 This is the 69th episode of Patterson in Pursuit. This week's episode I'm talking with Dr. Donald Vereen from Emory University in Atlanta about the famous German philosopher Hegel. Hello my friends and welcome to another episode of Patterson in Pursuit. I'm your host, Steve Patterson. Today we're going to do things a little bit differently. I don't know if I've done an episode yet just on the ideas of one philosopher. I'm usually not as interested in the history of philosophy as much as I am just ideas themselves. But Hegel is a philosopher that comes up quite a lot in my investigations because I'm interested in the various arguments that people use to justify the existence of paradox and contradiction. Hegel's name has come up quite a lot in those conversations and so I figured you know what, I need to learn a bit more about Hegelian philosophy. So I've traveled to Atlanta, Georgia to meet Dr. Donald Vereen, who is somewhat of a Hegel specialist. Dr. Vereen has written at least nine books, several of which are on Hegel, and he is the Charles Candler Professor of Metaphysics and Moral Philosophy at Emory University. We had an interesting conversation both while the interview was being recorded and afterwards too, and an interesting fact that he mentioned while we were talking is that he got interested in philosophy through poetry. And we talked about some of the connections between maybe an artistic mind or an artistic background and being more open to philosophies which are tolerant of paradox or tolerant of tensions or contradictions sometimes as you'll hear when we're talking about Hegelian philosophy. Like many of the recent interviews, I can't wait to break this one down for you, and before we start I want to tell you about the sponsor of this show who have created a product that I try to incorporate into my daily routine. It's a meditation app called 10% Happier, meditation for fidgety skeptics. And as I've said before, the host of the app takes a much more rationalist and skeptical inquiry into meditation, which I appreciate. But also, the more I go along, to be honest, I'm surprised that it's taken this long for meditation to hit the West. I feel like the more I practice meditation, the more experience I get, the more I think to myself, how is this not universal? Like how is this not part of people's everyday routines or everyday practice? Like when you're in school, you learn about mathematics, you learn about history, and from my experience I'm thinking you should probably learn the very basics of meditation as well. And I'm not exaggerating, it's so simple, it's so obvious, it's like very basic mind training. So if you want to give it a shot, head over to steve-patterson.com slash meditate and you can sign up for a free month's trial of meditation for fidgety skeptics. So let's dive into the interview that I had with Dr. Donald Vareen, where we cover the metaphysics and status of logic in Hegelian philosophy. Before we start this interview, you were saying you were exposed to Hegelian thought in grad school. And I have very limited exposure to Hegel and when I read some of it, it's dense, it's very hard, and I kind of get impatient maybe when things aren't clear, I want to kind of move along, okay, what does this mean? And I don't spend maybe enough time really sorting through the nuts and bolts of Hegelian thought because I know very influential philosopher. What I'd like to talk to you about is kind of the basics of his, some of his insights in two areas. One's metaphysics and the other's logic. So I'm going to ask you a question that may be impossible to answer, but I'm going to ask it anyway. If there is a way that you could summarize the insights, let's say of Hegelian metaphysics, how much you do so? I don't think that's too difficult a question to discover where Hegel begins. I think where Hegel begins is that he realizes that what is constant in human experience is change, and the change always occurs between opposites. That human experience as such is always something that happens through one thing changing into another. Day to night, light to dark, permanent object to an object that is impermanent. In that sense, he realizes that all experience is a matter of opposites. The question that Hegel, I think, raised for himself then was, is there a way that you can understand by means of reason the logic of opposites? And that then leads him, at least if we imagine, how he might have thought it through, that leads him to the idea of dialectic, because dialectic always goes from one thing to the next. And what I think he realized is that the ancient notion of dialectic of just as you might understand it as pro and con doesn't really go any place because you can go back and forth between this view or that view. The question then is how for Hegel you can move from one set of opposites to another, that it would be a self-defining kind of process. The first book on Hegel that was ever written in English by Hutchison Sterling was called The Secret of Hegel. It's a very large book, not much read today. And The Secret of Hegel is dialectic, according to Hutchison. Okay, so what does that word mean, dialectic? Well, of course, it's two because it's double. Aristotle in the metaphysics points out that a double can't simply be two or it wouldn't be double or one would really be many. Instead, a double has to do with one thing having some other version of itself. Hegel's logic of dialectic is a logic of doubling up, that consciousness is always doubling itself. It's always going from one point to another. This comes out in something Hegel calls the speculative sentence, the speculative resides. And he talks about this once in the preface to the phenomenology of spirit, in which he says the way to understand the speculative sentence is that if you say, what is the subject in meaning, it's in the predicate. But then once you go to the predicate to discover what the predicate means, you have to go back to the subject. When you do, of course, the nature of the subject has been changed because it has been infused with the predicate. Then once again, it becomes dialectical because to understand what that sense of the subject is, we go to a new predicate. So what's the example of that? What's the sentence? Well, he gives you a very complicated sentence in one sense. And I think this is done in criticism of Kant, where he says, an example is that God is. Kant, as you might remember, wants to say that is is not a predicate. Hegel says it is a predicate. And so that's that's perhaps his chief example there. He doesn't give you a lot of examples, except he gives you the entire phenomenology as an example of how the speculative sentence works. But one thing that should really be pointed out here is that the greatest error of people who try to understand Hegel is to say that he has a dialectic of thesis, antithesis and synthesis. You perhaps have heard that. That is absolutely false news. Hegel never uses those three terms together in any part of his corpus. He at one point calls it a kind of false traplicity that he attributes at one point to Kant and says that this kind of traplicity is not what he's talking about. One might say, well, how did the legend of thesis, antithesis and synthesis get started? There's an old article by Gustav Müller, a good Hegelian who published it in the Journal of the History of Ideas, trying to discover why anybody would have thought this, that it was a doctrine of thesis, antithesis and synthesis. And it turns out that Müller discovered that there was a series of lectures shortly after Hegel's death. Hegel died in 1831. So I think it was in the thirties by a not very well known, I think, Swiss thinker who really did a lecture tour around German speaking universities, interpreting the so-called new philosophy. Of course, Hegel's philosophy was was famous and dominant. He was the philosopher of the Prussian state. And he interpreted Hegel's dialectic in these terms that he probably got maybe from Fichte or from earlier thinkers and read off the Hegelian system. It is possible that the young Marx heard these lectures not direct evidence, but hypothetically he may have in Berlin, according to Müller's article. So the legend got going because it's much easier to think of thesis, antithesis and synthesis than to think the way Hegel really does think about dialectic. So it's a very interesting article. And I think is absolutely correct because I've looked through the entire corpus and he never uses these terms as a set of three. OK, so if his in the philosophy, it's more of a set of two. Yes, it's a two step. So how so that's in the abstract in the concrete. How does that what are the implications of that? I'm just like ordinary experience, ordinary life. Let's take a famous example, motion. So what in the Hegelian way of thinking about things? How would he understand motion? It seems very straightforward point A. There is the object is here at time A and then time B. The object is there. There is motion in between. Straightforward logical boom. Let's move on. How would Hegel say? Well, there might be more that that means the eye here. Well, Hegel is interested in the internal motion of human consciousness. That is how human consciousness is constantly recapitulates itself. Just as you would recapitulate yourself, if you were to produce your own autobiography. It's a the phenomenology is a process of self knowledge. So consciousness is a kind of motion. The German term is bewegung. It moves from one apprehension of the object to a next apprehension of the object. And in doing that, Hegel has this untranslatable verb, which he does talk about as a special German verb that is called Alphabung. Haven in German is to raise something up. But Alphabung, as Hegel wants to emphasize, is both to preserve something, moving forward from something, lifting it up from something, but also there's a cancelling. There's a preservation of what went before, but also something is lost. And I think many Hegel commentators don't focus on facts, things are lost in this movement from one stage to another. Something is lost, but something is preserved. So in that sense, one is always expanding and being more inclusive, but things are lost. I think in the same way we realize that we expand our selfhood from our childhood, but we also lose the childhood. In the meantime, we don't lose it completely because the child that we were, we still somehow have contact with that sense. So human consciousness in his so-called science of experience of human consciousness, experience means to move from one side to the other. And that's why he ends up saying, the true is the whole. Das Vara ist das Ganze. The true is the whole. So really none of these apprehensions of the object, none of these motions of consciousness between subject and object is the whole. It's always less than the whole. The truth for Hegel is always partial and error is always partial. It's never absolute. So when one gets to the whole, where all of these moments, one generating the other comes together, we get to what Hegel wants to call absolute knowing, the absolutis viscens. So two questions on that. When usually when we think about motion, we're talking about what we assume to be external objects, you know, the ball moving through the air. Is this way of thinking not making a claim about external objects per se as it is actually the changing consciousness that you might assume comes from an external object, but really it's just your consciousness changing from one state to another. Well, all objects as such are changing from one state to another. This is this is not a substance. An object always lives a life. It always has a beginning, middle and an end. So is there everything in experience has a beginning, middle and an end. So the claim is that there isn't any there isn't any objects outside the experience that it's all within the experience. Yes, that that that's a very interesting point. I think for Hegel, and this is by no means solipsism, Hegel's a rationalist. For Hegel, there is no object for consciousness that is somehow outside of consciousness. There is no thing in itself because the thing in itself is an idea consciousness has the thing. It's as simple as that. That is, you can talk about the thing in itself, but that's a concept of the thing. In other words, there really isn't anything for consciousness that is somehow independent of consciousness, even though consciousness can have an idea of the object as independent of itself. That's a concept consciousness has of the object. And it's quite it's quite useful. We we need that concept to do ordinary science. So all phenomena then that we're trying to explain and using the scientific method, for example, is really fundamentally analyzing contents of consciousness and experience. But there's no it's not like we're out there measuring some world that exists outside of everybody's consciousness. It's always and everywhere within the boundaries of consciousness. We might use a concept here that I think is compatible with Hegel that comes from the Italian philosopher Giambattista Vico, who you know I'm also interested in. Vico wants to say that the objects that what we would call natural science investigates that it contacts these objects by means of conscantia, the Latin notion of consciousness or conscience, which we might best translate as the witnessing consciousness. So I think for Hegel as well as Vico, what we have with science, natural science, is a very elaborate way of witnessing something which we do not make. We do make history, but we don't make nature. We come upon nature as something there and made not by us. Vico wants to claim made by the deity. But we encounter as as a scientist encounters nature and it is to be understood. But that understanding we could view as a very precise and elaborate kind of witnessing of what goes on. And that means that experimentation is very crucial to science because in an experiment we come very close to being able to make the thing ourselves. But of course we don't quite do that, but the experiment becomes crucial. We can understand why experiment is so crucial is that we come very close to being able to make the truth of the thing ourselves in an experiment. What do you mean that we come close to making the truth of the thing in the experiment? Well, we set up a hypothesis and we draw implications from the hypothesis and we investigate whatever we're investigating. And in so doing, we sort of make the event understandable. At least we try to make it understandable. Now, of course, very important not to impose our views on the experiment. Bacon was very good with his four idols of trying to warn us not to do that in his Novomorganum. So in that sense, Hegel was not in any way replacing natural science by philosophy. In fact, in his philosophy of nature and the encyclopedia, for a long time, he was thought that these seemed very fanciful discussions of science until Petri did his three-volume translation and analysis of it. And what's fanciful is that Hegel was absolutely accurate to the science of his day, which now looks pretty fanciful in many respects. But Hegel was accurate to it. And all Hegel was trying to do was to really reflect philosophically and put together how the various parts of science functioned as a kind of human consciousness of nature. So let me ask you about. This is a good segue into talking about maybe logic and the status of paradoxes and dialectic, perhaps. So if what Hegel is trying to do is reformulate how we think about the world in terms of what's going on in the contents of our consciousness, the contents of our experience. Human consciousness. Human consciousness. One way that I've heard Hegel interpreted when we're talking about motion, for example, is not just the leaving of something behind and the taking of something, but they would put it this way, that an object in consciousness is in one place and it's in another place at the same time. It's in two places. It is here and it is not here. So it sounds like in a straightforward way that sounds kind of paradoxical and contradictory. So the two question is, is that a good way to understand what He might say about motion? Object is here and it's not here. And then we'll get to part two of that. I know of no commentator on Hegel who has stated anything about that. And it's surprising to me because Hegel is not particularly interested in motion. I mean, it just is part of the philosophy of nature. He doesn't talk about motion. I mean, other than the way I was talking about it as the internal development of consciousness, that is, I would have to say the idea of motion, not a priority for Hegel is to discuss. I don't know where. That almost is like the thesis into the synthesis in becoming from some place, but not from Hegelian. I think it was Grand Priest, don't quote me on that, but I believe it was Grand Priest who was talking about paradoxes and contradictions and he was saying this is one way that Hegel would understand motion, it's here and it's not here at the same time. Well, it must be some kind of odd implication from Hegel because all I can say is as someone who has studied Hegel for over 50 years, it doesn't seem to make very much sense to me. Hey guys, so I just wanted to jump in here and clarify something. I had to go back after the fact and make sure that I didn't just get my facts screwed up. So I did a little research and I think this is what Grand Priest is referencing. I've got a quote here from Hegel's history of philosophy where Hegel is commenting on Zeno's paradoxes and he says this. If we want to make motion clear to ourselves, we say that the body is in one place and then it goes to another. Because it moves, it is no longer in the first but yet not in the second. Were it in either, it would be at rest. Where then is it? If we say that it is between both, this is to convey nothing at all for if it were between both, it would be in a place. And this presents the same difficulty. He says this. But movement means to be in this place and not to be in it. And thus to be in both alike. This is the continuity of space and time which makes motion possible. Zeno and the deduction made by him brought these points into forcible opposition. So in other words, if you follow the line of reasoning of Zeno's paradox, Zeno says, well, motion is impossible because it would entail a contradiction. It sounds like Hegel is saying, well, no, no, motion is possible and it entails a contradiction. And in fact, it's a demonstration of a contradiction in reality. Or as he put it, movement means to be in this place and not to be in it and thus to be in both alike. I just wanted to add that commentary to make sure that I wasn't totally off base and I wasn't giving you guys crappy information. So then the part two of the question would be in this worldview or in this way of thinking about the contents of our consciousness, what is the status of something like paradoxes or contradictions and more broadly logic? So does Hegel have a problem with paradoxes or the tension that we see between opposites? A lot of people go, if it appears that there's a paradox that appears that there's this opposite tension, that's something that needs to be solved and resolved. But I know other thinkers are a little bit more tolerant to the status of this tension between opposites. You see it a lot in Eastern philosophy where there's this kind of duality of opposites that they're more comfortable with, maybe. Well, you mentioned Eastern philosophy. It occurs to me that although Hegel, to my knowledge, did not have a knowledge of the Yi Qing, the Book of Changes, although Leibniz knew of it from correspondence with missionaries and he understood the mathematics of it almost immediately, although he never saw full copy of it. And I doubt that Hegel knew of Leibniz's knowledge in correspondence of that. But Hegel, I think, could have agreed with it because the interesting thing about the Book of Changes, the oldest known book in the history of humanity is the Book of Changes, the Yi Qing, is that it exactly says the constant element in human experience is change and change occurs between opposites. And of course, it has a way of dealing with opposites. That's what it's about, is how to deal with opposites. In that sense, it has its own mathematics of that and its own logic. I wouldn't go further, although something interesting might someday be written about the Hegelian dialectic and how it might relate to the Book of Changes. But Hegel would agree, I think, that that's absolutely fundamental to metaphysics is the idea of opposition and changes. For instance, and Hegel does comment on Giudano Bruno, the great Renaissance thinker, died in 1600. Bruno is very clear there is one of the great philosophers of opposites, influenced James Joyce greatly because of his doctrine of opposites. Bruno's coincidence of opposites. Bruno says, everything happens in terms of opposites and the coincidence of opposites. I think what Hegel has with his logic is an attempt to give you a kind of way of understanding the coincidence of opposites. Can you put more meat on the bones? Can you contrast the Hegelian logic to, let's say, Aristotelian logic? That's complicated. I think the person, by the way, who's done the best on that is, but we won't go through all of that, is Archie Collingwood, who was a Hegelian in his so-called logic of the overlap of classes. I guess we could say in a word what Hegel is interested in here is that the notion of, well, let's say a couple of things, the notion of a null class is just not there. Hegel replaces it with the doctrine of determinant negation. There isn't a null class. There is an ordinary logic. Hegel has no problem with ordinary logic. He supersedes all of that into his larger notion of metaphysical logic. But he has, in the great science of logic, he goes through all of Aristotelian logic and shows exactly how it fits in at some length. In the sense, why there's no notion of a null class, you might think of it this way, and I would think of Henri Bexel here, where if we have a concept of order and disorder, disorder is just simply another kind of order. So we come into a room and we say the room is disordered. It's because it has a different order than we expected. We didn't expect the chairs to be on top of the table. We expected them to be at the table. We didn't expect the lamps to be on the floor. We expected them to be on the table. But it doesn't mean that there's no order here. It's just a very different kind of order than the order which we wanted or expected or could understand. That I think Hegel could agree with. So when you say there's no null class, what do you mean by that term? Well, no class can function in ordinary logic, as a class of no members. So some people I know, what I've spoken with them about logic and all in general, and we talk about the status of contradiction. There is at least one popular interpretation. I don't know if this is articulated professionally by anybody, but there's a popular notion that in Hegelian logic, there's not only a acceptance of the opposites this tension between opposites, but there's an acceptance of contradiction, explicit logically, A and not a type of contradiction. Is that a correct understanding, or is there room for logical contradiction in Hegelian thought? Oh sure, Hegel never denies anything we would call common sense. He never denies anything we would call ordinary Aristotelian logic. It's just that the metaphysics that you would get from Aristotle's logic is not Hegel's metaphysics. In fact, I wanted to point out probably the one title that Hegel used that did himself the most disservice was to call his metaphysics the science of logic instead of the science of metaphysics. Of course, German could use science for what we would not normally use it for, but really the science of logic is his metaphysics, and he does not think that traditional or Aristotelian logic thinks it's a perfectly good way of reasoning, but it is not the ultimate logic of being, which he wants to have in the logic that he writes the science of logic. The thing that I think he's doing in the science of logic is that he begins it with the idea of being, and because he says, well, we could say that anything has being, so that would apply to anything and everything. But then he says, you know, that means that the idea of being is completely indeterminate. If it is completely indeterminate, then it's the same thing as nothing, because nothing is completely indeterminate. But then he says, if we've got a movement at bevegem from the indeterminance of being, the indeterminant of nothing, and so we now have the idea of becoming. Okay. And then he'll move on to how we have the idea of what he calls major or something becomes in a certain way. So that's the beginning of the whole logic in which he generates thought from the largest thoughts you could have about anything that it is. You could think back on Aristotle's 10 categories, which are the largest predicates you could attach to a thing. And he wants to generate the entire idea, and as he goes along, he'll generate Aristotelian logic about halfway through the big logic and keep going. So this becomes an order of all of the categories that we could ever use to try to understand something. And as we go, we get more and more particular. We're able to categorize something much more and more complex way as we proceed. So I think there's a temptation, I certainly am subject to this, of using the principles of classical logic and importing them directly into metaphysics or maybe not even making a hard distinction there between logic and metaphysics or the way we think about metaphysics. So is Hegel saying that there is a distinction that you might think of classical logic at least in terms of methods of reasoning? Methods of reasoning don't necessarily get you to metaphysical truth. It doesn't get you to metaphysical truth. It can be perfectly useful for ordinary purposes, ordinary reasoning, Hegel doesn't deny that. But there is an interesting assertion in the preface to the phenomenology where he says that where the substance becomes subject and what he means is that he's wanting to understand the inner form of something, the inner form of experience, which is developmental in the sense of subject, is developmental. He could have easily said substance becomes self, you might say, that it has an inside. So that's the sense in which Hegel, I think, moves from what we could call a substance metaphysics to a metaphysics that sees anything that exists as having an inside, an inner form, a way in which it develops or realizes itself in relationship to oppositions. So with this question of being, if the claim is that being and non-being are the same thing? Well, they're equally indeterminate. There are two notions of indeterminateness, which remain unsatisfactory in themselves. So it's not a straightforward logical contradiction in the sense that being and non-being can be together at the same time in the same way. I think that's, without going through it all, I think that's Collingwood's notion of the overlap of classes, that classes really do overlap, in other words. But in ordinary logic, we can separate them into two separate classes. Okay, okay, so let me try to... They're always becoming something other than what they are. Okay, so I'm gonna try to rephrase that in my own language, and if I make an error, then please correct me. So the claim is, I like what you just said there at the end, that when we're thinking about things in our rational structure of how we wanna separate and divide and class the world, we make very clear logical black and white separations. But in the world, those separations are not objective and absolute. There's overlap, so you could, if you were thinking about, it's like a continuum problem, that at what point do you go from white to red, to the color white to the color red, will you have pink, which is white, and it's red at the same time? Is that fair, that those kind of... Yes, and that would take us back to something we haven't really talked about, which is the distinction I think Hegel wants to make between the understanding, which in German is fairstand, and reason vernunft. And he thinks that the understanding, what it does is it classifies everything in experience into its orders, and in so doing, he thinks this is reflective thinking, and that, he says, is like putting experience in boxes in a grocer's stall, which in his day, of course, grocers had stalls with boxes, or giving us a table of contents of experience, whereas speculative thinking, as opposed to just reflective thinking, speculative thinking, really, I think he's thinking of the original Latin idea of specul, which is the idea of being able to see into something, to see into its inner form. Speculation is a kind of not seeing and reflected light, but being able to see into the inner being of something and discover its own logic by which it becomes what it is. So he doesn't see anything wrong with reflective thinking, it's just taken up and superseded by the whole notion of reason. Understanding, in other words, does not exploit the full powers of human reason. It limits it just to the ability to classify, which is perfectly useful and powerful, but not in the end the answer to the metaphysical question. So let's take the example of the color overlap. We have the category of the color white, the category of the color red, and in reality, that's not a complete taxonomy, because we have this middle, this white and red pink. How would this line of reasoning respond? If somebody were to say, well, if in the world there is this metaphysical blending of things from different categories, then all you need to do is expand your categories. So now we change our categories from there being white and red to white, pink and red, various shades of pink, various shades of red, various shades of white. So they still are metaphysically separate, we just have smaller categories. So we can explain the phenomena we experience, not in terms of blending of categories, but of kind of fine tuning our categories. Well, Hegel would want to say, let's focus on how you got from one to the other. How do we develop from one to the other, as you just described, a process of development, I think. And he would, I want to say, well, what's the logic of that? That is the logic of how one thing is connected to or generates another, not how they are just separate, but how they are interrelated. So if I were to respond, there's a qualitative experience of whiteness. This is something in my visual field, there's some qualitative nature. For example, that paper over there has white and right on it's got a clip that's red. So it's a good example. There's some fundamental qualitative distinction between those experiences, that part of my visual field and the other part. So I set up a category and I say, well, the qualitative that the nature of that white experience, I'm gonna call white, the nature of this other experience I'm gonna call red, those aren't the same. And in a sense, they can't overlap. There might be a third color that if they were pigments of paint, for example, we could mix them together and generate a new color, but there is in fact a kind of a black and white distinction between them, that in no way is the experience of white, the experience of red and in no way is the experience of red, the experience of white. You can only do that by forgetting a lot of things that are in experience, as to how you would even come to color at all and how one would move from one color to another, I think. Okay. So what are the forgetting? For getting the whole notion of how the color spectrum comes into existence and what it is and how it's held together, that would be to start to think about it, its inner form, I think. I don't have any good answers for what it is. I can just describe it and categorize it in a way. How does Hegel know these things, what it is? I mean, if I were to think about the experience of color, it's kind of a fundamental thing. It feels like that is its nature, as it appears to me. Well, I guess I'm thinking that Hegel, of course, discusses a huge section of the logic on quality and from quality we get the idea of quantity. What Hegel would, I think, say if you're trying to do that is how does the whole theory of color come about? I mean, I keep thinking of, you know, Goethe who had a whole theory of color and the materiality of the farm era who probably Hegel would have liked. That is, Hegel, I think, would say, you're really not asking the metaphysical question. You would say, of course, everything you say is perfectly true, but if we ask the question, well, where is color in terms of human consciousness and how does that whole idea come about and what else is related to it that's not colored, et cetera? That's what interests, I think, Hegel, that sense of being able to put all of experience together since the true is the whole. So Hegel would say, well, all of those things are true. He says also in the preface to the phenomenology that some propositions are just to be assented to as right or true or false. So, of course, you know, there are however many steps there are in the Washington Monument, it's either true or false, whatever you see there is. He says, well, those are propositions just to be assented to, but that's not the metaphysical question, ultimately. The metaphysical question is how do the concepts come about? How do we get our taxonomy? Yeah, in the same way, we could use this, I think, as an analogy, yeah, how we get our taxonomy. Once again, let's use the analogy of the human self. If I said, how did I ever come to know such and such? I say, well, I was told this, you know, by Ms. McMaster as my fourth grade teacher. Well, how did I come to know her, et cetera, et cetera? I would, in other words, start having an account of how I would put my whole self together as someone who could say these things, who would know these things. That's, I think, what Hegel is saying, the metaphysical question is, not whether it's right or wrong what I said or think I know, but how did consciousness ever come to be put together in this way? I think my own thoughts on the topic would be a self-described naive perspective, where it's something like, I have no idea, but all I'm given is the contents of my experience. So I start labeling things, start labeling that part of my experience white, that part of my experience is red. This is the taste of eating Cheerios in the morning. I'm just start labeling things and then kind of work from there. I don't know how I would even try to go about answering the, quite like, where does consciousness come from, for example, or I have no idea? Well, Hegel begins the phenomenology with the stage that he calls sense certainty. And what he thinks is that we know something just by perceiving it, here it is. We sense it, we're certain that it is. But then he says, well, certainty, truth like that, can't lose anything by being written down, let's write it down. And he says, but then we have this here at this noon time, but then it's still this here in its nighttime. And he says, what happens in language is that we really can't state the particular. The minute we try to state the particular, to think the particular, we discover that we can only think it in the most universal terms. Anything is of this here now. And so we start for Hegel from that. And he says, when we think somehow that we could think the particular, we don't know the wisdom of the cows in the field who realize with particulars they just fall to and eat them up. So he says, you can digest particulars, but you can't really think them. So he's saying, look, I can show you how if you start to tell me, well, I know this is here because I see it, et cetera. Well, what is it that you see? And so forth. And then you move on to the idea of a thing. And from a thing, you move on to what a thing could be. Becomes force and understanding. And goes into a good deal about Newtonian physics and so forth. He just starts moving you from this view of the world to this view of the world to this view of the world where things start to appear in the world. And then what things start to appear is instead as forces that are holding qualities together and so forth and so on. And he moves on until you start to get other consciousnesses in the world and so forth and so on. So in other words, there are two ways to say what a thing is, I think. And Hegel is in the second way. One way is, which you've given me some good examples of, is if you say what is something, you try to give it a definition. You could do it by genus and species. The other way to say what a thing is, is to think of it genetically. Where does it, what is its origin? Where does it come from? How does it come to be what it is? That's how Hegel, I think, is thinking always. You could take either way. And Hegel is looking at this always genetically as to where does the thing come from? Where does it begin? What is its course of life? And so forth. When you, we're giving that last answer, you used the phrase, this here now. Yes, he uses that. So that reminds me very much of Buddhist philosophy. And so kind of the last question I want to ask you, this is a great segue, is I had a conversation with a philosopher at Harvard about Buddhism. And one of the topics that came up is about the notion of things, what are things? And the context of the conversation is we were talking about composite objects. So ordinary, we think about tables and lamps and so on, that they have parts and the parts themselves and those parts have parts and so on. And she was saying that there's a notion of the infinite divisibility of things that there is no fundamental, there's no part that you can't divide in two. And she said, because of that, because there's no fundamental, some Buddhist thinkers claim that there are no things per se. It's not that there's nothing, that there are no things. That's the concept of shunyata, I think, shunyata. So I'm not sure, but that sounds compelling. It's sometimes called nothingness or suchness. So a key part of that claim was the infinite divisibility of objects. And I wonder, is there a correlation between that notion and Hegel? Would Hegel have agreed with something like that about infinity in nature kind of affecting how we think of objects in particular? I don't quite know how you would answer that. Hegel, by the way, was a little bit aware of Buddhism but the translations and the availability of material in his day would just pales before what we have in Western translations and knowledge today. There has been some, when I was an undergraduate, I did my honors year on Zen Buddhism. And there is some literature on Zen Buddhism, Japanese Buddhism, and Hegel in the Journal of Philosophy East and West, some very old articles about that, wondering whether Hegel's idea of absolute knowledge has some similarities, perhaps, with the Zen perception of things. And I think there might be something like that that you could talk about, particularly, I wouldn't put it quite in the way of the infinite divisibility of things, but maybe more whether you could say if you get to the point where Hegel says you have absolute knowledge, and he wants to do this by reason, it may require some kind of satori-like insight of seeing that any given version of reality is not the final version of reality, that it's only one way of constructing reality. I think there's something to be said about how we're to understand Hegel's notion of absolute knowing, which is to realize that any given order or doctrine of what's true is itself supersedible and isn't the whole. Does that imply that there is no absolute knowledge in the sense that there's no knowledge which is impervious to that kind of future revision? What I've argued in my book on Hegel's absolute is the idea that it is not when you get to absolute knowledge that you have put everything together as a whole that you finally got a synthesis between the two moments of knowing, but that you simply accept that there is no unity between these two moments, that everything is paradoxical, that everything has this doubleness about it, because Hegel shows you there's no doctrine of relation that will give you the relation ultimately between what is in itself and what is for itself, like the subject and predicate of the speculative sentence. And when you get to absolute knowledge, you finally accept that because what's been happening to this consciousness all along is it keeps believing, oh, I can keep things together, I can pull things together, I can discover what their relationship is, its perception, it's the thing, it's whatever put in there, but when you get to absolute knowledge and the Buddhists might like this, is that you simply accept that there's opposition and that ultimately experience is always double. That's really a beautiful note to end on. I do want to try to rephrase that in one way and correct me if I'm wrong here because I think this is really, really interesting. So the kind of the end of the examination and the internal examination of your own consciousness, the absolute knowledge is itself a paradox in the sense that it's not absolute knowledge. Well, it is absolute in the sense that you come to the realization that the two-ness of things, as James Joyce said, you need two things at a time. I'm a reader of Finnegan's Wake, you know, with two one. He says you need two things at a time. I think Hegel would agree with that. That is, you come to the realization that opposites hold themselves together because neither can be without the other, but that there is no way to fully comprehend what kind of relationship there is that holds it together. You can come up with a lot of different ways they're held together, but ultimately in reality, in the toe-antus-on, as the Greeks would say, in the really real, there's just opposites that are opposite of each other, that are held together, and wisdom, since absolute knowledge is to be wise, is to accept things as they are, and things as they ultimately are is just that the opposites stand in relationship to each other. And if we can't fully make sense of it... So we have to accept paradox, in other words. That's a good way of summarizing it. So if we can't understand it, and if it appears paradoxical to us, we have to essentially say that is the nature of things, and the wisdom is just accepting that. That's what wisdom has always been, is to accept things as they are. You're wise if you understand things as they really are. And so in a sense, it's always the grand delusion that keeps going on as to how you would bring them together, and we have one way of bringing them together after another that consciousness engages in, and some of those, of course, are very practically useful or just useful in terms of existing. But ultimately, I think on my reading of the Hegelian view, which is not accepted by everybody, but why should it, is that ultimately where you stand as a philosopher is that you accept the fact that this may sound too Kierkegaardian, that at the basis of things is the doubleness of everything, that you just accept. Paradox and philosophy teaches you how to accept that. That's why you do philosophy. Alright, that was my conversation with Dr. Donald Vareen. I hope you guys found that insightful. Like I said, I really can't wait to break this interview down. The ending of this conversation I kind of wish were the beginning, because I think it summarizes and gives the ultimate conclusion and perspective that, hey, Galeons are coming from. If you've been listening to the show or reading my work for a while, you know I'm very skeptical of paradox and contradiction. I would say something like, if you find paradox in your worldview, it's a demonstration of error, that something's got to be corrected. So it's great to hear somebody of, you know, the exact opposite persuasion, that well, if you find paradox, congratulations you've arrived at wisdom. Much more to say on the topic, many more interviews upcoming. I hope you guys enjoy the rest of your week.