Support me in Patreon: / footnotes2plato diagram for module 7 (note that this diagram builds on the prior four diagrams in this playlist on German Idealism)
Decent summary of my remarks from ChatGPT: This summary outlines a lecture that attempts to diagram Hegel's "Phenomenology of Spirit," providing a simplified visual representation of Hegel's complex philosophical ideas. The lecturer acknowledges the limitations of this approach, as it cannot capture the full depth and detail of Hegel's work. Sense Certainty: Hegel starts with the basic form of knowledge called "sense certainty," akin to pre-Kantian perspectives, where objects exist independently and knowledge is gained in an immediate, unproblematic way. However, this form of knowledge encounters contradictions and realizes its inadequacy as terms like "now" or "here" are more abstract than they appear, leading to the understanding that the mind plays a role in mediating knowledge. Perception: From the ashes of sense certainty, a new shape of consciousness emerges, called "perception." This stage recognizes that objects are mediated by concepts of understanding and by space and time. A dialectic unfolds as consciousness tries to reconcile the unity of an object with its multiple properties, eventually leading to the realization of its inadequacy. Force and Understanding: The next stage, "force and understanding," sees consciousness recognizing a supersensible substratum behind objects. This leads to an understanding of the identity of subject and object but still lacks complete self-consciousness. Self-Certainty: As consciousness evolves, it reaches "self-certainty" or self-consciousness, where the self assimilates objects to itself. It encounters another self-consciousness, leading to Hegel's famous master-slave dialectic. This stage involves a battle for recognition and an eventual realization of a master-slave dynamic, which the slave overcomes by internalizing the dialectic. Stoicism and Religious Consciousness: The progression leads to stoicism and religious consciousness, where self-consciousness grapples with its division and seeks freedom, eventually leading to the realization that the divine is within oneself. Reason: The stage of "reason" sees the self-consciousness becoming aware of its unity with nature and the evolutionary process of objects and subjects. However, this stage still needs to overcome itself to reach full knowledge. Absolute Knowledge: The journey towards absolute knowledge requires social institutions and forms. Hegel emphasizes that this is not just an individual's journey but the journey of absolute spirit, which eventually becomes self-conscious of its own spiritual being. The lecturer encourages students to read Hegel's "Phenomenology of Spirit" despite its complexity and the potential need for multiple readings.
I was introduced to the Phenomenology of Spirit by Hegel in 1999 at the University of California Riverside. At first I was completely lost, but I read and reread the book. It was the start of my journey into the plethora of ideas that I found in the continental tradition. I believe, especially now that this seminal work is completely under rated given the crisis of our time. Thank you for posting this.
When you said “the master is seeking recognition from another free being” I finally realized how deep the phenomenology of spirit goes: All the way from Leibniz to Fichte, it captures the story of philosophy over that period.
Hegel was such a fan of negation that his Preface in Phenomenology of Spirit actually starts out as an explanation about why a Preface to a philosophical work is bullshit. And actually expands his theory out of this ability to claim that a preface is in adequate lol amazing!
I am a student of nondual philosophy/spirituality, and it struck me how close this seems to be to the teachings of, for example, Rupert Spira and Adyashanti, and of Buddhist philosophers such as Nagarjuna. So helpful, many thanks!
@French Frys Yes, that's right: I was referring to the teachings of Vedanta (based upon the Upanishads) and, more recently, the Advaita or Nonduality teachings.
I'm blown away by this! I've tried for years to find any resource that would make Hegel make even a little bit of sense to me and this video has helped me understand more than I ever thought I would. Thank you so much, you are a great teacher
Phenomenal explanation! No pun intended 😉This explanation is direct, simplified without compromising the integrity of the fundamentals & conveyed wth ease. Well Done! 👏👏👏
Thank you so much, your explanation makes a lot of sense to me yet it does not feel like it deteriorates Hegel’s original thoughts. While all other summaries/ critical reviews I’ve found do or are themselves hard to comprehend. Again, thank you!
Hey great video!! I'm reading this book now, I really appreciate that you put all three sections in one concise video with a diagram. It takes a lot of time to understand this book, let alone to summarize in a simple way like you did here. Thanks for this!
Excellent explanation!...Hagel is not really that complicated, as long as we are open to his philosophy and not become attached to collective beliefs...you made it very simple...thank you for taking the time to share this!
As long as the collective is not the creativity of the individual and innovation of the individual slows or stops, then collective is functioning well in a country. Soepomo, Schuler vom Hegel said in 1941 and this develops in the Indonesian constitution of 1945. But you have to pay attention to that The individual has a duty and not only the right. So thank you Teacher, you have to help me understand Hegel
Thank you very much for this clear explanation. Hegel was such a ridiculously perceptive and smart person. I feel like these ideas are deeply related to the field we now know as psychology and that are still being researched to this day. This man just had all of this deep understanding of the world and human existence long before the term "psychology" even existed. To some degree this can be said about all pre-psychology philosophers, though, but I feel like this goed a lot deeper into the human mind and reality of the world than many other philosophical ideas, which to me often seem to focus more on "possibilities" and ideas less entrenched in the observable world, or at least not on this scale.
Congratulations. You are part of the dialectical unfolding of the absolute as the development of the human spirit, and, as such, will arrive at absolute knowledge, too.
Good work young man, although I dont expect you to try and explain every little details in Hegel's phenomenology with diagram. He would have been pissed off by that i am sure lol, but in his dialectical spirit as well, he would have been very delighted by the way you try to grasp his philosophy in a concrete form trying to unravel its complexity!! Thump up
kad je prijemni za filozofiju sutra a moras da spremis hegela i ponadas se da nije manijak ali onda odgledas ovo i znas manje nego pre gledanja videa 🙏😍😍🙏
2:25 "... every knowledge claim - at least until we get to *Absolute Knowledge* - ends up running into contradictions, BUT if it follows its logic through to the end those contradictions in fact overcome themselves..."
So now, what people should do is find out about this master slave dialectic and think about how this affects the ontological duality between user and programmer, input and output, hardware and software. I think there is very important and greatly unexplored grounds for Hegelian deconstructionist theory there.
When I read Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, I do not remember reading anything about how the imagination plays a role in experience-except to the extent that went on and on about distinctions between a priori and a posteriori, which is about before and after questions. Anyway, even until now, every time I thought about the difference between the thing-as-experienced and the thing-in-itself, my mind has always maintained a static conception of how these two interact. I would think of, say, a cup sitting in front of me and I would contemplate what it is-in itself-sitting right there before me. However, I have never thought of the way in which fantasy or imagination plays into this dynamic. When I think of the way I experience the cup in the future, then, clearly, in order to do that, I must call into use the faculty of imagination. In the case of science, each experiment begins as a hypothesis, a technical word designating really nothing more than imagination. Then, imagination, on the other hand, is basically an "experience" of the future based on experience(s) of the past. Strictly speaking, however, we cannot have an experience of the future right now, and our attempts to do so call forth the faculty of imagination, furnishing us with a set of integrated conceptions about the way things will be in the future, assuming we set up conditions in such and such a way. My question is whether this task of conceiving events as they will be under this or that condition in the future is precisely an example of gaining knowledge of what is meant by noumena. Arguably, imagination does not rely on direct perceptions, for arrangements of form and content constituting such experiences as are to take place in the future obviously cannot be based on things that are happening in the present-except by imaginal extension, or extrapolation. The future is basically another "world" that we do not occupy yet, but can potentially. The least we can say is that the present utilizes imagination but that the images so conceived in us are based on direct perceptions we are having in the present moment. Our conceptions of what will happen, on the other hand, depend on perceptions that we either have had in the past or are having in the present. Hypotheses are of this latter sort. A hypothesis is a technical word used to denote one's prediction-an internal image of a future state-about the way phenomena will behave under this or that condition. So could it be that we are getting to a knowledge of things-in-themselves whenever we imagine their possible changes, or different configurations, in the future? Indeed, is imagination our gateway into noumena? Or does it remain true nonetheless that even our conceptions about future states-absent direct perception-combine into such forms and contents as we have reason to believe will take place in the future, and yet these still continue to suffer imprisonment in what we call the phenomenal realm? If we are constrained to deny that even future "experiences"--i.e., educated fantasies-constitute example of accessing the noumenal realm, but we are still unable to deem such possible experiences as phenomenal (since they do not rely on direct perception), then I suppose the technical distinction and resultant dualism between things-as-experienced versus things-in-themselves would necessitate the addition of an entirely distinct and new realm: the imaginal. This of course would result in a triadic structure as opposed to the simple dualism between phenomena and noumena. And since we can never really pin down the instantaneous present, it would seem that most people-and that would include all scientists and philosophers-live just about the entirety of their lives in this imaginal realm. It could also be the case that there is no such thing as noumena, and there is only phenomena, and further that what we call phenomena isn't a "realm" at all but is rather just a word we use to denote experience. In other words, it is just mere synonym. Experience is experience-a tautology -whenever or wherever we have it, the reason we can't "get behind" phenomena is that it would call into play the same categories of the understanding that we of necessity rely on to construct any other experience. What we are asking to get to when we talk about noumena is to have an experience in the absence of those mental faculties by which we have experience at all. And that's why Kant said it was categorically impossible. Even if we could access noumena, for us they would yet have to be experienced as phenomena. However, I think the one exception to this is when we manage somehow to accurately predict the future, since we can be confident that the objects of future "perception" are not yet there-ie., they are not yet present as things-in-themselves-and yet we have somehow still managed to grasp that which would be there. And so I think these imaginal experiences might be examples of synthetic a priori phenomena. And I think all of this somehow ties into our strange predictions of particle behavior between two conscious subjects.
Thanks for the explanation. When you say forces can this be interpreted as the forces/influence of language? I..e our relationship and consciousness/understanding of objects is shaped by language? Is this what happens at the 3rd stage of your drawing?
Hegel is so entertaining, in the past month i have been studying the works of Henri Bergson, Gilles Deleuze and now on Hegel. it seems to me that these two have some similarities in the after taste of their philosophy. they are both creative and trying to over-come some dogmatic philosophical believes and traditions.
@@theonasy If the Elan Vital (driving force, Bergson) is something that actually exists, as entelechy perhaps, then yes I would say that it exists independent of our empirical senses
Awesome summary. Very well done, although I will say that the Phenomenology *is* in fact as impenetrable as it is said to be, but you should still read it anyway.
Thanks for putting this video together. Very concise, but I am still a bit unsure how Hegel gets from too-subjective reason to absolute knowledge. Could you briefly explain how the reason stage is still too subjective and how Hegel moves from it to the absolute knowledge stage. Thanks!
This is awesome, thank you! It's worth noting that this does not happen, as some of the comments below seem to suggest, at the level of an individual. This is not the dialectical progression of consciousness in an individual from birth to maturity-although one might be able to formulate a theory of developmental psychology of epistemology from something like this. Instead what Hegel is suggesting is the progression of consciousness and its development through history, "the gradual dawning of consciousness in the human community," as is said in the video. Hegel interfaces primarily with the history of philosophy itself.
Wow - straight out of the Kabbalah until 15:10. Supernal triad leading to sephiroth daat. Hegel must have been familiar with German ashkenasic kabbalism. Wisdom and understanding interact in the tree of life. That must be where he got mast/slav - interesting Cool - your pictures helped me to see the connection.
Why so you think it was kabbalistic. Slave master relationships exisred before Abramham even set of from Ur. He had relationships with his Egyptian handmaid. Then there was slvery in Egypt, then the migrant crisis in Canna where the Mosites had supposedly just handed Mosis some stone tablets but then with in a few days was ordering the opersite of his commandments as according to the book of Joshua (The murderer) God was ordering the coverting of the neighbors propert. Their Ass, their daughters and he was ordering murder and taking the murdered persons property. He also was ordering the murder of older married women and the taking of younger virgins as captives. So not a book or God discussing the relationship of master and slave but a book chronicling the taking of slaves along with murder. Where as King Phillip of Macedonia (Father of King Alexander) conquered or took Greece and out lawed slavery. His out lawing the Greeks to own slaves opened the door for the rise of the Roman slavers but that's something else. So clearly King Phillip had himself or with council considered slavery in the context of morality. Where as Joshua hadn't nor does it seem the Hebrew God ordering murder and enslavement. So if Hegel had studied Latin and Greek philosophers he most likly met philosophical studies there and not from Hebrew books which didn't contain moralistic philosophis about master and slave relationships. By the time of Jewshim Xhristos most books were adderessed to the so called slaves. So nothing had by that time been done in Judaea or Israel to change or abolish slavery. So it's not likly Hegel got it from Hebrew text.
@0ThouArtThat0 What would Hegel say to Socrates's response to Thrasymachus in the Republic? It seems Hegel's master-slave dialectic is already anticipated in Plato (as are many other things, Whitehead has famously 'noted'). And, once can add that Confusious also has an answer here, again, given the twists and turns Hegel is pointing out about the dialectic.
Excellent presentation. Seems like the continental philosophers are 2K years behind the philosophers of India that came up with all this prior. May be the Europeans stumbles upon this by osmosis or was brand new independent insights but there is a whole range of thought in the East that must be explored.
Thanks dude! But if the spirit is not conscious at the beginning and then it realises itself to be conscious of its own, which means the spirit lives in all.
Lol! Goethe's morphology of plants, Hegel's phenomenology of spirit, it will be Ed Witten's M-Theory next?! Seriously though Witten's M-Theory and also Plato's theory of forms, may be interesting subjects to show in diagrams? I was only joking about M-Theory but it is perhaps at a layman's level no more complex to understand than Hegel's work. Interesting stuff anyway! With Best Wishes! Cheers - Mike.
This is an excellent exposition of the Phenomenology. Kudos for your clear exposition-I wish Hegel had been as clear and succinct. One question I have of Hegel is, logically, why does self-consciousness encounter/confront another self-consciousness in a zero-sum conflict? (Master/Slave) Logically (vs historically) couldn’t such a confrontation for recognition and acknowledgement be a recognition of the other’s equality? (value, self-awareness, experience, etc.) I understand that social formations-societies and economies-segregate “winners” and “losers” into contending classes, but is this necessarily built into the ontology of self-conscious beings as they encounter one another? Maybe it is an inescapable confrontation, but maybe even at the point of such confrontation, it is possible to recognize the integrity and value of the other? If so, maybe the master/slave encounter is not a logical necessity for the formation and consolidation of either self-consciousness?
The "second stage" of seeking recognition you're describing here does indeed take place for Hegel - but much later; in his chapter about morality. This stage is only found after we were going through culture and several forms/concepts of self-consciousness and its relation to others and to the world in general. But at first (in the master and slave-chapter) it's still the first, most primitive stage (as always in the Phänomenologie des Geistes). Sorry for my poor english😂
This is good - I can see how some of this was used in some of my meditation courses - and how quantum physics figures into this also .... the OBSERVER Phenomenon.
In QED, the observer doesn't have to be conscious. This has been proven by doing the 2 slit experiment with a camera, the pattern appears regardless of the type of observer and it disappears when no measurements are taken. The universe doesn't need any form of consciousness to exist, it is perfectly capable of "observing" itself, and it doesn't care if you think it's "spooky", regardless of my affection for Einstein's work.
@@JimmyR42 that's because consciousness is a utility that's been put into existence for the goals of survival, higher consciousness, evolutionary ascension and with the trade of "years of being the lowest being in the food chain to the highest" with the eventual gain of the specific human neuron that is more consciousness than the rest of the animals, but still can be very much higher. the thing that triggers entities to change their super position into a single position is however photons, its a PHYSICAL MATERIAL that even the simplest matter can sense, as that's how the universal code of nature is built, has nothing to do with hegelian or Kantian perception, even the dumbest entity can trigger the sensor of an atom, it has to be physically NOT SENDING PARTICLES TO THE ATOM, which current living beings are unable to do and very likely never will, since for an observer to view something LIGHT HAS TO BOUNCE BACK INTO ITS VIEWING SENSOR (eye).
@@andrejpetrov6352 "consciousness is a utility that's been put into existence for the goals of survival" are you saying you believe consciousness was added externally to the evolution process or that it is a byproduct of it? because "put into existence" and "for the goals" sound a lot like it implies a premise much harder to defend than evolution itself, which you seem to evoke when you talk about the neuron.
@@JimmyR42 evolution i like to define as an entity for ease of communication, but its not something specific, singular or "Devine", its a blind force that has a single drive: power (which it gains only because it is competing against the void), otherwise all other sectors of it fall powerless compared to the void, and one reason to do so: survival, so it can continue competing, aka life and natural selection are blind lunar maniacal forces that use anything in their way to bust through nothing, and consciousness is just another one of those things, but it's not just higher or lower, or humans have the best and animals the worse but rather its in tiers, some animals have the "I perceive an object therefore i detect it but don't relate it to myself tier", humans have the "I am thinking of you thinking of me" consciousness level, and there are levels beyond that, but just like everything else, human neurons are also superficial with the only task being survive long enough to reproduce (except rare cases of existentialism and stoicism) in which self interest is no longer the main benefactor. for survival, life BRINGS IN different methods to do so in any way it can, and has adapted conscious and cognitive abilities into humans jusr for survival and nothing else, and the behind reasons could be many, for example that humans are just sex organs with sex organs for robots and AI (which is most likely the next evolutionary step- consciousness and life no longer being made up of organic material but metals etc) but as long as it concerns humans or human monkeys as I like to call them, humanity isn't conscious enough yet to care whether they are passed on by a stronger force for example better more adaptable beings, and are built just to shut up, comply and survive, running their service away and being used and then thrown like the fuel we are.
This is an excellent summary. My question is this: how did you reach this understanding of the text from the text itself? I have already read an introduction to Hegel and am on my second chapter-by-chapter reading guide to the text. I have also dipped into a Hegel 'dictionary' (which explains some of the different levels of meaning within Hegel's terminology in relation to its linguistic, cultural and historical context). However I am still scarcely closer to understanding the text itself. I've read and re-read the first two chapters of A.V. Miller's translation of the Phenomenology but am still really struggling. Any thoughts?
I think it is important to study Hegel in his historical context. He was not a particularly original thinker, but a master of synthesizing what he learned from his interlocutors. Studying Kant, Fichte, Schelling, and Goethe's work (especially Goethe's work on plant metamorphosis) is necessary to understand what Hegel is doing in the Phenomenology of Spirit.
@@Footnotes2Plato Thanks very much for your reply. That's very interesting, especially the reference to Goethe which I wouldn't have thought of. I suppose the gist of my question though is not how to understand his ideas but how to penetrate his prose. Would you say that to read those other works (Critique of Pure Reason etc) makes Hegel's language any easier to understand (in English translation)? Incidentally, I've noticed that Hegel's prose is less baffling elsewhere than in the main text of the Phenomenology. (And, I should explain, I've only read the first two chapters - Ivan Soll suggests it gets less abstract when Hegel gets to self-consciousness.)
@@davidchamberlain8910 The Phenomenology of Spirit does become more concrete in the second part. I would suggest taking a look at Eckart Forster's "The Twenty-Five Years of Philosophy" for a helpful exegesis. But yes, reading Kant, Fichte, and Schelling (particularly his "System of Transcendental Idealism") first might help you make sense of Hegel's prose.
@@Footnotes2Plato Thanks, that's very helpful. I've already taken your advice and I've got a bunch of things on order by Goethe, Fichte and Schelling. I already have Kant's Critique of Pure Reason and Critique of Practical Reason (which I haven't read yet). In fact, since our last interaction I've gone back a couple stages further to make sure I understand the Empiricists and the challenge they posed to philosophy. I'm already partway through Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding. My plan is to move by turns to Hume, Kant and then Fichte/Schelling/Goethe before facing Hegel again. Hopefully by then I should be in a better position to understand him. Incidentally, my starting point was trying to understand Marx. It's astonishing how much reading around you need to do to understand any theoretical position!
I loved it, I am currently reading PoS because of the School of Life video on Hegel but finding it rather difficult to understand. Also you gotta speak louder and/or get a lavalier mic.
1:35 Well, the notion of sense-certainty doesn’t necessarily precede Kant insofar as the implicit suggestion that Kant either rejects the possibility of knowledge being derived from sense certainty or represents some sort of philosophy that abandons it; rather, he was trying to ground that knowledge, rescuing objectivity from the threat of Hume’s very perceptive observation that, if all knowledge comes from experience, how can we say anything certain about tomorrow? Kant’s eventual answer was that, the necessary conditions of experience are that of time and space, so, what we can say for certain about tomorrow, regardless of what happens, is that we will experience the world through these necessary lenses/conditions (space and time); however, as a result, it must be true, for Kant, that, the knowledge we gain from experience through our senses is always filtered through these same lenses, meaning we can never get true knowledge of the objects in the world, the “things-in-themselves,” because those objects are experienced through our necessary, almost biological, restraints-restraints that both limit us yet allow us the conditions to “see” (experience) anything at all.
