The Partially Examined Life

On Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit (1807), sec. 527-73, i.e. "Faith and Pure Insight" and "The Struggle of Enlightenment with Superstition." Picking up where we left off in this book, an intangible part of us ("pure consciousness") escapes the attempts of culture to define us. This spiritual part has two sides: pure insight, which is the destructive critical faculty popularized by The Enlightenment which sees through all hypocricy and unwarranted belief; and faith, which Enlightenment either dismisses as superstition or chases into a little corner isolated from the real, empirical world. Eventually, the tension between these leads to a conception of faith that Hegel finds more congenial: Awareness of God is just a function of self-consciousness itself, though we don't typically recognize this. Get more at partiallyexaminedlife.com. Visit partiallyexaminedlife.com/support to get ad-free episodes and tons of bonus discussion. Don't miss the PEL Live show in Madison, WI on Saturday afternoon, July 11. See partiallyexaminedlife.com/live for details. Sponsors: Don't get caught running yesterday's security on today's web: visit nordlayer.com/browser. Get a $1/month e-commerce trial at shopify.com/pel.

Concluding our treatment of Ch. 2 of Hegel's Faith and Knowledge (1802). Hegel wants to connect various ideas in Kant: The idea of an "intuitive, achetypal intellect" which we have to refer to in explaining biology, the synthesizing imagination that makes experience possible, and the unknown agency that makes things-in-themselves suitable for processing by our knowledge faculties and vice versa. For Hegel, these things all point to Reason as both the way we know God and the activity of God Himself: Hegelian Reason is the bringing together of seemingly opposite things, and so underlying our minds must be some greater kind of mind that brings together mind and world to create experience. Get more at partiallyexaminedlife.com. Visit partiallyexaminedlife.com/support to get ad-free episodes and tons of bonus discussion. Sponsors: Don't get caught running yesterday's security on today's web: visit nordlayer.com/browser. Visit functionhealth.com/PEL to get the data you need to take action for your health. Get a $1/month e-commerce trial at shopify.com/pel.