0. Introduction

On the 28th of April, 2018, Abigail Thorn (Philosophy Tube) posted the video “Intro to Hegel (& Progressive Politics)” on YouTube. I don’t like this video. Even though it was posted over 6 years ago, I still feel the need to respond to it: firstly because it is simply so wrong that I have to respond to it, but secondly because in addition to showing how not to interpret Hegel, this can be an opportunity to show how to actually interpret Hegel.

1. Lordship and bondage

Philosophy Tube begins her video with a discussion of the Lordship and bondage passage within the Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel’s “magnum opus”. She first performs a theatrical version of the passage, followed by an explanation.

In her telling, it’s a story about two characters, each trying to understand themselves until they become aware of each other. This is somewhat positive for each of them at first, but ultimately negative. First, she claims, they resent the presence of each other; second, they desire to be recognised by each other as a person. This leads to a life-and-death struggle, ending with one emerging as the “master” and the other as their “slave.” The master makes the slave perform labour for them, but is never satisfied. They apparently don’t want recognition from a slave but from an equal. Since the master relies so much on the slaves labour and bases so much of their self-worth on the slave recognising them, the master turns out to be dependent on the slave. The slave on the other hand, by working in the world, has a greater connection to it. The slave eventually realises how dependent the master is and overthrows them.

There is a problem here though. It all seems incredibly abstract and hard to understand. What exactly is meant by recognition? Who are these two characters? Why do they care so much about recognition that they are fighting to the death over it? Her answer to these problems is by treating the passage as a metaphor:

11:23 — “The Master and Slave dialectic. What’s it all about? If it’s a metaphor what is it a metaphor for? […] Who is the Master supposed to represent, and who [is] the Slave? Are they literal masters and literal slaves? Are we talking about the Haitian Revolution? Or maybe they aren’t literal masters and slaves, maybe it’s about the French Revolution? Maybe they’re supposed to represent workers and capitalists?”

The strange thing about her saying this is that the passage that she is discussing does have a context. She is not merely taking it out of context and misinterpreting it - she is taking it out of context and then wondering why it has no context. Her conclusion that it must be a metaphor only makes sense from this framing - when you look at the text itself the questions are already answered before the passage itself begins, so I guess to prove my point we should have a look at the context and see how it affects our reading of the passage.

The Phenomenology of Spirit

Hegel was interested in creating a philosophical system. He believed philosophy has to be organised into a system, and that anything that looks philosophical but isn’t organised is not real philosophy:

Encyclopedia (Logic) §14 — Unless it is a system, a philosophy is not a scientific production. Unsystematic philosophising can only be expected to give expression to personal peculiarities of mind, and has no principle for the regulation of its contents. Apart from their interdependence and organic union, the truths of philosophy are valueless, and must then be treated as baseless hypotheses, or personal convictions. Yet many philosophical treatises confine themselves to such an exposition of the opinions and sentiments of the author.

As well as in the beginning of the Phenomenology itself:

Phenomenology of Spirit §24 — Among the many consequences that follow from what has been said, it is of importance to emphasise this, that knowledge is only real and can only be set forth fully in the form of science, in the form of system; and further, that a so-called fundamental proposition or first principle of philosophy, even if it is true, is yet none the less false just because and in so far as it is merely a fundamental proposition, merely a first principle. It is for that reason easily refuted. The refutation consists in bringing out its defective character, and it is defective because it is merely the universal, merely a principle, the beginning.

It is this system that all of Hegel’s works thus consist of. The primary task of the Phenomenology of Spirit is to show the path that must be taken to accept his philosophical system. He refers to it as a “ladder” that helps rise the individual to the “high ether” of science.

Phenomenology of Spirit

§26 — Science on its side requires the individual self-consciousness to have risen into this high ether, in order to be able to live with science, and in science, and really to feel alive there. Conversely the individual has the right to demand that science shall hold the ladder to help him to get at least as far as this position, shall show him that he has in himself this ground to stand on.

§27 — It is this process by which science in general comes about, this gradual development of knowing, that is set forth here in the Phenomenology of Spirit. Knowing, as it is found at the start, mind in its immediate and primitive stage, is without the essential nature of mind, is sense-consciousness. To reach the stage of genuine knowledge, or produce the element where science is found – the pure conception of science itself – a long and laborious journey must be undertaken.

Rather than accomplishing this task straightforwardly, perhaps by outlining arguments for why the reader should accept what he is saying, this work is a little different. Instead he provides a third person narrative of a character going through the stages it takes to reach his system. The reader is positioned alongside Hegel while still painstakingly exploring the logical arguments involved in every step of this “long and laborious journey”. This character isn’t some abstract entity but is best understood as a real person with a specific philosophical outlook. Though they deny certainty about things like colour, scent, or the equal reality of others, this reflects only their theoretical stance—not how they live day to day. In practice, they engage with the world and society like anyone else; it’s only under scrutiny that their worldview collapses into these outlooks.

Consciousness

After the Preface and Introduction, the “journey” begins in chapter 3, Consciousness. We explore what Hegel contends to be the philosophical view requiring the fewest assumptions - pure sense-experience. The character tries to understand the world through their senses, believing they offer an unfiltered view of reality, free from personal bias, free from their own subjectivity infecting their knowledge of objective reality. Problems emerge from within this worldview, forcing the character to adjust their perspective. As the character modifies their outlook to resolve each issue, their perspective becomes increasingly complex. Eventually they have nowhere left to run and are forced to dissolve their worldview. It crumbles apart, but out of the ashes arises a new simple perspective. This process repeats throughout the work: we start with something simple, problems start to emerge, the character responds by making things more and more complicated, and finally things get too complicated and collapse.

After this clinging to experience failed, the character was lead to the opposite extreme—radical subjectivity and the denial of any objectivity. It is at this turning point that we encounter the lordship-bondage passage.

Lordship and bondage

Perhaps now we can see places where Philosophy Tube went wrong. She imagines the story as unfolding in an abstract realm where people exist without prior contact with others, while Hegel begins with a real person grappling with how to construct a subjective worldview. Furthermore her interpretation of the passage is very political with talk of recognition of human rights, of slaves overthrowing their masters, and of the power of labour, but these ideas are not relevant to the matter at hand.

The key structure of the lordship-bondage passage is this: two characters seek recognition, leading to a struggle in which one becomes lord and the other bondsman. The lord initially appears essential, the bondsman inessential. But this reverses—the lord’s certainty proves empty, while the bondsman gains substance through labour and experience. The lord begins having total certainty and feeling like a god in their own world, but ends in dependence.

There are two useful ways to read this. First, the lord and bondsman can represent two strategies for constructing a subjective worldview. If we were to try to develop a purely subjective worldview, one in which we treat ourselves as universal, there are many problems we might encounter. The largest or most obvious problem is how we should understand other people. Are they lesser than me? Are they just a part of my universality? The lord character here would represent a path in treating others as inessential and oneself as essential to this universality. The bondsman character then represents the path where oneself is seen as inessential to this universality. The story that unfolds, with the lord turning out to be dependent on the bondsman and inessential, and with the bondsman turning out to be essential, here represents the development of these two paths. The path of the lord, initially promising, is doomed, and that of the bondsman, initially seeming less rewarding, is the most fulfilling path.

Another way to understand this passage is to see these characters as partitions within one mindset. Here the problem lies in the distinction between a feeling of being essential to reality versus the apparent disregard reality has towards oneself. I may in my own mind privately feel that reality is all a part of my subjectivity, but when I am made to eat and sleep, made to work, it stops feeling like this is all in my control. A potential solution would be to partition this framework such that there is an internal essential “I” that persists despite anything, and an external inessential “I” that actually interacts with the world but which derives its existence from the essential. This relation seems stable but the internal essential “I” would prove to have no content, while the external inessential “I” would have all the content earned from the interactions it has and prove to be the real essential part.

Ultimately, we don’t need to untangle every detail to grasp the passage’s point: what appears essential turns out to be inessential, and vice versa. The real conclusion is that each is equally a part of reality—not superior to it, nor above others.

There are other interpretations of this passage that I certainly dislike: those that assert that Hegel is here making commentary on historical slavery or about a historical origin for self-consciousness. The main reason that I dislike them is that they ignore the structure of Phenomenology. There is something that I neglected to mention earlier about the structure of this work at the end of the fifth chapter. The journey begins, as I discussed, with the third chapter. The third, fourth, and fifth chapters all follow an individual developing their worldview however at the end of this fifth chapter they realise that they are not merely an independent individual but also a member of a society whose worldview is shaping their own. This realisation causes the book to make a major change. We stop examining an individual character’s worldview and start examining different worldviews that a society might have - this is what Hegel calls Spirit, a collective mind. It is in the next three chapters that Hegel discusses pseudo-historical and religious worldviews of spirit, of shared consciousness. If Hegel was really arguing that self-consciousness was something that a society realised as a result of a historical process he would have placed that discussion in these chapters.

2. Dialectics and metaphors

All that being said - we need to look closer at her interpretation.

While it is bad that Philosophy Tube didn’t look at the main purpose of this text, is she completely incorrect to draw a political metaphor from it? Extending the use of a text into new areas is always possible, but it simply doesn’t work in this case. There are hundreds of works going back centuries, millennia even, that portray class antagonisms, the weak overthrowing the powerful, the dependence that power has on those it controls, and yet we are supposed to use this text to explore those ideas? When this passage is used a commentary on subjectivity, it is extremely unconventional and interesting, but when this passage is used as a commentary on social issues it becomes a weak and bland one.

The strangest part is the way Philosophy Tube concludes that the passage is a metaphor. She points to the name she has been using for this passage: the “master-slave dialectic” and decides that we should find out what this “dialectic” thing is.

7:18 — “We said this is called the ‘Master and Slave Dialectic’ so what is Dialectics?”

It should be noted that Hegel never referred to the passage as a “dialectic” but it is not a bad idea to look at how dialectics works within Hegel’s framework. She decides to turn to Vladimir Lenin in order to understand the term stating:

8:37 — “The condition for the knowledge of all processes of the world in their “self-movement,” in their spontaneous development, in their real life, is the knowledge of them as a unity of opposites.”

While Lenin’s description of dialectics is not unlike Hegel’s, one has to wonder why she would turn toward Lenin here. Many philosophers have talked about dialectics throughout history: Plato was perhaps the first to use it in the fourth century BCE. Immanuel Kant (1724 - 1804) notably used it, inspiring Hegel (1770 - 1830) to do so too. Hegel’s use inspired Karl Marx (1818 - 1883) as well as Vladimir Lenin (1870 - 1924). Across these centuries it has been used slightly differently and had different places within each framework. Lenin used the term, yes, but if you want to understand how Hegel used it you should consult Hegel. He outlined it in his Encyclopedia:

Encyclopedia (Logic)

§79 — In point of form Logical doctrine has three sides: [a] the Abstract side, or that of understanding; [b] the Dialectical, or that of negative reason; [c] the Speculative, or that of positive reason.

§80 — [a] Thought, as Understanding, sticks to fixity of characters and their distinctness from one another: every such limited abstract it treats as having a subsistence and being of its own. […] In the study of nature, for example, we distinguish matters, forces, genera, and the like, and stereotype each in its isolation.

§81 — [b] In the Dialectical stage these finite characterisations or formulae supersede themselves, and pass into their opposites.

§81a — Socrates used to turn Dialectic against the Sophists. […] If, for instance, the Sophists claimed to be teachers, Socrates by a series of questions forced the Sophist Protagoras to confess that all learning is only recollection.

§82 — [c] The Speculative stage, or stage of Positive Reason, apprehends the unity of terms in their opposition - the affirmative, which is involved in their disintegration and in their transition.

Here we can clearly see that for Hegel we have three moments in logic: the understanding where we study ideas in isolation, the dialectic where we show how opposite ideas pass into each other, and the speculative where the two opposites are united into one. The relationship to the lordship-bondage passage is clear: each of the two characters were studied in their isolation, Hegel then showed how each pass into their opposite (essentiality into inessentiality, inessentiality into essentiality), and finally he explored a unity of the two positions.

Instead of interpreting the passage this way, she declares that dialectics must always be metaphorical. Here is what she said when using atoms as an example to “explain” dialectics:

8:03 — “For instance atoms. Within an atom you have positively charged particles and negatively charged particles: protons and electrons. If you understand atomic charge and energy levels and so on you can understand what holds an atom together and how it will react with other atoms. If you understand the sources of tension within it, you can do chemistry. You can even exploit those sources of tension and split it apart.”

Later she complains that this dialectical analysis of atoms doesn’t work:

9:01 — “But how are we meant to use this? Is it meant to be literal? Because in an atom there are also neutrons, which don’t have a charge and which we didn’t really mention. And actually the nucleus of an atom is held together by the strong nuclear force, not by the attraction… Whoa, whoa, whoa! Hold your horses! Personally, and this might just be me, I find dialectics to be more useful as a metaphor. Which is why I presented it first and foremost as a piece of theatre.”

11:03 — “So Dialectics, the study of the unity of opposites, as a metaphor for understanding - what exactly? Well, loads of stuff! Ancient Chinese philosophy - Yin and Yang! There’s a kind of dialectic supposed to illuminate all kinds of stuff about nature and medicine and even ethics”

There are a number of issues with this logic. First, it seems strange to use atoms as an example only to later complain that her own example is a poor example. Hegel of course had no knowledge of atoms and wouldn’t have made these claims. Second, she doesn’t properly demonstrate how dialectics could apply to this issue. Neutrons shouldn’t pose a problem to the opposition between protons and electrons because they are simply not relevant when discussing that opposition. It is akin to saying we cannot look at two sides of a war as really opposing each other because there are some countries elsewhere in the world that aren’t party to the conflict. It also doesn’t matter that the strong nuclear force holds atoms together because it was only her claim that the opposition between protons and electrons should be used to understand how an atom is held together. If you instead used the opposition between these two particles to discuss charge and electricity, then it would work fine. Neither electrons’ negative nor protons’ positive charges have any real distinguishing factors. We could just as easily understand both particles as being conduits of just one “charge” that is mediated through the opposition between the two, rather than each exhibiting unique and opposition “charges”. This would be a dialectical and speculative analysis of these particles.

Regardless, she made the conclusion that dialectics must be metaphorical, which I cannot follow the logic for. If it is true that “dialectics” itself is a metaphorical idea simply used to analyse problems, then why would that make the lordship-bondage passage a metaphor too? She uses dialectics to discuss the nature of atoms but atoms are real - not metaphors. By her logic Hegel was using dialectics as a metaphor when studying the lord-bondsman dynamic. It doesn’t follow that the lord-bondsman dynamic itself a metaphor. I do agree that the lordship-bondage passage is metaphorical but her reasoning is faulty.

After talking about the passage itself, and showing that it must be a political metaphor, Philosophy Tube moves on to how we can “implement” the ideas expressed. Now I don’t have anything against her political messages per se, but their connection to Hegel and the lordship and bondage passage becomes increasingly tenuous. She claims that identity politics is a matter of recognition because it involves groups that are unheard, but Hegel’s struggle for recognition is a struggle to be seen as a subject, not a struggle to be “heard”. He even said that the struggle for recognition “is absent in civil society and the state because here the recognition for which the combatants fought already exists.” She says that the master was disgusted by the sight of the slave, and that this has parallels with racism, but that isn’t something that happens in the text. She even says that we should be careful about who we recognize, as Nazis and white nationalists are also “demanding recognition”:

17:55 - We could also maybe interpret the Nazis and the modern-day resurgence of white nationalism as a demand to be recognised as the superior race with the right to dominate all others, a belief which is obviously incorrect. 

Oh good point - I suppose Nazis and white nationalists are incorrect now that you point it out. It is here that I can’t even correct her reading of the text, because she is so far from the text that there is no equivalent “correct” reading - she is just talking about something completely unrelated.

3. Origins of misunderstanding

I cannot help but want to explore what possessed Philosophy Tube to treat the issue this way. Of all the texts Hegel wrote, why single out this one? Why lean so heavily on the so-called “master-slave dialectic,” and treat it as a straightforward political metaphor? Why invoke Lenin, or atoms, or the oft-repeated—but entirely un-Hegelian—formula “thesis-antithesis-synthesis”? I believe I can answer these questions.

If Abigail had approached this video purely out of interest in Hegel himself, the choices she made would be baffling. No literature would consult Lenin when discussing Hegel’s methods. No credible scholar of Hegel would suggest using the thesis-antithesis-synthesis formula. The only way to come to these ideas is if you had started with studying Marx or Lenin, had seen how often they mention Hegel, and were motivated to study Hegel in order to understand Marx’s and Lenin’s mentions of him.

A powerful influence here is Alexandre Kojève, whose Paris lectures in the 1930s effectively rewrote Hegel for a generation of French intellectuals. Sartre, Lacan, Fanon, and countless others were shaped by it. Kojève focused obsessively on the lordship and bondage passage, reading it as an allegory of struggle and history. But his reading stripped the section of its place within Hegel’s larger system—and lent support to the myth of the “master-slave dialectic” as a self-contained political parable. It’s no accident that this is the one part of Hegel that often appears in discussions of him. But remembering only that part—and remembering it as a political metaphor—is like pulling one page from a novel and claiming you’ve understood the plot.

If you’re looking to reverse-engineer what might have inspired Marx, and you land on this passage—already severed from its philosophical scaffolding and repackaged as a political allegory—the interpretation nearly writes itself. Marx spoke of class conflict in dialectical terms. This passage seems to do the same. Surely, then, this is what Marx was drawing from?

In fact, Marx almost never discusses the Phenomenology of Spirit. His real engagements are with The Science of Logic, The Philosophy of Right, and other texts. In one of the few places where Marx does mention the Phenomenology, he dismisses it for failing to grasp material labour:

1844 Manuscripts - “Hegel’s standpoint is that of modern political economy. He grasps labour as the essence of man – as man’s essence which stands the test: he sees only the positive, not the negative side of labour. Labour is man’s coming-to-be for himself within alienation, or as alienated man. The only labour which Hegel knows and recognises is abstractly mental labour.”

This proves one of two things: either Marx had forgotten about or didn’t place much emphasis on the lordship-bondage passage, or he didn’t think that Hegel was talking about physical labour.

Relationship between Hegel and Marx

The real relationship between Hegel, Marx, and Lenin (at least, according to themselves) is outlined in their own works. Marx referred to his “upturning” of Hegel’s logic and replacing its ideal with the material.

Afterword to the Second German Edition of Capital, 1873

My dialectic method is not only different from the Hegelian, but is its direct opposite. To Hegel, the life process of the human brain, i.e., the process of thinking, which, under the name of “the Idea,” he even transforms into an independent subject, is the demiurgos of the real world, and the real world is only the external, phenomenal form of “the Idea.” With me, on the contrary, the ideal is nothing else than the material world reflected by the human mind, and translated into forms of thought.

The mystification which dialectic suffers in Hegel’s hands, by no means prevents him from being the first to present its general form of working in a comprehensive and conscious manner. With him it is standing on its head. It must be turned right side up again, if you would discover the rational kernel within the mystical shell.

Especially more illuminating is Lenin’s The Three Sources and Three Component Parts of Marxism which claims that Marx’s inspiration from Hegel is in his logical methods but not in his understanding of class relations or of history. The political aspects of Marx’s thought (at least, according to Lenin, but with whom I agree) come from the English school of Political Economy and the French socialist movement that was active at the time:

The Three Sources and Three Component Parts of Marxism, 1913

Marx did not stop at eighteenth-century materialism: he developed philosophy to a higher level, he enriched it with the achievements of German classical philosophy, especially of Hegel’s system, which in its turn had led to the materialism of Feuerbach. The main achievement was dialectics, i.e., the doctrine of development in its fullest, deepest and most comprehensive form, the doctrine of the relativity of the human knowledge that provides us with a reflection of eternally developing matter.

Having recognised that the economic system is the foundation on which the political superstructure is erected, Marx devoted his greatest attention to the study of this economic system. […] Classical political economy, before Marx, evolved in England, the most developed of the capitalist countries. Adam Smith and David Ricardo, by their investigations of the economic system, laid the foundations of the labour theory of value. Marx continued their work; he provided a proof of the theory and developed it consistently. He showed that the value of every commodity is determined by the quantity of socially necessary labour time spent on its production.

When feudalism was overthrown and “free” capitalist society appeared in the world, it at once became apparent that this freedom meant a new system of oppression and exploitation of the working people. Various socialist doctrines immediately emerged as a reflection of and protest against this oppression. Early socialism, however, was utopian socialism. It criticised capitalist society, it condemned and damned it, it dreamed of its destruction, it had visions of a better order and endeavoured to convince the rich of the immorality of exploitation.

The stormy revolutions which everywhere in Europe, and especially in France, accompanied the fall of feudalism, of serfdom, more and more clearly revealed the struggle of classes as the basis and the driving force of all development. The genius of Marx lies in his having been the first to deduce from this the lesson world history teaches and to apply that lesson consistently. The deduction he made is the doctrine of the class struggle.

4. Other oddities

Hbomberguy’s appearance

There is two other oddities in her video I’d like to address. The first is when Hbomberguy appears some distance in the video to say the following:

21:31 — “By the way, if you find the Hegelian dialectic to be a useful metaphor then by all means use it. If not, don’t worry about it. If you’re engaged in political activism, or would like to be, you probably won’t get anywhere by insisting that everyone has to have read Hegel. If you find Hegel hard to understand, don’t worry, everyone does. There’s a really good reason why so many other writers, historians, philosophers even have dedicated themselves to the task of explaining what Hegel “actually meant.” Slavoj Zizek has built most of his career on this and, I mean, you’re watching a video that’s trying to explain it right now. I mean, if it was obvious you could have read it. Have you tried reading [it]? It’s awful.”

When I first heard this, I paused. Am I the kind of person he was warning about? Someone telling others what “Hegel actually meant”? Am I guilty of insisting that others read Hegel? But no—I don’t think so. I would never tell someone they need to understand Hegel. I would never shame anyone for not having read him. I do believe people can benefit from knowing more about his ideas—but not knowing them is hardly a moral failing.

The person Hbomberguy describes sounds much more like Abigail herself. She clearly has not read Hegel, and clearly has not understood him—but chose to present herself as someone qualified to explain him nonetheless. And Hbomberguy’s reassuring tone—“don’t worry about it,” “everyone finds Hegel hard,” “you don’t need him for activism”—starts to sound, unintentionally, like advice Abigail herself could have used. One can almost imagine him recording this for her directly: a gentle nudge not to worry, not to force it, not to make this video. She included it anyway. I’m being facetious, of course. But the point remains: my critique is not that she ought to understand Hegel—it’s that if she doesn’t, she shouldn’t be spreading bad interpretations of him under the guise of explanation. Finally, I want to note that no one seriously insists that you must read Hegel before engaging in political activism.

The Capacity Contract

Philosophy Tube, for her final point, turns to Stacy Clifford Simplican’s work “The Capacity Contract” to criticise both Marx and Hegel for relying on an individual’s cognitive ability in order to actualize themselves and become free. However this doesn’t really apply to Marx or Hegel.

In this work, “The Capacity Contract”, Stacy Simplican makes a critique of John Locke’s “Social Contract” to argue that his conception of the state doesn’t take into account intellectual disability. Locke had in mind an individualistic understanding of the state, where he argues that any person should be treated as a sovereign entity that never imposes on any other person, and that enters into a consensual contract with the state for protection and other benefits. Simplican argues that Locke doesn’t account for intellectual disability in his understanding of these perfect sovereign individuals, and especially doesn’t account for the role that power plays in a relation between the state and its citizens.

Both Marx and Hegel were at odds with Locke in this matter. Neither of them portrayed individuals becoming empowered through their individual thoughts or efforts, but instead collectively. 

While Hegel did devote the chapters “consciousness” and “self-consciousness” to exploring the development of an individual mind he later showed that every individual is but a moment within spirit, a collective consciousness, which is undergoing self-development and self-realisation. Marx was just as focused on collective understandings of freedom, rather than individual ones, as he said:

A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, 1859

“It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness.”

5. Conclusion

The main point of this essay was a simple one: to show that Philosophy Tube’s video about Hegel wasn’t very good. It is unclear to me whether she tried to make a video about Hegel and ended up being led towards politics, or whether she wanted to make a video about politics and used Hegel to get to her goal. I’m not sure which would be worse. The end result was a poor understanding of an over-discussed passage of Hegel’s, taken out of its context and applied to vague ideas about power.

A tragedy within this video is that in missing Hegel’s actual thought, she also missed how his philosophy does in fact have valid points to make about politics and identity. If she wanted to talk about the connection between transgenderism and Hegel she could have pointed to his unity of object and subject in social, spiritual, truth. Where many understand gender as purely objective and tied to sex, like the gender-critical movement, and others understand gender as purely subjective and merely a matter of self-expression, a unity of the two exists. Hegel certainly would have been transphobic, being a conservative in Europe from 200 years ago, but he wouldn’t have accepted the logic that “gender isn’t real because it is a social construct”, that it is a social construct is precisely why it is real.

More sorely missing is the actual political message of Hegel’s Phenomenology: that the truth of humanity can only be brought about by the cooperative action of all of mankind, and only as the result of history. In its place: “Nazis are bad,” “slavery is wrong,” and other groundbreaking insights. What could have been an opportunity to explore how Hegel’s dialectic illuminates the complexities of identity, recognition, and freedom becomes a shallow performance of radicalism. The tragedy isn’t just that Hegel was misunderstood; it’s that an opportunity to genuinely deepen public understanding—of both politics and philosophy— was missed—and, fittingly, in a way that Hegel would have found entirely predictable. By plucking a single metaphor from its dialectical setting and pressing it into service for a vague political aesthetic, Philosophy Tube has done precisely what Hegel warns against in his Preface: mistaking the fragments for the whole, and the end result for the actual truth. “The naked result,” Hegel writes, “is the corpse of the system which has left its guiding tendency behind it.” What’s left is not a living idea, but a shell dressed in the language of radicalism.

Phenomenology of Spirit

§3 — For the real subject-matter is not exhausted in its purpose, but in working the matter out; nor is the mere result attained the concrete whole itself, but the result along with the process of arriving at it. The purpose of itself is a lifeless universal, just as the general drift is a mere activity in a certain direction, which is still without its concrete realisation; and the naked result is the corpse of the system which has left its guiding tendency behind it.

“The bud disappears when the blossom breaks through,” Hegel reminds us, not because the bud was false, but because truth is the whole—and the whole is only actual through its development. By mistaking a metaphor for a system and recognition for mere affirmation, the video halts the dialectic before it begins. It doesn’t fail because it misreads Hegel; it fails because it never tries to read him at all.

Phenomenology of Spirit

§2 — The bud disappears when the blossom breaks through, and we might say that the former is refuted by the latter; in the same way when the fruit comes, the blossom may be explained to be a false form of the plant’s existence, for the fruit appears as its true nature in place of the blossom. These stages are not merely differentiated; they supplant one another as being incompatible with one another. But the ceaseless activity of their own inherent nature makes them at the same time moments of an organic unity, where they not merely do not contradict one another, but where one is as necessary as the other; and this equal necessity of all moments constitutes alone and thereby the life of the whole.