Logic – Forging Ploughshares

William Desmond’s Completion of Hegel

As a boy in Texas, unattenuated perhaps to the age, the world around me came alive with divine grandeur, discovered through my new-found faith. At the time it seemed obvious that I could ride off into the prairie and meet God, who showed himself in the meadowlark, the killdeer, the quail, the rabbits, the ever-present coyote. It was a stark landscape and yet the patches of life, the cottonwoods, occasional streams, the striking sunrise and sunset, seemed to show the face of God. What was once a regular occurrence and always in easy reach, faded with time, education, and perhaps attunement to the age. How is it that the world as saturated with the grandeur of God, once the common understanding, can be renewed?

As Charles Taylor has demonstrated in A Secular Age, the world has changed from one in which it was “virtually impossible not to believe in God in, say, 1500 in our Western society,” to one in which “many of us find this not only easy, but even inescapable?”[1] Taylor describes the closing in of the world into an “immanent frame” in which this world in its finitude is determinant of value, and there is a closing in upon the self, what Taylor calls the “buffered” self. Our age has been captured by the “punctual” or “atomistic” sense of self, cut off from history and only vaguely aware of any alternative culture, so that the framework shaping life is perceived as the singular possibility. “So the buffered identity of the disciplined individual moves in a constructed social space, where instrumental rationality is a key value, and time is pervasively secular. All of this makes up what I want to call ‘the immanent frame’.”[2] The irony is that the original effort, producing the secular, was to protect God from being contaminated with finiteness or materiality. It “was an achievement of Latin Christendom in the late Middle Ages and early modern period . . . made in order to mark clearly the autonomy of the super natural.”[3] Taylor spends much of his book describing how this immanent frame has come to dominate modern life: “Modern science, along with the many other facets described—the buffered identity, with its disciplines, modern individualism, with its reliance on instrumental reason and action in secular time—make up the immanent frame.”[4]

“God is dead,” not just philosophically or religiously, but in the sense of no longer being an obvious possibility. “From within the picture, it just seems obvious that the order of argument proceeds from science to atheism, through a series of well-grounded steps.”[5] There has been a subtraction or loss of concern for God or the transcendent, and “what we’re left with is human good, and that is what modern societies are concerned with.”[6] Human welfare in general is not the goal, nor is human freedom in general my goal. “Just being confined to human goods could just as well find expression in my concerning myself exclusively with my own material welfare, or that of my family or immediate milieu.”[7]

Even where belief endures the values that prevail in the Christian faith are often those of immanence and there has been a secularization or flattening out of faith, as transcendence has been eclipsed. God has been evacuated from public and social spheres and religion relegated to a private realm. Religious belief and practice are a realm apart from the practical political necessities of utilitarianism. Perhaps, worse than unbelief is a belief in God, confounded with the secular state and secular religion (e.g., Christian nationalism). It is as if “our actions, goals, achievements, and the like, have a lack of weight, gravity, thickness, substance. There is a deeper resonance which they lack, which we feel should be there.”[8] Ours is a world no longer enchanted with the divine.

Taylor calls for a new itinerary or a new path which will move beyond the dead-end of this secular age. “One could say that we look for new and unprecedented itineraries. Understanding our time in Christian terms is partly to discern these new paths, opened by pioneers who have discovered a way through the particular labyrinthine landscape we live in, its thickets and trackless wastes, to God.”[9]

This renewal begun by William Desmond, begins with a return to Hegel, who founds his philosophy on the createdness of the world. He presumes faith in the Creator is the proper frame in which to understand the world: “If someone were to make his profession of faith as follows: ‘I believe in God the Father, the Creator of heaven and earth’, it would be surprising if someone else were to conclude from this first part that the person professing his faith believed in God, the creator of heaven, and therefore considered the earth to be uncreated and matter to be eternal.”[10] Hegel was criticized for equating the “actual” and the “rational,” but he explains that he simply intends what the Christian religion is founded upon: God is the mind behind the world, and we encounter God in thinking this out. “With regard to their philosophical meaning, however, we may presuppose that the reader is sufficiently educated to know not only that God is actual– that he is what is most actual, indeed that he alone is what is truly actual, but also, insofar as the merely formal difference is concerned, that existence in general is partly appearance and only partly actuality.”[11] God cannot be equated with the appearance, but he is the personal actuality behind the appearance encountered in thought.

Hegel recognizes that the world is apprehended by persons, in thought, created as it is by a personal God. “They must be involved in it, whether through their external senses only or with their deeper spirit and the essential consciousness of their respective self. This is the same principle that in our time has been called faith, immediate knowledge, the revelation coming from outside and in particular from one’s own inner being.”[12] To imagine, with Newton, that everything is reducible to rule, to principles, or to abstractions, is to miss that these too are thought. “But what in essence they aim at and produce are laws, general propositions, a theory, i.e. the thoughts of what there is.”[13] Empirical knowledge or scientific laws are part of human experience and thought, marked by “freedom, spirit, and God.” To separate empirical laws from thought and experience is to lose the reality undergirding them. “The reason why they cannot be found in that sphere is not that they are supposedly not a part of experience; they are not experienced by way of the senses, it is true, but whatever is present in consciousness is being experienced– this is even a tautological sentence. Rather, they are not found in that sphere, because in terms of their content these objects immediately present themselves as infinite.”[14] This is part of recognizing the personhood on both sides of thought, not in the manner of Descartes – though an understanding toward which he gestured, that the person is involved in what he knows.

Hegel is also critical of the metaphysical tradition which would understand the world as an object or objectivity existing over and against the thinking subject. Traditional ontology focused on the world as a substance, which could be potentially endowed with thought, but nonetheless the thinking subject still viewed the world as a separate object: “something other than itself that is not a self for itself and therefore still separated from the contemplating subject.”[15] Hegel saw his work as bringing to completion the Kantian turn to the subject, but he expands upon this subjectivity and thinking, as “the world is, at its core, subjectivity itself. For this reason, substance had to be shown to be subject, too, and substance ontology had to be seen ultimately to be subject ontology.”[16] One need not approach the subject on the basis of the philosophical arguments for God, as if one needed to prove God before setting out in belief and thinking. This would be like needing to comprehend the digestion system before eating, or learning to swim before getting in the water. The content of philosophy is thought and this thought is engagement with the spirit “the living spirit, a content turned into a world, namely the outer and inner world of consciousness, or that its content is actuality.”[17]

This sets up a very different relationship between the finite and infinite. For Descartes the finite, inclusive of the body and the world of finite physical things, must disappear in thinking being. Where Descartes thinks away the world in his grasp for infinite being, Hegel presumes there is an encounter with the infinite only as being first proves to be finite. As Stephen Houlgate explains, for Descartes “not only does the infinite precede the idea of the finite in our minds but infinite being itself precedes and transcends finite being in reality.”[18] According to Descartes, and here much of the western philosophical and theological tradition concurs, God may create and sustain but this is secondary and subsequent to his existence apart from finite things. For Hegel the infinite and the finite are inseparable, and to separate them is to limit both. The infinite must include the finite or it is a bad infinite or not a true infinite. The determinant or concrete is not a limit for the infinite, as each implies the other and each turns into the other.

Hegel, Taylor, and Desmond, have a deep appreciation for the power of thought, to either delude or liberate. Thought has the capacity to locate and evaluate itself, but it is also easily lost in the age. Taylor traces how the power of persons to evaluate where they are, how they got here, and how things can change, has been captured by a utilitarianism which limits options to what principle will work. This is also the point of Hegel’s logic, namely that thought cannot merely be reduced to the useful: “insofar as the logical dimension constitutes the absolute form of the truth and even more than that, the pure truth itself, it is something completely different from anything merely useful.”[19] There is an inherent value in thought, as coming to the truth is the point. “Truth is a grand word and an even grander thing. If someone’s spirit and mind are still healthy, his heart must leap at once at the thought of this word.”[20]

There is a seeming “incommensurateness” between thought and truth, raising the question whether or not we can know God. “God is the truth; how are we to know him?” This is not a time for false humility. “Such language as ‘How am I, a poor earthly worm, to know the truth?’ is a thing of the past.”[21] Hegel notes, this is Pilate’s question, which (after Christ) is a thing of the past. Christ commands worship in spirit and truth, and Hegel is explicating this goal: “Only in thinking and as thinking is this content, God himself, in its truth. In this sense, then, thought is not just mere thought, but rather the highest and, properly viewed, the only manner in which it is possible to comprehend what is eternal and in and for itself.”[22]

This explains the departure of Desmond, who has been called the last metaphysician,[23] as he unrepentantly takes up the issue of being, but he sidesteps the postmodern critique of metaphysics in his reworking of Hegel. He adapts the Hegelian dialectic, keeping equivocity (difference) and univocity (sameness) alive, which he characterizes as “a process of interplay between same and different, between self and other.”[24] The focus is on dialogue as “mindful communication” between persons, as opposed to impersonal arrival at theory. Dialogue entails an openness to others, and a dynamic unfolding involving “a rhythmic process of unfolding, whether of process or events, thoughtful articulations or communications.”[25]

Desmond dubs his approach “metaxology” which attempts “to think beyond an oscillation back and forth between univocity and equivocity, while facing both of these fair and square.”[26] In the dialectic exchange there is a certain perceived lack, which moves the conversation forward. According to Ryan Duns, “Metaxology neither supplants nor annuls these voices but hold together to allow each to speak of being. Metaxology symphonically weaves together each voice and allows it to speak its truth yet balances these voices so no one dominates the other.”[27] Like Hegel, Desmond understands his work to lead to the “practice of a kind of thinking” which is mindful of the multiple voices at play within being.[28] Of course, Hegel is the focus of much of his critique, but it is from the advances of Hegel and his interactions with Hegel, that his philosophy of the metaxological takes shape.

The metaxological builds upon Hegel’s notion that infinite being is in-finite (or non finite) being that can only be understood on the basis of the finite. This turns the presumption of Descartes on its head and with him much of the ontotheological project. Descartes assumes that infinite being is that purely positive being, grasped in his cogito (“I think therefore I am”), which is the necessary beginning point which must be comprehended prior to knowledge of the finite, but for Hegel and Desmond being first proves to be finite and it is only on this basis that it also proves to be infinite. It is not that our faculty of reason arrives at God through its own power, but the infinite is given in the finite, first and foremost in human subjectivity. This is the truth Desmond builds upon and refines, as in his understanding the transcendent shows itself in the world. Where in a Cartesian modernism the infinite is gained by abstracting ourselves out of the world, Desmond’s philosophy presumes and shows how the Transcendent or Infinite is available in and through the finite.

While this was once the prevailing notion and sensibility (that the world is filled with the glory of God), the Cartesian divide served to disenchant the world, reducing it to a mechanism, no longer serving as a door to the infinite. Ryan Duns argues that Desmond has taken up Taylor’s challenge to forge a new path toward God. It is not simply that Desmond begins again, but he is a careful reader of Hegel, such that his work might be characterized (perhaps not the way he would characterize it) as a revamping and reworking of Hegel. As Duns notes, “By inquiring into the truth and limits of dialectic, Desmond exposes the nearly-imperceptible cracks in Hegel’s philosophy, exposing openings in the Hegelian system capable of leading us toward a renewal of metaphysical thought.”[29] This is not a return to an abstract metaphysics but is a path of spiritual renewal through a reawakened wonder which Duns compares to a pilgrimage. The secular age poses an obstacle to God which requires effort and practice to overcome.

The question of what to do, or even what would Jesus do, misses that the primary question should be what one desires to be. The focus, in Taylor’s terms (taken up by Duns), has been “corralled” by questions of “what we ought to do” without addressing “questions about what it is good to be or what it is good to love.”[30] The ethical issue is not to live up to a code but to enter into a relationship. Taylor contrasts an apodictic reasoning, set upon some code, to an ad hominem reasoning, which takes account of love in dialogue. As Duns explains (in applying Taylor to Desmond), “By ad hominem he means an argument that goes “to the person” and assumes the interlocutor’s point of view. Essentially, ad hominem argument begins from another’s standpoint and, by means of dialogue, shows how adopting another position might prove beneficial. Rather than trying to find neutral ground or territory, it seeks to engage the subjectivity of one’s interlocutor.”[31] Duns likens it to the practice of prayer: “In its commitment to abiding within the flux and ambiguity of existence and giving ear to the call of voices suppressed in other philosophical practices, metaxology affects a stance of ongoing vigilance, open and attentive to the call of the other. Metaxology, so framed, becomes akin to a form of philosophical prayer listening for and willing to respond to the call of the Other.”[32] The practice of metaxology means dwelling between sameness and difference, not through a final synthesis, but by “recurrence to the rich ambiguities of the middle.”[33] Desmond pictures Hegel as privileging a self-mediation which would reduce or encompass the Other in the same, but he advocates a continual inter-mediation focused on what is other to the self. Genuine philosophical thinking “must be both self-mediating and also open to the intermediation between thought and what is other to thought, precisely as other.”[34]

There is a convergence of Hegel and Desmond on human experience. The point is not absolute certainty, as in a traditional metaphysics or philosophical argument, but building upon experience and openness to dialogue. Where Descartes, like Anselm before him, begins with absolute certainty, presuming that he has grasped the infinite, the presumption of Desmond’s “dialogue” is that closure is impossible. “It is a biographical argument, one that offers a new form of life, that initiates an ongoing process of growth in articulacy as one approaches asymptotically the goal of human flourishing.”[35] Duns claims that Desmond’s metaxology redeems the promise of Hegel’s dialectic. “Whereas Hegel’s dialectic suppressed equivocity, metaxology recuperates equivocity and balances it with univocity.”[36]

[1] Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007), 25

[2] Taylor, 542.

[3] Taylor, 542.

[4] Taylor, 566.

[5] Taylor, 565.

[6] Taylor, 572.

[7] Taylor, 572.

[8] Taylor, 307.

[9] Taylor, 755.

[10] G.W.F. Hegel, Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences in Basic Outline Part I: Science of Logic, Edited and translated by Klaus Brinkmann and Daniel O. Dahlstrom, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010 [1817]), 11.

[11] Logic, 33.

[12] Logic, 35.

[13] Logic, 35.

[14] Logic, 36.

[15] Logic, xiv.

[16] Logic, xv.

[17] Logic, 33.

[18] Stephen Houlgate, The Opening of Hegel’s Logic: From Being to Infinity (West Lafayette, Indiana: Purdue University Press, 2006) 401.

[19] Logic, 48.

[20] Logic, 48.

[21] Logic, 48.

[22] Logic, 49.

[23] John Manoussakis writes, “William Desmond is arguably in our times the last metaphysician.”, “The Silences of the Between,” in William Desmond and Contemporary Theology 269. Cited in Ryan Gerard Duns, Spiritual Exercises for a Secular Age? William Desmond’s Theological Achievement (Boston College PhD, 2018) 79.

[24] William Desmond, The Intimate Universal: The Hidden Porosity among Religion, Art, Philosophy, and Politics (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016) 421. Cited in Duns, 122.

[25] Ibid.

[26] William Desmond, The Intimate Strangeness of Being: Metaphysics After Dialectic (Washington DC: CUA Press, 2012), 55. Cited in Duns, 134.

[27] Duns, 133-134.

[28] The Intimate Universal, 423 and Duns, 134.

[29] Duns, 124.

[30] Duns, 33-34.

[31] See Duns explanation, 25-26.

[32] Duns, 133.

[33] Duns, 132.

[34] William Desmond, Philosophy and Its Others: Ways of being and Mind ( Albany: SUNY 1990) 5. Cited in Duns, 132.

[35] Duns, 30.

[36] Duns, 131

David Bohm and G.W.F. Hegel on the Unity of All in All

There is a stream of theology focused on the unity of all things in Christ, beginning with the New Testament and developed by thinkers such as Origen and Nicholas of Cusa, and then rediscovered by Hegel. Through Hegel and Nicholas, this understanding is taken up in interpreting theoretical physics in the work of David Bohm (1917– 1992). In turn, Bohm’s understanding of a unified wholeness serves to illustrate the radical shift involved in the Creator being incarnate.[1]

Christian identity is, in Hegel’s description, the core of an alternative logic in which “knowing God” is participation in the Infinite. Hegel works this out most carefully in his Logic, but it is thematic in his other works, such as his Philosophy of History. There is a unified and unifying spirit which must be “cognized” so as to overcome the antinomies of Kant.[2] According to Hegel, truth is a unifying essence and energy which is not dependent on antinomies or dualisms. “It is its own material which it commits to its own Active Energy to work up; not needing, as finite action does, the conditions of an external material of given means (such as subject/object duality) from which it may obtain its support and the objects of its activity.”[3]

Reason and God are not separate but “Reason is the Sovereign of the World; that the history of the world, therefore, presents us with a rational process.”[4] Reason is grounded in and sustained by God and therefore “it is its own Substance,” its own “Infinite Power,” “its own Infinite Material underlying all the natural and spiritual life which it originates, as also the Infinite Form — that which sets this Material in motion.”[5] The Infinite Energy of the Universe, or the Infinite mind in which thought participates, is not a mere abstraction but the concrete reality enfolding all things. “It is the infinite complex of things, their entire Essence and Truth.”[6] While finite reason is grounded in the dualisms of subject and object (or God and world), infinite reason passes beyond alienated thinking to a unified knowing of God in “true reason.” Hegel explains this reason, particularly in his Logic, which captured Bohm’s life-long interest.

Throughout his life Bohm was reading and rereading Hegel’s Logic, apparently to such an extent that his wife complained. As reported by Maurice Wilkins, “Mrs. Bohm told me that not long before he died, he was sitting in his armchair at home reading Hegel again, and she said to him, ‘David, don’t you know everything about Hegel by now.’”[7] Specifically, Bohm found in Hegel a way in which to develop his focus on wholeness and his concern to overcome fragmentation.[8]

This choice between wholeness and fragmentation are alternative understandings of all of reality (social, scientific, and religious). Bohm recognizes that to overcome fragmentation, philosophy and religion cannot be treated as discrete realms separate from science. He found physics to have an immediate and necessary overlap, such that “his physical insights became essentially inseparable from the philosophical ones.”[9] Mind and matter in Bohm’s thought (as in Hegel’s) are not separate, but interactive realms, so that to understand the one is an insight into the other. As he explains, “I would say that in my scientific and philosophical work, my main concern has been with understanding the nature of reality in general and of consciousness in particular as a coherent whole, which is never static or complete, but which is in an unending process of movement and unfoldment.”[10]

Bohm found this sensibility most fully expressed in Hegel, though he also, at first, associated it with Eastern religion (with which he eventually became disillusioned) but not with religion per se. He may not have appreciated the degree to which Hegel was concerned with recovering Christian orthodoxy and delivering it from the philosophical abstraction into which it had fallen. According to Hegel, “The faith in that would-be philosophical sense is itself nothing but the dry abstractum of immediate knowing, a completely formal determination, not to be confused with or mistaken for the spiritual fullness of the Christian faith, either from the side of the believing heart and the Holy Spirit dwelling within it or from the side of a doctrine abounding in content.”[11] Hegel sets out to displace dry abstraction with an engaged and all-embracing speculative philosophy.

The Hegelian project is not unlike Bohm’s, in that both are seeking to overcome formal distinctions (a separate existence for God and the world or in physics the notion that the world can be divided into distinct parts and discrete causal laws). Both are displacing classical notions of causality (an objective power or force) found in the divided world of Descartes, Kant, and Newton. Ultimate reality, Kant’s “thing-in-itself” was inaccessible, there was a mind/body dualism, and human action and freedom were delimited by the mechanical order. Bohm describes the shift he sought as the displacement of the assumption that “the world can correctly be analyzed into distinct parts each having a separate existence, working together according to exact causal laws to form the whole.” He would replace it with the idea that “the world acts more like a single indivisible unit, in which even the ‘intrinsic’ nature of each part (wave or particle) depends to some degree on its relationship to its surroundings.”[12]

While Hegel is seeking a synthesis of thought in his vision of logos, Bohm’s pursuit is a consequence of the wholeness necessary to account for quantum phenomena. At first he perceives wholeness as an emergent property, but then posits wholeness as fundamental. This “new ‘basic reality’ was no more a manifest reality of discrete objects, and forms – our usual ‘explicate’ or ‘unfolded’ order – but the ‘implicate’ or ‘enfolded’ order that is carried by the ‘holomovement’.”[13] He pictures an unbroken flow from the “implicate” order through the manifest “explicate” (or “unfolded”) order, the whole of which is “holomovement.” He describes it as “the unbroken wholeness of the totality of existence as an undivided flowing movement without borders.”[14] Nature is neither unchangeable nor bounded: “there are neither unchangeable ultimate elements nor fixed ultimate laws describing them, i.e. that nature is ontologically and our science epistemically inexhaustible.”[15]

The world is in process, and as reflected in quantum phenomena “becoming” is built into reality. He compares it to a flowing stream of water: “On this stream, one may see an ever-changing pattern of vortices, ripples, waves, splashes, etc., which evidently have no independent existence as such. Rather, they are abstracted from the flowing movement, arising and vanishing in the total process of the flow.”[16] Space and time may lend itself to division into abstracted moments, like particular ripples or waves, but the splashes of a particular moment are part of the overall flow.

As Bohm explains, “explicate ‘moments’ that unfold have a certain temporal thickness, a certain duration. Moments are temporal segmentations of unfoldment.”[17] Time is typically broken into past and future with the present as an ungraspable point, but the “unfoldings” of time belong together. “[I]t follows . . . that becoming is not merely a relationship of the present to a past that is gone. Rather, it is a relationship of enfoldments that actually are in the present moment. Becoming is an actuality,” that “continues in all succeeding moments,” that is, “the two principles of the being of becoming and the becoming of being must be woven together.”[18] Time is nested in infinite layers as “any given level is unfolding (in principle creatively) from levels that are more comprehensive and more fundamental.”[19]

According to Michael Younker, “as physics has been further advanced, unexpected and nonintuitive layers beneath the atomic level have been discovered, and the subatomic level contains its own behaviors, and, again yet further, beneath the subatomic level, a layer of fields exists which contains its own distinct behaviors. This illustrates, in a manner, how there could theoretically be many deeper implicate or super-implicate orders.”[20] General laws may apply in particular contexts but this context must be viewed as part of a larger order. This means “laws will take the form of generally valid relationships between the nested sets of projections of its past enfolded in one moment and the corresponding set enfolded in another moment. The special creative quality of each moment cannot, however, be predicted in this way.”[21] Within the infinite implicate order there are always other underlying influences so that any particular moment or event cannot be isolated: “all these projections into any given moment will have the past of the entire universe as their potential content, which is thus enfolded into the moment in question.”[22]

The tendency in science to extract and divide is the tendency of society as a whole, with nations, races and religions pitted against one another. “And in turn, each man is fragmented into different and incompatible loyalties, aims, desires, etc.”[23] There is inevitable despair and helplessness in the face of these overwhelming social forces – “going beyond the control and even the comprehension of the human beings who are caught up in it.”[24] So too in science Bohm notes, “there are sharp divisions between applied science and pure science, between theory and experiment, between one specialized field and another, and between different branches of each specialty. The gap between science and other aspects of life is just a further example of such fragmentation.”[25]

He sounds very much like Hegel in describing how human thought divides and separates as part of an alienating utilitarian mode. “However, when this mode of thought is applied more broadly to man’s notion of himself and the whole world in which he lives (i.e. to his self-world view), then man ceases to regard the resulting divisions as merely useful or convenient and begins to see and experience himself and his world as actually constituted of separately existent fragments.”[26] Humankind is confronted “with a worldwide breakdown which is self-evident not only at the political level but also in smaller groups and in the consciousness of the individual. The resort to mindless violence is growing and behind it all is the even more mindless threat of mutual annihilation, which is implicit in our current international situation and which could make everything we are doing quite pointless.”[27]

For Bohm, the cure for fragmentation is wholeness. Health and holiness, he notes, both derive from a root meaning wholeness, and this captures the human drive. “All of this indicates that man has sensed always that wholeness or integrity is an absolute necessity to make life worth living. Yet, over the ages, he has generally lived in fragmentation.”[28] To survive the disintegration, a new form of consciousness must be realized in what he calls a “postmodern science.” “A postmodern science should not separate matter and consciousness and should therefore not separate facts, meaning, and value. Science would then be inseparable from a kind of intrinsic morality, and truth and virtue would not be kept apart as they currently are in science.”[29] He calls for an understanding in which seemingly discrete fields or fractured parts are recognized as “enfolded” in a unified whole, claiming “the whole universe is actively enfolded to some degree in each of the parts. Because the whole is enfolded in each part, so are all the other parts, in some way and to some degree.”[30] The power of the imagination is in realizing synthesis as a participation in the essential wholeness of reality. “You see, like I was explaining with Hegel, the idea is first implicit only in itself and then it unfolds, it spreads out, in the imagination or in some other form like writing or painting. It becomes explicit, unfolded.”[31]

The world is not a big machine but is grounded in the energizing power of God (creation is tied to incarnation). The food and nourishment of the world are from within creation, from within history and nature. The alpha and omega is “its own basis of existence, and absolute final aim, it is also the energizing power realizing this aim; developing it not only in the phenomena of the Natural, but also of the Spiritual Universe — the History of the World.” This “’Idea’ or ‘Reason’ is the True, the Eternal, the absolutely powerful essence” that “reveals itself in the World, and . . . in that World nothing else is revealed but this and its honor and glory.”[32] This is the thesis which Hegel and Bohm share and demonstrate. In Christian terms (which Bohm did not embrace but which his work illustrates),God identifies himself with, in, and through, creation so that the eternal is not an entity apart from creation, but is identifiable in creation, in which Christ is being made all in all (I Cor 15:28).

[1] This peculiar Christo-logic is summed up in Maximus’ formula, “The Word of God, very God, wills that the mystery of his Incarnation be actualized always and in all things.” Maximus, On Difficulties in the Church Fathers: The Ambigua, Edited and Translated by Nicholas Constas (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014) 7.22.

[2] According to Hegel truth, by definition is a unified understanding realized in thinking God: “God’s being is inseparably bound up with the representation of God in our consciousness.” Science of Logic, 267. Conceptions of God must be immediately related to thinking itself, as this is the “concrete” and unchanging foundation given in faith. There must be a concerted effort to arrive at a consciousness of God, inclusive of self-consciousness and consciousness of the world and others.

[3] Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of History, transl. J. Sibree (Kitchener, Ontario: Batoche Books, 2001) 23.

[4] Philosophy of History, 23.

[5] Philosophy of History, 23-24.

[6] Philosophy of History, 24.

[7] Interviews of David Bohm by Maurice Wilkins, Niels Bohr Library and Archives, American Institute of Physics. Cited in Boris Kožnjak, “Waterfalls, Societies, and Temperaments – Fragmentation and Wholeness in the Lives and Work of David Bohm and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel” (SYNTHESIS PHILOSOPHICA 73 (1/2022) p.p. (89–128), 99.

[8] This is the claim of Kožnjak.

[9] Kožnjak, 90.

[10] David Bohm, Wholeness and the Implicate Order (London: Routledge, 1980), p. x.

[11] Goerg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences in Basic Outline Part I: Science of Logic, Translated and Edited by Klaus Brinkmann and Daniel O. Dahlstrom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010 [1817]) 113.

[12] David Bohm, Basil Hiley, The Undivided Universe. An Ontological Interpretation of Quantum Theory (London: Routledge, 1993) 144. Cited in Kožnjak, 93.

[13] Kožnjak, 95. Bohm credits Nicholas of Cusa for the particulars of his vocabulary. Thus, for example, when asked about the Hegelian flavor of these concepts, Bohm replied that “well, of course, you can say that Nicholas of Cusa talked about something like this with a implicatio, explicatio, and complicatio”. Interview of David Bohm by Maurice Wilkins on 27 February 1987, American Institute of Physics. Available at www.aip.org/history-programs/niels-bohrlibrary/oral-histories/32977-9 (accessed on 31 July 2022). Cited in Kožnjak, 103.

[14] Wholeness and the Implicate Order, 218.

[15] Kožnjak, 123.

[16] Wholeness and the Implicate Order, 62.

[17]David Bohm, “Time, The Implicate Order, and Pre-Space,” in Physics and the Ultimate Significance of Time: Bohm, Prigogine, and Process Philosophy, ed. David Ray Griffin (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1986), 185. Michael F. Younker, “The Theological Significance of the Relations of Freedom and Time in the Sciences and Humanities: An Evaluation of the Contributions of David Bohm and Pauli Pylkko” (2019). (Dissertations. 1694. https://digitalcommons.andrews.edu/dissertations/1694,) 242

[18] “Time, The Implicate Order, and Pre-Space,” 185. Cited in Younker, 242.

[19] “Time, The Implicate Order, and Pre-Space,” 186. Cited in Younker, 243.

[20] Younker, 243.

[21] “Time, The Implicate Order, and Pre-Space,” 191. Cited in Younker, 245.

[22] “Time, The Implicate Order, and Pre-Space,” 191. Cited in Younker, 245.

[23] David Bohm,” Impact of Science on Society,”(https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000003864) 160.

[24] Wholeness and the Implicate Order, 3.

[25] David Bohm, “Fragmentation in science and in Society”, The Science Teacher 38 (1971).

[26] Wholeness and the Implicate Order, 3.

[27] David Bohm, “Postmodern Science and a Postmodern World” (https://www.davidbohmsociety.org/library/postmodern/),

[28] Wholeness and the Implicate Order, 4.

[29] Postmodern Science.

[30] Postmodern Science.

[31] Interview of David Bohm by Maurice Wilkins on 6 March 1987. Cited in Kožnjak, 127.

[32] Philosophy of History, 24.

Hegel’s Theology of Knowledge: A Defense of Hegel’s Orthodoxy

What distinguishes humans from other creatures is a capacity for thought, for a self-aware and world-embracing thought. According to G.W.F. Hegel, this is because the core or ground of reality is in thinking or reason, which he equates with God or spirit.[1] Knowing God, or conceptualizing reality is a participation in that reality, as basic reality is thought. Contrary to the usual portrayal, Hegel aims to regain an orthodox Christian philosophy, and to displace the semi-agnostic musings grounded in Enlightenment faith: “The faith in that would-be philosophical sense is itself nothing but the dry abstractum of immediate knowing, a completely formal determination, not to be confused with or mistaken for the spiritual fullness of the Christian faith, either from the side of the believing heart and the Holy Spirit dwelling within it or from the side of a doctrine abounding in content.”[2] He wants to return to the concrete reality of God known in Christ, and trace how this knowing is of a different order of thought. He notes there is a form of thought and philosophizing that denies the substance and authority of the Christian faith: “The content of this faith, however, is so indeterminate in itself that, while it will, to be sure, countenance that content in some way, it encompasses just as much the belief that the Dalai Lama, the bull, the monkey, and so forth, is God, and for its own part it restricts itself to the idea of a God in general, a supreme being.”[3] Dismissal of the primacy and specificity of revelation results in the God of Christianity being traded for an empty abstraction.

Though the world may appear as Other, and the individual in her thought may seem isolated from the world, thought stands behind the world and the bridge between subject and object, self and world, is in thinking (cognizing) God. Hegel argues for training in the faith, baptism, formation in the Church, and far from being an atheist or heterodox he considers himself an orthodox Christian.[4] “When the standpoint of immediate knowing admits that, for religious faith in particular, a development and a Christian or religious education are necessary, then it is mere arbitrariness to want to ignore this again when it comes to talking about believing.”[5]

Reconciliation with God, self, and creation, is not simply conceivable, but it is in the conceiving that reconciliation is accomplished. This overcoming of the gap between self and Other, or the negation of the seeming inherent alienation in the world (the negation of the negation) not only gets at the root of Hegel’s system but of Paul’s. Hegel is borrowing from Paul (deploying Luther’s translation of Paul’s κατήργηται in Romans) so as to describe this suspension of the negative (aufheben or Aufhebung).[6] Hegel was reacting to an Enlightenment understanding, much as Paul was reacting to a common Jewish understanding in which law, the world, or objects, are pictured as mediating God rather than God in thought and spirit as mediating the world. As Hegel puts it, “Now in the same way natural philosophizing, which holds itself to be too good for the concept and which through this deficiency takes itself to be an intuitive and poetical thinking, trades in the arbitrary combinations of an imagination which is quite simply disorganized by its own thoughts. . .”[7]

Hegel finds Kant’s philosophy an improvement (on Spinoza and Descartes) in its focus on the faculty of knowing, but the error is in trying to know about knowing before knowing. “To be sure, the forms of thought should not be employed unexamined, but examining them is already itself a process of knowing. Consequently, the activity of the forms of thought and their critique must be joined in knowing.”[8] There is a relinquishing of the possibility of knowing in Enlightenment thought, and in Hegel’s estimate this is its own kind of unbelief as thought is deemed inadequate. There is a simultaneous passage beyond Kant, which is actually to fall behind Kant into the metaphysics he critiqued.[9]

Hegel’s “concept,” he claims, preserves the Kantian critique while moving beyond it. “The concept in its speculative sense must be distinguished from what is customarily called a ‘concept’. It is only with reference to the latter one-sided sense of the term that it has been asserted again and again a thousand times and been made a prejudice that the infinite cannot be grasped by means of concepts.”[10] In Hegel’s definition, the concept is complete in itself: “The concept is the free [actuality] [das Freie], as the substantial power that is for itself, and it is the totality, since each of the moments is the whole that it is, and each is posited as an undivided unity with it. So, in its identity with itself, it is what is determinate in and for itself.”[11] There is an overcoming of subject and object through the concept (inclusive of a negation of negation), key to Hegel’s thought (derived from Paul).

Hegel’s negation of the negation extends Paul’s “suspension” of the law (Rom 7:2), in which knowing God in Christ is direct, and thus involves a denial of both Enlightenment antinomies and a Jewish understanding of God. This involves, both as Paul and Hegel describe it, a different experience of the self. Paul in Christ (Rom 8) is no long divided against himself as he was in his pre-Christian life (Rom 7:7ff). As Hegel describes (following Kant), the resolution pertains directly to experience of the I: “The I relates the manifold of sensing and intuiting to itself [the I] and unifies it [the manifold] within itself [the I] as one consciousness (pure apperception) and, as a result, this manifold is brought to an identity, into an original combination.”[12] Kant, in Hegel’s estimate has correctly articulated the issue, but Hegel’s point is that “it is not the subjective activity of self-consciousness that introduces absolute unity into the manifoldness. This identity is, rather, the absolute, the true itself.”[13] Kant’s philosophy is a subjective idealism, in that he does not incorporate objective experience into the subject, but Hegel maintains this unification in thought (the subjective) is not only true of the individual but of the world. “Now although the categories (such as, for example, unity, cause, and effect, and so forth) do belong to thinking as such, it does not follow at all from this that they should for that reason be ours alone, and not also determinations of the objects themselves. This, however, is supposed to be the case according to Kant’s outlook.”[14] Kant’s religion, like that of the Enlightenment, “contradicts the explicit command of the Christian religion to know God in spirit and in truth and . . . derives from a humility that is in no way Christian but instead conceited and fanatical.”[15] The ultimate conceit, according to Hegel is to refuse the knowledge of God offered in the Christian faith, while claiming to believe and follow this faith.

In Hegel’s estimate, this sort of thought is stuck in the finite realm: “If a fixed opposition attaches to the thought-determinations, i.e. if they are of a merely finite nature, then they are unfit for the truth that is absolutely in and for itself, and the truth cannot then enter into thinking.”[16] This finite thinking is split between the “subjective” and “objective.” “[D]ue to their limited content generally they persist in opposition to each other and even more so to the absolute.”[17] Science presumes that truth is available for and resides in “immediate consciousness” and so too “philosophical science” must begin with this fundamental acknowledgement, which Hegel calls the “simplest appearance of spirit.”[18]

The science of philosophy begins with the proclamation of a specific capacity for knowing God: “More precisely, the consoling quality of the Christian religion lies in the fact that, because God himself is known [gewußt] here as the absolute subjectivity. . .”[19] God is absolute Subject and it is knowing this reality that “our particularity is also by this means recognized, not merely as something that is to be abstractly denied, but at the same time as something to be preserved.”[20] Knowing God and being persons is not to be conceived as an abstract possibility but a lived reality, which is the very goal set before us in the Christian faith: “the Christian God is the God not merely known [gewußt] but the unqualifiedly self-knowing [sich wissende] God, and not merely imagined but instead an absolutely actual personality.”[21] God’s person encompasses all things and is the ground of human personhood and knowing.

Spirit, the concept, or knowing, in Hegel’s system, refuses traditional metaphysics – “an ontology focused on substances as with Aristotle and Descartes, or on the one substance as the sum total of reality that is both God and nature, as with Spinoza.”[22] Spinoza’s God, according to Hegel, left the human subject contemplating the world as an object. “Although substance could be endowed with thought or reason like Aristotle’s nous or Spinoza’s God, the thinking that contemplated this substance contemplated an object: something other than itself that is not a self for itself and therefore still separated from the contemplating subject.”[23] Hegel supposes that Spinoza’s problem is the Jewish problem, and so ”it must be admitted that the Spinozistic philosophy lagged behind the true concept of God, which forms the content of Christian consciousness.”[24] According to Hegel, Spinoza continues the assumption of Jews and Orientals in general that all finite things are “transient” and “vanishing.” This truth requires the further development of a Christian understanding that personhood or the individual is not subject to this vanishing transience.

He notes that Spinoza did not deserve the accusations of atheism, but terms his belief “acosmism, since according to this philosophy there is actually no world at all in the sense of something positively being [eines positiv Seienden].”[25] It is deeply ironic, that in denying the God of Spinoza and replacing him with the Father of Christ, Hegel is accused of atheism. In Hegel’s description, Spinoza is only guilty of what every Jew, Moslem, and Christian who regards “God merely as the unknowable, supreme, and other-worldly being” is guilty.[26] They are all semi-atheists in-as-much as they do not acknowledge the true Christian God. They are content with difference and antinomy, but according to Hegel this does not attain to Christian truth. They are finite thinkers, who make subject-object opposition the final form of thought, and they deny that God or ultimate reality or “the thing in itself” can be known.

Hegel presumes deism is the natural outcome of Enlightenment religion, and he juxtaposes this faith with Trinitarian orthodoxy: “the definition of God put forward by so-called deism, is the concept of God insofar as it is a mere concept of the understanding, while by contrast the Christian religion, knowing [wissen] God as the triune God, contains the rational concept of God.”[27] True reason is grounded in the orthodox faith passed on through the Church: “Christian faith includes within it the authority of the Church; by contrast, the faith of that philosophizing standpoint has only the authority of one’s own subjective revelation. Furthermore, that Christian faith is an objective content, rich in itself, a system of doctrine and knowledge.”[28] Hegel presumes he is building on a Christian orthodoxy largely abandoned.

Ironically, a post-Enlightenment world, very much like the Jewish world which Paul faced, so equated God with what is not God (the law, objective reality, the Other, or simply feeling and intuition) that knowing God directly in Christ involves denial of an empty category. God as the big Other (the transcendent Other), displaced by Christ, struck the Jews as blasphemy in the same way Hegel’s notion that God is cognizable is a denial of the God of the Enlightenment. The fact that Hegel is mostly read as heterodox or as an atheist points to a failure of thought; the failure to overcome the binaries of the Enlightenment (Kant’s “antinomies of the understanding”) and to embrace the full reality of Christian thought. As Hegel puts it, “God’s being is inseparably bound up with the representation of God in our consciousness.”[29] Conceptions of God must be immediately related to conception and thinking itself, as this is the “concrete” and unchanging foundation given in Christian faith. Knowing God in Christ through the spirit, is not isolated from knowledge in general but opens the world and ourselves to true knowledge.

[1] Goerg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences in Basic Outline Part I: Science of Logic, Translated and Edited by Klaus Brinkmann and Daniel O. Dahlstrom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010 [1817]) xi.

[2] Ibid, 113.

[3] Ibid, 113.

[4] Ibid, 117.

[5] Ibid, 117.

[6] G. W. F Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, Trans. A.V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 68.

[7] Ibid.

[8] Encyclopedia, 84.

[9] Ibid.

[10] Ibid, 37. In Hegel’s description, contemporary philosophy is caught up in trying to describe the instruments of knowing, before it actually begins to know, but to know the instruments of knowing is already to deploy them: “the examination of knowing cannot take place other than by way of knowing” Ibid, 38. He likens it to trying to learn to swim without getting into the water. To want to know before knowing is the conundrum that never allows for a beginning.

[11] Ibid, 233.

[12] Ibid, 85.

[13] Ibid, 87.

[14] Ibid.

[15] Ibid, 206-207.

[16] Ibid, 66.

[17] Ibid.

[18] Ibid.

[19] Ibid, 221.

[2o] Ibid.

[21] Ibid, xiv.

[22] Ibid.

[23] Ibid, xiv.

[24] Ibid, 224.

[25] Ibid.

[26] Ibid.

[27] Ibid, 256.

[28] Ibid, 224.

[29] Ibid, 267. Here he is favoring Anselm (whom he will also fault) over Descartes and Spinoza.