#847 Lydia Moland: 19th-Century German Philosophy, Hegel, and Abolitionism in the US

00:00 Ricardo Lopes: Hello, everybody. Welcome to a new episode of the Decent. I'm your host, Ricardo Loops. And today I'm joined by Doctor Lydia Moland. She's a professor of Philosophy at Colby College in Waterville Maine in the US. She has written extensively on 19th century German philosophy. And more recently, she has also been interested in abolitionism in the US. And she wrote a book titled Lydia Maria Child, a Radical American Life based on the American evolutionist with the same name. So, Doctor Moland, welcome to the show. It's a big pleasure to everyone.

00:38 Lydia Moland: Thank you. It's a pleasure to be invited and I'm looking forward to our conversation.

00:42 Ricardo Lopes: OK. So, uh I would like to start by talking about your work on 19th century German philosophy. So, first of all, why did you get interested specifically in 19th century German philosophy? And do you think that if anything, there's uh specific aspects of it that make it distinct from other kinds of philosophy, from other places and other time periods?

01:14 Lydia Moland: Yes. Thank you for that. Um I got interested in German 19th century philosophy through Spinoza. So I took a very general philosophy course as an undergraduate. Uh AND I had intended to be a political science major, but I read Spinoza and it just blew my mind and I, I was so moved by the vision that Spinoza had of holism and of um and, and the way he argued that I decided to do more philosophy and ended up in a course that ended with Kant. And I think as many people do finished with some very deep dissatisfactions with Kant's dualism and with his rationalism. And someone said to me, well, if you are impatient with Kant, maybe you should try Hegel. Uh So the next semester, I took a course on the Phenomenology of Spirit and then I was just hooked. Um AND I ended up going to Tubingen in Germany where Hegel himself studied, I lived there for a couple of years and really immersed myself in the culture of that particular time period. So many of your viewers will know that Tubing in is also where Holderlin lived and studied and also shelling. So Hagel was there in this incredibly fertile environment where people were taking very seriously. Spinoza was still essentially forbidden. He was still considered too controversial and too heretical to take seriously. But they were all sort of closet spin assists. And um I, I found all of that very intriguing. I think what, what really pulled me into Hagel was his attempt to make philosophical sense of religion and of protestantism. In particularly I came from a protestant background and was really intrigued by his attempt to show what was important and vital about the protestant worldview without attaching it to a kind of uh religious literalism. Um So that was, that was very helpful to me, even just in thinking through my own philosophical questions. So as far as what makes that period distinct, um a couple of things come to mind, again, sort of connected to Spinoza. I think the, again, this idea of holism, the attempt not to think of philosophy as just addressing one problem or focusing on just epistemology or just in the physics. But the idea that an idea could possibly explain kind of everything. Um I think characterizes a lot of early 19th century philosophy in Germany, certainly not later. But sometimes when I teach students this, I find that, that, that claim is really strange to them that there could be one answer or one idea that could explain everything. But I sometimes push back on that and say, wouldn't it be even stranger if different parts of the reality or of philosophy were totally unconnected from each other? I wouldn't it be sort of strange if nature functions in a completely different way from art or from politics or from epistemology? So, isn't there something even just more intellectually consistent about looking for an idea that could explain most of human experience and maybe even nonhuman experience? So that's one another, I think a lot of really existential questions get started in the 19th century. So you see that some in Kant for sure. But I think it took this generation of thinkers who grew up in the French revolution, which meant that everything they thought they knew about the way politics could and should work were um was, was challenged. And then there were great hopes around the French revolution and then they were dashed. And so this was a generation that really grew up feeling the existential weight of a major historical disappointment if you were a young person in that generation. Um And, and so the combination I think of K turn towards the subject, which really gives an individual subject an enormous amount of power. And therefore, also responsibility opens up these big existential questions and then living in this part of history where there are enormous shifts um that ask questions like what is the role of politics and what is the role of the individual in politics? And how do individuals assert themselves in the face of great historical forces? Um Those set the stage for the kinds of grappling with, what does it mean to be an individual? What does it mean to be alienated in a society? Um Obviously something that's been picked up by Marx and then more by Kirkegaard and Nietzsche later in the century. Um And then I would also say, and, and this is clearly in part because of my own work, a real reorientation around art and around aesthetic experience. So that certainly gets started in Kant with his taking seriously aesthetic experience is one of the most important things about human experience. Um But then when you get to people like Hegel, but also very much his contemporaries like Lael or Novalis, Bettina von Ar Carlina Von Gunder Rode. Um SOME of these other people who saw in art and then also in nature and our aesthetic responses to nature, really central truths about the human condition. Then I, I think you get something very interesting that lasts throughout the century in part because I think one way I try to think about it is the question, what if art far from being derivative or entertaining or the thing that we can philosophize about kind of if we get to it? What if instead it is the thing, the thing that that can explain us to ourselves and the world to ourselves better than other branches of philosophy. If that's true, then a lot of things need to be revolved um sort in any kind of revolution so that I'll stop there. But those are a couple of the things that I find really compelling and possibly um I don't know, unique but certainly indicative of that period in that place in the world.

08:02 Ricardo Lopes: OK. So I have to tell you straight away that the three German philosophers whose work I'm most familiar with are Kent Nietzsche and Schopenhauer. So uh probably because of some of my personality traits. I don't know exactly why, but those are the three I felt most compelled about. And, uh, I mean, but, uh, of course, I guess that we could pretty much say that, uh, everyone in the 19th century in German was to some extent influenced by Kent. Right? I mean, even the ones who rejected most of his philosophy or some, or parts of his philosophy, like for example, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, Nietzsche, to a greater extent, even them were very, very much influenced by Kent. I, I think we could and of course, uh I mean, it's not that German philosophy in the 19th centuries is a monolith, like for example, sometimes people talk about German idealism, but I mean, you get into figures like Schopenhauer and Nietzsche and they were extremely different from can or what you would consider just general idealism. Nietzsche particularly sometimes is classified as a romantic or rationalist and he certainly rejected many aspects of Kent's philosophy. And Schopenhauer was very much a pessimist for example. So, uh but I mean, do you think that we could look uh even with those differences? And of course, we could talk about the other philosophers and they certainly have m many distinct things about their philosophical corpus, I think. But uh do you think that e even with all of those differences and existentialism also that I didn't mention and all of that, that we can still find recurrent themes in 19th century German philosophy.

10:17 Lydia Moland: Yeah, I mean, I, I think one really is the struggle with the nature of subjectivity and what it means. Epistemological, metaphysically, politically, aesthetically. Uh What does it mean to be a self? And like if you think not to oversimplify, but if you think about someone like Descartes just saying, well, the self is a thinking thing. It's essentially an immaterial substance. Um ITS essence is just to think and it subsists as a thinking thing. Um You know, a quick contrast to Kant, I think is Kant's idea of this self as an activity. So as something that is actively synthesizing whatever is coming at it and that it only achieves selfhood through being active. And I think in a way, one of the questions that survives all the way through the century then is um what kind of activity is that? And what does the basis of thinking through subjectivity? Um MEAN for objectivity and for reality and for how we treat other people and obviously paired with that is the question of whether there is a transcendent divine that humans are beholden to or created by and who dictates reality as we see it. And in my opinion, Hagel, for instance, is trying very hard to reorient us from that to seeing that humans are the only creators of meaning and that we only create meaning in cooper operation with each other. So there's, if you think about kind as primarily thinking of the subject as activity. Hagel, I think picks that up but with a much stronger emphasis on the kind of mutual recognition that's necessary to think about my being a subject is dependent on your recognizing me as a subject. And only when we recognize each other, not just abs as abstract subjects, but as subjects embodied in different roles and different areas of history, different life plans. Can we really treat each other with the dignity and respect that Kant had originally said we owed each other. And so I think like if you follow that trajectory out um and start to think about like Kirke guards grappling with what it meant to be a subject kind of at odds with um with the conventional world or norms that were established by a society that he didn't feel um acknowledged by. And then someone like Nietzsche, who I think is even more expressly celebrating the agony and the ecstasy of being a self creating subject. So I think in, in Nietzsche much more than in Hegel, you get again the existential. Yeah, I'll say it again, agony and ecstasy of the fact that we have to create our own meaning where we can't rely on the divine or on nature as something separate from us to tell us what is meaningful, we have to do it ourselves. And that um is a great privilege and honor, but also an enormous responsibility that I think in Nietzsche's view more than in Hagel's only some people are really up to shouldering. So in, in each of them, you get the sense that lots of people would just really rather prefer to have others tell them what is meaningful. Um And our calling is to resist that. I think Hagel, for instance, is much less interested in that kind of resistance and more interested in trying to think of ourselves as a cooperating group of people, each with our own subjectivities. But working out our subjectivity and our bid for freedom very much with each other as opposed to in the kind of individualistic way that you get with Nietzsche.

14:28 Ricardo Lopes: That subjectivity part. I mean, what I'm going to say now, if I say something that you don't agree with or you think is incorrect, please correct me. But uh I mean, of course, in someone like Nietzsche and is to some extent, perspect perspective is philosophy because he, he particularly in beyond good and evil, for example. And when and when it comes to morality more specifically, there, there are places in his work where he expresses a very uh perspective perspective on, on things uh uh and things seem to be very dependent on the subject and subjectivity. But uh I mean, uh don't you think that even in Kent, particularly when uh in the critic of purism, he talks about, for example, the limits of, of our uh o of the information we can get from our senses, the uh th those kinds of limits and, and also the fact that we uh sort of uh have some sort of categories of understanding. And I think that some of them, they, it takes from, I guess Aristotle, if I'm not mistaken and expands on them, I mean, the a and then the, and then also when he gets into the, the antinomy and he talks about the things that even as through a reasoning process cannot fully answer. Like for example, if there's life after death, if there's a God, if the universe is infinite in time and space questions like that. Uh I, I mean, that isn't there, even if only a tiny seed of subjectivity planted there because I mean, it seems that there's the thing in itself or whatever reality is and then our own limitations as human subjects when it comes to perceiving it and getting an objective understanding of what it is. I, I mean, I, I don't know, what are your thoughts on this?

16:54 Lydia Moland: Yeah, absolutely. I think that's 100% right? And I think that's a kind of radical postulate that I don't even think Kant felt the existential weight of which is to say it took someone. Well, I, I, I'm much more familiar with the early romantics, you know, the Schlegel and, and Schelling and, and Novalis and Gunter Rode and people like that who took that. I, I just feel like much more to heart and as you say, I think it is partly dispositional or generational that, you know, can have laid those things out fairly matter of factly. But I think that the consequences for how we think about our role in, on our responsibility in the world and the radical perspect nature of that, as you say, um was really exhilarating and upsetting to more to the next generation of thinkers.

17:55 Ricardo Lopes: So getting into Hegel and specifically, of course, you've already said a few things about him, but getting specifically to into aesthetics because when we think about Hegel, I mean, people who are not philosophers and not specifically very familiar with Hegel's philosophy, we tend to just think about his more systematic and abstract approaches to history and uh uh thesis, antithesis synthesis and stuff like that. But he also in fact wrote about aesthetics.

18:34 Lydia Moland: Yes. And that was part of his system for sure. So um aesthetics is the first part of absolute spirit. So if you think of, of, you know, the system writ large, you've got um you know, subjective spirit and the first you have logic and then you have philosophy of nature and then in philosophy of spirit, you first have subjective spirit and then objective spirit and then absolute spirit. Absolute spirit is where Hagel talks about the three ways that he thinks humans grapple with what it means to be human. So the ways in which we reflect on um on the world, but also on our role in the world. So the first of those is art and then religion and then being a philosopher, Hagel always has philosophy win at the end. So philosophy for Hagel is still the best um most complete and most explicit way that humans reckon with their um their own status and ask themselves about meaning in the world. But art has a really important place in that for Hagel because we are embodied sensual beings. And contrary to what some people think about Hagel, he doesn't regret that. I mean, it isn't that if we could, we should get rid of that part of ourselves. I think he thinks that that's a very rich and very vital way in which humans remain part of the natural world. So we continue to feel and smell and hear things um that are outside of us. But we also use our senses to create things that then mean something to us and that reflect our own grappling with that meaning. So I think that for Hegel, aesthetics is the sensuous way of experiencing truth. So truth for Hegel again, back to Spinoza is this very holistic view of the identity of identity and difference. So he says the true is the whole, it's the thing that brings together contraries and this is where people get the thesis sis synthesis um theme that you just referred to. And so art is the way that we can sense that truth through our senses as opposed to understanding it through narratives, which is the way Hegel characterizes religion. So interestingly, religion for him is primarily about narrative stories that we tell ourselves to explain everything from the origin of the world to um you know, our own relationship to each other through. And then philosophy is supposed to do that without narrative and without our senses. So just through thought. So then within aesthetics, Hagel's project is to say how art does that and which kinds of art and which particular instances of art do that best? So for him, the question always is, is this particular art form or this particular artwork allowing us to sense the idea which is the unity of unity and division or the true? That is the whole. So he does this um in a couple of ways. Um One by giving what some people call the first really philosophical history of art. I always think people are too quick to assign first to anything and usually when they do that, it's to a male European philosopher. And I think that is often not true. So I try to be skeptical about that. Um BUT whether he was first or not, he certainly had a very influential idea of the sort of history and progress of art. So that's in what's part two of his lectures on the philosophy of art. And then he has a whole part three and I'm happy to get into it. This is one of my major claims in my book on Hagel's aesthetics is that part three has been essentially neglected by HGL scholars. But that's where he talks about what he calls individual arts, which are architecture, sculpture, painting, music, and poetry. Importantly, in that order, because that's the order in which Hagel thinks he can explain how humans increasingly come to take ownership of their own um art. So I'm happy to talk about that later. But anyway, so that's that in general um is where aesthetics and the philosophy of art fits in Hegel's system. And the, the other big claim that I make in my book on Hagel's aesthetics is that we learn so much about Hagel's idealism through his aesthetics. So it's not just that OK, we get Hagel's system and then when we have time, we can do the aesthetics. But if we don't understand the aesthetics, we don't understand really crucial things about Hagel's theory of selfhood, about feeling about perception, like things that, that people usually talk about under the heading of, you know, metaphysics or epistemology. Um But I think there's a lot to learn about those more traditional fields. Um Well, see, I shouldn't even say traditional fields because that, that wasn't the case in Hegel's generation that people thought that metaphysics and epistemology were like the core philosophical um enterprises and aesthetics was just derivative really the opposite. Um So it's more because of the way philosophy developed, especially in the early 20th century that we've come to think that um again, so part of what I'm, what I try to do here is, is, is reorient us towards thinking about it the other way.

24:15 Ricardo Lopes: So there's something that you mentioned there that I would like to get more into. So, and, and please correct me if I'm wrong. But it seems then that in a way uh the way Hegel approaches aesthetics, I mean, it's not as some sort of a separate field or domain from all the other domains of philosophy, like epistemology, probably ethics and metaphysics because uh I mean, isn't it also that as Hegel uh understands art and aesthetics more generally, that it ties very much to epistemology for example, and how we understand the world and how we acquire knowledge about it.

25:02 Lydia Moland: Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. So we don't, there are things that we can only sort of know through our senses. So that's an epistemological question. And there are ways in which our status as embodied beings can only be known to us through our senses. And so if we don't talk about art, we're not talking about a key part of epistemology. And I think that Hagel has a pretty clear sense that our senses are, uh again, it's not, sometimes people think that Hagel thinks that we'd be best if we were disembodied and I just think that's absolutely false. Um So, in so far as part of what we know is embodied and there is such a thing as embodied knowledge, this is where we get it, we get it through aesthetics. And I should say, you know, strangely, especially coming after Kant and Shelling Hegel is completely uninterested in natural beauty. Like he just doesn't even really want to talk about it. Um He, he is almost exclusively interested in the philosophy of art and in aesthetics as an artistic phenomenon. Um But other people have certainly talked a lot more about our aesthetic appreciation of nature. And Schiller is a great example of that. And it's always been very surprising to me that Hagel doesn't engage with that conversation in Schiller more than he does. Um But yes, absolutely. Um So like to give you an example when he talks about music, music for Hegel is the way we sense time. And if you think about Kant, talking about time is one of the two oper intuitions through which that is necessary to our understanding the world and having experience at all. For Hegel. Music is the thing that in the, in the most pure sense allows us to sense time and since time is so critical to selfhood, so there's no selfhood without time in a way. He thinks that music allows us to sense the self. I mean, it doesn't get more root epistemological and metaphysical than that. So what, what music allows us to do is have this very pure sense of what is so purely part of our existence, namely time. And that Hagel thinks is why music literally moves us, I mean, literally and metaphorically. So you can be moved by music emotionally. But Hagel himself says that sometimes without knowing it, we'll start tapping our feet when or moving our body. I love that image of Hagel it like, you know, we tended to give him as such a serious German philosopher and he was. But um but he himself recognizing that sometimes he couldn't help but move, you know, that that's really uh deep, deep knowledge of ourselves. And again, the knowledge without which I think Hagel thinks our own understanding of ourselves would be impoverished.

28:09 Ricardo Lopes: That's all very interesting. I mean, oo one of the things that I find fascinating about some philosophers is that nowadays through science, we are confirming some of their ideas or intuitions, things that they've arrived at uh without uh II, I mean, not through science as at least as we understand it today, of course. But for example, when you were talking there about uh embodiment and embodied knowledge, I mean, nowadays, we have an entire field of embodied cognition and how we acquire knowledge through, not just through operations that occur in our brain, but through our brain being connected to the rest of our body and how we move in the world and the actions we do and how we interact with things. And I, I mean, it's really fascinating to me and uh I mean, as I said, I'm more familiar with people like Nietzsche, but even Nietzsche, we could say was very much a philosopher of action. I mean, he, he loved to walk a lot and thinking while he was walking and he talked about doing philosopher, philosophy with a hammer and, and they very much admire people of action. And I, I mean, doing things instead of just sitting and thinking and have this sort of more platonic vision of things that perhaps we could or should in a way try to disembody ourselves, which in a way seems very, uh, uh, II, I mean, uh, the, there's a very interesting caricature of that. I, I don't know if you ever watched the movie, The Adventures Of Baron Munchausen. But there's a, there's a scene there played by Robin Williams where he's, uh, uh, the king of the moon. I think it's the king of the moon, but the man on the moon and he can separate his head from the rest of the body just to try to become more enlightened and it doesn't really work. So I think it's a very, uh, a very funny parody of that sort of, uh disembodied idea of nationality or epistemology. So, yeah.

30:36 Lydia Moland: Yeah. And I do think that Hagel, despite his reputation, also resisted that kind of reification of reason and of the mind. Um, AND, you know, there's a lot of that in his philosophy of subjective spirit too when he talks about anthropology and um in psychology and ways in which our minds are very formed by what happens around us. And it talks about insanity in those passages as being very much tied to our embodied um existence. So there's, there's way more of that in HGL than most people think. And again, I think the aesthetics are a wonderful way to get at that. I mean, I'll, I'll say one other thing about it. I think part of what Hagel really appreciated about art is that we go through our everyday lives, sensing things, but not being aware that we're sensing them. So not being aware of ourselves as seeing and as hearing and as touching. And when we do that, I think Hagel thinks we risk beginning to treat the world as something that's just out there that's a given. You know, so mcdowell and Brandon have been talking about this for a very long time. Mcdowell, especially the myth of the given, right? So the world is out there and what epistemology is, is just our, like attaching our ideas to the outside world in uh in an accurate way. And I think Hagel thinks that that that happens in part just out of habit, of course. So when I walk by a tree, I can't every time think, wow, I'm seeing a tree. And even though, you know, it seems this way from this perspective, it's actually a different way from that. Like I'd never get through my day. Um But what art does is remind us of what our senses are doing by disrupting that in really interesting ways. So, and one example would be looking at a painting and realizing that I can see three dimensions where there aren't three dimensions. And that tells me something about the interaction of my mind with the world. So we might think of a painting is a paradigmatic example of something that just exists independently outside of us. But actually for it to exist as a painting, there has to be someone looking at it and perceiving it in a certain way. And Hagel thinks that that kind of mutual formation between the self and the world actually is what is true of us all day, every day. But we get used to it, it becomes and this is a really important technical term for him. Prosaic, right? We start to treat it as just sort of normal and given and, and, and as existing independently of us. And what art reminds us is that in fact, everything that we sense and everything that we do is part of our mutual engagement and formation with the world. And I think Hegel famously doesn't articulate a theory of aesthetic experience the way Khan does. So, Kant says, you know, it's the playing of the faculties and that's part of why it gives us pleasure is because it gives us a break from our kind of prosaic parsing of the world Hagel doesn't ever actually say that. But I think what he implies is that when we are disrupted, out of our prosaic attitude towards the world into a more aesthetic attitude towards it, we're actually sensing truth in a way that we don't otherwise. So if I go from just seeing the tree to having an aesthetic experience of the tree, that's actually a more true experience of the tree. And that's part of what gives me joy. So I think that's part of what Hagel thinks is going on in all kinds of aesthetic pleasure.

34:25 Ricardo Lopes: So uh there was a point there uh in my previous question where you mentioned the fact that at a certain point in his work on aesthetics, Hegel talks about how humans can take ownership of their art through specific kinds of art. Could you tell us a little bit more about that?

34:48 Lydia Moland: Yeah. So this is behind his trajectory from architecture to sculpture to what he calls or actually it's one of his um editors. But anyway, the three romantic arts which are painting music and poetry. So, and many other philosophers like Herder had put art into a different trajectory. So I think one really good way of trying to figure out what Hagel is up to is to compare those and and you know, why does he put what at the top? Um So for Hegel architecture is the art form that feels most externalized to humans, right? So it's big in scope. It's also usually functional, although he often, he also talks about architecture that's not functional. Um And it, it has to do primarily with matter that seems independent of humans. So stone or brick or wood and then sculpture also has a more um and an externalized material. So whether that's marble or plaster or whatever, but in sculpture, at least paradigmatic sculpture as Hagel understands it, humans start to reflect themselves in it. So paradigmatic sculpture for Hegel is ancient Greek sculpture where um humans are no longer making uh like monstrous, exaggerated forms, but more just straight up human forms. So that's, that's more attention to the human and more attention to the subjective. And then when you get to painting music and poetry, you're increasingly focusing humans attention on what's going on inside of them as arts material. So color doesn't, I mean, it's let me put it this way. It's more obvious to us that color doesn't exist in the world the way that stone exists in the world. OK. So Hagel still doesn't think that we should talk about stone as existing independently of us. But leaving that aside, painting more obviously points out to us our involvement in whatever is painted. And so I already talked about like perspective, but that's true also of color. And Hagel likes to talk about how it's possible for a human to see a form like a human, not even by drawing, but just by juxtaposing colors against each other. So even if there isn't a human form drawn, if you juxtapose the colors, a human will see a drawing where there isn't one, right? So again, more activity on the part of the subject and then music, as I was saying a minute ago, same thing. Music is totally interior, right? So there we can't really talk about any material that's outside, like we can talk about the instruments, but the instruments aren't the music and they certainly aren't my experience of the music. So that's totally interior and then poetry. So Hagel and this is one of the the interesting differences between Hagel and other philosophers including Schopenhauer, right? So Schopenhauer puts music at the top because he wants really to highlight that kind of subjectivity. But Hagel is always interested in the unity of identity and difference, right? So he doesn't want to stop at subjectivity. He wants to go back to integrating subjectivity back into objectivity. And so when we get to poetry, we have um something that's 100% human creation, namely language as material, but it's, it's not as subjective as music because language is something that you and I have to agree on on some level. Otherwise it wouldn't count as language if I just start, you know, speaking gibberish, that might be my private language, but it's not going to function like language unless I'm in dialogue, literally, not just with one person, but with a whole culture. So then when we get to as a kind of poetry, which then embodies language as this very human creation and this very mutually formed creation back into action, right? So then you have characters embodied characters back to embodiment, embodied characters on a stage using language that's been mutually agreed upon, not just between individuals but by a culture. Then Hagel thinks we've got a really profound experience of collective aesthetic creation that can unite us as a community while also showcasing the kind of subjectivity that a character like Antigone or Hamlet is experiencing. So, um so that's the way in which Hagel, that's why Hagel orders them the way he orders them and decides that drama is the most complete form of aesthetic experience, which does not. And we'll probably get to this in a minute. Um Mean that he thinks that it's the best form of art, but it is the highest aesthetic experience philosophically for humans.

40:16 Ricardo Lopes: You know, uh while you were talking, I was thinking at a certain point because you mentioned Schopenhauer there that uh if um uh I mean, of course, you probably already alluded to some of that in your answer. But uh I was wondering what extent Hegel's statics also connects to his metaphysics because when you mentioned Schopenhauer, I mean, Schopenhauer is um a, at least for us more modern contemporary people, it's a bit of a weird idea. But uh if, if I understand it correctly. I think that, uh OK, so, um Schopenhauer took that division from Kent, uh the division between the Neuman and, and the phenomenon and the phenomenons uh the Ninon sorry, supposedly is what reality itself is. I mean, the fundamental nature of reality. And uh and this is also something I, I guess that Nietzsche talks about in the, the origin of tragedy because back then in his first book, he was already very much influenced by Schopenhauer. He then uh uh left some of that out of his philosophy later on. But uh didn't Schopenhauer have this sort of idea that music itself was part of the fundamental nature of reality.

41:46 Lydia Moland: Yeah. Absolutely. And that, and for Schopenhauer, the reason we love music so much and the reason it moves us so much is because it is the most raw experience of reality we can get. And uh absolutely, it, it moves us because it is also, you know, and this is, I think is, is the kind of thing Hagel thought too that the joy that we get in it and in and its immediate access to our emotions so that music can make us sad about nothing, right? So it's not if I listen to sad music, I'm not sad about anything. I'm just sad. That's incredible. Like the fact that that's possible. Schopenhauer thinks says something really profound about the nature of reality and about the nature of being human. And I think Hagel is attuned to that as well. And it doesn't be again because he's more interested in thinking about a society in which people work together. I mean, Hagel, I sometimes say to my students is just more interested in like making sure that the society functions. And so he's, he's much more interested in saying, OK, what institutions are going to be necessary for us to create a society in which humans can live to their full potential. And someone like Schopenhauer, as I understand him is, is just much less interested in that. So I think Hagel wants to pull back from this kind of ra education of subjectivity and say, OK, it's really good. It's really important fundamental to modern humans. Now, we've got to show how it can be fostered within institutions. And so I think that's part of why um music doesn't top the list for him and to your original question about metaphysics. Absolutely. I mean, this is the structure of reality as far as Hagel is concerned, the identity of identity and difference. And so the, the way in which the trajectory of the arts, including music's subordinate place to drama into poetry in general is a metaphysical commitment on Hagel's part. Absolutely.

43:56 Ricardo Lopes: Uh And uh I mean, you mentioned drama there. Uh Did Hegel have specific views about tragedy and comedy?

44:06 Lydia Moland: Yes, this is something I thought about a lot. Um And probably many of your viewers will know that Hagel is most famous for talking about tragedy. So his interpretation of antigone has been in particular, very influential. And I mean, the thousands of pages that have been written on that are testament to how, how important and revelatory his theory of tragedy was. But um much less attention has been paid to his theory of comedy. And so I got really interested in that at a certain point. Um Both what Hagel says about comedy and why it has been um not taken as seriously, really quick answer to the second question that's just really typical that philosophers um tend to take serious things more seriously. And unless you want to take comedy seriously and therefore risk being comic yourself because how ridiculous is it to take comedy seriously? Um People don't do it. I, I have uh spent probably more time in my life than I should taking comedy very seriously. I teach a course on it. Um And that, that is in part because I, yeah, I got interested in what Hagel says about tragedy and comedy. So in short, and I'm much more focused on what he says about it in his lectures on aesthetics rather than what he says in the phenomenology. But I do think they are, they are connected tragedy for Hegel shows a kind of subjectivity, very entrenched in itself and in roles in particular in like social roles. So if you think about antigone, she is struggling with her role as a daughter and as a sister and as a subject, right? So her brothers have been killed, she wants to bury one of them. She feels that that's her duty. Her uncle, the king is also her king now and she's supposed to obey him and he forbids this, um, since one of her brothers was a traitor. So the, the tragedy there is between two people who are deeply invested in their subjective relationships to their roles and those roles are incompatible. So there's no way for it to end without one of them dying. Um It's not several people die, but you know, of the two of them, only one of them dies. And so I, but in so far as Hegel is always interested in the unity of unity and division. What you get there is two people whose conflict with each other cancels itself out and then what you get at the end the synthesis. Although Hagel doesn't use that word is the survival of the Greek City state with increased knowledge of how those roles have to be treated within the Polish. So Creon ends the play essentially admitting that he shouldn't have had the attitude that he had to his role. So, so for Hagel, the reason that tragedy is art is because it shows this clash, which ends in a kind of unification comedy, also ancient comedy and Hagel's favorite is Aristophanes also ends in reunification. But it's because like if you take streps sides as an example in the clouds, he doesn't take himself so seriously. So he, you know, kind of goofs around and he undermines the city and then, you know, he cheats and he, and he's never like fixed on his role and that gives him an enormous amount of power. And so in the clouds, in particular, you also see the, like the beginning of the erosion of the idea that the gods are really in control because they're being mocked in strips and, and they had been before, this isn't new in Aristophanes necessarily. But at the end of that, you get a kind of cheerful reunification. And Hegel actually says, um at another point, you know, maybe that's better, you know, why would we choose the dark and um desperate conflict of tragedy over the cheerful life affirming? And I think there's a lot of this in Nietzsche too, life affirming laughter of someone who doesn't have to be so beholden to his roles that he's willing to bring the whole society down around him. So there's a, there's a, an extended story that I'm happy to tell if, if you're interested um about how that changes in modern tragedy and modern comedy. Um But Hagel is pretty pessimistic about both mo modern tragedy and modern comedy. Um And essentially, I think, thinks that we're going to have to transcend both of them or, and this is another big topic, move to more of a humor based aesthetic than a comedy based aesthetic,

49:00 Ricardo Lopes: right? Uh I'm going to ask you more about that, about modern comedy and tragedy in a second. But I, I mean, I just wanted to make a brief comment because this was to some extent, I mean, uh the, the way people like Hegel, Schopenhauer Nietzsche and others in the 19th century approached uh aesthetics and art uh somewhat reminds me of uh how dismissive uh the post Socratic were of the Pres Socratic because the Pre Socratic took the poets and uh seriously when it comes to uh I mean, perhaps uh also being able to acquire some sort of knowledge through art, through fiction and all of that. And I, and I, and I mean, of course, I, I don't think we can really be sure about what part of it came from Socrates or Plato because sometimes we don't know for sure if it's Socrates or Plato talking, but in Plato's works. But anyway, I, I mean, the Socrates and the, the other Greek philosophers who came after him were very dismissive of Homer specifically and the other poets. And when you think about the Pres Socratic and even what we call the Sophists, I, I mean, nowadays, sophistry has a very negative connotation to it, but the Sophists were very much philosophers themselves, I think. Uh SO I, I wa I was just, I mean, it just came to my mind that uh there are, there have been periods in Western philosophy, where people have very much been dismissive of art, at least as a potential source of some kind of knowledge and others where people really engaged with art seriously and philosophically took art seriously.

51:06 Lydia Moland: Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. And I think this is the 19th century, is one place where that pen direction.

51:13 Ricardo Lopes: So tell us about the issues that Hegel had with modern forms of art, particularly uh with what we could call, I guess modern subjectivity in art because uh as time went on and particularly since the, I guess, more or less the 19th century onwards, I mean, in literature and other forms of art, we see people focusing more on particular characters and character development and there's objectivity even what goes on in their minds through ex through lots and lots of, of, of texts sometimes just focusing on their inner thoughts and all of that. II, I guess that's what we could call a modern subjectivity in art to uh or perhaps there's also some other forms of subjectivity. But what did Hegel think about it?

52:16 Lydia Moland: I think one of the best places to isolate that is in what he says about humor. And yeah, and I think humor was a really new aesthetic phenomenon. It essentially began with Lawrence Stern's Tristam Shandy, which was enormously popular in Germany. I mean, Goethe and Schiller and Lessing and anybody who was anybody um loved Stern and his evocation of characters who were not comic in the classic sense of like, Aristophanes. Um, BUT were kind of quirky and had foibles and eccentricities that made you kind of gently laugh at them. So, not mock them, not guffaw but, but just recognize how much humans get obsessed with what stern called their hobby horses. Like their little things that they're, the, the little things that they wanna be obsessed about. So, you know, whether it's your train set or his, you know, his uncle's military, uh what was it? It wasn't exactly a like models, I guess. Anyway, um So Hagel thought that comedy and, and humor needed to be differentiated as, as did um pretty much everybody in his um generation. So comedy as a kind of dramatic art form and humor as something that more suffused literature and poetry and that highlighted again this sense that what is really important to pay attention to among humans now is that since we've discovered as it were that we are the source of meaning in the world, what is meaningful to us and how kind of adorably silly that often is like how adorably silly many of our concerns are. And I think Hegel thought that was really valuable aesthetically because it brought attention to, you know, the the concerns of art are no longer the gods or big battles or even like sublime landscapes, but like Dutch genre paintings or still lifes that show tiny little involved human obsessions with flowers or having your tooth pulled or, you know, like everyday human things, but he did not like it when people became so subjective that they didn't try to extract any larger meaning from whatever it was that they were doing. So he was very critical of Jean Paul Richter on this point, very critical of people like Schlegel, Friedrich Schlegel. And you know, to a lesser extent, people like Novalis who Hagel thought were way too focused on their own interiority and stream of consciousness essentially as you were just describing and therefore, again, never made the connection back from subjectivity back into objectivity and therefore, were not giving their audiences an experience of the truth. So that's always what's at stake for Hagel. Um So he's very critical of what he calls subjective humor and very admiring of what he calls objective humor.

55:40 Ricardo Lopes: Do you think that Hagel would have been a, a fan? Or at least like to some extent the existentialists, do you think that Hegel would have been a, a fan or at least like to some extent the existentialists?

56:04 Lydia Moland: I'm not so sure he would have been to be honest with you. I think he, he, as I said earlier, he was really interested in making a society function on an institutional level. So what kind of form of government do we need? What kind of um social order, what kind of economic order, what kind of family situation and in so far as existentialists and this is generalizing but often emphasize the subject in opposition to those things. I think Hagel would have again, felt like, well, but what we're after here is truth, which is the unity of unity and division, not just division. And we have a world to run like it's our responsibility to run this world. There's no God out there to help us out, there's no natural order like we've got to get this right. And if there's, and again, this is to caricature. But if existentialists are sometimes seen as self obsessed or just as oppositional to the order, I think Hagel would have been much more interested in reforming the order in ways that would better allow humans to be free and the way he thought humans needed to be free. And that back to something we were saying a minute ago, I think this is something that Marx picks up from. Hagel is very much about what kind of material conditions do humans need in order to be free. So it's not enough to say as Kant did um that you're free if you're self determining and can act against your inclinations in accordance with the categorical imperative. I realize that Kant scholars are going to say that that's not all he meant. And, and I accept that, but Hagel was much more explicit in trying to say what real freedom means is paying attention to what people need in institutions around them. And you know, just life forms around them in order to be, to flourish as humans with dignity and respect. So again, that's maybe too hard on the existentialist. But I, I think that might be his general take.

58:09 Ricardo Lopes: That's very interesting because o of course, we know that Marx was influenced by Hegel to some extent, but sometimes because people have these simplistic views of Hegel and Marx they think, oh, how could it be? Because Hegel was supposedly a big idealist and Marx was a me realist. I mean, how could they be more opposite? But uh I mean, what you mentioned there and uh Hegel caring very much about how we structure society, about the institutions we create and how we create them based on what values, I guess. Uh I mean, it's very much uh I guess also applied philosophy or political philosophy as some of what Marx also cared about.

59:04 Lydia Moland: Absolutely. And I, you know, I think another thing that you can find in Hegel that I think is just much more clearly articulated in Marx is that freedom can be a kind of ideological lie if you continue to tell people that they're free as a way of distracting them from the fact that they're being exploited and alienated, right? So if you make people focus on, yes, but I'm a free and determining being because I can follow the categorical imperative, which I, I again, that's a caricature. Um Then people are going to feel like, well, you know, who cares what sort of deprived economic situation I live in. I'm still free and Hagel, I think, worried that that kind, that, that kind of idea could fall into the wrong hands of people who knew how to manipulate it. Such that exactly as you said, you know, you can be a, a worker who's being totally exploited. But as long as you're told that there's a kind of freedom that exists in transcending that or not caring about it or, or that actually, you know what it is to be human is to, to subsist despite the struggle of economic depravity, I think Hagel also would say that's just, that's manipulative, it's deceitful and it's unethical. Uh IT'S, it's, it is not, it is false freedom, it is empty, fake, false freedom. And it can be a kind of uh a tool in the hands of people who want to manipulate others into ignoring the ways in which they're being exploited,

1:00:37 Ricardo Lopes: which is very interesting because I guess that this is also another idea that people do not tend at all to associate with Hegel. But as Marx, he also cared about the poverty, right? And about the causes of poverty and the potential effects it would have on people's behavior. Correct.

1:00:59 Lydia Moland: Yeah. So this is specifically in the passages where he talks about what's called the rabble. And, and I think this is again, a distinction that Marx picks up on that what Hagel means by the rabble is not just people who are impoverished. So and Hagel, like many people thinks that there will always be poverty. But what's new since, you know, well, not new now, but new since the modern world essentially is the claim that all humans are worthy of dignity and respect and the acknowledgement or just the fact that our economies are human creations. So whereas poverty before could be explained just by natural phenomenon or just by a hierarchy that we were told was natural. You know, the king gets to be rich and you have to be poor because God made him the king and made you a pauper. Now, the combination of the claim that all humans are worthy of dignity and respect and a human created economy, that means that many people live in total depravity generates a kind of rage on the part of what Hagel then calls the rabble. Um THAT is entirely justified and that Hagel sees as a pretty existential threat to modern society because they're right, right. It's, it's not that we need them to get over this fact that they're right about it. And as long as that's true, they, you know, society will be unstable because they will correctly demand the material conditions. For the thing that they're told is their kind of existential, right. So in HGL talks about ways to solve that through essentially what we would call labor unions or other forms within civil society that would and within the government that would represent not just geographical interests but economic interests. So when, when you look at what Hagel says about the form the state should take, I think one of the most overlooked facts is that he does not want purely geographical representation. He doesn't want, you know, Prussia gets two delegates and Bavaria gets two delegates and no following is two delegates but that different classes and different kinds of um of industry get representation. So that to me is very clear evidence that he was worried about not just the material conditions of capitalism, but also the questions of identity and self-respect that are necessary in the modern work world um that are essentially trampled on by capitalism.

1:03:47 Ricardo Lopes: And so um could we say that Hegel like Marx was also or thought that it was a moral imperative for society to try as best as we could to alleviate or ideally eradicate poverty?

1:04:05 Lydia Moland: Yeah, absolutely. I I don't think Hale thought it could be completely eradicated. But um yeah, I there's no question in my mind that he saw this as the deepest and most insidious kind of hypocrisy that a society would say on the one hand that everyone is equal and deserving of dignity and respect and then continue to choose um an an economic system that made that a joke, right? And it's very bad joke, a sad joke. Um It made it laughable in the worst possible way. And that a society that continues down that road is both morally responsible and in danger of instability. So I do, I do think Hagel thinks those two things are separate. So a better functioning society is going to be 11 with less inequality. But also that totally aside, just as a moral issue. Um YEAH, this is a classic failure

1:05:05 Ricardo Lopes: and just to be totally clear because at a certain point there, you mentioned the fact that some of these ideas stem from the more general idea that people, individual, people themselves have intrinsic value. I mean, this is not just a matter of caring about alleviating poverty with the long term success of a particular society in mind, but also caring actually about the individuals themselves and the conditions they live in.

1:05:39 Lydia Moland: Yes and their emotional and effective attachment to their value as workers. So when he starts to talk about solutions to this kind of poverty, he says, you know, you can certainly get government agencies involved in essentially welfare, but that's not going to fix the problem of self-respect. You have to give people the possibility of having dignity in their work if work is going to be such a central part of existence in a capitalist system. Um And so yeah, ju I mean, just trying to eradicate it through philanthropy is also not going to fix the problem. It has to come at the level of actually valuing workers in their roles as workers.

1:06:26 Ricardo Lopes: Oh my God. So it was not just that Marx was an alien but Hagel was also a Marxist.

1:06:34 Lydia Moland: Well, not everybody would agree with me. But, but, yeah, I mean, I, I think that's all, that's all very clear to me. Um, THAT, that is part of what Hagel was concerned about and, you know, there are places in his philosophy where he is also guilty of that kind of hypocrisy. So it's not as if he had some sort of moral genius that allowed him to see that in other parts of his life. But I, I think that was one place where he really did see the dangers that we are living with very presently now.

1:07:01 Ricardo Lopes: Yeah. No, but I mean, I, I made, I made that sort of a joke but, uh, uh, I, if, uh, he's, if you didn't mention his name, just everything you said about poverty and capitalism that we should structure society and all of that, I mean, if someone told me it was Marx to,

1:07:24 Lydia Moland: I won't believe it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I think that's true and that would be true until we started talking about the state. Right. So Hagel talks about all of this when he's talking about civil society, which is the middle one of the. So he talks about the family and civil society and the state and its, when he starts to talk about the state that you would no longer think we were talking about Marx.

1:07:46 Ricardo Lopes: Great. So, uh we've already talked here a little bit about uh comedy, but one of the things you've also done work on, uh and again, focusing on uh 19th century German philosophy is how seriously some of these philosophers took laughter.

1:08:06 Lydia Moland: Right. Yeah. Or we might say like the laughable because it, it's so hard to put all of the things that we laugh at under uh and, and a lot of things that are laughable, we don't actually laugh at. So it's, it's a very thorny um topic. But, but yes, especially around the time when Hagel was writing. Um AGAIN, people like Schlegel, um and some of the other more romantic philosophers like Zolar um were taking this question of what we laugh at and why or, or what it means to differentiate between wit and irony and humor really seriously. And I think that, uh you know, Lessing was another one who took this very seriously. Um Eta Hoffman, like the whole constellation of people who were philosophical, but also writing in literature. Um And I think again, it comes back to this question, like, what does it say about humans that we laugh? And what does it say about us that we find this whole range of things either funny or laughable? And what could we determine about the essence of what it is to be human by really trying to figure that out? And if you're someone like Schlegel who thinks that Hegel is wrong to imagine that we can articulate truth in philosophy, then you're going to be looking towards other forms that maybe as Schlegel would sort of put it gesture at the truth while not articulating it. Because articulating it is always going to introduce new categories and therefore new division. So if the true is the whole, I think Schlegel would say to Hegel, um any conceptualization is just going to show the division again. And if you want something that retains the unity, it has to remain at the level of affect or something like irony, which doesn't take itself too seriously and doesn't define things, but sort of says that things are true through saying they're opposite or says something that's witty in a way that you don't take literally, but you see the truth behind it. Um So all of these are ways in which a whole range of people in the romantic generation decided that if we could understand that and the way that functions in the way humans interact with each other and lead our aesthetic lives, then we could probably understand something much deeper about humans themselves and about metaphysics quite honestly. Um So there's a lot of um I edited a volume of essays about uh humor in the 19th century. And as I say in the introduction, usually when I tell people that they laugh because um one of the things we laugh at is incongruity and it feels so incongruous to talk about humor in this generation of very serious philosophers, but it is something they took really seriously.

1:11:12 Ricardo Lopes: And I mean, trying to understand something about our human nature through laughter. I mean, there are many different ways we can try to understand it. Right. And I mean, even philosophers themselves, many different philosophers across history uh have had different theories about why people laugh at something. And, uh, I, I mean, perhaps all of them are true. I don't know because some, we laugh at different things in different contexts for different reasons. I mean, sometimes we might laugh at something because it's funny and why it's funny is an entire question by itself. But uh sometimes perhaps people laugh at someone to mock them. Not exactly because it's funny, but just to mock them or to feel superior to other people, perhaps something, someone does something wrong. Uh And they are, I mean, competing with them and then the other person laughs just because, oh, you made the mistake. So I'm in a, in a better situation than you are or something like that. So, I mean, the, uh just thinking about laughter itself and the many different contexts and reasons why people laugh is, uh, I mean, it's, it's a very wide uh field of inquiry, I guess.

1:12:41 Lydia Moland: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah.

1:12:44 Ricardo Lopes: OK. So, um let's get now into uh how you got interested in abolitionism in America in the 19th century. So, tell us first about that. What got you interested in that and then we'll get into the work of Lydia Maria Child.

1:13:05 Lydia Moland: Yeah, this was, um, a very direct response on my part to the 2016 election in the United States. So when, when Donald Trump was elected, um it became very clear to many of us that we were in a kind of moral and political emergency. Uh So the real resurgence of a kind of far right, political stance and all of the other things that Trump represented, including his um just open derision of and abuse of women. And I think as a Hagel scholar, I've always had to grapple a little bit with what, how I felt when I would read Hagel scholarship from the 19 thirties. And I would always have in the back of my mind, what did this person think they were doing? Um WAS what they were doing more important than anything they could have been doing to fight the rise of fascism in Germany. Um And I don't pretend I don't mean to be judgmental. I'm sure people have all kinds of reasons, et cetera, but I just had a very clear sense very quickly that I needed my professional life and my scholarship to reflect the time that I was living in. And I had a, I wanted to know who in my own country and in my own history. Um I could turn to as an example of someone who had faced a moral emergency in their country. Head on. And I just decided I wanted to turn to women. I'd spent 20 years of my career really exclusively focusing on men. And so I, I asked myself to fight something as entrenched as enslavement was in the United States in the 19th century. I just thought you'd have to be thinking philosophically, you'd have to be asking big questions like, what is equality, what is justice? What does it mean to be a human? What is moral obligation? Um So I went to an archive associated with Harvard and that, that is a, a library and an archive specifically about women and asked if they knew of any women with a kind of philosophical uh trajectory who had been involved in abolitionism and they didn't. But they gave me a box of letters that included a letter by this woman who I'd never heard of, but um was immediately just transfixed by her moral vision, her ability to argue philosophically um and her ability to dedicate her life to ending entrenched evil in her country. So I decided to pivot towards doing something about her. And at first I, I did write a couple of more academic articles about her. She was definitely a philosophical thinker. She also talked about philosophy. She read philosophy, she was very influenced by German philosophy. Um She regularly cites Schiller and Goethe and Harrier and John Paul. She mentions Kant, she mentions Hegel. German philosophy was very popular in the United States. Um, IN the 18 thirties and forties when she started writing. So I had a lot of pretty instant connections to her philosophical thinking. But what really again got my attention was she wrote a book in 18 33 and that's almost three decades before the American Civil War started. So in 18 33 he wrote a book called An Appeal in Favor of that class of Americans called Africans. And this, this is just a fire hose of arguments denouncing all of the bad arguments that Americans had been using to justify slavery. And I was so impressed by how she, I think her general philosophical commitment was to thinking that humans are basically good, but they're susceptible to bad arguments that appeal to their selfishness, their self interest, their vanity. And if you can just clear away those arguments, you can really get them to reform. I'm not sure she was right about that. I don't even think she thought she was right about that by the end of her life. Um But I became really fascinated both by her as a philosophical thinker, but also as a woman whose life intersects in all of the major moments leading up to and through the American Civil War. Um She did everything from put her body between abolitionist speakers and anti abolitionist mobs. She wrote fiction and also argumentative essays. She wrote biographies, she wrote histories. Um She volunteered herself raising money for and sewing for both union soldiers and, um, enslaved peoples. So she, um, she was, she is, to me a real example of someone who took her role as an American citizen seriously and deployed everything she could think of, uh, to address what she saw as the great moral crisis in her country. So I wrote a biography of her. Um, AGAIN, I, I thought I would just sort of write academic articles about her, but the story is so compelling that I ended up writing the whole thing and that came out um about six months ago.

1:18:49 Ricardo Lopes: Great. Uh And II, I mean, uh we also have to keep in mind that the 19th century was not to, to put it mildly very women friendly and also for the most part, not very friendly to any person who was not of European descent, basically in, in terms of the mainstream philosophers, thinkers, scientists and so on. Uh I mean, of course, we have to keep also in mind the cultural context back then. And I, I'm also not one of those people who, of course, I say that that they were wrong in terms of their sexism and racism. But I don't think that if I lived back then I wouldn't have been racist and sexist myself, of course, very likely I would have been one as well and most of us, I guess so. Uh But I mean, we have to keep that, keep that in mind but also the struggle that women and, uh, but, uh African Americans and other minorities went through and particularly since we are approaching things here from a philosophical perspective and I am talking with U as an academic, I mean, it's historically, it's a fact and even con temporarily that, uh, women and, uh, other minorities, uh, I mean, their work has very much been neglected, sometimes suppressed and, uh, stuff like that. Right. So, it's, it's not been easy at all for people who are not European white males and European white males, particularly from the upper classes to have their voices heard.

1:20:52 Lydia Moland: Yeah. Yeah. And, and there's really wonderful work being done on that. So, um Kristen Yah and Dal and Nassar just last year published a whole anthology of work by women philosophers in Germany in the 19th century. And Alison Stone and I are working on a handbook about British and American women philosophers in the 19th century. There were many more of them than we think there were. And they were often much better known than we think they were. So, what we're talking about is a combination of, of course, women didn't have the same opportunities as men as far as education goes. But they, but even those who manage to philosophize despite that were pretty actively repressed and forgotten later, like not in their lifetimes but later. So, so there's a lot of really interesting work on that. Um THAT I I feel very passionate about. And I, I also think to your other point, it's really important for us to acknowledge in as much detail as we can the damage that people like Hagel did on these topics. So I think even myself as a woman, I used to just sort of think, well, of course, he thought women were like plants like everybody did, but that's not true. There were lots of people including women who didn't think that, but there were, he did have options available to him and even more so on race. So there's a, there's really important work by Daniel James and Franz Kopek and um and, and others on what Hagel probably did know about other ways of thinking about non European peoples which he deliberately chose to ignore or suppress. And there's even terrible stories about Hagel. Hagel's like philosophy of history being used as a justification in the United States for perpetuating slavery. And, you know, I was talking earlier about Hagel's ability to pinpoint hypocrisies um between in a culture that said on the one hand, all humans are worthy of dignity and respect. And on the other hand, subjecting them to capitalism's woes. Obviously, Hagel himself is horrendously guilty of doing that pretty much with anyone who wasn't, as you said, an upper class white European male. Um And I have become much less willing just to say, wow, OK, that's like a part of his philosophy, we can ignore um and much more determined to take that head on and, and as you say, too importantly, augmented with a kind of humility that reminds myself as well, that I'm probably on the wrong side of history on other things. And that, um if I were living at Hegel's time, I probably would have had many opinions that were not very enlightened either. So, to me, that's part of the, the general project of thinking about the 19th century is elevating voices like childs that are um so philosophical and so resonant and using the same kinds of ideas, including ideas about art that Hagel was interested in, but really in the service of good and trying to be much more mindful and critical of ways in which Hegel's philosophy is beautiful and compelling as it can be um was used for evil.

1:24:16 Ricardo Lopes: Yeah. Uh I mean, this is another entire discussion that I think is very interesting that people can have. I mean, uh and the same applies to artists. I mean, sometimes people discuss if what we should do with the work of immoral artists, if we should ban it, if not, if we, if we don't ban it, uh we should analyze it. Uh We should think of it if we should appreciate it or not and if we should criticize it, uh I mean, there's uh an immensity of questions out there that are very interesting about that. But, but uh uh I mean, of course, Uh I'm not myself and I don't think you are some of those people. I think that perhaps we should be because someone in the 19th century or the 18th century had some appalling views on women and uh black people and other minorities that we should just, uh, I completely ignore or think that the rest of their work is, doesn't have any intellectual valid validity at all. But, uh yeah, it's very much a well established fact that all of the people we talked about in German philosophy in the 19th century and Kent was mostly from the 18th century and, and others like them. Uh I, I mean, I, I it, it's interesting that even Kent was talking about universal values but apparently they didn't apply to uh non European people uh curiously enough. But, but I, I mean, the same thing I guess happened in other sorts of instances, like, for example, you have the French revolution and supposedly everyone should get a vote, everyone should get the same. But it was just very gradually that the population in France, uh the adult population got to AAA right to vote. I mean, first it was just uh one slice of the male population and then, and the same in happened in America, I think, I think that initially it was just the, the people who, who owned land, I guess whether the right to vote and then it was, yeah, all

1:26:51 Lydia Moland: of that was in flux. For a very long time here. That's true. And, and the other thing to bring up, I think in the context of the French revolution is the Haitian revolution. And the fact that France absolutely did not want any of their revolutionary principles to apply to a part of the world that was primarily inhabited by Black people. Um So that, that's another classic case of um of the kind of hypocrisy that I think you're right. To me, it just feels increasingly important to acknowledge those problems always and upfront. And in every part of our discussion of these earlier thinkers, um and never to treat it as something we can just sort of mention on the side and then move on from. Um But I don't think that ignoring these people is good either because it's important for us to remember that even people who were intelligent and progressive in other ways um could make really horrendous mistakes.

1:27:48 Ricardo Lopes: And I, and I guess that I it's not only important from a sort of ethical standpoint but also intellectually speaking, I guess it's enriching uh to uh have a better understanding of how our socio cultural context can influence and have an impact on our intellectual work, I guess.

1:28:15 Lydia Moland: Absolutely. Yeah, we, we need to understand why we think what we think and understanding thinkers that came before us is an indispensable part of that for sure.

1:28:25 Ricardo Lopes: A a and also keeping in keeping in mind that again, people are not disembodied beings and we live and we not only have a body but we also live in a particular society in a particular period of time, in a particular culture, we have a ton of different in influences and we are also products of all of that even intellectually. It's not that we have some sort of reasoning faculty that, that is impermeable to all of that and that allow us to get some sort of glimpse into objective reality as it is.

1:29:10 Lydia Moland: Yeah. And I, I'll also just say briefly, that's one of the things that really fascinates me about child is that she was able in many ways to transcend and to see beyond what was absolutely the norm around her. And I'm really fascinated by that. Um And I, you know, most of your viewers will know that. Um So she grew up in Boston, which is in the north and most northerners now assume that all northerners then were against slavery. And that's absolutely not true. Absolutely not true. Many northerners actively resisted the end of slavery in the South. So she was surrounded by politicians and educators and journalists and religious leaders who actively preached that this was an acceptable way for society to be organized. And somehow she saw beyond it. And she, you know, she wasn't alone in that. And I'll also say part of how she knew this is she actually talked to black people, right? So she actually listened to the people who were themselves affected. And once was able to see it from their point of view, realized that what she was hearing from the leaders in her society was, was wrong. So again, I don't mean to suggest that she had some sort of, as you say, disembodied um experience, but she was willing to listen in a way that I take as an inspiration to those of us who sometimes it's a kind of occupational hazard for philosophers. We like to look at things from very high up. And often I think it takes more of a listening on the ground to um get real ethical insight into what needs to happen next.

1:30:53 Ricardo Lopes: By the way, at least back in her time, how influential was her, I mean, in the philosophical world and more specifically in the abolitionist movement in the US,

1:31:08 Lydia Moland: she was very influential. She, she was one of the most famous abolitionists um of the 19th century. And, and part of what's so interesting about her is that she was famous before. She became an abolitionist because she um almost unheard of in the American 19th century by the age of 22 which would have been, you know, in the mid 18 twenties, was a very well known novelist and a self sufficient female author. And she'd written a couple novels and a couple of self-help books, um like cooking books or books about parenting or housekeeping um that had made her really beloved and trusted along among a great swath. I mean, she was the 19th century equivalent of a household name. Um And when she became an abolitionist, that was so upsetting to her readers because it really meant that she was a radical because to be, to be an abolitionist in the 18 twenties and thirties in the United States was to argue for the immediate end of slavery without compensation to enslavers and most Americans in the North and the South thought that that was just unthinkably radical. Um But she, that's what she was convinced. And, you know, by the time she was about 30 she continued to be one of the best published and most um public facing intellectuals of the 19th century. And certainly in the abolitionist movement as far as her involvement in the philosophical community, it's interesting, I mean, there wasn't so much like philosophical tradition in the United States except really for the one that was getting going again in Boston around Ralph Waldo Emerson. And they did know each other. They were almost exact contemporaries and she was admiring and would go to his lectures. Um But also was always concerned that he was allowing the abstraction of his thought to distract him from what she thought he should be doing, which was fighting slavery. So she'd sometimes say he has a platform big enough and a mind capacious enough really to make arguments against slavery and he's not doing it. Um Emerson did come around to doing that but only in 18 59 when John Brown's failed insurrection in Virginia uh convinced him that slavery needed to be um opposed. So she, she certainly knew all of the philosophers in the Boston area of her time and socialized with them, communicated with them, but I think she feared that they had disengaged themselves from the moral topics of their day. Too much.

1:33:53 Ricardo Lopes: OK. So uh I, I'm also getting mindful of your time now. So let me ask you, let me ask you one last question. Uh And let me see if, if I can phrase this correctly. So, uh and be clear about it. Uh So, uh I mean, there are some parts of philosophy that are politically motivated, like for example, abolitionism is a very clear example of that. And there are people that tend to be a little bit dismissive of philosophy that is done while politically motivated. And usually those people from come from political positions that are opposite to the, to the ones that they say are not valid philosophy, of course. So the question I wanted to ask you then is how do you look at the place of a movement like abolitionism uh in the broader historical context of philosophy? And uh uh I mean, when it comes to how people look again at politically motivated philosophy, I mean, to what extent do you think we should take it seriously? And, I mean, what do you think basically about those people's position, the positions that, oh, I, I mean, philosophy should be about, I don't know people in academia. I, I mean, it's, uh, transmitting knowledge to students shouldn't be about, uh, turning them into activists or something like that. So, uh, I, I mean, I, I hope I'm being clear in terms of the question I'm asking here. But what are your thoughts on it?

1:35:54 Lydia Moland: Yeah, thank you. It's such a, it's such an important question to me uh now, so I appreciate the chance to think about it. Um I guess a couple of things, first of all, philosophy has not always been removed from reality. And I think like the story of the 19th century into the 20th century uh is much more about philosophy deciding to extract itself from practice. And there are historical reasons for that, but I think we're wrong if we assume and I this isn't what you were saying either. But I think some of the people you're thinking about would say this, that, that real philosophy shouldn't dirty its hands or shouldn't kind of get involved in the world because then it's not as pure, that's, that's a choice that philosophy has made relatively recently as a discipline and it has to do with the professionalization of philosophy um in the 19th century, in the United States. Well, the three cases I know most about are the US, the UK and Germany, you, you couldn't get a degree in philosophy no matter who you were in for a long time. Right. Phd. S weren't invented that long ago and even after they were invented, they weren't necessary to philosophizing philosophical journals did not use to require that you came from. Um, YOU had a phd in philosophy to publish. So, so the, the professionalization of philosophy has meant that what it means to do philosophy has gotten narrower and narrower and narrower, more elitist, more professionalized. But there's a very long history of philosophy being born out of grappling with the real world as it were. Um And I don't think there's been a social movement in history that hasn't required people to think philosophically. Um I mean, Angela Davis is a great example of someone who uh was doing a phd in philosophy before she became an activist and brought her um studies in Spinoza and Kant and Hegel to her struggle for racial justice in the United States. But I think pretty much anywhere you look, you would find people who are fighting for justice thinking philosophically. And I've been very happy to see people emphasizing that more. So people are writing about Martin Luther King as a philosopher for instance. Um

1:38:26 Ricardo Lopes: And yeah, I was going to say that perhaps another excellent example would be the civil rights movement in the 19 sixties and seventies. Yeah,

1:38:35 Lydia Moland: exactly. So, so I think a, a more or an alternate model and I think in some ways, a truer model to philosophy's history is that when people are confronted with injustices, they have to ask those bigger questions. And I think what philosophy can do to empower us is to give us some clarity about those questions. So, you know, really what is justice? Um YOU know, we can go back to the Republic to find people trying to figure that out. And so when I teach philosophy, I don't at all think of myself as trying to turn my students into activists. But I do think that I want them to see that philosophy can be a really powerful and even essential tool for understanding the terms of our debates and the kinds of things we want to fight for and then giving us the clarity of thought that can motivate action. So when, when I think about the way movements work, sometimes what happens is people just aren't particularly clear what they're fighting for and why and what that means is that whenever there's infighting or tension or unclear, like you can just lose focus and get, you know, distracted by the details. But the better you are at saying no, I thought this through philosophically, even if you don't phrase it that way. This is what is important, this is what back to Hagel really creating a society in which people can truly be free and not just abstractly free. This is what it would look like that that is empowering and motivating in a way that can help us stave off the kind of burnout or fatalism that is all too often the death of movements for justice. So I would prefer to think philosophy is as something that is born out of humans, just trying to figure our way out in the world. And the more those of us who are inclined to think philosophically can articulate those thoughts and help people think them through. I think the better chance philosophy has of actually fulfilling a good purpose in the world.

1:40:43 Ricardo Lopes: Yeah, a and perhaps, I mean, people who might be worried uh about keeping some of the philosophical traditions of the West, perhaps they should also keep in mind that if Plato is the father of Western philosophy, then he wrote a book titled The Republic, which which I I it would be very hard to argue that it's not politically motivated because it's literally a book about how to, to, to structure politically a society from top to bottom. So, yeah,

1:41:27 Lydia Moland: very good. Yeah, absolutely. And the more I think we recognize that philosophy has been done in many different ways. So like the academic article really new, I mean, we think about like Plato writing and dialogues and Aristotle giving lectures and you know, k writing something more that we recognize as philosophy, but people writing philosophically through literature, Nietzsche through aphorisms, like many of our most important philosophers have been really disruptive of what people thought philosophy was. And so I, I do not feel like my time is well spent fighting for a version of philosophy that I think is pretty historically contingent, sometimes harmful and not where the real energy of philosophy should be

1:42:18 Ricardo Lopes: great. So, uh let's wrap up the interview here then uh just before we go and by the way, I'm also leaving a link in the description box to your book Lydia on Lydia Maria Child. Uh AND apart from the book, would you like to tell people where they can find you and your work on the internet?

1:42:39 Lydia Moland: Yes, thank you. I do have a website which is just Lydia Moland dot com. And I am also on Twitter. I think that's Lydia underscore Moland and I have maybe two things on Instagram. So I'm not, uh I'm not, never been a big social media person. I'm getting my dipping my toes in a little bit, but um Twitter is where I post the most and I do try to keep the website updated. So people are more interested in in any of my writing. Um All of my writing is listed on the website and what I'm working on now is um findable on Twitter.

1:43:14 Ricardo Lopes: Ok, great. So, Doctor Molan, thank you very much for your time and it's been a real pleasure to talk to you.

1:43:21 Lydia Moland: Likewise. Thanks for your very insightful and detailed questions. I really enjoyed it.

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