Welcome back to the Deep Dive. We are doing something
a little different today. Usually we're looking
at a specific event in the news or a scientific
breakthrough or maybe a business case study.
Right. Something with a clear beginning and end.
Exactly. But today we are standing at the foot
of a mountain. And I don't mean a metaphorical
hill or a gentle slope. I mean the Mount Everest
of Western thought. It really is the peak, isn't
it? If you want to understand the landscape of
modern thinking, Marxism, existentialism, critical
theory, even, you know, parts of psychology,
you eventually have to climb this mountain. You
have to make the ascent. But the air is thin
up there and a lot of people, they turn back.
We are talking, of course, about Georg Wilhelm
Friedrich Hegel, the philosopher everyone has
heard of. But let's be honest, very few people
actually understand. The name alone summons up
images of dust jackets, sentences that run for
three pages without a verb, and this creeping
anxiety that you are missing the punchline of
a very complicated joke. That is the reputation.
He's the final boss of philosophy for a lot of
students. You get through Kant, you think you're
smart, and then you hit Hegel and just hit a
wall. He is notoriously difficult. Exactly. But
here is our mission for today. We are going to
strip away that scary reputation. We've got a
massive stack of sources here, biographical details,
deep textual breakdowns of the phenomenology
of spirit and the science of logic, and historical
records from his time in Jena and Berlin. A lot
to get through. A lot. Our goal is to find the
Hume story underneath the jargon. and more importantly,
to figure out why this 19th century German professor
still matters. And he does matter. That's the
critical thing. The world we live in, the way
we think about history, progress, and even our
own identities is profoundly Hegelian, whether
we realize it or not. So let's start with the
central tension of his life. Because on paper,
this guy shouldn't have been a revolutionary.
He looks like the ultimate insider. Not at all.
We tend to think of Hegel as this abstract machine,
this system builder who lived in an ivory tower.
But the sources, they paint a picture of a man
whose life was incredibly chaotic. Really? Oh,
yeah. Revolution, war, financial ruin, illegitimate
children, intense personal struggle. He didn't
just want to add a chapter to philosophy. He
wanted to finish the book. He really thought
he had the final answer. He claimed to have created
a system that explains everything. God, nature,
history, freedom, the whole shebang. A system
of science that covers the whole of reality.
It's audaciously ambitious. It's almost arrogant,
but in a way that you have to respect. You do,
but he didn't start that way. Let's look at where
he came from. Okay, so part one. The formative
years. He was born in Stuttgart in 1770. And
to understand Hegel, you have to understand the
timeline. He is stepping into the world right
at the friction point of two massive tectonic
plates in history. You mean the Enlightenment
and Romanticism. Exactly. You have the end of
the Enlightenment, that era of strict reason,
categorization, science, Isaac Newton, a world
of, you know, clockwork. Everything in its box.
Precisely. And then you have the beginning of
the romantic movement, which was all about emotion,
art, nature, the sublime, the individual spirit.
Hegel was born right on that fault line. And
his background was pretty straight -laced, right?
Very. His father was a revenue officer, a civil
servant, so he came from a respectable, bureaucratic
background. He was expected to follow a very
specific, rigid path. But the real magic, the
spark, happens when he goes to college. He heads
to the Protestant seminary in Tübingen, the Stift.
And looking at the records, it seems like he
ended up in the most intellectually stacked dorm
room in human history. It really was a dream
team. It's almost statistically impossible. Imagine
this. You have Hegel, who is studying theology.
He's the old man of the group, a bit serious,
a bit plotting, even though they're roughly the
same age. Then you have his roommates. Friedrich
Hölderlin, who becomes one of Germany's greatest
lyric poets, just a beautiful, sensitive soul.
And Friedrich Schelling, who becomes a philosophical
prodigy. I mean, this guy is famous across Europe
by age 20. He's a wunderkind. That's insane.
It's like finding out that Lennon and McCartney
were randomly assigned roommates in a freshman
dorm with, I don't know, James Joyce. It really
is that level of talent packed into one small
space. But they weren't just hanging out studying
the Bible, were they? No, far from it. The atmosphere
in the Stift was repressive. It was orthodox,
dogmatic, and very conservative. The teachers
were trying to mold these young men into proper,
obedient pastors. And they were having none of
it. None of it. The three of them bonded over
a shared rebellion. They hated the dry, dusty
theology they were being fed. They wanted something
alive, something that spoke to the spirit of
the age. And the thing that electrified them
was the news coming from across the border. The
French Revolution. 1789. They were watching the
old world crumble. Kings. hierarchies, the church.
It was all being challenged by the ideas of liberty,
equality, and fraternity. And this wasn't just
an abstract political thing for them. No, it
was personal. The sources tell us that Hegel
and his friends read the newspapers with shared
enthusiasm. There's a wonderful detail in the
biography. They reportedly planted a liberty
tree in a meadow near Tübingen. A liberty tree?
What does that involve exactly? Well, it was
a symbol of the revolution. You plant this sapling
as a living monument to freedom. They danced
around it, likely singing revolutionary songs
like the Marseillaise, which was strictly forbidden.
So this was an act of political defiance. A huge
one. Now, scholars debate whether this literally
happened or if it's a legend that grew up around
them. But spiritually, it's true. It shows where
their heads were at. Hegel wasn't a stuffy academic.
He was a young radical. And I read that he kept
a ritual for the rest of his life because of
this. Yes. This is one of my favorite details
about him. Every single year on July 14th, Bastille
de Hegel would drink a toast to the storming
of the Bastille. Every single year. Without fail.
Even decades later, when he was a distinguished
professor in Berlin, rubbing elbows with Prussian
ministers and seen as a conservative figure,
he kept that flame of 1789 alive and private.
That's fascinating. It shows a core belief that
never really went away. He identified with the
Girondins, the moderate Republicans. Even when
the terror started and things got bloody with
Robespierre, Hegel never lost that fundamental
commitment to the principles of liberty that
the revolution represented. So these three roommates,
Schelling and Holderlin, are the stars. They
are publishing. They are famous. What is Hegel
doing? Hegel is struggling. He is a late bloomer.
A classic late bloomer. While Schelling is rewriting
philosophy at 23, Hegel graduates and has to
take a job as a Hoffmeister. Which sounds fancy
in German, but is basically a glorified... live
-in babysitter for rich families. Precisely.
It was a holding pattern, a dead -end job, really.
He spent years in Bern and Frankfurt tutoring
children. But this wilderness period was crucial
for his development. Why is that? Because while
he was teaching kids grammar and Latin, he was
writing these private essays on religion and
love. He was heavily influenced by his poet friend,
Holderlin, at this point. He was trying to figure
out how love could be a philosophical principle,
a way to unify opposites. That seems like the
seed of his later dialectic. He's always trying
to bring opposing things together into a higher
unity. It is the seed. He moves from criticizing
Christianity for being too positive, meaning
too focused on authority, rules, and dogma, to
exploring how the life and teachings of Jesus
could represent a unity of life. He's trying
to bridge the gap between the infinite, you know,
God and the finite man. But he's doing this all
in private notebook. All private. It's not until
1801 that he finally gets his chance and steps
onto the public stage. Okay, this brings us to
part two of our outline, the Jena period. This
is where the biopic really picks up the pace.
It really does. Jena was the intellectual capital
of Germany at the time. It was where the Romantics
were gathering, the center of the universe for
German thought. And his old roommate gives him
a call. Yes. Schelling, his old roommate, who
is now a big shot, basically calls him up and
says, come to Jenna. Let's work together. So
he shows up, but he doesn't get a salary. He's
a private dozen. Right. An unsalaried lecturer.
Yeah. You were paid directly by the students
who took your class. If nobody showed up to your
lecture, you didn't eat. Talk about pressure.
Immense pressure. He and Schelling edit a philosophy
journal together, but Hegel is still seen as
Schelling's junior partner, his protege. He needs
to break out. He needs to define himself with
a major work. And then we hit 1806. the crisis
i was reading the source notes on this yeah and
the pressure on this man was unbelievable it's
a perfect storm it really was hegel is 36 years
old that's not young for a philosopher in those
days he has not published his masterpiece yet
he's running out of money he is under immense
pressure from his publisher to finish his first
great book the phenomenology of spirit he needs
the advance to live he desperately needs it and
while he is trying to write the final pages of
this incredibly complex mind -bending book Napoleon's
army is literally marching toward the city. It's
the Battle of Janna. The French Grand Armée is
at the gates. And there's this letter he writes.
I think this is one of the most famous letters
in the history of philosophy. He looks out his
window, or he's walking through the town, and
he sees him. He sees Napoleon. Yes. He writes
to his friend Niehammer. And the line is unforgettable.
He says, I saw the emperor, this world soul,
riding out of the city on reconnaissance. The
world's sole on horseback. Die Welt ist zu fern.
That is such a heavy metal description. But he
doesn't mean it like a fanboy meeting a celebrity,
does he? No, no, no. This is pure metaphysics.
This isn't hero worship. Hegel sees Napoleon
not just as a conquering general, but as an agent
of history with a capital H. An instrument of
something larger. Exactly. He describes the sensation
of seeing such an individual who, concentrated
here at a single point astride a horse, reaches
out over the world and masters it. For Hegel,
Napoleon is the vehicle for the Geist, the spirit
of the age. So he's... He's basically the French
Revolution made flesh. The French Revolution
on horseback. He was spreading the Code Napoleon,
a modern rational legal system, equality before
the law, the end of feudalism across Europe with
his armies. Hegel believed that history moves
forward through these specific world historical
individuals who embody the necessary change of
their time. So Napoleon isn't just a man. He's
a principle in action. That's the idea. He's
the force that's dragging a... backwards feudal
Germany into the modern world. But the irony
is brutal. I mean, while he's having this profound
philosophical insight, admiring this world soul,
that same world soldiers are looting the city
and completely ruining Hegel's life. The irony
is staggering. It was total chaos. French soldiers
burst into his lodging. He had to grab the last
manuscript pages of the phenomenology and stuff
them in his coat pocket to keep them safe. Wow.
He called the book his voyage of discovery, but
the physical voyage was him. fleeing the burning
city with his career in tatters. And his personal
life was just as messy at this time, right? The
sources mention a landlady. Yes, Christiana Burckhardt.
While all this intellectual and military drama
was unfolding, Hegel had an affair with his landlady.
She had been abandoned by her husband, and she
gave birth to an illegitimate son, Ludwig Fischer.
So let's just recap the scoreboard for Hegel
in 1807. He's broke. His university is wrecked
by war. The students have fled. He has a child
out of wedlock that he needs to support. He has
no job. And he has a very, very difficult book
that he just sent to the printers with no guarantee
that anyone will ever read it, let alone understand
it. He hit rock bottom. Absolutely. He had to
leave academia entirely. For the next year, he
worked as a newspaper editor in Bamberg. A newspaper
editor. Yep. And interestingly, it was a pro
-French paper. He was writing editorials in support
of Napoleon, which got him in hot water with
the Bavarian censors. It's strangely comforting.
You know, even Jörg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel had
to take a day job he didn't really want because
he needed the cash. It humanizes him completely.
He eventually moves on from that to be a headmaster
at a high school, a gymnasium in Nuremberg. And
he was there for a while. Correct. He stayed
there for eight years. This was a period of stability
for him. He actually got married during this
time to Marie von Tücker, who was from a patrician
family half his age, and he started a legitimate
family. So things started to look up. They did.
But those years in the wilderness, teaching philosophy
to high schoolers, were where he wrote his second
masterpiece, the monster of a book called The
Science of Logic. Okay. We have to talk about
the book that was in his pocket when he fled
Jena. The Phenomenology of Spirit. This book
has a reputation for being, let's just say, impenetrable.
It does. It is often cited as one of the most
difficult books ever written in any language.
People pick it up, read three sentences, their
eyes glaze over, and they put it down for the
rest of their lives. So if I'm a listener and
I summon the courage to pick it up, what am I
looking at? The outline calls it a voyage of
discovery. What is the mission of this book?
Well, first off, don't expect a normal textbook.
It's not a list of arguments. It's a story. It's
a Bildungsroman, a coming -of -age novel for
consciousness itself. For consciousness itself,
not for a person. Not for one person. It's the
story of spirit, or geist, coming to know itself
through human history. Let's pause on geist.
That is the quintessential Hegel word. How should
we translate that? Is it a ghost? Is it God?
Is it the mind? What is it? It's tricky because
the German word covers all those bases and more.
It is usually translated as spirit or mind. In
Hegel, it means something like the collective
human mind, the culture, the shared rationality
of a people across time. But it also has a religious,
almost divine connotation. So in the phenomenology,
Hegel is trying to show how consciousness evolves
from the most basic level of just sensing, I
see a cup. all the way up to absolute philosophical
knowledge where it understands its own structure
and its place in the universe. And the source
material mentions this path of despair. That
sounds incredibly emo. It is, in a way. Hegel
says that for consciousness to learn, it has
to suffer. It has to fail. You start with a worldview,
right? You think you understand reality. And
then you encounter an anomaly, something that
doesn't knit your theory. A contradiction. A
contradiction. Your worldview crashes. You experience
despair. But out of that wreckage, you are forced
to rebuild a more complex, more sophisticated,
more capable worldview. So failure is a necessary
part of learning. It's the only way to learn.
He uses the analogy that you cannot learn to
swim without getting in the water. You have to
risk drowning. You have to flail around and feel
that desperation to learn. That's actually very
relatable. Growth requires the destruction of
your previous self. Precisely. The most famous,
the most influential example of this growth in
the entire book is the section on the master
-servant dialectic. Okay, let's unpack this.
This is the Lord Bondsman section. The source
notes make a specific point about the translation.
It is often called master -slave, but the source
says that's a mistranslation. That's right, and
it's an important distinction. The German word
he uses is necht. which means servant or bondsman,
not sclave, which is the word for slave. So why
are they confused? The master -slave phrasing
became popular much later, largely through French
interpretations by Alexandre Kochev in the 1930s.
His lectures were hugely influential. But lord
and bondsman is more accurate to the original
text. However, the dynamic is absolutely one
of domination. So walk us through the scene.
What happens? How does this start? Hegel asks
a fundamental question. How do we become self
-conscious? How do I know who I am? And he argues,
I can't just know myself in isolation sitting
in a room thinking about it. I need you to recognize
me. I need recognition. Anerkennung. Yes, that's
the key word. So imagine two primitive self -consciousnesses
meet for the first time in some primordial forest.
They both want to be the main character. They
both want to be recognized as independent and
absolute. But they see the other person as a
threat to that independence. Two egos collide.
Exactly. So they fight. It's a life and death
struggle for recognition, for pure prestige.
And the outcome of this fight determines who
is the master and who is the servant. Right.
At a certain point in the fight, one combatant
realizes they value their biological life more
than their abstract freedom. They get scared
of dying. So they submit. They drop their sword.
They become the servant. And the other one. The
other one values freedom more than life itself.
They are willing to die for recognition. So they
win. They become the master. So at first glance,
the master has won. He gets the recognition.
The servant does what he says. Game over, right?
You would think so, but here is the Hegelian
twist, and it is absolutely brilliant. The master
is actually stuck. He's in a dead end. How so?
He wanted recognition from an equal, someone
whose opinion matters, but he just turned the
other guy into a servant, a thing, a tool. You
can't get meaningful recognition from a tool
or a machine, so the master becomes lazy, dependent
on the servant's labor and his development. just
stops. He stagnates. He's painted himself into
a corner. He's the guy who peaked in high school
and now he just relives the glory days. That's
a perfect analogy. Meanwhile, look at the servant.
The servant is forced to work. He's dealing with
the resistance of the physical world. He's plowing
the field. He's building the wall. He's shaping
raw material. He's getting his hands dirty. He's
getting his hands dirty. He has to discipline
his impulses and think rationally to get the
job done. And through this work, the servant
looks at what he has made. the field, the wall,
and realizes something profound. What's that?
He realizes, wait, I'm the one changing the world.
My mind, my rationality is impressed into this
object. I have the power to transform nature.
So the servant achieves a higher level of consciousness
and freedom through labor than the master ever
could through idleness. Exactly. The truth of
the situation, the real engine of progress, shifts
to the servant. And this is why Karl Marx loved
this section so much. He took this dynamic and
applied it directly to social classes, the bourgeoisie
as the master and the proletariat as the servant.
You could see the direct line. It's a straight
line. But it also influenced feminism. With Simone
de Beauvoir analyzing the male -female dynamic
and anti -colonialism with Frantz Fanon, who
talked about the colonizer and the colonized.
The idea that the oppressed have a deeper insight
into reality than the oppressor, that is pure
Hegel. And this is just one stop on this voyage
of discovery. The book keeps going after this,
right? Oh, it keeps going. It's a marathon. It
goes through stoicism, skepticism, the unhappy
consciousness, which is this internal split where
you feel separated from God or the absolute.
It analyzes the... Enlightenment, the French
Revolution, the terror. It's a tour of Western
history and psychology, all framed as the internal
development of the mind. Incredible. OK, so he
finishes this massive book, survives the war
and eventually gets a job in Nuremberg. And then
he writes. The science of logic. Now, when I
hear logic, I think of math or, you know, A plus
B equals C. But Hegel's logic is weird. It is
not formal logic at all. It's metaphysical logic.
He's trying to describe the very structure of
reality itself, or as he puts it, God as he is
in his eternal essence before the creation of
nature and a finite spirit. That is a bold claim.
I'm going to map out the mind of God before the
Big Bang. Hegel was nothing if not bold. And
this brings us to the biggest myth we need to
bust about him. The whole thesis antithesis synthesis
thing. Yes. If you Google Hegel, that's the first
thing that comes up. History moves by thesis
antithesis synthesis. You see it in business
presentations. But our sources say. This is fake
news. Absolute fake news. Hegel never, ever used
those three terms to describe his method. He
never used them in that sequence. Seriously,
where did it come from then? That formula actually
comes from an earlier philosopher, Finberg, and
was later popularized by a guy named Heinrich
Moritz Schlebeius, who was trying to simplify
Hegel for students. Hegel actually thought that
formula was too mechanical, too lifeless. It
implies you just smash two things together and
take them up. He wanted something organic, something
that grows. So what is his method? If it's not
that tidy little triangle, how does change happen
in his system? The key German word, the magic
word in all of Hegel is Aufheben. Aufheben. And
this word is a linguistic nightmare because it
has three contradictory meanings, right? It's
a translator's despair, but a philosopher's delight.
Aufheben in German means three things simultaneously,
and Hegel uses all three meanings at once. It
means, one, to lift up or to raise to a higher
level. Two. to cancel, destroy, or abolish, and
three, to preserve or to keep. Okay, hold on.
How can you destroy and preserve something at
the exact same time? Give us an example. Okay,
think of a fruit tree. You have a blossom on
a branch. For the fruit, say, an apple to appear,
what has to happen to the blossom? The blossom
has to die. It wilts and falls off. Right. The
fruit... negates the blossom it destroys it the
blossom is gone but the fruit is also the truth
of the blossom it's what the blossom was trying
to become all along i see so the blossom is cancelled
it's physically gone but it's also preserved
its genetic purpose is fulfilled and carried
forward in the fruit and the whole process is
lifted up to a higher level of the plant's life
cycle That is El Pipo. Okay, that makes sense.
It's not just A beats B. It's that A and B clash.
And out of that clash comes a new thing, C, that
keeps the essential truth of both A and B. but
gets rid of their one -sidedness. Exactly. That
is the dialectic. It's a process of internal
conflict and resolution. Hegel believes that
concepts and history itself move through this
organic process. You have a state of affairs,
it develops an internal contradiction, it collapses
under that weight, and a new higher state emerges
that resolves the tension. This leads into his
system. Hegel devised reality into three big
chunks, logic, nature, and spirit. We talked
about logic. What about nature? This is often
the part of Hegel that gets criticized the most,
especially by scientists. He was writing before
Darwin, obviously, so some of his science is
outdated. But he sees nature as petrified intelligence.
Petrified intelligence. That sounds like a cool
band name. It does. He means rationality frozen
in physical form. He defended a holistic, organic
view of nature against the purely mechanical
view that nature is just a clockwork machine
made of dead matter. He saw nature as an organism,
always striving toward life and eventually consciousness.
And then we have the philosophy of spirit. This
is the human stuff, the world of culture and
history. Right. And he divides this into three
more parts. Subjective spirit, which is basically
psychology and anthropology, the individual soul.
OK. Then objective spirit, which is law, society,
ethics and state. And finally. absolute spirit,
which is where spirit fully understands itself
through art, religion, and philosophy. I noticed
in the source material for subjective spirit,
specifically the anthropology section, there's
a note about his views on race. We have to address
that. We do. It's important to be transparent
here and not gloss over it. Hegel was a man of
the early 19th century, and he held views that
are, by today's standards, racist. In what way?
He believed that climate and geography affected
human development, and he made unfounded hierarchical
claims about different races, placing Africans
at a lower stage of development, for instance,
and Europeans at the highest. These were typical
of the prejudices of his time, but they are deeply
problematic and scientifically wrong today. So
the Universal Spirit had some very specific...
Very European blind spots. Huge ones. It's crucial
to note he didn't believe race was a fixed biological
destiny. He thought anyone could achieve freedom
because the potential for reason is universal
in humanity. But he definitely bought into the
cultural hierarchies of his era. It's a stark
reminder that even the greatest thinkers are
trapped in their own time. Let's move to objective
spirit then, which is basically politics. Hegel
wrote a book called The Philosophy of Right.
This is where he talks about freedom in the state.
controversial in a different way. Some people
accuse Hegel of being a Prussian apologist, basically
an intellectual who just provided a fancy justification
for the authoritarian Prussian monarchy. Whatever
the king does is right. That was the criticism
for a long time, especially from liberals like
Karl Popper. But modern scholarship, for the
most part, defends him against that charge. Hegel's
view of freedom is much more complex. He doesn't
think freedom is just negative liberty. And what's
negative liberty? That's the idea that freedom
means being left alone. No one tells me what
to do. The don't tread on me version of freedom.
The freedom from interference. Exactly. Hegel
thinks that is shallow. That's just being a slave
to your own arbitrary whims and impulses. For
him... True freedom is something positive. It's
being at home with oneself in a rational society.
Being at home with oneself. That's a lovely phrase.
What does it mean in practice? It means you aren't
alienated from the world you live in. You live
in a state where the laws and institutions make
sense to you. You follow the law not because
you're afraid the police will hit you with a
stick, but because you genuinely agree that the
law is rational and good. And it reflects your
own will. So it's about identification with the
community. Yes. He famously called the state
the actuality of the ethical idea. That sounds
intimidating to a modern ear. The state is the
ethical idea. That sounds like it could justify
anything. It does, but he doesn't mean the government
bureaucracy or the DMV is God. He means that
our institutions, the family, civil society,
the courts, the Constitution, are the places
where our freedom becomes real and concrete.
You can't be free alone in the woods. You are
only free when you have rights that are recognized
and protected by others within a shared structure.
So I is we, and we is I. My individual freedom
depends on our shared social structure. That
is the absolute core of it. He favored a constitutional
monarchy, not an absolute one. He wanted a professional,
merit -based civil service. He wanted the rule
of law. He wasn't a Democrat in the modern sense.
He was deeply suspicious of the mob. But he certainly
wasn't a totalitarian. He wanted a state where
the individual and the collective were in harmony.
And this ties directly into his philosophy of
history. He sees history as a story with a plot.
It's not just, as one historian said, one damn
thing after another. No, for Hegel, history has
a rational plot. And the plot is the progress
of the consciousness of freedom. This is the
famous three epochs theory. Yes. Hegel divides
world history into three great stages based on
a very simple question. Who is free? Okay, what's
stage one? Stage one, the Oriental world. He's
thinking of ancient China, Persia, Egypt. In
the stage, Hegel says only one is free. the despot
or the emperor. Everyone else is a subject or
effectively a slave to that one person's will.
OK, one is free. Then what? Stage two, the Greco
-Roman world. Here, some are free. The citizens
of Athens or Rome have rights. They participate
in politics, but the entire society is built
on the foundation of slavery. Freedom is a privilege
for a select group. So we go from one to some.
The final stage must be. Stage three, the Germanic
Christian world. By Germanic, he means Northern
European Protestantism, essentially. Yes, that's
what he had in mind. In this final stage, the
realization hits that all are free. He argues
that Christianity introduces the radical metaphysical
idea that every single individual soul has infinite
value in the eyes of God. The modern world, for
Hegel, is just the long, difficult political
process of making that spiritual truth a reality
on Earth. All are free. That's the end point.
The goal of history. That is the endpoint of
history's logic. And this is why he addresses
slavery here. He argues that slavery was wrong
in the absolute sense, but it occurred historically
in that second stage. But in the modern rational
state, it is an absolute contradiction. It's
impossible because it violates the fundamental
principle that all humans are free. Now we have
to talk about the owl, the famous bird, in the
preface to the philosophy of Wright. He writes,
the owl of Minerva begins its flight. Only with
the onset of dusk. What is he trying to tell
us there? It's his beautiful, slightly sad statement
on the limits of philosophy. Minerva is the Roman
goddess of wisdom. Her symbol is the owl. Hegel
is saying that wisdom only comes at the end of
the day. So you can't truly understand an era
while you're living in it. You can only understand
it in hindsight. Exactly. Philosophy cannot predict
the future. It cannot write prescriptions or
issue instructions on how the world ought to
be. It can only understand the world after a
form of life has already played out. He says
philosophy is its own time comprehended in thoughts.
When the owl takes flight, the day is already
over. A shape of life has grown old. That's kind
of sad. It means we're always a step behind understanding
our own lives. It is melancholic, but it's also,
I think, very humble. He's saying, my job isn't
to tell you what to do next. My job is to explain
how we got here. So let's get to here. Berlin,
1818. Hegel gets the chair of philosophy at the
new and prestigious University of Berlin. He
has made it. He is the philosophical rock star
of Europe. It really is. He's the most famous
philosopher in the world at this point. But again,
the contrast between the idea of him and the
reality is funny. We have many accounts of his
lectures from his students, and by all reports,
he was a terrible public speaker. Really? The
guy drawing crowds from all over Europe was bad
at it. Awful. He apparently stuttered. He had
a strong Swabian accent. He shuffled his papers
constantly. He would start these long, convoluted
sentences, then pause and cough, and you'd forget
the beginning before he ever got to the end.
He looked exhausted and disheveled. So why were
people flocking to his lectures? What was the
appeal? Because they felt they were watching
thinking happen in real time. It wasn't a performance.
He wasn't just reading a polished script. He
was wrestling with the concepts, struggling to
find the right words right there in front of
them. It was intense intellectual labor. And
the students felt like they were witnessing the
construction of this massive system brick by
brick. And he finally had a stable life, right?
In Berlin? Yes. For the first time, really. He
was happily married to Marie. He had his two
legitimate sons, Carl and Emanuel. And this is
a poignant detail. His illegitimate son, Ludwig,
actually came to live with them. Oh, this son
from the landlady in Germany. Yes. Hegel brought
him into the household. But it didn't end well.
The sources suggest there was a lot of tension.
Ludwig felt like the blast sheep, the servant
in the family dynamic, constantly reminded of
his status. That's rough. He eventually rebelled,
ran away, joined the Dutch army as a mercenary,
went to Batavia, which is modern -day Jakarta,
and died of a fever. The saddest part is that
Hegel never knew he died. The news didn't reach
him in time. That is tragic. And Hegel's own
end was sudden, too. Very sudden. 1831. A cholera
epidemic was sweeping through Berlin. Hegel went
to the countryside to avoid it, but he came back
to the city too early for the start of the university
semester. He fell ill. It happened very fast.
November 14th, 1831. He died. The official cause
was cholera. though modern diagnostics suggest
it might have been a different gastrointestinal
disease. But the rumor mill, of course, gave
him some famous last words. Which were? There
was only one man who ever understood me, and
even he didn't understand me. I love that. Probably
apocryphal, not true, but it fits the brand perfectly.
It fits perfectly. He was buried next to Ficht,
his great philosophical predecessor at Berlin.
And almost immediately, the fighting started
over his legacy. This is part eight, the split
legacy. His followers divided into two gangs,
basically. The right Hegelians and the left Hegelians.
It was a war for the soul of the system. The
right Hegelians were the conservatives, the establishment
guys. They focused on Hegel's statement that
the actual is rational. So they interpreted that
as the current Prussian state is rational. Protestantism
is rational. We're done. Mission accomplished.
Exactly. They basically turned Hegel into a defender
of the status quo. And for that reason, they
were pretty quickly forgotten by history. But
the left Hegelians. Yeah. They were the troublemakers.
You young Hegelians. They were the radicals.
They focused on the dialectical method, the engine
of change, the idea that everything contains
its own contradiction and must be negated. So
they saw the method as a tool for revolution.
A tool for criticism and revolution. They were
atheists. They were Republicans. They looked
at the Prussian state and said, this isn't rational
yet. It's full of contradictions. We need to
negate it and move to a higher stage. And the
most famous one of them all. was Karl Marx. Marx
famously said he found Hegel standing on his
head and he turned him right side up. What does
that mean? It means he took Hegel's powerful
dialectical method, this logic of clashing opposites
leading to change, but instead of applying it
to conflicting ideas or spirit, Marx applied
it to conflicting material conditions, to money,
to labor, to social classes. So the master -servant
dialectic becomes the class war between the bourgeoisie
and the proletarian. Exactly. You simply do not
get Marxism without Hegel. He provides the entire
engine. But it's not just Marx. You also don't
get existentialism. How so? Meaning he forgot
the individual. He forgot what it's like to be
a single, existing, anxious individual. Kierkegaard
asked, what about me and my choices, my faith,
my anxiety? It's like Hegel is the sun and everyone
else is either orbiting him or trying to block
out the light. Even American pragmatism, John
Dewey and those guys owe a debt to him. Absolutely.
The idea that knowledge is not static, that it's
social, that we learn through experience and
history, that reason itself has a history, that
is all Hegel. So let's wrap this up. We started
with the mission. To strip away the jargon, we've
climbed the mountain. What is the view from the
top? What is the ultimate takeaway from this
whole incredible system? For me, the ultimate
Hegelian ambition was to heal the splits in the
modern world. He didn't like dualisms. He didn't
like mind versus body, God versus nature, the
individual versus the community, subject versus
object. He wanted to show that they're all just
different moments in one big developing rational
whole. His famous line is, the true is the whole.
You can't understand the part until you see how
it fits into the entire developing system. You
can't. And he suggests that we are fundamentally
social creatures. We aren't just isolated atoms
bouncing around. We only become selves when other
people recognize us. That is a provocative thought
I'd leave the listener with. In our modern world,
we are so hyper -individualized. We curate our
online profiles. We live in our social media
bubbles. We think we define ourselves from the
inside out. We do. But Hegel teaches us that
I is we and we is I. You cannot be fully human
alone. You need the recognition of others, and
you need to participate in the ethical life of
your community to be truly free. Have we forgotten
that lesson? It's a question worth asking. We're
all still struggling for recognition. Maybe the
master -servant dialectic is happening in your
Twitter replies right now. It almost certainly
is. The struggle for recognition continues. It
never stops. On that slightly terrifying note,
we'll leave you to find your own synthesis in
the chaos. Thanks for diving deep with us into
the world spirit. See you next time.