been jealous Hegel with a very popular teacher Schopenhauer was not his former friend Friedrich Schelling said of Hegel, after his death that his philosophy was shallow and superficial, showing also harbored resentment toward Hegel, who had surpassed him and reputation showing students by the way, included Friedrich Engels, certainly Kierkegaard, and the future anarchist Mikhail Bakunin, all of whom produced their own views of Eagles views. As soon as you die Hegel’s followers had split into two camps the left aliens, atheists and the right aliens, Christian fundamentalists, all of whom found to Hegel to their liking. Hegel is like the elephant described with a blind man, how can one philosopher mean so many things to so many people? Well, for one, Hegel was the exact opposite of a tabula rasa. He wrote a lot of words, in other words tried to come up basically with a theory of everything and pros, both opaque and obscure. In fact, there are dozens of alien glossaries out there unnecessary it seems for a reader to wade through his work. One of his concepts, for example, is something called off haven in English Sublation. To sublight, is to simultaneously supersede and and preserve something, you begin to see how tricky Hegel is he used it to mean that even when an old idea is refuted, it is still contained in the new idea. Maybe that’s what happens with Hegel, his readers cherry pick what they want from him, declare that the chair is now an apple, and either ignore the rest of the fruit or question the motives of those who pick it for the rest of us to know what Hegel really thought that would require, you know, reading all of him with the glossaries in German. That’s a lot of fruit. I gotta go

John Perry
Wow, Ken, my head is dizzy from sixty seconds of rapid-fire philosophy!

Ken Taylor
If your head is dizzy, that means you’ve got a conundrum in your mind and we can solve it for you, can’t we John.

John Perry
Yes—go to our webpage.

Ken Taylor
Conundrums@philosophytalk.org, or hit that conundrums button on the webpage. We won’t promise to solve your problem, but we will give you lots of new ways to think about it.

John Perry
Philosophy Talk is a presentation of Ben Manilla Productions and the trustees of Leland Stanford Junior University.

Ken Taylor
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John Perry
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Ken Taylor
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John Perry
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Ken Taylor
The views expressed (or mis-expressed) on this program do not necessarily represent the opinions of Stanford University or of our funders.

John Perry
The conversation continues on our website, www.philosophytalk.org. I’m John Perry.

Ken Taylor
And I’m Ken Taylor. Thank you for listening.

John Perry
And thank you for thinking.