The Partially Examined Life (Citizens): (Protected Content)
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Why are there two audio players in this post? Because the 1st one is the ad-free Citizen version.
On Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, sec. 551-559. This is part of the reading assigned for PEL ep. 394 (see parts one and two), but we didn’t get to discussing these exact sections there, and of course it’s always an experience to try to directly disentangle Hegel’s prose line-by-line rather than you hearing us just trying to summarize it. Not necessarily a good experience, mind you, which is why we’re not going to devote more hours to this any time soon.
We get a little more info on how The Enlightenment supposedly (mis)characterizes faith, and then conversely how faith sees The Enlightenment. The main point concerns idolatry: On the Enlightenment view of faith, the faithful wrongly reduce God to material images and objects, e.g. the communion bread, mental pictures of God as a guy in the clouds or physical pictures of Jesus. Likewise, Hegel objects to hanging faith on specific supposed historical events, and hence evidence for those events. Instead of faith being merely a belief in unprovable (and improbable) propositions, it’s supposed to be tied in with action and the phenomenon of self-consciousness itself: In pure insight (The Enlightenment, the flipside of faith in pure thought) faith sees (without understanding what it’s seeing) its completing element to become Spirit in-and-for-itself, i.e. God (in Hegel’s conception). Likewise, as pure insight, which began as a purely negative critique, contemplates faith, it gains content and becomes no longer just critical Kantian Reason but productive Hegelian Reason.
Read along with us, starting on p. 336 (PDF p. 373).
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