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

0:07 Mark: You're listening to the Partially Examined Life, episode 357, part 2. We are still talking about Ludwig Feuerbach's Principles of the Philosophy of the Future and we are jumping forward to his positive account. Wes, you said that was section 31.

0:26 Wes: 31.

0:28 Mark: Skipping over for the moment his detailed criticism of why didn't Hegel get it right? Why do we need materialism if it's not thought thinking itself? What is philosophy going to be like?

0:39 Wes: So in 31 he starts out by calling the new. So he's going to be calling this the new philosophy. And he calls it the truth of the Hegelian philosophy, which is a very Hegelian sounding thing to say, right? The truth of something is just the next stage, right? It's the teleological progression or something that completes the previous thing because it resolves a contradiction in it. That's the truth. And it's another way of saying he thinks this is going to flow right out of the speculative philosophy, out of Hegel. And why does it do that? Well, it overcomes the problem of positing another that is posited from within and not being concrete enough. So he'll say it thinks the concrete concretely rather than abstractly. It acknowledges the real in its reality. That's the new philosophy. Woohoo.

1:31 Mark: And can we say anything initially, like as a practical matter, do we even really know what is the problem with this? Right. A pragmatist would say the problem with Hegel's approach just in terms like, we can see why Marx wants to get rid of this because. Well, and even though we haven't read Hegel's philosophy right, yet, we will get to that eventually that he ends up saying, yay monarchy. He ends up saying the current state of the German monarchy, where we want to go, it acknowledges freedom for people, but as represented in the soul of the nation, the soul of the monarch, the Geist of the time, as represented through the monarch.

And Marx is going to at least take Feuerbach as one of the people that is going to allow him to say, no, you can't say that the monarch is representing the interests of the people unless you actually find out what those the people's interests are. Are they being fed enough? Are they being ground down into dust by horrible work? Are they in danger because their working conditions suck so bad? Like, let's actually get concrete from this. So is there anything? Is. Do we think that is the kind of thing that Feuerbach has in mind when he says thinking the matter abstractly is not enough.

We have to think it concretely. Or is this just a purely a theoretical disagreement in favor of.

2:52 Dylan: Okay, it's not political in the way you were talking about Marx, but it is what we said earlier, it's making the world real. I mean, the criticism of Hegel is. It's all in your head. It's idealism.

3:07 Wes: All in God's head.

3:08 Dylan: All in God's head. You're right, it's all in God's head. Feuerbach's criticism is you have to make it about the world, the material world, the world that exists outside of ourselves.

3:17 Wes: No, it just kind of reminds me of people today who want to say, speculate. Well, maybe we're all in a simulation. Yeah. And then someone might want to come say, no, the real is real, matter is real, it's not just a simulation. And I think that's the kind of sentiment that's involved here. In a way, Hegel kind of is the world as a simulation person of his day, or at least he could be criticized that way. Probably Hegel wouldn't think of himself that way.

3:43 Dylan: And you've brought up someone we read earlier, Moore, who was similarly, in a context, reacting against British idealists. Right. So where's the I could kick a rock, goddammit, the world is real and you keep going from there. And there's a different kind of exasperation in Feuerbach as well. And I don't know if that's common amongst realists is just exasperation, but.

4:06 Mark: Well, we've seen like within Yaya's, the idea that any idea that everything could be a simulation or could be a dream or whatever is based on some prior recognition that no, there are cases of reality, of real perception, and these accusations of skepticism only make sense in light of those veridical experiences. I don't remember my. Moore quite. I know it wasn't that long ago, but it seemed like could we characterize Moore as straight up giving a logical response to, you know, I've got an argument against idealism as opposed to the pragmatist who would just say this is a distinction without a difference.

By the very definition of truth, by the very definition of existence, we are in reality. Right. Even if it ends up being a simulation, we are justified in saying I'm in reality. Right now I don't think that's what Feuerbach's doing. I think Feuerbach is doing. Well, this is the question that we're entering this into. Is Feuerbach analyzing the sort of Is He Pulling in advance the kind of thing that Heidegger does by just saying our existential situation is such that these doubts do not make sense.

5:23 Wes: Yeah, I don't know. There's a lot of just assertion here. Right. So. Yep, I think it's. For G.E. Moore and Wittgenstein, skepticism incorporates a lot of assumptions that are realistic in a way we can't. So self skepticism, as I've said before, is self limiting. That doesn't seem to be the type of argument that's going on here. So he'll say in this section that another way to formulate this objection is this idea that logical can produce the real, that the formal can produce the material. He doesn't like that. He says there must be some reality beyond this, so that if we are not to forever be imprisoned in the identity of thought with itself, in absolute

6:11 Dylan: idealism, if the truth of the idea is that it really is, that it exists, then we have indeed raised existence into the criterion of truth. True is what really exists and in all that exists that's material. For Feuerbach, something that really exists is material in the world.

6:34 Wes: Or here's another way for thought to be real, something other than thought must accrue to it. Yes, that's another quotation. So I think, right. The problem with this sort of argument is that that's true. We need a principle of mind independence. But as you know, I've claimed before that it can be anything we like. It could be matter, it could be God, it could be a collective. Even if you're an idealist in the absolute sense and you say the world is just all God's ideas, we as individual subjects are still distinct from this external mind independent reality that is God's mind.

I mean, we are within it in a sense, but we are distinct from everything else within. Seems to me I'm very intrigued by Feuerbach's account and I want to understand it. But it seems to me that you can come up with any ontological principle you like to explain a mind independent reality. And you can call it whatever, you can give it, whatever stuff you know, you can treat it as whatever quote, unquote stuff that you like. But for Feuerbach, it really does need to be matter and sensuousness. And I find intuitively I find that appealing. I'm like, you know, maybe he's right about that.

Maybe it really does. Maybe you can't just insert God or any other principle you like. Not just because it's, oh, it's so speculative and this and that, not because of that. But maybe there is some work that matter does that none of these other things can do. I haven't worked this out for myself yet.

8:02 Dylan: I agree with you. And that's what Feuerbach is doing. What is this non thought, this something different from thought? It is sensuousness. That thought realizes itself means accordingly that it makes itself the object of the senses. So the pull of materialism, the fact that there is a mind independent reality that is accessed for Feuerbach by senses, by sensuousness, and it becomes a little more. I mean, I found sensuousness became a little more sophisticated or complicated than sort of like some kind of raw senses

8:40 Mark: interacting with the empiricism.

8:42 Dylan: Yeah, yeah, it's more complicated.

8:44 Wes: Well, it does. Here's a critical thing. At the end of the section, he'll say the only way out of this contradiction, which is that the sensuous is, he'll say, both essential and inessential. Anyway. Well, maybe we'll get into that. But the only way out of this contradiction is to regard sensuous reality as its own subject, to give it absolutely independent, divine and primary significance, not one derived from the idea. So this idea of material objects as something like subjects. Of course he's not saying they have mental states, but he wants to say that they are self active.

Right. So in the same way that we can say other minds are real in this very external sense because you have your own separate subjectivity and it can affect me and we can communicate and all this stuff, there has to be some sense in which. Yeah, matter is more than this passive thing. It is this very active principle that can affect me. Yes, right. It's really interesting that he would, because it sounds like. Wait, is he flirting with idealism again by saying sensuous reality is its own subject, but it's more metaphorical. But that to me is like.

Huh, yeah, that is like a little light bulb moment where what limits us, we're almost better off understanding it on analogy to another subject.

10:03 Dylan: Yes.

10:05 Mark: It's really interesting that he characterize this as the sensuous and not as the material, because it seems like he is not just. It is. I mean, it's the return of an empiricist sentiment. But the empiricists, right, is let's pay attention to our experience. And you know, maybe we have some a priori sort of the only. Like Hume, the only thing we could possibly know are things that come through the senses. Something like that. But instead he's putting it as a metaphysical point and what you were saying, Dylan, that for something to be real, it has to have the qualities that we would apprehend with the senses.

It might have many other qualities, of course, but. Right, so for a number to be real, it has to apply to an actual thing. It has to be two bananas. Right. So that's just Hume and Locke coming back, but it's put in this metaphysical terms instead of an epistemological term, which is interesting.

11:02 Dylan: His criticism of Hegel, I think, is a deeply metaphysical criticism. He's saying Hegel's not getting the metaphysics. Right.

11:10 Wes: He'll repeat this idea of the object as an activity which limits me in section 32. He'll say a real object is only given to me in a way that affects me in a way which my activity is limited by the activity of another. So we have to think of sensuousness or matter in this very active way.

11:32 Dylan: Isn't that one way of understanding, just understanding the real? And it's an object, it is the material world. And the sign of reality is the constraining of how I can think about the world. And in that way, the problem with idealism is there is no constraint. To me, it ends up being a little bit like the difference between mathematics and physics. Right. So you learn pretty quickly that math, you can come up with all kinds of theories in math. Math doesn't have self limiting theories about the way things are organized or the way things are related to one another. You can come up with basically an infinite number of equations and kinds of relations with one another. And it's by factoring in the constraint of the real that you end up selecting out the mathematics that will account for the real world.

12:25 Wes: Yeah, I mean, again, I think the idealist would want to say they've established their limiting factor, but he would want to say, well, you can't do that. Thought can't establish its own limiting factor.

12:36 Dylan: That's exactly what he would say. Yeah.

12:38 Wes: And then the other thing he gets into in this section is this. And this is something that he harps on throughout this new philosophy section is the role of the other. Is the role of the other human being in objectivity, or what we would call intersubjectivity. The concept of the object is mediated through the concept of you. Well, maybe he hasn't gotten to the other yet.

13:01 Dylan: Here.

13:01 Wes: An alter ego as object is given to the non ego as me. Maybe we should. Let's try to unpack that.

13:10 Mark: Well, this is why he says that the matter is actually subject because you are not by Yourself, subject. It's only when you become a full self conscious self that you are subject and you become a full self conscious self by another person coming and seeing you as matter, as sensuous being.

13:29 Wes: Right.

13:30 Mark: So again, he's sort of playing fast and loose with like, well, is it really their image of me that then becomes a subject in me? No, it is necessary that I be material for subjectivity to occur. But I wouldn't want to say that that actually makes matter into the subject. But yeah, we are animals, we are material beings, and we are also subject. So if that is the upshot, that's probably different than Hegel says.

13:59 Wes: You'll say, well, this sounds very much like master slave stuff too. Right, sure. Consciousness. Right. So I have to be transformed from ego into a you, which is to say, I have to be a you for someone else. I must see myself. Now, this is my parsing of it. I must see myself as sort of reflected in the subjectivities of other conscious beings in order to conceive of objectivity. Right. This is. He says the idea of objectivity must originate in this ability to see myself as a you, that is, to see myself from someone else's perspective. And we could think here of Tomasello's concept of joint attention as well.

Right. So, yeah, we could think of Tomasello and joint attention as well, where we're not really thinking about objectivity. Right. So animals without language can't do this. They can't do reference, whatever signs they're using, whatever proto linguistic calls or whatever they're using. They can't point to something and say, hey, look at this. And then have you look at it and have a mutual awareness of, hey, we're paying attention to the same thing. So none of that stuff goes on. And so the whole concept of objectivity is dependent on being a you for someone else.

Now, this is a very. Right. Cognitive psychology type of observation. I'm not sure that it has the ontological implications that he wants to draw for it, but it's very.

15:30 Mark: Yeah, that's what I wanted to point out. You're right. This is exactly Hegel's master slave picture. But Hegel does not stress it is the sensuous character of you that makes you accessible to another person. In fact, what is it to have that joint attention or to, you know, in the mirror stage, to gain the attention of the other? Does that necessarily. Of course, it involves us actually seeing each other in a real. We could think about this like, could you gain some of your sense of self through you're writing letters to somebody. Right. You're engaging with other people in, you know, you're in an online class. Like, does it actually have to be sensuous? Could it be purely. Certainly the fundamental, like developmental. You know, your mother.

16:13 Wes: Right. There's gotta be sense, something at some point.

16:15 Dylan: Yeah.

16:16 Mark: When you're a child, like, there's gotta be sensuous stuff involved. But it's not solely about the sensuous. And for Hegel, remember, this is a step in establishing Geist, in establishing spirit as something that is explicitly not material, that we have ideas that we can share among us. Right? So a lot of the mechanics of why your recognition of me allows me to establish myself as a subject is because you say, treat me as you're the garbage man. You know, you assign a role to me. That is not necessarily. That is a social construct. Right. That is something that is not purely material. It's not that you're saying, oh, you're so fleshy. And you're like, oh, I am fleshy. I guess that makes me a subject like that. We don't emphasize the material in that way, in the way that Feuerbach, I

17:03 Wes: think, is emphasizing it in 33. We get another interesting idea, which is that only in love is the secret of being revealed. Which is to say our distinction between things existing or not existing. We access that at a very primal level. Not through this kind of abstract cognitive act of seeing something exists or not, but through love mainly. Well, ultimately through pain or pleasure. Pain is a loud protest against identifying the subjective with the objective. The pain of love means that what is in the mind is not given in reality. The subjective is here, the objective.

So the pain reminds us, right, that the thing that we prospectively want in our mind, that we don't have it. Right? If it's the pain of longing, if it's the pain of desire, it tells us that not everything in our minds is real, that we can distinguish fantasy from reality because it's painful simply to have it in fantasy, but not in reality.

18:08 Mark: I really liked this section. I don't know if I agree with it. Just the quote here. So pain is a loud protest against identifying the subjective with the objective. So before we even get to love, what do you think of that as a. My hand hurts. I don't like that my hand hurts. So I'm envisioning a world in which my hand does not hurt. I want this subjective to not match the objective, but the pain is filling my subjectivity. So what is the objective? Pain. Ah, I want A separation there. That just seems a very strange over intellectualized. Like that's not what happened when a.

Is that what happens when an animal's in pain? Is that what happens when a child is in pain? It seems like pain reduces us to animality. This is definitely something that Feuerbach and Marx agree with. Right. They say explicitly stuff like that. If we are being oppressed, if we are being. This was in our Marx stuff. This is what reduced us to the level of the animal. If we're merely working for subsistence, if we're somehow just reacting in this instinctive way.

19:09 Dylan: I also wondered about things like phantom pains and stuff like that. I mean he's not responding to the problems of materialism here and the way in which you get things wrong, like the epistemological challenges of the interpretations we have of the real. And so I really sympathetic and in fact I basically agree that the world outside of ourselves, the mind, independent reality, acts as the constraint in our thinking. But he's pointing to things that seem sometimes to be more problematic than he's admitting about the way in which those constraints get resolved by just looking at the world or experiencing the world through pain. That pain doesn't necessarily clarify the real.

19:51 Wes: Well, we could ask ourselves, I mean, there's one broader question which is whether we could distinguish reality and thought or reality and fantasy, or reality of whatever's going on in our mind if we could distinguish those two things, if we couldn't feel pain or pleasure of any sort. And I think the pragmatist would say, and I think pragmatists are right about this, that we really be hobbled because we wouldn't have the desire to know. We couldn't feel satisfaction figuring something out. And part of the sense that hey, I know the truth about something is the sense of having figured out and being satisfied with it.

If being puzzled were just as satisfying as having figured something out, how would we distinguish them? We wouldn't have a vector in one direction or so that's a very broad point, psychological point, I think, about which pragmatists and Feuerbach would be right. And then the question here is this psychological point about pain and pleasure is something that comes up in Freud and psychoanalysis, whereas this early developmental stage in the mind. But it's very speculative. But developmentally we understand pain as external and pleasure as internal, which might be a little bit different actually than the point he's making here.

But stimuli are also often tension or pain producing. And then we have to work out a way to reduce the Tension or to get pleasure. Right. So if we are, I mean, maybe hunger. So there's lots of counter examples to this now, like hunger. Hunger comes from the inside, you know.

21:24 Dylan: Yeah, I don't buy that pain is from the outside.

21:28 Mark: Well, could. Let me inject Schopenhauer in here. Right. Writing about the same time as Feuerbach here. So the objective world can bat up against our senses, including our sense of touch, in many ways. But it's all just. It doesn't actually have any meaning, according to Schopenhauer, until we run up against it in some significant way. So pain actually is felt as the will being thwarted. So let's divide my touching the thing from my wanting to push through the thing. And I really need to get through the thing. And it's hurting, hurting my fingers because I can't get through the thing.

That it's. That's what actually makes it real and sensuous to us. Even though you think you'd have all you want out of sensuosity in the objective world, in fact, our feeling of our own will is not a sensuous feeling. Right. It is an inner sense or something. Maybe we only know it indirectly through the other people identify. I don't know. I'm trying to apply Hegel to Schopenhauer here.

22:22 Wes: No, this is good.

22:23 Dylan: This is good. Yeah, yeah, but in this way, isn't pain and pleasure just simply ways of making distinctions? Now, pain and pleasure are the manifestation of here and there and of distinction, one thing from another. And it may be part of the argument of Schopenhauer includes the fact that, look, we just pay more attention to the acuteness of things when that sensation is more like pain than it is pleasure.

22:52 Wes: Yeah, pain and pleasure give us a sense of the boundaries between our bodies and the world, for instance, and the

22:58 Dylan: boundaries between some things and other things.

23:02 Wes: And again, it's interesting to think about what happened if we didn't have that at all. Right? So I think the overall gist of this is that we have to conceive of sensuous reality as not just a picture. It's not just this passive thing that we take in, but something that affects us at this deeper level, and that our sense of what is real includes this deeper practical, pragmatic, whatever you want to call it, or emotional relation to things. So he'll say love is the true ontological demonstration of the existence of objects apart from our head, unquote.

I love that. And then the new philosophy bases itself on the truth of love, on the truth of Feeling. So we get away from this impassive, abstract, cognitive act of comprehension towards the importance of feeling. Another little proto Nietzsche element here. I think the heart demands real and sensuous objects. Actually, I'm on. That's in 34 that part, but yeah, yeah, okay.

24:00 Mark: So the rest of that quote that I started was the pain of love. This is still 226. The pain of love means that what is in the mind is not given reality or what. In other words, the subjective is here, the objective, the concept itself, the object. But this is precisely what ought not to be, what is a contradiction, an untruth, a misfortune. Hence the desire for that true state of affairs in which the subjective and objective are not identical, which, if anything, you might think that philosophy wants the opposite. I want my subjectivity to be imposed on the world.

Right. That's what Feuerbach says. Prayer is, is just sort of a belief that I can just ask stuff and that I can just magically change the world to fit my will. So that would, in a sort of idealist, in an imaginary way. That's what like we want that accord, but actually what we want is there not to be that accord, because we can't magically change reality. So we want the subjective and the objective to not be identical. Does that sound right?

25:03 Wes: Yeah, I mean, it gives the example of hunger, where if your stomach is empty, it is in a sense its own object. It just sort of grinds on itself. There's nothing objective inside. So we, we need something that is genuinely external, that we can take in and metabolize. And we can't just be supplying ourselves again, as with Hegel, it can't be self supplied.

25:23 Dylan: Yeah, and this is again pointing to his criticism of Hegel, in which the distinction between subject and object disappear. And it's another way of him hammering on the fact that we have to have a distinction between subject and object.

25:36 Mark: Okay, here was what threw me about that last quote. The desire for the true state affairs which the subjective, the objective are not identical. We do want. Where the subject and object are not identical, because I want to have, I want to love something that is not me. But merely saying the subjective. In other words, the way that I am perceiving or imagining things, I do want that to actually match what is objective, the way the world really is. Right. I want to actually have that love object close to me. I want that person to objectively exist.

26:09 Wes: Well, you're thinking about the fantasy of the right. So in the case of hunger, the subjective could be the feeling Hunger. And then I don't want that to be objective. I want the satisfaction to be objective. Yes. I want the objective in which mental state we're focusing on the satisfaction, which I'm not feeling right now, which is not part of my subjectivity right now. It's only there. It's a fantasy of a certain potential. I want that to become objective. But what's objective right now is just me not having food in my stomach. Does that make sense?

26:41 Mark: Yes. Let's just keep an eye on that.

26:43 Dylan: I think you're right to point out that there's a distinction here between objective and subjective versus having a distinction between subject and object.

26:52 Mark: Yeah. So let's see if this is actually a problem for him.

26:55 Wes: 35. That which cannot be loved does not exist.

27:00 Mark: I mean, that sounds like what I was characterizing as Schopenhauer, that like, okay, you can have an object that you recognize as an object, but unless it is meaningful in some way, unless you can love it or love that, it's not there.

27:14 Wes: Right.

27:15 Mark: You can hate it, you can. Unless there's some emotional affect, then it is not going to feel real, even though it is distinct.

27:24 Wes: Yeah, he's just putting it. These slogans are quite, you know, he's getting quite. He's waxing very poetic, Nietzschean.

27:31 Mark: It's hyperbole.

27:32 Dylan: He gets to Section 61 or whatever it is.

27:34 Wes: Right, right. He does, yeah. Does really get sections 36 to 38. This is where he gets a bit more into treating the self as real and sensuous. So I am real and sensuous. The whole of my body is my ego. That's another puzzler. Right. I mean it's. I get it at a more emotional, poetic level. And even Freud will say things like this, but you know, so they're an important analogies like the skin, the analogy of the surface of the body to the ego. But here it's a bit puzzling, I think, to make this kind of bold claim.

28:10 Mark: So page 228, this self consciousness in modern philosophy is again something that is only conceived, only mediated through abstraction, and hence something that can be doubted, indubitable and immediately certain is only that which is the object of the senses of perception and feeling. So this sounds to me like self consciousness in Descartes, which of course Descartes says I can be absolutely certain that I am, but can you? Hume thought that that was doubtful if you're just using an abstraction, but if you're actually up being in the world qua Heidegger, that means you are completely immersed. You are feeling your senses, are showing that yourself, you just can't doubt yourself.

28:49 Wes: In this section, only the objects of the senses are immediately certain. So instead of looking for certainty in the Cartesian ego, we find it immediate. Right. And then trying to derive the certainty of the external world through God's, you know, the insurance policy, that is God. We can just say, actually it's the external world that is immediately certain, not the ego.

29:10 Dylan: Yeah. And this is where I think he, you know, in pursuing his point. So he's in 37 and 38, he's moving to the ontological, is constraining the epistemological so that we get certainty out of understanding what is real. And then that is through sensuousness. He says in 38, when sensuousness begins, all doubts and quarrels cease, so we will know the true. I feel like he's getting out over his skis at this point. Right. He's making the points about the importance of the mind, independent reality and the role of the material and sensuous there. But now he's laying claim to that as providing certainty and clarity in ways that feels like he's just ignoring problems with.

30:02 Wes: Well, yeah, I mean, he's ignoring a very famous section in Hegel called sense Certainty where Hegel addresses just this sort of sentiment. And we know it. He knows it very well. He knows it in the way he knows Hegel, the way hyper religious people know. Biblical, can quote any biblical passage you like. He knows about all that. And he's not really giving us arguments against Hegel's argument and sense certainty.

30:27 Dylan: Yes.

30:28 Wes: So we're kind of left in the dark. I think a bit here about he's making the assertions, but I don't know quite how he would justify it. I know a little bit in Broadway what his general trajectory is, what the thrust of this is and why he wants it to be this way. But he's not giving detailed technical arguments.

30:47 Mark: Well, and I'm sure we skipped over the section where he specifically talks about that sense certainty section. And I think I referred to it within the. In the last discussion that if you start out, you think the basic, you know, we're going to start our entire philosophical explanation and we're going to focus on demonstration, pointing out of this and then saying, well, really, the. This is totally abstract, that this could refer to anything where. No, if you're actually in a situation, if we're talking about human beings doing this and not about abstract thought, God thinking the thoughts that any of us could have just like geometric proofs or something like that.

Then this would be. It would be very important what you're, you know, if you're. This. That when you're pointing at the one you love is quite different than when you're pointing at the sky or you're pointing at whatever. And I think I concluded last discussion asking, is this a good argument against. This seems to be just denying Hegel's whole project and saying you are confused from the get go in prioritizing this conceptual analysis, where it just seems like, well, couldn't the conceptual analysis be good? And yet, of course, I acknowledge that it matters to me in a concrete situation what this I am pointing to.

Why else would I point if it didn't matter?

32:04 Wes: Yeah, we might. Sounds very boring. But we might want to do an episode on demonstratives, because that's a whole subject within. Sure.

32:12 Mark: Demonstratives and indexicals.

32:14 Wes: Yes, Indexicals. Yeah. Because Hegel, I think, has been accused by contemporary analytic philosophers of ignoring pragmatics, for instance. And that's another subject I've wanted to do. Right. There's context. Right. Is this really a universal in the way that we're using it? It's unclear to me. So that might be a point of critique, but yeah, I don't see it as clearly made here by Feuerbach.

32:37 Mark: All right, back to this part of the. So we're 38. Where are we?

32:41 Wes: Yeah, only the sensuous is certain immediately through itself and indubitable and hence divine. It's an interesting idea. It's the secret of immediate knowledge. And then he'll say, mediation, by which mediation we can understand is putting something under a concept basically is necessary, or going through the dialectical process. But it's only necessary where there are wrong presuppositions or conflicting points of view.

33:09 Dylan: Yeah. So I mean, it's this kind of. When we're getting into this, like we were talking earlier about in previous readings, like how kind of maybe hidden genius Feuerbach is because there's something super stimulating about him. But when I get to things like this, I start thinking, eh, maybe I know why you're like, not so the necessity of mediation is only a limited one. It is necessarily only where a wrong presupposition is involved, where a different truth or doctrine contradicting an established one, which is still held to be valid and respected arises.

A truth that mediates itself is a truth that still has its opposite clinging to it. Basically, he's saying that when you have mediation, basically you don't know what's going on. And I'm thinking. So you're saying lack of clarity is lack of clarity. Right. Your uncertainty is because you have uncertainty about what the true and the world is, involves there being things that are in tension with one another or contradictory with one another.

34:11 Wes: Well, Hegel kind of wants to say that there's contradiction is clinging to everything. Right. So that when we point to a concrete immediacy of something that seems to be certain within sense, the contradiction that's attached to it is the concept. It's actually theory laden already to kind of modernize that point of view and as mediated by the concept. So we don't just have access to raw concrete reality, we have to do it through the concept. It's mediated. And yep, he's trying to vindicate. And I'm kind of sympathetic to this now I'm sympathetic to all sides, but he's kind of trying to vindicate the other point of view, which is that no, it's not actually there's something about this that we have access to that is not conceptually mediated.

35:00 Dylan: Yes.

35:01 Wes: Is that true? I don't know. Does he give many arguments for that? No, but again, something appealing. Have we gone too far with this whole theory laden thing?

35:12 Dylan: Yes. I'm similarly completely sympathetic to it. I think that's one of the things that you get out of pragmatism as well. And you've brought that up a couple different times. There's a kind of practical worldness that Feuerbach is saying, look, it's out there. And the theory ladenness, if it becomes theory, it's not merely laden, but it's all theory. That's the kind of criticism that he's making of Hegel, that the real world isn't in there anymore and you need the real world to be bumping up against you to have something laden.

35:48 Mark: So one example here of an immediate relation I think he's saying is love. As we've been seeing that if we're going to do an analysis of love, it might be pretty complicated and you might say the line between love and hate is very thin, that we are drawing on cultural norms of love. You could say it's very much conceptually loaded. But he's going to want to say, well, those might be some sort of variations or elaborations, but there's a core that is entirely unreflective, that you don't need any concept. It is entirely pre linguistic. Your animals can love each other and to just harp on like I'm just, again, kind of thinking of the analyses of knowledge that we just went through and the Gettier problems and the Williamson just saying, stop trying to analyze knowledge. It's basic. I think Feuerbach is, stop trying to analyze love in this way. Lacan, whatever, you know, it's just basic.

36:47 Wes: Yeah, no, that's very interesting to relate it to. Williamson's knowledge is unanalysable. Yeah, that's a really good point.

36:53 Mark: All right, are we done with 38? Really want to get to here being before we run out of steam here?

36:58 Dylan: Well, I think.

36:59 Wes: All right, so that is that in 44 here, being, he's talking about space and time and.

37:04 Mark: Oh, sorry, I saw at the end of 38, he does talk about genius.

37:09 Wes: No, go for it.

37:10 Mark: As one of the buzzwords in Germany,

37:12 Wes: we're running out of time, so we're going to have to prioritize.

37:15 Mark: But, yeah, all right. Genius is immediate, sensuous knowledge. Talent is merely head. But genius is flesh and blood. That which is only an object of thought for talent is an object of the senses for genius. So maybe, yeah, being an artistic genius, being an intellectual, is being able to get right to the heart of this thing and not think through the mediation of, like, what does everybody else think about this? How do I present this scene in my play? Whereas the genius just gets right to it, just intuitively focuses on the thing.

37:47 Wes: This just reminds me of the type of conversation I had as soon as I got to college, to St. John's which always basically meant someone else is better at guitar than me. So they are technically better, but I've got the heart and the soul. I feel it more. You know, man, maybe that's an uncharitable association for this argument. Genius versus talent.

38:09 Mark: All right. Less said about that, the better. Dylan, you wanted to push us forward to a spot.

38:13 Dylan: In particular, I think we should jump to here being.

38:16 Mark: Let's do it.

38:17 Dylan: 44.

38:18 Mark: Yeah, because he's going to talk more about religion and stuff in between.

38:22 Wes: They'll start out by saying space and time are not just forms of experience, a la Kant. They are essential conditions, rational forms, laws of being as well as thought. Okay, I can get on board with that. And then here being is first. So quote, the index finger shows the way from nothingness to being, saying, here is the first boundary, the first demarcation. The trajectory of this whole section, by the way, is it's going to sound like logical distinctions are derivative of spatial distinctions, which is a really interesting idea, but yeah, sure. What do you make of here being.

39:00 Mark: I mean, it just goes part and parcel with that metaphysical. For something to exist, it actually exists in a place and time. And how do we distinguish this from that? Well, this is over here and that is over there.

39:13 Wes: Exactly.

39:14 Mark: That's the fundamental thing.

39:16 Dylan: It's another way of talking about mind, independent reality.

39:20 Wes: Right. He gives this example of the distance between you and I is what allows us to both to exist without jeopardizing each other. This is a boundaries thing. You know how some people don't have boundaries and just make you go crazy.

39:35 Mark: Some people just conceptually melt into you and it's just you crowding you out.

39:40 Wes: So that. Yeah, I mean, he's saying, yeah, if you want to talk about existences, you have to talk about spatial boundaries, spatial demarcation. So, you know, like with our Aristotle metaphysics episodes, we emphasize the formality, right. And particularly natural kinds as giving us a way to say, okay, this is a particular being, but there is also necessarily a spatial dimension to this. For the most part, in our practical reality, we. There's something very basic about being able to make these spatial differentiations. To saying, this is one thing, this is another thing. I don't know. Am I getting that right?

40:20 Mark: Yeah, I think so.

40:23 Wes: To a lot different places, to things, different qualities, conditions for all economy, including even that of the mind. Yeah, go ahead.

40:34 Dylan: So it's Aristotle at that point, right? It's classification. I mean, they're different things in different places, different things with different qualities. It's the activity of classification.

40:48 Wes: The concept of space arises from that of place.

40:52 Mark: Yeah, I like that. And I like pointing out Aristotle's categories. Being in a certain place is a distinct category. It's not merely spatial location in general. Like being on something else I recall as being. He really considered some of these things fundamental that we're like, why is this fundamental? Why isn't Kenny just generalized to a kind of a general spatial. I don't know. My memory serves.

41:13 Dylan: The point being that you would get the notion of space out of the distinction that you have. That is the distinction of place.

41:21 Mark: Yeah.

41:22 Wes: Feuerbach will say, here being is positive, right. It's not just negative, a negative determination, like it is in Hegel. Yes, I am not. So it's not because I'm right. In Hegel, you might say, I'm here because I'm not there. There's this whole landscape of negation around me, and my relation to everything else puts me here. Like I'm located on a coordinate system. But no, Feuerbach reverses this. I'M not there because I am here. In some sense my spatial position is absolute. And then I. Yeah.

41:55 Mark: What do you consider absolute kind of being? Is it being God in all places at all times and therefore we are just a finite. A negation of most of that? No. Or is it being a specific individual thing that everybody can see and touch?

42:10 Wes: There you go. And then he moves on finally to saying, no logical distinctions without spatial distinctions. Thought and logical distinctions arise out of spatial distinctions.

42:22 Mark: The initial thing that the Boston Tea Party chanted until they changed it to Taxation without representation. More high minded.

42:31 Wes: What's the slogan here? No logical without spatial. Yes. And then the English said, okay, we'll give you the spatial, we'll give you the space. And then we took all the space. Manifest destiny. So the 53 to 63 is about community as the absolute standpoint. Or. I don't know if we want to get more into that.

42:51 Dylan: Yeah.

42:52 Wes: 39 to 40, which we skipped, is about art presenting the truth to sensuous art. Is God determined in sensuous perception? It's a little bit of a throwback to the Romantics.

43:02 Mark: Yeah. A lot of this reminded me of

43:03 Wes: the Romantics in 41 we. Which I think we skipped over. Or did we. No, we did go over that. Well, part of the problem is the repetitiousness of this.

43:13 Mark: Right.

43:13 Wes: So he's saying again, man is an object of the senses. And then he gives this line about when we press other people's hands, we're not just touching physical objects, we're touching other people's feelings. And then he'll. And then this idea that it takes two to give birth to the spiritual man. I think we got into that in the last recording. But our inter. Subjectivity again is a criterion of objectivity. Or which he calls togetherness.

43:37 Mark: Yeah. So he's kind of getting at these. He's elaborating some of these points about logic requiring. So for instance, time only. Opposites can only be united in one being over time. Right. Contra Hegel's abstract phenomenology, things contained within them their own opposite. No, something can turn to its opposite through change. So it's a pretty basic thing, but like supposedly the Hegelianism was so fucked up that it kept us from acknowledging these basic and obvious things. And now I'm going to put them out back to common sense. Something like this.

The real can be presented. This is 48. The real can be presented in thought, not only. Not as a whole, but only in parts. Right. We can't even understand what the unity of God. You know, this point of view in which an individual is just carved out of the whole. That just really makes no sense to us. Individuals are what populate our experience.

44:33 Wes: And in 48, two, you know, another formulation of the need for sensuous reality. Only that thought which is determined and rectified by sensuous perception is real, objective thought. The thought of. Objective of truth.

44:44 Mark: Yep.

44:45 Wes: This idea that. And then he uses this word interrupted in a way. We need to be interrupted by sensuous perception. Our thought needs to be interrupted by it in order for us to be in touch with reality.

44:57 Mark: Yeah, I like that. And then I don't like the way he sums that up as well. For Hegel, it's like a circle. It's like this constantly looking back on itself from the media through the mediated. But no, for Feuerbach, it's an ellipse of sensuous philosophy introduces. I guess an ellipse introduces that blockage, that sensory, where you're elongating one of the. So it's still a circle. Like, we still do reflect back on ourselves, but we do need an actual sensuous thing, which makes it a little wider. It's just a failed metaphor.

45:28 Dylan: Yeah, I thought that was not. That was pretty bad.

45:31 Mark: And yet they use the ellipse as their. If you put on their helmets. The Feuerbachians did this.

45:38 Wes: Did this catch on their helmets? Yeah. Feuerbachian army or football team.

45:44 Mark: Yeah. I think. Yeah. If you don't want to demean animals, you don't want to demean Native American tribes. Call your football teams. Call your teams. After basic shapes, the trapezoids,

45:57 Wes: the rhombi. Let's get ready to rhombai.

46:06 Mark: True dialectic is dialogue. The unity of I and you equals God. I'm just. I have a bunch of like, one line descriptions for these last bunch of sections here.

46:16 Wes: I mean, maybe the last thing to say to read it for me is to. Right. When he says the absolute standpoint is this distinction between you and I. And then later he'll say, this is from sections 56 to 63. But the essence of man is the unity of man with man. The community resting on this distinction between you and I. You can see the tension there. Right. Because he wants to emphasize the distinction between you and I and the way he's emphasizing the distinction between subject and object and thought and sensuous reality. So he wants, you know, there are like these communitarian trends in Hegel, and they're there in Feuerbach as well. But he doesn't want them to be grounded in the same way as Hegel, where there seems to be too much of an erasure of the distinction between you and I. But, yeah, it's an interesting tension.

47:08 Mark: Yeah. If individuals are just a stage, there's God externalizing this stuff, and it sort of consciousness is really everywhere. All points of view are consciousness. But then some of them rise up into individuals and establish these relations and establish societies and Geists, talking points, memes that they can brush around. And eventually we all are just. We realize our fundamental unity and we're God seeing itself through God's eyes. That's not a very. So we're only just temporary blips. I mean, there's something very poetic about that in that, yes, we are born and we die, we reduce back to dust.

So literally, we are only temporary things. But still, don't we want to think that our ultimate political and social ideas should be founded on that temporary, that becoming. That is humanity and not on the supposed endpoint of absolute knowledge? And I don't know if, again, if that's what Hegel. If Hegel's actual politics tries to take that very unhuman point of view or whether he's like, yeah, we are. Yeah.

48:13 Wes: Well, he's been accused. Right. Of being a bit authoritarian. Right. So taking that communitarian trend to the point of authoritarianism, which of course happens with Marx as well.

48:24 Dylan: Yes.

48:24 Wes: So the materials.

48:25 Mark: Yes.

48:25 Wes: You have your individual rights subject to the same.

48:27 Mark: Yeah, but they're sublated. They're going to be overcome.

48:30 Wes: Well, in that case, the Geist is everything. Right. And everything is subordinated to it. Yeah.

48:35 Dylan: And that's what's running through all of these. Right. I mean, even with Feuerbach, he's, you know, we get species being in whatever it was. 53. Man is not a particular being like the animal. Rather, he is a universal being. So he's getting. Just like he's getting to the communitarian piece, he's going back to the universality here, the one true philosophy. And this is going through all of these. And also the fact that the train is running, the train of the world of philosophy is running to this endpoint. It's irresistible. And damn it, we're going to force everyone to realize this and be there. That's where your authority, of course, we have to do this. That's where the authoritarian piece comes in.

49:15 Mark: All right, so hopefully listeners feel like they've gotten plenty out of this reading. We'll evaluate in the next few days whether some subsection of us or maybe get Seth back. Want to do a third hour for supporters, but this will definitely be the end of the public facing part of our treatment of this book. We're going to move on to Max Stirner, the Ego and Its Own, another key influence on Marx that he encountered a little after, and maybe ditched Feuerbach in favor of Stirner and then eventually ditched him in favor of what he's going to eventually come up with.

49:45 Wes: Hope.

49:45 Mark: That book has been requested for us many times, so I'm happy to finally have a good context for it. Please let us know. Pl partiallyexaminedlife.com comment in on our Facebook, on the blog, on the x.com or whatever other social media. Email us. Yeah. Pl partialexaminedlife.com we would love to hear from you. Thanks everybody, and good night.

50:05 Dylan: Good night.

50:06 Wes: Good night.