Civilization #55: Kant, Hegel, and the Theory of Everything

Okay. So today we will do Immanuel Kant and Friedrich Hegel. So my main argument is that Kant is really taking the main thesis of Dante, which is the imagination is the animating force of the universe and love is the unifying force of the universe. And what he will do is he will use epistemology. Epistemology just means theory of knowledge. How do we know what we know? And then he will do three things. He will clarify it. Okay. So if you read Dante, it's not very explicit what he's saying.

You have to interpret him properly. What Kant will do is make Dante explicit to the world. Then he will rationalize it. Rationalize it just means that he will remove divinity. He will remove theology from it and create a system of logic. Okay? And so then he will systemize it. All right? So this is the mission of Kant: to take the secret of the universe as first presented in Dante and then create a system of logic that then is able to incorporate itself into science and history and philosophy and the world that we know.

All right. So together Dante and Kant really did create the world that we live in today. All right. So let's first talk about the background, like why is Kant engaged in this project. So for most of Western history there have been two major philosophers. They are Plato and Aristotle. And up until Kant you could divide all philosophy into these two major camps. Plato believes that God is called the form of the good. The form of the good, it is this perfect immaculate eternal force that emits, emanates, breathes, thinks, and then he creates something called the ideals.

And these are the perfect conceptions of beauty, reason, justice. And then these ideals give rise to the forms. Okay. And these are the perfect encapsulation of these ideals. So think of the perfect horse or the perfect chair or the perfect square. Okay. This is the real world. Okay. This is what is true and real. We live in the shadow world. So remember back to the allegory of the cave. So everything in the shadow world is only an imitation of the forms. And so in this conception what is good is to move towards the form of the good, to return to the form of the good, and what is evil is to move away from the form of the good.

Okay. That's why for Plato art and poetry is evil, because you're imitating imitation. And for Plato mathematics and philosophy are inherently good because they are teaching you how to return to the form of the good. And Plato's important because what happens is that Plato's ideas become the basis for heaven and earth. Right? And so this is the basis for Christianity. Remember in the Catholic Church doctrine, your life, our life on this planet doesn't really matter. What matters is our return to heaven to be with God. And we say about Plato that he's a dualist.

Okay. So there are three conceptions of the universe. There is the materialistic worldview, which is what Aristotle is. Materialistic just says that only things that you can see and touch matter. Idealistic is what Hegel will represent, which is that only ideas matter. And then Plato believes that both matter and ideas do matter. Okay. So he's a dualist whereas Aristotle is a materialist. All right. So that's Plato. Pretty clear, right? Good. All right. Now let's move on to Aristotle. For Aristotle, his god is called a prime mover. The prime mover is the first thing that moves because when the first thing moves it causes things to move as well.

Okay, there's cause and effect. So in this world what matters is movement. Okay, everything's moving towards something called telos, which is what purpose is. It's a Greek word for purpose. So for example as a teacher my telos is to teach as well as I can and my mission in life is to constantly learn, to improve and to practice so that my teaching becomes better and better. Okay, that's the idea of telos, and we can understand through observation and experience what each thing's telos is and then you can start to categorize things. Okay, and Aristotle, his ideas of course become the basis for science.

Okay. And as I mentioned, Aristotle has a materialistic worldview as opposed to Plato's dualistic worldview. Aristotle doesn't really care about things outside the material world. He's only concerned about the here and now. So these are the two major schools of thought during antiquity. Now as I mentioned previously in class, as the Catholic Church comes into power and it has a monopoly power, it suppresses these philosophical inquiries. Okay. But after the Renaissance these schools of thought, Plato and Aristotle, they will reemerge. All right. So they will reemerge into three major schools of thought.

Okay. So taking up Plato's perspective will be a people called the rationalists. Okay. So the three most famous rationalists are René Descartes, Leibniz and Spinoza. Okay. But they are basically adopting Plato's worldview, which is there is a god and through mathematics, through logic we can, from first principles, reason out the mind of God. All right. So the project of rationalism is omniscience, and again this is best represented by Descartes, and this becomes of course the basis for the Enlightenment, right? So that's the first major school of thought, the rationalists. They're also called the Continentals, the continental philosophy, because it's really based on the continent of Europe. Opposing the rationalists are the empiricists. Okay.

And these are people who are adopting the Aristotle worldview. The empiricists, the most famous is John Locke. And what John Locke believes is our minds are born rasa, which just means blank slate, meaning there's nothing in our minds. So the only way that we can acquire knowledge, acquire wisdom is through... Okay, experience and something called induction. So in logic there are two methods. The first is deduction, where you take the general and apply it to the specific, and then induction is to take the specific and then you generalize it into the abstract.

Okay. So for example, if I see five boys wearing white shirts, then I can generalize and say that all boys wear white shirts. But if the general principle is all boys wear white shirts, then by deduction I can say, well you're a boy, therefore you wear a white shirt. Okay, so that's the idea of empiricism. And of course this becomes the basis for what we call the scientific method, right?

Now, there's another school of philosophy called skepticism. And this was pioneered mainly by a man named David Hume. And so, what David Hume is going to do is he's going to look at this idea of induction and argue, no, you can't do that. You cannot generalize things. Just because you meet 1 million swans that are white does not mean that all swans are white. It is entirely possible that there's a black swan out there. Okay. So, what David Hume does is he negates induction. And what he is basically saying is our understanding of the world is based primarily on custom.

For him, custom just means consensus. We agree this is right. Therefore, it is right. There's no inherent truth to this thing. All right. So David Hume is very controversial because he argues that true knowledge is just impossible, which means that the entire project of philosophy is pointless. Okay, you know what you know through experience and through custom. You cannot abstract things. You cannot reason out things beyond that and therefore what's the point of philosophy. All right, so that's David Hume. Now what's going to happen is Immanuel Kant is going to read David Hume and be so agonized over his conclusions that he writes something called the Critique of Pure Reason.

Okay. And this is considered the greatest treatise of philosophy ever in human history. It's extremely dense, extremely complicated, and quite honestly I have not been able to complete it. Okay, I've tried my best but it is way too difficult for me. So what I'm going to do today is I'm going to oversimplify his argument in order to make it clear for us. Okay? He's so fundamental to the development of human civilization that we need to study him. But I'm warning you that I am not in any way an expert on Kant.

But I hope that today's class will become a basis for your further study and inquiry into Kant and philosophy. Okay. All right. So in his Critique of Pure Reason what Kant's going to do is he's going to show that all three schools of thought, rationalism, empiricism and skepticism, are all in their own way problematic, and in doing so he's going to construct a new theory of everything, a new theory of the world that will become the cornerstone for neuroscience, physics and artificial intelligence. Okay. So his contribution to human civilization cannot be understated.

All right. So for Kant this rationalist school is problematic because he believes that omniscience is just not possible. It is impossible for us to ever achieve the mind of God. There are limitations to the pursuit of knowledge. There are limitations to our capacity to reason. Okay. So that's the first argument. Second argument is the empiricist argument of tabula rasa cannot possibly be true. He's going to show us through a lot of empirical proof that it's not possible for minds to be blank slates. We need to have certain mechanisms of thought already in place for us to engage with the world.

Okay. So that's the problem with the empiricists. His problem with Hume is he believes that there's knowledge that is real and inherent and true and so knowledge can be pursued. Philosophy is important. In fact, for Kant, philosophy is the most important pursuit in human history. Okay. So, by responding to all three of these major schools, Kant in his Critique of Pure Reason, he's going to create a radical new theory of the world. Okay? His own unique epistemology based on the thinking of Dante. All right. So let's go into his argument very quickly and again this is oversimplification.

All right. So we are all endowed with the capacity to reason. Okay. We all have minds and our minds engage reality. Okay. What Kant says is this. The moment that we engage in reality, we create a new universe parents. Okay. So, let me first go over the terminology. It's very important you understand terminology in order to understand Kant. Okay. So for Kant reality are things in themselves and here he uses the Greek noumena. Okay, things in themselves. This is the world that is true and real. And then the world of appearance are what I call things for us.

Things that we see but which may not be true. And he uses the Greek word phenomena. Okay. And what he's arguing is within us there is a mechanism in our minds that is always perceiving reality in a way that allows us to understand, interpret and manipulate it. Okay. So this is his thesis. Okay. So let me first explain how he got to this thesis. So what Kant does is this. He tries to reason out what is possible in epistemology. Okay, philosophy. And so what he does is he creates categories.

So there are four major categories that we need to know. Okay. And again this is a bit technical and complicated but we need to do this in order to fully understand Kant. So what Kant says is there are two types of knowledge. There's a priori and there's a posteriori. Okay. A priori is Latin for things that come before. A posteriori is Latin for things that come after. All right. So a priori means knowledge that is independent of experience, things that are universal and necessary, things that are true in themselves, and a posteriori of course are things that you learn after you experience it.

Okay. He also has two more categories of logic. The first is called the analytical, and then the second is called the synthetic. Okay, analytical just means things that are true in themselves. So they are true by definition. So if I say for example, a square has four sides. A triangle has three sides. That's an analytical statement because it's true in itself. Okay, I can also say that A is A. I can also say that Mary is a woman. Okay, these are all just identity statements, things that are true in themselves.

Synthetics. And so synthetic statements are statements that are not analytical, meaning that you need to build these statements based on other information and they could be false. Okay? So just think of synthetic as non-analytical. So what Kant does then is says well then if there are two by two there's four possibilities. Okay. And if you think about what a priori analytical is, that's just what logic is, right? This is just what's logical. A posteriori synthetic is just what we call empirical. This is the John Locke project, right? Empiricism, things that you know and learn after you experience it.

Analytical a posteriori is just doesn't really matter, right? Because a square has four sides. It doesn't matter if you see a square, four sides, it doesn't really change anything. The main conflict between David Hume and Immanuel Kant is whether or not a priori synthetic knowledge exists. For David Hume, he says this in his writings. It is impossible for a synthetic knowledge to exist. But what Immanuel Kant will show us is it does exist and he calls it transcendental... Transcendental idealism. Okay. And he's going to spend his entire book, the Critique of Pure Reason, about a thousand pages, explaining why this must be true.

Why is it that you must have a priori synthetic knowledge in your brain in order to understand the world? All right. So again this is his main argument and what it will show us is this. If you study mathematics, if you look at philosophy, if you look at classical physics, Newtonian physics and you break things down to the most fundamental level, what you will is we have to bring in certain assumptions into this field of knowledge for it to exist. Okay? And these two very basic things that we bring in are called space and time.

Space and time. Okay, space just means sensation and time is sequence. Okay, time is just an order of things. One, two, three, four, five. Space is just our interaction with the world around us. Unless we have these two basic concepts, no knowledge is possible. Right? Space and time. So this is really important and this is a hard concept to understand. What Kant is saying is that space and time do not exist in reality. Space and time is a projection of our minds in order to we can synthesize reality in a way that allows us to understand it and manipulate it.

Okay. Space and time. All right. In other words, okay, a very simple way to understand this is our minds turn the world into a story. Why? Because if you have space and time, you have causality, cause and effect. Okay? Space, time, movement, right? So now you have causality. Causality is a story. So what Kant is saying is we are just imagining reality into a story and that allows us to understand it. All right. So what Kant's going to do after he proves that space and time must exist a priori is he's now going to explain how we take reality and we turn it into... Okay.

And what he's going to show us is that our mind has a process of doing this. And this process is three stages. There's apprehension, there's reproduction, and then there's recognition. Okay, so apprehension is just you're engaging the things in themselves and through space and time, okay, by inputting space and time into things in themselves, you're able to reproduce it in your brain. You're able to create an image of it in your brain and then what you're going to do in order to understand it is to filter spacetime using something he calls categories. Okay, categories, just think of it as our algorithm.

A better word is heuristic. Okay, heuristic. Computers use algorithms, we use heuristics, right? And there are 12 different categories but there are four major categories. Okay. The first is quantity. How much of a thing it is? Quality. What are the properties of this thing?

Relation, is this thing logical or empirical? And then modality, which is what is the strength of the relation of this thing. Okay. Okay. I know it's complicated but later on we will use some examples from real life to better understand how this works. All right, so you don't really need to remember the categories, just remember that what Kant is saying is inherent in our mind is a heuristic, an algorithm that allows us to turn information into knowledge. All right, and when we do this what happens is we create a schema, a representation of the world, which allows for understanding the world.

Okay. Okay, so for example, we see a lot of triangles, but we don't actually have an image of a triangle in our head. We only have a concept of a triangle in our heads. Okay, and this is true for a lot of things. All right, and then the schema then returns to the categories, which allows us to filter the world even more. Okay, so it is a feedback loop. So does this all make sense? Okay, this is Kant's perception of the world. Again, if you want to know the proof, if you want to know his logic, then you have to read the book for yourself, which will take you about 10 years, right?

Great. All right. So, all this is saying is this is called reaffirming the Dante belief that the imagination is the animating force of the world. Okay. So, without us, reality cannot be alive. It is our imagination that makes reality alive to us. All right. Now this is from the Critique of Pure Reason. He also wrote a book called the Critique of Practical Reason where he presents a theory of morality. All right. So let's go over it. So for Kant the highest ideal in morality is something called the categorical imperative. And this is separate and distinct from something called the hypothetical imperative.

The hypothetical imperative is, okay, if you are a child in a school, how should you behave? Okay, this is specific. This is circumstantial. The categorical is the absolute. This is how you should always behave. And for Kant, there are three major principles that underlie all morality. Okay, so let's go over them one by one. The first is the idea of universal law. So Kant says imagine that each of your actions will be universalized, will be generalized, so that everyone will behave the way you do. Okay? So for example you can choose to steal but imagine everyone stealing.

Well what kind of world would that be? You certainly would not want to live in that world, right? So behave as though everyone is watching you and everyone's going to do what you're going to do. Okay? Be the best possible example to everyone. All right, so that's the first principle. Second principle is see humans each as an end unto itself and not as a means. Okay, do not manipulate people, do not use people, treat people with... Okay. And the third is the idea of autonomous will, which means everything you do must be something that you reason out yourself.

You're not coerced into it. You're not manipulated into doing it. You're not tricked into doing it. It's something that you, sitting by yourself in a room, you're able to reason it out independently. Okay. So this is the idea of the categorical imperative, which Kant believes is what we should all strive to and what we're all capable of doing because we're capable of reason. Okay, we're capable of imagination, we're capable of imagining a moral world, and this is important because this becomes the basis for what we have today: the United Nations, human rights, international law. Okay, that's how influential Kant has been in the development of human civilization. All right.

So, how can we understand the categorical imperative? Well, let's go back to Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Remember Jean-Jacques Rousseau proposed the idea of the general will. The general will is not democracy. Okay? Democracy is simply you get everyone to vote. Okay? So, in this room I ask everyone what should we have for lunch? And then someone proposes let's have ice cream and everyone raises his hand and says yeah let's have ice cream. Okay, that's democracy. But for Rousseau what he argues is the general will is the best interest of people that you can derive just by reaching out yourself. Okay, so if you were to sit down by yourself and ask what should we have for lunch, it wouldn't be ice cream because ice cream makes you fat, it's too much sugar, it's bad for you. Okay, you would probably think we should have salad. So the general will represents the best interests of everyone involved.

Okay? So if I would ask you what should we have for lunch, everyone would say, if we are following a general will, a salad or maybe a chicken breast or... Okay. So in other words, the categorical imperative is just individualized general will. All right? It is a general will that you internalize to yourself and you behave as though you are the general will. Right? So that's a way of understanding the categorical imperative. Now there's another way of understanding the categorical imperative and just using Dante. So remember we read the Divine Comedy and Dante's categorical imperative is very simple.

Love someone. Okay? Doesn't matter who. It could be your wife. It could be your mother or it could be your child. It could be your best friend. But love that person and when you love that person then all three things are true. It means you are now going to be your best. It means you are treating this person with respect. It means that you're choosing to love this person. Okay. So love is the unifying force of the universe. All right. So that's what Dante is really saying.

And so in other words, Kant, he is just systemizing what Dante said, the Divine Comedy. All right, does that make sense? All right. So, for us to better understand Kant's argument, I want to give you three examples to better understand what Kant is saying. All right, the first example is imagine you are writing a diary. All right, I want you to write a diary for a whole year. So every day you're writing what happened today. All right, so you have separate entries. Okay? Right? So every day at night at 9:00 p.m.

You're just reflecting on what happened today. And then at the end of the year, what I want you to do is write one long diary entry. Okay? Now, if you think about it, in theory, these separate entries should add up to equal this one long entry, right? But what you'll find if you actually do this experiment is this long entry that you wrote almost has no relation at all with these 365 separate entries. Does that make sense? Right. Okay. So in other words, what we're doing is constantly every day we are reimagining the world in a new way and we're building on top of this.

Okay. So that's the first experiment. Another way of saying this is all we're doing is we're taking discrete data points, which is what 365 diary entries is doing, and then combining them into one complete story. All right. Here's another experiment you can do. Memory. So, organize 100 classmates and go to a park together and spend the whole day in a park and organize the day so that everyone's doing the same thing. All right? Everyone's doing the same thing. And then next day, ask all 100 students to write down his experience of all that one day.

And I guarantee you every person will be different. Each person's experience will be unique unto himself. Thus confirming, affirming what Kant said. Okay, the imagination is the animating force of the universe. Right? So let's do one more experiment and this is a thought experiment. This is something you can't do but let's just imagine it. Imagine you end up on an island. Okay? And this island is very fertile, very opulent, lots of fruits, lots of fish. You don't have to worry about starving. But one day you go to sleep and then your mind is wiped clean.

It becomes a tabula rasa as proposed by John Locke. Okay. So you have no more memory. You can't speak. You've lost the capacity of language. You've lost capacity to reason. You don't know where you are. You don't know who you are. Okay. You get up and now the question then is what will happen to you? Well, if you're John Locke, what's going to happen to you is you're going to starve to death because you don't know what to eat. Okay? You take a stone and you put it in your mouth.

You take a leaf, you put it in your mouth. You don't know what to eat. You've lost all knowledge. Okay? But according to Kant, what Kant would say is okay sure you've lost all knowledge but because you have a priori synthetic knowledge, because you manipulate reality around you, because your mind is very good at filtering information, categorizing information, it'll take you a very short amount of time to figure out what is... Okay, you know stones, wood, that's a category of stuff you cannot eat. But then you know fruits, water, fish is another category of things you can eat.

All right. And I think just through pure intuition we can figure out you know what, Kant makes more intuitive sense than John Locke. Okay. So does that make sense? So again first experiment you can do and you will discover if you do one long entry it will not correlate to these separate entries. Okay. The memory experiment you can also do. You can also do the thought experiment you can't really do but you can reason it out and discover it to be true. All right. So that is Kant, a very short, simple introduction to Kant.

Any questions before I move on to Hegel? Yeah, a couple of combined questions. So, doing this Critique of Pure Reason as a natural philosopher, in maybe a way Newton might have, did he think he was doing science? Yeah, that's a great question. I may just follow up quickly. Do you know anything about Kant's current reputation in the scientific community, do scientists going back to... Okay, so two great questions. Okay, the first question is how did Kant perceive himself. The second great question is how does science perceive him today. So simple answer is Kant saw himself as a revolutionary thinker. He saw himself as Copernicus. He's going to fundamentally change the way that we perceive the universe. In fact he calls it, what, his Critique of Pure Reason, a Copernican revolution.

I'll discuss this later on. Okay. How Kant actually perceived himself. Second is Kant's ideas, I'll show you later on, is really the basis for modern day science. Einstein was heavily influenced by Kant. Einstein read Kant when he was 16 and because of Kant's theories of spacetime and through a priori synthetic knowledge that gives him the theory of relativity. Okay. And if you study quantum mechanics you will discover a lot of ideas were heavily influenced by Kant. So his influence on science is just incredible. And but I'll discuss this moving on.

Okay. All right. Good. So now let's move on to Hegel. All right. So with Kant his philosophy is, remember, we interact with the noumena, which gives us the phenomena, the things that we can see, the appearance. There are three major issues that are unresolved in Kant. Kant acknowledges these issues and doesn't really provide a solution. Okay, these three issues are this. The first issue of course is what is the noumenon? What are the things in themselves? And Kant says we can never know. Okay, that's the first major issue. Second issue is okay, sorry, but if our brains are capable of reason through a synthetic knowledge, where does knowledge come from?

What's the source for our mind? Right? And the third problem is uniformity. If it is true that we are in fact always projecting onto the noumena to create phenomena, how do we know that we're all doing it the same way? How do we know that culturally all cultures are doing it the same way? Are you saying that the Egyptians, the Chinese, the Greeks, they all perceive the world in the same way? Okay. So these are the three major unresolved issues in Kant. Noumena. Okay. What is it? And Kant says we can never know, right?

Because we cannot imagine ourselves outside of space and time. What is the source for our minds? And Kant says we don't know. It's just there. And the third is uniformity. How do we know what we see is consistent with each other? And Kant says we don't know but we have to believe it. Okay, otherwise the world doesn't make any sense. How is it possible that without uniformity you can have mathematics and science? Okay, but again the problem with Kant is this is not satisfying, right? So Hegel is going to come along and he's going to provide a theory of everything.

He's going to resolve these three issues for Kant and create an entire system of thought that encompasses everything. Okay. So let's now move on to Hegel. So, Hegel's insight is what if as we're perceiving the noumena, the noumena is projecting back onto us. So it becomes a source for our ability to perceive the noumena. Okay. So in other words the noumena is really the source which creates the uniformity. All right. And so what is this noumena? And the word that Hegel uses is Geist. The Geist. Okay. And this is a German word that we translate into mind or spirit.

Okay. So Hegel's major work is called the Phenomenology of the Mind, which can also be translated into the Phenomenology of the Spirit. Okay. So translators argue about what the translation is. The problem is mind and spirit don't really explain that much. Okay. So imagine Geist as, and this is a bad metaphor, okay, but imagine Geist as the internet and we are individual computers. We're always interacting with this internet. Okay. So that would give you a basic framework to understand what Geist is. It is a collective consciousness almost. But that's not accurate.

Okay. To fully understand what Geist is, we need to go into the etymology of the word. What words were influenced in English by Geist. And there are three words that were influenced by Geist. Okay. The first word is ghost. So ghost is the idea that the Geist is coexisting with us, right? The Geist is not separate from us. It is coexisting with us. It's here and now. All right. Second word is geyser. Geyser, an expansion, a spawning up. Okay. So the Geist is always growing. It wants to grow and expand.

The third English word that comes from Geist is gist. The gist of an argument, the essence of an argument. So what Hegel is saying is the Geist is the essence of reality. The Geist comes first. It's the source for who we... Okay. So again to understand Geist think of it as an internet but the internet that is coexisting with us, that is always expanding forward and which is the essence of all life itself. That's why we say that Hegel is an idealist, right? He doesn't care about the material world. He doesn't think it really matters. What matters to him is the Geist itself, the ideas, because that's what drives human history.

All right. Okay. So, let's talk about how he perceives the Geist. How does the Geist actually move? And for him, what matters are not the things. What matters is not the ideas. What matters is the movement of things. And so for Hegel, the main thing that moves is the dialectic. Okay? And this is famous because obviously from the dialectic we have the thesis which moves to the antithesis which moves into the synthesis and this is the movement of human history. Okay. And the way to understand this is we all seek self-knowledge.

But the way to seek self-knowledge is by asking who we are not, which creates the antithesis, and then when we have the idea of who we are not this comes in conflict with who we are, which then creates new knowledge. Okay. All right. So in order to understand this idea let's do a thought experiment.

The thought experiment is this. Okay, let's go back to the island and there's 100 of us, okay? And we all sleep in different corners of the island. And again, during the night when we sleep, our minds are wiped clean. We're all now tabula rasa. We have no more memory, okay? We wake up and we forget that there's other people there. We don't even know who we are. When we wake up, what we see is the universe, the space and time. And we think that we are the universe, that we are space and time, and there is a reconciliation between us and the world, okay?

And we're really happy. But as we move along on the beach, we see someone else. And this other person threatens us because it's like us, but it's not like us. And now this person has destroyed my conception of the universe which is like I am the universe or I am God. And this creates conflict. Okay. We fight. We might actually physically fight. We might argue. Okay. But over time we create a synthesis which is like okay the two of us are now the universe. Problem is we walk along and we meet another person, another person.

Okay. So this is a constant process. But over time, even though there's conflict, even though there's violence, it's all a natural part of enlightenment. It's all part of the process of reconciliation where eventually all 100 of us, we rediscover who we are through conflict and differentiation and we form a collective consciousness. We become what Hegel says is the absolute... Okay. Absolute spirit, and that is the progress and the purpose of our lives. All right. So let me frame it in a different way. All right. So what Hegel is saying.

Okay. And again these are not his words. These are my words. So be careful. Okay. But I think this is the best way to explain what he's really saying about the movement of history. God has two forms. God is the Geist. Okay. But God is also the universe. Does that make sense? Okay. So why would God do this? Why would God be both the universe and be the Geist? Because God is trying to create reconciliation between itself and all the things in the universe. It's trying to come to peace, a reconciliation, an awareness between itself and us.

Okay. So the Geist through the dialectic is growing and growing until it becomes the universe itself and that is the end of history. All right and this is what we call a teleological movement of history where things are moving towards their purpose. So what Hegel says is the world is... Okay. Do not think of the world as being but becoming, as constantly in a process of transformation, of growth, of expansion. Why? Because it wants to become being. The being is when we are completely reconciled to God. All right? That's the end of the world.

That's the end of history. The reconciliation between us and God. When we become God and God becomes us, then there's no more differentiation. There's now no more conflict. We are moving towards this because the world is teleological. Every single thing that we do is moving towards the one reunion with God. Okay. The Geist, so to prove this, Hegel discusses the Geist. How do we know the Geist? Well, in culture, we know the Geist through, sorry, art, philosophy, and religion. And when you study these three things historically, what you will discover is they're all progressing.

Okay. So, in terms of art right now, we are in the romantic period, which is the highest period of art because it is synthesizing all previous periods of art. Religion, the highest religion is Christianity because it is the beginning of a reconciliation between us and God. Jesus was the great democratic force that allowed us to now all in our own way access God before God was captured and imprisoned by the priests and Jesus freed God from the priests, and so Christianity is the highest religion and of course philosophy, what's the highest philosophy, Hegel, right? Because this theory of the Geist is the end point of all our knowledge. From the Geist we can now finally reconcile, we can move towards reconciliation.

Okay. And so from this there are some major influences. Okay. So let's talk about the three major influences, legacies, of Hegel. By far the most influential of course is the creation of Marxism. Because what Karl Marx will do is he will take this theory of Hegel, the movement of history, the dialectic, and he will create something called dialectical materialism. He will invert Hegel because Hegel says it's only ideas that matter. And what Marx will say is that nope, only material things matter. Okay. He will invert Hegel but he will also adopt a lot of Hegelian thinking.

Okay. So the dialectic becomes a very important part of Marxist theology, sorry, ideology, which we'll study next class. Okay. So that's the first major influence. Second major influence is in the idea of God is dead.

Okay. So it was not Nietzsche actually who introduced this term. It was Hegel. And by God is dead, what Hegel is saying is we need to change our conception of God. Okay. Before we thought God was aloof, distant and absolute. And now I'm presenting you a more advanced version of God which is a God that is moving in us towards itself. Okay. So God is that, and of course the third major influence which we will discuss later on is the idea of the nation state because this theory of Geist becomes part of the nation state and so now because of Hegel we could believe that the nation state can have a soul.

Okay. And this will lead to a lot of problems which include imperialism, war and other really fun things. Okay. But we cannot understate the influence of Hegel. All right. So that's Hegel. All right. So any questions before I move on to the legacy of Kant and Hegel?

Was this clear? Was this clear? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Good. Good. Good. The contrast is really interesting because both of these philosophers make great intellectuals, right? And one thing I can picture living within, right, and being very saying something concrete about the world. Yeah. And I'm not sure about Hegel. Do you think he... How much do you think he really believed what he was talking about as opposed to like this is a very elegant explanation of the world, right? It seems a little bit... They're both abstract but Hegel seems more abstract by almost scale.

Yeah. So that's a great point. Yeah. I mean, Kant is very logical, Hegel is very abstract. So if you read the Critique of Pure Reason, if you spend enough time on it you will get through it. Okay, you will be able to master it. Whereas if you try to read Hegel, especially the Phenomenology of Spirit, it's just impossible. It's like everyone who reads it will have a different interpretation. And the reason why is what Hegel is trying to do, he's trying to synthesize all human knowledge.

Okay? He's trying to take everything that's happened, everything that we know, and he's trying to synthesize it into a system, which Kant just basically said we can't really do. Okay. So I mean I'm not an expert on Hegel, and I don't want to be an expert on Hegel actually because I think I will go crazy if I read too much Hegel. But I do know there's a lot of controversy around Hegel. He's actually regaining popularity in our age because of the idea of the Geist, right?

Because we live in a too materialistic world. But yeah, sorry if I'm rambling on. Okay. All right. Let's move on to the legacy because the legacy will give us further insight into Kant and Hegel as well as help us better understand the world. Okay. So Immanuel Kant. So remember, Immanuel Kant, for him he was really aware of what he was doing and his argument was that the Critique of Pure Reason marks a radical new stage in human history. It is like Copernicus. Remember Copernicus, his major contribution was before we thought we were at the center of the universe, right, and then Copernicus banished us to the margins of the universe.

So it's a new way of perceiving the world and so Kant is trying to do the same thing. Okay. So pre-Kantian philosophers thought that there was an objective reality and that we were just observers of this objective reality. But through logic and experience we could ultimately access this objective reality. And Kant says no, no, no, the world is entirely subjective. We project our imagination, our ideas, onto the universe. We are active participants in the world. And this will give rise to the idea of romanticism. Okay. Which is that the human imagination is the highest ideal.

It is in many ways partaking, it participates in God itself, right? So that is Kant's major revolution. This fed Hegel and let's remind ourselves of the difference between Kant and Hegel. So what Kant would say is there are limits to reason. Okay, we can never know the mind of God. And what Hegel says is no, the mind of God is a dialectic. Okay, and therefore we can know the mind of God. All right. Kant will say the world is what we will it to be, meaning we have free will.

And then Hegel will say we are moving towards the end of history, which, we are progressing, but this means we have no free will. Okay. Everything has been planned from the beginning. All these conflicts are part of a process of eventual enlightenment. And Kant will say we must believe in God for morality to exist. This is a really important point. So Kant is extremely logical, is very honest, and he says there's nothing I can do to prove God exists but we must believe God to exist otherwise we have no morality in this world. Okay, he also says we must believe free will exists even though there's no logical proof of free will, otherwise what's the point of existence. Okay, Hegel says God is dead, I've created a new god, and it is a teleological god that is forcing us towards there.

All right. So these are the three major differences between Kant and Hegel. All right. So now let's look at the legacy of Kant. Okay. So what's amazing is the more science progresses, the more Kant is proven right. So neuroscience is telling us today that we hallucinate reality. All right? And there are lots of experiments that prove this. So let's go over some really quick examples. We see a triangle, right? Guess what, guys? It doesn't exist. Okay, it's just part of our imagination. These lines exist. The triangle doesn't exist.

But the first thing we see is this triangle that does not exist. All right. This thing moves. Okay. But we know it doesn't really move. Okay. So our mind is playing tricks on us. We see this as slanted. Okay. When we actually take them side by side together, you'll see them as parallel. Another mind trick that's played. Which is bigger? Well, they're the same, but because of these circles, we think this is bigger than that. Okay, another mind trick that's being played on us. A and B are different colors, right?

They see, it's obvious they're different colors, right? But actually, they're the same color. Okay, another mind trick that's being played. So neuroscientists have done a lot of experiments and they've proven to us that we constantly participate in reality. We hallucinate reality, which is what Kant originally proposed. All right, let's move on to artificial intelligence. Okay, artificial intelligence shows us the limits of the blank slate theory. Okay, so let's imagine you actually had a blank slate in your minds. Well, that would be extremely problematic and we know because of how artificial intelligence works.

All right, let's look at supervised learning. So when we talk about artificial intelligence, it doesn't actually exist. What exists is the idea of supervised learning. And the idea is this. We're trying to teach a machine, an algorithm, to recognize a picture. Okay? So what we do is this. We feed a lot of training data into the algorithm. And we're talking like millions and millions of pictures. And then we label this data so that the machine is able to, using its own analysis, figure out the differences. Okay, it basically turns every picture into a mathematical concept and then if you train it well enough then it's able to differentiate between a triangle and a circle.

Okay, that's the idea of machine learning. Okay, same concept here. Okay, you have to feed it millions of pictures and you have to label these different pictures and then the machine will mathematically be able to figure out which is which. Okay, how the machine does that we're not really concerned about, but we need to train the machine and the problem with this is it's very expensive, it's very time-consuming. All right, now let's compare this with how a human does it, right? If I just give you a picture of a sheep, you're able to know what a sheep is.

And why does that happen? Okay, so a machine is able to tell you this is a sheep. Okay, but what a machine is not able to tell you is, is this sheep real or fake, right? Is this a real or fake... Well, we think it's fake, right? But what the machine says is we don't know. And the machine is correct. Real and fake are categories of a mind. Right? How do we know this is a fake sheep and not a real sheep? Do you understand? So the machine is saying, you know, if I don't know anything, if I have no a priori synthetic knowledge, then I cannot differentiate between fake and real.

But a child, anyone can know this is a fake sheep because obviously we have categories in our minds. Okay. A machine could not tell you what this is. Why? Because this has become a schema, a concept. But any child can tell you this is a sheep. Okay. And again, so this is artificial intelligence showing us that Kant was correct. All right. As I mentioned, Kant inspired Einstein to dream up the theory of relativity. All right. So Einstein read Kant when he was 16. It had a huge influence on Einstein.

Spacetime curvature is influenced by it but also the theory of relativity. Okay. And the theory of relativity is fairly straightforward. Let's just say that I'm sitting on a platform, a train platform, and you guys are across from me. Okay. Now we're not moving, right, and we know we're not moving but let's just say that for whatever reason simultaneously both platforms are moving at the same speed. Okay. From our perspective we're still not moving and that's the idea of relativity, where the laws of physics are relative to where we are at the moment. Okay, and this again is influenced by Kant. What's really fun is to think about quantum mechanics. Okay, so quantum mechanics confirms things in themselves, noumena, are not knowable to us. So this is a major argument between Kant and Hegel. Okay, and so quantum mechanics, so we looked at light and we want to know what the essence of light is.

What are photons? And we discover something really problematic which is we discover that photons are both wavelike and particle-like. They're both wave movement and particle, something static. And what's even more problematic is what we discovered is you're not able to figure out the state of the light, if it's a wave or a particle, until you actually measure it. So in other words before you measure light, before you measure particles, they are simultaneously occupying many different possibilities, something we call a superposition. Okay, and this idea of wave function, a wave function is all the probabilities of its position in space.

When you measure it, it collapses into one data point. Okay, does that make sense? All right. So, you know, in school we teach you the Bohr model of the atom, but in reality it's a cloud, meaning we don't know where the electrons are at a certain state. We can only know the probability of where it could be. Okay. And so, that's a problem here. All right. So, this idea of quantum mechanics, Einstein hated this theory. He thought this was disgusting. There's too much randomness. It's ugly. He hated it. Okay.

He thought that God as an architect had an elegant mind and we come up with these theories like quantum mechanics which actually make absolutely no sense, you're insulting God. So to disprove quantum mechanics Einstein wrote a paper on something called quantum entanglement. The idea is this, okay, things cannot be measured. Oh sorry, things, we cannot know the state of things, of atoms, until they are measured. Right? Well, in quantum mechanics, things also exist in opposition towards each other. Okay? So these two, so maybe two atoms are aligned together and their two states are mirror images of each other.

So, what you can do is this. If you split these two and you send them off in different corners of the universe, according to quantum mechanics, the moment you measure the first atom, the second atom must also reveal itself even though you have not measured it. And also it has to be simultaneous even though these two atoms could possibly be at different ends of the universe. Okay, quantum entanglement, and Einstein says this can't possibly be true. This is a stupid idea and this proves quantum mechanics doesn't work. The problem is this.

The problem is we've done experiments to prove quantum entanglement actually does work and this is true. Okay, not only that, but quantum mechanics has proven itself to be the most successful theory in physics of all time because it's given rise to the transistor. Okay, the idea of the transistor is if you can understand electrons then you can manipulate electrons in a way that allows you to manipulate it which allows you to make calculations on it. Okay. So the transistor has given rise to the computer which has given rise to the internet.

Okay, basically created the world that we live in today. So without quantum mechanics, we cannot have the world we live in today. Okay. But again even though we know quantum mechanics to be true, we don't know why it's true. Okay. There are lots of mysteries in quantum mechanics. One of the biggest problems in quantum mechanics is something called Schrödinger's cat. So Schrödinger created a thought experiment to show you how problematic quantum mechanics is. Let's just say that you have a cat inside a box and there's radioactive material inside this box.

Okay? And you don't know, you can never know if this cat is dead or alive. So, the only thing you can say is it is both dead and alive, which again is problematic, but that's not it. It's even more problematic because another physicist, Wigner, said, "Okay, let's do another thought experiment. Let's just say, okay, I'm a scientist. I open the box. Then I know the state of the cat now, right? I didn't know it before. Once I open the box, I can see the cat is alive or dead.

Now I know. But let's just say that there's a friend in my laboratory who is observing me, okay? And he has not himself opened the box. So when I open the box and I find the cat is dead, what happens to him? Okay. Well, there are different possibilities. The first possibility is he now knows. Okay. So reality has changed for him once he has this information. The other possibility is he doesn't know but he thinks he knows. Okay. So this shows you how problematic quantum mechanics is. And you can keep on going like this to the nth degree.

Okay. In other words, the question that they're trying to deal with, the question that quantum mechanics isn't really able to resolve, is, is reality subjective or objective? Can there be one reality in which we all live or is reality constantly multiplying subjectively? Okay. In other words, whenever we make a decision, whenever we act, it changes reality for us but not for others. Okay, is it possible we all live within our own universe that is unique to us?

Okay, that's a question quantum mechanics cannot answer and it creates a huge problem in quantum mechanics. But if we go back to Kant, well, the answer's obvious. It is true that we do create our own individual reality, right? The noumenon is something we can never see. This is quantum mechanics. The mind, when it interfaces with the thing itself, creates the world that we live in. Okay. So this brings back the point that the imagination is the animating force of the universe. When we use the imagination, we create our own reality that is distinct from other realities.

Okay? So does that make sense? Okay. So okay another way of framing this is, what is happening here, is Kant describing the world we live in or did he create this reality that we live in? Okay. And another way of saying this is rather than artificial intelligence, neuroscience, quantum mechanics all confirming what Kant first argued, another way of saying this is Kant gave them the intellectual capacity to come up with these theories by themselves. Okay. Another way of saying this is this philosophy creates the boundaries of the human imagination and science, all science is doing is playing with these boundaries to confirm what is known within these boundaries.

Okay, that's the radical statement that I want you to think about. Okay, is science capable of coming up with new ideas by itself? And the argument I would make is no because you can have data. What matters is your interpretation of this data. And this interpretation of data comes from the Geist. Okay. The collective mind that philosophers like Kant and Hegel created. And this is problematic because we live in a world today that is undervaluing philosophy and arts and overvaluing STEM, engineering... Okay. And so my argument to you is if that is the case, if we just spend all our money on science, it's all going to be useless.

Okay? Because in the Dante world, Dante talks to God, writes the Divine Comedy. The Divine Comedy then inspires Kant to write the Critique of Pure Reason, which inspires Hegel. And then the two together will go inspire neuroscience, artificial intelligence and quantum mechanics. Okay. So in other words, it is imagination that creates all reality, not just our individual reality. There are some of us who are geniuses who are able to imagine a new reality in which we can now inhabit and participate in. Right? And evidence for this is, you know, ever since the Germans, so Kant also conceptualized the United Nations.

Okay. Ever since Königsberg fell, ever since the Germans lost World War II, we have not made major advances in science. Okay, remember the transistor is not a major advance. It's just technology. It's just taking a science and then expressing it in the world that we live in today. Okay. So without culture, without the Geist, is it possible to contribute to advanced science? Okay. And I think the answer is no. I think we're stuck where we are because we've abandoned culture. We've abandoned Geist.

The Geist. So Immanuel Kant was a citizen of Königsberg. In fact he was called the Königsberg clock. Why? Because he was so regimented. He made sure at a very specific time he would take a walk somewhere. Okay. And so by observing where he was at a certain time the residents of Königsberg would know what time it is. All right. So you can make the argument that Kant created Königsberg because Königsberg would after Kant become the intellectual scientific center of Europe, but Königsberg also created him.

Okay, which is an idea which would be very familiar to Hegel. All right. So that is it for Kant. We will now move on to Marx and Freud. Okay. But was this clear? Any questions? Okay, great. So, next class we will do Marx.