Ep. 392: Early Hegel Elevates Reason (Part One)

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Introduction to The Partially Examined Life

1:08You're listening to The Partially Examined Life, a podcast by some guys who were at one point set on doing philosophy for a living but then thought better of it. Our question for episode 392 is something like, to what degree can we know metaphysical truths? And we read Hegel's early essay, Faith and Knowledge, from 1802, specifically the introduction in the section on Kantian philosophy. For more information about the text and the podcast, please see partiallyexaminedlife.com. This is Mark Linson-Meyer in Madison, Wisconsin, who, once abandoned by the categories, cannot be anything but a formless lump.

1:39This is Seth Paskin, subjectively certain that the furthest we can possibly get in this text during this conversation is page 74 in Austin, Texas. This is Wes Alwyn, more than an empty identity in Cambridge, Massachusetts. This is Dylan Casey, immovably impaled on the stake of the absolute antithesis in Madison, Wisconsin. This was another insertion.

Hegel's Phenomenology

2:07We're supposed to get back to Hegel's phenomenology to talk about faith. That's where we left off. But because we read that Habermas essay that was talking about Hegel's critique of the Enlightenment and specifically what it got wrong about faith, how it had an inadequate notion of faith, we thought we'd read this one, this essay that he was pointing at, which, I don't know, Wes and I read for close reads a different early Hegel essay about Hegel versus Kant. And it read pretty smoothly. It was not a bunch of jargon and gobbledygook,

2:40but I guess this is a little later.

Hegel's Critique of Kant

2:42This was for this publication that sort of newsletter kind of thing, journal that he was publishing with Fichte and other folks. And yeah, it's almost as bad as Hegel's phenomenology, though in a different way. And then the point of what I wanted to get out of this mostly in the introduction here, where he gives this critique that Habermas had quoted. But then also, you know, well, we've read a lot of Kant before. We should throw in this section on Kant. And it really requires reviewing a lot of Kant

3:13in a way that I know Wes did, but probably the rest of us did not. So we'll see how we do. Yeah, I got excited by the epistemology in this because I felt like I was learning something that was actually key to Hegel's whole system. And in fact, I would say for beginners, if they, instead of just jumping into the phenomenology, this would actually be a good place to start because you get to see him directly critiquing Kant. I mean, it's amazing that just, just to see him mention someone by name,

3:44but to do it over and over and over again in such a vituperative way, it's quite enlightening. You really do. You know, he straightforwardly tells you, even though it's still in complicated language,

Kant's Transcendental Ego

3:55but it's not so, I don't think it's so obscure. It's more like Kantian level complexity or a little bit worse. But he's telling you what's motivating his whole system. And a part of it, very straightforwardly, he's just pissed off that Kant has made knowledge of God impossible. He thinks that is truly scandalous. And he thinks it's very anti-philosophical and it's anti-rational. Reason itself is all about our capacity

4:27to know the absolute, to know the fundamental reality of things. So to be cut off from it is a scandal. And he thinks that there are glimpses in Kant having to do with Kant's, what Kant calls the synthesis of the imagination and also in Kant's critique of judgment that give us, that are threads that Kant didn't pick up on but that he should have, that would have allowed him to see that there is a way to have knowledge of the absolute and of God. I agree with Wes that there would be something really smart

5:00about reading this before trying to read the phenomenology. I think that the interaction with, like you said, people with real names and also a kind of a little bit off the hook about the problem of modernity in a more straightforward way, I think it's there. I feel like the point that's being made in whatever it is, the 30 pages of the introduction could have been made in like two pages, but maybe a little bit of analysis, maybe six pages, but it felt a little bit like,

5:32I don't know if it's the wolf and sheep's clothing or the smoke cleared, just how much of like a Thomas Aquinas he is in terms of reason gets us to God kind of thing. I don't mean that in like a strict analogy, but just that we get to God by reason. And if philosophy isn't doing that, it's not doing its job. If it was ever sort of open for Hegel to me, it was made very clear in this. He's about the God. Seth, are you the kind of person

6:03who thinks that Hegel is the most difficult and notoriously opaque writer in the history of philosophy? Or are you the kind of person who thinks that Kant is the most difficult

Hegel's View on Subjectivity

6:12and opaque writer in the history of philosophy? Now you don't have to decide.

6:18You get to enjoy one talking about the other. This is, I can only imagine if you read Aquinas on Augustine or Aristotle on Parmenides or something like that, that you would get the same level of, I don't even know what to describe this as. McCann and Heidegger? McCann and Heidegger. Yeah, there's a few pairings. A very short introduction.

6:41As I was reading it, I was like, I don't know if I'm learning more about Hegel, like in the vein of which Dylan just mentioned, or if I'm learning more about Kant, or if I don't know enough about either to be even be able to follow what the hell is going on. But wow, this is a heavy lift. You do have to go back to Kant or you have to ask Claude or some other AI about what exactly in Kant he's talking about. Remind me what the antinomies are. Remind me what the paralogisms are. Remind me about this, that, and the other.

7:12Because he is going to, and you know, at least he's mentioning them. I mean, at least he's giving the name of them so you can go look them up. And in the phenomenology, that wouldn't even happen. So yeah, if you want to get the most out of this text, you basically have to spend a lot of time with Kant and figure out what he's responding to in Kant. I think that turns out to be quite rewarding, but I'm also exhausted now. And I can understand why someone wouldn't want to do it. You know, I will say, I think like you guys, I think this kind of confirms for me that he is a bad writer and communicator.

Hegel's Critique of Kant's Notion of God

7:43As much as Hegel fans out there might not like to hear that and to think that the phenomenology is just a result of deep thinking, he is a deep thinker, but he's also undisciplined. And this, all of this stuff in this essay can be translated into something comprehensible. It's all got a comprehensible, which, and I say that with the kind of confidence I can't say for the phenomenology because I can never fully decode it. I feel like this is definitely decodable, which is exciting to me. And the thoughts are worthwhile,

8:13but yeah, he's just not good at communicating it. And that's the big problem with understanding him. It's profound, but it's not so profound that it wouldn't be comprehensible if it had been communicated clearly. So the version that we read prepared and edited by Walter Cerf and H.S. Harris, and each of them has a pretty lengthy introduction. Harris's in particular is 50 pages. I did not want to add. Would you recommend Harris as a more transparent presentation of the substance of the essay?

8:45The second essay? Yeah. It's difficult. I don't think it's an easy for beginners guide to the essay. So I would actually say you could skip both of them and spend more time going back to Kant. And I will also say this translation does something very unusual that I don't know that any other translation does, which could be confusing. Any other translation or secondary literature on Kant that I know of refers to the understanding as the understanding. Here it's translated as intellect. So if you're right in Kant, it's all about the understanding

9:16and the concepts of the understanding and the categories of the understanding and reason is above the understanding and intuition is below it. It's weird to take a term of art like that and suddenly start calling it the intellect. So you have to kind of do that in your head and realize he's not talking about noose, like Aristotelian intellect or something like that, which is more akin to reason. And he's talking about discursive understanding. Yeah, I don't know if that's because the way Hegel used that term elsewhere, certainly the term reason is both used

9:46in the technical Kantian way, but the way that Kant and these other figures, there's a section in this essay that we didn't read on Fichte and a section on Jacobi, who's somebody I've never read at all, but, you know, an early responder to Kant. And he wants to say that all of them, even though, you know, as sort of a general critique of the Enlightenment, supposedly reason was dominated, but reason ends up a shell of its former self. So what reason is for Hegel and his cohorts

10:18who are coming up with this publication is something much grander and, you know, what we understand from that Hegel is going to elaborate as the dialectic or, you know, the progress that he displays in the phenomenology. So, yeah, I'm not sure when some of the words, this is what complicates it for me, because if he's actually quoting Kant, then you know he's using Kantian terminology, but when he's saying something about Kant, well, he could be using Kantian terminology or he could be using some, you know, his own uses of these words.

10:49Yeah, sometimes it's difficult to figure out when is it that he's paraphrasing Kant in a extremely subtly scathing, ironically, you know, in a scathing way meant to be disdainful, but, or when he's presenting his own positive point of view, that's another thing that's unclear when he's switching between his own POV and the POV he's describing and condemning. So we could see, for instance, why Habermas characterized all of the Enlightenment, including Kant, as a subjectivity.

11:21He's getting that from Hegel, who is saying, we've argued Kant is not a subjectivist because it's not merely up to the individual's whims, you know, that I perceive a dog or whatever. It is something about human psychology and really the psychology of any rational creature, presumably, that we are all, so it actually becomes completely objective that there is a dog here that has these qualities that we can say such and such about, that we can do science. It's all very objective, but it's still coming from the point of view

11:52of the subject. The subject ends up being the, according to Hegel, the only metaphysically real thing in Kant's account of the world, right? Everything else, everything that we, it's sort of like Descartes' insight, like, well, there's all these contents of consciousness. We don't know what the ontological status of them, but there has to be something that contains and unifies those contents of consciousness. So the transcendental ego, that is the one thing, and so then it ends up that we get this whole transcendental structure in Kant where the phenomena

12:22are separated from the noumena, and that becomes absolutely dogmatic. And so Hegel is asking in this, why would, given that everything is just the contents of consciousness, just doing phenomenology itself, all about the subject, why would he think that Kant is not justified, given those premises, in jumping to, insisting on the existence of the ego and the existence, this hard and fast, indissoluble, uncrossable barrier between the phenomena and the noumena?

12:53That seems a little bit of a kind of like strident characterization of it. I think a more charitable reading would be that Hegel says something like, Kant is led because of where he starts, because of the way that he's trying to build this from the perspective of the subject or subjectivity versus objectivity. and he gets trapped in the notion that the only knowledge that's possible

13:23is subjective knowledge of the type you're talking about, that even though he is pointed towards in some other texts and some other places, something which is absolute but not subjective, or I don't even want to get tied up in the terms, but basically that he's so bound by the structure that you just described, he can't see the fact that he's actually thinking something different. He's actually thinking an idea or an absolute that is in fact not an object

13:54of cognition in the way that he thinks all knowledge is and that he just isn't willing to go there. That was kind of the way the essay sort of like ended for me. Yeah, I didn't find it so challenging to figure out what parts Hegel was taking issue with versus what he was interpreting. I'm not like a super Kant person or a super Hegel person, but Hegel's characterization of what Kant was doing and how he lays out the phenomenal

14:25versus the noumenal and the point of view and what Kant is saying just rang right. It seemed straightforwardly correct with the criticism that along the way of it being a failure in critical ways. From Hegel's perspective, it's a failure in staying completely within the finite and providing no access to the infinite. I think that Kant straightforwardly says that you don't get that. That's his solution is there are things that are inaccessible

14:55in the world according to Kant and Hegel says, yes, that's exactly what Kant says and he's wrong to do so. He criticizes him for that. And so to me it was a very Hegel's very clarifying about what Kant's ambitions were and they seem to align well and he seems to have read Kant well. He just disagrees with him in a kind of plain-faced way. You do have access to the thing in itself ultimately. You just didn't, you gave up

15:26getting to it. You have to have access to the infinite. Otherwise, philosophy isn't doing its job and life is not worth living and, you know, you gave up. Yeah. He does also have a more kind of technical epistemological argument about this primordial identity of opposites and the absolute including, by the way, the particular and the universal so that when judgment comes to it, it's not just, it's not like the imagination, right, has baked

15:56the empirical and the abstract of the universal together into these appearances, right, made them cohere and then the judgment comes and extracts out of it what it's already put, what the mind has already put into it. He wants to say that primordial unity is already there and it would be just as good to say that it is the thing in itself, right, that what you're calling the synthesis of the imagination, Kant, is really a kind of process ontology where reality

16:27is in the process of constructing itself and when your mind kind of participates in that. You know, maybe if we actually discuss that a little bit I can give a clear explanation of what that means. But in any case, the subject and predicate kind of fall out in the judgment and of a primordial unity. They're not just kind of slapped together or taped together by our cognition so that I think that's a very important critique and kind of key to the whole Hegelian project. Let me read the quote.

16:58Yeah, Wes is already jumping into a very difficult thing and I'm going to throw another kind of difficult thing out here. For page 77, this is the part that Seth thought that I was not being nice enough about. This intellect is human intellect, part of the cognitive faculty, the intellect of a fixed ego point. The things, as they are cognized by the intellect, are only appearances. They are nothing in themselves, which is a particularly truthful result. The obvious conclusion, however, is that an intellect which has cognizance only of appearances

17:28and of nothing in itself is itself only appearance and is nothing in itself. But on the contrary, Kant's regards discursive intellect with this sort of cognition as in itself and absolute. So you'd think that why are you insisting, Kant, that there are these transcendental structures, the ego that is putting together things using one of the first things Hegel's going to criticize is the distinction between sensibility and the intellect and the understanding, right, that there's two stages in the Kantian and whereas really

17:58these are both in this primordial unity as you were just saying, Wes. And so why insist on that structure on the whole transcendental structure of Kant's model of mind just based on the fact that we only are subject to appearances? I think Hegel just thinks that is all bullshit, that we do not in some secret way apply the categories out of our own mind and that somehow these are all just a priori things in our mind and not in the world in itself, right? He thinks it's much more likely

18:29that we, as you say, we participate in the world in itself providing us with its own structure and yes, if there are different kinds of animals, they would perceive it in a different way because they are in effect creating a different reality in their interaction with the world but given that we are humans, this is the way that we do it and saying that well, there's just a formless lump out there that we come in and we apply such basic things as number and space and time to just doesn't make a lot of sense to say those are all

19:00on the side of humanity and the thing in itself is completely divorced from that. I think another way to put it is primordial unity precedes subject and object and that's where the categories are. That's where all of this apparatus is. It's the place where mind and object meet. It doesn't just belong to one of them. It's not like it's in the object and then gets imprinted on us on our tabula rasa and it's not like it's just in the mind. It's a meeting, it's the logical structure of reality and it's the meeting place for mind and nature insofar as

19:31they've been disambiguated from each other by this weird project that God decided to embark upon. Yeah, and in that way at least the tone of the Kant section to me is Hegel saying you came so close Kant, you were walked right up to the door and turned away and you know in this just after the section that Mark was reading Hegel's calling this thing that Kant is refusing to adhere to or think about he calls it rational cognition.

20:02So he says cognition of appearances is dogmatically regarded as the only kind of cognition there is and rational cognition is denied. You know if the forms through which the object exists are nothing in themselves then they must also be nothing in themselves for cognitive reason. Kant never seems to have had the slightest doubt that the intellect is the absolute of the human spirit. The intellect is then for him the absolute immovable insuperable finitude of human reason which is the part that is insufficient for Hegel.

20:33It's just completely constrained by finitude. Yeah, he talks about making and I think Mark has already referred to this the understanding or the intellect in the in itself not in the sense of being like the noumenal soul substance or something like that but just this philosophically introspected structure of the mind is the one stopping point for all of it right? That's the absolute for Kant that's the in itself and everything else revolves around it that's the Copernican revolution but Hegel's going to point out

21:04that's just the way it appears to us the cognitive faculty has a certain appearance as well in its functionings and we can't just take for granted that it is the way it appears to be from the inside on first look. Right, and this walking up to the barrier that Dylan was referring to is more in the critique of practical reason and even more so in the critique of judgment so it is interesting that we have Hegel commenting on all three of those texts

21:34and what is it called the religion as within the bounds of reason alone? Mm-hmm. Something like, yeah, that's a fourth text that we have not looked at in any detail. I think it sort of came up when we were talking about Schleiermacher many years ago just Wes and I and a guest but anyway so when Kant cheats like, well, Hegel actually likes that but it's a little pathetic and I was a little unclear on his contempt, Hegel's contempt for Kant's notion of practical reason for instance

22:05but in religion with the in the bounds of reason alone it seems like it ends up being defensible subjectively to believe in God right? You sort of have to in order to live a sensible life right? Just like you for in critique of practical reason you have to to live a moral life you have to believe that there's sort of this absolute moral law which we couldn't with theoretical speculative reason could not reach right? if God has made commands that are right there in the substance of the universe we have no way

22:36of detecting them all we can detect are things about our own the structure of our own will and you know we have to regard that as absolute just as a practical matter but it just seems like Hegel thinks that this is a little silly and maybe Dylan is right that he is kind of going back to something more like Aquinas that I don't know what did we get enough of Hegel's positive notion here that like oh you can prove God with something he mentions the ontological argument which I know he does and he's very bitter

23:07about that right because Kant thinks that he shows that the ontological argument doesn't work right because the ontological argument assumes that existence is like any other predicate which it isn't yeah Hegel's very bitter about that because the ontological argument is just the idea that to have the idea of God which is something that which nothing greater can be thought implies existence because if he didn't exist then he would he could still be greater and so you see in this right Hegel associates this

23:37with the identity of the idea capital I which is the idea of God basically and God himself so that I guess Anselm has done done something really clever on Hegel's point of view and this derivation and kind of illustrating the identity of the idea with God himself and of course I think since I think people generally thought Kant that was kind of a knockdown argument that he gave against the ontological argument so I was very surprised to see Hegel yeah wanting to defend that but we

24:08shouldn't forget you know his first he did write his first book was about how Newton was wrong so you never know where Hegel's going to go Hegel says that the Kant was arguing against the crappiest version of the ontological argument and I think that the kind that he likes I looked up just here now Spinoza's version of the ontological argument which if I remember correctly did not have the multiple steps of oh there are these different concepts and one of the concepts is being the greatest possible thing it was just that God is a self-caused

24:38substance whose essence necessarily involves existence by defining God as an absolutely infinite substance with infinite attributes Spinoza argues that God is the only substance that can exist making existence a necessary part of God's nature unlike contingent finite beings so right just the very notion of infinity at all right this is what ultimately Hegel says that Kant denies that like well okay there's infinity is just sort of not the finite but the only thing we can know anything about

25:08is the finite so if you say the infinite God is whatever's on the other side of that chasm then you're saying that's all just unphilosophical just superstition you know well you could have faith but faith is just saying fantasy things right according to the Kantian picture and Hegel just doesn't think that's what faith