038 - Why Philosophy? Why Reason? Why Hegel? - Some Practical Answers

For many people, philosophy is of little interest.  Some see it only as thinking about thinking, and who needs that?  Others compare it to contemplating one’s navel.  And few people understand how philosophy can actually have any meaning in one’s day-to-day activities.

This episode takes the other side.  It first shows why philosophy is needed for a rigorous, articulate, systematic, logical, and critical examination of the big questions in life. 

Next reason itself is discussed, and how it is often downplayed today.  But reason cannot be used to denigrate reason, leading to a contradiction. Reason is therefore not relativistic, person to person, but foundational to all. 

Lastly, an examination of Hegel’s full project is provided, showing how his system provides meaning, purpose, and a rational foundation to life; how this purpose is unfolding through an historical process; and how it is relational and holistic, not divisional.  And what this means in terms of living your life.

Transcript

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Hello, this is Gregory Nowak. This is the cunning of Geist episode 38. Welcome back. The purpose of this podcast is to discuss philosophy, psychology and science with an emphasis on the fact that we have a free and purposeful mind that can lead us to meaningful action for ourselves, our families, our communities. Our nations for the world. Please follow the cunning of Geist, Facebook page at cutting of Geist. And you can follow me on Twitter also at cunning of Geist. In this episode, I will be exploring the practical importance of studying philosophy. Specifically why recognizing the rationality inherent in our minds is of immense practical importance. And what unique benefits Hagle offers along these lines. So let's get into it. Now. Oftentimes when my friends here that I'm doing a philosophy podcast. The last meet. Well, what is the benefit of, of philosophy? How can one use it in one's everyday life? How do you use it every day? And. It's not that they're asking how one can use rationality in their life, but it's more a question of. their lack of understanding of philosophy and just what, what benefit it can provide. Many people think the philosophy is just thinking about thinking. And if this is your narrow definition. it can lead to a sort of a lack of meaning in, in philosophy. Some people think is just. Contemplating one's Naval. As we used to say, back in the, in the 1960s. So what good does, does thinking about thinking do well? Does it have any practical or pragmatic? Uh, benefit. Now. Another related question I get is, when people hear that. I'm studying Hagle. they, uh, they say, well, just tell me what Hegel's about. Give me a short. Quick synopsis of what Haydel's. Tight. And they really want me to give them a soundbite to encapsulate all of her Galean philosophy in 25 words or less. And that, that unfortunately is the world we live in in today. It's a world of very short attention spans, and this is people just want to get a, you know, just one bite of what halal is. And. it's really hard to do. It's impossible. We've talked about this a lot in the Haydel study group, but you just can't reduce Hagle to a Twitter. Tweet of 280 characters. and also I think. Some of the reason for asking this question for the quick soundbite is they want to get an immediate identification on Hagle. The way we categorize everything today. You know, I've had. I've told people you can't really, Summarize Hagle quickly and they'll immediately pull out their smartphones, the Google Hagle to get a quick answer on Google. And it's it's interesting. I think they're looking for as well. Who is this guy? Is he on the right? Or is he on the left? Is he a religionist or, um, an atheist or, Lightened mint thinker. What. And it's interesting. Every time somebody has done this, they don't get a clear identification right away. And they look back at me and kind of say, what. And they say, okay, now I think I may understand why you can't give a quick soundbite. Now. Getting back to the, the purpose of this episode. what personal or societal benefits is there to philosophy I touched on this in previous episodes, but I want to focus this entire episode on just the subject. To begin. I want to do something a little bit differently in terms of the format. I'm going to start with my conclusion and then I'm going to take you through the process of how I got there. And my conclusion is this. It is through philosophy. Then one can become convinced that mind rationality underlies everything. It is the foundation of the cosmos. It is that the bottom of it all. And we. As human beings have the ability to access this mind. It is part of us as human beings. It's not something that's other than us outside of ourselves that we have to get in contact with. It's actually getting contact with something within us. It lives and fulfills itself through us. And this is very important. Now. So I may call this God, if you will, but the term God is so loaded with different meanings that I prefer mind or rationality. Geist. you know, I think that's a, that's a good term. Now, it's important that this is not just a matter of faith. this, this belief in, in mind, I believe it is a warranted belief and we discussed the, what is a rational warranted belief. Back in episode 35 is belief in spirited, spirit warranted. And what does this mean? it. If rationality is the underlying basis of the world, it provides a meaning to the world. The world is there for not purposeless. we're not just random beings here trying to figure out. The best way to proceed. There's a reason why we're here and, this can give us comfort and more importantly, it can give us purpose in our lives, a practical purpose in our lives. And this. In turn will essentially make the world a better place. Now, What's important here though, is the one I want to focus more on is it's not just all philosophy that does this philosophy can be all over the map. I'm talking specifically here about a Galean philosophy. It gets you there. It delivers. So, what does it mean that mine, rationality underlies everything. It means that mine, rationality logic comes first. It is the foundation, as I say, all in everything. It's not just the result of some weird evolutionary development that occurred within some large ape. It's not something that just randomly appeared through genetic mishap. Well, it did suddenly appear. I'm not arguing with that, but the foundation for this appearance was preexisting. I believe. And as I've said, I'm not arguing against evolution. I've said this many times before, but I'm just saying that there's more going on here than blind, random, meaningless mutations. The same thing with life itself. Life did not just randomly appear in some molecule or chemical by accident. A few billion years ago on earth. Well, again, life did they actually suddenly appear, but the foundation of this life was preexisting. And again, I'm not arguing against primordial chemical formations here. Just that there's more going on. Now key thing which Hagle brought out is that this underlying condition of mind is not something, that is outside of nature, directing things. It's within nature. It's part of nature. It's what nature proves to be. And here's the key part. It is unfolding in nature as part of the historical process. And we have a role to play in this historical process. Okay. That's my overall conclusion. Now let's get into the details of how I, I got there. Now. and the title of this episode, I referred to three questions, which I'm going to attempt to address first. Why philosophy then? Secondly, why reason? And thirdly, why, why Hagle? Okay. First philosophy. What I'm saying is that it is important to study philosophy, because it is more than just thinking about thinking. Uh, not the philosophy probably came into existence. When people start thinking about the big questions in life. Such as, why are we here? What is our purpose? How should society best be organized? What is moral and ethical behavior. These are all big questions. And the first two in particular, why are we here? What is our purpose? These are very central. to philosophy. It's something that every philosopher and also every four year old child ponders. So philosophy is an important role. It, again, it's not just thinking about thinking, it's thinking about big stuff, big questions, big boy stuff. And. Just a word here about religion though. And the difference between philosophy and religion. Uh, religion provides answers to these big questions. I'm not denying that. And does it by means of stories and myths. But it's also a matter of faith of belief. Religion is not proven. It's. Not derived from critical thinking as this philosophy. But in this is important. I'm not denying this. You can get a lot of truth through, myths through narratives, even if they're fictional. But philosophy is different. It involves thinking these issues through, on their own, without blindly buying someone else's faith or belief system. And in this process of thinking things through oneself. It can be very important in developing a personal philosophy of life. And also we touched on religion. Let's touch on science. Where does science fit into all this? Well, science is certainly not an art. It's not religion. And I would say it fits under philosophy and we've discussed here in the past. There is a philosophy of science. And interestingly Hagle called his great work on logic, the science of logic, and he called his encyclopedia. The encyclopedia of the philosophical sciences. And there's other great work. The phenomenology of spirit was originally going to be called science and the experience of consciousness. It's interesting. And for Hagle sciences, not just natural science, but includes consciousness as well. and by science Hagle meant that the, that the discipline is subjected to a rigorous articulate, systematic and logical process. And the only difference between Hagle science and science of today is that he included mind and consciousness. And in his science we're in today. What mind is, is unclear. And for science today, it's known as the hard problem of consciousness. And this is. Basically due to the gross materialism that encompasses so much of science today, We've discussed this before many times. And we'll get back into it. I'm sure. In. Future episode. So to summarize, this is why philosophy is important. It gives a systematic and logical way to look at life. Ourselves and society. Now. Onto rationality itself and why it's important. It can seem, today in today's world, that there's little respect given to rationality. Um, there's certainly a belittling, if not a downright attack on a lot of rationality. And it's hard to say when this attack on rationality began, but one can certainly look back to nature. He famously stated. No facts is precisely what there is not only interpretations and quote. He stood at the world. Quote has no meaning behind it, but countless meanings. And quote. And he did not believe that absolute truth could be found anywhere. He stated quote, all interpretations of the world are false and quote, and even more bluntly quote, there is no truth and quote. Now. And for anyone that's studied Nietzsche and I've done a bit of it. He said a lot of things. And sometimes you can find contradictions from where he says, when he says here and what he says there. But he's very clear here in these passages. So if there's no real truth at all, can there be true rationality? let's move forward and some accused, uh, postmodernism of also arguing against pure rationality. They seen postmodernism of belief that knowledge claims are based on value systems that are socially conditioned. And this includes science and rationality itself. Quote, if all trues are equal, who cares? What science has to say, says Marcel. Koontz. In his article, the postmodern assault on science. The abstract for this article. Interestingly states. Quote post-modernist thought is being used to attack the scientific worldview and undermine scientific truths, a disturbing trend that has gone unnoticed by a majority of scientists and quote. Now. Th this trend has some pretty deep roots. Um, Um, this anti rationalism. And we discussed this in detail in episode 22 group ethics versus individual morality, Hagle and MacIntyre. And we discussed MacIntyre's concept of the motive itself. Allow me to quote MacIntyre. Quote. The specifically modern self, the self that I've called emotive. finds no limits set to then in which you may pass judgment. For such limits could only derive from rational criteria for evaluation. And as we have seen the motive itself, lacks any such criteria, everything may be criticized from whatever standpoint the self is adopted, including the self's choice of standpoint to adopt. It evades any necessary self-identification with any particular contingent state of affairs, it has no necessary social content and no necessary social identity. It can then be anything consume any role or take any point of view because it is in and for itself, nothing in quote. To put it simply to the motive itself. It's my feelings account. I use rationality only to defend my films. And one can argue the facts don't care about your feelings. But the counter argument to this is I'll meet ya. Uh, but there are no facts. Only interpretations. So we started off by discussing the need for philosophy. But if all this. Uh, Nietzschean post-modern stuff is accurate. There are no facts then what good is philosophy? It's just figuring out ways to elegantly express. Everyone feels. Well, I am here to say that indeed there is rationality in the world. I'm convinced of it. There are of course feelings, but there's rationality as well. And we need both. One is not subservient to the other. Both have to work together. It's like Gurdjieff's horse drawn carriage that we discussed in episode 34 of the fraternity in the horse-drawn carriage metaphor, young Gurdjieff and Hagle. We are like a horse drawn carriage. The carriers is our body, the horses are, are our emotions. The drivers are thinking. And the passenger inside the carriage is our purpose. He, she, they, this passenger, this master, if you will decides our direction, our rain, where we're going and all four elements must work together to get where you want to go. And they have to work as a one team. But for now, let's just focus on rationality and reason. It's a very difficult thing to define. As I've said before, there are a lot of words for this in the English language. And, but basically We tend to think of it in both a logical and a sensible way. In other words, if it conforms to correct thinking, then that is the logical part. And if it conforms to what we observe with our senses, that is the sensible part. But the motive is self calls. This first part into question, the logical part to the motor, the self there's. No correct thinking. There is. Logic of course, but it's not tied to anything underneath it. Only to the emotions. It is letting the horses decide where to go instead of the passenger inside the carriage. The motive itself sees no inherent truth. Only relativistic truth. Now here's the problem. If somebody says there's no inherent truth, that's actually a positive statement. when holding this belief would say that it is true, that there is no inherent truth. But a high, you see this as a contradiction. The point is you can't use reason itself to undermine reason. This implies. That reason itself is something. Fundamental. For example, Nisha said that all facts are interpretations. If all facts are interpretations. Then this is just an interpretation of his not truth and it may be wrong. And if everything he says maybe wrong, then why read him in the first place? Now, I don't want to pick on Nietzsche here. As I said before. He says a lot of things and he can contradict himself or appear to contradict himself or express something differently in a different context, in different work. And, and we just accept that about him. And that's what we love about him. But, I think his purpose overall was to creatively get us to think deeply about things and not to present some overall ironclad ideology. And he does that very well. But these contradictions show, that reason appears to be definitely something fundamental. It is within us. And it's also, and this is important. Something we realize is bigger than ourselves. It's not just our reason, but it's reason itself. And this is the key point. It's not our own subjective reason. It's the deeper, more universal reason that we appeal to. It's this universal reason. that we hold others too, because we, we believe that as a universal for them as well. It may be our interpretation of what is reasonable, but we believe that it's, it's more than just our subjective opinion that it has deeper roots. And, this is why I can look at what someone else is doing. And, and perhaps say that what they're doing is unreasonable and they can do the same to me. Now I must say here that reason is more like a goal or an aspiration than, than a rule book. And, uh, we in society struggled to do what's best. And what is reasonable? Our laws are based on commonly accepted, reasonable opinions. and. Using the horse drawn carriage example. It's almost like reasons the master within the carriage. but it's not just my master, my passenger. It's the same master. And all carriages. And this applies to morality as well as we discussed in the men compare episode number 22. True morals rely on an underpinning. Of a rationality. If they do not, they just flow down in space on tethered morals than are fleeting. Just a matter of one's interpretation. But this is not the case. Reason allows us an objective base from which to say, for example, that slavery is not right or that discrimination based on skin tone or ethnicity is not right. So not just one person's interpretation versus another, these beliefs apply to all and they were based in reason, fundamental reason now. Of course, there are plenty of other issues that are not as black and white it's slavery and discrimination. Um, and we need to work them out their society. We struggle to work these things out. but that's what we're doing. That's a purpose here that spirit unfolding itself through history. Now, speaking of history, this brings us to the last section. Of this episode, why Hagle? There are a few reasons why I believe, Hey, Hey, Google can be so helpful to study first. He laid out a complete system. Of my nature, spirit, everything. And he was the last major philosopher to do so. Now I'm just going to take a moment and outline his fistful project. Very briefly. We've covered this before, but it's always helpful just to review it. So you realize that it doesn't encompass everything. First Hagle identifies three main domains. First logic, the nature, and thirdly spirit. And spirit is the world we live in. And it has logic. On one hand and nature on the other hand is its main components. Now logic though, is what is foundational. It is logically prior to nature. Nature is an othering of logic of pure rationality. Uh, spirit on the other hand, the third domain is this ablation of pure rationality in nature. And for more information on what's ablation is all about see episode 36 on simulation. Now Hagle is a very interesting quote regarding reason spirit being the foundation of all and everything. And I'm going to read it now. Quote. There's an old phrase, often wrongly attributed to Aristotle. And suppose to express the general tenor of his philosophy. There's nothing in thought, which has not been incense and experience. It's speculative philosophy, refuse to admit this maximum. It can only have done so from a misunderstanding. It will. However, on the converse side, no less assert, there was nothing incense in experience that has not been in thought. And this may be taken in two sentences. And the general sense. It means that spirit is the cause of the world and its special, meaning it asserts that the sentiment of right morals and religions is a sentiment. Of such scope in such character that it can spring from and rest upon thought alone and quote. So Hagle is saying that. Not only is mind, spirit, the cause of the world, but it's also the logical foundation for morals as well. That's underpinning. There's no true basis for moralistic behaviors. We've discussed. Now. Taking spirit. He, this third domain, he divides this into three components. First they're subject to spirit. Which is one's personal psychology, how they view themselves. And their thought process and how they process information. Second is objective spirit, which is how individuals then organize themselves into a society into families, and then into society with laws and customs. And the third is absolute spirit, which is ablation. And the first two. And it's specifically how, how spirit comes to know itself, which is really its essential purpose. And it does this surprise surprise in three stages. The first being art, the second being religion, the third philosophy. A key point here is that each of these build on each other, religion does not replace art and philosophy does not replace religion. They all remain. So Hagle provides this overall scheme, which literally includes everything, our minds, nature, art, religion, science philosophy. Now a second key thing here. Uh, other than the comprehensiveness of had galleon philosophy is that his system provides a key anchor in rationality. Which can be used by an individual for truth detection and seeking. Uh, correct moral behavior for oneself and for society. As I said, Hegel's morals are not just floating in space on tide, anything in different from person to person for handled. There is a rationality that underlies nature. Uh, drives it forward, improving it as it goes through our actions, our trials, our fights, our compromises. And thirdly, this is the third important point. Hagle system is historical. I said Geist mind spirit is not some entity out there. It is within each of us. Is that master that presence sitting in the coach. We can't see this present, but he, she, they are there. We each have this presence, the spirit within us, and it is the same presence or spirit within all of us. This, it connects us. And this is the beauty and the wisdom of regalian philosophy. Now there's a fourth element as well. Haggled taught that rationality is holistic it's relational process oriented. We talked about this. With respect to the German word for pneumonia. reason. Spirit is the role, not just the rock as we discussed in the last episode, number 37. It's not only rock, but the role as well. And here's why this is important. Being relationship oriented Hale's philosophy teaches that every stick has two ends. If there's not a stick. There's no relationship that can't be two ends without the stick. And this is something Very important to keep in mind. particularly in anything that it's polarized. take politics, for example, we're so polarized today with, with politics, you know, One side's against the other and vice versa. And, The country itself or the, the entity. Is the anchor though for this polarization. And if this polarization is taken too far, the extremes can break off and affect kill the body. That's supporting both sides. And in political terms, this would be a country committing suicide. And this is almost occurred in the American civil war, but it did not the country help. My take here, though. Is that when thinking politically or thinking in any polarized sense? even if you're over on one extreme, it's always good practice to have one foot planted in your party. And yet another foot planted in the country as a whole, no matter what side you're on. And this does not mean that you don't fight for your point of view or opinion or party fight heart. But it's just. It means to always remember the whole, when taking up the fight. Same once for religion. Uh, I think it's a good idea to certainly have one foot in your religion, your faith, your practices, but also have another foot in humanity as a whole. And that's important. So we've covered a lot here. Hopefully this is interesting and helpful to you. Look forward to your comments. That's it for this episode. Thanks so much for listening. As always all references cited here will be listed at the podcast Facebook page at cutting of Geist. And please tell your like-minded friends about this podcast and share links to it on your favorite social media sites. I'm Gregory Nowak. This is the cunning of Geist. See you next time.