From Socrates to Sartre EP19 ⟩ “Hegel IV: The Cunning of Reason”
Details
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 IV: The Cunning of Reason
🎼 🎶 🎤 Welcome to your life 🎵 … and to Lavine’s most sweeping and provocative lecture yet. Why? Because it addresses the king of upsetting problems—i.e., the problem of historical intelligibility, aka “What’s the meaning of all this suffering, reaction, and re-suffering that we—the living and the dead—have endured.”
Can we find in the course of history a Bildungsroman of uplifting, meaningful development? Or is history, as Walter Benjamin famously feared, an unbroken chain of catastrophes, each new horror show piled atop the wreckage of the last?
Hegel will show that Benjamin’s depressing vision is not only intolerable, it can’t be true!
And Professor Steven Taubeneck—renowned scholar, card-carrying Hegel interpreter, and the first translator of Hegel’s Encyclopedia into English—will be on hand to guide and correct us as we make sense of it all.
Despite appearing like a meaningless avalanche of suffering, history is, physically and metaphysically, the progressive revelation of the protagonist of history, Free Geist. All that has happened, and is happening now, in all its nauseating and spine-freezing terrors, twists, and turns, is actually the unfolding of more and better Freedom.
Never before have Lavine’s Jedi teaching tricks been more helpful to serious Padawan learners. She presents Hegel’s Philosophy of History—its theological, psychological, and political dimensions—with exceptional directness and clarity. Through her, Hegel shows us how and why Reason, through its “cunning,” turns even private passion and public ruin into the materials of Spirit’s glorious self-realizing rock opera of freedom across empires and individuals.
1. Philosophical History: The Deep Structure of the Past
Hegel begins by rejecting most traditional ways of recording the past—eyewitness accounts, national histories, even professional historiography. They deal only with surfaces by treating facts like isolated events. What we need, he says, is Philosophical History, which penetrates the chaotic mess of historical details to discern the dialectical development of Spirit through it. Its guiding principle? The real is the rational. To understand history, one must grasp its rational structure. This shaping power is not a Platonic form, but logic operating on immanent contents. Elegant and economical.
2. History as Theodicy: Can Evil Be Redeemed?
But how can Hegel claim history is rational or good when it’s chock full of cruelty, stupidity, war, oppression, engineered immiseration, and surplus suffering? First, Hegel admits the horrors; he calls history a “slaughter-bench.” But this horror isn’t core. The core of history is a theodicy: a vindication of God/reason/freedom in the midst of “evil.” Behind the apparent senselessness lies a purposive unfolding—Spirit realizing freedom. Mommy’s screaming and gushing placental fluids for a good reason. Bridges are just made of evil.
3. The Dialectic of Reason and Desire
That comforting promise is very vague. How exactly does Spirit work its self-improvement through human historical horror show? Hegel’s answer: through the tension between reason and human passion. Humans do not act from pure rational insight—they act from desire. And Hegel’s Absolute—which is Reason itself—uses passion to enact change. Our private goals and desires are fuel for a larger historical process. Reason’s cunning lies in making our self-interested aims serve the rational development of freedom.
[And there are nine more paragraphs to type here, which will happen after Ingrid sends me her the rest of her grueling writeup!]
HEALTH WARNING: Watchers of this episode have reported an unexpected and unsettling aftereffect. Not only the grand narrative of human history, but the seeming chaos and suffering of your own life will be clarified and redeemed as well. All the regret, self-loathing, lethargy, cowardice, confusion, hopelessness, despair, and anxiety you’ve been stockpiling will be sublated into ceiling-shattering insight. Through the very same alchemy by which feces was transformed into gold in Jodorowsky’s The Holy Mountain, so too the feces of your life will be turned into penetrating wisdom, understanding the mind of God, fractal-deep insight into the bottom of things, and continual joy. You will experience every moment as an ecstatic co-flowing with the Tao of Geist, and every phenomenon as a particular dealing of God with your soul.
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:
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:
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.
From Socrates to Sartre EP19 ⟩ “Hegel IV: The Cunning of Reason”