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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.
PJ Wehry (00:01.899)
Hello and welcome to Chasing Leviathan. I'm your host, PJ Weary, and I'm here today with Dr. Michael Allen Gillespie, Professor of Political Science at Duke University. And we're here today to talk about his book, Hegel, Heidegger, and the Ground of History. Dr. Gillespie, wonderful to have you on today.
Michael Allen Gillespie (00:19.118)
Thank you, I'm glad to be here.
PJ Wehry (00:22.081)
So just to start us off, why this book?
Michael Allen Gillespie (00:27.34)
Well, this book was written a long time ago and I think it's still relevant today. It was written before the collapse of the former Soviet Union. It was part of an effort for me to come to terms with radical thought in the late 19th, early 20th century.
I think it still remains relevant today. You know, even after that long period when we thought liberalism was going to take over the world, it turns out that that wasn't quite as easy as people imagined it was going to be.
PJ Wehry (01:05.747)
Is there, do you see any crossover with Francis Fukuyama when you talk about liberalism taking over the world?
Michael Allen Gillespie (01:12.398)
Well, Francis's book, which was really dealt with Hegel in the end of history, a notion that we were, liberalism was going to take over the world, that it was going to be Nietzsche and in a certain sense, Kojev, who described the end of it, which was we were all going to become last men and the world was going to become a much more boring place. Now,
PJ Wehry (01:20.149)
Yes.
Michael Allen Gillespie (01:42.69)
Sometimes boring is better than the sort pseudo Chinese saying that we live in interesting times, but we certainly live in interesting times again.
PJ Wehry (01:52.513)
Yes, we do.
Michael Allen Gillespie (01:56.974)
So I think I, know, Hisbo came after mine did. It was an effort to, it adopted the Hegelian notion that we had exhausted all of the possibilities of human consciousness in human, different forms of human society. And that we now could live fruitful lives as citizens of liberal democratic states.
that basically all look like Denmark. know, Filippiano's later book on political order really focused on the whole question of how we can all get to be Denmark because Denmark was clearly the nicest place to live in and it's quite an interesting work. You know, although I think unfortunately it underestimates the extent to which what the Greeks called pleonexia and
feel it to me, ambition and the desire for more characterize human life. And even in a liberal world in which there may not be any new ideological possibilities, it turns out that there are still people that want more and people that are ambitious for power.
PJ Wehry (03:15.285)
Yeah. Yeah. Well, thank you. I know that's a little bit off topic, but I felt that that idea that liberalism is going to win out. It's really interesting to see. And you mentioned that it's still relevant even though liberalism hasn't won out. What do you think is the relevant message of the book today?
Michael Allen Gillespie (03:37.834)
I think the approach to history was, well, let me go back and just say something else first. The modern age was characterized by two great pillars, right? One was modern science that assumed that everything, all events have natural causes. And the second was the notion that human beings are free.
And thirdly, although less pronounced, that human beings are natural beings and not supernatural beings. Now, the consequence of that, of course, is that we seem both to be caused by natural causes and to be free, which poses a certain philosophical and practical problem. And that's something that's still with us. Kant, when he confronted this issue, tried to show that this was an antinomy, which is to say it was a law that contradicted itself.
And in his demonstration of natural causality, he argued that we can only, an explanation of something as a series of causes is only rational if it has a beginning, if we can identify a first cause. But if we have a first cause that isn't caused by something else, it has to be a cause through freedom. And therefore, to have an explanation that's rooted in causality requires freedom.
Early modernity accepted this and simply assumed that God was the primary cause of everything and that everything that followed were the dominoes that were all falling down because he gave a push. Now that has a whole variety of consequences, among them being that we are either elect or not elect, that we either are going to heaven or to hell, but then in any case the world is put together rationally in some way, shape, or form.
So this caused a variety of problems at the end of modernity, especially with Nietzsche and Dostoevsky. Dostoevsky's Ivan Karamazov says, well, if this is the world, then all of the torture and suffering in the world that we see in the example he gives in the Brothers Karamazov is adults that torture and kill children.
Michael Allen Gillespie (05:56.672)
And he says, how can this possibly be a world that was created by a good God? So either God doesn't exist or the God that exists is not a good God. And Ivan therefore says, I give back my ticket to that. Nietzsche, by contrast, says, yes, the world is not, it is an awful place like that. But in order for us to...
live in that world and to live affirmatively, we just have to say, thus I willed it. So it's not a pleasant thought and it's a difficult thought to really when you take it seriously, but it is some way to avoid the anger at being simply controlled by the dead hand of the past.
PJ Wehry (06:42.465)
Hmm.
And so, kind of the way that you start the book, you talk about like, what is history? Can you give us, because we immediately start with this ambiguity of the total events, and then we also have the telling of those events, and from there you lead us in two interesting directions. Can you talk a little bit about what is history? And then of course, the easy task of explaining Hegel and Heidegger, which is always rather simple. Yeah.
Michael Allen Gillespie (07:12.172)
those are, those are always.
The history, we generally think of history as a realm of being, right? It's the unfolding of events. And it's as close, you know, since we've, since we, at least since Plato, we've had this problem of explaining what he calls the idea of the friends of Heraclitus, which is that everything changes.
that there if there isn't something that is sort of laid up in heaven to use his example of forms of things that are laid up in heaven that we compare everything to then everything is constantly in a set of change now if that's the case then the world seems to be irrational what we just what modernity discovered however beginning with Galileo and others was that we could that it wasn't exactly irrational it was just rational in a different way which is to say things change
but they change according to certain laws. the ability to measure motion mathematically, for example, and change mathematically meant that we could understand the way in which things change, and we can make predictions about them, and we could manipulate those changes for our own benefit. Now, of course, at the beginning,
That was thought of as understanding the will of God, right? And history in that sense was understood as providence and not simply as a method of understanding the world. Aristotle, when he thinks about history, says, philosophy is about what's necessary, poetry about what's probable and history about what's actual.
Michael Allen Gillespie (09:13.836)
you know, obviously, there's a kind of poetic element to almost all of our history. And that's because we always there are innumerable number of facts, and we have to choose which facts are relevant to any given situation. So we tell a story and it's not accidental history and story come from the same root, istora, which was a Greek term that originally meant witness by the gods. And it
And when it began with Thucydides in particular, he thought that it was crucial that you write about things in your own lifetime and that you actually go and determine all the details. So he would travel around Greece looking at battle scenes and et cetera, et cetera, to find out what probably actually happened or as close as possible. Now, of course, he invented a whole bunch of speeches that people should have given under this circumstances and may have given.
But it took on that notion. And then it became a place where people displayed heroic deeds. So people like Cicero could imagine history to be a moral, a series of moral exemplars so that we could explain ourselves. From the time of Gustonon though, history was thought of as divine, the manifestation of divine providence. And that it was, it unfolded according to the will of God.
Of course, in modern times that meant as let's just say God receded in people's imagination and was replaced by reason, it became the unfolding of reason. So Hegel when he talks about history sees it as the rational development of consciousness. And the original title of his Phenomenology of Spirit was the experience of
consciousness, and it became, it grew into the phenomenology of spirit, but it was about the development of the human spirit over historically and according to particular laws that he saw as rational laws based upon a kind of his acceptance of the Kantian antinomy and his use of it to explain the way in which
Michael Allen Gillespie (11:37.966)
events developed.
PJ Wehry (11:42.155)
Yeah. And so how does, you use the term the ground of history and you use that to kind of trace throughout Hegel and Heidegger, how does the ground of history that this unfolding, comes from somewhere. As you've talked about kind of this, the reason, go ahead.
Michael Allen Gillespie (11:59.278)
Right. the term ground in this context is, it is when it's first used by Leibniz as a principle of reason, he describes it as, in the German is, prinzitis grundis, the principle of the ground. We usually translate it as the principle of sufficient reason, which is to say, is there, and again, to go back to the causality, is there,
an explanation that says, well, X caused Y and A caused X and B caused A, that you can go back forever, but there's no sufficient explanation unless you have some final point to explain that. And so the question is, if history, if we imagine that the unfolding of events is rational, how do we explain the beginning? And how do we explain the beginning without God?
in particular? How can it be rational in some sense? And Hegel, in trying to do that, is driven back in his logic, which he describes as the way God conceived the world before he even created it is what he calls the principle of absolute negativity. You know, and I think I say at some point in the book, Hegel may have understood this, but nobody else ever since has been able to make sense out of it, what he meant by that.
PJ Wehry (13:24.565)
Yeah.
Michael Allen Gillespie (13:26.094)
You know, that's true for a number of different philosophical concepts. mean, talked about the transcendental unity of apprehension as a solution to his problem of how to unite the phenomena and the numina, but nobody has ever been able to make a whole lot of sense out of that either. you know, and when we say God, it all begins with God, that doesn't really answer the question. That just says there's an incomprehensible beginning.
or cosmologists today who say, well, it was a quantum anomaly, which effectively means a miracle occurred. So we don't, you it's just the problem with explaining events causally. They need some initial explanation so that when, you know, your child says, why, you know, why is this guy blue? And you, and you then why is it this way? And then why, why, why? You just end up saying, because
Either I say so or somebody made it that way, you know, and they're, they leave dissatisfied, but you know, they have a fuller explanation than they before.
PJ Wehry (14:36.129)
So, and I just want to make sure I'm tracking with you here. I've always heard the principle of sufficient reason, but think of it the principle of this ground or grounding. The ground is something that something springs from and that it returns to. So it provides the, to think about this from the theological standpoint, when you talk about Augustine,
Michael Allen Gillespie (14:36.526)
So.
PJ Wehry (15:02.613)
This would be like quoting Hebrews, Jesus is the author and finish of our faith so that Jesus would be the ground of history. Is that a way to think about it?
Michael Allen Gillespie (15:12.046)
Right, or Jesus would be, insofar as you're Trinitarian and not a Pelagian, Jesus is the voice of God. Or just put it in the beginning of John. In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God. You know, it's that first Word that is the ground of all things. Right first, right? And nobody says, what was God doing before he created, before he made the universe?
PJ Wehry (15:18.035)
Right.
PJ Wehry (15:26.057)
Mm-hmm. Yes.
PJ Wehry (15:34.038)
Yes.
Michael Allen Gillespie (15:41.238)
I you know, it's a it we don't ask those questions because we assumed or least theologians assumed for a long time that there was that God we couldn't understand God. It was just a fundamental mystery at the beginning. We just we had the testimony of Christ that justified that that that sense. Now, you know, one of the problems that I argued about in my other books is whether or not the actual
text of scripture was what was the voice of Christ and Paul and etc etc. So there are variety of problems with that kind of justification but it was the basis for faith and faith was sufficient to say we don't have to answer that question of in any other way than to say that's the way God made it.
PJ Wehry (16:30.463)
Right. so, but then we see the, and that's where you talk about the movement from religion to reason with Hegel. so, but that this kind of author and finisher idea that the ground makes so much more sense to me than the principle of sufficient reason, because I think I get that, that metaphor. think there's a richness there that's missing in the translation.
Michael Allen Gillespie (16:30.84)
So, keep that in mind.
Michael Allen Gillespie (16:51.724)
Right, well what makes recent sufficient is it has a crowd.
PJ Wehry (16:55.518)
Yeah.
that's good. So when you're talking about Hegel's discussion of history, you say that there's two schools, really. One is the metaphysical school, one's the historical school. And you say that they're missing kind of the, I think that you say the synthetic intention. How do you, what are the two, those two misreadings and how do you, in some way it sounds like you're reconciling them in your reading of Hegel.
Michael Allen Gillespie (17:07.715)
Mm-hmm.
Michael Allen Gillespie (17:26.732)
Well, that's what I try to do. When he wrote the Phenomenology, the Phenomenology lays the foundation for everything else that he does. And in the Phenomenology, it began with the experience of individual consciousness. And he goes through and shows how individual consciousness develops. He then has a long chapter on spirit. spirit for him is just collective consciousness. It's what we could think of it as sociology or culture.
PJ Wehry (17:36.065)
Cough
Michael Allen Gillespie (17:55.926)
It's how cultures develop or how societies develop. And then is a chapter on religion in which he talks about the development of religion over time. Now, all three of these motions between the individual, the community and the divine are in his view, they're contemporaneous, but he describes them each individually. And in that sense, he provides a dialectical explanation for why
we see these developments based on but parallel between individual and individual consciousness in collective consciousness and with our notion of the divine. So those that's in a way the metaphysical explanation for this development and the historical development then is to go and look particularly at the individual instances that each of these things correspond to.
So Terry Pinkert in his book, The Sociology of Reason, does a really good job at going through the Hegel's Phenomenology and pointing to all the individual characters at each stage that he is concerned with. This was one of my hopes to write a book of that sort when I was young. And I was really glad that somebody else did it because it's an immense amount of work. now I don't have to do it.
know, but it's just an easy place to go see what he's actually referring to in those instances. So it's a very, in that sense, now the more historical view is, the question is, how sensible is that historical version of what he does in a convincing metaphysical manner? Now he says that it, of course it's not perfect, it isn't that everybody was doing this all the time, but
He tries to show, and probably one of the best ways to think about it is the master-slave dialectic, which he sees as the beginning of history. And he relates it, and to relate that to the experience of children when they grow up. So he says at the beginning, there's just mere consciousness. So you have a consciousness that doesn't distinguish itself from the world. just, it wakes up when it's...
Michael Allen Gillespie (20:19.38)
one cry is out of the womb and everything around it is it doesn't distinguish itself from that that that that stuff but then at a certain point we become self-conscious and we distinguish ourselves and that's that's both it makes us an individual but it also alienates us from everything else that we used to be right Hegel calls this Entzfeil
he says separation is the beginning of all philosophy so so it is at that point we we separate ourselves and we feel like we've lost something right we're not everything we used to be and the first thing we do is try to make it ourself our own so we eat it right
You know, we pop it in the mouth and just swallow it and yeah, it becomes us again And then we make it into property we appropriate it and then as we're passing as we're going through the world We run into another consciousness that is making the same kind of claims So, you know in the case of children it is you know the one child who is who's met another child and is he's playing with his blocks and the other kid wants one of the blocks and says
and he takes it and the other kids takes it and says this is mine, right? And you need mom and dad to say well Johnny you have to play with, share. But with primitive man from Hegel's point of view and he's thinking here of people like Achilles, the beginning is always no I'm the real thing. This world and you and your body belong to me, not the reverse. And if you
If you claim otherwise, I'll demonstrate to you that you belong to me by killing you or fighting you to show you. And in that sense, the one that gives up, either somebody dies or both people die or somebody gives up and becomes a slave, becomes the property of another person. And that person, then the person who is made into a slave then says, thou art the Lord. You're the you. Yes, you were right.
Michael Allen Gillespie (22:36.718)
And that seems to satisfy this desire for the other person to be whole and entire. But in fact, what happens is the as this person gains more and more slaves and the slaves do all the work, he finds he doesn't have any reason to do anything anymore, right? He's reduced back to a childlike existence where people, you know, come and give him milk to drink and et cetera, et cetera. So.
you see this dialectical development that means that the masters become dependent upon their slaves. And that's the kind of dialectical process that he describes both among individuals and among in societies that help to drive his historical role. So in each age, there's something that some goal that people have, something that they want, something that
that they're willing to fight and die for. And it's not always the same thing, right? In some instances, Christian martyrs are willing to just let the lions eat them, right? They are, you know, because they think that they're turning the other cheek. In other ages, the Spartans are willing to, you know, to fight to, you know, two million Persians in order to stay true to their laws. People find reasons that...
But all of those reasons are consequences, not of some inventive notion, but of the fact that at that point, this is the necessary shape that consciousness takes and the necessary shape that society takes. Now.
Is it, is it, is this true perfect everywhere and always certainly not from Hegel's point of view? Is it so it most people will always find exceptions and will always say, well, no, this there were all these other things going on. But it is interesting that we constantly look at the goals that different societies have. If at least in the Western world, Hegel was not as cognizant of what was going on in the East, although later he learned more about it.
PJ Wehry (24:46.113)
Mm-hmm.
Michael Allen Gillespie (24:51.022)
And you can see how there's a certain plausibility to this argument. Why supposedly divinely ordained monarchs who tell them that they should eat cake instead of bread turn up to lose. But we don't immediately then, the people don't then immediately become wealthy. You get the bourgeoisie, right? The bankers, the...
PJ Wehry (25:07.073)
you
Michael Allen Gillespie (25:19.918)
And that makes the world, you know, they make the world a different place. there is an attempt in, I think you can make, you you shouldn't simply dismiss Hegel because it all seems flimsy and up in the air. His argument is in a way like a rational choice argument in this respect. I want, why do I want the things that I want? Because those are the things that are socially respectable.
right? And whether it's honor, whether it's wealth, whether it's piety, those are the things in my time that are respectable. But when I get them, they turn out to not be terribly satisfying, at least until you get to the end, which is after the French Revolution and the notion of being a citizen in a liberal state. He thinks that's going to be satisfying. is, you know, Marx wrote a book called A Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right.
in which he tried to show why that wouldn't be sufficient because the reconciliation that it made possible for all human beings was still based upon class distinctions that were undermined by the development of a proletariat in 19th century. that they were effectively, they were students, they were citizens, but effectively excluded from real citizenship and even from property altogether.
Michael Allen Gillespie (26:50.03)
Thank
PJ Wehry (26:54.689)
Thank you. I want to get to Heidegger as well. I feel like any other any other threads we pull there. I mean, not that's a surprise. Hegel, you can keep talking about Hegel for a long time. Yes. What is Heidegger's response to Hegel and what he sees as the crisis of modernity?
Michael Allen Gillespie (27:06.478)
There are lots of strings to be pulled there, yes indeed.
Michael Allen Gillespie (27:21.966)
Hegel from Heidegger's point of view
ushered in, along with the Treaty of Vienna, ushered in what we think of as the long 19th century, from 1815 to 1916. And that it, at the last years of that, from the 1880s on, the development, you the collapse of Hegelianism, the sense that it was a kind of, it produced a bureaucratic state that was
that really left the religion out of human life. Kierkegaard complains about this, the Hegelian bureaucracy of the Danish state. It was certainly true in Germany as well. And it led to people like Nietzsche who talked about the death of God. And the death of God, why? Because human beings had become too
tiny to sustain the idea of a God from Nietzsche's point of view. We would just to say we'd all moved into, we'd moved into a, industrial and ultimately consumer society in which, you know, we just hopped around like little creatures in search of whatever our most recent passion demanded of us. And, you know, that, that is a critique certainly of the liberal state and, and the market economy that it, it just makes us, makes it possible for us to.
pursue whatever we want at any given moment, but it therefore undermines the notion of discipline and that really is essential to the pursuit of, let's say, higher forms of life from Nietzsche's point of view. So Heidegger inherits that notion that the Hegelian state, even if Hegel was correct, the...
Michael Allen Gillespie (29:21.282)
that Fukuyama in a certain sense was right, that the Hegelian state ends up being the state of the last man. consequently, the reality of nihilism is something that Heidegger takes seriously, which is to say Hegel's vision, along with Nietzsche's, simply undermines the possibility for the belief in anything higher than the things that we create.
And he says in contrast to Nietzsche and Heidegger and Hegel and Nietzsche, we have to understand that the cause of this is not simply due to the fact that consciousness has exhausted all of its possibilities. Because, and here Nietzsche would agree with him, we're not just consciousness.
For Nietzsche, consciousness is what we think of as our ego, our self. It includes some knowledge of our passions. It's some vague awareness of drives and instincts. But we're not transparent to ourselves. We don't know why we do all the things we do. I'm sure almost everybody in some sense has said to themselves, why the hell did I ever do that?
you know, or think that. that's the way, that's the beginning point for Heidegger's thought. And the question is, why is life so empty then? Why does it seem so empty? Why has it been spiritually emptied out? And his argument is, this is not because man became too small. This is because what he calls the question of being disappears.
And by the question of being, think it probably be fair to say what he means by that is something like the Deus Absponditus, that God has disappeared into, God has withdrawn into the background. And what's missing is not effort on our part, it's that we don't have any, we're not struck by primordial questions anymore. And the primordial questions are essentially the experience that gives rise to wonder and to new thinking.
Michael Allen Gillespie (31:48.802)
But they occur only with the experience of being as a qu- and no, by being with a capital B as opposed to little beings or entities, right? So he looks around, go back one step, when the pre-socratics looked at the world and in their mythological context everybody said who was saying who did that or who is it? it Zeus? it Poseidon? Et cetera, et cetera.
They asked the test in Greek, totion, what is being? And when Thales asked that answer, he had a very limited vocabulary in order to explain that. And so every time he opened his mouth, all that came out was water, right? And when Heraclitus said the same thing, all that came out was fire, right? Because they were looking for something like stuff or...
substrate or the but they didn't have any or matter even they didn't have a word that was a unified word for that and in part because we never experience stuff we never experience matter it's always embodied in some particular form
Now so that experience, the experience of the looming question of what gives all the beings their being, right, is something that doesn't appear for us anymore, it doesn't strike us anymore. And for Heidegger that's because it has been, the question of being has withdrawn. Now being capital B, Zion, it's an infinitival form in German,
is always only for us as a question, right? It's not something, it's not like a table or a chair or something that we can even get hold of. It's beyond our capacity to understand. And so his attempt is to argue that history since the time of the Greeks has been characterized by the with not by the diminution of man.
Michael Allen Gillespie (34:02.41)
and in Nietzsche's case or the progress of spirit in Hegel's case, but has been the increasing forgetfulness of the question of being. And that shapes almost all of the intellectual transformations that have taken place. And in that sense, philosophically, we've come to the point where we, along with Quine, can say,
PJ Wehry (34:09.438)
Mm-hmm.
Michael Allen Gillespie (34:31.694)
philosophy is just a handmaiden for science, right? It doesn't have any questions anymore. We're just around to clarify the concepts so science can make machines, technologies that will work to make life better for us. And Heidegger found that the highest point of withdrawal from philosophy altogether and and for him,
history is rooted in a kind of absence, the absent God, the increasingly absent God, who leaves us at the end unable to experience wonder, unable to experience questions, unable to experience beauty or joy. And so now, and for him then, all that's left is the waiting for God, right?
It's something that, you know, waiting for Godot was based upon, right? It is a waiting for the arrival of that question again. And all that we can do is kind of clear the ground so that we can, and that clearing of the ground he calls the destruction of Western metaphysics, which became the deconstruction of metaphysics and the antipost-structuralist.
So by clearing the ground away, it makes it possible, it opens up a place for the epiphany of being itself, for the question itself. Now, whether that actually occurs is another question. And in particular, insofar as Heidegger saw the character of the modern world being shaped by technology, what was needed was not theology in that sense, but what he calls
Phronasys, which in Greek just means practical wisdom, the knowledge of how to do things. And he thought of that as historicity, understanding your place in history and in this moment in time. in that, in what he calls a moment of vision, right, we would see what was necessary for our people or generation. And that, so that the ground of history in that sense is the
Michael Allen Gillespie (36:51.628)
the abyss of God, I think is one way to put it, or the unground as he puts it at other times. So history is always driven by the absence of something that we're looking for. And it only becomes, it only seems to come to an end when we stop looking. So here's the experience of nihilism for him as opposed to Fukuyama and the end of history for him is we've just stopped looking.
And we stop looking because we don't see the mystery that's at the heart of things. So Aristotle, for example, could say, things begin with wonder for him or aporia, things that don't make sense. But one of the examples he gives is, we plant some seeds, the rain falls, the sun shines, the plants grow, and there's something miraculous about that, but we don't see that.
Or for Nietzsche, we exist only by eating other things, other living things. We make them us and we're really, and we're gonna be eaten in turn. But what we're doing is really life consuming life in order to be. And that
you know, what we're and within the context of the Darwinian world, as he understands it, we are consuming our relatives, right? Now they're more distant relatives, but still relatives. And who speaks for life itself, right? As opposed to just for me or my people or my generation. And that's an increasingly important as we live in a
time of great extinction, that's an important question that we need to ask ourselves and one that I think comes up in this debate. Now, Heidegger, who's often used as somebody to speak in this way, says, well, yes, we should think of these things, beings all derived from this experience of being. And for him, that in one sense leads you to think of
Michael Allen Gillespie (39:17.582)
everything is divine creations and creatures and therefore to be treated with care. On the other hand, he seems to think that understanding what's crucial for our generation is, and people in generation is a frontemos, a wise, a practically wise man who understands things not in terms of what's technologically the most efficient or the most able to produce prosperity, but what makes us
a people whole and entire and of course he settled on Hitler as an example of that and you know there's a sense of I think of Heidegger as an aristotelian, know as a rich his aristotelian national socialism right it is kind of a notion of a wise person who thinks in a way about what we do as opposed to what we make
But, know, Heidegger eventually says towards the end of the war, Hitler failed me. You know, as opposed to I was blind, you know, he has had a different explanation. He didn't live up to what he needed to do.
PJ Wehry (40:34.901)
There's a yeah, mean, reading High together is a certain arrogance that was there even before Hitler like that. It would make sense. He push it on to him.
Michael Allen Gillespie (40:44.588)
He became, I would say, in the 1930s, he thought that a Nietzschean notion of will to power was something that could sustain and shape human life. I look at this sometimes as if it was, you know, he should be in the play, in the Oedipus play. so eventually, he's sort of Oedipus to start with. He thinks that he's for...
And Nietzsche does, they think they're fortune's children and they can do what they want. And unlike Jocasta who says, stop asking those questions, don't go any further, don't think about this, because you're gonna find out something you don't wanna know. I think after the war, he went back and instead of thinking of Oedipus as the example, he thought of Tiresias who's the blind prophet who, you know, who.
speaks listens to the gods tell him what to do. So I think he sort of stepped back from this notion that we can act immediately on this ground. So we just have to listen for the voice of being to speak to us again.
PJ Wehry (41:58.881)
This was a little bit further back, but when you were talking about Heidegger in some ways as a response to Quine, philosophy is just the handmaiden of the sciences. Is this where we get the concept of chattering that shows up in Heidegger?
Michael Allen Gillespie (42:17.55)
Well, that notion of chatter goes all the way, I you can find that already in Petrarch, know, where people, you know, or in, in T.S. Eliot, the women come and go speaking of Michelangelo, you know, it is, it is even, there's educated chatter, but it comes, there's what Heidegger understands that there's always going to be chatter, right? And we know from neuroscience that about 40 % of our,
our brain power is used for social grooming, right? You walk down the road and you see somebody you don't know and you say, how's it going? And if that person stops and says, jeez, I'm glad you asked, let me tell you all the problems I've today. You're like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, No, I really don't want to that. So we know it's social grooming, right? People don't make that mistake. And...
PJ Wehry (42:51.728)
Hahaha
PJ Wehry (43:01.438)
Yeah.
Michael Allen Gillespie (43:14.018)
But so Heidegger knows that that's going on for a long time, although he was not very good at social grooming in that sense. When we think about chatter, Petrarch talks about that earlier on. Heidegger, think, is...
is worried about the fact that there's no experience of wonder or profundity, except he thinks for the poets. And here you have someone like Sylvia Plath, whose famous claim, Poetry of Tyranny, is on the mark. We're dominated by that voice that speaks to us.
He sees that more in Rilke especially and in other German poets, World War I poets, et cetera, cetera, Trackel, So he thinks that those are the only people that are really listening and thinking today other than him. But the...
Michael Allen Gillespie (44:34.478)
So I think for Quine, chatter, the analytic project that Heidegger knew a great deal about, he wrote his dissertation on Russell's paradox and other things in analytic philosophy, the analytic notion was that we could, that the problem with philosophy that made it so controversial was the failure to provide adequate definitions to terms.
And if we just provide adequate definitions to terms and purge language of metaphysics, theology, mythology, imagination, and just make it a scientific language, we'd be fine. And that already in the 1960s was overturned by Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem, which showed even the simplest possible
language arithmetic has to be it's either contradictory or incomplete, you know, so it suffers from a lot of these same problems and that's I you know, heidegger I think understood that that this was not a path to go to and more and more the analytic philosophy people did as well and they gave it up and turned towards neuroscience and the philosophy of mind
PJ Wehry (45:55.477)
Yeah. And I want to be respectful of your time. One thing that you mentioned as a critique of Heidegger that I found really fascinating was that you said he turned against Plato when he should have seen Plato as an ally because he didn't. Basically, I won't say fundamentally, but he misinterpreted Plato. Can you speak a little bit to that and how his misunderstanding of Plato and how Plato actually could have helped his project?
Michael Allen Gillespie (46:25.356)
Well, I would say he misinterpreted Plato, but maybe didn't misinterpret the Platonists, right? In this case, Plato, think, Plato articulates a doctrine of the forms that becomes the basis for Platonism. In his Parmenides, the young Socrates is meeting with Parmenides and he says, you know, I have this theory of the forms and, you know, and he explains it and Parmenides says, well,
PJ Wehry (46:31.943)
yeah, that makes sense.
PJ Wehry (46:41.056)
Yes.
Michael Allen Gillespie (46:54.794)
is there a form for mud or hair? And Socrates says, well, that's a perplexing question. I don't have an answer for that. And Parmenides then goes on to explain in a very obscure fashion the relationship between the one and the many, which is to say you can't have a form for one form for many things without having many things as well.
PJ Wehry (46:57.951)
Yeah.
Michael Allen Gillespie (47:20.408)
So he says, if the many are, the one both is and isn't, if the one is, the many both are and are not. So it ends up in a kind of contradiction. Now, I think at least after that, don't think Plato seriously took seriously the doctrine of the forms. And in fact, for example, the Republic, his whole notion is based upon the idea of the good, right? That's the crucial thing that the philosopher King has to know to make everything work.
but he tells his the people that are you know he's talking to in the dialogue well you know you I could try to explain this to you but I probably wouldn't be sufficient you couldn't understand it in any case okay now that's not a terribly satisfying answer and you know there is this evidence that we have that may be not true but it captures this whole thing that Plato was his
students at the academy badgered him to giving a lecture on the good. Because they said, this is fine that you don't want to publish this and tell everybody else, but we're your students. You need to tell us what it is. And after a sufficient time of badgering, Plato agreed to give a lecture on the good. And he gave the lecture and we know two things about it. One,
He spoke very obscurely and lots of and using lots of math. And second, by the time he was done, the only person that was still left in the room was Aristotle. Right. So it was sufficiently obscure. know, it is it's a little bit I always thought of that a little bit like Hegel's notion of absolute negativity. You know, maybe he understood it, but. You know, we'll take it there.
PJ Wehry (49:12.811)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Michael Allen Gillespie (49:16.174)
So part of the problem with all of these things is, so I think in that sense, Plato could have been useful to Heidegger as somebody who was trying to bring out the questionableness of things. The problem with experiencing things as questions, which is what Nietzsche tries to do all the time, is it can be terribly disorienting and dispiriting.
for the world to think, you know, none of this makes much sense. We either have faith that God must understand what's going on or that there's somebody out there that understands what's going on. as soon as doubt crosses our mind that those people really understand things or that the Bible is not really telling us the truth, that can be disheartening to say the least.
part of what, and especially because in those, in the abyss of those kinds of questions, we often respond, we often think that we hear the voice of being or the voice of God telling us something, when in fact we just hear our own anxieties, our own passions telling us things.
you know, that's, think, that I think is a real danger. And, you know, we unfortunately in our current morass of questions and disinformation, it's hard for us to decide whether what makes sense and what's true. And we often end up doing things, you know, that shoot ourselves in the foot. You know, whether it's, you know, people that falsify their data on
PJ Wehry (50:40.217)
Cut.
Michael Allen Gillespie (51:08.014)
Alzheimer's research or people that think that vaccines cause autism or you know, take your pick and you know it or that we don't everybody should just get measles and You it's only cost us 30,000 large so far. So they know there are displays in which We're searching I mean people sometimes are legitimately Anxious and they think that they know something or they read something must be the case You know when not
PJ Wehry (51:38.869)
Yeah. So I want to be respectful of your time. And we obviously could I could ask a lot more questions about Hegel and Heidegger. I really appreciate it. If I could ask one more question for someone who has listened for the last hour. What is something that they should either besides, excuse me, besides buying and reading your excellent book, you just came out in a new edition, besides buying and reading.
Michael Allen Gillespie (51:47.15)
you
Michael Allen Gillespie (52:04.321)
Right.
PJ Wehry (52:07.445)
Hey, it's Goal, Heidegger, and the Ground of History. What is something that you would tell someone who's listened for last hour to either really meditate on or do over the next week in response?
Michael Allen Gillespie (52:18.695)
hmm.
You know, one of the, there are different kinds of ways to think about this. I think Heidegger's little essay, The Question of Technology can be useful for people to look at. is reasonably straightforward. In terms of, Hegel's a more difficult question.
PJ Wehry (52:50.963)
Yeah.
Michael Allen Gillespie (52:52.686)
To tell, just to tell you a little story, when I, after I, the reason I turned to Hegel when I was an undergraduate was one of my teachers told me that, that when I asked what was the best philosophical work ever written, and he said Hegel's Phenomenology. And so I had this idea that I would read Hegel's Phenomenology, Nietzsche's Schopenhauer World is Representation, and Nietzsche's Zarathustra is an independent study. And he took me down to the philosophy and said,
listen to this, he wants to do this and do you have any objections? So they all laughed and I spent an entire semester trying to make sense of these things and I had almost no idea what Hegel was talking about. But you know, I was stubborn and 20 years later I sort of knew more of what it was about. And now having taught this many times, I've got an even better idea.
PJ Wehry (53:32.545)
you
PJ Wehry (53:36.993)
you
PJ Wehry (53:44.501)
Ha ha ha ha!
Michael Allen Gillespie (53:50.968)
probably if you want to just see a little bit about Hegel, the introduction to the philosophy of history is, you know, that's probably the most straightforward thing. I mean, although he even says there, you know, these were lectures and he says, I, know, now reason rules the world. And of course you guys aren't going to understand that. So trust me on that. then the lectures follow. There we go.
PJ Wehry (54:12.971)
Yeah.
PJ Wehry (54:18.945)
That's, yeah, great. That's the first time I've heard anyone mention anything brief to be introduced to Hegel, so thank you, I appreciate that. Dr. Gillespie, absolute joy having you on today, thank you.
Michael Allen Gillespie (54:29.128)
There you go. Okay.
Michael Allen Gillespie (54:35.832)
Thank you very much. Good talking to you. Bye bye.