Ep. 392: Early Hegel Elevates Reason (Part One)

0:07 Mark: You are listening to the Partially Examined Life, a podcast by. Some guys were at one point set on doing philosophy for a living, but then thought better of it. Our question for episode 392 is something like, to what degree can we know metaphysical truths? And we read Hegel's early essay Faith and knowledge from 1802, specifically the introduction in the section on Kantian philosophy. For more information about the text and the podcast, please see partiallyexaminelife.com this is Mark Linsenmayer in Madison, Wisconsin, who, once abandoned by the categories, cannot be anything but a formless lump.

0:38 Seth: This is Seth Paskin, subjectively certain that the furthest we can possibly get in this text during this conversation is page 74.

0:49 Wes: In Austin, Texas, this is Wes Alwan, More Than an Empty Identity in Cambridge,

0:55 Dylan: Massachusetts, this is Dylan Casey, immovably impaled on the stake of the absolute antithesis. In Madison, Wisconsin.

1:04 Mark: This was another insertion. We're supposed to get back to Hegel's Phenomenology to talk about faith. That's where we left off. But because we read that Habermas essay that was talking about Hegel's critique of the Enlightenment and specifically what it got wrong about faith, how it had an inadequate notion of faith, we thought we'd read this one, this essay that he was pointing at, which, I don't know, Wes and I read for close reads, a different early Hegel essay about Hegel versus Kant. And it read pretty smoothly. It was not a bunch of jargon and gobbledygook, but I guess this is a little later.

This was for this publication, that sort of newsletter kind of thing, journal that he was publishing with Fichte and other folks. And yeah, it's almost as bad as Hegel's Phenomenology, though in a different way. And then the point of what I wanted to get out of this, mostly in the introduction here, where he gives this critique that Habermas had quoted, but then also, you know, well, we've read a lot of Kant before. We should throw in this section on Kant. And it really requires reviewing a lot of Kant in a way that I know Wes did, but probably the rest of us did not.

So we'll see how we do.

2:18 Wes: Yeah, I got excited by the epistemology in this because I felt like I was learning something that was actually key to Hegel's whole system. And in fact, I would say for beginners, if they. Instead of just jumping into the phenomenology, this would actually be a good place to start because you get to see him directly critiquing Kant. I mean it's amazing that just, just to see him mention someone by name, but to do it over and over and over again in such a vituperative way, it's quite enlightening. You really do, you know, he straightforwardly tells you, even though it's still in complicated language, but it's not so I don't think it's so obscure.

It's more like Kantian level complexity or a little bit worse. But he's telling you what's motivating his whole system and a part of it very straightforwardly. He's just pissed off that Kant has made knowledge of God impossible. He thinks that is truly scandalous. And he thinks it's very anti philosophical and it's anti rational. Reason itself is all about our capacity to know the absolute, to know the fundamental reality of things. So to be cut off from it is a scandal. And he thinks that there are glimpses in Kant having to do with Kant's what Kant calls the synthesis of the imagination and also in Kant's Critique of Judgment that give us that are threads that Kant didn't pick up on but that he should have, that would have allowed him to see that there is a way to have knowledge of the absolute and of God.

3:54 Dylan: I agree with Wes that there would be something really smart about reading this before trying to read the phenomenology. I think that the interaction with, like you said, people with real names and also a kind of a little bit off the hook about the problem of modernity in a more straightforward way. I think it's there. I feel like the point that's being made in whatever it is, the 30 pages of the introduction could have been made in like two pages, but maybe a little bit of analysis, maybe six pages. But it felt a little bit like, I don't know if it's the wolf in sheep's clothing or the smoke cleared just how much of like a Thomas Aquinas he is in terms of reason gets us to God kind of thing.

I don't mean that in like a strict analogy, but just that we get to God by reason. And if philosophy isn't doing that, it's not doing his job. If it was ever sort of open for Hegel, to me it was made very clear in this. He's about the God.

4:59 Seth: Seth, are you the kind of person who thinks that Hegel is the most difficult and notoriously opaque writer in the history of philosophy? Or are you the kind of person who thinks that Kant is the most difficult and opaque writer in the history of philosophy. Now, you don't have to decide. You get to enjoy one talking about the other.

5:21 Mark: This is.

5:21 Seth: I can only imagine if you read Aquinas on Augustine or Aristotle on Parmenides or something like that, that you would get the same level of. I don't even know what to describe this as.

5:31 Dylan: Lacan on Heidegger.

5:33 Seth: Lacan and Heidegger. Yeah. There's a few pairings.

5:35 Wes: A very short introduction.

5:40 Seth: As I was reading it, I was like, I don't know if I'm learning more about Hegel, like in the vein of which Dylan just mentioned, or if I'm learning more about Kant or if I don't know enough about either to even be able to follow what the hell is going on. But, wow, this is a heavy lift.

5:59 Wes: You do have to go back to Kant or you have to ask Claude or some other AI about what exactly in Kant he's talking about. Remind me what the antinomies are. Remind me what the paralogisms are. Remind me about this, that, and the other. Because he is going to. And, you know, at least he's mentioning them. I mean, he's. At least he's giving the name of them so you can go look them up. And in the phenomenology, that wouldn't even happen. So, yeah, if you want to get the most out of this text, you basically have to spend a lot of time with Kant and figure out what he's responding to in Kant.

I think that turns out to be quite rewarding. But I'm also exhausted now, and I can understand why someone wouldn't want to do it. You know, I will say, I think like you guys, I think this kind of confirms for me that he is a bad writer and communicator. As much as Hegel fans out there might not like to hear that and to think that the phenomenology is just a result of deep thinking. He is a deep thinker, but he's also undisciplined. And this, all of this stuff in this essay can be translated into something comprehensible. It's all got a comprehensible which.

Which. And I say that with the kind of confidence I can say for the phenomenology, because I can never fully decode it for, like, this is definitely decodable, which is exciting to me, and the thoughts are worthwhile. But yeah, he's just not good at communicating it. And that's the big problem with understanding him. It's profound, but it's not so profound that it wouldn't be comprehensible if it had been communicated clearly.

7:23 Mark: So the version that we read, prepared and edited by Walter Cerf and HS Harris, and each of them has a pretty lengthy introduction. Harris's in particular is 50 pages I did not want to add. Would you recommend Harris as a more transparent presentation of the substance of the essay?

7:44 Wes: The second essay? Yeah, it's difficult. I don't think it's an easy for beginners guide to the essay. So I would actually say you could skip both of them and spend more time going back to Kant. And I will also say this translation does something very unusual that I don't know, but any other translation does, which could be confusing. Any other translation or secondary literature on Kant that I know of refers to the understanding is the understanding. Here it's translated as intellect. So if you're right, in Kant, it's all about the understanding and the concepts of the understanding and the categories of the understanding.

And reason is above the understanding and intuition is below it. It's weird to take a term of art like that and suddenly start calling it the intellect. So you have to kind of do that in your head and realize he's not talking about nous like Aristotelian intellect or something like that, which is more akin to reason. He's talking about discursive understanding.

8:38 Mark: Yeah, I don't know if that's because the way Hegel used that term elsewhere. Certainly the term reason is both used in the technical Kantian way, but the way that Kant and these other figures. There's a section in this essay that we didn't read on Fichte and a section on Jacobi, who's somebody I've never read at all, but, you know, an early responder to Kant, and he wants to say that all of them, even though, you know, as sort of a general critique of the Enlightenment, supposedly reason was dominated, but reason ends up a shell of its former self.

So what reason is for Hegel and his cohorts who are coming up with this publication is something much grander. And you know, what we understand from that. Hegel's going to elaborate as the dialectic or, you know, the progress that he displays in the phenomenology. So, yeah, I'm not sure when some of the words. This is what complicates it for me, because if he's actually quoting Kant, then, you know, he's using Kantian terminology. But when he's saying something about Kant, well, he could be using Kantian terminology or he could be Using some, you know, his own uses of these words.

9:48 Wes: Yeah. Sometimes it's difficult to figure out when is it that he's paraphrasing Kant in a. Extremely subtly skating, ironically, you know, in a scathing way meant to be disdainful, but. Or when he's presenting his own positive point of view. That's another thing that's unclear when he's switching between his own POV and the pov, he's describing that and describing and condemning.

10:12 Mark: So we could see, for instance, why Habermas characterized all of the Enlightenment, including Kant, as a subjectivity. He's getting that from Hegel, who is saying, we've argued Kant is not a subjectivist because it's not merely up to the individual's whims, you know, that I perceive a dog or whatever. It is something about human psychology and really the psychology of any rational creature, presumably, that we are all. So it so actually becomes completely objective that there is a dog here that has these qualities that we can say such and such about.

We can do science. It's all very objective, but it's still coming from the point. Point of view of the subject. The subject ends up being the, according to Hegel, the only metaphysically real thing in Kant's account of the world. Right. Everything else, everything that we. It's sort of like Descartes insight, like, well, there's all these contents of consciousness. We don't know what the ontological status of them, but there has to be something that contains and unifies those contents of consciousness. So the transcendental ego, that is the one thing.

And so then it ends up that we get this whole transcendental structure in Kant where the phenomena are separate, separated from the noumena, and that becomes absolutely dogmatic. And so Hegel is asking in this, why would. Given that everything is just the contents of consciousness, just doing phenomenology itself all about the subject, why would he thinks that Kant is not justified, given those premises, in jumping to insisting on the existence of the ego and the existence this hard and fast, indissoluble, uncrossable barrier between the phenomena and the noumena.

11:51 Seth: That seems a little bit of a kind of strident characterization of it. I think a more charitable reading would be that Hegel says something like Kant is led because of where he starts, because of the way that he's trying to build this from the perspective of the subject, or subjectivity versus objectivity. And he gets trapped in the notion that the only knowledge that's possible is subjective knowledge of the type. You're talking about that even though he is pointed towards in some other texts and some other places something which is absolute but not subjective or I don't even want to get tied up in the terms but basically that he's so bound by the structure that you just described he can't see the fact that he's actually thinking something different.

He's actually thinking an idea or an absolute that is in fact not an object of cognition in the way that he thinks all knowledge is and that he just isn't willing to go there. That was kind of the way the essay sort of like ended for me.

13:03 Dylan: Yeah. I didn't find it so challenging to figure out what parts Hegel was taking issue with versus what he was interpreting. I'm not like a super Kant person or a super Hegel person, but Hegel's characterization of what Kant was doing and how he lays out the phenomenal versus the noumenal and the point of view and what Kant is saying just rang right. It seemed straightforwardly correct with the criticism that along the way of it being a failure in critical ways from Hegel's perspective, it's a failure in staying completely within the finite and provide no access to the infinite.

And I think that Kant straightforwardly says that you don't get that. That's his solution is there are things that are inaccessible in the world according to Kant. And Hegel says yes, that's exactly what Kant says and he's wrong to do so. He criticizes him for that. And so to me it was a very. Hegel's very clarifying about what Kant's ambitions were and they seem to align well. And he seems to have read Kant well. He just disagrees with him in a kind of plain faced way. You do have access to the thing in itself. Ultimately you just didn't. You gave up getting to it.

You have to have access to the infinite. Otherwise philosophy isn't doing its job and life is not worth living. And you know, you gave up.

14:34 Wes: Yeah. He does also have a more kind of technical epistemological argument about this primordial identity of opposites and the absolute, including by the way, that the particular and the universal. So that when judgment comes to it, it's not just. It's not like the imagination has baked the empirical and the abstract of the universal together into these appearances. Right. Made them cohere. And then the judgment comes and extracts out of it what it's already put, what the mind has already put into it. He wants to say that primordial Unity is already there.

And. And is. It would be just as good to say that it's the. That it is the thing in itself, right? That what you're calling the. The synthesis of the imagination, Kant, is really a kind of process ontology, where reality is in the process of constructing itself. And when your mind, your mind kind of participates in that, you know, maybe if we actually discuss that a little bit, I can give a clear explanation of what that means. But in any case, the subject and predicate kind of fall out in the judgment and of a primordial unity. They're not just kind of slapped together or taped together by our cognition.

So that I think that's a very important critique and kind of key to the whole Hegelian project.

15:54 Mark: Let me read the quote. Yeah, Wes is already jumping into a very difficult thing, and I'm going to throw another kind of difficult thing out here for page 77. This is the part that Seth thought I was not being nice enough about this. Intellect. Is human intellect part of the cognitive faculty, the intellect of a fixed ego point? The things as they are cognized by the intellect are only appearances. They are nothing in themselves, which is a particularly truthful result. The obvious conclusion, however, is that an intellect which has cognizance only of appearances and of nothing in itself is.

Is itself only appearance and is nothing in itself. But on the contrary, Kant regards discursive intellect with this sort of cognition as in itself and absolute. So you think that. Why are you insisting, Kant, that there are these transcendental structures, the ego that is putting together things using. One of the first things Hegel's going to criticize is the distinction between sensibility and the understanding, right? That there's two stages in the Kantian and whereas really these are both in this primordial unity, as you were just saying, Wes.

And so why insist on that structure, on the whole transcendental structure of Kant's model of mind, just based on the fact that we only are subject to appearances? I think Hegel just thinks that is all bullshit, that we do not in some secret way apply the categories out of our own mind and that somehow these are all just a priori things in our mind and not in the world in itself. Right. He thinks it's much more likely that we, as you say, we participate in the world in itself, providing us with its own structure. And yes, if there are different kinds of animals, they would perceive it in a different way because they are, in effect, creating a different reality in their interaction with the world.

But given that we are humans. This is the way that we do it. And saying that, well, there's just a formless lump out there that we come in and we apply such basic things as number in space and time to just doesn't make a lot of sense to say those are all on the side of humanity. And the thing in itself is completely divorced from that.

18:04 Wes: I think another way to put it, this primordial unity precedes subject and object. And that's where the categories are. That's where all this apparatus is. It's the place where mind and object meet. It doesn't just belong to one of them. It's not like it's in the object and then gets imprinted on us, on our tabula rasa. And it's not like it's just in the mind. It's a meeting, it's logical structure of reality. And it's the meeting place for mind and nature insofar as they've been disambiguated from each other by this weird project that God decided to embark upon. Yeah.

18:36 Dylan: And in that way, at least, the tone of the Kant section to me is Hegel saying, you came so close, Kant, you were walked right up to the door and turned away. And you know, in this, just after the section that Mark was reading Hegel's calling, this thing of that Kant is refusing to adhere to or think about, he calls it rational cognition. So he says, cognition of appearances is dogmatically regarded as the only kind of cognition there is. And rational cognition is denied. You know, if the forms through which the object exists are nothing in themselves, then they must also be nothing in themselves.

For cognitive reason. Kant never seems to have had the slightest doubt that the intellect is the absolute of the human spirit. The intellect is then for him, the absolute immovable, insuperable finitude of human reason, which is the part that is insufficient for Hegel. It's just completely constrained by finitude.

19:35 Wes: Yeah, he talks about making, and I think Mark has already referred to this, the understanding or the intellect. The in itself. Not in the sense of being, like the noumenal soul, substance or something like that, but just this philosophically introspected structure of the mind is the one stopping point for all of it. Right. That's the absolute for Kant, that's the in itself. And everything else revolves around it. That's the Copernican revolution. But Hegel's going to point out that's just the way it appears to us. The cognitive faculty has a certain appearance as well in its functionings. And we can't just take for granted that it is the way it appears to be from the inside on first look, right?

20:17 Mark: And this walking up to the barrier that Dylan was referring to is more in the Critique of Practical Reason and even more so in the Critique of Judgment. So it is interesting that we have Hegel commenting on all three of those texts. And what is it called? The religion as within the bounds of reason alone. Something like. Yeah, that's a fourth text that we have not looked at in any detail. We. I think it sort of came up when we were talking about Schleiermacher many years ago, just west and I and a guest. But anyway, so when Kant cheats like. Well, Hegel actually likes that, but it's a little pathetic. And I was a little unclear on his contempt. Hegel's contempt for Kant's notion of practical reason, for instance. But in religion within the bounds of reason alone, it seems like it ends up being defensible subjectively. To believe in God, right?

21:13 Dylan: To.

21:14 Mark: You sort of have to in order to live a sensible life, right? Just like you. For in Critique of Practical Reason, you have to. To live a moral. You have to believe that there's sort of this absolute moral law which we couldn't, with theoretical, speculative reason could not reach, right? If God has made commands that are right there in the substance of the universe, we have no way of detecting them. All we can detect are things about our own, the structure of our own will. And, you know, we have to regard that as absolute, just as a practical matter. But it just seems like Hegel thinks that this is a little silly and maybe Dylan is right, that he is kind of going back to something more like Aquinas, that I don't know what. Did we get enough of Hegel's positive notion here that like, oh, you can prove God with something. He mentions the ontological argument, which I

22:03 Wes: know he does, and he's very bitter about that, right? Because Kant thinks that he shows that the ontological argument doesn't work, right? Because the ontological argument assumes that existence is like any other predicate, which it isn't. Yeah, Hegel's very bitter about that. Because the ontological argument is just the idea that to have the idea of God, which is something that. Which nothing greater can be thought, implies existence, because if he didn't exist, then he would. He could still be greater. And so you see in this, right, Hegel associates this with the identity of the idea capital I, which is the idea of God, basically, and God himself, so that I Guess Anselm has done done something really clever on Hegel's point of view and this derivation and kind illustrating the identity of the idea with God himself.

And of course I think, since I think people generally thought Kant, that was kind of a knockdown argument that he gave against the ontological argument. So I was very surprised to see Hegel wanting to defend that. But we shouldn't forget his first book was about how Newton was wrong. So you never know where Hegel's going to go.

23:14 Mark: Hegel says that the Kant was arguing against the crappiest version of the ontological argument. And I think that the kind that he likes. I looked up just here now Spinoza's version of the ontological argument, which if I remember correctly did not have the multiple steps of oh, there are these different concepts and one of the concept is being the greatest possible thing. It was just that God is a self caused substance whose essence necessarily involves existence. By defining God as an absolutely infinite substance with infinite attributes, Spinoza argues that God is the only substance that can exist, making existence a necessary part of God's nature, unlike contingent finite beings.

So right, just the very notion of infinity at all, right. This is what ultimately Hegel says that Kant denies that like well okay, there's infinity is just sort of not the finite, but the only thing we can know anything about is the finite. So if you say the infinite God is, is whatever's on the other side of that chasm, then you're saying it's, that's all just unphilosophical, just superstition, you know, well, you could have faith, but faith is just saying fantasy things, right? According to the Kantian picture. And Hegel just doesn't think that's what faith is, that just the notion of the wholeness of the universe.

I think Hegel agrees with Spinoza here. If you just describe what the wholeness of the universe is, that is the absolute, that is God. That's why he doesn't even feel the need to use the word God. Or people have come at us like, well if you're going to argue God does or doesn't exist, first you have to define what God is. Well just define God as the maximum of the cosmos, as the absolute, whatever that is. And you've already said, just in saying that, I mean there has to be a maximum. If I have 1 foot, 2 foot, 3 foot, well there has to be an infinity foot, there has to be an infinite one little goodness, more goodness.

There has to be a most goodness. I mean I Think that's the ontological argument at its most basic.

25:13 Dylan: The problem is is that whatever that infinity of foot is no longer a foot in being an infinity. It's infinity isn't exactly another kind of like infinity of number. It's not like another kind of number.

25:29 Wes: Right. Yeah. And Hegel would say this. He's not thinking about what he calls bad infinity, which is this kind of spatial or temporal limitlessness. This is more about God's infiniteness has something to do with the lack of all limitation and self causing aspect. Right. So he's not limited by some cause that happened before him. He's not conditioned by it. That's. That's another right. To be not conditioned by anything is to be infinite in the sense of not. Right, not conditioned. So he doesn't have a cause before him conceptually. He can't be delimited. He's not relative to anything else conceptually or causally. I think that's the fundamental idea. And yeah, to argue about whether that makes sense is just to argue about the, you know, the arguments for the existence of God. I think.

26:21 Dylan: Yes, but like if post Kant, pre Hegel was it. I don't remember which one it was. If it was Schelling or we went on that kind of German idealist, I couldn't tell you which one it was. And these Romantics. But where the infinite becomes a corollary for basically the source of things that get accessed and constrained by reason and made finite. But that there's always, you know, the source of change and revision of what we think about the world is in that infinite. Right. Ends up being a source in a variety of different ways. You mean source, but it's just. It ends up being an infinite source. It means it's an unconstrained source for the new and the revisable.

27:08 Mark: Yeah, I like Wes, your characterization, Wes, that you were just giving as I'm aware of limitation, therefore, because I have that notion of limitation at all. There must be something unlimited in contrast to the limitation. It is really that simple. I think Hegel follows Spinoza in that.

27:25 Wes: We'll keep in mind here that for Hegel infinity is going to come to mean weirdly because it sounds circular, but it's going to be the identity of the finite and the infinite and the suspense of that antithesis. That's what the absolute is. It's the identity of these two things at a deep level.

27:42 Seth: This is where I feel like I was saying I'm going to learn more about Hegel in the way he talks about this than I am about Kant, the Hegelian mechanism, and I don't understand it well enough, but there is this notion of if something, in its definition or in its being, it's essentially defined by the negative. So, Mark, you just mentioned limitation, right? A boundary, whatever. Then I think for Hegel, that means that. Well, first off, there's a sense in which, I don't want to say a problem, but you can't be an absolute substance in a positive way if you're defined negatively.

That's one thing, you can't. But the second thing is if there's negativity there, then there has to be something against which it is negative. So if the problem with something is that it's limited, then there has to be. And I think he thinks not just conceptually, right, but like there has to actually be something unlimited. Otherwise defining something as limited just doesn't make any sense. And it obviously gets significantly more complicated than that. But it's not just the two parts of the antinomy, the negation and the positive, or the limited, you know, infinite, particular, universal right.

It's that Hegel takes very seriously, rightly so I think the idea that you can't just talk about those two things, you have to talk about the relation in which they stand as a third thing, and that that relation has a kind of reality to it and being as well. And so his critique of the Kantian ego and the manifold. So he contrasts the ego as this subjective unity absolute, and the manifold as the objective. Right? And that part of what he's saying is that Kant gets so wrapped up in trying to figure out where information is coming from, where is the knowledge coming from?

Does it come from Lockean way? Does it come from the manifold of intuitions and the things? Does it come from the categories and the intellect, what it imposes upon it? And he says, he kind of just forgets the relationship between the two, which is itself also. And he says, I think he. And this is why I want to get into the text. I think he thinks that Kant in some way rightly points out that the relation between the manifold of intuition and the transcendental ego, or the Kantian subject, whatever, is reason. And he says, this is great. What a great.

You put these two things in dialogue, you figured out there was a middle term and a relation, and. But that he's unable to do anything with that formulation of reason with a capital R because of the way that he's kind of caught up in the structure of knowledge, being kind of stuck in the subjectivity of that transcendental ego.

30:31 Wes: Well, he is trying to critique reason. You know, he is trying to rein it in. Pure reason for pure reason, because he thinks metaphysics has got a bad reputation, got to stop doing it.

30:42 Mark: I mean, do we think Hegel is. Really has no defense against the bad arguments that Kant was trying to head off? I mean, you would think that it would be kind of a. Well, it's okay to have local doubts about reason and just say that's a bad argument, but you don't want to have a global doubt about reason, which is what the skeptic or what Kant ends up arguing for. You know, like Hegel gets mad about Kant's treatment of the antinomies. But I don't see what Hegel's sort of solution like. Well, what is your take on the cosmological argument? Either here's the most common antinomy, the easiest to remember.

Either there's a chain of causes that goes on forever. Well, that seems to make no sense to us. Or it has to stop in a single cause, God. And that was, you know, Aquinas's cosmological argument. That's God has to be the first cause. Which one of those do you pick? Which one is more absurd? That causality stops at some point or that it just goes on forever? Both of those seem bad. And so right. Kant's solution is causality is just something that takes place only in phenomena. It just even asking the question, you've already done something wrong.

Well, if Hegel's going to say it's not wrong to ask the question, we are in fact directly in contact with the absolute. It is something that is the flip side of every limited thing we see implies an infinite thing. And so the absolute is God is always with us at all times. What is his solution to the beginning of the universe? I don't know.

32:15 Wes: Should we get into the introduction here, the thing that Mark wanted to spend all his time on?

32:21 Mark: Well, I said on the one hand that the main point is very simple and it's just stated again and again and again, but the wording is quite difficult and we could, you know, through it at the same speed that we went through Hegel's phenomenology, frankly, but I think we've sort of said what the main point is, which is that on the Kantian or, you know, fiction or Jacobian assessment of the religious talk, right, metaphysical statements about God, about religious things, about the infinite, they just don't allow you to do that. And you know, Kant says, I'm allowing you to do that.

I'm just separating off what the understanding, the intellect can actually talk about from things on the other side. And so no, we can't do what Aquinas does, but we still can through faith. I've saved all of religion. You could be as religious as you want. It's just, it's a separate sphere. And Hegel just wants to say on the one hand, that's a piss poor sphere that does not allow you the sort of access to God that I want. Hegel in my vision of what, you know, early Christian life is, where everybody's just seething with love and God is all around them and they're having a wonderful time, that that's what a civic religion that we all can participate in should amount to and what we're going to have when spirit attains its self consciousness of itself.

At the very end of the phenomenology of spirit, we're going to have this religion and joy going through us instead. What religion is defined as by the Kantian view is merely the flip side, merely in opposition to the empirical. So the empirical ends up being everything and the infinite is just not that, not the finite. So really you've not defined like there's the separate sphere of the finite, of the infinite, which is in fact the most awesome. And you know, we down here are merely limited and empirical and that is a mere small smidgen of the universe.

And the important stuff is all out there that you know, in God's universe instead you have sort of made them equivalent, two sides of the same coin conceptually, the empirical and the non empirical. And they're only defined in terms of each other. So you think you've created two separate spheres, but what in fact you've done in this division is create one concept that is a separating concept. That means actually the two spheres are equivalent to each other, ironically. Well, that was supposed to be a simple point, I think.

34:48 Wes: Well, it's kind of an overview of the whole thing. But yeah, I think, you know, we're going to want to talk about eudaimonism. Right?

34:56 Dylan: Yeah.

34:56 Wes: And the way he thinks it all kind of collapses into eudaimonism because that's what something that Kant thought he was actually opposing. Eudaimonism having to do with.

35:05 Mark: Right.

35:05 Wes: The Eudaimonism that Kant is opposing is I guess it's both Aristotle. Well, I guess it's fundamentally Aristotelian. It's virtue ethics or the idea that moral action has this intimate connection to happiness, when for Kant it's Going to be all about obligation. Yeah. All about duty, but.

35:24 Mark: But it's empirical is the point.

35:26 Dylan: Right.

35:26 Mark: You can tell when someone's happy. And so, in fact, utilitarianism ends up just being a form of eudaimonism. But it's just, you know, let's make everybody happy instead of just you happy.

35:37 Wes: Yeah. Hegel's going to accuse these guys, not just Kant, but Fichte and Jacobi, of falling back into eudaimonism in a way. This thing that Mark has already mentioned. Early on, Hegel addresses this idea that God. We don't want God to be thingified. We don't want to reify God. He talks about turning the sacred grove into mere timber. This is one of the worries that seems to motivate Kant, right. Where these metaphysical objects are not actually things, and we're treating them as if they are when we try to say, you know, these empirical concepts apply to them.

And so that's the danger that we're trying to avoid. But what we do is we leave our only mode of access to God as some kind of form of feeling or sentimentality or the kind of longing that Jacobi emphasizes, which is kind of a natural offshoot of Kant's idea that we can only think but not know God. Right. If we can only think but not know God, then we are in this eternal state of longing with respect to God and really doubt. Right. We just, you know, we. Faith just means, okay, I'm gonna rah, rah. I'm gonna say I believe in God, even though, you know, who's to say I don't have any, you know, haven't met him.

Right. So we get pushed back into feeling. And I think that's the sense in which we get pushed back into Eudaimonism on Hegel's view, which is weird that

37:07 Mark: you've, you know, Eudaimonism is an ethical position. And you're saying that this comes directly from a position about religion.

37:13 Dylan: Yeah. If you go to the quote that Wes referred to is on page 57. And the sacred reducing to the sacred grove of mere timber at the beginning of that paragraph, you know, this is him sort of going after Kant's point of view and by just saying, the great form of the world spirit that has come to cognizance of itself in these philosophies is the principle of the north. And from the religious point of view of Protestantism, the principle of subjectivity, for which beauty and truth present themselves in feelings and persuasions and love and intellect. Religion builds its temples and altars in the heart of the individual. And so this is where I take Hegel as, on the one hand, agreeing with the notion of the importance of the subjectivity, but that the access of the individual, of the subject to the absolute needs to be preserved. And that's his.

38:09 Wes: Yeah, I think he's. Yeah, this is something he's not so fan of. So, so fond of this north and Protestantism, you know, so that this reversion to feeling and because it's the natural offshoot of saying we can't intuit God, we can't have an intellectual intuition of God because, oh, if we let ourselves do that, we might be treating God like a thing. Don't want to do that. So we're stuck with feeling and religious sentimentality.

38:36 Dylan: Yes.

38:37 Mark: So he was a Lutheran. He was a Protestant. I feel like he's praising Protestantism, but thinks that what these philosophers have done with that magnificent spirit, because Protestantism is ultimately about. Don't rely on authority anymore. You yourself can feel, can be in a relationship with God. You don't have to simply have faith. You can actually participate in this. You know, we know that there's going to be a social component in Hegel's idea from what Habermas told us about him.

39:08 Wes: But he doesn't like this version. Right. Religion builds. This is pretty scathing. Religion builds its temples and altars in the heart of the individual. In sighs and prayers he seeks for the God whom he denies himself. An intuition, because of the risk that the intellect will cognize what is intuitive as a mere thing, reducing the sacred grove to mere timber. Of course, the inner must be externalized. Intention must become effective in action. Immediate religious sentiment must be expressed in external gesture. And faith, though it flees the objectivity of cognition, must become objective to itself in thoughts, concepts, and words.

But the intellect scrupulously distinguish the intellects being the understanding scrupulously distinguishes the objective from the subjective. And the objective is what is accounted worthless and null. The struggle of subjective beauty must be directed precisely to this end to defend itself properly against the necessity through which the subjective becomes objective. That beauty should somehow become real in objective form and fall captive to objectivity, that consciousness should seek to be directed at exposition and objectivity themselves, that it should want to shape appearance.

All these should cease. Of course, this is what Hegel wants. Beauty is our access to God. And what he's going to say is, you know, this fear is really unwarranted. The thing that he's calling the act, whether it's. It could be a work of art. It could be ethical substance, it could be the community. All of these actual instantiations of the beautiful are legitimate, and they're kind of a mode of access to God. And we shouldn't be warding that off and saying, oh, no, that's idolatrous. But yeah, he's thinking here specifically of, I think, ultimately the relationship between.

So let me just read another part to make this make sense. When he talks about the eth. The body, and this is on page 58. So he'll say, so when empirical existence is the pure body of inward beauty, it ceases to be something temporal. And on its own, the intention abides unpolligious, polluted by its objective existence as an action. And neither the deed nor the enjoyment will be built up by the intellect into something that is opposed to the true identity of the inner and the outer. The highest cognition would be the cognition of what that body is, wherein the individual would not be single and separate, and wherein longing reaches perfect vision and blissful enjoyment.

He's responding to ascetics who think, oh, no, religion can't be about enjoyment. It can't be sensual in any way. And he's saying, no, yes it can. So that this idea of the body, it's the body of Christ, right, on the one hand. But it also could be a communal body. It could be the church, right. It could be any embodied sociality. It can be the Greek polis, it can be ethical substance. It can be culture as art. All of these embodiments are legit ways to connect to God. And we don't have to become ascetics or say, oh, no, God is so abstract and can't be represented.

We can't communicate with him that way. It's just all about, I think he exists. I don't know anything about him and I have faith. And he's saying, no, you in these concrete areas of life, the kinds of immersion that you have in and the kinds of knowledge that you have with respect to them. That's about God, ultimately.

42:32 Dylan: Yeah. Just before what you read, he says, religion as this longing is subjective. But what it seeks and what it is not given to in intuition is the absolute and the eternal. And so just linking up with what you. Where he winds up at the end of that paragraph with what you're just saying, Wes, is Hegel's pointing to religion in highlighting us having a lack and saying that, yes, that's our subjectiveness. That's pointing us directly to what we're lacking and we're lacking that connection that we can have with the Absolute and the eternal. He's going to say it's a real lack that we can then close as part of the dialectic.

43:16 Wes: Ultimately, the idea is that we can, yes, the Absolute can be present in finite existence. We don't corrupt it by bringing it to us. We don't just make it a thing and corrupt it. And it's not like we have impure hearts now because we're enjoying this knowledge, immediate contact with the Absolute. He'll say at some point, right? The intention can remain pure and the deed and the enjoyment are identical.

43:43 Mark: So would it be a legitimate criticism of your typical conservative Christian now, who may be following in the footsteps of Aquinas, says my knowledge of God is objective, right? Who made the banana shaped like this, that I can open it up, you know, make using these traditional, cosmological, teleological, etc, and I've established that God, you know, is the first cause is all this stuff. Can you say, you know what, you are making God into an object. You're making him the first cause, like as if he were just on the same level as events in the world.

And you're just making him just another event in that chain. And God is so much greater than that. God is not someone that goes in and makes miracles happen. He is not a subject like we are, who goes and does things. You're debasing God through this of. Again, I just. I don't know what Hegel feels about these traditional arguments for the existence of God. Does he agree with Kant that they would improperly objectify God? It seems like we're saying that he would not have that objection.

44:49 Wes: Yeah, I don't know about specifics, but yeah, I think in general he's very much for the idea that he says empirical existence can become the body of inward beauty. So empirical existence is just fine for conveying beauty and therefore for connecting us to God. This is. Beauty is the real lynchpin. And that'll come across later in the essay as well, where it's all about, right. It's the critique of judgment and aesthetic judgment that are become our means of contact with the Absolute.

45:20 Mark: Well, so, okay, this makes it sound like you would not like those traditional Aquinas arguments for the existence of God because those are too abstract. You're saying that. I mean, maybe it's just that it's true that there has to be a first cause, and so God must be the first cause. But if you think that that's all we know about God, that that's Our primary way of being in contact with God or something that would just give you sort of the philosopher's God that is entirely a creature of the Enlightenment and that is what he does. Not like that. No, it's this. In order to live as a vital, practical human, you have to be religious in some fundamental way. That doesn't mean you have to believe in unprovable things. It just you have to be. Have an openness of. It's not just feeling. Say more about this inner and outer Wes, because I really was unclear about that.

46:11 Wes: Where are you looking at specifically the quote you read?

46:14 Mark: The intention of I is unpolluted by its objective existence. Neither the deed nor the enjoyment will be built up by the intellect in something that is opposed to the true identity of the inner and the outer. Is the inner and the outer there referring to action on the one hand that he's talked about words and then feeling. What is the inner, the subjective being with God? I just don't understand. If it's not mere feeling, which he seems to poo poo, then what is the stronger intuition?

46:41 Wes: Well, I don't think it's feeling per se that's the problem because he is talking a lot about enjoyment. Right. He's very pro. Enjoyment. I think the feeling that he doesn't like is this feeling of grief, he calls it, and longing of, oh, God is lost to me. That's the kind of negative feeling that a lack of knowledge of God that puts you in that place. This is more like, ooh, God tastes good. I eat my wafer and my wine at church. It's that kind of concrete enjoyment. And the inner and the outer? Yeah, I mean it's just the external acts, whether it's some ritual, like I said, I mean, I read this very broadly. The outer action can be the community. It can be a work of art.

47:25 Dylan: It could be.

47:26 Wes: It's everything associated with the external manifestations of religion or contact with the divine. And I think the idea is the inner is not going to get corrupted by that. I think he thinks he's responding to an Enlightenment trend where we have to be very abstract about God because all of this stuff, all of this stuff in the outer is polluting. It doesn't do justice to the purity of God. You know what I mean? And he's opposed to that.

47:55 Mark: I mean, is it just that the inner is that you are a barnacle on God, that you are God in a sense a mode of God? You are, insofar as you are the universal, you are spirit. Spirit is ultimately what God ends up being. So the inner is your godly nature, and the outer is the various manifestations, including just like a feeling of togetherness that's still outer, that's still somebody. It's a manifestation as opposed to. I'm just wondering if it's. You know, this is comparable to Spinoza's idea that, well, you've got your appearance in mind, you've got your appearance in body, but the inner to both of those is the single substance that is the whole universe that ends up being God.

48:43 Wes: Yeah, I think you're right. It's like the same sort of thing with the Romantics. When you look, the outer is the work of art, the aesthetic surface of it, but you're looking through that to something more profound, to the inward beauty of it. The beauty part brings us. It takes us through a little wormhole to the absolute. It doesn't just keep us on the surface, on the outer.

49:03 Mark: Well, let's make that the last word in part one here. Come back next week for part two. Or you can go to partiallyexaminedlife.com support and sign up for it. And part two will probably be in your feed immediately. Thanks.

49:18 Seth: Thank you.

49:18 Dylan: Thanks.