Ep. 392: Early Hegel Elevates Reason (Part Two)
The Partially Examined Life Philosophy Podcast
Mark Linsenmayer
4.6 • 2.3K Ratings
🗓️ 1 June 2026
⏱️ 50 minutes
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Summary
Continuing on Faith and Knowledge (1802), Ch. 1 and 2. We start off by discussing how beauty might give us a window into things-in-themselves according to the Romantics, who were in part following Kant's lead. Also, what version of the ontological argument for the existence of God does Hegel believe? We try to figure out what Hegel is praising in Kant's positing of synthetic a priori claims, and yet how he thinks Kant didn't understand the implications of this view.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hey, this is the partially examined life, episode 392, part two. |
| 0:12.3 | We've been talking about Hegel's essay, Faith and Knowledge from 1802. |
| 0:17.8 | And I think you wanted to say something, Seth, when we stopped here. |
| 0:21.5 | Right. |
| 0:21.7 | So when we closed out, part one, Wes had mentioned the romantics and the idea that an artifact has this sort of beautiful external appearance, but part of the aesthetic experience is to look through that into it. And there's |
| 0:38.1 | something inside of it, so to speak, that connects you to the absolute or to the universal or to |
| 0:43.6 | the infinite, however you want to characterize it. And initially, I wasn't sure, I realized I'd lost |
| 0:49.1 | the thread. I'm assuming that Wes was not saying that this was the Contean position, but that he was sort of |
| 0:55.9 | talking more about aligning Hegel with the romantics, or at least saying the Hegelian view is |
| 1:00.5 | similar to this. |
| 1:01.6 | Did I, am I correct in that? |
| 1:03.3 | Yeah, I was associating. |
| 1:05.1 | He's not, I don't think it's an exact. |
| 1:07.2 | Not exactly, but. |
| 1:08.2 | Yeah, but Hegel, all of these guys get this out of the third critique of the critique of judgment |
| 1:14.5 | where there's something special about aesthetic judgment also called a reflective judgment. |
| 1:21.0 | It's not just the aesthetic judgment, but it's the type of judgment where we can understand |
| 1:25.3 | that organic beings seem to be intelligently designed. |
| 1:29.7 | And then in judgments of beauty, there's an element of those where the world seems to be |
| 1:34.3 | designed for our senses. So there's the inherent teleology to this. And this is the other aspect. |
| 1:40.5 | Hegel is all about this teleology. He thinks this is also critical. And even Khan himself |
| 1:46.1 | and his, you know, even though he argued against the argument for God from intelligent design, |
... |
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