Ep. 394: Hegel on Faith vs. The Enlightenment (Part One)

0:00 Mark: The Partially Examined Life is celebrating the 250th birthday of our nation with another live show. We're back in Madison, Wisconsin on Saturday, July 11th. We would love all those in the area to attend. Please look to partiallyexaminelife.com live for details. You're listening to the Partially Examined Life, a podcast by some guys who at one point set on doing philosophy for a living, but then thought better of it. Our question for episode 394 is something like, can religion be dismissed as superstition? And we're returning to Hegel's Phenomenology of spirit, published in 1807.

Looking now at sections 527 through 573 within the Culture section with subsection titles Faith and Pure Insight, the Enlightenment and its first subdivision, the Struggle of Enlightenment with Superstition. For more information about the texts and the podcast, please see partiallyexaminedlife.com this is Mark Linsenmayer, my voice like a diffusion of perfume in unresisting atmosphere.

1:09 Seth: This is Seth Paskin, a victim of the deceptions of the priesthood and despots in Austin, Texas.

1:16 Wes: This is Wes Alwan, not basing my faith on any particular historical evidences in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

1:24 Dylan: And this is Dylan Casey, conducting my soulless existence in the real world in Madison, Wisconsin.

1:31 Mark: All right, all right, this is the last one. I know we were thinking maybe we would try to finish up the entirety of the rest of the culture section, which would be at least one more episode, maybe two more episodes. But this, after loosing ourselves from the grip of this text and now having to get back into it, at least the consensus seems to be enough is enough. Am I right here?

1:56 Dylan: I wanted to say, who's we, Kemosabe?

1:59 Wes: Yeah, and I'm ready to say uncle at this point. Yeah. I'm exhausted by this, which is funny because I just. I'm about to schedule like a seminar with fans potentially on faith and knowledge. Why am I doing that? Because I am burnt out on Hegel and faith.

2:14 Mark: Right. We did that detour into the earlier essay. Yeah, Faith and Knowledge. And that actually told us where the section that we read this time was going to conclude. Right. Because it's the enlightenment and superstition that I think is the theme of this. And I think it's really relevant to today. Right. It's not just about the culture of his time. It's is the way that people think about faith now, like belief in unprovable propositions, belief that there was a virgin birth, belief that someone literally rose from the dead things like that with the Enlightenment, right.

Philosophers were like, you can't, you can't believe that crap. Like, whatever Christianity has to be, it has to be something more subtle than that. It has to be, you know, you can buy into the love stuff, you can buy into God exists and was made human in some form, but you can't base it all on hearing about some historical events, right? The trying to prove that Noah's ark and that flood really happened or that the garden, these arguments over young Earth theory. Are dinosaur bones real? Or did dinosaurs live along with people? Like, if you're doing any of this, you've actually bought into the basic precepts of the Enlightenment, of the scientific method, which actually should not be applied.

That's not the way that people of faith actually know God. They know God in a very direct, experiential way. But because these are the terms that the Enlightenment have given us in which we think their faith ends up being, at worst, superstition and at best, what Kant was saying. Right? Okay. We don't want to be superstitious, so we're going to say God is above all of the earthly things. He's in some far off. In fact, we can't know anything. We can't have any discursive knowledge, at least about this world beyond. So it ends up being just a void.

So you end up being a despiser of life, as would say. Because all the real stuff, all the good stuff is in the world beyond, is in the immortal land where God lives. And the things of the earth, as, you know, Plato dismissed them so long ago, are just mere shadows. And that's not what Hegel likes. So, yeah, that's the overall, at least direction we're going.

4:37 Wes: Yeah, so he's. I mean, there are really three avenues by which the Enlightenment will be attacking faith according to Hegel. And one of these is what he calls the ground. And I think that Mark, that's the thing that you were just focusing on, right? The idea that you look to historical empirical evidence and say, okay, based on that, there's a Bible, there's testimony based on that, I can base my belief on that Hegel's going to have. And then there are these other aspects to this, like the asceticism in practice, and then the accusation that people of faith are engaged in idolatry because they believe in the communion, for instance, and are trying to turn God into some kind of visible empirical object.

Right. I need this physical stuff bread to literally be Christ and wine, if that's my view of transubstantiation. So I think Hegel thinks there are answers to all of these various attacks, including. So, for instance, in the case of the ground of faith, historical evidence is not really. Was never really the point. That's not really what the ground of faith is, I think. And maybe I'm wrong about that, but I think he replies to all of them.

5:59 Mark: Opening thoughts, guys?

6:00 Seth: Well, I think there's an aspect to this where it seems like what we're experiencing is Hegel's characterization of the Enlightenment's attack on faith. But really what's happening, not even under the covers, is that the Enlightenment is eating its own tail. So, you know, we can spend a lot of time parsing out how the Enlightenment, you know, takes apart faith and what have you, but the reality is it's a necessary move on the part of pure insight to do this very thing in order for it to negate the other and get to the point where it has an object that it can actually meaningfully do whatever it needs to do with.

So, you know, I think we should just keep that in mind as we go through on all the stuff related to faith is we don't want to get too hung up on defending faith or trying to figure out. It's just this is what Hegel thinks is pure insight has to go through in order to get to the. To the next stage of things.

7:04 Mark: Pure insight being the Enlightenment. He sort of goes between those terms.

7:09 Seth: Yeah. Or at least representing the Enlightenment.

7:13 Dylan: So I found myself just at this, you know, similar to the end of the metaphysics, Aristotle's metaphysics, where I'm thought, thinking itself and coming to some kind of conclusion about it. So we have reason being leading us to God. And I'm having to bite my tongue for just a combination of weariness. And this is the part of philosophy that I just don't have. I hardly have any patience for. I have to work very hard to understand even why it matters. So that's a terrible position to be in. So I'm having to force myself to understand what's being said and how that plays out in a way to understand. But to me, it feels like it's the winding end of a kind of cavern.

8:07 Mark: So I can see how we would see the whole book as what you're describing, the winding, the dead end. Right. So many of these transitions have been so illuminating and interesting. And to think that it all ends in we're all God. Self consciousness is God like. Okay, there's a lot more to explain about that. If you really want to understand that? And how is that different from Spinoza and things. But it's kind of fundamentally a goofy view. And. And if you think like such a terrible answer.

8:35 Dylan: And it just also.

8:37 Wes: Hegel's very pissed off that Kant says we can't know God. And with the results of that, you know, with what follows in that and Jacobi and others. But what does he mean by knowing God? Is it just communitarianism in the end?

8:53 Dylan: Yes.

8:54 Wes: It starts to sound more and more like that. Is it just being embedded in the community? What does knowledge of God even mean? What is he defending? Because he's very, very irritable about it. I suppose maybe we would learn that if we got to the end of the phenomenology. But I am starting to get suspicious that yeah, the answer he's not going to be able to deliver in the end except to say something about embeddedness and community to which you guys all know, I'm allergic.

9:20 Dylan: Yeah. And this is the difference. Even though I pointed to Aristotle's metaphysics. Right, Aristotle's metaphysics. When you get the thought thinking itself, you get this kind of woo woo end of a old guy with a beard saying, coming to that end, it's not as pissed off. It just feels like kind of I've moved from philosophy to chakras or something like that. Right. And this I agree. Hegel's pissed off that you can't know God. And so at this point, it's like a full throated enlightenment is enlightenment to Christianity and specific form of Christianity. And if you ever wondered if it was going to have to be a Christian state or not, now it's clear that that's exactly it is. And the community involved with it. I mean, I don't know.

10:07 Mark: Right. So insert Royce here.

10:09 Wes: Right.

10:10 Mark: If you want to go down that, that road. We, you know, I think we said something more specific about what that would mean and how, what it would be to be a person in such a community that is expressing the will of God, blah, blah, blah. I want to give it just a brief defense of. This has been back on my mind because of the whole Talarico thing and hey, you Texans, you want a religious person? Well, here's a religious person. Please vote for the religious person if you actually are religious. And then I'm looking at Twitter and people are saying he's a heretic.

Like actually using the word heretic in public discourse is not something you normally hear. So I'm very interested in. Right. I was not interested in religious philosophy at all when we started this podcast. But if religion is going to be in a public space, I want it to be the good liberal kind of religion. Right. That is, that says, as Talarico has said, we're all. All faiths are pointing ultimately at the same divine right. God has to be something that was not merely revealed in one historical thing. And if you don't happen to be born in that part of the world, too bad you're going to hell.

Like, that makes no goddamn sense at all. So it has to be something that is part of the phenomenology of human experience. And this is a view that Hegel is putting forward. So he's one of many, I would say, you know, progressive kinds of Christianity that are not so sectarian. You know, they're not gonna. Hegel's not gonna start wars. There's not gonna be wars between the Protestants and the Catholics on Hegel's watch. There's not gonna be, you know, just this demonization of the Jews or the Muslims or anybody else. Maybe I'm being too generous with Hegel.

I don't know ultimately how his state is gonna look. But that's what I feel is at stake here, that we are still in the. The age of the Enlightenment, such that those of us who are not religious basically dismiss the rel. Being irrational. You're believing things without due evidence. And a lot of the people of faith who have not read any sophisticated philosophical Christianity are. Yeah, that's just what the Bible says. And why do I believe the Bible? Because the Bible says I should believe the Bible. Right. They're believing things on plainly circular logic.

And they're okay with that. Right? I'm on the Bible's team. In some ways, I could not. You know, it's a leap of faith to be on the Bible's team, but it is a matter of believing, having thoughts about things that, you know, scientists say we can't know anything about. So we really haven't grown that far beyond the Kant vs. Hegel days, even though it's, you know, century later.

12:46 Seth: I think there's a way in which you could just read this and say, look, you know, Hegel's giving. There's a characterization of faith versus reason here that you can pick up old school. Like, we've all talked about this a million times. We've seen it a million times. Here's his version. You know, does what he has to say about how reason views faith and how faith thinks that reason doesn't understand it? Does that resonate with other instances of Rationality coming in contact with religion throughout history. Does it resonate with what we see today in our own, you know, experiences?

And if so, or at least if there's some measure of cogency to it. We've talked on this podcast about scientism and logical positivism and a number of other things that are very much legacies of the Enlightenment. And if you're not either actively engaging in listening to or being overwhelmed by commentary and podcasts and news about AI, then please send me the tips on how you're doing it. But the same discourse is going on. What's unique about humanity that can't be replicated by the machines? And just on and on and on this idea that there's some aspect of our existence which is connected to something greater than our individual selves and that isn't captured in the way in which we structure and understand the world for the most part.

And so, you know, it's the same old, same old.

14:29 Wes: Yeah, I don't think, as I've said many times before on this podcast, and in relation to scientism, I don't think faith is irrational. But I mean that the faith in its most abstract form, the positing of a necessary being, for instance, I think it's motivated by a real problem. And as you know, as you may remember, I like the cosmological argument, I think, more than a lot of philosophers. But the problem is the more you give content to faith, the more irrational it seems. And I think that's part of what Hegel is getting at here. The more content and that he wants it to have content, although he's accused of, you know, by subsequent philosophers, of having also made it too abstract, like Kierkegaard.

But I think Kierkegaard says, well, you just have to embrace the irrationality if you're going to give it content, if you're going to talk about historical personages and miracles and this and that, then you're going to have to embrace the irrationality. By the way, I also don't. I don't think the, like, the unmoved mover, I think, is a. I wouldn't put that in the category of woo. I think it, you know, it's motivated by a real philosophical problem and it's kind of an ingenious solution. So. But yeah, so I don't know. So where do we want to begin with this?

15:41 Mark: Well, let's jump in where we stopped last time. So we're still in the culture section.

15:45 Wes: Can I make a suggestion quickly, like these sections or there's 10 or 11 sections before 5:38 before the battle, you know, truly begins, are very technical. We should probably just try to give a high level summary of what's going on there.

15:59 Mark: Sure.

15:59 Wes: If we do that, we can get bogged down for the entire episode.

16:02 Mark: Yes, for sure. So right. In culture, what are we? Okay, well you're a doctor, you're a low class person, you're a king. Culture gives us clothes to dress up in, but it gives, you know, the. Everybody in Rameau's Nephew. Everybody's always having to fit into these roles and please each other and act according to these norms. But there has to be some part of us that escapes those roles that is outside of that role. So Hegel calls this pure consciousness. So the whole section faith and pure insight, which is different than pure consciousness, these are subdivisions within pure consciousness.

So pure consciousness is just that trace of spirituality. And you even saw that there's another footnote in here. To Ramo's nephew and Wes and I for close reads, read this Lionel Trilling essay that was saying that actually Rameau's nephew, that character represents the world wise, world weary, cultured individual. And even though he is having to engage in all these games and do these things, even he. There's a part of him that recognizes, look, I'm actually standing above all this. I'm. That's why I can be cynical about it because I'm a spiritual being that has some sort of inalienable dignity that cannot be captured by all these roles and things.

So that's what we've made out of this. And then within that we're going to have to put some effort into explaining why it splits into the two parts. But the two parts are kind of the. It is the Ramos. The pure insight is sort of the Ramose nephew part of it. It is that spirit of the light of reason that can just. It has no content of its own.

17:44 Seth: Right.

17:44 Mark: It doesn't say, hey, this is the truth, but it, it allows you to look at everything else and say, yeah, that's bullshit. That's bullshit. That's logically inconsistent. That. You know, it's sort of a pressure to. It is self consciousness itself to improve. And then the thing that is reflecting on is sort of like the evolution of what Hegel was calling in the previous section. The, the simple consciousness, the naive consciousness. So this is. I've got faith in things. And eventually these. Once he's established that these two things are in conflict and we can talk how they're really the same thing.

I mean this Is sort of what is so clever about this whole thing. I was referring in our last discussion that according to Hegel, Kant's view is presenting two sides of the same coin. And on one side we end up just embracing the empirical. Science is all just about the empirical. And on the other side, well, maybe we have this realm of faith. But if we're really good Kantians, we can't say anything about, you know, the realm of faith is just about the other world. And you could see how those are actually the same view.

18:47 Wes: Right.

18:47 Mark: They're both Kant. Kant is saying, yes, do science focus on the empirical? But he's also saying there is a spiritual part of us that reaches toward faith. It's just, you know, it shouldn't disobey the commands of reason.

19:00 Wes: Yeah. If you want to look to a specific place for this, it's 5:29. This is where the split occurs. And they're both pure consciousness. It's just that one side takes the path of being for self and the other side takes the path of being in itself. So the latter is faith and the former is more science oriented. Right. Being for self side of things tries to reduce everything to the subject and the certainty of the subject. But it's very abstract. It's still in the realm of pure consciousness. And then the other side tries to reduce everything to this abstract pure beyond. Or maybe reduce is the wrong way to it put. Put this but is focused on that side of things. But you can see how each is an aspect of quote, unquote, pure consciousness. And it's focused on the one hand on the, you know, this abstract self, and on the other hand on this abstract divine entity, pure in.

19:58 Mark: That is not empirical. We're not focused on my body. I'm focused on just. So I still find that a little hard to get a handle on of why the pure light of reason, as the Enlightenment might put it, you know, divine light of reason, some of them might put it, why that. That is self consciousness itself.

20:16 Wes: Because all the categories flow out of the apperception. Everything flows for Kant, out of self consciousness. The categories are necessary for the unity of the apperception. They're sort of the building blocks of self consciousness. So to talk of objectivity in Kant's terms, including scientific objectivity, we gotta go all the way back to treating the world as if it is a efflux of the self, the categorical structure required to sustain self consciousness.

20:47 Dylan: He uses the phrase or the name spiritual essentialities. So, you know, first part of 5 29, pure consciousness, namely Is reflection out of the world of culture in such a way that the substance of that world and also the masses or groups into which it is articulated are shown to be what they are in themselves. Spiritual essentialities, absolutely restless processes or determinations which are directly canceled in their opposite. He says their essence, simple consciousness, is thus the simplicity of absolute difference, which is at once no difference.

And I just put an unhappy face right around that. On the one hand, I basically. I read things like that. I'm like, I don't even know what you're. I mean, it's like a Buddhist koan. The water is not wet is true water. It's the kind of thing that he's saying. And then I said, okay, well, so I kind of get what you're trying to say. You know this because you're unifying contradictions and stuff like that.

21:48 Mark: But two sides of a coin, right? Those are an absolute difference, which is no difference. Like, they are both the coin, literally, but yet they are opposites in the sense. You know, in one conceptual sense.

22:00 Dylan: But they aren't both the coin. They're both parts of the coin. Right? So, yeah, sure, if you want to say that's absolute difference with no difference

22:08 Wes: and this whole dialectic problem again. But, yeah, he's right. Universal in particular, seem absolutely opposed within

22:16 Dylan: our realm, but are unified in his.

22:18 Wes: They're unified at some level where you ontologize the imagination. And, yeah, subject and object are identical, and then they emerge out of this primordial ooze that is, which is the place with no difference. So it is weird and contradictory, but, you know, it's like talking about the beginning of the world. It's a weird, contradictory place.

22:37 Mark: Yeah, I think universality versus individuality is a good point here because the person of faith is encountering these picture thoughts of God as an individual, and I am devoted to you as an individual. But we know, right? So that's just what the person in himself is being in itself. But the being, once you get to being for self, and especially once you're thinking, what is the light of reason? Tells us, well, the light of reason should be the same for everyone. So insofar as I am embodying the light of reason and I'm following wherever it leads, this process that is attacking and pervading the passive essence of the matter at hand, whatever it is that I'm being critical about, then I am acting as a universal self.

I'm not acting as my individuals, even though as a. You know, of course, Dylan the critic and Seth the critic are actually going to have quite different opinions on things. But insofar as there really is a, a light of reason and you are both adhering to that and doing mathematics according to it or whatever it is that you're doing, criticizing bad beliefs, then you're, the difference between you is trivial.

23:43 Wes: Yeah. You're in truth seeking mode and you're, you're trying to be objective. So just like as in Humean ethics, right. Or we empathize from the standpoint of a universal third party, right. We do that. We sort of get out of ourselves when we're trying to reason about things.

23:59 Mark: And I guess I think of that as equivalent to self consciousness because it is. Right? That's when you're being critical. Like I have a belief, I'm being self conscious about the belief. And you can just do this forever and it'll undermine all of your beliefs, right? Thus the partially examined life and not the fully examined life. Because you would literally, it would drive you to crazy nihilism. You would undermine everything. Reason under the pure insight even undermines itself is one of the things that is, you know, as Seth was saying, the enlightenment is eating its own tail.

24:31 Wes: But the upshot, you know, I think just we don't have to spend a lot more time on this section. The upshot is just he's talking about on the side of being for self, the reasons side. We get a reduction to the pure I, to the category and the categories. And that's Kant's solution to objectivity. It's trying to turn everything into the world, into an aspect of self consciousness, as weird as that sounds until you think about it in Kantian terms. The other side of that is faith, where what that leaves, right? If everything, if the world is only I can grasp it only as what is constructed by me, let's put it that way.

Then you leave this negative space where everything that can't be constructed by me, including the things in themselves, that's a big negative space. And God is just objects of faith or thought. We can think them, but we can't know them. So you get two forms of abstraction. On the side of doing the construction, you have abstract self consciousness. On the side of what can't be constructed, you have the abstract unknowable. And now these two things are going to have a big cage match in the next section.

25:41 Seth: So the entirety of the time that we've been doing this, coming back to Hegel, which feels like it's a year now, but probably at least six months, right? It's like I'VE been looking for a key, been looking for a Rosetta Stone, and I haven't found anything quite yet. But there's gotta be some concise way to say, like, this is ideal state for Hegel and actually use his jargon so you understand it like substance, essence, actuality, self consciousness, consciousness. Like, because everything that we see in here that you think is good is provisional and ultimately to be overcome.

And I feel like there's an understanding that you have to come to or you're in danger of just getting lost. So, like, for example, just on this last section, 5:28, page 322, you know, he's talking about. He says, we're of course talking about religion. And we've seen religion come up before. It came up in Unhappy Consciousness, it came up in culture, it came up here and the ethical substance. So if what you're thinking is that he's talking about religion, and religion to you is a single unified thing that you have a conception of, you're wrong.

The point being that it's like you have to do all this work to set the stage for what's going on here. Because if it's. If when he says at the end of that paragraph, it is therefore essentially merely a belief, you know, that's not what he thinks religion is, obviously. Right.

27:21 Wes: Well, he's trying to distinguish it, right. That he's saying, we've seen religion before. This isn't the first time. We saw it in Unhappy Consciousness. In fact, we saw it in. In the Divine Law, but in this case, in the Enlightenment form. Right. It becomes mere belief. It becomes this empty thing. Yeah, correct.

27:39 Seth: Yep.

27:40 Mark: Faith sub E. Right.

27:42 Wes: Faith sub E or faith sub C or Hochberg. Is that. Was that his name? At University of Texas at Austin doing extreme analytic philosophy. And they just. Yeah, they love the primes and the e's and the F's, fxs and all that. But I think, you know, by the time we get to the end of the section leading into the battle between faith and reason, there's a lot of repetition here. But in 536, he's re. Emphasizing this point that pure insight is trying to abolish. That's not a direct quote. Abolish everything that's independent of it. Again, everything is all the objects of knowledge as appearances are constructed.

Nothing that we can know is independent of self consciousness. And then in 537 it says, okay, now I'm going to get converts, strangely enough, right. It's this rat rationalist point of view that seeks to Convert. We read Kant on enlightenment, the whole think for yourself mandate. This is what this is about. So everyone is going to. In 537, these enlightenment geniuses are going to set themselves a task of getting everyone educated into rationality. That's what enlightenment means. Consciousness is raised for the culture and people in general.

It's not good enough just to have philosophes over here and philosophers and this and that. It's got to pervade the culture.

29:07 Dylan: Well, and isn't that part of the concise endpoint summary that Seth's asking about or talking about is in the end, we resolve the individuality of each person and their own perspective and experience into a unified one that's actually living and breathing. Right? Via culture becomes a reflect and in. So you get the differences with no difference. Right? So you have absolute. I mean, ultimately. Right. That sentence that we just talked about earlier is you would have absolute difference between all kinds of individuals and things like that. But they're all.

There's no difference because they're all unified in the grand absolute essence of everything. And that happens through culture, through the participation of individuals in that. Which is why you would have to have ultimately, effectively, even if it wasn't mandated, you would effectively have to have a state religion. Right? That's the way you'd get that unification. Even if there's something that's quote unquote tolerant about it in that it's not going to be. There's a sense that maybe it's not the same kind of power play, but the end point's the same.

It's a unified single religion of some sort of. That is reflected in the culture.

30:25 Mark: Yeah, but not a unified positive religion like we're not all going to be Lutherans. It's going to be the religion, the natural religion of enlightened peoples that is going to be the single. We won't have to dictate it. We won't have to have a despot which comes up in this section pretty soon imposing religion. We won't have to have priests imposing religion because we will all just see the light.

30:51 Dylan: Yep, sure.

30:53 Mark: Or rather be the light.

30:55 Wes: Are we ready to get into 538 and the Enlightenment, or did you want to do more? Prequel Prelude the only thing there was

31:04 Mark: a theme that you know, because pure consciousness, right? The thing that gave birth to this pure insight and faith is a retreat from the actual empirical world, then it's actually not pure. Right. As soon as you try to think as a faithful person, as soon as you try to Think about God, you think about like a man in the sky with a beard. You start using things, images from the actual world, because what else would you use? That's all that we have at our disposal. And so he just talks about that in terms of both sides, right? Faith more so, because faith actually has a content.

You're actually thinking about God and immortality, whereas pure insight is just this critical negativity, you know, it does end up spilling out something, right? We think we have natural rights of man and this whole political system, like we'll get into that. But initially it has no content at all. But yeah, both of them are pulling in illegitimate ways from the empirical world, just by necessity. That's how thought works.

32:07 Wes: So in 538, right, you get you sets the stage for the battle. Peculiar object against which pure insight, or the Enlightenment, directs the power of. Of the notion is faith, which is the form of pure consciousness, confronting it in the same element. In other words, both are doing battle on the plane of pure consciousness. Both are forms of pure consciousness. They represent a kind of retreat, in a way from concreteness.

32:33 Mark: Well, a thought in particular, right? Not just to make that. Because what is pure consciousness? Well, it's just that it's just thought. So you could actually have an argument. Whereas all these dialectical things that were happening before, right, by like the divine law versus natural or versus positive law, those are actually conflicts between people or phenomena or something like. But this is actual. We're getting to abstract logic, or at least the ability to talk in those terms.

33:02 Wes: What pure insight faces in the beginning here is actually what I was calling perverse, or I think, I guess he calls it the spirit perverse consciousness in some of our previous episodes, right, the stuff of witty Rameau's Nephew type of consciousness, maybe nihilism, so he says the nature, it's directed against the impure intentions and perverse insights of the actual world. And then in 539, we get a kind of recapitulation, a synthesis of the philosoph's tranquil consciousness, his earnestness, which is what he calls the form, because it doesn't have any content of its own. We'll discuss why. And then culture's witty self criticism. That's the content, the Rameau's nephew stuff. And that synthesis gives us this idea of insight for everyone, right? The Enlightenment, that's going to be spread out culturally among all people. But yeah, why does he call one form and one content?

34:01 Mark: I mean, it seemed like there was no content for just the sheer, right, pure light of Reason, it just is a spotlight that has to direct itself on something. But if you want to see this as the outgrowth of Rameau's nephew, the cynic that, well, so Rameau's nephew just has all these observations and sort of dismisses all of them as twaddle. I'm just talking, I'm just calling it like I see it. But if you really, as a philosopher reading that book, you try to synthesize them and say like, well, what actually is the message? What is the overall critique?

So it ends up being, you know, you say some insightful things. So Diderot himself is the voice of the Enlightenment of pure insight. You know, if he were to then write, you know, a synopsis of. Here's my takeaways from Rameau's critique. So the fact that it's aimed, it's a critique of a society, okay, there's content. The thing that's analyzing is the content.

35:01 Wes: Well, in other words, enlightenment society can't become self critical until it encounters the nihilist as a moment within it. Until then it could just be happily tranquil and unaware of the downside of its focus on reason and rationality. That downside, of course, is going to get much, much worse in the form of the terror of the French Revolution. But as it's first encountered, it's encountered as someone like Rameau's nephew, this morally slippery but witty person. But Rameau's nephew is supplying all the critical insight. And then tranquil consciousness has to take that up and do something with it, I guess.

35:45 Mark: I had read tranquil consciousness in here as what again? The simple consciousness, the tranquil consciousness that Rameau's nephew was opposed to in the previous section has now become faith. So faith before enlightenment comes and craps all over it is just like, I'm just here worshiping my God and I am tranquil about that. It is not unhappy consciousness. It is perfectly fine. So that is the tranquil consciousness.

36:14 Wes: The tranquil consciousness here is the philosoph encountering in 539.

36:19 Seth: Yeah, it's the pure insight, not the faith part.

36:22 Wes: So the tranquil consciousness has no special insight into the world of culture. The latter has itself, rather the most painful feeling and the truest insight about itself. He said this over and over again about witty consciousness and Rameau's nephew. The language of this feeling and the brilliant talk which pronounces judgment on every aspect of its condition. Yeah, this is the encounter between the philosoph and Rameau's nephew. And then the whole conflict between faith and Reason is kind of born of this stage.

36:51 Seth: It's like if the annoying, yet sometimes witty and ironic hipster individual, like if that attitude becomes universal, just like Wes said, until Rameau's nephew appears to show the culture a different path, a different way of apprehending the world, then it's not possible to move forward or change. But then once that happens, it has to be adopted more broadly and become maybe like a default attitude or at least ubiquitous.

37:29 Wes: So in 540, I think, is where we get this transition now to the enemy as faith. Or it's, you know, it's at the very end of that section. Right. He's trying to give us a little plot point, a little turn into the conflict being with faith itself.

37:46 Dylan: So let's say what section you're in again.

37:48 Mark: 545.

37:49 Wes: 40. Yep. However, the knowledge of essences of the last sentence is still firmly established as superior to empty knowledge. And pure insight only manifests its own peculiar activity insofar as it opposes itself to faith. So this is the point at which faith becomes the opponent.

38:07 Mark: Well, and. But they're trying to do the same thing I had clear up the confusion of the world. Is that in this section? Yes, yes. So it's like the problem of evil. So it's. The pure insight is not. You're right, it is the tranquil consciousness. The tranquil part of it is because with enlightenment reason, you're not just trying to tear down other people's inconsistencies or something like that. You are trying to make the whole world rational and consistent and law, like so. Right. If you see. So Leibniz is a great example. Right. The philosoph, you see something that the.

The problem of evil, you see all this apparent chaos in the world and you try to use reason. You, not simple faith. This, the simple faithful. Well, it'll all work out. You know, we just can't see God's grand plan. But the philosoph tries to actively. No, no, I'm going to use argumentation and show, like with my possible worlds argument, if I'm Leibniz, that all these apparent contradictions can be worked out. So, you know, of course, Hegel is

39:12 Wes: doing that himself also at the, you know, in this section, we start with pure insight being the possession of philosophes in particular individuals. But I think he's giving us a prelude to the idea that it spreads out culturally, that it becomes a cultural thing. And in a way, everyone is quote unquote enlightened or affected by enlightenment values, so that the philosopher is not so special. Shows that knowing better and judging are in general something universally and now universally known. With this, the sole remaining interest is eradicated and the individual judgment is resolved into universal insight. This is the process I've just been describing. But what's left over here is right as something. There's kind of an emptiness to this kind of knowledge. And what's left over is faith. And then so that becomes the target in the form of superstition and faith

40:09 Dylan: here at the beginning. Right. This is why it's sort of part of the dialectic that's opposed by enlightenment is it's whatever mere belief is the way it was characterized. It's sort of this unenlightened faith. And that's why it gets juxtaposed by enlightenment. And we have the section superstition where it's part of the path such that you get to a unification of enlightenment and faith where faith is no longer merely belief that is under the umbrella of superstition that enlightenment can't abide, but gets you to conclusion where you can have enlightened faith.

40:52 Mark: Well, I was trying to think of would the alternative to Nietzsche's God is dead be to describe the situation after Kantian enlightenment take on faith has done its job. It's like not God is dead, but God has been cast out into the void. God is effectively dead because he's no longer in the same world that we live in. Something like that. God has been thinned. Maybe that's a good God has been voided.

41:19 Seth: Yeah.

41:20 Wes: Made deistic. Yeah. So enlightenment, pure insight. They're both part of pure consciousness. But pure insight sets its sights on faith in the form of superstition. And in 541 he's going to compare this to previous negative attitudes of consciousness like skepticism and idealism.

41:40 Seth: Yeah.

41:40 Mark: Is there anything sort of conclusion? Conclusion. Conclusionary. We want to say conclusion.

41:46 Wes: Ish. E Conclusion.

41:47 Mark: E. To wrap up our first half here, that's going to be the. I don't know how much he really engages in superstition. Right. I've sort of pointed at the idea that. Well, when faith and pure insight are invariably. Because they're a flight from the actual material world, going to bring things from the material world with them. So faith in particular is going to. Again, how do you imagine God? And there's this big thing. Is God non binary? Is God in some sense male? You know, our Father is all over everything. Well, no, no, that's. That's a superstitious, really idolatrous importation of something from the empirical world into the noumenal world, into the world of the divine.

And so, of course, the Enlightenment should smack that down. I guess that's a good enough sentiment to stop with. Come back next week, get your Part 2 or become a partially examined life supporter at partiallyexaminedlife.com support. And if you support us through our website or through Patreon, then part two should already be in your supporter feed. Thanks, thanks.

42:55 Seth: Thank you, thank you.