Uploaded June 2026 | Updated September 2026, 3 weeks ago
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.
This continues with youtu.be/Tz1psWHKTGA. Get more at partiallyexaminedlife.com. Visit partiallyexaminedlife.com/support to get ad-free episodes and tons of bonus discussion.
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.
This continues with youtu.be/Tz1psWHKTGA. Get more at partiallyexaminedlife.com. Visit partiallyexaminedlife.com/support to get ad-free episodes and tons of bonus discussion.
