From Socrates to Sartre EP16 ⟩ “Hegel I: A Revolution in Thought”

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.

Special Preface

Our Meetup copy editor is out indefinitely after what she described, before going dark, as a “spiritual emergency.” What triggered it?

She had just one job: watch Lavine’s Hegel I and write a tidy event blurb.

But Thelma had other plans.

Instead of watching a single episode and jotting out a few cheerful lines, she binge-watched all five Hegel lectures in a single sitting. The last thing she said before reportedly renting a seven-sided coffin and refusing to speak to anyone was: “I have to do nigredo now.”

So, in the absence of our editor and her usually hilarious event descriptions, here’s a placeholder. Except it’s not hers. It’s mine. I’ve watched the first three Lavine Hegels, and now I understand why she disappeared.

These are not lectures. And what they produce is not learning. What they produce is … is …

Hegel Part I; or, Betcha Can’t Watch Just One

Seid umschlungen, Millionen!

If even 1% of the Millionen who casually mention Hegel in Meetups—or drop Hegelian terms (in-itself, for-itself, sublation, dialectic, negation, Absolute) or pretend to refer to Hegelian meanings—were to actually watch this episode, Meetup itself would become a world-historical force.

Here’s the truth: most of your past “Hegelian education” has been a barrage of misunderstoods, assembled with the glue of pretended knowingness into a self-handicapping poison that’s harmed you beyond depths that your self-awareness can even sound. I say this as someone who, until last week, was one of those pretending knowers.

For years we’ve all been eating tomatoes one week and lettuce leaves the next, then showing up at Salad Discussion Meetups posturing like seasoned Saladians.

We can stop pretending now.

Lavine will give you the full salad of Enlightenment philosophy—not just the ingredients, but their right proportions, their internal logics, their interrelations. With zero obscurity.

You’ll Find No Summary Here

Lavine’s trifecta—history lesson, philosophical exposé, and real-time meditation on historical becoming—covers so much terrain, with such cumulative force, that the only honest way to convey it would be to paste the full transcript right here, ribs and all, and ask you to read it like a score—if only to begin hearing the symphony that’s hidden inside the causal mesh of European modernity.

You will never understand Hegel unless you understand why he appears exactly when he does. You cannot grasp the categories of the Phenomenology of Spirit without understanding what the philosophes tried to do—and what went so catastrophically wrong. As Rick Roderick used to say: The guillotine was not a detour. The French Revolution, its rhetoric, its reversals, its collapse into empire—this is not background, it’s marrow.

She reconstructs a whole field of conceptual causality, a logic of emergence in which every figure and event becomes a pressure-point in the unfolding dialectic of modern thought.

Just take a gander here at who and what she brings into her com-position:

Figures

• Marie Antoinette, Plato, Descartes, Hume, Hegel, Voltaire, Diderot, D’Alembert, La Mettrie, Helvétius, Holbach, Condorcet, Newton, Karl Marx, Louis XVI, Napoleon, Locke, Immanuel Kant, Tom Paine, C. I. Lewis, Thomas Jefferson, Sartre.

Events & Processes

• The French Revolution, the Age of Enlightenment, the Protestant Reformation, the American and English Revolutions, the Reign of Terror, the rise of modern science, the Kantian epistemological rupture, and the delayed reception of the Enlightenment in Germany (Aufklärung).

Great Showings

• Enlightenment as the attempt to transform power by reconceiving nature, reason, and rights
• The philosophes as radical synthesizers of empiricism and rationalism, aimed at dismantling Church and Crown
• The French Revolution as both the triumph and betrayal of Enlightenment reason
• The Reign of Terror as the moment when rational universality gives way to the will of the people
• The German Enlightenment’s belated and metaphysical trajectory
• Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason as a response to Hume, and a re-grounding of science through the mind’s synthetic a priori
• The price of Kant’s certainty: alienation from things-in-themselves, and a rift between appearance and reality
• The structure of modern alienation as the conceptual setting for Hegel
• Hegel’s system as an effort to overcome this fracture, to bring unity out of Enlightenment contradiction, and to philosophize the failure of modernity without abandoning its promise

Unforgettable Learnings

• Lavine’s remarkable synthesis of Enlightenment history, from Newton to Napoleon
• The shift from metaphysical rationalism to Kantian epistemology
• Why the French Revolution matters philosophically—and how it becomes a dialectical template
• Hegel’s deep insight: modernity is alienation (more below)
• Why unity, reconciliation, and mutual recognition are more urgent—and elusive—than ever

What About Our Alienation?

We’ll use Hegel’s concepts to confront the very real crises of today: loneliness, social breakdown, the collapse of meaning. Philosophy must be made practical again. We will discuss together:

• What forms of solidarity are still possible?
• Can philosophical understanding become a mode of therapy?
• What kind of modern ‘happenings’ or spontaneous experiences might reconnect us?

At the heart of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit lies an uncanny diagnosis of our condition: separation from others, from ourselves, and from the world. Hegel calls it unhappy consciousness. Today we call it nature, necessity, just another Groundhog Day of pantagonism.

We are more fragmented, more disunified than ever—yet we need each other more than ever.

Alienation isn’t a glitch. It is modernity.

Come. Get help. And really understand Hegel for the first time, from the ground up.

Bonus Addendum

In my distress over Ingrid’s sudden Rosicrucian conversion, I forgot to mention the additional good news.

Our upcoming Hegel series won’t be the usual intellectual trapeze act of Dave, our Conant-trained mathematical surgeon, and me, your overcaffeinated phenomenological hype-man. This time, we’re calling in a real Hegelian.

Professor Steven Taubeneck—renowned scholar, card-carrying Hegel interpreter, and the first translator of Hegel’s Encyclopedia into English—will be guiding us through Lavine’s Hegel I and beyond.

What this means is that all questions, including the hardest that you thought you'd never get clarity on, are not only welcome but will get a correct answer!

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:

• Thelma Lavine: From Socrates to Sartre

Summaries, notes, event chatlogs, episode transcripts, timelines, tables, observations, and downloadable PDFs (seek the FSTS Book Vault) of the episodes we cover can be found here:

• THORR (The High Ontology Reading Room)

ABOUT PROFESSOR LAVINE

Dr. Lavine was professor of philosophy and psychology as Wells College, Brooklyn College, the University of Maryland (10 years), George Washington University (20), and George Mason University (13). She received the Outstanding Faculty Member award while at the University of Maryland and the Outstanding Professor award during her time at George Washington University.

She was not only a Dewey scholar, but a committed evangelist for American pragmatism.

View all of our coming episodes here.