This is the key idea on which the entire edifice of Hegelianism was to be constructed: there is no absolute difference between the human nature and the divine. — https://mises.org/library/hegel-and-man-god

Even according to orthodoxy, Jesus was at once human and divine - that is in keeping with trinitarian theology although I don't think they would accept absolute identity. But the key difference between Hegel and Feuerbach would be, I'm sure, that Hegel believes in the reality of spirit (geist) where the latter cannot.

'God-as-reason' could be interpreted as 'spirit-as-reason', if "reason" is understood in its broadest possible sense. Remember that for Hegel, following Kant, the deepest aspect of reason is antinomy, and Hegel interprets this as a sign that being itself is antinomous (dialectical).

I don't see the purported gap between Hegel and Feuerbach in the second quoted passage. Could you explain?

God is nothing but.... — Feuerbach

That sets off all my reductionist red flags....

Hegel lectured on Eirugena as part of his 'history of philosophy', and Eirugena's dialectic was formative for Hegel's philosophy.

As a speculative theologian, Eriugena concerned himself with the question, why did God have a need to create, or, “why is there something rather than nothing?”...

The answer to the question of 'why God creates' constitutes a theodicy that anticipates what must logically follow as the reason d’être of the hidden principles in nature that the natural philosopher seeks to uncover. Eriugena’s answer to the question of 'why God creates' is that, before God created, He Himself had no existence; thus, God and his making, or His creative action, are not distinguishable, but come into being co-constitutively. Whatever is understood in Him is actualized and participates in Him. Creation, in the orthodox sense of an ontological wedge driven between God and nature, is for Eriugena only metaphorical because the creator does not transcend nature, and therefore the creation is not dependent on the creator, nor does the creator depend on the creation — the creator and His creation are of the same indivisible substance. (Note this anticipates pantheism, although that is a term which did not exist at the time.]

Accordingly, the metaphysical speculation of Eriugena pre-supposes no radical separation between the creator and the creation [however, see note below]; hence, his supposition that the creation is of the same substance as that which is created, as in the case of Plotinus’ order of metaphysical entities emanating from the One. All things, events, and their consequences, are rationally and logically connected. According to Eriugena, there is reason and purpose inscribed in the order of nature because the source of nature is itself rational and purposive. The motives of human beings, then, are the motives of God; furthermore, the rational nature of the human subject allows the rational mind of man to access and become one with the rationally intelligible object. In terms of nature achieving final stability and perfection, the cycle of the return of nature to its divine source crowns Eriugena’s conception of God as the beginning, middle, and end of Himself.

According to Hegel, the act of the World Spirit coming to know itself through human history is likewise a dialectical process that culminates in the manifestation of universal freedom [here is where you can see the indebtedness to Eirugena]. The Hegelian contribution to the conception of 'God becoming man' plays out in his conception of the progress of world history, which is moved through a series of punctuated events involving what are referred to by Hegel as “world historical individuals.” These individuals, of which such men as Caesar and Napoleon are exemplars, are the tools of the World Spirit, the means by which history is moved forward. Great leaders, while believing themselves to be in command of their own will and actions, are in reality guided by the World Spirit towards the achievement of its necessary end, which is the coming to a knowledge of itself through history.

But a couple of other major points have to be noted. One, it was precisely this conception of 'the geist realising itself in history' that Marx inverted, leading to the saying that 'Marx stood Hegel on his head' (i.e. by converting an idealist dialectic to a materialist one). Feuerbach was also part of that movement, which re-interpreted Hegel's philosophy in materialist terms. So I think Hegel could not have accepted Feuerbach's interpretation, although I don't know that for sure.

Secondly, the above excerpt leaves out something important about Eirugena, which is the dialectical nature of his account of the relationship of God and the world:

an affirmation concerning the lower (order) is a negation concerning the higher, and so too a negation concerning the lower (order) is an affirmation concerning the higher. (Periphyseon, I.444a)
According to this mode, the affirmation of man is the negation of angel and vice versa. This mode illustrates Eriugena's original way of dissolving the traditional Neoplatonic hierarchy of being into a dialectic of affirmation and negation: to assert one level is to deny the others. In other words, a particular level may be affirmed to be real by those on a lower or on the same level, but the one above it is thought not to be real in the same way. If humans are thought to exist in a certain way, then angels do not exist in that way.

SEP.

So here is preserved the notion that there are different kinds or levels of being - that the 'being of an angel' is of a different kind to 'the being of a human'. I think that was subsequently lost with Duns Scotus and the 'univocity of being', but vestiges of it lived on in philosophy, even in Hegel.

I am reading Dermot Moran's The Philosophy of John Scottus Eriugena: A Study of Idealism in the Middle Ages (an expensive and hard-to-find book, but it's actually findable as PDF on Moran's site.) Moran argues that Eirugena lays the groundwork of what was to become German idealism a millennium later.

Nice quote. Marx strikes me as an over-correction. If the German philosophers emphasized the dominance of non-thought by thought, then Marx did the opposite. Instead of matter as a function of the idea, we have the idea as a function of matter. But Marx sawed off the branch he was singing from. If the realm of culture is one with the deterministic realm of history and matter, then why all the hand-wringing and accusation? In short there's a tension between the scientific role and the prophetic social-justice role in Marx that's hard to take seriously. Feuerbach was more of "scientist" in his desire. I think he wanted to see clearly more than he wanted to lead others in a practical cause. (His biography supports this.)

But the "levels of being" seems to run through all of them, in terms of stages of consciousness and stages of the division of labor. At the end is absolute knowledge, complete incarnation, classless society, the abolition of difference, etc. I like this period in philosophy because it's so "human." Just about everyone cares about this sort of issue. And I think this connects to Feuerbach's materialism. He was trying to get real, become genuine.

The unity of thought and being has meaning and truth only if man is comprehended as the basis and subject of this unity. Only a real being cognises real things; only where thought is not its own subject but the predicate of a real being is it not separated from being. The unity of thought and being is therefore not formal, meaning that being as a determination does not belong to thought in and for itself; rather, this unity depends on the object, the content of thought.

From this arises the following categorical imperative: Desire not to be a philosopher if being a philosopher means being different to man; do not be anything more than a thinking man; think not as a thinker, that is, not as one confined to a faculty which is isolated in so far as it is torn away from the totality of the real being of man; think as a living, real being, in which capacity you are exposed to the vivifying and refreshing waves of the ocean of the world; think as one who exists, as one who is in the world and is part of the world, not as one in the vacuum of abstraction, not as a solitary monad, not as an absolute monarch, not as an unconcerned, extra-worldly God; only then can you be sure that being and thought are united in all your thinking. How should thought as the activity of a real being not grasp real things and entities? Only when thought is cut off from man and confined to itself do embarrassing, fruitless, and, from the standpoint of an isolated thought, unresolvable questions arise: How does thought reach being, reach the object? For confined to itself, that is, posited outside man, thought is outside all ties and connections with the world. You elevate yourself to an object only in so far as you lower yourself so as to be an object for others. You think only because your thoughts themselves can be thought, and they are true only if they pass the test of objectivity, that is, when someone else, to whom they are given as objects, acknowledges them as such. You see because you are yourself a visible being, you feel because you are yourself a feelable being. Only to an open mind does the world stand open, and the openings of the mind are only the senses. But the thought that exists in isolation, that is enclosed in itself, is detached from the senses, cut off from man, is outside man – that thought is absolute subject which cannot or ought not to be an object for others. But precisely for that reason, and despite all efforts, it is forever unable to cross over to theobject , to being; it is like a head separated from the body, which must remain unable to seize hold of an object because it lacks the means, the organs to do so. — F

Sure, I think F has this kind of passage in mind:

It is as a universal, too, that we(3) give utterance to sensuous fact. What we say is: “This”, i.e. the universal this; or we say: “it is”, i.e. being in general. Of course we do not present before our mind in saying, so the universal this, or being in general, but we utter what is universal; in other words, we do not actually and absolutely say what in this sense-certainty we really mean. Language, however, as we see, is the more truthful; in it we ourselves refute directly and at once our own “meaning”; and since universality is the real truth of sense-certainty, and language merely expresses this truth, it is not possible at all for us even to express in words any sensuous existence which we “mean”.

...
Pure being, then, remains as the essential element for this sense-certainty, since sense-certainty in its very nature proves the universal to be the truth of its object. But that pure being is not in the form of something immediate, but of something in which the process of negation and mediation is essential. — H

Hegel makes a great point here, but perhaps he is attached to the domination of matter by mind or the reduction of non-mind to mind.

The most important thing to realise is that absolute thought, that is, thought which is isolated and cut off from sensuousness, cannot get beyond formal identity – the identity of thought with itself; for although thought or concept is determined as the unity of opposite determinations, the fact remains that these determinations are themselves only abstractions, thought-determinations – hence, always repetitions of the self-identity of thought, only multipla of identity as the absolutely true point of departure. The Other as counterposed to the Idea, but posited by the Idea itself, is not truly and in reality distinguished from it, not allowed to exist outside the Idea, or if it is, then only pro forma, only in appearance to demonstrate the liberality of the idea; for the Other of the Idea is itself Idea with the only difference that it does not yet have the form of the idea, that it is not yet posited and realised as such. Thought confined to itself is thus unable to arrive at anything positively distinct from and opposed to itself; for that very reason it also has no other criterion of truth except that something does not contradict the Idea or thought – only a formal, subjective criterion that is not in a position to decide whether the truth of thought is also the truth of reality. Ale criterion which alone can decide this question is sensuous perception. One should always hear the opponent. And sensuous perception is precisely the antagonist of thought. Sensuous perception takes things in a broad sense, but thought takes them in the narrowest sense; perception leaves things in their unlimited freedom, but thought imposes on them laws that are only too often despotic; perception introduces clarity into the head, but without determining or deciding anything; thought performs a determining function, but it also often makes the mind narrow; perception in itself has no principles and thought in itself has no life; the rule is the way of thought and exception to the rule is that of perception. Hence, just as true perception is perception determined by thought, so true thought is the thought that has been enlarged and opened up by perception so as to correspond to the essence of reality. The thought that is identical, and exists in an uninterrupted continuity, with itself, lets the world circle, in contradiction to reality, around itself as its center; but the thought that is interrupted through the observation as to the irregularity of this movement, or through the anomaly of perception, transforms this circular movement into an elliptical one in accordance with the truth. The circle is the symbol, the coat of arms of speculative philosophy, of the thought that has only itself to support itself. — F

Of course I think they're both great. Hegel is spectacular. His critics often take and use more than they object to. They sacrifice the husk to save the kernel.

I didn't much like Feuerback, or Marx, for that matter, or any of other European atheists intellectuals. My view always was, they're reacting against the extreme pressure to conform that characterised the Western and European religious tradition. In European history, the Church was for a long while the only central authority and political power. The various wars of religion and other conflicts, engendered a massive counter-movement, exemplified in Enlightenment rationalism, of which the secular intelligentsia are a product.

But this reaction was based on a particular type of religous mentality and an authoritarian conception of God. It is not at all like the understanding of the mystics, the spiritually illuminated, and many other forms of religious sensibility that existed inside, outside and along side the Church-dominated authoritarianism of the West.

I think your diagnosis is exactly right, but that doesn't mean there's nothing of value in Marx (or Feuerbach, though I don't know with him. I never read more than a tenth of the book; i asked for it more for symbolic reasons. What I do recall strikes me as Common Sense carving a path in the Hegelian thicket.)

But mysticism and lived-religion (as opposed to socially-driven participation in rituals for pragmatic reasons) carries its own dangers. The guy who does Slate Star Codex made the very good point that mysticism is a practice but a weird one in that, to a much greater extent than with other practices, people are prone to conflate knowledge/theory of the tradition with actual faniliarity(think periodic participation in meditation retreats as analagous to silver-spooned well-theoried radicals participating in worker demonstrations from time to time. Does the theory serve the participation or is the participation an offering to (or credentials to speak of) the theory?)

I take your point. Still, when we speak as "philosophers" (or present a crystallization of our living personality in a blog post), we are indeed (like it or not) carving a persona, which is to say an image of ourselves in the mind of another. We do not have direct access to one another. We do tend to attempt at least to control this image. And this makes sense, since we largely define ourselves in terms of the inferior other (liberals versus conservatives is an easy example). We know all too well (from our own dark hearts) how quick to stereotype and categorize that pesky, self-preserving Other can be.

(forewarning: this is a rambly post)

Yes, agreed. I've always struggled to understand the ethical import of the fact that we carve personas. Like, is carving a persona a falsification, a cynical manipulation? Maybe some of the moral stickiness of this stems from the Romantic idea that a work in any given medium can - and ought - to express fully the person who creates it.

One way to sidestep this dynamic is to view any expression, in any medium, as operating within an (inherited) genre. It's impossible for a work, within a genre, to express the whole, and there's no way to escape genre into the Genre of all Genres. Literature's 'realists,' for example, quickly, helplessly, developed their own set of conventions (and also half-consciously imported a whole bunch of old ones.)

This is a kind of language-game type view. A blog post (or anything else) would consist of 'moves' within a game. In addition to object-level moves (just the shit you talk about: Recipes maybe or thoughts on Hegel or Hillary's being implicated by Benghazi etc.) there are also meta-moves which

- communicate your own credentials to make certain object-level moves ('hell I was THERE at Benghazi" "I went to a prestigious culinary school" etc.)

- anticipate and prevent undesired countermoves ( "I know DMT has a reputation, but I'm not one of those Joe Rogan bros, my experience with it stems from my background in chemistry" "One objection to what I've said is x, but this is why x doesn't apply here" etc.)

- change the rules of the game itself (Having trouble thinking of a good example at the moment, but basically reframing things in a way that disrupts the way one's audience has grown to expect how one move will lead to another.)

- facilitate a transition from one game to another ( "OH YEAH, how bout you come down here and say that to my face!"

Anyway, the whole idea is that, if you get rid of the notion that you can or ought to express yourself fully in any one game, then the authentic/inauthentic dialectic and the language of masks no longer applies. An attack on one's honor isn't an unmasking, but an assault on one's right to participate in this or that social or political game. Of course that doesn't make it any less emotionally charged.

& of course, things don't break apart that easily. We contain multitudes, right, and we're animated by different forces that are all jostling to play different games, often at the same time. Many different uses can be made of the same game. So, for instance: talking about an alternative reading of Sartre's Being and Nothingness can be both an analysis germane to the topic and hand and a way of signalling that you have the capacity to not only comprehend difficult texts, but to also understand it at a level that goes beyond simply grasping what the author is trying to communicate.

I still can't meditate very well, but I started to get better when I realized the point wasn't to shut up my inner dialogue, but to watch it without identifying with it. (That's a truism, but it took me a long time to realize what that really meant.) But the neat part was seeing how my inner chatter consisted of a bunch of different, like, voices, each with very different goals. One would talk about how much I fucked this up, and that that meant I was BAD . One would talk about conceivable fantasy futures where I'm recognized as really great for x, y or z. One would talk about reasonable, practical ways to do this or that. One (instantly shouted out by the others) would try to get me to remember this or that memory from childhood.

One in particular though, was (is) super obsessed with stating novel truths. It's an end-in-itself for this voice. It's always on the prowl for new material to do this. But it's also kind of dumb in that it seems to think that the next truth will be the final one, despite that (obviously) never having happened in the past. This voice likes to team up with the voice that says I'm BAD and the voice that talks about fantasy futures. Or rather, the fantasy future voice and the let's-say-a-truth voice are constantly fighting with the bad voice, in a futile sisyphean tug-of-war. 'You're Bad.' 'But you could be very good!' 'And one way to do that is to find a truth, and say it!'

To go back: while the dialectic is useful, it seems to unfold by drowning out most of the voices, in order to highlight a select few. And when those voices have the stage, they like to pretend they're the only ones.

This seems impossible to escape if you're (half-consciously) identifying with any given voice (and so assenting to what it says). It takes effort - for me at least - to remember that anything I happen to be thinking at any time is only a small part of the actual situation.

In Hegel's case the need to state the final truth was desperately trying to assert itself, I think, above all the other voices. And Hegel was clever and self-conscious enough to realize he couldn't simply ignore those other voices. So instead he organized them and set them in motion in a way that allowed them to be subjected to the one voice.

So, there was a time when I would have written this whole thing goaded on by the 'future fantasy' voice, only to realize that I was looking for recognition for stating a final truth, which would make me feel bad.

But like, Idk, its part true, part not. I'm trying to convey something I actually feel, and, probably, some of the other voices, or tendencies, are gonna try to get their cut, but that's only a small part of the whole.

(Also NB these aren't 'real' voices.)

tl:dr

finite doesn't have to mean false & authentic doesn't have to mean infinite.

From the beginning, to find the reasons and remedies for the unpredictable phenomena of nature and life, humans stretched their imagination beyond the realm of available facts. Such a quest is emotional thinking, driven by greed and fear coupled with pride, which makes you fool your mind. This is how some prophets come up with off answers.

In a family, parents hold large control over the children. Since in pre-industrial time humans always faced the raw forces of nature, and often the flagrant and lawless interaction with others, the stronger of the two ganders, man, was the head of the family. Therefore, naturally, a figure of the supreme father was imagined. This is how God, and associated concepts were formed. We call this set of concepts spirituality. Spirituality demands blind obedience, because logic cannot explain it. Since spirituality depends largely on imagination, its format differs from culture to culture. Over time, mystery, myth and rituals were added, by greedy and misguided spiritual leaders.

Trade with other lands created towns. As communities grew in size, more law and order were established within, and their collective abilities were better able to counter the threats from outside and the wreath of nature. But we know that even the national strengths of a mighty super power, like us, is sometimes not enough to overcome the threats. For this reason the concepts involved in spirituality keep improving, as new facts are uncovered by cumulative observations and logic (i.e. scientifically), throughout the history.

Around 700 B.C, Iron was discovered. This made for higher production, enhancing the division of labor, and faster transportation and communication, by clearing land for roads faster. As a result, the kingdoms stared expanding. The ensuing wars devastated communities. This pain encouraged deep introspection. The world saw the lords of wisdom emerging. These exalted persons shaded all the crud from the definition of meaning of life, and gave us the quite correct roads to happiness. Incidentally, they defined the entity controlling our fate. Ironically, indigenous Indian religions deny the existence of God, and place ‘Karmas’ in the status of the supreme entity.

We perceive that everything has a cause, and that it becomes reason for a subsequent event. We call the understanding of this cause and effect as logic. The universe is logic. You can see this more vividly in mathematics. And so logic is the only vehicle on which, our effort to sustain our existence, and to manipulate the universe, within our sphere of influence, to achieve happiness, can ride. Majority of people in the world still proffer blind obedience to their religions. This gives them temporary respite from fear and impetus to their greed. This is an effort to shortchange your fate of due efforts. This is pride. On the other hand all sound religions preach humbleness.

Now no new religions are taking root, not only because all cultures of the world are already deeply rooted in their respective religions, but also because we have enough wisdom available from the masters to please the sincere followers, seeking deep wisdom about life. And science is destroying myths at an accelerating pace. God, being only a tool for this purpose, is slowly taking a back seat.

Maybe some of the moral stickiness of this stems from the Romantic idea that a work in any given medium can - and ought - to express fully the person who creates it. — csalisbury

I definitely relate to the impulse to tell the whole truth, which is to say reveal the whole person. But that's like exposing one's belly to the claws of a strangers. I think I might really have the courage to face merely verbal contempt, but I'm a slave to the dollar. Truth's a dog that must to kennel, even if it's just "truth." But I still measure personal relationships in terms of how much I have to censor myself (which I might self-flaterringly describe in terms of how "free" or "real" the persons involved are.)

One way to sidestep this dynamic is to view any expression, in any medium, as operating within an (inherited) genre. It's impossible for a work, within a genre, to express the whole, and there's no way to escape genre into the Genre of all Genres. Literature's 'realists,' for example, quickly, helplessly, developed their own set of conventions (and also half-consciously imported a whole bunch of old ones.) — csalisbury

I love this, and I totally agree. To be understood at all requires a background of mutual assumption,exposure, and expectation. Novelty is key. We want to delight others, and jokes and philosophy arguably do this in terms of surprise--which requires expectation.

his is a kind of language-game type view. A blog post (or anything else) would consist of 'moves' within a game. In addition to object-level moves (just the shit you talk about: Recipes maybe or thoughts on Hegel or Hillary's being implicated by Benghazi etc.) there are also meta-moves which

- communicate your own credentials to make certain object-level moves ('hell I was THERE at Benghazi" "I went to a prestigious culinary school" etc.)

- anticipate and prevent undesired countermoves ( "I know DMT has a reputation, but I'm not one of those Joe Rogan bros, my experience with it stems from my background in chemistry" "One objection to what I've said is x, but this is why x doesn't apply here" etc.)

- change the rules of the game itself (Having trouble thinking of a good example at the moment, but basically reframing things in a way that disrupts the way one's audience has grown to expect how one move will lead to another.)

- facilitate a transition from one game to another ( "OH YEAH, how bout you come down here and say that to my face!" — csalisbury

Again, I totally agree, and I'm delighted to see it written in black and white. That's the sort of self-consciouness that fascinates me. Changing the rules of the game is what I mean by abnormal discourse (which I steal from Rorty who stole from ...). That's the thrill of philosophy. It doesn't just break this or that proposition. It goes all King Slender on paradigms as a whole. (I also liked the lizard guy, but King Slender was my go to, and I hope this reference lands, so I feel less old.)

Anyway, the whole idea is that, if you get rid of the notion that you can or ought to express yourself fully in any one game, then the authentic/inauthentic dialectic and the language of masks no longer applies. An attack on one's honor isn't an unmasking, but an assault on one's right to participate in this or that social or political game. Of course that doesn't make it any less emotionally charged.

& of course, things don't break apart that easily. We contain multitudes, right, and we're animated by different forces that are all jostling to play different games, often at the same time. Many different uses can be made of the same game. So, for instance: talking about an alternative reading of Sartre's Being and Nothingness can be both an analysis germane to the topic and hand and a way of signalling that you have the capacity to not only comprehend difficult texts, but to also understand it at a level that goes beyond simply grasping what the author is trying to communicate. — csalisbury

I agree with all of this. But I feel compelled to clarify my own position. I try to avoid thinking in terms of oughts (beyond simple prudence). Instead I think in terms of desire. I desire to create the genre or game if necessary to express myself fully, but really this already exists partially in my best relationships. Occasionally one bumps up against limits and greedily fantasizes about a yet more circular ellipse. For instance, I'm "alone" with my favorite books in real life. Part of my reason for appearing on a forum like this is simply the desire to share affection for certain glorious ideas or realizations, which for me is more or less synonymous with friendship in a highly sublimated form. Anonymity is beautiul. We are "pure spirit." We are word-streams. Of course the bodiless god of the OP comes to mind. I experience my own name as a toe-tag. I didn't choose it. Of course that's silly and eccentric, but I associate it with what I respect about myself. History is a nightmare from which we continuously awake. (It's not that dire of a situation, but who doesn't wince as their stupid, former selves?

I still can't meditate very well, but I started to get better when I realized the point wasn't to shut up my inner dialogue, but to watch it without identifying with it. (That's a truism, but it took me a long time to realize what that really meant.) But the neat part was seeing how my inner chatter consisted of a bunch of different, like, voices, each with very different goals. One would talk about how much I fucked this up, and that that meant I was BAD . One would talk about conceivable fantasy futures where I'm recognized as really great for x, y or z. One would talk about reasonable, practical ways to do this or that. One (instantly shouted out by the others) would try to get me to remember this or that memory from childhood.

One in particular though, was (is) super obsessed with stating novel truths. It's an end-in-itself for this voice. It's always on the prowl for new material to do this. But it's also kind of dumb in that it seems to think that the next truth will be the final one, despite that (obviously) never having happened in the past. This voice likes to team up with the voice that says I'm BAD and the voice that talks about fantasy futures. Or rather, the fantasy future voice and the let's-say-a-truth voice are constantly fighting with the bad voice, in a futile sisyphean tug-of-war. 'You're Bad.' 'But you could be very good!' 'And one way to do that is to find a truth, and say it!' — csalisbury

Yes, indeed. Multitudes. In that sense the chosen persona is very much a mask. We are brown in our guts but get to choose how we paint our verbal surface, within Freudian limits.

The honor issue is fascinating. It touches on conflicting visions of the masculine. In some cases it would just be crude to defend one's honor. One debases one's self further by taking the dishonor seriously. There's some great Dostoevsky on this theme. Stavrogin in The Possessed is unforgettable. He refuses to kill what's-his-name after the public slap. At first all the men of honor despise him as a coward. Finally some old general re-interprets this restrain in terms of what's-his-name's social status being too low to ...deserve retribution. Then they all celebrate him for being more noble and impressive than they are. There's a humor so deep and black in Dostoevsky (here and there) that makes we want to cry....with a dark joy, of course.

Anyway, I know what you mean about the voices. I also try to listen neutrally and stony-faced to the complexity of my heart in all of its wickedness and generosity. Somehow it became a matter of principle. This is one of the reasons I love Kojeve. Philosophy as a religion of self-consciousness? You betcha. Childhood happened to shape me for just that questionable game.

I really like the "You're bad, but you could be good." I think we tend to preserve our "spiritual bodies" which is to say self-image so that criticism is hard to admit to consciousness without the accompanying possibility of a fix. As a writer and musician, I've often decided that everything I had done to that point was shit. But this was only tolerable when I felt that I had just figured out why it was shit and how it therefore wouldn't be shit in the future. The same applies to the self. "I can admit I'm shit now because I was shit relative to the recently discovered future and diamond self."

Of course I also relate to truth-presentation as a supreme heroism. Sure, I shave off universal validity in theory. I embrace pragmatism and skepticism. But there is some synonym of the word truth that I can't help adoring and pursuing. I might say "style" or "beauty," but it's a little more scientific/conceptual than that, if only because it's conceptual.

To go back: while the dialectic is useful, it seems to unfold by drowning out most of the voices, in order to highlight a select few. And when those voices have the stage, they like to pretend they're the only ones.

This seems impossible to escape if you're (half-consciously) identifying with any given voice (and so assenting to what it says). It takes effort - for me at least - to remember that anything I happen to be thinking at any time is only a small part of the actual situation.

So, there was a time when I would have written this whole thing goaded on by the 'future fantasy' voice, only to realize that I was looking for recognition for stating a final truth, which would make me feel bad.

But like, Idk, its part true, part not. I'm trying to convey something I actually feel, and, probably, some of the other voices, or tendencies, are gonna try to get their cut, but that's only a small part of the whole.

(Also NB these aren't 'real' voices.) — csalisbury

This is all great, too. I phrase in terms of "the laughter of the gods." We can get very passionate about the intellectual performance and lose ourselves in it, but, indeed, we speak from partial selves and in sense only partial truths. One could say that all thinking is reductionist. I very much appreciate that you are communicating something you actually feel. That's also what motivated me to be open about things that I knew weren't entirely respectable and could easily be misunderstood.

Pardon me butting in - I like the 'genres'. I'm interested in taking from Bakhtin the notion of speech genres and applying them in the philosophy of language to the idea of speech acts. But it can be a creepy idea. There is no 'authentic' voice, only the ring of authenticity in a particular genre. (Just as there is no metalanguage for the 20th century logicians, you've got to face it, the metalanguage is English too.)

Still, I'm amazed you two get all this from Feuerbach, whom I've tried, but to me he's only seemed a footnote to Marx on the one hand and George Eliot (his first translator) on the other. Maybe I need to give him another go. :)

Still, I'm amazed you two get all this from Feuerbach, whom I've tried, but to me he's only seemed a footnote to Marx on the one hand and George Eliot (his first translator) on the other. Maybe I need to give him another go. :) — mcdoodle

I was surprised by how deep Essence turned out to be. And the Eliot translation is beautiful. As far as Marx goes, I recently enjoyed The German Ideology. I did learn to respect Marx in a new way, but I can't help feeling that Marx had a narrower soul. Feuerbach is a big-hearted man. As you may know, he had a great love affair that was connected to his embrace of "sensualism"(materialism). He felt the poverty of conceptual clockwork that willfully ignored the largely sensual human situation. "Real" bread (this bread here "beneath" the concept , however invisible to the system of universals) is nevertheless primary.

That sets off all my reductionist red flags... — Wayfarer

It is indeed reductionist. But one could argue that all philosophy is reductionist, just as every map is a reduction of the territory and useful exactly for that reason. I can't fit the city in my pocket. If I could, I still wouldn't have the vision to read this copy of the city.

So maybe the real issue is whether a personality as a whole is narrow. We might carry a plurality of potent reductions that balance one another out. To studiously avoid reductions in any particular work threatens the work with a useless ambiguity. It's arguably better to err on the side of exaggeration, so that the thesis is clear enough to be assimilated. Rest assured the experience reader will figure out its limited zone of application and its friction against other beloved and useful reductions.