Ep. 357: Feuerbach on the Evolution of Philosophy (Part One)

0:08 Mark: To the Partially Examined Life, a podcast by some guys who at one point set on doing philosophy for a living, but then thought better of it. Our question for episode 357 is maybe something like, how should one actually do philosophy? And we're continuing from our last episode on Ludwig Feuerbach's Principles of the Philosophy of the Future from 1843. For more information about the text in the podcast, please see Partially Examined Life. PA this is Mark Linsenmayer, also philosophizing for the future in Madison, Wisconsin.

0:38 Wes: This is Wes Alwan, not just an ego, but a whole man in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

0:44 Dylan: And this is Dylan Casey here in Madison, Wisconsin, with my here being.

0:49 Mark: All right, all right. So we had gotten through most of the God stuff out of the way. I don't know that we'll talk about essence of Christianity anymore, but we had lots more as we were going through in some detail. I think we had gotten up to around section 14. Get us going, Wes.

1:06 Wes: Yeah, so these sections from 14 to 22 are like his little Hegelian history of philosophy, where he shows how one thing breaks down one. You know, you could call it a form of consciousness or theory if you wanted, but how one version of theology or philosophy leads to another. So it starts with traditional theism or theology and moves to pantheism and then to materialism and then empiricism and then finally to idealism. So he wants to show how everything will necessarily ultimately break down into this very abstract conception of God. So in sections 14 to 15, this starts with the movement from theism to

1:54 Mark: pantheism is the very beginning of that kind of a summary of this whole thing, speculative philosophy, Right. Where he's ultimately going as Hegel, as the realization of God is the positing of God, and at the same time his cancellation or negation, theism, and at the same time, atheism for God, in the sense of theology, is God as long as he is taken to be a being distinguished from and independent from the being of man as well of nature. The theism that as the positing of God, is simultaneously his negation or conversely, as negation of God, equally his affirmation is pantheism. All right, so we're getting on the first step here. So.

2:29 Wes: Yeah, yeah. So he's just kind of connecting us in because he's going to go on to say that theism, in a way, is an imaginary pantheism. He says it's an imaginary pantheism because it treats God as this personal being. But really all his predicates are taken from human beings in nature. So we mentioned this last time, right. So any adjective you can think of giving to God has been derived from some human property or from some natural property. So in a way, even though theism isn't technically pantheism, it's already got pantheism in it with those predicates. So God is distinct from the world only in personality and existence, but not in determinations essence. So you can. He's posited as this distinct, numerically distinct entity, but we can see why there's going to be this natural progression where he just breaks down into being the whole world and it starts with predicates.

3:26 Dylan: So the origin of the. Well, I mean, this whole thing is in some ways a determinant evolution. That's what Feuerbach is trying to sort of articulate. You can't help but have this happen.

3:37 Wes: Yeah.

3:38 Mark: I'm wondering to what degree, if you approach your average religious person, your average theist these days, and say, you know what your view is actually an imaginary pantheism, to what extent that's going to make sense or be at all convincing to them that if you. I'm willing to grant his. You know, of course, religious person is probably not going to grant this, that the way that we construct, the way any society construct their vision of God is by taking what they value in the world and taking away all its limits and just imposing that in an external being.

And so what they value in the world includes what they value in themselves, their self image. So it has some reflection of parts of the world. But pantheism means there is God in everything, not God in just the best part of you that you want to elevate to the divine. So why say this is imaginary pantheism as opposed to the play of imagination on certain aspects of the material realm? Anybody understand why he thinks this is necessarily the case?

4:43 Wes: So you think it's selective, the property. You're saying it's. We only selectively do these properties.

4:48 Seth: Yeah.

4:48 Mark: So Pan is all the. As it's supposed to be some theism.

4:52 Wes: Yeah.

4:53 Mark: Well.

4:55 Wes: Well, the next argument, I mean, it starts out that way, right. He's In a way it's suggestive, but it's not the whole argument. Yeah, the predicates. Although he does say.

5:04 Dylan: Right.

5:04 Wes: So for more, for pagan religions, right. Anything could be deified. The emotion of anger could be the. Okay, yeah.

5:12 Dylan: And I wouldn't have said that pantheism requires that you go to say everything is infused with God. I would have taken it as something More like anything could be. So basically, you know, it's sort of the many version to go with the single unified God version, but it doesn't necessarily. I mean, you could have a pantheism in which everything is infused with God.

5:38 Wes: I do think he's thinking about Spinoza in particular.

5:40 Dylan: Yeah, exactly.

5:41 Wes: Pantheism. And. Yeah, so the universe and nature, particularly nature, including material nature, will literally be God.

5:48 Dylan: And so.

5:49 Wes: Right. So extension and matter and the world of physics is just one of the modes of God. That's pretty radical. Pantheism and materialistic, so that he's showing how each thing leads to the other. But the next argument he gives is that, you know, he gives this demiurge, what I call a demi. He doesn't mention the demiurge, but what I called last time, the demiurge argument, where he wants to draw our attention to the fact that when God creates the world, it means he has to have some kind of architectural plans in his head. So let's put it that way.

He has an idea of everything before he executes it. As an artisan of sorts, if he's a demiurge. Yeah. And so, yeah, this is another example of ideational pantheism where everything is in his intellect first, in the way it is in an artist's head. It's there first before it comes into being in reality. And. But with God, how do you distinguish a conception of what he's going to create from the real thing? It's kind of hard if you think about it. Why would one thing be distinct from another? And so this is another argument for saying, well, everything just is in.

Right. That there is no real distinction and the two things can be equated. So that's another breakdown into pantheism argument.

7:09 Dylan: Yeah, I agree with you that Feuerbach is, you know, sort of a strong Spinozan pantheist. I thought Marx question was trying to figure out how a typical thinking about a typical theist now, how they'd react to the notion that their theism was an imaginary pantheism, that there's something imbued in the world, even in their specific. About their specific theism. And I think that's one of the challenges you end up having is, you know, you get into all those discussions about how active is God in the world or, you know, the interpreting. How do you understand the phenomena of the world as reflecting or not reflecting God? You end up in those conundrums because of this. Of the inclination that it would be. Yeah, I don't think most Believers would like that word, imaginary pantheism, that phrase.

8:05 Mark: Sure, sure. I'm just trying to understand what it means. I mean, I think being deluded about what you're doing is fundamental to religion, according to him. So like we wouldn't expect the believer to just say, oh, you're right, I was deluded. But there's sort of a dual movement. There's the one, the. When a rationalist comes to religion, they might ask like, well, if God is so all encompassing, so huge, how could there be room for anything else in the universe that is not God? It doesn't make sense that there would be God and then there's like a source of chaos or something, a formless void that he takes and he creates out of. Like there's not a separate material. It would have to come out of him. All the plans would have to come out of him, even the eventual creation. There's just physically no room in the world.

8:55 Wes: And this is the last argument in section 14 is that he has to supply not just the plans, the form, but the matter as well.

9:03 Mark: Yep, yep.

9:04 Wes: Which is weird when you think about it, because he's supposed to be this non material entity who. Yeah, I think this is what you're just saying, Mark, you know, suddenly takes matter out of the void somehow or makes it appear out of the void.

9:16 Mark: So can I just finish? So that was one direction.

9:19 Seth: He.

9:19 Mark: At the same time, since he says the imaginary pantheism is nothing other than the real and true theism. So once you, this rational move following any of his arguments like Spinoza did, then actually you are becoming an atheist. You are throwing away the essence of naive, childlike religion. The purpose that religion is actually supposed to serve is only there in the very basic thing. And the critics of Spinoza that said he's an atheist are actually correct. So.

9:48 Wes: Well, he calls it theological atheism, which means it negates, it denies the personal God who's numerically distinct from the world.

9:58 Mark: But if you don't have a God that's numerically distinct, that you can pray to, that has a personality, like, why even have a God? You're no longer doing religion, you're certainly no longer doing Christianity, you're no longer doing ancient paganism. So if you want to say that that anthropological form found all over the world before philosophy enters the picture is serving a prime human need, then none of these rational improvements actually serve that need. We've, we've already drifted off that. We've already grown up out of our infancy.

10:27 Wes: Yeah, I was going to Make a joke about. Well, he does have a personality. It's your personality plus my personality, plus Dylan's and plus everyone's.

10:33 Mark: Yeah, he's a pan personality.

10:37 Wes: Yeah. But what is he saying in section 15? In section 15, he's saying pantheism is theological atheism and then hence a kind of materialism, which. Right, yes. Spinoza was accused of that and theological materialism. Yeah, yeah. And people are right. And people, you know, were probably right to accuse Spinoza of that. And Mark, you're, you know, you're accentuating that with. Well, yeah, if he's not a person you can pray to and cares about you, then we have a big problem. And he still has to be an intelligent entity. It's critically important. He'd be some conscious or intelligent.

11:11 Mark: Right.

11:12 Wes: In some sense.

11:15 Dylan: Some entity with agency. Yeah.

11:20 Wes: I mean, at the end of 15, he'll say something like, there's not a conflict with the non material, anti materialistic God who makes normative demands on us. But then he kind of relegates that to. This is like the projection of our ideal image of man. So I don't really get that. And that's when he calls Moses the modern free thinker. Yeah. I don't know. Does anyone have another.

11:44 Mark: Let's find the quote here.

11:45 Wes: Yeah.

11:46 Mark: Is it the last God who also quite consistently imposes on man the duty to give himself up only to anti materialistic heavenly tendencies and concerns? For God is nothing other than the archetypal and ideal image of man. What God is and how he is is what man ought to be and wants to be, or at least hopes to be in the future, but only where theory does not belie practice, and practice theory is their character, truth and religion. Spinoza is the Moses of modern free thinkers and materialists.

12:16 Wes: Yeah. Right. Before that, he says Spinoza's philosophy was religion. He himself was an amazing man. Unlike so many others. Spinoza's materialism did not stand in contradiction to the notion of a non material and anti materialistic God who imposes on man a duty to give himself up, blah, blah, blah. That's why. And I translated that into a God who makes normative demands on us. So I don't know why he thinks that's not a contradiction, though.

12:43 Dylan: Well, does he not think it's a contradiction or does he think that this is, you know, along each of these steps there's an implicit contradiction. Right. I mean, and this is like the Hegel in Feuerbach. Right. He's tracing this evolution and at each stage of the evolution. There's some kind of contradiction that's getting resolved.

13:00 Wes: Yeah. The next step in 16 is basically the transition from pantheism to empiricism, which is really Kant, I think, even though. Right. You know, you have the English empiricists. But the thing that he wants to highlight is this idea that God is like a noumena at this stage, God becomes a noumena that we can't know in Himself. We know his bare existence, we know that he exists, and we know that we have these particular properties that we ascribe to him, which are just projections of ourselves in our world, but we can't know what he's really like. So, you know, it still has practical significance. Right. Kant, it's a regulative ideal. It still defines in many ways the way we live our life. Although even he'll end up saying modern philosophy turns this practical negation into a theoretical negation.

13:55 Mark: So I think we could connect this to. I've still been thinking about Spinoza as the Moses of modern free thinkers and materialists. Right. The way that Kant is often characterized is we're going to group the empirical matters, the tight web of causality, into one area, and this leaves room for faith and religion in the rest of them. Well, Spinoza has kind of done the same by saying that there's just one universe, but it has two fundamental aspects. And even though we are material, we are cause we don't have free will, we still aspire, we still can use the spiritual, use the mental as some. We can basically get Platonism out of it.

14:33 Wes: Right.

14:34 Mark: That we can still say that there is a higher nature in man. I don't know if Spinoza, in his ethics. I'm not totally remembering how whether he characterizes, like Plato and Aristotle, the material causes is sort of bogging us down. And the more. Yeah, yeah, actually I remember Spinoza, you know, the more that we are in touch with reason, the more we are in fact immortal. Right.

14:57 Wes: He's.

14:57 Mark: It's a very Platonic thing that that is what life after death, that is what immortality is, is being one with reason. It's almost right out of the phaedo. So he is, by saying that there is. We can still aspire, we can still have all the Platonic goodies, but we have this room for materialists to roam, to be utilitarians, for instance. That it's not. I'm still just trying to put this together. It seems like there is, by acknowledging that, unlike Plato, that the material is fundamentally real, that it is just as godlike as anything else, then you can engage in purely material political and ethical programs like utilitarianism, like ultimately Marxism. And there's nothing wrong with that, that's completely compatible. It's in fact just the flip side. A reinterpretation of being godly and attaining toward more spirituality and training for death. That whole anti materialist stuff.

15:51 Wes: Yeah, in a way, you know, I think when we get to the new philosophy, in a way it is like it's kind of a recapitulation of the Spinozan turn in philosophy. Right. He wants to get, you know, Hegel is pivoting off Spinoza and it's like he wants to return a bit to, you know, he wouldn't say that exactly. It's. It's a new thing, but it. Right. It's a return to materialism in the way Spinoza was An early turn to materialism.

16:17 Dylan: Yeah, I guess I don't know my Spinoza well enough. I feel like he's doubling down on the materialist aspect, that he's a less abstract than Spinoza.

16:29 Wes: But yeah, I mean, I mean, what I remember about Spinoza was that strongly psychological tenor. Right. The conatus of man. Like almost like a drive theory or something.

16:39 Mark: Yes.

16:40 Wes: The striving that we.

16:42 Mark: And his descriptions of emotions looked very much like Aristotle's descriptions of emotions to me, which are also very sort of down to earth that, you know, pleasure accompanied by a feeling of happiness or whatever. This is what love is, pleasure with. Accompany the feeling of the object, I guess. Wes, you and I read in close reads, even Hume had something like this style of giving. So a very down to earth materialist. Not what is love, but being drawn toward God. Or I'm trying to think what the theological rationalist, opposing view of emotions view of. And emotions, of course are the sort of building blocks that we have to work with when we're working with ethics. How do we make ourselves to love God? How do we make ourselves want to go away from the crass and you know, the bad side of material. How do we ascend the symposium ladder?

17:35 Wes: Right. Just looking at the end of this section again, because I think I said something wrong. So again, this is the end of. Yeah, 16 where. Right. Empiricism treats. It doesn't say God doesn't exist, but it says, you know, we don't, we can't know him, which Feuerbach calls a dead indifferent being. And then he says, quote, it denies any. Quote. Effective intangible being that cuts into life. It affirms God that it negates all the consequences that would follow from affirmation. And he calls this a practical negation.

18:09 Mark: Yeah.

18:09 Wes: And then says modern philosophy turns it into a theoretical negation where I guess he's thinking modern. Seems like he uses modern philosophy in various ways. But it. I think that would have to be Hegel. So is it a practical negation? I mean, if you affirm God as this unknown being, I guess potentially it's harder to draw moral lessons. I mean, maybe it's practical just in the sense of we don't get the comfort of knowing that God is this and God is that. God is kind and God is thinking about us, and so it would have less of a practical implication in our life. But anyway.

18:45 Dylan: Yeah.

18:45 Wes: 17 most exciting part. Longest, or is it the most exciting? The transition from empiricism to idealism. Idealism takes the objectivity of pantheism and makes it subjective. Right. Hegel's substance as subject. So you take this world, God, whose matter and mind somehow are his modes, and you make it all just hollowed out subject. And the world is God's thoughts in a sense. But he will go down the steps of that from he gets into Fichte, I think in this section. And Fichte might be the only one he gets into Kant, I guess these are the people he names by. By name, but. And then finally, Hegel. Hegel, Hegel.

19:31 Mark: Let's pull out some quotes that show what the necessity.

19:36 Dylan: Well, just in the first paragraph, he's going back and forth. Matter is an essential object for reason. If there is no matter, reason would have no stimulus and no material for thought and hence no content. One cannot give up matter without giving up reason. One cannot acknowledge matter without acknowledging reason. Materialists are rationalists, but pantheism affirms reason as a divine being only indirectly, namely by turning God from a being mediated through the imagination. And this is what he is in the theism as a personal being into an object of reason or a rational being. The direct apotheosis of reason is idealism. Pantheism necessarily leads to idealism. Idealism is related to pantheism in the same way as pantheism is related to theism.

20:27 Mark: So the apotheosis, the raising up to making it the most divine thing. Yeah. So we have to suck matter into mind, which is just idealism. Right. For reason to. If we're going to say reason, well, is in charge. Yeah, go ahead.

20:44 Wes: Well, we've made God this thinkable being. I mean, and that goes for pantheism and for Kant. Right. So in pantheism when we do science, in a way, we're acquainting ourselves with God because, you know, the world just

20:58 Dylan: is God and via rationality, via thinking.

21:01 Wes: Yeah, exactly. So all our relationships to God become very rational. And the same thing with Kant, God is thinkable. You know, he does want to say that leaves room for faith, but it's not such a fleshed out faith again that can think of God as this, this personal being. It's very antiseptic, I think, is the idea. And our real relationship to God in, in all these cases has become rational, which paves the way. Right. For Hegelian, hyper rational relationship to God.

21:31 Dylan: Yes. The genealogy here is that you're trying to squeeze out inconsistencies and the seeds of making, you know, this personal God that's sort of a, a state of nature God. As you go down the path of turning your rational experience with the world more and more into God, you're thinking about the world and the very things you're thinking about are mediated or interact with God. God becomes the world. You inexorably go down this path of idealizing because you have to figure out how to make God both the thing that causes the things in the world, but also the thing that you are going to figure out things about in the world. Then the mechanism for that, and you know, you're doing that all via your thinking, which in this account of the history, philosophy, it's through your, you know, it's your philosophical activity.

22:33 Wes: Then he'll say, you know, Hegel in a way switches that, right? So we are the thinking beings in relation to God. And then God becomes the big subject, God becomes the thinker. In this switch to idealism, we're set up for that little reversal by God primarily becoming the object of thought. But the next stage is for God to become the thinker himself, which I

22:59 Mark: guess I want to quibble historically, because I was under the impression that for Spinoza, God is already the thinker, right? Our minds are only exists because we are part of God's mind. So it's right there that insofar as we are immortal, we are participating in reason, that is what God is thinking, Right. If I think the Pythagorean theorem, that is a great example of a timeless truth not aimed at a particular bit of matter right now. So that is like the most holy kind of godlike thought that I could have. So I think Spinoza could start on Hegel's logic right in his own system if he saw fit and say, here is, you know, As I sketch out the fundamental relation of being to nothingness, to becoming, blah, blah, blah. You know, you and I, as philosophers are. Thinking is just as good as God's because God is thinking through us all the time.

23:53 Wes: Yeah. I think, you know, Mark, you and I read a little bit of his history of philosophy, Hegel's history, his critique of Spinoza. He doesn't think Spinoza does a very good job of making God a subject.

24:04 Seth: Right.

24:05 Mark: He just says it, but he doesn't actually show us the money.

24:08 Wes: He gives us a little bit. I mean, I think the idea is there's a suggestion in Spinoza that God is this monistic stuff that precedes thinking and matter, and matter and thinking are just modes of it. And when thinking does appear, it seems to be just manifested in human thinking. There's no. Maybe this isn't a legitimate critique of Spinoza, but it. God himself, I don't know how much he is a thinker, except by way of human beings in Spinoza. So. And then there's that little critique about Spinoza will say something that sounds very Kantian, which is that.

So it's. It's all the same stuff, but it just looks different from a different standpoint. It looks like mind from one standpoint, it looks like matter from another, something like that which Hegel doesn't like. And I forget the specific argument, but it actually is a good argument. Yeah. So I don't know the extent to which that's legitimate, but that is part of what's motivating Hegel.

25:04 Mark: So, yeah, I could see. Right. If we see that creation has to proceed according to a plan, that the thinking is in God before the. Like, there's no indication that I saw that that is in Spinoza, whereas maybe it was in Malebranche. It seems like there's plenty of other more traditional figures that that was in. But yeah, already in Spinoza's move, it's toward a God that is purely thinkable. I guess this is the other historical point I wanted to chew on just for a second. Is, is God thinkable? For Kant, Right. God is definitely thinkable for Aristotle, for Aquinas, for Maimonides, all these people that say, well, God, let's define as the first mover, as the greatest possible thing. Right. All these sort of classic theological, not very personal, for the most cases, accounts of God culminating in the idea of God as the prime mover. So the deist version, where he's just

26:02 Wes: the prime mover, God is knowable for them. Right. Not just thinkable, but Knowable.

26:07 Mark: Okay, so you can actually know because of this causal reasoning.

26:12 Wes: And that's what makes the metaphysicians. And Kant comes along and says, oh, we can't know, but we can think that. That he exists. And that's my rejection of metaphysics.

26:21 Mark: And so he's still very abstract, but he's not merely thinkable in the way that he is for Kant where. So for Kant explicitly it was the concepts of reason. They really want to talk about God and do these sort of causal. The ontological argument, the cosmological argument, etc, but all those are illegitimate. So actually you can't think of God. God is only something that for practical purposes you have to assume, but that is not thinking. That is something that is a practical relation that is not one of reason and not one of thought. So it seems like actually Hegel is a return to God as thinkable, or God is merely thinkable as well as. Whereas Kant didn't even think he was thinkable, there was some other relation.

27:06 Dylan: Well, in that way, Hegel is saving God from Kant.

27:11 Wes: Right. And then Kierkegaard and Feuerbach want to save God from Hegel. Exactly, because Hegel is still too. I think you're right. Remember, for Kierkegaard, the Hegel, you know, all the. The empirical determinations of God in what Feuerbach is calling theology, all the window dressing, so to speak, is just purely becomes purely symbolic. And Kierkegaard thinks in a way that that's too blanching of the substance of religion as well. We get more than with Kant, but it's not enough, I think. So someone like Kierkegaard seems to be asking in some ways for a return to theology in the traditional sense, although it has this existentialist bent now.

27:53 Mark: And that was our question of. Is Feuerbach also wanting a turn to theology in original sense at least as something to say what a wonderful. The youth of man, let's say that was wonderful that we went through that. We're not necessarily. We can't put ourselves back in that innocence. So we're also going to, in some sort of existential way, choose to just, you know, relate to a personal God, even though we know that personal God is just me exteriorizing things about myself and about nature and about other stuff. It seems like he still wants us to have the goods that the ancients got out of religion, which he thinks Hegel with his abstract God cannot give you. So is Feuerbach a variation off Kierkegaard?

28:37 Wes: Yeah, I mean, I think there are some comparisons to Draw. Although I think Feuerbach looks more like an atheist to me. But although, again, he did. If you read the Stanford article, you'll see that all the work he did later in life was still on theology, and he has new theories about that. I mean, it's all very psychological and anthropological and in that sense reductive. But it's hard to believe that. I mean, the guy was obsessed with religion. So what is he? Is he an atheist, or is he someone who's still trying to preserve religion in this very materialistic, existentialist form? I think it's hard to say.

29:11 Dylan: Yeah, you know, the history of philosophy that's sort of being presented is this kind of. To me, it feels like this back and forth of who gets offended about the character of God and, you know, the relationship of God to us and our own thinking about the world. And so you have Plato or Aristotle, and God is suffused with thinking and the way in which we have access to God has to do directly with our own thoughts. And then you get, over time, the personal effect of God, of God being an entity that runs the world, as opposed this is this back and forth in Feuerbach's account.

The big thing missing to me is here it's still all very philosophical and theoretical and it doesn't have that political sensitivity that someone like Spinoza has where you'll get the theological political treatise, maybe in the context of all these religious wars and just trying to say, hey, people, we have to have yet another sort of separation of church and state. And Kant is similar doing, trying to save rationality from rational world from Hume. He's also choosing to push off God into God's real. God affects things, but it's in a separate realm ne' er the twain shall meet sort of thing.

30:39 Mark: Sure.

30:39 Wes: So in the rest of 17, I think, I mean, the thing to kind of draw out of that is that the typical idealist supposition that external objects are only real insofar as the object they are objects of consciousness comes into play. And so consciousness itself becomes the absolute reality that is God. And nothing can basically the world just becomes God's thoughts. And then there's this question of where contingent material reality comes from, right? And you get Kant and Fichte positing that. Right. That it's kind of all posited out of the super ego.

I mean, the big God God ego. And then in 21, I think we get something very interesting, which is this is where alienation comes up in a Hegelian sense, where God posits Matter as his own self alienation that he will then overcome. And the important part here is, so you don't. You still get sensuousness, the thing that Feuerbach wants, and you get matter. But in a way it's only inferior. Right? It's. It's just a kind of linchpin, or it's just something that serves the purpose, God's purpose of self alienating and reuniting with himself. And God is only God by negating matter in a sense, in this way.

So he calls this the wretched contradiction of the modern era.

32:06 Dylan: Yeah. God is God only through the fact that he overcomes and negates matter. That is the negation of God. So God is only God insofar that he is the negation. Negation overcomes the negation of God.

32:18 Wes: Right.

32:19 Mark: And can we say more about this, why this is motivated by idealism? Because I'm really. It's good that we actually read Fichte and I'm having these flashbacks on kind of what I was explaining Spinoza as being capable of. Fichte actually does that. He says that I have two layers of myself, that I can experience myself as an empirical being in the world, but that can also, you know, maybe it's in a sort of a mystical plotinus sort of way of washing out all the individual, like. But I can become a being outside of space and time and realize my spiritual community.

So sort of inherent in this is that spirit, and hence God is something that is atemporal, that is exists outside space and time. So there could not be anything. In fact, it would make absolutely no sense to say that God at some point in time self alienated himself, created matter and then absorbed it back into it. Like that would make God into becoming, but God just by definition, and we, insofar as we are God, So all of mentality is just straight up mental being. So. Yeah. Why does Feuerbach say that there's something inherently unstable about this Fichte picture?

I mean, the Fichte picture is definitely weird, but like, why does it necessarily push us into. Is it something about the idea that for Fichte, the ego acting as divine acting has to generate the content and that there is something that violates your west, your. No, it has to be a mind independent reality. We need the matter. We need something for God to chew on, for the mind to chew on that's external, for there to be any sort of relationality at all?

34:04 Wes: Yeah, well, he gives us this at the end of 17. He'll say he doesn't tell us a lot. And I don't know that it's going to be all that helpful. But he says Fichte's is the Kantian idealism, but an idealism nonetheless. Only from the standpoint of empiricism can, according to Fichte, there be a God distinguished from an existing apart from us. But in truth, from the standpoint of idealism, the thing itself, God for God is, properly speaking, the thing itself is only the ego in itself, that is the ego that is distinct from the individual and, and the empirical ego, outside the ego, there is no God.

Our religion is reason, quote unquote. But the Fichtean idealism is only the negation and realization of abstract and formal theism, of monotheism, and not of religious material content, replete theism, not of trinitarianism, whose realization is the absolute or Hegelian idealism. Right? So and the, you remember, this is Hegel's. You know, Hegel's is criticizing Fichte and Schelling is not being concrete enough. Hegel is all about the. The concrete. And specifically Hegel is going to give all these explanations of concrete religious Christian content like the Trinity.

Hegel can kind of save the appearances of Christianity as connected to all this other abstract stuff, but he ends it. Or in other words, Fichte has realized that the God of pantheism only insofar as he is a thinking being, but not insofar as he is an extended and material being. Fichte embodies theistic, whereas Hegel embodies pantheistic idealism. And so I think it's kind of vague, I don't know, but it's this vague idea that Fichte wasn't concrete enough. And so necessarily you're going to get Hegel. And again, this brings us back to 21, but you get Hegel reintroducing matter in this new unique way.

I mean, it does sound a lot right, like the Fichtean positing. But now it's become this moment of alienation. And the thing that he highlights in 21 is right. In traditional theology you have this very cut and dry distinction between God and matter, God and nature. And then you had all these poor theologians and like St. Augustine, working very hard to detach themselves from the material world and from their own bodies, right? You had to do this work of self purification in Hegel, God does all that work, right? He does it through us, but it becomes the self activity of God.

God is the one who will be liberating himself from matter, but he has to start that whole process by alienating matter out of himself. Matter does not precede ego or spirit. Feuerbach will say it is the self alienation of spirit. Spirit comes first. You know, ultimately the message is, Feuerbach thinks matter has to come first in some important sense, and it can't serve as a principle of mind independence unless it does. There has to be this hard and fast kind of doorstopper against mind. Mind. You know, matter can't just be dependent on mind in this way, not even on the very.

A general God mind. That's the ultimate objection we're working towards.

37:30 Mark: So I think I was wrong in characterizing this self alienation as implying that God does this in time, that if you're saying that matter has to be there primordially as a backstop against mind, then it just means that God, just like in Spinoza's picture, it's not like God creates his mental aspect and then creates his physical aspects. Just the nature of God is to have this dynamic character. Which doesn't mean that God exists in time. Right. It is his atemporal nature to be this.

38:08 Seth: Yeah.

38:08 Wes: I mean, these are all.

38:09 Mark: Yes.

38:10 Wes: These are all theological debates about creation. Right.

38:13 Mark: It's the Heraclitean tension. Right. That he is the existence. Right. So this is Heraclitus's idea, even though I don't know that he characterized this as God, but that as these oppositions that are like. Right. For God to not just be a completely featureless mass that we might as well call nothing, or we could call the One. For him to have any character at all, then there has to be a manifestation which comes as a stable tension between opposites.

38:44 Dylan: The Logos.

38:45 Mark: Yes. So maybe again, we're back to Parmenides, that God in himself is an absolute unity, but God as actually existing has to come up. Right. In the way of opinion, as Parmenides puts it, has to come up as light and dark, or in this case, mind and matter sort of pushing against each other, providing limits conceptually to each other.

39:08 Wes: Yeah, I mean, I think that's Feuerbach's position, but yeah, for Hegel.

39:12 Dylan: Yeah. That's why sensuousness comes in so much. Right.

39:15 Wes: Yeah. You know, for Hegel, I mean, it's funny the way this. All this section ends, this section 21, where he'll straight up say, and I think this is right, that Hegel is basically this last attempt to restore Christianity by way of philosophy and by way of incorporating atheism in a way as a moment of God, ironically enough. So he'll say the much extolled speculative identity of Spirit and matter of the infinite and finite of the divine and the human is nothing more than the wretched contradiction of the modern era. This sounds very Nietzsche, right? Having reached its zenith in metaphysics, it's much easier to understand where Nietzsche is coming from after reading all of this. Like the state of theology in the

39:58 Dylan: wake of Feuerbach, Feuerbach has similarly kind of audacious to me sentence. The Hegelian philosophy is the last grand attempt to restore a lost and defunct Christianity through philosophy. And of course it is characteristic of the modern era by identifying the negation of Christianity with Christianity itself.

40:20 Mark: Well, I'd written Death of God in my notes for page 201 next to this quote. It often happens that in actual practice we have long ago freed ourselves from a particular thing, a doctrine or an idea, but we are far from being free from it. In the mind, it ceased to have any truth for our actual being. Perhaps it never had, but it still continues to be a theoretical truth that is a limit on our mind. If only Nietzsche spoke with such calmness and clarity. Well, he wouldn't be as famous.

40:51 Dylan: He wouldn't be nearly as fun to read.

40:54 Wes: So in the last, in 22, in the last section of this, this jag from pantheism to idealism, he will just give a little bit of a kind of epistemological comparison of Kant and Hegel. And I think the. The important part of this is that Kant reduces sensuousness to phenomena in a way, to mental constructions. And then you have these noumena, these unknown underlying intellectual entities which Feuerbach translates into at the level of appearance. You get essence without noble existence. You get the true, but not the real. He associates the real with essence.

41:35 Seth: And then.

41:36 Wes: So Hegel wants to overcome that by restoring us to the possibility of knowing essence. Right, To a kind of metaphysics. And he does that by making the essence or the constitution of objects the same as that of the subject. We've talked about this many times. The categories, what are for Kant. Mental categories become the structure of the world. They become the noumena, or they become the structure of the noumena. So we are no longer finite subjects conditioned by these radically external noumena. We are in a way freed from that.

42:12 Dylan: So what else do we have to say to get to the new philosophy? I mean, there's the next section, 23 to 31. What is it?

42:21 Wes: Yeah, I mean, 23 to 30. So that's his critique of Hegel. Yeah, for not really giving us a mind independent reality, hence the big emphasis

42:32 Dylan: on materialism, that this is your big mistake, Hegel. You made it idealism. And you really need to have a mind independent reality, otherwise it's not real. That's the problem.

42:42 Wes: He'll say the absolute can't just contain and positivity being and then try to distinguish it from its thinking by virtue of this concept of immediacy. This is in section 24. Immediacy is not really the. What's the single of differentiation. A differentiator that we want. It really is more a property of thought as well. I mean, ultimately. Right. The differentiator we want is the sensuous.

43:13 Dylan: But yeah, thought posits being as counterposed to itself but still within itself. And that's the problem.

43:19 Wes: Yeah, it's too incestuous is what a psychoanalyst would want to say about all of this. You need to get outside of the family, so to speak. You need some exogamy. And there's no exogamy in Hegel. Like your wife is born out of you.

43:37 Mark: So I think this criticism of Hegel is definitely some of the most difficult part of this. So I think we should save it for perhaps a part three. That in our second half here we're going to zoom right to his positive account and see how much we have to say about that so that we don't just run out of time before we give the whole reason that we're doing all this intervening stuff. I think we've characterized in rough terms why he's rejecting Hegel. You've said a lot about the mind independence. Hegel's too abstract. We want to get material.

44:13 Dylan: Let's get real. We have to get real.

44:15 Mark: That's 70% of the benefit that we get. This few sentences that we would get out of going in detail through these sections. So, yes, please come back next week and listen to our final. Well, our final public part, our part two in this discussion. And if you are a supporter, then that should be. If not right now, then very soon in your supporter feed. If you support strictly through Apple, then you're still under the public schedule. So you'll see it next week. But in any case, you won't have to listen to these horrible advertisements anymore. Well, the wonderful advertisements that we read and the horrible advertisements that are injected by our host that do make it possible for us to make this.

So we just really appreciate your listening. And even if you're fast forwarding those, it's. That's cool with us. But we would love you to give us some support that's partially Sam Support. Thanks.

45:09 Dylan: Thanks.

45:10 Wes: Thank you.