In this talk, associate teaching professor Josh Wretzel outlines plans for his current project, a reinterpretation of Hegel’s Jena Phenomenology as a moral psychology. He identifies three varieties of moral personality present in Hegel’s text, culminating in that of absolute knowing.  Along the way, Wretzel treats the cool jazz of Miles Davis as the aesthetic counterpart, not only to Hegel’s absolute knowing, but to philosophical thought generally.  For as he shall argue, both philosophy and cool jazz represent a capacity to break free from the frenzy and anxiety of one’s age, or to consider things from a standpoint of calm contemplation.  This reaches a particular peak, Wretzel argues, in Hegel’s attempt to show how the absolute knower “finds [their] feet in absolute disruption” and bears the “death” of a form of spirit “calmly.”