You're listening to the partially examine in life, a podcast by some guys who were at one point set on doing philosophy for a living, but then thought better of it.

Our question for episode 388 is something like, how does culture shape individuals?

We're continuing our treatment of the spirit chapter of Hegel's phenomenology of spirit,

now covering sections 484 through 510,

which is the first part of self-alienated spirit culture.

For more information about the text and the podcast, please see PartialexaminedLife.com.

This is Mark Lenton Meyer, perverting every determinatness into its opposite in Madison, Wisconsin.

This is Seth Paskin, ignoble in Austin, Texas.

This is Wes, all one focused on my own enjoyment, but therefore providing for the

enjoyment of all in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Thank you for doing that, Wes.

It's the invisible hand.

We're in the modern world now.

Two episodes ago, we're in the Garden of Eden as far as the ethical life was concerned,

that people were at peace with their society,

their values flowed unreflectively out of them, out of their culture.

And then there was this fall where the two sides of the ethical life, the so-called divine

law, the family life, and the civil life, the community customs, came into explicit conflict.

And this sort of alienated people from both of

these. And so we had the government, the culture itself became alienated from people. But on the

other hand, people actually emerged as individuals before in this harmony. They were mere

shadowy figures. And now they're full-blown, self-reflective.

...