Hegel on Reason (Part One)

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0:57Terms at aka.ms slash college PC. This is Close Reads. A philosophy podcast with Mark and Wes. I'm Wes Alwyn. And I'm Mark Linsenmeier.

1:09We are returning to Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit. Last time, not that long ago, we looked at the self-consciousness section, specifically the stoicism bit, which was followed up by some skepticism and freedom of self-consciousness. And we're going to skip forward very slightly to the next major section, reason, part five, the certainty and truth of reason, section 231.

Section 231 Introduction

1:37So in the Miller translation, this is page 139. If you want to follow along. Do you have any initial thoughts, preconceptions, Wes, about this? No. What do you think we're going to see here? It would be nice to find out what he thinks reason is. He's probably building on Kant. Wes, can you tell us what Kant thinks reason is? It's not the understanding. It's the thing. It's something other than the understanding. It goes beyond the understanding. It's the thing that he's critiquing.

2:08It's the thing that wants to make generalizations about everything over and beyond just the things that we can experience. So my understanding is that that's what Hegel wants. That's his whole dialectic.

Kant's Influence on Hegel

2:20That's his whole. He's been using reason this whole time. It has been his primary motivation. Right. So that's the critique of pure reason. We associate the use of reason with metaphysics and with illegitimate metaphysical speculations that treat abstract objects as if they were empirical objects that could be known in the way that empirical objects are known and they cannot be. So the whole point is that things like God or soul or anything else we might want to call a thing in itself, which is ultimately what the absolute is all about, right?

2:52Those things are not knowable by reason, but they're thinkable by reason. And reason's tendency is to reach towards those things, towards these totalizing explanations that end with something where the buck stops, which is what Hegel calls the absolute. And so can we say preliminarily, do we know how Hegel avoids the Kantian charge that he's just engaging in abstract speculation about things that we really can't know anything about?

3:23It seems if he was doing phenomenology in the sense of describing appearances, well, that would solve that. That's why Husserl uses that term. But who knows whether Hegel's phenomenology, it seems less a description, a systematic description of experience as early 20th century phenomenology is, and more just a description of the dynamics of stuff, of phenomena, meaning that just the most general like entity.

The Dynamics of Entities

3:51The dynamics of entities in the cosmos, including, you know, we know he's an idealist, so it's really about the transition of one idea to another, but he's an absolute idealist. He's not a merely subjectivist idealist. So these are not necessarily ideas in the mind of God, or it's not meant to reduce, to say there are no material objects. Yeah, well, for Kant, phenomena are objects of empirical experience, right? That ultimately, it begins with the senses.

4:23I think in the phenomenology, the phenomena, at least in the beginning, are forms of consciousness. They are modes of knowing, and in epistemological positions in the very beginning of the book, so that the philosophical theorizing becomes the phenomenon to understand, or it becomes the thing that you observe as if it were a phenomenon, and then you watch it unfold.

Hegel's Dialectical Method

4:50So there's a really interesting kind of pretense to the book that instead of simply offering a philosophical argument, he's going to put a little philosophical seed on the table or into the soil, and then he's just going to watch it grow and bloom from one stage to another, and that movement is predicated on some contradiction in a previous stage. So the observer can look at any given theory, find a contradiction, and watch it move naturally on to the next stage, and then find another contradiction, and it's hands-off.

5:21He doesn't have to do anything but observe the phenomena. The phenomena are the arguments themselves. That's what I understand of the earlier part of the book.

5:31You know, the way the use expands, if it does, I don't know more generally. You know, he definitely is following in Kant's footsteps in starting with perception in this book, and then taking us through the understanding, force and the understanding. So to make sense of macroscopic objects in the world and the forces that we perceive that they have between them, we have to bring in the understanding.

Understanding and Force

5:55And then the next step was self-consciousness, we have to review how at the end of force and the understanding, well, you have to group objects together to say all these appearances are appearances of one object to make sense of the different perspectives that we have on objects versus the forces that are manipulating them. We have to refer to a subject that is contemplating these things, that in some ways we are the ones, per Kant, who synthesize these objects, we put them together.

6:25So we had to bring up the subject explicitly and then talk about how the subject could be aware of himself thinking. And so, all right, so what is this new kind of self-consciousness-informed thinking? Well, that's going to be reason, which presumably is going to be able to go beyond merely synthesizing objects of physics, but it's going to be able to talk about eventually democracy and, you know, anything else you'd want to talk about.

6:56So let's get into it. It is, again, section 231, just the title, The Certainty and Truth of Reason, we know from the dialectic before, usually certainty is, even though that sounds like something that you're shooting for, it sounds like that, no, it's actually this illusory, shallow first step that you could be certain about just the surface of a thing.

Certainty and Truth of Reason

7:18And then to get at the truth, then we somehow have to turn it around, we have to look at it from a different perspective, we have to let the next step of the dialectic unfold, and then we get to the truth. So, yeah, how is reason itself going to have a surface level that we're going to have to penetrate through this section? Yeah, the relationship of certainty is what seems to be an unmediated relationship, almost like the relationship we might think we have to sense data before we come to think that there's a myth of a given. And we can take at any stage, it might seem like we have this unmediated, immediate relationship to some object of knowledge, when in fact it turns out to be mediated in one way or another.

7:59And the example, the earliest example in the book is where what seems to be an unmediated relationship to a this, right, to some seemingly particular thing is actually mediated by something universal, which in a way is very much like Wilfred Sellers' argument about the myth of a given, which is that we don't get particularity without universality, universality becomes the mediator, so we will expect that move here, and it will probably happen multiple times.

8:30The whole story of this book is something that seems unmediated will turn out to be mediated, something that seems concrete will turn out to be abstract, and then we move on to the next stage, and it's never, never going to stop until we get to the very end. And presumably in absolute consciousness and absolute knowledge, we will be able to stop this journey, but until then, it's all discovery of mediation. Without reading it yet, which we know we're going to get about one idea per nine pages, so for the next hour we're maybe going to get the first, the first little shred of this, what would you think?

9:04I mean, I could see somebody using a starting point that we have sort of an unmediated relationship to the principle of non-contradiction, that that is the basis of all reason, that you just can't, a thing can't both be and not be at the same time, and, you know, I'm trying to think through this, could we argue that this is unmediated, that we, we certainly think we're certain about it, but maybe when I drill into it, I have to, well, how can a thing be and not be? Maybe I have to bring in things, I have to bring in some sort of mental apparatus, some sort of extrinsic stuff to make sense of the principle of non-contradiction, whereas it might seem like it is just immediately apparent.

9:44That's my best guess. I think that's a good guess. It might, you know, if we're just guessing, it might also have something to do with the sense that we have an unmediated knowledge of objects of metaphysics, the things that Kant is going to say not only are mediated, but it's not possible to know them. So, so for instance, we might think like Descartes, that the obviousness of the cogito of self-consciousness is something to which we have incorrigible, immediate access, not mediated access.

10:16And that in fact, there's a sense in which, because that's a substance, we have unmediated access to a metaphysical object. And that would be, I think, you know, purely speculating something like the certainty of reason. And we might say the same thing of God, if we want to do the ontological argument in Anselm to say God is, exists by definition. It seems to be an unmediated relation. We don't need to infer him through causal relationships to the phenomena. We can just do it a priori, that type of stuff.

10:48It would be very surprising if in the religion sections of this book, if that kind of thing did not come up. The thing about the self, of course, the section before this, there was self-certainty. And then that ends up being, but I think this is really intriguing to me, the idea of when you know the self, in the sense of Descartes' cogito, you are somehow knowing a primal thing about reason, as opposed to just what he was talking about in the previous chapter. So could we echo the previous chapter? That would make a lot of sense for Hegel and sort of add, oh, we're still talking about the self.

11:21In fact, later in this section that we're not going to get to, I'm sure. Certainty and truth of reason, he does talk more about the self. All right, well, let's. Okay, 231.

The Absolute Essence

11:32In grasping the thought that the single individual consciousness is in itself absolute essence, consciousness has returned into itself. Okay, so let's just stop there. We don't have to do one sentence at a time, but just as a setup, this does seem to be gesturing towards Cartesian concept of, right, individual consciousness is absolute essence. Right, for Descartes, is it absolute essence?

12:03Well, it is the starting point epistemologically. It is the first principle epistemologically. You start with the cogito, you start with the fact of self-consciousness, our access to that. It's a weird phrase, absolute essence. Obviously, it's not God, unless you're effecting Hegel and maybe you're identifying the self and God. But if it's a substrate for free will, if free will belongs to the self, to consciousness as substance, then there's some sense in which it's absolute in that sense.

12:37I'm scanning a little bit of the previous section on freedom of self-consciousness. It's actually intriguing to me now, given that we just read Aquinas on soul, that there are things that are, you know, just talking about the independence of the thing. And is it, for instance, absolute essence in the sense of being an immutable thing? Do we think that we're somehow tapping into an immortal soul, just, you know, that sounds like absolute essence, a thing that does not change over time, an essence that would not change over time?

13:14Without reading that whole section, I'm not sure if there's really any of that in there, but this is intriguing. Yeah, I think Descartes certainly thinks that's what he's doing, right? I'm not only just grasping that there is a phenomenal field that is unified in the way that this thought and this thought and this thought are all mine. I am grasping a substance, as you were saying, a metaphysical substance that, in fact, I can know without a lot of further steps of reasoning is detachable from, you know, since I know it immediately and I know the physical things only immediately.

13:49So, therefore, it is at least logically and therefore metaphysically, for Descartes, detachable from everything else. So, I really am grasping a, you know, Christian immortal soul. Yeah, I think when I see the word absolute, I think of something like what Aristotle would call a first principle. And it's first, right? The firstness is the thing that makes it absolute. It's the terminus of some sort of chain of reasoning or some sort of causal chain. So, if we have found a fundamental atom or subatomic particle or field or whatever it is, whatever the unit of reality is, that's a kind of absolute.

14:28Or God is an absolute because he is the beginning of the world in some sense, causally. But it's an equivocal term because we can think of the absolute ontologically or epistemologically. The examples I've just given are ontological. But the, right, the Cartesian version is an epistemological example. To say that self-consciousness is an absolute in the sense of it's a first principle of our reasoning doesn't mean it's an ontological first principle, right? Just because I say, well, the foundation of all my knowledge is self-consciousness, the certainty of myself, doesn't mean the foundation of the world is that.

15:05But unless we get to German idealism and that becomes fuzzy, the sort of epistemological absolute and the ontological absolute start to converge because it looks like the cogito becomes God in a sense in its most abstract form. The single individual consciousness is what we got here. So, that's not that. But right now, we're just with ordinary, yeah. And then the other sense of absoluteness, I stress, was the freedom of the will because that's another case in which there seems to be some sort of terminus, causal terminus, right?

15:39There's nothing that causes – if there is a free will, there's nothing that causes it. Therefore, it is an absolute in a sense. So, that is what, just for listeners, whenever they, yeah, see the word absolute, they should be thinking in those terms and understand that it's ambiguous between the epistemological and the ontological, but maybe the two actually converge. Second sentence. For the unhappy consciousness, the in itself is the beyond of itself. Do we remember from our – what that means?

16:12From our dabbling in the unhappy consciousness, I know we are getting to the idea with skepticism, stoicism and skepticism that the self-consciousness was just a completely free little moat not tied to even its own past. It is a truly imminent object and it seems that's kind of unhappy that you end up feeling like an alien in your own body, an alien in the world.

16:42If you really think that you're this. Is that what it means as far as your record call? Well, it sounds here like what he's referring to with unhappy consciousness. So, the in itself is the beyond of itself, which is to say, right, the in itself and the sense of things in themselves are beyond itself. So, we understand this in skepticism, for instance. We can't know – you know, this is Kant. We can't know the things in themselves. They're beyond us. We can know the phenomena and that just fleshes out this Cartesian self-consciousness where we can know our own consciousness and then the phenomena become part of consciousness and that's what we know.

17:21But we can't know things in themselves outside of consciousness and that's part of the unhappiness. So, what is unhappiness, unhappy consciousness? Yeah, yeah. I thought to – and I think this is okay for us to do when we're reviewing sections that we're not reading today. It's to use the Google AI. So, Hegel's unhappy consciousness is a state of self-awareness where a person sees themselves as a divided contradictory being torn between their changeable finite existence and a desire for an unchangeable absolute truth. So, if we grasp ourselves, the consciousness in itself as absolute essence, it seems actually we are sort of at peace about that.

17:58I really am grasping the thing. But when you – there are at least certain states in the unhappy consciousness where you posit yourself as merely the imminent, completely transitory thing in contrast to some underlying ground. The in itself is the beyond of itself. What my self really is has to be a soul or something that is underlying this mere trick of the light that is my imminent consciousness. Yeah.

18:30So, what is this beyond that it sees as essential? I mean, it seems like it could be the beyond as God or the beyond as my metaphysical self, right? My soul, yeah. Yeah. Anything transcendent. Right. So, it might principally mean the soul. So, this distinction between the metaphysical self and what Kant would call the empirical self. Should we – Third sentence. Go ahead, Wes. But its movement has resulted in positing the completely developed single individual or the single individual that is an actual consciousness as the negative of itself, as the objective extreme.

19:14In other words, it has successfully struggled to divest itself of its being for self and has turned it into mere being. So, this sounds like objectification. Yes. The mirror is in brackets, but we can see – I mean, it sounds like Sartre, right? I want to make myself into a thing. I want to grasp myself as I'm a substantial soul slash personality slash social self slash metaphysical self.

19:51Everything is just this absolute that I have immediate access to, and it's a being as opposed to being merely a phenomenon as opposed to being for self. But as such, we seem to rob it of consciousness. I take that to be the mereness of being. And we see that with the mind-body problem, right? To individuate minds, it seems like we need brains. The minds have to be in bodies, but then the question is how we can get consciousness out of bodies.

20:25I think in this case, if we have a metaphysical soul and it's supposed to be like – we're thinking of it on analogy to other physical things that we know in the empirical world, things that don't have consciousness. And to the extent that we objectify it in that way, we rob it of the property of consciousness when we look at it from the outside. Consciousness, in a way, is only visible from the inside.

20:57Yeah. So we have the hard problem of consciousness, of how can it come out of physical things, but we don't have the hard problem of souls. Of what would the – a corresponding problem of if a soul is a substance, how could that substance itself generate consciousness? Especially since, I mean, we can say it's hard for us to imagine how physical things could advance this because we know physical things have parts, are parts in structures.

21:28But we don't know dick about non-physical souls. This is why I kind of want to read something by one of these guys actually trying to get us the mechanics, you know, that are sort of comparable. The closest we got is in Descartes' The Passions, is that, well, somehow the non-physical thing has to touch the physical thing. It has to have parts in – I don't even remember how he – obviously, I think this whole thing is a fool's errand. But it should point out, at least he's saying phenomenologically, this is a real problem, you know, that once you conceive of self-consciousness as, hey, that's my soul.

22:06Then the soul becomes a thing, and then it actually becomes puzzling how it can have self-consciousness. Yeah, and this for Hegel is a very live problem because he's pivoting off of Spinoza and, right, there's a beginning of the call of this book to understand substance as subject. And for Spinoza, substance is just God, but it's like – sounds like this big lump, you know, of – God is also the world, so it's almost like God is all of material being. And then modes of that are consciousness and materiality or spatiotemporal world.

22:42Those become modes or something like properties, and that doesn't really tell you that much to say that consciousness is a property of this big substance and that, hey, extension and matter, those are also properties of the same thing. So this kind of monistic substance under everything looks like a kind of clay that doesn't in itself have consciousness, right? Consciousness is just another add-on.

23:13So the call at the beginning of the book to understand substance as subject, I mean, subjectivity has to be built in from the very bottom up. We don't just add it on as a nice little property after we start with our monistic stuff. Right. All right. In this movement, it has also become aware of its unity with this universal, a unity which, for us, no longer falls outside of it, since the superseded single individual is the universal, and which, since consciousness maintains itself in this its negativity,

23:46is present in consciousness as such as its essence. All right. Become aware of its unity. We do have to keep going by one sentence at a time. Well, I just don't understand the sentence. Yeah, yeah. Become aware of its unity with this universal. What is this referring back to? The mere being, that once it becomes a soul, then, well, a soul is a genre. No longer falls outside of it. Yeah, I mean, it has to be talking about the substantial soul here, but it's become a universal.

24:22I mean, if it becomes a mere being, then I think it becomes a being of a particular type. And so I have a soul and you have a soul, whereas the phenomenal field taken purely from a first-person perspective, we can't in any sensible way count it with other people's first-person perspectives. There is no perspective from which one could count those things unless you just shrink them all conceptually and say, okay, you got your thing going on, you got your monad, and I got my monad, and then we can start counting them.

24:55And then those monads, those souls, that's universal. Yeah, it does. The superseded single individual is the universal. Hmm.

25:05Superseded single individual. You know, maybe he is talking about Spinoza here, where the being, right, being for self has become part of being. And that certainly single individuals are superseded, right, in Spinoza especially. They're just part of the bigger substance. I don't know. Consciousness maintains itself in its negativity. In this, it's negativity. Yeah, well, that sounds like, yes, that the universal, so right, universal, I was using it as a type.

25:40So a rabbit is a universal, but not the universal consciousness. So as he's saying, we've already somehow tapped into in this unhappy consciousness when I was saying, oh, oh, there's just me and my little isolated individuality. And then there's the vastness of the spiritual landscape that I sure wish I was one with. And so we actually are discovering ourselves not as a single soul that sits along other souls, but as, as you were saying, the other possible transcendent alternatives that I am patching into the universal soul right there.

26:17Yeah. By contrast, I'm a negative. I as an individual, I'm a negativity. It's almost, it does kind of sound like the universal consciousness being present in consciousness as such as its essence. Mm-hmm. Again, we're coming right off of Aquinas and Aristotle and Plato about forms. And that sure as hell sounds like if I have the form of a soul as a genre that I'm, well, that's, I'm partaking in the universal soul. That's what that means. A hot thing takes, partakes of the universal heat.

26:49Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Let's provisionally go with that interpretation. Sure. At least see if we can make it to the other paragraph. Yeah. It's truth is that which appears in the syllogism whose extremes appeared as held absolutely asunder as the middle term. And this, this is mediation whenever he does this as a middle term, which proclaims to the unchangeable consciousness that the single individual has renounced itself.

27:22And to the individual, but the unchangeable capital U is for it no longer an extreme, but is reconciled with it.

27:33The middle term, let me just read the last sentence through. The middle term is the unity directly aware of both, both and connecting them and is the consciousness of their unity, which it proclaims to consciousness and thereby to itself, the consciousness of the certainty of being all truth. This also sounds, you know, it sounds a bit like a relationship of the individual to God, of course, which we would expect the relationship to an individual, to the universal consciousness or to the world soul or whatever. Right. There's also analogous to the relationship to God.

28:06And we're talking about the question of alienation here in that sense, right? Things that seem to be completely asunder, unknowable things in themselves. Okay. So it's truth. Truth is going to be the thing that underlies the phenomenon, the given phenomenon here. We're going to discover something new. So truth, truth is always at this stage of this Hegel's argument. Truth is the thing that falls out of the contradiction. The truth is that which appears in the syllogism.

28:39It would be nice if He gave us the syllogism.

28:43Yeah. So that's right. Because we know the single individual is the first term. And this is a living syllogism, right? They're all points of consciousness because He says the middle term is directly aware of. It is the consciousness of their unity. So it's not merely a logical syllogism. It involves entities that are taking up these three points. So we know the single individual. We know that the universal, which we're trying to figure out if it's the universal consciousness or God or just souls taken as a genre or maybe all three of those things are the same thing.

29:16And so what is the middle term is the awareness of their unity. But how could this be put, yeah, in syllogistic form, a la Aristotle? I think Christ is going to be the middle term ultimately. Ah. Although this may – he's not necessarily talking about that here, but it's the same pattern. Yeah. So this is about the reconciliation of, yeah, of God as absolute with the individual. And there's got to be a way to bring them together.

29:47So the middle term, which is the human, right, he proclaims to the unchangeable consciousness, which here could be the metaphysical self or God, that the single individual has renounced itself, which sounds like an awfully Christian thing to do. But it is also the thing that the individual consciousness does in attributing itself to metaphysical substance. It renounces itself in favor of that substance.

30:18And then to the individual, that the unchangeable is not an extreme, but is reconciled with it. So whatever the case, it's – you know, you could think of this in terms of reconciliation of the subjective aspect of conscious – individual consciousness with its objective aspect or of its subjective aspect with its – it's, you know, with God and the universal consciousness and those two – those may amount to the same thing, which is what I was getting at when I talked about the epistemological and the ontological converging at the beginning of this. Right. Can I suggest a slightly less overtly theological interpretation, which is I'm trying to – you know, one of the ways that Spinoza thought of our immortality is that we are thinking Phragian thoughts.

31:04We are thinking Platonic thought individuals. So just two plus two equals four, that is an unchanging existing thing. This is all about reason. So actually – and he says in the next sentence, now that self-consciousness is reason. So it seems that the middle term is not – we don't want to say Christ here, even though I think you're right that he's going to relate this to this later when he talks explicitly about religion. But it is reason that is hooking us up to the universal world of thought, you know, the very concept of universality itself, the stuff that Kant thinks that reason extends to, which does include theological stuff.

31:43But we don't have to fill in that gap and say it's God yet. Yeah, I was just trying to foreshadow. I think it helps to sort of understand – I think what excites Hegel is the way these patterns reoccur. And I think we get to the religious thing later in the book, but this definitely foreshadows it. But yeah, this sounds like primarily about – yeah, reconciling – like I said, I don't need to restate it, but subjective and objective consciousness. But this middle term is the unity directly aware of both and connecting them and is the consciousness of their unity, which reclaims to consciousness and thereby to itself the consciousness of the certainty of being all truth.

32:26Okay. Well, I don't know how it does that.

32:32Right. So for Kant, it's just, you know, the I think is a representation. We don't know the self. The self is among the – you know, the metaphysical self is among the things in themselves that we can't know. And we have an empirical ego, how we know ourselves psychologically and our personality traits and how we relate that to the stream of consciousness and memory and all that. But yeah, how do we say that the empirical ego is the one with the metaphysical ego? I don't know. I mean, just insofar as the Cartesian cogito can contain things like that definition of God, which is just a truth of reason.

33:08So, hey, there's me as an individual ego hooking right into – and if I think of that definition of God and you think of that definition of God, we are thinking of the same thing. So we're both plugged into the universal.

33:22Can reason together. Section 232. Now, that self-consciousness is reason. It's hitherto negative relation to otherness turns around into a positive relation. It's.

33:38Okay. Of it's. Of reason. So reason used to be negative in relation to otherness, right? Reason is the thing that synthesizes. And now it's going to actually – well, we actually need – reason uses these individual things to draw its conclusions. Like, so it – well, so I think it's might refer to self-consciousness because he was saying, right, so earlier in the previous paragraph, the single individual that is an actual consciousness as the negative of itself, as the extreme, as the objective extreme.

34:14So, right, the negative is just to say that, right, in a way the metaphysical self is the negative of subjective consciousness. So we understand it in a way negatively, and Kant certainly understands it negatively because we don't know it. But it's just what is – what the thing that's out of our grasp but somehow may explain what we experience. But now it becomes positive once reason gets involved because, at the very least, reason has the illusion that it can have a kind of unmediated relationship of certainty to this metaphysical self.

34:53That might be what he's talking about here. So that's where we get the positive relation, as if it's now seeing things in the way the sense is seeing things, right? We have a positive relationship to sense data, that would be an example, as opposed to a negative relationship to scientific models where we are simply trying to come up with explanations of the phenomenon. That's my provisional understanding of this. But – Yep. I mean, that is entirely wrong. Well, but, I mean, we're coming out of the self-consciousness section, and the fact that he's saying the middle term is itself a self-consciousness.

35:28Well, that should mean what it's been talking about before, that it is an actual person reflecting on itself as, you know, one among other beings gaining fleshed out by the view of the other and all that stuff that, you know, we just have kind of lost track of in going through the unhappy consciousness and merely thinking of my relation to my universal soul, right? So, up till now, it has been concerned, so reason, up till now, it has been concerned only with its independence and freedom.

36:03So, okay, so self-consciousness as reason. This is the whole really difficult thing to – we understand what self-consciousness is, but how could self-consciousness be reason as opposed to be something that self-consciousness is related to? The reason is the universal or something that it does, but it is, you know, you are what you do. So, up till now, it has been concerned with its independence and freedom, concerned to save and maintain itself for itself at the expense of the world or of its own actuality, both of which appeared to it as the negative of its essence.

36:37But as reason, assured of itself, it is at peace with them and can endure them, for it is certain that it is itself reality or that everything actual is none other than itself. Its thinking is itself directly actuality, and thus its relationship to the latter is that of idealism. So, it's been concerned only with its independence and freedom to maintain itself at the expense of the world or of its own actuality. All right. So, I think what's going on here is that, right, if it's concerned with its own freedom, this is the old problem of it, right?

37:14In a way, Fichte's project is predicated on saving the freedom of the self in a deterministic world. And you could say that in a way that that is kind of the idealist project, is to make the world revolve around the self so the self doesn't have to be shackled within the world. So, the concern for freedom comes at the expense of the world, which is to say the world is suddenly inside the self as the phenomena or of its own actuality, which is to say what?

37:44Well, I was interpreting this as, again, interpreting your consciousness as a sartrean spontaneity. It is a mere point. It is absolutely free from your past, from everything, but then it's not actual. It's not a thing. You want it to actually be a substantial thing. Or it's saying, like in these stoicism, skepticism sections, the rest of the world doesn't really matter. I am the one absolute point. Everything else I can doubt, I can escape from.

38:15So, in that sense, I am not determined because, as Sartre says, nothing appears to determine me. You were saying that Fichte was doing something different than this. He was not merely just taking advantage of the fact that we don't perceive our own motivations as mechanical. He was saying something else.

38:36He was identifying the – if you go back and, you know, listeners can go back to our Vocation of Man episode, where the solution is to identify individual consciousness with the universal consciousness God and then say that God, right, all the data come from the positing of that universal consciousness. So, all the contingent data within the material world come from that. And so that, right, if you thought about the – so the universal consciousness doesn't just find itself in the world

39:14such that it is determined by it, but it makes the world and everything that happens into it. And to the extent that we participate in the universal consciousness, we're making the world with it. So, it's not that I'm doing something because I was determined to by all these mechanical scientific causes. There's a sense in which that's true from our position, but actually, I already made with God, as part of God,

39:44I already made all those things, and then they come to affect me. But that's okay because I already created them. Something like that. Yeah, and that goes with what's here, as reason ensures of itself is at peace with them, for it is certain that it is itself reality, or that everything actual is none other than itself. Yep. It's thinking is itself directly actuality, and thus its relationship to the latter is that of idealism. I think he is talking about Fichte here. Yep. I think this is something you can do with Hegel. You can – it's too bad he doesn't actually mention the figures because it would be so much simpler.

40:18But at any given time, I think he's very often referring to a specific thinker when you're reading the phenomenology. He's doing what we would call subtweeting these days, or he's mentioning without mentioning. All right, go ahead. Apprehending itself in this way, that is, as idealism, it is as if the world had for it only now come into being. Previously, it did not understand the world. It desired it and worked on it, withdrew from it into itself, and abolished it as an existence on its own account,

40:51and its own self qua consciousness, both as consciousness of the world as essence and as consciousness of its nothingness. And thus apprehending itself after losing the grave of its truth, after the abolition of its actuality is itself abolished, and after the singleness of consciousness is for it, it in itself absolute essence, it discovers the world as its new real world, which in its permanence holds an interest for it, which previously lay only in its transiency. For the existence of the world becomes for self consciousness its own truth and presence.

41:25It is certain of experiencing only itself therein. I think what you said about Fichte just completely unlocks all, just about all that.

41:37Yeah. The existence of the world becomes for self consciousness its own truth and presence. It is certain of experiencing only itself therein. Yeah, I think this is all tied to this. And it, right, and we saw at the, what is the section? And somewhere back in the, in the book, right, we get this idea that knowing the world is knowing ourselves. Because the categories, to know ourselves is to know the categories. And he wants to say the category, well, the categories are the things in themselves.

42:07They really, and we really do know them. And that there's not, right, we're not simply locked inside ourselves by only having access to the structure of consciousness, the categories. They, the structure of consciousness just is the structure of the world, and to know consciousness is to know the world. Self-knowledge is world knowledge. So we've seen this idea before. When it's Hegel, when is it Hegel's, when is it Fichte's, and what flavors are there? I don't know. So I know it's not appropriate for me then to be injecting Sartre into this.

42:38Sartre is responding to Heidegger, who's responding to Hegel and others. But this, this idea, if you say, of course, we don't want to be idealists. Of course, the world is real in a sense that is, you know, maybe we can abstract phenomenologically in the way Husserl does from considering the, the realism versus idealism problem. But we're certainly not going to just embrace Fichte and idealism. Then my self-consciousness is as a nothingness in a sea of being. It is the thing that is negating, you know, for all the reasons that if we, you know, remember what that nothingness means for Sartre.

43:14I feel like that maybe he got that idea out of here that I'm, I'm not going to take, says Sartre, the Hegelian solution of, of the Fichte and road, because that's nonsense. I'm going to bite the bullet and be unhappy consciousness. And that is what gives existentialism its whole bummer reputation. Yeah. You are isolated from others. You do see yourself as basically a nothing. Hmm. Yeah.

43:44Uh, yeah, keep going to 33. This is probably going to be our last section since it is, uh, a page long. Yeah.

Reason as Idealism

43:52We're not going to get, I mean, maybe we'll get through. Reason is the certainty of consciousness that it is all reality. Thus does idealism express its notion, capital N.

44:05It's DNA, so to speak. Just as consciousness that comes on the scene as reason possesses that certainty directly in itself, so too does idealism give direct expression to that certainty. I am I, that sounds very Fichtean or Cartesian, I am I in the sense that the I, which is an object for me, is the sole object, is all reality, and all that is present. Here, the I, that is object for me, is not merely an empty object in general, as it is for self-consciousness as such, nor is it, as in free self-consciousness, merely an object that withdraws itself from other objects which retain their worth alongside it.

44:53On the contrary, it is for self-consciousness, an object such that any other object, whatever, is a non-being. Again, just, just sounds like Fichtean idealism, but, but self-consciousness is all reality. Is that allowed in Fichtean? I mean, if you've already said the entire conceivable universe is me, I'm one with it in some weird sense, then does it fall from that, that anything that's not part of that is?

45:23A non-being, like, because there just is no non-being, right? Everything is.

45:30Everything that is, is posited by self-consciousness. The data comes from inside the house, so to speak. It's not being given to us from the outside, we give it to ourselves. Yeah. But are there then objects that are not given to me? Are there non-beings at all? Well, there's nothing else. There's nothing else outside of that. So, but self-consciousness is all reality, not merely for itself, but also in itself, only through becoming this reality, or rather through demonstrating itself to be such.

46:04Hmm. All right. So, not merely for itself, but also in itself, right? Yeah. So, once you, once you say self-consciousness comprises all of the data, all of the given, you know, this is almost like another objectification. It's, it's very, and it is very much like Spinoza, except that we, our substance is subject. So, it isn't in itself now. It's for itself in the sense of being subject and in itself, right, in the sense of being a independent entity.

46:35But yeah, go ahead. Only through demonstrating itself to be such. So, what does that mean? That, you know, that you could just imagine, you could be a solipsist, basically, and would say everything is, you know, part of my, but somehow, no, no, it has to prove it. It has to prove that it is not just for itself, for you, which would be solipsism. Everything is for me, but it isn't in itself. This is actually what being is. And in fact, other minds can be in that. That's okay. It's not just me.

47:06And some, and that seems like what the demonstration is, is how we prove something. How do I prove that this is not an illusion? Well, then I ask you, or maybe I ask myself at time B by, you know, looking at the thing from another angle or approaching the, the mirage in the desert and seeing, you know, getting, adding experiences either by through actual other people or by dividing myself into multiple perspectives, multiple observations. Yeah, I mean, he might even mean here that, right, so Fichte does try to give a demonstration of all this, and it's very tedious.

47:44So he may be giving this evolutionary picture where the stage of our philosophical knowledge determines what consciousness is, like there's not a distinction, so that until we can demonstrate this for ourselves, then we are not such, which sounds a bit relativistic and crazy, so I might not be right about that. Well, let's read more to see what this demonstration is. Okay. It demonstrates itself to be along the path in which first, in the dialectical movement of meaning, perceiving and understanding, otherness as an intrinsic being vanishes.

48:23Then, in the movement through the independence of consciousness in lordship and bondage, through the conception of freedom, through the liberation that comes from skepticism and the struggle for absolute liberation by the consciousness divided against self, otherness, insofar as only for consciousness, vanishes for consciousness itself.

48:44So we got a nice little review here. Does it make sense to you, Wes?

48:51Only in the way that we've already been explaining it, which I'm no longer sure is right. But, because now we've gone backwards to skepticism, and I thought we were up with ficta, but it demonstrates itself to be this along the path where otherness as intrinsic being vanishes. So, right, it's clear how it vanishes with skepticism if we think we don't have access to things in themselves, or maybe they don't even exist. Otherness as intrinsic being.

49:23So, all the phenomena are not, they're not others. The phenomena are within us. Objects as empirical phenomena are not other. They're constructed by consciousness, so to speak. They're not intrinsic beings that come from outside us. Well, the demonstration, I think he's saying, it's not just like somebody's coming to you and saying, hey, I think idealism is right, and you say, prove it. It's like, well, I've stumbled into idealism through this path that has pushed me to this point,

49:54and so this is what I needed to posit in order for me not to be alienated from myself, an unhappy conscience, to have this really weird view, partial view of myself as an alien in this strange world. So, it's just saying, if you need a proof, look back. I've been giving you the proof all along. Then we get this movement through lordship and bondage, and I don't know how that fits into this picture,

50:24because that innovates. Well, it's there in Schelling. I mean, he kind of steals it from Schelling, right? No, he steals it from Fichte, so it is already there. So, we take the idea of self-consciousness depends upon being conscious of the other's consciousness of you, and we have to reach this relationship of reciprocity before it kicks in. It can't just be some degraded, abject consciousness that I overpower and say, hey, recognize me, recognize me, without recognizing it in return,

50:56because the recognition of the other is too weak if you have simply enslaved them, or they need to be equals to you for their recognition to be valuable enough to construct you as a conscious. I don't know how that fits into all of this, though. Well, you need that equality. Think about the private language argument or something to have a community of reasoners. You don't have reason without a community of reasoners. You can't have reason just all by yourself with whatever random thing flits across your mind.

51:28So, you need to have, if it was, you know, just Trump and all his lackeys, then whatever Trump says, even if it's self-contradictory, all his lackeys just say, oh, yes, because they're not being true equals to him and speaking truth to power. You need pushback. Again, kind of guessing here, but I think that's why reason is only possible at this point. You could have, again, I'm not sure if this is, it seems like you needed other people earlier just in, well, this is a question maybe.

51:59So, if we think that we can do all of physics just as an isolated individual, that we are programmed to break objects down into, there's this object and there's this object, and it's not merely a random buzzing confusion, but they have their essences in themselves so that any, just an isolated individual could still pick them out, could still talk about forces between them, could talk about my perspective on the unity of the object as a bunch of properties versus it being just a bundle of property.

52:30All this stuff can happen without people, but to have reason, you have to have people actually coming along. And I know what's always misleading about talking about these earlier sections is that in writing the book, in reading the book, we're already reasoning. We're not actually in the phenomenological place of the stunted mind that has not yet gotten self-recognition and has not yet gotten reason. We're still doing reason in this. So, you have to just imagine that what I was just describing, this object recognition, is not like going to a physics conference

53:02and reading physics textbooks. Of course, you can't do those things by yourself. Somebody had to write these things, but just the raw phenomenon that physics is using is fundamentally individual. Yeah. I think you're getting at my puzzlement in lordship and bondage coming before skepticism because I thought of it as something more advanced, but it might be around toddler age or something, right? So, I'm thinking here of our Tomasello episodes and joint attention

53:32and the capacity to have a theory of mind of another, which lordship and bondage is related to. It's a very, very basic capacity, which is, I think you're pointing out, is implicated in any higher reasoning, any sort of higher cognition that we're doing. This theory of mind of the other. Am I getting that right? Yeah. Yeah. I like bringing in babies. So, a baby could grasp a pacifier. It could drop a pacifier. It could drop things again and again. It could do lots of sort of physical things, but it's not going to actually do the full-on reasoning.

54:04So, you could have object permanence, perhaps, without positing it as an other is looking at the object or something like that. Like, even if the ball is behind the couch, some possible being back there would see it. Like, that's not necessarily part of object permanence, the social. Right. I mean, very early on, it's going to be able to do something that no other animal can do, including chimpanzees. It's going to be able to, like, have a book on its lap and be looking at it and then look back up at the adult to say,

54:35hey, you're looking at the same thing as me and get delight out of that so that there's two. There's always at least two there, right? And there's a whole lordship and bondage dynamic that actually happens in toddlerhood where the toddler is kind of trying to control the love object, which is the mother and, to some extent, the father. And that is a kind of longstanding human impetus is to try to control the other. And at some point, reciprocity occurs where we give up that project. I guess the thing to emphasize here thematically is that this is all about liberation.

55:09There's a kind of freedom that comes through the resolution of the lordship bondage dynamic. And there's a kind of freedom that comes in from skepticism or it's right, it's absolute liberation or seems to be. And that freedom is always predicated on getting rid of otherness, right? Because otherness is where determinism is. We need everything to be inside of us if we're going to be truly free. All right. I think we're out of time. So we will start in the middle of section 233 next time. So where we say a little more.

55:41But I think ending with this recap, I'm trying to connect it with the earlier sections, made a lot of sense. I assume you are down for more of this. It made a lot of sense to us. I don't know if it will make a lot of sense to them, but you can tell us. Yes. Please reach out to us. I know we've gotten, I don't know, we don't get too many requests. But I think the overall sentiment seems to be that this format is the best designed for this kind of text, for phenomenology of perception, for Heidegger's being in time, for being in nothingness.

56:16Frankly, if we just did those four books and said, that's what this whole podcast is about forever, that would probably be a good service and would probably be satisfying to us. I know there are other things I want to look at. Deleuze has come back to mind. We need to do Deleuze on the main podcast again, but maybe we could do another essay from the what is, you know, how we did what is philosophy. That was like the first essay in a book. So rather than, you know, I don't think that would be our next thing on PEL.

56:46Maybe we could return to one of those. I don't remember, what else was floating around in your mind for possible future topics for this podcast? I have a list, but I can't, I can't think. I mean, I do have a list. All right. Well, we have a list and we would love to have you listeners, watchers add to this list. So reach out to us. PEL at PartiallyExaminedLife.com is the most direct way. And there are various places you could leave comments. Thanks. Thank you. Thank you.

57:18Close Reads is a Partially Examined Life podcast. See PartiallyExaminedLife.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 CloseReads on your favorite podcast listening platform.