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9:48

(In »The syntheist agent and her desires and drives«)

It is Hegel who digs the Cartesian subject’s grave. His logic is a redoubled contingency. His rationality is a redoubled irrationality. Hegel’s most brilliant insight lies in that thinking starts and ends with paradox and inconsistency. Thinking is nothing other than a production of problems; it is only activated at all when it is confronted with enigmas. Hegel’s stroke of genius is the insight that knowledge reaches its absolute limit, is transformed into what Hegel dramatically calls absolute knowledge, just when it understands and acknowledges its own built-in limitations. Hegel thereby pokes holes in rationalism; the blind faith in the scope of human logic as the foundation for epistemology, which his predecessors Spinoza and Kant cultivate and celebrate. Hegel instead opens the door to transrationalism, the idea that Man’s thinking is founded on his conditions for survival and based on an extremely narrow perspective, as a contingent phenomenon without any chance of being able to embrace and comprehend in advance the enormity of existence.