(delivered at a University of Sydney conference, 2007)
Robert M. Wallace
abstract: This paper outlines
G.W.F. Hegel’s critique of conventional conceptions of God and presents his own
substitute conception, which makes it clear how we can know a God who is nevertheless, in an important way, transcendent.
The paper also responds to well-known objections to the “philosophers’ God,”
explaining in some detail what Hegel preserves
from conventional conceptions, which
justifies him in applying the traditional name of “God” to what he’s
discussing.
It’s well known that various
liberal theologians during the last century and a half have wanted to
articulate a conception of God that could satisfy people’s spiritual longings
without conflicting with Darwinian evolution and other well-established
scientific discoveries. What’s not well known is that G.W.F. Hegel already did
this, with remarkable power and subtlety, in response to the great modern
skeptics, Hume and Kant.
Hegel’s philosophy is difficult to
access because of his intricate manner of writing, and because of various
misleading rumors that have become attached to his name. Karl Marx claimed that
Hegel was an important influence on Marx’s own thinking, and since Marx was an
atheist, many believers have wanted nothing to do with Marx’s supposed teacher,
Hegel. Many scholars working on Hegel today continue in Marx’s footsteps in
that they believe that what’s of value in Hegel has no significant overlap with
the doctrines of traditional religion, or perhaps with what they call
“metaphysics.” Søren Kierkegaard, on the other hand, shared Hegel’s concern
about “God,” but made fun of Hegel for supposedly reducing faith to an arid and
impenetrable rational “system.” The “right Hegelians” who defended Hegel’s
philosophical theology weren’t able to explain it concretely enough to
counteract these two lines of critique, and the result has been that Hegel’s
philosophical theology has had rather limited influence down to the present.
The most visible group of
Anglophone philosophers advocating Hegel’s relevance today—the group composed
of Robert Brandom, Robert Pippin, and Terry Pinkard—has shown no interest in
Hegel’s philosophical theology. Among religious thinkers, Hans Küng, the
Catholic theologian, published a thick book about Hegel. Rowan Williams, the
Archbishop of Canterbury, admires Hegel. Slavoj Zizek gaily paraphrases Hegel
for numerous purposes. But none of this provides much access to Hegel’s God for
the person in the pew (or the person not in the pew, as the case may be). In
the recent exchanges between religious people and the “new atheists,” Richard
Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris and Daniel Dennett, I haven’t seen
any mention of Hegel’s conception of God, although it presents a powerful reply
to many of the new atheists’ complaints about what they call “God.”
In this paper I aim to outline
Hegel’s central train of thought about God clearly enough so that you can see
how it cuts through many long-running and unnecessary disputes.
Hegel begins with a radical
critique of conventional ways of thinking about God. This is his critique of
“spurious infinity.” Hegel provided a condensed and rather impenetrable version
of this critique in Faith and Knowledge, as
early as 1802. He relied on it throughout the Phenomenology of Spirit (1807), and laid it out in extensive detail
in the Science of Logic (1812).
Unfortunately, he didn’t state the critique in simple terms in any of his more
introductory writings, including his Lectures
on the Philosophy of Religion. The Encyclopedia
Logic is too condensed to be helpful on this crucial issue, and even its
very useful introductory sections don’t bring the issue into focus. Hegel had a
habit of assuming, even in his lectures, that his readers had already
understood the gist of his most important writings, and especially of the Science of Logic. It was all so clear to
him, and had been for so long, that he could no longer imagine what it would be
like to have no clue as to what he was driving at. This state of affairs, more
than anything else, explains the ongoing lack of comprehension of Hegel’s
philosophical theology, and indeed of his “system” as a whole. For of course
very few of us have in fact understood the gist of the Science of Logic, or even of Faith
and Knowledge.
So I’ll begin by stating Hegel’s
critique of spurious infinity and (thus) of conventional conceptions of “God.”
The critique addresses the common conception of God as a being who is
omniscient, omnipotent, perfectly good, and so forth.
Hegel says that this conception already
embodies a disastrous mistake. The mistake is contained in the first two words:
“a being.” If God is to be truly infinite, truly unlimited, then God cannot be
“a being,” because “a being,” that is, one being (however powerful) among
others, is already limited by its relations to the others. It’s limited by
not being X,
not being Y, and so forth. But then it’s clearly not
unlimited, not infinite! To think of God
as “a being” is to render God finite. This is the message of Hegel’s critique
of “spurious infinity,” as applied to God. Whatever impressive attributes it
may have, nothing that can be described as “a being” can be truly infinite, nor
(consequently) can it be God.
We could think of this critique, by
Hegel, of the conception of God as “a being,” as another step in the long
struggle (in religion) against “anthropomorphism” —against our natural tendency
to think of God as like ourselves, only bigger and more powerful. As long as we
think of God as like ourselves in being “a being,” we prevent this “God” from
being truly infinite, regardless of how often we may
call this God “infinite.”
If God, then, isn’t “a being,” what
is God? Here Hegel makes two main
points. These are implied especially in his treatment of (spurious and true)
infinity in the Quality chapter of the
Science
of Logic. All of Hegel’s later treatments of the divine, whether as the
Concept, the Absolute Idea, or Absolute Spirit, rely crucially on the pattern
of thinking that he lays out here. I’ll lay out the pattern’s full implications
for philosophical theology without regard to the details of its presentation in
the various sections of Hegel’s works. For explanation of those details, I
invite you to consult my book.
The first point that Hegel makes is
that there is a sense in which finite things like you and me fail to be as
“real” (German: real) as possible,
not in the sense that we’re illusions, but in the sense that we aren’t fully ourselves. What you and I are depends to
a large extent on our relations, both logical and causal, to other finite
things. Our location in space and time, our color, weight, and nationality
depend on our relations to other finite things; so do our fears, desires,
genes, and numerous other characteristics that have been implanted in us by
what isn’t us. If, by contrast, there were something that depended only on
itself to make it what it is, then that something would evidently be more fully
itself than we are, and more real, as
itself. This focus on being real as
oneself will be crucial for everything that follows. It’s what makes it
important for God to be truly infinite: being infinite makes God more himself
(herself, itself), and more fully real, as
himself (herself, itself), than anything else is.
Hegel’s second, very important
point is that this something that’s more real as itself than we are isn’t just
a hypothetical possibility, because we ourselves have the experience of being
more real, as ourselves, at some times than we are at other times. We’re more
real as ourselves when we step back from our current desires and projects and
ask ourselves, what would make the most sense, what would be best overall, in
these circumstances? When we ask a question like this, we make ourselves less
dependent on whatever it was that caused us to feel the desire or to have the
project. We experience instead the possibility of being self-determining, through our thinking about what would be best.
But something that can be self-determining in this way, or even conceive of being
self-determining in this way, seems already to be more “itself,” more real as
itself, than something that’s simply a product of its circumstances.
Putting these two points together,
Hegel arrives at a substitute for the conventional conception of God that he
criticized. God is the fullest reality, achieved through the self-determination
of everything that’s capable of any kind or degree of self-determination. Thus
we might say that God “emerges out of” beings of limited reality, including us.
Because God emerges out of us, God isn’t rendered finite by being a separate
being from us.
But this doesn’t mean that God
essentially is us, as in Ludwig
Feuerbach’s “anthropotheism,” or that God is Nature, as in Spinoza. God’s
emerging out of us and out of nature doesn’t reduce God to us or to nature,
because the God that we’re talking about is more
fully real, more real as itself, than we and nature, in general, are.
Hegel’s picture differs from
familiar pictures of something emerging from something else because rather than
some underlying “stuff” that’s simply the paradigm of what’s “real,” what we
have here is a process of
increasing
reality. Furthermore, we can correctly say that we and nature receive whatever
full reality we possess
from Hegel’s
God (from “the self-determination of everything that’s capable of any kind of
self-determination”). We get our reality from God, while God gets his (her,
its) freedom from limits, by including us. This mutual relationship enables us
to be intimately connected to God (who isn’t “a separate being” from us, and
thus isn’t limited by us), without being identical to God. God embodies all of
our self-determination, all of our full reality, without embodying our
limitations.
This intimate relationship between
something that’s less real (us) and something that’s more real (God), is
Hegel’s version of what’s usually called “transcendence.” Please don’t let
anyone tell you that Hegel’s God is “immanent” in the world or nature or
anything else. Hegel’s God is not immanent, because he (she, it) is more fully
real than anything else. Hegel has reformulated transcendence as a kind of
emergence, precisely so that it can be true
transcendence, rather than failing, as the “spurious infinity” did, to be
transcendent at all. If like most
present-day writers about Hegel we continue to use the terms “transcendent” and
“immanent” in the conventional way, rather than reconceiving them along the
lines of Hegel’s true infinity (where transcendence is a kind of emergence), we
have simply failed to get the point of Hegel’s critique of spurious infinity.
Hegel identifies an intimate connection between us and God, precisely so as to
prevent this “God” from being a spurious infinity, which fails to transcend its
relationship of contrast with us.
Now this intimate connection
between us and God, whereby God is the self-determination of everything that’s
capable of self-determination, has another important consequence. Because we
experience this divine self-determination
in
ourselves, as our stepping back from immediate urges and searching for
what’s really good, we can reasonably say that, to a significant degree, we
“know God.” This is why Hegel can confidently assert, contrary to notions of
sheer “faith,” that we know God. While at the same time acknowledging that
obviously we don’t know God in the same way that we know physical objects. In
fact we know God
more intimately than
we know physical objects, since we know God through our own inner mental acts
that are directed at self-determination. Probably we aren’t often aware of the
fullest reality, the sum total of what’s truly itself, as such; but we’re often
aware of one
aspect of the fullest
reality, which is the process of seeking greater self-determination and freedom
for ourselves.
I know that this Hegelian
conception of God sounds pretty “squishy,” at first hearing. What is this thing
that’s neither identical with us and the world, nor a separate being from us
and the world? How can we even talk about such a thing?
The first answer, of course, is
that what we’re talking about isn’t a “thing” at all, because if he (or she or
it) were a “thing,” he (she, it)
would be limited, as we are, and wouldn’t be God. So we need to stretch the
limits of our ordinary language, which is pretty much designed for talking
about limited “things” like ourselves. Above all, we need to get used to the
idea that a word like “real” doesn’t necessarily refer simply to material
objects that we can measure, weigh, and kick. Nor need it refer to an
additional category of objects, such
as “minds” or “souls,” that aren’t material objects but somehow get connected
with material objects. Instead, “reality” can be a matter of degree,
proportional to the object’s degree of success in being self-governing,
self-determining, and “itself.” This is the significance of Hegel’s famous
transition from “Substance” to “Subject,” in the course of his Logic. “Subject”
is what is self-determining and thereby real as itself. Without an
understanding of this dimension of increasing reality through “Subject”-hood,
the notion of “God” seems to be doomed to the sort of self-stultifying
anthropomorphism that Hegel criticized, in which God is pictured as “a being,”
a finite quasi-object, like us.
I suspect that it would be very
difficult to understand what Hegel is doing without having some acquaintance
with the traditions of mystical literature, such as St Augustine, Meister
Eckhart, Jelaluddin Rumi, St Teresa of Avila, and modern poets such as
Wordsworth, Emily Dickinson, Whitman, and Rilke. They all show that Hegel isn’t
alone in stretching ordinary language to evoke a reality that, to some degree,
is bound to elude it.
And they show that
the intimate connection between God and ourselves that Hegel proposes—we’re not
identical, but we’re not separate beings, either—has plenty of precedents in
the history of religious thought. Consider St. Augustine’s famous description
of God as “more inward [to me] than my most inward part”; Meister Eckhart’s
dictum that
“we must
act from our own inner self, which is him [God] in us”; Rumi’s “There’s no need
to go outside” (to find God); and Whitman’s “There is that in me […]/It is not
chaos or death…. It is form and union and plan… it is eternal life…. it is
happiness.”
The distinctive thing about Hegel’s
contribution to this mystical literature is, of course, that he aspires to a
more systematic and logically sound statement than poets are obliged to
produce. His key contribution for this purpose is his explanation of just how
it is that God is “within us,” while still being in important ways beyond us.
God is “within us” because God is our freedom,
our ability to be ourselves rather than merely being the product of our
surroundings. At the same time God is always beyond us, because we’re never
fully free, never fully self-determining and ourselves. As the mystics
constantly tell us, if we achieved full freedom, the finite “we” would no
longer be there; only the infinite “we” or “I,” which is God, would be there.
In drawing this connection between
divinity and the human capacity for self-determination, Hegel follows the prior
examples of Plato, Aristotle, and Plotinus. All four of these thinkers focus in
various ways on the notion of a higher, self-determining reality with which we
can be involved through our capacity for seeking to be self-determining, to be
ourselves. The exit from the Cave, in book vii of Plato’s
Republic, is an image of pursuing the Good, which (as Plato
explained earlier, in books iv and v) is the way in which the tripartite “soul”
is able to act as one, and thus (we could add) to
be one, be fully itself and be self-determining. This is the basis
of Plato’s announcements in the
Theaetetus
and the
Timaeus that the philosopher
can be “like God.”
When we
understand Plato’s writings in this way, what is absolutely central for him is
not the Forms, as such, but rather the process of transcendence whereby the
soul becomes one, fully itself and self-determining. Plato believes that this
process presupposes something like the Forms, but later thinkers who follow him
in other respects are often revisionary about the Forms. Aristotle’s account of
human functioning in the
Nicomachean
Ethics and
De anima is very
similar to Plato’s in focusing on a vertical dimension by which humans can
transcend their animal roots and develop what is “divine” in them.
This dimension, and not the Forms as such, is
likewise the central concern of Plotinus, who describes the soul as seeking to
find itself and thus truly be itself through the fuller reality of the One.
By taking Kant as his primary point
of departure, Hegel was in effect taking an important modern version of this
broadly understood “Platonism” as his point of departure. In contrast to
materialists and empiricists, Kant and Plato agree that the crucial feature of human functioning is the human
being’s ability to achieve a kind of inner unity and self-government that
non-rational beings can’t achieve (or can achieve only to a lesser degree).
Kant and Plato disagree in that Plato
thinks that our knowledge of this difference in functioning justifies us in
believing that the result—namely, what he calls the “soul” or the “divine”—is
more fully real; whereas Kant assigns the soul and the divine merely
“regulative” functions in practical reasoning, and no status as known
realities.
There is no reason to assume that
thinkers like Hegel who agree with Plato rather than with Kant on this issue,
are thereby engaging in a distinctively “religious” rather than “secular” type
of thinking. Rather, it seems that Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus and Hegel have
simply come to different conclusions than Kant came to about what deserves to
be called “real,” and in what sense. Since Kant (unlike Hegel, in particular)
seems not to have given focused attention to the different possible meanings of
the word “real,” it may well be that Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus and especially
Hegel give a clearer and more persuasive account of “reality,” as such, than
Kant does. In any case, Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus and Hegel all claim to be engaging
in pure philosophy (as opposed to un-philosophical “religious” thinking), and
it seems to me that it’s appropriate for us to take them at their word on this,
unless and until someone shows from the detail of their arguments how what they
were doing is not pure philosophy.
Writers who interpret modern
philosophy as seeking to replace more or less theistic metaphysics with a kind
of thinking that’s “secular” (i.e., non-“religious”) need to confront the fact
that Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus and Hegel all seem to base their talk about
“god” on the same process of seeking self-government and self-determination on
which Kant focuses in his Critiques.
Why should modern philosophy exclude a certain kind of thinking as
non-“secular,” if the foundation of that thinking isn’t different in principle
from its own? A proper appreciation of the Platonic tradition will make it
clear that transcendence and divinity are perfectly legitimate concepts for
philosophy as such, because their relevance doesn’t depend on our accepting any
sort of non-rational revelation or dogma. The modern preoccupation with the
confrontation between dogmatic religion and skeptical “secularism,” which
continues in (for example) the debates recently set off by the “new atheists,”
makes it difficult for people to get into focus this third, non-dogmatic but
“spiritual” option. But one has to ask, why should we assume that when
metaphysicians speak of “God,” their agenda has been set for them by dogma,
rather than by autonomous reason? Why shouldn’t God himself (herself, itself)
be an extrapolation of autonomous reason, as I’m suggesting he (she, it) is for
the entire Platonic tradition, including Hegel?
The prospectus for this conference
asked us whether Hegel continued “the world-view that inextricably linked
orthodox theological and metaphysical notions,” or should be thought of instead
as “advancing the spirit of Kant’s critical project.” It’s hard to know where
exactly—in how much of our history—this “linkage” of metaphysics with orthodox
theology is supposed to be “inextricable.” It is, at any rate, clear that
Plato, Aristotle, and Plotinus, being pagans, had no interest in church dogma.
I believe, in fact, that these three thinkers anticipated everything that’s
valid in Kant’s critical project, so that their (chronologically pre-Kantian)
“metaphysical notions” are not, in general, vulnerable to justifiable Kantian
skepticism. The same, of course, need not be true of orthodox Christian or
other theologies, or of particular arguments constructed by various theologians
with the aid of concepts borrowed from Plato or Aristotle. Many of these
arguments are quite vulnerable to the kinds of critiques to which Kant, and
Hegel as well, subjected them. In particular, the common notion of an omnipotent,
omniscient being is vulnerable
precisely to Hegel’s critique of spurious infinity. But neither Plato, nor
Aristotle, nor Plotinus, nor Hegel himself advances such a notion. They suggest
instead something like the more subtle, “true-infinity” conception of God that
I’ve been outlining, which does not appear to be vulnerable to Kant’s
justifiable criticisms.
So my answer to the prospectus’s
question is that Hegel certainly advanced the spirit of Kant’s critical
project, just as Plato, Aristotle and Plotinus, “Kantians” avant la lettre, had done before. It’s only the limited perspective
of the modern struggle against church dogma that gives Hume and Kant the mantle
of advocates of free thought, and
denies that mantle to Plato and his successors in philosophical theology,
including Hegel.
You may be wondering how Hegel, who
(unlike Plato, Aristotle and Plotinus) presents himself as a more or less
orthodox Christian, can be an advocate of free thought. Not having space to go
into the relevant texts in detail here, I can only offer the (I think)
uncontroversial observation that in unfolding his Logic and his system, Hegel
has no intention of appealing to Christian or any other dogma. Specifically
Christian notions enter the system only in the Religion section of Absolute
Spirit, and there (as always) Hegel claims to arrive at these notions by strict
logical development out of the concept of freedom, which underlies Spirit as a
whole. So once again, interpretive charity requires that we take him at his
word, unless and until it has been shown that some portion of this development
in fact conflicts with his claims about it.
It’s time, now, to turn to
objections from, as it were, the other side. You may be wondering, what does
the Plato/Hegel “God” have to do with the God that we learned about in Sunday
school, who created the world in seven days, sent his Son to save us from our
sins, and will judge us at the end of time? Rather than using the name, “God,”
for Plato’s or Hegel’s emerging fullest reality, wouldn’t it be more honest to
use some technical term like (say) “the Absolute” or “the Ground of Being,”
which wouldn’t imply any particular connection with traditional religion?
Blaise Pascal, Søren Kierkegaard and Martin Heidegger rejected what Pascal
called the “God of the philosophers” as having little or nothing to do with the
God who’s worshipped by ordinary believers.
I want to underline several ways in
which even without the biblical mythology, and without the anthropomorphic
conception of God as “a being,” Hegel’s conception of God nevertheless seems to
capture what ordinary believers care about the most. So that it makes good
sense to say that he’s still describing what they call “God.”
The first point is that when Hegel
and his predecessors in the tradition of mystical philosophy talk about human
beings becoming more “themselves” by stepping back from their current desires
and projects, this stepping back has consequences that go well beyond the
“intellect,” as we usually think of it. Plato wrote extensively about love (
eros). His central concern in this
writing was to show that inner freedom and love, head and heart, are not
ultimately separable from one another.
First, Plato showed that love necessarily has an intellectual dimension, a
dimension of inner freedom or questioning. This is because love seeks what’s
truly Good for those it loves, and therefore it has to ask the question, what
is truly Good?
This requires thought, which is the function of intellect. And second, Plato
aimed to show that inner freedom ultimately has to lead to love of others, for
their capacity for freedom. Plato says in the
Symposium that we can “possess the Good forever” only by “giving
birth” to an orientation to the Good (and thus, we might add, to an
actualization of freedom) in others. But it seems that if we were to limit the
number of others whom we care about in this way, we would replace the “forever”
by a limited portion of space and time.
Hegel spells out what’s probably
essentially the same thought in the following way. If I exclude anyone from
what I’m concerned about, I define myself by my relationship to them (namely,
the relationship of excluding them), and thus I prevent myself from being fully
self-determining: that is, from
having inner freedom. It’s easy enough to see in everyday life that people who
think of themselves as having “enemies” seldom manage to be very free,
internally. It’s not that we must agree with others about everything, or
endorse everything that they do. Rather, it’s that we need to be able to see
something in others that we can identify with, so as not to be confronted by
something completely alien, which will define us (always) by this relationship
rather than by ourselves. But to identify with something in others is at least
a key aspect of what we call loving them. So Plato and Hegel have shown that
there is an intimate connection between inner freedom and love.
Now, this intimate connection must
operate most of all, obviously, on the level of God. The God who is fully
self-determining because he (she, it) isn’t defined by “not being” anything
else, is intimately involved in every living thing, as its capacity for
self-determination. Hegel describes this involvement as “
free love and
boundless
blessedness,” just because of its universal inclusiveness.
Since, as we just said, full self-determination must be loving, to be involved
in the self-determination of one is to be involved in the self-determination of
all.
As for justice, the “last
judgment,” and so forth, Hegel’s God administers this in the most direct
possible way. Beings who achieve freedom and love, achieve the greatest reality
that any being can achieve. They achieve a reality that’s effectively timeless.
So their very actions reward them. Those who exhibit less freedom and love,
“enjoy” less reward. They aren’t equipped to enjoy it. But Hegel’s God is
likewise forgiving, as we read in the famous passage at the end of Morality in
the
Phenomenology of Spirit about the
“reconciling Yea in which the two ‘I’s let go their antithetical Dasein,” and
they are “God manifested ….”
Everyone is God manifested, in whatever part of themselves isn’t or wasn’t
“antithetical.”
Thus Hegel’s God exhibits the
combination of justice and nurturing love that we see in the more inspiring
documents of the Abrahamic religions. Justice, because all are included and are
treated appropriately, and love for the same reason.
Hegel’s conception explains and
preserves another famous feature of Abrahamic religion as well. The God that
Hegel describes as emerging from the world of finite things, gives to them the
greatest reality of which they’re capable. In this way, Hegel’s God performs
something very similar to what’s traditionally called “creating.”
However, this Hegelian “creating”
takes place throughout time, rather than only “in the beginning.” And it deals
with a kind of “reality” that, though we’re intimately familiar with it, can’t
be the subject matter of natural science, which is all about how things depend
on other things to make them what they are. For both of these reasons, Hegel’s
God doesn’t conflict with what astrophysics and biology tell us about the
history of the universe.
The final question that people ask
is, is Hegel’s God a “personal God”? If a “person” resembles you and me by being
a finite thing that you or I could confront face to face, then obviously
Hegel’s God is not a “person.” If, on the other hand, a “person” is a reality
characterized by inner freedom, then Hegel’s God clearly is “personal” to the
maximum possible degree. Religion seems to be about learning to recognize and
to love this kind of “person,” in all of his (her, its) manifestations.
Thus, Hegel’s “philosopher’s God”
is not only less open to doubt than the Abrahamic God, as conventionally
understood, is. (Less open to doubt because of the way Hegel’s God is “in us,”
and thus knowable by us.) Hegel’s God also seems to preserve all of the
Abrahamic God’s worship-inspiring features, but without conflicting with the
empirical sciences as the Abrahamic God, as conventionally understood, does.
In dealing with the literal
statements of Abrahamic religion, whether in the scriptures or elsewhere, the
charitable thing is to assume that these statements are trying to refer to the
reality that Plato and Hegel describe. People who insist on literal
interpretations generally do so either from fear or from anger: from fear that
without the letter, everything will be lost, or from anger at the hypocrisy of
self-appointed spokespersons. Greater understanding can dispel this fear and
moderate this anger. What is essential will not be lost, and the self-appointed
spokespersons are, after all, only self-appointed.
