Further Into the Struggle of Enlightenment With Superstition

We're making good progress through this long and quite complex - though often enough schematic - section of the Phenomenology.  If there is one central theme running through the entire section, you might say that it is how both Faith and Pure Insight - as shapes of consciousness - are attempting to work out what they actually are.

Neither of them can really do this apart from their other, since they are what they are in relation to each other.  Even if Insight seems to have an advantage over Faith in the historical period of the Enlightenment, this isn't an absolute priority.  Faith has its own "comebacks", and Insight has a lot to learn. . . .

Here are the next three videos in this portion of the work, covering the next six paragraphs.

• Lecture 228 - paragraphs 549
• Lecture 229 - paragraphs 550-552
• Lecture 230 - paragraphs 553-554

February Online Hegel Q&A and Discussion Tomorrow - Join Us!

It is time for another monthly online Half Hour Hegel Q&A and Discussion session.  We'll be holding it tomorrow evening - from 5-6 PM Central Time.  I hope you'll be able to join us for some discussion about Hegel's thought!

This session is open to anyone who would like to participate, not just the Patreon supporters of this project.  We discuss whatever Hegel-related matters people want to bring up, often straying a good distance from Hegel himself into other topics.  I do make sure to give priority to anyone who wants to bring up or ask about something focused on Hegel's thought.

If you'd like to participate, we use FreeConferenceCall as our videoconferencing platform - here's the link that you'll need to use to get into the session.

Support by my Patreon supporters makes work possible for me to engage in and continue, so if you're interested in chipping in a bit to underwrite this crowdfunded project, here's my page.

Four Videos On The Enlightenment

We are now moving into a new section in Spirit - one that is really at the heart of Hegel's entire enterprise - "The Enlightenment."  After a very short introduction - which we managed to get through in just one video lecture - he launches into the first sub-section, "The Struggle of the Enlightenment With Superstition". That part is pretty long - 33 paragraphs, and it will take us a while to get through.

It is followed by a much shorter part, "The Truth of Enlightenment" - just 8 paragraphs long - before we launch into the next main part, "Absolute Freedom and the Terror".  So, you might think of the relationship between these two parts of the Enlightenment section as analogous to the two parts of the earlier "World of Self-Alienated Spirit - Culture" section.  The first one is where much of the action proper takes place, and the second one provides a shorter, transitional treatment, introducing themes that won't be entirely worked through until the following main part of the work.

Here is the one introductory video to this section.

• Lecture 224 - paragraph 538-540

Here are the first three videos in the "The Struggle of the Enlightenment With Superstition" section:

• Lecture 225 - paragraphs 541-543
• Lecture 226 - paragraphs 544-546
• Lecture 227 - paragraphs 547-548

Five Videos - Faith and Pure Inisght

This new sub-section, "Faith and Pure Insight", is much shorter than the one that preceded it, Culture and the Realm of Actuality.  Given that both of them are portions of the first part of the second main section of Spirit - the part titled "Self-Alienated Spirit. Culture" - one might expect that Hegel would have given more space to the Faith and Pure Insight material.

But there is actually a good explanation for why the treatment here is so short.  "Faith and Pure Insight" is really a transitional section, leading right into the next big block of the Phenomenology, devoted to "The Enlightenment", where both Faith and Pure Insight will undergo further development.

This section, then, really is just moving us into the domain of "pure thought" that Hegel tells us takes up past the impasses, hypocrisy, and (though he doesn't use this term) nihilism of the culture dialectic.  It introduces us to Faith and Pure Insight but doesn't aim to exhaustively work through their dialectical relations and development.

Here are those five video lectures:

• Lecture 219 - paragraphs 527-528
• Lecture 220 - paragraph 529
• Lecture 221 - paragraphs 530-533
• Lecture 222 - paragraphs 534-536
• Lecture 223 - paragraph 537

Finishing Up Culture and the Realm of Actuality

With these three videos, we finish up this long sub-section in the middle of the Spirit portion of the work, Culture and the Realm of Actuality.

Going through the dialectic of culture required 18 lectures - there's a lot of material there - but we're now ready to move past culture or Bildung, an actuality in the world, and to focus on what Hegel depicts as a realm of "pure thought", the dialectic of Faith and Insight.

Here are the three lectures with which we end the study of this part of the work, and get ready to move right into the next, much shorter part.

• Lecture 216 - paragraphs 521-522
• Lecture 217 - paragraphs 523-524
• Lecture 218 - paragraphs 525-526