The Chicago Philosophy Meetup

July 8 - We are returning to the fifth and sixth paragraphs of chapter 13 to rediscover an often-neglected distinction between possibility and necessity as analogous to the changeable and the unchangeable. The bookmark is set at Bekker line 22b29. George will present his findings.
.
Aristotle grapples with competing notions of "possibility" {dunamis}--metaphysical possibility concerning a thing's capacity and ability versus epistemological possibility concerning whether the evidence justifies a predication. In this last part of the chapter, he addresses the metaphysical.
.
On the nature of anything existent, it is necessarily what it is. What are possible to be or not to be for it depend on what it is already. Some existents have opposite possibilities; but some have only one-directional possibility. Fire, for example, is going to be hot; it cannot not be hot. So, fire has the one-directional possibility about being hot.
.
What else? Join the meeting and discuss.
.
----

Organon means "instrument," as in, instrument for thought and speech. The term was given by ancient commentators to a group of Aristotle's treatises comprising his logical works.

Organon
|-- Categories ---- 2023.02.28
|-- On Interpretation ---- 2023.12.12
|-- Topics
|-- On Sophistical Refutations
|-- Rhetoric*
|-- Prior Analytics
|-- Posterior Analytics

These, the best overview lectures of all time, provide a complete college course in philosophy. Beginners will get clarity and adepts will be revitalized.

Thelma Zeno Lavine’s From Socrates to Sartre: The Philosophic Quest (1978) is the most riveting (her painstaking contortionist elocution), endearing (the eerie, theremin-laced Moog soundtrack, straight from the golden age of PBS), and confrontational (her radical politics and censorship-defying critiques) philosophy lecture series ever produced.

Hegel V: Last Tango with Hegel

Here is a non-entertaining, non-funny, non-excited event description; in fact, this sentence contains the only exclamation point you’ll find on this page!

Lavine’s mind operates like a cloudless quartz engine—every piston firing at full intelligibility. Check out her method of exposition. Dwell with it here for a moment. Who is the greatest hand-holder for newcomers to Hegel? Behold …

Pedagogical Obermeister Lavine begins by asking us about the most timely possible topic today. In fact, this topic is more timely than any of those timely topics other Meetups use when they try to act timely by announcing events with popular (officially) trending timely topics tucked in their titles.

Lavine opens with a question more fundamental than any contemporary hot topic:

• What justifies opposition to one’s own state?

That’s a good question. We know that we are so justified, but can we articulate how?

Some obvious pseudo-justifiers come to mind—conscience, the progressive direction of history (which so far thankfully has hobbled forward on its Left foot), and the usual Kantian concerns (the philosophical conditions under which “resistance to constituted authority” becomes intelligible). Thelma helps by presenting us with a list of candidate justifiers:

1. Universal moral principles
2. Legal norms
3. Religious doctrines
4. Private conscience
5. Divine command

Which of these can genuinely authorize dissent?

Surprise. Hegel’s answer is none of the above.

For Hegel, no moral principle is higher than the state. (Gulp. Unless, … oh, this might need interpretation.)

See? This is the way to begin an engaging filleting of Hegel’s moral and political philosophy. Most teachers would have started by describing the system. Not Sweet The Dear—she immerses us in a crisis. As Uncle Ben said to baby Spiderman, “With great emotion in the feeling of the question, comes great intelligibility of the thing that finally comes out which is the answer to that question.”

In other words, hooking the audience with a good, emotion-making question both generates the right follow-ups and also integrates them into a unified, memorable, understood system. This is the Tao of Lavine.

SPOILERS

I – Hegel’s Moral Philosophy

1. Organicism — Hegel’s moral philosophy inherits his organicism: nothing works in isolation, but only as an organelle locked inside an organic many-in-one. This totality is the Nation-State, which embodies the “Spirit of the People” through its culture—language, laws, morality, fake news, movies, and all media (a Hegelian tech term!)—and its social, economic, and political institutions. For Hegel, this Nation-State is the fundamental source of culture, institutional life, and morality, providing the ethical framework for individuals.

2. The Nation-State As Source of Ethics — Hegel asserts that an individual can live a moral life only by adhering to the moral principles expressed through her society’s institutions. He views individuals as culture carriers, conduits for the moral values flowing from the Nation-State’s culture, political, economic, religious, and educational systems. So the moral values of one’s Nation-State are the sole source of an individual’s morality, ideals, and obligations—and moral life can only be fulfilled within this context. Hegel emphasizes that all ethics is “social ethics,” the ethics of a specific society, and that human essence and value are derived solely from the state. Individuals cannot truly separate themselves from their society’s beliefs and values.

• (a) Social Immorality. Anticipating the objection that a society or government might become immoral (like during witch hunts or Watergate), Hegel responds that any criticism of such actions is itself based upon the moral and legal ideals generated by the nation’s own culture. For example, criticizing the denial of voting rights or the violation of assembly freedom stems from internalizing the nation’s own constitutional ideals, such as the Fifteenth Amendment or the Bill of Rights. Hegel does not claim that actual cultures or governments are perfect, but rather that the ideals we use to criticize them are products of that very nation.
• (b) Private Conscience. Hegel views reliance on private conscience for moral guidance with “extreme suspicion,” arguing that it is fallible and may produce erroneous or contradictory judgments due to a lack of objective standards. Furthermore, private consciences among individuals risk conflict without a means of resolution.
• (c) Universal Moral Principles. Hegel denies that universal rational moral principles, such as the Golden Rule or Kant’s categorical imperative, can adequately guide moral action. He dismisses such principles as “empty and hollow,” “vacuous, contentless,” and incapable of directing or prohibiting specific actions.
• (d) God. If one turns to God as a moral source, Hegel offers two counter-arguments: first, the difficulty of being sure whether the perceived divine voice is truly God’s, or merely one’s own or society’s. Second, and more critically, Hegel’s “trump card” is that the Nation-State itself is a manifestation or revelation of God, embodying the Absolute – the totality of truth. For Hegel, the Nation-State represents the “divine idea as it exists on earth,” embodying a stage of God’s rational truth unfolding through World-History.

4. Participation in Larger Life and Truth of the Nation — Hegel’s theory of social ethics implies that for an individual, living as a contributing member of the Nation-State means participating in the life of the Absolute and a larger truth, transcending merely personal desires. The individual’s moral center shifts from their isolated self to this “larger life of the spirit of the whole people,” which is the unfolding Absolute. This participation involves engaging in the public life and political process, where cultural standards, values, and beliefs are debated and developed, allowing individuals to enter into the truth of their time as manifested in their nation.

5. The Moral Ideals of the Individual and the Nation-State Are Identical — The moral ideals present in public life define the Nation-State’s moral identity, and individuals find their own moral identity and selfhood within this larger life of the Spirit of the People. This identity between individual and national ideals is what Hegel means by “ethics is social ethics”.

6. The Need for Unification — In stark contrast to Enlightenment ideals of the autonomous, independent individual, Hegel emphasizes the human being’s profound need for unification with others and participation in a purpose larger than their own. He argues that this need for belonging and wholeness is greater than the need for independence, speaking to the sense of fragmentation and isolation often felt in modern society.

7. Stages of Internalization of the Ethical Substance of Society — Hegel explains that individuals acquire the moral ideals of their culture and develop a sense of belonging through a dialectical process of internalization, maturing through three stages: the family, civil society, and the developed state.

• (a) The Family. The family is the initial social group, the first way the self enters the moral life of the nation. It is characterized by a unity of feeling and a bond of love, where members relate as parts of a deeply felt unity rather than as individuals with separate rights. When family members insist on individual rights over unity of feeling, Hegel believes the family is in dissolution.
• (b) Civil Society. The child outgrows the family to enter civil society, a new stage where the young adult becomes a self-conscious individual personality with their own will and aspirations. Hegel refers to civil society as the economic aspect of modern capitalistic society, where individuals relate to each other in terms of satisfying their economic needs through a division of labor. He observes the “Cunning of Reason” at work here, where individuals pursuing personal interests inadvertently fulfill the interests of the larger economy. However, Hegel also recognizes the problems within this system, such as wealth polarization, the rise of an urban proletariat suffering economic and spiritual poverty, and a loss of identification with society, similar to Karl Marx’s later observations. Crucially, unlike Marx, Hegel believes the state can control these conflicts and utilize them for human development, rather than requiring a revolutionary overthrow.
• (c) The State. The developed political state is the synthesis of the unity found in the family and the individuality of civil society. It functions as an organic unity that provides both unity (like the family) and individual development (like civil society) through its culture, public life, and institutions. The state is the most complete embodiment of society’s ethical substance, fusing the ethics of the family and civil society with universal ethics. Internalizing the ethics embodied in the state’s ongoing life means acquiring the ethical substance of one’s society.

II – Hegel’s Political Philosophy

1. Formal Freedom Versus Substantial Freedom — Hegel distinguishes between two types of freedom. Formal freedom is the negative, abstract freedom pursued by the Enlightenment, focusing on the individual’s natural rights (life, liberty, property) and freedom from oppressive authority. This is a freedom from something. Substantial freedom, in contrast, is a positive and concrete freedom derived from the society’s spiritual life. It exists when an individual recognizes that their own ethical and political ideals align with those embodied in the laws and institutions of their nation-state. This means the laws no longer appear alien or coercive but are seen as identical to one’s own chosen ideals, leading to an identification of personal will with the state’s will. For Hegel, this substantial freedom is a necessary condition for human happiness, leading to a sense of unification and belonging, similar to the perceived harmony in ancient Athens. It is also the ideal toward which human historical development progresses.

2. Theory of Alienation — Hegel defines alienation as the state where an individual’s will fails to identify with the larger will of society. Symptoms include feeling estranged, shut out, self-estranged, normless, meaningless, or powerless, and perceiving society’s ideals as meaningless or false. Alienation is the opposite of social identification, tending to disintegrate community and shared life, breaking society into non-participating atoms. Just as substantial freedom leads to happiness, alienation from society is a necessary condition for unhappiness. Hegel views political and social individualism as a “serious form of alienation” and a “solvent, a destroyer of national and community unity”.

3. Rejection of Political Individualism — Hegel fundamentally rejects the Lockean view of political individualism, which asserts the state is subordinate to the individual and exists solely to protect individual rights. Instead, Hegel consistently argues that the state is superior to the individual, viewing the human individual as a “cell within the organism which is the state”. He denies that individuals possess inalienable natural rights, claiming they only have rights and liberty prescribed by the state to serve its institutions. For Hegel, an individual’s moral value and meaning are derived from and dependent upon the Nation-State, making the state politically and morally supreme. This perspective is termed statism or political absolutism, where the individual exists for the state, not vice versa.

4. Rejection of Political Democracy — Hegel is opposed to universal suffrage and direct voting for all citizens. He argues that universal elections reduce the public to a “mere formless, meaningless mass” lacking organic unity and that the general public is not knowledgeable enough to understand its own interests or make informed political choices. Instead of universal voting, Hegel proposes that representatives in the legislature be drawn from three estates—agriculture, business, and civil service—who would hold office by appointment or aristocratic birth, not by popular election. This stance firmly positions Hegel against the “twin pillars of political liberalism: individualism and democracy,” leading some to label him a conservative or reactionary.

5. Relativity of Politics to Society — Hegel argues against the idea of a universally “best” government, stating that it is “ridiculous” to dictate an ideal government in abstraction. Based on his organicism and historicism, he asserts that every nation possesses the type of government that expresses the spirit of its own people and is appropriate for its specific time. A constitution, for Hegel, is not a manufactured document but the “work of centuries,” representing the historical development and “indwelling spirit” of a nation. He suggests that governments imposed externally, without roots in a people’s historical development, are doomed to fail.

6. Philosophy and Politics — Hegel believes philosophy lacks the power to change the course of a nation or the world. He contends that a philosopher cannot transcend their own culture and cannot offer valid blueprints, predictions, or utopias for the future; instead, the philosopher’s role is to reflect upon and understand their existing society by grasping the “rational concept” revealed by the Absolute within its historical life. However, philosophic wisdom, symbolized by “the owl of Minerva,” only “spreads its wings and takes flight when the shades of night are falling”. This means philosophical understanding comes too late to transform a society; it can only enable the society to understand itself and the truth it embodies once it has matured. This view contrasts sharply with Karl Marx’s famous assertion that “The philosophers have so far only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point, however, is to change it”.

III – Evaluation of the Hegelian Philosophy

[This section is too explosive and controversial to include in a family-friendly Meetup description. Expect fireworks afterthe 4th this month! And you can put Bette Davis’ All About Eve quote here.]

METHOD

Please watch the tiny 27-minute episode before the event. We will then replay a few short clips during the event for debate and discussion. A version with vastly improved audio can be found here: