Ep. 24 - Awakening from the Meaning Crisis - Hegel

Vervaeke traces the line from Kant through the Romantics to Hegel, showing how Hegel's absolute idealism reinterprets reality as the self-actualizing system of intelligibility (Geist), central to the

Key Takeaways

Kant's unknowable thing in itself, pursued to its conclusion, leaves meaning trapped inside the mind.
Hegel responds by denying the thing in itself and identifying reality with rationality.
Irrational experience is reinterpreted as an undeveloped stage of rationality within a self-actualizing Geist.
Hegel's absolute idealism profoundly shaped subsequent responses to the meaning crisis, including political ones.
Hegel's project severed Platonic dialectic from personal transformation, a key problem for addressing meaning.

What the video covers

Episode 24 continues the historical genealogy of the meaning crisis, moving from Kant to Hegel after covering Comte, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche.
Kant's 'thing in itself' makes reality unknowable, leaving meaning enclosed within the mind's self-constructing activity.
The Romantics reversed Kant's framework, arguing that irrational states of mind reconnect us with reality.
Hegel argues the unknowable thing in itself is indistinguishable from non-existence, and removes it from the picture.
Hegel's claim that 'the real is the rational' builds on Parmenides and Plato's link between being and being known.
Hegel reinterprets irrational mental states as developmental potential for rationality rather than contact with an unknowable reality.
Geist, meaning mind and spirit, names an extended living system of patterns of intelligibility that structure reality and undergo self-actualization.
This position is called absolute idealism; the absolute refers to this self-realizing system.
Hegel frames philosophy's progression as mirroring the move from mythology to reason and the dialectical development of ideas.
Hegel's thought deeply shaped later political and cultural movements, including Marx, which Vervaeke presents as crucial to understanding the meaning crisis.

Chapters

Why does Hegel reject Kant's thing in itself?

Hegel argues that a thing that is completely unknowable is indistinguishable from something that does not exist. Removing it, he concludes that reality is found entirely within the structure of intelligibility.

What does Geist mean in this episode?

Geist is the German term for an extended living system of patterns of intelligibility that structure reality and develop toward self-actualization. It overlaps the English notions of mind and spirit.

How does Hegel relate the Romantics' irrationality to rationality?

Hegel reinterprets irrational mental states not as contact with an unknowable reality but as a developmental potential within the mind that has not yet become fully rational.

Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown

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[Music] you [Music] welcome back this is the 24th episode of awakening from the meaning crisis last time we were talking about the historical developments that happened around caught we took a look at Conte and Schopenhauer and Nietzsche and I presented Nietzsche

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as one of the great prophets I'm using that in the Old Testament sense of a prophet of the meaning crisis and we talked about a way of understanding what Nietzsche is saying now it's not just simply atheism and we also took a look

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at way in which Michi doesn't really adequately give us a response to the meaning crisis although he indicates that an important project within the response to the meaning crisis is how do we reappropriation legacy the idea of radical self transcendence within a

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secular scientific worldview now I want to go back to Kant and trace out another important line of development that's going to be crucial for understanding the meaning crisis and that's the line that comes from Conte and to Hegel I can't go through all the

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various important German thinkers like Victor and Schelling but I want to talk a lot about Hegel because of the tremendous impact how Hegel has had on the political landscape and the cultural landscape surrounding the meaning crisis and as we know Kant also had a deep

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influence on the romantics who also have a significant impact on Hegel so if you remember Conte as this model of the way the mind is framing reality in order to produce what is rational within it and that this was then taken by the Romantic

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stand and reversed in an in an interesting way that the closer you got to the actual con reestablishing in the contact with reality the more you're reversing this process of rationalization and you're coming into contact with reality via

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more irrational states of mind and what Kant had of course is the idea of that reality out here was the thing in itself which we cannot directly interact with we can only interact with our experience you see how the the disconnection from

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the world becomes radicalized and caught and all the meaning is totally within a self enclosed activity a self constructed self constructing self enclosed activity of the mind right and the thing in here the thing in itself is nothing that we can come into rational

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contact with and that's why of course as I said the romantics proposed this radical idea sort of the exact opposite of the actual revolution that by moving into more irrational states we can reestablish contact with reality now Hegel is aware of both the romantic

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response and the contine framework and talking about hey goes from oh my gosh Hegel is a Titanic and complex and difficult thinker and so once again I want to remind everybody that I'm trying to cut through a lot of material in

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trying to zero in on those aspects of Hegel's thought that are I think directly relevant to understanding the genealogy of the meaning crisis so what Hegel says first of all is that this idea makes no sense Hegel points out that the thing in

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itself is completely unknowable and for something to be completely unknowable he argues is indistinguishable from it being non-existent there is nothing that can possibly be knowing about it right then we should stop thinking about it as something that exists something that

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should be taken into account when we're talking about a relationship to reality and if you remove the thing in itself then you get this idea that reality is totally found within this structure this is of course a form

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of idealism which has nothing to do with pursuing ideal idealism is the idea that reality is ultimately constructed made by the mind in some fashion and so Hegel makes the famous claim that the real is the rational that this rational stuff

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and reality are actually identical if you get rid of this side of the equation the thing in itself all you're left with is this that reality is the rational the real is the rational and the rational is the real and this of course is an

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important derivation I think is a correct way of putting it from the original insight from Parmenides that we saw exemplified in Plato that there's a deep connection between being and being known that there's a deep connection between our sensing something as real

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and I don't mean just physically sensing I mean making sense are sensing something as real and how intelligible it is to us how knowable it is to us and pearl in his book thinking being the classical addition to metaphysics just

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does a fantastic job at explaining how profoundly fecund this idea has been for us so Hegel takes that Platonic inspiration and he he weds it to a critique of the thing in itself and then we get this idea that what's what's

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going on actually is not just not that the mind like in kata is making the structures of rational experience of reality no no you get the DES mind is actually making the structures of reality itself well what about the

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irrational stuff that the romantics were talking about well he go sort of re understands and reinterprets these developmentally he understands the irrational aspects of the mind right not as us moving towards the contact with the unknowable thing in itself

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instead the irrational aspects of the mind are actually a potential within the mind a developmental potential for rationality so the idea is are rational in intelligible experience it has not fully developed has not been fully self actualized and you can hear the

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Aristotelian aspects in Hegel's thought now when I start talking about mind in this way and rationality they have to be very careful we're not talking about mind um in a sense that's your mind in the individual mind we're

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talking about mind in an extended sense we're talking about the entire system of patterns of intelligibility that are at work in humanity all of the patterns of intelligibility that we're using to make sense in this profound way so if you

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think about this room for example and my mind is structuring my experience and then if you give Hegel his critique of content there's nothing beyond the structuring of experience then you have the idea that this is all in sense in a

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deeply metaphysical sense this is all the activity of these patterns of intelligibility the patterns of intelligibility and reality are this is this mind in this extended sense so try to think of these patterns of intelligibility as structuring reality

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not just the experience of reality and that they form a living system they're developing like an era Staller it's like a living thing they're going through a process of self actualization the irrational elements are constantly being transformed into more rational

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intelligible elements so the Germans have a great word for all of this the word Geist and like all German words it doesn't translate that readily into English it covers these two words that we separate in English and it overlaps

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between them mind and spirit because what it's trying to pick up on again this living systems of patterns and of intelligibility by which we all timidly make sense and given this argument against a renewable reality being a reality then the patterns by making

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sense are identical to the patterns by which reality is intelligibly structured so this is an individual idealism this is what's going to become known as absolute idealism because the absolute is another term that's used for this system of self realization of the

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patterns of intelligibility rather than talking about an individual mind I'm trying not to get too abstract here but it's hard not to be abstract when you're talking about Hegel's idealism and so my task with you is to try and explain this in a way that

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constantly makes it plausible to you and also at least viable so you can see why it became an attractive way of thinking if you deeply by Conte and the Romantics and yet you accept Hegel's argument against this you reinterpret the

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romantics the way he did you get this position how do you study it how do you understand it how do you study this living systems of patterns of intelligibility that structure experience and reality well you study history and here you can

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see of course the deep influence of Christianity and going back to the axial revolution within ancient Israel about understanding history as the process by which reality and our understanding of reality are Co unfolding together so you study history and you look for patterns

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and right the history what are you looking what kind of patterns right these are patterns in how we have systematically made sense how cultures have created world views ways of making sense ways in which we have as I've often used the the

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metaphor we've created grammars by which we make sense of ourselves and the world so you can see some of the influence of Hegel on some of the terms and ideas that I've been using as we've been in engaging in our historical analysis okay

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so these are patterns we realize and I want to really pick up on the double meaning of this word like alright I've indicated before when realizing means here both that it is something we experience but it is also a way in which

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things are being made real coming into realness coming into reality in a developmental sense so we're talking about looking at history to discover the development of this grammar of intelligibility this grammar of human thinking human being human living how

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humans are world Inge how they're creating worlds of of intelligible patterns in which we can act in a meaningfully meaningful manner and understand ourselves the world in each other and what you discover Hegel said is if you look at this history you you

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see it's not static you can see that it is going through a developmental process and that development is driven by sort of two opposing movements or forces one is a process of differentiation so think about when you're trying to

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make sense what do you have to do often right you have to grasp the differences between things you have to distinguish you have to clarify you have to contrast so what a good way of thinking about this is this term we use articulation

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articulation means to speak and to make sense but it also means to find all the joints find the division points between things so part of what we're doing right is when we're trying to make sense we're engaging in a process of differentiation

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articulation but of course we also are doing the other right we are doing integration we are gathering things together so that we have systematic connections are being realized again it's we're not we're becoming aware of them but we're also

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constituting them and making them and again not as individuals but as participants right in this project of how the patterns of intelligibility are working themselves out through our thought through our behavior through our ways of living and being in the world

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so Hegel understands the process of understanding as of the creation of a system or systematization because when I'm doing this when I'm differentiating things and also integrating them together I'm putting them into a systematic relationship and so let me

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give you an analogy right for for understanding Hegel please remember it's an analogy so when you study child development you can see children have ways of making sense of the world and that discloses the world to them in a

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certain way and that way in which they make sense works for them it gives them a certain understanding but what happens as you go through stages of development is that that system gets incredibly improved things that were often confused together get

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differentiated apart and they get reintegrated so that you get a more sophisticated systematic understanding of the world and again when I say this understanding you have to understand that it means right not just in your head but how the world

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is structured for you so you've got this living system of patterns of intelligibility and you see across history that it's always being articulated by differentiation and then being integrated into a systematic way of understanding being and not just

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being but how the world is being to us so higgles thought he saw this internal development in Geist that this is his name as I said for this explosion of an extended mind right it was it had an

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internal development much like a living thing much like a child right so what what do you see happening what you'll see in the history of ideas as we try to make sense of things you'll see an idea is proposed particular idea a way of

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understanding and it gets contrasted right it gets clarified it gets distinguished it gets differentiated from a counter idea but then what typically happens right is that these two ideas then are drawn together into a higher integration now this is often popularly explained the

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Hegel doesn't actually use these terms this way but this is often explained by this idea of thesis antithesis and synthesis right so the idea is you get an idea you'll get a counter idea it's integrated together and then this serves as a new

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idea to start the whole process again there's the counter idea right and then that gets integrated and so on and so forth and what you have is the increasing articulation and integration of the patterns of intelligibility which for Hegel given the argument are also

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the patterns of realness the patterns of reality you get this incredible complexification you get emerging capacities for understanding and being in the world he calls this process dialectic alright so just give a quick example from the history of ideas right

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you have people who are trying to write get out what is reality what kind of thing is reality and you'll have certain people like Parmenides and Plato and saying well being right for things to be is ultimately for thing right reality is

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changeless because when I know something I know it to be true and for things to be true right it has to be that that's the way they really are and if they're changing and I try to know them I can't

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ever get a true grasp of them and you get this idea that reality is changeless right and then you get people like Heraclitus and others saying no no if you do that then the whole capacity for understanding understanding your

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experience of reality that things are changing if you if you write off all that experience as an illusion then there's no content to your experience there's nothing actually that you're having an experience about in fact they argue the opposite that reality is pure

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change so you got Parmenides right and an aspect of Plato and then you got Heraclitus now to be real is to be unchanging no to be real is to be changing and you know you can see this where people in our culture they'll talk

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about reality as if it's eternity but they'll also talk about there's nothing as real as change itself that reality is always in process and then Plato comes along as we've seen and proposes a way of integrating them together and what he

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says is know that there are eternal patterns and they write structurally organize changing processes and if you remember that maps on to this is more having to do with the upper world the more real world and this is the more

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looser your world and you can see this played out in our science what do you think you say what do you mean John well science is built around the idea that there are these eternal patterns laws and yet they constrain and interact with

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forces which are defined completely and how they change things and so science right is a synthesis out of these two ways of trying to understand reality okay and it ultimately goes back to Plato and we and we use math to talk

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about this and we use experiments to talk about this and and so forth okay so this is not a ridiculous idea that Hegel has it's a profound idea you can see it at work and if you talk about something

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to use I think a strong analogy about how science is progressing and something about the patterns that science discovers are also the patterns of reality then you have something strongly analogous to how how Hegel is thinking of Geist

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so this dialectic even the term that Hegel uses by the way this is inspired by Plato although I think Hegel's interpretation of dialectic is very different from plato's but this whole process of the way in which Geist is

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historically developing is a process of self transcendence on Geist's part emergence it's the way in which Geist is developing self actualizing the way in which it is moving from a more and more irrational making sense to a more and

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more rational systematic making sense so Hegel proposes that in the history of dialectic we can get to a stage where the system of understanding and realization becomes aware of itself that one of the things the one of the ideas

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one of those systems of making sense that emerges is this idea itself and you see what that means and and and there's there's there's there's hubris and Hegel here right because what Hegel is basically saying is his philosophy is

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the philosophy in which this process of Geist and realization has become reflectively aware of it in which this practice process has created a systematic understanding that grasps the dialectical principles of Geist when you get that then you have what he calls

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right absolute spirit absolute Geist there's this T loss there's this goal in this whole process all of history is moving and of course he now sees himself as the discoverer of this but all of history is move to this moment of absolute idealism so

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rationality is seen as a systematic process in the self-development of guyst of its self understanding now many of you probably finding that this is very impersonal way of talking about mind and meaning and we will come back to that so

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hold on to that we will come back to that so when the process of making sense of understanding passes into this stage of self understanding when the process creates systems of ideas that grasp this pattern of dialectic then Hegel says

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that what's happened is we have moved from understanding with a capital u because it's not individual understanding but the understanding in Geist to reasoned with a capital R so what does he mean by that the principles of rationally making sense this living

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system of principles for rashly making sense moves from understanding things to understanding everything systematically all the things are getting integrated into a systematic understanding and that systematic understanding is now self reflective it includes and refers and grasps itself

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in a very deep sense rationality has realized itself there's very powerful way of thinking and put this all together with the original and crucial premise of idealism right if this is a process by which reality realizes itself and the real is the rational this was

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also a process by which reality realizes itself this process at work in in and through us and in and through history by which reality and rationality have like realized themselves is God you see what Hegel is done he's taken again as I've

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mentioned this right Hebrew Christian idea that God is right that process by which we make sense and we develop and create the world with God and he has created a philosophical understanding of that and it translated that religious way of talking about

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history into a completely secular philosophical way of talking about history he has secularized and rationalized the Hebrew ik the Hebraic heritage now this is important right because this God is in in many senses right a secularized non-religious God this is

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not a God that is right intervening in history through profits this is a God who has been realized through the reflective actions the contemplation of a philosopher Hegel Hegel understood his project in very religious terms but and this is a very

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important but he was always translating those religious terms into philosophical conceptual terms of rational development he would consistently take the religious terms and go through this kind of translation this kind of exposition and explication and explanation that would

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transform them into philosophical conceptual theories of how rationality intelligibility and reality have Co developed together so I'm gonna read your quote from the earliest system program of German idealism he states the following quote here I shall discuss an

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idea which as far as I know has not occurred to anyone else we must have a new mythology notice the word he's using notice he's using that word in a way that resonates how we've been using the word mythology in this lecture series we

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must have a new mythology but this mythology must be in the service of the ideas notice that language it must be in the service of the ideas it must be a mythology of reason capital our reason it must be about this he goes on to say

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quote in the end enlightened and unenlightened must clasp hands right the the philosophical and the mythological the enlightened and the unenlightened and notice the language enlightened right must clasp hands mythology must become philosophy in order to make the people rational and

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philosophy must become mythological in order to make philosophy and sorry in order to make philosophers sensible notice that this is simultaneously a philosophical proposal and a social cultural program for how to transform religion people and the role of philosophy within that

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transformation he then goes on to say that this will lead to a quote higher spirit sent from heaven must found the new religion right among us it will be the last and greatest work of mankind this is the final utopia this is the

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culmination this will be the last religion this will be the last thing because all of this results in this final stage in which Geist pattern this living system of patterns of intelligibility and how reality itself is structured has generated a systematic

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self understanding and we grasp all of our previous cultural and intellectual history I want to show you how Hegel does this in a specific example this this translation between mythology and philosophy to create the new religion that is beyond right all other religions

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so let's think of the process by which understanding right is moving to reason and you can see that right that's directly parallel to the process by which mythology is moving to philosophy so let's get an example of a very

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important mythological structure and of course I'm gonna take Christianity because I tried to show you Hegel is secularizing Christianity in many ways so you Hegel argues that right let's put the myth on this side and then the fill

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it with the philosophy on this side and we're going to see how we go from making sense of things to this self-realization participating in that the the system that grasps the systematicity of this whole process so you have the Father and

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the Trinity what does the father represent well the father represents Hegel would argue understanding is undifferentiated unarticulated unnatural eyes unarticulated an actual eyes I am okay and then of course the idea is you get the incarnation in the Sun sorry

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that should be capitalized I don't mean any disrespect right now the incarnation is how our understanding starts to get differentiated into particulars here is a table here's a cop right I'm here the worlds over there we get all this

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articulation so you get the beginning of right articulation in two particular things and so you can see there's a sense in which right the Sun is the counter the antithesis of the Father all right but then you get right the

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reconcile the reconciliation of the son to the Father you know there's the sign is sacrificed and the son reconciles with the father and that of course is right that moment of higher integration a higher new kind of identity is created so this is this

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corresponds to the realization again trying to pick up of both meanings of this term the realization of the identity indifference of the father in son so the father and son are both different in one and that's how understanding is

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now moving to this process where the integration and the differentiation are being brought together understanding is realizing that understanding is made out of differentiation and integration and there's a kind of reconciliation a higher-order self-awareness that is taking place and then we finally moved

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down here right to the Holy Spirit and of course there's a bit of a pun intended because that's you know Geist is one way of translating spirit and this is what what did we see in the New Testament the idea that God is agape God

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is identical to the very process by which we are making each other into persons and we don't individually possess agape in our minds cappe is agape is something we dwell within a process of making sense and making persons and making community of persons

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and of course what does the holy spirit corresponds to well this is that right this is Geist dwelling within its self awareness God has always been agape we just didn't realize it God is dwelling within the development of the community this is

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what Hegel's doing this is why Hegel has been called the Thomas Aquinas Protestantism he's doing right in Germany post the Protestant Reformation what Aquinas was doing when if you remember when European fought the systems of European thought encountered

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Aristotelian science Hegel is now taking right all of the machinery right the theological machinery that he sees at work in myth and he is integrating it with the philosophical and scientific understanding that is impacting so powerfully on Europe in his time he's

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trying to deal with how to restructure Christianity in light of the Scientific Revolution the Protestant Reformation and this is what he's doing and he creates this powerful system it's this just tremendously powerful system it's grand synthesis and that's important

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because Hegel felt and I said there's an element of hubris in here but that his system exemplified what it was talking about his philosophical system in the way it provided at a total present in that word a total explanation of reality

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mind being God religion philosophy history he thought it exemplified it demonstrated it and so German idealism was just massively influential because of this grand synthesis that it offered but you can see what's going on here right you can see that this is a very

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powerful attempt to try and save the meaning making machinery and salvage the axial legacy and somehow give us an account of right how we can still develop an increasing contact with reality in a way that is ultimately spiritual and rational at the same time

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Hegel is in many ways a Titanic figure trying to provide a powerful grammar philosophical set of you know concepts the conceptual vocabulary and and and theoretical the theoretical principles for structuring that vocabulary he's trying to create a grammar by which we

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can deeply respond to the meaning crisis he's enormous ly popular and as I said this this form of German idealism spreads across Europe very powerful ways deeply influential you'll even see figures within America like Josiah Royce early on in the Kalista intellectual

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history of America deeply influenced by Hegel so why why is this important well Hegel is just gonna have a profound impact on any future attempts to try and respond to their meaning crisis just because of the way he's trying to

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synthesize everything together but what's more important is for many people this form of idealism German idealism has completely collapsed it doesn't it's no longer considered a viable position now I'm not here to argue about this sort of an abstract philosophical level

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I'm right because there of course there are many defenders of Hegel today I want to take a look at what has happened right in the critical response to Hegel and how that has infused the development and the intensification of the meaning

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crisis remember Hegel sets up this pattern of secularizing religion into systems of ideas that attempt to give us a total explanation and guide he's the Godfather in this sense of totalitarian ideologies so you have three main avenues of seeing

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response we already did one the person who has a right deep critique of Hegel is Schopenhauer because and as you remember Schopenhauer understands the relationship not the way Hegel does in terms of reason Schopenhauer understands it in terms of

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will the will to live and then Nietzsche takes that up as the will to power and he tries to use that as a way of recapturing right self-transcendent so we've already talked about that so I'm not going to go over that again but

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please remember it right so the fact that the aspect of will and the will to live and the will to power wasn't adequately being addressed was what Schopenhauer points to okay and then we have of course the tremendous critique

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of kirkegaard right where the guard famously said Hegel made a system and then sat down beside it what's he what's he pointing out here there's an impersonal ISM there's a lack of perspectival and participatory knowing in Hegel's whole proposal it has been

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rendered into a system of ideas all of this right all of this connectedness to reality to ourselves and to each other all of this process by which we cultivate wisdom and self transcendence has been rendered into a system of beliefs the system of

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ideas perspectival and participatory knowing have been lost the only participation we have is in our understanding and appreciation of the Hegelian system now what does that mean trigger-guard is pointing out I believe to the idea that this our attempt to make contact with

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what's most real or attempt to realize the divine like in platonic and agog a and put plato's dialectic was linked to deeply to an agog a has been completely severed from personal transformation and self transcendence you do not have to

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undergo any radical change you do not have to have mystical experience you don't have to have a higher state of consciousness you do not have to have a encountered a Socratic challenge theology has has become completely conceptual propositional rational self

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reflection it is not in any way engaged with projects of transformative experience Westphal in his book transcendent and self transcendence echoes this critique and points out that while Hegel is proposing this tremendous epistemic self transcendence we come to know how we

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know he has lost the canoe the deep connection you saw in Wright in Plato - what Westfall I'm not quite happy with this calls with this term but he calls it like ethical self transcendent this is the process by which we become

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radically different we overcome our ego centrism we become more capable of a gothic love and kirkegaard points out I think quite correctly that when we move through those transformative experiences it requires what he would call a leap of

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faith and this is a very dangerous concept and I'm not going to try and defend it but I think this makes sense given what we've already seen in the work of La Paul and others that going through these transformative experiences

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is not something you can reason your way through we exist before we discovered this essence about who and what we are that's the whole point of existentialism as I mentioned so what kirkegaard is pointing out is that this

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system for all of its grandeur is in a very deep sense like what Socrates found with the original natural philosophers it is profound truths that have no existential transformative relevance you cannot find in Hegel how to call how to

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cultivate wisdom you can only find a theoretical structure for interpreting history what about Marx Marx is the other great critic of Hegel and I hope you're seeing a pattern here what's missing is the connection to will write our participatory respectable

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involvement what's missing here is the connection to transformative experience to ethical self transcendence what's missing here according to Marx well what Marx is basically arguing again Marx unlike me God you know to just know the Titanic things we're talking about here

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and and and there's there's all these aspects of Marx I can't touch on like this whole economic critique and and that's not what I'm trying to do here March is basically saying right that history is not driven by think of

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Plato think of the man and the lion and the monster history is not driven by reason by the man history is driven by the monster right it's driven by our socio-economic activity as we try to provide for our material existence

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so marks was of course deeply influenced also by flora Bach which means fire stream it's a great name and mark says you can't understand me unless you have passed through the fire stream of fire box work Feuerbach made this proposal

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that religion contra de Hegel that religion is not the arena in which Geist has been unfolding itself and reality and intelligibility had been co-developing instead he argues that religion is a projection a term of course that Freud and Jung are going to

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pick up on that when I'm thinking about God what I'm actually doing is projecting an ideal model of my own humanity and firebox idea is that this projection distorts and distracts us deludes us and it ultimately alienates human beings from their own role within

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historical processes so March is going to take up this idea this critique of religion and he's going to see religion not as Hegel does as you know the the the vessel and vehicle in which Geist is unfolding itself he's going to see

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religion as a noxious projection that is actually deluding people and distracting them from how they are the authors of history so what Marx does is he says okay once we get rid of the religious distortion and we shift to the material

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monster we see the dialectic at work there the dialectic is a dialectical materialism not a dialectical idealism right so the clash is not between ideas that are contrasting and integrating the clash is a process of political struggle between opposing ways of socio economic

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life we have different classes that's what the class is a socio-economic way of life that opposed the the idea of this distinction and articulation has been turned into one of conflict between these classes but these classes are nevertheless systematically

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related they are interdependent they rely and define each other so history is a dialectic good is constantly through these clash these conflict the political struggle between the classes is working out the self contradictions in socio-economic life this is what this is the core of Marx's

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critique of capitalism that contains all these inherent self contradictions and that this process this process of political struggle and violence will work out the self contradictions in our socio-economic activity until we achieve a political state of peace and freedom

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the promised land always the attempt to find the promised land so what is Marx done do you see he's actually in a sense completing I'm not trying to justify I'm just saying he's developing and bringing to a kind

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of logical conclusion the secularization implicit in Hegel and he's supplying I have criticisms of of this being an adequate solution but this is what he sees himself doing he sees himself supplying the missing participant the missing participation that we don't have

Speaker A

in Hegel how do you participate in Hegel well Marx says this is how you participate a call to arms right you know the philosophers have only talked about the world right the communists want to change it that's the Communist

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Manifesto right we you know workers of the world unite we have nothing to lose but our chains the idea is the the dialectic and participation come together in the idea of political socio-economic revolution and you can also see elements of will

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violent ideologies violent totalizing ideologies that promise a secular utopia that is the culmination of the internal logic of history so you have this deep political ization of the process by which people are supposed to try and have faith since

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the course of history participate in the Karl's you see the Kairos of Christianity has become the revolution the turning point in history that you have to participate in you have to be on the right side you have to bring about

Speaker A

the utopia so these three critiques all push this is of course pushing towards existentialism this is a religious kind of existentialism this through Nietzsche is pushing towards a an anti religious existentialism this of course is pushing towards maersk Marxism but what they all

Speaker A

share right is they share a sense that Hegel's totalizing ideology has not captured the core of human meaning making well take a look at how this ramifies through germany and the next episode thank you very much for your

Speaker A

time and attention [Music] you you

Topics:Hegelabsolute idealismGeistKantmeaning crisisRomanticismthing in itselfdialecticMarxJohn Vervaeke

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