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).

How G.W.F. Hegel's Broadly Platonic Idealism Explains Knowledge, Value, and Freedom

Robert M. Wallace

To appear in The Routledge Handbook of Idealism and Immaterialism (Routledge), edited by Benedikt Göcke and Joshua Ryan Farris.  (6,000 words)

1. In this essay I will show how Hegel belongs in the broadly Platonic tradition (which includes Aristotle),[1] and how this tradition explains knowledge, value, and freedom or rational functioning better than common-sense “realism” or Berkeleyan or Kantian versions of “idealism” can explain them.

Common-sense realism has trouble explaining how (if at all) we are free and rational, and thus how we can know what’s real, rather than merely believing whatever our environment causes us to believe. Not to mention how we could know how it would be best to live. These problems have led many modern thinkers to explore views resembling Berkeley’s or Kant’s idealisms as possible solutions. Maybe, we suppose, our mind already contains, or it “constructs,” the crucial things that we need in order to know reality and know how it would be best to live. But in exploring this avenue we often find it difficult to give up entirely the realist principle, that what is true is true independently of anything that we may think. And thus we wind up on the see-saw of so-called “idealism” versus so-called “realism,” which makes much modern philosophy seem rather futile.[2]

Plato and Aristotle appear to advocate views that might get us off of this modern see-saw. For neither of them appears to be located on either side of it. But when it turns out that they both connect reality with value, as the Good or as final causes, we hesitate to follow them because we are so impressed by the modern natural sciences, which appear to explain reality purely in terms of efficient causes and without reference to value. Hegel can help us to understand the limits of the natural sciences, and how an approach that follows Plato and Aristotle in treating value as an essential aspect of the ultimate reality can solve the problems of freedom, knowledge, and value in a way that neither common-sense realism nor Berkeleyan or Kantian idealism can.

Despite his intention of getting off of the “idealist”/”realist” see-saw, Hegel does call his own doctrine an “idealism.” He does this because he associates that term not with Berkeley or Kant, but with Plato and Aristotle and their doctrines of the eidos/idea (“form” or “idea”), which he is restating. Because Hegel’s version of “idealism” agrees with neither of idealism’s modern paradigms, Berkeley or Kant, it has created ongoing uncertainty and vagueness both in encyclopedia articles and in the specialist literature.[3] To explain Hegel’s “idealism” and its accomplishments in regard to freedom, knowledge, and value, I will draw on key passages in his Science of Logic and his Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences, and I will outline how his terminology and his thinking restate Plato’s and Aristotle’s similarly powerful and also not sufficiently well understood conceptions.

2. Hegel’s most explicit and illuminating systematic comments on the notion of “idealism” itself occur in a Remark in the Quality section of the Doctrine of Being in the 1832 edition of his Science of Logic. Here Hegel tells us that “The idealism of philosophy consists in nothing else than in recognizing that the finite has no veritable being.... Consequently the opposition of idealistic and realistic philosophy has no significance” (HSL 154-155; GW 21:142; SuW 5:172).[4] That is, we are going to get off the “idealist”/”realist” see-saw.

To see how we will get off it, we first need to understand Hegel’s claim that “the finite has no veritable being.” A few pages earlier he had announced that “It is not the finite which is the real [das Reale], but the infinite” (HSL 149; GW 21:136; SuW 5:164). Why should we agree with this? Common sense supposes the exact opposite: that what has “true being,” what is “real,” is precisely finite things like planets, trees, or (perhaps) subatomic particles.

In the two chapters leading up to these theses in the Logic, Hegel has in fact given an extensive argument for his doctrine that the infinite, rather than the finite, is what is real. The argument runs roughly as follows. Being, or what is, when it’s taken merely as such, has no feature that distinguishes it from nothing, or what is not. (For, as Kant taught us, “being” is not a predicate!) And the reverse is also true: Nothing, or what is not, when it’s taken merely as such, has no feature that distinguishes it from being or what is. (“Not being” is not a predicate either.) So we should consider whether “becoming” (that is, coming into being or ceasing to be) might be more definable than being or nothing, as such. And indeed it seems that what comes into being or ceases to be must be something definite or determinate.

But the question naturally arises, is it determinate through itself (an sich) or only in its relations to others (Seinfüranderes)? If the latter were the case, the something would apparently not qualify as truly being, since its determinateness would belong to it only through (its relations to) others. And yet, insofar as there are “others,” it seems to be inevitable that some of the determinateness of each something will accrue to it through its relations to these others, and thus it won’t be fully determinate in itself, an sich.

So in pursuit of determinateness in itself, Hegel introduces another wrinkle: the finite. It seems that something that has a boundary, as a finite thing does, would to that extent be more self-contained and thus more “in itself.” However, as we might have foreseen, inasmuch as a limit or a boundary bounds X off from Y, it also relates X to something that’s other than itself, whether that is Y or the boundary between X and Y.

Hence the need for the infinite, which promises to be determinate entirely within itself, since there is nothing that is “other” than it. (Note that what we’re talking about here is a qualitative infinity, rather than the more familiar quantitative infinity.) The infinite will be determinate within itself, as long as it isn’t defined as what is not finite—since such a definition would again make it dependent on something that’s other than itself (this is the “spurious infinity,” schlechte Unendlichkeit, which aims to be infinite but fails). This is why Hegel moves to the “true” (as opposed to spurious) infinity, which he says “is only as the self-transcending,” the Hinausgehen über sich, of the finite (HSL 145; GW 21:133; SuW 5:160). As the finite’s self-transcending, the true infinity isn’t opposed to anything that’s other than itself.

But now we can see what Hegel means by saying that the infinite is the “real,” and the finite has no “veritable being.” The infinite is the real because only it is fully determinate in itself. What is (fully) real, Hegel supposes, should be what it is by virtue of itself, rather than by virtue of any relationships it may have to other things. The finite has no veritable being because it depends in part on its relationships to others to make it what it is. The infinite has no such dependence, so it is (fully) real.

Hegel at one point calls true infinity “the fundamental concept of philosophy” (Encyclopedia Logic, §95R), because it’s the first adequate formulation of being, and the rest of his system is largely an elaboration on this formulation. I show in some detail in my Hegel’s Philosophy of Reality, Freedom, and God (2005) how throughout Hegel’s system true infinity is the nisus or the goal, because it is true being, or reality.

3. Can we take true infinity seriously as a description of our own world? I find it especially helpful, for this purpose, to trace out the connections between Hegel’s account and our experience of inner freedom and self-government. And for that purpose it’s helpful to look first at how a mixture of metaphysics and moral psychology that’s similar to Hegel’s can be seen much earlier in Plato’s Phaedo and Republic books iv-vii. (And likewise in his Symposium, Timaeus, and other dialogues.)

Plato asks, what kind of reality can a soul or a thinking being have, and how does that reality relate to the reality of things that are less self-governed than souls or thinking beings are? In the Phaedo, Plato writes that “the truly good and ‘binding’ binds and holds [the person] together” (99c), and in the Republic he explains how this is the case. Republic book iv lays out the “parts of the soul,” the appetites, self-importance (thumos), and the rational part. These can be unified (443d) under the guidance of the rational part. In books v-vii we learn that the rational part is able to carry out this unification because it finds a higher source of guidance in the “Good” (509b). As Socrates plausibly asserts in book vi, “Nobody is satisfied to acquire things that are merely believed to be good … but everyone wants the things that really are good, and disdains mere belief here” (505d). The Sun, Line, and Cave similes in books vi and vii are meant to show how we might attain knowledge, as opposed to mere belief, regarding what’s really good. This is important because this kind of functioning would make a person self-governed, insofar as appetites and self-importance, the lower parts of the soul, are inherited or are reactions to one’s environment, whereas the pursuit of the Good is or could be something that a person chooses. So this is how reason could give the soul a unity, and thus a kind of reality, that the rest of nature lacks, or that it achieves only through beings like ourselves. It’s how “the truly good and ‘binding’” can “bind and hold [the person] together,” as a person and not just a collection of influences.

4. Now, Hegel invites us to consider his train of thought from being to infinity as having to do, like Plato’s thought, with unity and self-government. Hegel underlines this connection when he describes the “something” as “the beginning of the subject, being-within-self [das Insichsein] only as yet quite indeterminate” (HSL 115, emphasis added; GW 21:103; SuW 5:123). And then when he cites the ”ought,” the Sollen, as part of the transition from the finite to the infinite (HSL 132-136; GW 21:118-123; SuW 5:142-148); and above all when he exclaims that

At the name of the infinite, the heart and Spirit light up, for in the infinite, Spirit is not merely abstractly present to itself, but rises to its own self, to the light of its thinking, of its universality, of its freedom. (HSL 137-138; GW 21:125; SuW 5:150)

All of Hegel’s apparently dry metaphysical topics—determinateness, something, finite, infinite—are in fact closely tied up, in his mind, with the theme of the emergence of freedom: of the ability of certain “somethings” to engage in free, thoughtful self-determination. The framework of concepts that Hegel is constructing will ultimately serve, in his Encyclopedia’s account of “Nature” and “Spirit,” precisely to make sense of the presence of such somethings in what we call the “physical world.” Which is the same presence that Plato sought to make sense of in his Phaedo and his Republic books iv-vii. This presence was just as controversial in Plato’s day, with the advent of philosophical materialism and atomism, as it was in Hegel’s day with the rise of the modern natural sciences and the materialism of Hobbes, La Mettrie, and Holbach. And of course it is still controversial in our day with our neurosciences and projects of “artificial intelligence.” If the “infinite” is the prototype of free, thoughtful self-determination, then proposals to reduce our apparent freedom to finite mechanisms such as bones and sinews (Phaedo 99a) or neurons and circuitry (21^st century) miss the boat because they don’t address veritable being and what’s truly “real.”

            Here we can also see how Hegel begins to capture the intimate connection between reality and value that we see in Plato, for whom the highest principle of reality is the Good, and in Aristotle, for whom everything seeks, in one way or another, to emulate God.[5] In both Plato and Aristotle, it’s the pursuit of value (as the Good, final cause, “form,” or God) that gives living things and humans a degree of unity and thus a kind of reality, designated as “soul,” that lower things such as rocks can’t possess. The same thing then occurs in Hegel, when the “Ought” or Sollen figures as a crucial step in the passage from the finite to the infinite and thus to what is truly real. Hegel criticizes Kant’s and Fichte’s conceptions of the Sollen for failing to be infinite, but some conception of what the Sollen aims at is indispensable here, precisely because it gives being a vocation that goes beyond such finite characteristics as appetites and self-importance. Hegel shares with Kant and Fichte the conviction that such a higher vocation, properly understood, is indispensable to freedom, and he goes on to add that it gives humans (and anything else that’s capable of freedom) a distinctive kind of reality, which we might call reality “as themselves” and which Hegel calls Fürsichsein or “being-for-self.” As “infinite,” not constrained by finite appetites or self-importance, Fürsichsein is “real” in the sense that it’s self-determining or an sich, in itself. Which is what Hegel has in mind when he lays it down that only the infinite is truly “real.”

Now, the higher vocation that’s inherent in the Sollen is clearly a kind of value. So we now see that for Hegel as well as for Plato and Aristotle, value is an indispensable aspect of the fullest kind of “reality”: of reality, as we might say, “as oneself.” And thus the doctrine that only the infinite is real, which Hegel says is going to get us off of the “idealism”/”realism” see-saw, depends upon understanding the fullest “reality” as dependent on value, just as it was for Plato and for Aristotle. And indeed we find at the end of the Science of Logic that the fullest reality in the book, which Hegel calls the “Idea,” is achieved first through teleology and life (as in Aristotle), and then through a combination of the “Idea of the True” with (as in Plato) the “Idea of the Good.”

Hegel’s reason for calling this ultimate reality the “Idea” is not, primarily, because of any affinity it has with Berkeley or with Kant. It doesn’t refer to an “idea” in any particular mind, nor does it refer, as in Kant, to something that’s regulative and not constitutive (that guides our thought but is not an object of knowledge). Rather it refers, as in both Plato and Aristotle (where we usually translate eidos/idea as “form,” but a more etymologically direct equivalent would be “idea”), to a fundamental feature of reality as such. In Plato, this “idea” reality or Form is surpassed only by the Idea or Form of the Good, and in Aristotle by the energeia or actualization of nous or intellect. In Hegel it is surpassed, or completed, only by the unity of life, truth, and goodness in the Absolute Idea. In each case, the “idea” brings about a more integrated and self-governing reality than its ingredients, as a collection, possessed.

It’s because of this continuity with Plato’s and Aristotle’s eidos/idea that Hegel calls this ultimate reality the “Idea.” And this “idea”/reality gets us off the modern see-saw of “idealism” versus “realism” inasmuch as the highest reality that it constitutes is made of an “idea.” Not an idea in a mind, but an “idea” as such: a thought. The highest reality is a thought, not because everything is thought (as in Berkeley), and not because thought imposes something on the reality that it knows (as in Kant), but because it’s only through thought that the highest reality exists.

We have to get over the assumption that an idea or a thought must be “contained in” a mind. Since such containing would render the idea or thought finite, this is a version of the assumption that finite things are the real things, which Hegel has shown to be mistaken. “The Idea” is involved with our finite minds, since the true infinity is the finite’s transcending itself, but the finite does, precisely, transcend itself. What we need, in order to have knowledge, is “in our minds” in the sense that we’re capable of it (and in this respect, Berkeley and Kant are correct), but it is not “in” our (finite) “minds” inasmuch as it transcends our ordinary, finite functioning (and in this respect, Berkeley and Kant are mistaken).

5. At the end of the Science of Logic, the Absolute Idea “freely releases” itself into space, time, and nature (HSL 843; GW 12:253; SuW 6:573). This is the equivalent of the act of creation, in Plato’s Timaeus, in which the “demiurge” or craftsman, who was good and therefore “without jealousy” or spite, generously tried to make a world as much like himself, and therefore as good, as possible (Timaeus 29e). Plato’s and Hegel’s God is fulfilled, as good, only by sharing his goodness as widely as possible. (Like Aristotle, Hegel is careful to avoid suggesting that the act of creation occurred in a past time; since it creates time, it’s eternal.)

But to make the world as much like himself as possible, God shares his goodness by inspiration, rather than by coercion. And since even a miniscule amount of good is better than none, the world that is inspired into being has every kind of imperfection. So the great question then is, how will this world respond to, relate to, its creator/inspirer? To the best of its ability, the world will understand, and implement its understanding, that the creative/inspiring Idea surpasses it but, as a true infinity, isn’t separate from it. This is the understanding that Hegel unfolds in his Encyclopedia’s sections on Nature and Spirit.

6. I don’t have space here to explain the full unfolding either of Hegel’s Logic or of his Encyclopedia. But one especially revealing point in the Hegelian “turning back” or epistrophe (as Plato’s follower Plotinus called it) of Nature to the creative/inspiring Idea is the transition from Nature to “Spirit” (Geist). Hegel says in Encyclopedia §381,

For us Spirit has for its presupposition Nature, of which it is the truth, and for that reason its absolute prius [absolut Erstes]. In this its truth Nature is vanished, and Spirit has emerged as the Idea that has arrived at its being-for-self. Here the Idea’s subject and object are one—either is the Concept [Begriff]…. Whereas in Nature the Concept has its perfect, external objectivity, this externalization has [now] been sublated and the Concept has thus become identical with itself in this externalization. Thus at the same time the Concept is this identity only insofar as it is a return out of Nature. 

Spirit is “the truth of” Nature, that is, it is what is true or real in Nature, omitting what is false or unreal. It is Nature’s “absolute prius,” that is, it is absolutely (in terms of truth and reality, though not in the order of exposition) prior to Nature, more fundamental than Nature. It is more true and more fundamental than Nature because it’s free (as Hegel explains in §382), self-determining, and thus in Hegel’s sense of the term, “real.” In that sense “Spirit has emerged as the Idea,” the embodiment and source of reality, which arrives here at its “Being-for-self” (Fürsichsein) in that it is free, and thus infinite. And the Idea’s subject and object now are both “the Concept,” that is, they’re both the free subject that is finite objectivity’s and finite subjectivity’s going beyond themselves, just as the infinite is the finite’s going beyond itself.

We could misunderstand Hegel’s statement here that “Nature is vanished” as a Berkeley-like thesis that we can dismiss the idea of a Nature that’s independent of minds. But Hegel prevents such a misunderstanding by telling us that the Concept is identical with its externalization in Nature “only insofar as it is a return out of Nature.” What occurs here is a “sublation” (Aufhebung), a preservation as well as a cancellation. Nature’s externality is an essential aspect of Spirit, because the infinite “is only as the self-transcending of the finite.” So Hegel’s “idealism” doesn’t reduce reality, in the manner of Berkeley, to the contents of minds (any more than it reduces minds or Spirit to Nature).

But Hegel’s idealism does assert, as we see here, that mind or Spirit is the Idea’s being-for-self or Fürsichsein, from which we can infer that it is veritable being and truly real. And Nature as such, evidently, is not veritable being or truly real. Which is why Hegel can say that Nature “is vanished,” in Spirit. So it’s a mistake to describe Hegel as embracing “naturalism.” Some present-day writers are tempted to associate Hegel with naturalism because Hegel clearly is not a dualist, and they imagine that super-naturalism must be dualistic. But the point of Hegel’s “true infinity” is precisely to show that an upward motion or transcendence doesn’t need to involve dualism.[6]

6. To understand Hegel’s doctrine of Spirit as surpassing or transcending Nature, I think we need, again, to have recourse to our experience of our own inner freedom. When we seek to be guided by what is truly good and true, do we not achieve a higher degree of reality, as ourselves, than we experience when we let ourselves be guided merely by our appetites, our opinions, or our self-importance? In the extreme case, a “wanton” such as Harry Frankfurt describes, who is driven purely by appetite and has no higher-order thoughts at all, clearly is less of a person and less “himself” than someone who has such thoughts and tries to be guided by them.[7] And being less of a person and less himself, he is less real as himself. Rather than being “himself,” he is simply the puppet of his biological and social heritage and environment.

In this thought we can, I think, find the germ of the truth that Hegel is putting before us, which is that what governs itself through thought, is more real as itself, and in that sense more “real,” period, than what is merely the product of its relationships. Spirit is what is real as itself, and in that sense more “real,” period, than what is merely the product of its relationships. That is the sense in which Nature, whose contents are largely determined by their relationships, “vanishes.” As we seek what is most “itself” and in that sense most “real,” we realize that Nature as such, the finite mechanisms of subatomic particles, neurons, and electrical circuits, is not what we are seeking. Rather, we are seeking freedom, or the infinite. These are not the opposite of Nature, or separate from it. But they are in a clear sense more real than it. When common sense asserts that what has “true being” and what is “real” is finite things like planets, trees, or subatomic particles, it ignores the higher degree of reality, namely, reality “as ourselves,” which we experience when we engage in free, thoughtful self-determination.

7. Hegel’s fundamentally Platonic/Aristotelian conception of a true reality that incorporates Nature but goes beyond it through ideas or thought opens perspectives on freedom and rational functioning, on knowledge, on value, and on the natural sciences, that are available neither to conventional realism nor to Berkeleyan or Kantian idealisms.

First, freedom and rational functioning (or “Spirit”) are real but they don’t require a separate domain, carrying with it the insoluble problem of how that domain relates to nature. Instead, freedom and rational functioning are achieved by nature’s transcending its merely “natural” modes of functioning, in pursuit of full reality or reality as oneself. They are a “return out of nature.”[8]

Second, since full reality according to Hegel’s account is achieved by thought, there is no problem as to how the thinker can know this reality. The thinker knows “from inside” what her thought achieves. As for the less-than-full realities that are not achieved by our thought, we know them insofar as they contribute to the full reality. In this way, our minds do indeed bring with them the crucial things that we need in order to know reality, but not because everything is contained in minds (Berkeley) and not because anything is externally imposed on reality (Kant). Minds bring this with them through their ability to contribute, through thought, to the full (and not to the less-than-full) reality, and thus to know it.

Third, theory and practice, and fact and value, are united insofar as the fullest reality or “fact” is achieved only by the pursuit of a certain kind of practice or value. And practice and value are informed, in turn, by the knowledge of this reality or fact that’s achieved through them. Thus we overcome the modern (and, in particular, Kantian) division of theory from practice and fact from value.

And finally, the natural sciences on the whole investigate finite objects as such, without reference to their self-transcendence as infinite self-governing thought. But like any search for truth, as opposed to mere appetite-satisfaction or self-importance, this investigation is itself a form of self-transcendence and infinity. So when scientists become aware of the implications of their own activity as scientists, they will arrive at what amounts to the Hegelian view of the reality that includes this activity.

            These solutions are made possible by the way Hegel goes beyond the modern subject/object way of thinking. The real subject, he suggests, is the object’s transcending itself. We have seen this in the form of the transitions from being to infinity and from Nature to Spirit, both of which feature the emergence (or re-emergence) of subjectivity, in a process that was anticipated by Hegel’s famous dictum in the Preface to his Phenomenology of Spirit that “Substance is essentially Subject” (Miller trans., §25; SuW 3:28). Infinity knows the Finite, Spirit knows Nature, and the Subject knows the Object (or Substance) because Infinity, Spirit, and the Subject are the self-transcendence (or in the Phenomenology, the “essence”) of the Finite, Nature, and the Object. And by knowing themselves they know that of which they are (essentially) the self-transcendence or the essence.

8. Most of what I’ve just said about Hegel’s thinking applies to Plato and to Aristotle as well. Neither Plato nor Aristotle puts subject and object side-by-side, as many modern thinkers do. Plato clearly thinks of the soul as going beyond but still incorporating natural mechanisms when it integrates appetites and self-importance into something that’s more unified. His contrast of what “is and is not” with what “completely is” (to pantelos on, Republic 477a), with their respectively lower and higher (as commentators put it) “degrees of reality,” parallels Hegel’s contrast between Nature and Spirit or the finite and the infinite, where only the latter, in each case, is fully real.[9] Similarly, Aristotle’s “four causes” go beyond efficient causation, while still incorporating it; and he tells us that “We must consider also in which way the nature of the universe possesses the good and the best” (Metaphysics 1075a11).

Something like the Good, the supreme goal, is at work, under various names, in all three of these accounts. Because this reality is understood in terms of integration, or the emergence of a higher-level whole, rather than in terms of mechanical push and shove, it’s something to which humans can and do make a distinctive contribution. And thus in all three writers we can know this more self-determining and in that sense more “real” reality “from inside,” rather than having to approach it “from outside,” as in the modern subject/object model.[10]

9. Against the idea that “we have in Hegel a recognizable ‘degrees of reality’ Platonism,” Robert Pippin objects that such a view “would leave unaccounted for all [Hegel’s] references to subjectivity, the active universal, deeds, and that brought about (hervorgebrachte)…. Concepts are supposed to be moments in the process of thought’s attempt to determine its own possibility…, not apprehended realities, eidetic things.”[11]

What I’m suggesting, however, is that what’s most important about Plato’s Forms is not their apparent “thing”-hood, but the role that they play in the soul’s achievement of unity, which is the primary locus of the Platonic “ascent.” The Forms make the soul’s ascent to unity possible by giving it a source of guidance that has more authority than the pushes and pulls of appetites and self-importance. By uniting the soul in this way, the Forms make subjectivity or a real “self” possible, against materialism, mechanism, relativism, and skepticism. Which is precisely what Hegel, too, is seeking to do with his notions of subjectivity, the active universal, and so forth. In this way, Plato is more “modern” than we generally recognize, and we can see how the modern and Hegelian focus on the “subject” or the “self” continues Plato’s line of inquiry rather than starting a new one. And how when Plato, Aristotle, and Hegel show the way in which the subject’s functioning can bring about a higher degree of reality, they completely transform the usual picture that places subject and object side by side, rather than one above the other.

10. In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries a number of philosophers have sought to lay out positions that are similar to Plato’s, Aristotle’s, or Hegel’s. Some prominent figures in this effort have been Alfred North Whitehead, Michael Polanyi, Wilfrid Sellars, John Niemeyer Findlay, and John McDowell. One might also mention Ludwig Wittgenstein, who entertained ideas in his early work that are in line with the aspects of Plato that I have emphasized here.[12]

The complexity of the issues that such efforts must address makes progress painfully slow. The current group that’s composed of John McDowell, Sebastian Rödl, Irad Kimhi and their associates draws on Aristotle, Kant, Hegel, and Wittgenstein and may be able to pull a lot of this together.[13] I have the impression, however, that so far none of these writers subsequent to Hegel have appreciated the relationship in Plato, Aristotle, and Hegel between value and full reality or reality as “oneself,” and the way this relationship ensures our freedom and knowledge, as I have tried to bring out in this essay. I hope that when these features of Plato’s, Aristotle’s, and Hegel’s approaches are better appreciated, we will see work on these issues which will integrate the best features of the work of all of these writers, from Plato to the present.[14]

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[1] For a detailed account of the sense in which and the ways in which Aristotle is a “Platonist,” see Lloyd Gerson, Aristotle and Other Platonists (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005).

[2] Thus on the “realist” side of the see-saw we get E.B. Holt and others, The New Realism (New York: Macmillan, 1912) and again, a century later, Maurizio Ferraris, Introduction to the New Realism (London: Bloomsbury, 2015).

[3] Berkeley’s and Kant’s versions of “idealism” are the paradigms in, for example, the online Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article, “Idealism” (accessed in November, 2018), and the comparable article in the Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy (London: Routledge, 1998). Thomas Wartenberg’s “Hegel’s Idealism: The Logic of Conceptuality,” in Frederick C. Beiser, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Hegel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 102-129, surveys major recent accounts of Hegel’s idealism and gives Wartenberg's own non-Kantian and non-Berkeleyan account, but Wartenberg doesn’t explain how Hegel could be justified in maintaining “that reality is a self-actualizing whole” (p. 110). I will show how Hegel’s argument for the thesis that the true reality is infinity fills that gap.

[4] HSL=Hegel’s Science of Logic, translated by A. V. Miller (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities, 1989); GW=G. W. F. Hegel, Gesammelte Werke (Hamburg: Meiner, 1968-); SuW=G. W. F. Hegel, Werke. Theorie Werkausgabe, ed. K. M. Michel and E. Moldenhauer (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1970-). HSL cited by page number; GW and SuW cited by volume and page number. Translations are my own.

[5] “The most natural act is the production of another like itself … in order that, as far as its nature allows, it may partake in the eternal and divine” (Aristotle, De Anima 415a26). For an overview of Aristotle’s theological cosmos, see David Sedley, Creationism and Its Critics in Antiquity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), pp. 170-171.

[6] Terry Pinkard describes Hegel as embracing “naturalism” (Terry Pinkard, Hegel’s Naturalism: Mind, Nature, and the Final Ends of Life [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012]). Like many recent commentators on Hegel, Pinkard overlooks the finite’s “self-transcendence” (Hinausgehen über sich), Nature’s “vanishing” in Spirit, and the human “elevation to God” (Erhebung zu Gott: Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, vol. 1, ed. Peter C. Hodgson [Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1984], pp. 414-425; Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Religion, ed. W. Jaeschke [Hamburg: Meiner, 1983], vol. 1, pp. 308-318; and elsewhere). I elaborate on Hegel’s notions of transcendence and the super-natural in “Infinity and Spirit—How Hegel Integrates Science and Religion, and the ‘Natural’ and the ‘Supernatural,’” in B. Göcke and C. Tapp, eds., The Infinity of God (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2018).

[7] Harry G. Frankfurt, “Freedom of the Will and the Concept of a Person,” Journal of Philosophy lxvii no. 1 (Jan. 1971), pp. 5-20.

[8] Reality is a “self-actualizing whole” (see note 3, above) because infinity (which is the real) is unified or whole in a way that the finite, with its dependence on others, can’t be; and it’s self-actualizing for the same reason:  having nothing outside it, its actualization can only be self-actualization.

[9] Unfortunately neither Plato’s notion of a higher degree of reality (to pantelos on) nor Hegel’s notion of true reality as infinity has been studied with much sympathy in recent decades. I defended Hegel’s notion of a higher degree of “reality” in my Hegel’s Philosophy of Reality, Freedom, and God (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), especially pp. 61-62. Walter Bröcker challenged both Plato and Hegel on this issue in his “Platons Ontologischer Komparativ,” Hermes 87:4 (Dec. 1959), pp. 415-425. Gregory Vlastos discussed Plato’s “degrees of reality” view in two papers, “Metaphysical Paradox” and “Degrees of Reality” (in his Platonic Studies [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973 and 1981]). My view is that rather than being merely “personal” (as Vlastos suggests on p. 56), Plato’s “degrees of reality” are an essential part of his systematic thought. I elaborate on Plato’s systematic thought in Chapter 5 of my Philosophical Mysticism in Plato, Hegel, and the Present, to appear in 2019.

[10] Kant seems to be reaching for a solution like this one in his consideration of teleology in his third Critique, but he can’t grasp it because of his commitment to a Newtonian efficient-causal concept of reality, which makes him classify teleology and Ideas in general as merely “regulative,” rather than “constitutive.”

[11] Robert B. Pippin, Hegel’s Realm of Shadows. Logic as Metaphysics in The Science of Logic (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018), pp. 96-97.

[12] Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality (New York: Macmillan, 1929), Michael Polanyi, Personal Knowledge (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1958), Wilfrid Sellars, Science, Perception, and Reality (New York: Humanities Press, 1963), J. N. Findlay, The Discipline of the Cave and The Transcendence of the Cave (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1966 and 1967), John McDowell, Mind and World and Having the World in View (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994 and 2009). I discuss Wittgenstein, Whitehead, Findlay, Sellars, and McDowell in my Philosophical Mysticism, forthcoming.

[13] Sebastian Rödl’s Self-Consciousness and Categories of the Temporal (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007 and 2012, respectively) draw especially on Aristotle and Kant, and Irad Kimhi’s Thinking and Being (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018) elucidates especially Plato and Aristotle.

[14] I am grateful to Benedikt Göcke for helpful comments on a draft of this paper.