Ep. 394: Hegel on Faith vs. The Enlightenment (Part One)

Subscribe to get parts 1 and 2 of this now, ad-free, plus tons of bonus content. On Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit (1807), sec. 527-73, i.e. "Faith and Pure Insight" and "The Struggle of Enlightenment with Superstition." Picking up where we left off in this book, an intangible part of us ("pure consciousness") escapes the attempts of culture to define us. This spiritual part has two sides: pure insight, which is the destructive critical faculty popularized by The Enlightenment which sees through all hypocricy and unwarranted belief; and faith, which Enlightenment either dismisses as superstition or chases into a little corner isolated from the real, empirical world. Eventually, the tension between these leads to a conception of faith that Hegel finds more congenial: Awareness of God is just a function of self-consciousness itself, though we don't typically recognize this. Don't miss the PEL Live show in Madison, WI on Saturday afternoon, July 11. See partiallyexaminedlife.com/live for details. Sponsors: Don’t get caught running yesterday’s security on today’s web: visit nordlayer.com/browser. Get a $1/month e-commerce trial at shopify.com/pel. The post Ep. 394: Hegel on Faith vs. The Enlightenment (Part One) first appeared on The Partially Examined Life Philosophy Podcast.