40 The Ugly Hegel

Like episodes 38 and 39, episodes 40 and 41 form a unit, written together but separated because of length and complexity. Please listen to both as a unit. Having seen both the good and the bad of Hegel, it is time now for the ugly, those philosophers I have termed the ”prescriptive Hegelians.” Hegel’s inversion of value, the rejection of transcendence and embrace of immanence, which is the foundational move of his philosophy, is also the mother of all prescriptions, laying the groundwork for all who follow. If there is no transcendent God (summum bonum), god does not go away; He changes form. Instead of being the Being we encounter, that we seek to understand and know, god becomes the value we choose to embrace. Man in rejecting God becomes god, just as Nietzsche predicted.