Kierkegaard on Knowledge (Part One)

Introduction to Close Reads

0:00This is Close Reads, a philosophy podcast with Mark and Wes. I'm Wes Alwyn. And I'm Mark Linsenmeier.

0:10Welcome back to Close Reads. We're starting a new text or a little tiny bit of a text. We had, on Partially Examined Life, been engaged what were five hours in to at least nine hours of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, following our five-hour treatment of a different part of that text on this show. And it made me think about Kierkegaard and the similarly long Partially Examined Life run we had with him two years ago, something, a little while ago.

Kierkegaard and Hegel

0:44And the big book of his, I guess there are lots of works of Kierkegaard's that we haven't read, but was this, the most important one, my understanding is this concluding unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments, published 1846. And I have the paper copy. It is a very, very fat little book. I have spent zero time in it. I think I just bought it at a used bookstore at some point, but I wanted some idea. And so I was searching for an online PDF of it. And lo and behold, somebody, it's at a Stanford EDU address, somebody published an excerpt.

1:21So it's a 16 PDF pages, right? It's 32 pages from the text that starts on page 196 in the book. And it looks to be about dialectic.

Dialectic and Existence

1:32And I was just looking through this and it seemed like something very relevant to our recent Hegel treatment. Yeah. Any preconceptions? Do you know anything about this book? Not, nada. I mean, I, I've read a little bit about it in the past, but I, yeah, I don't remember. Right. The wiki page says it's an attack on Hegelianism, particularly Hegel's science of logic. Famous for its dictum, subjectivity is truth. Attacking what Kierkegaard saw as Hegel's deterministic philosophy.

2:04He seems like he is a metaphysical libertarian.

Free Will and Determinism

2:08In other words, he believes in free will. The, uh, postscript to Philosophical Fragments, right? Philosophical Fragments was an earlier work. This is five times as long as the original work. And it's under the pseudonym Johannes Klimakis with Kierkegaard as an editor. I forget if Klimakis was the official author. Let me just quickly look it up. Klimakis or Klimakis? Probably makes sense. There is a John Klimakis, John of the Ladder, a 6th to 7th century Christian monk.

2:43Clearly, this is being referenced here. And his, his name in Greek is Klimakos, but I don't know if that means anything. That's how you'd pronounce it in the Greek, but.

Philosophical Fragments

2:55Yeah, the philosophical fragments itself, through this same author, Kierkegaard contrasts the paradoxes of Christianity with Greek and modern philosophical thinking. And we've been reflecting a lot with Hegel's phenomenology on Hegel's disdain for the individual. And having actually just taught fear and trembling to my continental class, the question with that text is always like, if you're not a super Christian, if you're not so interested in faith, does this matter? Does this, is this saying something about the place of the individual?

3:28And right, Kierkegaard describes Hegel's view of ethics as just rise to the level of the, of the social norm, right? If you, if you deviate from that, then you are falling short of that. You are not living up to your duties. You're not fulfilling your responsibility. You're not attaining your telos as a human being, because what being a human is all about is being a social animal, is being in the culture.

Hegel's View of Ethics

3:53Not that the culture, not that this is fascistic, that the culture is one dimensional. The culture can have ideals and aspirations. You can have fights within the culture about what's the best way to do things. But still, it ultimately, you are having, per Richard Rorty say, you're having a conversation with other people and working out what the right thing to do is, whereas in Fear and Trembling, no, no, no. Actually, each of us has this calling, has this individual, it's subjectivity. It's ultimately up to us. And there's a level of individualism that is above and beyond merely attaining to the social norm.

Individualism and Social Norm

4:29So I remember that much. All right. Shall I? Yeah, let's get to it.

4:38Consequently, A, a logical system can be given. B, but a system of existence cannot be given. What does that say? A tilverolism system? I mean, we're looking at the Danish, right? There would be a single Danish word for system of existence, right? All right. If, however, a logical system is to be constructed, special care must be taken not to incorporate anything that is subject to the dialectic of existence.

5:10Accordingly, anything that is solely by existing or by having existed, not something that is simply by being.

Logic and Existence

5:20It follows quite simply that Hegel's matchless and matchlessly admired invention, the importation of movements into logic. Not to mention that, not to mention that in every other passage, one misses even his own attempt to make one believe that it is there, simply confuses logic. It is indeed curious. Let me see. Let me see. Is this his footnote? I think so. It is indeed curious to make movement the basis in the sphere in which movement is inconceivable, or to have movement explain logic, whereas logic cannot explain movement.

5:55I'm going to read the footnote.

6:25Hegel. Hegel. Hegel. Hegel. Hegel. Hegel. Hegel. Hegel. Hegel. Hegel. Hegel. Hegel. Hegel. Hegel. Hegel. Hegel. Hegel.

6:48Hegel. point of the method. But a method possesses the peculiar quality that, viewed abstractly, it is nothing at all. It is the method precisely in the process of being carried out. And being carried out, it is a method. And where it is not carried out, it is not a method. And if there is no other method, there is no method at all. To turn Hegel into a rattle brain must be reserved for his admirers. An attacker will always know how to honor him for having willed something great

Respecting Hegel

7:18and having failed to achieve it. All right. So he's saying there he respects Hegel more than Hegel's worshipers because he's taking him seriously enough not to push this logic problem under the rug. And the idea is that this whole idea that logic can be modeled on movement or organic growth or the contingencies of existing things, including biological organisms, is not workable.

7:48Now, he hasn't told us yet exactly why it's not workable, but he has harangued us. Yeah, this was seen as very obvious by, say, Bertrand Russell and therefore the entire analytic tradition to say, look, logic is an abstraction. It is not, you can't take a concrete object and say, in virtue of its form, it has a logic. This, you know, the growth, these two-parent

8:21sheep giving birth to the new sheep is not a logical movement. The sheep attaining its telos as a fully grown, healthy sheep is not a matter of logic. The evolution of the sheep over time from other kinds of animals, two more specialized things, not a matter of logic. Let's not confuse these things.

8:47Yeah. If we think about what Aristotelian categories are doing or Kantian categories are doing, I think the subject gets a little bit more complicated because, right, logic there is just like a category of unity or a substance property distinction. And in that case, we might want to say, well, the ontology of the world that lends itself to those sorts of discriminations is something like a logic. And that logic as we, you know, mental disposition or mental structure,

9:26not to reduce it to psychologism, but the ways in which we might use logic are deeply connected to the fundamental structure of reality. So in a way for Hegel, there is a logical structure to being, to existence. And that's the only way we can explain how it is that we can even comprehend being, you know, as how we can, how we can cross the chasm, the subject object chasm. Right. I was giving examples involving individuals and Hegel would, I think, of course, say what happens

10:03in a given circumstance is contingent accidental. The fact that it happens according to a certain logos, like that is what he's talking about, the logic. So every scientist that thinks that we can know something about how sheep are bred or how sheep evolved is buying into the idea that the logos does have not control. The logos is not reaching down, right? Scientific laws do not say, hey, stop going that way. You know, they're not like laws in a society that people can ignore. They're

10:38descriptive laws of the inner nature of things. And so, yeah, at least it seems to work as a metaphor. It seems like that there's a logical movement to objects that like physics can write a lot of equations about. If we think about, and I don't know if I can do this on my feet, but modern analytic, quantifiable, logical calculus and try to connect it to say what someone like Aristotle or Kant or Hegel

11:12is trying to do, you know, what are we dealing with? We're mainly, we do have these A, Fs and As, right? We do have an implicit ontology of objects and properties, right? So A is F, you know. And then we get the quantification for all, you know, there exists an X such that X is F or something like that. I think those quantifications are related to what Aristotle was doing with syllogisms,

11:43that sort of logic. And Hegel is also very interested in that, except for Hegel's syllogisms, it's often the, right, there's a, he talks a lot about the middle term, which is like the middle term in the syllogism. But for him, it's more about some sort of implicit contradiction that leads us to the next quote unquote conclusion. But then, then the conclusion contains its own contradiction and then leads to the next thing. So I'd have to think about all that more to try to, I'm sure there's some very good book chapters or papers on this, trying to,

12:16trying to connect what, yeah. What are Aristotle or Hegel doing? What is that kind of logic versus what analytic philosophers today mean by logic? But yeah, so, but it is interesting, you know, I was thinking the same thing. I'm like, wow, Kierkegaard is like, yeah, he's, this is 1846, right? Yep. Or, and he's already onto this sort of critique and I'm sure he's not the only one, but. Right. Just as you could make a metaphor for the Logos logic applying to things in the real world,

12:54right? Things move mathematically. You could metaphorically move it the other way if you're doing Aristotelian logic and saying, here's the first two lines of my syllogism. All men are mortal. Socrates is a man. Do those not carry the mind forward? Isn't there a movement to all men are mortal? Can we come up with similar? Maybe that is the essence of movement. I just wonder if these two metaphors that I've just, maybe it's just a metaphor. Maybe it really is. It's not something we

13:29should take very literally. Of course, Hegel gives a very long defense and it's been a long time since we read the logic, but you know, we've been reading the phenomenology recently. Really he says, you know, you can't in advance prove his method. You just have to do it and say, look, look, look how it works. Yeah. I mean, I think contemporaries would on average be, or analytic philosophers or philosophers today on average would be against psychologism, right? So logic is not simply about

14:01the rules of thought. And maybe, maybe if you're kind of, I don't know how, what continental philosophers would say about that. So it's not the movement. It's, it's not simply a way of describing the laws of the movement of the mind, for instance. It's, there's something about reality, but it's, it's difficult to say what that is. Is it the form of reality? Is it something formal as opposed to material and contingent, right? And individual. So it's a bit mysterious, but I would, you know, I would think that saying it's something about the movement of being, it's more plausible than saying

14:35the movement of thought, if thought is taken as something carved out from being and radically different from being. Right. Right. It is that, that Hegel's main idea was that thought is not something carved out. It's not as Descartes perhaps thought, but that as his idealist immediate predecessors thought that the movement of thought is the movement. I mean, that's, that's essentially what Kierkegaard is arguing against, right? That the movement of thought is the movement of matter. Yep. I mean, this, this little footnote just seems to be, look, some people are taking issue

15:10with particular. So if you take the whole logic or the whole phenomenology, plus the logic, plus the rest of his system and they're disputing particular points saying, you know, I don't think this movement works. I don't think this movement from phrenology to ethics works or whatever, uh, that, that is, that nitpicking is missing the overall point. Yeah. And I think he, I thought maybe the implication was they, they think they can leave aside the question of method here and say, well,

15:41I don't, I'm not going to worry about the method. Let me talk about all this other stuff. And he wants to say, you can't just abstract away from the method. Everything rests on that for Hegel. On this point, however, I'm very happy to be able to refer to a man who thinks soundly and fortunately, uh, is educated by the Greeks, rare qualities in our age, a man who has known how to extricate himself and his thought for every trailing graveling relation to Hegel, whose fame everyone usually seeks to prop to profit if in no other way than by going further. That is by having absorbed Hegel,

16:15a man who has preferred to be content with Aristotle and with himself. I mean, Trenlinburg in his logische interschugen. Oh yeah. Trenlinburg. Of course. Trenlinburg. Yeah. Everyone knows that. One of his merits is that he comprehended movement as the inexplicable presupposition as the common denominator in which being and thinking are united and as their continued reciprocity.

Trendelenburg's Logic

16:42All right. Well, we were pretty prescient than just talking about that. But that sounds like he's describing Hegel. I, I know. Okay. I know. Yeah. Let's see where this goes. I cannot attempt. I'll allow it. I'm sorry. I cannot attempt here to show the relation of his conception to the Greeks, to Aristotelian thought, or to what oddly enough, although in a popular sense only, bears a certain resemblance to his presentation. A small section in Plutarch's book on Iris and Orisis. It is by no means my view that Hegelian philosophy has not had a salutary influence on

17:15Trenlinburg, but it is fortunate that he's perceived that wanting to improve Hegel's structure to go further, et cetera, will not do. A mendacious approach by which many a botcher in our age arrogates Hegel's celebrity to himself and mendicantly fraternizes with him.

17:33On the other hand, it is fortunate that Trenlinburg, sober like a Greek thinker, without promising everything and without claiming to beautify all humankind, does indeed accomplish much. And beatifies, is it beautifies, even though it's spelled beatifies? Yeah. Beatifies. Beatifies, whoever would need his guidance in learning about the Greeks. Okay. I mean, we don't know what this means. This is weird. Yeah. We start off, it's supposed to be, it sounds like going back to the Greeks

18:04is an alternative to being stuck in Hegel, as everyone was in Kierkegaard's age, right? Hegel just took over philosophy and the way people thought about the world. But then we learn that Hegel has actually had a positive influence on him and also that he comprehends the movement as a way in which being and thinking are united, which as you pointed out, does sound quite Hegelian. So this is a bit

18:38confusing. Yeah. I know this phrase, uh, going further. I recall Kierkegaard using it in a derogatory manner, the dialectical tendency to, I'm going to take this thing and I'm going to take it further. I'm going to add my stamp on it. And, uh, well, I, I associated with, with Feuerbach and, and the young Hegelians and then Marxists that going further means, well, alienation's not over yet. Now we're, now we're in alienated from this other entity. And then, oh, you think you're

19:10reconciled. So they go further by extending the diet dialectic indefinitely. Yeah. I think the, uh, communism, I think it was in fear and trembling was where I had seen that. And it was, you know, people who want to go further than faith. So either something is great in itself, and you should just do that thing and not go further than it, or it has fundamental problems that you should question and not think that you can tinker, put a few raisins back in the basket

19:40by just pushing, adding your little thing for your box, you know, uh, well, it's, uh, I'm going to make it, uh, actually material. It needs a, which, which I think is now that we've read more Hegel, I think is a bad criticism of Hegel. But I mean, this is sort of, what is that issue here? Because I don't think that Hegel is altogether an idealist. I think that he is denying as Spinoza does the fundamental distinction between mind and matter, that these are aspects of the same thing.

20:12And so I, my God, my spirit, He says, right, the speed, what spirit is, is the, the human beings. And yes, they are human beings qua universal. It is not this specific matter that matters, but you need some matter, right? It's a little bit of accident who gets born when, and that this person is a brother of somebody else. Those are accidental. But if you didn't have those accidents, you know, if you didn't have the actual matter, you couldn't have

20:42all the formal relationships that he's talking about. Hmm. In a logical system, nothing may be incorporated that has a relation to existence that is not indifferent to existence. The infinite advantage that the logical, by being the objective, possesses over all other thinking, is in turn, subjectively viewed, restricted by its being a hypothesis, simply because it is indifferent to existence understood as

21:13actuality. This duplexity distinguishes the logical from the mathematical, which has no relation, whatever, toward or from existence. That's a surprise, surprising to hear, but has only objectivity, not objectivity in the hypothetical as a unity, as unity and contradiction in which it is negatively related to existence. He's starting to sound a little bit like Hegel. He's sure. Yeah. But I mean, it starts out pretty clearly, right? Logic is formal. It's not saying anything

21:50about contingent relationships in the world. It could never say that the cat is on the mat, even if it might want to say something about, you know, even if our ontology might want to say something about onness. So look, there's the spatial relationship of onness. That's one of our fundamental relations. You know, the way we think of this today, it wouldn't even, it wouldn't even ever get that far, right? It wouldn't say anything about space, but it'll say something about implication. There are two specifications of different Danish words for existence here,

22:23right? The mathematical, this decision is the logical from the mathematical, which has no relation whatever toward or from existence till velocity, but it has only objectivity. So what do we, I mean, clearly there are some ontologies that regard mathematical objects as existing, as real in some way. And clearly Kierkegaard is not one of those people, but that's not,

22:57yeah. Why did you say that was surprising? That doesn't seem surprising at all to me. It seems that the mathematical is just, I mean, I would put it as hypothetical, but he's saying it's not objectivity and the hypothetical as unity and contradiction in which it is negatively related to existence. I don't, I don't understand that last part, but it seems like if something existed, that was a square, then it would have this, you know, a perfect square, then it would have these properties. That's what mathematics says to me. It's a hypothetical. It's not making any existence claims.

23:29Yeah. I mean, I would, I would be inclined to see the mathematical as part of the formal structure and intimately related to the logical, but, but he says the advantage of the logical by being objective. So the logical is objective, but then we get it's restricted to being a hypothesis because of its indifference to actuality, which I take to mean that it doesn't make any sorts of existence

23:59claims, right? So we, we could, we could say the cat is on the mat, or we could say there exists an X such that X is, you know, P or whatever, X is F, but we can't make logical claims in those terms, right? We can't just, logic is not an observable fact. In other words, that's why I think he wants to call it a hypothesis, perpetually a hypothesis. There's no, for a positivist, right? They're very keen on logic, but even they would admit that there's not, or a verificationist that you're not

24:31going to verify it by going out into the world and finding something. And then he says that distinguishes the logical from the mathematical, which has no relation, whatever toward or from existence. So the, there seems to be a relationship toward, well, is there, what's the relationship of the logical to existence? I do not know because I, what I just described is the mathematical. I think I'm now reading that second sentence as saying exactly what I just said about the logical, right? The, the logical. So the objective here, I was taking objective in the phenomenological sense

25:05initially, but I think it should be in the more ordinary sense. That is, it's, it's something is objective. If it is independent of the, the whims and judgment of an individual, whereas something is subjective, right? Ethics, as I was saying, if you're in trembling, ultimately ends up being, you know, what you should do ends up being a subjective matter, not a matter of, of merely what is the law? What do the norms say? Those would be objective standards. So the logical is objective. It, it possesses an advantage because of this over all other thinking, uh, is in turn subjectively

25:42reviewed, restricted by it's being a hypothesis because it is in, I got this, I got this wrong. Yeah. So I was associating hypothesis with, but he's, yeah, he's obviously qualifying what it means to be subjective there. But what, but I don't know that I understand the, what the subjectively viewed there, because it seems like it is objective, but it's about nothing in particular. It's about if there is an X and X has this property, you know, right. If a, then B, if B, then C, therefore, if a, then C,

26:13like that is all hypothetical that there actually is something that is an A and a B and a C. Well, if we take this distinction, you know, for, for something, something subjective is restricted to being a hypothesis in the sense that it can't be, it can't ever be confirmed observationally. And then you have this ordinary world, which is in between the subjective and the logical where, you know, of facts that could be confirmed. And then you have the logical,

26:47which is a priori truth, right? It's then that's what I take in difference, different to existence to mean. Yeah. It's objectivity, you know, is absolute in the sense you don't have to go out and confirm it. It's, it's not a posteriori. It's, it's objective by default. Can we say the logic from his own point of view is just stating objective truths, but it says subjectively viewed the logical is only hypothetical. So as me, an individual looking at this and I'd say,

27:20I see all A's or B's, all B's or C's, therefore all A's or C I'm saying, well, okay, if there were an A and a B and a C, so I'm, it's only hypothetical from my point of view. It thinks from the objective point of view, it thinks that is only stating objective truths. Well, I was taking the subjective to be qualifying all other thinking as opposed to the logical. So the advantage over the logical by being objective that it has over all other thinking. Well, this is just too confusing.

27:56There's just too many different ways to read this now. Yeah. Maybe we should just go on. Yeah. We'll have to just go on, but I still don't understand the relationship to the mathematical logic. This distinguishes the logical from the mathematical because the mathematical has no relation, whatever toward or from existence. I mean, the relation for the logical is that it's indifferent to existence. All right, we get that. The mathematical is not even indifferent. It has no relation, but it has objectivity.

28:28Only objectivity, not objectivity. And the hypothetical is unity. So contra what I said before, mathematics is not saying if there were a square, it would return. It just says something about this imaginary entity, the square. Yeah. It definitely doesn't exist. There's no squares. Right. This is important actually, because it's revealing what he thinks about the logical. So the logical has a unity of objectivity and the hypothetical, which is negatively related to existence.

29:04That is precisely what the mathematical, but does not have. And the second existence is a different word, right? No relation to or from existence. That's till Varelva say, uh, sorry, sorry, Danish speakers, uh, as opposed to not objectively and the hypothetical as unity and contradiction in which is negatively related to existence, existence. All right. Well, I'm sure this is going to become completely crystal clear as we, as we move on.

29:40So let's just say existence at least sounds like the existentialist kind of word till Varelva say he, I see he's, this is going to come up again and again. Maybe we could just say T. T, T being, or maybe it's being, maybe it's like a being and existence. Well, let's, it's in the next sentence. The logical system must not be a mystification of ventriloquism in which the contents of existence, T emerges cunningly and surreptitiously where logical thought

30:15is startled and finds what the hair professor or the licentiate has had up his sleeve. Judging between the two can be done more sharply by answering the question in what sense is a category and abbreviation of existence? Assume, I assume that's still T, uh, uh, uh, abbreviation of existence, whether logical thinking is abstract after existence or abstract without any relation to existence. I would like to treat this question a little more extensively elsewhere. And even if it is not adequately answered, it is always something to have inquired about in this way.

30:49So this, this makes me wonder if, you know, of course, if this is related to my particular preoccupation with the question of whether you can account for contingency in these idealist systems, right? Cause he says, right. It, it, these logical systems want to pull the content of existence out of their ass basically, right? We only get the formal, we get space and time, we get causality, all that stuff, but that doesn't give you contingency. That doesn't give you the

31:20cat is on the mat. That doesn't give you what must be posited for Fichte, right? All the data. Where's the data come from? I, and, and Kant, I mean, Hegel seems to think, well, the data sort of falls out of the concept. It's sort of, which is just mystifying, right? Falls out of the categories. I don't know how that's supposed to work. And is, is he onto that type of idea here? Cause I think that was floating around. I mean, is that the same thing I was saying before about the relationship between the contingent and the logical, right? That somehow the, the individual human beings

31:55with their quirks are the data and, and their variation is accidental, right? But the pattern of the variation, the form is not accidental at all. Right. But you can't derive them from the form. You can't derive the particulars from the, from the forms or the categories of the logical, the content doesn't come from that. I guess not. I'm thinking of like genetics. I was really excited in early high school, learning about genetics and look at the variations. Uh, you know, if you do a

32:29non-hybrid cross, so you have nine traits that have a dominant and a recessive, and then you just write out all the permutations and figure out like, well, if you were talking about blonde hair and dark hair and dark hair is the dominant one, how many of those of that list that you come up with will actually have the dark hair, right? Normally it's, uh, if, if you're just talking about, uh, one trait, it's four potential possibilities, dark, dark, dark, light, light, dark, in both all three of those

33:02cases, it's going to be dark hair. Light, light is the only one that's going to be light. So does the data fall in it? So the form is that mathematical structure? I guess the data is that we're talking about light and dark at all, as well as the individuals, right? So you can't, you could, you could determine the individuals based on the form, right? Based on the pattern, but you can't determine that you are talking about dark and light in the first place. Right. So he's going to say,

33:33in what sense is a category and abbreviation of existence, which may mean, does it, an abbreviation is, is that's, that's all of what we're talking about when we talk about existence. And that's the question that he's going to address here. So hopefully we'll, we'll see if we're on the right track. I mean, you could see, right? The logical system as a mystification of a triloquism in which the content of existence emerges cunningly and surreptitiously. I feel like that is the kind of, he's, he's pointing out where the objectivists, the, the Randians are saying A equals A, therefore

34:08Bach is better than Mozart or whatever. I can't, I can't remember what the criticism like that I've heard, but like that, that is no, no, no. You're, you're confusing form A equals A with a bunch of content. Capitalism is better than communism or whatever. Like that's, you can't, that doesn't work. Yeah. This is the contingency data problem. All right. A system of existence, the T existence to, to something. T system. T system cannot be given. Is there then not such a system? That is

34:43not at all the case. Neither is it implied in what has been said. Existence itself is a system for God, but it cannot be a system for any existing spirit. Existerenda spirit, not T spirit. System and conclusiveness correspond to each other, but existence is the very opposite. Abstractly viewed system and existence cannot be thought conjointly because in order to think existence, systematic thought must be, think it as a nulled and consequently not existing. Existence is the

35:21spacing that holds apart. The systematic is the conclusiveness that combines. So I think, yeah, the systematic here is associated with the logical, which abstracts from particular content, right? Which abstracts from the data and nulls it as he puts it here. And so we can give a system of the formal, but we can't get a, we can't give a system of the data. Now I wonder what he would say about laws of science, right? Isn't that a system for the data? Well, I think I gave the example of

35:52that with genetics that you still don't have the particulars. I feel like that what he's, that it's, he's just pointing out that, uh, Hegel's first moment of the phenomenology is when you try to look at the particular right in front of you and say, look, I have a direct acquaintance with this. Well, no, no thought comes in, logic comes in and sweeps in and saying, how are you referring to that? I'm referring to it as a, that I'm referring to it by, by way of the universal. Oh no. I thought my, my immediate access to things is actually, you know, it turns out

36:26it's actually always mediated. And that's a way of saying I'm actually grasping existence by that initial thing. And as soon as thought comes in, as soon as logic comes in, it is denying that the existent, it's denying existence. It's, it's turning instead to abstraction. Existence itself is a system for God.

Existence and System

36:47So God can keep track of all the particulars, but we can't. Right. Right. Yeah. It does sound an awful lot about the contingency itself can't be systematized, which is just for me is another way of saying the data can't be a product of the, you know, either of the logical or the laws of nature, right? The laws of nature don't produce the, the data, the data have to come out of the big bang, basically all this, um, all this stuff.

37:19Well, we've, we've seen that Hegel now we've gotten to in the ethics that he has contempt for the notion of a person with rights. That is a way of taking, I mean, maybe this is a Hegelian, right? This is a Hegelian criticism, right? What does he want? He wants something more fleshed out, but is the more fleshed out that he want the actual individual, right? It's, it's, I would say that the Kantian recognition that I should treat you not merely as a means, but as a full person, right? You could take that just as, well, I'm actually ignoring that's

37:54everything that's individual about you. And I'm just treating you qua person in the most, oh, I have respect for you, but that doesn't mean that I love you. It doesn't mean that I recognize anything individual. If you were dead and somebody else was there, I would treat them in the same way. It really, you know, whereas obviously the, uh, the, the trend in continental philosophy with, uh, Buber and Levinas of seeing, you know, having a thou relation. So you are not, you are not just saying I thou, it's not like Hegel would say, well, you could say thou to anything.

38:29You could say thou, I, although actually now that I'm thinking of it, Buber does say that, like that, that the experience of the thou is the experience of the divine. And you could actually even have that with a tree or anything, but still it does involve positing that you are an other, you are a world unto yourself. It would be the worst thing in the, you know, that could happen for a world to be destroyed, right? That's why every human life is absolutely sacred in a way that maybe every tree is not sacred. Like you could, you could knock down a tree to build your house,

39:01but I can knock down, knock down you to, to, to build a house out of your, your sweat, your sweat equity. You're making me think of psychoanalysis where a thou is always an object, right? Also an object in the sense of a relational pattern, some schematic for a person out there as you, as you can see them. So something like a Hegelian category, universal, right? We think of people under the igis of certain concepts and, and sometimes that's right. That's very influenced by

39:38our early experience. So we may experience people as persecutory and that might have something to do with a relationship to parents, for instance, but trend. And then we transfer that, we transfer that onto the current thou, right? We take that concept and we apply it. So, so we can, you know, we can go beyond logical concept and concepts and speak of psychosocial concepts and the way we apply them. You know, it's funny that I, I had kind of, uh, through our work, reading Hegel's Uncappy

40:09Consciousness, I had become more sympathetic to Kierkegaard's idea that you could grow a sense of self out of a relation to God, because I thought that you, in the, uh, the master slave dialectic, you needed unreal, actual existent human being in front of you to treat you certain way. But actually you don't, you could have say a computer program that responds to your inputs or, you know, let's imagine we have a more advanced one that can be an avatar in front of you. You could, you could

40:42actually be a solipsist. You could truly be the only existent individual in the world. And if something is fooling you into treating you certain ways, and likewise, so much of the work in, uh, relating to this other is your own work, right? That the other, having an other around is not going to cause an animal or an inanimate object to become a self. It's only because you have this potential to recognize self-consciousnesses and recognize yourself as a self-consciousness, that you are open to the other treating you as self-consciousness.

41:16So all this is to say that initially when we considered Kierkegaard, oh, I can build myself by reflecting my relationship with God. Well, God doesn't do anything. God doesn't say anything to you. God doesn't treat you a certain way. God is not real fundamentally. So how could it do that? It's like being treated, you know, saying I built myself through my, uh, you know, my imaginary, uh, celebrity, uh, celebrity girlfriend who actually doesn't know me at all and, uh, wouldn't give me the time of day, but I have that in my heart, but in, in the unhappy consciousness section, it seems

41:47like, well, what's important is that you have somehow from whatever the source is you've internalized, so you've separated yourself into one voice sort of that you're treating as the subject. And then one voice is that you're treating as the other, and it is talking to you. So, uh, the fact that Kierkegaard now seemingly would be stressing that, that you actually have to have a real other individual existent there, you know, that that's, what's important. And that's what Hegel fundamentally misses. It seems like I was, uh, you know, using Hegel to excuse something that I saw

42:22in Kierkegaard, and now Kierkegaard is criticizing that very thing that I was using to understand Kierkegaard, if that all makes sense. All right. Let's see how it pans out. Top of 198 now. Actually, there now develops a deception, an illusion, which Fragments has attempted to point out. I must now refer to this work, namely to the question of whether the past is more necessary than the future. And there's a footnote that is not at the bottom of a page, so I don't care. An

42:53end note. Uh, so, so yeah, he's going to refer to this previous book, Fragments, I'm sure, but I, I think you can, we can get it from the context. That is when an existence of a thing is in the past, it is indeed finished. It is indeed concluded. And to that extent, it is turned over to the systematic view. Quite so, but for whom? Whoever is existing cannot gain this conclusiveness outside existence, a conclusiveness that corresponds to the eternity into which the past has entered.

43:27Even if a good-natured thinker is so absent-minded as to forget that he himself is existing, speculative thought and absent-mindedness are still not quite the same thing. On the contrary, that he himself is existing implies the claim of existence upon him, and that his existence, yes, if he is a great individual, that his existence at the present time may, as past, in turn, have the validity of conclusiveness for a systematic thinker. But who then is this systematic thinker? Well, it is he who himself is outside existence and yet in existence, who in

44:03his eternity is forever concluded and yet includes existence within himself. It is God. Let's maybe stop here. Yeah. What do we think? So it sounds like we have to be a systematic thinker. We have to be

Conclusion and Ethics

44:19outside of time and therefore to be God. Why do we have to be outside of time? The past vanishes from existence. That's one of his, not every philosopher thinks, thinks that's true by the way, but for Kierkegaard, the past is no longer existent. Right. This is Augustine, right? And when we think systematically, we have to, of course, we can't just take the present moment into account. We

44:52have to take the past as well, which is something that's gone out of existence. I'm not sure that why that means that we have to be outside of time ourselves in order to think systematically. Right. To think about everything, right? I think he's saying to think about anything is to think about it as concluded. So if I want to consider you, Wes, the object, right? I'm treating you, as Sartre would say, as merely an object. It's because I am summing up your character

45:26as events through your past actions. So I'm taking this history and I'm rolling it up into a ball and saying, this is what Wes is, where clearly you as a present existence who has not done can, is entirely unpredictable. You might do this. I can always change. Yeah, exactly. I promise. I promise I'll change. So it does seem to think if you want to, even if you want to say that the essence of, of Wes is fundamentally change, right? Even that ironically, you would have to

46:00have sort of an eye view of Wes, you know, after you can only declare of Wes that he is fundamentally change after Wes is dead. You can only declare a man happy after he's dead. You can only say what something is when it is dead. So yeah, I like this. This is a very good example that you gave. And not just because it includes me, but so conclusiveness corresponds to the eternity into which the past is, has entered. And so we must take it in a way of view from taking a view from

46:32nowhere. On the contrary. So it sounds like a great individual can have the validity, validity of conclusiveness for a systematic thinker. Well, his existence. Yes. If he is a great individual, but then it's God. So I don't understand the reference to a great individual because then it turns out that only God can do this. Where does it, where does it say great individual? I'm actually just looking. So on the contrary, that he himself is existing implies the claim of existence upon him and that his existence. Yes. If he is a great individual,

47:06that his existence at the present time may as past in turn, have the validity of conclusiveness. Okay. Now I understand this. Now I was getting this wrong. It's not. So the particular existence of the great individual can be conclusive for a systematic thinker, but only if that systematic thinker is, is God, is God. From God's standpoint, he could be complete, right? And thought of in terms of

47:36correct essences and things like that. Because God is outside of time. But for those of us inside of time, you know, the, it's, we can't, it's the, the, the existence is not concluded. Yeah. Well, the part right before that, I like this, even if a good nature thinker is, is so absent minded is to forget that he himself is existing. So when you're doing speculation in the Hegelian way, you are not phenomenologically saying like, here I am sitting in a chair describing my existence.

48:06You're saying, no, no, no. The subjective part of it doesn't even matter. I'm just going to dive right in and sort of imagine that I'm in the position of whatever the phenomena is at that point in the dialectic. So that's just being absent minded. You're trying to forget yourself. So that's, that's one of Hegel's actual goals that, that there is a difference at every stage between the position of the phenomena and the, what the phenomena is confronting and the observer, that sort of the next stage describing the phenomena. But, but there's still, yeah, he, he,

48:40I think on Kierkegaard's account, you still haven't given a real account of what the observer is, where the observer is in all this, like an actual honest phenomenologist who admits like Descartes that they're starting thinking in their easy chair is better. Yeah. The systematic thinker tries to take this bird's eye view, this view from nowhere as if they're God, he's giving a nice little ironic, you know, jab here at the idea that we could do that

49:10by imagining that thinker as an existent from the standpoint of God. And it's only, only God has that systematic thinker standpoint in actuality. And you as a supposed systematic thinker are just, right. An object in God's field of view, not outside of it. Right. So we pretend to be outside of the field of existence in a way when we try to be systematic thinkers. But as you, as you point out, we're simply located within it. We can't look at it from the outside. All right. So you want to start

49:45on, so why the deception? Yeah. I think we have time just to finish this. So why the deception? Just because the world has lasted now for 6,000 years, or maybe a little longer, does not existence, therefore not have the very same claim upon the, the existing individual that it has always had, which is not that he in make-believe should be a contemplating spirit, but that he in actuality should be an existing spirit. All understanding comes afterward. Whereas an individual existing

50:19now undeniably comes afterward in relation to the 6,000 years that proceeded, the curiously ironic consequence would emerge. If we assume that he came to understand them systematically, that he would not come to understand himself as an existing being, because he himself would acquire no existence, because he himself would have nothing that should be understood afterward. It follows that such a thinker must be either the good Lord or a fantastical, quote, libit. Anything. A fantastical anything.

50:57Certainly everyone will perceive the immortality in this. And certainly everyone will also perceive that what another author has observed regarding the Hegelian system is entirely in order. That through Hegel, a system, the absolute system was brought to completion without having an ethics. Okay. So here's a new accusation. By all means, let us smile at the ethical religious fantasies of the middle ages in asceticism and the like, but above all, let us not forget that the speculative farcical exaggeration of

51:33becoming an I dash I, right? Or an I, an identity and I equals I exaggeration of becoming an I dash I and then qua human being often such a philistine that no enthusiast would have cared to lead such a life is equally ludicrous. If I need a scathing literary critic to go after someone, I want Kierkegaard. So this is quite different than the, uh, sort of complimentary, I think in either, or our, our,

52:07our second, our, or narrator was giving the Hegelian point of view that to be ethical, to live up to your demands is to rise to the level of the social. And this is just what Hegel is arguing again and again and again. So even if Hegel doesn't have an actual ethics, like here's the ethical rule that you must follow. In fact, Hegel is accused of being retrograde about this, that it's really just whatever the society has come up with. Like that's the best that you can work with because that's what

52:38you've already internalized. That's what your conscience is telling you, right? We are all just products of our cultural environment. That is what it is to be a human is to be a social animal. And so we don't need an objective external to any society ethics to come along. Like if you think you're doing that, you're actually still just channeling, right? If you think you're Kant and then you actually look at, you know, when we read Kant's ethics lectures and got a little more of what his actual ethical intuitions are, like they were just the mores of his society. So stop fooling

53:13yourself that you can get an ethics from something higher than the social. Uh, but here it seems like Kierkegaard is saying that that is, that whole thing is tantamount to not having an ethics at all saying just defer to the society or the society's ideals. Yeah. Yeah. Well put. So, so we get this transition from a sort of, uh, yeah, an accusation about logic and systematic thinking to, to the idea

53:44that the system lacks an ethics precisely because it takes this fantasized view from nowhere. The system is brought to completion without an ethics. So what is the accusation here? Let us smile at the, I think he's saying that Hegel smiles at the ethical religious fantasies of the middle ages, right? And is supposed to have found some sort of higher ground, some sort of more general, you know, absolute

54:15ground, right? But in fact, in the attempt to reach that higher ground, the absolute, the view from nowhere, et cetera, et cetera, we abandon ethics altogether. We think we have an ethics, but we, but we don't know. Now, now why is that? I don't know because Hegel of course himself was giving a related objection to Kant, right? The Kantian ethics is so abstract. It's not, it's loses content. It's not

54:47embedded in social norms. For instance, it makes us these thin persons, subjects. Is he just, is he launching the same sort of critique at Hegel that Hegel was launching at his predecessors?

55:07Yeah, we haven't, we don't know quite, right? We're just starting the, the Hegel as we're reading in partial exam in life, the Hegel on culture, which is supposed to be the, uh, the description, historical description of, of, of alienation, right? That in the Greek city states, there was a harmony between people's underlying ethical intuitions and the explicit law of the land. And as societies grow inevitably, invariably, then we have a, an alienation. We have a ripping

55:47apart of these two things such that, you know, you probably right now certainly do not consider the, every law of your land to be, uh, completely consonant with your own ethical intuitions in your will. So what is the alternative for what, what does Hegel think is happening in that situation? Because we do have an ethic being proffered by the government, say the official mouthpiece. And then we just have a multiplicity of different people's consciences, pointing them in different

56:23ways, and there is no unity. So it seems like to fix that, we have to raise our collective consciousness until we have fixed on a contentful ethics, right? He's saying that the, the, uh, there's, in the alienated state, we have to use things like human rights and property, and these are all don't have enough content. So what is the alternative? And Dylan had brought up in that,

56:54is it like Sandel that, you know, the, the communitarianism that you had argued against, is it, well, actually we do need to pay attention to what family you belong to. And, you know, we can't just treat everybody as, as a, an abstract person with human rights and property rights that are just formally determined by like, were particular rules followed in the gaining of this property, right? Did you break, did you steal to get this property? Uh, so that's the absolute libertarian Nozick position. Like, I don't care, you know, could end up that, that Michael Jordan has

57:31all the money because through his talent, you know, he, he, in a legal way, charged us to watch him play basketball. And so all the money went up into that, you know, but, but to focus on content, to actually care about human beings is to focus on content and outcomes and not merely on form. Yeah. Yeah. This is a good connection to make between, um, procedural justice and distributive justice. And we know, you know, with Rawls, he tries to balance that. So we, we saw, we still

58:04maintain a liberalism, but we soften it a little, a little bit with utilitarian consequentialist distributive justice type, type concerns. So definitely let's, let's continue this. We can, we can sort of start by recapping a little of this. The second, next part is called subjective truth, inwardness. Truth is subjectivity. And I really want to know what Kierkegaard thinks about that. That's sort of what he's famous for, but we have not gotten a great, uh, inkling of that yet. So if you want to hear the second part, uh, I don't know if we do five of them last time I made

58:37parts one and two public. Maybe I'll do that again this time. Uh, we'll, we'll see when, if, and when we record part three, whether I'm going to do that, but at the very least, uh, if there's more than two parts and probably if there's more than one, then some of them are only going to be available. If you go to patreon.com slash close reads philosophy. In any case, maybe this has been enough for you. Maybe getting a dose of Kierkegaard was enough. We would love you to leave a nice rating and review, uh, on Apple podcasts, wherever you listen to that, right? The public, uh, headquarters for this is

59:10close reads philosophy.com. All right. Thanks Wes. Thanks everybody. Thank you.

59:22Close reads is a partially examined life podcast. See partially examined life.com. We're distributed through the evergreen podcast network. See evergreen podcast.com slash close reads philosophy. And you can also find us at close reads philosophy.com or just look up close reads on your favorite podcast listening platform.