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

0:07 Mark: You're listening to the Partially Examined Life, episode 394 part 2. We have been discussing Hegel's phenomenology, the Enlightenment, and we're now up to the section the struggle of Enlightenment with superstition. So I think the direction that we are going here is that the Enlightenment's view of faith, right, Faith sub e is believing unsupported propositions, maybe unsupported propositions about aspects, characteristics of God, about historical events, miracles that have taken place. And these all end up being classified by pure insight, right?

The voice of the Enlightenment as mere superstition. But he's going to end up saying that actually pure insight does not, the Enlightenment does not understand faith, that faith is not. In fact, this was a mistake of the whole section of pure consciousness, right? That the overall thing that gave birth to the two sides, pure insight and faith, just the fact that that is a retreat from the actual physical social world means it's going to falsify what faith is. Right? If faith is mere thoughts about God, while, well, that's wrong. Faith is a matter of comportment that the faithful will have toward God.

And in fact they find theirselves in God. They define themselves in terms of God and correctly, according to Hegel. So that is how ultimately we're going to get out of this. Why the Enlightenment had an incomplete understanding of the kind of thing that it was criticizing. So faith sub e does go down, but faith sub H. Right. Hegel's view of faith will end up being, you know, where he's ultimately going in the book.

1:52 Seth: Yeah, I just feel compelled to note that this aspect of you just mentioned, faith, enlightenment will get faith, right? Effectively. Is that an intrinsic characteristic of the unity, the solving of Kant's problem or Kant's failure to not know the thing in itself is the way in which you get all the way to undoubted truth or pick your way of talking about it, that you are aligned with the universe, the universe is aligned with you, you reflecting the truth of the world in all of your actions and all of your being. So this is a universe in which, and an endpoint in which there's no doubt. There's no shadow of a doubt, there isn't a sliver of it, because once you have that, everything will fall apart. So it's a kind of utopia.

2:43 Wes: So in 541 we get this, what he calls a sharper negativity than skepticism and idealism and the Enlightenment. And it's sharper because it declares self consciousness to be Absolute and the self, as we've already said, it treats the self consciousness really as if it's the essence of all reality. This is what pure insight does. And in doing so, all of empirical reality, in a way is what we can know about it is reducible to self consciousness and its categories. But what it leaves out is all the content, right, the stuff that Fichte said you had to posit. And the content really belongs on the sides of the things themselves, including God. So faith, says Hegel, content falls on faith's side. It's what you know is durable being. And pure insight starts out empty without content.

3:42 Mark: Is there a way of interpreting the pure insight as the embodiment of Enlightenment reason without explicit reference to Kant's notion of the categories? Just that the reason, you know, on any, you know, if you're Locke, if you're Hume, if you're any of those guys.

3:59 Dylan: Cartesian ego.

4:00 Mark: Yes. Things that it can range over everything. So in that sense everything is its playground without having to. I just wonder if we have to be full on Kantians for this to make sense at all.

4:13 Wes: So no, this is because he's saying over and over again this very confusing thing that pure insight thinks everything is reducible to self consciousness and readers are not going to understand what that means. I mean, listeners are not going to understand what that means. Otherwise it's just baffling. It's just, it's just gibberish. Why would Hegel say that the Enlightenment is trying to reduce everything to self consciousness except through that? Unless we understand it through that Kantian picture?

4:37 Mark: I don't want to spend a lot of time on this. But even on Kant's view, the fact that my experience is made up of the imposition of the categories of my understanding, I'm not conscious of those categories. So there is no actual self consciousness involved in, in Kantian knowledge.

4:57 Wes: We're going to have to go back and do the apperception and Kant, if you want to do all of this. We can't argue about this. Okay, but the apperception, it's the deduction of the categories involves this idea of self consciousness. It's the unity of self consciousness. Right? The thing that Hume just thought was a bundle that proves the categories because there is a representation of self consciousness and it's not possible without the categories qed. Therefore there must be the categories of experience and for objectivity to work, they must be imposed by us. They must be self consciousness's imposition. Otherwise. Yeah, without that we should just do a whole episode on Apperception, comparing Hume and Leibniz and Kant and everyone else. Because it is kind of the key.

5:40 Mark: All right, so we'll push this to the future.

5:42 Seth: Yeah, well, it's basically the whole strategy Kant has. Right. These are the conditions under which our consciousness has to be in order for us to have the experiences of the world that we have.

5:51 Wes: Yeah, but I think Mark is right. We can leave it aside for now and move on. But. Yeah, because it gets exciting now. 542. Right. Priesthood, envious conceit and dupes and things like this.

6:03 Dylan: Right.

6:03 Mark: It starts to sound like. Like Nietzsche, that faith is not merely wrong, but it is, you know, the opiate of the masses. It is the evil intentions of a group of priests that are trying to enslave people by giving them these bullshitty things to believe.

6:21 Wes: Well, it breaks out right between the naive masses and their superstitions and prejudices and then the priests with evil intentions who are trying to take advantage of them and bifurcates into those two things.

6:32 Seth: What's funny to me about this section is you actually can understand what he's saying. It's so clear. Right. The masses are victims of the deception of a priesthood which in its envious conceit holds itself as to be the sole possessor of insight and pursues its other selfish ends as well. It's actually like in an understandable, normal, if polemical sentence, the stupidity and confusion of the people brought about by the trickery of priestcraft. Despotism, which despises both, draws for itself the advantage of undisturbed domination and the fulfillment of its desires and caprices, but is itself at the same time the same dullness of insight, the same superstition and error. All right.

7:17 Wes: We found Dylan's favorite section in the Phenomenology.

7:21 Dylan: The point being, Hegel clearly had the capability to write as clearly as he wanted to make you happy. And he did it on purpose. So there must be. He must have had a reason for it. I'm not saying it was a good reason, but he must have had a reason.

7:35 Wes: I had concluded after this reading that actually he's just bad at communicating. He does have these incredible literary flourishes, which we saw it in the Faith and Knowledge book as well, where he's just. He's on. But in general, I think he's just too in his head and in these deep thoughts to kind of fully come out of the cave and enlighten the rest of us.

7:53 Dylan: There's something implied in this that's not said explicitly as well. So just as pure insight sees faith as this superstitious belief, there's kind of a consequence of that and that is that it must also see a class division because it sees the masses as naive and unreflective. So there's reflective and unreflective people, which is another consequence or another way that the Enlightenment sees culture or sees the world. And I don't think it's controversial to say that, but it's not something that he harps on. It's just since we've talked about the role of the individual in these various epochs that Hegel's been working through, seems like that might be something that he might have put a little effort into.

8:41 Wes: So here's an example. He says at the same time it the priesthood conspires with despotism, which as the synthetic non notional unity of the real and this ideal realm, a curiously inconsistent entity, stands above the bad insight of the multitude and the bad intentions of the priests, and yet unifies both within itself. He's talking about the absence of separation of church and state. So this is something that philosophs like Voltaire railed against, this alliance between the altar and the throne. And instead of saying that directly Right. In his language, the priesthood conspires with the state, with despotism in the synthetic non notional unity of the real and the ideal. The real being worldly power and the ideal being the religious aspect. So anyway, we don't have to argue.

9:28 Mark: But a non notional. It's not a productive.

9:32 Wes: Yes, non notional in the sense, it's not going anywhere, it's not going to produce. Right, Is that what you meant Mark? Produce the next stage? Yeah, it's not a dialectical tension.

9:42 Mark: So this is pointing at something against what I think Dylan was pointing to, like, oh, we're going to just end up with a state religion. Like that's not what he wants. It's going to be a state religion, but it's going to be grassroots universal religion, not a state imposed religion.

9:55 Seth: Well, okay, whatever. I agree with the notion that that's what he's pointing to. But this is also why I would bring up the utopian ness of it. Because the whole reason for all kinds of aspects of the problem of state religions and stuff like that has to do with the fact that we don't live in a utopia and we actually live in a real world that doesn't have the kind of unity that he's talking about. And that's fundamentally what's so sort of challenging to Understand. But also infuriating to try to even think about is, you know, you have. I mean, this is barely halfway through the. It's barely two thirds of the way through the book.

10:41 Wes: Right.

10:41 Seth: There's still like a ton of the book left, right?

10:44 Wes: Yeah. So I think it's complicated. You know, this is. We'll have to read Philosophy of Right. Because I think he does argue against. Right.

10:50 Mark: That in the year 2055 you'll read philosophy of Right.

10:54 Wes: Yeah. Religion simply ruling the state. But it is complicated because he does, you know, we should remember he doesn't like Catholicism and he thinks Protestantism and particularly, I think Lutheranism is a higher stage. So he's not just a rah, rah, let's wear our crystals and we can all have different religions kind of person either.

11:13 Seth: But yeah, and I agree that he's not having a. Or discussing a state religion in the form of it needs to be imposed on people for their own good or something like that. There's this conceit, this utopian conceit, that this is the natural evolution of the human beings and human soul towards this end and that it will naturally get there.

11:36 Wes: Yeah, I mean, I think we all thought that. He seems to suggest that the state will absorb civil society. And what that means is complicated. But here. Right. We get the Enlightenment. You know, we should keep in mind he's kind of. When he talks about these three aspects of superstition. The people, the priests. Right. And the despot. This, you know, he's speaking in a way, from the standpoint of the Enlightenment and the Enlightenment's attacks. And in 543 he's going to say it doesn't attack all of these things without making a distinction. So maybe I should read.

For since its essence is pure insight, what is universal in and for itself, its true relation to the other extreme is that in which it concerns itself with the common and identical element in both. In both what? This is where. Yeah, I thought I was going to be explaining something and now I'm confused. The aspect of individuality isolating itself from the general naive consciousness is an antithesis which it cannot directly affect the will of the deceiving priesthood and of the oppressed. Despot is therefore not directly the object of its activity.

Its object is the insight devoid of will, which has no separable individuality of its own. In other words, the Enlightenment goes after the people in general, the naive believers. It doesn't go after the priests directly. It doesn't go after the despots directly. It singles the General masses out for its disdain.

13:01 Mark: It is not against the believer qua individual relating individually to his or her deity is relating to patterns of thought that are common to the various people. So, right, that's. You make a logical argument against a position, not against a person. And that's going to end up being important because persons are the ones who are engaged in behaviors, say of devotion. Those are no longer just logical positions or thoughts.

13:31 Wes: And then in 544, pure insight will have a twofold relationship to this naive consciousness, the consciousness of the believing masses. And what is that? What are the two relationships?

13:46 Dylan: Well, he says on the one hand, pure insight is itself the same as that consciousness. So I'm not sure if he's saying any more than he did before, where he said there's pure consciousness and it has two elements, pure insight and faith.

14:00 Wes: You're right, he's just saying that, right? It's pure thought trained on an essence, basically.

14:04 Dylan: Right. On the other hand, this naive consciousness gives complete liberty to absolute being as well as to its parts in the simple element of its thought, and allows them to subsist there and be valid only as it's implicit. Here we go.

14:21 Seth: Now we're cooking with gas.

14:23 Wes: Did you fall into a sinkhole?

14:26 Dylan: Let me just scoot down a bit. So it says faith is for pure insight in itself, pure self consciousness, and has only to become this explicitly for itself. Pure insight has, in this notion of self consciousness, the element in which instead of false insight, it realizes itself. So this is actually really important. So pure insight goes after this naive consciousness, this naive faith, and it, it sees in it that it is self consciousness.

14:57 Wes: So what's going on here is he associates God with being in itself, right? And the thing in itself and the implicit, which is what being in itself always is. For Hegel, things become explicit when they become for itself. And so I think what he's saying here is a naive believer privileges this thing in itself, God in the beyond, and therefore surrenders themselves as for themselves, right? Their own self standing, their own activity as believers. All the value and all the importance goes to God in the. To what is in the. The beyond.

15:35 Dylan: So just in rereading that, I think I've come to a different understanding that I had before. Pure insight looks at the believer, looks at the masses and says, ah, somehow they have this concept. It's not even a concept, right? We can't say concept here, but there's some sort of relationship of the believer in faith to the absolute that pure insight recognizes as important in itself. But the believers don't have the right kind of relationship to the absolute that Hegel would want. So it's not self consciousness for itself. In other words, they haven't earned it.

The idea of an absolute is a good thing, but they don't in faith like this. It's just a belief. It's not the appropriate kind of knowledge. So it's in itself, but it's not for itself. And it says to pure insight, says to itself, so to speak. Aha, right. I have the ability to conceptualize in a way that the believer does not. I can do what faith cannot. You know, I can use notions. And now I have something that I can put against myself. Like I have a self conscious that I can wrestle with because I see myself as self conscious. And so now I've got the foil that I need.

16:54 Wes: Yeah, I don't think Hegel is yet talking about what he wants, but he is talking about. On the other hand, this naive consciousness gives complete liberty to absolute being, to God as well as to its parts in the simple element of its thought, and allows them to subsist there and to be valid only as implicit being and hence to be objectively valid. Implicit being. The things in themselves don't actually become for us. They're always non explicit things that we can think and empty abstractions. But in this implicit being, it renounces its own being for self.

Right. We have a passive, you know, we renounce ourselves in relation to God. Insofar as, according to the first aspect, this faith is for pure insight in itself purely self conscious and has only to become this explicitly for itself. Pure insight has in this notion of self consciousness, the element in which instead of false insight, it realizes itself. In other words, pure insight sees in this deception. Right? It sees, how do you put it? It's basically going to be able to install itself in place of faith's false insight, because it's already what faith claims to be.

It's already this kind of pure self consciousness anyway. I can't make it any clearer than that. But he's giving this the standpoint of the naive believer on the one hand, and then pure insight's critique of it on the other.

18:12 Mark: I see as very similar to the critique that Hegel was making of Kant in our last episode. That man, you know, you Kant, you're saying that God is just out there and unknowable, but right there in your very theory of transcendental apperception and the way that experience is constructed, you have acknowledged that there is this primary thing the imagination that creates this world of experience. You've already acknowledged that transcendental is not something that is a part of off in its own heaven. It's actually intimately related. So if you would just explicitly state what you have implicitly demonstrated you believe, then you would be saying, my view, Kant is Hegel's speech to him.

18:57 Wes: I think there's an analogy there, but. Right. He's not. He's giving pure insight's position, not his own.

19:03 Mark: It's the only way that I was trying to make sense of that. Pure insight is conceiving of faith as self consciousness, when explicitly is defined as not self consciousness. It is merely consciousness, consciousness of the essence, which is God. But yet we want to say that they are two sides of the same coin, that pure insight and faith are one in the same thing. So if pure insight is self consciousness, that at least has to see faith as implicitly self consciousness.

19:32 Dylan: If you just.

19:33 Mark: If you just realize that you're me.

19:35 Wes: Yes, that's perfect. That is, I think, what he's saying. All right, then we get the spread of this infection, the Enlightenment. Yeah, go ahead.

19:43 Mark: Yeah, well, just that even though I was just saying that, you know, it's. If pure insight is saying, you should realize that you're me. Well, pure insight doesn't recognize that faith is itself either. So they're both in ignorance.

19:56 Wes: Yes.

19:57 Mark: 5, 45. The interaction of pure insight and faith is unimpeded. They take place through the same element. Right. Thought. They're essentially the same.

20:07 Wes: And then it is on this account that the communication of pure insight is comparable to a silent expansion or to the diffusion, say, of a perfume in the unresisting atmosphere.

20:19 Seth: It is the penetrating infection. Now the analogy gets sinister there.

20:24 Wes: Right. Starts out as a perfume, and then.

20:27 Seth: And now it's an infection. It went from the wafting of the lavender in the fields to the percolation of Ebola or Covid, since it says that goes through the air.

20:39 Mark: Faith is trying to faithfully represent its object. It's God. And when you point out to faith, you're actually engaging in idolatry, because every word you use to think this God is not godly, it is something imported from the empirical realm like that is just undeniable. So this faith was all happy with its own knowledge, and now everything's ruined. From the point of view of faith, everything has been diseased.

21:06 Dylan: Am I wrong or is this. In all the stories he's told about the breakdown of all of these previous paradigms, has he given an explanation like this? That it comes creeping and that there's this slow transition and awareness.

21:20 Seth: Yeah. And you end up with David Hume. Is that the problem?

21:23 Mark: One would think because like the divine law and the positive law were in fact two sides of the same coin in the same way, but yet they had to be embodied by different individuals. But since I think this is the first time existing on the realm of pure thought. So it's just like this argument is simply better than the other one and it will knock down the other one, you know, for any right thinking person who considers them, whereas you just don't. Antigone is not just going to give in to Creon like she's in her position. She represents only the divine law in ignorance of the other. So it's just the fact that these are not represent. I mean, we're still talking about a believer as a person and. And then a philosoph, a skeptic, a Rameau who is coming along and making fun of them. So I'm not sure why these couldn't be people as well.

22:11 Seth: Sure.

22:11 Wes: So here, I think part of the point here is the Enlightenment takes its. It becomes culturally pervasive even among the religious, before they even think about it. Right. And before they even think about the implications for religion. And then he'll say later on in this paragraph, so once they become aware of it and they start to struggle against pure insight, he says this at the bottom of the page. The struggle too is too late. And every remedy adopted only aggravates the disease, for it has laid hold of the marrow of spiritual life. That is the notion of consciousness.

He's talking all the remedies, Right. That's all the stuff he's going at in faith and knowledge. It's Kant and Jacobi and Fichte. These are all the remedies. Because those guys, their whole project is to say, ooh, well, how are we going to a save practical reason? How are we going to save God and religion? And of course, Kant is, you know, I think is the worst offender for Hegel by kind of hollowing out religious life, getting, you know, laying hold of the marrow of spiritual life and desiccating it, or something like that. So if you could fight, if faith could have fought its battle against pure insight before it had been infected, that would have been a different matter.

But it starts already infected. And so therefore its solutions are just pure insight, forms of the solution that make things worse.

23:30 Mark: And this is where he quotes Rameau again in this section on page 332. So we know that he has Rameau on his mind that as this thing creeps in, this is this spirit of enlightenment takes complete possession of all the vitals and members of the unconscious idol. Then quote, one fine morning it gives its comrade a shove with the elbow and bang, crash. The idol lies on the floor.

23:56 Dylan: Right.

23:56 Mark: So twilight of the idols, basically.

23:59 Seth: And on one fine morning whose noon is bloodless if the infection has penetrated to every organ of spiritual life.

24:07 Wes: Yeah, very Nietzschean sounding.

24:09 Dylan: And the new serpent of wisdom raised on high for adoration has in this way painlessly cast merely a withered skin.

24:19 Mark: We take the morsels where we can get them.

24:21 Dylan: Yes. I don't think 546 adds much in 547.

24:27 Wes: It's, it's. He's. Pure insight attacks itself.

24:31 Dylan: Yes. This is the. We have therefore to see how pure insight and intention behaves in its negative attitude to that other in quotes which it finds confronting it. So I guess up until this point, right. Spirit is not pure insight. Pure insight is part of spirit, but it's not until it infects the body politic or the body, I don't know what the term for the general body is. The body politic, once it's sufficiently infected and spirit now has taken on the character of pure insight, now pure insight turns its attention towards faith again or towards itself towards faith.

25:14 Wes: So what he's going to say is basically pure insight is projecting and all these attacks that are going to come up. The attacks for instance, on the grounds. Right. You know, these historical documents. He's just going to say it's insincere that it's the reason and pure insight are going to be manufacturing all these things that they claim to oppose and projecting it into faith.

25:36 Mark: Yeah.

25:37 Wes: 548 continues this theme.

25:39 Mark: Yeah, well, this is the thing that Habermas was struggling with is does the Enlightenment inevitably undermine its own foundations?

25:46 Dylan: Right, that.

25:47 Wes: Exactly.

25:47 Mark: If you have a hermeneutic suspicion toward the priests and the naive people, why not have it toward the scientists and the philosophes as well? They're all just trying to exert their own power or do something, you know, express their privilege, their cultural situation, whatever it is, such that reason. Pure insight is never pure. It was a flight explicitly from the material and it is going to drag material things into it. You know, so though you think that just because you are being critical and I'm being critical and Seth is being critical that we're all going to think the same way.

26:24 Seth: Of course we don't, but this is also why? Hegel's solution to try to come to a unified ending is one way to solve the problem because you have to get rid of doubt in that founding, in that strategy. So his strategy is ultimately to get rid of that. Whereas Habermas, Korsgaard, those folks are looking at underpinning reason by talking about the ways and the processes in which you hold and manage doubt and resolve reason. Right. I mean Hegel's is a way to solve it. You just navigate towards the truth, put

27:03 Mark: up with some dissension, put up with an ongoing conversation with plural. You know, we don't. Just because we're all trying to think critically doesn't. I'm just saying this is Habermas's or Rorty's solution is like we just maintain the tension of a social body, a body politic that has more than one voice. And that is the best way to not be completely out of control as they were in the Enlightenment. Right? Because that's in the, in the French Revolution.

27:34 Seth: That, that's, that's the answer for the

27:35 Wes: French, for the French Revolution.

27:37 Mark: That's why we're going to get to terror, because oh, now we're all unified and we're self consciousness, but there's nothing external to us to keep us from doing horrible shit.

27:47 Wes: 548 is a very long technical explanation of why it is the pure insight is only condemning itself when it attacks faith. I'm not sure, I think we can mostly skip over it. Unless people want to draw something, just

28:02 Mark: take our word for it.

28:04 Wes: It's just a needlessly technical way of trying to explain that you're projecting pure insight.

28:09 Dylan: I mean there's a nice little nugget just about two, three sentences in. So this is the perspective of pure insight. What is not rational has no truth. What is not grasped conceptually is not. When therefore reason speaks of something other than itself, it speaks in fact only of itself. So doing it does not go outside of itself, but it also. That's a fair characterization of probably not the Enlightenment, the proponents of Enlightenment reason of his day, but it's certainly a fair characterization of radical subjectivity or radical idealism kind of thing. It's just. But I mean, if you circumscribe the world into things you can conceive of and verify as true, and anything outside of that is incoherent, then to go ahead and try to attack something that's outside of it is in itself incoherent. That seems makes sense to me.

29:06 Wes: The other thing to call out from this section is just that he makes this contrast again between us as phenomenologists and then the way it looks to faith. The way it looks to faith is that enlightenment is self defiling in its negative attitude. But Hegel's going to point out this is a necessary part of the dialectic. So from the standpoint of us phenomenologists, it doesn't look so bad.

29:29 Mark: Yeah, I mean I don't think this is. Hey you, you rationalists, you reason bros. When you try to criticize you new atheists, when you try to criticize faith, you're actually just criticizing your own view because you don't realize that your critical mindedness is just exactly the same intellectual content as the faith that you are attacking. You think any new atheist is going to buy that? No. So he set it up. Hey, I've defined the pure insight and faith as both identically two different aspects or two different ways of looking at the individual and the universal aspect of looking at pure consciousness. And so therefore by my own definition these are the same thing. But I just don't think this is going to be convincing to anybody that thinks that is a weird. Just a trick.

30:18 Wes: No, I think there's more to it than this, right? Because you have these very pure relationships to the thing in itself on the one side and to self consciousness on the other side. So they share that purity. And you'll see manifestations of this right in science, like Cartesian science for instance, where everything is extension or in any of the claims that we can make about what science is doing. It's not just that science is faith or reason is faith or something like that, but there are sophisticated ways to draw out this analogy, right? And the postulating of models and all the rest of it. It's just he's not putting it in here explicitly. So I don't think it's without foundation this idea that they two sides of the same coin. But yeah, it would need much more content for us to find it plausible.

31:06 Mark: 549 Trust enlightenment. The way in which enlightenment apprehends its object in the first instance and generally is that it takes it as pure insight and not recognizing itself therein, declares it to be error in insight as such consciousness apprehends an object such that it's full of consciousness. It declares that faith has just made up the absolute right. It's just a being of faith's own consciousness. Some of that was paraphrasing here. I thought this was actually getting at the thing that we saw in Feuerbach, right? Feuerbach, I wasn't sure if he was giving a version of Hegel or if he's reacting to Hegel.

But his whole thing is, hey, you religious people, you just don't realize that what you're grasping is just the best in humanity. So saying God exists is actually a trivial statement because God is an aspect of us. But at the same time, then Feuerbach, we interpret him and Marx following Feuerbach as actually an atheist. Right. That's just a way of saying we've just made God up. But I think Hegel, Feuerbach actually talked though. No, no, no, I'm still actually very religious. I'm not an atheist. And Hegel, I think gives a slightly more nuanced version of this.

That it is not merely that the believer creates God. It is a matter, it's an ambiguous stable ambiguity as I've called these things, between are you finding God or are you creating God? It is one and the same thing really for the believer.

32:36 Dylan: Yeah, so I think earlier on I said something like it's the believer in faith here. It's got the right idea, just doesn't have the right relationship to it because it's not a relationship of knowledge of the sort that Hegel is looking for. And pure insight has this structure of knowledge, subjective knowledge. So it's like it's bringing a kind of apparatus it thinks will help to the problem. But that relationship that the believer does have, even though it's not knowledge of the correct sort, it does functionally have some of the characteristics that you're looking for if you're trying as a self consciousness to go through a Hegelian dialectic with another and you know, come to some kind of self knowledge.

So it's a complicated relationship. There are aspects to it that are positive, the relationship with the believer. And it's because it reinforces, just like earlier on way back when, we had to encounter another self consciousness to. To become certain in some sense of our own self consciousness. The believer is able to use this, the absolute, to gain some measure of certainty about themselves.

33:53 Wes: I think that, yeah, what's going on here too is he's just, he's saying that this accusation that God is just a projection of one's own consciousness, this accusation that enlightenment makes against the faith, he says it's the very same thing as enlightenment itself is. It's just that enlightenment starts out with its absolute being as being self consciousness. And then he has this weird section on how certainty of myself is predicated on trust. It sounds like a kind of criticism of this notion of the incorrigibility of the Cartesian ego and the way that we can build everything up on top of that.

34:37 Seth: This is right in the middle, right. Whomsoever I trust, his certainty of himself is for me the certainty of myself. I recognize in him my own being for self, know that he acknowledges it and that it is for him purpose and essence.

34:53 Wes: Trust, however, is faith. So we don't just get right self consciousness. We can't just start out from a Cartesian self consciousness that is disconnected from the recognition of others. And to that extent we need faith in order to engage in self consciousness. So we can't get away from it either way. We can't set ourselves up with a cool foundationalism in self access on this reading, on this view because of the element of trust in another recognizer that's implicated in self consciousness.

35:26 Seth: Yeah, so this part is super interesting because it's taking the reflection of. Well, as you pointed out, it's a version of Descartes cogito, right? That you're gaining certainty about the world through yourself, in your certainty of yourself.

35:46 Wes: And.

35:47 Seth: And you're getting that also reflected through your certainty about another person because of your own certainty about yourself. And then Hegel is pointing out that all of that has to do with trust. It's not founded in the kind of certainty that you have. There is a certainty that's rooted ultimately in trusting. It's not brought about from the outside.

36:11 Wes: All right, 550. The enlightenment is a self refuting lie. Here I think we get some talk of faith and community. Right? Faith is sort of the spirit of the community here. The Enlightenment is foolish. Faith regards it as not knowing what it is saying and is not understanding the real facts. When it talks about priestly deception and deluding the people, it talks about this as if by some hocus pocus of conjuring priests. Consciousness had been palmed off with something absolutely alien and other other to it in place of its own essence. And at the same time it says that this is an essence of consciousness that consciousness believes in.

It puts its trust in it and seeks to make it favorably disposed towards itself. What it asserts to be alien to consciousness, it direct declares to be of the inmost nature of consciousness itself. Then how then can it possibly talk about deception and delusion since in the same voice it asserts the very opposite of what it maintains regarding faith? It really reveals itself to faith as the conscious lie.

37:19 Mark: Yeah, I don't know exactly who he's talking about here because when I Think about Nietzsche or the Ego and Its Own guy. People who say that the divine, these religious thoughts really are foreign impositions. That for Nietzsche, it's the sneaky priests who have basically imposed this idea. I mean, there has to be some reason that people are receptive to it. But I think it's because they want to assert their own power, not because they have authentically found their inmost self in the God that they claim to worship.

37:53 Dylan: Well, is he just not saying so? Pure Insight attacks faith and says, oh, this is something that it's. This. It's not truly. It's not consciousness in itself. It's something that was brought from the outside by these priests and these despots and it's alien to consciousness. And it's, you know, you're being deluded and deceived. This is not who you truly are. Who you truly are is like me, you know, you're reasonable and subjective and idealist and so forth. But he says, how does he get to the idea that it's the inmost nature of consciousness itself? Unless there's an equivocation between. Is it tied back to the idea that it is? Pure insight is just consciousness too. Are we at that point?

38:38 Mark: I mean, it was a part that Wes skipped over in reading the quote.

38:41 Wes: Consciousness, actually. Okay, go ahead.

38:42 Mark: Consciousness beholds in it its pure essence just as much as its own single and universal individuality, and through this action produces this unity of itself with its essence. So it's merely a phenomenological matter that if you are a believer, you are in direct, immediate access to the absolute.

39:04 Wes: So I think he's just said before this that we skipped over an important part of the previous section at the end of it. But the absolute being of faith is essentially not the abstract essence that would exist beyond the consciousness of the believer. On the contrary, it is the spirit of the religious community, the unity of the abstract essence and self consciousness, that it be the spirit of the community. This requires as a necessary moment the action of the community. It is the spirit only by being produced by consciousness. Or rather it does not exist in the spirit of the community without having been produced by consciousness. So when I think he talks about essence here, he's going to be. I think there are implicit references to community here now. But in Pure Insight is going to accuse it of the essence of faith being something alien to consciousness when it's really community.

39:53 Dylan: Well, it's just. This is the part I just. There's a connection I'm just missing here because on 336 the latter half of this paragraph, if the general question has been propounded whether it is permissible to delude a people, the answer would in fact have to be that the question is pointless because it is impossible to deceive a people in this matter because. But in the knowledge of that essential being in which consciousness has the immediate certainty of itself. The idea of a delusion of delusion is quite out of the question. So it sounds like, I don't know, I don't know exactly how he gets here, but it's pure insight apprehends that people are being deluded, that faith is a tool in the hands of the priests and the despots to manipulate the people.

And then I can't tell here if pure insight comes to realize that in fact it's not a delusion, that it's an essential part of the consciousness of the believer or the faithful.

40:50 Wes: No, I don't think pure insight's realizing this yet.

40:53 Dylan: But yeah, yeah, okay, so it's not pure. And say it's just Hegel saying, but it's certain that this is not a delusion. It's not even possible for people to be deluded. This brings us back to the ontological argument, right? It's not possible for people to be deluded that they have an idea of the absolute or of God. Even if they're being manipulated by people, they can't be deluded about that. It's, it's a part, it's an essential part of their consciousness.

41:20 Wes: I think the idea here is that if you accuse faith of simply projecting and inventing God through its own projections, right? That's the, it's the inmost nature of consciousness itself, actually this alien being. Then how can you talk about deception and delusion, right? How are we deceived, right? Where these are aspects of our own self consciousness. And then there almost is an appeal to Cartesian incorrigibility here. In other words, the priests are not going to come along and they can't just invent whole cloth, some deception, another, and expect it to take hold among the people. It's got to have its seed and the nature of human self consciousness. And if it's projection, okay, maybe, but it's got to be based, and those projections have to be based in self consciousness.

42:10 Mark: Well, it should go without saying that this kind of logic should work for non European countries as well and non Christian religions as well. That unless they're in some previous historical state and it's really just a despot that is saying you must Believe in basically me as the God, Right. That you could have that kind of thing. But if it's an abstract religion, right. Even if there are priests who are coming up with the religious culture, right. How are you going to phrase your religious beliefs? Still, it's the individual citizens that are having and communicating, being in a community about these primal religious beliefs. So we do have to say that all religions ultimately point to the same divine absolute insofar as they're authentic religions at all.

43:06 Wes: 551. It's more on this theme. A people cannot be deceived about its own essence, right? So if in a way the essence of faith is the community and the community is, you know, and pure insight may say, well, you're just projecting your culture and your community into this divine entity. Well, there's still, in a way, it represents a kind of self knowledge. And then in the next section, I think, then we're getting towards the. I think that's where we get the explicit critique by pure insight of faith as involving these picture thoughts and material things. It kind of is trying to reduce itself to sensuous things and idols and things like that, Right? Or is that the first. Let's see. It doesn't get into that in great detail, but this is like the first hint of that.

43:56 Mark: I feel like it's been mentioned before.

43:58 Wes: Well, it comes later. It doesn't really come into full bloom. Okay. No, it's actually in 553 that we get the full bloom of this. Right. So these are some famous passages. Enlightenment, which professes to be pure here, converts what is for the spirit, eternal life and holy Spirit into an actual perishable thing, right? Like communion wafers, and defiles it with sense certainty's view of it. Right? What do you. You idiots. It's just. You bought it from a store. It's just a wafer. It's not Christ. A viewpoint which is essentially trivial and definitely absent from faith in its worship.

This is where Hegel starts to begin to defend faith against these critiques. So that enlightenment is completely in the wrong when it imputes this view to faith. What faith reveres is it certainly does not regard as stone or wood or dough, nor any other kind of temporal sensuous thing. If enlightenment has a mind to say that, all the same its object is also this or even that, it is essentially and in truth this, then firstly faith is equally well aware of that also. Right? Which to me must be the thing that's signified or symbolized, which lies outside of its Worship.

Secondly, however, faith does not regard such things as stones as possessing intrinsic being. What is intrinsic for faith is solely the essential being of pure thought. This seems to me to be his way of saying, look, obviously it's just symbolic, right?

45:26 Mark: Sure. So we're just about out of time here. We have another 12 pages or so. So maybe we could have part three if some of us want to do that. Or we could just say we've gotten the gist across.

45:39 Dylan: I mean, maybe we could say that we didn't originally have those 12 pages until you said maybe we should read those 12 extra pages again.

45:47 Mark: I think what is missing here, what we're going to introduce in some of these latter pages, is the idea of what is it to be in this immediate relationship for the person of faith with the divine. And so there is stuff about serving others. Some of it is just presaging. We know that after the concern of the terror section is once you are admittedly a self conscious spirit, you have no guardrails. And then there's a huge section on morality after that that will talk about things I kind of listened ahead in the audiobook, like the relation between the ideal world, the world of duty, and the actual world. If everything was in harmony, it seems like we wouldn't need ethics because the world just is rational and it makes sense. But we have the obvious problems of evil and things that religion is one of the things that we're trying to address throughout here.

46:47 Wes: The trajectory that gets us to the terror is pure insight, turns God into a vacuum and then religion just becomes what's useful, becomes a matter of utility and kind of utilitarianism takes hold. And then finally you get this kind of absolute freedom and it's this absolute freedom of the self when it's unleashed on the world becomes terror. So that's the very, very general trajectory here.

47:15 Seth: Well, that makes sense, right? Just because of lack of constraints. Right. I mean the whole ambition here is going back to Kant. How do we ground our moral life, right. And how do we figure out what those constraints are? This is his answer to it. And the warning that if you don't have it, then you get unconstrained individuals and therefore you're just going to get the terror.

47:41 Wes: You can't just tie it to being, for self, to self, consciousness, consciousness, consciousness. You need a being, you know, as I've said many times, you need a mind independent reality if you want to have knowledge and truth. And this is the ethical version of that. If there's no mind independent kind of anchor for these things, if it's all reducible to eudaimonism and utilitarianism, then you might get a utility machine, right? You might say, for the good of the many, we have to engage in all this terror.

48:11 Mark: So some of the things that pure insight, the enlightenment are criticizing faith about are not just that, hey, you believe things that cannot be proven, but you are engaging in rituals that don't make any sense, right? You're engaging in a sacrifice, for instance. You're going to show that you're not merely subject to your own desires, that you're better than that, that you're godly. And so you, you know, don't eat fish during Lent and like. But does giving up that one thing, fish, does that really show that you've given up all sensual thing? No, you still have to eat. So this is all pure insight, saying faith, you're just being silly. Just be rational. Just, you know, utility. A good God would only command us to do things that are good for us. So you end up, you know, using religion to back utilitarianism. As you were saying.

49:01 Seth: I didn't mean to keep us talking about Hegel. I'm sorry.

49:05 Mark: That is what we're here for today, but let's stop for the moment and next time. So sort of following on this little faith trail and getting it out of Hegel land. We'd gotten many requests to do some CS Lewis, and so I think this is a good time to actually turn to that. We'll do part of his book Mere Christianity, and then after that, we're going to turn to some pragmatism and we're going to work toward our wonderful live show that's going to be political. You should let us know what you want us to cover. Email us@peltiallyexaminedlife.com, comment on this episode or on the blog post at partiallyexaminedlife. Com, or through Facebook or Twitter or Instagram or any of the other ways that you can find us. Thanks, everybody, and good night.

49:49 Wes: Good night.

49:49 Dylan: Good night.

49:50 Seth: Good night.