(from pp. 99-101 of my Philosophical Mysticism in Plato, Hegel, and the Present (Bloomsbury Academic, 2019)
How the Plato/Hegel God Fulfills Martin Heidegger’s Requirements
In a much-quoted passage, Martin Heidegger stated without argument that “one can neither pray nor sacrifice to this [god of philosophy]. Before the causa sui, man can neither fall to his knees in awe nor can he play music and dance before this god” (Identity and Difference [1969], p. 72). But we do in fact pray and sacrifice to the Plato/Hegel God, inasmuch as we seek its guidance and the resulting peace of mind, and we give up our selfish and self-important schemes. And quantities of awe and music and dance are in fact addressed to this God, both outside institutionalized religion and within it. For whenever we celebrate the infinite power and authority of inner freedom, love, forgiveness, or beauty, we celebrate this God. The “insect” (Edward Young) that we can feel ourselves to be, in comparison to this power, can and does fall to its knees in awe.
Heidegger was understandably impressed by the apparently un-spiritual character of modern science and technology, and by the apparent decline, in modern times, of traditional forms of worship and religious doctrine—the decline that Nietzsche heralded with his pronouncement that “God is dead.” These are undoubtedly among the major reasons for Heidegger’s failure to see how deeply and ubiquitously we are involved, in modern times as much as in other times, with the Plato/Hegel God, and it with us.
Are We Really In a “Secular Age”?
It seems to me that a major part of what’s going on in the world of “religion” and “spirituality,” in our time, is a sorting out of the issue of what is genuinely transcendent. Much conventional religion seems to be stuck in the habit of conceiving of God as a separate being, despite the fact that when it’s carefully examined, such a being would be finite and thus wouldn’t really transcend the world at all. Plus, it’s hard to know how we would know anything about such a being, which is defined as being both separate from us and inaccessible to our physical senses. In response to these difficulties, more or less clearly understood, many people have ceased to believe in such a being, and ceased to support whole-heartedly the institutions that appear to preach such a being. Thus we have the apparent “secularization” of major parts of (at least) European and North American societies.
But at the same time, people’s desire to identify and relate to something that’s truly transcendent seems to be as strong as it has ever been. This could hardly not be the case if, as I’ve been suggesting, transcendence is an inherent (though often unrecognized) feature of human thought, freedom, and love, as such. One of the current manifestations of this perennial interest in transcendence is the proliferation, in the West, of non-traditional religious or spiritual organizations and movements, including Buddhism, Vedanta, Taoism, shamanism, Wicca, mysticism, “New Age” and Jungian ideas, Romantic poetry and nature writing, and so forth.[i]
For those of us who wonder what’s really going on here, it’s very helpful to know that an important part of the western spiritual tradition was never, in fact, committed to the problematic notion of God as a separate being. Plato, Plotinus, St Paul, St Athanasius, St Augustine, Meister Eckhart, Rumi, Hegel, Emerson, Whitman, Whitehead, Tillich, Rahner, and many other poets and thinkers in all phases of the western tradition have thought, instead, of something like the “God within us” that I’ve been outlining here. The notion of God as a separate being has, of course, been highly visible in public discourse, but if it’s less widely accepted today, that’s no reason to think that transcendence as such is losing importance for people. For the non-traditional movements that I mentioned all embrace transcendence in some form (though not always, of course, by that name).
Equally important is the seldom-recognized fact that science itself constitutes a form of transcendence, inasmuch as a person who seeks knowledge seeks, in doing so, to rise above the sort of existence in which she would be governed merely by her preexisting appetites and opinions. Thus the age of science is an age that seeks, as much as any other age does, to transcend. Of course this raises the important question of how different forms of “transcendence” relate to one another. But at least it makes it clear that the modern period is as much involved in transcendence, in general, as any other age has been.
So we don’t have to picture what’s happening in the west as a relentless process of “secularization,” by which “transcendence” is gradually or rapidly being replaced by “immanence.” Transcendence has been a feature of every phase of western thought and experience, and it’s just as manifest in the current period as it has ever been. What’s different is simply that some of its more familiar and institutionalized advocates appear to be losing influence, partly (I suspect) because the separate being that they seem to identify with transcendence is rationally inaccessible and can’t truly transcend.[ii]
Regarding our supposedly “secular age,” Charles Taylor’s influential book, A Secular Age (2007), seems to me to be excessively preoccupied with the fortunes of Christian “belief” (as Taylor calls it), as distinct from transcendence in general, as, for example, Plato explains it. A decline in “belief” need not entail a reduced interest in transcendence as such. Taylor seems insufficiently aware of the critique of the conception of God as a “separate being,” which is also a critique of much conventional Christian “belief” and which was already implicit in Plato, St Paul, St Augustine, and Meister Eckhart and is explicit in Hegel. Overlooking this Platonic critique of conventional “belief” and overlooking the alternative conception of transcendence that Plato and Hegel develop, Taylor grants more credibility than I would grant to the claims of what he calls “immanent humanism” to function without any appeal to transcendence. [iii]
[i] In his classic study, Natural Supernaturalism. Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature (1971), M. H. Abrams takes it that the Romantic poets’ “natural supernaturalism” (p. 68) breaks with the outright supernaturalism and outright transcendence that were postulated by pre-modern theology (“displacement from a supernatural to a natural frame of reference” [p. 13]). My thesis in this book is that sophisticated pre-modern religious thinkers like Plato, Plotinus, and Augustine located God “within us” and thus within nature as well as “beyond us” and beyond nature, so that the Romantics’ “natural supernaturalism” in fact continued, rather than breaking with, the most sophisticated pre-modern tradition (the one that understood what true transcendence must be like).
[ii] I should add that some institutions such as the Roman Catholic Church impart a sophisticated Augustinian philosophical theology, and thus a conception of transcendence that doesn’t make it in principle “separate,” to their more intellectually inclined members.
[iii] My disagreement with Charles Taylor about God, “belief,” and “transcendence” or “immanence” begins with his stimulating book, Hegel (1975), in which I think he failed to understand Hegel’s critique, in his Science of Logic, of the conventional conception of transcendence (which Hegel calls the “spurious infinity”). I explain Hegel’s critique of the conventional conception of transcendence, and I discuss Taylor’s interpretation of Hegel, in Chapter 3 of Wallace (2005).
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