Ep. 356: Feuerbach Against Theology (Part Two)

0:07 Wes: You.

0:08 Mark: This is a Partially Examined Life, episode 356, part 2. We've been talking about Ludwig Feuerbach's Principles of the Philosophy of the Future from 1843. I think that's probably all we're gonna focus on. We technically had read Introduction of the Essence of Christianity from 1841 as well, but we probably said most of what we're gonna say about that. But this essay, Philosophy of the Future, wow, there's a lot to it. It goes through 65 sort of points. So it sort of seemed like, oh, are these going to be aphorisms? But some of them go on for several pages. It's not quite. Yeah, so aphoristic. But, you know, it has something in common. It's sort of like you're reading Nietzsche a little bit.

0:49 Wes: Well, I think there's an overall structure and I'm. Why don't I just give that very quick.

0:54 Mark: Oh, yeah, yeah, sorry. It's not. It's not like Nietzsche aphorisms in terms of. Here's a bunch of. It's more like, you know, the Zarathustra aphorisms where he's telling a story and. Anyway, but yeah, please go ahead.

1:05 Wes: Yeah. So sections one through 13. He's going to start off by giving some preliminary thoughts on theism, what he's going to call theism, or the old theology versus the speculative philosophy, by which he means Hegel. I think we should keep that in mind. The speculative philosophy is. It's called speculative as opposed to critical philosophy of Kant. Right. Speculative philosophy gives us back access to metaphysics and things in themselves and God. So I think it's a safe bet to say he's talking about Hegel when he's talking about that sections 14 to 22, he will give that kind of historical account of how theism necessarily devolves into pantheism, materialism, but then into ultimately into idealism.

And that will lead him into sections 23 to 30, which are a critique of Hegel for not doing a good job at giving us a mind independent reality. And then he's going to come to save the day in the final sections 31 through 65 with the quote, unquote, new philosophy, where we can recapture mind independent reality if we return to being good old practical materialists or if we embrace the sensuous as the ground for objectivity. And there's a fair helping of what I would call intersubjectivity in there as. As well. Objectivity implies intersubjectivity.

But yeah, that's my. My basic outline. Should we start with section one? Sure.

2:38 Mark: Seth, start us off.

2:39 Seth: Okay. The religious or practical form of this humanization was Protestantism. The God who is man, that is to say, the human God, Christ. This and only this is the God of Protestantism. Unlike Catholicism, Protestantism is no longer concerned with what God is in himself, but only with what he is for man. Hence, it knows no speculative or contemplative tendency like Catholicism. It has ceased to be theology. It is essentially Christology that is religious anthropology.

3:13 Mark: So Protestantism seems like the spirit of Protestantism is actually what he's shooting for on his description, on his very idiosyncratic description.

3:20 Wes: Description.

3:20 Mark: If it's all about me and my relationship to God, you know, it's. The Godhead is imminent in all of us and, you know, right before us. And you don't need the mediation of a scripture or the mediation of priests telling you anything, or it is a human function.

3:33 Seth: Yeah. Well, it also brings in that he's not really talking about religion, as Dylan pointed out in the first, the last episode. He's talking about theology, and specifically speculative theology about the nature of God. That's really what's at issue here. And he's also signaling, right, that something that concerns human beings or man is on the right track in some way, shape or Form.

4:02 Wes: So these first five sections, he's going to basically talk about this Protestant non speculative strain, right? Unlike Catholicism, it's non specific speculative in its, in its practical form. But he'll go on to say in section three that it leaves, while negates God in practice. Protestantism leaves him intact in theory, leaves him theoretically intact. And what he means there, he associates Protestantism with Kant. And basically what happens is, right, as a practical matter, we go to church and we worship God and we say we're good Christians, but as good Lutheran Christians and Kantians in that time in Germany, we think, well, we can't know God.

We don't know he's a noumena. He's not an object of experience. We only have a relation of faith to him. We only have a relation of revelation. And that's the first step. And there's a sense in which Hegel tries to overcome that, but he does that by basically assimilating God into the rational. And so I think, right, so you kind of understand the tension here that we go from a Kantian position of not knowing God but believing in God to Hegel trying to kind of save the day by giving us access to God in himself, but only insofar as he's a rational being.

And so that might seem, okay, great, we got God back. Well, what did we get back? We only got back this like super rational, abstract creature. That's the upshot of the first five sections.

5:41 Dylan: Yeah, 4 and 5 are, yeah, Hegel's the answer or the response.

5:46 Wes: And then he goes, you know, with section six and on he's gonna. Well, section six will get into this projection idea of God's. Right, right. That's very prominent in the other essay that we read. So God's qualities. So it's a kind of slice of that because it's. In this case, God's qualities are projections specifically of rationality and reason. That's what the speculative philosophy does to us. So he'll go through this list of different qualities, right? Determinations, properties that are associated with God. He's infinite, he's necessary, he's unconditional, immutable, independent, autonomous. And he'll show us, you know, you think you're talking about God, you're really just talking about reason and rationality. And he'll go through each one and show us these are just qualities of reason that are being projected onto a deity, onto a divinity.

6:40 Mark: I have a Note on page 179 in section 6 here. That in which a being finds satisfaction is nothing but the being in which it encounters himself as its own object. That this is like. If there was one sentence that sort of encapsulates this is what Feuerbach is about for me, that would be it.

7:01 Seth: Yeah, I have the same page, Mark. Reason. Is that the one you just.

7:05 Mark: Yep.

7:06 Seth: Yeah.

7:07 Wes: Yeah. So if we're using reason to find God, then naturally we're going to find something very rational, because that's what's gratifying to reason. So when we say God is necessary, we're really just describing an aspect of reason, right? Necessity. It's a logical relation. One thing flows necessarily from the other. In theology, necessity is supposed to be. Well, God is necessary. So there are different ways of thinking about necessity. There's the cosmological argument. He goes into both the cosmological and the ontological. God is necessary for the creation of the world.

And there are reasons why making him this an intelligent being, Right. As opposed to just, you know, the Big Bang or something like that is supposed to be helpful, supposed to help solve this infinite regress problem. With the ontological argument, God necessarily exists just because the idea of him, right. St. Anselm's ontological argument, the idea of him, you can infer from the very idea. We can infer from very. His very essence that he must exist. So I think, again, the overall point here is that these theological conceptions of necessity are really just about logical necessity.

Reason is looking at itself in the mirror and painting God with the brush of necessity, because necessity is a property

8:37 Mark: of the rational. And that whole God is love thing that I referred to, which is explicitly the conclusion of the Essence of Christianity book. There's a very euthyphro flavor to that, that you don't want to have your God be an arbitrary thing who just. Who dictates morals. You want God to follow morals, which means you want it to be part of God's essence. So here, if you're Spinoza, if you're. Various ways that definitely, if you're Hegel, God has to just be reason, or at least reason has to be part of God. It can't just be. There's some. There's. There's this God who's a personality, and then there's this reason, and God chooses to follow reason. God doesn't have to follow. It has to be sort of right baked into. So, yes, this. So this. This identification of God with reason seems to follow, you know, when you're trying to make religion make sense.

9:34 Dylan: So in response to a question, the Euthyphro question, Is, are things good because God says they're good?

9:43 Mark: Right.

9:43 Dylan: Or does God. Or are things. Does God only do good things or

9:48 Mark: does God do them because they are good?

9:50 Dylan: Because they're good? Yes.

9:51 Mark: Right, so. And Plato says obviously the latter. And. But then that's not to diminish God. It's not saying, oh, God sees, there's a law up there, I must follow it. It's just, no, this has to be baked into the essence of God. And you could say the same for reason or, you know, anything else you think is going to be constitutive.

10:07 Wes: Yeah, I mean, I mean, we should keep in mind here, right, that this is a depiction of God that he is ultimately objecting to. This is speculative philosophies, God, the irrational God.

10:18 Dylan: Is he objecting to it or is he diminishing or just pointing out that this is what theology is and God is.

10:27 Wes: So as to this is what God is. For Hegel was what he's describing, speculative philosophy, specifically Hegel. So I think traditional, the old philosophy or traditional theologies is a bit different. It is there, right, in like Anselm and St. Augustine. But they're also talking about qualities like kindness and other very personal attributes.

10:50 Dylan: I see what you're saying, but what

10:51 Wes: he's really trying to nail down here is this like hyper rationalistic picture of God. So for instance, in seven, you can see him pointing this contrast. He's where theism treats God like a sensuous particular, right? Like he's an individual, he's an old man with a beard in the sky. He can be kind, he can be. Speculative philosophy treats him as subject, as thinking being, in a way, it's very Aristotelian, right. He's like thought, thinking himself. And really, what, again, this is like we are just taking ourselves as cogitos, as thinking beings and projecting that in this particular Hegelian depiction of God. Right.

11:32 Seth: I don't think this is as explicit in the text as I remember, but in God as an object in theism is not conceived of originally through a lens of reason. The move that speculative philosophy does, right, Is it? We have this notion, theism has this notion of God as good and powerful and all these sorts of things. It's only when you start to think that it's the God that imposes order on the world and makes judgments, right. And does these sorts of things. And so there's a way that human beings can connect with godliness through reason, as opposed through strictly through faith, that you have the move to speculative philosophy.

And that's the move where God ceases to be the object but becomes subjectivity. Because God's subjectivity in ordering and maintaining and creating and doing whatever with the world is something we share through reason. And then ultimately we're going to get away from the whole concept of God and it'll just be reason by itself. Is that right?

12:48 Wes: Yeah, I think 181 is good, is in section 7 is the. Is a good place to find this contrast. So the theist represents to himself God as a personal being existing outside reason and man as a subject. He thinks God as an object. He conceives of God as a being that is as an intelligence, knowledgeable, non sensuous being with regard to his idea of it. But a sensuous being with respect to its, its actual existence or truth. For the essential characteristic of an objective existence, that is of an existence outside of thought or perception, is sensuousness.

Okay, so what does that mean? It means that when we want to think of things as existing, we have to think of them as a, individuals, as particulars. They can't just be big, abstract, all encompassing, compassing, conceptual things. And we tend to think of them as visible or at least on that analogy. Right. So even theologians will say, okay, yes, you know, we, we do have to describe God in these ways. And it does sound an awful lot like we're describing him as a person in the sky who's visible. And. But that's not what we mean. That's just because of our limited cognitive faculties.

So it's all metaphor, it's all just analogy. This is something the picture that Feuerbach is ultimately going to object to. But here, right, It's a perfectly natural thing to do if you think that God exists as an external reality. Because what do we know of external reality except material things? So why wouldn't we make him analogous to that? And then you get. So that's the standpoint of theism of old theology takes that standpoint. It's kind of mixed up with the sensuous still. And then you get to the speculative philosophy tries to purify that right, for obvious reasons, because it is all messed up and mixed up.

You can come up with all kinds of objections to that way of looking at God. So speculative philosophy, Hegel, thanks, God quote from the standpoint of thought. It identifies the objective conceived being with subjective thinking being. So instead of thinking of God as this particular person, in a way, you just say, okay, remember Kantian categories or the, the mind in general, the structure of the mind. God is just the structure of the mind, which conveniently also turns out to be the structure of the world.

15:09 Mark: The structure of mind in the abstract. Yeah, yeah. It's interesting. He doesn't seem to have the basic insight of intentionality. He has that with regard to sense experience, that you have to sense something that is transcendent, the mind independent reality, as you keep saying. But even thought itself, at least at this point, right. Just the end of section 6 there he contrasts breathing and eating and seeing like all those things a being could never do in complete isolation. But thinking is the thinking being is referred only to itself. And this is a very classical idea, right.

In Aristotle, it must. God is thought, thinking itself, because you don't need. You can have the object and the subject be one in the same. But fundamentally, I mean, that's, I think the insight of phenomenology is that even thinking needs to refer to something that is external in some way. Right. It has an object. Thinking perhaps is, you know, if you're an empiricist, you would even say it's only based on perception. You could not have a thinking being without first having a sensuous being interacting with things. And then you can abstract from that and just think of their representations or something.

I think Feuerbach would ultimately agree with that. But here at least, it seems like

16:28 Wes: what he's saying specifically here is that if you want. Right. We want God to be independent and autonomous, which means outside of the causal chain, he has to be self causing. He can't have been caused by something else. And what, what do we know? Sensuous beings, they need something outside of them in order to exist. They have to be caused. They're part of the causal, you know, fabric. They're always produced by something else. So if you want a self producing being, get rid of sensuousness. And, and that's again, this is on in six. This is on the, on the track of the benefits of making God out to be just pure rationality or pure mind.

We get out of various theological problems that way or we explain. So in other words, God can create the world through thought without being a physical, efficient cause of the world. That's a very important role for him. And that's why we want him to be this intelligence. But we want him to be in mind. We want him to be a demiurge, to be more like an artist, a craftsman than like an animal giving birth to. A callback to Aristotle's metaphysics. We need creation out of mind.

17:41 Dylan: Yeah. And so that makes Hegel the Omega to Aristotle's Alpha in that respect.

17:47 Wes: Yep.

17:48 Mark: Yeah. Going back to section seven, if once you've identified God and reason, the idea like, does God exist? That doesn't even make sense. Right. You don't ask, does reason exist? And I think this is going to be fundamentally like, if he comes out with any theism left in him, it is because. Right. If God is just the correlate or one in the same with my own passion, my own love, like, you can't say, oh, does that really exist? Like, well, I mean, you could ask, does that exist in you? Are you devoid of love? Or so the same thing. If God is reason, the question doesn't even make sense.

18:23 Dylan: Yeah, but wouldn't Feuerbach point to those kinds of things as like, even the thought thinking itself, that recursion that Aristotle comes to, he would say, well, look, you just made a mistake. You've mistaken the ability of thinking to, you know, the requirement that reason and our thinking has to have an object as inherently recursive as a solution to the subject object distinction. When that's not true, it's just in that activity of the thought, quote, unquote, thinking itself. It's acting on its own thinking as if it's an object, which is a different conclusion than it being a recursive relationship of it thinking its own thing.

And so he reaches back in page 181 and, you know, plucks out of theism that subject object distinction and says, you have to have this. The subject, you know, what a being is can be known only through its object. The object to which a being is necessarily related is nothing but its own manifest being. And this is the path that's going to take him to. Human beings create God, and our understanding of God is a reflection of us as human beings.

19:37 Mark: So what does this mean to west, your ultimate conclusion that he's looking for a mind independent reality? Because no, he's saying here, this is not just from the point of view of Hegel. I think this is his own view.

19:50 Dylan: Yes.

19:51 Mark: What Dylan just quoted. And it's a very weird view that ultimately our own object is identical in some sense. Right. He's some kind of.

20:01 Wes: He says with this particular object, so it's with God in particular. Quote, the distinction between what the object is in itself and what it is for man dissolves itself with sense perception. It's different with sense perception. Sense objects, as he says here, are not. Don't work in the same way. They aren't just what they are for us. They are what they are in Themselves separately.

20:27 Dylan: Yeah, but this paragraph is weird because right after what I quoted, he goes on to talking about the objects of different other animals. The object of the herbivorous animals is the plant is all precisely through their object that these are distinguished from other animals, the carnivorous ones.

20:45 Wes: And he goes on, yeah, let's unpack that.

20:48 Dylan: Yeah, well, okay. So let me just read this section and then we can unpack it, because it is a little weird. Thus, the object of the herbivorous animal is the plant. It is, however, precisely through their object that these are distinguished from other animals, the carnivorous ones. Similarly, the object of the eye is light and not sound or smell. And it is through this object that the eye reveals its essence to us. It therefore comes down to the same thing, whether someone cannot see or has no eyes. That is also why we name things in life with respect to their objects.

The eye is the light organ. He who cultivates land is the land cultivator, peasant, someone else, the object of whose activity is hunting is a hunter. He who catches fish is a fisher and so forth. Now, if God is an object of man, and he is indeed that necessarily and essentially, the essence of this object expresses nothing but man's own essence.

21:44 Mark: So he's.

21:45 Wes: I want to set the frame for this, too. He starts this section out by saying he wants to explain why the transition from theism to speculative philosophy has an inner necessity to it, right? That goes with Hegel there. And it's going to be because of our rational natures. There's going to be this pull towards painting God as a rational creature because we are very much that way, our cells. So he goes. He gets basic here, and he wants to get into this theory that he has that if you want to know about the particular beings, you should look at the objects that they take. Okay, so what does that mean? Herbivores take plants as their objects. So that's like an eating.

22:29 Mark: So that means they are plants, eyes,

22:31 Wes: light, land, you know, farmers, land hunters, hunting, fishermen, fish. It's kind of weird, right? These are very scattered examples and different sorts of relations. But I think we can understand this in terms of functional orientation, right? Especially in the case of an eye. If you. You can't really know what an eye is unless you understand its relationship to light, which is just another way of saying you have to understand its telos, you have to understand its functional orientation. Herbivores are biologically what they are. They're constructed in a certain way, right, through evolution to have certain properties and certain features just by virtue of their relationship to plants, to enable them to eat plants, to.

That's part of their environment and that's. That's part of how they're designed. So we are. You know, I think what he's pointing to is our tendency to have rational objects. Right. In a way, that's our teleology. And it says a lot about us. It says a lot about our essence. And then that essence is what is going to be projected onto God. So if it were an herbivore creating a God, I don't know, would God look like a plant or. Oh, for sure, for sure.

23:50 Mark: I think he's.

23:51 Wes: Well, we know with birds. He'll talk about birds in some other part. But, you know, God would have wings, definitely. This is a little bit more complicated, but. Yeah, but the idea is that, right. The essence, in a way, we're trying to create a mirror with God. We want. This particular divine object that we're going to take is going to express man's inner essence. It's going to be a way of looking at ourselves in the mirror, looking at an idealized version of ourselves in the mirror.

24:21 Mark: I just think sometimes he's a little too glib about this. I mean, like, can only encounter, like in some ways that we can't. If something were just had nothing in common with us, we could not actually sense it or think about it at all. So when I encounter another human being, like, I'm really, you know, getting. I'm using that as a mirror and experiencing my species being in my humanity. When I encounter something else sensual. I'm not saying, you know, I'm all about the Oreos. I'm not saying I'm an Oreo, but I'm still using the sensuality and the biology and the eating connection.

And so something like this to say something about myself. But just the way he often seems to talk is sort of. I want to say you are what you eat, but you know, you are. You are your object. Which would make it follow that the herbivorous animal is a plant, which clearly is not the case. But in other cases, you know, your God well, that just shows that, you know, you worship, you create this divinity that just shows the divinity in you. You are taking infinity of your object. That shows that you are in yourself, infinite. He says stuff exactly like that to posit these things about ourselves that we might have thought were only in God.

That I just. It sounds very Emersonian.

25:37 Wes: It's in there in our essence. Let's be clear.

25:40 Mark: Sure.

25:40 Wes: He wants to draw this distinction between individual and essence. So the perfected quality. Right. I'm not necessarily. I don't necessarily as an individual have all these qualities, but it's in the human essence, at least in its most

25:52 Mark: perfect form, which, which involves sociality. Right. Because it's not that I can do everything, but all of us together, you know, we.

25:59 Wes: Right, right. That becomes a thing too. But yeah, you know, and this is important in the other essay, the introduction to the Essence of Christianity. He wants to be very careful about his definition of self consciousness or consciousness in the strict sense. It is not just an individual being conscious of, oh, hey, I'm Wes, I'm conscious of Wes. That's not what self consciousness is. Self consciousness is me conscious of myself qua human, conscious of my human essence. And so God is ultimately just the ultimate vehicle of self consciousness. We seek out this divine figure mirror because he is the. The ultimate way to accomplish that task of self consciousness. We don't just do it by ourselves being self aware, so to speak.

26:49 Dylan: Am I right? I feel like the examples that he gives inevitably are analogical in a way that he doesn't intend the case with God and human beings to be that. He does mean that God is the object of man. The expression of this, the essence of this object expresses nothing but man's own essence. I think he does mean that. But the others seem like they've got to be analogical as a way to illustrate this point that, you know, an herbivorous animal's object is a plant. Sure. It seems like you're going to have to admit that, like the character of its essence, but it's not determinative of it. There's all kinds of other things.

27:36 Wes: There's more to an herbivore than what it is.

27:38 Dylan: Yes, yes.

27:39 Seth: Yeah.

27:39 Dylan: I mean, like just to say that reproduction and generation.

27:41 Wes: Right.

27:41 Dylan: I mean, I don't know. Right. There's all kinds of things that are true about that.

27:45 Wes: Right. It falls into lots of different categories and you could take, you know, each of those, the essence of any different classification you liked and you could say, oh, that's its essence. Yeah, that's a problem.

27:56 Dylan: But I don't think he intends that with the conclusion that he has.

28:00 Seth: No, I think you could rephrase in some sense. If you want to understand what a thing is, look at what it does. It eats plants. Okay, well, here's something. It's. It's not a predator, right. It's. It's something. It has a different essence than something that doesn't eat plants, that eats other animals or Eats.

28:22 Wes: You're about to say character. I think character is a good way

28:24 Seth: to frame it, maybe. Well, because it's sounding very.

28:29 Wes: Dispositions to natural dispositions to do this, that or the other.

28:33 Seth: Aristotelian. Mm.

28:35 Dylan: Oh, it is very Aristotelian for sure.

28:37 Mark: So I like in these examples that some of them are activities.

28:40 Wes: Right.

28:41 Mark: Who cultivates land is a land cultivator. It should be more like. As opposed to the object, like the plant, you know, the fish. You're a fisher because that would make you a fish or whatever if you. But so we should be the. The godders. It's not that God is our object, it's that we are godding.

29:00 Dylan: Well, they're also powers. Right. The example with the eye is. Has to do with powers as opposed to. I guess that's related to activities. But yeah.

29:10 Mark: And I think why he's an atheist is because his notion of God, even though I think he wants to keep a notion of God, but it's God as self. Admittedly imminent, that God's esse is percipi. In other words. And he says in various places like, well, if you believe in a God, then for you God exists. It sounds very relativistic for somebody that.

29:33 Wes: I don't have the same impression of him that he. I think he's just a straight up atheist. But. And that this is all deflationary. I could be wrong.

29:42 Dylan: Yeah.

29:42 Wes: All right.

29:42 Mark: Well, maybe this is just soaking through. Soaking through all this of the essence of Christianity. I have a different impression.

29:49 Wes: Yeah, but it's just a. I haven't read enough. Well, I mean, I've read some secondary literature which I think casts him as an atheist in my. But you know, I think. I guess he doesn't. It is quite puzzling because he does talk, you know, and I think. I think even in later life, like he. He devoted most of his time to theology. He just spent years and years and years writing theological treatises. So I think, I guess. Mark, you're on. Is something which is really. He's. He. He wants to believe or something like that. He wants God in some. In some form or. Or another.

30:20 Mark: It's like. Does your imaginary friend exist? Well, do you have an imaginary friend? I do. Well then, yes.

30:26 Wes: He exists in your mind in section eight. He. He'll make this contrast again between ordinary theology or theism and speculative philosophy. And this is an interesting irony because theism will make God more like a sensuous particular. Right. He's someone you can imagine, but he's also kind of fuzzy and remote and we tell ourselves, well, he's not really like that. So there's a sense in which he's inaccessible, strangely enough. But the speculative philosophy, even though it makes him abstract, right. And there's no flesh on the bones, so to speak, he's not satisfyingly like a sensuous particular, we're told, oh, you know, don't think of God as the old man in the sky. He's, you know. And then Hegel's case, he's just the concept or whatever. But the advantage of the speculative philosophy is that it makes God encounterable in thought as a rational entity. So that's an interesting little.

31:27 Dylan: You don't have to climb.

31:28 Wes: I already get that in section eight. Yeah, Right. There you go. Just read a lot of books. It's probably be easier to climb up a mountain, actually. Probably with your firstborn.

31:40 Dylan: Yes.

31:40 Mark: Yeah. Kierkegaard definitely came through here.

31:44 Wes: Oh, yeah.

31:44 Mark: You know, as something that could be. It seemed a weird variation of Hegel when Hegel is like, you have to meet another person and they help determine your sense of self. It's like, well, no, I could just use God.

31:56 Dylan: But.

31:56 Mark: But God's not real.

31:58 Wes: Right.

31:58 Mark: So how could you use God? You know, and if God is real, you're definitely not talking to him in the. He's not. You're not sensuously encountering God. Right. So how could God determine yourself? Well, I mean, first of all, I think he has a very sort of Buber Levinas kind of thing. Like, ultimately we do encounter God in the other person. Like, this is sort of what sanctifies our relationship. You know, our species being in our love and our compassion is that. That is the experience of God is through another person. You would never. Nobody would just come up with the idea of God completely on their own.

But once you kind of. This ball is rolling. Yes. You can use that sort of imagery to Partially, of course, again through social means, since it's not your personal God. Its esse is not percipi by you. Its esse, its essence, is as if perceived by the believing community or the philosophical point of view or whatever, but you're somehow able to actually gain knowledge of yourself through this thing that. So it's less puzzling for me than it was when Kierkegaard said it. All right, so we're up to what.

33:03 Wes: So 9, 10. So 9 and 10, if you want to. Yeah.

33:06 Mark: Yep.

33:07 Wes: Is where we. So he's going to accuse speculative philosophy of making God's predicates, God's properties, pure, passionless Spirit, there's no matter sensuousness there, it's just absolute thought. And he's going to blame that on a trend that begins in early modern philosophy and Descartes and Leibniz, where God is starting to be thought of as a non material substance on analogy to the thinking substance. Right. Which has been marked off from and contrasted from material substance. And then by the time we get to Hegel, it's pure intellect.

33:49 Seth: Yeah, there's a. The beginning of Cartesian philosophy, namely the abstraction from sensuousness and matter, is also the beginning of modern speculative philosophy. But Descartes and Leibniz regarded this abstraction only as a subjective condition for cognizing the non material being of God. They conceived the non materiality of God as an objective quality independent of abstraction and thought. Theirs was still the standpoint of theism, that is to say, they considered the non material being as the object and not as the subject. That is the active principle or the real essence of philosophy.

34:24 Dylan: Clockwork God.

34:26 Seth: Clockwork God. You know, non materiality as a predicate really is what they're saying in that.

34:32 Wes: Well, also, you know, this is kind of an allusion to Hegel's right famous statement in the introduction of the Phenomenology, where the point is to conceive of God, conceive of substance as subject, pivoting off of a Spinozan conception of God, where God is like this big lump of substance and we are all attributes or mind and extension or attributes of that big lump. And then we are modes on top of that, like we're all barnacles riding on top of God. That particular God, the Spinozan God. Even though Spinoza might talk about him as an intelligent being, he's also equated with nature.

It's pantheistic. It's like he's a big lump of matter and everything is a property of that big lump of matter. And so I think, even though I think he's thinking here, that there's something similar going on with Descartes and Leibniz. It's not that they don't think of God as an intelligent being, but that intelligence is not fully fleshed out. He's more like a big lump of substance. And Hegel's going to come along and really inject the subject into that substance and say, you know, by saying he is our own ego, he is our own mind writ large. It's not just that there's this divine intelligent entity who's similar to us in certain ways, our minds in some sense Are his mind.

The world is his mind.

35:58 Seth: Yeah.

35:59 Mark: So are Berkeley and Malebranche sort of the halfway points getting to that view? That for Berkeley, it's God as perceiver, is literally what, you know, make creates the mind, independent reality. And Malebranche. I don't know if it's the perceiving, but certainly the acting, that it's not just a clockwork God, it's God who is at every second getting in there and using his activity to make things happen. I'm not sure if we're all the way to God being a subject there, but God is certainly quite involved.

36:29 Dylan: Well, but involved in a different way than.

36:31 Wes: Well, no.

36:31 Dylan: Yeah.

36:32 Wes: I mean, with Malebranche.

36:33 Dylan: Yeah.

36:34 Wes: We're intuiting space and time in God. Right. Instead of having the intuition of space and time as forms of our own mind, they are part of God. That's the way he describes it. Kant will say, okay, let's take that out of God, put it into the mind. Hegel's actually, let's take it back out of the mind, put it into God. Because that's where we want things in themselves to be. We want reality. Of course. Yeah, He's. Now that's going to be the object of this criticism.

36:59 Dylan: Wes, you've just really made me want to hear the hymn that Spinoza would write about the lump that we are nodes of. You know, I couldn't help but hear like kind of Catholic priest, but a Spinozan spinning out. Oh, the lump we are.

37:21 Wes: Anyway, yeah. For some reason, I always just think of Spinozan God as this big lump of clay and that everything is imprinted in. Or like a whale with barnacles on it, but not a very flattering way of looking at it. So I think the idea here is that Hegelian absolute idealism and the speculative philosophy sort of. It completes the trend of treating God as a subject, as a rational subject, and therefore putting kind of projecting man's intellect and essence, rational essence, into God.

37:56 Dylan: Yeah.

37:56 Wes: The difference is, you know, he. He'll end on. The difference is that we, unlike God, Right. God can have an intellectual intuition of everything. We are stuck with, quote, unquote, dark perceptions. Our perception of the world is mediated by the material. And Descartes and Leibniz have to account for that.

38:13 Mark: So how much are we really going to spend. Do we really want to get into the specific critique in the following sections of Hegel? Can we sum it up? Rather than. These were just. They just. They just get worse and worse as they go. More and more difficult to Me?

38:32 Seth: Yeah.

38:32 Wes: I mean, I see that the critique of Hegel is not really fully starting until 23, but.

38:38 Mark: Okay.

38:39 Wes: But I have summaries for everything, so we can always skip over anything. And I can try to summarize. So we're kind of at sections 11 and 12 now, which is the beginning of that. So in, you know, I think one of the problems. Right. So he is this does. This will become part of his critique of Hegel. But it. It's a basis for it, which is that. Well, in section 11, he wants to point us to this very interesting way in which speculative philosophy turns creation into something different. So whereas in traditional theology, theism, God's creation is of this, you know, personal divinity creating a material world, in speculative philosophy, and I've already conceptual creation, it's more like the particulars are just logically, they're moments of the concept and they flow out of the concept.

So why. Why did God create matter? Well, that's just sort of necessarily flowed out of God's mind. And you can think of this in terms of. And this is the explanation he tries to give here. You know, if God is like a demiurge, if he's like an artisan, and he has a plan in his mind for the world, okay, what is the world going to be that I'm going to create? Those thoughts are part of his being. Right. And he is the ultimate being, in a sense. We can think of those. You know, we can ultimately get to the point where we have trouble distinguishing the designs and the plans from creation itself.

So aren't we just all in God's mind, isn't the moment of thinking the moment of creation isn't the having of it for a divine being, Isn't the having of the concept the same thing as the thing existing? I think that's the track he's on here.

40:31 Dylan: So he's articulating the story of speculative philosophy in order to get us to the point where it's failing to do the work that it intends to do. And on the one hand, you have it aligning with reason. So through that you have the sort of saying, well, it's really doing the following sorts of things. In his sort of atheistic interpretation, it's functioning as reason, and it is also simultaneously losing the object of that's required. And then there'll be the. That thread ends up being sort of, I guess, the ultimate criticism that you can't. You can't do the work. The work of speculative philosophy can't accomplish its goal because it is absent the connection with the real world, the world outside of ourselves. And so it's sort of the fatal. The fatal mistake.

41:34 Wes: He doesn't deliver that critique yet. So no, like in these first 13 sections, it's just a very kind of straight up. Let's do a comparison and contrast of ordinary theology versus speculative philosophy. And then sections 14 to 22, let's show how ordinary theology kind of necessarily devolves into historically over time, into idealism, into speculative philosophy. We'll just give this genealogical account and then he'll really get sharply into the critique starting in section 23. But yeah, that's exactly what you've just been doing saying Dylan, which is that once we desaturate everything of the empirical and the particular and the concrete, once we. We turn God into this purely rational being and then make him the principle of an independent reality, we. We end up with something that just doesn't work. It doesn't do the job it's supposed to be doing well.

42:31 Dylan: And maybe that's like we're getting close to what than the second episode is about. Right. We. Is it. Do we start with Hegel, Hegel's critique or.

42:44 Wes: Yeah, I mean we could skip section. We could kind of jump to section 23 and start on that critique of Hegel and then. Yeah, I mean we. We should spend a half an hour on that, I think the new philosophy. Yeah, like his positive vision should. Yeah, we should spend most of the time on. On sections 31 to 65 than the quote unquote new philosophy.

43:05 Dylan: But if we. But if we spent 20 minutes or whatever it was on that critique of Hegel, that would set. Recapitulate the problem that we've been going through for the whole book, but also set the stage for the positive philosophy.

43:18 Wes: Yeah.

43:20 Mark: And supposedly, I mean you, Wes, you. You were saying as we were prepping for this, like, oh, I didn't understand Marx's rejection of Hegel.

43:29 Dylan: Oh, that's right. That's why we're reading this is because of Marx.

43:37 Wes: Independent life of its own. It's no longer about Marx. But.

43:40 Mark: Yeah, right. As a preliminary judgment here, do you guys feel like I kind of went back and forth between this is a great lost genius who really like understands Hegel and can, you know, is prefiguring phenomenology and Heidegger and all this stuff and his view of religion is. Seems pretty unique to me to just thinking like what a blowhard. I actually like Marx's strategy of just saying the hell. Like I just feel like Marx, of course I'm saying this out of kind of an ignorance of the Marx corpus. So I'm sorry, but that just was not a very careful reader of Hegel.

Right. That he kind of knew a lot of people were talking about Hegel and so historical determinism and the evolution. Evolution of things. And Marx ran with stuff like that, but kind of. He was like, you know, kind of like Nietzsche read Hegel. Like, he was aware, but he didn't spend a crapload of time immersed in the logic and the phenomenology, whereas this guy did. So does that make him a better philosopher, or does it make him much less.

44:43 Wes: I thought Marx did. I thought Marx specifically went to university to immerse himself in German idealism. And then I think you're right, but I'm relying on my fuzzy knowledge here of the. But, yeah.

44:58 Mark: In what I know of him, I'm not seeing. Right, Okay, I should retract all that. We're just not reading the rest by Marx.

45:05 Wes: You might be right, but I. Yeah,

45:07 Dylan: well, I guess I'm not gigantically, deeply familiar with Marx's corpus, but having out of everything from the German ideology, the manuscripts and the bits of, I don't know, the several hundred pages of the. Whatever, 1500 pages of the capital that I've read. It's not a dissection of Hegel. Right. You could have a different criticism of this than criticism of Marx. But Feuerbach is really doing a genealogy, intellectual history. Then he's going to get to the end of it saying, and, well, he didn't quite get it right. This is what you need to do kind of thing, which is very different than what Marx is doing.

45:43 Wes: Although the end is kind of like. I was thinking, this is like a manifesto at the end, his new philosophy. This is like he wants. He thinks he's starting a revolution. And I think I feel exactly the same way as you do, Mark. This alternating between he's brilliant and he's bloviating. So I do think he's brilliant. The reason why I wanted to spend two recordings on him is I just felt like I'm learning so much, and part of it is just being kind of dipped into a conversation, you know, instead of reading a commentary on the phenomenology or something.

And it's like I'm being dipped into the conversation at the time. Like, if people were tweeting back and forth at each other about Hegel and it were like, controversial and like, I'm suddenly part of a conversation. I feel like when I'm reading Feuerbach And I'm like, oh, this is the way Hegel was read and thought about and what they understood him to mean. I find that very enlightening. Regardless of whether or not he's. I don't think he's a lightweight at all. I mean, he's obviously very learned and he is right flamboyant, let's just put it that way, as philosophers were allowed to be once upon a time.

46:49 Dylan: But yeah, he also gets completely overshadowed by Marx just by the course of human events.

46:58 Mark: Yeah, of course. Even though we read the logic, some of the logic for some episodes, I still don't feel comfortable enough to know, like, is this a good reading of Hegel? Is this a good critique of Hegel? We did read the first chapter of the Phenomenology there and it seemed like when it came down to it and talked about the treatment of the this that, you know, it's only Hegel was making a very abstract point about how ostension pointing can't uniquely pick something out. And Feuerbach responds like, but if you're actually a person in the world, the this, what you're actually pointing at is all that matters. Think about pointing at your.

47:36 Wes: What wife?

47:36 Mark: Is she just a this. You could just be pointing at ever all the wives. And I'm just like, this seems like a bad response.

47:43 Wes: Anyway, yeah, we'll get into it.

47:45 Mark: We can't get much more into detail about this, so we will persist in. And folks should feel free to email us as to your opinion as to whether this is one of the great lost thinkers that should be on everybody's syllabus or whether, you know, the fact that waited 15 plus years to get to him is entirely deserved and he's only a footnote to Marx. Whatever. Interested in hearing about it? Thanks so much for listening. We'd love to hear what you want us to read. Email us@pelartialexaminedlife.com Reach out to us through Facebook through X. Maybe we should start a Bluesky account. A Bluesky account. Seems there everybody's doing it. We'll see. Email us. Yeah, through the website. Thanks everybody and good night.

48:24 Seth: Good night.

48:25 Dylan: Good night.

48:25 Wes: Night.