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Who thinks that they can subdue Leviathan? Strength resides in its neck; dismay goes before it. It is without fear. It looks down on all who are haughty; it is king over all who are proud. These words inspired PJ Wehry to create Chasing Leviathan. Chasing Leviathan was born out of two ideals: that truth is worth pursuing but will never be subjugated, and the discipline of listening is one of the most important habits anyone can develop. Every episode is a dialogue, a journey into the depths of a meaningful question explored through the lens of personal experience or professional expertise.
Mark Alznauer 0:00
And so, like, what you get when you get a view of Hegel's encyclopedia isn't like one part of reality, a couple interesting questions, or even some really high-level abstract, you know, metaphysical claims. What you get literally is the unfolding or the attempt to unfold the basic structure of all reality, of all the cosmos, from a certain set of of logical operations that are embedded in the absolute idea.
PJ Wehry 0:28
Hello, and welcome to Chasing the Viathan. I'm your host PJ Wery, and I'm here today with Dr. Mark Altsnauer, the associate professor of philosophy at Northwestern University and the president of the Hegel Society of America, and we're talking about his book Hegel's Soul Idea: The Last Great Metaphysical System. Dr. Altsnauer, wonderful to have you on today. Wonderful to be here, PJ. So I now you've mentioned you've been studying Hegel for quite a while now, so there's there's an obvious answer to why this book. But if you could explain to us where kind of where the idea this book came from and what it's trying to do, why why this book, Doctor Altenauer?
Mark Alznauer 1:08
There's like I think two two answers to that question. Like one's the more edifying answer that I'll start with, and then I'll go to the actual biographical sort of answer. Like I really like Hegel's encyclopedia system is like is is I think one of the great monuments of European thinking. Like it's a comprehensive view of all reality, and it's like comparable in some ways to things like you know Dante's Divine Comedy or Tolstoy's Warren. Like it's like it's a great work that gives you a view of all of human reality, all of the cosmic reality in the case of Hegel, like how we should feel towards it, what our place is in the world, and I just felt like it had fallen off a little bit of the radar of the way people think about both Hegel and about about philosophy. And so I really wanted to focus on his encyclopedia system and like what view of the world it provides us with and how he justifies it, and I thought that was like of enormous importance and very close to what I think is most sort of compelling about Hegel's Hegel's thought, and it was something I I had my previous book on Hegel was on like a smaller part of his system, and this is the second answer, and I had in thinking about Hegel's theory of responsibility, which is my other book, I'd gotten really interested in how he argues, because like the forms that his arguments take have this puzzling developmental structure. So instead of like a transcendental argument or a geometrical argument, he like starts with a simple thing and shows how it grows, like through a contradiction into a second thing, and so forth. And I just was really interested in what the logical infrastructure was, and I realized that I couldn't quite understand why Hegel thought that was the right way of doing philosophy, unless I backed up to actually looking at his at his logic and then seeing how that informed the system as a whole, and so that was, I think, the beginning of my interest in what became the central topic of this book, Hegel's idea.
PJ Wehry 2:57
Thank you. So, and because I kind of think I got it in terms of, but if you give us one line, what what did you find most compelling about Hegel? Is it the logic itself, the way that that works, or is it or is it the way that he's a he's a monument?
Mark Alznauer 3:13
Well, I mean, so they're connected. So I'll try to connect these to you so that you can sort of see how they're how they're of a piece, like it's it's certainly the case that I think, like from the point of view of like a humanist, like what you're going to find most compelling about Hegel is it's like you get to the peak of a mountain and all of a sudden you see everything laid out before you, and so you get a whole view of the of everything of the cosmos of nature of what he calls Geist, human human civilization, the development of religions, the development of societies, all from the point of view of like what all unfolding he thinks from a single insight, from a single concept, which he calls the absolute idea. And so, what's particularly they said what's powerful about Hegel is his scope, but what's amazing about it as a philosophic achievement is it is all supposed to follow from a single thought, from a single concept, even. And I wanted to just see how anybody could possibly think something like that would work, and also to appreciate the scope of the vision. So both of those, as I said, sort of together in my mind.
PJ Wehry 4:17
Yeah, and so you've mentioned cosmic cosmology a little bit, and then you had this really interesting. And I've never, I don't think I've ever heard anyone else make this comparison. And I wonder if it's a if you're making this comparison to just Hegel or more to the encyclopedia in general, which of course is not one of his more well-known works, at least in our contemporary scholarship. That you compared him to Dante and Tolstoy. Can you elaborate a little more on that parallel? Is that because of the cosmology? Is that because is there a creative aspect to it, or is it just his place in kind of the literature?
Mark Alznauer 4:53
Well, I was thinking about it. So first, let me clarify one thing just to be explicit about it. So Hindu only like published. A handful of books, and so the the one he's probably best known for is like 1806 ish, the Phenomenology of Spirit. He also wrote a a book, The Philosophy of Right, which is the other text that I've written on a book about. And then, like later in his career, he he wrote he published the Encyclopedia, which has three parts to it, and one part to it is like more narrowly metaphysical. It's called the science of logic, and where he lays out. Oh, okay.
Mark Alznauer 5:25
His first principle, and then the other two parts of the encyclopedia are the philosophy of nature and spirit. And the philosophy of nature corresponds, you know, roughly to non-human the non-human world, the cosmos, as we would think of it in those terms: planets, plants, animals. Philosophy of spirit is more singularly Hegelian, and it corresponds to human reality, like certainly anthropology, psychology, politics. But then it extends all the way to this is in some ways the most provocative part of the system: art, religion, and philosophy as ways that we think of our oneness with the absolute. And so the the what I meant by comparing it to to say like Dante or or Tolstoy or Proust, I mean, there's a lot of examples you have. This is that it's everything is in this. Like everything, there's nothing that of any importance he thinks that he's left out of this systematic overview of the world. And so, like what you get when you get a view of Hegel's encyclopedia isn't like one part of reality, a couple interesting questions, or even some really high-level abstract, you know, metaphysical claims. What you get literally is the unfolding, or the attempt to unfold the basic structure of all reality, of all the cosmos, from a certain set of of logical operations that are embedded in the absolute idea. So, like, it's the it's everything. That's the thing that's so capacious and exciting about the encyclopedia, but it's also just to say why it's not as popular as the phenomenology or why it's not as popular as some of these other things. Nobody likes a system anymore. Like it, like a system. I think when we think of systems now, we think of being imprisoned within them. And so, one of the things I wanted to do was sort of like to revivify this project in a way that you could be sympathetic to it and even awestruck by it, while at the same time recognizing that there, from our point of view, you know the system is limited. Like we have, there's lots that we've discovered since Hegel wrote, and it's puzzling to know how we should retrofit the system with these insights, or whether we just have to admit that the system, in some ways, was a failure because we've continued to move on from it,
PJ Wehry 7:21
and I apologize. You said revivify so that we are, and I missed the first word, and then you said awestruck. Was was it? I want to say compassion. It wasn't compassion. What was the? I'm
Mark Alznauer 7:32
not sure what I said. I'm nervous about it. But by revivify it, I mean like like there's like a way of like talking about Hegel that's some kind like deadening, and so where you're just repeating like all of these very opaque dialectical progressions that nobody you feel like nobody really understands, and that are very opaque and difficult to sort of like reproduce in a way that other people could be compelled by them. But I wanted to like keep the the whole in view, and so that you could sort of see that this there's like a power to the vision, and that the idea of what he's trying to do is sublime, because what like it's it's an attempt like that is in its ambition like unparalleled in in Western thought, and it's something like if it was if he was right about it, then he would be right about the most important thing you could possibly be right about, and so I wanted to get the life of the project back up and running into at least my own view and possibly the reader's view. It is still a book on Hegel, so lots of abstract arguments. So that was the the thing that motivated me was I thought that there was something like absolutely worthwhile about just getting the project reproduced in a way that you could see what would motivate somebody both to attempt to achieve it, to attempt to write out a system like this, and what the payoff would be if it were if it were successful.
PJ Wehry 8:49
I think there's a valuable insight here that I'm I'm missing in the parallel between Dante, Tolstoy, and Proust because one of the words that showed up was systematic, which I don't think most people would use for Proust, and but there's also this discussion of cosmos and and like nothing left out of the world. And is it in that sense? And because obviously you read Tolstoy and you read Proust, and you're sharing in fiction, and Dante, you're sharing in like fiction and like some theology, so but Hegel's doing something. It's a totally different genre, but you feel that in some ways there's that comparison of the the total worldview. Is that to? I'm just trying to to track with you. The
Mark Alznauer 9:38
reason why I picked those works, I mean Dante's maybe even closer because of this is that it. You see it with Dante. You have the Inferno. You have Purgatorio. You have Perdisia. So you have like an attempt, and like in the course of like the your your moving up into into paradise, you get a sense. There's like it's supposed to give you a an understanding of the full range of human experience. The virtues, the vices-it gives you a sense as to what the point of human life is and what the right attitude to have towards it is. And I think that's also the case, very much so in *War and Peace* which was actually kind of an anti-Hegelian book. If you read the last, I mean, the part that nobody likes very much-the essay at the end of *War and Peace*-it's a-it's a picture of all of like. I mean, it's less cosmological. Granted, War and Peace doesn't include like a treatise on like organic nature or anything like that. Although it does have a treatise on history at the end of it, but it gives you like a a this is the way I'd want to put it. Like in in in a relatively organized view of what human the scope of human life is, how human beings are embedded in a like in War and Peace in a kind of history that they cannot control or fully fathom, and what the right human response to the to to human to to all of this is. And Hegel's doing this yes in a different media. Like I said, the crucial thing about the difference between Hegel and I mean Hegel has his own theories about how philosophy relates to literature, and he thinks it's doing. It was not an accidental comparison I was making. Hegel thinks they're both forms of absolute spirit. They're both trying to do the same thing. What they're both trying to do is, in his terms, is sort of show you the the truth of reality. Hegel thinks philosophy can do it better than literature, precisely because it can conceptually prove or establish the claims that it wants to make, but he thinks, and I think he's probably right about this, that they're in the same basic game, and that's the comparison that I wanted to sort of underline in making that that point.
PJ Wehry 11:30
So Tolstoy has his own version of the absolute idea that he is he is doing in his work. Is that a way to think about it? Then,
Mark Alznauer 11:38
well, yes and no. Yeah. So he has his idea as to what, like, so the thing that's going to be unique about Hegel, regardless, is like nobody else thinks you're going to derive like the fundamental structure of reality from a concept. That's just Hegel, no comparisons with anybody else. But the idea that like the most important thing for a human being to do is to understand our relationship to the world and to God, if there's a God, like that's shared by Dante, shared by Tolstoy, shared by Hegel, and that's the thing that I that that's the comparison. But definitely, the the thought that it the the there is this deep rational structure, it's uniquely Hegelian. Like, and other people had thought of something like that, but nobody had tried to execute it the way Hegel did. And so you get with the encyclopedia, even though it's still an outline, is still something with the appropriate scope, and so it's something that if you if you spend your time with it, you can see that he tried he tried to give us a rationally justified view of of all of reality, and that's as I said, that's going to be unique to a philosophical version of this as opposed to a literary version of it. But as I said, aiming at the same thing. Hopefully,
PJ Wehry 12:43
yeah, yeah, yeah. That's thank you, thank you for your patience. That that really that helps kind of set it in my mind. And I have a I have a kind of random thread. You know, I'm not gonna. Well, because because you you were talking about people like the way that the the monumental status of it is what's interesting about Hegel. Because even as you you were talking about like Maximus the Confessor, I recently I recently read Maximus the Confessor, and he talks about the logos and the logoi and the way that all logoi were able to synthesize them because they all derive from the logos, right? Well, that's great. Which is very cool. Yes, I know. I was like, it's a very weird, random thread. But and this is, I think the the this is what made me think of it too. One, it it sounds a lot like the the rational structure. But for him, it's a throwaway line. It's his little prolegomena to explaining how the liturgy works, right? Which is like, you're like, wait, that was that was the part I was interested in. Like, I mean, great. Tell me about like the service and everything and how you think about it. But like, can we go back to like it's like it's like two paragraphs. He's like, by the way, the reason we can understand everything is because it's all rooted in one single reason that splits out into these little, the little reasons. And I'm like, that, that's it. That's all I get. You know,
Mark Alznauer 14:14
it actually raises some big issues. I mean, big theological issues and big philosophic issues. So obviously he's referring to the beginning of the Gospel of John, and and so Hegel is of course deeply you know he he was deeply aware of that as well. And one way to sort of see the the differences between like a certain kind of philosophic way of executing the the shared project and non philosophic or way of executing the shared project is that like is it do you think that like so? And you, I think, nicely laid out the contrast. But I just want to bring out the logical difference. Like Hegel thinks that if you get the proper log, if you get the absolute idea right, you can. It's almost like like um uh, it's almost like something that will it will immediately generate all of the logoi that you're talking about, all of the different speeches, all of the different areas of human rationality. All of that stuff, if you get it right, they were already hidden in the logos. Like his metaphor always is the is like an acorn turning into an oak, and so that's Hegel's version. It's deeply philosophic because it's really committed to the idea that everything needs to be demonstrated or derived from the logos. But you could have a different, more analogical imagination or something like that, where you're just thinking like, here's the logos. I mean, you can imagine a Christian version of this, where you know, of course, Christ is, you know, you know, we have this sort of. There's a theological version of this, and it's imbued through everything. But there's no sense in which you're going to drive all the logo away from it. But anytime you see something else that has like the right kind of structure, irrational structure, whatever you want to, whatever you take it to be, like you're going to see like the logos is manifesting itself in this particular way here, but you're not on the hook for deriving all of the different particular logoi, and that's like I think an interesting distinction between two different ways of thinking about the relationship between metaphysics and reality. Like Hegel's, which is a really strict like once you get the metaphysics right in the logos, you're going to get all the logoi if you do it right because they'll unfold out of it, and then there's a different version where it's a looser fit between the Heidegger talks about regional ontologies and ontology, and like that's a similar way of marking the distinction between the logos and the logoi. I think so. It's an important. I think it's an important distinction. Yeah,
PJ Wehry 16:13
yeah. It's that commitment to a total system. Is that the? Is that? Am I tracking with you there?
Mark Alznauer 16:20
That's what's singularly Hegelian. In fact, like the reason why the title of my book is Hegel's sole idea is it's meant to underline the fact that you don't need to ever go outside of the idea to get to get to anything that Hegel wants to claim. All of it is supposed to be unfolded or developed out of. Uses a ton of metaphors like this. It's supposed to be dialectically unpacked from from the idea. So if so, on Hegel's view, if I'm right, like philosophy really is just one idea. Like everything, all of the rational structure of reality is packed in. You don't need. It's not just the a loose relationship between a logos and various different kinds of logoi that you couldn't derive from it. It's a tight one where all of the different the what I'm call what we're using metaphorically speaking as the logoi are the other he's going to call them the other sciences of philosophy like the science of right the science of religion the science of you know all of these things for Hegel they're all already in the the logos in the absolute idea so
PJ Wehry 17:15
which for him like Maximus confessor would make total sense because he said he was he was of course, you can trace it into here because that's that that's the Christian version of it. And then he, I mean, famously Hegel unpacks what Christianity really means in his terms. Absolutely,
Mark Alznauer 17:32
and so like we can get into whether this is like a fair or unfair thing to do with Christianity. But like he was really, I mean, this is a good point. He emphasizes this in some of the the early matter in the encyclopedia, so the prefaces that he writes to it is that like there he really thinks that philosophy and religion are very close in certain ways, but religion can exist without philosophy, but philosophy cannot exist without religion is one of the things he says. Religion comes first, and in in the and and for most people, it's the way that they understand their relationship to fundamental reality. But he thinks that there's like a defect in religion that requires you to move on to philosophy, and the defect is that basically religions just think in pictures, so they think in representations. And so, and what you really want is something like say they tell you God is like a father. What to what degree is he like a father? To what degree does that metaphor break down? Like all of that is very difficult to figure out, like from a religious point of view, but Hegel's going to give you. There's like a conceptual truth that's underlying that image that he thinks only philosophy can give you, and so philosophy is going to be. So even though he's like in some, I mean, whether he's a whether this counts as being a Christian, we could leave open to you know further further debate. But he's going to he thinks he's on board. He thinks Christianity is basically true, but it's just a bunch of pictures that need to be redeemed in a philosophical way in order for the conceptual truth to be unfurled and and actually justified. And in the preface, there's this like to me, it's one of my favorite plays. It's really provocative to me because he looks at he's trying to argue against religious people who don't think that philosophy could possibly add anything to religious consciousness, and he's like quoting scripture, saying like, "Look, even Jesus said you don't know fully now. The Holy Spirit has to come later. And basically, he's suggesting, "I'm the Holy Spirit. Like, I'm going to give you the thing that Jesus said we needed to like lay out the truth of Christianity in completely articulate form. And it's a very impious and provocative thing to say because you don't need faith anymore. Like, and so you need it only genetically. Like, faith was the first step. But once you have philosophy, well, faith can. We faith is for the many, and like the philosopher has the full high octane version of the truth.
PJ Wehry 19:35
So, the high octane. I maybe I think too much in pictures, but immediately I just had like I had like Vin Diesel just like flash through my mind like driving like I octave philosophy like passing religion. I should be
Mark Alznauer 19:53
careful about metaphors, and I realized maybe I didn't realize I was smoking diesel. So all right, oh I enjoy it. No,
PJ Wehry 19:58
that was that was a that was. Fun blip to have show up in the conversation. Now, when we talk about his followers and his critics, the immediate reception. How does he? And maybe just I'm curious. I've read a lot of Kierkegaard, so I mean that's I I naturally tend towards that. But also Feuerbach. Where where does where do Hegel and Feuerbach align? Is is that a fair question, or is
Mark Alznauer 20:27
that yeah? Yeah, it's definitely related to what we're talking about here. So the right way to think about this. So the it's Hegel's reception is is really kind of it's striking what happens. So let me just give. I'm going to back up a step, and then I'll get to the Foerbach thing. Yeah, please. So Hegel dies like 1831, and so he's like the most important philosopher in all of Europe. He's famous, very well well known, and within like I would say 15 to 20 years, he's fallen completely off the radar and discredited. And so a lot of the most important movements of mid 19th century philosophy in Germany-they're just not even engaging in him, so like not even like rejecting his claims, like just ignoring them entirely. But but for the 30s, like there's just an enormous ferment where people are kind of digesting the Hegelian system, and the biggest divide are going to be between people who this is the right the old divide between right and left Hegelians between the people who think that yeah, like Hegelianism is basically a defense of orthodoxy and of the existing political state regime. I mean, obviously Hegel was a reformist, so he wasn't defending the the status quo. And then there was a a bunch of radical thinkers, and Feuerbach was among these radical thinkers, and Marx was among these radical thinkers, and eventually Kierkegaard, like to some degree, although you know the story has to be extended a little bit to get him into the view, and and for Feuerbach, like like the part of Hegel that the Reit Hegelians were attracted to, like oh this is a way of defending like Protestantism and the Prussian, was all like the surface of Hegel. In reality, what Hegel had unlocked was this way of realizing that all of the things that religions had projected onto the gods were in fact qualities of humanity, and so there you like. Here's my way of characterizing what's going on in that moment: is that Hegel wanted to kind of reconcile like the forces of Enlightenment, secular humanism, and the theological like world that he the Protestant theological world, and the synthesis broke, and like after Hegel, nobody could really believe that he pulled it off, and so then there was a debate as to what the right way to go forward is. And the Feuerbachian way is, of course, going to be more-I mean, in in a traditional considered anti-theological direction, where you start to think like, no, it's all just humanity. There's nothing beyond human beings, and so Feuerbach is moves in that direction, and eventually you know that Marx goes even further in that direction, thinking that not only is Feuerbach right about religion, but he's but he but he is not realizing that that there's something even more important than like our religious or philosophic views, which is like the actual reproduction of our material life, and so Marx is then going to repudiate Feuerbach as not having gone far enough in the direction of secularizing Hegel's project, and so this is like one of the most important trajectories in the in the 19th century, the one that goes through Feuerbach, the left Hegelians, and then probably reaches its deepest sort of thinking in the in the in the project of Marx and Engels, Kierkegaard's not real. Kierkegaard's a different kind of rejection of Hegel in some ways, and I don't know. Would you want to talk a tiny? Do you want to talk a little bit about the Kierkegaardian reception?
PJ Wehry 23:31
Well, real quick, if I read this correctly, the split that happens and all this-it's with Marx or with Hegel. You have religion as the tutor for the masses, and for Marx, it's famously an opiate for the masses. And that's-I mean-that's a fundamentally different stance. Is that the right way to? Is that helpful? That
Mark Alznauer 23:52
is a fundamentally different stance. Yeah, and so there's different ways to think about like what has happened between Hegel and Marx. Like, how do we get from Hegel's relatively respectful view of religion? Like, even though, as we said, some religious people are going to think, well, I mean, not that respectful, since he ends up like thinking that you can just sublate faith into reason. But like, at the same time, he's basically saying it's true. He he still goes to church with his wife on Sundays, so he seems like a good, upstanding member of the Protestant establishment. And how do we get from that to Marx's view, which is very different? Which is like Marx also respects religion in some ways. The opiate of the masses line. I mean, there's something beautiful about it. Like he's saying that like there's a lot of human suffering, and religion helps meet that human suffering. He doesn't think it's true. Like he thinks it's, and so that what what he thinks is going on now is he's trying to think about the. This is a little bit simplified, but we're on a podcast. We should be allowed to simplify a little bit. Is that the superstructure is there for the sake of the of the structure, and so religions are there. They're stabilizing forms of domination that are necessary at certain stages in the development of the productive forces. And so he so Marx at this point. I mean, he's not a gay. He's not a Hegelian at all in the idealist sense, but he's keeping you know. So so now he's thinking that the right way to think about religion is in terms of what function does it play within a capitalist economy or within a feudal economy or whatever it may be, and so he's actually thinking about it in much more social scientific terms, whereas Hegel was thinking about it in terms of what parts of Christian theology hide conceptual truths that I can sort of bring out of it? That there's like a rational core to Christian teachings that can be with the right method unpacked, and so they end up focusing on different parts. Like Hegel takes the actual theology very seriously, and Marx is more thinking about its social function, and so and so it ends up being they very different views of religion. Well, it
PJ Wehry 25:44
does save, which would, I mean, again, brutally overly simplified, but that would track with a more idealist conception and a more material. Like, of course, it's also where that goes from. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. I mean,
Mark Alznauer 26:00
that is crucial. Like in the place to sort of see him working this out, you know, is in marx's sort of earlier in the German ideology. He's very explicit about the polemic against idealism, and he thinks Feuerbach's an idealist in this sense because he thinks ideas matter. And so, hey, so the reason why he's anti-Feuerbachian in the German ideology is Feuerbach thinks it's really like the way to be progressive is to attack religious ideas, and from Marx's point of view, if you're staying within the realm of ideas, you still haven't gotten the deeper point. You even haven't freed yourself of the German ideology, and the German ideology is ideas matter. They're the things that determine what happens in history, and Marx just wanted to say that whole thing is an obstification, and reality, something else is determining it, and he-the radicality of Marx's project is that he got out of, he broke free of the German ideology, and that I think is a genuine theoretical achievement, regardless of whether you believe in Marxism or whatever. So it's a-it was a huge, huge moment.
PJ Wehry 26:54
Yeah, absolutely, and so I wanted to kind of round that out a little bit, but I am interested because it does seem it's a totally different move in Kierkegaard's rejection of Hegel. What does that look like?
Mark Alznauer 27:10
I I just taught a class on Kierkegaard's concluding unscientific postscript, so like in some ways this is more to my mind than like Google is right now. What's the right way to put it? I mean, there's so I'm going to risk being overly simple, but let me just put it in this vivid way, and I'm going to ignore the distinction between Kierkegaard and his pseudonyms, which you know that the people in the business are cannot afford to ignore. I think Kierkegaard thought there was a fatal misunderstanding of Christianity that Hegel was complicit with, and the and it was a it was the the thing that he didn't understand about Christianity is that it's not something that's we're supposed to. It's not an an attempt to give you the objective truth. It's not something that needs to be sort of argued for with historical proofs or with dialectical proofs or anything like that. And what and so what I was I was actually thinking of Kirk in the back of my mind when I was sort of expressing some of my misgivings about whether Hegel's a good Christian or not, from Kierkegaard's point of view, he's the worst possible Christian because he plays in this world historical misunderstanding of what Christianity is, where it's a bunch of doctrines that you need to like you know assent to, and Kierkegaard thinks well maybe you assent to all of those things and you still are not even remotely a Christian. Like it's like so far from being necessary that it's become even an obstacle to being a Christian to think that it's something that could possibly have this speculative truth hidden in it, and so what Kierkegaard, one of the things he's trying to do in concluding on scientific postscript, or that Johannes Klamakis, who the pseudonym is trying to do, is he's trying to break us of a certain idea as to what Christianity is, such that it even could be sublated by higher philanthropic wisdom, and he's trying to put us in. He's trying to put us in the place of thinking that no, it's really about your capacity to do something in your in your soul. He calls it an interaction, and so faith is not like you know getting yourself in the right relationship to certain doctrines. It's about a certain capacity. I mean, he uses a lot of metaphors here, and they're all very controversial. A leap, it's a decision. It's an existential commitment. Like what? And so, so the whole book is meant to is is is deeply against the whole idea that it's at the bottom of Hegel's account that the right way to think of Christianity is an attempt to give us a view of the absolute, and philosophy does it better. And Kierkegaard's like, no, like that that contemplative attitude toward Christian truth is not a Christian attitude toward it. Like what we need to be doing is having a passionate commitment to it, and that has just disappeared in Hegel's treatment, and it has played into what Kierkegaard thinks of as some characteristic pathologies of modern life. So it's did this very different than the Marxist critique, but but in one sense comparable because both Kierkegaard and Marx think that Hegel was just like he was reinterpreting things, and he got a lot of pleasure out of just seeing this the accuracy of his reinterpretation, the truth of his reinterpretation, and they both wanted to be more active. I mean, Marx in the political world and Kierkegaard in the soul, but in both. Cases they felt like there was something perverted about the theoretical upshot of Higginhagle's system, like it didn't leave the right space for either political action if you're a Marxist or or or genuine Christianity if you are a Kierkegaardian existentialist.
PJ Wehry 30:16
Yeah, it would one way, and I just seeing if I'm tracking with you, would one way be that for Kierkegaard, there's an equivocation going on with what knowing means? I mean, that's maybe a little oversimplified, but it's like for for Hegel, it's knowing is this totalizing conceptual thing, and for Kierkegaard, knowing is a personal relationship, you know, to the absolute, which we see in in Abraham and of like, I haven't read concluding scientific postscript, but I've read fear and trembling, and so the use of Abraham, and he makes a big deal about the demons knowing and not having the right relationship, and so that kind of tracks onto the way that the Bible uses knowing. Is there? Am I tracking with you there, or is that? Yeah, no, I was thinking
Mark Alznauer 31:13
about this. I mean, I, I, I think that there's. Let me just see if I can put it in my own terms, and then I will get back to the knowing thing. I think is a good word to do this with too. In concluding on scientific postscript, the word that he I feel like he thinks is being used in two different ways is truth, and so he's thinking like, what does it mean to say Christianity is true, and and what is the and what he wants to say in that book is that there's been a conflation between like an objective sense of truth and what he calls like this subjective sense, he says, subjectivity is truth, and so what he wants to say is that what it means for Christianity to be true is like something very different than what it means for a proposition to be true or or or anything like that. And I think that what you're suggesting, rightly I think, is that knowing already has that ambiguity sort of built into it. Like when you're thinking about what does it mean to know God, does it mean like I can go through the Anselm's proof or something like that, so I know that God exists or something like that. Or does it mean to know it the way you? I mean, I don't want to use to know like a friend or like to know a like, and that's going to be a very different sense of know. And so, definitely, I think that across the board, Kierkegaard is like deeply sensitive to the fact that there's there's some drift had happened. He thinks in Christianity where people had always known it was supposed to be something that was very hard, and it was something supposed to be heroic. It was very difficult to do. It was something that required all of your life to do right, and it becomes something that like professors are talking about and like teaching classes on what God is and something like that. And he saw that as like a deep like perversion of the thing Christianity was supposed to be, and so he was very sensitive to like what he saw was the drift of some of these terms away from Christ saying like I am the truth and the life toward Hegel's the truth of the idea. It was like for him an appalling shift, a degeneration, and I think you're right that knowing has the same kind of ambiguity built in. Like we use knowing in so many different ways, but Hegel, what Hegel was really deeply committed to, was that like philosophy was the highest form of knowing, and all of the other forms of knowing-scientific knowing, ordinary experience, religious faith, the knowing that's involved in literature-those were all like they were good and they can be ranked. He actually has like a hierarchy, but the highest was philosophy. Like philosophy was able to capture a truth that, without remainder, that all of these others were striving toward, that only philosophy could fully express and articulate. And so he really wanted to celebrate philosophic knowledge to make it out exalted as the highest form of human cognition of reality, in a way that it could do everything all of these other forms could do and more, and that's definitely something that somebody who wants to defend faith is going to at some point or other have to resist. So yeah, I think that's an important that's an important comparison.
PJ Wehry 33:56
I so and I just want to to clarify as you're talking about revivifying this project, what are you hoping to enliven? Are you trying to bring back the Hegelian system? It doesn't sound to me like that, but maybe I'm misunderstanding. Or are you trying to get people just to appreciate the enormity of it, the scale of it? Or is there something about his process and about his system that you think is useful and practical for philosophy today.
Mark Alznauer 34:26
Yeah, that's a good question. All of the above is what I want to say. Let me let me see. But the way that I think, I mean, I'm just going to try to put it. I'm going to try not to fall back on the things I've said about this before in in writing. Like I said, I think of this like I'll just sort of speak about this maybe biographically. Like I'm, I have a kind of historical sensibility where I try to. I think that in order to understand where we are, you have to understand where we come from. Let's put it more broadly speaking. And like, if we want to understand where we are right now, like one of the things we have to understand is what happened to the project that Hegel was the conclusion of, which was a grand. Physical project arguably began with Plato and arguably ended with Hegel, and some people want to say that there's some version we can we can once you see what Hegel was doing, like maybe he did it in an obscure way. We can fix the problem. We can cut off the parts that are false. We can like we can we can do it again. And that's like you know there are some people in the Hegel Hegel world who like that's how they see themselves, they see themselves as like, look, we've missed a lot of things that Hegel was just right about, and his project really is the only way that philosophic science could ever have been consummated. So we should really look at it again and be very careful about it and return to it. And I'm happy and thrilled to be a part of those conversations because I do think it's very difficult to see what he was doing, and it's very difficult to assess him as having failed or or succeeded, like it's something that requires a lot of thought, and that's one of the things we do when we're teaching Hegel is to like we try to bring these arguments alive again and see if we can you know make them work and see where they fall apart. Like all of that's like what we do in the history in the in the philosophy classroom, but but I'm also interested in something else that is more negative, and so the more negative thing is, I think I'm very interested in what what I mean. You had Robert Pippin on, and he wrote a beautiful beautiful book on Heidegger and Heidegger's culmination. I'm also interested in the Hegelian aftermath, and I'm interested in in like what happened in the 20th century. There was a lot of people, not just Heidegger, but also Adorno and Kozhev and Boddyev, a lot of figures, who who sort of feel like you can't understand where where philosophy is now, which is to say where like rational reflection on human life is now, without understanding the failure of Hegel's project. They thought it was a super important failure, and they didn't think it was just like, well, you know, if he was smarter, he could have done it without that mistake and how he can fix it. They thought that it showed there was something wrong with the project, and I actually think we were already kind of alluding to this before with Kierkegaard and Marx, where it's not just that they thought that Hegel, like his arguments, he wasn't sophisticated enough dialectician, but they thought that there was some there was a vision underlying the project that was wrong, and that what we really needed was a new kind of philosophy. I mean, it's not clear to me that Kierkegaard or Marx would have called what they what they themselves are doing philosophy.
Mark Alznauer 37:05
But we needed a new kind of thinking, and so one of the things I feel like we should do as historians of philosophy is we should try to tell the story of the history of Western philosophy in a way that we can understand why there was this grand disillusionment with philosophy because of the failure of Hegel's project in the 20th century, like the disillusionment happened in the 20th century, and so one of the things I'm very interested in myself, partly because it matters to me to get to clarity about this, is to understand our place in this story, and to get our place in this story right, we really Hegel's crucial node. He is one of the most important moments in modern philosophy, and it's the moment, and it's a moment important both because of his ambitions and the radical new forms of philosophy that he brought into existence, which do still have legs and do still have promise. But also interesting because of the failure, because what he ended up giving us in the system ended up feeling to people like they didn't even want it to be true. That's the thing that I feel like I've I've come to realize in writing the book, is that although there's there's an inner beauty to seeing the world this way, it felt constraining to the next generation, and it felt like it didn't give them a way to move forward, and it didn't give them a way like like this is clearly the case in Marx. It's also the case in Dewey, where we we needed philosophy to do something different to allow us to engage in the world in like forward-directed ways, rather than this backward-looking reconstruction of everything, the way that Hegel did, and I feel like understanding that moment, understanding both the appeal of Hegel, and you can't, and then also the the disappointment with it that followed in its wake. All of those are like important. They're important part of our legacy as human beings, but also more narrowly, it's important part of like philosophy's understanding of its own history. So that's I think what I'm that's another part of what I'm interested in.
PJ Wehry 38:50
Yeah, and that's a that's really helpful that you haven't given up totally on the project yet. But even if the project never completes, the failure I mean, shows up everywhere, right? Yeah. Because you have to diagnose what that failure is, because it definitely you. It's very hard to look at the history of philosophy and not trace that arc from Plato to Hegel.
Mark Alznauer 39:13
Yeah, yeah. That
PJ Wehry 39:14
makes a lot. Yeah.
Mark Alznauer 39:16
And there's a there's another part. There's another thing I just wanted to add to this that I think like really is an important part of Hegel's legacy that I'm now very interested in, and I'm writing a little bit more on it now. Is that Hegel like was telling these stories about the development of concepts and the you know they said the whole nature to spirit thing is a story like that that he thinks is akin to the Christian story of creation and reconciliation, and he thought that the whole thing had this sort of tight logical like every tight derivation is supposed to be happening. But one of the things he brought into like our way of thinking about the world is that if we want to understand any of our problems, any of the concepts we're using, we need to be aware of their history, and that is a genuine Hegelian legacy, even if it's like neo-Hegelian in the sense that it's not as ambitious as Hegel wanted this story to be. And I think that one of the things I've become aware of and interested in is the development of like what you might call a neo-Hegelian current that even exists under this under this moment. I mean, people like Croce and Collingwood, but also Alistair Macintyre to some degree, Charles Taylor. Like you can see people who are who are who are still working on this new historical conception of philosophy that we that philosophers can't do what they need to do unless they have some awareness of the history of the concepts they're using and the history of the problems they're interested in, like that was something Hegel really made unmistakable, and it's part of his legacy that I think is still totally alive in the current moment and is not doesn't look like it's going to be superseded anytime soon. Although we now have many ways of doing historical philosophy, not just the developmental narrative way that is that is Hegel's central interest.
PJ Wehry 40:48
It's interesting to me. One, I've studied and delving more and more into Charles Taylor, and one of the things you find is a massive in the middle of his work is a massive tome on Hegel, so it's definitely yes. Oh, you're like oh, it's it's sitting on my my shelf right now. It's just it's huge. I think is it just okay? Never mind. I lied. Okay, I couldn't see it, but the the other thing that's interesting is there. Does this focus on history. Does this also show up in the genealogical critiques of Nietzsche and Foucault?
Mark Alznauer 41:30
Yeah. So definitely the interest in history does, but it's not an ode to Hegel almost at all. I think so. Okay. Yeah. So one of the things I've come to think is that like there are these. There's also stuff that you can see. There's kinds of narratives that you see, kind of in the social contract tradition, but clearly in Hume, which are kind of genealogical. Like he tells these stories about how you know justice was arrived at. You have these Nietzschean stories, like in genealogy or moral. That's morality. That's like the clearest one, where you can sort of the slave revolt and morality. All these sensational claims, and definitely that those those views like they show up in Foucault, they show up in Bernard Williams, and so that that's like to me a separate strand in the turn to history philosophy, because like if you look at Hegel, there's there's nothing quite like that. Most of those, some of those are I would say like the Nietzschean versions of these are debunking, and that's clearly not what Hegel is interested in. But the deeper point is this: that it's typical of genealogies to think that the shifts are caused by for contingent reasons, for reasons that are not internal to the concepts being understood. And Hegel was really like that's as far like Hegel thought that that's like a meaningless form of history because it's not it can't be rationally reconstructed. And so it's not that I don't think those are valuable. Like those are obviously part of the toolkit of modern historicist historical philosophizing, but it doesn't come from Hegel. Like, in fact, Hegel would have found it deeply repellent because he was really hoping to reconstruct all of these things as as rational unfolding histories. And so you get this. Like I think in maclntire's After Virtue, for example, you can see that he's put these things together in a way, in a very interesting way, like in effect, like he begins the story with like the loss of our the language of virtues making any sense to us any longer, which is like a contingent happening. It's not a necessary occurrence. But then later in the book, like the nature of the virtues, you can see him reconstructing like how you go from virtues to practices to forms of life in a way that's that's more distinctively Hegelian because it's supposed to enrich and get us to a better view of virtue. So, in a lot of these great 20th-century figures, like MacIntyre's the example I'm thinking of right now, he's synthesizing these different kinds of historical strategies into a into a new thing. Taylor's an interesting case too. He doesn't really use the pure Hegelian kind of narrative that much. I've been reading right now. Have you read his new book, Cosmic Connections, by chance?
PJ Wehry 43:41
No, I read the one right before Cosmic Connections. I can see that one, so I do have that. No, the the language animal. So the which I think is kind of the setup for Cosmic Connections.
Mark Alznauer 43:54
Yeah, it is, and at the very end of Cosmic Connections, if you're interested, he gives like a I don't know, it's like 1520 page history of all ethical thought, and it's really interesting. He's emphatic that it's dialectical, but not in a Hegelian sense. And so, if you read that chapter, you can sort of see he's very aware that he's doing something that's in the Hegelian vein, like, but is not doing it the way Hegel did it. Like, he doesn't understand the dialectic is working the way Hegel does because, on taylor's own account, every time we make a a step forward in terms of ethical consciousness. There's a backlash, and like the backlash is not determined by the concept. It's this sort of I don't know what you want to call it. Maybe a sociological mechanism. Isn't interesting. I have to think harder about what Taylor's doing at the end of that book. But as I said, he's aware that he's might say in the space of Hegelian historical philosophizing, but not doing it the way Hegel did. He's like he four or five times emphatically says, but this is not a teleological story. This is not the way Hegel would have told it. So,
PJ Wehry 44:48
yes, is that at the core of this? There seems to be a discussion about necessity and contingency, and so that one. I'm glad I asked about Nietzsche and Foucault, even though I was like way. Off base because that highlights for me what's yeah and but and what we see I think a lot in in Taylor is that like how to necessity and if I'm hearing you like this is what I see in like the language animal you see it in his use of Humboldt I think
Mark Alznauer 45:18
yeah
PJ Wehry 45:18
but the the way that things work out from contingent things in ways that there's a there's a reason for them, but they're contingent reasons. I don't. It's but of course for Hegel, it all has to be internally necessary. If I understand that correctly,
Mark Alznauer 45:36
you're getting the the crucial distinction right. I mean, it's obviously it's hard to. We'd have to get more conceptual clarity about what we mean by necessity, what we mean by contingency. But you're getting it right. Like Hegel really wants it to be like in every one of these domains. Like so, when he's telling the history of religion, or when he's telling the history, I mean, even when it's something like the development of the will, from the natural will to the arbitrary will to the rational will in the beginning of the philosophy of right. It's supposed to be that there's like a problem, is a contradiction in the arbitrary will, which requires us to move to the rational will, and so the model is always an internal contradiction, which forces a transformation to a new shape, and so that's what it means for it to be necessary: is that there's an internal contradiction. It can't be that like the reason why we moved to modern life was because of like I don't know something like aliens or something like that-some sheer thing that came outside of human history and changed it can't be a virus. It can't all of these things unless the virus was just making it possible for the internal contradiction to manifest. It can't be sheerly sheer contingency. So if it was sheer contingency, then Hegel thinks you wouldn't have a proper rational reconstruction of that domain. You wouldn't be able to show that the movement from one shape to another was genuinely conceptually necessary, and so that's absolutely what Hegel really wants. And Taylor, nobody else really thinks that level of necessity is available in history. Although some people want it to be to some degree, I'll give you the one example that comes up a lot. I think that there's a deep desire we have to think that slave societies were contradictory, that there was no way that they could go on forever. There was some kind of normative deficit that was internal to them because of the way that they they didn't allow all human beings to have moral status, and like that's crucial for Hegel's story. And I think those of us who are most attracted to Hegel's you know style stories, they they can see the appeal of that kind of story with regard to this example because it would sort of give us a reason to think that even if give us a reason to think that slave societies were inherently irrational, there was something built into them that was contradictory, and that is what Hegel thought. But if you think that instead the reason why slavery disappeared was just because of productive forces, like we finally didn't need it anymore, something like that, that's going to be a story where it's just a contingency from the point of view of of the society, why it moved away from slavery, and so there's going to be really important differences between the ways we tell these stories, like whether we we think that there's a Hegelian reconstruction that's available to us, or whether we think that at the end of the day it's just contingencies that are determining the direction of history.
PJ Wehry 47:56
So one would have a good example of that, and I feel like this is an attempt to kind of revivify the system of Hegel is like Francis Fukuyama, right? Would that be an example of?
Mark Alznauer 48:10
Sure, Fukuyama. This is controversial. Like nobody likes Fukuyama anymore. But like, I haven't. He's a Google book once. But I actually think Fukuyama's Fuku is a really good question. So, if you have you, I don't know if you've read it recently or like yeah, it's been a
PJ Wehry 48:25
long. I read it. I I read it 15 years ago. The what is it? The end of history. The last man. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I read it 15 years ago, and then I read his follow up book, which was on how our gene editing would be what what finally finished the evolution. Anyway, yeah, yeah. I think everyone kind of got excited about the democracy being the final one, and then they got disillusioned, and then they didn't read the follow up. But anyways, I digress.
Mark Alznauer 48:54
But let me tell you what I think about the Fukuyama thing. It's like, obviously, so just for your audience's knowledge, like Fu the end, Fukuyama argued in, I guess it was at 1989. Is that when this essay comes out? It's like really good timing that we had reached the end of history. And what he meant by the end of history is there really weren't any other ideological competitors to liberal capitalist democracy. Like we were at the end of the we were at the end of the line. Nothing else was like really capable of motivating people to like have a revolution. So we'd gotten to something that had basically satisfied our need for mutual recognition enough that what was going to happen is we were-I mean, he predicted we'd get bored and we'd fight over dumb stuff, and maybe that's what happened. No, so it's not impossible.
PJ Wehry 49:30
Maybe he was right.
Speaker 1 49:32
Yeah.
PJ Wehry 49:33
So,
Mark Alznauer 49:34
but like the the so it's sort of Hegelian in that there's an end of history. So the reason why it's Hegelian, just to repeat, like Hegel's fundamental explanatory strategy is always a developmental one, and it's always like an acorn becoming an oak tree. And so, an acorn does finally become an oak tree. So it is. It does every one of these stories reaches a conclusion where the oak tree is fully present. And so, so what? What Kojev, who was Fukuyama's master on this, had gotten from Hegel. Was a certain picture. It was a. It was an updated version of Hegelianism, where instead of everything ending with the you know a reformed Prussian state, it was ending with what what was around in the 50s or whatever, which was like a lot more like you know capitalist liberal democracy, and but the thing that was kind of cool or interesting about Fukuyama's argument was never based on dialectics, and so it was never based on a metaphysical kind of reconstruction, it was much more sociologically responsible. So it was based on like observations and modernization theory and all of this stuff. So it wasn't very Hegelian in what justified it, even though it was, as I said, ending up with a somewhat Hegelian-sounding claim. And in some ways, it was sort of you know more attractive than Hegel's view because like you know you can actually check the sociological claims or the historical claims, whereas Hegel's claims are so difficult to assess that you know it's it requires somebody with my with PhD from the Committee on Social Thought to to engage in, and so so Fukuyama is an interesting version of this. So he definitely was updating a theme in Hegel, but he was divorcing it from any of the systematic argumentation that Hegel himself had offered for it, and offering instead like different kinds of arguments for it that I think probably have more currency in the modern world than Hegelian style arguments. And well, Bukiyama, I don't know if he still endorses. I should keep closer tabs on like what his what his view of. Well, I do
PJ Wehry 51:16
you think the because to me it felt like the metaphysical framework was there. It just was. It wasn't alluded to, right? It was that.
Mark Alznauer 51:23
I don't think so because I the the other book that I read of Fukuyama's is what is it called? There's like a two volume like history of order. I can't remember the name of the. Okay, he does his own wide scale history. He wrote his own wild like philosophy of history, and it's much more what you would expect from somebody who'd read Weber, you know Michael Mott, like people like contemporary social theorists, much more informed by anthropology and sociology and history. It's not driven by a an a priori conception as to what the domain of history is and what would count as its fulfillment. The way I think Hegel's is, so I think I have a kind of controversial reading of Hegel's philosophy history, because most people want to downplay that that kind of stuff in Hegel, but I just I don't want to downplay it. I want to play it up, and so so I think that Fukuyama's ends up having a very different kind of justificatory framework for making his claims than. So,
PJ Wehry 52:16
if you don't mind, I'm really fascinated in hearing what that difference
Mark Alznauer 52:20
is. Sure. So let me just maybe I can give you a little bit of the Hegel view, and then you can sort of see like why all of these things might not carry over to it might not be easy to carry over into a contemporary climate. And then I can talk a little bit about Fukuyama, although I'm not like a Fukuyama expert, so I might get that. Yeah.
PJ Wehry 52:37
Well, I'm interested how Hegel is different there because in my like, I mean, I read this 15 years ago, so in my head, I was like, "This feels very Hegelian. But I also, there's been a lot of time passed, so this might just be a major misunderstanding. But I think I think it's useful to you're like, well, it ends in you know, it has this kind of internal necessity that kind of ends in a certain story. Does that isn't that Hegelian? And I'm I'm interested. You're like, no, it's actually not. I'd love to hear that.
Mark Alznauer 53:05
It's similar. Like it's not like as I said. There's unfortunately things get even more complicated the more we talk about this. So there's actually three people we need to be keeping track of. Let me show you Hegel, Kojev, who is the French thinker who who Fukuyama is is version of Hegel is based on, and and Fukuyama himself. Okay, so what does Hegel think is going on in history? Okay, so so history, like any, so what what he thinks is going on in history, the the lapidary and very brief like slogan that he gives us is that one is free, some are free, all are free. So he thinks that at the earliest parts of history, the first human states were actually empires in the East. Uses the term. He's an Orientalist, so we can you know put apologies in your notes on your podcast or something like that. But like so, there you have like early forms of despotism where like only the the the monarch, the tyrant, or whatever was free, and then eventually you have the Greek and Roman world where some people are free, but they're only free by virtue of the fact that they're in slave societies and they don't have to work. And so other people are not free in those societies. And then eventually Hegel thinks, and he thinks this happened because of Christianity. He thinks Christianity taught at a very deep way that we were all equal before God, and the and what modern life is is just the secularization of Christian principles, and so it was something that manifested itself in Europe, and so in Europe we eventually had these constitutional monarchies that recognized that all of that slavery was antithetical, like it was it was an absolute injustice to human beings, and so we finally had societies that he thinks realized what human beings what was true of human beings all along, which is they're in themselves free, and but it matters for Hegel coming to self-conscious of that literally transforms you into almost a different kind of being because it makes it so that you be willing to die rather than be a slave. And once people have that insight, they become like unenslavable, and that's what he thinks modern life has brought into. Existence is this new form of life, and so the story he's trying to tell in history, what he's going to try to show is that each like so. There's four phases. There's an earliest Oriental phase. There's the Greek phase. There's the Roman phase, and then there's the calls it the Germanic phase because he's a little bit of a you know he loves his country. He has a patriotic disposition toward it, but he means by that European mostly, and so, and so what he's going to try to do is show you that like there is a what the state was all along is like was misunderstood by the people in these periods in a way that that created a contradiction that they couldn't resolve and that required a movement to the next phase, and so there's a really so it's a stadial theory of history where, like, there's these necessary stages. All of the necessary stages could have been predicted given the concept of a state, concept of human freedom, and so all of them were teleologically necessary. Like, it was just in the same way that the you know, if you have an acorn, it's going to become an oak tree and not an elm. Like, that's teleologically necessary given the nature of the seed, it had to go in this in this in this direction. Now, if you look hard at Hegel's account and you say, "Well, Hegel, why exactly did this stage follow that stage in like like what caused it to happen? Is no there's nothing in the text that will allow you to see that. Like he's not really what he's trying to do is show you a necessity that had to occur. Show you that it did occur, and he's just not interested in what we would normally think of as causal mechanisms here. So, like, it's something that like it's a very strange way of doing.
Mark Alznauer 56:30
Like we no no contemporary sociologist or historian would be content with it because in some ways it seems like magic that like one empire falls apart and then another one that's an advance on the principle emerges. Now Hegel thinks there's a conceptual rationality that justifies it, but he again not interested in giving you a kind of precise causal account as to why the Greek polis came together when it came together. He doesn't even think that's philosophically relevant, so to speak. So I'm making I'm emphasizing this because you can sort of see that the kind of account we're going to be prone to give in the modern world is going to involve. We just feel like you have to have that account, like yeah,
PJ Wehry 57:06
yeah, yeah.
Mark Alznauer 57:07
And part of the reason why Hegel didn't is because it was prior to Hegel was like an is prior to the development of the social sciences in any way that we would recognize them. So prior to economics, prior to sociology, prior to anthropology, prior to all that stuff, and so we now like have recognized all sorts of explanatory tools that we feel like you need to invoke in order to have a proper explanation as to why one of these things seceded or came after another one, and Hegel was trying to give you an a priori conceptual derivation of the various empires that was exemplified by empirical history, and that's a very different project. Now Koshev is between the two, so now I'm getting to the the twist. So I'm giving you feel like I'm a total philosophy professor today. I'm giving you these long. Oh, I love it. No, this is
Speaker 2 57:48
great.
Mark Alznauer 57:48
So Koshev had this idea that the fundamental mechanism in history, like he was basing almost everything on a reading of the master-slave dialectic in Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, and so Koshev thought that like human beings have a. This is me remembering Kojev from a long time ago, right? Like that, we had like a deep desire to be recognized by other people, and that if that desire was frustrated, eventually you're gonna have like a Spartacus situation where there's gonna be a revolt, and so and once the desire is met, this is Kojev's like this is at least Fukuyama's version of Kojev. Then there's not gonna be revolutions anymore because everybody's basically getting the recognition that as human beings, they deeply desire, and so so that's so it's not really a dialect. I mean, there's some dialectics involved with it, but like it's it's it's different. It's a different kind of argument than the one Hegel actually gives in his philosophy of history, and it's one that has a Hegelian pedigree because it comes from the master-slave dialectic in the phenomenology of spirit. But it's it's like has a it's a weird relation to Hegel's actual views because it's not the way history worked. So
PJ Wehry 58:46
yes, yes, like but I think it's a great example of how putting aside the viability of Hegel's project, Hegel's failure really in some ways people didn't like it, didn't like the way that it answered things, and so they had to go out and, in some ways, I mean, it's more complicated than this, but the the founding of different disciplines follows Hegel, and I won't say necessarily because I don't know how to describe it, but it makes sense. It makes sense that people would go look for these other explanations that we now feel compelled to give
Mark Alznauer 59:22
the the person who is crucial in this part of the reception history is Diltai. So, like, he was somebody who was foundational in like this sort of distinction between the the Geistes Wissenschaft and the natural sciences and the spiritual sciences of the social. What would eventually become the social sciences, and he did get something from Hegel, like because there aren't we haven't talked about them yet? Because like there are other really deep insights Hegel had. One of which is that there's something about what he calls spiritual kinds, like activities, where you you the thing doing it has a conception of what it's doing when it's doing it. That's almost his definition of spirit. I know it's abstractly put, but like like when I'm digesting, I don't have to have a concept of of digestion and. To digest, but when I'm marrying somebody, I need a concept of marriage in order to do that. So that's a that's a kind of activity that requires self consciousness in order to happen. And so, because Hegel is so deeply aware of that difference between nature and spirit, in his terms, that a lot of people who started getting interested in the social sciences and what it would be to have a science, like a science of history or something like that. They realized it was really crucial that that human actions have an inside, and we need to have some sort of we need to get into what people are thinking when they're actually doing these things. And there's no analog for that in the natural sciences because we don't need to know what a cell is doing in order to in order to have a true account of cells. And so Hegel actually is crucial to development of you might say so the social ontology that's behind classical sociology and these debates about history in the late 19th century and the 20th century, but it's because of that way that he was theorizing the difference between Geist and Nature.
PJ Wehry 1:00:53
Well, you've been very patient, and the answers have been awesome, and I've really appreciated it. I want to be respectful of your time. If I could ask you one more question, besides buying and reading your excellent book, which comes out in December, pre-ordering. Did they say
Mark Alznauer 1:01:08
December? Have they changed it?
PJ Wehry 1:01:10
Oh, you know what? I'm going to check right here on the AR. I'm going to check. I could have sworn.
Mark Alznauer 1:01:16
No, it's you don't have to check. You don't have to check. Whatever it is, I could live with it. So
PJ Wehry 1:01:20
it's just it's December. I'm sorry, they change it on you. So it says december 3 right now, but pre-order it. It helps with the marketing. But besides buying and reading your excellent book, Hegel's Soul Idea: The Last Great Metaphysical System, for someone who has listened for the last hour, what would you recommend that they meditate on or do in response to what you've shared today.
Mark Alznauer 1:01:43
Oh, that's a great question. Well, if you're interested in Hegel, like if it's piqued your interest to some degree, like the the things that I find like the most accessible like ways into Hegel's system are not his proper systematic writings, but his introductions. And so, let me give you like three of them that are sort of the introduction to the lectures in the history of philosophy, the introduction to the lectures on esthetics, and the introduction to the lectures on world history. Like these are like they're full of sensational claims. They're really kind of like to me they give you a lot more of the flavor and the spirit of the project. They're not as technically as I said. They're they're they're gonna they're going to. It also is the side of Hegel where you can most sort of most evidently see the things that you're going to resist. But I feel like they're still like the most marvelous way to start thinking about Hegel is to get captivated by somebody who's making claims that are this grand. And and I think those those introductions are a good place to begin.
PJ Wehry 1:02:43
Fantastic, Dr. Altsnauer. Thank you so much for coming on today. I really appreciate
Speaker 3 1:02:47
it.
Mark Alznauer 1:02:47
This was wonderful. I enjoyed the conversation very much. So thank you.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai