Hegel and Post-Hegelian Idealism
Hegel
His Project
Let’s start by the things concerning the German idealists generally. We were going to get a new metaphysic, absolute idealism, in which every individual event and entity is an expression of all-inclusive process. So your self consciousness is just a passing moment of the self consciousness of the divine, the divine which is working out its full freedom and self expression in the course of history. It’s not a mechanistic cause-effect model, it’s a process model, that sees organic interrelatedness of everything within the all-inclusive one. If you talk about Napoleon, Hegel thinks that all history converges on that individual and all history opens up from that point on. He calls Napoleon a world historical figure, one in whom that path is summed up, and the one is loaded with future. That metaphysical monism, absolute idealism or idealistic monism, everything is spirit at work is Hegel.
While that’s one side of his metaphysic, it becomes appreciated more in the second half of 20th century than it is in early 20th century. In early 20th century, Hegel was depicted as a rationalist rather than a romanticist because he says that the real is rational and the rational is real. He seems to be saying whatever you decide is rationally necessary, that’s what the reality is. To say the real is rational he means that the real is a creative manifestation of mind/spirit. And to say that rational is real is to say the categories of thought which structure creative thinking and activity are also categories of reality. So when we get into his logic we’ll see him spelling out all kinds of logical categories. It reminds you of Kant’s categories, which he thinks are purely categories of thought, while Hegel says they are also categories of reality. Keep in mind that for Hegel, the starting point is the all-inclusive creative free spirit, whose creativity is being freely manifested in the ongoing movement of history.
Third theme is an echo of the earliest Greek thought. If you can cast your mind back to 400 or 500 BC, you’ll remember that even before the Pre-Socratics, in the Greek poets, there is a recognition that the universe in a whole is an ordered unity, of which a just society is a microcosm, of which a just person, with a well-ordered moral life, is a further minicosm. The universe in a whole are all made of in the same image, that’s what’s underlying the logos in the Pre-Socratics, and the theory of Forms of Plato. Likewise, Hegel uses the term logos and he sees the individual as a microcosm of the whole, of the absolute spirit. The nation state is a further microcosm of the whole. When we get to the phenomenology of mind, he unfolds the mental meandering that traces the dialectical unfolding of the self consciousness, but you never know whether he talks of a just self or of a society, a social consciousness, or of history in the unfolding of history. This is about how an individual achieve self awareness, position in relationship. But you could read the same sort of things about how a nation achieves its own identity in relationship. All process of history is rational in his sense of rational.
New Method
What we had in preceding century or two is an attempt of demonstrative metaphysic, deductive reasoning, mathematical reasoning, starting either self-evident truth or empirical generalization. And it’s that kind of metaphysic Hume and Kant were both critical of, and Hegel agrees with their criticism. His conception of reason is not the conception of deductive proofs, but what you might call thinking, trying to understand. For 18th century reason involves ideas which forms propositions and which develops syllogisms. In other words, the unit of thought in the tradition from Descartes on is really the proposition, the judgments we make. And Kant tries to find the categories that underlies the judgments. The key difference for Hegel is that he makes the focus of thought, not the proposition but concept(begriff in German). If you are thinking in terms of propositions, you try to see what a proposition logically implies, and you try to state it in another proposition, but if you are thinking in terms of concepts, you are trying to clarify a concept, you are trying to explore conceptual relationships, one concept gives rise to another concept as your mind meanders along. You start with a direct awareness and that initial concept is mediated by a process of reflection, so there is a process of reflective meandering to a clearly conceptualization. It’s that creative thinking process is life of spirit, life of mind. In the German sense, the spiritual life is culture. In talking of this new method, notice it’s called a phenomenology of the mind, it’s a description of the logos structure of phenomena of the life of the mind.
New Logic
You also get the new Logic, the dialectic, the thesis, antithesis and synthesis. The overall three points you see are Logic, Nature and Spirit. What you have in logic is the logical structure, the Form that history follows. In Nature you have the objective material in which spirit is manifested at a pre-conscious level. The thesis is what is immediately apprehended, the antithesis is the mediating stage, the synthesis is where it comes together with comprehension. The initial is abstract and it becomes more concrete, the movement is from abstract to concrete and the most concrete expression of thought is in culture.
Remember the traditional law of logic begins with identity. When the principles of essence are taken as essential principles of thought, they become predicates of proposed subject, which is true of everything, a propositions thus arising have been stated as the law of thought. Propositions that are principles of what it is to be, of essence, what is being. You notice that you start with being and then move to essence, what it is to be, that it is existence, what it is essence. That’ where did Sartre get his famous terminology that existence precedes essence. The maxim of identity reads everything is identical with itself. Negatively, law of non-contradiction, this maxim is nothing but a law of abstract understanding.
Traditional laws of logic is true, but trivial. Why? Because he’s not concerned with some static proposition, about a static reality, he is not concerned with shear abstractions with reality, reality is process, the unfolding meandering of thought, and in that process nothing stays the same. The law of identity may deal with abstract understanding, but not with concrete conceptualization of process.
Instead of maxim of the excluded middle which a maxim of abstract understanding, we should rather say that everything is opposite, neither in heaven and earth, neither in the mind of mind or nature is there anything such as abstract either or, as the law of the excluded middle maintains. Whatever exists is concrete with difference and opposition with itself. The finitude of things will then lie in the want of correspondence between their immediate being and what they essentially are. Thus in inorganic nature, the acid is implicitly at the same time the base, it’s only being consistent to its relationship to its other. The acid is not something that persists quietly in contrast, it’s always in effort to realize what it potentially is in process. Contradiction in that sense is the very moving principle of the world, it’s ridiculous to say that contradiction is unthinkable. Contradiction contradicts itself. The proximate result of our position realized as contradiction is the ground of being which contains identity as well as difference superseded to elements in the complete notion.
To think those laws of logic give you a corner of a changing process, it’s obviously mistaken. They’re dealing with something you hold in your mind in abstraction from the concrete process of reality where you think of the essence of something in abstraction from the process of actualizing that in reality. Every finite being is actually in process of becoming. It’s not until the concept of being is amplified and fleshed out in the great overall synthesis that you finally get what being is in its fullest reality, namely absolute all-knowing completely free sovereign spirit. When he says about contradiction, that is, the moving principle of the world, he’s not saying that the world is teeming with contradictions, and that self contradictory propositions are true, he is simply saying that in the process of history, things are changing.
Q&A
When he is talking about universal, particular and individuals, Hegel thinks that universal is a sheer abstraction, it’s an abstract way of talking about ideas, there are no real universal running around separately in some Platonic heaven. On the other hand, the notion of particulars isolate discrete particulars of an atomistic sort without any intrinsic connection to anything else. That is a further abstraction that stands in the antithesis to the first abstraction. Reality concretely is neither particular or universal, you’re not an island, no man is an island. We are what we are in relationship to everything around us so that the individual who is what he is by virtue of every relationship that is fed into him and everything goes out from him. What we all do as individuals is to concretize the universal possibilities.
Summary
Notice that the initial notion is of a ground of existence, this is a theoretical concept, being as it is in itself, in contrast to mere appearance which is the antithesis and then you get the concrete actuality. You don’t talk simply of substance in the actuality or causal processes but a reciprocity within an organic whole, the inter-dependence of things within an organism. But more concretely, in the concept by Gryff in talking about a subject, you have the concept of the subject, then the judgment then the syllogism, that is the structure of traditional logic. The antithesis is when you don’t look at the subject that way, but objects share experience empirically, but you need to bring the rational structures together with the object in order to grasp the idea. Now what you have under logic is simply shared categories, structures of thought that applied to reality.
When you get into the realm of nature, you notice that he is dealing with abstractions first, namely laws of nature, and the mechanism he’s thinking of is cause-effect mechanisms, so what you have under that first thing is space time motion in matter and cause-effect mechanisms is the mechanistic science. But then you get beyond the abstractions of mechanistic science to the actual interplay of forces and by now chemistry as a science, where you see there are interactions, not just one way cause-effect as in mechanics, but the thing that really beginning to emerge is the biological concept, the organic model, and here he sees the idea of teleology because biological processes are end oriented, growth with a view to producing fruit.
Phenomenology of Mind/Spirit
Mode of Thought of Kant and Hegel
Kant was still involved in linear thinking, tracing out a line of argument, trying to identify the underlying presuppositions, or the transcendental presuppositions, and then in the dialectic he is simply examining the logic of the argument, and you are accustomed to that. But Hegel is diving into a pool and try to get your bearings. You are trying to locate your self, but to do that you have to find points of reference in all sorts of directions, it’s as if what Hegel is doing is lending clump in the middle of something and try to locate himself in relationship to other things in the environment. Kant is engaged in deductive thinking, tracing the logical connection between propositions and of the logical inference from one proposition to another. Hegel is not dealing with propositions, he’s dealing with concepts, he’s analyzing concepts, it’s a different mode of thinking. All of the outline of thesis, antithesis and synthesis begins with the most abstract conception being, everything else is trying to explore the concept of being, making it more concrete. It’s as if Kant told us that existence is not a predicate, not a concept, to which Hegel responds, that’s what you think, I’ll show you. The bare fact of existence may not be being, it’s just given, fact without meaning, existence without essence, you don’t find that in Hegel. Hegel is much more back into the Greek ethos in that regard, because the concept of being is loaded with all sorts of implications, he’s trying to unravel them. He’s way to get inside it is to meander, asking himself, if I say being what comes to your mind. Immediately you begin to see that being and non-being, while the seem like to be antithesis, either-or, they sort of combine when you think of becoming, because anything that’s in process of becoming it is what it was not and it is not what it was. There is no such thing as a static being in the world of change. So you realize what is not is just about to be is and what is is about to be what is not. What he’s doing is trying to make that a bit more concrete. Then from existence to essence, because while on the surface, in a static kind of logic, it looks as if essence and existence stand over against each other, the bare fact that it is as distinct from what it is. Sartre would say existence precedes essence, who is breaking with Hegel, since for Hegel there is no existence without essence. While the two concepts in the abstract stand over against each other as opposites, in concrete reality they come together. So it has to move to the real concept of being, notice he says being is a concept.
Introduction
If we are trying characterize Hegel’s Metaphysic, you can characterize it as romanticist idealism, it’s an evolutionary Idealism, where everything, which is potentially creative spirit, is moving towards its full manifestation. So not only is biological evolution is seen in these terms, but at the same token cultural evolution is seen in those terms, the history art is seen in those terms, the history of religion is seen in those terms. And dialectic is simply the traces of the process. Thesis, antithesis and synthesis is the process of reflection and the process of reality. With that in mind, we’ve seen that Hegel moves from that original grand thesis of logic, which is the abstract form of things to nature, which is unconscious manifestation of thought bearing that form to spirit which brings that abstract form and the unconscious manifestation together in developing consciousness. He is concerned with the development of the individual self consciousness, the social consciousness and the self identity as a society, state and nation. He is concerned with the absolute, the all inclusive spirit. The first looks like an introspective psychology, the second reads like a book of ethics, and the third like a treatment of cultural history, including art, religion and philosophy, and philosophy is the synthesis, and the grand synthesis of philosophy is Hegel’s philosophy. Hegel view his philosophy as everything after which is footnote of it, there is nothing after the final synthesis.
Subjective Spirit(Individual)
What’s going on in subjective spirit is the gradual freeing of reason from the senses. One he is obviously not going to be an empiricist, because in empiricist there is a world of change and if we are trying to do is to moving towards the world of unchanging, the grand synthesis, then in the final analysis, the process of change is not governed by the sensory, it’s governed by form, order, the unchanging, so Hegel is interested in seeing reason free from its bondage to the senses. That reaches its culmination in Arts, you are working creatively with sense material, reason is working imaginatively, and same as religion and philosophy. The lens through which he sees this vast screen is the lens of our own self consciousness, what he’s doing is impersonation, role playing, empathetic description, he is entering into the feelings of an individual to capture what it is like in the emerging consciousness. Phenomenology is concerned with structures of our conscious being in the world. He’s trying to trace out the dialectic structure of that conscious being. He’s not trying to deal with the consciousness and abstraction from the world, that was Descartes’ mistake.
The concern is with the structures of conscious being, what being is revealed through our self consciousness, so you look at our self conscious being in the world, in relationship to the world. There was a tendency in 17th 18th century, for an individual to be regarded as Robinson Crusoe, an isolated individual, ruled by reason, self sufficient, living alone in his island, he is able to bring nature under the rule of reason, provide for himself, then the savages come, then he met Friday, but keeps him in submission, until he becomes rational enough so they can enter into a social contract. Not so for Hegel, there is no such thing as an individual in isolation, even self consciousness doesn’t exist in isolation, he is interested in the structures of our conscious being in the world.
The realm of subjective, or individual spirit, begins with a thesis having to do with sense consciousness, which is not the same as self consciousness. It is something animal has. Sense consciousness is simply like part of the synthesis in nature now becomes the thesis for a new antithesis. Sense consciousness is simply the consciousness of the other and that stands in antithesis to the consciousness of oneself. But you don’t have really have mind, spirit, reason at work free until that self consciousness in dealing with the world of sense consciousness achieves its freedom in that world of sense consciousness. It’s not just the self consciousness isolated, but rather at work reflectively, rationally, creatively doing something to shape the world of sense consciousness and is the stepping stone over into the objective spirit into order in society. Because law and order are but work of reason ordering the world of sense consciousness. One only achieves self consciousness in relationship to the other, so this is a phenomenology of emerging self consciousness. The dialectic is what he is tracing, the isolated self is always incomplete, we have to see self in relationship to the other. The synthesis in the realm of subjective spirit is a truly rational spirit, reason that gets beyond simply observing the world of the sense and the other, gets beyond contemplating his own independent identity and becomes a reflective rational being addressing the ordered-ness of the world to which we are related. If there is liberty for Kant, it’s always going to be liberty within the framework of law. And that is because there is no such thing as existence without essence. Because there is logos structure, running throughout all being, so you have to have individual in a relationship with each other.
Objective Spirit(Social)
Here you notice the triad moves from the abstract concept of law to the antithesis dealing with the individual conscious and morality, then to the synthesis fo the social morality and social order. Law in the abstract provides the context for dealing with freedom, the law in the abstract is the rule of reason, it’s the Kantian conception of universal duty. Law in the abstract has to do with human rights, conceived as being something objective, rooted in reality. But you have to unpack the concept, and you begin to do so when you turn from that universalized abstractions about law and rights to questions of individual conscience, from something like law which is completely objective, to something like conscience, which is very inward and subjective. Kant works with both, acting out of a sense of duty as well as objective rights and duty. What Hegel tries to do is to bring these two together in the synthesis of a social ethic, addressing the social order. It’s in social structures that we live out our morality, it’s in social structures that we have to act rationally. And it’s in that context he talks about states and his political philosophy begins to emerge. He wants to say that we found our individual consciousness and individual freedom maximized in the context of sovereignty of the state. Out of Hegelian philosophy emerged some of the most extreme statism, particularly Italian fascism in the 20th century.
Absolute Spirit (All-inclusive)
There were two ways of interpreting Hegel, which has a bearing of how easy it is to understand him. There was an interpretation of Hegel that tries to see him as an 18th century Enlightenment rationalist, trying to work out deductively a speculative metaphysics. That is to say, he was a speculative metaphysician. However, with growing interest of phenomenology in Europe, an alternative interpretation has developed which I think is much more in keeping with Hegel himself, namely, we have to take seriously of his major work, the phenomenology of mind. So he’s not trying to prove something, or develop a well argued rationalistic system, when he says the real is rational and the rational is real, he’s not using that as a lever for another speculative metaphysic, but rather he’s trying to describe the phenomena, the consciousness of being, the individual, societal level and the absolute consciousness of being.
When he gets to absolute spirit, the closest you can get to that in theological language of Judaism and Christianity would be to talk of God’s own knowledge, God’s self knowledge. Hegel is thinking of God’s self knowledge not of God, but as objectified in the world he’s creating in the course of the unfolding history of the universe and he sees God’s self knowledge is unfolding in ourself as subjective spirit, and our self consciousness is really God’s self consciousness, God is conscious of himself through our consciousness. Because if God is all inclusive being, then my consciousness is a finite moment of God’s consciousness. If we contemplating nature are drawn to contemplate the perfection of God then certainly God in contemplating his handiwork is contemplating himself. But the fullest expression of God’s self knowledge is when the form of thought synthesized with the stuff of nature by virtue of the imaginative creativity of the subjective spirit as one part of the conscious of being a national spirit. So there’s a phenomenology describing the consciousness of being.
We’ll look more closely here the thesis antithesis synthesis triad in the historical unfolding of the absolute spirit, which is art, religion and philosophy. The initially interesting thing is to see how he differentiates those three. Hegel would say it’s the form in which the expression finds articulation. The arts are using artistic images, the poet would use verbal images. Image is cognitive imagination which is the distinctive activity of the artist, not so much craft in applying the pigments as imagination in coming up with the images.
Religion which speaks symbolically for representation. But a representation is not the reality, it’s the idea that stands for the reality. So religious language is a language for symbolic story, not necessarily parable. The religious form of expression is the pictorial representation. He traces the religion from oriental religion which was largely pantheist, to Greek religion which is polytheistic which is antithesis, to the Christian religion which is trinitarian, three in one and one in three, combining the infinity of God with the finite expression of the deity, infinite spirit incarnate in all history. The story of incarnation is a symbol of the way in which God is immanent in everything that happens in history.
It is in philosophy that you find pure concept as the form of expression, the philosopher in his analysis of concept tries to avoid metaphor imagery and conceptualize with clear and distinct thought.
Hegel’s view on Religion
Immanentistic Theology
First of all he has an immanentistic kind of theology, that is to say God is immanent in everything else, the transcendence of God is in traditional Judeo-Christian thought, the transcendence of God, his numerical distinctness from the creation is lost. Consequently any notion of supernatural act is regarded as religious symbol picture, rather than as historically true. There is no act of divine revelation because everything goes on the human spirit is God’s self manifestation, all understanding is subsumed within that inner self expression. This is related with the phase “The death of God”, that is to say the death of the picture of a transcendent deity, that’s a concept of God which dies in the unfolding history of religious thought. Secondly you have his criticism of certain other views of religion.
Criticism of Schleiermacher & Kant
Kant reduces religion to ethics and Schleiermacher criticized him for that. But Schleiermacher tended to define religion in terms of a feeling of dependence on the all-incompassing absolute to which Hegel responds if the feeling of dependence with the core of religion, then the most religious of all creatures is the dog. His point being that obviously there is something phenomenologically awry in that description of religion, above feelings of independence you have imagination involved in the art, you have symbolizing activity involved in religious stories. The point is then the Schleiermacher’s view on religion is far too limited and it misses the fact that the religious symbols can and are in philosophy and in theology translated into concepts so that philosophy is trying to conceptualize what religion is symbolizing, which is why history of philosophy finds its culmination in a Hegelian kind of idealism with a panentheistic being because this is the truest conceptualization of what religion has been symbolizing.
Division between History and Faith
The thing that is significant for faith is the symbol, which is the expression of the faith, rather than the history which is the foundation of faith to which the faith looks back. So the historicity of the story is not important. When we get to Kierkegaard we’ll find he’s very conscious of this, we will find what’s known as Lessing’s ditch, who point out that there is a logical gap, a ditch between a historical statement and the statement of faith. Jesus Christ died, he died for our sins, He rose from the dead, he rose for our justification, how do you get one from the other? This becomes the dominant issues and tensions between liberal and traditional theology in the late 19th and the first half of the 20th century and it still is. The inerrancy business is simply an attempt to reinforce the emphasis on the historicity of the story.
Post-Hegelian Idealism
Left & Right Wings of Religion
There are two ways in talking about the immediate influence of Hegel. One is that the left and right wings of religion, where the left wings lays emphasis on the evolution of religion, the history of religion, and the symbolic nature of religion. And the left wing really spurs the development of the liberal theology. Stumpf refers to two individuals David Strauss and Bruno Bauer, two German biblical scholars. Their emphasis on identifying God with the human spirit so that our beliefs in God are projects of our self consciousness and after all Hegel tells us our consciousness of God is God’s self consciousness in and through us. And somebody is going to turn around and say then we can think of God in terms of our own consciousness. That move becomes explicit in Ludwig Feuerbach, who is the primary influences in shaping the thinking of Karl Marx that is to say he is a materialist, who combines Hegel’s dialectic of self consciousness, with a materialistic interpretation of history. Hegel says that men’s God consciousness is the self consciousness of God, Feuerbach says men’s God consciousness is the consciousness of men, so the idea of God is something we project as an extension of our self consciousness. And ascribe to God attributes that are symbolic of what we see ourselves to be, so that theology really becomes simply a veiled exercise in psychology and anthropology. The essence of religion is the relationship of man to man and that in Feuerbach is one of the main sources for religious humanism, that is say a humanistic religion that you often find in a Unity Church. When Marx say that religion is the opiates of the masses, what he’s doing is drawing on what Feuerbach says, he’s drawing on the notion that religion is a form of a sublimation of our own ideals for our self that we project into a hypothetical mythical being, so religious symbolism can not be translated into language of our God, it’s simply language about the human condition and human need. The right way is essentially more orthodox in theological terms, retaining Hegel’s idealism and his panentheism, but retaining a fairly traditional view of Christianity.
Old and Young Hegelians
Then there is further distinction draw between the old and the young Hegelians, where the old Hegelians are more conservative, they believe that Hegel brought philosophy to its finest hour, and the Hegelian philosophy is probably the system to end all systems and so there was a extensive neo-Hegelian movement. That is against the young Hegelians, who wanted to leave to Hegel the theoretical, philosophical conceptualization of system building and turn to the kind of action that is implicit within Hegel’s thinking, where the aim is not to contemplate the world, but to change it, to be an agent in the dialectical movement of history. Marx and Engel was one of those Hegelians. What you get then is the emergence of Marxist philosophy in the 1840s, which is known as dialectical materialism. Materialism comes from Feuerbach and the dialectical logic comes from Hegel, which is also known as historical materialism, which means a materialistic interpretation of history. It’s the material conditions of history that is the driving force, not absolute spirit, so instead of history being a manifestation of the absolute spirit as it is for an idealist interpretation of the history, in a materialistic interpretation of history, it’s the material conditions that make history, meaning the forces and means of production, that is to say the economic conditions of history. So you get an economic determinism, a class struggle that is the dynamic force in history.
Introduction
Remember what you have in the idealistic movement is to project onto the hole of reality what one sees in the lens of one’s own human consciousness. You see that in Hegel, that the self consciousness is the microcosm of the absolute spirit in its unfolding manifestation of history. Something of the same carries all the way through. Schopenhauer is a voluntaristic idealist, meaning the aspect of self he finds the most revealing, is will rather than reason. Hegel said the rational is the real and the real is the rational, that is to say, one understands reality in terms your own conscious dialectic. What Schopenhauer is saying is that will is reality and reality is will. So you understand reality in the image of human will.
Schopenhauer
Schopenhauer’s major work is titled “The World as Will and Idea”. The idealists view things through what the self is and two things we are conscious of in ourselves introspectively are will and ideas. If that is the lens, if that’s what I see in the mirror, then I’m gonna project on reality as a whole. His influence in emphasizing will is by both Kant and Fichte, both of whom had maintained that the ideas of the material world are simply phenomena. So Schopenhauer regards the world in terms of ideas we have as phenomena and will as noumena, reality and appearance. The phenomena is easy, the point is human mind has ideas which are taken representations of nature. But we order them with categories. Like Kant he thinks that there are a-priori and universal categories. He is talking here about the world of theoretical thought.
In four fold root of sufficient reason, we find logical, causal and mathematical necessity and moral necessity when we think about the world. In fact the antithesis to necessity is will. The world is my idea, my representation, a world projected by my will, because I’m imposing my will and categories of thought on it. The sufficient reason is a notion, a structure we impose on things according to Schopenhauer, it’s a projection of my will. If we talk about reality, the key is in realizing the self is at its root a will, an impulsive, driving thing. But one of the interesting ways in which he develops this has a lot of influence on the existentialists later on. He comes at it not by looking at human thought because that’s the way to phenomena only, but by looking at the way I live bodily, his phenomenology is what now known as the lived body. The body treated as the object of study is not the body you live, a lived body is your conscious bodily experience. The consciousness of living bodily. You can get the difference between objective time measured by physical motion and lived time, death as a biological phenomena and something you live. The unified reality is the absolute will. The thing in itself is the will, manifesting itself blindly by urge and creative outburst.
It means at the heart of reality there is an endless striving from which there is no escape, if you get away from endless striving what’s left is boredom and pain, so in this world there is only unsatisfied desire, unfulfilled will or else boredom and pain. So Schopenhauer says this is the worst of all possible worlds and this is the roots of Sartre and his pessimism later on. You can overcome that worst in degree by aesthetic experience which is contemplative, representational, but that is absorbing yourself in the world as idea, you can turn to ethical responsibility and fight to overcome self will, gain sympathy with others and merge your will not as a craving of your own but with the absolute will, but what does that do to you own will? The third alternative is asceticism that negates the will, but if the world is a projection of my will then if I repress my will I also negate my world. If I have no will to see, to think, to observe then there is nothing, the state of nothingness is the result. If this is the worst of all possible worlds, the suicide is the consequence. If you read Albert Camus and his myth of Sisphus in which he discusses the ethics of suicide, he’s discussing it because of this problem. What do you do in a world where the dialectic has left things without a synthesis in the worst of all possible worlds. That’s Schopenhauer’s question, which the existentialists tries to answer. And I think it’s fair to say the religious existentialists pose the synthesis, the pessimistic existentialists has no synthesis to pose.