Ep. 386: Hegel on Society (Part Two)
The Partially Examined Life Philosophy Podcast
Mark Linsenmayer
4.6 • 2.3K Ratings
🗓️ 9 March 2026
⏱️ 60 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Continuing on the "Spirit" section of The Phenomenology of Spirit, giving a sort of social metaphysics, wherein the ethical life of a society is analyzed into two complementary types of law, human (explicit laws but also customs) and what Hegel calls "divine" (a subconscious ethical sense represented by the home and women).
Get more at partiallyexaminedlife.com. Visit partiallyexaminedlife.com/support to get ad-free episodes and tons of bonus discussion.
Sponsors: Visit functionhealth.com/PEL to get the data you need to take action for your health. Get a $1/month e-commerce trial at shopify.com/pel.
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | You're listening to the Partially Examined Life episode 386 part two, discussing Hegel's |
| 0:13.2 | phenomenology of spirit, the spirit section, sections 438 through 463, and be given a lot |
| 0:20.4 | of summary and a lot of context and a lot of where |
| 0:23.2 | is this going. |
| 0:24.6 | But as far as getting through the actual text, I think he'd gotten through three of the sections. |
| 0:29.6 | Are we up to? |
| 0:31.1 | Yeah, maybe we can try to be more synoptic, but yeah, 441, spirit manifests itself as the ethical life of a nation. |
| 0:39.3 | Yep. |
| 0:40.3 | The cichlikkites, the communal life, yep. |
| 0:42.3 | But we have to move beyond that. |
| 0:44.3 | We have to move beyond the, does he use the word beautiful here? |
| 0:48.3 | The beauty of ethical life, yes. |
| 0:50.3 | Oh, okay. |
| 0:51.3 | It says, yeah, it says, it must advance to the consciousness of what it is immediately, |
| 0:55.9 | must leave behind it the beauty of ethical life by passing through a series of shapes |
| 1:00.9 | attain to a knowledge of itself. |
| 1:03.1 | So the beauty of ethical life, I think from commentary basically, is just this stage of living |
| 1:07.6 | without questioning, right, living in custom without having reflectively |
| 1:11.6 | questioned it yet. And the whole Antigone movement, which we're going to get a preamble to here, |
| 1:16.3 | this conflict between what the state demands and what the family might demand of me, |
| 1:20.7 | I got to bury my brother, Creon won't let me. That internal contradiction is going to move us |
| 1:26.2 | out of this beautiful stage where there seems to become some kind of harmony between the demands of the state and the demands of the family, the divine law. |
... |
Please login to see the full transcript.
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Mark Linsenmayer, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.
Generated transcripts are the property of Mark Linsenmayer and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.
Copyright © Tapesearch 2026.