Perhaps there is no philosopher more blatantly misinterpreted than G.W.F Hegel. Hegel is said to be a pantheist, reducing all that is external to the self into possession of the rational self (“the same”) such that all difference is made univocal, monological, and subject to reason (synthesis). Hegel is made the boogeyman, whose pretensions must be opposed so as to preserve the Other, and the finitude of reason must acknowledge absolute difference and otherness, resisting synthesis (sameness). Hegel is portrayed, variously, as a super-rationalist or as marking the end of reason, and he is either an atheist or a heterodox Christian who imagines God in process. In much (most?) of what is written on Hegel, though there is not a lot of agreement, his Christianity and his self-description as an orthodox Christian working within the parameters of Trinitarian theology, is often not accounted for or mentioned. The exception to this reading, are those theologians reading him from an Eastern Orthodox orientation, such as Sergius Bulgakov, or even the Swiss Catholic, Hans Urs von Balthasar. In this list I would include Rowan Williams, who wrote his dissertation on Vladimir Lossky, though he credits Gillian Rose with his reconsideration of Hegel. Williams recognizes that Hegel is not effacing difference in synthesis and sameness, but in Christ this difference is preserved but overcome.[1]
This reconsideration of Hegel is important, as Hegel develops a full appreciation of the meaning of Trinity and the Trinitarian necessity for thought. As Williams points out in his key article on Hegel,[2] thought is ultimately dependent upon what God has done in Christ. For Hegel, “no otherness is unthinkable,” as “an unthinkable otherness would leave us incapable of thinking ourselves, and so of thinking about thinking – and so of thinking itself.”[3] God, in the tradition, is portrayed as completely Other to the world, which means he is unthinkable, discrete and independent. But this notion of God leaves out the fulness of a Trinitarian understanding. In his philosophy of religion, the culmination and final project of Hegel, “God is defined as ‘the living process of positing his Other, the world, which comprehended in its divine form is His Son.’”[4] The “consummate religion” in Hegel’s description of Christianity, in this final work of his life, is “the religion that is properly related to itself, the religion that is transparent to itself, thinks itself – spells out the inseparability of thinking God and thinking the reconciled consciousness; it also, very importantly, explains why such a religion can only be a historically determined (‘positive’ or ‘revealed’) faith.”[5] Consciousness and thought begin with the recognition of the self in and through the other. God is not an isolated Subject, but gives himself to the world in his Son. He gives himself for thought, and makes thought and self-consciousness possible.
Much like Ludwig Wittgenstein’s philosophy aimed at dispelling the notion of private language (specifically as illustrated in Augustine), Hegel pictures self-consciousness as dependent upon God’s self-consciousness shared/realized in the historical person of Christ, and given or realized in the Spirit. “To think myself is to discover my identity in the alien givenness of the past, and to think history is to find it in my consciousness (thereby discovering that there is no such thing as a consciousness that is ‘privately mine’).[6] Thus, Hegel defends the melding of thought and being, but this defense is part of his explaining the doctrine of the Trinity, the work of Christ, the meaning of createdness, “which leads to the full and mature thinking of God, as spirit in community.[7] The condition for thinking is nothing less than the doctrine of Trinity, creation, reconciliation, and incarnation.
This is why Hegel focuses on Anselm’s ontological argument, which in Anselm’s version he judges inadequate, but which he would rescue. While he is not unappreciative of Augustine, Anselm, and Aquinas, picturing God in his simplicity as unthinkable, Hegel would transmute the Christian tradition of divine simplicity “into the terms of a process” rather than in terms of pure negation.[8] For example, Anselm would equate the greatest thought with God, and yet Anselm erases all content for this thought. The God that is thought (to be or to have existence) is absolutely different from any other existing thing, such that the world is rendered comparably nonexistent. Hegel’s point is that this notion of absolute otherness is at once contradictory, rendering thought an impossibility. “If there is what is not and could not be thought, there would be some sort of life or reality with which consciousness could not be in relation.”[9] Hegel may be thinking of Kant, but also Kant’s critique of the ontological argument, maintaining Kant is confused. “We should have no word or idea for such a ‘reality’ (we could not even call a reality what we could not in any way engage with).”[10] As in Anselm’s cosmological argument, in which he pictures God, in comparison to the world and normal thought, as “absolutely different,” there is a contradiction. If something is “absolutely different” than there is no comparison to be made and no thought of God whatsoever. “For Hegel, an otherness that couldn’t be thought would not even be a negation, because it would not negate anything that could be thought (if it did, it would not be absolutely other; part of its definition would be given as ‘not x’).”[11]
Anselm is in a line of thinkers who picture thinking absolute difference as the thought of God. Hegel’s point is this destroys thought itself, as God is Truth, the ground of truth and reason, and to leave God out of thought – as the impossible thought – destroys thought. The universal and eternal Truth of God holds all things together, and knowing anything is to enter into this relational understanding. “To say that there was thinking and . . . whatever, that there was no identity between nature, action, history, law, society or religion and thinking, would be to conclude that thinking is not what we do, and that therefore we cannot think what we are.”[12] Thinking is based on a relational understanding, in which thinking and knowing relate to the self, the other and to God, but where things are imagined to exist discretely (without relationship) than nothing is thinkable. “Thus to think is, ultimately, to step beyond all local determinations of reality, to enter into an infinite relatedness – not to reflect or register or acknowledge an infinite relatedness, but to act as we cannot but act, if our reality truly is what we think it is, if thinking is what we (just) do.”[13]
If God is beyond thought, Williams is quick to point out, this also means that not only thinking and knowing are rendered impossible, but sensation, emotion or love are also empty. Hegel’s point, in the Logic is, “there are no discrete and simple objects for thought . . . “ as “thought is bound to dissolve the finite perception, the isolated object, as such, moving from the level of diversity (a contingent multiplicity of things) to that of complementary opposition: each ‘thing’ is defined by not being another, lives only in the absence of another, and so ‘passes over’ from being a discrete object to being a moment in a complex movement.”[14] This complex movement allows for no final resting place for thought, no static presence, or no end to movement. Certainly the self, is not a discrete object for thought or something we come to possess. The self-presence which a misoriented desire is in pursuit of, is that static letter of the law, that immovable written word, that object in the mirror, and is not focused on a Person or the personal.
Again, it may be helpful to think of Anselm arriving at his final thought, the place of the word arising within himself, and yet this word cannot speak as it is before language (it is the place of language). He pictures an end to the movement of thought, but this end is no-thought, no-movement, no-place, but an unthinkable apophatic interiority. Anselm thinks the greatest thought by ceasing all other thoughts. As with Descartes, all relationality, all movement, all embodiment, is excluded. One is left with an empty, static thought, in which there is an end to thinking. Rather than demonstrating the existence of God, the God who is beyond thought, establishes doubt, darkness, and nothingness, as prime reality.[15]
In contrast, Hegel is picturing thought, in its dialectic form as that which “outlives and ‘defeats’ stable, commonsense perception, not by abolishing it from the outside, but by the penetration of its own logic and process.”[16] It opens up to and requires relating thought as that which is grounded in God. “Everything can be thought” and “nothing is beyond reconciliation” as thought is the “overall environment” establishing harmony and relationship between all things. God is where thought begins and, in this light, there “can be no such thing as unthinkable contingency.”[17] The particular is thinkable in its relational harmonies and this relational entry into understanding is made possible by the fact that God gives himself for humanity, for thought.
This is the power and love of God. “God’s goodness has to give way to God’s power – but to a power which acts only in a kind of self-devastation.[18] God’s kenotic self-giving love makes God available in the Son through the Spirit. “It means both that the life of God comes to its fullness in the world solely by the death, the stripping, of the human – the human, that is conceived as something solid in itself, as the finite negation or contradiction of the divine, and that human fragility and mortal weakness are not ‘outside’ God, in the sense that they do not prevent union with God. After Calvary, then, human self-awareness, the human knowledge of humanity as vulnerable and finite, becomes inseparable from awareness of God.”[19]
Human weakness is not the end but the beginning of human understanding. Weakness is not something alone (something in and of itself) but this weakness is “a moment in the life of God.”[20] It is the place God meets us and we meet God. The dispossession of the self and of the thought of self in self-emptying, is the entry into the life of the Spirit. “Only through a history of the emptying out or bringing to nothing of the fullness of Spirit” can “thinking establish itself, because only in such an event can we definitely lose the pretensions of the individual consciousness.”[21] The self as a thinking thing is beyond thought. Despite Descartes, and the confused reading of Hegel, this is not a fusion of subject and object (sameness) in some mystical synthesis. It is itself a sign of the limitations of thought without God, or of what Verstand (understanding) alone can only think fragmentarily or episodically.”[22] The Cartesian cogito splits thought and the reality of self, isolating thought from the body and the world.
The condition for thinking is impossible apart from God who is mediated through the Son and Spirit to himself and the world. The “Christian vision is of a God who is quintessentially and necessarily mediated in a divine self-hood that is simultaneously its own absolute other. And Hegel concludes, the complete transparency of self in the other that is God’s act of being (as ‘Father’ and ‘Son’) is what constitutes God as ‘Spirit’, as living consciousness proceeding into the determinate otherness of the world.”[23] In the words of Hegel, “The abstractness of the Father is given up in the Son—this then is death. But the negation of this negation is the unity of Father and Son—love, or the Spirit.”[24]
Hegel’s continual refrain in this final lecture, is the love of God, expressed through the Son and realized in the Spirit.[25] The “concluding message of the Philosophy of religion lectures is that concrete freedom is unimaginable, unrealizable, if thinking revolts against the triune God, against thought as self-love and self-recovery in the other, against thought as ecstasis.”[26] Thinking is the realization of self in reconciliation with God. “Hegel asserts that the ‘reversal of consciousness begins’ at Calvary. The beginnings of the Church have to do with the discovery of reconciliation, the discovery that freedom is realized on the far side of dispossession so total that it is now impossible to think of a God who claims the ‘right’ to be separate from humanity.”[27] “That this is so is the Holy Spirit itself, or, expressed in the mode of sensibility, it is eternal love.”[28]
[1] See the article on Williams by Matheson Russel, “Dispossession and Negotiation: Rowan Williams on Hegel and Political Theology,” in On Rowan Williams: Critical Essays (Cascade Books, 2014) 88.
[2] Rowan Williams, “Logic and Spirit in Hegel,” in Wrestling with Angels: Conversations in Modern Theology (Grand Rapids: William Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2007).
[3] Ibid, 36.
[4] Ibid, 41.
[5] Ibid.
[6] Ibid.
[7] Ibid.
[8] Ibid, 39 And here to avoid equating Hegelian theory with something like process theology, the Maximian formula, creation is incarnation, enters in. God is always creator, and always the Father of the Son.
[9] Ibid, 36.
[10] Ibid.
[11] Ibid.
[12] Ibid.
[13] Ibid, 36.
[14] Ibid, 37.
[15] Ibid, 47 “God’s ‘exceeding’ of thought cannot itself be thought or spoken, and, in this regard,” we see Hegel’s convergence with Wittgenstein.
[16] Ibid, 37.
[17] Ibid.
[18] Ibid.
[19] Ibid, 45.
[20] Ibid.
[21] Ibid.
[22] Ibid, 38.
[23] Ibid, 42.
[24] G. W. F. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion: The Consummate Religion, vol. 3, Translated by R. F. Brown, P. C. Hodgson, and J. M. Stewart with the assistance of H. S. Harris (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2007) 53.
[25] It brings to mind the work of Julia Kristeva who pictures all dialogue as an act carried out in love (see here).
[26] Hays, ibid op. cit., 44.
[27] Ibid.
[28] Ibid, 42. Williams is quoting Hegel, but provides no reference.
Discover more from Forging Ploughshares
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
