ILN EP 73: Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

Pat was feeling dialectical so Ben bulldozes him with the humongous theories of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, the Leslie Knope of 19th Century German philosophy. This guy literally thought of everything, which is both impressive and exhausting. After wandering off on their requisite tangents (such as names in other languages and Jimmy The Greek's unfortunate on air racial anecdotes), Ben & Pat explore Hegel's zany ideas set down in his mammoth book "The Phenomenology of Spirit." Through this work, Hegel dominated the Post-Kantian philosophical landscape, claiming that all of history is the progression of a World Spirit that overcomes dichotomies like subject vs. object or nature vs. freedom through a dialectical process. Another successful episode!