Varn Vlog
Abandon all hope ye who subscribe here. Varn Vlog is the pod of C. Derick Varn. We combine the conversation on philosophy, political economy, art, history, culture, anthropology, and geopolitics from a left-wing and culturally informed perspective. We approach the world from a historical lens with an eye for hard truths and structural analysis.
Varn Vlog
The Journey of Freedom: Unpacking Hegel's Philosophy with Borna Radnik
The episode explores Hegel's complex understanding of freedom as self-determination and its historical evolution through time, juxtaposed with Kant and Rousseau's perspectives. It emphasizes that freedom is a relational and collective struggle that necessitates recognition and social action, questioning the practical implications of Hegel's thought in contemporary movements for change.
- Examining Hegel's definition of freedom as self-determination
- Historical context: freedom's evolution through societies
- The importance of temporality in understanding freedom
- Comparing Hegel with Kant and Rousseau on freedom
- Duns Scotus' radical contingency vs. Hegel's causal necessity
- Practical implications: social struggles for freedom today
- Connecting Hegelian philosophy to contemporary movements
Musis by Bitterlake, Used with Permission, all rights to Bitterlake
Crew:
Host: C. Derick Varn
Intro and Outro Music by Bitter Lake.
Intro Video Design: Jason Myles
Art Design: Corn and C. Derick Varn
Links and Social Media:
twitter: @varnvlog
blue sky: @varnvlog.bsky.social
You can find the additional streams on Youtube
Current Patreon at the Sponsor Tier: Jordan Sheldon, Mark J. Matthews, Lindsay Kimbrough, RedWolf, DRV, Kenneth McKee, JY Chan, Matthew Monahan, Parzival
And that sound means welcome to VarmVlog. And today I am talking with Borna Radnik, phd holding philosopher, marxist, who I've argued with in some capacity for, I think, over a decade, honestly, yeah, and writer of Freedom in Context, which is actually about Hegel, which is why we're here today to discuss the H-Man and you go into the relationship between history, time and necessity and in its relationship to freedom for Hegel. And I want to start there with what's in your book. It's available from Bloomsbury Academic, which means get it from a library. Sorry, guys, bloomsbury books are usually pretty expensive, but it's a good book.
Speaker 1:And I wanted to ask you there are all kinds of debates about freedom as understood by hegel. It's religious capacity, it's temporal capacity, it's philosophical capacity, and Hegel is probably, honestly, more than Marx, used as a cipher for a bunch of different things, because Hegelian thought is difficult. I remember reading the Phenomenology in English and then reading it in German, when I was like, oh, I'm learning German, I'm going to go try to read the phenomenology of spirit in German. And then me realizing that I needed to catch a thousand Swabian puns to actually even understand the beginning of what he was talking about, because the English translations always either veered towards the religious or veered towards the secular side of what he was saying and couldn't find a way and admittedly it would be difficult to uh, articulate hegelianisms in a way that had both elements in english apparent, because so much like world spirit or absolute. You know, these things have slightly different connotations in English. So this is me asking you what the fuck is freedom and Hegel and why is it so important?
Speaker 2:That's a good question. Well, thanks for having me on. I, I, I, I appreciate it. Well, I'm going to start off by by kind of just maybe paraphrasing something that Hegel himself says about freedom. He says something like no idea in the history of ideas has been so misunderstood and misapplied than the idea of freedom.
Speaker 2:Idea of freedom, and that is true even to this day, whether you're talking about personal freedom, political freedom, social freedom, people have all sorts of definitions of what they think freedom means or is, or what it should be, and Hegel took this very seriously. So, for Hegel, and Hegel took this very seriously. So for Hegel, he understands freedom as self-determination, and all that means for him is that for something to be free, it determines itself and conditions itself. It cannot receive its conditions or its determinations by anything other than itself. Right, its conditions or its determinations by anything other than itself, right, so, uh, so that's a very basic idea of of freedom for hegel, that's. That's any any any tries to demonstrate that logically, and so on. Um, another way of thinking about that is the idea of autonomy. Right, if you can be set to be autonomous, if people have autonomy, then they are, in a certain respect, self-reliant or self-determining right.
Speaker 2:And Hegel? He argues that human beings, by virtue of our ability to think abstractly, we are self-determining beings. So Hegel puts forward, let's say, an ontological argument for why human beings are free as beings, right. And then he extrapolates and he tries to show that what this essentially means. And you know he says we have free will and all the rest of it. But he goes a lot further than simply talking about humanity and free will. He also makes the claim that the entire history of the world is the history of freedom, of the idea of freedom trying to realize itself, is the history of freedom, of the idea of freedom trying to realize itself. So if you look at human history, you'll see societies changing and progressing and philosophy can come along and interpret history and recognize that there's a movement, a process, a rational process in history that actualizes or realizes greater degrees of freedom.
Speaker 2:Now what freedom means for Hegel? I mean again, I gave you a very kind of quick and dirty version of it. But people either downplay that historical aspect of freedom in Hegel, they don't pay any attention to it and they maybe focus on what he said about the free will, mostly in the philosophy of right, or they go the other route and they emphasize the theological, christian, religious dimension and they downplay the political, revolutionary, more not really liberal but I would say revolutionary, radical element of Hegel's thought on freedom. And in the book my attempt is to give a more larger encapsulation of Hegel's account of freedom by providing a systematic reading of his philosophy and linking it to what he says about history and time and ontology and also politics so in what ways is hegel's definition of freedom as autonomy unique?
Speaker 1:I mean, we see similar ideas in kant, or even in the french philosophes and rousseau. So how is Hegel different from Kant or Rousseau? Your book talks a little bit about this, but I just want to expand a bit here.
Speaker 2:Yeah, well, I mean in their own ways. Again, I'm simplifying here. But both Rousseau and Kant, you can say that they have a self-legislative, if you will, understanding of human freedom, right? So Kant, for example, you know, he says you know, insofar as we obey the moral law, we are free, right, and the moral law is something that the will gives itself. For Kant, Similarly Rousseau, you know, for Rousseau, freedom means self-mastery, similarly for Rousseau, freedom means self-mastery.
Speaker 2:Hegel in a sense agrees with both Kant and Rousseau in the sense that, yes, there is that self-giving aspect to human freedom. Meaning, if we're talking about human freedom, it's something that human beings not give themselves but rather actualize in themselves. They don't receive their self-determining capacity from any other source. Rousseau, philosophically and in their methodology, they don't seek out to provide philosophical justifications for why their definition of freedom is the case. In other words, hegel's issue with a lot of philosophers before him and maybe a lot of thinkers after him is that they treat as given certain criteria. So, right away, hegel rejects the idea that you can define freedom, that is, provide a definition for it. So notice, I didn't say Hegel defines freedom as self-determination. I say he understands freedom as self-determination, self-determination. I say he understands freedom of self-determination. And it's because Hegel goes along.
Speaker 2:In his Science of Logic and in other texts he points out that philosophy cannot make any presuppositions. And so if you're going to provide, say, a concept of freedom, you can't just derive it from something else, you can't just give a definition of it and start there, because if you do that, he says, you'll be caught in a contradiction, namely the content of what you're defining. Freedom is itself conceptually contingent upon certain concepts that you just assume as given. So, like Rousseau, for example, so Hegel's reply to Rousseau would be well, rousseau defines freedom as self-mastery, but what he presupposes is a notion of self, is a notion of mastery and is a notion of self-relation. Right, and Hegel doesn't want to do any of that. He says well, wait a minute. If we're going, if philosophy is going to demonstrate, rigorously, prove that freedom is self-determination, then it has to prove it. You can't assume it from the outset and in a sense hegel's entire philosophical project is an exercise in that self-justification. So, for example, in his Science of Logic, hegel points out that the science of logic can also be thought of as the science of freedom.
Speaker 2:Science of freedom. And when you get to the third part of the book, the logic of the concept or the doctrine of the concept. Hegel says the concept is the realm of freedom, but he wants to give a demonstration of why that is the case. And he wants to demonstrate why and by demonstrate all I mean is for Hegel. He tries to give an imminent deduction of why self-determination is identical to human freedom. I don't know if that answered your question, but this, in other words, he's focusing on the genesis and the movement of thought and philosophy, whereas Rousseau and Kant don't do that and philosophy, whereas Rousseau and Kant don't do that Right.
Speaker 1:I mean, you can make an argument that Rousseau has a sense of historicity in the social contract thinking, but not in terms of freedom itself. That does not seem to be something that is actually defined. It's just kind of assumed, you're right be something that is actually defined. It's just kind of assumed, you're right.
Speaker 1:Um, thinking about this in terms of hegel leads me to some interesting uh things that your book helped me actually get my head around, which that hegel is a historical philosopher which necessarily roots this in time, um, in a Pacific temporality. Um, but he's coming out of both the German idealist and I would even say, in some ways an Aristotelian uh set of conceptions about teleology and and the development of freedom. Um, what is the role of temporality in freedom for hegel? Because that does seem to be something that other theorists of freedom don't really have the same focus on, like maybe whiggish liberals, but we're not going to worry about them for a second. So, um, what is the role of temporality in freedom and why is that so important? Because I think that gets us to some other major ideas that'll help us understand what's at stake here yeah, well, I mean, this is um, um.
Speaker 2:I think this is a very important point, because everyone kind of readily acknowledges that for Hegel, freedom is a historical achievement. Right, because what he himself says, look, human societies progress. This movement of progression is the realization of freedom, to greater and greater effects. Modern societies are more free in some ways than ancient societies or feudal societies. Okay, hegel says that, everyone says great. In that respect, freedom is a historical achievement. In other words, for Hegel there's a certain historicity, or historical becoming to freedom. Or to put it in another way, you know, human freedom, political freedom, is always grounded in history in some sense. Right, and Hegel points out, you know, the ancient Greeks, the Athenians, had a certain idea of freedom, but it was not a universal idea because it excluded women and slaves. And so modern societies, especially after the French Revolution in Europe, when Hegel was writing, you have a certain larger degree of freedom. That is realized, but it's still kind of incomplete, and so on.
Speaker 2:However, what I'm pointing out in the book is because all Hegel scholars accept this. This is not controversial. What they don't really accept, or where I saw that there was a lack of recognition, was not so much how Hegel's idea of freedom is historical in the way that I was just talking about, but rather the way in which temporality and history influence and, as it were, impact or condition the content of Hegel's philosophy itself. Right? So what I've tried to do in the book is to say, yes, for Hegel freedom is a historical achievement in the sense that it's a historically mediated movement. But the idea of freedom as an idea, as a logical category, freedom as an idea, as a logical category, has its own temporality to it. And so I argue that there's a temporality in Hegel in two senses, in two right senses.
Speaker 2:One external to his system you know the German idealist context, hegel writing after the French Revolution. Hegel, for example, appreciating the exploitation that capitalism brings about. But he dies and he doesn't see the full. He wasn't able to appreciate the full contradictions of capitalism in the way that maybe his thought would allow, right? So Marx comes along and we can see a link there.
Speaker 2:But also there's a temporality internal to Hegel's thinking, internal to his philosophy, internal to his logic, and this is something that very few commentators acknowledge, right? Catherine Malibu is one of them, marcuse was one of them as well. In his own limited way, marcuse was one of them as well in his own limited way. But most contemporary English-speaking Hegel scholars and Hegel specialists don't really acknowledge that element of temporality, and so what I do in the book is I emphasize both I emphasize the kind of broader external element of history and temporality and I emphasize the internal aspect of it, and I think that produces some interesting results when it comes to thinking about political freedom and social freedom from a broad Hegelian or dialectical perspective from a broad Hegelian or dialectical perspective.
Speaker 1:Well, one of the things that I was working through in reading your book is that you kind of have to have multiple conceptions of time to really get everything that's going on here. So like logical time versus natural time versus, maybe, time in the absolute sense. I don't know how does this temporality like, what are the modes of temporality that Hegel is using and why?
Speaker 2:Well, yeah, I mean some of them. I mean, look Hegel, so he has, so he has. So, in his philosophy of nature, he gives you a theory of natural time and it's just, you know the coming to be and passing away of finite moments. Right, you can think about it as chronological time if you like, um, but what he's doing there is he's, he's combining Aristotelian time and Kantian time, uh, into one, um, uh, so you can call that natural time, uh, but that's different than history, or what I call in the book, historical time. So Hegel operates on both.
Speaker 2:Hegel points out that, because for him the idea of freedom is universal, it's a universal, absolute idea. It's a universal, absolute idea. And so if you say that all ideas are relative to or reducible to their historical context, like some Marxists love to do, right, they reduce everything to their social and material contexts. And if you do that with Hegel or with anything that's universal, it ceases to be universal because it's entirely contingent upon a certain specific historical moment. Right, for example, if we say, I mean, I mean, there are examples of this right. So, like the, the like during the french revolution, right, the, the, the um, uh, uh, the declaration of the man and the Citizen right espouses universal values, right, equality, liberty, fraternity, and as a constitution it sets up rights for men over the age of 25 who are property owning and everyone else. If you're Jewish or black or a woman or a man who doesn't own property, those rights aren't afforded to you. So right away we can say, with the French Revolution they tried or they declared themselves to have universal rights and freedoms, but in practice, of course, that fell short. So we can maybe say that their idea of liberty wasn't really universal, even though it tried to be, and it was specific to the historical context.
Speaker 2:Right, with Hegel he says well, okay, right, but for Hegel he wants the universality of the idea of freedom and he wants to show that it's also a historically mediated, specific thing. So it's both and in the book that's what I tried to do with this idea of context, right. So I try to argue that, yes, we can see how Hegel's attempt to establish a universal idea of freedom doesn't negate its particular emergence in history. It allows for that, but it also allows for the universality to exist. And to make sense of that you need a notion of historical time and you need an idea of eternity or something that is absolute and not bound by time or not bound by history, right?
Speaker 2:So, for example so I'll try to kind of summarize it this way which is that if we didn't have a universal understanding of freedom, we wouldn't be able to look back in history and point to different societies where certain human beings were not free. So when chattel slavery was happening, or if we look at everything from ancient Rome to ancient Greek societies, we can look back and see, yes, well, they had a certain understanding of freedom, but it wasn't entirely fully actualized, it was incomplete, right. And what we're doing there is we're we're employing a universal idea, but we're also allowing that universal idea to be applied to a particular situation, right, but we're also allowing that universal idea to be applied to a particular situation, right? So, essentially, anyway, to kind of make sense of all of this, in Hegel's philosophy yes, I do put forward several notions of time, like logical time or natural time, historical time, to show the ways in which temporality operates in different areas of his thinking, different areas of his philosophy.
Speaker 1:It's complicated, but it's, I hope, challenging and worthwhile. I did find it helpful one of the things this idea of eternity as a way to contextualize any time, the idea that you have to have an other reference for anything to be somewhat meaningful. In Hegel, otherness is actually super important and relationality is super important for Hegel in ways that it isn't for analytic philosophy or even a whole lot of continental philosophy pre-Hegel. And this, I guess, brings me to the two ideas the absolute, because it is related to eternity in some sense, has to be non-temporal Right. That's a given. It has to be non-temporal right. That's given has to be outside of time.
Speaker 1:Um, where is this absolute being ontologically or metaphysically justified? And hegel like like, what is the? I mean this is like the billion dollar question for every hegel scholar. But like, what is the absolute idea we're dealing with that contextualizes time and in a way that that in itself can also contextualize freedom? Like what is this idea of the absolute? Uh, beyond its non-temporal nature? Um, because this is where I even get tripped up on hegel's trying to figure out what that is well, yeah, I mean, this is, this is the uh, uh, this is what everyone chides hegel for, right.
Speaker 2:Is the absolute just another name for god? And isn't he sneaking in theology and christianity? Or or what does he really mean by it? And um, uh, and there are different competing readings, right? Computing readings, right. You know, some read Hegel's absolute as like the, as like a, like a cosmic mind, you know, like almost like the universe becoming self-conscious of itself, or something trippy like that. That's not my reading.
Speaker 2:So for me, for, well, I'll just say this that first of all, when he uses the word absolute, what Hegel means by that is the absolute. Is. So for something to be absolute, it cannot be relative to anything else, right. It can't be conditioned by anything else, it can't be determined by anything else, it can't derive its absoluteness from anything else, right, because if it did all of those things and for Hegel this also goes for a philosophical method. So if you define the absolute, or if you provide a definition, like Spinoza does in the beginning of your philosophical text, your method for Hegel is contradicting the very content which is the absolute, right. So, right away Hegel goes well, wait a minute. If philosophy's job is to express and grasp the absolute idea which he thinks. That's what all philosophy has been trying to do for thousands of years, and the absolute idea is just that, which is absolutely true. Right, then we can't grasp the absolute philosophically if you provide definitions or axioms, or principles and all the rest of it. This is my cat, cat, by the way. We have to be able to philosophically demonstrate the absolute status of the absolute idea, and that is what Hegel's entire philosophical project is about, and that's what he devotes the science of logic to.
Speaker 2:For me, I read the absolute idea as as the idea of freedom, so I think they're identical. And the reason I argue this or think this, is because Hegel himself says as much. Right, so the absolute idea is absolute, meaning it's not relative to anything else, and in other words, it's a self-grounding or self-determining or autonomous idea. Uh, determining or autonomous, uh idea. And for hegel, all the absolute idea is, is the is. He says it's the unity of the concept with uh, objectivity or a reality, and what that means so I might, can't is being particular. Hold on what that means. Sorry, my cat is being particular. Hold on what that means is the concept for Hegel is self-determination and objectivity, or what's external to the concept is actuality. So for Hegel, the absolute idea must necessarily actualize itself in the world.
Speaker 2:I appreciate this is maybe a bit abstract. I'm not necessarily answering your question directly, but I devoted, I think, 80 pages to that in the book or so. So it's a complicated thing. But I will just say that in my reading I link or I try to show that we can read Hegel's absolute idea as being identical to his idea of freedom, self-determination, and that his absolute idea has a logical element. Sorry, excuse me, it has a temporal element to it. That's a temporality not only as a historical idea but also internal to its own activity.
Speaker 2:Now, whether or not the absolute idea is identical to God or there's a God, like I address all of that in the book, I don't reject this. I think there's good reasons for Hegel to employ the term God and religious language. But the absolute idea is not reducible to anything. But the absolute idea is not reducible to anything. Again, if it were reducible to God or if it were reducible to Christianity, it would lose its universal and absolute status.
Speaker 2:So in all of this and in Hegel, this is what's so fascinating he's always playing with, trying to demonstrate how there's eternity in finite time. Right, there's eternity in finite time. Right Within finitude you find the infinite. Or within natural time you find eternity or that which is internal right. So the absolute idea isn't something that and Hegel says this it doesn't exist above us like a heavenly father. It's imminent to every human being, it's within us. And here Hegel is closer to Spinoza, right, the idea that there's this imminence or this internal reality or internal being to that which is absolute. So we're not separate from the absolute idea. So Hegel says every human being carries the absolute idea within them without even knowing it. Right, and if you remove human beings from the picture, for Hegel the absolute idea wouldn't be able to realize or manifest itself in the world, if that makes sense in some ways. I hope that made a bit of sense, but there's more in the book.
Speaker 1:So there's two other concepts that you bring up in the early part of your book, in the first chapter, big section. So we've dealt with freedom and we dealt with temporality, which is important. We haven't, of course, exhausted either one of those topics by any means, but one of the things that you hit on is self-reflectivity maybe that's the word or the self-reflectivity, maybe that's the word, or the self-reflective need and the relation that has with necessity as well as with historicity. So those are all we're still at hugely abstract concepts, and I'm just going to acknowledge that. But in what ways is self-reflectivity so important to both, let's say, the temporal notion of freedom and the idea, and also self-reflectivity in its relationship to the absolute idea and the need for speculation and all that around that. So, um, why is self-reflectivity so important to hegel? Because, you know, if anything, that's something that maybe Marx drops out.
Speaker 2:So yeah, well, I mean, this is it's. It's so with Hegel, you know it. He used to lecture on the history of philosophy, right? So, so, so Hegel was famous for giving these broad lectures on the history of philosophy. You know the pre-Socratics, socrates, plato, you know the Greeks, aristotle, medieval thinkers, so on, up to Leibniz and Spinoza, and the German you know, and Kant up to, and he would end those lectures with sort of his own philosophical system.
Speaker 2:But what he would do and I'm asking your question here about self-reflexivity what he would do is he would say look, we can look at the history of philosophy and we see that all these philosophical systems are grappling with trying to understand the absolute idea. And here's how Spinoza tries, and here's the problem in Spinoza, or here's how Plato tried to do it, but here's the issues in Plato. And he ends these lectures by saying and now, finally, the time has come where we've arrived, at the historical moment that philosophy is prepared to be systematic and to become a philosophical science and become speculative. What he means is now, and what he means by those statements is he's referring to his own philosophical thought. Right, and that act, that act of referring, or philosophy being self-conscious of itself or self-aware of its own project. Another way of thinking about it is that it incorporates itself into its own explanation. Right, and that's how I understand self-reflexivity and Hegel's philosophy is this to the core, in the sense that Hegel is always aware of his own philosophical system in relation to other thinkers and he's aware of the historical need for such a system.
Speaker 2:Right, and so what I do in the book is I take this aspect of Hegel's thinking and I systematize it and I try to show that when we so, for me in the book, for my argument to work, for me to link what Hegel says about freedom and the idea of freedom and the absolute idea to time and history, I do that by emphasizing their self-reflexive dimensions. So what I was saying earlier about how, in the book, I try to show that Hegel's logic has a temporality in two aspects. One, there's an external temporality, namely the kind of historical moment that Hegel writes the book you know science of logic and so on and an internal temporality, that is, a temporality that is internal to the contents of the book, the logical categories and so on. And to make that argument work, I argue that there is an ontological feature or dimension of temporality in Hegel that is self-aware or self-reflexive, if that makes sense. And all that means is Hegel incorporates his own philosophical system and is aware of his own philosophical thinking in the very content of doing philosophy. So a moment ago we were talking about the absolute right and I was saying how the absolute can be dependent on anything else. It can't be defined because the moment you give a definition you're assuming a lot of ideas and concepts, right?
Speaker 2:Another word to describe that whole process in Hegel's thinking is to say that Hegel is self-reflective. He's self-aware at the level of mythology. He says well, wait a minute, if we're going to do this, right, if philosophy is going to grasp what is absolutely true, you can't just start with a series of axioms or principles. Or you can't start with with what's what's what's called as first philosophy, where you say you know, noose is all that's true. You know everything derived from noose, for example, where everything is derivative from the good, if you're Plato right.
Speaker 2:So to avoid all of that, hegel has an element of self-awareness, if you like, in his philosophical method or in the way he presents philosophy. That is integral to philosophy's project and Hegel's view to grasp and express the absolute idea. Right? Because for Hegel. He realizes, if we want to, really, if philosophy is serious about understanding what is absolute, what is absolutely true, and if the absolute means that which is not relative, you can't get there with a mythology that starts off with assumptions and presuppositions, right? In other words, you have to be self-aware or self-reflective about how your method might contradict what you're trying to do.
Speaker 2:So this word self-reflexivity just refers to that aspect in Hegel's thinking, that kind of self-awareness or self-referencing that he does in his thinking. And so I systematize this throughout all of Hegel's thought. Well, throughout the book and what Hegel says about freedom, we can connect what he says about freedom to history and necessity and causality by emphasizing this self-reflexive element in his thinking, right? So that's how my argument proceeds in the book. I try to show that if we read Hegel in this way, it'll be very productive for thinking about freedom and the idea of freedom. In a way, it'll be very productive for thinking about freedom and the idea of freedom in a way that is temporal and historical and not reducible to time or history, right? So it's an irreducible and self-reflexive understanding of freedom that I try to argue for.
Speaker 2:How does that, this double move differ from the way that say, like Marxists, understand historical development of freedom? Well, I mean, it depends who you mean. Right, right, uh. Because, as I'm sure you would agree with me, marx himself was not a historical determinist in the in the kind of strong sense uh, right, um. However, others, who I mean other marxist thinkers, are a bit more deterministic, um, and sometimes you get glimpses of this in Marx himself, which makes it a bit tricky.
Speaker 2:So, like in the German ideology where Marx and Engels is it a German ideology or is it another text where Marx says something consciousness doesn't determine life, life determines consciousness or the right. So there's all of these reversals in Marx doesn't determine life, life determines consciousness, right, or you know the right. So there's all of these reversals and marks which is, I mean, in some sense it's true, yes, I mean, ideas don't determine the society. The society impact informs the ideas. There's nothing wrong with that. But if you were to then say, well, all ideas are always and only expressions of their ruling class, for example, or of their specific class formation, then you'll be engaging in a bit of a reductive way of thinking about ideas that Hegel rejects, because if you do that then, ideas can never be universal, they're always particular and contingent upon a certain historical, economic and material social order. Right, and you see this? You know I mean you don't hear about much of it now, but you know there's all this talk about bourgeois freedom, right, this idea that you had liberal bourgeois notions of freedom, this idea that you had liberal bourgeois notions of freedom. And that's true, there are bourgeois notions of freedom. However, this doesn't mean that all ideas of freedom are always going to be bourgeois, right? So I think this is where my reading maybe differs from certain tendencies in Marxism, where certain Marxists try to give you a more kind of reductive, materialist account of concepts and of thought and of ideas. And I want to resist that temptation.
Speaker 2:And then the book, the whole point of the book is to show that Hegel already was aware of this, and Hegel doesn't dismiss historical context, he affirms it, he just thinks that. Well, I mean, I try to show in the book that, for Hegel, if you try to reduce all ideas to the historical moment, you're caught in a performative contradiction, because the only idea that you're applying universally is that very idea, namely that all ideas are reducible to history. Right, you see what I mean so. So it is multi history. Then that very statement itself, it has a historical context to it, and so on and so forth. So Hegelgel would say well then, what are we doing here? Right, you're contradicting yourself. So I would say that would be. The main difference is to kind of not fall into kind of a vulgar materialist reductionism. And, like I said, marx himself doesn't really do this. There's elements of Marx that might give you the impression that he might try to think that way, but I personally think that he wasn't a historical determinist or a reductionist in that vulgar sense.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I tend to agree with you about that in so much that I think that it would be self, it would be self-undermining in a lot of like even Marx's political context, to assume that he thought all concepts and rights were strictly and only delimited by their specific class of historical perspective.
Speaker 1:Because in a way, if you take that to a kind of logical hotel abyss conclusion, it would mean that communism also wouldn't really be thinkable in a bourgeois context, because we don't exist in a context where that would be thinkable, although maybe I can hear the reductionists say, ah, but bourgeois society implies communism somehow, and I know the arguments for how sociality of labor, sociality of the mode of production, free labor being, you know, even though it's free labor, there is kind of a funny concept, but it is different than, like corvée, slave or serf labor, etc. Etc, etc. I can see the tension, though there's this concept that you bring in that does seem to be not in Marx but kind of important, which is this idea of being with oneself in one's other. Can you get into what the meaning? Because that concept is is, I think, where people are going to hit a wall with your book.
Speaker 2:Um, oh no, I know this is yeah, so this is um, um, so, uh. So this is hegel's full understanding of freedom, right? So, for hegel, freedom uh, uh, um. So, you know, earlier I said hegel understands freedom as self-determination, or another way of thinking about it is, you know, autonomy. That's true.
Speaker 2:However, he also points out well, wait a minute that which is self-determining is going to be confronted with its other. You know, just logically speaking, ontologically speaking, right, and just to give an example of this is to talk about human beings. So, human, for Hegel, human beings, we are self-determining beings because we can think abstractly and we have free will, for Hegel. And so in a sense, we have internal freedom, right, as he says, because we have a free will. But there's an issue, which is that the entire world, everything that is not us other human beings objects, society, institutions, nature, animals, everything else that we're confronted with in the world, in life, stands as an other to us, and in a sense we have to overcome that to realize our freedom. Right, we take action. We can kind of manifest our freedom through our actions, make it a of manifest our freedom through our actions, make it a reality in the world through our institutions and through kind of social makeup. But to do that we also have to, as it were, make society free, right? Or another way of thinking about it. For freedom to be actualizable, it has to be realized in the world. It can't just be an idea you have in your head, right? So to describe this relationship, hegel argues that, yes, freedom is self-determination, but his full formula or his full understanding of freedom is what he calls being with oneself. In one's other or another way he says the same thing is being at home in one's other jargony statement is to basically explain the relationship that a free individual has to its other right, in the sense that relating to others.
Speaker 2:So one way to think about this is collective action, right? So if a lot of workers get together and form a union to fight for better rights and better wages and so on, you could think about that enterprise as individuals who have self-determining wills coming together and taking collective action to manifest greater freedom for themselves, better wages, right? And what they're doing is they are the act of entering a union. You don't give up your free will when you join a union, right? You're still the individual. You still have your individual freedom. You're just linking with other people who are other to you to manifest greater freedom and to explain that relationship. That's what that statement does, logically speaking.
Speaker 2:So being with oneself and one's other just means this is Hegel's way of thinking about the relational aspect of freedom. Relational aspect of freedom. So how do you go from self-determining individual to relating to its other without negating that self-determining individual, right? So it is a bit abstract and jargony, but this is Hegel's One way of putting. It is for Hegel. He hates this idea, he hates the liberal idea of atomized individuals, right? So Hegel is not a libertarian. He doesn't think we're all self-sufficient and my freedom is the best and we don't need society and all the rest of it. He thinks that's unavoidable. We need to work together, right. And so for him, freedom is both the self and the other. It's both coming together, right, and that's what that term does. So being with oneself and one's other is Hegel's logical and ontological formula, if you like, for trying to philosophically make sense of that relationship so self-determination in a strange way is necessarily social in the sense that, yes, it necessarily has to relate to others right
Speaker 2:right? Um, because the, the, the, because, think about this way if, if self-determining freedom was just the idea you had in your head about yourself, but all around you in the world and in your society, that freedom wasn't reflected, you know, you didn't have any rights, you couldn't vote, you couldn't get a job, you had to sell your labor power to work X amount of hours to make a living wage. Right to work X amount of hours to make a living wage. Right. If your self-determination was threatened or undermined in society, then that self-determinating idea is in contradiction, your freedom is in contradiction. It's being undermined. And Hegel says well, wait a minute to overcome that contradiction, or those series of contradictions.
Speaker 2:Human beings have historically, he says, fought and struggled and worked hard to actualize or realize greater degrees of social and political and economic freedom. And it's a continuous struggle, for Hegel, right? Because if there wasn't any struggle, if you just this is why Hegel hates stoicism, by the way if you just try to retreat into your own thoughts, your freedom isn't going to be realized. But then it's not really a freedom, right? Remember, for Hegel, an idea is a concept that is realized externally. It doesn't sit in your pretty little head and stay there the idea has to manifest, and so Hegel thinks this has been happening throughout human history already, and with philosophy we can have greater awareness of it. We don't necessarily need to be aware of this movement, of this activity, but human beings have and they will continue to help actualize greater realizations of freedom.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and that makes sense of a lot of, even some things in Marx, like historical development. Being kind of, you know, being in a fluid state is an important idea in Marx, which is not something that's talked a lot about, although you mentioned it in your book, and I think that has to do with the fact that, like freedom, has both this, this external, to be a reference which we can, can actually understand it has to be externalized but also this very historically development, historical development thing, and one of the reasons why that's a weird way of phrasing that historical developed form, there we go, that is historical partly because it has to be socially enacted. Right, that's the key to this is the social enactment of freedom, which he does see as teleologically unfolding in time, has to develop historically because human interaction is necessarily historical. Am I articulating the point correctly? I guess is what I'm asking.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean yes, yes, in a sense right, so I mean it again. You get this in a lot of more liberal readings of Hegel where they are obsessed with this idea of recognition. You get this in Habermas. You get this in, I mean, all the kind of mainstream Hegel scholars mostly in the English language scholarship kind of read this political philosophy as some form of like communitarian liberalism or something like this and they emphasize, you know, like Robert Pippin does this and Terry Pinker does this and so on. They all emphasize this idea of recognition where, yes, you know, for Hegel, human beings struggle to actualize freedom and they do so because they need to have their self-determining freedom recognized or reflected back to them in the political state, in the social institutions. And Hegel says this right. But my issue with those readings is they can't let go of this idea of recognition.
Speaker 2:And it's not a coincidence that in the 80s and 90s, you know, when all the talk was about multiculturalism and tolerance of the other and so on, you had a lot of academics write papers arguing, you know, using Hegel's ideas, and using Hegel's ideas and recognition and applying it to justify liberal multiculturalism in the Western capitalist world. But there's so much more to Hegel than just that. So, yes, recognition is a part of it, but if you just focus on the recognizing, like by recognition I mean individuals in society wanting the institutions to reflect their freedom, right, so, for example, you can think of any civil rights movement ever as being characterized in this way. Right. So you can use Hegel to think about sociology in the sense that you know that Martin Luther King and all the civil rights activists in a sense wanted to, and rightly so, wanted to have the humanity and the rights recognized by the state of the time. So that's an important element of it, and this is a big but, but that's not the end, all and be all for Hegel. So, yes, there's this social aspect to it which is historical, and the recognition element of it is important going to reach a point because hegel is not a utopian right? So he doesn't think we're going to get to a point in human history where everyone's freedom is recognized and there's no more tension or or, or conflict, or struggle, or antagonism. Everything is perfect, right, politically speaking, socially speaking, hegel says well, no, there's always going to be. Hegel is always a constant sorry, freedom is always a constant struggle for him. Right, there's always going to be something or some element of self-determining freedom that has yet to be fully realized and that is entirely historically contingent, right, Right.
Speaker 2:So what I do in the book I point out we can think about contemporary capitalism as infringing upon our self-determination. Most of us don't have a choice. We have to work for a living. You know. We have to work to survive, to pay the bills, to eat food, to get health care, all the rest of it. Right, Hegel would say. Well, you are not allowed to determine yourself by necessity. You have to go out and work for money to live. So just in that economic sense and again Marx was aware of this in that economic sense we are not autonomous, we're not free because of the current economic system that we're all living under. Now, if we were to actualize communism and change the mode of production and change the means of production and all the rest of it, then that element of society wouldn't be an infringement upon our freedom. We wouldn't have to sell our labor power to survive. But for Hegel, there would be other elements of our life that might still need to be worked on, as it were, to realize greater degrees of freedom realize greater degrees of freedom.
Speaker 1:So, and you're reading, this kind of perpetual unfolding and struggle of freedom preclude certain early and mid-20th century raids of reading Hegel. So, like pre-liberal Hegel's, we're going back to Kajave here, which saw Hegel as kind of a philosopher of the end stat or like what you could see as the inside, as the final reconciliation on freedom. That's kajiv is reading for the most part. That's where and I always, when I was taught hegel in college as an undergrad, I was actually didn't realize I was actually being taught kajiv.
Speaker 1:Uh, um um, not because I went looking for Instat and Hegel and found that it wasn't there, but that's an important thing to note. And how does it? For example, this gave the example of communism. So if we are not looking at Hegel as predicting the Instat where all these contradictions are solved, that means that certain kinds of readings of Marx, for example, that say that once we have communism, once we get through these first early phases and these transitions, there just are no more problems and no more political or social contradictions, and your reading of Hegel would be like that doesn't make sense, like, basically, like that's not a correct reading of Hegel and that's probably not a correct reading of Marx. Why is that important though? I mean, I do think it is important. But why is it important that we acknowledge that freedom, in this Hegelian concept, would be a constant thing, that would always be struggled for and unfolding, and not fully realizable or manifestable in some kind of final form of the state or whatever?
Speaker 2:Yeah, well, I mean, this is, I mean I do agree with you that that is, you know, not a good reading of Marx either, because I mean we all know that Marx famously said very little about communism himself.
Speaker 2:You, know, he said very little positive things about communism and there's that line that you know, like we're not the cookbooks of the future, we're not the architects of the future, kind of thing. But I think I mean I also think that this is important to keep in mind because if, as Marxists, we do think that once we've achieved full communism, fully automated, luxury, gay space communism, whatever you want to call it, then everything will be fine, all the social contradictions will be solved, there's not going to be any more struggle, everyone will live happily. Well, marx would reject that idea because that is utopian thinking. I would imagine him and Engels would say well, wait a minute, hold on. What's this weird utopianism that you're suddenly bringing up here? Right, and I want to have a caveat here as well.
Speaker 2:I know that the 20th century attempts to realize communism are all very problematic. They all failed. I admire Lenin very much and Trotsky very much. I loathe Stalin. I think Mao didn't really understand Marx and you know Q was a different example. So all of these examples of quote unquote. Really existing socialism never managed to go the full way. Right? Marx says once in the revolution you need a dictatorship of the proletariat to usher in the transitional phase between capitalism and full communism and, of course, in the 20th century, none of the countries that had communist revolutions managed to get there fully, countries that had communist revolutions managed to get there fully. And one way to point that out or one way to critique those attempts is and I want to emphasize, this is just one way because Trotsky did it with Stalin.
Speaker 2:Right is to kind of look at these attempts from a Hegelian point of view, if you like, or Hegelian Marxist point of view in relation to freedom, right? So when Stalin starts, you know, censoring artists and locking people up and people are disappearing for speaking out, then, in other words, when people's freedoms are curtailed in the name of you know history, you know history will show that this is the right thing to do, comrade. Just you wait and see. The Hegelian Marxist stands up and goes well, no, wait a minute, that's not the case. This is not okay, right? And I would even think that, of course, marx himself would have issues with that.
Speaker 2:So the importance in thinking about freedom as never being, as always being, something that people are struggling for, is that it makes you hyper vigilant or hyper aware to areas of human life where self-determining freedom and autonomy are being infringed upon or curtailed. It's happening right now in the United States, with Trump's flurry of executive orders, right, and the cowardice way in which certain mainstream media organizations and certain members of Congress and Democratic Party are just kowtowing Trump and his administration and are bending the knee, for example, right. So the political import of that is to be be hyper aware. You know, so you don't get, so you don't fall into the rosy, rosy glasses, tinted thinking of um, uh, uh, of.
Speaker 2:You know, once there's a communist revolution and a communist society, everything will be fine. Um, it might be or it might not be. We might have some work to do. We might have to figure out how to restructure an entire economy so that people aren't oppressed, as it were. You know what I mean and I don't have any solutions, but of course I'm just pointing out that this is an important thing to keep in mind.
Speaker 1:So there's two other things that I think are helpful. One of the things that I did not see coming in your book was the section on the source of freedom, where you actually compare Hegel with Don Scotus, which is not. This is something I hadn't seen before, so I want to go into that because I do think it actually maybe even further the point that we're making about communism and all kinds of the kind of necessary vigilance. But let's get into that. What is Don Scotus's notion of freedom? How was it so dominant in Western philosophy prior to the German idealism Thurn, and why is Hegel against it.
Speaker 2:Don Skoda's premises his idea of free will on what he calls radical contingency. For Hegel, freedom as a self-determining idea is connected to causal necessity. So Hegel links necessity and freedom. Duns Scotus links freedom and contingency. So right away you have two thinkers who argue for the same thing, namely freedom or the free will, from two diametrically opposed ontological or metaphysical positions. And nowhere in the literature on Hegel has anyone examined their thinking on this. And I was like holy shit, this is fascinating. So that's what I did in the book. There's a small section there on Don Scotus and Hegel, but the point there and I mean I'll also just say that Don Scotus is an immensely fascinating thinker. I mean, I don't know, some of your viewers might be Deleuze fans and of course Deleuze loves Don Scotus and his university of being thesis and so on, and Don Scotus is a fascinating thinker in his own right. But what I found interesting was that here you have a medieval thinker, don Scotus, who argues for the free will by virtue of a thesis of radical contingency, and I compare and contrast that to Hegel's thinking about the free will or freedom from a position of causal necessity and I try to show that why I think, as it were, hegel has a more rigorous and more systematic and more productive understanding of freedom. As much as I admire Don Scotus and I think Don Scotus is brilliant and one thing that's strange is that there's no evidence to suggest that Hegel himself ever actually read Don Scotus. He was aware of Don Scotus' philosophy, but from what I can understand and there might be new research on this, I don't know but Hegel's understanding of Don Scotus came from a German compendium of the history of philosophy written by some other German historian. So we don't really know exactly if Hegel himself read Don Scotus in the original Latin. He was aware of Don Scotus's thinking. He references Don Scotus in his lectures several times.
Speaker 2:And to answer the other part of your question, this idea of freedom being linked to contingency or spontaneity is something that you find in. Well, it's a very common idea, right? Because it decouples freedom from causality, right? So if freedom is that which is not causal, then it's a spontaneous notion, right? It's a contingent notion um, uh and um. And we would normally think that. And you know, like, like, if you, for example, if you go to Kant, you know Kant says that, you know, in nature there is uncaused uh or caused by itself, then then it can't be a product of something else, so it can't be a product of nature, right? But hey, uh, uh. So that roughly, that's sort of khan's view and in a way that goes back to kind of what duns scotus was was saying.
Speaker 2:You know, for him freedom is premised on this idea of radical spontaneity or radical contingency. It can't be derived from a causality. Hegel argues the exact opposite. He says well, freedom, not that freedom is derived from a chain of cause and effect, but rather freedom itself as a concept has. It is a self-caused concept. And to make it even more confusing and bewildering to your listeners, hegel demonstrates the emergence of self-determining freedom logically through an examination of causal necessity in his science of logic. Or to put it another way, he tries to show that if you really think about cause and effect rigorously, you're going to arrive at self-determining freedom. And he logically thinks that he's proved this, which is fascinating to me because it's a fascinating part of his thought.
Speaker 1:Well, it's interesting because it makes Hegelian freedom something that like crude scientific naturalism that goes there's no such thing as freedom because there's no such thing as free will. The reason why there's no such thing as free will is nothing is self-caused. Right, that's the whole logic. Now there's all kinds of problems with that If you actually think about in the grand array of metaphysical time, because you end up having, like, well, nothing self-caused, but where does the universe come from? So I find it very unsatisfactory. But also that this idea that necessity would actually bring you to the idea that there must be some meaningful agency and self-determination, even beyond any idea of radical contingency or a causality or whatever. Well, hegel's argument really makes that kind of reductio ad absurdum that you might get from scientific naturalists. I'm thinking about people who are just total deniers of any human agency at all.
Speaker 1:Hegel's argument really sidesteps that problem almost altogether. Not saying it doesn't create other problems, but it does seem like if necessity would dictate that, if you thought this through, you would come to the idea that self-sufficiency is something that all beings, or maybe even all the universe is actually aiming towards, then it's a lot of, there's a lot stronger ground to be on than getting on the Kant slash Duns Scotus train, where you have to figure out what would be beyond causality in some sort of way, and it feels like that radical contingency stuff would ultimately lead you back to that kind of naturalism which I often think is self-contradictory even of itself, because all the people who really talk about radical determination are also people like well, we should be more compassionate to criminals, because no way we can have that kind of agency to be nicer to criminals. I mean, like it would imply actually that there's no room for anything to be other than it is at all.
Speaker 2:Right.
Speaker 1:And yet you're arguing with me that if I accepted your radical determinist views that I could act differently. But your radical determinist views would actually indicate that there's that that I'm going to do this no matter what because this is ultimately causally necessary. Uh, going all the way back and I don't think people often realize how conservative and and um, even metaphysical sense, that is like um and and. So the Hegelian answer that we are, that everything moves towards self-sufficiency almost as a teleological orientation, not just humans, but that humans are aware of it and can enact it because we can think abstractly in ways that it does not seem like many other animals can Hegel would say, no other animal.
Speaker 1:I'm not willing to put that bet as clearly on the table anymore after learning a lot about primates and whales, but in general there's a point there. There's enough self-awareness and language and whatnot that we actually can be part of our own feedback loop towards freedom in a way that would be a lot harder for other beings. So, whew, that's a long explanation of what I got out of that, but I do think it's very interesting, because Hegel's argument for freedom really isn't critiquable in this, by the same way that we critique all the radical contingency stuff which, to bring it back to the Marxist debates, would actually indicate that some of the critique of the Hegelian elements of Marxism being unscientific, made by the structuralist and post-structuralist Marxist in the middle and end of the 20th century, would actually be kind of a misunderstanding of Hegel's starting point. Yeah, Question mark.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean, it depends exactly what you mean by that. Maybe you can elaborate a little bit on your last point.
Speaker 1:Well, okay, so one of the things that say the Altisterian, structuralist Marxists want to do is throw alienation out, because they also kind of want to throw this idea of human agency out, except by aleatory materialism, which is just going back to this Lucretian swerve where, where history changes because of being able to take advantage of a contingency, and that seems very much a, that seems very much a Duns Scotus way of thinking. That's what I got out of your book actually, and it and critiquing Higgle on those on the grounds that, oh, you're not taking like logical determination seriously enough and trying to get rid of that in Marxism and also getting rid of the concepts associated with it. It isn't so much in your book but like alienation as a constant, of which you can be more or less, but is always there. You know they want to get rid of these ideas from Marxism, they being Altasarians.
Speaker 1:And part of that seems to me that if you understood Hegel's view of what necessity and freedom actually were, you see that throwing out those ideas have pretty big problems. And I kind of think that you see that throwing out those ideas have pretty big problems. And you know, I kind of think that, uh, trying to read, trying to put back historical change into mere contingency that you see in some of the post-structuralist to lose some post-altisserians, maybe even laid off, to say, uh, doesn't do the work that you think it does anyway. Like um, it doesn't do the work that you think it does anyway. Like um, it doesn't actually. It means that the human freedom is effectively fucking arbitrary and stochastic actually is what it would mean. But um, uh, what is your take on that?
Speaker 2:well, I mean, I um, I mean I do agree with you that attempts to decouple Hegel from Marx or to read Marx without the Hegel or the different variations of it, whether you're Alphazer or from that camp or whether you're an analytic Marxist who just thinks that dialectics is continental philosophy nonsense and Marx is closer to some sort of weird logical rationalism. All of these, I think, misunderstand both Hegel and Marx in some respects. Famous postscript to Capital Marx says that Hegel's dialectic for Marx is something that makes the bourgeoisie tremble, is something that makes the bourgeoisie tremble right Because it's continuously emphasizes the transient nature of the status quo. I mean, I'm paraphrasing what Marx says, but he basically points that out about dialectical thinking, right about Hegel's dialectics that Marx then, according to him, turns around and kind of uses it in a more materialist aspect and so on. But I want to also clarify that Hegel doesn't get rid of contingency. So as much as he makes and I point this out in the book as much as necessity is essential for Hegel in many different ways, freedom and necessity and the kind of historical process that realizes freedom and so on, all of that can't happen without contingency. So in a way contingency itself is also necessary for Hegel, otherwise there wouldn't be any freedom.
Speaker 2:And at the same time as I try to argue, necessity itself is in some sense contingent or has the status of contingency.
Speaker 2:Itself is in some sense contingent or has the status of contingency, and I argue this by drawing on what I call a logical retroactive temporality that is operative in Hegel's own thinking.
Speaker 2:So I point this out to say that those who treat Hegel as a determinist in a strong sense, like a strong determinist thinker, and then try to go with other thinkers that emphasize the spontaneous or the contingent, they misunderstand Hegel's position on contingency or they haven't really read Hegel properly enough to really understand what he says about necessity and contingency and how those operate in his philosophical thinking.
Speaker 2:Because if you do kind of take the time to read Hegel, you will, I would hope, appreciate what he says about contingency and necessity. And he doesn't just dismiss contingency outright, which makes it harder for people to reject Hegel as being a how would you call him a strong thinker of necessity. Right, he's only a strong thinker of necessity. He's only a strong thinker of necessity if there's also contingency at work which is making that strong in terms of as a thinker of necessity. So I would complicate the picture that the structuralists or others would want to paint between Hegel and Marx, or the Hegelian version of Marx, if you like, and they're kind of rethinking of Marx away from Hegel, based on these grounds.
Speaker 1:So I guess we've been talking at a very abstract level, because I think, with Hegel, you kind of have to. The phenomenality is still legit, the shorter and longer logics. They're at a level of abstraction that you don't even often get an analytic philosophy to be quite frank. But to tie it back in, one of the things that we can see here, then, is freedom in the collective sense, not just in the libertarian, lone monad sense, is a constant thing you build. So what are some of the practical implications of that? Are there practical implications of that? Even I think there has to be, but I'm going to let you answer that.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean, I think there are right. So, as I try to point out in the book, the purchase of all of this, if you like, or one of the consequences of my reading of Hegel in this way, where I emphasize the temporality and the historicity of freedom and the self-reflexivity of it and all the rest of it, is to say well of it is to say well is to just emphasize that Hegel is a great thinker of the ways in which struggles for human freedom that are social and political are always constant. So in the book, I do talk about Black Lives Matter as a social movement, and I know there's problems with it, but I give that as an example. I also link my reading of Hegel to the more recent Iranian uprising the Women Life Freedom movement that we saw in 2022, where you had women and men in Iran. It was the biggest rebellion the country had seen since the Islamic Revolution, and the reason I can link what I'm saying about Hegel to these 21st century political movements is that they're examples of different particular social groups, different particular, let's say, countries in a specific time in history fighting for their freedom, right.
Speaker 2:So women in Iran, a lot of women in Iran, do not want to wear the obligatory hijab of. Women in Iran do not want to wear the obligatory hijab, right? They're sick and tired of it. And so they were rioting and protesting and a lot of them were killed and captured and tortured and imprisoned and so on, and so you can think about that phenomenon as being a particular instantiation of the universal idea of freedom or the universal struggle for greater freedom.
Speaker 2:So, basically, the practical use or the practical aspects of my reading are that, in the sense that it allows us to think about different struggles for human freedom in different contexts, in a way that is both specific to that region.
Speaker 2:So the iranian example is, in a sense, specific to the situation of women in iran, right. At the same time, it's also a universal movement. It's also an expression of a universal demand for greater freedom, and Hegel's philosophy in my reading of Hegel's philosophy in the book at least, I would hope allows us to make a bit more sense of these sorts of social movements, that this is the only way you can interpret these political movements, or that this is the best way you can interpret these political movements, but rather that Hegel's philosophy gives us tools to think about struggles for human freedom in relation to time in history that are, I would say, productive, and it allows I would hope it opens up different avenues of theory and practice from this reading of Hegel that you don't get in, say, robert Pippin's reading of Hegel, or you don't get in some of the other more liberal or conservative readings of Hegel.
Speaker 1:Right, yeah, you definitely won't get this from Rosenosen for the. For those who've read that or something like that, yeah, like almost neoconservative reading with mingle. Um, well, I'd like to thank you for your time. Borna, where can people find your work?
Speaker 2:yeah, thank you so much. Uh, well, um, uh, I've written a few reviews in Radical Philosophy. I've also published a few papers with some. I mean these are all available free online. I published with Crisis Critique and I've published with Critique and what is it called? Continental critique and thought something like this. It's a journal out of New Zealand. I believe my book is available for purchase. There is a paperback coming out next year. So the hardcover, which is very expensive, you can wait. Next year there'll be a more affordable paperback and I'm and just to kind of mention this, I hope you don't mind I am starting I I'm. I'm running an online course on hegel's logic starting in in mid-february. It's online, it's not free, but it's pay what you can. So, uh, if those of you are interested, you can, you can contact me and if you want to participate, I can register you. It's pay what you can. It's an online course on Hegel's logic and I hope to be publishing more soon, so you can find me online somewhere.
Speaker 1:All right, so that course starts in February, right?
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, probably mid to late February.
Speaker 1:Alright, okay. Well, thank you so much and I hope people get something out of it and read your book. And if you guys want to read it now, you don't want to wait until it gets on soft quarter, just request that your library buy a copy, because that's how these academic hardcovers actually see the light of day for most people. And then, if you want your own copy, buy it when it comes out on paperback, because those are usually moderately affordable. Yeah, exactly, yeah, bluthberry is usually not too, but when when those paperbacks come up, they're usually too awful it's. It's usually like uh, not gonna break the bank in the way, some of those, some of those academic hardbacks, I'm like I, I don't have 200 for 200 page book, sorry, yeah, yeah, it's criminally expensive.
Speaker 2:The academic publishing world is awful in that respect, unfortunately.
Speaker 1:Yep, all right. Well, on that note we will end. Have a great rest of your evening, you too. Thank you.
