Free Love: Rethinking Hegel's Concept of Life with philosopher Karen Ng

 Logic, Self-consciousness, and the continuity of mind and life: This episode is with Karen Ng, author of Hegel's Concept of Life, and an Associate Professor of Philosophy at Vanderbilt University. Andrea and Karen discuss Hegel's concept of life, self-consciousness, and the problem of contradiction, emphasizing how life and love are fundamental to understanding his ideas. The episode moves through Kant's influence on Hegel, internal and external purposiveness, and how these philosophical concepts relate to our modern understanding of the mind, nature, and meaning. Karen shares her journey and insights on making Hegel’s complex ideas accessible and relevant to contemporary issues.

Philosopher Karen Ng
Hegel's Concept of Life

00:00 Hegel's Contradictory Philosophy

00:31 The Concept of Life and Self-Consciousness

02:48 Karen Ng's Insights on Hegel

09:48 Understanding Hegel's Rationalism

17:57 Kant's Influence and the Copernican Turn

25:11 Mechanism vs. Teleology in Philosophy

29:57 Internal vs. External Purposiveness

37:08 Life as Process and Meaning

40:34 Hegel's Radical Thought on Intelligibility and Life

41:44 The Connection Between Life and Meaning

42:25 Hegel's Perspective on Self-Consciousness and Life

44:14 The Role of Logic and Life in Hegel's Philosophy

49:46 Hegel's Critique of Cartesian Dualism

51:31 The Speculative Identity Thesis and Cognition

53:36 Modern Philosophical Challenges and Hegel's Relevance

54:26 Hegel's Influence and Contemporary Philosophers

01:01:28 The Journey of Writing a Book on Hegel

01:09:05 Hegel's Concept of Love and Life

01:14:46 Concluding Thoughts on Hegel's Philosophy

 Karen Ng at Vanderbilt University

“True union, or love proper, exists only between living beings who are alike in power and thus in one another’s eyes living beings from every point of view; in no respect is either dead for the other.”

“… love is a sensing of something living …”

These Hegel quotes that Karen mentions are from the fragment on love, published in Early Theological Writings, trans. T.M. Knox, UPenn Press, 1975. The passages are on pages 304 and 305. And the German can be found in volume 1 of the Suhrkamp edition of Hegel’s Werke.

Transcript

Karen Ng on Love and Philosophy Beyond Dichotomy

 [00:00:00] For Hegel, everything is contradictory. And so that can also seem to be a kind of mystical way of not allowing us to draw any boundaries or limits or make clear distinctions. 

Andrea Hiott: He was sort of obsessed with life and love, if we think of it in those bigger terms. 

Karen Ng: Objects must conform to our knowledge. If they, if that is to count as knowledge and experience in any meaningful sense.

To eliminate the subjective aspect, the subjective perspective from knowledge and experience would be completely unintelligible. Self consciousness is a kind of subject object phenomenon because it's a way in which the subject can grasp itself as an object of a certain kind. Kant made self consciousness so central to his philosophy and yet didn't give us a theory of it.

The model for thinking about living things, so not human, not Consciousness, but certainly bodies was the model of a machine, and that reached certain limits that we very quickly run up [00:01:00] against when we tried to understand living animal bodies on a more mechanistic machine model. The importance of understanding the phenomenon of life was also in part.

to help us understand something about ourselves because the model of a machine very quickly is not the right model for thinking about the unity of our mind. A tree is, he says, organized and self organizing. It takes in materials from the environment 

to sustain and reproduce itself. We can never quite be located in either of those dualisms, it pops it out into a complex system we don't have to take one side or the other anymore. 

Andrea Hiott: Instead, there's something more organic, 

Karen Ng: So it turns out self consciousness isn't the only, subjective perspective on the world. If we look at nature, we can actually see that there are similar forms, similar structures the thought is that self consciousness is self conscious life. We can't just drop that. That self consciousness is self conscious life is very [00:02:00] significant.

A 

lot of what the science of logic is about is the conditions for intelligibility. Thinking isn't disembodied. Reason is living, is living activity. It's still radical, and we're still trying to find. Ways of understanding the mind that are not, that do not reduce it to a machine and to insist that minds have to be living, that the concept is free love.

What a wild thing to say, but I think we should take him serious. I think he means it. True union or love proper exists only between living things who are alike in power, and thus in one another's eyes living beings from every point of view. To love someone is to see them as fully alive. Reason is, is living activity.

That's what, that's what it is. 

Andrea Hiott: Hello everyone, welcome to Love and Philosophy. After one week off, we're [00:03:00] back, or I'm back, and I'm going to post a conversation I had with Karen Ng about Hegel's concept of life, you've probably heard me talk about Hegel, or you know that I studied Hegel, and his idea of the problem of contradiction, which is the central idea in his work that Everything, whatever you want to call everything, concepts, ideas, processes, however you want to define it, has some sort of contradiction contained within itself. So the process contains its own opposite, so to speak. I'm not going to go into all that here but I mention it because Karen and I dance around and talk about it in terms of how we might understand Hegel's work as a rhythm or a pattern to help us hold the paradox. Karen Ng is the Associate Professor of Philosophy and the Director of Graduate Studies at Vanderbilt. She's also George S. Allen Chancellor's Faculty Fellow. And an associate professor of German, Russian, and East European studies she specializes in 19th century European philosophy, especially [00:04:00] Hegel. Karen has done a lot of research in post Kantian philosophy, and The connection between Kant, Hegel, Marx, and others of the Frankfurt School. The book we talk about here is Hegel's Concept of Life, Self Consciousness, Freedom and Logic, which was published in 2020 by Oxford and it won the Journal of the History of Philosophy Book Prize in 2021. And it explores The concept of life in Hegel's philosophy, which is what we talk about here. This idea of process, rhythm, movement, that I feel one understands when reading Hegel but can never quite put into words. It's part of the movement of the writing. This expression of how everything already contains its opposite. And how I would say that it's not actually an opposite, it's part of this movement that we make towards understanding the process. Karen and I talk about her book through this lens in a way, and I enjoyed this conversation very much. We had it quite some months ago, but I'm posting it now because it goes very well with the one I just had with Evan Evan [00:05:00] Thompson's about subject and object, which you might think of as a problem of contradiction, so to speak.

She's the Alexander von Humboldt Research Fellow at the Center for Post Kantian Philosophy at the University of Potsdam, which is one way I came across her work because of being in Berlin and she was there for some talks. But also her book on Hegel is really one of the best I've ever read. I love that she brings in the idea of life in the way that she does. And how we discuss some really difficult things. First of all, it's just hard to talk about Hegel at all sometimes, much less when you're trying to talk about paradox and process and rationality and the Copernican turn, all of these things we talk about here. Towards understanding life and love so that's fun and I love conversations that can somehow touch on all of those in an authentic way and with passion and That's one reason. I also really enjoy reading Karen's work and listening to her talk and I hope you'll go look at her [00:06:00] website and read her book and listen to some other of her talks. She's a great philosopher. I'm also just glad you're here, and I wish you wonderful and good contradiction that resolves in feeling of love and life. Wishing you lots of motivation, and all the best of what philosophy has to offer.

 Hi, Karen. It's so nice to meet you today and thank you so much for coming on Love and Philosophy. 

Karen Ng: Thank you so much 

Andrea Hiott: for having me, Andrea. I asked you to come on because I've been looking at your amazing book about Hegel, Concept Life, and today we're going to try to do something that's a little bit impossible, which is have a general conversation about Hegel.

So Hegel's not known to be the easiest philosopher, so maybe to start, maybe we could talk about you and how you discovered him, just to sort of get into this 

Karen Ng: sure I I majored in philosophy [00:07:00] when I was an undergraduate and I came to it, I guess, like many people do.

I just, actually, I was very lucky. I, I first had philosophy in high school. So my first great philosophy teacher was actually in high school. And then, what continued to draw me to it was reading in the history of philosophy, but also I was just fortunate to have really good teachers. I think that's a very familiar story that we need good teachers to bring us into especially a difficult text like Hegel's.

So, I came to Hegel first as a skeptic. Maybe that's another good way to,

to approach a figure like this, that I came to Hegel as a skeptic. I read lot of, figures in the, what we now know as the continental tradition. That were very, very critical of Hegel. Interestingly, of course, I subsequently learned that the history of analytic philosophy is also shaped by its skepticism towards Hegel.

So skepticism towards Hegel in some ways shapes a lot of, uh, 20th century philosophy, and, I think we see influences of that even today. [00:08:00] And so I also came to Hegel as a skeptic and then because I read all of these people who were all complaining about this figure named Hegel, I think I should learn something about him.

And so I I did take a, I did end up taking a class as an undergraduate where we read the phenomenology of spirit. And I just got very, I, I was immediately sort of just very attracted to it. There there was I found it very, very difficult. So I don't pretend that at the time or even now that I understand all of it.

But there was something about the rhythm and the movement of, of the phenomenology that just, I kept, got me to keep, keep reading. And so that's how I found it. Came to Hegel, initially as a skeptic, and then I realized, oh, but this isn't so bad. 

Andrea Hiott: Why do you think people have this reaction to Hegel that can often be so negative.

In the book, for example, you do mention how this, there's this romantic or this mystical thing that gets associated with Hegel, at [00:09:00] least in philosophy circles, it can seem that he's somehow, I think you bring up what is the term Hylozoism is that how? 

Karen Ng: Yeah. 

Andrea Hiott: Yeah. Or even, , this, the shelling idea that sort of like the whole world is just alive or, there's this feeling of either it's just too hard to read Hegel, this is what I've heard and just doesn't make sense. And people get frustrated.

Or everything is alive and spiritual and there's a kind of almost mystical monism to it that people just don't want to touch. I don't know what your experience has been with it, but what did you find was so initially that people were so skeptical of about, about Hegel.

Karen Ng: I think you're touching on some of the reasons why people were so skeptical of Hegel.

I like that you, you call it a mystical monism. Another way of putting it, it's, it's a, it's commitment. Or rather it's commitment to hyper rationalism sort of makes it right, turns it around and it becomes almost again, a form of mysticism because of what looks like the [00:10:00] powers you know, he uses the term all of the, not just Hegel, but in this tradition, the idea of the Absolute, that reason is somehow absolute and that the worry, I think there was a worry of a kind of hyper rationalism in Hegel where reason just determines the world.

Have of Hegel's what looked to be Hegel's hyper rationalism. Nothing outside reason. Everything is determined by reason. We get from someone like shelling. I think on the other side, there is also a suspicion of the way that he treats the problem of contradiction. So on the one hand, There's this hyper rationalism.

On the other hand, there is this acceptance of a certain notion of contradiction. I I think there's a lot of misunderstanding here about, right, the exact sense of contradiction that Hegel is interested in. But I think there is a worry that in accepting contradiction, contradiction, here's where maybe the mysticism comes back.

You have this hyper rationalism, but For [00:11:00] Hegel, everything is contradictory, and so that can also seem to be a kind of mystical way of, you know, not allowing us to draw any boundaries or limits or make clear distinctions, and so there, there is a worry about that with Hegel if we don't sort of think carefully about what he means by what he means by contradiction, just for one example.

Andrea Hiott: Yes. And I like in the beginning you said the movement caught you. I've always thought reading Hegel that it's almost something like what you talk about as method in, in the book or or a practice almost that he demonstrates with his writing and I bring that up because what you just expressed is still trying to fit it into these kind of boxes right that modern philosophy is severed into whether it's rationalism and empiricism if we go back to Kant or whether it's a certain tradition in philosophy or whether it's even life and mind if we want to get closer to Hegel and but also what I've always felt he was doing, or that Kant opened [00:12:00] and he opened further, is getting past those, dualistic ways of thinking, so just prefacing with that, to think about that modern philosophy has put things in these boxes, this convention even that life and mind are different, or you put life here and then you talk about cognition, which people Actually have argued that Hegel does that right?

And what you're saying is actually no what he's done is show those are inseparable you can't separate life and mind and cognition and open up this other way of thinking about it I know that's not adequate to kind of a summary of the book, but I just to get us going in that direction, what what do you think about that?

Karen Ng: So I think you're right. Anti dualism is something that really motivates , you could, look at this Hegel's opposition to stark dualisms, whether it's the dualisms of Kant, whether, as you were pointing out, these more traditional dualisms that we work with in modern philosophy of life and mind, of mind and body and that it's [00:13:00] absolutely the case that the structure of Hegel's arguments often is to try to debunk, these dualisms and show us how what we took to be separate is actually deeply interconnected.

In the book, of course, what I was most interested in was this problem of life. I think one of Hegel's most, one of the most exciting radical things that, that Hegel does in his philosophy and is actually Historically speaking, I think a very interesting moment because he's writing at a time in the 19th century, sort of just on the cusp of the development of the biological sciences.

So that's an interesting 19th century moment. But then he's also harking back to a more ancient moment because in ancient philosophy, especially in the philosophy of Aristotle, for example, the connection between life and mind or life and psuche. Life and soul is something that was very deeply explored.

And so you could see Hegel as almost, right, working [00:14:00] against early modern philosophy, certainly Cartesian philosophy, but more immediately, right, the dualisms of Kant, reviving this more ancient way of thinking about the connection between life and mind. But in this moment in the 19th century, or on the, where we're in, as we're moving into the 19th century.

on the cusp of a new way of thinking about life also in the natural sciences. So I think that's something that when I was, at the time when I was writing the book, I thought was, was really overlooked in discussions of Hegel. So I started by saying that a lot of the skepticism about Hegel concerned his hyper rationalism.

But what I saw when I was reading the text was that If Hegel is a rationalist, right, if there is a commitment to thinking about reason and understanding how reason may or may not shape our world, that understanding of reason and the powers of reason, the powers of cognition are completely tied to what he thinks of as, right, the powers and capacities of living [00:15:00] beings.

And so that was one way for me that if If he is a rationalist, and I think undoubtedly there, there is certainly a rationalist. He is a rationalist. There's, there's no denying that. But he has such a subtle and expansive way of thinking about the powers of reason that in which, reason permeates the living natural world.

And so that was what drove me to to write the book, to think about the, the questions that, that I explored in the book. 

Andrea Hiott: That reminded me of, I think it's, which is once very briefly in the book, or maybe twice. You talk about the young Hegel, and how he was obsessed with life and love, if we think of it in the way, in those bigger terms, and then, in the book, you go through his writing and you show us, in the phenomenology of spirit, how the absolute negation almost takes the place Of what we might think of as life, and also in, science of logic, we get to the concept and the idea not takes the place of life because you're basically putting that back into it. But in these old [00:16:00] theories those things would have been the rationality, the focus on rationality is the absolute negation. It's the concept it's we're all stuck in our head somehow with this rationality. But actually what you're opening up or what I was thinking as reading is maybe this was his way of actually infusing that fascination with life and love into this language.

You brought up Kant and, this was the enlightenment, right? And he was What was he trying to do? not save reason, but there was a focus on the Copernican turn. Maybe we could talk about that, because I want to get towards this idea of purposiveness relative to this idea of rationality,

how can we help people understand what you're really meaning by rationality when you say that Hegel is a rationalist? 

Karen Ng: Sure. So, there are a few ways. that we can think about this, this trend, this big moment from Kant to Hegel.

And of course over many, many years of scholarship people have tried to think about this question and I'm always a little bit careful when I start here because there's never any agreement. I just [00:17:00] want to be clear that there's never any agreement and, you know, philosophers will always disagree about this, but you, you focused on the Copernican turn.

So I think that's a good place to start.

And I think I'm, I'm a reader of Hegel who wants to stress a lot of the continuities between Kant and Hegel. There are a lot of readers who want to say that, you know, there is a radical break. And of course, you know, there, there's truth to both. But in terms of the Copernican turn, I do think so.

Copernican turn this thought that is so simple and yet so I think so profound that he says, you know, hitherto, you know, all previous philosophers thought somehow that we had this puzzle about how, how it is that we know that our thoughts and our, and the objects of our thoughts can somehow hook up together.

And Kant just had this insight. It's the Copernican turn where he says, well, no. Objects must conform to our knowledge if they if that is to count as knowledge and experience in any meaningful sense, and so that sort of create [00:18:00] that that allowed Kant to sort of turn to self consciousness as a very important focal point for thinking about the problems of knowledge, thinking about problem questions of intelligibility.

Now there was a worry in the aftermath of Kant that this was too subjective, right? Of the early of figures like Fishta and Schelling, where this is merely then a subjective idealism, if we think that all objects have to conform to our knowledge. And so you could see again, I'm speaking in very broad terms.

this German idealist project of trying to, right, not to go back on the Copernican turn. So we still need to acknowledge this, the importance of our subjective contributions, the importance of our subjective perspective on any possible knowledge, right? That's something we could say is irreducible, ineliminable, right?

To eliminate the subjective aspect the subjective perspective from knowledge and experience. Right, would be [00:19:00] completely unintelligible, but we want to find a way to make sure that this isn't just mere subjectivism. And I think that one of the ways in, in the early, in the work of the early post Kantians to, to try to, right, resolve this problem, square the circle, was to precisely turn to thinking about nature, think about whether or not we could identify within nature aspects that already looked like.

So it turns out self consciousness isn't the only, uh, subjective perspective on the world. If we look at nature, we can actually see that there are similar forms, similar structures, similar, right? We could, we could now say sort of proto cognitive aspects or proto cognitive shapes within nature that could allow us to see that this wasn't merely a subjective idealism when we say that something like, you know, objects have to conform to our knowledge.

We see this kind [00:20:00] of activity in, taking shape, right? Not just with us, with, with self conscious human beings, but already with different forms of nature. So that's one initial way that I try to get into the problem. And I try, what I try to show actually is that Kant in a work called The Critique of Judgment, which we now call The Third Critique in a way already gave us a first step into this problem.

Because one insight that Kant comes to in the first, in the, sorry, in the third critique is that when he's considering the problem of the human power of judgment he immediately sort of comes upon this puzzle and he says, well, if nature was completely chaotic, showed no unity, no regularity, no form whatsoever, He, he sort of came to this puzzle that it's not clear that judgment, the power of judgment, the power to right, just bring unity to nature's forms.

It's not clear that it would work at all if it was the case that nature was just right, completely [00:21:00] chaotic. As he likes to use this term, the accrued chaotic aggregate. And so in a way Kant himself comes to this problem of life and living form in thinking about the question of judgment himself. In, in this text from 1790 called the Critique Critique of the Power of Judgment.

Andrea Hiott: Yeah. The reason I brought up the Copernican turn and I'm trying to bring up the Enlightenment, and so I was , I'm trying to get at what was really going on? Why was this so important? Why is it still so important to us, you know, in a way? Because it's kind of a caricature, but Let's think of the enlightenment, the time and more more focuses on machines and less on something like our inner subjective understanding of the world or something like this.

 And Kant sort of does this thing where he's in the way you just described this move of we can start to understand that you can't separate those things, right? That the object being studied and the self consciousness or whatever are tangled up. Isn't that kind of what idealism.

in, in [00:22:00] this sense is, would you say, or would you unpack that better? Do you think? 

Karen Ng: Absolutely. I think this idea, there's this, there's this term, it's a kind of technical term, but in some ways you, you described it very well, that, that gets used. And I talk about it a lot in the book, this idea of a subject object a kind of hyphen hyphenated term.

And that can seem right. What, what, what is this? This weird thing subject object and in a way you're just what you're describing is exactly the point right that we have to understand the subject and the object is intimately bound up together. They, uh, Hegel and some of the other idealists use the term subject object to think about the problem of self consciousness right.

Self consciousness is a kind of subject object phenomenon because it's a way in which the subject can grasp itself as an object of a certain kind and then very importantly for Schelling and Hegel, they refer to life as a kind of subject object, in part because Life living things are subjects because they have a [00:23:00] perspective on the world and on their environment.

So they are subjects of experience. That's something that we a term that we now use as well. On the other hand, of course, they are also objects, right? They can be perceived by other subjects. They have an objective shape and objective form, and so this idea of a subject object is actually very important for the idealist.

Andrea Hiott: Oh I love it so much. And that gets towards the speculative identity thesis, which is a big part of the book, and but it's, these are very hard things, right? So I hope it's OK, that we, this is kind of messy, and but I just think it's worth trying to relate this in a way to we're trying to understand the world we create all of these machines and we start to put our sort of what is it our trust?

In the external like in understanding science as something external but then with khant and idealism We at least get this feeling that it's all important. We can't we can't separate our mind and our internal intertanglement or entanglement with that world [00:24:00] from those objects that seem so scientific, let's say, at this time.

And he's, so he shows us, in a sense, I guess, that there's, we, we can take it all seriously. We don't have to necessarily say subjective is bad or objective is bad, but he doesn't really talk about self consciousness, does he? I mean, it's more, yeah, yeah, it's all about it, but he's not exactly Yeah, 

Karen Ng: that's right.

That's that's so this is something I I'm making reference to another scholar. But yes, very famously self consciousness is very important for Kant. But so the story goes, he doesn't have a theory of self consciousness. And so, and it's really only with Fichte that we get a theory of self consciousness.

And so, I think this is, you know, like everything, as I said, everything is disputed in the literature, but that that was for a long time a thought that Kant made self consciousness so central to his philosophy and yet didn't give us a theory of it. Let me pick up on something you said about [00:25:00] machines and this, this problem of machines and mechanism.

I think one way, one re another reason to think about why the concept of life is so philosophically important for this period is that there is a debate about mechanism and teleology. I think certainly, and this is even before Kant in, in a kind of Cartesian way of thinking about the world the model for thinking about living things.

So not human, not consciousness, but certainly bodies was the model of a machine. And that reached a certain, as you, as you can imagine, right, there were certain limits that we, we very quickly run up against. When we tried to understand living animal bodies on a more mechanistic machine model and even, and, and in Kant's third critique He also, right, in, in trying to understand the distinction, uh, so his way of thinking about the internal, the very special form of self organization of living things, [00:26:00] he thinks about this, he calls it internal purposiveness, and the contrast for him, he sets up, he says, well, imagine a watch, which is obviously, right, very well organized, we understand how the parts and the whole work together to help us tell time but there's still a difference between, right, whatever unity we want to and functionality we want to attribute to something like a watch versus the unity and self organization that we want to attribute to a living being.

And so, The your, your mention of this problem of machines is actually really important because the issue of understanding life and its unique organization. It's unique unity. It's unique perspective on the world. A lot at that. We could say the interest in that wasn't just about an interest in figuring out nature, although it was also that right we also want to understand right nature as a whole and nature as a system, but the importance of understanding the phenomenon of [00:27:00] life was also in part to help us understand something about ourselves because we wouldn't want to think about our minds are cognitive right the unity of our mind.

We see that the model of a machine very quickly is not the right model for thinking about the unity of our mind. And then even more importantly for this tradition, the problem of freedom. If everything in nature, including ourselves as a part of nature, Operates in accordance with a deterministic flow of causality.

What Kant is going to call right this mechanistic flow of causality That also threatens that our understanding of freedom our understanding of ourselves as self determining As being able to set our own ends as opposed to just right being determined on the basis of a causal flow And so the interest in life While, of course, we're interested in understanding nature and the natural world around us, the stakes [00:28:00] of having an account of life the philosophical stakes of having an account of life also, was also about having an understanding of ourselves, an understanding of our mindedness, as much as an understanding of our own freedom.

Andrea Hiott: Wonderful. Yeah. Very well said. I guess what I'm trying to set up in a way is that This, there's still this bifurcation going on almost as if we're the world is there and there are machines and then there's nature and then there's us and I feel like in the book, opening up this idea of purposiveness, which which comes out of Kant's third critique and you spend the first part of the book

unpacking that and we can say what that is now But I feel what what i'm seeing happening and you can completely disagree with this is that we're opening up the space around that bifurcation and then we're going to get this kind of movement that you talked about at the beginning that Hegel's going to come in with this speculative identity thesis, subject object.

We can never quite be located in either of those dualisms or those things, and in a weird way it Pops it out into a complex system where we [00:29:00] don't, we can't, we don't have to take one side or the other anymore. Instead, there's something more organic, lifelike but to get there, you know, Kant had to sort of, first of all, Open this up.

He sort of linked the inner and the outer world, even if he did it in a very different way than Hegel is going to do. And I think the way he sort of does that is the way you're pointing out. And when you look at the third critique and this idea of purposiveness, inner external, maybe you can unpack what you, I know you took a whole book to do it, but just for people who haven't read the book yet, what this really means is inner purposiveness moving towards the speculative identity idea.

Karen Ng: Good. So the problem of, and purposiveness is sort of like a clunky word, but it's trying to think about the problem of, right, so thinking about the problem of the unity of form of nature. And this is where Kant also I I had mentioned earlier that Hegel was sort of reviving some Aristotelian ideas, but [00:30:00] Kant, too, in the Third Critique, in a way, is doing that again, trying to do it in a way that is you know, doing it in a way that attends to the Copernican turn, trying to do it in a, right, many, obviously many, many years, uh, lie between Aristotle and the 18th and 19th centuries, so trying to take into account, right, things that, things that they know, the scientific theories of their time.

But in a way, Kant was also trying to revive a certain Aristotelian idea. And the thought, so the main, one very important distinction that I talk about in the book, and this is drawing from Kant, is a distinction between internal and external purposiveness. And the idea 

the idea of a purpose is pretty straightforward, right? It's the idea of an aim, a goal, and end. How do we understand, and this is very controversial in Kant's time, because basically, Aristotle thought that everything in nature had an end, or a purpose, or a goal. And then in modern, and I'm also doing this very sketchily, the short version of the story is that That in, in, in modern philosophy, [00:31:00] the idea of ends and purposes were sort of wiped off the map that it was not that there was something mystical and something very inappropriate about thinking of nature as right guided by goals or ends.

And Kant sort of comes back on this pro he basically sort of starts to think about this problem anew. And the distinction he draws, so external purposiveness is a way of thinking about nature as being organized by goals or ends that are it's external because it's given by something else. And this is a, a an idea that Kant entertains, but I argue that he ultimately rejects, which is that, well, maybe, maybe we can think about nature as, as org as, you know, On parallel with an artifact, right?

And if an artifact has a designer, then maybe nature sort of has a designer God and we can think of the organization of nature as having aims or goals or purposes that are given by a designer God in a similar way that artifacts have ends or [00:32:00] purposes or goals that are given to it by its designer. That's what he calls external purposiveness.

Another sort of less, maybe less extravagant way of thinking about it is that he also says, well, we can also see external purposiveness as a way of thinking about usefulness. So he says, sandy soil is useful for spruces. Well, isn't that a handy, isn't that nice? So that's a, that's also, we could think of that as a relation of external purposiveness.

But Kant, I argue, and also I think all of the Hegel as well, think that this is a very bad way of thinking about the organization of nature. Hegel has a joke somewhere where he says, oh, well, then we think that, you know, we, God made cork trees so that we could have corks, right? That's the sort of, that's a, that introduces a kind of arbitrariness, they think, in our understanding of nature that that doesn't really grasp what is distinctive, right?

That basically, we can't distinguish between artifacts and nature at all, because in a way, if [00:33:00] nature is an artifact, then, right, we lose the very idea of nature. Internal purposiveness, Is a way of thinking about nature as setting right, nothing but the unity and form of of the organism and I'll stick with an organism sets its own goals in accordance right with its own activity.

And so. Here we do not see aims and goals as given from the outside whether, whether it's an artifice or whether it's from any other outside force, but that living beings have an intrinsic unity a form of self organization that, uh, sets its own aims. and goals and purposes. And it's very important.

This doesn't have to be done intentionally, right? So we can see that, because Kant's example is a tree. He says that a tree is sort of, or he says organized and self organizing in that it reproduces other trees of its own kind. It takes in [00:34:00] materials from the environment to sustain and reproduce itself.

And its parts are also, right, organized, such as to contribute to the functioning of the whole. And all of this, he says, he calls this internal purposiveness, because this is a form of self organization. In contemporary philosophy, a term that's sometimes used is autopoiesis. So there is actually There are a lot of connections to, uh, the way that Kant is thinking about this is something that we, we now think of as actually quite helpful for thinking about the internal unity and organization of living beings and what's distinctive about the organization of living beings as opposed to artifacts or other non-living things. And in a way, I think internal, uh, purposiveness is similar to what we might say, to say is an auto poetic way of, organizing oneself 

Andrea Hiott: I was just thinking of the Varela Maturana book, Tree of Life, as you were saying it, and it's interesting that the example is a [00:35:00] tree. So that's that kind of purposiveness. Does it, do you really think of it still as having to have sort of an end, or as an end, or because sometimes in the book it feels more what is beneficial is the purpose, or, I mean by the time we get into, to Hegel it's become more of that movement idea that I was talking about.

Picking up on what you said that we've gotten, because again, I'm trying to get, I feel like we're trying to get out of these rigid categories that we're so stuck in. And these kinds of examples, like the tree, which is a dynamic, ongoing process. And there's this great quote, which you have in the book that Kant says, where I wish I could remember it, but every form is a form of every other, it's a kind of fractally way in which you can look at any part and it's, you know, There's other auto poetic parts that are part of it and so on.

There's this, again, this complex scaling feeling that's starting with Kant that we then see much more of, as you expressed it in Hegel of this movement, the subject object, you know, kind of ongoing. [00:36:00] But having said all that, do you still kind of really think of purpose as

an end in that Aristotelian telios kind of way that's always so criticized or was and is still criticized quite often in some circles. Or do you think we can think of purpose in a different way in the way that you're using it here? 

Karen Ng: That's a great question. I think the idea of, so the idea of teleology, I think it's, is, is itself a very controversial idea, especially.

Yeah.

Andrea Hiott: the German Zweck you use that more often, but. 

Karen Ng: Yeah, the idea of, but the idea of Zweck and Zweck Messischkeit is very much connected to these, again, as I think it's a way of trying to revive or update Aristotelian ideas. I think the way that I, I don't know if I say this exactly in the book, but one, the way I would answer your question now is that you're right.

We shouldn't think of it as an end because end, even the word, especially in English, right? And it sounds like it's an end point and already suggests finality, 

Andrea Hiott: even though it already doesn't fit with that example of the tree. [00:37:00] Right. Or that. 

Karen Ng: Yeah. And so one thing that Hegel emphasizes is that in a way, and I think this is very novel and again, really speaks to a lot of our contemporary ways of thinking life is a process.

And so instead of, although I do think that there's something very important about the teleological structure of how Hegel is thinking about living beings, not just living beings, but also us and how we, we set goals and ends, but it's not, it doesn't have this sense of finality. It really for Hegel is about process.

And in fact, This is something that I think he, he really comes to, especially in the mature work when he's talking about life in the science of logic, it's all about process. And it's not an accident that a lot of process philosophy, whether you're thinking about whitehead or more contemporary.

A philosopher like, uh, Jean Dupre, that process philosophy has a lot of Hegelian roots, you could say, because you're absolutely right. We don't, while I think there's something about the [00:38:00] teleological structure and form that's very important to how Hegel understands life and, and reason the, the non finality of it, that it always has to be an ongoing process, is very important and that life for him, right, it's not a, it's not a thing, it's not a stable being, but really an, an ongoing continual process.

Andrea Hiott: Yeah, and that fits more with this life, uh, itself, in a sense, of, of, um, We're trying to get at something that's very hard to talk about, which I think is why Probably Hegel writes in a way that seems so obscure and that's what we were talking about It's almost the movement itself within the writing kind of comes through but I do think we can talk about it in a really practical way too, maybe for a second I mean purpose can also mean something like meaning right or and a lot of this with the speculative identity thesis and going into this is about internal organization it's about finding a pattern in that movement or regularities in that movement and taking that seriously and [00:39:00] that being robust, which would be almost in a contrast to what we started with in terms of this, everything is alive and we just , dissolve in wonderful mysticism, which can feel good.

But this is, he's trying to do a science of logic it's trying to be very robust in the way that you show in the book. But can we also think of it as really connected to meaning and to actually trying to understand this mind, nature connection on a level that really does pertain to our everyday life.

Karen Ng: I, I think it absolutely can. And maybe I'll start, I really liked that you connect this idea of purpose and meaning. And I think this is important. So I'll start with a more technical way of thinking about it, but move out to this more general sense of meaning, which I think is for Hegel has to be connected with life and living things rather than same machines and mechanisms.

That's something I think that, that could really speak to our present moment, [00:40:00] but starting with the more technical sense. I think, along with other scholars, but again, other scholars disagree, but I think that a lot of what the science of logic is about is the conditions for intelligibility. So that would be a very technical way of thinking about the condition, right?

A few, we would take a few steps. And really it is about meaning because it's the conditions. What does it mean to say that to to make anything intelligible? What are the conditions that allow us to make things intelligible, to render things intelligible is, is sort of a technical way of speaking about it.

And again, I think Hegel's most radical thought, and I'm not, I, I wanna say. Sometimes I want to say that Hegel is really not just thinks about this in the deepest way, but also really is among the first to make this big claim. I've said that, yes, Aristotle certainly connected life and mind, but I don't know that he connected intelligibility as such, right?

Or eventually what you're going to say, meaning [00:41:00] as such as connected with life. And the reason for that is because he thinks that it is only once We have life comes on the scene, so to speak. And again, so it's not an impure. He's not interested in the scientific question of, like, the how did right? How, which is still an open question.

How did life begin? Right? Where does life come from? That's not the he's not a that's not the natural scientific question he's interested in, but he is saying if we're interested in thinking about intelligibility and meaning and how things how anything can become intelligible or meaningful to us at all.

That question only makes sense once life is on the scene, because it's only a question that makes sense for living beings. And that this idea that all living beings have to make sense, of themselves and their environment in a certain way. Now, obviously, depending on the living thing we can talk there, this can happen in a very primitive level for very basic, even, [00:42:00] even bacteria, right?

Have to say sense and make sense of their environment in a certain way in order to survive and reproduce. That's obviously a very primitive and basic idea of sense making. But that can, that gets more sophisticated with more sophisticated forms of life. And I think Hegel's saying that For self conscious forms of life, which is the most sophisticated form of life of which we're aware that that sense making right that the idea of making things intelligible is still connected with the fact that we are living beings because sense making is is only possible once living things come on the scene.

And so that's really so your question about meaning. Meaning for Hegel is essentially connected with life and living activity, living aims, living purposes. Of course, for, for self conscious beings, we have more complicated questions than just mere survival and [00:43:00] reproduction. We want, we think about the good life, right?

And again, this Aristotelian idea. We also think about reproduction, but reproduction is a more encompassing question for us. It's not just about very basic forms of individual, but about social. What does it mean to reproduce a form of life or a society across history? Is it the case that sometimes entire forms of life, you know, and in, in English, Hegel's term Zittlichkeit is translated as ethical life.

Which, although not a very literal translation, I think is a very good translation, because it captures the spirit of what Hegel means with the idea of Sittichkeit and so I do think that the, this connection between life and meaning in a very broad sense that you brought up is, is definitely something that, that Hegel thinks about very deeply, maybe more deeply than, I think, Any philosopher that I can think of.

Andrea Hiott: Yeah, especially for his [00:44:00] time, because, again, Kant hadn't even really used this term, self consciousness. But before I get carried away in that this idea of the speculative identity thesis, this purposiveness, as you were talking, I was reminded, I think you said that you're reading the science of logic.

in maybe graduate school and you came across an absolute idea that life was like the first the first section and you were it was amazing, right? Because those words seem so far apart when you were reading that you were in a space where

logic and life Clashed, right? This idea of the rationalist that you presented at the beginning or the logic. It almost seems it's something other than life and it's talked about in that way and you assume it that way.

But I guess I just want to go to that moment of what happened for you there because maybe it helps unpack this weird dichotomy

Karen Ng: that, you're right, that was the moment and that, you know, there there are very memorable moments in one's life where one, you read something where it just floors you. 

Andrea Hiott: Yeah, yeah, I've had them too. 

Karen Ng: [00:45:00] And that was certainly one of them reading this huge, difficult, probably one of the most difficult books That I've ever, even now that I've ever read, maybe most, one of the most difficult books ever written. And also going back to the beginning of our conversation, all of these myths about Hegel, right?

This hyper rationalist , we know that the science of logic, moves us towards this, this, the absolute idea, which sounds like the most mystical rationalist thing that you could, you know, ever conceive of. And exact, that was exactly my reaction.

I was expecting to reach this, this big culmination. And of course I had no, you know, we'd look at the table of contents, so you know it's coming. But on that first read, when you finally get there, it is absolutely astonishing. And also that what he talks about there. So although he's very clear, He wants to distinguish, he says, yes, this is what we're talking about here.

He says, this is, we're still in, we're still talking about logic. We're still talking about thinking and intelligibility. So let's not, we're not thinking [00:46:00] about nature. But nonetheless, the, the content of what he's talking about life, he's talking about corporeality uh that, Thinking has to, thinking, thinking isn't disembodied, right?

This great, again, a thought that might be very obvious, but, you know, given the history of philosophy is difficult and controversial and hard to, to think about, uh, to conceive. corporeal reality, thinking always has to take shape in a distinctive body, that thinking takes place in relation to, takes place within a living body that is in an environment and in constant metabolic exchange with an environment in these, this processual character that you, you were asking about earlier.

And that most importantly. Thinking is not some thinking is not something that an individual does in a void thinking living things are always living things that live with other living things [00:47:00] of their own kind of other kinds, but the most Hegel thinks that the most significant relationships are, of course, the relationships we have with others and that these, all of this contributes to how we understand thinking and the powers of cognition and how we make things intelligible and meaningful how we make sense of the, how we make sense of the environment as much as how we make sense of ourselves and so it was, you're absolutely right about this moment, it was, and, and the shock that how could this is, you know, coming to Hegel as a skeptic, all of these criticisms of Hegel for, over now 200 years, but even if we just stick with the hundred years after Hegel, like how could we have, how could we have accused Hegel of this when his whole point was to say that, yes, he wants, he is a rationalist, he wants to, think about reason in this expensive way, but.

Reason is living act, is living activity, that's what, that's what it is. 

Andrea Hiott: Yeah, it's, [00:48:00] it reminds me of this idea of, how do you say it the whole idea of the speculative identity thesis, that self consciousness is the self consciousness of life, or it is, life is constitutive of self consciousness, that's kind of radical, but why is that radical?

Yeah. In this content. Yes, 

Karen Ng: so the thought is that self consciousness is self conscious life. And that, exactly, and that life part isn't super, like, we can't just drop that. That self consciousness is self conscious life is very significant. It's very radical. From the perspective, again, if you think about the trajectory of modern philosophy and Descartes, and maybe I'm, you know, every philosopher is unfair.

I'm sure there's, there's, there are better ways to think about Descartes, but we'll just use Descartes as the bad, as, as sort of the bad guy. 

Andrea Hiott: He opened up something that helped us get here, but there is this, again, that, that bifurcation, just to link it to what we were talking about, that's very real and very solid.

It's very real. 

Karen Ng: And so this Cartesian way of. [00:49:00] Because in a way Descartes was also what the that's what the I think is right the the I think I exist or I think I am to associate thinking, but for date right thinking is thinking substance, and so there is there are these stark dualisms it's absolutely impossible.

on a Cartesian view to think of self consciousness as self conscious life. And sorry, 

Andrea Hiott: but that is just amazing, isn't it? It's, it's really it really is true what you just said that it is, you can't think of self consciousness as self conscious life in that worldview, which, what is it then?

It's. 

Karen Ng: So, you know, you've really emphasized the danger of these dualistic ways of thinking. And I think as, as, Kant does a lot, so I don't, I don't want to be unfair to Kant, but Kant does hang on that Kant hangs on to this dualism in his understanding of self consciousness. Uh the distinction for, you know, the [00:50:00] most important distinction, the most, the closest to something where we might get like a Cartesian like dualism in Kant is the distinction between noumena and phenomena.

And so there are, While I think Kant is a much more sophisticated, right, even in his dualism, he's much more sophisticated than someone like Descartes, he, it's still a dualistic picture where we cannot think of self consciousness as self conscious life. And there are also, Kant has moral, there are, right, theoretical, in his theoretical philosophy, there are reasons for that, but I think the more important reason for Kant is his moral philosophy.

You know, which we don't have to get into. But what is it? So what does it mean to say that life is constitutive of self consciousness? You know, you've been, you've been making reference to what I talk about in the book is the speculative identity thesis, which is really just a Hegel's technical way of thinking about this, this idea of the subject object that we've talked about, where life is [00:51:00] one of the primary.

Models for the this this speculative identity of the subject and object. Well, for one thing, cognition, I think, and this is something we really only get in the logic that to understand cognition is to understand something about these three fundamental processes of living beings that understanding powers of cognition requires that we understand them as embodied.

And so different living bodies will have different powers of cognition. And again, something that strikes one especially for today as something obvious, but I think for a long period of history, of the history of philosophy, We didn't want to think about human cognition as in any way connected with the powers of the human body.

So there was, again, at the time, something very radical about this. It's so 

Andrea Hiott: radical. I'm sorry I keep pausing, but it's just for me, this is a really important thing that you've brought up in the book and that [00:52:00] you show in a way that's very robust, because after reading the book, it seems obvious, right?

Life is constitutive of self consciousness, but if you're coming out of a philosophical tradition, it's really not obvious and Weirdly, and even now it's kind of it's you know, it's gotten it's we still don't want to take the body too Seriously, we still now we think of mind as like a machine again Computation a computer or something.

So I guess I'm just trying for people listening there's really something very Fascinating that for so much, it took Kant, it took Descartes, it took these people going through this to even just open it up to where we could imagine our thoughts, our mind as connected to nature and life. That's a really revolutionary thing, even though it now is starting to seem a little bit simple.

We almost had to bifurcate to even get there, 

Karen Ng: to the mind body. This is right, but I want to say so on the there's a certain sense in which it now seems obvious to us that minds have to be living, but you mentioned the computational theory of mind. This [00:53:00] is a very so actually, it's still radical. And we're still trying to find.

Ways of, of understanding the mind that are not, that do not reduce it to a machine. You mentioned the work of Varela, you know, I really admire the work of people like Evan Thompson. I think Evan Thompson is one contemporary philosopher who's tried to give us ways of thinking, he, he talks about Kant's critique.

He talks a lot about Merleau Ponty. I think, People give the idealist, maybe because they're so difficult. I don't know, maybe because of, you know, we started by saying just how difficult it is to read Hegel. Also the complicated history of the reception of Hegel. So I think right now we're, we're not drawing on these really important resources from German idealism to think about these questions.

Another contemporary philosopher who I also, whose work I really admire, is Peter Godfrey Smith, who also is now just trying to think about the deep, deep connections between [00:54:00] the life and mind. And this is not easy to do. And so even today, I think it's still quite a radical thing to argue against a computational theory of mind and to insist that minds have to be living.

Andrea Hiott: Yeah, it's great you brought that, that up because it isn't easy actually philosophically to draw a line from From bacteria, I think you mentioned, and trees, and life, and nature, which You have to kind of accept all of that once you start thinking about life and nature To our experience of ourselves and mind and thought and memory. That's a very hard thing to trace, so even though it might when I say it in this big way Obviously life is constitutive of self consciousness. It sounds obvious once you really try to do it philosophically It's very hard Which is why I think your book is really important because I do think We can look at hegel in this way to for help.

 And it's also connected to these themes.

We've been playing around with in terms of what Kant was trying to do with we're always like on the seesaw between these dualisms and I do think in your book you show [00:55:00] another way, or Hegel shows another way, Fitch to Schelling, you can't separate, it's all that time period, right, which we haven't talked about those guys yet, but that's all connected, but I do feel like, and I wonder I wonder if you also see that as a possible way of rethinking some of these, ruts that we've gotten stuck in all that Evan Thompson's blind spot, right? This movement of subject object that doesn't have to be located in one of those bifurcations. 

Karen Ng: Exactly. It's just, see, it's, it's so interesting because Earlier we were talking about Descartes, but there are these habits of thought, this bifurcating, this separating of the subjective and the objective.

It comes back in so many different forms. One thing that I thought about when you were talking earlier, the hard problem of consciousness. The contemporary way of thinking, right, so everyone thinks, oh, well, no one's Cartesian anymore, but we still have something called the hard problem of consciousness, and

and so the bifurc [00:56:00] the tendency to think in this bifurcated way, you know, the biggest version of it is the bifurcation of subject and object, right, if we want to put it in the most general terms. And I think if I, if there was one plea that I, you know, that I mostly work in the history of philosophy, but I would love for people to take Hegel seriously, or to take Hegel as somebody who can offer insights.

into resolving some of these problems. I think some people have turned to, you know, like in the work of Evan Thompson, turn to phenomenology. The work of Husserl or Merleau Ponty. I actually think the German idealist tradition maybe has more to offer in part because they thought so much more deeply About this problem of the that life and mind have to be connected in order for us that that that is in a way the solution to all of these problems of bifurcation.

Andrea Hiott: I actually think extending the idea of phenomenology. It is phenomenology of spirit. This is a word right is there. I actually think we could [00:57:00] extend it a bit because there's a lot of overlap already between phenomenology in the tradition of taking nature seriously, for example, and what Hegel was trying to do, and what you actually express in this book, it's just, it's hard, because we can't think in those either or categories that our language and our philosophy are really built upon. Everything is so stuck in that, which I think is why it's so hard to read Hegel, and understand Hegel, in a way, too, not that he figured it out, because really a lot of it comes from Fichte and Schelling that whole thing, but there's an expression of it there that I do think we're trying to express better.

Karen Ng: Yes, and I do, you're, you're touching on something that is That sounds right, that one reason Why is Hegel's text so difficult, right? Was he just trying to be obscure? Was he just trying to be annoying? Obviously, there are also translation issues but it's just One reason it's so difficult is because he's trying to find a language to understand Exactly to understand To, you know, people talk a lot about hegel's dialectic, you know, hegel's dialectics and the dialectical mode of [00:58:00] expression, or a dialectical method.

One very straightforward reason why Hegel's so difficult is that he was trying to capture right the, the movement and contradiction and processes of things in a language, right. That was true to that. 

Andrea Hiott: This aufheben, I think, captures it a little better. It's weird, you know, you don't, I love it in the book, you don't talk about dialect until the very end.

It's kind of the little beautiful send off, right? Because that's the thing everyone associates with Hegel, but. And it is this kind of movement, isn't it? This, what you were just expressing, or this, this feeling of things layering and sublimating and changing and moving. We don't have a good language for that yet, but in the book you're starting to show how we could, right?

 It can be robust if we look at it.

Karen Ng: Yeah. I hope, I, you know, that's what I was trying to convey. And, and I don't even, it's not even that I think Hegel did it, you know, you know, Definitively or perfectly, but he really, you know, returning to his text, I think, can can help us. With a [00:59:00] lot of the problems that we still struggle with that, as you put it, are often connected with this tendency to bifurcate.

Andrea Hiott: And that is, it's Schelling who has the subject, object, object, subject that sort of, that you tie in very closely to this idea of what we're calling, or what, the speculative identity thesis. But we could also just say it's almost the dialectic movement or this pattern of that we're talking about in a way too from a different, from a form based, angle maybe.

Karen Ng: Yeah. Schelling, that's an, I think. Reading Schelling is just, is also very difficult, but I think one thing I try to say in the book is that some, some people think that, in the early Hegel, Schelling was an important influence, but something that gets dropped, and I try to show that this is not, that Schelling is actually more important.

in, in the telling of the story than he's been given credit for. 

Andrea Hiott: Yeah, I love 

Karen Ng: it that 

Andrea Hiott: you bring all those people [01:00:00] in because I really feel it was almost a spirit or a time, where people were trying to do this. Try, try to find some way to hold these paradoxes and talk about them, bring nature back in, still connect on a, On a, on a bodily level with the world, but also in a really robustly logical way.

I guess to go back to your journey just a little bit before we end is, so you've, you discovered that life in the logic and it, it had, I had one of those moments for you, which I think a lot of us know, or it's just things are brighter or something. You can't leave it behind. How did that proceed on into this, this book?

Karen Ng: So it was, you know, these, these, I guess, maybe all books that take, they, they take a long time. They have a long period. And, so when I was a graduate student was when I had that moment, it was in a seminar. I took a year long [01:01:00] seminar on the science of logic taught by the late, uh, and wonderful Richard Bernstein.

And so we had, I had that aha moment and then I spent, so the, the, The origins of the book was my dissertation. And then after I wrote the dissertation, it took me a long time. I basically rewrote the whole thing. It's very interesting, hard process of, in a way, I had the thought and dissertations are often like this.

You have the thought, but the execution is not, you know, you're not happy with the execution. And so it was sort of, yeah, it took me a long time to, to, to have, to, to write it as a book in the form that that in which it eventually appeared. 

Andrea Hiott: Trying to connect it to your.

purposiveness in your dialectic, not to be too, too silly, but there's something, I wonder like how it's changed your way of being or thinking, or if if it connected to you because [01:02:00] of some way that you are in the world, I don't know why it's coming to mind, but in the book you talk about I that this for Hegel, this, what we've been describing this diet, this process, dialectic, speculative, whatever you want to call it, this movement.

This pattern that he noticed, then kind of let him look at nature differently or almost look at other kinds or species or like start to almost think about what it might be like to have this purposiveness, almost enter into different perspectives. And I just wonder if that connects to

in your life at all. What does does it bring up for you? 

Karen Ng: It has changed. It's it's It was an aha moment. It has changed the way that I think about I think how I think about, but also how I relate to nature. I think that can sound so, I don't know. It can sound 

Andrea Hiott: cliche, but it's really not. I mean, this is actually really what matters.

Karen Ng: It's just hard to talk 

Andrea Hiott: about. 

Karen Ng: It completely has to think of the world as. Alive with [01:03:00] a plurality of forms of life and that and alive in a more right robust way, not just, we know, of course, when I'm taking if I'm on a hike, I know that there's life all around me, but that all of this life has a perspective on things and that there are sort of an infinite number of these worlds.

And so it actually has absolutely changed the way that I. think about the natural world and relate to it. I think it has a lot of, not just for me personally, I think it's very, this view of life and living nature as a whole, I think could have a lot of ramifications for our present way of relating to nature, given our environmental crisis.

I think it's an absolutely It's a super helpful, again, another, there, we need lots and lots of different ways of thinking about this, but I think this is one very helpful and important one that could help us [01:04:00] rethink our relationship to nature um, , those 

Andrea Hiott: bifurcations are still there I guess that we were talking about at the beginning or those divisions they've changed forms or even accelerated in terms of what you were saying about the way we think of technology in mind and

Karen Ng: exactly. You, you've been talking throughout about machines. Obviously AI is such a huge question and problem and puzzle for us at the moment. You mentioned computational theories of mind again, I think there, Hegel can give us a very helpful alternative way of thinking about these things. And that it's been, it's, It's his thought has been underappreciated in this regard.

I know he's been a hugely influential philosopher in many ways, but there are currents of his thought that have been really underappreciated. 

Andrea Hiott: It almost seems like we've applied that to philosophy that either or way of thinking that you have to choose a side, and so that's why it's been hard to

think of something like this in a robust way and bring it in across scales to understand. But I really [01:05:00] think that a lot of people are trying to do it from a lot of different angles. And it doesn't necessarily mean that all the stuff from computational mind needs to be gone. If anything, it could, if we could open it up in the way we've been trying to talk about, all of these things could start to help each other in a way, because what we're really trying to do, if we could do it would be very helpful.

If you could really understand how life is continuous with mind, if we're just thinking of common sense kind of way, somehow we've gotten to this point where we have thoughts and feelings and memories as living creatures in a living planet.

And to try to find a robust way to talk about that and trace that out in ways like you or Evan Thompson, or gosh, a a lot of philosophers of the past and present are trying to do. It does seem like it could be very helpful to these problems that we have now relative to the environment and technology I wonder in your everyday life as a philosopher if you are able to think about things if you still have those moments that you had when you read nature and [01:06:00] logic because those are other ways we get put into Boxes in a sense we become professional philosophers and we have this and this and this I wonder you know How is it hard for you to hold all this? Yeah, 

Karen Ng: sure. I think teaching is this is what makes Teaching so important to, to the, not just the practice of philosophy, but probably for a lot of researchers that this contact with students who are always approaching this with fresh eyes for the first time, that is, and also with their concerns, right?

Cause their concerns are always changing and their world is changing so fast. And so I think teaching. Definitely helps with that. Because you're right. There can certainly be, we get stuck in our little silos and yeah, professional life is what it is for everybody, including for academics. But I think teaching helps with a lot of that.

Andrea Hiott: And I think that meaning, we talked about purpose, purposiveness, and I brought up meaning, but it does [01:07:00] connect right to that because you, We can also feel like, what are we doing? We're studying Hegel and, thinking about all these crazy concepts that don't even make sense to people if you just say, speak it out, if you try to read it out a paragraph of Hegel.

 But actually it really does connect to these bigger themes, I think, and it's worth the hard work of trying to figure out how to articulate that I guess it's just a way of saying thanks for trying to do that right as a teacher but also In writing the books and this is love and philosophy So I have to bring up this word love at the end.

Do you see any I mean I brought I know hegel I thought about love a lot in his youth and with Hoderling we didn't talk about him with the poets and the life and love was very big for him and I, I think it still runs through his work. I was trying to say maybe he put it all into these terms, but for you just holding all this together, this perspective, this connection with nature, Hegel what comes to mind with that word for you? 

Karen Ng: I think Hegel had. Lots of interesting things to say about love and [01:08:00] in the connection in the early Hegel for him, love and life were deeply, deeply connected. There was something about this infinite, you know, he used the term infinite infinite structure of love.

Life and love right that life infinitely returns to itself and love sort of has a similar structure. You're right that often we think of this as you know the early romantic Hegel, when he was Hegel was very good friend. Hegel, Hölderlin and Schelling were roommates and the Tübingen Stift, and of course, So Hegel and Schelling, uh, broke off and were no longer friends, after a certain point.

But, uh, Hegel and H Hödelin remained friends for Hödelin's, uh, too short life. But I actually think you used this word earlier. You said that it's not that he abandons these earlier romantic themes, but that they get infused into, right, this, this theory and including what he says about the [01:09:00] concept. And I think that word is, you're absolutely right.

Thanks. I don't think that he ever abandons this way of thinking about the connection between life and love. There's a great passage in the Science of Logic where he's talking about the concept of all things, which is the most, right, you might think this is the most abstract of all things you could possibly talk about.

But he says that the concept is free love. free love, before we had that term. Exactly, right, and not in the sense that, you know, that we meant it in the 60s Right. Free love. The concept is free love. What a, what a wild thing to say, but I think we should take him serious. I think he means it. And, and that there is a consistency in his thought of thinking about something about this, you know, infinite self return.

And also that, you know, Relationality is very important that we that even when we're thinking about something like the concept, it's not enclosed within itself. But always in these, it's [01:10:00] only in these relational processes of which love is, is a particularly powerful manifestation that we can, you know, arrive at something like meaning or purpose or truth.

Uh, so I think love is, love is a huge theme in Hegel. It's also a model for how he thinks about recognition, which is another really important concept in Hegelian philosophy. So I think Hegel is a great thinker of love. 

Andrea Hiott: And do you think this movement, I mean sometimes we talk about flow or we talk about there's a kind of, when you're present, sometimes when I'm reading Hegel, I was trying to sit down.

You do feel a kind of presence and a kind of movement that does something good for the way you can be in the world, so to speak. I don't know if that, I mean, I'm not trying to sound too, it can happen with a lot of different writers and philosophy. It's kind of just something that happens, but I get the feeling maybe he felt that a bit when he was talking about free love.

I don't know. Or how would [01:11:00] you think he, this free love, what, what does he really mean by that? 

Karen Ng: Well, so in. Can I maybe just, when I was preparing to talk with you today, I pulled up this fragment from, you know, there was this early fragment that Hegel wrote about love. And it's wonderful because it's so connected with how he thinks about life.

So, here's one thing, just, I just read a couple of short things that he says. He says, True union or love proper. Exists only between living things who are alike in power and thus in one another's eyes, living beings from every point of view. 

Andrea Hiott: Oh, wow, that's all the themes we were just talking about in a way that yeah, self consciousness is life is all these perspectives.

Yeah. 

Karen Ng: But to associate that love is to see another as living from every point of view is so beautiful. [01:12:00] So, right, so this to to move against bifurcation and fixity right to see them to to love someone is to see them as fully alive. He also says, love is a sensing of something living, which is also such a, I think, beautiful profound thing to say.

So, So yes, I mean, going back so okay now jumping all the way back to the concept as free love. I think there's a tendency in later criticisms of Hegel to worry that his rationality, his way of thinking about conceptual thinking is to fit right to it. make things fixed. You know, Adorno loves to say the identity thinking, this is what Adorno accuses Hegel of doing with the concept. So Adorno is a very interesting and astute reader of Hegel in many ways. So I I'm definitely not dismissing Adorno.

I think Adorno is deeply insightful of Hegel and many other things, but I, I just think that this idea that [01:13:00] the concept fixes is exactly wrong, right? This is exactly what he doesn't want. If, if the concept is getting something right we, uh, we, it's almost like, We are grasping something the way that a lover would grasp something right as fully alive as he says in every from every point of view.

So, yeah, I think that love, although it can seem like once we get to the mature Hegel love is a less important theme than it is for the early Hegel. I still think it's actually very important. 

Andrea Hiott: I think that's right, and there would be so much more to say there about the self consciousness itself, what's really happening when we become aware of ourself as consciousness, and I mean that is part of that trying to see from a different perspective, and if you try to think about that quote that's beautiful that you just read about love, then there's some There's some way in which this movement we've been talking about and how you [01:14:00] can use it to maybe look at different perspectives that does become in a really practical way um, about love, self love, The recognition of nature is a kind of love almost, like recognizing it as life.

Karen Ng: Absolutely. To see it as living from every point of view. Yeah. And this association of love with sensing, the sensing of something living. Uh, I like what you said about loving or recognizing nature. I think that's right. 

Andrea Hiott: That's kind of, the point of philosophy and science in a weird way to do it as robustly as possible, but that's the kind of the doubling too that you talk about.

But in any case is there anything that we haven't talked about that you wanted to bring up? I already kept you five minutes over. So, 

Karen Ng: No, I think we've touched on a lot. This was a really, this was really fun to chat with you about all this. 

Andrea Hiott: Yeah, it was. There's always more with Hagel. Yeah. You can never get, you'd never get to the bottom, but that's the point of it. But I really, I really do appreciate your [01:15:00] book and the work you're doing

thank you so much for 

Karen Ng: inviting me. 

Andrea Hiott: Yeah, my pleasure. 

 Have a great day there in Nashville. 

Karen Ng: You too. All right. 

Andrea Hiott: Bye