Science as an Aspect of God

(presentation for “Science and Scientist” conference, Rutgers University, June 15-16, 2019) (ca. 5,000 words)

Robert M. Wallace

Abstract: This talk explains how Hegel shows how science is an aspect of God, inasmuch as science, religion, ethics, the arts, and philosophy are all necessary aspects of a single self-determining reality, which is what we traditionally call “God.” Science, religion, ethics, the arts, and philosophy all seek to “ascend” above our initial opinions, appetites, and emotions, to something that’s truer, better, or more beautiful. This ascent takes us beyond the ways in which we’re determined by our biological antecedents and our environment, and thus it makes us self-governing, and real as ourselves. In that sense it constitutes a higher reality, which we call “God” because only it is fully real as itself, and not a product of limits and thus of what’s other than itself. This God is “super-natural” inasmuch as it adds “self” and self-government to nature as it is understood by, say, physics. But the “ascent” to self-government of the material objects that we are connects nature and the “super-natural” in an intelligible way, rather than leaving their relationship a mystery. In this way Hegel shows how we can honor the natural sciences while recognizing a higher reality that is beyond their purview and is at work throughout the history of life and mind.  As a doctrine of material and efficient causes, Darwinism is an important part of the truth.  But insofar as advocates of Darwinism ignore or reject the higher reality of formal and final causes, such as we see at work in science, religion, ethics, the arts, and philosophy, they ignore the implications of the search for truth that they themselves are engaged in. For a search for truth is an effort to find not just what our material makeup and prior events cause us to believe, but what’s actually true. So science, as a search for truth, aims to be guided by something other than material and efficient causes. This is the sense in which science is an aspect of something higher and more self-determining, which (as such) we traditionally call “God.”

In this talk I’m going to outline how G. W. F. Hegel reconciles science and religion by showing how science is itself an aspect of God.[1] I actually think that Hegel derived the gist of this perhaps surprising idea from Plato and from Aristotle.[2]  And something like it can also be seen in Asian thinking, in which knowledge and faith tend not to be opposed to each other as they have recently been in the west. But Hegel spells out the Plato/Aristotle conception more explicitly and thus more provocatively than Plato and Aristotle do, and thus he helps us to appreciate the remarkable insights that have been hidden in the obscure terminology and images of the Platonic tradition.

Besides science, other aspects of God, in Hegel’s conception, include religion, ethics, the arts, and philosophy. If science, religion, ethics, the arts, and philosophy are all aspects of God, it makes no sense to try to delegitimize one of them by appealing to another one. As aspects of the same ultimate reality, they belong together, and each must be practiced in a way that respects the others. So (in particular) science can’t dismiss religion, and religion can’t dismiss science.

1. An Ultimate Reality?

But how can science, religion, ethics, the arts, and philosophy all be aspects of an ultimate “reality”?  Shouldn’t we say that these are all really just aspects of “consciousness,” rather than of actual reality, which is composed of the objects of consciousness?

Hegel invites us to look at this question in a different way. Rather than being just aspects of consciousness, science, religion, ethics, the arts, and philosophy all help to constitute something that’s more fully real than the familiar kinds of objects, insofar as what science, religion and so forth constitute is more self-governing and thus more “itself” than the familiar kinds of objects are. This is because in all of these cultural efforts (science, religion, and so forth), we seek to “ascend” above our initial opinions, appetites, and emotions, to something that’s truer, more beautiful, or better than those initial opinions, appetites, and emotions. By ascending in this way, whether through truth, beauty, or goodness, we make ourselves more able to govern ourselves, rather than being governed by whatever external forces caused us to have the opinions, appetites, and emotions that we started out with. And insofar as we govern ourselves, in this way, we become more “real,” as ourselves, than we would otherwise be. In this way we bring into being a kind of reality which Hegel calls “more intensive” and which it’s reasonable to call more fully real than what was there previously.[3] For since this new kind of reality is self-governing, it’s real as itself, and not merely as the product of its circumstances.

This notion of a reality that’s real “as itself,” and not just as a product of its circumstances, is not as peculiar as it may initially sound. We have all had the experience of not being fully “ourselves,” when we acted unthinkingly to satisfy an appetite or to maintain an opinion. And then when we wake up and think (rather than just “reacting”), we experience ourselves as being more fully present than we were in our unthinking mode. For thinking is more essential to us than any appetite or opinion is. We can easily imagine losing any appetite or opinion and still being fully ourselves. But if we lost all of our thinking, we would become (in effect) mere automatons, not functioning as ourselves, and in that sense not being ourselves.

This is why Socrates preached the “examined life”: it’s the life in which we’re fully real as ourselves, and not as mere products of our biological heritage or social environment. Hegel’s doctrine of the higher and fuller reality that’s composed of science, religion, ethics, the arts, and philosophy, is a more elaborate version of this basic Socratic and Platonic observation. It’s a doctrine of how thinking produces a fuller, “more intensive” reality than mere mechanical interactions can produce, because it produces something that’s real “as itself,” and not merely as the product of its environment.

In the remainder of this talk, I’ll try to clarify the nature of this higher reality. To begin with, let’s look at the specific ways in which science, religion, ethics, and the arts each contribute to it.

2. Science as an Aspect of the Ultimate Reality

To begin with science, it’s not difficult to see how science is an aspect of the ultimate reality that I’ve described. Insofar as science seeks the truth, as such, rather than merely to satisfy our preexisting appetites or confirm our preexisting opinions, it goes beyond those appetites and opinions and embodies something that seems more our own than they are. Since abandoning the pursuit of truth would make us mere automatons, no longer functioning as “ourselves,” our pursuit of truth expresses us ourselves, our self-government, more than externally-induced appetites or opinions can. And the same is true of the sciences, as particular ways in which we pursue the truth.[4]

Thus the idea that science shows or presupposes that no reality is higher or more ultimate than any other is refuted by the practice of science itself. For by rising above our externally-induced appetites and opinions, science helps to constitute something that’s more self-governing, and thus more real as itself and in a clear sense more ultimate than what lacks science. I’ll say some more about science after I’ve surveyed the contributions of religion, ethics, and the arts.

3. Religion as an Aspect of the Ultimate Reality

Turning to religion, I want to suggest that even in the Abrahamic religions, with their focus on a God who seems to be separate and set over against us, there is an important sense in which this God in fact does or can function to make us more fully ourselves.

It’s well known that religions in general urge their followers to subordinate purely self-centered concerns to something that’s higher or more inclusive. Judaism, Christianity, and Islam sometimes promise rewards and punishments after death, but their most exalted and most admired teachings celebrate virtue itself as bringing us closest to God. The best-known and most admired saying of Rabia of Basra, the eighth-century Sufi saint, is that she wanted to “burn paradise and douse hell-fire, so that … God’s servants will learn to see him without hope for reward or fear of punishment.”[5]

There is still the issue of the authority that God seems to have in these religions, which sets God over against those who must merely obey. Here, turning to Christianity, I would point out how in the Christian scriptures, Jesus is reported as saying that “the kingdom of God is within you” (Luke 17:21).[6] St Paul is reported as approving the view that “in” God, “we live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:28). And numerous early Christian writers wrote of the possibility of our “becoming God” (theosis), as something that was made possible by God’s “becoming man.”[7] These latter formulations are in fact preserved and repeated in the Roman Catholic Catechism and Mass. Similar formulations can be found in Jewish and Islamic mystical writings and in Advaita Vedanta and Taoism.

None of these formulations encourage the common idea that God is simply a separate being, one that “exists independently of” humans. Nor does such an idea recommend itself if we want God to be infinite; for as Hegel points out, any being that’s separate is ipso facto finite, limited by its relation to the other beings, from which it’s separate. (That relation being the relation of “being separate from” those beings.) This is Hegel’s critique of the “spurious infinity” (schlechte Unendlichkeit) which is conceived of as separate from the finite but is therefore limited by its relation to the finite, and thus is finite itself.[8] So Hegel, drawing on the “orthodox” texts that I mentioned and followed by modern theologians like Paul Tillich and Karl Rahner, seeks a formulation that will preserve God’s transcendence while not making God a “separate being.”[9]

4. Hegel’s Version of Transcendence: Beyond but not Separate

We naturally want to know how something (call it, “B”) can go beyond something else (call it “A”) and be “more real as itself” than A is, without being a separate being from A. The answer is that this can be the case if B is A’s own going beyond its finitude, by becoming infinite and fully real.[10] A can go beyond its finitude through rational self-government or the pursuit of truth, such as I described earlier, in which A is guided by reason rather than by whatever external forces caused it to have the opinions and appetites that it started out with. If anything expresses A itself, rather than expressing externally induced opinions or appetites, it is A’s pursuit of truth. When it’s guided by itself in this way, A as B is real as itself, and in that sense it’s more real than it was merely as the externally-guided, unthinking A. But since B is A’s own going beyond its finitude, in this way, B is not a separate being from A.

Presenting God in this way, as the self-surpassing or becoming fully real of finite things rather than as a being that’s separate from finite things, is Hegel’s way of interpreting (among others) the teachings that “the kingdom of God is within you” and that in God, “we live and move and have our being.” The kingdom of God is within us in the sense that we’re capable of rational self-government, and we have our being in this God in the sense that it’s only through our self-government “in” this God that we achieve full reality, full being, as ourselves. But we’re still talking about God, and not merely about us, insofar as this full reality is always “above” a great part of what we, as human beings, are.[11] It’s “above” our instinctive efforts to satisfy unexamined desires and to maintain unexamined opinions

Through this interpretation of religion, Hegel identifies a core of truth in it which lends itself to integration with science, ethics, the arts, and philosophy, because this interpretation takes religion to be promoting the surpassing of one’s everyday finite self, rather than promoting submission to something that’s separate from oneself. No advocate of religion is likely to deny that religion encourages its followers to surpass their everyday ways of thinking and functioning. Jesus (in Luke), St. Paul, Rabia, and Hegel are simply defining with increasing precision what would be the result of our doing that. Similarly, Plato’s account of rational “ascending” in his discussions in the Republic of the Sun, the Line, and the Cave made it clear how beings like us can in fact surpass their everyday ways of thinking and functioning. This is why Jewish, Christian, and Muslim thinkers who want to go beyond the anthropomorphic mythology of their religious traditions have found the writings of Plato and his followers especially helpful.

5. The Plato/Hegel “Philosopher’s God”

As for the common objection that religious believers will be left cold by a “philosopher’s God” such as we find in Platonism and in Hegel, several points need to be made.[12] First of all, this kind of God is characterized not only by the rational self-government or freedom that is manifest in rising above unexamined appetites and opinions, but also by an important kind of love. The reason for this love is made most explicit by Hegel, in a variation on his critique of the supposed “infinity” that turns out to be rendered finite by being opposed to finite beings. Hegel points out that being separate from others is a way of being related to those others, so that being guided by one’s separateness from others is a way of being guided by those others as others and, to that extent, not being guided by oneself.[13] So being guided by one’s separateness from others detracts from one’s self-government.

But “self-centered” people and gods are, precisely, guided by their separateness from others—they are concerned about themselves, and “not” (as they will tell you) concerned about those “others.” And to that extent they are guided by (their relation to) those others, and they fail to be self-governed. So people and gods who are fully self-governed will not be self-centered. Rather, they will be loving: they will treat others the same way they treat themselves. In this way, freedom as self-government translates into an important kind of love.[14]  Of course this also makes it clear how being truly oneself entails ethics, in which we are expected (broadly) to treat others as we treat ourselves.

Secondly, since the ultimate reality, which is real “as itself,” is real in a way that everyday finite realities are not, one could see it as the core of truth in the idea of God’s “creating” the world. By its presence in and influence on the world, the ultimate reality gives the world all of the “full” reality, reality “as itself,” that the world possesses.

Third, our adherence to the ultimate reality that’s composed of freedom and love, despite the attractions of self-centered appetites, opinions, and so forth, is equivalent to what traditional religion calls “faith.” This is because our adherence to the ultimate reality requires us to adhere to something that from the point of view of unexamined and self-centered appetites and opinions has no evident authority at all. It’s only to the extent that a person cares about being free and thus being herself, and cares about other people because this makes her free, and thus has the Plato/Hegel kind of “faith,” that the “higher” domain comes into view.[15]

In all of these ways, this “philosopher’s God” and our dealings with it reproduce what we see in traditional religion. And thus it’s reasonable to suggest that what’s most inspiring in traditional religious stories and concepts could be precisely the transcendent, free, loving, and supreme reality that Plato and Hegel show we’re able to experience.

Plus, as I’ve explained, what Plato and Hegel describe has the advantage over the conventional conception of God as a separate being that Plato’s and Hegel’s God is truly infinite, that is, truly transcendent. It’s truly transcendent because it’s not, as Karl Rahner put it, a mere “member of the larger household of all reality,” as it would be if it were an additional being, separate from the “world.”[16]

6. The Arts as Aspects of the Ultimate Reality

Now we can turn briefly to the arts. Insofar as a work of art goes beyond the artist’s appetites, opinions, and ego, and beyond merely conventional rules, so that it has its own inner coherence, it governs itself. This explains the fact that we find outstanding works of art not merely pleasing but (as we say) “inspiring.” Insofar as they are free from merely external influences, works of art are self-governing and they thereby contribute to the reality that’s real “as itself,” by not being governed by what’s other than it. In this way they exhibit for us how we ourselves can be self-governing, rather than being mere reactions to our biological heritage and social environment. And this we find deeply inspiring. As Iris Murdoch wrote, “Art with which we are familiar stays with us as an intimation that love has power and the world makes sense.”[17]

7. Science and the Scientist, “Object” and “Subject”

Turning back to the issue of science’s contribution to the reality that’s fully itself and that’s traditionally called “God,” I have to acknowledge the likely response of admirers of science to the picture that I’ve been drawing. The problem is that science doesn’t seem to recognize any such “ultimate reality” as I have been describing. If science doesn’t recognize it, how can I say that science helps to constitute it? This puzzling state of affairs fuels the suspicions towards “metaphysics” which one often encounters among people who admire the sciences.

The explanation of this puzzle is that beginning with the scientific revolution in the seventeenth century, modern science has made it its business to focus solely on what we call “objects” and to ignore the possible significance of its own rational activity—of the “subject,” as German Idealists call it. The narrow focus on “objects” was initially intended as a practical way of maximizing the likelihood of rapid progress within a delimited area. Since then, however, it has come to be taken for granted, to such an extent that a scientist who suggests that her own rational activity deserves attention in its own right is likely to seem like an eccentric who is distracting attention from the only true reality: that of “objects.” Science in practice systematically excludes itself, its own rational activity, from the realm of “objective realities” that it addresses.

When one puts it that way, it’s obvious that such an exclusion can only be defended as a temporary expedient, not as an established truth about what’s real. Surely an activity that claims to be fully rational must ultimately address itself, the “subject,” as well as its “objects.” And indeed this is just what the great modern philosophers have tried to do, on behalf of science.

Immanuel Kant’s way of addressing this issue, in his three Critiques, was to keep the subject separate from its objects. Science as he understood it was properly concerned only with objects, understood in a Newtonian mechanistic way, while the subject had “moral faith” in certain things about itself which mechanistic science could not know about the world as such. The subject had moral faith in its freedom, responsibility, immortality, and so forth. Kant’s thoughts, in his third Critique, about the “regulative” role of teleology in understanding life, did not succeed in bridging the fundamental divide between object and subject, and knowledge and “faith,” which he had thus created. There was still no way that one could have knowledge of oneself and of how one should act; one could only have practical faith. But if one’s ideal is knowledge, then a “faith” that’s contrasted with knowledge is bound to seem like a poor substitute for it. As a result of this unresolved dualism of knowledge versus faith, it seems clear that Kant did not successfully integrate science with ethics and religion.

One alternative, which is often adopted, is to exalt some kind of “faith,” as the key to everything, over knowledge. As an admirer of science, Kant wasn’t tempted to do this, so he remained stuck with the problem of how to relate the two.

8. Hegel’s Platonic Solution

A third approach, which goes beyond Kant’s uncomfortable dualism and beyond the exaltation of faith, is Hegel’s. Hegel explains how knowledge and faith, and object and subject each involve the other. Rather than being belief in a separate and very powerful being, “faith,” in Hegel’s view, is one’s commitment to the pursuit of knowledge—and through knowledge, of being oneself, and being real as oneself—as opposed to mere opinion, appetite-satisfaction, and the resulting failure to be oneself. The “subject” that exhibits this commitment is far from being merely “subjective” since, being real as itself, it has a more complete “reality” than mere “objects,” as such, possess. Thus “faith” in this sense generates full reality, and gives rational access to it as well. Rather than being opposed to knowledge or reason, this faith is the pursuit of knowledge and reason.

So where Hegel differs from Kant is that by showing how the finite fails to be self-governing and thus fails to be real as itself, Hegel shows that only the (truth-pursuing and loving) infinite is fully real, in that it’s entirely self-governing and thus real as itself. Knowing this, through Hegel’s exposition, and knowing through our experience the freedom and love that constitute the infinite full reality, we know the infinite, our freedom and love, and the highest reality, rather than (as in Kant’s account) merely having “practical faith” in them. Plus we know how finite things like ourselves go beyond themselves in this infinity. This knowledge of the finite’s relation to the infinite creates a path from the finite to the infinite, an intelligible process of “ascending,” in contrast to the unbridgeable duality between theoretical knowledge and practical faith, which Kant had left us with.

We see this ascending from finite to infinite again later in Hegel’s system as an ascending from Nature to Spirit. As the true infinity is the self-surpassing of the finite, so Spirit is the self-surpassing of Nature. And in each case, what propels this surpassing is our effort to be fully ourselves, and in that sense fully “real.” So again we have an intelligible process of ascending, this time from Nature to Spirit.

By presenting this process of ascending from Nature to Spirit, Hegel responds to the standard charge made by advocates of “naturalism,” that because we have no real understanding of the relationship between the “natural” and the “supernatural,” we should ignore the latter and focus only on the former. Or we should “reduce” the latter to the former. Following the example of Plato’s analysis of ascending, in the Sun, Line, and Cave allegories in the Republic, Hegel shows how natural beings such as ourselves can and do come to function in ways that can appropriately be described as “super-natural.” This functioning merits such a description not because it belongs to a completely different “world” than nature, but because it’s more self-determining or self-governing than such paradigmatic “natural” processes as those studied by physics. Rather than being two separate “worlds,” the “natural” and the (properly understood) “supernatural” are lower and higher phases on a scale of increasing self-government and selfhood as such.[18]

9. Consequences for Life, Mind, and Culture

Having given you this brief outline of Hegel’s vertical integration of the natural with the super-natural and object with subject, I can now mention some of the ways in which it is most relevant to present-day debates.

First, with regard to the origins of life and of mind, we no longer need to suppose that the primary alternatives are a process that was governed by the laws of something like what we currently know as physics and chemistry, or (on the other hand) a process of creation by a powerful separate being, a “designer” or “creator.” Instead, these higher features (life and mind) emerge from space, time, and matter as the emergence of full reality from what previously lacked full reality. Plato’s metaphor for this process, “birth in beauty,” reminds us of its familiarity.[19] What is fully real emerges from what is less real because, as birth is the goal of gestation, full reality is the goal of everything. So even if full reality as such is temporally posterior to much, it’s logically prior to everything, because it is everything’s goal.[20] Because the goal of achieving full reality is the achievement of full reality, what is prior in time is inferior in determining power to the telos that achieves this full reality. So biology can freely and without apology use all four Aristotelian causes (efficient, material, formal, and final causes), in combination, as it in fact does. Together with Aristotelian formal and final causation, Darwinian efficient and material causation are also part of the truth. But formal and final causation are primary because the form and the goal are life and mind, which, insofar as they are self-determining, are full reality, and the goal of everything.

Aristotle’s four causes are united, rather than separate, because although life and mind, and form and telos are superior to space, time, matter, and mechanism, they are (as Hegel especially makes clear) the self-surpassing of space, time, matter, and mechanism. For, if it is to be fully self-determining, self-determination can’t be separate. This is why some kind of Darwinian story about space, time, matter, and mechanism is a necessary part of the truth. But although what is superior can’t be separate, it’s not reducible to what is inferior (it’s not reducible to space, time, matter, and mechanism), because what is superior is more real. It “surpasses.”

Thus, critics of reductivist versions of Darwinism would do best to focus on the dogmatism of these doctrines, rather than on fine points of biological research, which are endlessly debatable. Form and telos are at work in science insofar as science pursues truth rather than whatever its circumstances may cause it to believe. Reductivism ignores this fact about science, which is manifest even in its own claim to be pursuing truth and (by implication) not merely what its circumstances cause it to believe. So our experience of higher forms of reality, of form and telos, in ourselves is sufficient to refute doctrines that dogmatically deny the operation of form or telos in reality.

Furthermore, since such spiritual or cultural phenomena as science, ethics, the arts, religion, and philosophy surpass the categories of biology as such through their development of higher degrees of self-determination or “Spirit,” we can study biological aspects of human behavior without risking any reduction of Spirit to mere biology (or chemistry, or physics). Darwinism need not be a “dangerous idea” for the humanities, as Daniel Dennett and others take it to be, because we have to understand ourselves as simultaneously embodying and surpassing all the lower forms of organization.[21] Thus Hegel (following Plato and Aristotle) gives us an understanding of the relation between lower and higher realities which is neither reductionist nor dualist. Both the higher and the lower, the fully real and the less fully real, are indispensable, because true self-determination cannot reject anything on pain of failing to be self-determining. So what is truly self-determining must be the self-surpassing of what is not self-determining.

Since the ascending begins with nature, but goes beyond or surpasses it, it integrates nature with the super-natural. Since it begins with knowing objects (in the natural sciences), but it goes beyond that knowing to knowing the knower, the “scientist,” or the “subject,” it integrates object and subject, science and the scientist. By integrating nature with the supernatural and the object with the subject, the ascending integrates science with religion and (indeed) with all “higher” phenomena (ethics, the arts, religion, and philosophy). Since the ascending does all of this without rejecting or “reducing” anything, but by doing full justice to the contribution of each, while going beyond it, it is a genuine integration and unification. In our age of ongoing cultural disunity and consequent un-freedom, an appreciation of this integrative solution could set free a lot of energy that is currently wasted in debate between advocates of misconceived alternatives.

10. Responses to Hegel (and to Plato and Aristotle)

Unfortunately, due to the complexity of Hegel’s rather awe-inspiring conception, many writers since Hegel have not been clear about what he was driving at. Criticisms of Hegel by writers like Feuerbach, Marx, and Kierkegaard recapitulated reactions that also appeared in response to Plato and, in early modern times, to Aristotle. Critics such as Epicurus and Lucretius in the ancient world, Thomas Hobbes in the 17th century, and Feuerbach, Marx, Nietzsche, and Kierkegaard in the 19th century, all failed to see how they themselves, insofar as they sought truth, were engaging in the rational transcendence that Plato, Aristotle, and Hegel describe.[22] And if we think of influential recent doctrines like existentialism, pragmatism, logical positivism, materialism, naturalism, and deconstruction, none of them acknowledges rational freedom as a means by which one can be self-determining, real as oneself, and thus “transcendent.” Accordingly, few thinkers who are influenced by these doctrines appreciate how the common core of science, ethics, art, religion, and philosophy is this rational transcendence.

Since Hegel’s time, the Plato/Aristotle/Hegel view has not been expounded very effectively. Its central notion of rational transcendence has not been brought into focus.[23] But in recent decades a number of writers have developed conceptions of human rational self-government that resemble Plato’s, Aristotle’s, and Hegel’s in their general approach.[24] Ethics and the arts are getting respectful attention; commentators on science are doing their best to clarify the nature and the limits of science’s understanding of reality; and not everyone regards religion as inherently and in all respects irrational. When we put all of these pieces together we may once again appreciate Plato’s, Aristotle’s, and Hegel’s remarkably integrated and consequently powerful synthesis.

When we appreciate this synthesis we see that science, religion, ethics, the arts, and philosophy are all aspects of the same rational transcendence, the same freedom, and the same freest and fullest reality. And thus if science is indispensable, so are religion, ethics, the arts, philosophy, and the fullest reality. To deprive oneself of any of these, on the grounds of its supposed incompatibility with one or more of the others, is to render oneself finite in that respect, and un-free. We are familiar with the dogmatisms, whether scientistic, religious, or aesthetic, that do deprive themselves of aspects of the fullest reality. Plato, Aristotle, and Hegel show us how by avoiding dogmatism of all kinds we can have the freedom and full reality that go with what might be described as “having it all.”

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[1] This talk incorporates material from my “Infinity and Spirit: How Hegel Integrates Science and Religion, and Nature and the Supernatural,” in B. Göcke and C. Tapp, eds., The Infinity of God (Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 2018).

[2] In this talk I can only gesture toward the ways in which Hegel belongs in the broadly Platonic tradition, which seeks to overcome materialism, mechanism, nominalism, relativism, and skepticism through a single systematic effort. (See Lloyd Gerson’s description of “Ur-Platonism” in his From Plato to Platonism [Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2013], p. 10; and compare his Aristotle and Other Platonists [Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2005]).  Like Gerson, I do not take Plato’s apparently dualistic remarks in the Phaedo and elsewhere about “despising” the world of sensation to give the essence of his mature view. So that Aristotle, Plotinus, Spinoza, Hegel, and Whitehead, who while not embracing dualism do, like Plato, bring out a vertical dimension in reality, count as important members of the broadly Platonic tradition. I give a good deal of textual support for my way of reading Hegel in my Hegel’s Philosophy of Reality, Freedom, and God (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), and further elaboration in Philosophical Mysticism in Plato, Hegel, and the Present (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2019 forthcoming), Chapters 2-4.

[3] “The infinite is … in a more intensive sense” (Hegel’s Science of Logic, trans. A.V. Miller [Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1989] [“Miller trans.”], p. 137; G.W.F. Hegel, Gesammelte Werke [“GW”], vol. 21 [Hamburg: Meiner, 1985], p. 125; G. W. F. Hegel, Werke [“TWA”] [Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1969-}, vol. 5, p. 150). Hegel announces at Miller trans. p. 149 (GW 21:136, TWA 5:164) that “the finite is not the real, rather the infinite is the real.” And he associates the infinite with “freedom” at Miller trans., p. 138; GW 21:125; TWA 5:150. In connection with the idea of the infinite being “real” in a way that the finite is not, please note that “real” here (Hegel’s German word is the Latinate “real”) is not to be understood primarily in contrast to “illusory” or “imaginary” or the like. Rather, to be “real” is to be, as its Latin root res suggests, “thing-ish,” that is, having an inherent unity of some kind, in contrast (say) to a mere aggregation of items. Thus A can be “more real than” B without this implying that B is illusory or imaginary; it merely implies that B is less organized or “itself,” and more like an aggregate. Hegel proceeds from his introduction of “Realität” in the Science of Logic directly to the “something” (Etwas) which he describes as “relation to itself,” and indeed as “the beginning of the Subject” (Miller trans., p. 115; GW vol. 21, p. 103; TWA vol. 5, p. 123). When he calls the “something” the “beginning of the Subject,” here in the Logic’s initial “Doctrine of Being,” Hegel is saying that through its “relation to itself,” the something foreshadows what he describes in the Logic’s culminating “Subjective Logic” as the domain of “freedom” or self-government. So “reality,” as preliminary to the “something,” exhibits very much in nuce the “self-relation” and self-governing unity that we later find fully developed as the “Subject” and its freedom. That’s how, unlike the “reality” that’s contrasted to “illusion,” etc., Hegel’s “reality” can come in degrees (“being in a more intensive sense”). I explain in more detail in chapter 3 of Wallace (2005) and in the whole book how this “more intensive being” or “reality” of infinite freedom is the theme of Hegel’s philosophical system as a whole.

[4] By contrasting us with automatons, I don’t mean to take any position regarding determinism or libertarian free will, as such. I’m merely drawing attention to our need to take seriously our own rational functioning as enabling us to go beyond pre-given appetites and opinions. If we can’t actually function in this way, we might as well abandon the idea that we can practice science or any other rational discipline.

[5] Michael A. Sells, ed., Early Islamic Mysticism (New York: Paulist Press, 1996), p. 151. Do teachers like Rabia, who aren’t concerned with an “afterlife” as such, reduce religion to mere morality? They don’t, insofar as they are concerned with the fuller “reality” or God that is achieved through the “ascent” of which morality is one aspect. This is the way in which “mystical” traditions, which are concerned with the eternal present rather than with an afterlife, are still fully “religious.”

[6] On the issue of how to translate this famous line in Luke, see Ilaria Ramelli, “Luke 17:21: ‘The kingdom of God is inside you.’ The Ancient Syriac Versions in Support of the Correct Translation” (2009), available on-line (March 2013).

[7] For example, “The Word of God became man, that thou mayest learn from man how man can become God” (Clement of Alexandria, Exhortation to the Heathen, ch. 1, par. 871). For other examples see the Wikipedia article, “Divinization [Christian],” citing among many other sources the Catechism of the Catholic Church; and for commentary see Michael J. Christensen and Jeffery A. Wittung, eds., Partakers of the Divine Nature (Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Presses, 2007). See also St. Augustine’s famous saying, “You [that is, God] were more inward [to me] than my most inward part” (Confessions, III.vi [11]).

[8] “It will be found that in the very act of keeping the infinite pure and aloof from the finite, the infinite is only made finite” (Miller trans., p. 137; GW 21:124; TWA 5:149). As is usual in theological discussions, the kind of “infinity” that Hegel is discussing here is a “qualitative” infinity rather than a mathematical or quantitative one. He discusses mathematical infinities in the second section of the Logic’s “Doctrine of Being,” entitled “Quantity.” The relation between the two types of infinity, as Hegel presents it, is too complex for me to discuss here.

[9] See Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology, vol. 2 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1957), pp. 6-7, and Karl Rahner, Foundations of Christian Faith (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1978), p. 63. One could also mention Alfred North Whitehead, Charles Hartshorne, Jürgen Moltmann, David Ray Griffin, and Philip Clayton, all of whom are usefully surveyed in John Culp, “Panentheism,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy on-line (2008 and 2013).

[10] Hegel writes: “The infinite is only as a going beyond [Hinausgehen über] the finite…. The finite is not sublated [aufgehoben, “lifted up”] by the infinite as by a power existing outside it; on the contrary, its infinity consists in sublating its own self [sich selbst aufzuheben]” (Hegel’s Science of Logic, trans. A.V. Miller, p. 146; TWA 5:160; GW 21:133).

[11] The scholars (who are too many to cite) who take Hegel’s God to be “immanent” rather than “transcendent,” as well as those who describe Hegel’s philosophy as a “naturalism” (such as Terry Pinkard, Hegel’s Naturalism: Mind, Nature, and the Final Ends of Life [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012]), ignore Hegel’s doctrine that the infinite is real and the finite is not. (See the quotes in note 3, above.) Probably most of these scholars assume that a “transcendent God” would have to be a separate being from the world and from humans. But Hegel aims precisely to show that true transcendence, like true infinity, need not and cannot take the form of a separate being.

[12] When Robert Pippin refers to Hegel’s God as (in Blaise Pascal’s phrase) a “God of the philosophers” (Hegel’s Realm of Shadows: Logic as Metaphysics in the Science of Logic. [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018], p. 134 n. 72), and implies that such a God can’t also be the God of religion, he assumes what he needs to demonstrate. I will list several ways in which the Plato/Hegel God resembles the God of familiar religions.

[13] “Mutual repulsion and flight is not a liberation from what is repelled and fled from; the one as excluding still remains connected to what is excluded” (Science of Logic, Miller trans., p. 175 [translation revised]; GW 21:163; TWA 5:196).

[14] The free alternative to being guided by one’s separateness from others is not being guided by what we merely happen to share with others, but rather being guided by our (shared) search for the True and the Good. So the love that Plato and Hegel advocate isn’t indiscriminate promotion of whatever we all happen to want, but rather a fostering of rational freedom in each and all of us. Which is a fostering that undoubtedly will often involve promoting the material conditions that enable such rational freedom to be actualized in individuals.

[15] Critics often suggest that the Plato/Hegel God is not a “personal” God. But their God is in fact much more personal than we usually are, because, as Hegel tells us, it’s “supremely free.” Through its freedom and love, it nurtures the potential for “personhood” in everything, including us. “Supremely free”: Science of Logic Miller trans. p. 841, GW 12:251, TWA 6:570. At Miller trans. p. 824, GW 12:236, TWA 6:549, Hegel spells out “personality” as involving being “for itself” rather than “for” (dependent on) anything else, and being “practical” (as well as theoretical or contemplative). Nurturing: “The universal…could also be called free love … for it bears itself toward what it is different from as toward itself” (Miller trans., p. 603, GW 12:35, TWA 6:277).

[16] Karl Rahner, Foundations of Christian Faith (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1978), p. 63.

[17] Iris Murdoch, Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals (New York: Penguin, 1993), p. 81.

[18] In this way, Hegel’s “idealism” (as he calls it) does not assert like George Berkeley’s idealism that all reality is ideas located in minds, or like Kant’s idealism that important features are imposed on reality by minds. Rather, it shows how what most deserves to be called “real,” because it’s self-governing and thus is what it is by virtue of itself, is minds or “spirit.” The processes studied by physics are real in the sense that they can be studied objectively, but not in the sense that they are what they are by virtue of themselves. This is the gist of Hegel’s definitive account of what he means by “idealism,” in Science of Logic Miller trans. pp.154-156, GW 21:142-143, TWA 5:172-173. It’s also the turning that he signaled in his famous announcement in the Preface to his Phenomenology of Spirit that “Substance is essentially Subject” (Miller trans. [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977], p. 14; TWA 3:28).

[19] Plato describes the emergence of adult freedom as “birth in beauty” in his Symposium, 206b. It is “birth” because it’s natural (though not inevitable or automatic), and it’s “in beauty” because freedom is an orientation toward higher values such as beauty.

[20] Wolfram Gobsch gives the clearest account of this combination of logical priority with temporal posteriority in his Basel dissertation, “Bedingungen des Unbedingten” (2013), especially pp. 326-349. This dissertation is, in fact, the most thorough and convincing reconstruction of Hegel’s “absolute idealism” that I have seen.

[21] Daniel Dennett, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995).

[22] Not recognizing the role of love in Hegel’s ascent, Ludwig Feuerbach criticized it as merely “intellectual,” and held up a counter-ideal of non-intellectual “love” which he hoped to find in the senses and in matter. It’s sometimes suggested that Feuerbach’s “anthropotheism” restates what was really going on in Hegel’s philosophical theology, but this is a mistake, because Feuerbach didn’t reproduce the vertical dimension of (Plato’s, Aristotle’s, and) Hegel’s thinking, which corresponds to religion’s “transcendence.” Karl Marx likewise failed to recognize the vertical dimension of rational transcendence which is essential to the Platonic tradition including Hegel. And Soren Kierkegaard presented faith as the antithesis of reason, a dualism that makes it difficult to understand how or even whether human functioning is directed at truth.  

[23] Internecine arguments between “Platonists,” “Aristotelians,” “Kantians,” and “Hegelians” have obscured their shared critique of materialism, empiricism, nominalism, and skepticism, a critique that is based in each case on some version of rational transcendence. For some recent indications of greater awareness of what the four schools have in common, see the next note.

[24]  In the twentieth century, Ludwig Wittgenstein, A. N. Whitehead, Michael Polanyi, J. N. Findlay, and Iris Murdoch each approached the Plato/Hegel view in important respects, though without getting rational transcendence fully into focus. I discuss most of these writers in my forthcoming Philosophical Mysticism in Plato, Hegel, and the Present (London: Bloomsbury, 2019). Other promising recent work includes Charles Taylor (“Responsibility for Self,” first published in A. O. Rorty, ed., The Identities of Persons [Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1976], pp. 281-299), Gary Watson, Susan Wolf, John Martin Fischer, Alfred Mele, Sebastian Rödl (Self-Consciousness [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007]), Michael Thompson (Life and Action [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008]), Irad Kimhi (Thinking and Being [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018]), and Wolfram Gobsch (his dissertation, mentioned above).