If something helps us to interpret experiences of the divine/supernatural, then it helps us to understand the divine/supernatural. This is to say that if something helps us to interpret something that we experience, then it helps us to understand that thing. For example, we can conceptualise this as translating language. People can speak to us in any language they want, but we cannot understand them unless we can interpret what they are saying in a way that we can understand it. This works the same for divine/supernatural experiences. To understand such a thing, we must be able to interpret it. Therefore, if anything can help us to interpret such an experience, then it, in turn, helps to understand that experience. — ClayG

I have no knowledge of Hegel but your introductory presuppositions seem problematic.

You seem to begin with an assumption there is a supernatural or divine. How did you arrive at this?

Would the first step not be describing what a supernatural account is and why it would require such interpretive steps (Hegel as medium)? Perhaps I have you wrong but the analogy with a foreign language seems limited since when we hear a foreign language, we know it is a language and we can still understand some things. We also have a demonstration of a language being used. The supernatural, as far as we are aware, provides no such demonstration and might be said to consist of silence, which some people fill with claims or speculations.

Therefore, Hegel’s dialectical model can help us understand experiences of the divine/supernatural. — ClayG

Perhaps what you would need to do is take an example of a specific supernatural claim and apply this dialectic to it? Demonstrate it in action. I'm not even sure if thesis-antithesis-synthesis are pure Hegel or not. I think this was Fichte.

built into Hegel’s dialectic is the possibility of both being right and wrong in specific aspects...find a synthesis of both views. — ClayG

:up:

In other words, many theories get something right but go too far ( claim to much ) or leave something out ( completely ignore something vital ).

It's great you mention synthesis. Hegel noticed that the human world was increasing in complexity. He also saw that those alive now are truly the Ancients, for have more cultural memory (more synthesis) than any who came before. We are cumulative, timebinding beings.

With this in mind, talk of God gets more and more complex, more and more correct (or less and less shallow.) For Hegel, we 'are' God. Theology itself is God. [ God is 'just' incarnate theology, etc. ]But theology doesn't realize this immediately but only after a sufficiently intensive and creative self-critical synthesis. The world comes to understand itself and this very understanding in us, we timebinding selfexploring theological-metaphorical brickstacking primates.

You seem to begin with an assumption there is a supernatural or divine. — Tom Storm

Whereas, the general consensus on this forum is that any claims of religious revelation or accounts of the divine arising from religious or mystical traditions generally should be disregarded as valid sources of knowledge and/or information and should be put to one side. Would you agree with that?

for the most part, traditional dialectics, by their very nature, start with the assumption that one side is right and one side is wrong. — ClayG

I don't know if that is really correct. Dialectic has always comprised a dialogue between opposing points of view, but part of the point of dialectic is that in this exchange an understanding emerges from the tension between them which may not be disclosed without there being this opposition. But, that said, overall I agree with your analysis of the value of Hegel's dialectical approach for the evaluation of religious ideas.

Whereas, the general consensus on this forum is that any claims of religious revelation or accounts of the divine arising from religious or mystical traditions generally should be disregarded as valid sources of knowledge and/or information and should be put to one side. Would you agree with that? — Wayfarer

No. I think there are plenty of folk here who don't hold to naturalism. Even moderators. :wink: I personally don't have reason to accept any accounts/claims that come through mystical traditions, but I would need to investigate specific instances.

But it has to be said that a supernatural realm or entity (whatever that even means) can't just be asserted with no demonstration or at least an example. Doesn't seem to be a useful starting point. To use the OP's analogy - how can you translate a language until you know it is a language?

Perhaps if the OP has said - let's suppose for the sake of argument that X exists... that might have been more fruitful beginning. It would be useful to have a specific example.

Out of interest can you site a reference for Hegel actually employing the thesis-antithesis-synthesis model?

For Hegel, we 'are' God. Theology itself is God. [ God is 'just' incarnate theology, etc. ] — plaque flag

Which means what exactly? That we invent concepts and that's enough to be getting on with? Is the metaphor the thing itself? Does by this account Shakespeare's play become Hamlet? (I'm not referencing Bloom's Invention of the Human, unless you insist). :wink:

Out of interest can you site a reference for Hegel actually employing the thesis-antithesis-synthesis model? — Tom Storm

You are correct ( I think ) that he got it from Fichte, but he did use it, at least implicitly. The key idea is determinate negation, which allows us to construct a differentiated system of concepts. One remembers, contains, and understands (from the inside) less sophisticated positions. Russian dolls. Concentric circles.
https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/works/ph/phprefac.htm
[ Starts around section 39. ]

[We] might ask to be taken straight to the truth at once: why meddle with what is false at all?

[This] may be answered here by considering the character of negativity in general regarded as something false. The usual ideas on this subject particularly obstruct the approach to the truth. ...

Truth and falsehood as commonly understood belong to those sharply defined ideas which claim a completely fixed nature of their own, one standing in solid isolation on this side, the other on that, without any community between them.

Against that view it must be pointed out, that truth is not like stamped coin that is issued ready from the mint and so can be taken up and used. Nor, again, is there something false, any more than there is something evil.
...
To know something falsely means that knowledge is not adequate to, is not on equal terms with, its substance. Yet this very dissimilarity is the process of distinction in general, the essential moment in knowing. It is, in fact, out of this active distinction that its harmonious unity arises, and this identity, when arrived at, is truth. But it is not truth in a sense which would involve the rejection of the discordance, the diversity, like dross from pure metal; nor, again, does truth remain detached from diversity, like a finished article from the instrument that shapes it. Difference itself continues to be an immediate element within truth as such, in the form of the principle of negation, in the form of the activity of Self.

Which means what exactly? That we invent concepts and that's enough to be getting on with? — Tom Storm

As I read the situation, some of the Germans of this era were transforming Christian pessimistic memes into humanist (Satanic?) optimistic memes. You don't want to forget the creepy organ music. Feeling is first. Religious tradition could be integrated as if by magic (with mouthfuls of air and handfuls of printer's ink) with optimizing factory output. Hegel was giving the bourgeoisie a critically purified (pseudo-)Christianity [ Christ the Lion rather than the Lamb? Blakean Romantic Satanism ? ]

God in his truth is therefore no bare ideal generated by imagination; on the contrary, he puts himself into the very heart of the finitude and external contingency of existence, and yet knows himself there as a divine subject who remains infinite in himself and makes this infinity explicit to himself.

Is the metaphor the thing itself? — Tom Storm

:up:

We might think of the icing or top layer of 'Spirit' in terms of a self-referential complex of concepts-metaphors. Theology is that part of the lifeworld which describes its own conceptual essence. As Schopenhauer might put, its computation is like a parasite, mostly impractical. But the self-image of a community matters. Existence is what it takes itself to be, within the usual limits of embodiment.

Does by this account Shakespeare's play become Hamlet? — Tom Storm

As you may know, Bloom quotes Hegel noticing that Shakespeare's characters overhear themselves and for that reason change. We are dialectical protagonists, with Hamlet for our dark prince.

Bloom quotes Hegel noticing that Shakespeare's characters overhear themselves and for that reason change. — plaque flag

It's a cool observation. Next stop: metacognition.

Next stop: metacognition. — Tom Storm

:up:

We've all caught the Hamlet virus by now.

@Tom Storm @plaque flag
How do you suppose that natural brains consisting of natural cognitive and sensory functionalities adapted to nature are in any way capable of perceiving – experiencing – "supernatural" events / agents? I'd like to be shown what publicly warrants the OP's problematic assumption that human beings can have "supernatural experiences" (which are more than just drug / psychosis-induced hallucinations). :chin:

I think this is an entirely fair question. And of course, the only available answer must be that humans can gain 'higher awareness' though certain contemplative practices. They might also argue that reasoning can demonstrate catastrophic gaps in the naturalistic worldview - e.g., idealism, the evolutionary argument against naturalism, arguments for mathematical Platonism, etc.

I'm not convinced, but where else can you go with this?

I'd like to be shown what publicly warrants the OP's problematic assumption that human beings can have "supernatural experiences" (which are more than just drug / psychosis-induced hallucinations). — 180 Proof

Recalling my youth and those around me then, I'd say that the supernatural mind tends (I'm not denying clever exceptions or exquisite sublimations) to not really be aware yet of rational norms. They just don't live in our secular world on this particular issue.

I also find it hard to make sense of 'supernatural.' I have a model of reality, of my self in relation to the world. If weird stuff happens, I update the model. That model is nature. Of course we tend to work together and build a common model. We keep one another sane, cancel out each others's blind spots, call out careless overstepping.

I hear you. I think we probably need to take a more deflationary or minimalist view of the subject. Rather than trying to talk about The Supernatural - what is it specifically in terms of a particular claim made? We can investigate specific instances, such as life after death, theism, fairies, the soul, etc. I would need to take an evidentialist approach to these kinds of claims.

We can investigate specific instances, such as life after death, theism, fairies, the soul, etc. I would need to take an evidentialist approach to these kinds of claims. — Tom Storm

:up:

Right. And probably the terms would be better defined as the case was made.

How do you suppose that natural brains consisting of natural cognitive and sensory functionalities adapted to nature are in any way capable of perceiving – experiencing – "supernatural" events / agents? I'd like to be shown what publicly warrants the OP's problematic assumption that human beings can have "supernatural experiences" (which are more than just drug / psychosis-induced hallucinations). — 180 Proof

We have in our culture a very rigid barrier between natural and supernatural. It is mainly constructed due to the cultural dynamics surrounding early modern science. I once read a document about the formation of the Royal Society, as you know the first properly scientific body in the world. It explicitly said words to the effect of 'no metaphysics! Keep out of anything that is the business of the priesthood!' And you can understand why. At the time, Europe was convulsed with religious wars, Britain herself had the many religious conflicts between Church and Throne. Natural philosophers found it prudent to keep a strict separation between their investigations of 'the movements of bodies' and the kinds of questions which occupied the priesthood and the scholastic philosophers. And also, as you're well aware, there were dreadful penalties placed on deviation from orthodoxy, which literally means 'right belief', from the beginning of Christian culture. So that, I think, is where this firewall between natural and supernatural, in a political and cultural sense, can be traced back to.

Christianity itself is grounded on supernatural stories, that being the resurrection of Jesus, and the accounts of the miracles in the Gospel. It was a requirement to believe these as fact - not as symbolic or metaphor, and not as something explain rationalistically or 'work out' The Gospel was 'foolishness to the Greeks', i.e. confounded the Greek philosophers (hence the deep-seated tension in Christianity between Gospel and philosophy.) That is what I think has given rise to the deep division in western culture between religious and secular culture.

But as @Tom Storm says, there there are voluminous testimonies of religious and mystical experience and realisation from every culture and every period of history, of phenomena and experiences outside the bounds set by this division in Western culture. Even the scientific world-picture is moving away from old-school materialism and the idea of the human as a gene machine. Have a look at The Neural Buddhists, an old OP by David Brooks.

I think there is, in a very broad sense, such a thing as religious naturalism. That is not 'religion within the bounds of currently-defined scientific knowledge' but arising from the experiences, practices and traditional lore of cultures other than Western that has developed over millenia, from sources including India, China, and Persia, to mention only a few. There are vast domains of understanding in those cultures which are not characterised by the same implicit divisions between nature and what is purportedly above or beyond it, that we in the West have absorbed.

Also, closer to the OP, Dermot Moran has a book on the mystical theologian and neoplatonist Duns Scotus Eriugena, in which he traces his influence on the development of German idealism via Echkardt and medieval mysticism. Also I've noticed a book mentioned in a few of these debates on Hegel as an Hermetic philosopher (Hegel and the Hermetic Tradition https://www.amazon.com/Hegel-Hermetic-Tradition-Glenn-Alexander/dp/0801474507)

:ok: So you haven't a clue how a natural brain with natrural capacities adapted to nature can have "supernatural experiences" even though you believe that people do and/or that you have had them.

Yeah, it's like asking 'how can a person who was born blind have color experiences even though s/he claims to see red or recognize faces without touching them'. I'm serious about calling 'believing is seeing' into question, Wayf, as delusional (or deceitful) in the absence of squaring this empirical / phenomenological circle. :chin:

So you haven't a clue how a natural brain with natrural capacities adapted to nature can have "supernatural experiences" — 180 Proof

From what I understand, neuroscience has no idea of how the natural brain with natural capacities experiences the taste of vanilla.

What I'm saying is, there is abundant documentary evidence and witness testimony for the experience of such states of being, but I'm not going to waste any time trying to convince you of that.

Ah I see, you are convinced by mere anecdotes (i.e. appeal to popularity). That shows, sir, what assuming "supernatural experiences" amount to (i.e. it's delusional) and therefore why the OP is incoherent. As for what you apparently "understand" about neuroscience ... :eyes: :sweat:

Why do I feel the only reason you asked me the question is to debunk whatever response I came up with? I won't waste my time in future.

The reasons you (and others) have for taking seriously the possibility of some supernatural claims are:

- Worldwide anecdotes and first person accounts of experiences.
- Limitations of naturalist accounts (eg mind from no mind; something from nothing; mind/body)
- Contemplative traditions and scriptural accounts.

Any personal experiences?

Can you assist me in improving the language I have used to describe these above?

We can then get back to Hegel. :wink:

I asked an honest, epistemic question of you because, if I'm not mistaken, you are a learned student / practicioner of comparative religions and mystical traditions. I have no reason to doubt that you gave an honest (by your lights) and informed answer, yet, even though, I've charitably interpreted your response as insufficiently epistemic. Now you're irritated that you've been found out – again – either as not so learned or a shallow dupe or both.

Asking inconvenient questions, Wayfarer, is in the best Socrstic tradition – examining (acid testing) assumptions. Whatever else you are, sir, are you not also a student-practicioner of philosophy? My apologies if I'm (again) mistaken and have given you more credit than is warranted. Anyway, I'll move along with my midday lantern looking for a principled thinker who can handle inconvenient, simple questions like these. G'day. :smirk:

More clearly, the philosopher using Hegel’s model does not have to struggle against it, like they would have to with the traditional model, to find a synthesis of both views. — ClayG

It is not clear whether you are interested in discussion Hegel or just looking to reconcile differences. With regard to Hegel, he is very critical of what you are proposing. From the preface to the Phenomenology. It is:

#7:
... to take what thought has torn asunder and then to stir it all together into a smooth mélange, to suppress the concept that makes those distinctions, and then to fabricate the feeling of the essence.
...
What it wants from philosophy is not so much insight as edification. The beautiful, the holy, the eternal, religion, and love itself are all the bait required to awaken the craving to bite. What is supposed to sustain and extend the wealth of that substance is not the concept, but ecstasy, not the cold forward march of the necessity of the subject matter, but instead a kind of inflamed inspiration.
...
Spirit has shown itself to be so impoverished that it seems to yearn for its refreshment only in the meager feeling of divinity ... That it now takes so little to satisfy spirit’s needs is the full measure
of the magnitude of its loss.

The movement of Geist (Spirit/Mind) is the movement of the whole to its self-realization. It is the working out of the internal logic of the concept.

#12:

... the whole which has returned into itself from out of its succession and extension and has come to be the simple concept of itself.

Returning into itself is to become what from the beginning it is to be. Each stage of this new whole no matter how different it is from earlier stages is not a move away from but within itself, adding to the completion of itself.

The actuality of this simple whole consists in those embodiments which, having become moments of the whole, again develop themselves anew and give themselves a figuration, but this time in their new element, in the new meaning which itself has come to be.

The moments in the development of spirit do not understand themselves and are not understood by subsequent moment until this moment when it has come to the simple concept of itself. It is in this new element that each of those moments is understood anew as part in the development of the whole.

Any personal experiences? — Tom Storm

Recounting them is rarely particularly meaingful, no matter how meaningful they are or were to those who have had them.

With respect to Hegel, I think he definitely had a mystical side to him, but I haven't really mustered the endurance to slog through his often impenetrable prose. There's a scholar by the name of Robert Wallace who had an article in Philosophy Now about Hegel's God:

If God is to be truly infinite, truly unlimited, then God cannot be ‘a being’, because ‘a being’, that is, one being (however powerful) among others, is already limited by its relations to the others. It’s limited by not being X, not being Y, and so forth. But then it’s clearly not unlimited, not infinite! To think of God as ‘a being’ is to render God finite.

But if God isn’t ‘a being’, what is God? Here Hegel makes two main points. The first is that there’s a sense in which finite things like you and me fail to be as real as we could be, because what we are depends to a large extent on our relations to other finite things [in other words, our being is contingent]. If there were something that depended only on itself to make it what it is, then that something would evidently be more fully itself than we are, and more fully real, as itself [unconditional being]. This is why it’s important for God to be infinite: because this makes God more himself (herself, itself) and more fully real, as himself (herself, itself), than anything else is.

Hegel’s second main point is that this something that’s more fully real than we are isn’t just a hypothetical possibility, because we ourselves have the experience of being more fully real, as ourselves, at some times than we are at other times. We have this experience when we step back from our current desires and projects and ask ourselves, what would make the most sense, what would be best overall, in these circumstances? When we ask a question like this, we make ourselves less dependent on whatever it was that caused us to feel the desire or to have the project. We experience instead the possibility of being self-determining, through our thinking about what would be best. But something that can conceive of being self-determining in this way, seems already to be more ‘itself’, more real as itself, than something that’s simply a product of its circumstances.

Putting these two points together, Hegel arrives at a substitute for the conventional conception of God that he criticized. If there is a higher degree of reality that goes with being self-determining (and thus real as oneself), and if we ourselves do in fact achieve greater self-determination at some times than we achieve at other times, then it seems that we’re familiar in our own experience with some of the higher degree of reality that we associate with God. Perhaps we aren’t often aware of the highest degree of this reality, or the sum of all of this reality, which would be God himself (herself, etc.). But we are aware of some of it – as the way in which we ourselves seem to be more fully present, more fully real, when instead of just letting ourselves be driven by whatever desires we currently feel, we ask ourselves what would be best overall. We’re more fully real, in such a case, because we ourselves are playing a more active role, through thought, than we play when we simply let ourselves be driven by our current desires.

I think Hegel may have been trying to update Spinoza. The World is God, and We are God's eyes, God's spies, God's neurons. [ I use capital letters to get the Feel. ] Note that he saw the World growing toward freedom and self-knowledge and power. For Hegel, as I read the difficult bastard, God was not some frozen finished but rather a hale and hungry growing boy. Theology is God in the sense that God needs us, thinkings Himself through us, as us. Hegel was no escapist, no blamer of the world. He embraced history and all its filth as justified and necessary. He's a terrifying thinker in this sense. There is no higher court than Us as our norms evolve without foundation or instruction from some authority that would have to be tyrannical and alienated given the enlightenment imperative made explicit by Kant. Are we puppets ? Or do we govern and create ourselves like young men leaving home to join the larger world for the first time as autonomous citizens ?

I think Hegel may have been trying to update Spinoza. The World is God — plaque flag

I think that is a notoriously difficult point in Spinoza's philosophy, whether it amounts to a flat out declaration that Nature is God tout courte. I've found an interesting recent title on Spinoza, Spinoza's Religion by Claire Carlisle, although probably that ought to be subject of another thread.

As for Hegel, I don't know for sure, but I don't think he was at all inclined towards atheism or even Pantheism. I am kind of interested in Robert Wallace's interpretation but, you know, too many books......

I think Hegel may have been trying to update Spinoza. — plaque flag

I think so, and he more or less says as much ...

You're either a Spinozist, or not a philosopher at all. — GWF Hegel

... and he considered himself a (great world-historical) philosopher, ergo "Spinozist".

The World is God, and We are God's eyes, God's spies, God's neurons. — plaque flag

This is too pantheistic, even for Hegel (a christian pan-en-theist). As he (with Maimon) points out, Spinoza's metaphysics is acosmist. Insofar as "Hegel may have been trying to update Spinoza", I think he reconceptualizes one of Spinoza's infinite modes ("the world") as a 'meta-historicizing teleology' according to his own idealist dialectic ("Geist").