PEL Presents Closereads: Hegel on Faith vs. The Enlightenment (aka PEL#394 pt. 3)

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The Partially Examined Life Philosophy Podcast 56 min 2 speakers 8 chapters transcribed 17 hours ago

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What is Hegel’s critique of the Enlightenment’s view of faith?

Mark Linsenmayer 0:01

This is Close Reads, a philosophy podcast with Mark and Wes. I'm Wes Allwan, and I'm Mark Winsemeyer. It's a new day and uh we're gonna celebrate that by doing more of what we've been doing on Partius Exam in Life for a long freaking time and everybody thought we were done with, but we're not quite done. It tangles phenomenology. And of course we could do this for the rest of our lives, but let's uh this is not this is really we could see it as a part three to our most recent episode on it, episode three ninety four. We really didn't get to the latter part of our reading assignment in the discussion, so I think we wanted to start on section five fifty one. Right, we're talking about the way in which the enlightenment diagnoses faith.

Mark Linsenmayer 0:49

How it gets it wrong.

Wes Alwan 0:51

This section before that I'd been talking about faith as the spirit of the community.

Mark Linsenmayer 0:56

Mm-hmm.

Wes Alwan 0:58

And how how the Enlightenment is a self refuting lie. So I think in this section we're gonna be getting into This idea that People can't be deceived about their own essence, which I suppose is a retort To the idea that the general masses need enlightening, I'm not I'm not sure. This has been a battle between faith and pure insight. Pure insight is what he associates with the Enlightenment.

Mark Linsenmayer 1:24

Yes.

Wes Alwan 1:24

They

Mark Linsenmayer 1:24

are they are supposedly one and the same thing, seen from different points of view. The point of view in question is that they're both part of the self-conscious essence of humanity and the s insofar as it is self-conscious, insofar as it has that bending back, it is pure insight, insofar it is mere in itself, mere consciousness before the bending back, then it is faith. But the question is sort of w what is it consciousness of Seems like we don't have direct consciousness of God or something like that, but Hegel's actually gonna say something like, Well, we sort of do because it is part of the phenomenology of the way that the individual interacts with the larger cosmos.

Wes Alwan 2:18

All right. Five fifty one. Let us see further how faith experiences the enlightenment in the different moments of its own consciousness. To which the view mentioned above referred to only generally. These moments are pure thought or as object absolute being in and for itself. Then its relation as knowing to absolute being. The ground of its belief. And lastly, its relation to absolute being and its acts or its worship and service. Just as pure insight has failed to recognize itself and has denied itself in belief generally, so too in these moments will behave in an equally perverse manner. Alright, why did I think this was about people deceiving themselves in my notes? Um

Mark Linsenmayer 3:03

well they don't realize, right, as faithful beings, they don't realize that the God that they think they are aware of actually is their self-consciousness. So they are deceived. They think that God, right, per the enlightenment conception of faith, God is something out there. You know, you can only have faith in it. You can't actually know it. But insofar as they are partaking in self consciousness the phenomena of God is actually right there with the they're just they don't know that. They're deceiving themselves about that.

Wes Alwan 3:35

Yeah, I mean there is a section about that. I guess it's the previous section actually, five fifty. Just had it misnumbered. So but anyway, yeah, there is a section about not being deceived about your own essence. But here yeah, so here he's introducing a whole new You know, these three different things that he's gonna address in the rest of the reading. In our main episode we talked about the ground of belief, for example, the Enlightenment criticizes faith for grounding its belief. in these external contingent historical facts like the crucifixion or like miracles and finds that wanting. In various ways and Hegel's gonna say, Well, you don't you don't get it. So yeah, he's gonna go through and respond to, defend faith against these various enlightenment criticisms.

Wes Alwan 4:22

So faith is not a static

Mark Linsenmayer 4:23

thing, any phenomenon in any stage in Hegel's thought is gonna have moments within it. So the moments as it confronts