Summary of Awakening from the Meaning Crisis by John Vervaeke, Chapter 24: Hegel
Among the many thinkers influenced by Kant was Hegel. As mentioned last time, Kant viewed the rational mind as responsible for framing reality by imposing a model onto the thing in itself. While the Romantics saw rationality as what separates us from reality, Hegel reversed that by claiming that the real is the rational.
As the thing in itself cannot be known, we are left with patterns of rationality as the only relevant reality (idealism). These patterns of intelligibility structure reality, and like living things they can develop towards more rational states. The name for this kind of extended mind in German is Geist, meaning a combination of mind and spirit.
The development of Geist is driven by two processes: differentiation / articulation, and integration. Together, they comprise the systematization of the world itself. This autonomous system gradually evolves as it synthesizes opposing ideas through the dialectical process. In this way, rationality (and thereby reality) realizes itself, ultimately becoming self-aware in the form of the World Spirit (or God).
One of the consequences is that God, as the self-organizing principle of reality, is again seen as rational, and we can again access the divine through rational reflection. Hegel is effectively translating religion into philosophy.
While popular in his time, Hegel’s ideas faced critiques on numerous fronts:
- Schopenhauer (and later Nietzsche) considered the intelligibility patterns to be driven by will (Will to Live, Will to Power), making them fundamentally irrational and arbitrary.
- Kierkegaard criticized Hegel’s philosophy for being a purely intellectual system lacking in the participatory knowledge needed to cultivate wisdom. From the Kierkegaardian perspective, our attempts to realize the divine have been severed from personal transformation (they do not compel us to take the “leap of faith”).
- Marx saw religion as an opium distracting us from the reality of how socioeconomic forces shape history through conflict. The participation that Hegel inherently lacked, Marx provided through a call to political and economic revolution.