Hegel on Faith vs. The Enlightenment

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Hegel's Phenomenology

1:00This is Close Reads, a philosophy podcast with Mark and Wes. I'm Wes Alwyn. And I'm Mark Linsenmeyer.

1:09It's a new day. And we're going to celebrate that by doing more of what we've been doing on Partially Examine Life for a long freaking time. And everybody thought we were done with, but we're not quite done. It's Hagel's Phenomenology. And of course, we could do this for the rest of our lives, but let's, this is, this is really, we could see it as a part three to our most recent episode on it, episode 394. We really didn't get to the latter part of our reading assignment in the discussion.

1:40So I think we wanted to start on section 551, right?

Enlightenment's critique of faith

1:45We were talking about the way in which the Enlightenment diagnoses faith, how it gets it wrong. This section before that, I'd been talking about faith as the spirit of the community and how the Enlightenment is a self-refuting lie. So I think in this section, we're going to be getting into this idea that people can't be deceived about their own essence, which I suppose is a retort to the idea that the general masses need enlightening.

2:16I'm not, I'm not sure. This has been a battle between faith and pure insight.

Pure insight and faith

2:21Pure insight is what he associates with the Enlightenment. Yes, they are, they are supposedly one in the same thing seen from different points of view, the point of view in question is that they're both part of the self-conscious essence of humanity. And this, insofar as it is self-conscious, insofar as it has that bending back, it is pure insight insofar as it is mere in itself, mere consciousness before the bending back than it is faith.

2:53But the question is sort of what is it consciousness of? It seems like we don't have direct consciousness of God or something like that, but Hegel's actually going to say something like, well, we sort of do because it is part of the phenomenology of the way that the individual interacts with the larger cosmos.

Enlightenment's view of faith's God

3:18All right, 551. Yeah. Let us see further how faith experiences the Enlightenment in the different moments of its own consciousness, to which the view mentioned above referred to only generally. These moments are pure thought or, as object, absolute being in and for itself, then its relation as knowing to absolute being, the ground of its belief, and lastly, its relation to absolute being in its acts or its worship and service. Just as pure insight has failed to recognize itself and has denied itself in belief generally,

3:51so too in these moments will behave in an equally perverse manner.

Enlightenment's negative attitude

3:56All right. Why did I think this was about people deceiving themselves in my notes? Well, they don't realize, right, as faithful beings, they don't realize that the God that they think they're aware of actually is their self-consciousness. So they are deceived. They think that God, right, per the Enlightenment conception of faith, God is something out there. You know, you can only have faith in it. You can't actually know it. But insofar as they are partaking in self-consciousness, the phenomena of God is actually right there

4:31with that. They're just, they don't know that. They're deceiving themselves about that. Yeah. I mean, there is a section about that. I guess it's the previous section, actually, 550. Just had it misnumbered. So, but anyway, yeah, there is a section about not being deceived about your own essence. But here, yeah. So here he's introducing a whole new, you know, these three different things that he's going to address in the rest of the reading.

Faith's response to Enlightenment

4:54In our main episode, we talked about the ground of belief, for example, the Enlightenment criticizes faith for grounding its belief in these external contingent historical facts like the crucifixion or like miracles and finds that wanting in various ways. And Hegel's going to say, well, you don't, you don't get it. So, yeah, he's going to go through and respond to defend faith against these various Enlightenment criticisms. So faith is not a static thing.

5:24Any phenomenon in any stage in Hegel's thought is going to have moments within it. So the moments as it confronts its other side, right, the self-conscious side of it, right, which is what the Enlightenment is, it confronts it as pure thought. I mean, we said both of these are pure thought. Okay. So as object, absolute being in and for itself. I mean, that sounds like it's, it confronts it as God, right? Really what the human is, is a one-sided thing that is folded and facing itself.

6:00That is what self-consciousness is. If you're merely at one side of this folded piece of paper, if you want to take this as an analogy, you might see the other side, you know, that's been folded toward you and think it is something else. But in fact, it is one in the same thing. And in this case, yeah. Why is it absolute being in and for itself as opposed to mere self-reflection? I think it's, it's absolute being in the sense that it is the Kantian thing in itself, cut off God. How, how it experiences the Enlightenment, not how it experiences God.

Enlightenment's critique of faith's certainty

6:34Right. Yeah. How faith experiences the Enlightenment. Yeah. I, anyway, the contrast is going to be between the absolute, the kind of abstract God of the Enlightenment versus the picture thoughts of faith, I think. If I'm remembering from my notes, I mean, we're about to find out as he moves forward. This is just a, he's giving us the headings of what's coming. Okay. I mean, I thought we, that, that had already been discussed. I thought we were getting into a different thing now because everything I think we described

7:04before was how the Enlightenment sees faith. The Enlightenment sees faith as having picture thoughts. The Enlightenment sees faith as having expelled God into this otherness. Well, how does, no, no, Enlightenment, you've, you're confused about faith. You don't even understand faith. How does faith therefore see its other side, the Enlightenment, right? Which is the critical faculty. So it doesn't seem like faith should have any opinion about the Enlightenment except just rejecting it, right?

7:35You're going to try to tear me down? Fuck you. But because they are in fact one in the same thing, even if, if the Enlightenment is right, that the faithful, right, Kant is a faithful person says God is unknowable. God is off there. Really, Kant himself is being confronted by the spirit of the Enlightenment, by God, right? The spirit of the Enlightenment, just like every other human spirit, is in fact the phenomenon of divinity, God is right there among us.

8:09Yeah, well, we're about to find out. He's going to tell us exactly in the next section.

Pure insight's negative attitude

8:14552, he's going to do the first, the first thing, which is the... Pure insight adopts a negative attitude to the absolute being of the believing consciousness. This being is pure thought, and pure thought posited within itself as an object or essence. In the believing consciousness, this intrinsic being of thought acquires at the same time for consciousness that is for itself, the form, but only the empty form of objectivity. It is the character of something presented to consciousness.

8:45Do we have that much? While reading it, I did not really understand what I was just reading. Right, we think of it as an in itself, as having intrinsic being. I think we have to keep going before we fully explain this section. I mean, I know one of the reasons that pure insight was dismissing faith was because faith, like pure insight itself, is mere thought, right? So it's not reality. This being is pure thought and pure thought posited within itself as an object or as essence.

Enlightenment's positive truth

9:20In the believing consciousness, this intrinsic being of thought requires the same kind consciousness that is for itself. So that I'm not sure I understand because I thought in the believing consciousness, the whole point is it is not for itself. It is merely the in itself, but we want to say that, no, no, no, it too is dynamic. Thought, in that it encounters the enlightenment and the enlightenment actually is itself, I guess then its attitude toward the enlightenment is a for itself.

9:50That's the best I can... So I think the character of something presented to consciousness is about the picture thoughts, right? So you're getting a contrast between the unknowable, only thinkable God and the believer's God, where I think if you read on, we might get that, right? He's going to directly mention picture thoughts, so this will become clearer. The form, but only the empty form of objectivity, is the character of something presented to consciousness. Okay, so that does sound like a picture thought. To be pure insight...

10:21Well, he's going to directly talk about picture thoughts in a second. To pure insight, however, since it is pure consciousness from the side of the self that is for itself, right, right, the other appears as something negative of self-consciousness. Okay, so that just means it's unknowable, I think. To pure insight, right, it's just the negative. It's just this thing that's outside of consciousness. Okay, yes, because pure insight atopps a negative attitude to the absolute being of believing consciousness.

10:51In other words, to faith's God, to the enlightenment faith's God, to Kant's God. Okay. Negative for self-consciousness. This could still be taken either as the pure intrinsic being of thought, or also as the being of sense certainty.

11:07That is peculiar. I think here it's almost like the idealist identification of God and self-consciousness, right, in the Fichtian sense. I think that's a little poke at the Fichtian idea. So we can make the movement from the Kantian unknowable God to something like an identify, identification of God with the abstract pure ego, which we have sense certainty in the sense of incorrigible self-knowledge of that.

11:38But he doesn't, Nagel doesn't like that either. It doesn't get him where he wants to go with religion, right? The faith that he's talking about here is still, is also deficient. But yeah, this enlightenment God is, I think the Fichtian God still counts as that. But go ahead. But since it is at the same time for the self, and this self, qua self, that has an object, is an actual consciousness, the object proper, as such, is for pure insight, an ordinary thing of sense certainty that merely is.

12:10This is, so now we're getting to things, yeah. Well, so he's not talking about Kant's God anymore? Yeah, it's getting, I'm confused. We're going to have to piece this together, I think, as we go forward. But the thing of sense certainty. That's what's confusing me. It's an actual consciousness. It's a this-worldly actual consciousness with objects that are part of sense certainty. So I think he's talking about sensible objects here. So he'll say, this is, this, its object is manifest to it in the picture thought of faith.

12:44It condemns this picture thought and in its own object. But apprehending the object of faith as insight's own object, it already does faith a wrong. All right. So let's, yeah, let's go back and piece this together now. This is the Enlightenment's critique of the picture thought is what we're getting here. Yep. Yep. So the other appears as something negative. That's pure insight's point of view. Yeah, we've already got that. And I was speculating about this being the pure intrinsic being of thought or the sense certainty.

13:15The object is for pure insight, an ordinary thing. So I think what he's saying here is that because pure insight thinks of all objects as empirical objects in the Kantian sense, it's going to prejudge any picture thoughts as these illegal hypothesizations of God or something like that. If you say that God is an old man in the sky, that's a crude version of this, but you're taking him to be an empirical object of sense, which is precisely the Kantian criticism.

13:50God can't be that. And religion makes him that. I think that's the idea. Right, for it is saying that, in other words, a pure insight in dismissing the picture thoughts is saying that the absolute being of faith is a piece of stone, a block of wood, which has eyes and sees not, or again, a piece of dough, which, having come from the field, is transformed by man and returned to the earth again. Or in what other ways faith anthropomorphizes absolute being, making it into an object that it can represent to itself? Okay, that's the word I was looking for, anthropomorphizes, not hypostasizes, although the hypostasizes works too.

14:27Yeah, so we get the picture there, you know, and then the sacrament and anything physical that's associated with the faith is trying to turn God into something physical. According to the Enlightenment, faith does not actually think that it is doing that. And Hegel doesn't, Hegel's, and now in the next section, he's going to say, this mockery from the Enlightenment actually misfires. The Enlightenment's wrong about this. All right. Read away. Enlightenment, which professes to be pure, here converts what is for spirit, eternal life, and Holy Spirit, into an actual perishable thing,

15:04and defiles it with sense certainty's view of it, a viewpoint which is essentially trivial, and definitely absent from faith in its worship, so that Enlightenment is completely in the wrong what imputes this view to faith. What faith reveres, it certainly does not regard as stone or wood or dough, nor any kind of temporal sensuous thing. This is one of the clearest paragraphs in Hegel ever. However, 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, I think the physical object,

15:40then firstly, faith is equally well aware of that also, which, however, lies outside of its worship. Then they're not worshiping the physical thing. Secondly, however, faith does not regard such things as stones, etc., as possessing intrinsic being. On the contrary, what has intrinsic being for faith is solely the essential being of pure thought. So, however the sacrament is used, or other physical objects used in professing faith, the intrinsic being for faith, the thing that faith is directed to, it kind of passes through those things

16:15towards the object behind them, which is the essential being of pure thought, right? Because we have to remember both faith and insight are coming from the standpoint of pure thought. So, you know, we may still be on the, for those who are in the position of faith, I think they still might have the Kantian God here and the Enlightenment. Well, I don't know. Yeah. Yeah, we don't know what the opposition to material wooden stones are.

16:45You're saying the thing behind it, he's calling it the essential being of pure thought. Is it being related to the Kantian God, which is outside the phenomenology, or is it actually being related to Enlightenment itself, as I was positing earlier, such that, you know, that's going to be the right answer for, for Hegel, is realizing that you and the thing that you don't recognize, you, that you are facing, right? The rest of society and the thought structure that this all is, these are elements of God.

17:18And if you want to say, what is the essential being of all that? Well, that is the divinity. All right, let's just keep going. 554. The second moment is the relation of faith to this absolute being as a consciousness that knows it.

17:33For faith, right? So something that's merely outside the Kantian God, that doesn't know me. At least, I don't know that it knows me. But the religious person actually feels that God, yes. Well, this is going to get into the historical proof section. So we're going to get contingent historical facts that can be known. And the Enlightenment doesn't like that. Yeah. For faith as a thinking, pure consciousness, this being is immediately present. But pure consciousness is just as much a mediated relation of certainty to truth, a relation which constitutes the ground of faith.

18:08For enlightenment, this ground becomes equally a fortuitous knowledge of fortuitous events. Like the crucifixion. Yeah. But then a ground of knowledge is the conscious universal. And in its truth is absolute spirit, which in abstract pure consciousness or in thought as such is merely absolute being. But qua self-consciousness is knowledge of itself. Let me just read that again. But the ground of knowledge is the conscious universal. What does that mean?

18:37A conscious universal as opposed to an unconscious universal.

18:44I mean, I guess I'm just interpreting this as, again, faith might think that or, you know, Kant might think that his faith is aimed at something outside the phenomenological circle. But it is actually abstract pure consciousness, which is absolute being qua self-consciousness, knowledge of itself. So pure insight characterizes this conscious universal, the simple self-knowing spirit, equally as a negative of self-consciousness. We've said that before.

19:15It is true that pure insight is itself pure mediated, i.e. self-mediated thought is a pure knowing. But since it is a pure insight, a pure knowing that does not yet know itself, i.e. is not aware that it is the pure mediating movement, the mediation seems to insight, as does everything that is itself insight, to be an other. So I think the mediation is about Christ. Christ is this mediating moment between God and earth.

19:46But I think this will come out. Yeah, this is frustrating that one could not possibly have gotten that, I think, from the text that I just read. But just further down in the paragraph, particular historical evidence is, yeah, go ahead. In its realization, therefore, develops this moment, which is essential to it. But this moment seems to it to belong to faith, to have the character of being something external to pure insight. Right? This moment, which is essential to it, the moment of the crucifixion or something. Mm-hmm. Fortuitous.

20:16This is to be a fortuitous knowledge of narratives of real events, real in the ordinary sense of the word. Here, therefore, it falsely charges religious belief with basing its certainty on some particular historical evidences, which, considered as historical evidences, would certainly not guarantee the degree of certainty about their content, which is given by newspaper accounts of any happening. I really like this connection because I hadn't really thought about focusing on contingent historical facts as being a form of idolatry.

20:48Mm-hmm. You can worship Christ through the cross, or frankly, you could worship Yahweh, the God, through the golden calf, right? If the sinning people that Moses came to that were worshiping the golden calf said, oh, no, no, this is, we set this up as a symbol of Yahweh. We're not literally worshiping the calf. We're worshiping Yahweh through the calf. Okay, there still might have been some argument over that, but, you know, the Christians don't have any such hard and fast rule against idolatry, right?

21:23There's against making icons, right? You have pictures of Jesus all over the place. There's no pictures of Yahweh. Anyway, so, but yeah, so focusing on an external event is focusing on something tangible in the same way. And so the same possible charge of blasphemy or reduction of the intangible, much larger than any human creation or human witnessable object or event, you know, you could just say that you have to be missing the point.

21:56If everything comes down to, was there a historical Jesus that said this and that, and, you know, this, his resurrection was witnessed by such people. Of course, they wouldn't consider that a contingent event. It is the only necessary event, actually, apart from maybe creation itself. So, yeah, I mean, it's still historical and contingent and, you know, maybe it may be inevitable if God has rigged the historical narrative in that way. So, why contingent then, if you want to say that the manness of God, the connection, just as it was somehow inevitable that God create us in the first place.

22:33So, we could say that did not happen on such and such a day, but in a sense is always happening and, you know, God doesn't experience time anyway. And I'm just getting this from C.S. Lewis, that the crucifixion itself was also an event sort of that, for us, it was temporal, but for God, it was outside time. For us, yeah. And it would have happened sooner or later in every, this is at least my conclusion, it would have happened sooner or later and, you know, for every possible population. Well, I think even if we accept determinism, forget about God, we still have contingent, historical, we still have contingency.

23:11It's not logical necessity or something like that, but I'd have to think about all that. But in any case, focus on the historical part. Okay. Further, that uncertainty rests on the accidental preservation of these evidences. On the one hand, the preservation by means of paper, and on the other hand, by the skill and honesty of their transference from one piece of paper to another. And lastly, on the correct interpretation of the meaning of dead words and letters. In fact, however, it does not occur to faith to fasten its certainty to such evidences and to such fortuitous circumstances.

23:43So I really like that as well. So even the existence of the Bible itself, right? This was a historical creation within historical time. It's been translated a bunch of times. It was interpreted. The people that, you know, wrote it had to interpret the events to write them down. You, you know, even if they were divinely inspired, you as the worshiper or your priests or whoever is reading the scripture, they have to do interpretations. So in the same sense, you shouldn't get all like real religion should not be hooked on some particular book that was made at some particular point in time.

24:19It has to be something more fundamental than that. And that's, he's going to tell us what that is. Faith in its certainty is an unsophisticated relationship to its absolute object, a pure knowing of it, which does not mix up letters, paper and copyists in its consciousness of absolute being. It does not bring itself into relation with it by means of things of that kind. On the contrary, this consciousness is a self-mediating ground of its knowledge. It is spirit itself, which bears witness to itself, both in the inwardness of the individual consciousness and through the universal presence in every one of faith in it.

24:55If faith wants to appeal to historical evidences in order to get that kind of foundation, or at least confirmation of its content that enlightenment talks about and seriously thinks and acts as if it were a matter of importance, then it has already let itself be corrupted by the enlightenment. And its efforts to establish and consolidate itself in such a way are merely evidence it gives of its corruption by the enlightenment. Yeah. It almost sounds like faith is a personal relationship to God. Yes. It's above all this historical stuff, but it's right.

25:26Yeah. It's a consciousness that is a self-mediating ground of its knowledge. It doesn't need knowledge from outside of itself. It doesn't need knowledge of historical facts. It is spirit itself, which bears witness to itself. So it's almost like God witnessing himself in our faith, both in the inwardness of the individual consciousness and through the universal presence in everyone of faith in it. So the inwardness. Anyway, it's still fuzzy and unclear, right?

25:57This defense. What does he mean by all this? Well, it's evocative, but I wouldn't call it clear. Well, and I think both those criteria, the inwardness of the individual consciousness, right? That's the thing that I felt like was, right? The enlightenment slash subjectivist Protestant take on religion, which has some advantages over, right? If God speaks to all of us and God is right there with all of us, then you don't need the secret decoder ring of the Bible or your priest to figure it out.

26:34But at the same time, people disagree about things and could disagree in radically wrong ways, such that you think that God is commanding you to kill all the Jews or whatever the stupid fucking thing you have in your head, your mission. So we need the universal presence of everyone of faith in it. So we need a community to figure these things out together. So there is a role, it seems, for a church, but it has to be sort of a radically democratized church.

27:05And things like the scriptures would be sort of notes within the community from one member to another. And I think then it sort of leaves open the idea of, well, is there something sacrosanct about the notes of the earliest people, right? If the Bible was just sort of written by the earliest followers of this Christian tradition, are they, you know, qua the originalists and we should be like originalist Supreme Court justices in determining, you know, by looking at what were what were there?

27:36Or should we say, no, they were in their historical time period. We're in our historical time period. God is beyond both of those and should speak to us. So we, you know, are we learn from the mistakes of history, you know, so we might have tried some things like the sale of indulgences or or tried very strict puritanical sexual practices or something. And we we discovered that that was not a human way to live, right? Denying anybody who's gay or otherwise unorthodox any way of expressing their sexuality.

28:09They're just condemned to be, you know, you, you, you make them ascetic priests and then they end up molesting kids like, okay, we tried that. So, you know, it needs to speak to us now as a community, not as individuals who, who could be wrong and sinful and whatever. Just one caveat here, you know, even though he is defending faith against the enlightenment, the faith is, is not, you know, still falls short for Hegel. He's something called religion, quote unquote, religion, his technical term is going to replace faith, but mere, mere faith in this, just this sense.

28:48So this is an incomplete moment, but the enlightenment's opposition to it is unfair and wrong in many ways. So actually we had already read the rest of the paragraph. So you were, you were now. Yeah, that's why I was confused. Yep. There still remains the third side, the relation to absolute being of consciousness as action. All right. So this is like worship services. This action is the setting aside of the particularity of the individual or of the natural mode of its being for self, which precedes its certainty of being pure self-consciousness of being.

29:21I think this means you have to go to church instead of just going, hanging, hanging out at Arby's by yourself. Yeah. Just, just to be clear, which whence proceeds, I thought maybe you read it as precedes, or at least I was hearing it as precedes. It's being for self. No, I said proceeds, but I still, I maybe read the whence part wrong because it was confusing. This action is the setting aside of the particularity of the individual, which I take to be, I think this action is going to turn out to be communal worship, right?

30:02So in which the individual is set aside and it's natural mode, which is pleasure seeking being, being for self. This is why I said it's got to go to church instead of to Arby's. You go to Arby's after you go to church. But once precedes, it's the certainty of being pure self-consciousness. So I think we get that from communal worship and we get the oneness with absolute being. All right. We'll find that. I think it'll get clear. Hopefully. Since in action, purposiveness and end are distinguished and pure insight in relation to this action equally adopts a negative attitude and as in the other moments denies its own self, it must as regards purposiveness exhibit itself as lacking in intelligence.

30:49This is the enlightenment since insight united with intention that is the harmony of end and means appears to it as an other or rather as the opposite of insight as regards the end itself. However, it has to make badness enjoyment and possession of its end and so prove itself to be the impurest kind of intention since pure intention qua other is equally impure intention. Having you read it instead of me actually doesn't make me understand it any better.

31:24So, yeah. Right. So there's a distinction in action between purposiveness. And the end. So the fitness of the means to the end and then the end itself. All right. The goal. The goal I am dead. Well, so in ritual action in particular, right, the end is I want to light those candles. I'm going to do everything I can. I'm going to light the batch. I'm going to lift it up there. But the purposiveness is just to worship.

31:55Right. So am I, is that right? Or is it that I'm lighting the candle as a means to worship and so worship is the end. It just doesn't seem like that's an accomplishing, right? I could worship right now. Just I don't have to light the candles to worship. I could.

32:14Yeah. And, and also I'm just speculating about worship so far, but I mean, I'm not, I mean, I'm based, based on my read, my note, reading notes of what comes later. It could be works, right? Charity, works of charity or whatever, you know, but yeah. Ritual sounds more likely. Yeah. But if we were just reading this, this paragraph cold, I think it would just simply be baffling what he means by action. All right. Yeah. I think hopefully the next paragraph will help shed life because he mentions butter and

32:44eggs. So there's something concrete in there. Accordingly, this 556. Accordingly, we see that as regards purposiveness, enlightenment finds it foolish when the believer gives himself the superior consciousness of not being in bondage to natural enjoyment and pleasure by actually denying himself natural enjoyment and pleasure by demonstrating by his actions that his contempt for them is no lie, but is genuine. All right. So yeah, maybe this is really just about denial of pleasure. Cause I knew that was part of this.

33:16Cause he's going to, right. So the enlightenment thinks it's foolish for the believer to be an ascetic because as we'll find out, they're hypocrites. They're not really, they do, they do allow themselves pleasure and blah, blah, blah. But I think this still works to say that we're talking about ritual and good works or whatnot, because what are you doing instead of pleasure? You're not sleeping. You're not just, you have to. Demonstrating by his actions.

33:49Right. That it's genuine, but it, but it has to do with good works like charity and things like that. Yeah. So it's not just self denial of pleasure, but it's about charity and all right, go ahead. Similarly, enlightenment finds it foolish that the individual absolves itself of its quality of being absolutely individual, excluding all others and of possessing property of its own by itself, giving up its property for thereby it shows in truth that it is not in earnest with this isolation of itself, but is raised above the natural necessity of isolating itself and in this absolute isolation of being for self, denying that others as this are the same

34:23as itself. All right. So when you give charity, it, it shows that you are actually rich, right? You're raised above the natural necessity. I think if you can give part of your property to others. Right. You're still keeping it and you deny others are the same as yourself in the sense that you're right. They're still poor and you're still rich. It's a still enlightenment's critique of the, of the giver of charity. Yeah. It'd be nice to know who he has in mind. I mean, we can just think about the Diderot and, uh, but I don't recall, you know, Romo

34:57saying, oh, you're think you're so good by giving a little bit. And in fact, this is something Jesus says, right? That the, the, the woman who gives the really poor woman who gives her one gold piece is way more virtuous than the rich person who gives many more, but it's only, you know, 5% of his wealth. Yeah. So, but, but he's saying this, that's a critique of the enlightenment that makes on religion, but it's right there in religion itself. So I don't know. Yeah. He's going to, yeah, he's going to say this is unfair by the end of this.

35:30Pure insight finds both to be of no purpose as well as wrong. The purpose of showing oneself to be free of pleasure and possession is not served by denying oneself pleasure and giving away a possession. In the opposite case, therefore, it will declare the man a fool who in order to eat has recourse to actually eating.

35:48Insight also finds it wrong to deny oneself a meal and to give away butter and eggs, not for money, nor money for butter and eggs, but simply to give them away without receiving anything in return. It declares a meal or the possession of things of that sort to be an end in itself. And in fact, it declares itself to be a very impure intention, which treats such enjoyment and possession as something wholly essential. So it sounds like this is, is it mill?

36:16Utilitarianism is the enlightenment where, right? Your, your happiness is still important. I don't, I'm not sure. Yeah. I think, um, he's accusing the enlightenment of, of putting pleasure first, this impure and intention. So it's a, it is part of utilitarianism. I mean, he'll, I, this whole section ends with talk of utility, right?

36:38Again, it also affirms as a pure intention, the necessity of rising above natural existence. What is it? What is it? The enlightenment, presumably? The necessity of rising above natural existence, above acquisitiveness about the means of existence, only it finds it foolish and wrong that this elevation should be demonstrated by deeds. In other words, this pure insight is in truth, a deception, which feigns and demands an inner elevation, but declares that it is superfluous, foolish, and even wrong to be in earnest about it, to put this elevation to actual practice and demonstrate its truth.

37:11Pure insight thus denies itself both as pure insight for it denies directly purposive action and as pure intention, for it denies the intention of proving itself freed from the ends of a separate individual existence. Yeah. Pure insight says there's something impure about and hypocritical about, you know, giving away part of your money when, when you're still going to be rich and the other is still going to be poor or thinking that you can, you know, maybe one critique is like win your way

37:42into heaven, buy your way into heaven. There are all sorts of, and, and you could even give the Nietzschean critique here, right? You're just trying to have power over people and feel superior to other people. There are kinds of, all kinds of critiques that you could give of the altruist and the ascetic. And that's kind of pure insights or the enlightenment. That's its pretense to kind of what he calls inner elevation, right? It's more pure not to do that because I don't want to be a hypocrite. I'm going to, you know, I'm going to be true.

38:14And then Hegel doesn't like that because what is it doing? But it's denying itself as pure insight, as action and intention. It doesn't put any of this inner elevation into action. Is there some critique of Kantian ethics going on here? I mean, certainly Kant thinks it's the thought that counts. It's the, the goodwill that counts. It's not works in themselves. If you go and do supposedly good deeds, but you're not actually motivated appropriately,

38:46then you were being a hypocrite. And we'll find Kant. Well, this is the, but this is the Protestant critique of Catholicism in general, though. And I think Hegel's a Lutheran, right? So this criticism of the whole good deeds requirement, really, you just need faith, right? For the Protestant, you just need faith, not good deeds. So it's enlightenment that's criticizing the whole good deed approach here. And you would think Hegel would be, as a Protestant, sympathetic, but he's not.

39:18Right, because having your personal relationship with God, even if you take this as the Protestant thing, still means that you have to be in a community doing things and loving each other in this active way, not just like a Stoic standing, governed in strict self-control by law, right? It would be divine law in this case. It would be whatever. But that it ultimately, it's your own. If you say it is only my own thoughts, right?

39:49I don't want to think any impure thoughts, then that would be pretty messed up for Hegel. I don't know if he's really criticizing anybody. Like, I don't think that's a good reading of Kant, even if Kant says it's the thought that counts, it's the motive that counts. Clearly, he wants you to, you know, there are positive duties for Kant. He's not just about avoiding the negative things. And if you run your, you know, are my evil thoughts going to hurt anybody? Like, it seems like Kant is fine with that. What if everybody had evil thoughts?

40:19Well, they do. Does that, does my, do my evil thoughts treat people like mere things and not ends in themselves? Well, I mean, they could, but that's, you know, most of what Christianity considers impure thoughts or evil thoughts, you know, that's not why. It's not because you were objectifying. I'd have to think more about that.

40:40All right. It is thus that enlightenment lets itself be understood by faith.

40:47Enlightenment lets itself be understood by faith. All right. So I guess this is the face that the enlightenment shows to faith. These, these sorts of critiques. All right. Yeah. It presents itself in this bad light because just by being in relation to an other, it gives itself a negative reality or exhibits itself as the opposite of itself. Right. It's caught up in these contradictions. For example, the one that we just talked about, but pure insight and intention must enter into this relationship for it is their realization.

41:19This at first appeared as a negative reality. So I think when he says first appeared as a negative reality, it's these critiques and rejections. Perhaps it's positive reality is better constituted. Let us see how things stand with this. If all prejudice and superstition have been banished, the question arises, what next? What is the truth enlightenment has propagated in their stead? It has already declared that this positive content is in its extirpation of error.

41:52Positive content is in its extirpation of error for that alienation of itself is just as much its positive reality. In its approach to what, for faith, is absolute spirit, it interprets any determinateness it discovers there as wood, stone, etc., as particular real things. Since in this way it grasps in general every determinateness that is all content and filling as something finite, as human entity, as a human entity, and mere idea, absolute being

42:26becomes for it a vacuum to which no determinations, no predicates, can be attributed. The attribution of predicates to such a vacuum would be in itself reprehensible from its point of view. And it is just in such a union that the monstrosities of superstition have been produced, according to the enlightenment. Reason, pure insight, is certainly not empty itself, since the negative of itself is for it, and is its content.

42:56On the contrary, it is rich, but rich only in particularity and limitations. To let nothing of that sort appertain to absolute being or be attributed to it, this is the prudent behavior of reason, of pure insight, which knows how to put itself and its finite riches in their proper place, and how to deal with the absolute in a worthy manner. All right. Wes, you're really just very rich, in particularity and limitations. Zing.

43:27Yeah. It's what I'm not. My richness is in all my nots. I'm not this. I'm not that. I'm not the other. All right. So, we get that the enlightenment interprets every determinant. So, it's not just about, right, historical facts and bread and all that stuff, right? You can't predicate anything of God. This is a big, you know, with Aquinas, we saw it's like a big thing with the medievals. Can we give God predicates, or would you have to do it merely by analogy? It turns out it's just by analogy for Aquinas.

43:59How can we actually talk about God or know God? Every time we try to do it, we're just talking about him. We're anthropomorphizing, or we're giving him these determinate qualities of empirical objects. Well, if we can't talk about him at all, if he has no determinations and no predicates, then he becomes a vacuum, which seems to be a critique here. But by the end of the paragraph, he seems to be suggesting that pure insight is doing something

44:30worthy, dealing with the absolute in a worthy manner. Or I'm not sure if he's fully endorsing that point of view, or if that's pure insight's point of view to itself, yeah. Right. Is he transforming reason from enlightenment reason to his reason? Reason, pure insight, is certainly not empty itself, since the negative of itself is for it, is its content. So, we know Hegel's going to try to retrieve determinateness and concreteness, and it seems like here, he's going to try to do that.

45:02So, he's going to find something good in this position, which is not unusual, right? Dialectically, there's going to be some positive thing that comes out of this enlightenment negativity, and this is the positive side that he's trying to get on. Right. Well, I recall the arc of this is that pure insight starts as a pure negative, but because it works on so many things, then that becomes its essence, its meal, right? If you were a film critic who just, oh, that's so yucky, that's so yucky, that's, you know,

45:37but you sort of implicitly build up, like, what actually would meet your standards? What would be worthy? So, you're building up a positive canon, even if only negative things are coming out of your mouth. Yeah.

Synthesis of critiques

45:51558.

Synthesis of critiques

45:52In contrast to this empty being, there stands as the second moment of positive truth of enlightenment, the singleness in general of consciousness and of all beings, a singleness excluded from absolute being and in the form of absolute being in and for itself. That's interesting. So, that's excluded from absolute being. Consciousness, which in its very first reality is sense certainty and mere meaning, returns here to this from the whole course of experience and is, again, a knowledge of what is purely

46:24negative of itself or of things of sense, that is, of things which immediately and indifferently confront its being for self. Here, however, it is not an immediate natural consciousness. On the contrary, it is become such for itself. Whereas at first it was at the mercy of every sort of entanglement into which it was plunged by its unfolding and now has been led back by pure insight into its first shape, it has experienced that shape as a result. Being based on the nothingness of all the other shapes of consciousness and hence of everything

46:54beyond sense certainty, this sense certainty is no mere meaning but rather absolute truth. This nothingness of everything that lies beyond sense certainty is no doubt merely a negative proof of this truth, but it is not susceptible to any other. For the positive truth of self-certainty is in its own self the immediate being for self of the notion itself qua object, and that too in the form of otherness. The positive truth that every consciousness is absolutely certain that it is, and that there are other real things outside of it, and that in its natural being, it, like these things,

47:30is in and for itself or absolute.

47:34I mean, it's just, this sounds like the rediscovery of the Cartesian ego or of the fictian ego as a positive. I was reading it as an affirmation of the being of the experienced world. I mean, maybe that's the same as what you're saying, right? That every immediate, every person, every immediate being for self is absolutely certain that it is.

48:05Right. So every consciousness is absolutely certain that it is. So we have sense certainty of our self-consciousness. That's like the Cartesian ego and that there are other real things outside it. That's the next step in the Cartesian derivation, and that it is a natural being, like these things. So that's a different step. So that places consciousness within the natural world. It, like these things, is in and for itself or absolute. Is that part of the positive thing of what even Kant accomplished, right?

48:39Of course, Hegel's critique of Kant was that you're saying that this world is nothing. You're being Plato, and you're saying this world is mere shadows. All the real being is off there in the godhood. But what enlightenment is doing is saying, that's bullshit. There is actual reality and value in the things of this world, and we are there among them. You know, what should be a very obvious thing. That's a good point. Yeah, so this is, so maybe the overall point is one of the positives of the enlightenment

49:12critique, right? The flip from its unjust negativity to these positives is that, yeah, we're no longer just in denial of the world of sense. We get a more positive relationship to it. Yep. And then let's do just, I think this is going to be our last one. We have our third, the third moment of the truth of enlightenment. Lastly, the third moment of the truth of enlightenment is the relation of the individual being to absolute being, is the relation between the first two moments.

49:43Insight, qua pure insight of what is identical or unrestricted, also goes beyond what is not identical, that is, beyond finite reality, or beyond itself as mere otherness. For the beyond of the southernness, it has the void to which, therefore, it relates the sensuous reality. In determination of this relation, both of the sides do not enter as content, for one of them is the void, and it is only through the other, the sensuous reality, that a content is

50:17present. But the form of this relation, the form of the relation, to the determination of which the side of the in itself contributes, can be a matter of choice. Sounds like you can choose your own religion. For the form is something intrinsically negative, and therefore self-opposed. Being as well as nothing, the in itself as well as its opposite, or, what is the same thing, the relation of the actual world, to the in itself, qua a beyond, is as much a negating

50:50as a positing of that actual world. Finite reality can, therefore, properly speaking, be taken just as one needs. The sensuous is, therefore, now related positively to the absolute, as to the in itself, and sensuous reality is itself an intrinsic being. The absolute makes it, fosters it, and cherishes it. Then, again, it is related to the absolute as an opposite, as to its own non-being.

51:21In this relationship, it is not anything in itself, but exists only for another. Whereas in the preceding shape of consciousness, the notions of the antithesis were determined by as good and bad. In the case of pure insight, on the other hand, they become the pure abstractions of being in itself and being for another. All right. Well, that was perfectly clear. I don't think we need to discuss it.

51:44You know, I think this is going to be our last chop at this for today. And I was willing to sort of give this a shot of, like, now that we're not doing it on PEL anymore, should we continue to do this on our own? No. I'm still burnt out on it. I agree. I'm burnt out. I'm burnt out, too. Six weeks ago. So I want to, let's slog through this last paragraph, but then- There's only so many in itself and for itself, so I can take in one life. You would think that this is so much easier, especially since we've read this before in

52:18preparing our notes for this. But it just, it doesn't. It doesn't get a lot easier. Like, there was definitely an initial hub to get over, but you never just kind of learn the language and then it's just clear. Yeah.

52:32All right. The relationship of the individual being to absolute being. Of the actual world to the beyond. So there's, I mean, there's a point where the sensuous is now related positively to the absolute. The absolute makes it, fosters in it, and cherishes it. What's the, what do they call it when you, the kind of church you can go to where they encourage you to get rich? There's a name for it. Uh, yeah, I don't, I don't remember. Just because you're, you know, religious doesn't mean you can't enjoy yourself, guys.

53:06God created this world. He created it for us to enjoy it. The prosperity theology, prosperity gospel. Yeah. There you go. Prosperity gospel. The idea is that there's been some, some kind of reconciliation between, so we're no longer ascetics, I think. If we do a synthesis on these critiques that the enlightenment has given us, we can move to a higher level where the sensuous and the divine are not simply opposed. But that's just a very high level gloss on something that is kind of baffling in its

53:38particulars. Yeah. In saying that we're, we're connecting the first two moments. I realized that the second moment was this sensual being has real being.

53:50What is the first positive moment? Is it, is it 557? That is, in other words, it, the negative reality or exhibits the. Then yeah, 557 is the first positive moment, which is that by shrinking everything to a vacuum, what do we get that's positive out of that by shrinking everything to a vacuum? Reason pure insight is certainly not empty in itself since the negative itself is for it and its content on the contrary is not rich, but rich only in particularity and limitations

54:25to get. So we're not really told. I mean, there's some sort of positivity coming out of these, all these negatives that the critiques have thrown at it. But to say that it's rich in particularity and limitations, I don't, right. That's just undefined. Right. So this was the problem, the sentence that we had a trouble with last time is why after he said that this is not a good use of reason to say it, to let nothing of the sort appertain to absolute being or to be attributed to it, this is the prudent behavior of reason

54:56of pure insight, which knows how to put itself and its finite riches in their proper place and how to deal with the absolute in a worthy manner. Like, unless he was saying that ironically and saying this is like how Kant does, that it treats the absolute in a worthy manner by shoving it off into the corner. But no, we were interpreting it as you have to do this. So you have to go through the stage for reason to then operate as Kant wants it to operate or sorry, as, as Hegel wants it to operate and to deal with the absolute in a worthy

55:28manner, which means to actually do the dialectic on it and treat it not as a thing that we can't even think about. But in fact, we're thinking about all the time and all thinking is ultimately about it. All right. Okay. I think that's a good, that's a good last word. So what, how does that synthesize with, with, so we got the good use of reason and now we have the good sensual world. I mean, you can see, yeah, I guess that's the, the sense of that is Kant's view. I mean, is, is Hegel's view, like saying this backward.

56:02Whereas in the preceding notion, shape of consciousness, the notions of the antithesis were determined as good and bad. In this case of pure insight, on the other hand, they become the pure abstraction of being in itself and being for another. So I guess you, you know, if there wasn't enlightenment religion, if there wasn't Kantianism, then you wouldn't get Hegel's whole way of looking at things, whole, whole way of structuring things where the, the primary ontological division is being in itself and being for another.

56:34That sounds like a good final word. Whether it is really, or whether we've simply run out of gas, let us. I'm throwing in the towel.

56:46I'm still going to read a lot about Hegel and Pippen and all those other guys, Pinkert, and I'm just going to enjoy the hell out of it, but it's going to be a long time before I can return to raw Hegel. Oh, holy crap. Sounds good. We really, we really, you know, we did it. That's the end. We're going to be dead before we come back today. Let's just make continuing this text right where he's left off the live show. Forget all this Declaration of Independence stuff that everybody will be able to understand.

57:18We want to make it, we'll just, we won't even announce it. We'll, we'll, we'll just surprise change that we're just going to read aloud from this book for our front of an audience and watch their eyes glaze over.

57:35Thanks for glazing. Good, good to see you. We'll have a different topic next time. Bye. All right. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye.

57:51Close Reads is a partially examined life podcast. See partially examined life.com. We're distributed through the Evergreen Podcast Network. See evergreenpodcast.com slash Close Reads Philosophy. And you can also find us at closereadsphilosophy.com or just look up Close Reads on your favorite podcast listening platform.