Bonus Video about Ben Shapiro AND livestream announcement

Are you kidding me, of course Shapiro has read Hegel! Ben Shapiro's a smart and educated dude, he's just gross in his applications of that intelligence and education.

That last shot with your voiceover was haunting. Nice stuff!

tagliatelle grande (sam)

I was going to make a similar point, @Ian Adelstein. I remember the first time I tried to read Hegel, and halfway through his Lectures on the Philosophy of History it suddenly hit me – when Hegel said "freedom", he meant something totally different that how I understood the word. Hegel was using "freedom" to refer to a state of being where everyone followed laws & rules at all times because those laws & rules perfectly matched their own inclinations. I think one of the most challenging parts of reading Hegel is his habit of redefining common words like "freedom" and "spirit", and then using those words over and over before deigning to give us his original definitions. (Of course, I cannot claim to have perfectly understood Hegel because nobody understands Hegel; I'm just trying my best). Hegel's idea of perfect freedom would sound like a dystopian novel to many of us today (not only does nobody break the rules, but nobody even WANTS to break the rules), and I'm fairly certain that, even among German-speakers in the early 19th century, it was still very much not the common meaning of "Freiheit". Anyways, re: Boostiiyo, I agree that Shapiro has probably never read Hegel, much less bothered to try and understand Hegel, but he wouldn't need to for Ian Adelstein to have a valid point. Hegel's ideas have filtered down through Western culture (in highly simplified form) to an enormous degree, mixed with other conservative notions of freedom (e.g. Edmund Burke's "social freedom") into a vague notion that Western capitalist societies can be simultaneously completely free AND completely ordered. While I doubt that Shapiro thought too hard about his definition of freedom – he's seems pretty off-the-cuff in his answers – he did seem to subconsciously draw upon centuries of conservative intellectual tradition in which "freedom" ends up meaning, "obeying the correct masters."

I know this is a cliche but there's something kinda funny about someone saying "freedom isn't freedom," in a kinda "war is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength" way, right?

Josh L

I somehow highly doubt that was the perspective Ben Shapiro was coming from

Boostiiyo

that is a bit complicated to be introducing to 5 year olds, you don’t think?

Gotta disagree here from a leftist perspective. Quentin Skinner has a great lecture outlying a genealogy of the concept of freedom. Highly recommend. The concept Freedom of has evolved since Hobbes into roughly three categories represent by the Utilitarian/Bentham approach, the Kantian approach , and the Hegelian approach. These approaches outline the guidelines assessing what type of society we should be striving for. I disagree with the Utilitarian and kantian views, but we can’t say they aren’t concepts of freedom in fact.

Ian Adelstein