Quentin Lauer-Hegel's Concept of God-State University of New York Press (1982) PDF

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title: Hegel's Concept of God SUNY Series in Hegelian Studies

author: Lauer, Quentin.
publisher: State University of New York Press
isbn10 | asin: 0873955978
print isbn13: 9780873955973
ebook isbn13: 9780585078472
language: English
subject God--History of doctrines--19th century, Hegel, Georg
Wilhelm Friedrich,--1770-1831--Contributions in theology.
publication date: 1982
lcc: BT101.H423L38 1982eb
ddc: 231/.092/4
subject: God--History of doctrines--19th century, Hegel, Georg
Wilhelm Friedrich,--1770-1831--Contributions in theology.
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Hegel's Concept of God

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SUNY Series in Hegelian Studies
Quentin Lauer, S.J., Editor

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Hegel's Concept of God
Quentin Lauer, S.J.

Department of Philosophy
Fordham University
State University of New York Press

ALBANY

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Published by State University of New York Press, Albany
© 1982 State University of New York
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in
the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
For information, address State University of New York Press, State University Plaza, Albany, N.Y., 12246
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Lauer, Quentin.
Hegel's concept of God.
Bibliography: p. 331
Includes index.
1. GodHistory of doctrines19th century. 2. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich,
17701831Theology. I. Title.
BT101.H423L38 231'.092'4 81-21452
ISBN 0-87395-597-8 AACR2
ISBN 0-87395-598-6 (pbk.)
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3

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Contents
Abbreviations vii
Introduction 1
1. Religion and Philosophy 21
2. The Concept 57
3. God as Spirit 128
4. The Infinite 162
5. "Proofs" of God 203
6. The Question of Pantheism 243
7. Philosophy and Theology 283
Epilogue 325
Bibliography 331
Index of Names 333
Analytic Index 335
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Abbreviations
BDGVorlesungen über die Beweise vom Dasein Gottes, ed. Georg Lasson (Hamburg: Himmelheber,
1966).
BS Berliner Schriften, ed. Johannes Hoffmeister (Hamburg: Meiner, 1956).
Diff "Differenz des Fichteschen und Schellingschen Systems der Philosophie," Jenaer kritische
Schriften, edd. Harmut Buchner and Otto Pöggeler (Hamburg: Meiner, 1968).
EGP Einleitung in die Geschichte der Philosophie, ed. Johannes Hoffmeister (Hamburg: Meiner,
1940).
EpW Enzyklopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften (1830), edd. Friedhelm Nicolin and Otto
Pöggeler (Hamburg: Meiner, 1959).
GPR Grundlinien der Philosophie der Rechts, ed. Johannes Hoffmeister (Hamburg: Meiner, 1955).
GW Glauben und Wissen, ed. Georg Lasson (Hamburg: Himmelheber, 1962).
JL Jenenser Logik, Metaphysik und Naturphilosophie, ed. Georg Lasson (Hamburg: Meiner, 1967).
JR Jenaer Realphilosophie, ed. Johannes Hoffmeister (Hamburg: Meiner, 1969).
PdG Phänomenologie des Geistes, ed. Johannes Hoffmeister (Hamburg: Meiner, 1952).
VA Vorlesungen über die Aesthetik (3 vols., Frankfurt a/M: Suhrkamp, 1970).
VGP Vorlesungen über die Geschichte der Philosophie (3 vols., Frankfurt a/M: Suhrkamp, 1971).
VPG Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Geschichte (Frankfurt a/M: Suhrkamp, 1970).
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VPRVorlesungen über die Philosophie der Religion (2 vols., Frankfurt a/M: Suhrkamp, 1969).
WG Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Weltgeschichte (4 vols.) Vol. I, ed. Johannes Hoffmeister,
1955; Vols. IIIV, ed. Georg Lasson, 1976 (Hamburg: Meiner).
WL Wissenschaft der Logik (2 vols.), ed. Georg Lasson (Hamburg: Meiner, 1963).
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Page 1
Introduction
It could well seem that I am being facetious if I refer to this study as "a book in search of a title," but many an
author will recognize that the expression designates an experience which is not unfamiliar. I had already completed
the first draft of this volume before coming to a decision as to just what title it should bear. What is a title, after all,
but a concise symbol of what one hopes one has said? As I looked back, then, over what I had saidor tried to
saythe rather obvious title that suggested itself was "Hegel's Idea of Philosophy," but that title had already been
preempted by a book I had published ten years previously. The question then became: Is there another way of
saying virtually the same thing? If one takes a panoramic view of Hegel's entire philosophical endeavorthe
endeavor to come to grips with and to be committed to reality in the concreteone is struck by one inescapable idea:
The Hegelian enterprise is an extraordinarily unified and grandiose attempt to elaborate one concept, which Hegel
sees as the root of all intelligibilitythe concept of God, whatever that term is going to turn out to mean. Hence, the
title Hegel's Concept of God represents an attempt to encompass the global character of the Hegelian philosophical
enterprise.
To those, of course, who are at all familiar with the enormous body of secondary literature that surrounds Hegela
body of literature which has been expanding rapidly in recent yearsit will be immediately evident that Hegel's
"God" has come under fire from a number of directions both among his own contemporaries and in subsequent
generations. In the course of this study it will be necessary to take into consideration the various facets of
opposition to Hegel's "God-language." Here it should be sufficient to indicate the main directions this opposition
has taken. (1) There are, first of all, those who claim that Hegel has no business bringing Godparticularly the God
of Christian religioninto a philosophical


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discussion at all, either because (a) there is no such God to bring into the discussion, other than negatively
(Feuerbach, Marx); or (b) because the only God there is is beyond the capacity of rational thinking to
comprehendGod is defined most adequately as the "incomprehensible," the "transcendent," the "mysterious"
(Kierkegaard, Barth). (2) Then there are those who contend that regardless of the terminology he employs, Hegel is
not really talking about God but only about the "absoluteness,'' the "infinity" of the human spirit, a sort of
overarching "Spirit," which at once transcends and embraces all its finite instantiations, but which bears no
resemblance whatsoever to the God of any religion, least of all the God of Christian religion (Kojève, Findlay,
Kaufmann). (3) There are those, too, who take Hegel seriously enough but assert that, by "logicizing" God, Hegel
has deformed him and has put in his place Hegel's own questionable concept of "infinite reason," the "logic" of
which is Hegel's own invention (Maréchal, Küng, Ricoeur). (4) Finally, there are those who contendand in a sense
this contention is common to all the objectionsthat there is only one reason, an essentially finite human reason, and
that therefore God is simply beyond reason, either (a) as irrational and therefore nonexistent (Nietzsche, Sartre), or
(b) as suprarational and therefore only to be believed in, not to be known (Kant, Fichte, Jacobi).
There is no need at this point to seek answers to the objections that have been raised. The question with which we
are facedand this will be true in all of what followsis neither whether Hegel is correct in what he says nor whether
his interpreters are justified in what they say of him. Rather the question is one of finding out just what Hegel does
say and of determining what impact that can have on our own thinking. The point is, however, that it is enormously
difficult to determine exactly what Hegel is saying. There are two reasons for this: (1) The language he employs is
frequently that of the Christian religious and theological tradition, a language which those who do not share the
tradition will decipher only with great difficulty and which those who do share the tradition may feel Hegel is
using in such a way as to make its meaning hopelessly obscure; and (2) only in the framework of an elaborate
philosophical "system," which no one claims to have unraveled adequately, is the meaning of all that Hegel says
intelligible. When Hegel employs such terms as "God," "revelation," "elevation," "infinite (or absolute) Spirit,"
"trinity," "creation," and "incarnation," it is clear that the vocabulary is borrowed from Christian theology. Yet the
terms, as he employs them, have a peculiarly philosophical significance, and it is questionable whether turning to
the theological tradition will make their meaning clear, precisely because Hegel is quite definitely trying to make
what is initially the content of faith rationally comprehensible.
To put all this in another way, we might say this: There can be no question in anyone's mind that Hegel repeatedly
employs the term "God"; nor


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should there be any question that, when he uses the term, he intends it not to refer to some unknown or
unknowable being, but to have a conceptual content with which human reason can come to grips. It is here that the
objections we have seen come in. Has Hegel simply made God too comprehensible? Is the God who is the content
of finite human conceptual thinking really God at all? Has Hegel, perhaps, rationalized God out of existence? has
he finitized infinite Being by making it the object of finite thought? or has he illegitimately infinitized a human
thinking which is essentially finite? When the questions are put in this way, we can, perhaps, see that the questions
themselves may well be illegitimate, since they are based on three unverified (or unverifiable) presuppositions: (1)
that rational thought is finite and only finite; (2) that the questioner knows precisely what Hegel means by
"infinite"; and (3) that the questioner has drawn an intelligible distinction between "finite" and "infinite." If rational
thought is finite and only finite, then of course it cannot know infinite Being; it can only, as did Kant, "postulate"
infinite Being and resign itself to not knowing what it has postulatedunless, of course, it is not infinity at all that
has been postulated, but only indeterminacy. The human mind can come to grips with mathematical infinity, with
the infinity of time or space, or with the infinity of endless repetition, but this would seem to run up against an
equally grave problem, namely, the intelligibility of indeterminacyunless what is being said is that indeterminacy is
preferable to intelligibility. Perhaps Hegel too is postulating what he has no right to postulate, the intelligibility of
reality, a necessary condition of which is an intelligible God.
The Intelligibility of Reality

Perhaps, then, the trouble is that Hegel is too optimistic about the intelligibility of reality, even finite reality.
Because he simply will not accept an unintelligible realitywhich may very well be a nonphilosophical (or
prephilosophical) refusalhe will presuppose that intelligibility and then spell out in detail the necessary conditions
for the conceivability of an intelligible reality. That, after all, is where his logic takes him. But it takes him further
than that: As he sees it, a condition for the reality of the real is that it be intelligible, susceptible of rational
comprehension; and by the same token a condition of the intelligibility of the real is that it be actual, a determinate
object of rational comprehension. Here, then, philosophy and theology come together again. According to Hegelian
logic, being is intelligibleand it must be, since being is the foundation of all intelligibilityonly if being is both finite
and infinite. By the same token thought can comprehend beingand it must, or else nothing is comprehensibleonly if
thought is both finite and infinite.
To say that reality is intelligible, however, or that the thinking mind


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knows reality, is not to say that the mind imposes a form on reality and thus renders it intelligible, known. Hegel is
content to let reality speak for itself, and he is convinced that it does speak, not only to the mind but also through
the mind, in the mind's thinking. If we can go this far with Hegel, there seems to be no "logical" reason why we
cannot go further and say that knowledge of being is being's self-revelation both to thinking spirit and in thought.
Nor does it require a "logical" leap to move from this to the conviction that the ultimate principle of all being,
intelligibility, and knowledge reveals itself to thinking spirit in thought. Thus, when Hegel says that God is
comprehensible (or better, perhaps, not incomprehensible) to the human mind, Hegel is not saying that the human
mind can know all that there is to know about God ("comprehension" does not signify that sort of all-embracing
grasp). What he is saying is that God, who is infinitely self-knowing Spirit, reveals himself to man, to the human
mind, and that this revelation, indispensable as it is to any knowing of reality, is comprehended. If not, it is no
revelation; comprehension of the revelation is part and parcel of the revelation, whether of finite or of infinite
being. The very being of spirit is self-revelation, but self-revelation is, in fact, revelation only if comprehended.
The Intelligibility of Divine Reality

It must be admitted at this point, however, that it is not difficult to see why both nonbelievers and believers might
balk at Hegel's contention. Has he not overlogicized God? Does a logic of infinite Being really make sense? Can
the infinite being to which Science of Logic ineluctably leads, identified as it is with "absolute Idea," legitimately
be identified with the infinite Spirit of which faith speaks? To the nonbeliever, obviously not. What about the
believer? Without going into the argumentation with which this entire volume will be concerned, we can let Paul
Ricoeur be the spokesman for the many believers who fear that the God of whom a Hegelian "logic" speaks cannot
fail to be a degradation of the "transcendent" God who is the object of religous faith.
A teleology carried out in Hegelian style does not have as eschaton, as final term, the sacred delivered in
myth, cult, belief. Of itself what this teleology envisions is absolute knowing, not faith; and absolute
knowing bespeaks no transcendence, only the subsumption of all transcendence in a thoroughly mediated
self-knowledge.1
Ricoeur, of course, is not alone in fearing that a Hegelian "logic" makes
1. Paul Ricoeur, De L'interprétation (Paris: Seuil, 1965), pp. 505506.


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God too comprehensible, thus doing away with the "sacred," the "numinous," the "transcendent"in short, the
"mysterious." What does not seem to bother such thinkers, however, is that their own logic may well run the risk of
making God not only logically incomprehensible, but logically reprehensible.
What needs to be said here is that in a certain sense, perhaps, Feuerbach, Marx, and Engels,2 were right: the
thought of Hegel does mark the "end" of philosophy, that is, of a rationalism which tries to retain its theism. Hegel
would be the first to agree with thathe sees in "rationalism" (particularly "Enlightenment" rationalism) the enemy
of both philosophy and religion.3 Whether, as marking the end of that sort of rationalism, Hegel's thought marks
the beginning of a rationalism which is nontheistic, is at least debatable. It will be the argument of this volume that
Hegel's philosophy is theistic, but in a new sort of way. That what he has to say in Phenomenology of Spirit (Chap.
VII, section C, "Revealed Religion") and in Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion (part III, ''Absolute Religion")
does much to discredit belief in God who is only "transcendent," that Hegel bids us seek God elsewhere than "out-
there," and that he would turn our gaze to the overarching "spirit" of man if we are to find a God who makes sense,
can well be admitted. This, however, makes Hegel neither an "atheist" nor a "pantheist"; it makes him one who
does not think that saying "God" necessarily involves knowing what one is saying and one who does think that
knowing what one is saying is indispensable to saying anything. On the other hand, it would be foolish to deny that
the "humanist" approach (say, of Feuerbach and Marx)according to which when one says "God" one is not saying
anything but merely projecting a mental constructreceives more than merely moral support from Hegel's
argumentation. Hegel is in the position of having to say that the term "God" does have a very determinate meaning
which the mind can both grasp and see the necessary reality of, if it is to be able to assert the reality of any object
of thought whatever. One can at least understand the fear of those who feel that this sort of argumentation
downgrades God to the level of human self-conscious knowing.
The real problem, howeverand this is where the philosophy of Hegel must meet the crucial testdoes not come with
the assertion that the mind must affirm the reality of infinite being if it is going to affirm any reality whatever, nor
with the assertion that any spirit, absolute Spirit, can be infinite, but rather with the contention that the God
(ultimately the God of the Judaeo-Christian tradition) whom religious consciousness believes in can in no way be
other than the God whom "speculative thinking"
2. See F. Engels, L. Feuerbach und der Ausgang der klassischen deutschen Philosophie. (Berlin: Dietz,
1951.)
3. See the section "God and Philosophy" in this introduction.


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recognizes as a logical necessity. But here a caution is in order. It would simply be a mistake to claim that Hegel
anywhere contends that "speculative thinking" can dispense with religious consciousness in asserting the real
existence of the "infinite Spirit" it affirms. Even more obviously, this sort of thinking cannot dispense with religion
in affirming the identity of its own God and the God of religion. The problem, then, is that of holding on to religion
and at the same time affirming the thorough-going rationality of religion's God, such that there simply can be no
essential difference between the God religion believes in and the God whom reason comprehends. If God be real,
there can be no abstract "God of the philosophers," who would be other than the God of faith.
The key concept here, it would seem, is that of "transcendence." In relation to this concept, those who attack Hegel
from opposing sides are in agreement: either God is immanent or God is transcendenthe cannot be both. For
Feuerbach and Marx there cannot be a "transcendent" God as that would be an insult to human dignity. Therefore,
Hegel's God must be immanent, and this is no God at all in any intelligible sense, only a projection of human
needs and aspirations. As we have already seen, for Paul Ricoeur the only God who can truly be God is the
"transcendent" God of faith; and thus, because Hegel's God is immanent "in thoroughly mediated self-
consciousness," he cannot be truly God. From a slightly different point of view Emil Fackenheim says much the
same. "There is no greater attempt than the Hegelian to unite the God of the philosophers with the God of
Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. The 'result' of its failure is that the two fall radically apart.''4 For Fackenheim a God
whose inner logic of "love" demands a world in which God can reveal himself is a God in whom faith cannot
believe, because faith and logic, belief in God and knowledge of God, are incompatible. Philosophic knowledge of
God is more hostile to faith than is an out-and-out atheism which wages open war against faith5to affirm the
reality of a non-God is worse than to deny the reality of God.
Object of Reason vs. Object of Understanding

These objections from both sides bring us to the very heart of Hegel's "speculative logic." It has so often been
asserted that Hegel denies the principle of noncontradiction, that the assertion has taken on the air of a
commonplace which needs neither proof nor explanation. The fact is that Hegel affirms over and over again that
noncontradiction is an indispensable principle of formal logic, of abstract understanding (Verstand); to ignore it on
4. Emil Fackenheim, The Religious Dimension in Hegel's Thought (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
1967), p. 240.
5. See ibid., p. 204.


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this level can lead to nothing but confusion. What is a necessary principle of abstract understanding, however, need
not be a principle of concrete reason (Vernunft). This is not to say that reason violates the rules of understanding,
nor, worse still, that reason dispenses with understanding. It is to say that reason, whose standpoint is that of
totality, infinity, is not compelled, as is understanding, to fight shy of contradiction. In the light of infinity,
contradictories call each other forth and are continuous with each other, and contradiction can be allowed to
resolve itself. If to abstract understanding infinity means nonfinitude and only that, and if finitude means
noninfinity and only that, then "never the twain shall meet." If, on the other hand, to concrete reason the finite
(concrete) and the infinite (concrete) are continuous, such that the finite implies the infinite and the infinite implies
the finite, their contradictoriness is resolved in their necessary relationship to each other. The same applies, in the
light of infinity, to freedom and necessity, individuality and universality, possibility and actuality, faith and
knowledge, immanence and transcendence, and so on. A parade example for Hegel, then, of the continuity of
contradictories is that of immanence and transcendence. If immanence is nontranscendence and only that, if
transcendence is nonimmanence and only that, they are clearly incompatible, and that is the end of the line, as it is
for abstract thinkingwhich is inadequate to reality if it does not move on to concrete thought.
It would clearly be going too far to claim that what we have thus far seen answers all the objections that Hegel's
opponents raise against him. Nor is it the function of an introduction to do that. We might ask ourselves, however,
whether the atmosphere has been cleared with regard to the charges which have been brought against Hegel from
the standpoint of "orthodoxy." That these charges were brought against him even during his own lifetime we know,
if from no other source, from the preface to the third edition of Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences and
from numerous references in Berliner Schriften. One thing does seem to be clear; he was convinced that his
thinking, as striking as it might appear, was orthodox. Along with that went the conviction that only adequate
philosophical thinking could legitimate theological reflection on the content of faith, and that neither Wolffian
"metaphysics," Kantian "criticism," exegetical "erudition,'' nor romantic "intuitionism" could accomplish the task of
making "orthodoxy" intellectually respectable. One might still find it debatable whether Hegel's "speculative
thinking" succeeds in accomplishing the task; it will be the task of the present study to examine in detail the degree
to which Hegel can be looked upon as successful in his endeavor. The only point here is to see whether, in fact,
Hegel's endeavor was to make orthodoxy intellectually respectable by making it speak intelligibly to the enquiring
mind. Does a "logic of concept" prove to be at once philosophically satisfying and theologically (or, perhaps,
religiously)


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acceptable, or has Hegel opted for philosophical satisfaction at the expense of religious acceptability? More
pointedly, perhaps, was Hegel serious in trying to come to grips philosophically with the self-revealing God of
Christianity?
A hint as to the answer to this last question may be found in Hegel's conviction that a revelation must be
intelligible if it is to be a revelation at all. To put it more bluntly, Hegel is convinced that God has told us nothing
of himself if what he has told us is unintelligible to human reason. He is also convinced, however, that
philosophical knowledge of the infinite Spirit who is God is just as much divine self-revelation as is the word of
God in scripture or in the teaching of the Christian religion. Opposed as he was to "rationalism," considering it a
kind of abstract burlesque of reason, he was a vigorous advocate of supremely rational thinking, to which he would
assign no limits. That there should have been opposition to this attitude can come as no surprise, but the grounds of
the opposition would seem to be more emotional than rational. This, of course, his "theologian" opponents would
not deny, since in religious matters they considered emotion more reliable than reason. But, it is not difficult to see
that, precisely from the point of view of his supreme confidence in reason, Hegel should sense the danger of such a
reliance on emotion. Can one honestly be religious and at the same time be satisfied with an unknown or
unknowable God? Is not a non-God preferable? Hegel's endeavor, then, can be looked on as a mighty effort to
avoid the second conclusion. One wonders, in fact, whether his "theologian" opponents were opposed to him on
truly religious grounds or merely fearful of the conclusion to which rational thinking would lead them. Since the
reason of "rationalism" does not permit them to know God, and since they cannot conceive of a reason which is not
rationalistic, they must resist Hegel's claim that reason can know God. ''Mystery"and therefore unknowingis much
more comforting. Since it is not rational either to affirm or deny God, it would seem imperative to drop reason, if
one is not to drop God. Hegel's contention is diametrically opposed to this; as he sees it, relinquishing reason is
tantamount to relinquishing religion, and both relinquishments are unworthy of the human. If man alone is capable
of religion, it is through that which is most characteristic of man, that is reason.
Given the prejudice of our own time which so separates feeling and thinking, it can be considered a need
that they be opposed, even that they be inimical to each other, in such a way that feeling, particularly
religious feeling is sullied, even annihilated, by thinking, so that it is essential to religion and religiousness
not to be rooted in thinking. To separate in this way is to forget that only man is capable of religion,
whereas the brute has no religion, no more than law or morality. [EpW, no. 2]


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If to be religious is to be nonrational, then to be religious is to be nonhuman. Such an attitude is indeed grist for the
atheist mill!
What Is Reason?
As one moves through Hegel's writings it becomes more and more clear that he is constantly working out three
consistent convictions: (1) that reason both can and must make sense, not nonsense, out of God who is real; (2) that
it is an abdication of reason not to make sense out of God, either by claiming that God is not real or by claiming
that the human response to the real God is not rational; and (3) that reason cannot make sense of any reality
whatever, if it does not make sense of God. One question, however, still remains: Why must it be reason which
makes sense of God? or, why is it reason alone that can make sense of God? At this point we must try to make
sense out of Hegel's ultimate identification of infinite Being, infinite Thought, and infinite Spirit. Although we
shall have to wait until chapter 4 for a detailed exposition of Hegel's thought on the "infinite," we can say here that
Hegel sees thinking as a continuous process of self-purification, thought purifying itself of all sensible content
whatever. It must be emphasized, however, that Hegel never says that reason does not think what is sensible; rather
he says that thought must transform the sensible into the nonsensible if it is to think the sensible adequately.
Rational thought, then, can think both the sensible and the nonsensible; butand this is importantonly rational
thought can think the nonsensible. Since it is of the essence of the sensible to be finite, if the infinite be it must be
non-sensible, and with this only rational thought can come to grips. That the infinite cannot be sensed is clear
enough to all; that it cannot be imaged should also be clear. That the infinite cannot be "represented" (vorgestellt)
in "understanding'' (Verstand), may not be so clear; but if we follow Hegel's claim that "representation"
(Vorstellung) is always at least linked to images, we can see why he makes the claim. Hegel is not claiming that
"understanding" does not "represent" the infinite; that is what "understanding" does when it seeks to think the
object of religious consciousness. What he does claim is that "understanding" cannot be successful in this, because
it cannot dispense with "representations." Only rational thinking can be successful, precisely because only "reason"
goes beyond "understanding," beyond "representations," and it is the insistence on identifying "reason" with
"understanding" which underlies the claim that the reality of God must be impervious to reason.
Here, it would seem, something needs to be saidin a preliminary way, at leastregarding Hegel's notion of the
function of "representing" (vorstellen) and "representation" (Vorstellung) in human thinking. A great deal has
already been written on this subject, and, it seems to me, much of


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what has been written misses the point. When human consciousness is presented with an object, whether the
presentation be in the form of sensorial awareness, linguistic communication, or, in the case of religious content, in
the teaching, for example, of the Church, Hegel refers to it as "immediate" awareness. It is characteristic of the
human to seek to think the content thus "immediately" given. This "thinking" of the content presented to
consciousness in "images'' initially takes the form of "representations" (Vorstellungen) which the mind subjectively
makes to itself in an effort to come to grips with the content presented. Precisely because this is thinking, the
process of vorstellen (Vorstellung) constitutes the beginning of a dynamic movement away from the image-
character of what is present. It is important to note that Vorstellung (the form is participial) is itself a process, a
progressive movement from image toward thought. So long, however, as the process is still one of subjective
"representation," what Hegel frequently calls "one-sided," the link to images has not been superseded. The
movement of Vorstellung, then, is oriented to transcending itself in thought, which is no longer merely subjective
but objective.
It may well be that the counter-claim could be made that it is asking too much to demand, with Hegel, that there be
human thought without images. To make this counter-claim, of course, is equivalent to the claim that there is no
rational thought in the way Hegel understands it. So be it. It is not the function of an introduction to establish the
validity of Hegel's claim, only to assert that he makes it. One thing, however, is clear: If there cannot be human
thought without images, then it is the case that the human mind cannot have the infinite as its object; a conclusion
which can satisfy atheists but can hardly satisfy the theists. Even religious consciousness, which represents the God
of faith in various metaphorical ways, thinks of God as nonimageablean infinite which could in any way be imaged
would not be infinite. It is, nevertheless, necessary to admit that the Hegelian logic does make great demands on us,
if we are to come to grips with it. One might say that we have to have reached the lofty heights of this sort of
"speculative thinking," before we can recognize the conceivability of such thinking. This is one reason why Hegel
does not treat us to the luxury of a "proof" in the formal-logical sense of the term. His logic is not a theory of
"proof" at all; it is a study of the logos in which reality is revealed, or reveals itself, in thought. There is no
question of "demonstrating" that the infinite can be grasped in imageless thought, or that there is imageless thought
to grasp it; there is question only of following Hegel's thought and "seeing," so to speak, that it does make
eminently good sense. It is small wonder that Hegel looked upon Plato's Parmenides (part II) as the profoundest
work of ancient philosophy; it nowhere calls upon sensible images to bolster its philosophical dialectic. If we are to
think with Hegel we must be both will


Page 11
ing and able to follow a process of thought which finds no need of touching ground in the images constantly
present in our ordinary thinking and which, nevertheless, claims to be more "concrete" (penetrating to the heart of
reality as it is in its total interrelatedness) than is a thinking which relies on "representations."
Perhaps the difficulty we experience in following this sort of "logic" stems not so much from our inability or
unwillingness to think of the infinite as concrete as it does from our inability or unwillingness to accept a thinking
which Hegel calls "untrue to itself" if it does not progressively divest itself of reliance on sense. It is not that Hegel
denies that thinking begins in sense perceptionthat is too obvious to need discussionrather he contends that only in
constantly and consistently moving away from the sensible can thought be the pure spiritual activity which alone
can come to grips with "all reality." Reason (spirit) must transform (spiritualize) even nature, because only as thus
idealized does nature itself reveal its own "truth" to and in thought. Only if we can do this can we avoid a return
either to an indefensible causal metaphysics of cognition or to an equally indefensible Humean scepticism.
God and Philosophy

All of this brings us around full circle to where we began: Just what can it mean to say that the whole of Hegel's
philosophy is wrapped up in his concept of God, that his philosophy stands or falls in the rationality of that
concept? Perhaps the problem is not that Hegel has so philosophized theology that he has dispensed with faith, but
that he has theologized philosophy to such an extent that, even as purely philosophical thinking, it cannot dispense
with faith, that is, with faith's content. Here it might do well to emphasize once more that Hegel nowhere says that
we can rationalize faith; what he does say is that if reason takes a long hard look at the content of faith it will find
that content not only rationally acceptable but also rationally necessary, and that reason fails as reason if it does not
see this. As he sees it, in terms of the overall process of human experience, religious "experience" is not something
either to be left out of the rational process as a sort of aberration, nor is it suprarational in the sense that it simply
defies the power of reason to come to terms with it. Thus, religion is not to be superseded, in the sense of canceled
and only canceled, as it is for Marx, nor is it to supersede reason, in the sense that religion can attain to an object
which is opaque to reason. Rather, as Phenomenology of Spirit makes abundantly clear, religious experience is
integral to and continuous with the march of experience in the process of becoming "absolute knowing." Nor is
"religious experience" to be given the rather narrow interpretation which it has, say, in James; for Hegel, thinking
is the experience


Page 12
of thinking's object or content. Religious experience, then, is the religious mode of thinking (in Vorstellungen) the
absolute content which is God. Religion, however, will not be true to itselfor to its contentif it rests content with
not knowing that to which it is oriented. It might be argued, of course, that "the faith of a Breton peasant" could
well be superior to that of the philosopher; it would be questionable, however, whether it would be good for the
philosopher to have that kind of faith. To insist on a faith which bypasses reason is, according to Hegel, to
capitulate to Enlightenment rationalism, which is just as inimical to philosophy as it is to religion.
The Enlightenment, that vanity of the understanding, is the most vigorous opponent of philosophy; it is
displeased when the latter demonstrates reason in Christian religion, when it shows that the foundation for
the testimony of the spirit of truth has been established in religion. In philosophy, which is theology, the
only thing that counts is to demonstrate the rationality of religion. [VPR II, p. 341]
What Hegel has done, then, is not so much to "theologize" philosophy as to attempt to show, from the
philosophical point of view, that philosophy and theology are oriented to one and the same truth, the logos of being
in its infinity. Erwin Metzke has expressed this as clearly and succinctly as has anyone.
Hegel's world of thought is religiously rooted (cf. the footnotes to the Preface of the second edition of the
Encyclopedia). For Hegel, of course, this does not result in surrendering philosophy to theology; rather he
seeks to illumine philosophically the profounder common ground of both. Not only for faith but also for
philosophical knowing the supreme and unique object, the being of God as the truly absolute Being,
includes in a comprehensive way the being of the world: the world is nothing but the unfolding of God
himself through the otherness of nature. The world is God's other. Truth is the unity of the infinite and the
finite. To see God only as transcendent would be to truncate truth, an abstraction.6
God and Human History

We can at this point look at what could at first sight seem a rather implausible source for a confirmation of the
present interpretation of the movement of Hegel's thought. Between 1822 and 1831 Hegel presented five times a
course of lectures on the philosophy of world history. We now have these lectures in a monumental 938-page
edition, Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Weltgeschichte, which, it would seem, presents Hegel's
6. Erwin Metzke, Hegels Vorreden (Heidelberg: Kerle, 1949), p. 269.


Page 13
maturest thought. It is precisely here that he stresses again and again the intimate link between the development of
philosophical "culture" (Bildung) and the process of religious experience. "Culture" (Bildung could also be
rendered as "cultivation") is that process of development which is unique to the human spirit; a process which is at
once the activity and the product of spirit, whereby spirit comes to be what it is to be spirit. What is peculiar to the
spirit's process of self-cultivation is that "culture" is inadequate to the task it has to perform until the human spirit
is "alienated'' from the merely "natural" in which it is immersed, and that the alienation, as at once a
"spiritualization" and a "denaturalization," does not take place independently of the religious consciousness from
which emerges into reality a progressively more concrete human spirit (WG, pp. 125, 128, 13132). Thus, in Hegel's
view, religion and culture can never be separated in the process of man's becoming human (ibid., pp. 134, 733,
821, 878). The Enlightenment, which, as he sees it, is the last futile attempt to accomplish naturalistically what can
be accomplished only spiritually, effectively showed the impossibility of making this separation. The culture of the
Enlightenment, like the vast cultural edifices which preceded it, proved to be self-defeating, because it sought to
leave out of the picture the only possible integrator of spiritual development, that is, absolute Spirit.
When Hegel speaks of Bildung, of course, he speaks of that process of self-cultivation which is proper not so much
to the individual as to the spirit of a people, all of whose members share, albeit in varying degrees, in a Bildung
which is common to all. By the same token religion is not primarily that which characterizes the orientation of the
individual spirit to absolute Spirit; rather it is that which orients the collective spirit. Spiritual activity, then, is not
only the activity which most properly characterizes the human; it is the very process of humanizing the human; and
this it does by authentically orienting the human to the divine (ibid., pp. 6162, 7273, 530, 554, 576). At this point
we may, as has been noted earlier, be brought up short by the objection that it is arbitrary to identify the
overarching spirit which unifies the totality of the human, the "absolute Spirit" of which Hegel speaks, with the
"divine Spirit" of which religion speaks. The objection, however, has the disadvantage of not appealing to what
Hegel does say. It is difficult to see how anyone could read Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Weltgeschichte
and say that Hegel is not identifying absolute Spirit with Godwhether or not one likes this "God" of whom Hegel
speaks (see WG, pp. 12526, 131, 745).
Perhaps, however, it would be better to approach this question from another angle. It may be that one could
interpret what Hegel says regarding the humanizing of the human in terms of an orientation of human spirit to
absolute Spirit as no more than an absolutizing of human spirit through philosophical knowing. This interpretation,
however, runs up against the


Page 14
difficulty of Hegel's consistent refusal to look upon human self-development as a process of man's lifting himself
by his own bootstraps (see ibid., pp. 182, 57273, 821, 878). To those who are familiar with the seventh and eighth
chapters of Phenomenology of Spirit this will be clear enough; it is also clearly the teaching in Vorlesungen über
die Philosophie der Weltgeschichte. Not only is the dialectic of spirit's culture one of self-activity, whereby man
rises to ever-higher awareness of what it is to be human (WG, p. 35); not only is the goal to which man is oriented
one which is not antecedently inscribed in a blueprint of human "nature," precisely because the human spirit is to
bring into being that to which it is oriented (ibid., pp. 58, 74); but the process toward the goal is to be the activity
of both the human spirit and of the divine Spirit. The ascension of the human spirit is both a "self-lifting" and a
''being-lifted-up" (Erhebung). "It is essential to this process that there be levels [of development], and world-
history is the manifestation of the divine process, the ascension by stages, wherein spirit both knows and actualizes
itself and its truth" (ibid., p. 74).
Strong medicine this, it is true; but the question is not at the moment whether the medicine is too strong to take or
even whether what Hegel says is true; it is simply a question of whether Hegel means what he says. We can, if we
wish, say that when Hegel speaks of man as "in himself his own goal" (ibid., p. 106)a goal, nevertheless, that is not
predetermined, as it would be if man were simply a being of natureand as his own goal "only through the divine
that dwells in him" (ibid.), he is not speaking religious language, but rather he is using the term "divine"
metaphorically. However, it would seem that the evidence for this contention has yet to be uncovered. When Hegel
further says that "the goal of the spirit" is "to give itself consciousness of the Absolute," and that "this
consciousness of his is alone true," or that this is at once "honor paid to God" and the "glorification of the truth"
(ibid.), it is indeed difficult to see why we should not take him at his word. Nor does this take away from (rather it
enhances) the dignity of man, since "in honoring God the individual spirit too finds its own dignity," in the
recognition that man's "activity for the honor of God is the absolute [for man] (ibid.). Precisely here is where
philosophy comes in, for it is "philosophy" which "thinks and comprehends what is contained in religion in the
mode of representation, both sensible and spiritual" (ibid., p. 134; see p. 172). The point Hegel is trying to make,
however, is that the activity of honoring God concerns man more than it does God, since "the dignity of man is to
be found in honoring the divine . . . such that the divine receives honor through the honor given to the human, and
the human receives honor through the honor paid to the divine" (ibid., p. 572; see pp. 181, 573).
This last statement, it is true, is made in the context of Hegel's discussion of Greek religion, wherein the beauty of
Greek art honors both the divine


Page 15
which it portrays and the human which does the portraying, but it has to be read in continuity with a whole series
of texts wherein ever higher forms of religious representation give rise to an ever more purified conceptualization
of what it is to be human, to be spirit, since "God is the essence of the human" (ibid., p. 575). Nor is this to be
separated from man's progressive realization of his own rationality; reason, after all, "is the substance of spirit"
(ibid., p. 733). But, the rationality of spirit is not to be divorced from the rationality of spirit's object; that object is
rational, whether it be present in the explicitly rational form of philosophical thinking or in the implicitly rational
form of religious consciousness (ibid.). The move to explicit rationality is accomplished in the progressive
overcoming of the naturality in which the human spirit, even religious spirit, is immersed (ibid.).
It may seem that Hegel is taking a very large leap when he moves quite rapidly from this vague religious
consciousness of the unity of the divine and the human, to the Christian dogma of the unity of the divine and the
human in the Incarnation (ibid., p. 729). In a sense, of course, it is a leap, but Hegel is convinced not only that the
move must be made but also that the move is philosophically defensible. That there are dogmas at all, he claims, is
true only because there is philosophical explication of religious beliefnor is the philosophical explication alien to
the content of religious belief (ibid., p. 742). More than that, the human and the divine are not simply to be equated
(ibid., p. 734)a contradiction which "understanding" sees so readilya union with the divine is essential to the
actualization of spirituality in the human; and this, "speculative" thinking can comprehend.
Man becomes actual as a spiritual being only when he overcomes his naturality. This overcoming becomes
possible only under the supposition that the human and the divine natures are substantially and consciously
(an und für sich) one, and that man, to the extent that he is spirit, possesses the essentiality and
substantiality which pertains to the concept of God. [Ibid., p. 821]
This human consciousness of union with the divine is neither immediately given nor readily comprehensible; man
must grow into it. "The consciousness of this union with the divine is given in Christ. What is important, then, is
that man come to grips with this consciousness and that it be constantly awakened in him" (ibid.).
"Denaturalization" of the Human

Now, what is important in all this is Hegel's claim that the whole of post-Roman "European" cultural development
has been tied in with and conditioned by Christian religious consciousness and by the latter's explication in


Page 16
a philosophical awareness of just what it is to be human, to be spiritual, to be spirit in a way which images in a
this-worldly context the spiritual reality of God. The crux of Hegel's claim is his contention that man, as the unique
combination of the "natural" and the "spiritual," must by his own activity "overcome" the merely natural in himself
and thus actualize the truly spiritual, which is his destiny and his dignity, by being reconciled with God as ''Spirit,"
the paradigm of all spirit (WG, p. 878). The process of this overcoming is the Bildung which characterizes Western
man, a Bildung marked by centuries of vicissitudes whose overtones are moral, religious, legal, and political, but
whose orientation is ineluctably the realization of man's true being as spirit, since only spirit is self-determining,
free.
We have to admit at this point that Hegel, in his Lectures on the Philosophy of World History, leaves us with what
can be termed an unsolved riddle. All along he has been talking of philosophical thought and its orientation to
absolute Spirit, to God. In tracing the development of European cultureand pari passu of European philosophical
thinkinghe describes a movement of separation of thought and culture from their foundation in the Absolute, the
Divine. He does not, however, describe any process of reintegration. The reason, perhaps, is that, because he is
speaking of a philosophy of history, he will not anticipate; the process of reintegration is yet to come. Be that as it
may, we can, I think, recognize in his description of the period of disintegration a hint that he is describing a
transitional stage in philosophical thought, a stage ushered in by the scientific revolution emerging from the
Renaissance.
There can be no question that the modern spirit of philosophical inquiry, the beginning of which Hegel finds in
Descartes, has effected a separation of the human thinking subject from that which had previously been conceived
of as ruling that spirit from above. To find itself, the human spirit now looks to itself alone, and this is the prelude
to a thinking which is conceived of as self-determining in itself (WG, p. 914). No longer, to the scientific mind, is
there question of the grace of God coming from without to enlighten that mind. It was Descartes who had turned
the mind's gaze inward, and his cogito, ergo sum is to be interpreted not as an inference from thought to being, but
as a recognition that being and thought (human thought) are one. That this insight should be elucidated in the
conviction that the external world must exhibit the same rationality that human thought does, may itself not be a
thoroughly rational conviction (one is reminded of Whitehead's contention that the scientist "must begin with an act
of faith in the decency of the universe"). The pattern now is one of observing nature, discovering that it is regulated
by "laws" which constitute its rationality and which imperceptibly become prescriptive rather than descriptive.
Enter the Enlightenment, and the disintegration is complete (ibid., p. 915). Kant, Fichte, Jacobi, and
Schleiermacher accept the


Page 17
disintegration as complete, even though they continue to insist that the validity of faith is not compromised thereby.
One thing is clear: A philosophical thinking which, with Kant, Fichte, and Jacobi, has lost its mooring in the
concrete Absolute has given up the very possibility of an effectual reintegration. Thus, although Hegel does not, in
the Lectures, map out the path of reintegration, he does, in the very last section, entitled "The Present Situation,"
hint at the solution. There he suggests that the disintegration has come about because of the spirit's failure to
recognize itself for what it is, a recognition which will come about only if it listens to the testimony of absolute
Spirit which bears witness to the true reality of the human spirit, which, if we are willing to inquire carefully, Spirit
does in "World-History"the history which on the very last page Hegel calls "the true theodicy," the "justification of
God."
The spirit is only what it makes of itself; and for that it is necessary that it presuppose itself. Only this
insight can reconcile the spirit with world-history and with actuality, the realization that what has happened
and what happens at all times not only comes from God and is not without God, but is essentially the work
of God himself. [WG, p. 938; see pp. 78, 81]
However, the answer is not contained here. What Hegel does is to send us back to the final chapter of
Phenomenology of Spirit, where religious consciousness and rational self-consciousness are reconciled in
"Absolute Knowing," the elaboration of which constitutes the whole of Science of Logic and the "System" which
flows from it. The answer, then, depends on the ability of the human spirit to go beyond the "analytic" thinking of
Verstand to the "speculative" thinking of Vernunft; only in the latter can the spiritual destiny of man (cultural and
religious) be realized. It will be the task of the present volume to follow Hegel in his attempt to articulate this
realization in his own "speculative system,'' which he takes to be what "philosophy" has made of itself.
Hegel's Language
That the task of following Hegel proves to be enormously difficult will come as no surprise to those who are at all
familiar with his writing. There is no need here to expand on the complexityor better, perhaps, tortuousnessof his
thought. However, the difficulty is compounded by the language he employs in expressing that thought. What does
one do, for example, with a language which is at once so elusive and so allusive? Can one say what Hegel is
saying in a language which is other than Hegel's own? Nor is the problem simply that of saying in English what
Hegel has said in Germanas tantalizing as the translation of that German into English may be.


Page 18
The problem, rather, is that of finding any language adequate to express that thought. The initial assumption must
be, if we are to get on with the task at all, that what he says does make sense, whether or not we agree with that
sense. But even this last point presents a problem: Can we agree or disagree with what Hegel says, if we do not
know exactly what he is (or is not) saying? As we shall have occasion to note again and again in what follows, one
way of not getting the task done is to insist on having precise definitions of the terms Hegel employs. By the same
token we cannot insist that he use grammar in the way we want him to use it; which is but another way of saying
that we cannot legitimately interpret any author by taking his words to mean simply what we would mean if we
used the same words. Language is in the service of thought, not vice versa. If Hegel stretches language (or
grammar) to fit thought, we have no right to insist that he confine thought so as to fit a preconceived language (or
grammar).
The danger, of course, in approaching the problem in this way is that we run the risks: (1) of rendering it
impossible to determine just what Hegel is saying, of throwing up our hands, or of simply guessing what he might
be saying; (2) of looking upon language as doing more to veil thought than to reveal it; (3) of simply allowing
Hegel complete liberty to say what he pleases, since there is no way of checking on the validity of what he says.
Even granting these risks, however, it does seem necessary to issue a number of cautions in the effort to come to
terms with Hegel's thought, which must be expressed in language or else not expressed at all: (1) We must not
demand of language more than language can deliver. Perhaps language renders to reality the fullest justice it can by
admitting its incapacity to express reality adequatelywhich does not mean that thought must stop short of reality. It
may well be that language itself is formed in the either/or realm of what Hegel calls "mere understanding," needing
to be fleshed out in the more comprehensive realm of "reason." No philosopher has ever wrought out a language
totally adequate to either reality or thought. (2) Meaning cannot be confined to what can be defined. Plato taught us
that lesson many years ago, and the lesson still stands; the quest for definition is a help, but meaning as it emerges
bursts the bonds of definitionbut it need not suffer from so doing. (3) Hegel is difficult, but he is not unintelligible.
His language conveys a meaning which we can grasp, not completely, perhaps, but that is not necessarily the fault
of the language; the language flows from an experience which is not oursnot merely in the sense that it is separated
from ours by a century and a half, but more significantly because his is a special experience (as is that of all
genius), and it requires great effort on our part to share that experience, even partially. (4) It may be true to say that
Hegel's philosophical thought resists being put into our philosophical language; but that does not relieve us of the
burden of coming to grips with his thought through his language, which itself may well be not


Page 19
totally adequate to the thought it expresses. If nothing else, precisely because Hegel's language has interesting
things to say, it will not say them with perfect precision.7 (5) Hegel's grammar does, in fact, break the rules of
grammar as we know them, but that need not be a fault in Hegel's grammar. Grammar as we know it may well be
unable to handle what Hegel has to say. In any event we must make the effort to come to grips with what Hegel
says, in the way he says it.
Having said so muchrather abstractly, it is to be fearedof how Hegel says what he has to say, we are brought
around full circle to where we began, to the title of this book, Hegel's Concept of God. Why can a title such as this
be said to encompass the entire thrust of Hegel's philosophical thought? It can be said without much fear of
contradiction that Hegel's philosophy is from beginning to end a philosophy of manthe focus is constantly man as
thinking spirit. The "system," as Hegel sees it in outline, is divided into three quite unequal parts: Logic (or the
philosophy of thought), philosophy of nature, and philosophy of spirit (subjective, objective, and absolute). It is
still true, however, that the focus is consistently man: man, the human spirit, thinking thought; man finding the
logic of thought, the logical Idea, expressed in the thinking of nature; man coming to grips with the spiritual being
which he himself essentially is. Why, then, the "Concept of God"? The answer is to be found in the culmination of
the entire Hegelian system, "The Philosophy of Absolute Spirit." Only in the light of "absolute Spirit" is anything
Hegel says intelligible. It will be the contention of all that follows that, in Hegel's view, ''absolute Spirit" is in fact
to be identified with God and that, therefore, only if Hegel's "Concept of God" is intelligible, will anything Hegel
says be intelligible. It will not be necessary to claim here that Hegel's concept of God does in fact correspond with
the Christian concept of God. I am convinced, however, that Hegel indeed thought it did. More than that, I am also
convinced that, if he did not think it did, there is no way to make sense out of Hegel's philosophy.
Question of Sources
A few final words about sources. Some might argue against the wisdom (or even the honesty) of relying so heavily
on Hegel's lectureson aesthetics, on the philosophy of history, on the history of philosophy, on the philosophy of
religion8which were published posthumously and taken for the most part from the notes of his students (which we
all know with pain does not necessarily make for accuracy). The same could be said of the
7. "Where a language has interesting things to say, precision is never perfect" (William Barrett, The Illusion
of Technique [New York: Doubleday, Anchor, 1979], p. 280).
8. The objection might be considered particularly weighty against the use of Vorlesungen über die Philosophie
der Religion, the definitive edition of which we still await.


Page 20
many quotes from the Zusätze, which have been added to the text of the Encyclopedia, again from the notes of
Hegel's students. A number of answers to such objections suggest themselves. (1) If the interpretation were
supported exclusively from the lectures, with no confirmation from the Phenomenology, Logic, Encyclopedia, or
Philosophy of Right, the objections would indeed have weight (it is for this reason that I have made no references
to his Early Theological Writings, which Hegel presumably deliberately did not publish). The interpretation,
however, can be quite clearly supported from the writings Hegel himself had published. (2) To my knowledge, it
has not been possible to show, without taking quotes out of context, that Hegel repudiates what either the lectures
or the Zusätze say. (3) Hegel himself says, in his prefaces to the Encyclopedia, that the whole work is but a
compendium, a sort of textbook outline, which is of value only when supplemented by the oral presentation of the
professorpresumably what the notes of the students contain, with considerably more accuracy than a lecturer could
hope for today.
A considerably more serious objection, from the scholarly point of view, could be made against my use of the
Suhrkamp edition of the lectures rather than the more critical Meiner edition (the latter does not contain the Zusätze
at all). My reason for so doing was simply practical: the Suhrkamp edition is more readily available for those who
wish to check my references. In checking the Meiner edition myself I have found nothing that would make me
want to change the interpretation. I shall be grateful, however, if anyone can furnish me with texts from the critical
edition which would modify my interpretation. It should, perhaps, be noted here that I give no references to English
translationssimply because I use no translations. One possible further complaint is that, in referring to Berliner
Schriften, I have not given the dates of the pieces referred to. Since, however, all these Writings belong to the
period of Hegel's professorship in Berlin (18181830)and thus postdate all Hegel's published writings, except
Philosophy of Rightit seems reasonable to assign all of them to the period of Hegel's philosophical maturity.
When all this has been said, one concluson still seems inescapable: Hegel is clearly the most "God-inebriated" of
philosophers. We may or may not like Hegel's God, but we cannot refuse to take him seriouslyboth Hegel and
Hegel's God. Nor can our own thinking remain unaffected if we have reflected long and seriously on "Hegel's
Concept of God."


Page 21
Chapter One
Religion and Philosophy
To one who read's Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit for the first timeespecially if this first reading is also one's
initiation to a grasp of Hegel's thinkingit cannot but come as a surprise that chapter VI, "Spirit," which would seem
to be a culminating point of the inquiry, should be immediately followed by a chapter entitled "Religion," that is,
religious consciousness. Not only does this indicate that, in Hegel's thinking, human self-conscious awareness of
being "spirit'' and not merely "nature" is inadequate, it also indicates that the consciousness of being spirit is not a
consciousness of what it is to be spirit until it goes beyond the self-enclosed consciousness of being merely human
spirit. There are those, of course, who think that when, in the chapter on religious consciousness, Hegel speaks of
God he is not being serious, that he is speaking at most metaphorically of an absolute unity of spirit which
continues to be no more than human, even though not individual, but it is difficult to see how those who hold this
can themselves be taken seriously. There are those too who, like Loewenberg, contend that by bringing religion
onto the scene, thus focusing on a more-than-human spirit, Hegel has in some way ceased to engage in a
phenomenology of the human spirit at all. Loewenberg considers the entry at this point of a "superhuman spirit" to
be "intrusive" into the "biography of human spirit."1 However, it should be emphasized that, although the object of
religion is divine, infinite Spirit, the religious experience of which Hegel is here speaking is essentially human
experience. Perhaps the trouble lies in beginning a study of Hegel with the Phenomenology at all. It is in Science of
Logic that Hegel makes clear his contention that all philosophical thinking is "speculative" thinkingthat
1. J. Loewenberg, Hegel's Phenomenology: Dialogues on the Life of Mind. (La Salle, Illinois: Open Court,
1965), p. 298; see pp. 33637.


Page 22
phenomenology, therefore, is speculative thinkingand that speculative thinking in its search for truth can never be
confined to finding that truth in what is immediately present to thought, but only in that to which the immediately
present points as its "truth." No one, so far as I know, has any difficulty in seeing that this is what goes on at every
stage of the Phenomenology, up to and inclusive of section C, "Spirit Certain of Itself: Morality," which ends
chapter VI. That some do not see that this points beyond itself to a spirit more than human is due, not to a
determination to take what Hegel says seriously, but to an antecedent conviction that there is no more-than-human
spirit to which morally self-conscious spirit can point. They are faced with a rather desperate alternative: either to
refuse to follow Hegel any further or to interpret him in such a way as to make him say something quite other than
what he quite obviously seems to be saying.2 If we take as our guidelines for interpretation what Hegel quite
clearly does say in Science of Logic, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, Lectures on Proofs for God's
Existence, and the final sections of Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences, rather than some unfounded
antecedent conviction, we are, I think, more likely to come to grips with the real Hegel, for whom a thought which
fails to rise to the absolute fails to come to terms with itself,3 and for whom religion attains to the absolute sooner
than philosophy does.4 The overriding question with which logic (and, hence, the entire Hegelian system) is
concerned is, "What is the true, what is the absolute foundation of everything" (WLI, p. 51)and this makes sense
only if "absolute foundation" is at once logical, epistemological, and ontological.
In Phenomenology of Spirit, it is true, precisely because its subject matter is "the experience of consciousness,"
which reveals itself to be "spirit," Hegel is more directly concerned with "religious consciousness' than he is with
the "Absolute" which is the object of that consciousness.5 Nevertheless, it is clear even here, as it is throughout the
Phenomenology, that consciousness is of interest only because it is the progressive revelation of the truth of its
object and because consciousness will be true to itself as consciousness only if, ultimately, it is "absolute"
consciousness of an ''absolute" object. What is, perhaps, of even more significance in this context is that the
culminating stage of "spirit's" itinerary in coming to adequate con-
2. It is true, of course, that any interpretation of any authorincluding my interpretation of Hegelwill be
colored by the interpreter's wanting the author to make sense, which usually means "my kind of sense." By
itself, however, this need not invalidate the interpretationespecially where the evidence seems to be heavily
weighted in its favor.
3. The thrust of the whole introduction to the Phenomenology.
4. "The content of religion, therefore, expresses what Spirit is sooner than science does, but the latter alone is
its own knowledge of itself" (PdG, p. 559). See also BDG, pp. 5, 9, 17679.
5. In BDG, pp. 4647, Hegel speaks in scornful terms of those who would speak of religion as a form of human
experience and yet consistently refuse to speak (philosophically) of religion's object, i.e., God.


Page 23
sciousness of itself and, therefore, to the "truth" of what at the beginning of chapter V was only "immediate
certainty" that "Reason is all reality"the culmination which Hegel calls "Absolute Knowing"is continuous with and
inclusive of ''Religion." It would be worse than arbitrary to look upon chapter VII as either a parenthesis between
chapters VI and VIII or as not really saying seriously what it purports to be saying, that is, that religious
consciousness, which has God as its object, is indispensable to authentic philosophical thinking and knowing. In
truly dialectical fashion "religion" is "speculative" in the sense that it is the "truth" of consciousness as "moral
spirit" and that it irresistibly "points to" the fulfillment of its own "truth" in "Absolute Knowing," where the
philosophical form of "knowing" is suited to the religious content of "believing," and where "thought" supersedes
"representation" without thereby either losing or distorting its "object."
It may well be that we must go beyond the pages of the Phenomenology if we are to appreciate fully Hegel's
identification of the "God" of religion and the "Absolute" of "Absolute Knowing," but there is no reason why from
the vantage-point of a more mature working out of Hegel's thinking we may not look back and interpret where the
Phenomenology was "pointing." One thing is clear: Hegel was dissatisfied with the views of his
contemporarieswhether with the absence of a philosophical absolute in Kant's thought, with an absolute which is
the object of feeling or intuition in that of Jacobi or Schleiermacher, or with an absolute which is the starting-point
rather than the result of philosophical enquiry, as it is for Fichte and Schelling. This dissatisfaction begins to
surface as early as the unpublished Theologische Jugendschriften; it continues, still in somewhat tentative form in
Hegel's earliest published writings, Die Differenz des Fichteschen und Schellingschen Systems der Philosophie and
Glauben und Wissen, on into the writings of the Jena period; it is, as we have seen, far less tentative in
Phänomenologie des Geistes; ultimately it becomes most explicit in Wissenschaft der Logik and has its place in all
subsequent writing, even, obliquely, in Philosophie des Rechts.
In a very important sense the history of Hegel's dissatisfaction is autobiographical: in his formative years the most
potent influences on the development of his philosophical thought were Kant, Fichte, and Schellingby a strange
sort of reversal, perhaps due to his rereading the history of philosophy in light of his own Logic, the effective
influence of Plato, Aristotle, the medieval theologians, and Spinoza manifests itself for the most part only
subsequently. It was Kant's and Fichte's emphasis on the rationality of the "moral order" which opened the way for
Hegel to a synthesis of the theoretical and the practical which was to issue in his version of "speculative thinking,"
and it was Schelling's insistence on the "identity" of "spirit" and "nature" which provided Hegel with the impetus to
bridge


Page 24
the seemingly yawning chasm between the subjective world of thought and the objective world of reality. The key
to Hegel's dissatisfaction with all three, however, was the failure of each of them to come to grips either with
religion as a fundamental mode of consciousness integral to the human spirit's orientation to the Absolute or with
the Absolute itself as the focus of religion's thrust.
We can take Kant's Religion innerhalb der Grenzen der blossen Vernunft of 1793 (Fichte's Kritik aller
Offenbarung had preceded it by one year) as symbolic of Hegel's dissatisfaction, which was to grow with the years.
Two expressions in Kant's title alone will provoke in Hegel a reaction which will develop into a "philosophy of
religion" which is at the same time a philosophy of God. "Within the limits" will signify to Hegel that, for Kant,
philosophical thinking is essentially "finite" and, therefore, incapable of coming to grips with an "infinite'' object;
and "mere (blossen) reason" will tell him that Kant's "reason" is not reason at all but only "understanding" trying to
stretch itself beyond its limited capacities. Kant, it is true, sees, as will Hegel, an identity of content in religious
consciousness and in philosophical thought, but that "identity of content" is vastly different from what Hegel will
ultimately take it to be. Not that Hegel will ever deny the close connection between religious truth and moral truth,
but he will consistently refuse to identify them, especially in the interests of permitting philosophical "reason" to
come to terms with religious truth. Like Hegel, Kant seeks to ground religion in reason, but, because for Kant this
means giving a rational foundation for a subjective religious response, he is under no compulsion to assign to
reason a task which, as an essentially finite human capacity, he is convinced it is not equipped to carry out. Reason
must remain silent in regard to God, the ultimate object of religious orientationexcept to the extent that "moral
reason" must "postulate" God as the guarantor of a happiness to which moral activity is ordered but which reason
alone "cannot demand." Better still, perhaps, Kant will recognize "postulates" as "demands of reason which need
not be met." Kant will appeal to reason to give an account of religious consciousness, but he is convinced from the
start that "mere" reason can give only a very limited account. In human affairsand religion is a human affairmoral
reason is supreme; it needs neither a superior being in order to know duty nor a superior motive in order to
accomplish it.6 It is unquestionably helpful to see in moral duty the "will of God," but there is no rational demand
that
6. Kant, Die Religion innerhalb der Grenzen der blossen Vernunft (Hamburg: Meiner, 1956), p. 3. Earlier
Herder (Schriften, ed. Walter Flemmer [Munich: Goldman, 1960], p. 143) had criticized Kant for
formulating a morality which for lack of adequate motivation resulted in no action: "It is easy to formulate
a law which is not followed, which without motives even cannot be followed."


Page 25
morality do this, even though there is a close parallel between morality's reverence for the moral law and religion's
reverence for God.
If morality recognizes in the sacredness of its law an object of greatest reverence, by the same token, on the
level of religion morality represents in the form of a supreme cause completing those laws an object of
adoration and thus becomes manifest in the majesty of this cause.7
It should be noted that morality, although it can be quite certain of the universal validity of its laws, can only
"represent to itself" a "supreme cause completing those laws"; it cannot say unequivocally that there is such a cause
or what this cause is. If there is a content to "supreme cause," it is supplied by religion, and reason has nothing to
say about that aspect of religion.
For Kant, religion is in principle subservient to morality. The only religious teaching which counts is moral
teaching, which religion helpfully sets forth as the "will of God."8 God is, so to speak, the personified idea of the
good principle,9 and religion consists in recognizing the demands of moral reason as divine commands,10 which is
not to say that religion is not right in doing this, only that religion is not "rationally" justified in doing this.
Religion (considered subjectively) is the recognition of all our duties as divine commands. The religion in
which I must know ahead of time that something is a divine command in order to recognize it as my duty is
revealed religion. . . ; on the other hand, the religion in which I must first know that something is duty
before I can recognize it as a divine command is natural religion.11
It is instructive that, although Kant does not explicitly identify God and universal moral will (as does Fichte, after
him), he nevertheless makes moral will the criterion for any rational approach to God. God is recognized, as it
were, as the "universal lawgiver" of a moral law which "mere reason" can infallibly know to be true without
knowing God. The authority of the law does not reside in its character as "divine" but in the intrinsic moral value
reason finds in it. At the same time, however, we do "sanctify'' moral duty by interpreting it as God's command,
and we honor God by observing
7. Ibid., p. 8.
8. Ibid., p. 10.
9. Ibid., p. 63.
10. Ibid., p. 92.
11. Ibid., p. 170. Since, fairly obviously, religion is for Kant significant to the extent that it shows the ends of
moral reason, its object, God can well be a postulate of reason, without being an object of reason.


Page 26
the duties dictated by reason, because we have interpreted them as God's commands;12 if they are dictates of moral
reason they do have a sanctity to them. It is important to note that the reason here in question is individual reason
(Kant's) universalized, that is, seen to be necessary.13 In the moral order, then, the "content" of religion and of
philosophical reason is identical, but that content is law, not God.
The only true religion contains nothing but laws, i.e., the sort of practical principles of whose unconditional
necessity we can be conscious and which we can, therefore, recognize as revealed through pure reason (not
empirically).14
The "Divinity" of Thought

This is the Kant Hegel read during his formative years (interpreted, perhaps, through the eyes of Fichte), and his
influence is recognizable in Theologische Jugendschriften, although even there Hegel's dissatisfaction has begun to
manifest itself. That dissatisfaction comes to a head in the Phenomenology, where Hegel is striking out on
uncharted waters. Here, Hegel effectively dissociates himself from the "rationalism" of the Enlightenment, whose
criterion of rationality was, he thought, primarily negative; namely, opposition to authority of any kind, particularly
religious. He also distances himself from the "critical philosophy" of Kant and Fichte, for whom the absolute
rationality of the moral order bespeaks no direct connection between human and divine reason, but only the need
the mind has to "represent" to itself a God whom nonrational religion supplies. What Hegel has doneand, it would
seem, quite consciouslyis to insert his own thinking into the tradition of Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus, Anselm, and
Spinoza, all of whom saw human rational thinking as somehow divine and oriented to the divine. Thought reveals
itself as infinite activity, and infinite activity is seen to be activity of the infinite. This is not the place to unravel
the intricacies of the development through which "spirit" goes in coming to a realization of its own infinity, nor,
perhaps would it be possible to do so, if we did not have Science of Logic to use as a guide in interpreting the
Phenomenology (which in his preface to the former Hegel authorizes us to do). One thing, however, is clear from a
reading of the Phenomenology without appeal to later works for clarification: on the subjective side moral reason is
not, for Hegel, the ultimate in rationality, since "absolute knowing,'' through the mediation of religious
consciousness, transcends moral reason; on the objective side, "moral law" is the ultimate content neither of
religion nor of philosophy, but rather "ab-
12. Ibid., p. 114.
13. Ibid., p. 143.
14. Ibid., p. 187.


Page 27
solute Spirit" is. Whether or not those who assert that there is no justification for the claim that Hegel equates
"absolute Spirit" and "God" have validated their own claim will be the subject of the rest of this study. On the face
of it, Hegel's statement, in as unlikely a place as Philosophy of Right, that the "content" of ''philosophy" is "the
comprehensive knowledge of God and [thus] of physical and spiritual nature" (GPR, p. 12) would seem to demand
serious consideration. On the other hand, it should be too obvious to need textual demonstration that religious
consciousness is consciousness of God, not consciousness of moral lawor whatever elsewhich permits the human
mind to "represent" to itself a "supreme lawgiver," who, if there be such, adds a "sacredness" we do not really
need.
God is self-consciousness; he knows himself in a consciousness which is distinct from him, which is
implicitly the consciousness of God, but is also this explicitly, since it knows its identity with God, an
identity which is, however, mediated by the negation of finitude. It is this concept which constitutes the
content of religion. This is what God is: to distinguish himself from himself, to be object to himself, and
yet in this distinction to be simply identical with himselfto be Spirit. [VPR II, p. 187]
Whether the "God" of religion and the "God" of philosophy are one and the same may still remain to be seen, but,
once again, on the face of it Hegel would seem to give abundant evidence that this is precisely what he is saying:
The God whom human self-consciousness implicitly knows in religion is one and the same God that human self-
consciousness (infinitized) knows philosophically.
Religion, then, is itself the standpoint of the consciousness of the True, which is in and for itself; and it is
consequently the stage of spirit at which the speculative content as such is object for consciousness.
Religion is not consciousness of this or that truth in individual objects, but of the absolute truth, of truth as
the universal, the all-comprehending, outside of which there lies nothing at all. The content of religious
consciousness is further the universally True, which exists in and for itself, which determines itself, and is
not determined from without. . . . It is this speculative element which comes to consciousness in religion.
[VPR I, pp. 3031]15
Nor does he confine statements such as this to his explicit treatment of the philosophy of religion: philosophy as
such and religion as such have one and the same objective, that is, truth, absolute truth, God.
15. It scarcely seems open to dispute that "speculative content" is the "absolutely true" to which the entire
elaboration of Science of Logic is oriented.


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First of all, it is true, philosophy has in common with religion that their objects (Gegenstände) are the same.
Both have the truth as their object, and that in the highest sensei.e., that God and God alone is the truth. In
addition both treat the sphere of the finite, nature and human spirit, their relation to each other, and the
relation of both to God as their truth. [EpW, no. 1]
Although, then, Hegel in no way denies the close connection between religion and morality, he has come a long
way from the Kantian position that religion stands in the service of morality. Nor did Hegel adopt the diametrically
opposed position that morality is subservient to religionhe was careful in all matters to avoid either-or options. In a
very significant sense he continued to agree with Kant that the moral roots of religious consciousness were not to
be ignored.
True religion, or religiousness, arises only out of morality; it is thinking morality, i.e., a morality becoming
conscious of the free universality of its concrete essence. Only from the standpoint of morality are we
conscious of God as free spirit. It is vain, then, to look for true religion or religiousness apart from the
moral spirit. [Ibid., no. 552]
The point of all this, however, is to insist that what is important for the human spirit is to be in the service of truth,
which it is in philosophy, and that by serving the truth it is serving God.
In a text which highlights the intimate relation not only of religion and philosophy but also of art to the highest
truth, to God, Hegel makes his point very clear.
By occupying itself with the true as the absolute object (Gegenstand) of consciousness, then, art too
belongs to the absolute sphere of spirit and, therefore, from the point of view of its content, along with
religion . . . and philosophy, art stands on the same ground. For philosophy, too, has no other object but
God and is, thus, essentially rational theology, and because it is in the service of truth, it is enduring service
of God. [VA 1, p. 139]16
But, Hegel is not saying, along with Kant, that moral reasoning comes first and is "absolute," finding only a kind
of "sacralizing" prop in the religious "representation" of God. What he is saying is that "truth" comes first, that
''absolute truth" is God, and that to seek truth, whether morally (in the realm of "objective spirit") or artistically,
religously, and philosophically (in the realm of "absolute Spirit") is to seek God.
If, then, we say that philosophy ("speculative thinking") and religion
16. The German term Hegel uses is Gottesdienst, which translates the Latin liturgia, Greek leiturigia *, and
could be rendered in English by "liturgy."


Page 29
("religious consciousness") have the same content but in a different form, just what are we saying? Perhaps we can
get at the meaning of what we are saying by first turning to two levels of enquiry which do not have the same
contentempirical science and philosophy. We have just seen that, for Hegel, the content of philosophy is the
"comprehensive knowledge of God and [thus] of physical and spiritual nature." We have also seen that both
philosophy and religion have the same "objects" (Gegenstände) in common, "truth . . . in the highest sense, [which
is] God,'' and both treat finite reality, that is, "nature and the human spirit." To say, however, that religion and
philosophy "treat" (handeln) nature and finite spirit is not to say that as "objects" (Gegenstände) they come under
the "content" of philosophy; only their "truth" does, and truth is fully true only as "absolute truth," or as related to
"absolute truth." Thus, for Hegel, there is a "philosophy of nature" and a "philosophy of spirit" (subjective and
objective), but the "content" of such philosophy is not the same as that of "empirical science," even though the
latter shares with philosophy "the formal aspect of thinking," the "universal in experience" (EGP, p. 158). In
"science," then, we can have a "content" which is "empirical" and a "form" which is "philosophical"; whereas in
philosophy both "content" and "form" belong to thought and to thought alone.
From this diversity of content and identity of form we can now turn once more to the identity of content and
diversity of form in religion and philosophy. If it is true to say that short of a "comprehensive knowledge" of
"absolute truth," philosophical thinking has not attained to "knowledge of truth" at all, then it is also true to say that
only "absolute truth" can be the adequate "content" of philosophy. But "God and God alone is the truth," and, thus
"philosophy, too, has no other object but God." Are we correct then, in claiming that when Hegel says "religion" is
"consciousness . . . of the absolute truth" or that "it is this speculative content which comes to consciousness in
religion," he is saying that the "truth," which is "God and God alone," is one and the same in philosophy and
religion? The conclusion, it would seem, is difficult to avoid, unless one wishes to say that Hegel has two different
meanings for the term "God," and that is difficult to prove.
What, then, of "form"? The "form" of thinking of which God is the "content" in religion, Hegel says, is not the
"form" of thinking of which God is the "content" in philosophy. What does this mean? Minimally it would seem to
have to mean that, although the "God" of whom each thinks is the same (there is only one God), the way in which
each thinks of God is different. For some, of course, this can mean nothing more than that "belief" (faith) and
"knowledge" (reason) are not the same. In view, however, of Hegel's ongoing controversy with the "theologians"
of his day, which begins to take definitive shape as early as 1802 in Glauben und


Page 30
Wissen, it is imperative to see in the distinction of "form" both more and less than did those "theologians." It is
necessary to see more, because it is not sufficient to be content either with the ''Enlightenment's" simplistic
conception of "reason" or with "Pietism's" simplistic view of "faith"17 (see PdG, pp. 385407); and less, because at
the hands of Kant, Fichte, Jacobi, and Schleiermacher, the distinction tends to be seen in terms of a dichotomy
rather than a continuity. If knowledge is interpreted as a function of subjective thinking and faith as a function of
subjective feeling, intuition, or what have you, the likelihood that either the distinction or the continuity will ever
be grasped in their truth is slim indeed.
What it comes down to, Hegel tells us, is the prejudice, inherited from the Enlightenment (aided and abetted by
Pietism) that philosophy is supremely rational (the "reason" of the "philosopher") and that faith is simply
nonrational (if not irrational). Hegel has many pungent things to say about this prejudice, particularly in his
critique of the Enlightenment in the Phenomenology and other works, in his abundant criticisms of
Kant18particularly of the latter's attitude expressed succinctly in the statement, "I had to suspend (aufheben)
knowledge in order to make room for faith"19and in scattered remarks about the "modern theologians" who want
to confine the approach to God to "immediate" feelings or intuition. The issue is highlighted in Hegel's Introduction
in Vorlesungen über die Geschichte der Philosophie, wherein he is trying to characterize philosophy in such a way
as to justify saying that it has a "history." He tells us that philosophy is the highest form in which spirit reveals
itself at any time or place (EGP, pp. 3839). To say that it is the "highest form," however, is not to say that it is the
"only" form. There are also nonphilosophical ways in which the "absolute idea" (spirit) can be present in thought,
and these are art and religion"the way in which the supreme idea is present for nonphilosophical consciousness, for
sensitive, intuitive, representational consciousness" (ibid., p. 42) (hence, "art" and "religion" as integral to the
"philosophy of absolute Spirit" in the Encyclopedia; hence Vorlesungen über die Aesthetik and Vorlesungen über
die Philosophie der Religion). It would be a mistake, however, to look upon this nonphilosophical presence as
nonrational; it is not totally spiritualsince only "pure" thought is thatbut it is eminently rationalso long as it is
oriented to and continuous with the supremely spiritual form. As we shall see later (chap. 5,
17. What comes out in these pages of the Phenomenology is the view that Enlightenment and Pietism are
but two sides of the same coin. Insisting on its own "reason" the former is merely negating the naiveté of
pietistic "belief," and the latter is taking Enlightenment "reason" far too seriously.
18. For a more extended study of these criticisms, see Quentin Lauer, S.J., "Hegel's Critique of Kant's
Theology," in God Knowable and Unknowable, ed. Robert J. Roth, S.J. (New York: Fordham University Press,
1973), pp. 85105.
19. Kant, KrV B., P. xxx.


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"Proofs of God"), a content can be supremely "rational" without having been discovered by subjectively rational
thinking.
(It has been remarked above that, like philosophy, so too religion must first of all be comprehended, i.e., it
must be recognized and acknowledged as rational.) For religion is the work of self-revealing reason, its
supreme, most rational work. Those are but absurd notions according to which priests out of self-serving
deceit have simply manufactured a religion . . . . Rather, this region of the spirit is the sanctuary in which
the remaining deception of the sense-world, of finite representations and goals, the region of opinion and
arbitrariness, has been dissolved. [Ibid, p. 43]
There is much in the above quotation which will have to await the next chapter for its explication. One thing,
however, is clear: That the truth as presented in art and religion is not the conclusion of "subjectively rational
argumentation" (Räsonnieren) is no indication that the truth of it is nonrational. Its presence in the mind is the
result of rational activity, which is not synonymous with "logical argument" nor with merely subjective thinking.
What makes the content of consciousness "rational'' is not the rationality of the procedure whereby the truth was
arrived atwhich does not mean that rational procedure should be ignored or abandonedbut the internal rationality of
the content. In fact, the procedure in question will be authentically rational only if it accords with the inherent
rationality of its object; no "reasoning" at all can make the claim for itself of being rational, if the conclusion at
which it arrives is not rational. For the purposes of an exercise in formal logic, perhaps, one can by a perfectly
correct procedure arrive at a nonsensical conclusion, but that is merely the game of reasoningwhich has but little to
do with "reason."
The Rationality of the Religious

Hegel, however, is saying a great deal more than that. He is saying that, if reason characterizes the human, then
reason sets its mark on whatever is specifically human, be it thought, intuition, emotion, or "representation." This
does not mean that whatever is the object of intuition, feeling, representation is eo ipso rational and true; it does
mean that to the extent that the object of consciousness is not rational, not true, to that same extent the
consciousness is not authentically human. One is not being authentically human if one's intuitions or feelings come
up with what is irrational. By the same token, however, if what intuition comes up with is a truly rational content,
reason has not been absent from the "thinking" in question. There is an affinity in man for what is rational:
"Whatever is human, rational, finds an echo in us, in our feeling, emotion, heart, in our subjectivity in


Page 32
general" (EGP, p. 48). "Universal reason"which, for Hegel, is not individual subjective reason abstractly
universalizedreveals itself best in human reason properly so called, but it is not limited to that manifestation. We
might put it this way: If the content of an affirmation is true, it is rational; the subjective process of arriving at the
affirmation may not be rational, but this does not take away from the rationality of the contentnor of the human
response to it. Concretely this is saying that if God, absolute truth, absolute Spirit, is objectively supremely
rational, then, even if the affirmation of that truth is not itself a supremely rational activity, as it is not in art or
religion, still it is the affirmation of what is rational and, as such, partakes of the rationality of its content. In no
way does this mean that as human beings we should be satisfied with a procedure which is less than rational in
coming to grips with inherently rational objectivityin fact it is the function of philosophical thinking to transform
thought which is inadequately rational in form into adequately rational thoughtbut it does help us to understand
what Hegel means when he says that the presence of truth to the mind is rational; it is rational that the mind should
think what is objectively rational. As we shall see, "speculative thinking" is the adequately rational procedure
which has "speculative truth" (the rational) as its "content," but this does not mean that as the subjective thinking
of any individual philosopher it discovers ultimate rational truth. This truth can be discovered (made manifest) to
thought at a level of less than total rationality and then be ''transformed (speculatively, "spiritually") into the
rational form proper to it. (See chap. 7, "Philosophy and Theology.")
It is here that the distinction between "immediate" and "mediated" becomes important. Basically "immediate" refers
to that which is "given" in consciousness without the intervention of transforming"mediating"thought. It is the
"immediacy" of which Hegel speaks in the first chapter of the Phenomenology in reference to "sense certainty"; it
is the "immediacy" of the first content of thought, that is, "being," in Science of Logic. That no consciousness or
content of consciousness is "absolutely" immediate, since both immediate consciousness and its immediate content
are seen to be "mediated," if by nothing else, by each other, is of no great consequence here. What is important is
that no relatively "immediate given," whether empirical "data" or the object of faith "given" in revelation, can
remain simply as "given" but must be mediated by the hard labor of rational thinking in order that it may reveal its
own inherent rationality. What is characteristic of "knowing" in the truly "spiritual" sense is that it is in no way
"immediate," not even relatively (VGP II, p. 494).
The distinction between "immediate" and "mediated" becomes particularly important for Hegel when he comes to
the question of "knowing" God, the God in whom religion "believes," the only "God" of whom it will


Page 33
make any sense to speak of as being "known," since, when the nonactual is known, it is not in truth known. The
problem of human mind as "finite" capacity coming to grips with God as ''infinite Being" is not, of course, one
which became crucial only with the advent of Kant. It is a problem which worried Saint Augustine and the
medieval Scholastics, notably Saint Anselm and Saint Thomas Aquinas. It is to be noted, however, that in seeking a
solution to the problem, each of these men, "theologians" though they were, manifested a greater confidence in
human reason than did Kant, or, for that matter, the Enlightenment "rationalists," for all of whom a rational
knowledge" of God was simply out of the question. What saved the medieval thinkers, perhaps, was their faith in
reason, which issued in the confidence that "faith" could "seek understanding" and could bring reason to bear on
the questions not only of whether God is but also of what God ishowever limited they may have thought the
answer to the second question would be and however close they tied their answer to what "divine revelation" and
the "teaching" of the church had already made known. Given the influence of Kant, however, Hegel had a rather
different problem to face: not only that of vindicating the capacity of reason to know God but also that of
counteracting the opposite convictiona reactionthat God could indeed be known, but only "immediately," either in
the sense that scripture tells us all we need to know or that "feeling" or "intuition" were adequate to the task which
thought could not accomplish. "Through Kantian and Jacobian philosophy the public was strengthened in its
conviction that knowledge of God is immediate, that one knows right off the bat (von Haus aus), without having to
study" (VGP III, p. 414). That this sort of "immediate" knowledge told the "public" no more than "that" God is,
leaving the name "God" to stand for an indeterminate "I-know-not-what" seems to have caused little disturbance
either among the pious or among the "Deists."
Finally, immediate consciousness of God is supposed to go no further than telling us that God is, not what
God is; for the latter would be an act of cognition, demanding mediated knowing. Thus God as immediate
object of religion is expressly limited to God in general, to the indeterminate supra-sensible, and religion is,
as far as its content is concerned, reduced to a minimum.
If it were really necessary to accomplish only so much that the belief, there is a God, would still be
retained, or perhaps, that such a belief should come to be, then one could only wonder at the poverty of an
era which lets the merest pittance of religious knowledge count as a gain and has had in its church to seek
refuge at the altar which long ago stood in Athens, the altar dedicated to the unknown god. [EpW, no. 73]
What is gradually coming to the fore here is Hegel's unshakable convic-


Page 34
tionprephilosophical rather than philosophical in characterthat the "content" of religion, that is, what is believed,
particularly in the Christian religion, which he calls "absolute religion," is "rational" and, therefore, suited to a
human mind attuned to rationality. What is rational, however, must also be developed rationally, and this
development, too, is characteristic of Christian religion; its beliefs cannot simply stand still but must unfold.
Because Christian religious consciousness is in principle knowing (Erkenntnis), it develops its content; for
its ideas (Vorstellungen) regarding its overall object (Gegenstand) are given to it as in themselves thoughts,
and as thoughts they must expand. [VPR I, p. 26]20
As products of "thought," Vorstellungen here stand somewhere between mere acceptance of what is given and
conceptual comprehension.
On the other hand, because the content belongs essentially to representation, it is thus distinguished from
immediate opinion (Meinung) or intuition and pierces right through the distinction. In short, over-against
subjectivity the content counts as absolute, as being in and for itself. [Ibid]
Merely as religious consciousness, then, Christianity is not a "knowing" in the full sense (Wissen), but it involves a
movement away from immediate acceptance toward "knowing."
Christian religion, therefore, of itself touches on the opposition between feeling or immediate intuition and
reflection or knowing. [Ibid., pp. 2627]
What it comes down to is that what Christians believe has a thought-ful content; it is something for the mind, not
simply for feeling. Here we come, willy nilly, on the distinction between "representation" (Vorstellung) and
"concept" (Begriff), which will be of utmost importance not only for the distinction between philosophy and
religion but also for their relation to each other. Scholars have always had difficulty translating the term
Vorstellung, particularly as Hegel uses it. It should be obvious from what has gone before that the term cannot be
translated by "image"; it belongs too clearly to the realm of thought and not to that of sensibility or imagination
(unless, of course, the meaning of the latter term is broadened considerably). It is not totally incorrect to translate
Vorstellung as "image thinking," but in this the stress on ''image" would seem to be too strong,
20. The "in themselves" (an sich) here is important: as thoughts only an sich, Vorstellungen, have a true
content only implicitly; the content must developexpand.


Page 35
unless, of course, we can think of a "spiritual" image (see WG, pp. 134, 172). "Representation" is, perhaps, not the
best possible translation, but it has two advantages: (1) it captures the nuance of the ''notion" which finite mind
"forms" for itself in "representing" its object to itself; and (2) as Hegel himself observes,21 it conveys the
additional meaning of "standing for" (stellvertretend or repräsentierend) the object which is not yet totally
"spiritually" present to the mind. When the Christian, then, hears the "word of God"be it in scripture, Church
teaching, or preachinghe forms for himself Vorstellungen which he must "think through" in order to arrive at
Begriffe which are only implicitly present in the Vorstellungen. That Hegel's "representation" has not yet totally
freed itself from sensible "image-content" is clear enough, but it leans, so to speak, more in the direction of
"concept" than of "image." It has to be noted, of course, that Vorstellung covers a gamut of meanings, ranging from
almost image to almost pure thought (e.g., "notion," "idea"). When Hegel says, then, that the "content" of religion
and philosophy is the "same," but that the "form" is different (in the former the form is "representation," which is
not adequate to the content, while in the latter the form is "concept," which is adequate to the content) we must use
utmost caution in interpreting him. What adds to the difficulty is that although Hegel's more constant distinction is
that between Vorstellung and Begriff, sometimes he distinguishes between Vorstellen and Denken, even though, as
in the above quotation, he also says that Vorstellung belongs to the realm of Gedanke. We must interpret this: As I
see it, his meaning is that Gedanke may be either in the form of Vorstellung or Begriff, but only the latter is the
form of Denken in the fullest and most precise sense of that term.
In any event, what Hegel is trying to do is clear enough. Having disposed of the contention that, because human
"knowing" is essentially finite, its object too must be essentially finite, he sets up a distinction which will make his
denial of that contention intelligible. As the activity of an essentially finite subject human thinking is essentially
finite, and the form in which its "thoughts" (Gedanken) are cast is that of "representation," which is simply not
adequate to an infinite object. This is human "thinking" (Denken) in its role as "understanding" (Verstand), and it
is adequate only to "abstract" objects. As the activity of "spirit" which is neither merely human nor merely finite,
"thinking" (Denken) in its role as "reason" (Vernunft) is adequate to its object as "concrete" (totalized). The
"thoughts" (Gedanken) of the human "spirit," however, need not remain at the level of "representation": they can
be raised to the level of "concept" (Begriff), and when they are they partake of the all-embracing universality of
"thinking" (Denken)
21. See PdG, p. 216.


Page 36
whose form is "concept in-and-for-itself" (Begriff an-und-für-sich). The object of this "conceptual thinking" is
''infinite." All of this will have to await chapters 2 and 4 for further elucidation.
Knowing and Believing

If nothing else, what has been said here should alert us to the nuances of meaning contained in Hegel's statement
that "the more highly cultivated consciousness" cannot be satisfied with religious thinking of its object, because
only when "thinking" is "knowing" is the mind satisfied. This Aufhebung of the "form" of religious thinking is
neither the "cancellation" of religion nor its "downgrading"; it is its "completion" and "justification" as
authentically human. There is no question in Hegel's mind that religious Vorstellungen, derived as they can be from
a variety of sources, can and do contain truth. Only, however, when they have been adequately "thought out" can
they satisfy the educated mind, which is not to say that the "educated mind" can then discard them.22
Philosophy, then, has the same purpose and content as religion, only as thinking, not as representation. The
form (Gestalt) of religion, therefore, does not satisfy the more highly cultivated consciousness, which must
want to know, to transcend (aufheben) the form (Form) of religion, but only in order to justify its content.
This, then, not the historical, the scholarly, the extrinsic, is the true justification. The eternal does not have
its grounding in the temporal, in facts, etc. What does that is the testimony of spirit. [BS, p. 15]
What this is saying is that philosophy is itself a form of religion, the highest formGottesdienst (see above, p. 14
and note 16) and that to comprehend God in "systematic thinking" is religious activity"worship" in purest
"interiority."
For religion, in which God is for consciousness initially an external objectbecause we must first be taught
what God is and how he has revealed
22. Authentic religious representation has a content which is supremely rational. In characteristically
empathic fashion Emil Fackenheim interprets Hegel as authentically Christian in his approach. "In the
above brief account, one decisive characteristic is not mentionedthat religious representation moves toward,
but fails to reach, the universality of speculative thought. . . . We may presently only say, negatively, that
the thought in question is not finite reflection and that it does not expose religious representation as mere
human projection and illusion as it reflects on it. Careless readers have always mistaken it for such a
reflection, and they have therefore viewed Hegel as a demythologizing enemy of religious faith. In fact,
however, Hegel regards a thought of this kind as inferior to religious representation and declares himself to
be in alliance with Christianity or Theology against it (e.g., Werke XI, pp. 28 ff.; XII, pp. 350 ff.)." E.
Fackenheim, The Religious Dimension in Hegel's Thought (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1967),
p. 155.


Page 37
himself and still doesoccupies itself, it is true, with the interior, moves and inspires the community. Still the
interiority of devotion limited to emotion and representation is not the highest form of interiority. It is self-
determining (freies) thinking which has to be recognized as this purest form of knowing. It is in this that
science brings the same content to consciousness and thus becomes that spiritual worship which, by
systematic thinking appropriates and comprehends what is otherwise only the content of subjective
sentiment or representation. [V A I, p. 143]
This "scientific" comprehension of the truth contained in religious Vorstellungen is no less profoundly religious
than is religious consciousness in its representational form.
When Hegel says, then, that the religious form of consciousness is not satisfactory for the "more highly cultivated
consciousness"by which he clearly means highly educated modern manhe is evidently talking about "religion" in
the way he has described it in the seventh chapter of the Phenomenology and in his Lectures on the Philosophy of
Religion; that is, as a consciousness of the divine dependent on a "revelation," whether that be contained in created
nature, art, the word of the Bible, or the incarnate Word of Christianity. This revelation has a ''content," and
"religious consciousness" expresses that content in the form of "representation," which the religious mind employs
to translate the revelation into products of the human mind in "seeking" to "understand" it. This may or may not be
what others mean by religion; it is certainly not what medieval theologians like Anselm and Aquinas meant by
"faith seeking understanding," which was not so much man looking for "representations" to interpret the content of
faith as it was faith itself seeking a "rational understanding" of itselfthe "rational understanding" being part and
parcel of the "faith" in question. It is significant in this connection that, when Hegel composed his Lectures on
Proofs of God's Reality, he conceived them as an extension, not of his philosophy of religion but of his logic,23
and that his most extensive treatment of the "ontological argument," which he considers to be the most valid, is
contained in his Science of Logic (see chap. 5). If, however, we consider all he has to say about the "religious"
character of philosophy itself and about the confidence in reason manifested by the medieval theologians, we may
find that he is not so far from them after all. That he distances himself, on the other hand, quite definitively from
the "theologians" who are his own contemporaries is abundantly clear. These "modern theologians" (presumably
under the influence of the Enlightenment) do what the "Scholastics" never dreamt of doing; they make "faith"
23. See chapter 5, " 'Proofs' of God," pp. 211212. It might be well to note here that it was not Hegel but his
editors, who appended Vorlesungen über die Beweise vom Dasein Gottes to Vorlesungen über die
Philosophie der Religion.


Page 38
and "knowledge" discontinuous, and in so doing they either surrender faith to "feeling and intuition" or they
degrade knowledge to the level of abstract "understanding" by means of "representations" which simply do not do
justice to the content of faithabove all to Hegel's Lutheran faith which rests on the "interior testimony of the
Spirit.''24
The time has come, then, to get back to that "interior testimony of the Spirit." It is a traditional commonplace that
God reveals himself in nature, either because the very existence of a nature which cannot account for itself cries
out for an infinite "first cause" which does account for nature's finite existence (cosmological proof), or because
the rationality manifested in the nature we observe bespeaks a supremely intelligent cause of that nature
(physicotheological proof). In Hegel's view, however, God does not manifest himself to man primarily in "nature"
but in the activity of the human spirit; it is the human spirit, after all, which makes nature the mirror of God (EGP,
p. 201). What is more, God also reveals himself preeminently in the symbols of religion, which, again, are man-
made but not arbitrary; they are the human spirit's way of permitting God to come into human consciousness (ibid.,
pp. 5557). The point is that in religion (or religions) men have expressed the consciousness they actually have of
the supreme being, and no matter how subjective the form of expressing may be, the expressing itself is a function
of reason, since what is expressed is supremely rational (ibid., p. 168). Now, although supremely rational truth is
"contained" in religious consciousness, its presence is a "given" which religion as such cannot verify; only the
process of "thought" can (ibid., pp. 17374). When the divine Spirit is present to the human spirit in thought, the
divine is present in the medium proper to itself and not merely in a "representation" standing for it, and it is for this
reason that only philosophy "knows" God, who manifests himself to the human in that activity which is most
proper to spirit.
The difference between individual and universal spirit, then, should be expressed thus: the subjective,
individual spirit is25 the universal, divine Spirit to the extent that the former is rationally conscious of the
latter, to the extent that the latter manifests itself in each subject, each man. Thus, the spirit which is
rationally conscious of absolute Spirit is subjective spirit. [Ibid., p. 176]
It would be a mistake, however, to conclude from this that philosophical "knowing" can dispense with "religious
consciousness." In fact, the very
24. What Hegel has to say in the final section ("The Religion of Revelation") in the seventh chapter of PdG
and in "Absolute Religion," the culmination of VPR, makes this abundantly clear.
25.The difficulty of integrating Hegel's use of the copula "is" is admirably illustrated here. In this citation only
this "is" clearly connotes orientation, movement to; for the rest he employs "is" as the simple prepositional
copula.


Page 39
logic of the situation precludes this; de facto not every individual human being, not even every philosopher, knows
God. The human spirit needs the revelation "given" in religion in order to be able by its own activity to think the
revealed content through. There is even a sort of parallel to this in man's knowledge of "nature." The "thinking
through" which is the "knowing'' of nature is entirely man's "spiritual" activity, but that nature be "given" in sense
perception is a precondition for the spiritual activity.26
That, for Hegel, philosophy in this sense "needs" religion is eloquently expressed by Emil Fackenheim:
It is a central Hegelian doctrine that the true religion already is the true "content," lacking merely the true
"form" of speculative thought; that philosophy could not reach truth unless its true content pre-existed in
religion; that philosophic thought therefore requires religion as its basis in life, and that the true philosophy,
in giving the true religious content its true form of thought, both transfigures religion and produces itself.27
Thus, when Hegel tells us that religion and philosophy have the same content, he really intends to tell us more
about philosophy than about religion. What he intends to tell us is that, in the concreteness of "life," it is only when
philosophical thinking passes beyond its empirical beginnings to that which is its inescapable objectfreedom, spirit,
Godis it authentically philosophical thinking.
At the present time religion has more and more contracted its cultivated expansion of its content and
retreated into the intensity of piety or of feeling, frequently indeed a feeling which manifests a thin and
scanty content. As long as religion has a creed, a doctrine, a system of dogma, it has that with which
philosophy can occupy itself, thus uniting itself in this with religion. This, however, is not to be understood
in the bad, separatist sense, which restricts contemporary religiousness, making it interpret both religion and
philosophy in such a way that they are mutually exclusive, so separated that unity can only be imposed
from without. Rather what is also implied in what we have already seen is that religion may well exist
without philosophy, but not philosophy without religion; philosophy includes religion. [EpW., pref. to 2nd
ed. 1827, p, 12, Meiner]
In the words of Henry Harris, Hegel's mature system of philosophy "grows out of what was called 'religion'
before."28
26. Obviously one should not push the parallel too far; neither is the mode of "givenness" the same, nor is
the "inner testimony" of "Spirit" operative other than, perhaps, obliquely in coming to grips conceptually
with nature.
27. Fackenheim, Religious Dimension, p. 23. Note the point made that it is in "life," not in the abstract, that
philosophy needs religion.
28. H. S. Harris. Hegel's Development (Oxford: Clarendon, 1971), p. 391.


Page 40
In the concreteness of life, then, Hegel would say, "belief" comes before "knowledge," religious belief before
''speculative" philosophy. But the mind cannot stand still; it must go on to a "knowing" of what it initially
"believes." This it can do, however, only if it goes beyond a Kantian philosophy of "understanding" which, in fact
"has placed God beyond knowing as indeterminate, without predicates, without properties" (BS, p. 70).
This philosophy has given to this kind of understanding a correct consciousness of itself, namely that it is
incapable of knowing truth. But, because it has viewed mind as nothing but such an understanding, it has
come up with the universal propositionas though apart from God there could be absolute objects or a truth
at allthat man can know nothing of God or of anything which is in itself. [Ibid.]29
Whether or not the criticism of Kant is justified, the words tell us clearly enough what Hegel's own position was.
One wonders how in the light of texts such as those we have just seen, and they could be multiplied, Richard
Schacht can say, "This self-realizing 'system' is the essential nature of the whole of reality and of the only God
Hegel recognizes."30 The point that Hegel is constantly making is the one he makes in the introduciton to Science
of Logic that the only possible starting point for philosophizing is "God as he is in his eternal being before the
creation of the world or of a single finite spirit" (WL I, p. 31). If one's own "logic" tells one that this cannot be,
then one is forced, I suppose, to say that, "the only God Hegel recognizes" is not the God of transcendent faith. In
criticizing Kant and Fichte, however, what Hegel is actually saying is that, if philosophy cannot "know" God, then
neither can faith know what it "believes" (GW, pp. 1314), "since the religious mode of representation does not
make use of the critique of thought, it does not comprehend itself" (EpW, no. 573).
To speak in a very simplified way (which will be remedied in the next chapter), thinking in general begins in sense
experience with what is "immediately given." The thinking subject then "reflects" on its experience and forms
"representations" which reproduce experience in the form of abstract generalities. Only when thinking, however,
reflects on its own reflection, thinking it through ("speculative thinking"), can it become "knowledge" in the strict
sense. Religious thinking, then, can be said to follow a parallel course. It begins with what is "immediately
given"be it written or spoken words, man-made images, or, perhaps, nature itselfas
29. As early as Differenz des Fichteschen und Schellingschen Systems der Philosophie Hegel has equally
harsh words to say of Fichte.
30. Richard Schacht, Hegel and After (Pittsburgh: University Press, 1975), p. 7; see pp. 6768, 127.


Page 41
the result of which it forms to itself "representations" of the "supreme Being." Here, Hegel says, religion runs the
risk of not passing on to the highest stage of thinking, either because it is satisfied with the "givens'' and the
"representations" they call up or because it is convinced that, where the "Absolute" is in question, there is no
"higher stage" to which it can go. In this, we might say, the person of simple faith who is not a "critical thinker"
has the advantage over the sophisticated "theologians" who are "critical thinkers"; the former is not satisfied with
"words," which do not say enough, nor with "representations" which are too abstract to say anything. Let the
"critical theologians" tell the common man what his religious thinking is; he is not likely to pay much attention.
When we Europeans say, "God is the supreme Being" this predicate is just as abstract and empty as is the
word "God," and the metaphysics of understanding which denies knowledge of God, i.e., knowing what
characterizes him, and demands that the notion (Vorstellung) of God be confined to this abstraction, is
destined to know nothing more of God than it does of what Brahm is. Despite this critical wisdom the
European notion will in general contain this: that in using the expression "supreme Being" and even more
the word "God," it has before it something concrete, God as Spirit, and that what the notion means is richer
and fuller than what it says. [BS, pp. 13839]
What the "critical mind" can be satisfied with the "religious heart" cannot: God must be a reality, not an
abstraction, not an indefinite object of whom content-full predicates cannot be said.
If the concept of God is viewed as that of abstract "most real Being," then God becomes for us a mere "out
there," and of that there can be no further talk of knowing, for where there is no qualification no knowledge
is possible. Pure light is pure darkness. [Ep W, no. 36, Zusatz]
Philosophy of God
Once again, Hegel may or may not be fair in his criticism of "critical philosophy," but it is significant that the
criticism flows from a philosophy of religion which is worlds apart from that, say, of Kant or Fichte. Hegel will
have none of a philosophy of religion which confines itself to an analysis of the subjective response to notions
which are not thought through and, hence, contain no knowledge. There is, in fact, a very significant sense in
which Hegel's philosophy of religion is not a philosophy of religion at allexcept, perhaps, in the Phenomenology,
where "Religion" is explicitly treated as a stage in the evolution of consciousness toward "absolute knowing."
Hegel's is rather a philosophy of God, that is, of religion's "object." In religion, God, "absolute truth," is present to
consciousness; it is


Page 42
philosophy's task to plumb the depths of that "absolute truth" and, in so doing, to discover what its own truth is.
What God is is for us who possess religion a familiar object, a content which is present in subjective
consciousness; but from the scientific point of view God is initially a general abstract name, which has as
yet received no true content. For only philosophy of religion is the development and knowledge of what
God is, and it is through this philosophy that we first experience in a knowing way what God is. God is this
very familiar (be-kannte) notion, but one which is not known (er-kannte) in the sense of being
scientifically developed. [VPR I, p. 92]
The content of religious consciousness, then, is rational, just as rational as is the content of speculative philosophy,
because it is one and the same content. Only because the content of religion is objectively rational can philosophy
"think" it, "know" it. Conversely, it can be said, if philosophy cannot think the content, then that content is not
rationalwhich, of course, is what Hegel's adversaries would saybut, if it is not rational, is the consciousness of it
adequately human? It is clear from his "Philosophy of Subjective Spirit" that Hegel does not completely discredit
the nonrational in human behavior, but in religion he will have none of itor, perhaps, he will lift what is nonrational
in it to rationality, and thus "revealed (geoffenbarten) religion becomes manifest (offenbare) religion."31 There are,
however, two ways in which one can say that God, "absolute truth,'' "absolute Spirit," is the object of reason. (1) It
can mean that human reason, functioning as reason, can come to a knowledge of God; or (2) it can mean that God,
as "absolute truth," "absolute Spirit," having in him absolutely no admixture of the sensible, being pure spiritual
activity, can be the object of reason only, because only reason is purely spiritual activity, having in it no admixture
of sense activity.32 It is quite obvious that one can make the statement, "God is the object of reason" in the second
sense without making it in the first sense; but it is doubtful that one can make the statement in the first sense
without making it in the second sense too. In any event, when he makes the statement in the first sense, Hegel quite
clearly intends both senses, precisely because he holds the statement in the second sense to be true. What it comes
down to is that "on God's part there can be no obstacle to a knowledge of him by men" (BDG, p. 48). God can
reveal himself to the human spirit; it would be a limitation
31. See PdG, pp. 52830. It would seem that one is thus justified in entitling the final section in the chapter
of the Phenomenology on "Religion" as "Revealed Religion," even though "die offenbare Religion" literally
means "manifest religion."
32. Quite obviously this means in addition that one's affirmation of God's reality is objectively rational, no
matter what the subjective source of the affirmation may be.


Page 43
to the purity of "absolute Spirit" if he could not. It bespeaks no limitation at all in God to say, "God cannot reveal
himself to nature, to the stone, to the plant, to the animal [it would be to assert a contradiction to say that he could]
because God is spirit." Spirit can reveal itself to spirit alone, because spirit alone can receive a communication
which has nothing of the sensible about it. God, therefore, "can reveal himself to man only, who thinks and is
spirit" (ibid., p. 49). If God cannot reveal himself to man, then, this inability must be due either to the inability of
the human spirit in its finitude to receive the revelationand this cuts out religion entirelyor "it is owing to human
caprice, to an affection of humility, or whatever you like to call it, that the finitude of knowledge, of the human
reason, is put in contrast to the divine knowledge and the divine reason, and that the limits of human reason are
asserted to be immovable and absolutely fixed'' (ibid.). It might, of course, be countered, as it was by Kant, Fichte,
Jacobi, and Schleiermacher, that God reveals himself to man but not to man's "reason," which might well provoke
the query, how can God reveal himself to man, if he does not do so through man's highest capacity? Hegel is not
about to deny that man cannot know God, if God does not reveal himself; what he does claim is that in revealing
himself it is to the human spirit, which is reason functioning at its highest pitch, that God communicates.
One is reminded in all this of the medieval disputes about the distinction between intellectus and ratio, in which
knowledge of God was assigned to intellectus but not to ratio. We must remember, however, that for the
Scholastics intellectus meant "intellectual intuition" and ratio meant "discursive thinking." For Hegel, Vernunft,
which is the equivalent of the Greek nonV *, combines "dialectically" both intellectus and ratio: intellectus without
ratio is what he calls "mere intuition," the intuition of Jacobi and Schleiermacher; ratio without intellectus is mere
Räsonnieren (ratiocination), the function of Verstand (understanding), not of Vernunft (reason).
Human Spirit as Divine Revelation

God's revelation, then, is not simply a communication to man of knowledge about God; it is self-revelation in the
sense that God communicates himself to man. This communication of himself to man is not contained primarily in
words (or signs or symbols) but in the human "spirit" which is the revelation of the divine in man, the presence of
the divine in man. Because even infinite Spirit can communicate himself only finitelyother than to himselfthe
human spirit is finite, but its link to the infinite makes it essentially oriented to the infinite, to "knowing" God.
Thus, God not only can reveal himself to man; he does reveal himself to manelse, God would, in fact, be "jealous."
To say that God as Spirit is


Page 44
present in man is to say that man's very finite existence is God's self-revelation to man.33
For what is here suggested is that God is not jealous, but, on the contrary, has revealed and is revealing
himself; and we have here the more definite thought that it is not the so-called human reason with its limits
which knows God, but the Spirit of God in man; it is, to use the speculative expression previously
employed, the self-consciousness of God which knows itself in the knowledge of man. [Ibid., p. 49]34
Whether this last statement raises the ugly specter of "pantheism" in Hegel's philosophy can await discussion in
chapter 6. For the present, no more need be said than that it throws added light on those mysterious words with
which Hegel ends Phenomenology of Spirit.
The goal, absolute knowing, or spirit knowing itself as spirit, has as the road it has traveled the memory
(Er-innerung) of multiple spirits, as they are in themselves and as they bring to completion the organization
of their realm. Their retention from the point of view of their self-determining existence appearing in the
form of contingency is history; from the point of view of their comprehended organization, on the other
hand, it is the science of knowing as it appears; both together, as comprehended history, constitute the
memorial and the calvary of absolute Spirit. The actuality, truth, and certainty of his throne, without which
he would have been the lifeless solitary; only from the chalice of this realm of spirits foams forth to him
his infinity. [PdG, p. 564]35
Looking back now, we can begin to understand what Hegel means by the "necessity" of the rational, its necessary
objectivity, which makes sense only if it is rooted in the all-embracing necessity of "absolute truth" and which, thus
rooted, makes sense of Hegel's talk about the objective necessity of logical truth, moral truth, and religious truth.
There is no truth, not even "absolute truth," which is not "rational,'' the object of "reason."
Man is in himself the purpose of his own being, only in virtue of the divine that is in him, of that which was
designated from the outset as reason, which in view of its activity and power of self-determination was
called freedom. And we affirmwithout at present being able to enter into the proof of the asser-
33. As we shall see in chapter 7, "Philosophy and Theology," Hegel sees in "creation" a relation internal to
God, not a transient activity external to him. Hence the creation of finite human spirit is God's self-
manifestation to finite human spirit.
34. It should be emphasized that in calling this a "speculative expression" Hegel is serving notice on those who
confine themselves to interpretinig the expression in terms of "understanding," which cannot but find it
contradictory, that they must "think it through" rationally.
35. As Hegel sees it an infinite God who would not create would be one who condemns himself to an empty
life of solitary splendor.


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tionthat religiousness, morality, etc., have their foundation and source in that principle in man and so are
essentially elevated above all extrinsic necessity and chance. [Ibid., p. 50]
Hidden beneath much of what Hegel has to say about God or "absolute Spirit," both in his positive assertions
regarding God's knowability and in his opposition to those of his contemporaries who deny that knowability, is his
desire to make sense out of what today is called "language about God," or simply, "God-language." There can be
no question that "God-language" is tricky, that philosophers should be cautious not to be misled by it, and that, to
an extent at least, thinkers like Spinoza, Lessing, and Hegel took great pains to ''demythologize" that language. The
question, however, is not whether Hegel was trying to "demythologize" the language but whether, in doing so, he
was trying to rob it of all cognitive value. If he was trying to do the latter, one is forced to wonder if he was not
guilty of "over-kill." The language he employs is certainly not the most convenient language for a philosophereven
for one who had to be cautious of Prussian state censors, nor is it, if intended to be metaphorical, free of
numberless ambiguities. Nevertheless, even taken at face value, it makes eminent good sense. It might make sense
for a philosopher to say that philosophers should not talk about God, because it is beyond philosophy's competence
to do soKant and Fichte, after all, were not nonsensical. It might even make sense to say that philosophy should not
talk about God, because there is no God to talk aboutFeuerbach and Marx were not purely nonsensical either! It is
difficult, however, to make sense out of the contention that a philospher of Hegel's competence would choose to
employ a highly elaborate "God-language" as a smoke screen for something else he wanted to saywhich is another
question entirely from that of whether the language he employed was an apt language for what he did want to
say.36 There is another question, which it is beyond the scope of this study to go into: Were Hegel's
contemporariesbe they "pietists," "rationalists," "dogmatic metaphysicians," or "critical theologians"able to give
more than a vague and indefinite meaning to the term "God"? Our question is a different one; namely, Was Hegel
able to give to the term a meaning that was not vague and indefinite? Two other questions might also be asked: (1)
Did he give to the term a meaning which does not weaken its religious significance? and (2) Did he give it an
acceptable meaning? These are questions for the reader to answer.
36. There was a time when philosophers of the stature of Feuerbach, Marx, Kierkegaard, Nietzscheeven
Schopenhauercould say that Hegel was simply wrong. Today, we might say, Hegel has won his spurs and
no oneexcept perhaps Eric Voegelin (see his "On HegelA Study in Sorcery," Studium Generale 24 (1971):
33568)has the nerve to say that Hegel is talking nonsense. Still less does anyone want to say, "if Hegel is
right, I am talking nonsense." Solution: "Hegel is obviously saying what I am saying"!


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One thing is quite clear: In September, 1830, less than a year before he died, in the preface to the third edition of
his Encyclopedia, Hegel was able to reiterate his enduring opposition to the meaninglessness and emptiness of both
Enlightenment "rationalism" and unenlightened "Pietism." In doing so he made an eloquent appeal both for a
"faith" with an identifiable doctrinal content and a philosophical ''thinking" which would be more than just "formal
and negative" in its relation to that same content. "Pietism," as he had said so often before, had emptied religion of
all content "by reducing faith to the shibboleth of 'Lord, Lord,' " and "rationalism," with its "formal, abstract . . .
thinking" was no less empty. They cannot even fight with each other, because they have nothing positive in
common to fight about, no "matter" that they could possibly investigate and by so doing come to "knowledge and
truth" " Enlightened theology" had taken refuge in a "formalism" of "freedom of conscience, freedom of thought,
and freedom to teach," calling this "reason and science," without even a nod in the direction of the "first condition
of truth, namely faith." It is not enough to be "free"; one must be free to "hold" something definite to be true, not
simply free to have "arbitrary opinions" (Ep W, pp. 2627). Strong words for one who did not say what he meant
when he talked about Godcowardly words, if all he was trying to do was keep his job!
God and Metaphysics

What it comes down to is that Hegel, following in the footsteps of Aristotle, sees the philosophical pursuit of truth
as, ultimately, itself a religious activity. For Aristotle "first philosophy"which is, in fact, synonymous with "ultimate
philosophy," since it is oriented to the pursuit of truth, which is at once "beyond" (meta *) and the "root" (arch*)
of the orientation of the human mind to knowingis the "divine science." It is "divine" in two ways: (1) its
orientation carries it to the ultimate "principle" of all being, knowledge, and truth, that is, to God; and (2) it is the
kind of knowing which is worthy of a "divine" being.37 For Hegel this means that the orientation to truth, which is
the inescapable characteristic of human thinking, is an orientation to "absolute truth" and, therefore, fundamentally
a religious orientation.
The doctrine of truth is entirely this, and this alone, to be a doctrine of God ordered to the revelation of
God's nature and activity. Understanding, however, because it has dissolved all this content, has again
thrown a veil over God and reduced him to what he was before, in the period of mere longing (Sehnsucht),
the unknown. For thinking activity, therefore, the only matter
37. Aristotle Metaph. A 983a.


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left is antecedently given finite matter. The only difference is that this is now accompanied by the
consciousness that there is no matter other than temporal and finite matter. [BS, p. 65]
The attitude that Hegel here impugns implies a relinquishing of man's "religious" vocation to soar above the
merely finite, a vocation which, at the same time, does not view the infinite as separated by an "infinite" chasm
from finite thinking. If the "atheist" finds in this attitude support of his position he is at least being straightforward
in his approach. But, what of those who claim to be religious, to "believe" in God, but deny that in this they are
being ''philosophical"? Are they not, in fact, claiming that God is jealous," denying the human mind all access to
ultimate truth?
What would it then be other than jealousy, if God were to deny to consciousness knowledge of himself? He
would at the same time be denying all truth to consciousness, for God alone is the true; whatever else is true
and seems somehow not to be a divine content, is true only to the extent that it is grounded in him and is
known in the knowing of himwhatever else there is to it is but temporal appearance. It is knowledge of God,
the truth, alone which raises man above the beast, that alone which distinguishes man, makes him happyor,
rather, blessed. This is true for Plato and Aristotle, and for Christian teaching. [BS, p. 80]
If one prefers, of course, to look upon Hegel's "God" as in some mysterious way an "absolute" quite different from
the God of religion, or of "transcendent faith," one is, perhaps, free to do so, but one runs the risk of making Hegel
even more mysterious than his actual words would seem to imply. It does not seem farfetched to say that James
Yerkes has hit the nail on the head when he says that it simply makes better sense to see Hegel's philosophical
position as essentially religious.
As far as Hegel is concerned, it is not sufficient to say man thinks because he is religious; rather, one must
also say that it is the thinking capacity itself which constitutes the fundamental mode of man's self-
conscoiusness as religious: man is religious by means of his thinking capacity. To put it yet another way, in
thinking, man is inescapably or "necessarily" religious. To understand the nature of man as a thinking being
is to understand him ab initio as a religious being.38
One can, of course, shrug this off as "special pleading" on the part of one who is committed to a religious
interpretation of Hegela "shrug" which might well turn into a boomerangbut Yerkes' approach does have the vir-
38. James Yerkes, Hegel's Christology (Missoula, Montana: Scholars Press, 1978), p. 76.


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tue of taking seriously what Hegel actually says (e.g., "true philosophy leads to God," [GPR, preface, p. 17]);
unless of course, one wants to say that there is more truth in the "unsaid" than in the ''said." In this connection it
might not be amiss to point out also that Hegel never says that "philosophical thinking" deals only with God.
Rather, philosophy is "general theory of the universe." The question is whether philosophy can make sense out of
the universe if religious truth is beyond philosophy's purview. "Still, it comes down essentially to the relation of
religion to man's general theory of the universe, and it is to this that philosophical knowledge is essentially
directed, and upon which it essentially works" (VPR I, p. 15). What is important to note, however, is that Hegel is
constant and unambiguous in his contention that philosophy's direct concern is not "empirical knowledge" of the
universe, but rather, "it is knowledge of what is not of the world . . . of what is eternal, of what God is and of what
flows from his nature" (Ibid., p. 28).
Philosophy, therefore, explicates itself only when it explicates religion, and it is in explicating itself that it
explicates religion. As thus occupied with eternal truth which is in and for itself, and, as indeed an
occupation proper to thinking spirit with regard to this object, and not a matter of individual caprice and
particular interest, it is the same kind of activity as is religion. [Ibid.]
Philosophical thinking, as thus understood, "immerses itself with a like living interest in this object, and renounces
its particularity in that it penetrates its object in the same way as religious consciousness does" (ibid.). If the finite
human spirit is to think truly it must renounce philosophically its own particularity as thoroughly as it does
religiouslywhich, of course, also tells us much of Hegel's view of religion and its "renunciation" of particular
interests; for example, in personal salvation rather than in "eternal truth." The barb against Kant in these lines is
unmistakable: neither religion's nor philosophy's "God" is to be looked at as the "guarantor" of a reward for having
followed one's "duty"no more than he is Kierkegaard's pledge of subjective "eternal happiness."
The conclusion of all this, then, is that religion makes known to philosophy what philosophy's "true" content is;
and philosophy makes known to religion that this content is "rational." Whether it be in religion, in philosophy, or
in both, God can reveal himself to man only in man's "reason," which is the function of "spirit": "For philosophy
has this in common with the form of culture referred to, that reason is regarded as the region (Ort) of spirit in
which God reveals himself to man" (ibid., p. 50). Philosophy, then, is "theology" (see chap. 7). The "logos of
God," which makes known to religion the latter's own "rationality": "Philosophy, which is theology, has as its sole
concern showing the rationality of


Page 49
religion" (VPR III, p. 341). But, this is a far cry, as we have already seen, from saying that religion is a "rational
discipline"; it is not philosophy's function either to replace or to swallow up religion, but rather to plumb the depths
of religion's object.
Nowhere, perhaps, is the chasm between Hegel's thought and the thought of not only his immediate predecessors
Kant and Fichte (his dispute with Schelling lies elsewhere) but also of all his predecessors from Descartes on (with
the exception of Spinoza) more pronounced than it is here. When Hegel speaks of the "rationality" of both
philosophy and religion, he speaks not so much (or not at all) of the logical purity of the subjective process of
thinking as he does of the "objective" rationality of the content of "thought." His, then, is not the problem (even
though some might claim that it should be) of explaining how an essentially subjective mental activity of thinking
can possibly correspond with an essentially objective order of reality in such a way that the fusion of the two can
be characterized as ''rational knowledge." The "rationality" of knowledge is not so much a function of adherence to
the a-priori conditions of formal thinking as it is of the "rationality" of what is known. This is not to say that any
"method" of thinking is as good as any other for the acquisition of knowledge; it is to say that the rationality of the
method and, therefore, of the knowing which ensues is not dictated by the formal a-priori rules of thinking
(discovered in some mysterious way prior to the philosophical thinking itself), but by the rationality of the object
thought. This means, among other things, that the relation of thought to its object can be "rational," even when the
"mode" of thinking in question is not that of "pure thought," when it is "belief" and not "knowledge." Here,
however, there arises a difficulty for those who would follow Hegel in the intricacies of his thinking. Does the
rationality of his own thinking tell him just what the rational object of that thinking is; an object which he then
sees to coincide with the object of religion? If so, it is difficult to see how he has avoided the Kantian dilemma; he
still has to connect the "representations" in which his formal thinking issues with the "reality" they are supposed to
"represent." Or, does some antecedent intuition into the rationality of the object of religion permit him to see in it
the blueprint for the rationality of the thinking which is to correspond to it? If so, his intuitionism would seem to
be even less consistent than that of Jacobi and Schleiermacher (not to mention the "mysticism" of Jakob Böhme).
The Logic of Being

In seeking an answer we have to begin, I think, by banishing the "before and after" pattern, which no antecedent
logic imposes on philosophical thinking. The key is to be found in Hegel's Logic, his account of what


Page 50
thought inevitably finds when it examines itself (more of that in chapter 2). What this examination first reveals is
what the initial "object" of thought cannot but be, that is, "being." This object reveals its essential articulation in its
being thought. In doing so it reveals that being simply is not, if infintite being is not. But where to turn to find the
self-revelation of "infinite being"? In Phenomenology of Spirit, as we have seen, consciousness in examining itself
arrived at a similar impasse, out of which it could not get without turning to an examination of religious
consciousness, wherein is revealed the full objective reality of spirit, that is, absolute Spirit. In the Phenomenology
that was long in coming, and in the Logic it will be equally long in coming; but in both it will be realized that the
"Absolute'' when it comes will reveal itself as having been there all alongin the Phenomenology as "absolute Spirit"
and in the Logic as "absolute Idea."
At the second level of the Logic we begin to realize that the self-articulation of the object of thought demands more
than the "categories of being" in which it manifests itself; we who follow the articulation must also take into
account that the characteristics disengaged through thoughtful "reflection" on the "thought" of being reveal what is
"essential" to being if it is to be the content of thought at all. This characterization of being in thought, however,
will not be complete until the thinking itself is examined as the subjective process whose ultimate claim is to be
objective. Here it is that we see "concept" as the essential structure of thought, which will not be objective unless
the structure of thought and the structure of reality are seen to coincide, which, Hegel tells us, they do in "absolute
Idea." But once again, "absolute" will be meaningful only as "the Absolute," which is God; it simply makes no
sense to speak of any other absolute as real. By equally tortuous ways the Phenomenology and the Logic have
come to the realization that only God, "absolute truth" can make the whole process hold together. In both, however,
it has been the nature of "speculative thinking," which alone is capable of constantly moving on to the "more" to
which its own object constantly points, which comes to the realization that what it had been seeking all along was
the "absolute truth," God, who, although he was there all along, "could be reached only in pure speculative
knowing" (PdG, p. 530). Many years before, Hegel had recognized that knowledge would be deserving of its lofty
dignity only as knowledge in the framework of the totality of the knowable: "Speculation recognizes as the reality
of cognition only the being of cognition in the totality. For speculation everything determinate has being and truth
only in the cognition of its connection with the Absolute" (Diff, p. 31). Only if we can come to the recognition that
all knowledge is rooted in the one and only absolute (total) truth, will there be knowledge and truth at all.


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This which formally belongs to our thinking consciousness as such [i.e., that truth is only one] is in the
more profound sense the starting point and the goal of philosophy, i.e., to recognize this one truth. But this
means recognizing it at the same time as the source from which everything else flows, all laws of nature, all
phenomena of life and consciousness, which are simply mirrorings of this one truth. To put it another way:
all these laws and phenomena are to be brought back along what could seem to be the reverse path to that
one source, for the purpose, however, of comprehending them in comprehending the source, i.e.,
recognizing that they are derived from it. [EGP, p. 29]
To see this, of course, thinking must cease to be the merely subjective activity of the individual (or of accumulated
individuals), finding its self-determination not in the arbitrariness of subjectivity but in the infinity of absolute
objectivity.
Only because the pure infinite form, the self-manifestation which continues to be with itself, has put aside
the onesidedness of the subjective, wherein it is the mere pretense of thinking, is it free thinking, which has
its infinite determinateness at once as absolute content in and for itself and as object, wherein it is,
precisely, free. In this sense thinking itself is simply the formal aspect of the absolute content. [Ep W, no.
571]
How are we now to relate this back to God as the object of religious consciousness? Not, certainly, by insisting
that religion is no more than a subjective response which stands there in all its glaring subjectivity to be examined.
Nor shall we find any answer, if we cling to a narrowly epistemological view of thinking and knowledge. For
Hegel, thinking knowledge is not primarily an epistemological matter at all; it is a way of life, and relating it to
God is not simply a way of validating its knowledge-claims. Rather, it is the question of the whole of human life in
relation to God, of the all-inclusiveness of the divine-human relationship. What Hegel experienced in his own day
was a prevalent fragmentation of culture, of lifepolitical, social, religioussuch that his vision of and aspiration
toward reintegration are expressed in metaphors taken from the unity of organic life and sought for in an
overarching unity of a philosophical conception which would integrate the moral, political, social, and religious life
of Western man. In his early years Hegel saw this as the task of healing religious disintegration; subsequently, he
sought integration on the level of politics; and ultimately, he saw the necessity of a philosophical underpinning
which would make total integration a reasonable possibility. the dim vision of this came to him early.
It is true that a philosophy issues from its time, and if one wants to call the fragmentation of the time its
ethical corruption, then philosophy issues from


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that corruption, but it does so in order to reestablish man from within himself, against the confusion of the
time and in order to restore the totality which the time has rent. [Diff, pp. 12021]
Philosophy by itself, however, especially if it be a "philosophy of understanding" and not a "philosophy of reason,"
runs the risk of turning man himself into an abstraction, of satisfying the needs of abstract understanding only. A
philosophy which is to satisfy the concrete demands of human living must be one which embraces the
manysidedness of the humanif nothing else it must take into consideration the reality of the religious and the
political in human living. "Consciousness that has received an abstract culture, and whose sphere is understanding,
can be indifferent to religion, but religion is the universal form in which truth is contained for non-abstract
consciousness" (VPG, p. 527).
To many contemporary thinkers, who are, as it were, the unconscious inheritors of both the naive religiousness of
Kant and Fichte and the naive atheism of Feuerbach and Marx, Hegel can well seem to be anachronistic in his
approach to his own age. He actually thinks that the thought of God plays a far more important role among his
contemporaries than it does among ancient and medieval thinkers. In one sense, however, he is correct; his
contemporaries agonize over the thought far more than did their predecessors, whether because to them the thought
was philosophically unacceptable or because it was totally acceptable for other than philosophical reasons. For
Hegel, it would seem, reasons for not accepting the thought of God could scarcely be authentically philosophical.
In any event, as he sees it, the question of God perplexes the modern theologian as well as the modern philosopher,
precisely because they take man's religious relationship to God and not God himself to be the object of inquiry (see
VPR I, pp. 101103). "In naive ancient theology," as Fackenheim puts it, "the object is God; hence, he is . . . one
object among others."39 For reflexive modern theology, on the other hand, the object is not God but "the religious
divine-human relationship"whether positively or negatively. This goal as all-inclusivepositively or negatively''is
identical with reflexive modern philosophy, whose object is the relation between thought and being, in their
opposition as well as their union."40 What it comes down to is that, from the viewpoint of "national" culture,
paramount in the thinking of Hegel's day, "religion is the sphere in which a nation gives itself a definition of what
it regards as the true." One can, so to speak, judge the character of a nation by examining its concept of God: "The
conception of God, therefore, constitutes the general basis of a people's character" (VPG,
39. Fackenheim, Religious Dimension, p. 178, note.
40. Ibid.


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p. 70).41 No one today would be so naive as to think, with Hegel, that the members of a nation think alike in this
respect, or that a whole "people" has this sort of cohesion in its "conception of God," but it is clearly applicable to
individualsas is one's concept of God, so is one's conception of the reality of the human. No matter what
distinctions one likes to make, the conception of the human is inextricably tied up with the conception of the
divineor the absence thereof! Whether one can go even further with Hegel and say that "in this aspect, religion
stands in the closest connection with the political principle; freedom can exist only where individuality is
recognized as having its positive and real existence in the divine being" (ibid.), may be a moot question, but one
wonders whether Hegel did not have more foresight than many would credit him with. In any event, Hegel saw in
religion what few, if any, both before and after him saw: that the religious view of God is inextricably linked to the
political view of the human, and only where the relationship of man to God is viewed as all-inclusive is the view
of the human all-inclusiveat least logically so. The question, of course, is whether religion is not so ''other worldly"
in its view that it cannot come down to contemplate the realities of earthly existence. That Hegel was convinced
that religion could and should is fairly obvious; that philosophy follows religion in this might be more open to
question.
In religions people have set down what they thought of the being of the world, of the Absolute, of the being
which is in and for itself; what they held to be the cause, the essence, the substantial in nature and spirit. On
the basis of this we can judge what was their view of how the human spiritor human naturewas related to
such objects, to the divinity, to the true. [EGP, pp. 16667]
Such a view may very well seem to go beyond the evidence available to Hegel, but it is clear that he sees religion
and philosophy linked in a concrete way that he has previously developed only minimally: A philosophy which
lacks the contribution of "heart" which religion affords is cold; a religion which lacks the contribution of "head"
which philosophy affords is empty.
A philosophy without heart and a faith without understanding are themselves abstractions from the true life
and being of knowing and believing. Whoever is left cold by philosophy or who is not illumined by true
faith should carefully look to where the blame lies; it lies in the individual, not in knowledge and faith. The
coldness lies outside philosophy; the obscurity outside faith. [BS, p. 325]
41. A theme which, as we know, Feuerbach will exploit but for the purpose of drawing a diametrically
opposed conclusion.


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It could be said in this connection that religion is directly concerned more with man's relationship to Godreligious
"practice," devotion, worship, moral activity, direction of lifeand less with theoretical questions regarding the
"nature" of God, creation, divine providence, and doctrinal truth. By the same token philosophy's concern is more
cognitive than practical, oriented more to knowing what we mean when we speak of God than to responding
through action to the reality of God. The important question for Hegel is, however, whether we can make a great
deal of sense in speaking of man's relationship to God, if we do not know what we mean by the God to whom men
are related.
The manner in which man thinks of his relationship to God will be determined especially by the way man
thinks of God. It is not the case, as is now so commonly said, that one need not know God and can at the
same time know man's relationship to God. Because God comes first, it is he who determines that
relationship, and thus, in order to know what is true of the relationship, one must know God. [VGP II, pp.
41718]
This means, at the very least, that, if an awareness of our relationship to and dependence on God is essential to
"insightful reflective judgments about being, truth, and value,"42 which in turn are essential to authentic human
living, then "knowing" God is inseparable from the religious relationship to Godheart and mind must go hand in
hand, for the arbitrariness of "heart" will go uncorrected if not complemented by the authenticity of "mind."
The danger, as Hegel sees it, is that, although in religious consciousness there is a true awareness of God, and the
God of whom man is aware is truly God, still what is present to consciousness is teaching about God, not God
himself, with the result that the "emotions" raised by "representations" of God may not be adequate to their object
(see EGP, pp. 18284). Here we come upon, once more, the difficult conception treated above of the finite human
spirit, whose consciousness of itself can be adequate only if it is identified with the divine Spirit's consciousness of
itself in the human spirit. We can only hope that this will be adequately worked out in the next three chapters.
Suffice it to say here that, if, as Hegel conceives it, the function of religion (from re-ligare) is to relate man,
however indirectly, to the "Absolute," and the function of philosophy is to think the "Absolute," it makes sense to
say that the ''Absolute" in both is one and the same. Hegel is not saying, however, that religious consciousness does
not think God, while philosophy does; he is saying that religion "thinks" God in one form and that philosophy
"thinks" God in another, more adequate form. In
42. Yerkes, Hegel's Christology, p. 89.


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both the God who is "thought" is ultimate truth, which is one and only one, the truth of all truth.
As a result of all that has been said in this chapter we can note a remarkable evolution in Hegel's thought. From his
earliest years he set out to find a religion and a God which would be able to heal the fragmentation of European
culture and at the same time be compatible with sophisticated modern philosophical thinking. If we were to look at
his Theologische Jugendschriften, which for very good reasons he did not publish, we could come to the
conclusion that what he expected to find would be substitutes for the Christian God and the Christian
religionperhaps the unified reason of the Enlightenment or the supreme moral principle of Kant and Fichteperhaps
even grafted onto the politicosocial Volksreligion he so admired among the Greeks. As early as Differenz des
Fichteschen und Schellingschen Systems der Philosophie and Glauben und Wissen, however, we have been able to
note his growing dissatisfaction with both of these solutions. What he came up with, then, was a transformed
Christian religion and a transformed concept of God. As Fackenheim puts it, "For the early Hegel, philosophy will
produce a new religion on the ruins of the old. For the mature Hegel, philosophy comprehends the old religion, and
this latter is not and cannot be ruined."43 Earlier Fackenheim had gone even further: "Hegel asserts with
unwavering insistence, that Christianity is the absolutely true content, and that his philosophy can and must give
that content its absolutely true form."44
It can, of course, be doubtedand it has beenthat the religion Hegel speaks of is in truth the Christian religion, or
that the God he speaks of is truly the Christian God. For the present, however, that is not the question. There can
be no doubt that the God-question occupied him very profoundly and that he sought to understand God in such a
way that the God he spoke of not only would not conflict with the autonomy of philosophical thinking but also
would not be an object which simply exceeded the capacity of human reasonwhich a separated God "out-there"
would. The Christian God has always been looked on as the supreme Being, infinite Spirit, and absolute Reality.
Of Hegel's God the same can be said. The difference is, however, that Hegel's is a philosophical endeavor to
understand what such terms can mean to modern man.
With this it becomes clear that the endeavor resulted in more than a transformation of Christian religion; it
produced also a transformation of philosophical thinking. For Hegel, philosophy is "science" par excellence, which
has for its object absolute truth and, as the manner of comprehending this object, "absolute knowing." That
knowledge is indeed knowledge
43. Fackenheim, Religious Dimension, p. 209.
44. Ibid., p. 112.


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Hegel never really doubteddespite his insistence on "skepticism" as a necessary stage on the way to knowledge.
His problem was that of working through the process of coming to know in such a way that knowledge would
reveal itself as precisely knowledge. It can be said with truth of his Phenomenology of Spirit that it attempts to
make this process real. Still, if we are to comprehend what even the Phenomenology is attempting to do, we must
turn to Hegel's ground plan for the whole philosophical endeavor, his Science of Logic.


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Chapter Two
The Concept
Hegel's contention that religion and philosophy have one and the same content, that is, have as that which makes
them be what they are the same object of investigationthe absolute or Godhas seemed to some to either (1)
eliminate religion, since philosophy takes its place, telling us all that religion can tell usand moreabout its object, or
(2) downgrade religion to an inferior grasp of that one and the same object, or (3) at the very least permit
philosophy to dictate to religion what religion's own concepts are to mean. In the preface to the third edition (1830)
of Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences, which, unlike the prefaces to the other two editions, has more the
character of an emotional outburst, Hegel complains of those who have reviewed his book in such a way as to
make him out to be not Christian at all, thus arrogating to themselves not only the exclusive right to be called
Christians but also the authority to judge what is to be acknowledged as Christian in the thought of others.
Although in that preface he does not specifically answer the objections raised above, it is clear from what he has
written elsewhere1in the preface to the second edition of the same work (1827) and in the introductionwhat his
answers are. (1) Not only does philosophy not eliminate religioneven religion's Aufhebung signifies its retentionit
arrives only subsequently at what religion long before philosophy has grasped in thought, that is, the truth which
grounds all truth, the absolute truth which is God. It may be that philosophy thinks God in a way that religion does
not, since to know and to believe are not the same (note Hegel's unremitting insistence that belief is a form of
thought), but it is religion which tells
1. See Quentin Lauer, S.J., Hegel's Idea of Philosophy (New York: Fordham University Press, 1971), p.
117.


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philosophy, and not vice versa, what the latter's object must be, if it is to be worthy of the title "philosophical
thinking" at all. Only when philosophical thinking passes beyond its empirical, finite beginnings to its inescapable
foundation, its only adequate foundation, is it authentic philosophical thinking. Religion cannot, it is true, institute
a critique of philosophy's thinking of Godreligion is not critical thoughtbut it contains within itself the criterion for
the adequacy of philosophy as authentically rational. If philosophy fails to come to grips with the infinite reality
which is religion's object, philosophy fails as philosophy. (2) It is true that, in Hegel's view, philosophical thinking
is the highest achievement of the human spirit and is, therefore, more adequate to the object which is absolute
Spirit than is any form of "representational" thinking, even religious representational thinking. However, this view
would constitute a "downgrading" of religion only if religious thought and philosophical thought were for Hegel
discontinuous, as they would seem to be for Kant, Fichte, Jacobi, and Schleiermacher. Far from being a
downgrading of religion, philosophical knowing is an uplifting of religious thought to its true vocation (as Anselm
saw so well), the vocation of "seeing-in'' thought (speculare) the God who is there present rather than framing
thought about the God who is only represented by these thoughts (with their admixture of images). Perhaps the
difficulty lies in the assumption that because Hegel distinguishes philosophical science, "absolute knowing" from
religious consciousnessthe latter as the penultimate stage in the movement toward the formerhe is saying that
philosophy is not religious. The assumption can be seen not to hold, if we look at Hegel's characterization of
philosophy as "comprehending reason . . . whose content is speculative and therefore religious" (EpW, no. 573,
italics mine). His polemic, after all, is not against theologians like Anselm who want us to come to know what
initially we only believe; it is against "this new theology, which turns religion into a mere subjective feeling and
denies a knowledge of God's nature" and in so doing "has made for itself an emaciated and empty God" (ibid.).
The absolute, spirit, God, the Concept (Idea) can be the object only of thought, never of mere feeling, whether that
thought be belief or knowledge. (3) It is difficult to see how this is even an objectionexcept, perhaps, in its
employing the emotion-packed term "dictates." Philosophy is an instrument which the human spirit has at its
disposal as a search for meaning. Why should not thought seek to know what the utterances of faith mean? Or, is
there to be no theo-logy at all? If we want to know what is true of the object of thought, whatever the form of that
thought may be, we turn to the concept of that object, "for a property (Bestimmung) which belongs to the concept
of a reality (Sache) must truly be contained in it" (WL I, p. 172).
When all this has been said, we can but see that, although there is no need


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to whitewash Hegel in his view of the relation of religion and philosophy,2 we must first look carefully at just
what he means by "philosophy," "concept," and ''speculative thinking" before we "cast the first stone." If to this
inquiry we bring the antecedent conviction that the only way to get at meanings is to frame definitions of the terms
we employ, trusting that others will see the rationality of our procedure and thus accept the meanings which our
definitions express, there is little likelihood that we shall be able to follow Hegel, for whom, it is true, meanings
reside in the concepts which express them, but not in concepts which we construct for the purpose of establishing
our meaning. If we are to follow Hegel, we must be prepared to see meanings emerge in "speculative thinking"
which seeks to "see into" the conceptual structure of the reality with which our thinking is engaged, allowing the
reality to tell us what concepts mean and, thus, to put us in touch with the reality of the real, not merely with the
"representations" (Vorstellungen) we frame of it, no matter how important these Vorstellungen may be as an initial
stage (or stages) in our philosophical thinking. I can think of no more efficacious way of tuning in on Hegel's
wave-length here than by carefully analyzing the introduction (nos. 117) to his Encyclopedia of the Philosophical
Sciences.
Philosophical Thinking
No. 1. Philosophy, Hegel tells us, begins with what might seem to be an initial disadvantage not shared by other
"sciences." It can presuppose neither that the intelligibility of its objects is already given nor that the method of
coming to grips with these objects is simply at hand, to be employed at will. Like religion, philosophy has as its
goal the attainment of ultimate truth, and, like religion, it recognizes that the ultimate truth, the truth of all truth,
lies in the being to which all truths refer for their intelligibility and truth, that is, absolute truth, which for the
moment we can simply call "God." Nature, as the sum total of all reality which is not spirit, and human spirit, as
the sum total of all spiritual reality distinct from God, are, of course, objects of philosophical inquirythe
Vorstellungen of God, nature, and finite spirit can be presumed to be already with us (whatever we are to make of
them). The point is that they are to become the objects of thought in its purest form and, thus, to become
philosophically known.
There can be little dispute that the human mind, at least in modern times, seeks to know itself (even if only to find
out that it is part and parcel of the physical structure of the human reality). Nor can there be dispute that the human
mind inquires into the reality of the physical world which it inhabits and to whose laws the physical structure of the
human is subject. The point
2. I.e., making his thought conform to what I happen to think makes good sense.


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is that the mind, if it wants to know and not merely surmise, must seek some sort of rational necessity in the
content of its thoughtwithout simply presupposing that it is there. It may be that the "scientific" mind can base its
inquiries on an "act of faith in the decency of the universe"; the philosophical mind must question even that.
No. 2. So much having been said, Hegel feels safe in giving a provisional definition of philosophy: "Philosophy
can initially be characterized as thinking consideration of objects." The mind already represents to itself objects;
now it must think them out. What do they tell the mind about themselves? The "thinking" in question, however, is
not merely that which characterizes all specifically human activity, thus distinguishing the human from the
nonhuman: "Philosophy is a particular manner of thinking," distinct from other modes of human response, such as
emotion, intuition, and representation, which are modes of thinking, Hegel says, but not the thinking mode;
because such responses are specifically human they have on them the mark of thought, but they are not themselves
modes of thinking properly speaking. This distinction has two consequences: (1) It avoids the oversharp distinction
between, for example, thinking and feeling, particularly in the area of religious response, where thinking is
considered by some of Hegel's contemporaries ("the new theology'') as not only distinct from but also inferior to
feeling, as though religious consciousness had its roots in feeling rather than in thinking. (2) It directly attacks the
current prejudice that philosophical thinking is nothing but "reflective" thinking (Hegel calls it Nachdenken and
then plays on the prefix nach as though it were a thinking that comes after thinking); a thinking about thinking and
not about the objects of thought (today we have "meta-logic," "meta-ethics," etc.). The really important distinction
is not, for example, between feeling and thinking about feeling, but rather that between mere feeling and feeling
shot through with thought.
The emphasis on Nachdenken becomes particularly pernicious, Hegel feels, when reflection is looked upon as the
only reliable way to come to grips with eternal truth, as though God could not be an object of thought, since
philosophy can handle only thought about God (or, worse still, language about God) but not God himself. It is as
though one would say that the validity of belief in God depends on the formal-logical validity of the traditional
"proofs" of the existence of God.3 Strangely enough, this view of philosophy would make philosophy absolutely
indispensable to a degree beyond that which even Hegel made it. The approach to eternal truth would have to wait
on a critique of the logic of the approachas though it
3. If the only acceptable form of "proof" is that of formal "inference" from a set of propositions, the truth of
which inevitably entails the truth of a concluding propositiona truth already contained in the propositions
which precede itone might legitimately question whether there are any "proofs" for the reality of God.


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were rational to demand that the logic of philosophy be simply identical with the logic of positive science without
justifying the demand!
No. 3. This approach compounds the felony by making the content of thinking not the object of thought but the
form in which the object is present to the mind. It is true enough to say that the content of any act of consciousness
determines that act of consciousness; be it feeling, intuition, image, or thought and concept. Consciousness is what
it is as the form of a content, and the content can be one and the same, no matter what the form; for example, pure
feeling, a mixture of feeling and thought, or pure thought. If, however, the form of consciousness becomes the
content of thought, then the object being considered is not the same but different for each mode of consciousness;
to anticipate, instead of one idea in a multiplicity of manifestations, there is an uncontrollable chaos of ideas and
only the unity of reflective thoughtif that be a unity at all.
There is an added disadvantage in this approach, says Hegel: it reverses the authentic philosophical procedure of
going from inadequate modes of consciousness of an object; from feelings, images, representations, to more
adequate modes, thoughts and concepts. It is rooted in an inabilityperhaps just lack of practiceto think abstractly.
Our ordinary thoughts are a mixture of the sensible and the spiritual, and when we reflect on them we fail to sort
out the sensible and the intelligible elements in themwe are not used to thoughts without images or to recognizing
the pure forms of thought (e.g., categories) in our thinking processes. But there is another side to this: We are
impatient. We prefer to look for the image or representation which corresponds to our thought or concept, rather
than vice versabecause we long for the more familiar; we do not know where we are when we are dealing with
thoughts only. Better to deal in expressions we have learned by rote than to ferret out meanings which go beyond
the expressions, to stick with the metaphors that stand for reality than to come to grips with reality itselflanguage is
so much more comfortable a medium in which to engage ourselves than is reality!
No. 4. Philosophy, then, has an important initial task to perform: it has to show that its mode of knowing is very
special to itselfor, perhaps, it has to bring about this special mode of knowing, which is neither an immediate mode
of consciousness nor a mere reflection on a mode of consciousness which is not its own. If we take this a step
further to a consideration of the content of religious consciousness, where the ultimate truth lies, philosophy has to
show that it (philosophy) has in itself the capacity to know ultimate truthand, if there seems to be a difference
between the representations characteristic of religious consciousness and philosophy's own thoughts, philosophy
must be prepared to justify the latter. The implication, of course, is that there can be only seeming opposition
between what religion and philosophy say of ultimate truth; it is philosophy's task to


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plumb in thought the meaning of what religion says in metaphorical language.
No. 5. Even here, however, there is a dangerthe danger that philosophical thinking will be conceived of, once
again, as simply reflection (Nachdenken) in the sense of thinking about thinking. There is, in fact, a significant
sense in which philosophical thinking is Nachdenken; it rethinks a content which is initially presented only under
the form of feelings, intuitions, opinions, and representations. Its task is to translate, to transform these into
conceptual thought. This is, if you will, a Nachdenken; it follows upon other, inadequate, forms of thought, not, be
it noted, to eliminate them but to raise them up to a form adequate to their content. The mistake should not be
made, however, of thinking that this is all very easy, that the mind, after all, has an inborn capacity to perform this
sort of transformation. It is readily conceded that other sciences and skills can be acquired only at the cost of much
effort and practice, even though the human mind does have the inborn capacity to acquire them. It is no easier, to
say the least, to acquire facility in philosophical thinking. There is no comfortable way to the acquisition of
philosophical insight,4 as would be, for example, immediate, intuitive knowledge. Philosophy is hard work; we
must not ignore the necessary steps (mediation) to its acquisition.
No. 6. Perhaps the chief obstacle to coming to grips with the difficulty of philosophical thinking is the conviction
that it has to do, not with the actuality (Wirklichkeit) of the real, but only with a kind of watered-down ideality
which belongs to thought about the real. It might be well to note here at the beginning of any discussion of
"actuality"a crucial term in the Hegelian vocabularythat the German term it translates, Wirklichkeit, is derived from
the verb wirken, which means "to effect." Although the German term is rarely translated by ''effectiveness," it
would be well to bear in mind that the overtones of "effectiveness" are never absent from "actuality"; it is the
capacity which reality has to "effect" its affirmation through rational thinking.5 Hegel is not about to deny that our
initial contact with reality is through sense experience. Nor will he deny that even in this kind of experience a
distinction is drawn between that which only appears to be real and that which actually is real. The difficulty lies
in knowing just what is the distinction between the apparent and the actual. In Hegel's view it is not a question of
simply distinguishing between what is the case and what is not the case. Rather it is a question of distinguishing
between what is rationally demanded and what is contrary to what is rationally demanded. What is
4. No "royal road": see PdG., preface, p. 56.
5. That philosophies in particular have shied away from a translation which runs the risk of making knowledge
a "cause-effect" relationship is understandable. But, "effectiveness" need not have this connotation, any more
than does Plato's remark (Sophist, 248a) that "being" is to be equated with "power."


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simply the case may very well be the latter; the irrational may very well existunfortunately the world is full of it.
However, this does not mean that the irrational is actual in the sense that it is the object of philosophical
thinkingexcept, of course, in the sense that philosophy can judge its irrationality against the criterion of the
rational, which is philosophy's proper object. There are important as well as trivial ways in which, even in our
everyday thinking, we consider that which is as it ought to be real and that which is not as it ought to be unreal.
The true, the good, and the beautiful are real, even if all we are saying is that "Coke is the real thing," or "Don
Giovanni is real opera." By the same token, when we run up against the false, the evil, and the ugly, we can
intelligibly say, "That is unreal," that is, it should not be, or it is as it ought not to be.
Hegel has had to take a lot of flack for having said, in the preface to his Philosophy of Right, "What is rational is
actual, and what is actual is rational." The attacks have come from all sides, from the religious as well as from the
philosophical point of view (interestingly enough, the statement has been defended from the irreligious side by
Engels, who, of course, interprets "the rational" from the Marxist perspective).6 In Hegel's view the opposition
from the religious side is unfounded, since he takes the statement to be saying what belief in divine providence has
always said. As for the philosophical point of view, Hegel says (to the discomfort, I am sure, of those who finitize
his "God"), ''We have to presuppose a degree of education, such that one knows that God is actualthat he is the
most actual, that he alone, is truly actual. But we must also presuppose, from the point of view of formal thinking,
that existence (Dasein) is in some instances mere appearance and in others actuality." This is but another way of
saying what is central to the whole of Hegel's philosophizing: that the "really real" is that which corresponds to its
"concept"with the proviso, of course, that only God corresponds totally with his concept; all other (finite) reality
corresponds only partially with its concept (see chap. 5). Another way to put this, as Hegel does in the paragraph
now under consideration, is in the form of a value judgment, in terms of what can justifiably count as real, that is,
effectively" present itself as real. No one doubts that contingent things exist, but they count as really real only to
the extent that they are rooted in rational necessity; apart from that they are no more real than is the possible. Hegel
is not saying that the contingent is not real; he is not even saying that the contingent is not necessaryit is necessary
that there be contingent realitiesbut he is saying that the necessity, and hence reality, of the contingent does not lie
in its contingency but in the necessary (e.g., the concept) of which it is a contingent manifestation. The concept of
"man" is necessary and, there-
6. Friedrich Engels, Ludwig Feuerbach und der Ausgang der klassischen deutschen Philosophie (Berlin:
Dietz, 1951), pp. 69.


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fore, really real; you and I do not wholly correspond to this concept, and it is, therefore, contingent that you and I
should be. By the same token, the concept of God is necessary, but, because he corresponds fully with his concept,
it is not contingent but necessary that he actually be (see chap. 5) and God's "actuality" lies in his "effectiveness."
It might seem to conflict with what was said before about the "really real" being what it "ought'' to be that Hegel
goes on to speak here of the inefficacy of arguing from "ought" (Sollen). We must examine carefully what Sollen
means in this context. He is talking about a philosophical framework wherein the idea (and the ideal) are looked
upon as separate from the real, having no more than the vague "reality" which the human mind gives them. When
the ideal has only this sort of vague being which mere understanding attributes to it, then its character is that of an
abstract "ought" which has no power to actualize itselfit is not "effective." Rather, it is a kind of utopian dream of
"how good it would be for things to be this way"and if they were the way they ought to be, the Sollen in question
would lose its meaning, which persists, precisely as Sollen, only if it is not actualized (one is forcefully reminded
of Hegel's sharp critique of Kant's whole moral system). It does not take a great deal of intelligence, Hegel tells us,
to recognize that there is much around us which is not as it ought to be. It is questionable, however, that there is
anything particularly philosophical in this recognition. Philosophy "is concerned only with the idea, which is not so
ineffective as to ought to be and not actually be." That none of this can make sense, unless the idea of which Hegel
speaks is the "absolute Idea," God, whose nonactuality is inconceivable, should be obvious. As Hegel sees it, it
should also be obvious that the actuality of anything else whatsoever is inconceivable without reference to the
absolute Idea (see chap. 5). The important point here is that the actuality of the real and the ideality of the real are
not opposed to each other; they are inseparable, neither makes sense without the other. Nor does this make sense if
conceiving (begreifen) is simply what the mind does when it thinks its object, or if concept (Begriff) is only a
mental representation which the mind forms to itself of its object. For thinking to have concept (or idea) as its
object is not to have its own mental act as its object. Rather, it is to have as its object a reality which imposes itself
on rational thinking precisely because as effectively real, reality is itself rational, and it is rational because like
rational thought it is the product of rational activity. It is for this reason that reality and rational thinking are
effectively oriented to each other; reality demands conceptual thought for its realization, and concept demands
reality for its concretization.
No. 7. None of what has gone before is to be interpreted as saying that reflection (Nachdenken) does not constitute
the beginning of philosophical thinking. Without reflection there would be no philosophy, only the seemingly
measureless mass of that which is present to consciousnesswhat ap-


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pears. The function of reflection, however, is not simply to impose a form of unity on the manifold of that which is
present in consciousness; it is to permit the rationality of reality itself to emerge in the consciousness had of it; and
consciousness itself is authentically rational only to the extent that it is in tune with the rationality of realityits
"concept." If reflection is to merit the title "philosophy," it must be a knowing which penetrates the boundless "sea
of empirical singularities" to find therein the "necessity" of the ''universal," to find "laws" in the seeming chaos of
the contingent.7 The content of philosophical thinking, then, which is properly universal and necessary, is not the
form which conceptual thinking imposes on perceptual intuition, à la Kant; it is that which thinking takes from its
own intuitive grasp of both an outer and an inner world, from both nature and spirit as present in the human
thinking subject. What Hegel says here is couched in surprisingly metaphorical language, but it serves to
emphasize that the process of universalization which characterizes thought is not discontinuous with the process of
presentation which characterizes the empirical; the form of universality is not external to empirical reality, it is
discovered in that reality as present to mind. In rationalizing reality, thought manifests the inherent rationality of
reality.
Hegel is no enemy of experience; he makes abundantly clear that experience is indispensable even to philosophical
thinking; the thinker must not only be present to that which he thinks but also find himself in the content of his
thinking, no matter how empirical that content be. The presence-to of experience, however, characterizes both
external sensation and internal consciousness of self. A science is called "empirical," if its point of departure is
experience, whether external or internal. Such sciences, however, are philosophical only if they find in what is
experienced laws, universal propositions, theory, all of which belong in the realm of thought. There was a time
when even the natural sciences were called "philosophical." This is no longer necessary or to the point, but it does
highlight a consciousness that science has to do, not with things, but with thoughts; and to the extent that
investigation is aimed at the "rational" in the content of thought, it is philosophicalhence the propriety of various
branches of philosophy, each concerned with the rational content of its object.
No. 8. Granted, however, that empirical objects can give rise to and be the subject matter of philosophical inquiry,
there is also another realm of objects which are simply not susceptible to this kind of investigataion; for example,
freedom, spirit, and God. The reason for this, however, is not that these are not objects of "experience." They
cannot, it is true, be experienced
7. Precisely because the contingent is susceptible of being grasped in rational thought it manifests the kind
of necessity which is characteristic of rationality; it manifests the working of "law."


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sensibly, but if they are objects of consciousness at all, they are objects of experiencea kind of tautologythey are
objects, however, which are neither limited to a particular kind of experience nor limited by the experiencing of
them; they are infinite (see chap. 4), the "beyond" to which human experience of self inevitably points. Thought
"infinitizes" by breaking down (or crossing over) the barriers which separate reality into finite instances.
In the Zusatz appended to this brief paragraph we find a remark which is of utmost importance, if we are to see
clearly where Hegel is going. There is, he tells us, a statement erroneously ascribed to Aristotleas though it
characterized Aristotle's whole philosophywhich runs, "nihil est in intellectu quod non fuerit in sensu."8 "There is
nothing in the intellect which was not [previously] in sense." The point which those who use the quote seek to
make is that the mind is limited as to content by what is contained in sense experience (a sentiment worthy of
Locke!). Speculative philosophy is supposed to be missing its vocation if it fails to recognize the truth of this
statement. In true dialectical fashion, however, Hegel asserts that speculative philosophy must with equal truth
state that "nihil est in sensu, quod non fuerit in intellectu." This could simply mean that the continuity of sense and
intellect is such that it would be erroneous to make the first statement as though it could be separated from the
second. But, to Hegel it means much more, and the whole of his philosophy hangs on that ''much more." Taken
generally, he tells us, the second statement signifies that reason (nonV *, intellectus)better still, and more
profoundly, spiritis prior because it is the cause (Ursache) of the world; that is, the reality of the real is to be found
in the order of concept and idea, not in the order of empirical "existence." Even more to the point in this
introduction, the second statement (see no. 2) means that the sort of "feelings" Hegel has been talking aboutlegal
(rechtliche), moral, religiousconstitute the experience of a content which has "its root and its abode in thought
alone." Thus, there are objectsfreedom, spirit, Godwhich are objects of thought and only thought, and there are
empirical objects which are truly objects only because and to the extent that they too are objects of thought.
No. 9. (See no. 1). Having spoken about the content of rational (speculative) thinking, that is, a content which for
thought is essentially universal, Hegel now turns to what characterizes rational thinking from the point of view of
form, that is, the way in which it comprehends its object, and this he finds to be the mode of "necessity." The
language here may well
8. The statement is, in fact, to be found nowhere in the Aristotelian corpus (nor did Aristotle write in
medieval Latin!). Nor is Hegel's citation completely accurate: the old chestnut reads, "quod non prius fuerit
in sensu." I am not aware that anyone has been able to pinpoint the source of the quote. One thing is clear:
authentic or not, it does not deserve all the mileage it has achieved!


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seem strange to contemporary readers. If by "necessity" is meant the psychological necessity of thinking in a
certain way, Hegel would seem to be running afoul of his own complaint against Kantian reflective thinking that it
makes only the subjective mental act its object, which yields a rather fruitless form of necessity. If, on the other
hand, he is speaking of the logical necessity that the object of thought be so delimited (defined) that only
propositions are necessary and that propositions are necessary only if the denial of their truth would violate the law
of noncontradiction, he runs the risk of being shown that much of what he saysparticularly about freedom, spirit,
and Godcannot be claimed to be, in terms of formal-logical entailment, necessary at all. Hegel even concedes that
not infrequently the connections we make in our seemingly logical thinking are quite arbitrary, not necessary at all,
such that, for example, the connection between the generalities we set upgeneraand the particularities they are
supposed to subsumespeciesare not necessary but quite clearly contingent. Classification can, after all, be quite
careless; it can depend on the taken for granted, the accepted, the presupposed. More importantly, where what is in
question is what Hegel calls "speculative thinking," it may be impossible to satisfy the demands of formal-logical
necessity at all, since this sort of necessity is confined to the connection between concepts which have been limited
for the sole purpose of making the connection between them logically unimpeachable. But this is manipulative
thinking, which is more interested in not contradicting itself than in knowing what is true. If, then, thinking is to be
concerned with more than what is merely plausible or merely noncontradictory (the latter being a condition of
abstract possibility), it must move on to the kind of reflection (Nachdenken) which Hegel calls ''speculative
thinking." We shall have more to say of this later. Here suffice it to say that Hegel sees it as a kind of thoughtful
"looking-in" which sees in the object it contemplates the kind of necessity which characterizes organic structure
whose parts have the actuality they have only as the living parts of a living organisman eye plucked out is not an
eye, a hand cut off is not a hand, a body which is dead is not an organism. The form which characterizes this kind
of thinking is what Hegel calls "concept," whose dynamic structure distinguishes it from all other forms of thought;
it is the form which makes thought to be thought in the fullest sense of the term; it is not the isolated activity of an
individual subject, not the mental act which represents reality, but the internal rational structure of reality itself.
Concepts do not simply "represent" alien reality. They "manifest" the intrinsic rationality which characterizes
reality.
Once again it is important to note that in Hegel's thought there is never a question of the either/or which makes us
deny one side of a seeming contradiction if we affirm the other. Having affirmed the significance of speculative
science or of speculative logic, there is no need to consider either


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the empirical sciences or formal logic as of no significance. Speculative thinking does not ignore the empirical
content of the particular sciences; it both acknowledges and makes use of such content. By the same token it both
recognizes and makes use of for its own content the universal laws and categories which the empirical sciences
have uncovered, but it also introduces and validates other categories which are beyond the capacity of the special
sciences to comprehend. Nor does speculative logic reject the thought-forms, laws, and objectivities of either
formal logic or of a metaphysics tied to formal logic; it simply takes thought beyond where these earlier forms of
thought have been able to take it. All of this means, of course, that concept as understood in speculative thinking is
not the same as concept is commonly taken to be; from the speculative point of view concept is a dynamic totality
constantly on the move, breaking through the bonds which abstract thinking has imposed on it. It is only when
concept is understood in this latter arbitrarily limited sense, that abstract thinking can contend that the infinite
cannot be comprehended conceptually; of course, it cannot be comprehended in concepts whose source is merely
finite thinking but it is arbitrary to claim that the concept as such can be only that. The concept "man," for
example, is not simply the product of any (or every) finite activity of thinking the object "man"; it is the reality of
man expressing itself in a thought which exceeds all limits of particularity.
No. 10. There is, then, something quite special about the kind of knowing proper to philosophical thinking; it is not
modeled on but goes beyond abstract modes of thinking, beyond the merely subjective activity of merely individual
subjects. The task that Hegel sees before him, then, is that both of coming to grips with speculative thinking and the
kind of necessity proper to it and of validating its capacity to know the absolute objects spoken of above. The
problem is that doing this is itself a philosophical task, to be accomplished by philosophical thinking itself, not in
some sort of non-philosophical propaedeutic (read: "critique"?). An attempt to give an explication here in an
introduction would be unphilosophical, resting as it would on a congeries of statements, assertions, and
ratiocinations, "i.e., contingent affirmations the opposite of which could be asserted with equal right." Quite
obviously we cannot stop here, but we do have some indication as to where we are going.
By the time he wrote this Hegel had already distanced himself considerably from Kant's "critical philosophy"
which had nourished him in his youth. Here he simply indicates rather succinctly some of the reasons for this
distancing. Even granting that the really important questions for philosophy concern, for example, God and the
essences of things, critical philosophy, he tells us, will not even attempt to answer such questions without first
investigating the mind's capacity to know anything at all. The instrument to be employed in philosophical
investigation, it tells us, must be


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examined before it is put to use. Nor can there be any doubt that Kant, following in the footsteps of, but violently
disagreeing with, Locke, Berkeley, and Hume, had convinced most of his contemporaries of the reasonability of
just such an approach, with the result that philosophy tended to concern itself far more with thinking than it did
with what thinking thinks. What is more, if one wishes to employ a term such as "instrument,"9 it is fairly obvious
that in many instances one can legitimately investigate the trustworthiness of the instrument one employs without
using the instrument itself in order to carry on the investigation. What seems to have escaped Kant, howeverat least
as Hegel reads himis that the attempt to know that knowing is valid can be successful only if the knowing of
knowing is, in fact, valid. The circle is rapidly building up! One way of solving the problem which seems too
obvious to be ignored and too devastating if it is not solved, is to do what, Hegel says, Reinhold did, by assuming
that knowing is valid, treating it as something problematical, which need not be rejected until it is proved to be
untrue. The difficulty is that in treating the validity of knowing as a problematic hypothesis one has not very much
changed Kant's procedure, nor has one escaped its pitfallsif knowing is assumed to be true until proved to be
untrue, the assumption is still an unproved assumption.
No. 11. What has happened is that a thinking which confines itself to the mode of abstract understanding has
involved itself in a circle out of which, merely as understanding, it can find no exitunless, of course, thinking can
find a virtue in the circularity of its procedure; that is, that the circle is not "vicious" but rather "dialectical," not
skirting but rather making use of the very contradictions in which it has become involved. If we see spirit as the
unified source of conscious activity (perhaps "source activity" would be better), there is no need to speak of
''faculties" (instruments) at all, as though the mind "employed" them in relating itself to this or that object. When
the activity of the mind is that of feeling or intuition, then its objects are sensible; when it imagines, its objects are
images; when it wills, its objects are purposes, and so on and on. If the mind goes all the way it will come upon an
activity which is, so to speak, in contradiction with all of these lesser forms and can do what none of the others do.
It can occupy itself with itself, and this is thinking.10 In the most profound sense of the word, thinking can think
itself, and there is no circle here, no unresolved contradiction. Thinking in the fullest sense, that is, as speculative,
can both
9. In the introduction to the Phenomenology Hegel is at pains to point out the futility of looking at knowing
(thinking) as that which a subject employs (an instrument) in grappling with objects.
10. Sensing does not sense sensing; imagining does not imagine imagining; willing does not will willing; but
thinking does think thinking. What is more, thinking thinks the other activities also.


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think and resolve the many contradictions in which thinking on the level of abstraction inevitably becomes
involved. Thinking, as we saw before, does not stand still in order to be examined, nor does an analysis of what
would have to be the case if thinking is to be counted valid yield particularly satisfactory results. Thinking must
think itself as the dynamic activity which it is in order to reveal to itself what it is.
We have a foretaste here of what logic is going to be for Hegel. He speaks, however, of an "insight" (Einsicht)
into the nature of thinking which reveals that it is essentially dialectic. Of utmost importance in this is the
realization that on the level of abstraction proper to understanding (Verstand) thinking cannot but become involved
in contradictions. What is new in Hegel's thinking is the conviction that, if the contradictions are faced honestly
and not simply wished away, they will resolve themselves in dynamic interaction, showing that the complex
manysidedness of thought, rather than being a cause for despair, constitutes the enormous richness which only a
thinking unimpeded by images can unravel. At the same time thought can now objectify itself in all its forms,
without fear that it will become bogged down in any one of them,11 nor will it have to take refuge in a kind of
thinking which deliberately leaves out the dynamic mediation which makes thought to be thoughtit can avoid the
pitfall of relying solely on so-called "immediate" contact with its object.
No. 12. When philosophical thinking is looked upon in this way, Hegel has no difficulty in acknowledging that
philosophy does, in fact, find its point of departure in experience, which provides consciousness with a content.
From this point of view experience is seen as a "stimulus" (Reiz) which calls forth thoughta thought which, so to
speak, lifts itself above the consciousness which is no more than naively manipulative of the content given in
sensation to a level of thinking which does not need an admixture of sensible images, thus moving away from and
adopting a "negative relationship" to its point of departure. Its domain is no longer that of successive appearances
but rather that of the one universal essence manifested in appearances, call it the Absolute, or God, but still an
essence which is at this point more or less abstract. On the other hand, the empirical sciences carry thier own
stimulus for thought to raise itself above the merely empirical form of thinking, wherein its manifold content is
taken to be simply given and hence contingent, to a level where that same content assumes the form of rational
necessity, where the universality of laws of nature rules. It is this stimulus which cancels the satisfaction which
thought initially found in its abstract absolute, by goading it on to a development which proceeds from within
thought itself. But even on this level thought is no more than the reception of a content, whose determinations
simply belong to it as it is,
11. The overall message of Hegel's Phenomenology.


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thus giving thought the appearance of being free, not in the sense of being self-determined, but in the sense of
zeroing in on the rationality which belongs properly to the real which is its object. Thinking in this sense is tied
down, it is true, but it is tied to reality, not to its own vagaries nor to the merely sensible manifestations of reality.
It is too soon, Hegel feels, to speak more in detail of the relationship of immediateness and mediation in
consciousness, a theme about which he will have much to say in logic. Suffice it to say here that, even though as
moments of thought the two can be distinguished, they cannot be separated, if thought is to be thought. Thus, to
know Godor any suprasensible12 object whateveris to be lifted above the sensible, to be negatively related to it,
and this negative relation is itself mediation, that is, a movement beyond what is immediately given. The result can
seem rather paradoxical: the very immediacy of the initial grasp mediates the movement which carries thinking
beyond it, a movement which is inescapable, if thinking is to be true to itself. Still, and this is important, the
movement beyond the empirical is not dependent on the empirical, not derived from it. Thinking cancels out the
sensible from which it took its rise; it negates that which is immediately before it. The sensible does not remain as
an element in thinking. The dialectic of thinking involves not a finding in the sensible what it needs but a going
beyond the sensible to find what it needs; and the going beyond must go all the way!
Hegel adds here a remark which is seldom noted by commentators, especially by those who complain that for him
speculative thinking simply swallows up religious belief. There is unquestionably a very special kind of satisfaction
to be found in a thinking which has in itself a universality it gives itself (a priori); a satisfaction which permits it to
be rather indifferent to the contingent particularizations of this universality. But the satisfaction runs the risk of
being empty if it simply stops here. When we look at religion, he tells us, whether it be developed or undeveloped,
brought to the level of a conscious knowing or held on the level of simple, heartfelt faith, we can see that the kind
of emotional satisfaction it gives in both cases can be the same; the one does not have to be antagonistic to the
other. And here, I think, we have to supply something which, although Hegel does not explicitly state it, seems to
be required by what follows (and it is also stated explicitly elsewhere [see BDG, 4th lecture]), namely, that if
religion becomes so intellectual that the satisfaction of the heart has been eliminated, religion itself has become
empty formalism. By the same token, if philosophy stands still in the universality of ideas, as happened in the case
of the "being" of Parmenides or the "becoming" of Heraclitus, there can
12. It should not be amiss to point out that the German term for "suprasensible" is übersinnlich, which
means not only "above" the sensible but also ''more than" the sensible.


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be a justified complaint that philosophy has stagnated into formalism. Even a highly developed philosophy can get
bogged down in abstract propositions; for example, that "in the absolute all is one" or "the subjective the objective
are identical,"13 with the result that these abstractions are simply carried over unaltered and applied to particular
instances. Philosophy should remain grateful for what the empirical sciences have provided, preparing the material
which philosophy can then make its own (i.e., "appropriate''). Philosophy is self-developing, it is true, but its self-
development should not be separated from its appropriation of a content antecedently prepared. It develops that
content "speculatively," which is what the empirical sciences are incapable of doing, but there is no reason why, in
the deep satisfaction of its own independence, it must downgrade the empirical, the particular. Even the
universality attaching to the term "philosophy" itself should not blind philosophers to the diversity of philosophical
positions subsumed under the one heading of "philosophy"; not only are particulars no less real than the universal,
but they constitute in their diversity the concrete unity of the whole which is the universal. Here is enunciated in a
rather unobtrusive way the peculiarly Hegelian principle of concrete universality, arrived at not by the suppression
of differences among particulars until a sort of least common denominator is reached, but by embracing in one
whole the complementarity of diverse manifestations of the one. This principle of seeing unity in diversity will be
of utmost importance in Hegel's philosophy of religion.
No. 13. The consequences of this principle are singularly manifest in the development of one philosophy out of the
diversity of philosophical positions, a development which is elaborated in the history of philosophy as, so to speak,
the "organic" growth of a "concrete universal" whose unity is that of continuous process, not merely the unity of
collection (a sequential movement in which "philosophies" accumulate), nor is it the unity of including diversity
under one class concept called "philosophy."14 There is a danger, of course, that the continuity of the movement of
thought will be missed by those who merely record a succession of philosophical positions without attention to the
intrinsic growth of the very idea which is philosophy.
It is here that Hegel puts so much stress on that central theme of his philosophizing which so many find
unacceptable. The active source of philosophical thinking, and hence of its development, he contends, is "the one
living spirit," which in the millennia which have preceded us has been progressively becoming conscious of itself
as being the totality of both all thought and all reality. It is this spirit which is the articulated summation of
13. Quite clearly in these remarks Hegel has Schelling in mind.
14. See EGP, pp. 94136; Lauer, Hegel's Idea of Philosophy, pp. 6792.


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finite thinking infinitized in the continuity of its own process. The history of philosophy, in this view, bears
eloquent witness to the unity which is philosophy, one "organic" whole of which diverse philosophies are the
"branches" and whose consummation in any given age retains the whole of its significant past. What becomes
evident here is that the diversityeven contradictorinessof successive philosophical positions, far from arguing to the
unreliability of the philosophical enterprise as a whole, rather attests to the living complementarity of diversity,
which makes for richness rather than poverty, for growth rather than decline, and for the hope that truth constantly
sought after can be attained, on condition that it never be required to stand still.
No. 14. Development in the sense in which Hegel understands it, however, is not confined to a chronological
sequence of positions. It is exhibited in philosophical thinking itself, independently of chronological sequence.
Thinking itself is developmental, or it is not thinking. Truly self-developing thought is itself concrete (from
concrescere, a process of internal growth). Seen in this way thought is idea, the objective unity of thought in its
development or the unified interrelatedness of objective thinking. If the unity is total universality, what comes to
light is the Idea, the Absolute. Philosophy can rightly be called the "science" of the Absolute as Idea, but only if
philosophy is "system," wherein concrete truth unfolds itself as united in a totality which not only retains a
diversity of determinations but also recognizes that diversity is necessary to the process of self-determination.
Hegel will sharpen this even more by stating that a "philosophy without system cannot be scientific"; it can only be
a subjective mode of thinking tied to the contingent content which the senses present to it. We must recognize that
a content of thought is valid only as a "moment" of the whole, otherwise it is no more than an unfounded
presupposition, a mere subjective certainty. A nonsystem is no better than a congeries of conjectures and opinions;
truths cannot be isolated from each other nor from the totality. On the other hand, a philosophy which limits itself
to one principle which is to explain everything (e.g., Fichte's Ich or Schelling's undifferentiated absolute) is not
truly philosophy. It is the true principle of philosophy to embrace within itself all particular principlesthis is
"system."
No. 15. Imperceptibly, Hegel now shifts from the diversity of philosophical positions within the ongoing whole
which is "philosophy" to the "parts" of philosophy, presumably the multiplicity designated by his use of the plural
in the title, Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences. Looking at philosophy this way he considers each of its
"parts" to have a certain philosophical wholeness in itself, even though the validity of each depends on its being a
part of the one whole. If the whole of philosophy, then, can be called ''system," each of its parts is, so to speak, a
system


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within the system, or, as he says metaphorically, "a circle enclosed within itself" such that the whole can be seen as
a "circle of circles." The philosophical Idea, which is one, is present in each of the parts under a form peculiar to
the part. Each of the "circles," because in itself a kind of totality, breaks through the confinement of its own
particularized subject-matter, thus laying the foundation for an ever-widening sphere of thought. Each of the parts,
then, is a necessary moment of the dynamic whole, in such a way that the overall system which embraces what is
peculiar to each of the parts is the one Idea which is manifested in each of the constitutive parts.
No. 16 Once again, the point is made in the title: what Hegel is presenting here is an Encyclopedia, the whole
circle (cucloV *) of instruction (paideia*) in philosophical thinking. As such its task is not to present the detailed
development of particulars but rather to confine itself to the principles and fundamental concepts of the particular
sciences which make up the wholea whole in the sense that it is complete, no "philosophical" sciences being left
out. It is not as though, however, one could count the number of parts which must be included, if the whole is to
be a whole. The parts are not separated units; each is true only to the extent that it is itself a whole. The whole of
philosophy, then, can be seen as in truth one science, but it must also be seen as a whole of many
particularcomplementaryparts. In this context diverse "philosophies" can be seen, even in their particular
inadequacy, as converging beams of light all illumining the one "absolute."
If by "encyclopedia" we ordinarily understand a composite work which treats many topics, an aggregate whose
loose principle of unity is little more than to be of common interest to the enquiring human mind, then perhaps
Hegel should offer an apology for employing the term. In any event what he means by a "philosophical"
encyclopedia is not (1) a collection of interesting items of information, nor (2) an arbitrary inventory of what are to
be called "positive" sciences, having no rationally necessary connection with each other. This does not mean that
philosophy has no interest in the subject-matter of what from their own point of view are, in fact, positive sciences.
To the extent that these latter have a rational foundation, they are of interest to philosophical enquiry, even though
what is merely "positive" (informational) in them is not of philosophical interest. It is not, however, that facts are
unimportant, even to philosophical enquiry; it is simply that philosophy's interest is not in facts as facts, only facts
as illustrative of concepts which are philosophy's sole concernan uninterpreted "fact'' is, properly speaking, not a
fact. The concept of beauty can be instanced in this or that work of art, the concept of law in this or that particular
bit of legislation, the concept of history in this or that event, the concept of nature in this or that treeor even
forestbut philosophy's concern is the concept, not the particular instance as such. What it comes down to is that a
"science," to the extent that it is "positive," must recognize that it is


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oriented to the knowledge of contingent facts and to the concepts which render these facts intelligible, not to the
overall rational interrelation of concepts. Hegel is willing to admit, however, that even an empirical investigation
can be so organized that its procedures are dictated by the internal consistency of the guiding concept, in which
case the procedures would still be essentially philosophical. It would seem that he is referring, at least indirectly, to
his own procedures, particularly in his philosophy of nature, philosophy of subjective spiritand, to a certain extent,
in the philosophy of right, philosophy of art, and even in the history of philosophy, in all of which he looks to
facts (or events) in order to obtain "empirical verification" for a conceptual structure which his Science of Logic
had told him he could justifiably expect to find. "In such a procedure," he contends, ''an experimental physics or a
history, etc., rooted in sense experience will present the rational science of nature and of human events in image
form, which form, although extrinsic to the concept, still mirrors it."
No. 17. It could seem that, if philosophy is to begin, it must do so, like the other sciences, on the basis of a
subjective presupposition, which is to say with an initial decision as to what its proper object is.15 Just as
mathematics makes space or number the object of thinking, so philosophy makes thinking itself that object. There
is a difference, however; thinking is the free, self-determining act which characterizes philosophy, where its
standpoint is independent, where it gives to itself an object which it itself has produced. More than that, the
standpoint which appears to be immediately given must be the result of the scientific thinking in question, so that
only at the end does it attain to its beginning (i.e., to its truth). Philosophy, then, is a sort of circle closing on itself,
which does not have a beginning, in the sense that other sciences do, whose beginning is dictated by the scientist's
decision to begin. Philosophy's (or logic's) beginning is dictated by the science itself, by the very concept of what
the science is. Where does philosophy say that the philosopher must begin? Philosophy has only one purpose, only
one goal of its activity, to attain to the concept of its own concept. Philosophy's proper task is to find out what
philosophy is, which is to say, to bring itself into being by philosophizing.
The foregoing analysis of Hegel's introduction to Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences has been, it might
seem, rather prolix. At the same time it has not been erudite in the way, for example, that Theunissen's 220-page
analysis of twenty-five paragraphs of the Encyclopedia has been.16 The pur-
15. We are forcibly reminded here, in the introduction to the Encyclopedia of [all] the Philosophical
Sciences, of the question which introduces the first part of Science of Logic, "The Doctrine of Being":
Womit muss der Anfang der Wissenschaft gemacht werden? ("with what must the science begin?"), (WL I,
p. 51).
16. Michael Theunissen, Hegels Lehre vom absoluten Geist als Theologisch-politischer Traktat. (Berlin: de
Gruyter, 1970), pp. 103322.


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pose of the analysis here has been twofold: (1) to extract from the text the overall movement and direction of
Hegel's philosophical thinking; and (2) to see how the movement of this thinking inevitably culminates in a
thinking of God, without a knowledge of whom all thinking is condemned to fall by the wayside and never attain
to the grasp of its own truth. It is not that the reality of God is the only necessary truth to which philosophy attains,
but that no other necessary truth, be it that of morality, of human freedom and the rights consequent on that, of
logical thinking, or of the laws of nature, would be either true or necessary, if not rooted in the necessity of the
absolute Idea, which is none other than absolute Spirit, God.
The "Necessity" of Truth

For contemporary thinking the difficulty with all this is not so much that Hegelian thought culminates in
Goddespite various attempts to claim that it does notrather it lies in an uneasiness with a thinking which speaks of
"necessary truth" at all or, worse still, that the human mind can claim to know what is necessarily true. It is all
right, logically, to speak of necessarily accepting a proposition as true, if it is seen to be logically entailed in
another proposition (or propositions) already accepted as true, but that is a far cry from saying that a state of affairs
enunciated in such a proposition is necessarily the case, that this state of affairs could not not be true. Nor need
there be too much difficulty for the contemporary mind to acknowledge at least the plausibility of the Kantian
contention that human reason operates in such a way that it necessarily asserts that certain states of affairs are true,
even though it cannot know that this is the case. But Hegel cannot be satisfied with either of these positions. With
regard to the first position, he will claim not only that the human mind is logically necessitated to affirm certain
universal truths (e.g., that infinite being is real, that the human spirit makes free decisions, that murder is wrong)
and is illogical if it does not, but also that what the human mind is thus logically necessitated to affirm is
necessarily the case, even when the formal-logical entailment of these propositions in other propositions has not
been demonstrated to be necessary. There is a logic of speculative thinking which carries the mind beyond the
limitations of formal logicwihtout violating the rules of formal logic in so doing. With regard to the second
position, Hegel will make a sharp distinction between the way the human mind in fact necessarily thinks
(presuming that this could be known at all) and the way the human mind is logically necessitated to think, under
pain of its thinking being a nonthinking. Knowing how the human mind is logically necessitated to thinkespecially
if the logic in question is "speculative"may still cause us some difficulties, but Hegel is convinced that "speculative
thinking" will


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be seen to validate itself if we go through with it. What it comes down to is that Hegel is making the enormous
claim that the human mind must think this way under pain of being irrational if it does not. Nor does "rational"
refer only to the way the mind necessarily thinks; it also takes in the way reality necessarily is; reality reveals to
and in rational thinking what reality's own rationality is.
It might not be amiss here to give a few examples of what this kind of thinking entails. When I speak with you, I
can (perhaps must) say "that what is before me is a human being is contingent, not necessary"no "fact" is. That a
human being is immortal, if it is true at all, is necessarily true, in such a way that to deny it would be irrational. The
same can be put in a slightly different way: To say that I am not human, might very well be untrue, but it is not
irrational; there are nonhuman beings. To say that a human being is not immortal is not only untrue, it is
irrationalthere are no nonimmortal human beings; immortality belongs to the very "concept" of human. It should be
observed, of course, that in this context "irrational" carries with it no moral stigma. You may be doing the best you
can, but ''doing the best you can" does not save you from irrationality.
Relation of Thought and Reality

In one sense all of this is very clearthere is scarcely anything in Hegel's writing clearer than the introduction to the
Encyclopedia. In another sense, however, since it was not possible for Hegel, in an introduction, to spell out the
doctrine of "concept" upon which the elaboration of philosophical thinking is predicated, a certain lack of clarity
persists in clinging both to Hegel's text and to an analysis thereof. In a tradition of philosophical thinking
according to which a sharp distinction was drawn between the subjective activity of thinking and the objective
order of reality which that thinking sought to reproduce, the guiding principles in the interpretation of human
knowing had been (1) the Aristotelian assertion that in knowing, the mind somehow "becomes" that which it
knows, and (2) the contention, erroneously attributed to Aristotle, that the "somehow" implies that the mind is a
"blank tablet" upon which reality makes its imprint. That the mind has a special capacity of its own both to receive
these imprints in such a way as to produce "ideas" which, if properly produced, would be faithful reproductions of
reality, was also part of the Aristotelian heritage which dominated philosophy until the eighteenth century.
Explicitly or implicitly the presupposition behind all this was that the activity to be explained was causal activity:
the causality of reality in imprinting itself, and the causality of the mind in working on the materials at its disposal.
What the heritage was left with, however, was two worlds, a world of reality "out there," and


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a world of ideas, which, however faithfully it might be said to reproduce the world of reality, was nevertheless
another world.17 With the advent of "modern" philosophy, however, whose beginning is commonly said to be
found in the thinking of Descartesalthough it might be more accurate to make the beginning more general, locating
it in the overall need to secure a foundation for bourgeoning experimental sciencea new need arose, that of
guaranteeing the validity of the knowledge the human mind was supposed to possess. The Aristotelian framework
of causal explanation was not immediately abandoned, but a new emphasis was introduced: The world of ideas was
still distinct from the world of reality, but the validation of the world of ideas was to be sought within that world
itselfideas were true if they had the proper qualities to make them true, which is to say, if they were such as to
make it impossible to doubt their truth. Very subtly the emphasis had shifted from the truth of reality which ideas
were supposed to reflect to the certainty the mind had concerning the validity of its ideas. On the European
continent this resulted in a "rationalism," which found a guarantee for ideas in the rationality of the subjective
process of arriving at them. Across the channel it resulted in an "empiricism,'' which sought to guarantee ideas by
tracing their derivation from indubitable experiencethe only "rational" way to guarantee them. Then came Hume,
who tossed the bombshell which rocked both camps: The only indubitability attaching to ideas was their
relationship to each other, which left reality in the dark; and the only indubitability attaching to experience was the
experience itself, not what it was the experience of. Causality was of no help as a guarantee, since there can be no
certainty of causality itself.
There was no escaping Hume's challenge, and so Kant picked up the gauntlet right where Hume had thrown it. It
has been said of Kant that he was the first philosopher to have inserted the human thinking subject into the very
heart of the logic of thought. No longer would it be a question of validating ideas by tracing the process of arriving
at themmetaphysically, rationalistically, or empiricallysince Hume had made all three approaches suspect. Rather,
Kant would investigate critically the necessary conditions for the human mind's concepts to be both true and
meaningful, and he would find that the human subject had all the equipment it needed for that. It the human subject
would employ that equipment in the way it demandedwith necessitythat it be employed, human thinking would be
trueeven though not, perhaps, true to a reality presumed to be "in-itself" independently of the experiencing of it. It
was a gigantic break with a long
17. In Phenomenology of Spirit, chap. III "Force and Understanding: Appearance and Supra-Sensible
World," Hegel depicts the last-ditch stand of the "objective" attitude of a consciousness which would look
outside itself for the cause of its being conscious of the world. In doing this Hegel shows how the two
worlds (of reality and of the mind) demand that the world of the mind be an image of the real world, where
in fact it may be no more than a mirror-imagean "inverted" (verkehrte) world.


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philosophic tradition. In one way or another Kant's predecessors, all the way back to the Greeks, had presupposed
that the structure of human thought bore witness to a corresponding structure of reality. Gone now was this
presupposition, whose only supportpresumablywas the causality whose cognitional significance had been impugned
by Hume. Causality for Kant had not completely left the stage, but it remained on the stage only as a category
operative within thought, with no justification for its application to a world of reality beyond thought.
There is no question that Kant bequeathed to his successors a problem; it is a mark of his genius that, if the
problem is not solved, there is no going beyond Kant. There can be a question, however, as to whether the problem
is insoluble. Of the three great "system-builders" who succeeded Kant, that is, Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel, each
attempted in his own way to resolve the Kantian dilemma without returning to the causality principle, at least in the
form of it impugned by Hume. This is not the place to describe the efforts of Fichte and Schelling to overcome the
Kantian duality of objectivity and subjectivity, or of an independent reality and of a thinking whose task it was to
reproduce it faithfully. Suffice it to say that both sought to solve the problem by appeal to an absolute subject
which would account for both itself and objectivity, thus leaving no gap between subjectivity and objectivity to be
bridged. Hegel would build on both, and he would do so by denying the basic premiss that it makes sense to speak
of a world of reality "beyond thought" at all. This is what has been called Hegel's "idealism," but it is not the
purely subjective idealism of a Berkeley, not the idealism of an indeterminate absolute à la Fichte or Schelling,
nor, to anticipate, is it the idealism of an unidentifiable ''transcendental subject" à la Husserl. For Hegel, as for his
great predecessors Plato and Aristotle, Aquinas and Spinoza, the structure of truly rational human thinking does
bear witness to the structure of reality; not, however, because the structures of thought and of reality are similar but
because they are, ultimately, one and the same. It will be the task of his monumental Science of Logic not only to
show that they are one and the sameFichte and Schelling had sought to affirm thatbut also to show how they are
one and the same, namely, as dynamic process. Logic is the unfolding in thought of the structure of thought, and
the affirmation which Hegel makes in his introduction to Science of Logic, that the "content [of Logic] is the
presentation of God, as he is in his eternal essence before the creation of nature and of a single finite spirit" (WL I,
p. 31), however one may want to interpret it, is to be taken seriously. It means at the very least that the thought
which logic investigates consists of a unified totality which is both antecedent to (logically), and the source of
(ontologically), finite reality and finite thought. The structures of thought are the structures of reality, because
subjective rational thinking and objective rational reality are products of a thought which at once transcends and
embraces both. This, in turn, means


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that the transcendent concept (the producing) and the transcendent idea (the produced) are identical and constitute
both the reality of the real and the truth of thought.
The Meaning of Concept

It is time, however, to let Hegel himself speak. I have chosen, once more, to let Hegel speak in the words of the
Logic contained in his Encyclopedia, not because the language of Science of Logic would not be both more
instructive and more satisfying, but because an analysis of what he says in the larger work would by itself turn into
a full-length book. The passages to be analyzed here are taken from the third part of the Logic, entitled "The
Doctrine of Concept." In it Hegel is telling us what he means by "concept," as opposed to what a great part of the
Western philosophical tradition and, in particular, his contemporary opponents have meant. He begins by saying
that concept is a self-determining totality, not the mental act of an individual subject, but "independent substantial
power," such that whatever is subsumed under the concept is a "moment" of the whole concept and, as a moment,
expresses the whole concept and is valid only as inseparably united with the concept, deriving its determinateness
from its identification with the whole (no. 160). Quite obviously a statement such as this needs some explaining,
which is precisely what Hegel tells us, in the prefaces to both the first and second editions, a lecturer who uses a
manual like the Encyclopedia should give. The Zusatz, presumably, contains the explanation which Hegel himself
gave when lecturing. In any event, throughout this section the Zusätze are for the most part more enlightening than
is the main text. The Zusatz here tells us, then, that when Hegel uses the term ''concept," he is speaking from the
point of view of "absolute idealism," according to which what ordinary consciousness looks upon as a "being"
independent of consciousness is seen to be but an "ideal moment" of a larger whole which only "begreifendes
Erkennen" can come to grips with.18 The "logic of understanding," on the other hand, tends to look upon the
concept as simply a form of subjective thinking, the way the in-
18. Apart from the difficulty of coming to grips with what Hegel means by Begriffthe thrust of this entire
chapterthere is the difficulty of determining just how the term should be translated (if indeed there can be
one undeviating translation). For the most part those who have translated Hegel's works into English
(particularly British translators) have opted for the English term "notion." This has its merits, especially if
the term recaptures the dynamic connotation of the Greek nonV *, which Hegel translates as Vernunft. It is
to be feared, however, that for most of us the term "notion" does not have these dynamic overtones.
"Concept," on the other hand, although it is not without its difficulties, has the merit of being related to the
activity of "con-ceiving" (producing from within) and of retaining connotations of "concreteness" and
"com-prehension," both of which for Hegel are essentially dynamic. It is a question of what one chooses to
emphasize, and neither of the English terms emphasizes all that Hegel wishes to emphasize.


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dividual mind "represents" to itself universally the object it thinks, an empty abstraction. As Hegel sees it, the
concept is the exact opposite of abstract; it is an "utterly concrete," vital principle. The whole logical movement
described up to this point should make that clear; even the distinction of form and content of the concept is seen to
be a dialectical distinction, that is, one which in the movement of thought cancels itself outthe thinking is the
content of the thinking, and the concept is the unity of form and content. If, of course, one means by "concrete" the
sensible, then the concept is abstract, not "graspable" by the senses at all; but as uniting the totality of finite
perspectives into an ideal unity, into a determinate whole, it is concrete, the locus of concrete universality, the
really real, not the mentally fragmented. In this sense the concept is the definition of the absolute. It might, of
course, be asked why "speculative logic'' calls what is here in question "concept," since the term can lead to so
much misunderstanding. The fact is, however, that the "speculative" meaning of concept is not so far from the
meaning given it in "ordinary language"; we do speak of deriving the properties of an object from its "concept,"
and we do try to grasp the meaning of what we are faced with by turning to the "concept" of it.
What Hegel is saying of the concept, then, is that it is the dynamic reproduction in thought of the rational structure
of reality. The overall pattern of logical thinking contains three main parts: (1) the logic of being, or the self-
development of thought's inevitable object; (2) the logic of essence, or reflection on that object as it is reproduced
in thought; and (3) the logic of concept, or the investigation of the dynamic structure of thought as expressing the
structure of reality. It is not as though the concept is that which thought produces and then attributes to realitya
medium between reality and thoughtit is the self-manifestation of conceptually-structured reality in conceptually-
structured subjective thinkingthe discovery of dynamic thought-structure in reality is the same movement as the
self-expression of thought-structured reality in thought.19 In thinking itself thought finds that it necessarily thinks
its object universally. But, if it is to come to grips with its universalized object, it must also think the particularities
of that object, which it can do only if it thinks the particularities of its own structure. Although, then, the abstract
universality of the concept in subjective thinking is only a moment in the concrete process of thought, it is a
moment and, as such, is indispensable. If it is a function of reason to unify diversity, then unified diversity is a
product of reasonbut so is diversified unity. The direction in which Hegel is moving is already clear: toward the
all-unifying concept (absolute Spirit), the absolute Idea (God).
19. As Hegel tells us, he had already given an adumbration of this logical method of investigation in the
Phenomenology's examination of the structure of consciousness. See WL I, p. 7.


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No. 161. The progress of the concept, he goes on to tell us, ceases to be a passage of reality into what is other than
itself, that is, thought. Rather it is a "development" of the concept itself. The progressive identification of the
diverse and the unified in a whole determinateness is the self-determination of the concept as a whole.
Zusatz: Hegel is not denying that there is a passage involved in the movement from reality to thought; reality and
thought are distinct. But the distinction is dialectical, and so the term "development" is more accurate than the term
"passage"; reality does not become thought, it already is thought-reality. As an illustration of this he takes the
development in nature from seed to full-blown plant, where the progressive diversification does not presuppose the
antecedent presence of infinitesimal "parts," only the ''ideal" presence of a diversity whose actualization is the
growth of the plant. In a very significant sense, then, the plant is, from beginning to end of its growth, one and the
same. So too with the concept; it grows according to its own laws of development. Like the plant, it takes on
otherness, so to speak, only to find that the otherness is not other; it remains itself in othering itself. As a model of
this Hegel takes the Christian teaching on creation, according to which God brings to being what is other than
himself, only because from eternity he generates a Son, in whom God remains the same as himself. For some the
example could seem farfetched, but it does point up Hegel's contention that it makes no sense to speak of
"concepts" except in the framework of the one "concept" transcending all concepts (see chap. 7).
No. 162. By this time it should be clear that Hegel's logic has at most a faint family resemblance to the logic with
which most of us are familiar, concerned as the latter is with the forms of subjective thinking and with rules for the
correct manipulation of those forms. Not only is the investigation of concept, for Hegel, only the third part of logic,
but the study of the "forms" of thinking constitutes only a "part of a part." This part Hegel calls "the doctrine of
the subjective or formal concept." It is to be followed by a study of the "objectivity" of the concept and by a study
of the unity of subject and object, which he called "idea" and which alone contains "truth" in the full sense of the
term. It is not a question, however, of repudiating formal logic but rather of clearing out the "empirical material,"
whether psychological, "metaphysical," or whatever, which has crept into what should be purely logical
considerations. What is more, these forms, which are legitimate subjects of logical investigation, tend to be looked
upon from the very narrow viewpoint of the "understanding," which is proper to positive science, rather than from
the more comprehensive point of view of "reason."
The real danger is, as Hegel sees it, that such notions as "being" and "essence" will be looked upon as dictated by
subjective thinking alone rather than as "concepts" with their own inner laws of dialectical develop-


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ment and interrelatedness in a concrete whole of thought. If what are commonly called "concepts" are no more
than the determinations imposed by understanding on the reality it thinks, that is, universalized "representations,"
they are essentially "finite" and, therefore, inadequate to a thought which transcends all finite instantiations. It is
the danger of dealing with the "forms" of thinking in such a way that the "truth'' of thinking's "content" is either
ignored (in favor of "correctness") or is considered to be supplied by a source other than thought itself. On the
contrary, Hegel will look upon the forms of thought as "the living spirit of the actual," such that it is by virtue of
these forms, "through them and in them" that what is said of the actual is true. Therefore, it is necessary to look
into the very truth of these forms themselves. Just what are theyin truth? Just what constitutes the necessity of their
connection with each other? It is more than merely formal-logical entailmenthowever difficult it may be to grasp
what that "more than" can mean. That there is an initial stage in the thinking process when the reality thought is
distinct from and over-against the thinking of it is not to be gainsaid; my concept is the product of my thinking, and
it is distinct from the reality it represents, "as subjective thinking it is a reflection external to the thing" (WL II, p.
236). In this sense to know thought is to know oneself as positing the object of one's thinking. But, it must not be
allowed to stop there; it is only the beginning of a dialectical movement "through which its isolation and
consequently the separation of the concept from the thing is superseded. As its truth there emerges the truth which
is the objective concept" (ibid.). Thus, "in its objectivity the concept is the thing itself which is in and for itself"
(ibid.)."20 It is to be noted, of course, that what is said here is merely asserted, not proved; it is "the concept of
concept," what Hegel means. Now we must follow this out.
No. 163. The process of development, then, begins with the subjective concept, that which the thinking of an
individual subject produces, and we must see what this subjective form, merely as such, involves. It contains the
three "moments" of universality, particularity, and singularity. It should be pointed out that, by calling these
"moments," Hegel is serving notice that he considers them as dynamic elements in a process, each intelligible only
as related to the others in a movement from one to the otherand back. "Universality" designates the character of
sameness with itself that the concept retains in each of its instantiations (Bestimmtheit). "Particularity," then, is the
generalized instantiation, in which the self-sameness of the universal remains undisturbed, whereas "singularity" is
the ultimate instantiation, wherein are reflected both the determinacy of the particular
20. It should be noted that the operative term here is "Objektivität" not "Gegenständlichkeit." Gegenstand is
"object" as given ("standing") over-against a subject; Objekt is "object" as that toward which a movement
is directed. It contains overtones of purpose, e.g., "my object in doing this."


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and the self-sameness of the universal. The singular is the same as the "actual thing," but it is the conceptualized
thing, posited in a universal way as simply this thing identical with itself. The actual thing, on the other hand, is the
existing, the self-manifesting thing, which can "effect" (wirken)21 its self-manifestation as what it is. By the same
token, the singularity of the concept is its "effectiveness," not like a "cause" which effects something other than
itself, but as effectively moving toward its own completion. The singularity of the concept, clearly, should not be
confused with the individuality of things, which is pinpointed only in judgment. Since each ''moment" of the
concept is the whole concept, the singularity in question, which belongs to the subject of a judgment, is the concept
posited as totality, that is, that which embraces all its determinations.
Zusatz 1: To say that a concept is at once universal, particular, and singular is obviously a rather uncommon way to
speak of concepts. A concept is usually looked upon as a universal, arrived at by a suppression of the particular
differences which characterize its instantiations. This is the way, Hegel tells us, that understanding considers
concepts, and it tends to make them empty shells. What he is talking about is a universal concept which
particularizes itself, and only if we bear this in mind can we avoid the complaint that philosophical thinking deals
in mere abstractions. The universal about which he is talking here, in its truly comprehensive signification, has its
roots in Christianity's conception of God. The Greeks knew neither God nor man in their truly universal
dimensions. Their gods were merely particular powers, and the only universal god for them was the Athenians'
"unknown God";22 nor was "man" truly universal, since for the Greeks the barbarians were not men in the same
sense the Greeks were. One might doubt what Hegel is saying here, but the point he is making is a familiar one:
What is universally true of man, that is, based on the very "concept" of man (e.g., freedom), is not true of only
some men, based on a particular reason (e.g., that they were Greek citizens), but of all men, simply because they
are human. Thus, slavery is compatible with paganism but not with Christianity, according to which freedom is
proper to the human in its infinite universality, because each and every human being is of equal value. There are
slaves only when this is not recognized, when some human beings are considered not to be "persons." The
difference, however, is not quantitative; the universal is not arrived at by counting noses but by realizing that the
concept is true only if it is universally true and, thus, that what is necessarily true of the particular, or of the
individual, is necessarily true only because it is universally true, and the universally true is the "concept"but
21. Not, however, by causally "affecting" what is other.
22. Acts 17:23.


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there would be no "concepts" in this sense, if there were no one "Concept" in this sense.
Zusatz 2: Nowhere is it more clear than in Hegel's "doctrine of the concept" that Karl Löwith was correct in
characterizing Hegel's Logic as "a constantly repeated defining of God."23 Even one who is thoroughly familiar
with Hegel's cast of thought is in for a series of surprises as Hegel asserts again and again that human thinking
simply makes no sense except against the backdrop of divine thought, that conceptual thinking is valid only
because "the Concept" is necessarily valid. Here he very boldly states that "the logic of understanding'' is simply
wrong when it speaks of "the emergence and construction of concepts." As a matter of fact, he tells us, we do not
construct concepts, "nor is the concept to be considered as something which has come to be." It is true, of course,
to say the concept is not simply "being" or a "given," that "mediation" is inseparable from it; but the mediation is
not applied from outside, it belongs to the very "concept of concept"; it is its own mediation, its movement. It is
not true to say that first there are objects (Gegenstände) which constitute the contents of our "representations,"
which we then, by the subjective activities of abstraction and combination of what is common to the
representations, conceptualize. It is the concept which is truly first, and "things are what they are through the
activity of the concepts that dwell in them." We see this most clearly in our religious consciousness, according to
which we say, "God created the world out of nothing or, to put it another way, the world and finite things have
proceeded from the fullness of divine thoughts and decrees." What is being said in this religious way expresses the
philosophical truth that thought or, better still, "concept is infinite form, true creative activity, which requires no
already present matter outside itself in order to realize itself." This is not to say, with regard to human thinking,
that there is nothing out there; it is to say that, just as divine thought is creative of the conceptual structure of
reality, so human thought is recreative of a conceptual structure which is antecedent to finite thinking.
No. 164. The concept, then, is what is unconditionally (schlechthin) concrete, because the self-contained unity with
itself which constitutes the intrinsic determinateness of singularity is precisely its relation to itself which constitutes
universality. The "moments" of the conceptuniversality, particularity, and singularityeach of which is universal (see
WL II, p. 246), constitute the dynamic structure of reality itself, which is real only as concrete totality. These
"moments," then, cannot be separated from each other; theoretically each has validity independently of its
contradictory, but
23. Karl Löwith, Von Hegel zu Nietzche, 2nd ed., (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1950), p. 39. Gustav Müller
(Hegel: Denkgeschichte eines Lebendigen [Munich: Francke, 1959], p. 386) says much the same: "The
concept of God is in and for itself the proof of God."


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the concept embraces the contradictions in a unity (shorthand for "the validity of one conditions the validity of the
other"), so that only in their complementarity does any of them make sense at all.
Universality, particularity, and singularity are, in fact, abstract terms, but they express what we understand by
identity, difference, and the real in which identity and difference are united; universality remains identical with
itself only to the extent that it includes concretely the particularities which it subsumes. By the same token, the
particular is meaningful only to the extent that it is an instantiation of the universal and includes the individual
within the scope of its own signification. The singular, too, makes sense only as a "subject" in which the particular
(species) and the universal (genus) are actualized. In other words, the concept of any reality whatever is intelligible
only if the "moments" which make it up are inseparable; the "clarity" of any concept depends on the degree to
which its diverse moments are seen to be embraced in its totalizing unity.
All of which sounds unnecessarily complicated, not to say abstract. In two senses this is correct: What Hegel is
talking about has neither the so-called concreteness of the sensible, which is not the sphere of thought, nor does it
have the complete concreteness of the all-embracing "idea." In one sense the concept of which we are speaking is
still merely a "form" of subjective thinking; and yet it has no other content than itselfit does not "receive" a content
from outside itself; it is not simply a form imposed on an alien content. It is, nevertheless, the form whereby
whatever its content is is determined to concreteness. What this implies is that the subject which gives
determinateness to its own content is the very source of concreteness and, therefore, is itself preeminently concrete,
and this, in Hegel's thinking, is to say that the subject is spirit, wherein the initial total abstractness of mere "being"
is progressively concretized. Thus, the concept, even though a subjective activity and, hence, distinguished from its
own objectivity, is, nevertheless, the source of its own objectivity, since it does what the so-called ''concrete" out-
there cannot do, that is, unify the diversified manifold of the "given." There are, it is true, determinate abstract
concepts, like "man," "house," and "animal," but because they are only universalneither particularized nor
singularizedthey are undeveloped and do not have the concreteness of the authentic concept. The determinateness
of the concrete concept is precisely the negation of the indeterminateness of the abstract.
Judgment
No. 165. If, then, any concept whatsoever remains only at this formal, subjective stage of undifferentiated
universality it will not be concrete; only if the universal is said of the singular, and this it is only in "judgment," the


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articulated concept, will the movement toward concreteness continue. It is in judgment that the "moments" of the
conceptuniversality, particularity, and singularityare "posited" as meaningfully related to each other.
To characterize concepts as "clear," "distinct" (Descartes), or ''adequate" (Spinoza), Hegel tells us in the note to
this paragraph, is to engage in a "psychological" rather than a "logical" description of concepts. These terms refer
to the manner in which the subject conceives. Dependence on "characteristics" such as these is, in fact, inimical to
logic, since they refer to something the subject does in "subordinating" or "coordinating" concepts, not to what is
proper to the concepts themselves. By the same token, to speak of "contrary or contradictory, affirmative or
negative concepts" is to list characteristics which have their place in the sphere of "being" or of "essence," not in
that of "concept," because they are not necessary to the very "concept of concept." Even to speak of "universal,"
"particular," or "singular" is not to designate "kinds" of concepts, whose distinction would be the result of a
reflection "external" to the concepts themselves. Necessary distinctions must be "immanent" to the concepts, and
these belong to "judgment," that is, the concept in the process of determining itself, which will not be complete
until the grounds of its determinateness are manifest.
No. 166. It is in the judgment that the "moments" of universality, particularity, and singularity are at once
distinguished and uniteddistinction indicating the kind of unity, and unity designating the dialectical character of
distinction. This, of course, runs contrary to the common view that the subject and the predicate of judgment are
independent concepts linked by a thinking subject who says "is"as though the subject were a "thing" out-there and
the predicate a universal determination "residing, so to speak, in my hand," which I then bring together in judging.
According to this view, then, the determination which judging gives to the subject24 is subsequently taken to be a
determination of the "object" (Gegenstand). Hegel's view, on the contrary, is illustrated by the etymology of the
German word for judgment, Urteil, which he takes to be "original" (ur) "division" (Teilung), indicating that the
concept divides itself in order to bring its "parts" (Teile) together in a more meaningful unity.
Abstractly speaking the fundamental judgment can be expressed in the proposition, "The singular is the universal."
It is not likely that anyone today would enunciate it that way, but we can see the point: the subject of the
24. It is unfortunate that, in both German and English, the term "subject" is ambiguous: it can mean either
the subject who thinks (experiences) or the subject of which a predicate is said. It should be noted in
addition that, in Hegel's use of the term, the two meanings come closer together: what is said of the subject
is not simply said by another who is "subject" in the first sense; rather the "subject" in the second sense
says the predicate of itselfmediately, of course, in the thinking subject.


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proposition is designated as an individual of which a universal predicate is said.25 In this way the abstract
propositions, "the particular is the universal" and "the singular is the particular" can also make sense, but they are
further steps in the self-determination of the judgment and can be expressed in the initial form, which is simply
Hegel's rendition of "the subject is the predicate." The terminology may vary, but the "identification" characteristic
of judgment remains the same. What he is trying to say is that the linking spoken in the "is'' indicates that it is the
"nature" of the concept to express itself as identical with itself, that is, in breaking itself up it remains itself. In any
event, what is in question is more than a thinking subject attributing a predicate to a subject, thus joining two
different concepts. There are no two concepts which are first not joined and then joined by someone; the concept is
what it is in the joining, in the judgment, that is, the articulated concept. An indication of this can be found in the
very "form" of the judgment, in the "is" of predication. When I say "the rose is red," I do not mean, "I attribute red
to the rose," no matter what peculiar philosophical or psychological predispositions I may bring to the question.
We might, however, say "the rose expresses itself as red in my consciousness of it," which is equivalent to saying
that the rose, which is much else besides being red, particularizes itself in my consciousness as red. "The concept is
that which inhabits things themselves, whereby they are what they are, and to conceive an object (Gegenstand)
means, thus, to be conscious of its concept." If we pass from this to judging the object, it is not our subjective
activity which attaches a predicate to the object, "rather we consider the object under the determination posited
through its concept," which of course, it expresses in our conceiving (begreifen). This last sentence is fraught with
consequences. It means, at the very least, that all the particular determinations which can be said of an object are
already contained in the concept of that object; our thinking lets them emerge and, thus, lets the concept emerge in
its fullness, and its emerging is a process whose "moments" are "universality," "particularity," and "singularity."
No. 167. Although it is true to say that judgment is a mental operation that takes place only in self-conscious
thinking, this observation is of no particular interest to logic. Rather, logic is concerned with the objective status of
judgments; not what they tell us about the activity of thinking subjects but what they tell us about the real of which
they are said (or of which they speak). In this sense judgment is a structure of the relationships resident in the
world of reality. Things, for example, can be looked on as singulars whose inner nature is universal, or they can be
seen as singularizations of the universal. In either case, they contain universality and singularity as at once distinct
and identified; that is, the singular is destined to univer-
25. The caution noted in n. 24 is again to be emphasized.


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salize itself in thought, and the universal is destined to singularize itself in existence. Although, however,
judgments find expression in propositions, not every proposition expresses a judgment in the logical sense, that is,
as the unfolding of a concept. The statement of a single fact or event remains just that; it may involve the
psychological operation called "judging," but it is not a judgment in any logically meaningful senseunless, of
course, there is a question of doubt as to what is truly the case, and there is a logical process of seeking the correct
predicate for a subject. To say, Hegel tells us, "a car is passing in the street" is not to express a logical judgment,
unless there is a doubt that this is true, followed by a logical process of seeking to show that there are reasons for
saying that it is truewhich, of course, involves universalizing.
No. 168. Because, simply by itself, a judgment does not assert the grounds of its own affirmation, its point of view
is that of "finitude"; the "things" it deals with are finite, and the context within which they are dealt with is finite.
In them there is a union of the singular and the universal, else "thing" would be meaningless (cf. PdG, chap. II),
but if the judgment does not develop beyond the stage of mere judgment it is an inadequate unfolding of the
concept, whose moments of singularity and universality are still separate. As we shall see, this cannot be remedied
short of the syllogism.
No. 169. When the judgment is presented in its most abstract form, "the singular is the universal," the subject is
presented as only itself, related to only itself, the so-called "concrete" as given. In this case, the predicate is the
diametric opposite of the subject; it is universal, in the sense of abstractly indeterminate. The very presence of the
copula "is," however, shows either that such a judgment is not in truth abstract, because the predicate has to
contain the particular determinateness of the subject, or that it is not in truth a judgment, because it does not really
say anything. Strictly speaking the subject has a determinate content only in its predicate; that is, without the
predicate it is not a "thing" but only a ''name." For example, if we say "God is the most real of beings," the subject
"God" without its predicate is not a reality but a name which has been given no meaning, and the predicate, "the
most real of beings" is truly a predicate only if it has a determinate meaning. This we shall find to be very
important: If a predicate, that is, of God, does not involve an advance in concreteness, it says nothing. To take this
a step further, which Hegel does not do here, if I say "God is omniscient" without knowing what it means to say
this of God, I am not saying anything. To say of a subject, then, that it is simply the singular, or of any predicate
that it is simply universal, leaving out the mediation of one with the other through particularity, is to say nothing, to
express no judgment, to express only an insignificant, not a significant relationship.


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No. 170. It must be said, then, that the logical relationship of subject and predicate in judgment is such that they
are mutually determining: determining, hence distinct; mutually, hence identified in the unity of one concept. The
subject is the self-identical foundation, by inhering in which the predicate has its ideal consistency and, in relation
to the subject, is only one of the latter's many determinations and demands to be complemented by others. On the
other hand, the predicate by itself is in its universality indifferent to this subject, which is only one of many of
which it can be said (its determinate intelligibility). But a "determinate" content of the predicate effects the
identification of subject and predicate.
No. 171. Initially, then, subject, predicate, and determinate content are "posited" in judgment as related to each
other and, therefore, as different from each other; relation presupposes difference. As contained in one and the
same concept, however, the different are identified: the subject as "concrete totality" is not some undifferentiated
manifold, it is this one, embracing both particular and universal in a unity which is the predicate. It is the copula,
of course, which posits the identity of subject and predicate, initially again only as an abstract "is," to be
concretized (filled) in the syllogism which justifies ("grounds") the linking. The syllogism, then, validates the ''is"
of the judgment by moving from what is at first only the generality said of the sensible through "allness," "genus,"
and "species" to the fully developed "universality of concept," which contains the rationale of the whole
movement. Still, simply to enumerate "kinds" of judgment on the basis of these distinctions is superficial; what
needs to be shown is that the "kinds" of judgment follow necessarily from each other as the progressive
determination of the concept. Thus judgment is "determinate concept." If we look back at the spheres of "being"
and "essence," we can see these spheres reproduced as conceptual relations in the framework of judgment
determining concepts.
Zusatz: Some judgments, then, are logically on a higher plane than others, according to the manner in which they
are rooted in their concept. In this sense the judgment, "the wind is blowing," which is little more than the mental
record of an observation, is scarcely a significant judgment, whereas a well-thought-out moral or aesthetic
judgment, demanding to be firmly rooted in the profound concepts of "good" or "beautiful," are on a much higher
plane. We might add, which Hegel does not do here, that a judgment such as "the wind that is blowing is beneficial
to the health of the inhabitants," would be on an intermediate logical plane, and "planes" could be multiplied.
In our present context it is doubtful whether it would repay the effort to follow in detail all that Hegel has to say
about the kinds of judgment in which the unity of concept is articulated. This does not mean that what he has to
say in this connection is unimportant both for an understanding of


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Hegel's thought and for the light it throws on the structure of conceptual thinking in its relation to the structure of
reality. In view of the limitations of space, however, its importance can be summed up in the realization that Hegel
is spelling out the close interrelationships of conceptual determinations, the rational character of reality, be it
"natural" or "spiritual," as the self-manifestation of transcendent thought, and the rationality of human thinking as
the locus of reality's self-revealing rationality. It is important to be aware (1) that the "qualitative judgment," which
simply states that a predicate is to be said of a subject, demands to be filled out in the "judgment of reflection,"
which focuses on the character of the interrelatedness of universality, particularity, and singularity in one subject
(such that what is said of the subject is said because of what the subject is essentially); (2) that the judgment of
reflection, in turn, will be fruitful, only if there are ''judgments of necessity" which reveal a necessary relationship
of the "moments" of concept (where what the predicate says of the subject, the subject necessarily says of itself);
and (3) that, finally, the "judgment of concept" reveals that "necessity" itself is meaningful only if rooted in the
concept, the ground for whatever is said, ultimately in the all-unifying Concept whose objective counterpart is
"absolute Idea." The entire discussion of judgments, however, finds its culmination in the rational grounding of
judgments which is the syllogism. It is to the syllogism that we must turn, if we are to discover the "Why" of
whatever can be said of reality, a "Why" which makes sense, only if thought is the ultimate foundation of reality
itself.
Syllogism
No. 181. In Science of Logic (II, p. 308) Hegel had defined the syllogism as "the concept posited in its
completeness, the rational." It makes the complete transition, in "reason" rather than in mere abstract
"understanding," from the subjectivity of the mental act of judging to the objectivity of truth in the fullest sense,
whose rationality transcends that of any subjective rational activity. The framework in which the syllogism is
operative is not that of the isolated judgment, which as such does not go beyond "opinion," not even that of the
effort on the part of the thinking subject to relate one isolated judgment to another. Rather, its framework is that of
an integrated totality of judgments, ultimately the integrated totality of all thought and all reality, whose
"objectivity" resides in its fullness. As Hegel puts it in the text we are considering here, "the syllogism is the
rational, and it is the whole (alles) of the rational." This is a far cry from the conviction that syllogism is a rational
"form" of thinking applied to a content with a view of "proving" it, which, if its content is not true is not rational at
all. As Hegel sees it, the function of syllogism is to plumb the rationality of


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the content itself. It is still true, of course, that only if the thinking in question is rational will it perform its task.
Rational thinking, then, "is none other than the (at first formally) posited real (reale) concept"the uncovering of the
rationality of the real, not the imposition of rationality on the real. Syllogism, then, is "the essential ground of
whatever is true." It is what we mean when we say "absolute,'' that is, that whatever really is is a syllogism. "All is
concept," and "its expression (Dasein) is the distinction of its moments." Thus, the concept as universal
particularizes itself in external reality, which, in turn, exists in singulars. Conversely, one can say, "what is actual is
an individual (Eizelnes) which, through its multiplication in particulars, rises to universality and thus realizes its
identity with itself," and the syllogism is the circular movement involved herethe universal emerging out of itself to
rejoin itself, or the singular breaking itself up in order to reunite itself. This is the unfolding of the truth of boththe
transition from subjectivity to objectivity.
No. 182. The "syllogism of understanding," as Hegel calls it, is familiar enough to usand to all who have played
logic games. A proposition, composed of subject and predicate, is to be proved true. The "understanding,"
standing-off, so to speak, sets to work constructing a syllogism which will prove it. It becomes a question of
justifying what we say rather than of enabling a reality to tell us what is true of it. This, of course, the reality
cannot do, unless it is in some sense a "subject""telling" is an activity which "subjects" perform. If, however, we
are to comprehend what it can mean to say that an "object" is a "subject," we may have to take time out here and
reread Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit.
Hegel is not about to deny, incidentally, that "syllogizing" is something we do when we think rationally. What he
does say, however, is that if that is all "syllogizing" is, it is the work of abstract "understanding" only, not the work
of concrete "reason." What is more, if the reality we are dealing with is the manifold of "finite things,"
understanding is the best we can do; we can classify and then draw conclusions on the basis of our classifications.
Zusatz: At this point in an addition, presumably reporting Hegel's oral presentation, we find a remark which will be
of utmost importance for our subsequent considerations. In terms of a "faculty" psychology, reason has been called
the "faculty of syllogizing" and understanding, the "faculty of forming concepts." Apart from the superficiality of
looking upon the mind as a composite of "faculties," we are told there is a serious danger that the concept will be
looked upon as proper only to understanding, and any and every correct syllogism will be viewed as rational. Not
only is it untrue that the concept is merely a form of understanding, but it is abstract understanding itself which has
thus degraded what is the truly rational form. What mere formal logic calls syllogism is no more than a syllogism
of understanding and in no way deserves to be called the rational form of thinking. It is on the basis of this


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understanding that a distinction is made between concepts of understanding and concepts of reason, as though there
were two kinds of concepts or, worse still, as though the distinction simply touches what we do when we think. The
result is, for example, that the concept of "freedom" is looked upon as simply the abstract contradictory of
"necessity," whereas the truly "rational" concept of freedom contains in itself superseded necessity. Freedom
without necessity is unintelligible, not merely in the sense that opposites throw light on each other, but in the more
profound sense that truly rational freedom and truly rational necessity do not contradict each other: they are
dialectically identified, one necessarily implying the other; to be genuinely free is to be rationally necessitated. By
the same token, the definition which ''Deism" gives of God as a simply self-identified supreme Being is no more
than a concept of understanding, whereas "the Christian religion, which knows God as triune, contains the rational
concept of God."
In detailing the kinds of syllogisms the mind "employs" in its thinking and in evaluating their "rational" standing
Hegel characterizes them along the lines we have already seen in his treatment of the judgment. He enumerates,
however, only three basic kinds, the "qualitative syllogism" (nos. 18389), the "syllogism of reflection" (no. 190),
and the "syllogism of necessity" (nos. 19193). There is no syllogism of the concept, however, since the very
"necessity" of the "syllogism of necessity" is its grounding in the concept which it makes explicit. Although Hegel
devotes seven paragraphs to the "qualitative syllogism," it is of little interest to us here, because it is significant
only for a purely formal logic, confining itself to a description of the correct ways in which subjective thinking can
proceed from premises to conclusions. Because this syllogism describes only operations of understanding, because
the realities to which it directs its attention are only finite realities, and because the relationships expressed in it are
only "contingent," not "necessary," it is not, properly speaking a "rational" syllogism at all; so long as the process
is merely what mind goes through, error is possible because mind can prove anything. The "syllogism of reflection"
is, it is true, significant, because its force lies in what the mind finds to be "essential" in what it thinks. Because,
however, Hegel sees its contribution primarily as an introduction to the truly rational "syllogism of necessity," he
devotes little space to it (one paragraph). In the "syllogism of necessity," on the other hand, the whole force of
logical thinking and of concrete rationality is concentrated. It is only here, in fact, that we can begin to see what
Hegel means by "the rational is actual": what reason sees as being necessarily so is necessarily so. The emphasis
here, then, will be on this last section (three paragraphs, but covering as many pages as the first section).
No. 190. What characterizes the "syllogism of reflection" is that it focuses on the "essence" of the subject in
question and derives the


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predicate from it. The "determination" said in the predicate is seen to follow from the "essence" of the subject; all
subjects of this kind have among other predicates the predicate in question. There is a problem, however: "allness"
is true of the subject of the major premiss, only if in fact the predicate is true of the subject of the conclusion. We
say, for example, ''all men are mortal; but, Caius is a man; therefore, Caius is mortal." This seems to follow, but the
truth of the "all" of the major depends on the truth of the conclusion; if, in fact, Caius is not mortal, the major is
not true. The truth, then, of the major depends on a complete induction based on counting all the cases that could
come under the major. This, quite obviously, could not be done empirically; there simply is no such thing as
counting empirically all possible cases. When we employ such a syllogism, we in fact argue from "analogy," which
may provide a good rule-of-thumb, but it does not make the conclusion "necessarily" true. If it is the "essence" of
man to be mortal, the conclusion follows, but how does reflective thinking decide what determinations are
"essential"? Certainly not empirically.
No. 191. If, however, the "concept" of "man" is available to thought, there is a way out. Where, in fact, the
"concept" is available, not as the result of a merely subjective procedure of induction, the inclusive "all" is no
longer required. This "way out," however, makes sense only if the "concept" is antecedent to the empirical reality;
subjective thinking can derive the concept from empirical reality only by deciding what is to count as the concept.
There is question, then, of determining what kind of syllogism will so thematize the concept that what are
necessary determinations will reveal themselves as necessary. "Necessity" in this context does not mean the
psychological necessity that the subject think this way, but the logical necessity that the subject's judgment be true
(WL II, p. 345). We are looking for a "middle" in the syllogism which clearly indicates that the determination in
question does in fact pertain to all the particulars subsumable under the universal, which is what it will do if the
middle is either the "genus" or the "species" to which the "singular" belongs. This is what is assumed in the
"categorical syllogism," which states that what is true of something because it is the sort of thing it is is true of
whatever is this sort of thing (WL II, p. 346). In the "hypothetical syllogism," on the other hand, the singular is
taken as given, and what is said of it is said because some other determination is the "reason" for it; if the subject is
the one, it is also the other; thus the connection of one and the other is affirmed. The reason for one is in the other,
and the "absolute content" of both is the same (WL II, pp. 34748). Finally, in the "disjunctive syllogism" the
universality of the middle is broken up into all its possible particularities, such that the singular must be of some
one of them, leading thus to a process of elimination; if all the possibilities are present, the concept is complete.
The issue


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now is that of seeing which of these forms best suits the totality of concept. To put the question in a somewhat
different way: How does reality present itselfmake itself presentin thought? There is no answer to this question if
all reality does is present itself empirically. Nor will there be an answer, if reality is not, prior to finite subjective
thinking, already thought-realityand this is the heart of Hegel's logic, of his contribution to philosophical thinking.
No. 192. Although Hegel speaks in general of "the syllogism," his treatment of it, quite obviously, is based on
"different kinds" of syllogism contained in the one concept, "syllogism." What he sees as the overall result of this
procedure is that the differences cancel themselves out, insofar as they are considered external to their unifying
concept. It is no more essential to the syllogism that it be broken up into three propositions than it is to the concept
to be broken up into "moments.'' The "because" which answers each significant "why" is but a particularization of
the "syllogism," just as each "moment" of the concept presents itself as the "totality of moments," that is, as a
whole syllogism, in which the "moments" are identified. Different syllogisms, then, are different ways in which
one and the same concept makes itself present in thought. Thus, the negation of the differences and of the form of
mediation peculiar to each constitutes the "self-identity" (Fürsichsein) of concept-syllogism. What has happened is
that in the "ideality" of its moments, "syllogizing" takes on the "character" (Bestimmung) of essentially containing
the "negation" of those "determinations" which make it merely a "procedure." Syllogizing, then, becomes a
mediation which transcends mediation, thus joining the subject not with its "other," but with a "transcended other,
that is, with itself." The predicate is not other than the subject, it is the self-othering of the subject; and the
"joining-together" (Zusammenschliessennote the play on schliessen) is in fact not a "joining-together" performed
by a mind external to the concept; the concept concretizes itself. "The various kinds of syllogism present the stages
of fulfillment or concretion of the middle" (WL II, p. 351), and this is a progress in thought toward the totalization
of reality.
Zusatz: What has just been said runs counter to the common opinion that the treatment of the syllogism question
closes the first part of logic, the so-called "doctrine of elements" (theoretical logic). Following this there is a
second part, called "doctrine of method" (applied logic), in which by applying the forms of thinking treated in the
first part to given objects we constitute an entire science. This sort of logic of understanding "tells us nothing of the
origin of such objects nor of what the very thought of objectivity implies." What we are supposed to have before
us is a thinking which is no more than a subjective and "formal" activity, over-against which the "objective" is
fixed as simply "there." There is no evidence for this kind of dualism, nor does it make sense simply to accept the
notions of subjectivity


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and objectivity, as though there were no need to ask where the notions originate. In any case, both subjectivity and
objectivity are "thoughts," determinate thoughts, whose grounding in universal, self-determining thought has to be
brought out, not simply taken for granted. This is what Hegel has been trying to do with regard to subjectivity, by
showing that subjectivity, or "the subjective concept," containing as it does "the concept as such," "the judgment,"
and "the syllogism,'' is the dialectical result of "both first main stages of the logical idea" in its self-developing
process, that is, the stages of "being" and "essence." There is no problem, then, in admitting that the conceptas well
as judgment and syllogismis, quite simply, "subjective." The same is true of the so-called "laws of thought" which
logic studies. But that is not the point; the move from subjectivity to objectivity is. Mental activity, Hegel insists, is
not an empty framework which needs to receive a content from a world of objects waiting for it "out-there"; rather,
it is subjectivity itself which, because it is dialectical, breaks through its own limitations and by means of the
syllogism moves to objectivity. What the mind necessarily thinks to be objectively true, with a necessity contained
in the very rationality of syllogistic reasoning, is objectively true. Nor, as we shall see, is it merely the formal-
logical correctness of the thinking procedure which guarantees this objective truth.
No. 193. What, then, is the "object" of thought? Is it a "thing"? But there are neither "objects" nor "things," except
through the mediation of thought. Thus, in Hegel's view, "object" is the "realization" (in the etymological sense of
"making real") of the concept. Here it is that the "universal" is "one self-contained totality," whose diverse
instantiations are each also the totalityeach expresses the whole. Thought has the capacity to transcend its own
"middle position" (Vermittlung) between subject and object in the only sense of Vermittlung that makes sense.26
From Subjectivity to Objectivity

It can obviously seem strange, especially if one is accustomed to consider only the "syllogism of understanding" or
to look upon "syllogistic reasoning" as nothing but the activity of consciousness, to speak of a "transition" from
concept in generalmore precisely from the syllogismto the "object" (Kant's "leap" from concept to reality). But
there is no question here of making such a transition "plausible" in the sphere of (representation"it simply cannot
be "represented" at all; it must "take place." We might, of course, try to recall what our customary "representation"
of what is called "object" is and see whether it approximates what in our present context constitutes the
determining (Bestimmung) of "object."
26. Once again, recall the caution noted in n. 24.


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It is not customary, however, to mean by "object" simply either what "is" or "exists" in abstraction or what is in
general ''actual." Rather, we think of something "concrete," something completely independenton its ownand this
completeness is the "totality proper to concept." There is no denying that an "object" (Objekt) is characterized as
"what-stands-over against" (Gegenstand) and is external to "another," thus "positing" (setzt) an "opposition"
(Gegensatz) between "objective" and "subjective." We do tend to think that way, and when we do, we tend to see
the concept, which has left behind its "mediating" role, as a "pure-and-simple" (unbefangenes) "immediate" object
(Objekt). By the same token, we tend to characterize the concept in the resulting "opposition" as "the subjective."
What we fail to see is that we have characterized the concept as both objective and subjective.
From another point of view we can look at "the object in general" as the "one even more indeterminate whole,"
call it the world, call it God, call it "the absolute object." Even in this sense, however, the object has its
differentiations and falls apart into an "indeterminate manifold," precisely as objective world," in such a way that
differentiation means many "distinct" objects, each existing as "concrete" " complete," "independent." Both unity
and distinction would seem to be contingent.
If, then, we are to comprehend the transition from subjectivity to objectivity precisely as "transition" and not
"leap," we have to backtrack a bit. Earlier, in what he had called "objective logic," Hegel spoke of "being" (the
most purely abstract object of thought), "existence" (abstract being manifesting its progressive determinateness in
thought), and "actuality" (being as manifested in "reality"). "Objectivity" must now be seen as containing similar
"moments." More than that, however, the transition from subjectivity to objectivity must be examined in the light
of the transition of abstract being to existence and actuality. He had also spoken before of "essence" as the "ground
" for the emergence of "existence," and this essence is a "relationship mediated by reflection which explains the
transition to "actuality." What we can now see is that the "moments" of which he spoke earlier were simply "the as
yet inadequately posited concept," that is, abstract aspects of the concept. Thus, "ground" is merely the concept's
"essential unity," and the "relationship" is merely the "connecting" (operated in thought) of aspects which are
"supposed to be" real and to have reference only to themselves. The concept in its fullness, on the other hand, is
the (concrete) unity of "ground" and "relationship," in such a way that the "object" in question is not merely the
"essential" unity (i.e., of reflection) but an "all-embracing" (allgemeine) unity which contains in itself distinctions
which are not only "real" but also in themselves wholes" (Totalitäten); they are constituted as what they are by the
overarching totality which embraces them.


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What must be made clear here is that the "transitions" Hegel speaks of are not to be conceived of along the lines of
the inseparability of thinking and being. It is obvious enough, and the point need not be belabored, that to think at
all is to think beingof whatever thinking thinks is can be said, but to say this is to say very little; merely as what is
contained in the subjective concept it says nothing. The "being" which thinking inevitably thinks is the utterly
indeterminate, abstract being with which Hegel's logic starts, and whose ever-fuller self-determining is its process
of conceptualization.27 What needs to be done is to take the concept in all its concrete determinateness, precisely
as concept, and to see whether, in truth, what the concept affirms constitutes a passage to a "form'' which in reality
is different from "the determination which belongs to and appears in the concept." The "belongs to" and "appears
in" are important. It simply is not a question of subjective thinking attributing to reality subjective thinking's own
abstract content; the real manifests itself in and through the concept. Gone is the presupposition that "conceptual
determination" and "real determination" are simply different. In what sense they can be said to be the same
remains to be seen.
If we follow Aristotle, as we know Hegel claimed to do, we must say not only that human rational thinking can
culminate in objective knowing, that is, in a true grasp of reality, but also that, in knowing, the subject knowing
"somehow" becomes the object known. As Hegel sees it, then, the "somehow" must at the very least mean that
when the object as product of the transition from subjectivity is put in connection with the concept which in the
process has lost its peculiarly subjective form, the "result" can correctly be expressed in this way: In their
innermost reality (an sich) concept, or subjectivity, and object are the same. What Aristotle, however, does not say
in so many words and what Hegel explicitly says is that they just as truly remain diverse. But precisely because
both statements, that is, that concept and object are the same and that they are different, are correct so are both
incorrect; this manner of speaking is simply incapable of expressing their true relationship to each other. The "in its
innermost reality" is an abstract expression, even more "one-sided" than the concept itself, whose onesidedness is
transcendedbecause the concept is transcended in its becoming object, its onesided opposite member. Only in their
"mediated"28
27. Hegel here refers in passing to those false interpretations of the "ontological proof" for the being of
God, according to which the "being" said of God would have no more content than the mere abstract
concept of being.
28. It is important to note here the function of "middle" (Mitte) in the real as opposed to the merely mental
syllogism. It is not the "middle term" of purely formal-logical entailment. Rather it is that which mediates a
process whose extremes are contradictories, whose relation to each other consists in the different relation of
each to the middle, which reconciles their opposition to each other. Thus, the mutual exclusivity of the
contradictories is resolved in a continuity mediated by the "middle."


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relationship to each other is that difference transcended. The object that the subject knows in conceiving is concept,
that is, concept is both the conceiving and the conceived. So too the "in its innermost reality" by negating its own
indeterminacy determines itself to "independent being" (Fürsichsein). This is but another way of saying that
"speculative identity" is more than the trivial identity of concept and object "in their innermost reality''an identity
which says little because of its abstractness; little more than that if there is to be knowledge there must be identity,
which is about the equivalent of Aristotle's rather uninformative "somehow." It is not, however, trivial to speak of
the identity of knowing (thought) and reality, if that can be fleshed out.
It is only at this point that we begin to realize that all along Hegel has been building up to the model for the
"concrete" identity of concept and reality, "absolute Idea" "absolute Spirit," "God." It is this unity, taken in its
"utmost generality" (ganz überhaupt) and leaving out the "onesided form" of its "abstract being" (Ansichsein),
which is presupposed in Saint Anselm's "ontological proof of God's reality (Dasein). " God's reality is the "most
perfect" reality.29 As Hegel reads Anselm, the question is initially simply whether a content of thought is only a
content of "our thinking." But, just to put the question this way is for Hegel to give a hint of what his answer will
be: No content is true if all it is is the content of "our thinking." It is for this reason that "finite things" are not
"true," in his sense of true, precisely because their "objectivity" does not correspond with the thinking thereof, that
is, with the universality proper to the "genus" to which they belong or to the "purpose" to which they are ordered.
Although, in Hegel's view, Descartes, Spinoza, and others, had expressed this unity "more objectively," the
"immediate certitude" of belief which is, in fact, the starting point of this kind of argumentation, sees the unity in a
subjective manner more reminiscent of Anselm. This is to say that "in our consciousness" the determination "God's
being" is inseparably connected with the "representation" of God. It is not incorrect, of course, to say that "belief"
sees in the representations of finite things the inseparability of the "consciousness" of them and their "being,"
because to "intuit" them is to attach to them the character of "existence" (Existenz). But, Hegel continues, it would
be nonsensical to think that even in our consciousness "existence" is connected with the representation of finite
things in the same way as it is with the representation of God.30 To make the connection the same would be to
29. Although the term Dasein is in this context frequently translated as "existence," it seems preferable to
say "reality," since in Hegelian terms it would make absolutely no sense to speak of "most perfect"
Existenz; the latter is essentially finite manifestation.
30. It might seem to contradict the preceding note that Hegel employs the term Existenz here in relation to God.
It should be noted, however, both that this occurs very rarely and that here it is not a question of God's
"reality" but of the note of "existence" attaching to the "representation" of God.


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forget that finite things are "mutable" and "transient," that is that "existence" belongs to them only transitorily, that
the connection is not "eternal" but "separable.'' Anselm, then, was right when he rejected the sort of connection that
suffices for finite things and declared that alone to be "perfect" which "is," not only subjectively, but at the same
time objectively. To look down on the so-called "ontological proof" and on Anselm's characterization of "the
perfect" will get one nowhere. The latter is present in all "uncorrupted," "common sense" representations of God,
and it is present in every philosophical concept as well. Whether philosophers like it or not, it crops up again, as it
does even when the principle in question is that of "immediate belief," which is adequate as belief only if it
represents its object as "most perfect." Philosophers have never eliminated belief, they merely substitute one belief
for another, and Hegel prefers Anselm's kind of belief; he finds it a lot closer to what reason tells him must be so.
That Hegel thought Anselm's starting point the right one does not mean that Hegel found Anselm's argument (or
method of argumentation) faultless. The fault that he finds in Anselm, and which he also finds in Descartes, in
Spinoza, and in the "principle of immediate cognition,"31 is that what they speak of as the "most perfect," or, from
the subjective point of view, as the object of "true knowing" is simply "presupposed," that is, assumed as only "in
itself." What happens, then, as can be seen in the case of Anselm, is that the distinction of concept and reality is
immediately opposed to their merely abstract identification. The fact that the representation and the existence of the
finite are distinct is put forward as an argument against their identification in the infinite. Quite obviously the
argument does not hold water, because, as Hegel had remarked earlier, the finite is the sort of objectivity which
does not correspond completely with its purpose, its essence, its concept; that is, the subjective representation of
the finite is such that it does not involve existence. The contradiction on which this objection is based can be
resolved only by pointing out that the finite is untrue, that the determinations of "mental" and "real" existence as
"independent" (für sich) are nullified as onesided, and that their identity is, thus, one in which their movement of
transition culminates and in which they are reconciled in the infinite. That thought and being cannot be identified
in a finite object is no argument that they are not identified in the infinite object. All of which means that the time
has come to discuss just what "object" means.
31. The term Hegel employs here is Wissen, but it does not have the strong sense it has elsewhere, only a
rather generic sense.


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The Meaning of "Objectivity"

In the German language there are two terms, Gegenstand and Objekt, which are normally translated by the English
term, "object."32 In German, however, although the term Gegenstand is intended to translate the Latin objectum,
the etymological thrust of each of the two terms is quite different. Gegen-stand is a purely German term
designating that which "stands-over-against" a conscious subject antecedently to the consciousness had of it. Ob-
jekt, on the other hand, is a transliteration of the Latin ob-jectum designating that which is "thrown-out-from" the
subject. In Hegel's language Objekt has, in addition, the connotation of purpose, much as it has in a familiar usage
of the term in English, as in the Mikado's "My object all sublime, I will achieve in time." We can recall what Hegel
has to say about "speculative terms'' which have more than one meaning in such a way that when the "speculative
thinker" employs the term he does not choose which meaning he intends but rather intends all meanings at once.33
No. 194. "Object" (Objekt), then, designates the "being" of what the mind thinks without regard to the
"differences" of the many which the mind embraces in thinking them as one "object." "Difference" has been
aufgehoben in the object, and the object is a self-contained "totality." At the same time, however, because the
"identification" achieved in the object is only abstract (ansichseiende) identity of "moments," the object is equally
indifferent to its "immediate" unity; it is broken up into a differentiated multiplicity, wherein each of the different
(objects) is itself the totality. The "object" then is the "absolute contradiction" involving the complete independence
of the manifold and the equally complete dependence of the differentiated. Sinuous language indeed, but it simply
signifies that the object of thought at once "cancels out" and "retains" the differences of the manifold it embraces.
That it also "lifts up" manyness to a higher form of unity we shall also see.
In this context Hegel finds that he can say, "The absolute is the object," a definition which most aptly characterizes
the "Leibnizian monad" which is at once an object and as such also "represents"; that is, it is supposed to be a
"totality" representing the totality of the world. In the simple unity of this monad, whatever differences there may
be are "ideal" and "depend-
32. To translate Gegenstand as "general object" and Objekt simply by "object" serves no useful purpose.
33. The parade example of the speculative term for Hegel is aufheben, which means "cancel out," "retain," and
"lift up," and which are all meanings Hegel intends when he employs the term. Another example is vorstellen
which means "represent" in the sense of "render mentally present," "stand in place of," and "introduce." Quite
obviously such terms offer peculiar difficulties to the translator.


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ent. " Since the monad has no windows, nothing comes into it from outside, and it is, thus, within itself (in sich) the
whole concept, differentiated only according to greater or lesser self-development; not every monad reflects the
totality with the same adequacy. By the same token the simple totality of the monad breaks up into an absolute
multiplicity of differences, such that each is an independent monad. Each is a "substance," and all are united in the
"monad of monads" and in the "preestablished harmony'' of the internal development of each, such that each
"substance" is likewise again reduced to the dependence of ideality. Leibniz's philosophy, then, is the completely
developed "contradiction," of identity and differenceor of the identity of identity and difference; identity which
constitutes difference, and vice versa.
Zusatz 1: If the "Absolute (God)" is seen as object and only object, that is, 'out there," over-against, then Fichte
was right in characterizing this as the root of superstition and slavish fear. Of course God is "object," but only in
the fullest possible sense of that term. God is object in the sense that, apart from God as object, our own subjective
opinion has no truth, and our subjective willing has no validity. If we claim to think but do not think God, we do
not think truly; if we will and do not will God, we do not will what is right. But, precisely as absolute Object, God
does not "stand" as an obscure and alien power "over-against" our subjectivity. Rather, God as "subject" (Spirit)
contains finite subjectivity within himself as an essential moment; human subjectivity is an expression of the divine
Subject (the perfect subject-object). We find this stated clearly in Christian doctrine, according to which God wills
that all men be helped (to be what they are destined to be) and that all men achieve blessedness. This is
accomplished in that human beings come to the consciousness of their union with God and, thus, God ceases to be
for them mere "object" (Objekt)34 and, by that very fact, ceases to be an "object" (Gegenstand) of "fear and
trembling" as he was for the religious consciousness of the Romans. If we go further into Christian religion to the
consciousness that God is love, to such a degree that his Son, who is at once an individual man and one with God,
has revealed himself to men and thus redeemed them, we can also see in this that the opposition between
objectivity and subjectivity has been overcome "in itself" (it has yet to be overcome in us). It is now our task to
share in this redemption by putting off our own immediate subjectivity ("to put off the old Adam") and thus
become conscious of God as "our true and essential self." What emerges from this is the realization that just as
religion itself (including cult) consists in overcoming the opposition between subjectivity
34. It is not too clear why Hegel uses the term Objekt in this context. If, however, the term is employed in
only one of its meanings, i.e., projected by a subject, as the adjective "mere" (blosses) would seem to
indicate, then it is no better than a Gegenstand.


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and objectivity, so too science, particularly philosophical science, has as its task overcoming the same opposition
in the realm of thought. The whole question of knowledge is that of getting rid of the alien character of the world
which "stands" objectively "over-against" us and, thus, to find ourselves in this world, which is another way of
saying that our task is to find what is objective in conceptualization itself, which is our innermost self. This means
that we must overcome the tendency to look upon subjectivity and objectivity as in fixed opposition to each other.
They are both in the most fundamental sense "dialectical." Granted that ''concept" is initially a subjective
designation, that is, our thinking, it moves, nevertheless, in the direction of objectifying itself, without the need of
some "external material," with the result that its object is not something static but is its own process, both objective
and subjective, culminating in the objective "idea." We can put it this way: By "objective" we mean that which is
the way it is independently of the intervention of some individual subject. In this sense the subjective is not
automatically objective; what is required is the Aufhebung of subjective intervention such that objective
interrelatedness is seen to be intrinsic to reality itself (WL II, pp. 35859). If one is, of course, not conversant with
the determinations "subjectivity" and "objectivity," which will mean clinging to them as "abstractions," one will
find that such abstract determinations will be lost before being fully grasped, with the result that one "says"
precisely the opposite of what was intended. There is nothing more confusing to thought than the confusion of
what is subjective and what is objective about it; and the worst confusion of all is to look upon it as nothing more
than the activity of a finite thinker. It is true, of course, that "objective" has meaning only in relation to
"subjectivity," but the merely subjective of finite individual subjectivity must be canceled" in its "onesidedness,"
"retained" in its essential relation to the objective, and "lifted up" in its fusion with "absolute subjectivity."
Zusatz 2: What Hegel will seek after this is a "model" in the reality which "science" investigates of a process
which at one and the same time identifies diversity and diversifies identity. What he seeks is a principle intrinsic to
reality which unifies it in such a way that the unification of being in thought will not be a process different from its
unification in reality. The two sciences of his day which were taking giant strides in this direction were mechanics
(Newtonian) and chemistry; one seeing all physical activity as the working out of physical "laws," the other seeing
the chemical affinity of "substances" as somehow explicating the complex relationships of real multiplicity and
ideal unity, whether as the unification of diversity or the diversification of unity. Philosophically speaking,
however, Hegel sees the "teleological" relationship, the working out in reality of purposes contained in the world
of "idea" and embodied in the world of "reality" as the keystone for a genuinely intelligible relationship of thought
and reality. One


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is forcibly reminded of Socrates' contention in Plato's Phaedo that one does not "know" even something so simple
as a "wagon," if all one knows is what it is composed of and the mechanical relations of this composition, if one
does not know "what it is for." By the same token, for Hegel, knowing the mechanical relations of "causality" or
the chemical relations of "affinity'' is to know very little of the world of reality; mechanical laws tell us only of
external relations of "acting on" or "being acted upon," while chemical laws speak only of the instrinsic affinity of
"elements" for each other; and both are deterministic in their operation. The real key to the identification of thought
and reality is the concept of "purpose," without which thought is mere emptiness and reality is mere chaos.
Nos. 195203. It is not really important for us to go into what Hegel has to say about "mechanics" and "chemistry."
It is no more, or less, naive than what the scientists of his day were saying. The point is, however, not so much the
"scientific" significance of what he says as the conviction that neither provides the model for a philosophy which
would be "scientific" in its grasp of the unity and diversity of the real world in which finite thinking subjects
liveand to this only the concretely totalized concept is adequate. The question, then, of a "model" of this process of
totalization (Zusammenschliessen) becomes important, nor is it farfetched to say that some, in their quest for a
"unified science," would by preference look for a "mechanical" or "chemical" model to explain the world of
"spirit"!
The Dynamism of Purpose

We have to remember, then, that what Hegel is looking for in his discussion of "objectivity" is not a thought-
process which "from outside," so to speak, puts the diverse moments of reality together, but rather a thought which
recaptures reality's own process of putting-itself-togetherin thought, to be sure. It is a self-putting-together which
makes sense only if the "totalizing" (Zusammen-schliessende) concept is not merely the product of subjective
(finite) thinking. It is for this reason that Hegel now turns to the concept of intrinsic "purpose," which, of course, is
significant only if reality is in some sense a "living" whole. There is nothing uncommon, we might say, in the
question as to whether life has a "meaning," but we have to be clear that, in asking this question, we are
equivalently asking, "does life have a purpose?"35 To ask that same question with regard to the totality of reality,
obviously, will have far-reaching consequences, but there is no a priori reason to say that the question is
nonsensical. In any event, only if we do ask the question shall we ever get to the heart of Hegel's philosophizing,
35. It is not without significance that the German word Sinn, which can be translated as "sense" (hence
"meaning") also (like the French sens) has the connotation of "direction" or "orientation." As usual, Hegel
intends all the "senses" of the term.


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which sees the world of both nature and spirit as the finite expression of infinite (divine) life, or purpose.
In tracing the movement from the subjectivity of conceptual thinking to the objectivity of "the concept," then, the
notion of "purpose" is of utmost importance. Purpose is, Hegel goes on to tell us, the "self-contained" (für-sich-
seiende) concept, which "has moved into self-determining (freie) existence," by negating its "immediate''that is, in
subjective thinking alone"objectivity." This initial determination is, it is true, subjective because the "negation" in
question is "abstract," which means that subjective thinking in operating the negation initially merely "stands-over-
against" (gegenübersteht) objectivity. In relation to the totality of the concept, however, this character of
subjectivity is "one-sided," that is, contained only in the subject's own limited conceiving, since in this conceiving
all determination has simply been "posited" as superseded. Thus, in this framework the presupposed object is only
"an ideal (ideelle) reality, in itself unreal (nichtige)." The contradiction between the concept's self-identity and its
opposing negation is resolved only by the "activity" of negating the opposition which it "posits" as identical with
itself. If, however, the notion of "purpose" is included in that of "object"and purpose is integral to the "speculative"
meaning of the termthen the "activity" of negatizing identification is the "realizing of the purpose," such that the
concept "makes itself" the other of its subjectivity and thus objectifies itself, transcending the subject-object
dichotomy, uniting "itself with itself" and maintaining this union. To see in objective reality, then, a "teleological"
principle is, with Aristotle, to see objectivity as a rational striving toward the realization of a purpose. For Hegel,
however, unlike Aristotle, this makes sense only in a framework of "total" reality.
To today's readers language such as this can well seem hopelessly complex; its aim, however, was to bridge the
gap between human subjectivity and objective reality bequeathed to philosophy by Kant. If knowledge is to be
knowledge of what "really is" not merely of its "appearing" to consciousness, the correspondence of linguistic fact
(proposition) and mental act (judgment) has to be validated in a manner which goes beyond the mere "correctness"
of subjective thinking based on rules, without taking refuge in a questionable "causality" in the thinking
processmost emphatically questionable, if that causality is taken to be physical. What Hegel seeks is a return to the
Aristotelian contention that in knowledge the thinking mind is "somehow" identified with the reality it thinks. What
Hegel has done may or may not resolve the ambiguity of the "somehow," but it has the merit both of recognizing
the problem and of seeking a dynamic solution. It is Hegel's claim that Aristotle himself saw "purpose" included in
the very "concept of concept"witness Aristotle's philosophy of the internal finality of natureand that this can make
sense only if the structure of "concept"


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(including judgment and syllogism) is common to both reality and thought, which it will not be if the
"identification" (Zusammen-schliessen) of thought and reality is no more than the imposition by thought of a form
of identity on a recalcitrant reality.
In one sense, then, Hegel tells us, the "concept of purpose" is superfluous, saying, as it does, the same as "rational
concept," as opposed to "understanding's" ''abstract universal," which is related to its particulars as merely
"subsuming" particulars, not as "containing" them "within itself." Here the important distinction is that between
"final cause" and simple "efficient cause"the latter being what is usually meant by "cause." "Efficient cause"
belongs to the ambiguous sphere of mere "blind" necessity (expressed in the "mechanical" and "chemical"
metaphors), which touches reality only from the outside. It can be "posited" as the necessary relationship of cause
and effect (a Kantian "category"), but this misses the point that "cause" and "effect" are related to each other as at
once mutually extrinsic to each other and mutually defining each other. "Purpose," on the other hand, is "posited"
as "containing in itself" the effective determination of that of which it is the purpose (e.g., the plant in the seed). In
this sense purpose "realizes itself" in the becoming of that which is intrinsically ordered to an end. Purpose,
however, is a closed book to "formal" thinking; it has to be grasped "speculatively" as the concept "which in its
own unity and ideality of determinations at once contains the judgment" and the opposition of "subjective and
objective," while at the same time "superseding" the opposition. No amount of mental prestidigitation is going to
"make" the concept objective if it is not already "subjective-objective."
It is a mistake, then, to think of "purpose" merely in terms of the "form," according to which purpose is a
determination "at hand" (vorhandene) in conscious "representation." It is the merit of Kant, Hegel says, to have
resuscitated the "idea," particularly that of "life," in his concept of "internal finality." We all know what it means to
speak of "someone" having a purpose in making or using "something," but that is not the finality proper to life, of
which both Aristotle and Kant speak; it is no more than "finite," "extrinsic" finality.
In short, to speak of the "purpose" of something is to speak of its "internal impulse" to go beyond itself and
become what it is not yetand yet, what it is to be it already is in this impulse to go beyond itself. The objective,
then, is the purpose of the subjective, that toward which it is oriented, not as to something outside itself but as to
something contained within itself. Either subjective consciousness is oriented to objectivity or it is not true to
itself.36
36. Hence, the progressive "negation" of illusory satisfaction with less than authentic objectivity, which
characterizes Phenomenology of Spirit.


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This can be illustrated in the "syllogism" which is the working out of purpose, the purpose of "reason." The
"realization" of purpose, that is, the identification (Zusammenschliessen) of the extremes effected by means of the
middle, is in truth the negation of the extremesas opposedthe negation at once of ''mere" subjectivity and "mere"
objectivity. To make sense out of this is to see in the "negation" spoken of the same sort of negation as that
contained in the "lifting-up" (Erhebung) of the (human) spirit to God"against" the contingent things of the world
as well as "against" one's own subjectivity. This "lifting-up" is the "moment" which, in the form of "syllogism of
understanding" given to it in the so-called "proofs for the reality of God," has not been recognized (see chap. 5).
We get an important hint as to what it means to say that the objectivity of thought is in truth "subjectivity-
objectivity," if we can compare it with the knowledge of God as "subject-object," borrowing, as Hegel does,
Aristotle's characterization of God as nohsiVnohsewV.
No. 205. It would be difficult to assert that Hegel's view of teleology is shared by a great many philosophers,
particularly by those "modern" philosophers, whose name is legion, who do not share Hegel's reverence for the
Aristotelian tradition. Nor can it be denied that the far more obvious instance of the "teleological relationship"
occurs in what Hegel calls "extrinsic finality," wherein purpose is assigned by a subject who is other than the
"purposeful" object, which as "object" is assumed to be antecedent to and distinct from the "concept" of it. In this
context purpose is simply "finite," both because "what is purposed (der Inhalt)" is a finite end and because a
condition for the "realization" of the purpose is an "already given" object which serves as "material" for that
realization; with the result that "purpose" applies to the object only as conceived ("formally"). What is more,
purposes are particular and as such subjective, so that "what is purposed" is "distinguished" from the "totality" of
the "form" of subjectivity, that is, the concept. This diversity makes the purposes intrinsically finite. Like the object
which is particular and antecedent to its concept, "what is purposed" is "limited," "contingent," and "given." Thus,
things are not looked at as having an end in themselves; they merely serve as means for the realization of what a
subject "purposes"; they are "useful." Although Hegel does not use the terms here, a distinction is being drawn
between Zweckmässigkeit, "having a purpose," and Zwecktätigkeit, "serving a purpose," which is in effect the same
as Kant's distinction between "internal" and "external" finality. Hegel's adversaries simply deny that things "have a
purpose" at all. Hegel, however, is not saying that every naive view of purpose is true (e.g., the bark of trees
serving as corks for bottles!); what he is saying is that the assignment of an external finality is not synonymous
with the reality of an internal finalitywhere it is a question of "living" things, or more importantly when it is a
question of the totality of reality.


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No. 206. We can now begin to see what Hegel meant when he said that "all is syllogism": If the structure of
thought when it is adequately rational is syllogistic, and the structure of reality is rational, then the structure of
reality is syllogistic; the rational is syllogism, hence the totality of reality is, as totality, rational. The form in which
this argument is here expressed is itself scarcely syllogistic, in the formal-logical sense, but it is not intended to be;
the reasoning is "speculative," and what it is saying is that "the teleological" is what we find in the "syllogism.''
"Subjective purpose," which is purpose as we first recognize it, "identifies itself" (sich zusammenschiliesst) by
means of a middle, which, as "teleological activity," that is, as "objectivity immediately posited under the heading
of purpose," the middle" (term), then becomes the "means."37 The ob-jectivity of the "object," then, is subjective
"activity," but not that of a separated thinking subject; it is subjective activity as the totality of conceptual
relationship. Farfetched? No more than the subject "becoming" the object is; the subject recognizes its own
rationality in the rationality of reality, which is the overall theme of Phenomenology of Spirit; how else can Spirit
take reality unto itself, which it must, if there is to be knowledge all?
Zusatz: If there is knowledge of reality as it is, it is contained in "idea," and "purpose" develops into idea in three
"stages": first, the stage of subjective purpose; second, in that of purpose "accomplishing"; and, third, in that of
purpose "accomplished." If we can identify subjective purpose with self-contained (für sich seiender) concept,"
then purpose is the totality of "moments of the concept," concept, of course, being self-developing process. The
first "moment" is universality embracing all its particulars indiscriminately. The second, then, is not the
"particulars," but the activity of "particularizing" the unviersal, whereby the universal achieves a determinate
content, because it is the "activity" of the universal which "posits" this determinate content and, thus, by means of
this content "returns to itself," thus "identifying itself with itself" (schliesst sich mit sich selbst zusammen).38 Once
again, the complexity of the language needs to be unpacked: When we conceive an "ob-ject, " we set ourselves a
"purpose," we "decide on something" (etwas beschliessen), and in this we look upon ourselves as "open" to a
"determination," that is, we have "made a decision" (sich zu etwas ent-schliessen). This means that we have
stepped out of our "self-contained interiority" and "surrendered ourselves" to the objectivity over-against us. We
have moved from the merely subjectively conceived purpose to outwardly oriented "purposeful activity."
"Objective" thinking is not "receiving" into the subject an already prepared object; it is the subject objectifying
itself in its purposeful activity. All of which makes very lit-
37. The logical "middle" (Mitte) becomes the "means" (Mittel) of attaining purpose.
38. The play on Schluss (syllogism) and zusammenschliessen (identify) should be obvious.


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tle sense, if all that is at stake is the limited subjective activity of an individual subject; to let oneself go in the
stream of meaningful subjective activity is to realize the goal of objectivity; objectivity is beyond the capacity of
self-enclosed individuality.
No. 207. What all this means, Hegel tells us, is that the "moments" of the concept, universality, particularity, and
singularity, are not merely the moments of subjective mental activity. "Subjective purpose" is itself the unifying
"syllogism," in which the "universal concept" by means of particularity so ''identifies itself" (sich
zusammenschliesst) with the singular, that the singular becomes the "self-determination" which "judges," that is,
both particularizes the as yet indeterminate universal, making of it a determinate "content," and "posits" the
"opposition" of subjectivity and objectivity. For the individual subject this is at the same time a "return into itself,"
because by comparing the presupposition that the subjectivity of the concept is "opposed" to objectivity with the
self-contained and self-identified totality, it can see that the presupposition is deficient, and thus it turns "outward."
It should be noted that here Hegel has operated a subtle and very important switch. He begins by speaking of the
"moments" of the objective "concept," whose identification occurs in a movement from universality, through
particularity, to singularity and its identification with universalitythe conceptual dynamics he had spelled out
beforethen in turning to the dynamics of subjective "conceiving," he makes the "singularity" (Einzelheit) of the
subject of the "judgment" (proposition) into the individuality (without changing the term Einzelheit) of the subject
"judging." This may be a trick, but the move is significant: the single individual judging (syllogistically) must
come to the realization that precisely because he judges only from the subjective point of view, the distinctions he
makes are deficient; only a turn to the total concept away from a onesided aspect of it will remedy the deficiency.
Subject-Object
No. 208. Hegel is now zeroing-in on what is perhaps the most important element in his whole "doctrine of the
concept": The concept is neither a relation of receptivity to a content presented to it from outside nor the product of
a subjective activity which merely re-acts to what is presented to the minda "representation" (Vorstellung) of
reality. It is the "activity" itself of thinking, a purely "spiritual" activity. There is no question that it first manifests
itself as the subjective activity of an individual subject, but it is significant only because within itself it is oriented
to burst the bonds (limitations) of individual subjectivityits inescapable orientation is "outward." This activity is
that of a "singularity," which, in the framework of "subjective purposes" is identical with a particularization of the
universal; a par-


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ticularization which includes within itself not only a content but also "external objectivity." As singular, then, this
purposeful activity is initially related "immediately" to the object (Objekt) which it employs as a "means." The
concept is the very capacity to employ the means, because as negating the reality of the object it transforms the
very ''being" of the object into "ideal being." The "middle" (of the syllogism), then, is this intrinsic power of the
concept as "activity" to transform, and the "ideal" object as "means" is subservient to it.
Since we are speaking here of "finite teleology," it is to be noted that this involves the "breaking-up" of the middle
into two "moments" extrinsic to each other, the "activity" and the "object," which latter serves as a "means." In this
context the relationship of the purpose as "power" over the object is "immediate"the first premiss of the
syllogismwhich is to say that in the self-contained ideality of the concept the reality of the object is "nullified." The
relationship expressed in the first premiss, then, "becomes itself the middle," which is at the same time the
syllogism, because the purpose through this relationship, that is, its activity, is "identified" with objectivity. In this
sense, the "end" (purpose) is a "cause," in the sense of "effective" orientation, which therefore makes the
conceptual activity "objective."
What Hegel seems to be trying to say here, in what is admittedly a round-about way, is that the objectivity of
conceptual thinking does not consist in the activity of an already constituted object on a subject who thinks in
response to such activity. Rather, the thinking, which is initially the activity of the subject and, in this sense, a
subjective activity, is at the same time the self-objectifying activity of the subject. It is the subject's thinking which
constitutes the object in its objectivity, which it does precisely by "derealizing" (to employ an expression of J.-P.
Sartre) reality in order to make reality the subject's own and in so doing to "realize" the thinking's own inward
thrust toward objectivity, which once again the individual subject can do only if it ceases to be merely a subjective
subject, that is, by realizing in its activity the objectivity of "universal" subjectivity.
Zusatz: The relationship explicated here can be exemplified in the living human being. The living being has a
body, which the soul controls and in which the soul immediately objectifies itselfthis implies no body-soul
dualism, merely that the body in question is the body it is only as animated. The human soul makes its own
corporeality a means of action; it does not employ the body in a dualistic way. Thus, the human being must, so to
speak (gleichsam), "take possession" of its body, making that body its "instrument." The dualistic tone of the
language indicates nothing more than the ontological priority of soul over body, paralleling the logical priority of
thought over objectivity. The body is only "so to speak" an "instrument."
No. 209. We are still concerned with a teleological activity which, along


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with its "means" is directed "outward," precisely because the "purpose" is not identical with the object (despite the
note of purpose in the term "object"), but is related to it ''mediately." This it is in the second premiss, in which "the
means as object" is immediately connected with the other extreme of the syllogism, that is, objectivity as "pre-
given," the "material object." Once again the "mechanical" and "chemical" metaphors come into play; they are
modes of relationship serving the "purpose" in question, and they have some "truth," because the purpose is "their
self-determining concept." "Mechanical" and "chemical" relations become the means which "reason" employs in
achieving its purposes. Physical activities do, in fact, serve the purpose of the concept's development, provided, of
course, the concept is seen as being realized in the attainment of its purpose. None of this, however, will make
sense except in the context of an overriding "reason," which transcends all particular purposes. In a sentence
reminiscent of the introduction to his Philosophy of History, Hegel here speaks of the "cunning of reason," which
makes use of "the subjective purpose as the power controlling the physical processes" ("mechanical" and
"chemical") wherein "objective" reality is broken up into parts which act on each other, while the purpose of reason
at once holds itself apart from the processes and maintains itself in them. The "cunning of reason" uses particular
"purposes" to attain the overarching purpose of "reason" itself.
Zusatz: Here, as in other places, Hegel explicitly connects this notion of the "cunning of reason" with "divine
providence," which achieves its purposes in and through particular purposes which may very well "in themselves"
be opposed to God's own. Divine providence, in relation to the world and its process of development can even be
called "absolute cunning." God permits men to follow their own "passions and interests" in such a way that what
results from human activity is the accomplishment of what God intends. This is but another way of expressing
what we have seen before. "The actual is rational, and the rational is actual"; reason can come to grips with reality
only because reality itself is rational.
No. 210. "Realized purpose, then, is the posited unity of the subjective and the objective." The unity in question,
however, is achieved in such a way that only what is "onesided" in both the subjective and the objective is
"superseded," while at the same time the objective is made subservient to the "self-determining concept," which is
objectivity's criterion. "Purpose," then, "sustains" (erhält) itself both against and in what is objective, because in
addition to being subjective and, therefore, "onesided," that is, particular, it is also "concretely universal," that is,
the intrinsic identity of subject and object. It is because the many particulars subsumed under the universal are
oriented to a universal purpose that their significance as particulars is not eliminated by being universalized. Seen
this way the universal, as simply "reflected" back on itself, is the "content"


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which remains the same in the movement of the syllogism's three terms; that is, they explicate one and the same
concept, of which they are the dynamic articulation.
No. 211. If, however, we remain on the level of "finite" teleology, where particular purposes hold sway, we are
faced with a situation in which even the "realized (ausgeführter) purpose" is just as much "broken-up'' within itself
as was the relationship of the "middle" and the "initial purpose." This means that where the purpose is finite only a
form "extrinsically imposed" on a preexistent material comes into play, and because of its limited "purpose-
content" such a form is, by the same token, a contingent determination, whose presence or absence does not alter
the "material," since another purpose can take its place; finite purposes are not "intrinsic" to reality. The
accomplished purpose, then, is only an object which is also the "means" to or "material" for other purposes, on into
an "infinite" series.
No. 212. When we look at the realization of purposes simply by itself we find that what happens is that "onesided
subjectivity" and what seems to be a given independent objectivity over-against it are both superseded. Purpose is
the key to identification of subject and object. In "taking hold" of the means "the concept" posits itself as the
"intrinsic" (an sich) essence of the object. This means going beyond the "mechanical" and the "chemical"processes
in which the independence of the object had taken refuge. In the course of a process subservient to purpose,
however (i.e., process without purpose is not process, it is going nowhere), the "illusion" of independence, which
"in relation to the concept" is negative, "dissolves." If, however, the realized purpose is characterized as merely a
means to or material for another purpose, then this object too is being posited as of itself null, "merely ideal"; and
this spells the disappearance of the opposition between form and content, that is, what is content is also form, and
what is form is also content. The "concept" which was initially "formal activity" has only itself as its content; its
activity produces only itself. What has happened, then, is that "what the concept of purpose" was, that is, the
intrinsic unity of the subjective and the objective, has now been posited as "self-contained" (für sich seiende)and
that is "the idea," the concept as its own product.
Zusatz: An extrinsic purpose, which is always contingent upon the intent of a finite subject is inevitably a finite
purpose. When it is attained, the means which were employed to bring about its attainment have to that purpose a
relation imposed from without. When on the other hand, Hegel tells us, we speak of the relation between purpose
and object (Objekt) we are speaking in terms of the concept, for which the purpose realized in the object is
precisely a manifestation of what is intrinsic to the concept. An object extrinsic to the concept, then, turns out to be
a kind of shell concealing the concepta shell that is broken through only in the realization of "infinite"


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(total) purpose. Strictly speaking, finite purpose never is attained; there is always a purpose beyond it. Infinite
purpose, on the other hand is always being attained, and its realization is the removal of the deception of thinking
that it is not being attained. The rationality of the world is its constant orientation to "absolute good," to "absolute
purpose," which, according to Hegel, is constantly in the process of bringing itself about, no matter what
individual, finite purposes may be: that is the "cunning of reason."
We do live in the deception of thinking that by attaining the purpose we as finite human beings have before us, we
bring about whatever good there is. Our world is of interest to us because it is a world in which we achieve these
purposes. More than thatand here the language is indeed strangeeven "the idea" in its process of being realized in
our thinking deceives itself by setting up what is "other than itself" to be achieved. Nevertheless, it is the proper
function of the idea by its activity to eliminate the deception. In the idea truth and error are intermixed, and out of
the error comes truth, and in this emergence the idea is reconciled with both error and finitude. All of which says
that what is other than idea, that is, error, is a necessary moment of truth, in that truth is only as emerging from
nontruth, and the emergence is its own doing, its activity as self-manifesting concept and idea.39
Truth as Idea
No. 213. Very gradually, almost imperceptibly, Hegel has been bringing us around to what is, perhaps, the most
controverted contention in his whole philosophical position; his doctrine of "idea" as both the locus and source of
all truth. At this point he tells us, "The Idea is the true in and for itself, the absolute unity of concept and
objectivity." In terms of the language Hegel has just been employing, Nicolai Hartmann expresses the same by
saying, "The end which provides its own means, the concept which realizes itself, the subjectivity which objectifies
itself, is the 'Idea.'"40 The "ideal" content of the Idea is the same as that of the fully determined conceptthe latter is
total subjectivity, the former is total objectivity, and they are identified. The ''real" content of the Idea, then, is the
totality of reality, the identity of the real and the ideal. This is very much in the tradition of the
39. The language is unquestionably rather bizarrethe language of the text is even more bizarre. We have to
remember, however, that here we are dealing with a ZusatzHegel's lecture mediated by the pen of a note-
taking student. I am convinced, however, that it would be a mistake simply to ignore the Zusatz completely.
If it is true to say that the Idea as absolute (infinite in its significance) expresses itself in and through the
human mind thinking, it should not be amiss to say that the expression is deceptive and thus that, so to
speak, the Idea "deceives itself." Nor, if the self-manifestation is a dialectical process, should the notion of
truth emerging from the confrontation with the idea be shocking.
40. Nicolai Hartman, Die Philosophie der deutschen Idealismus: II Hegel (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1929), p. 225.


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Platonic "idea," as that in the "light" of which reality, in all its particularity, is intelligible.
The Idea, then, is absolute, not only in the sense that it depends on none of its "realizations" for its truth, but also in
the sense that it embraces in its unity the totality of its "particularizations." To define "the Absolute''short of which
the true is not trueas "Idea" is to give it its "absolute definition." The Idea is truth, because, as we saw before, that
is "objectively" true which corresponds fully with its "concept," and "idea" is this full correspondence. When we
speak of "external things" we do not say that they correspond with my "representation" of them, but rather that I
correctly represent things in my thinking. In speaking of "idea," however, we are speaking neither of
"representations" nor of "external things." Rather, whatever is realto the extent that it is trueis "idea" and is "true"
only by virtue of the idea resident in it. An isolated "being" is but an "aspect" of the idea, needing for its
completion other realities which also "seem" to be "self-contained" (für sich bestehende), but it is only in the
interrelationship of all these that the concept is realized; that is, idea is the objectively interrelated totality
corresponding to the concept. As we have seen, nothing isolated from the whole corresponds with its conceptand it
is precisely this which constitutes the "finitude" and contingency of the "isolated."
Clearly, then, to speak of "the idea" is not to speak of "an idea" of something or other, no more than "the concept"
is this or that concept. To get back to the "absolute," it is "one" all-embracing idea, which in its self-articulation
becomes the "system" of particular ideas, which have validity only as verified in the one idea. The idea so
articulated is seen initially as simply a "substantial" unity, but if the articulation is seen as "development," its true
"actualization," then it is a "subjective unity," or better still, it is "spirit," pure activity whose only adequate object
is itself, the absolute "subject-object."
If we make the mistake of looking upon idea as no more than a mental "form," then we shall also make the mistake
of looking upon "existing things" which have not been caught up in the unity of idea as the true "realities" or
"actualities." It is the same mistake as that of looking upon "idea" as merely "abstract." In the sense that in true
ideas "untruth" is overcome, they can be called "abstract," that is, withdrawn from the untruth of existential
instantiation, but intrinsically idea is essentially "concrete," the concept "determining itself" as "real." An idea is
abstract only when the concept of which the idea is the culmination is itself abstract, that is, subjective thinking cut
off from the concrete totality of thought, not when the idea is rooted in "subjectivity" in all its comprehensiveness.
Zusatz: It is important to distinguish the "truth" which characterizes "idea" from the "correctness" which can
characterize my subjective think-


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ing process. We do, in fact, speak of a "true man" or a "true work of art," for example, when we mean that what
we are speaking of corresponds with its concept, that is, is as it ought to be. Strictly speaking, we are referring in
this manner to what is "good" or "bad,'' but that is precisely the point: "good" and "bad" are meaningful only in
reference to the concept of what "ought" to be, and the "ought" is the content of the "idea" as well. This is where
"philosophy" comes in; it is "knowing" the idea, or knowing "ideas" in the "Idea."
In one way or another the Western tradition of philosophical thinking has considered the locus of truth to be the
term of rational thinking, that to which reason turns in looking for the truth of reality. Not until the advent of
Descartes, however, was this term of cognition "in" the mind looked upon as that which the mind knows in
knowing, the idea, the thinking of which enabled the mind to know the reality "represented" by the idea. Both
rationalists and empiricists, in different ways to be sure, followed Descartes' view, until Hume cast doubts on
man's ability to be sure that ideas corresponded to reality at all. As we have seen, Kant sought a way out of this
dilemma by turning his gaze on the process of thought in order to establish its claim to objectivity. The German
"idealists," notably Fichte and Schelling, sought in their turn to overcome the Kantian dilemma by turning attention
not so much to ideas "in" the subject's mind as to the subject's knowledge of itself as ultimately the absolute source
of true knowledge. What Hegel does when he comes on the scene is to go back to the roots of philosophy in Plato
and Aristotle, which "modern" philosophy had consistently ignored, where he found "ideas" and "concepts" more
intimately linked to reality than any merely subjective thinking process could make them. Borrowing also from
Spinoza, for whom the whole of reality was but the unfolding of the one idea of "substance," and from Leibniz, for
whom the whole of reality was mirrored in each subjective "monad," awaiting only its unfolding in thought, Hegel
came to the conclusion that the truth of reality is not "represented by" ideas but rather "contained in" ideas to the
extent that they were all embraced in the "absolute unity" of "absolute Idea," which is at the same time "absolute
Reason," "absolute Thought," "absolute Subject," "absolute Spirit,""God."
No. 214. When Hegel says, then, that "Idea can be comprehended as reason (this is the proper philosophical
meaning of reason), and in addition as subject-object, the unity of the ideal and the real, of finite and infinite, of
body and soul, as the possibility which has its actuality in itself, as that whose nature can be conceived only as
existing, etc., because in reason are contained all the relationships that understanding comes upon, but contained in
reason is infinite return to and identity with itself," he is but spelling out what he means by "absolute Idea is
absolute Spirit, the being whose reality


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fully corresponds with its concept." This is the ultimate ("absolute") object of all knowing, and whatever else is
known is known in the knowing of this, because whatever else is known is the product of this.
Having said this, Hegel goes on to say that understanding has an easy task to show that whatever is said of the
"Idea" is contradictory. It is, in fact, contradictory, because the truth of the absolute can be expressed only in
contradictory terms, without which only "aspects" and, hence, not the "truth'' of the absolute could be revealed. It
is the task of "speculative logic" to recognize that "the subjective that is taken to be only subjective, the finite that
is taken to be only finite, or the infinite that is taken to be only infinite, etc." is really not true, really contradicts
itself and, thus, goes over into its opposite. What is revealed as the truth of such opposites is the unity of the idea
in which the contradictories are reconciled "moments," whose contradictoriness is integral to the emergence of
their truth.
The misunderstanding here is simple enough; it is that of taking the meaning of the opposed moments as they are
in the "concrete" unity of the idea to be the same as their "abstract" meaning in isolation from each other, that is, to
assume that because they are not synonymous they cannot be united in one idea. What it comes down to is missing
the significance of the copula "is" in the "speculative judgment." We have no difficulty, for example, in admitting
that, although "rose" is not synonymous with "red" or "Socrates" with "man," it still makes sense to say that "the
rose (singular) is red" or that "Socrates is a man," but we do balk at saying "the subject is object" or "the finite is
infinite." What is more, "understanding" tends to look upon the contradictions in question as occurring in its own
"reflection" on the idea, not in the idea itself. If, however, we see "reason" as inevitably "dialectical," we can also
see its task as that of reconciling what "understanding" can see as only abstractly contradictory"Socrates," as an
isolated and therefore abstract individual, is no more "humanity" in the abstract than "finitude" is "infinity"; strictly
speaking, abstractions cannot be predicated of abstractions at all.
There is no need to pretend, of course, that the viewpoint of "totality" is easy to adopt. There is a point of view
from which the "ideal" is not "real," the "finite" is not "infinite," "identity" is not "difference," but it is a
misunderstanding to see this as the only possible viewpoint, even though it is not a viewpoint to be passed over.
"The idea," says Hegel, "is the infinite judgment," not made up of abstract parts united by an abstract "is," but each
of whose moments is the whole concept (idea). No abstract concept is the totality, but "the concept" is and thus is
both subjective and objective.


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Idea as Process
No. 215. What has been gradually emerging in this discussion is an awareness that "idea is essentially process,"
and that the kind of unity it manifests is the unity proper to process. The kind of identity idea manifests is the
"absolute," the "self-determining" identity proper to "concept," because idea, too, is dialectical. The idea, it can be
said, recapitulates that movement of concept whereby the latter is the "universality'' which is also singularity,
oriented both to objectivity and to the opposite of objectivity, thus reorienting, by means of its own immanent
dialectic, the "externality" which finds its "substantial reality" in the concept back to the "subjectivity" without
which substantiality does not make sense.
Precisely because idea is "process" it is not accurate to say that the absolute is the "unity of finite and infinite, of
thinking and being, etc.," because "unity" expresses static abstraction. By the same token it is inaccurate to say that
the absolute is "subjectivity"; the abstract "unity" of subjectivity says only what is implicit, "substantial," in "true
unity." In such expressions the "infinite" (absolute) has the appearance of being "neutralized" by the "finite"; so
too, the subjective by the objective, thinking by being. In the "negative" unity of the idea, on the other hand, a
dynamic unity of process, the infinite embraces the finite, as thinking does being, as subjectivity does objectivity.
The kind of unity proper to idea, then, is at once subjectivity, thinking, infinity; this unity is to be distinguished,
however, not only from "substantiality" but also from merely formal, onesided, exclusive subjectivity, thinking,
infinity: a subjectivity which is not subjective-objective is not even truly subjective. The same is true of a thinking
which is exclusively subjective or of an infinity which is exclusively infinite.
Having asserted rather summarily what are the implications of seeing idea as process, Hegel now tries to spell out
the dynamics of idea-process just as he had previously (nos. 194212) sought to spell out the dynamics of
objectivity-totality. In the former procedure he sought to discover in the "objective" world an intrinsic principle of
unification by turning first to a "mechanical" model, then to a "chemical" model, only to find that nothing short of a
"teleological" model could account for the rationality of the first two. Now, in an attempt to discover in subjectivity
an intrinsic principle of unificationnot only of the subjective but also of the subjective-objectiveHegel turns to other
models, this time not quite so metaphorical. Looking at the human subject he can find a model of unified process
in "living," in "knowing," and finally, in the "absolute idea" as that which alone makes sense of the other two.
No. 216. Idea as process, then, finds its first exemplification in "life," as


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that whereby organic bodies are united in one process of "living" (nos. 216222). The initial "immediate" focus is on
the "living body'' (animal), which is living not simply because it is a body but because in it resides a principle of
lifeAristotle's "soul" or "entelecheia." Hegel likens this to a sort of incarnation of "idea." Just as the "members" of
the living body (hand, eye, heart) are what they are only as living, as animated by all pervasive "life," so "ideas"
are what they are only as inhabited by the all-animating "Idea."41 That life as process of the "living body," then, is
likened to a "syllogism" (no. 217) whose "moments" are "syllogisms," should come as no surprise. Life in general
is a rational, systematic whole, and so is each living body, in which "living" is both "process" and "result," the
process which is its own end. The "moments," as could be expected, are three: (1) "Immediately" there is life as the
internal process of one living body, in which each and every part is animated by one principle (no. 218),
articulating itself as "sensibility," "irritability," and "reproduction." (2) The process is one of "mediation," wherein
living is oriented to its "ob-ject," and the living body employs its inorganic components as "means" to its "end,"
which is the nonterminating culmination of the process (no. 219). (3) The synthesis of "immediacy" and
"mediation" is completed in the relation of one body to another, precisely in the life-process, where organic bodies
are only as sexually differentiated (no. 220).
No. 221. What the process thus described results in is quite clearthe "species," which, as a "reality" and not merely
a mental classification, affords Hegel an instantiation of the identity of the ideal and the real (cf. WL II, pp. 41011).
The living individual is a member of a real class, but the living individual "dies" because it is the embodiment of a
"contradiction"; the universal (class) "exists" only in the individual, but it is not identified with the individual; the
"ob-ject" of animal life qua animal is not the individual but the species, which means that no individual in the
species corresponds with its "idea"it "needs others" (cf. WL II, p. 409); individuals come and go, but the life of the
species goes onand it is "one" life. Nor is the individual, however, simply the univocal instantiation of the abstract
universal in the concrete process of life (cf. WL II, p. 408). This contradiction, which is inescapable in animal life,
will be resolved only in "spirit," which is both individual and "for itself," singular and universal; individual spirit is
not for the species (no. 222).42
Nos. 22335. Although the unity of process exhibited in organic life,
41. "The actual is only so far as it contains the idea in itself and expresses it." (WL II, p. 409)
42. It is here that both Feuerbach and Marx find fault with Hegel; for them man is essentially a "species-being"
(Gattungswesen). To Feuerbach this means that man belongs to the abstract class "mankind" and is thus related
to all other members of the class; to Marx this means a more concrete universality embracing the concrete
relationships of all its members to each other. But neither of these positions is what Hegel is denying.


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whether of the individual organism or of the animal species, is manifestly real and shows a manifest
correspondence between the process as conceived and the process as real, neither the overall unity of the real nor
the correspondence of ideal and real unity of the totality can be concluded from a consideration of vital organic
unityalthough the latter might be looked upon as a "model" whose structure could give a hint as to what an overall
unity might be. As a "mean" between the "given" unity of the organic and the "sought-for" unity of the totality
Hegel now introduces a life-process which clearly exceeds the capacities of the organic qua organic, but which is
exhibited as embodied in one of the kinds of organism in the world, the human, the nonorganic process of
''knowing."
No. 223. As so often happens, Hegel begins with a presupposition (better, perhaps, an "ideal"): If the idea he is
searching for is to resolve the problem of totalizing unity, it must be the "objective universality" which constitutes
the orientation of concept, and it must be the adequate resolution of the apparent conflict between the "subjectivity"
of concept and the "objectivity" of reality. This, then, is what he is looking for, not having found it on the level
simply of "life."
No. 224. Implicit in the idea of life, it is true, is the unity of the subject objectifying itself, but the unity is implicit
only, because to it clings "finitude." In the subject endowed with "reason," however, there resides the conviction
that it can legitimately "posit" the identity of subjectivity and objectivity, of singularity and universality.43
No. 225. The question, then, is that of legitimizing the claim of "knowing" to embrace all reality, by actively
removing the "onesidedness" of both objectivity and subjectivity. So long as the knowing in question, however,
remains "finite" the resolution of the conflict will be a task not an accomplishment. Nor will it be an
accomplishment short of a synthesis of the spiritual activities of "knowing" (theoretical) and "willing" (practical).
No. 226. The "idea" of knowing exceeds by far the finite fact of knowing. In the latter there is simply the
assumption that what is known is a "given" which is "received" in thought, in "reason" functioning as only
understanding"the finite grasp of a finite object. But, even this has its roots in the overall comprehension which is
the concept.
No. 227. Where the knowing is finite it presupposes a diversity of objects which are united only because the
knowing subject imposes an abstract form of universality on them. This sort of "classification" Hegel calls the
"analytic method"breaking up and putting together again, both merely subjectively, beginning with the singular
and, by comparing it with other singulars, forming a universal. It is a method of moving away from the
43. This notion is admirably spelled out in the opening paragraphs of Phenomenology of Spirit, Ch. V,
where Hegel speaks of "reason certain of itself as being all reality."


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"concreteness" of the immediately given toward the "abstractness" of universality (the method of the empirical
sciences).
No. 228. The "synthetic method," on the other hand, begins with the universal, equally applicable to all particulars.
The "synthesis" is the application of the one determinate concept to the many particulars it subsumes.
No. 229. When an object is brought under the universal heading (class) to which it belongs and to that is added that
which characterizes the object as particular under this heading, the result is "definition." It is the "analytic method"
which accomplishes this, but it does so by assigning to it what the subject decides is the defining characteristic.
No. 230. When, on the other hand, the subject in considering the universal "particularizes" it, the technique is that
of "division"again on the basis of characteristics decided on by the subjectand this belongs to the "synthetic
method."
No. 231. What Hegel is trying to bring out in all this is the artificiality of both methods, particularly if they are
thought to be adequate to philosophical thinking; the methods simply cannot be arbitrarily applied to any and every
object. The artificiality comes from their being "applied" to objects, not dictated by the inner dynamics of the
concept itself. The two methods work very successfully within a limited field, but they are simply too "formal" to
be of use in philosophy, which simply does not permit of "constructing" either "theorems" or "proofs.'' Philosophy,
speculative thinking, looks for an inner necessity in its concepts, not the necessity of subjectively thinking in a
certain way. "Knowing," in this sense, means more than simply "putting" into concepts determinations received
from an object as "given"; there is a "logic" of reality to be uncovered (cf. WL II, p. 444).
No. 232. The necessity proper to "proofs," then, applies to finite knowing, and it is "extrinsic" to the concept,
belonging only to subjective activity.44 It is only when the concept relates itself to itself, that it finds in itself what
"necessarily" belongs to itself. That the merely "subjective idea" should move from what is "given" in it to what is
"immanent" but not "given" requires a passage from mere "knowing" to the ideal of "willing," which is essentially
oriented, but not arbitrarily directed, to the "not-yet-given." Its orientation is rather to what "ought" to be, which,
again, is inseparable from the concept.
No. 233. If the "subjective idea" contains in itself the determination good," that is, ought to be realized, the
subjective is being described as oriented to reality. Once more the teleological aspect of objectivity has been
44. As we shall see in chapter 5, there is a far more significant form of "proof" which is not ratiocinative, as
is the "proof" here spoken ofperhaps the term "argument" would be better here.


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introduced: the given world is more than just "given"; its givenness has a "purpose," even though this is initially
only "posited" in the "subjective idea."
No. 234. What needs to be overcome here is the "contradiction" contained in the "finitude" of a world in which the
"good as purpose" is just as often not realized as realized. From the side of the subject the "realization" of the good
stands merely as an ''ought." What the "ought" does, however, is more than characterize subjective activity; it
pertains to what is "substantial" and "true" in the object. To say that willing ought to be oriented to the realization
of the object is to say more of "knowing" than that it is abstractly true; the "oughtness" of the object is far more
significant than its "givenness." This is even more significant when we see an "oughtness" in the world itself, an
"oughtness" which brings the world together into a onethe unity of "is" and "ought." "Willing," then, is part and
parcel of rational process, which cannot simply "take" reality as it is but must "make" it into what it ought to be.
Nor does this mean that any particular "good" attains to truth by being realized; it is true as the demand "to be
realized" which is intelligible only in the framework of totality (cf. WL, p. 479).
No. 235. "Thus is posited the truth of the good as the unity of the theoretical and practical idea." It is as though
Hegel had resurrected Plato's "Idea of the Good," which alone gives ultimate intelligibility to reality. If nothing
else, it enables us to "see into" (speculare) what Hegel calls the "absolute idea," the idea which realizes itself,
because in it there is the rational demand that it be realized. What this is to mean we shall see in the final
paragraphs of this Logic (nos. 236243).
No. 236. What needed to be broken down, then, was the mere "givenness" of the objective over-against the
subjective and the mere "subjectivity" of idea over-against the "objectivity" of the real. The "concept of the idea"
bespeaks precisely the "oneness" of subjective and objective idea. The point is that idea as "absolute" bespeaks the
reality of that to which "concept," as the activity of spirit is oriented. What "idea" in this sense "logically" demands
to be true is absolutely true, and "concept" as subjective activity is true only if it corresponds to "idea."
Zusatz: Dialectically speaking the absolute idea reconciles the defects present in both the "idea of life" and the
"idea of knowing" as explanatory of total unification. In "life" the totality is "implicitly" contained, but what a
"living" totality can possibly be is not explicated. On the other hand, mere "knowing" is equally "onesided";
"totality" is "explicit," but the working-out of totality is unexplicated. In the "absolute idea," Hegel says, these
defects are remedied, because the "absolute idea" is at once "living process" and the concrete thinking out of all
that is implicit in the "idea." Previously it was "we" who "had" the idea in its process as "our" object;


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now it is the idea which is "objective" to itself; it is its own working-out, the nohsiVnohsewV, the highest form of
the idea, the synthesis of the rationality of the theoretical and practical idea, the fusion of "is" and "ought" in the
truly real.
Idea as Absolute
No. 237. Because as "self-contained" the "absolute idea" contains no "transition," no "presupposition,'' and above
all no "determination" which is not at once "fluid" and "clear," it is the "pure form" of the concept which sees itself
as "its own content." To say that it is its own concept, however, is not to say that its content is not "objective"; it is
to say that its content does not "come to it" from outside but is its own activity. Quite obviously this would make
no sense if "its own activity" were nothing more than the subjective activity of a finite subject who "has" the idea.
If, however, it can be said that "reason" transcends individual reason, "thought" transcends individual thought, and
"spirit" transcends individual spirit, may it not be said that "idea" transcends the "ideas" of individuals? If this last
makes sense, then it also makes sense to speak of the "content" of the "idea" as the "totality of form" the "logical
system" of all content. "Absolute idea" is the thoroughly rational concept (cf. WL II, p. 484). It is this totality of
content which dictates the method of thinking the idea.
Zusatz: Appended to this paragraph is an addition, presumably, as we have seen, taken from Hegel's own oral
presentation, which goes a long way toward clearing up misgivings about the elusiveness of the "absolute idea."
There is a danger, the author admits, that enthusiasm for the all-embracing idea will be without foundation. The
danger is that talk about the idea will be empty, precisely because the content of the idea is too vague to be
genuinely convincing. Its true content is the entire "system," the tracing of whose development has been the task of
the whole Logic up to this point. The "absolute idea," then, is not a mere abstract "form" thrown as a cloak, so to
speak, over an unspecified content from without. Rather it is the "absolute (concrete) form" which so unifies the
totality of objectivity as to illuminate all the real determinations of being (which have emerged in systematic
discussion) by relating them intimately to each othernothing is intelligible except within the framework of the
whole. To illustrate this, the author compares it to the old man who pronounces the same religious creed as does
the child, with the difference that for the old man what he pronounces synthesizes the experiences of a lifetime.
Even if the child "understands" the religious content, still for him his whole life and his whole world are not caught
up in what he says. The same thing is true of human life and of all the events which make it up. Everything one
does is


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oriented to the goal of making life what it is, but when one attains the goal one is surprised to find that it is that
toward which one was striving all along. It is only the "whole movement" that counts. If one contemplates the
whole of one's life, its "end" can seem severely limited, but the whole of life is summed up in that "end." By the
same token, the content of the "absolute idea'' is the entire vast panorama which has gradually been unfolding for
us. The ultimate insight is that it is the unfolding whole that counts. Philosophically speaking this means the view
that whatever simply "by itself" (für sich) seems limited in significance takes on value as belonging to the whole,
not as a "given" but as a "vital development" of the idea, which is the form embracing the whole restrospectively.
Each of the stages we have already seen is an "image" of the absolute, but each in a limited way; each is driven
forward toward the wholeness, the unfolding of which is the method which has been described.
No. 238. Out of this last protracted remark comes a recapitulation of the whole logical endeavor, the "speculative
method," whose "beginning" is described in the present paragraph. The beginning is simply "being," which is
"immediate" precisely because it is only the "beginning." From the "speculative" point of view, however, "being" is
a process of "self-determination," which it can be only as the "movement" of the concept that in "judging" posits
its own negation: the "being" which is initially taken to be "given" is recognized as "posited," that is, the
"negative" of "given," which is to say, it is "mediated." However, the concept as no more than "negation," in which
it recognizes itself as "positing" its other and therefore "identical with" its other, in which it finds the mere
"certainty" of itself, is not yet explicitly but only implicitly the "concept as concept." The universality which
belongs to the concept at this stage is only "immediate," "indeterminate."
This sort of "beginning" is the result of the abstract characteristic of the "analytic method" proper to "finite"
knowing. But, precisely as "universal," this resulting "beginning" is at the same time the beginning of the
"synthetic method," wherein progressively the "particular" determinations of being emerge.
Zusatz: Previously Hegel had said that neither the "analytic" nor the "synthetic" methods of finite knowing were
proper to philosophy. Here he is saying that the "synthesis" of the two methods, in which neither remains simply
what it was, is "philosophical." As merely "analytic," thinking is no more than "passive" reception. Add to this,
however, synthesizing activity, along with the effort to avoid "private conjectures" and "particular opinions," and
the philosophical method comes into its own as the "activity of the concept itself."
No. 239. What the "activity of the concept itself" can mean has, of course, been a problem to many an interpreter
of Hegel, especially to those


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who do not share his views on the primacy of "spirit." If we go back, however, to the basic meaning of "concept,"
which first manifests itself as the subjective activity of the individual as "conceiving," we can rely on the
fundamental distinction between an "immediate" object, "given'' in such a way as to be "received" by a subject,
and an object "posited" in the activity of a subject and, thus, "mediated" by that activity. The "activity of the
concept," then, is that of "positing," of "mediation." If it is further possible to see "concept" as the activity, not of
an individual subject, but of "spirit" transcending the sum total of individual subjects, we may also be able to grasp
what Hegel is trying to say in speaking of the "concept itself" as an "activity" transcending the sum total of all
merely individual subjective activities. In this way we may also be able to grasp what Hegel means by speaking of
"idea" which is not anyone's idea but is the transcendent "absolute idea."
It is only thus that we shall be able to fathom Hegel's meaning when he speaks next of the "progress" (Fortgang)
beyond the "immediate" beginning in the "speculative method." "The progress is the idea's posited judgment." We
have already seen the kind of dynamic relationship which Hegel describes under the heading "judgment." If we
remember that judgment is "articulated concept" we can at least see judgment as enjoying the same
"transcendence" as does concept. If, in addition, we can grasp what he means by saying that the universal as
"posited" in concept is "dialectical," that is, self-developing, we can also see both that all universality is "mediated"
and that the universal is thus, posited as the "negative of the beginning" (immediate), the "positing" of a
"determinateness" not present in the "immediate." Initially, however, even this "positing" is considered only as the
work "of one" (für eines), i.e., "moment of reflection."
As could be expected, after the explanation in the Zusatz to no. 238, the "progress" here described is both
"analytic" and "synthetic": "analytic," because in light of the "immanent dialectic" of the concept only that is
posited which is contained in the concept as "given"; "synthetic," because in this initial stage of the concept
dialectic distinction "had not yet been posited."
Zusatz: To confront directly those who ignore the primacy of spirit Hegel goes on to say that the "progress of the
idea" makes it clear that even the "beginning" was not simply "immediate" but "mediated." Only when
consciousness itself is "immediate" does it look upon "nature" as "primary" and spirit as "mediated." The true state
of affairs is that spirit posits nature and only thus "makes" nature its "presupposition"; the process of conceptual
thought transforming reality into idea is not to be distinguished from the process of idea "realizing" itself.
No. 240. Looked at abstractly, the progress is seen at the stage of "being" as "transition to another" rather than just
being. At the stage of


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"essence" (the "moment of reflection") progress is seen as the ''showing" of what is over-against. Finally, at the
stage of "concept" progress is seen as the "distinguishing" of singulars from universality; a universality, however,
that is "continuous with" what is distinct from it and, therefore, in this sense, "identical with it." This last sentence
is extremely important: "Identical with" does not mean "equal to" but rather "continuous with"; that is, the
dialectical dynamic of the concept demands the "positing" of both singular and universal.
No. 241. If we take a step backward to the stage of "essence" (reflection) we can see that the concept, which was
initially only "implicit," has come to "manifestation" (Scheinen) and is, hence, "implicitly" already the "idea." This
is but another way of saying that, at this stage, development involves not only a transition from the first to the
second stage, but also a return from the second to the first; and it is only by virtue of this double movement that
the distinction of stages makes sense. The reason for this is that each of the distinct spheres considered in itself is
completed in the totality and thus functions only as combined in a unity with the other. Only because each of the
two transcends its own onesidedness in the unity of the two is the unity itself saved from being onesided. In a
dialectical union of the distinct neither of the two sides dominates the other; the unity both embraces the two and
has a significance other than the sum of the two.
No. 242. In the third moment of the "speculative method," then, unity and distinction are preserved in a delicate
balance. The stage of reflection develops the connection of distinct moments into the kind of "contradictory"
relationship it first of all is. This works itself out in a "progress to infinity," where the contradiction is ultimately
"dissolved" in that the "different" is posited as what it is "in the concept," that is, both identical and different. What
is different, then, is the negative of the first, but as identical with the first it is also the negative of itselfa somewhat
complex way of saying that the concept distinguishes with a view to identifying and identifies with a view to
distinguishing. The "concept" is the unity in which "being" and "essence" are ideal moments, at once transcended
and retained. Thus, the concept whose "implications" are "explicitated" by means of its differences and of their
supersession, which enables it to "come together into itself," is the "realized concept," that is, the concept which
contains in its "independence" the "positing" of its own determinations. This is what Hegel calls "the idea," which
as the "absolute principle" (of the method) is simply the disappearance of the illusion that the beginning is
"immediate" and that the idea itself is a "result"and this means the "knowledge" that the idea is a totality embracing
all the "different" moments of the process, which is the "method."
No. 243. All along it has been becoming more and more clear that when Hegel speaks of the "method" proper to
the "science" of logic, he is not


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speaking of a method one chooses with a view to solving problems, as one does, for example, when one employs
geometrical constructions extrinsic to the figure under consideration in order to "prove" the relationships of the
angles, lines, area, and so on, of the figure in question. Thus, when he identifies method with the "soul and concept
of the content," he is telling us that the "method" as inseparable from the content is dictated by the content of
philosophical thinking, and that the animating principle of the content is the concept. If the concept, then, has
''moments," whose relationships to each other constitute the concept as a whole, the method of conceptual thinking
simply must follow where the relationship of these "moments" lead it. Now, since the "determinate content" of the
concept along with its "form" harks back to the "idea," then this latter presents itself as a "systematic totality,"
which ultimately is only one "idea," whose particular moments are "in themselves" (an sich) the same as are those
which in the dialectical movement of the concept "produce" the simple "self-contained-ness" (Fürsichsein) of the
idea. There is no place to look but in "idea" for objectivity, and the structure of idea can be only "conceptual." The
"science" of logic, therefore, closes by comprehending its own conceptwhich tells us what the "science" must
be45the concept of the "pure idea," to which any and every "idea" points. No content of any concept will be true,
except insofar as it finds its place in the overall "system" of the one "idea." The total content of the "idea" may be
beyond the capacity of finite mind; the "method" dictated by the "idea" is not (cf. WL II, p. 485).
No. 244. Logic as such is now complete, but it must make itself real by turning to the real contents offered for its
inspection. Thus, the idea taken "by itself" (für sich) is "contemplation" (Anschauen), that is, "looking at" what is
before it, and the "contemplative idea" is the idea of "nature," which is "totality in the form of immediacy" (WL II,
p. 505) to which "speculative thinking" must now turn. As contemplation alone, however, the idea is posited as no
more than the "onesided characterization" of immediacy or of negation by means of a reflection external to nature.
It is the "self-determining" idea in nature which must be uncovered, which means that it is not enough for "the idea
of nature" to make the transition to "life" or, as finite knowing to let life "manifest itself" in knowledge; the idea
must "enclose itself" in its own "absolute truth," thus enabling it to "let emerge from itself" the "moment" of its
"particularization," its "determinate self-othering," the "immediate idea" as its "self-mirroring," which is nature.
The philosophy of nature, then, is what "speculative logic"
45. The initial "Womit muss der Anfang der Wissenschaft gemacht werden?" becomes: "What does the end
result tell us scientific philosophy essentially is?"


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inevitably leads to, the "idea" expressing itself in nature. When "speculative thinking," however, does turn to
"nature," it must carry with it the remembrance that "dialectic" is not merely a subjective act of discovery or of
argumentation; it is what the contradictions which ''understanding" finds in contemplating nature impose on
thinking (cf. WL II, p. 496).


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Chapter Three
God As Spirit
From all that we have seen so far, one conclusion emerges with utmost clarity: Hegel has made a profound act of
faith in the human, in the capacity of the human spirit both to respond religiously to the self-revelation of absolute
Spirit and to plumb philosophically the profound rationality of that revelation. More than that, we have become
more and more aware that, in Hegel's view, the rationality of the revelation has its source in the Spirit who reveals,
just as the capacity to comprehend the revelation resides in the spiritual character of the recipient who
"appropriates" by "reproducing." Spirit speaks to spirit, so to speak, and the result is both religion and philosophy.
The time has come, it would seem, for us to try to fathom what Hegel means when he speaks of both God and man
as ''spirit." One rather obvious way of doing that, of course, is to do what I have attempted to do in another place,1
by tracing laboriously the intricacies of his Phenomenology of Spirit, but this is hardly the place to do thatalthough
we shall have occasion more than once in this study to consult that master work.
Without entering here into the complexities of both distinction and identification, we can say with Hegel that in the
world in which we live we are confronted with two realitiesnature and spirit, the world of "things" and the world of
"spiritual activity." In one sense there seems to be an unbridgeable chasm between matter and spirit; one is simply
not the other, and all our experience of knowing, loving, willing, acting upon, using, and so on, in which they
would seem to influence each other, does not solve the mystery of the relationship of spirit and matter. (1) One of
the solutions attempted has been that of materializing spirit, whether in the naive form of
1. Quentin Lauer, S.J., A Reading of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit. New York: Fordham University
Press. 1976 (second printing with revisions, 1978).


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mechanical "reductionism" or in the more sophisticated form of some sort of "dialectical" emergence of "spiritual"
activity from its "material'' base. It is called "naturalism" and has as its motive and aim a "scientific" grasp of all
that is or possibly could be. This "solution" Hegel categorically rejects. (2) Another solution has been that of
spiritualizing matter, and this, too, can take two principal forms: (a) By some kind of indescribable power spirit
can, from out of its own resources only, transform "material" reality into "spiritual" reality, thus taking possession
of the former and making it object for thought; or (b) spirit can recognize that matter is not merely matter; its very
being has the stamp of spirit on it, thus making it antecendently susceptible of appropriation by spirit. Both forms
of "spiritualization" have been called now "realism," now "idealism," until it is not clear what either term means,
even in the context in which it is being used. Of these "spiritual" solutions the first, on the face of it, would seem to
contain much that is both mysterious and gratuitous, requiring the hypothesis of a number of intermediate entities
to make it work. There are, unquestionably, those to whom the second of these solutions will seem as mysterious
and gratuitous as the first. Still, the difference which separates them is vast. Fundamental to the second solution is
the conviction not only that, weighed in the balance, spirit takes precedence over matter, both logically and
ontologically, but also that the capacity of matter to be appropriated by spirit is a capacity inherent in matter, its
intelligibility. Intelligibility, however, is not simply there, because matter is matter; it is a communicated
intelligibility, just as its reality is communicated reality. If we follow Hegel this farand many, perhaps most, do
notwe are, it would seem, forced to go further with him and agree that to communicate is the privilege of spirit
alone. More than that, if "communication" is to be meaningful, it must be self-communication. Matter, then, has the
mark of spirit on it. But, if the "appropriation" of matter by spirit is a "communication"spirit speaking to spiritwho,
or what, is the communicator?2
If the question is put this way, it might be argued, the questioner is employing an unjustified argument from
analogy. But what logic is it that tells us that such an argument from analogy is unjustifiedor unjustifiable? If I find
that "things"make themselves known to me, and if I argue that the activity of self-manifestation is the activity of
spiritwhich things are notwhy is it an unjustified use of analogy to argue that the "communication" in question
makes sense only as the activity of a spirit which transcends both the things which finite spirit appropriates and the
finite spirit which appropriates? What is illogicalexcept in an un-
2. As will become manifest in chapter 5, "Proofs of God," simply to put the question this way is to embark
on what Hegel considers the most rational proof, i.e., the "Ontological Proof."


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justifiably narrow sense of "illogical"in seeing the being of both "things" and "spirits'' as a communicated being
which gives both things and spirits that in common which not only relates them to each other but also relates both
to the Spirit without which neither is in any meaningful way a possibility?3 Most of us would agree that our
experience testifies that nature "speaks" to usin a not totally metaphorical wayin somewhat the way a work of art
"speaks" to us of its author. Perhaps "nature," too, is but the voice with which the Artist who is greater than all
speaks, and perhaps, if we really listen, we shall be conscious that the voice we hearor the word spokenis that of
the one Spirit who is above allso long as we do not understand "above" either spatially or separatistically. In any
event, it is difficult to see how such a consciousness would be "illogical." We might even from this go on to say,
with Hegel, that the "one" who speaks is "God." If, however, we prefer to conceive of the speaker as "force" or
"power," or even as "supreme being," we run the risk of making the "speaking" both unintelligible and lifeless.
I remember speaking many years ago to a friend of mine in Paris. He was an artista painterand a good artist, too.
He had spent the greater part of his lifeall of his adult lifepainting, trying to express on canvas who he was, what
he was, what was his experience of the world in which he was immersed. Only gradually did he come to the
realization that the self-expression to which his art compelled him was more than just that; he was putting forth
that which was to be appropriated by others. He found in himself the need, the effort, not merely to express himself
but, more significantly, to communicate himself. Each work he turned out, he saw, was autobiographical, and he
began to see that he had a need to let others in on the story and that the mode of communication was the beauty he
created.
All of this passed through my friend's mind without his thoughts straying much beyond the art in which he was
engaged: his own art as the effort of self-communication, his appreciation of the work of others as his
appropriation of their efforts at self-communication. He could not be an artist, however, without being
overpowered by the beauty of nature.4 Still, it was not until he was in his forties that he began to realize that he
was not simply finding beauty in naturenor was he putting it therethe beauty of nature was nature speaking to him.
Here, without being able to give it a
3. It might, of course, be arguedwith Feuerbach and Marxthat since things actually are, it is illegitimate to
shut our eyes to their actuality and to speak of a condition of their possibility, but it is difficult to see the
logic of that position. The notion of conditioned actuality is scarcely illegitimate.
4. We might note that Hegel sees things a bit differently herehe is overpowered by man's capacity to be both
overpowered and controlling.


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name, he was beginning to argue from "analogy." If his artistic production was his effort to communicate himself
to others in the language of beauty, was he not forced by his "logic" to conclude that it was not nature by itself that
was "speaking" to himit had no intelligencebut that another ''speaker" was employing nature as (its?) voice and
beauty as the language in which to speak to him? His logic, indeed, pushed him one step further to the conclusion
that, just as he in his work spoke to others of himself, so the one who spoke through the voice of nature was
speaking to him of the speaker himself. With that realization my artist friend became both religious and a
philosopherand it was his "logic" which impelled him to both.
"A strange sort of logic, indeed," one might say; and yet, it was not too different from what, as we have seen,
Hegel calls "speculative logic" (even though, for Hegel, the human spirit spoke far more loudly of "absolute Spirit"
than did nature). The artist's logic, to be sure, was not of the kind that permitted him to draw out of his premisses a
conclusion already contained in them. Rather, it was a logic which would not permit him to rest in only what the
premisses already contained and which forced him to move in the direction of that to which the premisses were
pointing; and that to which they were pointing he found himself incapable of refusing. The analogy with Hegel's
"speculative logic" may seem forced; it may not adequately explain to us what went on in the "spirit" of the artist.
But perhaps we can approach this experience from the opposite direction: Does it help us to understand something
of what Hegel is trying to tell us in his "speculative philosophy," which does not permit him to stop short of an
affirmation of the reality of "absolute Spirit"provided, of course, we remember that, for Hegel, the most potent
indicators of both the reality and "nature" of God is the reality and "nature" of the human spirit? With regard to
what has just been said, one further question might be asked: Could the artist himself, prior to his intuition of
God's self-communication in nature, fully appreciate his own continued efforts at self-communication? Was the
real revelation the self-manifestation of God in the activity of the artist's own spirit rather than in natureand is this
the overall message of Hegel's Phenomenology, indeed of his whole system? Human spirit reveals divine Spirit in
a way that neither nature nor art can.5
In whatever way one might wish to interpret my artist friend's experience or however critical one might be in
evaluating the conclusion he drew from it, one thing is clear: It is far more difficult to get off the hook in
interpreting Hegel's contention that the only way to come to grips with the
5. Texts could be multiplied which converge on this point, but it seems scarcely necessary to do more than
refer to chapters VI and VII of PdG; EpW, nos. 55377; and VPR II, part III, B.


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human spirit's experience of itself is to cast it in the light of that same spirit's experience of "absolute Spirit." There
is more to this, however, than simply saying that the human spirit is led step by describable step to an affirmation
of the reality of an all-embracing Spirit; it means rather that consciousness is not consciousness if it is not
consciousness of self, that it is not consciousness of self if it is not consciousness of itself as spirit, and that it is not
consciousness of itself as spirit if it is not consciousness of absolute Spirit, short of which the very concept of
"spirit" is unintelligible. Thus, when Hegel says, "Spirit is not merely the sort of knowing in which the being of the
object is separated from the process of knowing it'' (VPR I, p. 197), one might respond naively by saying, "of
course there are no mental objects apart from the mental process of their becoming objects; that is almost a
tautology." Or, one might respond even more naivelynot to say crudely"This is just nonsense; it is too obvious that
there are any number of objects which exist independently of anyone's knowing them." There is no question in
Hegel's mind that "things" exist independently of any individual consciousness or sum total of individual
consciousnesses. It is equally clear, however, that no "thing" is an "object" except as object-for consciousness. But,
neither of these statements touches what is at issue. What Hegel is saying is that we have not come to grips with
"spirit" at all if we treat it merely as a "form"albeit the highest formof consciousness: "Spirit does not exist merely
in the manner of a relation, not merely as a form of consciousness" (ibid.). Rather, when we speak of spirit, we
recognize that consciousness is "included as a moment in the being of spirit; and this at once implies an
affirmative relation of the spirit to absolute Spirit" (ibid). This means, in Hegel's language, that finite spirit is at
once different from and identified with absolute Spirit, and this first becomes manifest in religion.
Only this identity where, in its object, knowing posits itself for itself, is the spirit, reason which is
objectively for itself. Religion is, therefore, a relation of spirit to absolute Spirit; only thus is spirit as that
which knows also that which is known. [Ibid.]
Identity of Finite and Infinite Spirit

It is not, therefore, as though finite spirit stands off from absolute Spirit in knowing it; rather, finite spirit is a
manifestation of absolute Spirit knowing itself as the totality of both knowing and the known.
This is not merely a way in which spirit relates itself to absolute Spirit; rather absolute Spirit is itself that
which is the self-relating to that which we posited


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on the other side as the element of difference. Thus, on a higher plane, religion is the idea of the spirit
which relates itself to its own selfthe self-consciousness of absolute Spirit. [Ibid., pp. 19798]
The consciousness which finite spirit has of objects as, so to speak, over-against itself is but an aspect of its self-
consciousness, and this self-consciousness is but a facet of the overall self-consciousness of absolute Spirit.
Strictly speaking, finite spirit does not have either consciousness of objects or of itself; it is finite manifestation of
infinite self-consciousness. Only as identified with absolute Spirit is finite spirit what it itself really is.
Consciousness, as such, is finite consciousness, it is the knowledge of what is other than the ego. Religion,
too, is consciousness and consequently includes finite consciousness, but superseded as finite; for the other
which absolute Spirit knows it itself is, and thus only is it absolute Spirit, i.e., in knowing itself. [Ibid., p.
98]
To put all this in another way, the initiative, so to speak, belongs to infinite Spirit, whose self-differentiating in the
totality of spiritual activity is the very being of the finite. If it is essential to spirit that it manifest itself,
"communicate" itself, it is equally essential that there be an "other" to whom spirit manifests itself. But, if ''absolute
Spirit" is a meaningful term at all, its "other" can only be the term of its own "self-othering." As we shall see in the
final chapter, "Philosophy and Theology," Hegel understands this in three sensestrinitarian, creational, and
incarnationalbut here it is enough to see the principle expressed in its religiousand hence, also
philosophicalbearing, without being explicitly theological. The religious consciousness proper to finite spirit is that
spirit itself as the self-manifestation of infinite Spirit. The self-consciousness of infinite Spirit is the very being of
finite spirit.
The finiteness of consciousness comes in here, since [absolute] Spirit by its own movement differentiates
itself. This finite consciousness, however, is a moment of the Spirit itself which is its own self-
differentiation, self-determination; that is to say, its own self-positing as finite consciousness. By means of
this, however, it is mediated only through finite spirit's consciousness in such wise that it has to render itself
finite in order to become knowledge of itself by thus rendering itself finite. Thus religion is the divine
Spirit's knowledge of itself through the mediation of finite spirit. Accordingly, in the Idea in its highest
form, religion is not a transaction of man, but is essentially the supreme determination of the absolute Idea
itself. [Ibid., p. 198]


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Whatever else this prolonged analysis of an extremely dense and difficult text may tell us, it makes one thing
abundantly clear: There is no coming to terms with Hegel's thought which is not a coming-to-grips with his
concept of God, who makes sense only as "Spirit." There is no understanding what Hegel has to say of spirit (be it
finite or infinite) without understanding what he says of God; but, by the same token, there is no understanding
what he says of God without understanding what he says of spirit as such. "The relationship which grounds (das
Grundverhältnis) all religion and all philosophy is first of all the relationship of spirit as such to nature and then,
that of absolute Spirit to finite spirit" (BS, p. 123). That finite spirit is related to nature needs no elaboration; its
very immersion in nature is its finitude. But, it is also related to nature in that it can know nature, work it, and
transform it; and all this it can do only becausae as finite spirit it is the expression of absolute Spirit. To be spirit is
to be conscious of being spirit; and this is but a truncated consciousness if it is not consciousness of all that spirit
is, which it will not be short of knowing absolute Spirit.
To many, perhaps most, it may seem supremely arbitrary on Hegel's part to insist that only with the advent of
Christianity did it become possible for the human spirit to get this grasp of itself. He is not saying, however, that
the grasp is not rational, that the Christian religion in revealing Spirit to spirit superseded human rationality; he is
saying that the Christian religion in laying before man a supremely rational content is at the same time laying on
human "reason" the onus of working out the rationality of that content. "It is now the task of the world to recognize
God as Spirit and to recognize this in [the human] spirit" (EGP, p. 245; my italics). The implications of this last
statement are important: The essence of spiritincluding human spiritis activity, which means that the human grasp
of divine spirit is activity of the human spirit, and this in turn means that, if what relates the human spirit to the
divine is not to be an inadequate substitute, a ''representation" of the latter, the divine must somehow inform the
very activity of the human. When man in thinking, then, knows God, there has to be some significant sense in
which not only what is known but also the knowing is divine. We have already seen that this is precisely what
Hegel says when he speaks of the human spirit thinking God religiously, "the divine Spirit's knowledge of itself
through the mediation of finite spirit." It does not seem adequate to interpret this as meaning no more than that God
has "created" the human spirit with a capacity to know the divine; it would seem more accurate to say that Hegel
looks upon the human spirit as, in some sort of Plotinian way, an offshoot of the divine. This, however, "is a hard
saying, and who can bear it?" For a more profound investigation of it we shall have to wait for chapter 6. Here we
must be content to note that to say that what the human spirit does in knowing is "analogous" to what the divine
Spirit does in knowing is not enough, and that to say the divine and the human


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spirit are one and the same is too much. There is an identification, to be sure, but it is a "dialectical" identification,
which makes sense only if it is at the same time a differentiation. It might also be noted that terms themselves do
not have exactly the same meaning when predicated of the infinite as they do when predicated of the finite.
Nowhere, to my knowledge, does Hegel make use of the Scholastic concept of analogia entisnor does he give
evidence of being aware of itbut he does say very clearly, as we shall see in the next chapter, that predicates,
which in the context of the finite are contradictory, are in the context of the infinite compatible.
We might try to approach this whole question from a different angle. Whatever one may think of Hegel's
philosophy of religioneven granting that it is far more "philosophy of God" than "philosophy of religion"there can
be little question, if we look at the broad lines of his development, that he makes a good case for a progressive
development in the religious conception of God. As man moves from a conception of the divine drawn from and
rooted in the things of nature, through the progressive attempts to portray the divine in a variety of art forms, all
tending to anthropomorphize the divine, until the self-conscious self-revelation of God in the Judaeo-Christian
tradition supplants all othersin the West at leastand as this culminates in the self-revelation of God in the form of
an individual man, whose "spirit'' subsequently vitalizes the religious community, it can be said that the God man
believes in becomes more and more "spiritual." Nor does it demand too much of a concession to agree that parallel
with this development of God-consciousness there occurs a growth in man's consciousness of himself as a spiritual
being, a progressive recognition that to be human is to be spiritual. Thus, it follows that man's "concept" of God
and man's "concept" of man develop hand in hand. That this development bespeaks a closer and closer approach to
"the concept" which is itself infinite but includes finite "moments" may well be unpalatable, but it is not illogical.
In this connection it has to be admitted that to speak of "a progressive recognition that to be human is to be
spiritual" involves a certain degree of fuzziness. The expression "progressive recognition" would seem to describe
a process of coming to awareness of what has been true all along rather than spirit's own process of coming to be
that which is altogether different from nature. What characterizes spirit, as opposed to things of nature, is that spirit
is not simply "given" as what it is; it is the activity of making itself, of, we might say, "progressively realizing
itself" as spirit. It is precisely for this reason that in the Encyclopedia Hegel divides the "Philosophy of Spirit" into
three parts: (1) "subjective spirit," or man as natural science sees him; (2) "objective spirit," or man as he develops
rationally; and (3) "absolute spirit," or man as he comes to the realization of all that it is to be spirit.


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Spirit is simply not immediate; natural things are immediate and remain in this condition of immediate
being.6 The being of spirit is not thus immediate, but is, exists only as producing itself, as making itself for
itself as subject by means of negation; without that it is merely substance. And this coming to itself on the
part of spirit is movement, activity, and mediation of itself with itself. [VPR I, pp. 7879]
What is important to note here is that in the discovery of spirit, religion and philosophy go hand in hand. What is
true of spirit as spirit is true of both divine and human spirit. If Hegel, then, can say, "The absolute is spirit," that
"this is the supreme definition of the absolute" (EpW, no. 384), he is saying that what we know of human spirit as
spirit enables us to know what we mean when we say "God is Spirit"; ''It may be said that the discovery of this
definition and the comprehension of its meaning and content was the ultimate orientation of all culture and
philosophy" (ibid.).7 By the same token, however, "Christian religion," by making clear that God is spirit, has
thrown light on the otherwise vague notion of human spirit. "Both the term spirit and the notion (Vorstellung)
corresponding to the term were discovered early, and it is the purport of the Christian religion to make God known
as Spirit. It is the task of philosophy to grasp what is here given presentatively, the essence in itself in its own
proper element, the concept" (ibid.). That this is a constant in Hegel's position is borne out abundantly by even a
cursory reading of chapter VII of the Phenomenology and of part III of Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion. It
is, then, the concept of spirit which makes philosophy intelligible: "The final result of the philosophy of nature and
mediately of logic is, therefore, to attain to the proof of the necessity of the concept of spirit" (EpW, no. 381,
Zusatz). At the same time it is the philosophical comprehension of spirit which makes religion intelligible.
God is more than living; he is Spirit. Spiritual nature alone is the worthiest and truest point of departure for
thinking the absoluteif, that is, thinking does seek a starting point and wants what is at hand. [EpW, no. 50]
6. This remark could be interpreted as flowing from Hegel's denial of biological evolution. Although there
is little evidence that Hegel affirmed biological evolution, there is no greater evidence that he denied it. But,
that is not the point here at all. Whatever may be true of organic growth, it is still toto coelo different from
spiritual development. Natural organisms (individuals) are what they are, and their growth process does not
change that; whereas spirit (individual) is itself process, a self-producing process.
7. "Culture" (Bildung), as Hegel sees it, is the mode of self-development characteristic of the human spirit in
its history. This might be called the overriding theme of his Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der
Weltgeschichte.


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Self-Manifestation Essential to Spirit

What we have seen so far of Hegel's thought regarding the concept of spirit and of the being of God as Spirit may
well be controversial in the minds of those who reject either the reality of God or the reality of spiritor both. It may
even be unpalatable to those who are religious and who feel that philosophy should be more humble and make no
claim to know what must be said of God. It is doubtful, however, whether anything we have seen can be construed
as unequivocally opposed to religion, or to the Christian religion in particular. But when it comes to the next point,
which, Hegel is convinced, his "speculative" meditation on the "concept" of spirit makes clear to him, he
unquestionably becomes controversial, precisely in religious circles. It is essential to spirit, he tells us, that it be
self-manifestation, and, since this belongs to the very ''concept" of spirit, it must be said of divine Spirit, too, since
what is essentially true of spirit must be said of the divine as well as of the human. This has given rise to the
accusation that, for Hegel, the existence of finite spirits to whom God makes himself manifest is necessary to the
very being of God as Spirit. We shall have occasion to go into this contention in more detail in chapters 6 and 7,
but it does seem necessary here to at least air the difficulty.
This is what spirit is: self-manifestation, to be for spirit. Spirit is for spirit, and not, be it observed, only in
an external, contingent manner. On the contrary, spirit is spirit only insofar as it is for spirit; this constitutes
the very concept of spirit. Or, to express it more theologically, God is essentially Spirit, so far as he is in his
church. It has been said that the world, the material universe, must have spectators, must be for spirithow
much more, then, must God be for spirit. [VPR I, pp. 5253]
He puts the same more succinctly when he says, "God must appear . . .; since essence as such must appear; it is not
if it does not appear" (WG, p. 580). On the face of it this could seem to be saying that the very being of God as
Spirit demands other spirits to whom God appears. We have need of caution, however, before we jump to this
conclusion. Hegel does, indeed, say that "God is Spirit," that it is essential to spirit to be "for spirit," and that what
is essential to spirit as such is essential to "divine Spirit" as well. But, what he does not say is that what is essential
to spirit is to be said in exactly the same way of infinite Spirit and of finite spirit.8 It is certainly safe to say that, for
Hegel, a solitary finite spirit does not make sense; the necessity of its communicating itself demands that there be
other finite
8. Once again, one wonders if Hegel is not very much aware of the analogia entisor at least of the analogy
of predicationwhether he uses the term or not.


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spirits "for whom" it is; a solitary finite spirit would not be spirit. Still, whatever other reasons we may have for
contending that Hegel means this to apply also to God, it is not part of his thesis here that God needs "other" spirits
to whom he can appear. As spirit, God must be "for spirit"; but Hegel does not say that the spirit ''for whom" God
is is necessarily "other." Theunissen puts this well in his commentary on no. 564 of the Encyclopediawhich takes
up in its essentials the text we are examining. According to Theunissen, one might wish to argue that Hegel does
hold for the necessity of finite spirits, but one is not justified in stating this as a consequence of what he is saying
in the present context.
That is forbidden precisely by the fact that this thesis belongs to the thoughts he has just been unfolding
regarding revelation. For, if the manifestation in question begins with God's internal self-objectification,
then the Spirit to whose being it belongs to-be-for in no way needs to be different from the Spirit for whom
he is. Absolute Spirit, then, does not necessarily require finite spirit for its own being. To put it positively
the statement can be and must also mean: Absolute Spirit is spirit only insofar as it is for itself.9
The point is one that Hegel had made much earlier in the Encyclopedia: that it is only in thought and as thought,
that spiritual being, including that of God, can make sense. God, then, can be object of thought and thought alone,
which does not mean that there must be finite thought, if God is to be; rather it means that if God is to be for finite
spirit, he must be for finite spirit as thinking.
This content, God himself, is in its truth only in thinking (Denken) and as thinking (Denken). In this sense,
then, the thought (Gedanke) is not simply mere thought (Gedanke); rather it is the highest and, accurately
speaking, the sole way in which the Eternal which is in and for itself can be grasped. [EpW, no. 19, Zusatz
2]
It is precisely this which enables Hegel to say that logic is oriented to God: only if God is can there be logic, which
is quite obviously not to say that only if logic is can there be God. What this says further is that only a thinking
which has completely freed itself from every trace of the sensibility proper to nature can come to grips with God
who is Spirit and only Spirit. "Only through this contemplation of God's being as thoroughly spiritual and
imageless, over against the mundane and natural, is the spiritual [said of God] completely wrenched away from
natural sensibility and freed from finite existence" (VA I, p. 478). Hegel does, nevertheless, say that the human
spirit,
9. Michael Theunissen, Hegels Lehre vom absoluten Geist als theologisch-politischer Traktat (Berlin: de
Gruyter, 1970), p. 221.


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finite as it is, is capax Deiby virtue of the "reason" which characterizes this spirit, reason which is the "divine"
dimension in the human.
If, then, Hegel speaks of the relationship of man to God as a "oneness" of spirit, or of "reason," we must be careful
not to think that he is simply erasing all distinction between the human and the divine. From a purely formal-
logical point of view we might be tempted to look upon ''spirit" (or "reason") as a purely abstract universal,
subsuming both the divine and the human in its scope. This, however, is exactly what Hegel is careful not to say.
That is one reason why he is nervous about characterizing God as "supreme being"or whatever other expression
one wants to employ, which would modify a noun with an adjective that would simply make the being in question
a one of manyeven "supreme" among the many. To say, on the other hand, that God is "absolute Spirit" is to
indicate that God is absolutely all that spirit isthe "concrete universal"and that whatever other "spirit" there is is so
only in relationship to the all-embracing Absolute.
It is for this reason that Christianity, because it truly represents in spirit God as Spirit, and not as an
individual, particular spirit, but as absolute, returns from the sensibility proper to representation to spiritual
interiority, making this and not the corporeal the matter and reality (Dasein) of its content. By the same
token the oneness of the human and divine nature is a oneness which is known and which is to be realized
only through spiritual knowing in spirit. [VA I, p. 112]
To say, then, that God is "Spirit" and that man is "spirit" is not to achieve oneness by a suppression of difference in
abstraction; it is to see the concrete oneness of God embracing in its wholeness the manyness of the human.
There cannot be two kinds of reason and two kinds of spirit, not a divine reason and a human, not a divine
Spirit and a human, which would be absolutely different. Human reason, the consciousness of one's essence
is indeed reason; it is the divine in man, and spirit, insofar as it is the Spirit of God, is not a spirit beyond
the stars, beyond the world. On the contrary, God is present, omnipresent, and as Spirit is present in all
spirits. (VPR I, p. 40]
What can, of course, be difficult to see in this sort of "oneness" of the human and the divine, the finite and the
infinite, is how the human can succeed in not being swallowed up in the divine, the finite in the infiniteif, indeed,
the problem does not turn out to be the reverse! If the human spirit is to be truly spirit it must be self-determining,
free; it must be the product of its own activity; its concepts must be its own, even its concept of God. How can the
relationship of the human spirit to the divine be "absolutely free,"


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as Hegel claims it must be? An initial answer to this question would be that being finite, in the sense of cut off
from and independent of infinite Spirit, is by no means a condition of being free, self-determining. On the
contrary, being cut off from infinite Spirit, infinite Reason, is tantamount to being determined from without by an
"infinity" of finite factors in human existence and, thus, not to be free, except perhaps in the sense that a freely-
falling body is called "free." To be bound to the rational is to be freed from the multitude of nonrational constraints
on the self-determination of finite spirit. We see this clearly enough in the moral order: that spirit is not free which
is subject to all the whims of arbitrariness; only that spirit is free which can stick to the narrow path of rationality.
Rationality, however, is not a private affair; there is not one rationality for one man, another for another; a
condition for the freedom of both is that they accord with the objectivity of rationality. If, then, divine infinite
Spirit, divine infinite Reason, is integral Spirit, integral Reason, to be in accord with it is to be rational, or free; to
be out of step with it is to be unfree. The human spirit is not automatically free; it is free only to the extent that its
"principle" is the "absolutely'' free Spirit which pervades it. One can romantically glorify the "free spirit" of the
pagan Greeks, but, says Hegel, theirs was but a truncated freedom; "still, neither in philosophy nor in religion did
they attain to cognition of the absolute infinity of spirit; thus among them the relationship of the human spirit to the
divine is still not absolutely free" (EpW, no. 377, Zusatz). The adequate principle of free subjectivity becomes
manifest only in Christianity with its doctrine of the entry of divine Spirit into the finitude of history. "It was
Christianity, through the doctrine of the incarnation of God and of the presence of the Holy Spirit in the
communion of believers, which first gave human consciousness a completely free relation to the infinite, and thus
made possible the conceptual cognition of spirit in its absolute infinity" (ibid.). One way to put this would be to
say that to know man adequately, as spirit, is to know God; another would be to say that short of a knowledge of
God it is impossible to know man adequately, as spirit. In Science of Logic, as we shall see in chapter 4, Hegel
quite clearly states that to conceive "being" without knowing it as "infinite" is not to comprehend being. Here he is
telling us that to conceive "spirit" without knowing it as infinite is not to comprehend spirit, not to know just what
spirit is. It is precisely for this reason that he considers the greatest dignity of man to be not that man can know the
world of nature, and control it and transform italthough this, too, is important and is the work of spiritbut to pass
beyond nature, both man's own sensuous nature and the mere naturalness of initial objects of consciousness, to the
Spirit which transcends not only nature but all that is finite.


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Spirit takes indeed its beginning from nature. [But] one should not think merely of external nature; to nature
belongs also the sensuous nature of man himself, his sensuous, bodily being . . . . The extreme to which
spirit tends is its freedom, its infinity, its being in and for itself. These are the two aspects, but if we ask
what spirit is, the immediate answer is that it is this motion, this process, this activity of emerging, of
freeing itself from nature; this is the being, the substance of spirit itself. [Ibid.]10
There is a risk, of course, in employing this kind of languagethe risk of seeing only the unity of the human and the
divine, the finite and the infinite, without seeing the distinction, the difference. The point, as Hegel sees it, is that
the difference is not that God is spirit and man other than spirit, or that man is spirit and God some vague,
indeterminate, "supreme being," in one sense "infinitely" removed from the human, but in another sense a being,
distinguished from the finite by being other, that is, infinite, and thus, effectively limited by not being what the
finite is. A condition for knowing what God is is to know what spirit is, but a condition for knowing what spirit is
is to know man as spirit, just as a condition for knowing all that spirit is is to know spirit as infinite, that is, to
know God. The unity of spirit, then, must not be seen as the absorption of two different ''spirits," divine and
human, under one categorial heading, "spirit." Ratherand here Christian "religion" comes in againman, finite spirit,
is to be seen as a finite "moment" of the infinite divine Spirit, who is God. This will have to be spelled out more
fully in chapters 4 and 6.
Thus finite spirit is itself posited as a moment of God. Man himself, therefore, is comprehended in the
concept of God, and this comprehension may be thus expressedthat the unity of man with God is posited in
the Christian religion. But this union must not be superficially conceived, as if God were merely man, and
man were likewise God. Rather, man is God only to the extent that he transcends the naturality and finitude
of his spirit and elevates himself to God. [VPG, p. 392]
Activity Without Passivity

We can, perhaps, come closer to a comprehension of what Hegel is saying here, if we can conceive of spirit as a
reality whose whole being is to be "activity," an activity which, because it contains in itself no passivity, no being-
acted-upon, no mere "re-activity," produces only itself. Aristotle, in an effort to explain the activity of thinking as
"pure activity," draws an
10. This addition, which comes from the carefully prepared notes of Major von Griesheim (1825), is
contained in M. J. Petry, Hegel's Philosophy of Subjective Spirit, vol. I (Boston: Reidel, 1978). It is not
contained in the Suhrkamp edition.


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analogy from the physical activity of "seeing," which is productive only of itselfthe activity and the term of the
activity are one and same, that is, "seeing." As an illustration of "spiritual" activity the analogy may limp, but it
does get a point across: there is an activity which does not consist in ''acting-on" something, and "spiritual" activity
is precisely that. Human self-activity is not synonymous with divine self-activity, but each is revelatory of the
other, and to know one is to know the other; they are united in being "self-activity"; the self-activity of the human
is a "godly" self-activity.
To put it another way: The self-activity which constitutes finite spirit is finite activity, but it is oriented to
transcending limitation, because nothing outside itself is a limitation to it. This is best exemplified in thought,
which, as Hegel sees it, is an acting involving no being-acted-upon; the "thinking" subject "produces" its own
thinking, no being other than the subject produces the thinking. On the other hand, there are subjective "activities"
which are not so completely self-determining. Things do act on subjects and produce an immediate response; for
example, sensation, feeling, and even willing, which looks to producing what is other than the activity itself. "Only
thinking is the sphere in which all alien influence has disappeared, with the result that the spirit is absolutely free
[self-determined], with itself" (EGP, p. 111). When thinking produces thought it produces no "other" over-against
itself; whatever "otherness" there is is its own "self-othering." "Furthermore, when objects of a subjective kind are
present, that is, in spirit alone and not as external sensuous objects, then we know that in spirit there is only what
its own activity has produced" (VA I, p. 41). Among other things this means that the highest form of knowing is
self-knowing, because in it spirit is fully aware of itself as productive of itself in its activity. Nothing external to it
produces knowledge in it, least of all its self-knowledge, which is what knowledge, ultimately, is. "It was noted
above in reference to the essence of spirit that its being is its doing. . . . More precisely, its doing is its self-
knowing" (EGP, p. 36). The human individual, it is true, is a "vital organism," but that is not its being as spirit: "I
am as spirit only insofar as I know myself" (ibid.). This is what it is to be self-productive; spirit is what it is in
knowing itself for what it is.
This is what Hegel means when, with regard to spirit, he speaks of "freedom." Sometimes the expression he uses is
"self-determination," sometimes it is "freedom"; the terms may or may not be synonymous, but what he is speaking
of is the same: Spirit finds the resources for its own dynamic being in itself, but only in its knowing itself as source
of itself are these resources activated. "Quite simply, we can call the highest content which the subjective can find
in itself freedom. Freedom is the supreme characteristic of spirit" (VA I, p. 134). Initially all this means is that the
"subject" does not find in its "object" something alien to itself; it finds


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itself constituting the objectivity of its object, which is not an object imposed on it from something outside itself.
"On the basis of even this formal characterization . . . the subject is reconciled with the world, satisfied with it, and
every opposition or contradiction is resolved" (ibid.). This is not denying that there are impulses from without
which affect the body; it does deny that these corporeal impulses work on spirit; the latter, in transforming these
impulses, gives itself its own content.
In the characterization of spirit as self-active which we have just seen, it is not difficult to detect the direction in
which Hegel is moving. He is gradually building up to the characterization of "absolute Spirit" as "infinite" self-
activity (self-determination, freedom), upon whose intelligibility the intelligibility of self-active finite spirit is
dependent. How the relationship between infinite self-activity and finite self-activity is to be characterized remains
to be seen, but it is legitimate to anticipate that if each is the "self-manifestation" of spirit, the finite will be
dependent on the infinite, or, to put it in more Hegelian language, the infinite will be inclusive of the finite. Nor is
it difficult to see that this bespeaks some sort of infinitizing of the finite.
Because, however, spirit contains no determination which it would not know to have been posited by itself,
and which therefore spirit could itself supersede, it endures the contradiction of objectivity and subjectivity.
This power over the whole content present in it constitutes the basis of spirit's freedom. . . . The whole
development of the concept of spirit simply exhibits the manner in which spirit frees itself from all forms of
its determinate being which do not correspond to its concept. The liberation is accomplished in that these
forms are transformed into an actuality entirely adequate to the concept of spirit. [EpW, no. 382, Zusatz]
To speak of the "concept" of spirit, however, is not to speak of this or that finite instantiation of it. It is to
understand even finite spirit as significant only to the extent that it expresses the "infinity" proper to the concept,
"spirit."
This universality is also its determinate being. As being for itself the universal particularizes itself in that it
has being-for-self and is, thus, constituted self-identical. The determinateness of spirit is therefore
manifestation. Spirit is not a certain determinateness or content, the expression or exteriority of which is
merely a distinct form of it. Rather than revealing something therefore, its determinate content is itself this
revelation. Its possibility is therefore immediately infinite, absolute actuality. [Ibid., no. 383]
Finite spirit, then, without ceasing to be finite is the self-manifestation of infinite Spirit. That this has to be called,
in some sense at least, an "in-


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finitizing of the finite" seems clear enough. We must now try to see whether this makes sense without some sort of
concomitant "finitizing of the infinite." If, however, we are to understand what this can possibly mean, we must
recall very emphatically that, for Hegel, spirit as such is process, and more precisely, the process of coming to
consciousness of self. Now, all process is made up of "moments," which is to say, dynamic elements constituting in
their totality a dynamic whole. On the level of the development of human consciousness, whether it be that of the
individual or human consciousness as a whole, it is not too difficult to see what this means: Hegel has delineated it
masterfully in Phenomenology of Spirit. The "moments" in the process constitute a series of ''forms" (Gestalten) of
consciousnessultimately recognized as "forms" of spiriteach of which both makes a contribution to the ongoing
process and reveals its own inadequacy if taken as a stopping point in the process. Thus, each of the "forms"in their
character as "moments"must be aufgehoben, in the triple sense of "canceled" (the inadequacy), "retained" (the
positive contribution), and "lifted up" (the succeeding level), until they all come to rest (to coin a phrase, "dynamic
rest") in the completeness of the "absolute"here "absolute knowing." If it belongs to the "concept" of spirit,
however, to be "process," then even "absolute, infinite, divine Spirit" must be process and, thus, must be made up
of "moments." But, there are no "infinite moments"; that would be a contradiction. The "moments" of infinite
Spirit, then, are finite. Two things are to be noted here: (1) the "moments" are moments only as moments-of the
process; and (2) the "moments" of "infinite" process cannot come to it from without; they must be its own doing. If
there are "moments"which means "differentiation"in the process which is "absolute Spirit," then, they must be the
"moments" of its own "self-differentiation." The model, obviously, is taken from Hegel's own "Trinitarian"
theology, which, as we shall see in chapter 7, is continuous with his theology of creation and Incarnation, but here
we can confine ourselves to his philosophical view of what constitutes "absolute Spirit." The process of
"consciousness" is that of coming to be "spirit," and the process of spirit is that of coming to be aware of what it is
to be spirita coming-to-be which "points to" completeness only in absolute Spirit, where "consciousnes . . .
experiences the joy of finding itself therein and becomes aware of the reconciliation of its individuality with the
universal" (PdG, p. 160)finite spirit is spirit at all only because as "process" it is continuous with infinite Spirit,
whose manifestation it is. But the "finding itself" takes place only because the "reconciliation" is the doing of the
"universal." In the words of R. Williamson:
However, the dialectical process is not just the coming to this recognition by individual consciousness, for
the life and movementthe total processof all


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reality is also the self-manifestation or unfolding of, and the coming to fulfillment of, Absolute Spirit. It is
only because this is so, in Hegel's view, that the individual has any reality: the finite individual has reality
only as a "moment" of the infinite universal; but conversely, the Universal or Absolute Spirit has reality
only in and through finite particulars which are the concretization and self-manifestation of the Universal,
and which are therefore stages or moments in the coming to self-knowledge and self-actualization of the
Absolute.11
It might seem, of course, unjustifiable to confine what Hegel says of the self-manifestation of the Absolute in the
totality of finite realitynature and spiritto self-manifestation in the human spirit. We must remember, however, that
because Hegel finds the very "essence," the "truth," of nature only in spirit"as what it essentially is nature exists in
spirit" (JR I, p. 191)he can still hold that the ''external" manifestation of absolute Spirit is contained "essentially" in
finite spirit.
With that nature has made the transition to its truth, into the subjectivity of concept, the objectivity of which
is itself the transcended immediacy of singularity, i.e., concrete universality. The result is that there is
posited that concept, which has as its determinate being the reality corresponding to it, i.e., the Conceptand
this is spirit. [EpW, no. 376]
More than that, we must also remember that Hegel takes as his point of departure Christian religious consciousness,
according to which the most significant locus of divine self-manifestation is the human spirit, since only in human
spirit is God known as spirit (VA I, p. 106). Granted that Hegel is talking about the Incarnation here and not about
any and every human being as "image" of God, still he is talking about man as the exclusively fitting locus of
incarnation, for the reason given. It is not merely that no other finite reality can know Goda too-obvious truth to
need emphasizingbut that the very being of finite spirit is to be existential term of God's self-knowing.
Only Spirit Knows Spirit

Sometimes, admittedly, it is difficult to know when Hegel is speaking theologically, in the sense of explicating
rationally what to faith is "given," and when he is speaking purely philosophically, in the sense of working out
what reason demands, without employing religious teaching as a starting point. This is particularly true when he
speaks on the one hand of "pure"
11. Raymond K. Williamsom, "Hegel's Philosophy of Religion" (Ph.D. Dissertation, University of
Newcastle. New South Wales, Australia, 1979), p. 136.


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spirit, which, because there is in it no admixture of what is not spirit, is "absolute" and on the other hand of spirit
incarnate in nature, which, precisely because it is incarnate and therefore multiple, is finite. We shall see, however,
in chapter 7, that he does make a very clear distinction between the theological doctrine of the Incarnation, where
the divine Spirit takes on human form in an individual and yet remains "with itself" and therefore infinite, and the
philosophical contention that the spirit which is spirit only is absolute, infinite, while the spirit which is immersed
in nature is finite, even though it somehow shares the infinity of absolute Spirit.
What is important from this second point of view is that it takes spirit to recognize spirit and that, therefore, only
because man is spirit, even though finite, can he both recognize divine Spirit and affirm that only absolute, infinite
Spirit can be divine. Nor could man do this if he could not see rationally that the very concept of spirit can make
no sense if there is not absolute Spirit. Our experience is such that we can "think" spirit at all only because we are
confronted with a human "nature" which is also "spiritual," the paradigm of which is the divine Spirit incarnate.
''Only with the advent of the self-certain, interior spirit [the God-man] can human spirit bear to dispense with the
phenomenal side and have the assurance to assign the divine nature to an individual" (VPG, pp. 305306). But
precisely because we can thus "think" Spirit can thought rise to spirit not immersed in nature.
This spirit, then, no longer needs to insert the natural into the realm of the spiritual, in order to hold fast its
conception of the divine, and to have the unity of the divine externally visible. Rather since free thought
thinks the external, it can leave the latter as it is; for it also thinks this unification of the finite and the
infinite, and recognizes that it is not a mere accidental union but, as the Absolute, is the eternal Idea itself.
[Ibid., p. 306]
So far, of course, even those who disagree with Hegel can recognize a certain cogency in his reasoning. But when
the capacity which the finite human spirit has to "rise" to the infinite is described as a "being-lifted-up"
(Erhebung), which in turn is possible only because finite spirit is an expression of the infinite's "self-
differentiation," thus making the "union of finite and infinite," so to speak, a doing of infinite Spirit, then a long
line of thinkers, beginning with Feuerbach and Marx, sees in this an attack on the autonomy of the human, to say
nothing of an unwarranted introduction of "theology" into philosophy. At this point we can withhold any judgment
as to the justification of the objection; before all else we must try to understand just what Hegel is saying. As he
sees it, there are two points of view from which the question can be approachedfrom the point of view of "finitude"
or from that of "infinity." Both approaches require us to do


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minor violence to linguistic propriety by interpreting "finite" as "noninfinite" rather than interpreting ''infinite" as
"nonfinite." Here, it would seem, Hegel stands on fairly solid ground: There is little likelihood at all that the term
"nonfinite" by itself will yield any intelligible sense at all; there is a better chance that "noninfinite" will say
something worth saying. "Spirit looks upon finitude as the negative of itself and thus attains to its own infinity.
This truth of finite spirit is absolute Spirit" (VA I, p. 130). Here we are on familiar enough ground; finite spirit in
trying to come to grips with its own finitude finds itself positing infinity as a prerequisite to its own intelligibility.
"In this form, however, spirit is actual only as absolute negativity; it posits within itself its own finitude and
transcends it" (ibid.). In so doing it starts from itself precisely as finite: "at its highest level it makes itself the
object (Gegenstand) of its own knowing and willing" (ibid.). This points it in the direction of the Absolute: "The
Absolute itself becomes the object (Objekt) of the spirit, because the latter takes its stand on the level of
consciousness and distinguishes itself as knowing from itself as the opposite of that, i.e., as absolute object
(Gegenstand)" (ibid.). Finite spirit, then, simply characterizes itself as finite over-against the infinite, finding its
own intelligibility simply in its own distinction from the infinite. "From this previous point of view of the finitude
of spirit, the spirit which knows about the Absolute as an infinite object (Objekt) over-against itself is by this very
fact characterized as the finite distinguished from the infinite" (ibid.). It should be noted that Hegel is not saying
that this approach is untrue, merely that it is too negative, too onesided, too separatistic, in short, too much on the
level of understanding. The "speculative" approach is higher and more fruitful. It is the self-differentiation of
infinite Spirit in knowing itself which makes the finite intelligible.
From the higher speculative point of view, however, it is absolute Spirit itself which, in order to be for itself
the knowing of itself, differentiates itself within itself and, thus, posits the finitude of spirit, and in this
finitude becomes absolute object (Gegenstand) of its own knowing. [Ibid.]
We are back, once again, with the notion of finite spirit as a "moment" of absolute Spirit. "The finitude of spirit,
however, should not in fact be regarded as a fixed determination; it has to be recognized as a mere moment" (Ep
W, no. 386, Zusatz). In this sense it is true enough to say that the Absolute is "the negatedness of that which is
finite," which is to say that what constitutes spirit essentially is infinity, not finitude; "the quality proper to spirit
then is rather true infinity" (ibid.). The finite is, so to speak, derivative of and included in the infinite. "Spirit as
spirit is not finite, but has finitude within itself, although only as that which is to be superseded and has been
superseded" (ibid.). This means that "finite spirit" is simply


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inadequate to the concept of spirit (ibid.). But precisely because finite spirit is not an independent other, "outside
God himself," it is also true to say "that in its character as otherness it does not hinder unity with God; otherness,
the negation, is consciously known to be a momemt of the divine nature" (VPR II, p. 297).
It would be a mistake, however, to think that "self-othering," positing its object out of its own resources and thus
remaining with itself in its other, is a prerogative of divine Spirit alone. "The only real antithesis that spirit can have
is itself spiritual: its inherent heterogeneity, through which alone it acquires the power of being as spirit" (VPR II,
p. 278). Whatever is for spirit must be spiritual; an alien content is content only as spiritualized. That this is
characteristic of spirit as spirit is something which the human spirit discovers by looking into itself. What it also
discovers by taking a long, hard look at itself is that its own self-othering will be meaningless if spirit is not
"essentially'' infinite and, therefore, that what is true of the human is true only because it is first true of the divine.
Once more, it would seem, we are confronted with a Hegel who takes his cue in speaking of spirit from Christian
theological thinking regarding God. That he considers the identification of identity and distinction in the
infiniteand only in the infiniteto be a "rational" principle is clear enough; but that he finds the model for this
principle antecedently in the Christian "dogma" of identity and distinction in the triune God seems equally clear.
That, in Christian theological language, "identity" comes under the rubric of "nature" or "substance," and
"distinction," under the rubric of "persons" would seem to be due to the limitations of a language tied to
Vorstellungen, which Hegel seeks to translate into "speculative" language, but that does not obscure the theological
parentage of what he says. By the same token, the notion of "identity"without synonymityof divine "attributes" is
of theological provenance. Here, however, as we shall see in chapter 7, Hegel replaces "attributes" by "predicates,"
since it is not a question of what is "attributed" to God by struggling finite thought, but rather what God "says" of
himself in his activity as infinite Spiritthus doing what spirit as such must do, that is, speak of itself. "But spirit
must have opposition; the principle of dualism belongs therefore to the very concept of spirit, which, in its concrete
form, finds distinction essential to it" (VPG, p. 222). What the "concept" of spirit "essentially" demands is derived
concomitantly from a philosophical consideration of human spirit and a theological consideration of divine Spirit,
"and this point is important, since the divine as such has to be conceived of as Spirit; which involves its being
concrete and having in it the moment of negativity (ibid., p. 240).


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Relation of Divine Spirit to the World

Christian theologians, who take the Christian doctrine of the Trinity seriously, should have no difficulty in going
along with Hegel this far. When, however, he carries this principle of identity in distinction over to the relationship
(Verhältnis) of God to the world, even to the extent of saying that God can be "thought of" only as related to the
world, many a theologian will balk. "It is imperative that God be thought in relation to the world, to man, insofar
as God is a living God. This relationship to the world, then, is relation to another, and thus distinction,
determination is posited" (VGP II, p. 416). We already know that Hegel sees that only as related to God is the
world intelligibleto us. What needs nuancing, however, is the character of "otherness" in the world to which God is
conceived of as related. "The relationship to the world, then, appears initially to be relationship to another which is
outside God; but, because it is God's relationship, his activity, then this having a relationship in himself is a
moment of God himself" (ibid.). Relationship to the world, yes, but it is God determining himself as so related, and
the relationship is internal to God. "The connection between God and the world is determination in God himself. In
other words the otherness of the one, the duality, the negative, in short (äberhaupt) determination, is essentially
moment, which is to be thought of in God'' (ibid.). Only at the risk of conceiving an abstract God can this self-
determination be thought away. "In himself God is concrete, opening himself outward and, thus, as positing distinct
determinations in himself" (ibid.). The very notion of "creation" becomes a self-determining of God, a relationship
which is proper to God in himself, the only explanation Hegel can see of the reality of the finite.
This differentiation within himself is the point of connection between him who is in-and-for-himself and
man, the mundane. We say, God created man, created the world. This is a determination in God himself,
and this determination is first of all self-determinationand this determination is the starting point of the
finite. The point of God's self-differentiation is the point of mediation between the finite, the mundane and
God; and so the former begins within the latter. The source of the difference is that God differentiates
himself within himself; and this is his concrete nature. [Ibid.]
Finite reality, then, is, but its being is not to be independent, so to speak, "alongside" God; to speak of God "and"
the world is simply misleading. It makes no more sense to speak of an independently existing world than it does to
speak of God as vague, indeterminate "substance." "Subjectivity is the infinite form, and as such it no more leaves
to form which is not free, that is to say external naturalness, any independent existence alongside of it,


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than it does to empty, pure, undetermined substantiality" (VPR II, p. 10). If we were to speak of God "and" the
world as some sort of irreducible duality, it is difficult to see how we should not be positing a world which sets
limits to God. In an effort to explain, then, how "absolute Spirit" can be at once absolutely self-contained, which is
a condition for being "spirit" and not some natural agent producing an effect outside itself totally distinct from
itself, and the source of all finite reality, which is a condition for being "absolute," Hegel has recourse to the
concept of spirit as activity whose term is both other and not other than itself.
Absolute Spirit comprehends itself as itself positing being, as itself its other, bringing forth nature and finite
spirit, such that this other loses every appearance of being independent of it, ceases completely to limit it,
and appears merely as the means by which spirit achieves absolute being-for-self, the Absolute unity of its
being-in-itself and being-for-self, of its concept and its actuality. [Ep W, no. 384, Zusatz]
But to say "absolute Spirit" is more than to say simply "spirit"; "absolute" must be an intelligible, positive
determination of Spirit, raising it essentially above the level of finiteness. "If we wish to indicate what the absolute
Idea is in its true actuality, then we must say that it is spirit. More than that, we must say that it is not spirit, so to
speak, in its limitation and confinement, but rather universal infinite and absolute Spirit, which from within itself
determines what in truth is the true" (VA I, p. 128). Quite obviously, however, we cannot even speak of "absolute
Spirit,'' if we confine ourselves to the way we "represent" spirit to ourselves on the basis of our experience either of
ourselves or of those with whom we are in communion. "If we consult only our ordinary consciousness, then of
course the notion (Vorstellung) of spirit which forces itself upon us is as though it were spirit over-against nature, a
nature to which we then ascribe equal dignity" (ibid.).12 Hegel is, clearly, the archenemy of all mere "naturalism,"
even a mitigated kind which accords to nature an independence of spirit and at the same time accords to spirit a
superiority. "Still, to consider nature and spirit as equally essential spheres connected with each other is to consider
spirit merely in its finiteness and confinement, not in its infinity and truth" (ibid.). Nature simply is not a limit to
absolute Spirit set outside spirit. "In relation to absolute Spirit, it should be noted, nature neither possesses equal
dignity nor is it posited in such a way as to be a product, which would give it the power to be a limit or a barrier"
(ibid.). We must try to come to grips
12. Precisely what Feuerbach and Marx, in their opposition to Hegel, insisted on doingand, quite
consistently, since in denying infinite Spirit, they are equivalently denying finite spirit any ontological
superiority over nature.


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with absolute Spirit as the absolute activity of self-differentiation. "At the same time absolute Spirit is to be
apprehended simply as absolute activity and, thus, as the absolute differentiation of itself within itself" (ibid.).
Although, then, we go nowhere if we do not begin with spirit as it first presents itself, we are mistaken if we simply
stop there. "The supreme definition of the absolute is not that it is spirit in general, but that it is the Spirit
absolutely manifest to itself, absolutely self-conscious, the infinitely creative Spirit we have just indicated" (Ep W,
no. 384, Zusatz).
Our purpose in all that has been said up to this point is to show that, in Hegel's view, there is only one way to
conceive the "Absolute," whether it be "Idea" or "God," and that is as ''Spirit." Gradually it has been becoming
evident that, for Hegel, our conceiving the absolute as Spirit and God's revelation of himself as Spirit is one and
the same "process" whose "moments" are being delineated. One way of understanding this, and perhaps the most
common, is to see God, the creator, revealing himself to man, the spiritual creature, through the workings of
"nature," behind which the human mind can see the necessity of an infinite source, without whom the very
existence of an intrinsically oriented nature would be inconceivable. It is the attitude summed up in the words of
Joyce Kilmer:
Poems are made by fools like me,
But only God can make a tree.
The world in which we live presents to our experience two kinds of external reality which we readily distinguish,
the things of nature and the works of human ingenuity. When these two types of reality are distinguished from
each other, the palm is given to nature as revelatory of its divine source; what is made by man is revelatory of the
human. That man has the ingenuity to transform nature into the useful, the pleasant, the beautiful, is, of course, a
cause of great wonderment and deep satisfaction, but it is precisely that which man cannot maketrees, mountains,
stars, human nature itselfwhich lifts the human mind to a contemplation of the Being who is beyond nature.
Hegel's attitude, however, is the diametric opposite of this. This is not to say that Hegel downgrades nature in the
hierarchy of divine self-revelation, but that he upgrades the activity of the human spirit. It is as though he were
borrowing the medieval distinction between the things of nature as "traces" of God (vestigia Dei) and the human
spirit as the "image" of God (imago Dei). His emphasis, however, is not on "things," whether natural or spiritual,
but on "activities." "Things" are not revelatory of God at all; only "activities" are, precisely because they are
revelatory of the Being who is "pure activity"without shadow of passivityand on the scale of activity


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the "spiritual" stands higher than the "natural" because it is closer to the "pure." Spirit, and spirit alone, can do what
nature cannot; spirit not only can make its source known by mirroring him forth to another, but it can also
"comprehend" its source by looking into the activities of finite spirit where absolute Spirit is more fully revealed
than in the activities of finite nature. Hegel is clearly coming out on the side of ''theism," for whom God is a
personal, self-conscious "subject," over-against "deism," for whom God is no more than an impersonal,
unconscious "substance"a "force." It is not that God is not active in nature, but that he is more manifestly active in
spirit, because only spiritual activity is itself somehow divine. It is easy enough, Hegel tells us, to look upon nature
as the product of divine activity and thus as a manifestation of the infinite, while looking upon the products of
human ingenuity as issuing from an essentially finite activity and, hence, less significant in manifesting God. But
this is a mistake. Of course God is active in nature, but he is even more manifestly active in the activity of finite
spirit.
In contrasting the production of nature as divine creation with human activity as merely finite one has
begun with a misunderstanding, as though God did not act in and through man, as though the sphere of
divine activity were confined to nature. [VA I, p. 49]
"Only God can make a tree," and the vital activity of the tree tells us that. But, only God can "make" a human
being, and the spiritual activity of the human tells us that even more clearly. Trees produce apples, and men
produce poemsand producing the latter tells us more about God than does the former, because the producing is
spiritual activity.
God is more honored in what spirit effects than in the products and structures of nature. For not only is
there the divine in man, but in man the divine is active in a form which in a completely other, higher way
than nature, is in accord with the essence of God. [Ibid.]
God as spirit finds a more significant echo in self-conscious finite spirit than in unconscious finite nature. "God is
Spirit, and in man alone has the vehicle through which the divine emerges the form of conscious, actively self-
productive spirit" (ibid.)and this simply cannot be said of nature; man is "image" in a way that nature cannot be.
"Spirit conceived (vorgestellt) truly is simply that which comprehends itself" (EGP, p. 176).
What is most significant in this is that, by revealing himself to man, God not merely lifts man above nature but also
lifts man above his own finitude; to "know" God is to be in a very special way the "image" of Godknow-


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ing God is the best way of imaging God. Man is different from God, but the difference does not exclude the
identification which knowing effects.
The difference between the individual and the universal, then, is so to be expressed: the subjective,
individual spirit is the universal divine Spirit to the extent that the latter is comprehended, that the divine
Spirit manifests itself in each subject, each man. Thus, the spirit which comprehends absolute Spirit is the
subjective spirit. [Ibid.]
Once again, Hegel finds this succinctly expressed in Christian teaching on the nature of faith, the validation of
which is not something external but the indwelling testimony of divine Spirit, since only spirit, not things or
events, can speak to spirit; only spirit can comprehend spirit.
What is the ground of man's faith? The testimony of the Spirit regarding the content of religion. In the
Christian religion this is also expressly stated: Christ himself warns the Pharisees not to base faith on
miracles; what justifies faith is the testimony of the Spirit. If we want to be more precise regarding the
testimony of the Spirit, then we must say, only spirit comprehends Spirit. [Ibid.]
It is precisely because man is spirit, and only when aware of being spirit, that he can be aware of the unique Spirit
who manifests himself not by means of externals but in the innermost depths of the human spirit itself; for man to
know himself as spirit is to know God. This is not to say, as we have already seen, that Hegel would abolish from
the sceneof either religion or philosophyall that is external, whether the externality of nature or of the work of
human art. Spirit alone speaks; spirit alone hears. But the Spirit who speaks may employ external signsnature, artin
speaking, so long as the spirit who hears internalizes the message which is spoken. Not only, then, is speaking
spiritual activity; so too is hearing. But this rather obvious point is not the important one that Hegel is trying to
make. Rather it is that the very being of spirit is activity, and that activity, therefore, is revelatory of spirit. More
than that, however, spiritual activity of whatever kind it may be, is revelatory of absolute Spirit. This brings us
back to that rather strange contention that God manifests himself (to man) in the finite work of nature, which man
cannot possibly simulate, but not in the finite work of finite spirit. Apart from the fact that this contention runs the
risk of seeing man in his progress as no more than a being of nature and thus of eliminating the need of a Spirit
higher than man, the contention also simply misses the point. If it is possible at all to say that the work of nature
manifests God, it is impossible to say that the activity of the human spirit does noteven the activity of transforming
nature or of knowing it.


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Human Self-Consciousness Reveals the Divine

Now, if we can say that the human activity which most clearly manifests man as spirit is self-conscious activity, it
appears necessary also to say that human spiritual activity is revelatory not only of infinite Being but also of Being
which is infinitely self-conscious (see chap. 6). That such a conclusion is not immediately self-evident is no
argument against it; no important truth is immediately self-evident but requires the mediation of profound
reflection, of a highly trained mind.
Under the heading of this higher training, then, belongs preeminently the more profound principle that
absolute Being must be conceived of as self-consciousness, that precisely this is its essence, to be self-
consciousness, and that therefore this self-consciousnes is present in individual consciousness. [VGP II, p.
432]
What Hegel is struggling to say and what we, undoubtedly, are struggling to understand, is that the outstanding
revelation of God as he truly is is human self-conscious spirit.
Nor is this to be understood in the sense that, as is so often said, God is a Spirit external to the world and to
self-consciousness, but rather that his manifestation as Spirit conscious of himself is precisely actual self-
consciousness. [Ibid.]
In what we have just seen, Hegel is making two statements, which may or may not be separable: (1) God manifests
himself preeminently in finite self-consciousness; and (2) in so doing, he manifests himself as preeminently self-
conscious being. The first of these statements will be the focal point of chapter 6. The second concerns the nature
of God which we are investigating here.
Once again, we must note here that Hegel is countering two opponents: (1) Enlightenment rationalism, which, if it
acknowledges a God at all, contents itself with a deistic "supreme being"; and (2) illuminationist pietism, which
will make God so transcendent that human reason in effect has nothing intelligible to say about him. Hegel, as we
have seen, is convinced not only that human reason can say a great deal about God but also that it has said a great
deal. The most significant way in which reason can designate Godand in this it agrees with religion at its highestis
as "Spirit," which, of course, means "self-conscious, personal subject" and, thus, "pure activity." Negatively this is
to say that to speak of God as ''being" is to say the least that can be said; only if "being" is qualified does it say
anything: The being of God is to be Spirit. There is even the risk that in speaking of God as "being" one will
understand by that "a being," one among many; and the qualification "supreme" merely emphasizes the risk.


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On the other hand, no matter how one otherwise characterizes God, if personality, which is inseparable from spirit,
is left out, the characterization is inadequate. There is no escape: to conceive of God in any way other than as
"Spirit" is to conceive of a non-God. It is precisely on this point that Hegel takes issue with Spinoza, whose "God"
is substance but not subject. Many a "theologian" in Hegel's day referred to Spinoza as an "atheist"; in one sense,
Hegel will say they were right, but for the wrong reason.
Thus, Spinozism is far from being atheism in the customary sense, but in the sense that it does not conceive
of God as Spirit, it is atheism. By the same token, however, so are many theologians atheists, those who
designate God simply as all-powerful, supreme, etc., being, who do not wish to know God and who allow
the finite to count as trueand these are worse [than Spinoza]. [VGP III, p. 195]
The difficulty is that Spinoza's God is incompatible with the God of Christianity, precisely because a God who is
just "substance" is not personal and, therefore, not God. "That he is the absolute Person, however, is a point which
Spinoza never reached; and in that regard we have to admit that the philosophy of Spinoza falls short of the
concept of God which constitutes the content of religious consciousness in Christianity" (EpW, no. 151, Zusatz).
Hegel, incidentally, is not saying that God is not substance, merely that "substance" is an inadequate designation;
"spiritual substance" would be better. To say that God is not substance at all would be to say that he does not
''subsist in and for himself as absolutely independent" (BS, p. 347). It is, indeed, difficult to conceive of a God who
is "infinite activity" but not "substantial" as a genuinely "actual" God and not a figment of the mind. "On the other
hand, the Christian God is God not merely known but also self-knowing; he is personality not merely represented
in our minds, but rather absolutely actual Personality" (EpW, no. 147, Zusatz). Absolute Spirit, in short, is not only
activity but also one who acts.
The absolute religion, on the other hand, contains the characteristic of subjectivity or of infinite form which
is equivalent to substance. We can call this knowledge, pure intelligence, this subjectivity, this infinite
form, this infinite elasticity of substance whereby it fragments itself within itself, and makes itself object
(Gegenstand). The content of absolute religion, therefore, is identical with itself, because it is infinitely
substantial subjectivity which makes itself both object and content. [VPR II, p. 193]
For those unaccustomed to the Hegelian "speculative" thinking it may seem strangeeven contradictoryto speak of
God as at once "substance" and "activity," or "substantial activity." But this is precisely the point we


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have seen so many times already: What on the level of understanding, which deals only with the finite, is
contradictory is on the level of reason, whose adequate object is the infinite, noncontradictory (or not unresolved
contradiction). Finite spirit is immersed in nature and, therefore, shares the finitude of all things natural. Finite
spirit, however, is also activity and, therefore, although it partakes of the infinity proper to spirit as such, it is also
finite, with the result that its finitude and its infinity are distinguishable. That they can be united at all is due to the
fact that the human spirit is the expression, the vehicle, the "moment" of the divine, infinite Spirit. The human
"substance," therefore, is not pure activity; it is also passive, it acts (spiritually) and is acted upon (naturally). The
divine "substance," on the contrary, is "absolute substance," at once pure substance and pure activity, and there is
no contradiction in this. As Hegel sees it, this is what Aristotle was saying when he spoke of God as at once
''unmoved" and "moving," eternal, changeless, and yet "pure activity" (VGP II, p. 158).
If in modern times it has seemed novel to characterize absolute Being as pure activity, we can see this as
ignorance of the Aristotelian concept. The Scholastics correctly viewed this as the definition of God: God is
pure activity [actus purus], that which is both in and for itself; God needs no materialthere is no higher
idealism. To put it another way: God is the substance whose potentiality is also actuality, whose essence
(potentia) is activity itself, where both are inseparable. In the divine substance potentiality is not
distinguished from the form; this substance it is that produces its content, its very determinations, its very
self. [Ibid., pp. 15859]
Finite beings, then, are, but only insofar as they are finite determinations, expressions of infinite Being. Continuity
between the finite and the infinite, as we shall see in chapter 4, is unbreakable.
There is, quite clearly, a whole theology of creationwhich includes a trinitarian and incarnational theologyin what
has just been said. Here, however, it is imperative to confine the import of what is being said to the relationship
between finite spirit and infinite Spirit. God reveals himself to finite spirit; in a very real sense that is what we
mean by "revelation." But, God also reveals himself in finite spirit; the preeminent revelation of God is the human
spirit itself, whose essence is to be manifestation of the divine; other than as manifestation of the divine the human
spirit essentially is not. To speak of God as "revealed," however, is to speak of God first of all as religious truth, as
object of religious consciousness, and it is of this that Hegel speaks. That God is the content of religious
consciousness implies, as we have seen, that he is also the ultimate content of rational consciousness and that, if
the God of religion is not to become the object of thought, he is


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not an object for man as man. But we must begin with religious consciousness, where absolute Spirit is for finite
spirit, because God has made himself known, has revealed himself to man.
It belongs essentially to the concept of true religion, i.e., to that religion whose content is absolute Spirit,
that the religion be revealed by God. For, because knowing, the principle whereby the substance is spirit, is
an infinite form which is for itself the self-determining, the knowing is out-and-out (schlechthin)
manifestation. Spirit is spirit only insofar as it is for spirit, and in the absolute religion it is absolute Spirit
who no longer manifests abstract moments of himself but manifests himself. [EpW, no. 564]
Absolute Spirit is present to finite spirit not because he tells the latter something about himself, but because he is
present in finite spirit. It is this which permits Hegel to say that there is some truth in the contemporary (Kantian)
view that a philosophy of religion is concerned with the subjective response of the human spirit to the divine, even
though this view fails to grasp the continuity of the divine-human relationship.
We have to recognize the truth which is involved in the modern view, namely, that God is not to be
considered as separate from the subjective spirit; this, however, not on the ground that God is an unknown,
but because God is essentially Spirit, exists as one who knows. There is then a relation of spirit to spirit.
This relation of spirit to spirit lies at the foundation of religion. [VPR I, p. 102]
For Hegel, then, God is known, not as an object out-there but as a presence-within making the very knowing a
possibility.
This brings up one of the most controverted points in Hegel's philosophy of religion, to which we shall have to
return in more detail in chapter 6. His contention is that to say that finite consciousness "knows" God is to say that
God knows himself in and through finite consciousness. "Finite consciousness knows God only to the extent to
which God knows himself in it" (VPR II, p. 187). So far so good: knowing God is in some sense a divine activity
which takes place in human consciousnessor, which is human religious consciousness. That the Christian
community worships God is somehow God's doing: "Thus God is Spirit, the Spirit of his community in fact, i.e., of
those who worship him. This is the perfect religion, the concept becomes objective to itself'' (ibid.). We can look
upon this as God sharing his self-knowledge with menif knowing God is to be truly knowing at allin such a way
that in knowing God men know themselves and in truly knowing themselves know God. "Here it is manifest what
God is; he is no longer a Being above and beyond the world, an unknown, for he has told men what he is, and this
not merely in an external account, but in con-


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sciousness" (ibid.). Knowing God is an activity of human consciousness, not merely a passive acceptance of
teaching about God, even though the initial form in which human consciousness "represents" God may be simply a
response to teaching about God. Many "theologians," however, began to find a difficulty here. If human spiritual
activity is essentially finite, and God knows himself in this activity wherein man knows God, then God would seem
to be finitizing himself in being known by manunless, of course, man is being infinitized in knowing God. In either
alternative there seems for these theologians to lurk the danger that the God of whom Hegel speaks is really not
God. On the other hand, I am not aware that any theologian has explained how the self-revelation, even of infinite
Spirit, could be other than finite if it is a revelation to and in finite spirit. It is for this reason, perhaps, that they
prefer not to call the human response to divine self-revelation a "knowing" at all. But, it is difficult to see how this
solves anything. "We have here, accordingly, the religion of the manifestation of God, since God knows himself in
the finite spirit. God is simply manifest, and this is the relation in question" (ibid.). We have to remember that the
''theologians" Hegel is debating do, in fact, believe that God reveals himself; but it is difficult to comprehend what
"reveal himself" can mean, if man does not "know" what is revealed. If, however, even finite human spirit in its
relationship to infinite divine Spirit can cancel out the finiteness which is not essential to knowing as such, there
may be here an intelligible subsumption of the finite in the infinite. "The transition consisted in this, that we saw
how this knowledge of God as free [self-determining] Spirit was, so far as its mode (Gehalt) is concerned, still
tinged with finitude and immediacy; this finitude had further to be discarded by the activity of spirit; it is
negativity, and we have seen how this negativity was made manifest to consciousness" (ibid., pp. 18788). If, as we
saw before, it makes no sense to conceive of finiteness as other than the negation of infinity, and if negation is
meaningful only in terms of that which it negates, then perhaps, after all, it makes a great deal of sense to say that a
knowing of the infinite is essential to a recognition of the finite as finite. Beyond this we cannot go until we have
examined more in detail the very meaning of "infinite" as Hegel employs the term (see chap. 4).
The Function of Negation

Whether or not the riddle of finite spirit's "knowing" infinite Spirit has yet beenor ever will besolved, one message
does come through loud and clear: The God of the Christians is at once concrete personality and pure spiritual
activity; if it is possible to know what one is saying in saying that, then there is a sense in which one can know not
only that God is but also


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what God isand this by virtue of negating what is negative in human spiritual activity.
The Greek god is not an abstraction but is individualized and has a form closest to the natural. The
Christian God, it is true, is also concrete personality, but as pure spiritness (Geistigkeit), and he is to be
known as Spirit and in spirit. The element of his manifest being, therefore, is essentially inner knowing and
not an external natural form, by means of which he can be presented only imperfectly and not according to
the full profundity of his concept. [VA I, pp. 102103]
God reveals himself, then, not because he chooses to do so but because, as pure Spirit he is eternally pure self-
revelatory activity: "God is self-revelation just because he is Spirit" (VPR II, p. 219). This, however, need at first
simply mean that God is totally manifest to himself. But if self-revelation is to be manifestation outward, there
must be finite spirit for whom God is, and this is what Hegel calls God's "appearing" (ibid.).
As Hegel sees it, then, spirit is thinkable only because it is unthinkable that absolute Spirit should not be: If spirit
is, God is. There is still a danger, however, that the "universal" Spirit embracing all spirits be conceived as an
abstraction, a category unifying the "infinite" diversity of finite spirits. Just as Plato saw the "Idea of the Good" as
the absolutely universal form, both uniting and giving meaning to all formssurely an abstractionmay not Hegel be
seeking to unite all "spirits'' under the abstract form of "Spirit"? There are those who would say this is so, because
this is the only way they can make sense out of Hegel. It would seem preferable, however, not to make sense out of
Hegel rather than to fly in the face of all we have seen him saying about "reason," "spirit," "speculative thinking,"
the "concept," and the "concrete universal." That subjective thinking universalizes its object is undeniable, but that
is not the universality Hegel speaks of when he speaks of "absolute Spirit."
The divine is not to be conceived of as merely a universal thought, or as something inward and only
potentially real. The objectifying of the divine is not to be conceived of simply as the objective form it takes
in all men, for in that case it would be conceived of simply as representing the manifold forms of the
spiritual in general, and the development which the absolute Spirit has in itself and which has to advance
until it reaches the form of the Is, which is immediacy, that development would not be contained in such
objectivity. [VPR II, pp. 27576]
Divine Spirit in this sense is concrete, not abstractly "universal."
The "Spirit" of which Hegel speaks, then, is "infinite subjectivity" in its


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"actuality," a Spirit which can become incarnate precisely because it is not an abstraction. "Secondly, according to
its concept the idea does not stop short in the abstractness and indeterminateness of universal thoughts, but is in
itself free [self-determining] infinite subjectivity and as Spirit comprises this subjectivity in its actuality" (VA I, p.
391). God is pure subject, not merely pure object of thought. This Spirit is the Christian God who, unlike the gods
of the pagans, makes himself manifest in the only external form adequate to spirit, the human. "Now, the Spirit as
free subject is determinate in itself and through itself, and in this self-determining finds in its own concept the
external form adequate to it, a form in which it can unite itself with itself, as with the reality which belongs to it in
and for itself" (ibid.). In words reminiscent of the closing lines of the Phenomenology, which we have already
seen, Hegel speaks of infinite Spirit "othering" itself in the multiplicity of finite spirits only to return to its eternal
oneness with itself in the consciousness these spirits have of it as one.
The enduring reality of the [spiritual] community is its continuous, eternal becoming, whose foundation is
the very nature of spirit knowing itself enternally, shooting forth in the form of finite flashes of light which
constitute individual consciousness, and then gathering itself again out of this finitude and comprehending
itself. In this way the knowledge of its essence and consequently the divine self-consciousness appears in
finite consciousness. Out of the ferment of finitude, since it changes itself into foam, Spirit rises like a
vapor. [VPR II, p. 320]
The poetic language may well seem to hide more than it reveals, but the thought it expresses is without doubt
intoxicating. It is unquestionably true, of course, that God has beenand to a great extent continues to beconceived
abstractly. The progress of religious consciousness itself is a process of concretization in the sense that the
universal content of that consciousness moves from abstractness to concreteness, from the multiplicity of particular
"spirits" to the unity of "absolute Spirit." The process of concretizing, however, is not merely an inner mental
process of forming more and more adequate "representations" of an abstract "deity"; it is a process of coming closer
and closer to the truth of the concrete concept which is eternal, and this coming-closer is the historical process of
divine self-revelation.
The principles of the national spirits (Volksgeister) are by virtue of their particularity, wherein they have
their objective actuality and self-consciousness as existing individuals, simply limited. Their destinies and
their deeds in their relationship to each other constitute the manifest dialectic of their finitude, out of which
dialectic the universal Spirit, the Spirit of the World, brings itself forth as unlimitedwhich it is. [GPR, no.
340]


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This "universal Spirit" is both universal "reason" and universal "will," unfolding its own concreteness in history.
"This good, this reason, in its most concrete form (Vorstellung), is God. God governs the world: the actual
working out of his governmentthe carrying out of his planis the history of the world" (VPG, p. 53). One might
conceive of the "plan'' abstractly; one might even think of the subject-who-plans as an abstraction; but it is difficult
to see how one would be following Hegel in so doing. "This plan philosophy strives to comprehend; for only that
which has been developed as the result of it possesses bona fide reality" (ibid.). What this is saying is that "rational
will," as a self-determining reality, that is, spirit, governs the process we call "history." "Only the rational will is
that universal principle which of itself (in sich) determines and unfolds itself, and articulates its moments as
organic members" (ibid., p. 67).
When Hegel, then, identifies "universal reason," "universal spirit," and "absolute Spirit," he is speaking of a
"subject" who is "actual", "personal," and "concrete." At the same time he calls this Spirit "God." It would seem,
consequently, that the burden of proof lies with those who wish to claim that Hegel's God is no more than an
abstractly universal, or perhaps collective, spirit, to which he attaches the name "God." Over and over again he has
told us that the name, by itself, is empty of meaning until its determinate content has become manifest, and that
this manifestation is the activity of Spirit revealing itself. The concept "spirit" is, for Hegel, never abstract.


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Chapter Four
The Infinite
There is scarcely a term in Hegel's philosophical ("speculative") vocabulary that he repeats more frequently than
the term "infinite" (unendlich), usually, of course, accompanied by the opposite and correlative term, "finite"
(endlich)indicating, at the very least, that, if we are to understand either of these terms as Hegel employs them, we
must grasp them as mutually defining, implying, explicating each other. One might wish, of course, that Hegel had
not been so generousor so imprecisein the use, particularly, of the term "infinite,'' since it is both enormously
difficult to pinpoint the meaning of the term (especially if the only instrument we have for so doing is a language
couched in prepositional expressions) and problematical whether Hegel's use of the term corresponds in any
intelligible way to the traditional use of the term as applied to God or to God's "attributes." We like to tell
ourselves that we are perfectly clear in our mind as to what we mean when we say "finite," but that we say
"infinite" precisely when we do not quite know exactly what we do mean, unless it be to designate in as vague a
way as possible the absence of those limitations which inevitably accompany any object whatsoever of our
experiencea condition for the very possibility of experiencing and of knowing what we experience is that the object
of experience be limited, that is, have assignable boundaries of intelligibility and meaning. What should be
perfectly clear, however, to anyone who reads Hegel even cursorily, is that Hegel not only intends that the concept
of "infinity" be thoroughly intelligible (whether or not the language employed to express the concept be adequate)
but also sees its intelligibility as the necessary condition for the intelligibility of whatever else the human mind is
to understand.
As Hegel employs the terms "finite" and "infinite," the form in which they appear is for the most part adjectival,
whether as attributive, for example, "finite spirit" (der endliche Geist), "infinite Spirit" (der unendliche


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Geist), or as predicative, for example, "beings [multiple] are finite" (die Seienden sind endlich) or "Being is
infinite" (das Sein ist unendlich). Frequently, however, the adjectival form is given nominal significance, as when
he speaks of "the finite" (das Endliche) or ''the infinite" (das Unendliche). Sometimes, too, he employs
thegramaticallyabstract terms "finitude" (die Endlichkeit) or "infinity" (die Unendlichkeit) in the sense of
categories. Finally, Hegel also uses the adverbial form (but only to express infinity), and his intention is either to
be deliberately vague or to designate what he considers to be the least significant form of the infinite, the
mathematical. In these cases it might well be preferable not to translate unendlich as "infinitely" at all. Thus, when
Hegel speaks of a problem as being unendlich kompliziert, he means something like "enormously complicated";
unendlich viel means "innumerable" (with the added connotation of "undifferentiated"); unendlich klein is
"infinitesimal," unendlich gross is "immeasurable," and so on. The adjectival (unendlich) and the abstract
(Unendlichkeit), too, can sometimes express this sort of indeterminateness. I know of no instances, however, where
the expression das Unendliche expresses other than "the authentically infinite," and it always takes its meaning
from "the finite" to which it is opposed in the context.
As frustrating as it may be to find unendlich and its cognates "infinitely" repeatedsometimes as often as ten times
on one page1it is frequently relatively easy to determine what Hegel has in mind as he employs the term. What is
not nearly so easy, however, is to come to terms with the subtle shades of meaning which Hegel attaches to the
term unendlich in contexts where it quite clearly cannot have one and the same unambiguous meaning, even
though in each case it can be translated as "positively" or "authentically" infinite. It is in these cases that the term
must be understood as inseparably linked to its opposite number "finite" (endlich). What causes partbut only partof
the difficulty is that, although grammatically unendlich is simply the negative of endlich, for Hegel this can make
sense only if endlich is read equally well as the negative of unendlich and if both terms are seen to have both
positive and negative significance. Because only with difficulty do we conceptualize reality other than in a
spatiotemporal framework, we tend to think of the determinate as that which has closely defined limits and thus to
think of the infinite as the negative of this, that is, the indeterminate.2 If, however, we can, with Hegel, conceive of
infinity as primary, in the realms of both reality and intelligibility, we should be able to understandeven if at this
point we are unable to accepthis contention that the negative expressed in the concept "in-finite" is negative only as
negating the negation already contained in the concept "finite."
1. See the writings of the Jena period in particular.
2. It is for this reason, it would seem, that William James opts for a "finite" God, since only the finite can
James conceive of as determinate.


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If addition we say that the infinite is the not-finite we have in fact spoken quite truly, for, since the finite is
itself the first negative, the not-finite is the negative of the negation; it is the self-identical negative and
thus at the same time truly affirmation. [Ep W, no. 94, Zusatz]
Such an infinite, of course, is a far cry from endless progression in space or time, but that is precisely the point:
Philosophical thinking is not concerned with mathematical infinity, except, perhaps, to the extent that its abstract
intelligibility affords a hint of the intelligibility of concrete infinity. "What philosophy has to do with is always
what is concrete and in the best sense present" (ibid.). We have to grasp not only the intelligibility of infinity but
also the infinity of intelligibility.
It would be a mistake for us not to recognize that the only sensible approach to Hegel's use of the terms endlich
and unendlich is from the point of view of the at least initially religious use of these terms. In religious
languageand here, for Hegel, the paradigm is Christian religious language (Christianity is "absolute religion")there
is only one infinite, and that is God, whether he be designated as "the Absolute," uncreated Being," ''absolute
Spirit," or "infinite truth, love, goodness." All else is finite; that is, whatever can be multiplied, whether it be
things, souls, spirits, thoughts, or the universe, as the sum total of finite realityno conceivable accumulation of
finite reality can add up to infinite reality. That Christian religious language speaks this way there can be no doubt;
the problem for Hegeland it occupied him from the beginning to the end of his careerwas whether he could make
rational sense out of what the religious language of Vorstellungen proclaimed so glibly. Is it possible to speak of
"the infinite" and to know what one is saying, or must one say with both the philosophers and the religionists of
his day that to speak of the infinite God is to make affirmations which only faith but not rational thought could
justify? If it can be said, and it would seem that it must be said, so their contention goes, that human reason is
essentially finite, then must it not also be said that an adequate relation of a finite capacity to an infinite object
does not make any sense? That this would also involve saying that human reason could scarcely find adequate the
faith relation to an I-know-not-what-it-could-mean infinite object scarcely seems to have disturbed those whom
Hegel singled out as his adversaries. Nor could Hegel be satisfied with what he considered a subterfuge, namely,
that the human mind could indeed be related, through intuition or some sort of religious feeling to an infinite God
whose infinity consisted in indefiniteness, indeterminacy, or the indiscriminate heaping together of perfections
whose content man's thinking could in no adequate way come to grips with.
In Hegel's view this attitude, which could look like cognitive humility, is


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in reality a far cry from humility; it is the existential refusal to submit to the infinite, to relinquish one's own finite
particularity. It is as though one were to say, "My heart, my emotions, my religious intuition can affirm an
unintelligible infinite, but my mind knows that it can affirm only what is on its own level of finitude." This kind of
"humility" Hegel can do without. "True humility, on the contrary, renounces itself, renounces its claim as this
particular to be the affirmative and recognizes only the true, the absolute (Anundfürsichseiende) as the affirmative''
(VPR I, p. 182). The decision to insist on the absoluteness of one's own finitude is a strange humility indeed!
Immediately, however, there enters the but, i.e. whether we are capable of knowing the truth. There seems
to be a disproportion between us limited humans and the absolute truth, and there arises the question of a
bridge between the finite and the infinite. God is truth; how are we to know him? The virtues of modesty
and humility seem to be in contradiction with such a proposal. Some, then, also ask whether the truth can
be known, in order to justify their persistence in the pettiness of their finite aims. Humility of this sort
accomplishes little. [Ep W, no. 19, Zusatz 1]
There would seem to be in this sort of "humility" a kind of fear that by allowing infinite Spirit to be known by
finite mind the Infinite thus becomes finitizednot unlike the contention (see chap. 6) that to speak of God as related
to finite spirit is to degrade God. Difficult as it may be to comprehend on the level of reflective understanding,
what Hegel consistently says is that, although the relation of finite to finite is itself part and parcel of the limitation
of what is finite, the relation of finite to infinite is not of itself a limiting relationship. By the same token, a
relationship of infinite to finite is not a limiting relationship, precisely because the very reality of the finite is
relation of the infinite to itself. The distinction of finite from infinite is a distinction which is no distinction,
because as source of all distinctions the infinite is identical with itself in all distinctions.
Infinity is identical with itself, because its distinctions are tautological; they are distinctions which are no
distinctions. This self-identical being, therefore, is related only to itself; to itself, which is thus an other to
which the relation is directed, and the relationship to itself is rather duplication; in other words, precisely
that self-identity is internal distinction. What have been doubled are thus in and for themselves, each an
opposite of another. In this way, to say the one is at the same time to say the other. To put it another way, it
is not a question of the opposite of another, rather only the pure opposite, and thus the one is in itself its
own opposite. [PdG, p. 125]


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Such language, quite obviously, is completely unintelligible on the level of mere "understanding," all of whose
forms are simply finite; what is only the object of finite reflective thought is in fact finite.
Now because, on the other hand the True and the Eternal are known, i.e. enter consciousness, are supposed
to be for the spirit, then this spirit for which they are is the finite spirit, whose mode of consciousness
consists in the representations and forms of finite things and relationships. These forms are what is familiar,
customary for consciousness. This is the general mode of finitude, which consciousness has made its own
and has made into the general medium of its conceiving (Vorstellens). [EGP, p. 49]
The Infinite Object of Thought

As mentioned in the first section of this chapter, to speak in this way of finitude and infinity is to speak the
language of religious consciousness, for which God is the unique "infinite," but it is also to try to make this
language intelligible to "speculative thought." What Hegel is doing is taking seriously talk about God as unique,
uncreated, eternal Creator, absolute Being, infinite Spirit, a subject of whom predicates such as "omnipotent,"
''omniscient," "omnipresent," "all good," "all loving," can be said. At the same time, he is convinced that none of
this can be said in a way that is other than nonsensical unless placed squarely in a context of human knowing,
which alone can make sense out of any language. This is not to say that the language of religion, of faith, of
devotion, is nonsensical; it is to say that it is not faith by itself which can make sense of this language, only faith
informed by rational thinking. For Hegel, the very "concept" of the human is that it must be characterized by
thought. Human beings, to be sure, do many things which are not characterized by thought, but it is precisely these
things which do not constitute the uniquely human in man. If it can be said, and it would seem that it must be, that
science, morality, law, politics, art, religion, and philosophy, are uniquely human accomplishments, then they are
so only because all are characterized by thinking; take away the thinking and they are empty, "sounding brass and
tinkling cymbals." But a thinking which is not a knowingor, at least, oriented to knowingis itself not a thinking in
any intelligible sense of the term.
If, then, we are to understand what Hegel means by saying that a human thinking which stops short of the infinite
and turns that over to "faith" or "intuition" is not really thinking at all, or that a human knowing which stops short
of knowing God who is infinite is not really knowing at all, how are we to proceed? A necessary presupposition of
any procedure, I think, is the recognition that, for Hegel, the essential focus of all philosophical investigation is
human thinking, both as that which essentially characterizes


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the human and as that which delivers all that is susceptible of philosophical investigation.
Here a caution is in order. There is a persistent temptation to see in the quality of infinity, as applied to the human,
either (1) the human infinitely multiplied (through time and space), which would, so to speak, exhaust and
therefore "infinitize" the possibilities of the human, or (2) the human ideally expanded to infinity, à la Feuerbach,
such that the "universal" human spirit would constitute the only "infinite" which can make sense. The first of these
is too obviously nonsensical to need comment: Numerical infinity simply cannot be concretized, least of all in its
application to concrete humanity; the number of humans who have existed in this world is clearly finite, and
multiplication through future time will not make that number infinite. The second kind of infinity simply flies in
the face of all that Hegel has said, both in terms of God as the paradigm of infinity, and of the individual human
person as in some intelligible way "infinite"because continuous with the essential infinity of spirit. We have but to
consult Phänomenologie des Geistes, Vorlesungen über die Philosophie des Weltgeschichte, Vorlesungen über die
Geschichte der Philosophie, "Philosophy of Objective Spirit'' in the Enzyklopädie, Grundlinien der Philosophie des
Rechtsall are replete with statements regarding the infinity of the individual human person. We must concretely
come to grips with a concept of infinity which is paradigmatically said of God but also said authentically of the
individual human subject, spirit, person, thought, will, right, value, and so on.
We could, then, institute a "genetic" investigation, seeing how Hegel's thought on the inseparability of the finite
and the infinite as foci of human thinking and knowing develops from his earliest published writings (we can
conveniently leave out his Early Theological Writings on the assumption that, if he did not publish these, it was
because he did not want to), beginning with the Differenz des Fichteschen und Schellingschen Systems der
Philosophie and Glauben und Wissen, both of which are concerned with the division, unacceptable to Hegel,
between the finite and the infinite in human thinking. From there we could move on to the writings of the Jena
period, where begins to emerge the conviction that only a "system" which seeks to come to terms with reality as a
totality of interrelationships is viable. These early investigations would prepare us for another hard look at
Phenomenology of Spirit, where Hegel makes it clear that only in the light of infinite Spirit does it make sense to
seek to know the human spirit at all. The transition then would be to Science of Logic, where human thinking is
seen in the light of the very essence of thought, ultimately the proper object of philosophical investigation. Finally,
we could see how the relation of finitude and infinity shapes the structure of the mature system, through
philosophy of nature, philosophy of subjective and objective spirit, to the


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philosophy of absolute spirit, which then draws all the threads together, culminating in an overall view of
philosophy as infinite thinking of infinite reality; a view embracing in its grasp the total framework which permits
Hegel to make sense of finite reality. That, however, is the blueprint of the entire Hegelian endeavor, and would
require a treatment as extensive as Hegel's own. A more modest approach would be to see first in Science of Logic
how the thinking of finitude and infinity is crucial to the philosophical endeavor as Hegel sees it. This could then
be illumined by a study of the movement of the human spirit from the minimal data of consciousness to the
realization both that the only satisfactory culmination of spirit's progress is in the recognition of spirit's infinity and
that the only way in which "the infinite" can make sense at all is as spirit. For the rest, the mature system of Hegel
will supply abundant confirmation of the continuity of his conviction that only a knowing which is infinite and has
as its object infinite reality is in the final analysis knowing at all. Taken in isolation from all else that Hegel says,
this could, of course, simply mean that a thinking whose determinations are wholly its own is in no way limited by
these determinations and is, hence, "limitless" (see Ep W, no. 440). That, however, would be to beg the question of
whether a thinking which is not continuous with the concrete infinite reality of spirit could in fact be wholly self-
determining. Precisely because human thinking is finite, it cannot by itself lift itself to the infinity of self-
determination.
According to Hegel, then, one can say that, logically speaking, knowledge of infinite being is prior to knowledge
of finite beingsthe former a logical precondition, so to speak, for the latter. Epistemologically speaking, on the
other hand, we must say that human knowing, finite as it is, must first come to grips with the finite reality in which
it is immersed, finding in the process that its knowing is inadequate even to its finite object if it does not pass
beyond (rise above) the finite to the infinite precondition of both the being and the knowing of the finite. This is
but another way of saying that, logically speaking, the very concept of being, with which thinking must begin,
makes sense only if being is infinite. What the system, taking its cue from logic, makes clear is that the only
conceivable concretely infinite being must be spirit. It is Phenomenology of Spirit which attempts to make clear
both that this is true and what it means for spirit to be infinite. The system in its totality, then, emerges out of the
Logic and the Phenomenology operating, so to speak, in tandem. One might say, of course, as more than one
contemporary author has tried to say (Kojève, Findlay, Kaufmann, Schacht), that Hegel's "infinite being," "infinite
spirit" need not be Godof course leaving it very unclear just what else it could bebut it is to be feared that one can
do this only by making Hegel speak nonsense, a rather risky tactic. Why not take what Hegel says at face


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value? It is difficult to see how one can read Hegel's Science of Logic and not recognize that its overriding theme
is that to know being at all is to know being as infinite (WL I, pp. 31, 144; II, pp. 15960, 441). It is equally difficult
to see how one can say, without talking nonsense, that in affirming the infinity of being Hegel is not affirming the
being of the infinite, that is, of God. Just what would an "infinite being" (Spirit) be which is not God? By the same
token what would a "God" who is not infinite being (Spirit) be?
One might also want to say, very piously I am sure, that Hegel thinks he knows too muchnot that the infinite Spirit
of which he speaks is not God, but that to claim to know the infinite Spirit who is God is to claim too much. This is
tantamount to saying that the God whom faith acknowledges cannot be knowna position that Hegel was clearly
fighting. The difficulty here, it would seem, is that the disavowal of knowing God demands a context in which we
speak of the God we do not know. Might it not be better not to speak at all, if we know not that whereof we speak?
Perhaps, with Kierkegaard, we should not speak of God at all, only speak to him. A tenable position, perhaps, but
one which requires that we also do not speak of not knowing God. Faith may tell us that God, infinite Spirit, is, but
has faith told us anything, if we do not know what it has told us? Are we to say that, philosophically speaking at
least, the terms "God," "infinite being" (Spirit), are empty of meaning, or, if given a meaning by faith, a meaning
that is impervious to reason? Would that be "meaning" at all? What Hegel seems to be saying is that the term
"infinite" has a meaning we cannot do without, that its meaning is discoverable by human reason (indeed that
reason will fail to be reasonable if it is not), and that the intelligibility of the term ''infinite" is not confined to its
application to the infinite being who is Godalthough a failure to see God as the paradigm of all talk of the
"infinite" is to empty all such talk of meaning. If nothing else, Hegel should shake those who think they know what
they are saying when they say "infinite"and shake even more those who think that the only paradigm for talk of the
infinite is the mathematical infinite. Our question, then, will be whether Hegel successfully articulates a meaning
of "infinite being," such that it is both precise and determinate enough to be justifiably called knowledge, and not
simply feeling, aspiration, or religious conviction. In attempting to answer this question we must first examine the
manner in which he employs the term "infinite" as part of his philosophical (speculative) vocabulary. We must
remember, too, that what Hegel does say can be understood only against the backdrop of those contemporary
opinions according to which the infinite could be the object only of faith, not of knowledge (Kant, Jacobi,
Fichte)without ever explaining how even faith as human activity, could be capax infinitior of those according to
which


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the infinite could indeed be known, but only immediately in intuition, not through a process of mediated rational
thought (Schelling and the Romantics).
The Meaning of "Infinite"

What, then, does the term "infinite" mean for Hegel? If the purport of this question were taken to be "how does
Hegel define the term infinite," the question would, quite obviously, be self-defeating; the answer to it would
necessarily be a contradictionto de-fine a term is to set identifiable limits to its meaning, so that language can
legitimately perform its function of clarifying discourse. To define a term in a language is to express its meaning
more clearly and precisely in that same language and thus to set up boundaries beyond which that meaning does
not go and within which that meaning is always the same. This is not to say, however, that the intelligibility of
meaning need be confined to definition. Plato, we remember, taught us that lesson long ago: his Socrates was ever
in search of definitions which he never found, and yet he was ever shedding new and expanding light on meanings.
Plato it is who shows us that the intelligibility of forms cannot be confined to definitions and that the
inexhaustibility (read: "infinity") of the forms of truth, beauty, goodness in no way militates against their
intelligibility.3 Nor is the inexhaustibility of intelligibility to be equated with the "and-so-on'' of endless repetition
of the sameeven though, as Hegel recognized so well, the intelligibility of this sort of mathematical infinity gives a
hint of the intelligibility of a much more significant infinity (see Ep W, no. 104, Zusatz 2).
The key text which will permit us at least to begin to understand Hegel's concern with infinity comes rather early
in the first book ("The Doctrine of Being") in Science of Logic. Hegel has already told us that the science which
seeks to think thoughtand all its implications"must" begin with the most general and most unified object of
thought, that is, being. This is but a way of saying that to think at all is to say mentally of thought's object that it is,
which is, quite obviously to say little or nothing. Only when thought says determintate being does it say anything,
but to say determinate being is to say determination as distinguishing. Thought is faced, however abstractly, with
one being distinguished from another. With this introduction of otherness the seamless robe of unified being seems
to have been rent; multiplicity has been inserted into the very heart of unity; universality has surrendered to
particularitythat which is other is "something" other, and that which is something other both limits and is limited by
its other (see
3. Perhaps what needs to be said here is that "defining" can be of two kinds: (1) putting limitations on a
meaning in order to handle it; and (2) permitting an object to define itself, i.e., its concept.


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Ep W, no. 92). Hegel's concern, then, becomes threefold: (1) Can thought restore the imperiled unity of being? (2)
Can thought do this short of thinking a concretely infinite being which would embrace the totality of being? and
(3) Can thought think infinite being, if thought itself is not in some sense infinite? In attempting to come to grips
with Hegel's answers to these questions, we must bear in mind that throughout Science of Logic Hegel is engaging
in a not-too-thinly-veiled polemic against all those who contended that human reason is essentially finite and only
finite; for him, to say that being makes sense only if there is infinite being involves saying that rational thought
makes sense only if rational thought is infinite. What can it mean, then, to say that rational thought is infinite?
What it cannot mean, in a purely negative way, is that human rational thinking is not the activity of a finite being
nor that it is simply not finite activity. There can be no question that Hegel regards the human mind (spirit) as
finite. This does not mean, however, that rational thought is essentially finite, nor that human rational thinking is
discontinuous with infinite rational thought. It means, rather, that human thinking, precisely as rational, is
conceivable only as continuous with infinite thought (see Ep W, no. 24). Thus, in saying that "reason observing" is
seeking in what it observes "its own infinity" (PdG, p. 183), Hegel is quite consistently saying that only in infinity,
where its "truth'' is to be found, is rational thinking adequately rational (ibid., p. 184). By the same token, if Kant is
right, and the content of rational thinking is to be found only in sensory experience, then rational thinking is not
capable of coming to grips with the infinite. "It is unquestionably correct to say that the infinite is not given in the
world, in sense-perception . . . . Spirit is for spirit alone" (VGP III, pp. 35253).
As Hegel approaches the task he has set himself he reminds one of the pole-vaulter distancing himself from the bar
he is to clear in order to muster up force and momentum and to plan carefully the sequence of steps which will take
him to the barand over it. One could suppose, of course, that it is relatively simple to say what one means by
infinite; it is the opposite, the negative, of finite. What is limited is finite; what is unlimited is infinite. Such
simplicity, however, labors under a number of difficulties. (1) It assumes that it is sufficient to look for a meaning
without any concern as to whether what is meant is, to say what the infinite would be if it were. Hegel's concern is
to show that the infinite is, that apart from infinity there is no way to make sense of finitude. (2) The simple
solution presupposes too, that the intelligibility of the finite is primary and that, therefore, whatever intelligibility is
to be found in the infinite is derived from that of which it is the negation. For Hegel it is the essential negativity of
the finite which makes it necessary to assert that the supremely affirmative is the infinite. That, precisely, is finite
which does not contain within itself all that it is to be what it is. (3) It presupposes, further, that the infinite differs
from


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the finite in exactly the same way as one finite entity differs from another or, worse still, as one thing differs form
another thing; one is simply not the other. (4) Finally, the simple solution is based on the assumption that finitude
and determinacy are synonymous, with the result that infinity becomes synonymous with indeterminacy,
indefiniteness, emptiness. For Hegel, on the contrary, it is the infinite which is supremely determinate, because it
contains within itself all its own determinations; it is not determinate merely by its relation to others which thus
limit it.
If this is what Hegel means by infinity, then there should be no doubt in anyone's mind that the paradigm of
infinity for him should be God, the Absolute, absolute Spirit, the absolute totality of reality, the Inbegriff aller
Realitäten. That God is the paradigm of infinity, however, does not mean that every time Hegel employs the terms
infinity, the infinite, or simply infinite (as an adjective), he is referringdirectly at leastto God. He also, for example,
speaks of the world, the soul, the concept, thought, freedom, and the value of the human individual as "infinite." It
is nevertheless necessary to say that the true concept of unqualifiedly infinite is realized in God alone and, thus,
that other uses of the term are derivative. Wherever, then, reality can be said to be infinite (or infinity said to be
real), it will be (1) determinate, not an undifferentiated abstraction; (2) self-determining, not needing what is other
than itself for its determination, which would be limitation; (3) having predicates which, although in a finite mode
they might be contradictory, do not contradict or limit each other and yet are not simply indifferent to each other;
and (4) self-contained, complete in itself.
Whether or not one likes the language Hegel speaks, there can be no question that the overriding theme of his
Science of Logic is that to know being at all is to know being as infinite (see WL I, pp. 31, 144; II, pp. 15960, 441).
This, however, can make sense for Hegel only if to know being as infinite is to know what it is for being to be
infinite, and short of knowing God as he is (the paradigm of concrete, determinate infinity) knowing being as
infinite does not make sense. This, in turn, is but another way of saying that to know being as finite without
knowing being as infinite is not even to know being as finite"finite being" without reference to "infinite being" is a
meaningless formula (''finite" and "infinite" are, as we have seen, mutually implicativebut only infinite is
explicative of finite (see WL I, pp. 41, 80, 109, 117, 126, 128, 143, 145; Ep W, nos. 36, 112).
The difficulty that we all experience in coming to grips with (begreifen) infinity in our thinking, according to
Hegel, is that we have the seemingly inescapable tendency (Kant would call it essential to human thinking) to
couple conceptual thought with sensible or imaginative representations, while it is the very nature of the infinite
that it cannot be represented, either sensibly or imaginatively; it is the object of thought alone, or it is no object at
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We might put it this way. It could scarcely occur to anyone that what is infiniteif there be suchcould possibly be
the object of the senses or of imagination. There is simply no way that the senses or imagination could represent
infinity. Nor could the understanding (Verstand), if its task is to represent abstractly what the senses or imagination
have presented sensibly or imaginatively, represent infinitythe mathematical infinite is its last ditch attempt to do
this. Infinity, then, can be the object of thought and thought aloneas Hegel puts it, of pure rational thought
(Vernunft). The question then arises whether the converse of this will not also be true: that, whatever is the object
of thought only and in no way of the senses and imaginationfor example, unity, universality (the unity of
multiplicity), value, truth, beauty, goodness, and so on; in short, the ideal as suchis infinite in some intelligible
sense of that term. At the very least it should be said that such objects of thought are not finite in the way objects of
sense and imagination are. If this is true, however, then infinity is inseparable from ideality"ideality is the quality
of infinity"the infinite is ideal; not, however, in the sense that it is not real but rather in the sense that the ideal is
the truly real (toontwVon). But here we are brought up short by what, to the inquiring mind, could well seem to be
utter nonsense. How can the ideal, whose existence is by definition mental, be more truly real than the "things" we
can stick our knives and forks into? Is the essence "man," for example, which has meaning only as the ideally
united totality of all human beings, more truly real, than the living, breathing, acting, feeling, thinking, loving and
hating, human individuals who inhabit our world? It depends on what we mean by "real.'' If the concept of man can
be arrived at only by a mental activity which abstracts from all the differences which distinguish one human being
from another, from all others, then the concept of man is obviously less really human than are the individuals from
whom the concept is derivedif indeed this is the way the concept is derived. If, on the other hand, the concept is in
some very significant sense (logically, ontologically?) antecedent to its finite exemplifications in isolated
individuals, such that the concept of the human serves as the criterion for the reality of the humanity of each
individual, then as the foundation of the reality of the humanity in each isolated individual, the inexhaustible,
infinite concept has to bespeak more reality than the particular exemplifications it unites in a totality which only
mind can grasp. The universal "man" is the concrete, determinate totality of the human. When the manufacturers of
Coca-Cola, for quite unphilosophical reasons, to be sure, insist that "Coke is the real thing," they are not saying that
each individual bottle of Coca-Cola is more real than "coke." They are saying that there is a very real concept of
"real thing," against which the reality of the individual drink can be evaluated. The illustration is trivial, but it
points up an important fact of life; we simply do not look to the finite individual human being


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for the total reality of what it is to be truly humanor else, what is striving all about. "Be an authentic human being"
means "strive to embody in yourself what it is to be really, truly human." The model of the "really, truly human'' is
to be found in the inexhaustible concept of the humanor, perhaps, in the "true idea of humanity," a goal, not a fact
(Objekt vs. Gegenstand).
Infinity of Concept
It is thus that we can begin to understand how the finite particular, the object of particular experience, is real only
as the realization of the infinite reality which is its concept. We can also begin to understand how the infinite
universal concept is but an empty abstraction apart from its realization in finite particulars. Of course, the universal
is the object of thought alone, not of sensation or imagination, but it is also the product of thought alone; it is not
produced in thought by something other than thought. This is not to say that thought can simply dispense with
sense or imagination; it is to say that in the activity of thinking, of bringing forth (conceiving) its object it is self-
contained, gives itself a content, does not receive it from what is other than thought. None of this, of course, would
make sense, if thought were no more than the finite activity of particular finite mindsor even of the accumulated
totality of all finite mindsif one could make sense of the latter at all! "All" and "every" are not synonymous; "all"
bespeaks essence and, therefore, infinity; "every" bespeaks accumulation and, therefore, finitude. Nevertheless, it is
still true to say that finitude is intelligible only in relation to infinity, and infinity is intelligible only in relation to
finitude; each contains the other in its concept, that is, each is a movement toward, a passing over into the other.
Thus, infinity must be somehow said of the finite (only if the finite is idealized, i.e. infinitized, is anything being
said), and finitude must be said of the infinite (only if the infinite expresses itself finitely is it actual), if either is to
be intelligible.
To ordinary thinking it can well seem patently contradictory and, therefore, absurd to speak of an infinite which is
also finite or a finite which is also infinite; the terms (concepts) are mutually exclusivewhat is infinite is not-finite,
and what is finite is not infinite, and that is all there is to it. And so it is, Hegel assures us, for a thinking which
fragments the universe of reality and is, thus, constrained by mathematical or formal-logical rules. Such a thinking
is abstract, compelled to "represent" a reality presumably over-against itself by Vorstellungen which it constructs,
keeping its distance from a reality which is not present in but only represented by it. This, Hegel goes on to say, is
not a thinking which comes to grips with (begreift) reality, precisely because it leaves reality "out-there" never
bridging the gap between thinking and the reality thoughtthe "thing-in-itself" men-


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tality. This thinking contracts thought by abstractly fragmenting reality, thus enabling it to manipulate reality,
perhaps even satisfactorily, but comprehending reality only partially because statically. Beyond this, Hegel tells us,
there is a thinking which expands in Begriffe, seeking to reproduce in itself the conceptual movement of dynamic
reality, recognizing in this very reality a thought which is its source, not its outcome.
If, then, we look in another way at the thought which Hegel describes, wherein finitude and infinity are inseparably
linked conceptually (see Ep W, no. 60), we may find that the contradiction which "ordinary thinking" shies away
from resolves itself (i.e., its resolution is not due to the efforts of abstract thinking). Just what meaning could we
assign to (find in) an infinite reality which would be so cut off from finite reality, so opposed to it, that the very
reality of the finite would be inimical to it? By the same token, what could it mean to speak of a finite reality
whose only claim to reality would be its not being infinite (on the assumption, of course, that finite is eo ipso more
determinate than is infinite)? Either each would exclude the very possibility of the other, or each would be limited
in its reality by the reality of the other which it itself is not; the reality of the infinite would conflict with the reality
of the finite, and the reality of the finite would conflict with the reality of the infinite. "All well and good," one
might say, "let us drop the terminology altogether"other than in mathematical abstraction, "finite'' and "infinite" are
empty terms which lead only to confusion of thought. Still, dropping terminology will not make the problem
disappear: unity and diversity are going to remain with us, whether we talk about them or not, or, no matter what
terminology we employ in talking about them. The unity which the mind cannot but find in reality (totality)
bespeaks infinity (the self-containedness of totality); the diversity of reality (plurality) which the mind cannot think
away bespeaks finitude. Neither militates against the other, but only the decision to throw up our hands in the
presence of reality can prompt us to ignore the problem of concretely reconciling diversity and unity, finitude and
infinity. What Hegel is trying to show, then, is not merely that they do not militate against each other, but that
neither is conceivable without the other. What further needs to be shown, perhaps, is that it is not nonsensical to
speak of unity in terms of infinity and of diversity in terms of finitude.
Here it is, then, that we can, in one sense, see all of this as an attempt to clarify language about infinity by
reference to an infinite which is not Godfor example, thought (concept, idea), truth, value, spirit, freedom, the
universethe elaboration of which will enable us better to understand the concept of infinity in a thinking which has
God (Der Inbegriff aller Realitäten) as its object. By speaking of a qualified infinite which is nevertheless
intelligible precisely as infinite, we can move on to the intelligibility of an unqualified infinite which exhausts the
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in God the very foundation for the possibility of unifying the totality of reality in conceptual thinkingprovided, of
course, one does not prefer to remain on the fringe of reality, seeing only a chaotic manifold, upon which a finite
thinking is satisfied to impose order, since that worksup to a point.
In another sense, however, we might approach Hegel's endeavor from another point of view, seeing it as an attempt
to move in the other direction alsosomehow Hegel's thought always does. His endeavor begins with God as the
paradigm of infinite reality and, thus, makes it possible to understand Hegel when he speaks of an intelligible
infinity, which, although not unqualified, characterizes reality in the order of idea, where it is most authentically
present to mind. If it can be said that it is impossible to make sense of the concept of being (foundational for all
logical thinking), unless being ultimately reveals itself as both infinite and determinate (the task of logic, as Hegel
sees it), then it is only in recognizing that any idea, precisely qua idea, is infinitereality must reveal its
characteristic infinitythat we can come to terms with it in its truth, which, Hegel tells us, is the goal and purpose of
logic (see Ep W, nos. 21314).
If we are to understand what Hegel is saying when he speaks of "infinity," of the close link he sees between the
infinity of God, the unique concretely infinite Being, and the infinity characteristic of the ideal order which unifies
the diversity of the finite, the time has come to examine what he has to say of finitude, of the negativity which is
inseparable from the finite and which the infinite negates in affirming its own reality, affirming its own
determinacy in negating the unsatisfactory determinacy of the finite (see WL I, p. 143). Actually, however, Hegel
has little to say about the finite by itself, precisely because, as he sees it, there is little to say of the finite by itself,
since by itself it is nothing; its reality is its relation to thought, to the infinity of idea: "The proposition which states
that the finite is ideal (ideell) constitutes idealism. The idealism of philosophy consists in nothing else but the
recognition that the finite is not a true being" (ibid., p. 145). More than that, reality without ideality is not truly real,
because it is merely finite (ibid., p. 146). He goes so far as to say that both "finite being" and ''finite thinking" are
of themselves contradictory and that their contradictoriness can be both recognized and resolved only in "infinite
thought" (BS, pp. 408409; see also pp. 7980). This is not to say that finitude is not significant, but that what can be
said of it is significant only as pointing to infinity; merely finite being can neither be nor be thought (see Ep W no.
92, Zusatz).
To further understand what has just been said we must grasp the close parallel which Hegel draws between
finitudewhich characterizes "things" (Etwas)and "immediacy"which characterizes the given (to sense or
imagination) independently of the mediation of thought. If Hegel says, then, that the "immediate" is not true,
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sent from it, he is but saying the same in asserting that the "finite" is not true, because its reality (Dasein) is that
which characterizes "things" (Etwas) without reference to thought in the fullest sense. The mind can give no
account (logic) of "things," only of thought conceptualizing things in the unity of idea. It is not too difficult to see
that thinking cannot deal with "things" by themselves, but only with the thought of things. What may be difficult is
to see that thinking is dealing with reality at all when it is dealing only with thought. What can it mean to say that
things are true only when mediated by thought? What it does not mean, according to Hegel, is that the very being
of what is other than thought is the subjective thinking of it, esse is not percipi. What, at the very least, it does
mean is that thought enters into the constitution of the object of thought; the latter is not simply there, to be
reproduced or mirrored in thought. More than that, it means that thoughtin its fullest senseis indispensable to the
constitution of reality. Here it is that Hegel distinguishes between subjective thinking, which is finite, and objective
thought, which is infinite, and whose paradigm is divine thought, which is productive of not only the objectivity
but also the reality of its object.
In regard to the relationship already mentioned of the three stages of the logical idea, this relationship
presents itself thus in concrete and real form: God, who is the truth, is known by us in his truth, i.e. as
absolute Spirit, only to the extent that we at the same time recognize as untrue the world created by
Godnature and finite spiritif separated from God. [Ep W, no. 83, Zusatz]
Infinite Being, which (as we shall see later) can only be absolute Spirit, thinks, and its thinking is creative of finite
reality, and this, since thought can think only itself, is, so to speak, the finitizing of the infinite. This is not to say
that infinite thought exists in sovereign independence and then "decides" to think and, thus, create finite reality.
Rather it is to say that infinite thought in thinking itself both engenders its infinite trinitarian Other, the Son, and
creates its finite other, the world of finite reality, a self-finitizing othering. "The answer to the question, how the
infinite becomes finite, therefore, is this: that there is no infinite which is first of all infinite and then, in order
simply (erst) to become finite needs to go out of itself into finitude. Rather, in its very being for itself it is already
just as much finite as infinite" (WL I, p. 143); "The absolute, then, is that which in one unity is both finite and
infinite" (VGP II, p. 79). Hard to swallow, indeed, if we take Hegel to be saying by "is" that ''infinite" and "finite"
are being predicated of God in exactly the same way. If, however, we take the Hegelian "is" as descriptive of a
movement which is inseparable from the very being of the infinite"this inseparability is the concept of the infinite"
(ibid., p. 144), we can see him saying that all thoughteven in-


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finite thoughtis movement, and that infinite thought is a creative movement toward finitude4 (see Ep W, no. 441,
Zusatz).
Be the difficulties of understanding Hegel's language about the infinite creativity of a thought which issues in a
finite reality and which he calls the "self-finitizing of the infinite" what they may, it is not difficult to see how this
can help us to understand him when he speaks of human rational thought as an "infinitizing of the finite." If it is
true to say that it is impossible (presumably for us finite mortals) to conceive the infinite without conceiving the
finite (since the conceiving is finite activity), it is equally true to say that infinite reality can be only as containing
in its bosom, so to speak, the finite. By the same token, if it is true to say that infinite thought issues in an object
which is finite, and this is creation, it does not seem absurd to say that finite thought issues in an object which is
infinite (else the thought would be no more than partial thought), and this is re-creation. What is more, this finite
thought is in an intelligible sense infinite, since it is self-determining, self-contained, not dependent on something
outside itself in its re-creative activity.5 That finite thought is dependent on infinite thought offers, for Hegel, no
contradiction: only if we spatialize thought is infinite thought "outside" finite thought; and thus in such a
dependence the self-determination and self-containedness of even finite thought is not lost. There is, however, a
difference between the infinity of infinite reason and the infinity of finite reason: the thought of infinite reason is
prior both logically and ontologically to the finite reality which is its term; finite reason is logically but not
ontologically prior to its term. The reality of the finite has as its criterion the rationality of the human thought
which thinks it; it does not have it as its existential source.
The Infinity of the Finite

Back to the finite, which is not only in the unfortunate position of not being able to maintain itself in existence but
is also by its very essence as finite destined to go out of existenceunless, of course, its link with the infinite is such
as to sustain it in existence.6 Every being of "nature," for example, is
4. This leaves us with the difficulty, to be discussed later (chap. 6), that Hegel seems to be making creation
necessary, what God cannot but do. Without here going into the intricacies of this problem, we can simply
say that, for Hegel, just as unity and multiplicity, ideality and reality, infinity and finitude, are contradictory
only for the finite thinking of Verstand, not for the infinite thinking of Vernunft, so too, the necessity which
infinite thought imposes on itself in no way contradicts the freedom of infinite self-determination. It is
difficult to think that anything we can truly say of God is not necessarily true of God.
5. To say, "not dependent on something outside itself" is simply to say that its thinking is its own activity, not a
being-acted-upon.
6. For a reason which is not thoroughly clear to me Hegel never does discuss explicitly the question of the
immortality of finite spiritnot, that is to say, philosophically, except, as we saw earlier (chap. 2), when he
speaks of "immortality" as essential to the "concept" of man.


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essentially finite, not only because it is limited in being related to and dependent on other beings of nature for its
very being, but also because the ideality which unites it in the whole of nature is to be found not in itself but in
another, that is, in spirit. Nature does not think, cannot be aware of itself, cannot contain itself, and can be
idealizedinfinitizedonly in being thought by spirit (see WL I, p. 106); what nature is "in-itself" can be realized only
in its "being-for-another." Only in spirit, which is infinite capacity for awareness, is there an awareness of both the
finitude of the natural and the infinity of nature as ideal totality (ibid., p. 109). Nature without spirit, then, simply is
not (ibid., p. 105). The "things" of nature, however, are not condemned to nothingness, precisely because "in the
concept of the limit inherent in a something'' (ibid., p. 116) is contained "the contradiction which propels it beyond
its limit" (ibid., p. 115) toward a totality which is unlimited and which is realizable only in thought (see VGP III, p.
435). Because, however, human thinking has a tendency to get bogged down in "categories of understanding," and
because finitude is "simply (überhaupt) negation . . . the most stubborn category of understanding" (ibid., p. 117),
thinking itself, often enough, refuses to go beyond the finite, seeing the finite as only finite (ibid., p. 118). The
question, however, is whether the insistence on finitude is not self-defeating; could finitude be known as finitude,
that is, as bursting at the seams to be beyond itself, if the knowing of this were not infinite, an infinitizing
activitythe finite, simply as finite, cannot know its own finitude, whereas in being known it is carried beyond its
limit (ibid., p. 121). This can make eminently good sense, if we consider how the concept of a particular
"something" breaks down the barriers which confine that something to its particularity; for example, the concept of
"man" as opposed to "some-one-particular" man. Nor is there here a question of mere abstract universality; it is
rather a question of the interrelatedness of concrete totality. "If a particular existence contains the concept, not
merely as an abstract self-identical being (Ansichsein), but rather as a totality which is independent (für sich
seiende), as drive, life, feeling, representation, and so on, then this existence itself accomplishes both the
transcending of and the having transcended its confinement (Schranke)" (ibid., pp. 12223). Thought does not lift
the finite over the barrier which confines it; the finite itself surmounts the barrier in thought. Surmounting the
barrier is the rationality inherent in reality (ibid., p. 123). Even where the passage is achieved only in abstract
universality, it shows that the barrier of finitude is not insurmountable (ibid.). The being of natural "things" is
simply indifferent to being thus confined; the being of the human strains at the bit to get beyond it, even if the
getting beyond is achieved only in abstract understanding, which is not satisfactory (ibid., pp. 12425).
It is finitude itself, then, which cries out for infinity, which makes the human mind, if it truly follows out its logical
bent, incapable of resting con-


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tent with either its own finitude or the finitude of its object. If the mind thinks logically it is going to see that the
infinite is the condition for the very possibility of the finite (ibid., p. 126), just as the mind can think the
relatedness of one "thing" to another only if the foundation for the relatedness of the diverse is the unity of total
interrelatedness which is the absolute. In fact, "the infinite in its simple concept can initially be looked at as a new
definition of the absolute" (ibid., p. 125); that is, relativity-finitude is intelligible only if absoluteness-infinity is. ''It
is not that infinity as such comes to be in the transcending of finitude as such; rather the finite is such that of its
own nature it comes to be infinite. Infinity is its affirmative orientation (Bestimmung), what the finite in itself truly
is" (ibid., p. 126); the finite is destined to be infinitized in thought (ibid., p. 127). It is not enough, however, that
the mind cannot think the finite without thinking the infinite; the foundation of the impossibility of thinking the
finite must be the impossibility that the finite be without the infinite (ibid., p. 129). Finite and infinite are
inseparable not only in thought but also in reality (ibid.), which means that the finite in passing beyond itself has to
be more than endless repetition of essential finitude (ibid., p. 130). Nevertheless, the finite can pass beyond itself
only in thought (ibid., p. 131): the finite is the "external realization of the concept" (ibid., p. 132); the infinite is the
rational concept in which the finite finds its full reality (ibid., p. 135). True infinity, then, is reality. "Not the finite
but rather the infinite is the real" (ibid., p. 139), the truth of which is to be found in the ideality of "essence,
concept, idea" (ibid.). The finite shares this reality, "not as independent but as a moment" (ibid.). Thus, the ideal is
not the negation of the real but the negation of that which negatives the real, that is, finitude (ibid., p. 140).
After all this it may well seem rather arbitrary to employ such a grandiose term as "infinity" to designate the
ideality which characterizes the rational conceptualization which in turn unifies the multiplicity and diversity of the
finiteeven if the proviso is included that the unity in question is not a cloak thrown over the multiple by subjective
thinking. Worse still, it may seem not only arbitrary but futile to try to come to grips with the unique infinity of
God by finding in the infinity which characterizes ideality a sort of model which makes the infinity of God
intelligible. If, then, we are to avoid falling into a trap of our own (or Hegel's) making, we must first move on with
him to a consideration of the infinity of the concrete singular, which he treats under the heading of Fürsichsein,
and then move backward, so to speak, to Phenomenology of Spirit, wherein Hegel makes it clear that only of a
being which is spirit does it make sense to speak of infinity at all. In doing this we must bear in mind that, for
Hegel, to think out the thought which has reality for its object is to discover the implications of reality, one of
which is that without infinite reality there simply is no reality at all. "The whole of the Science of Logic, then,
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is infiniteor that infinite being isand, correlative to this, that the reason which knows infinite being is itself
infinite."7
In thinking out the implications of thought, then, it is inevitable that the thinking of being should come up against a
being which is special, which is not only a thought being but also a thinking beingthinking thinks itself, is self-
conscious; there is self-conscious being (Selbstbewusst-sein). It is in this category that the perfection of being will
be foundor else it will not be found at all (or there will not be any finding at all). Such a being, even though
"posited" (gesetzt) by thought as its own object, is "complete" (vollbracht) in itself, depending on nothing outside
itself for being what it is (WL I, p. 148) and is, thus, "the parade example (das nächste Beispiel) of the presence of
infinity" (ibid.), of which it is characteristic to become other while remaining the same (see EpW, no. 95). The
being in question is the being an object has for the one who thinks it, but the object and the one who thinks it are
one and the same. "The ideal is necessarily for one, but it is not for another [one]; the one for which it is is only
itself'' (WL I, p. 149). This is true of the "I" (who thinks); it is true of "spirit" (which is active source of thinking); it
is, above all, true of "God" (the active source of all reality): "God, therefore, is for-self, in the sense that (insofern)
he is himself that which is for him" (ibid., p. 150). The being, then, which the I, spirit, God have is "ideal," but not
ideal merely in the sense of "not-real" (ibid.). The infinity which must be said of this ideal being is not the vague,
undifferentiated infinity of Parmenides' "being," nor yet that of Spinoza's "substance"; rather it is the self-
differentiating being, whose determinations are its own activities, differences which do not limit each other (ibid.,
pp. 15152).
Once again we are up against the seeming contradiction of unity and multiplicitynot merely the trite, "there is a one
and there are also many ones," but the much more difficult and significant, "there is one which is also many, and
there are many which are also one." In true Plotinian fashion Hegel sees this as explicable only in terms of
Aristotle's nohsiVnohsewV, which he calls "infinite self-determining," wherein the relation to what is other is not
different from the relation to self. This is not to say that the self and the other are identical (let alone synonymous),
but that the relation to other is the relation to self.8 There is (dialectical) distinction between the self and others,
without loss of unity in the self, because thought's thinking itself (nohsiVnohsewV) is its thinking what is other
than itselfthe distinctions are its own (ibid., p. 155)it is "the absolute unification of the relation to what is other and
the relation to itself" (ibid.). That Hegel should apply the nohsiVnohsewV *which Aristotle applies only to Godto
the I and
7. Quentin Lauer, Essays in Hegelian Dialectic (New York: Fordham University Press, 1977), pp. 14243.
8. This will be spelled out in much greater detail in chapter 6.


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the spirit should cause no panic; the application is not identical in all three; Hegel simply hopes that, if we can see
its applicability to the I and the spirit, we shall see how it applies a fortiori to God, who is absolute I and absolute
Spirit.
By the same token we should not be thrown off by Hegel's metaphors, borrowed from the science of his day,
which he employs in an effort to illustrate the dynamic character of the relationship between unity and multiplicity.
What hs is trying to show is that, when the mind seeks to think the unity of the one and the multiplicity of the
many (ones), neither unity nor multiplicity are simply given, to be analyzed by a subject who thinks. If, then, we
are to think dynamically, we can conceive of multiplicity as a multiplication of ones and unity as a unification of
many (ones); not that the one becomes many or that the many become one (ibid., p. 158) but that the one conceived
as one breaks itself up into many, and the many conceived as many unify themselves into one (concept) (ibid.).
More than that, if both unity and multiplicity are inseparable from the concept of any reality, then they belong
essentially to the reality in question; that is, it is inconceivable that they should not, "for a determination which
belongs to the concept of a thing (Sache) must truly be contained in it" (ibid., p. 172). What Hegel is saying,
further, is that multiplicity must be conceived as a movement from one to many, and that unity must be conceived
as a movement from many to one. Contradictory? Yes, but that is precisely the point: There is no solution short of
the infinity which resides in concrete (Vernunft), not abstract (Verstand), thought. "The multiplicity of the ones is
infinity, as unabashedly (unbefangen) self-producing contradiction" (ibid., p. 160). Now, clumsy and inadequate as
the metaphors may be, Hegel seeks to illustrate the reciprocal movements (unity-to-multiplicity and multiplicity-
to-unity) in terms of two quasi-forces familiar to the physics of his day, "attraction'' and "repulsion." Repulsion
designates the movement of the one breaking itself up into many; attraction, the movement of the many into the
unity of the ideal one. Like positive and negative electricity, attraction and repulsion imply each other; neither is
intelligible except as related to the other. It is not merely, however, that the mind must think of them as
inseparable; in the real order the condition for the possibility of the many is the breaking up of the one, and the
condition for the possibility of the one is the unification of the many. But here, in Hegel's exposition, a subtle shift
of thought takes place. Reality, at least in the accepted sense, is multiple; ideality, on the other hand, is unified
(multiplicity). In terms of "attraction" and "repulsion," repulsion is "the reality of the one," that is, ideality realizing
itself; attraction is "the posited ideality of that reality" (ibid., p. 164), that is, the multiplicity of reality demands
unification in ideality. Ideality, then, is the condition for the possibility of reality: (1) as the source from which
reality flowsdivine infinite Spiritand (2) as the


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unifier which makes reality intelligiblethe "infinity" of human thinking spirit. Neither makes sense without the
other: "Attraction is attraction only through the mediation of repulsion, just as repulsion is repulsion only through
the mediation of attraction" (ibid., p. 167). Mutatis mutandis, we can apply this to divine (one) and human
(multiple) spirit: to know what it is to say that the unique divine Being is Spirit, we must look to spirit as realized
in man for a clue; to know what we are saying when we say that man is spirit, we must look to the divine Being
who is in himself all that spirit can be. If we do this, we may find out what "infinite" means when it is said of both.
This, however, is the task of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, to which we now turn.
Phenomenology of Spirit
When we look at the Phenomenology we may be surprised to find that the term "infinite" (unendlich), along with
its cognates, "the infinite" (das Unendliche) and "infinity" (Unendlichkeit), occurs rather infrequently; much more
often Hegel employs the term "absolute" or "the absolute.'' In the earlier writings, as we have seen, particularly
Differenz des Fichteschen und Schellingschen Systems der Philosophie, Glauben und Wissen, and the writings of
the Jena period, on the other hand, the term "infinite" occurs with baffling frequency. If we combine the frequent
occurrence of the term in the earlier writings with the seeming hesitation to employ it in the Phenomenology and
add to that the remark we have already seen from the first volume of Science of Logic, "the infinite in its simple
concept can initially be looked upon as a new definition of the absolute," we can be led into some interesting
surmises, which we cannot develop here, regarding the technical importance of the term as it is employed in the
earlier writings. At any rate, in this regard the Phenomenologyterminologically at leastseems to be transitional. The
term "infinity" occurs initially in chapter III, "Force and Understanding,"9 where Hegel is trying to point up (1) the
tendency of the mind to move from the merely finite to the infinite, and (2) the fundamental incapacity of
understanding to make this move, because its thinking is essentially finite and thus incapable of coming to grips
with true infinity. As might be expected it occurs alsoalthough sparinglyin chapter IV, "Self-Consciousness," since
it is there that the characteristic whereby consciousness finds the other of itself in itself, thus remaining in itselfa
feature of infinity which we have already seen elaborated in Science of Logicbegins to assume prominence. In
chapter V, "Reason," where Hegel begins to plumb the significance of reason's
9. We can here ignore the occurrence of the term in the preface, which is as much an epilogue as a
prologue.


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awareness "that it is all reality," the concept of infinityif not the termassumes greater importance. It is not until
chapter VII, "Religion," however, that the infinity of the absolute Spirit who is Godthe term is still scarceboth
points the way to the importance of the concept in Science of Logic and in Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion
and thematizes the infinity of divine Spirit as a foreshadowing of the relative infinity of the finite spirits which are
its manifestations (Gestalten). Finally, in chapter VIII, "Absolute Knowing," the whole movement comes to a head
in the awareness that out of the prolonged investigation of the "spirits'' which are the manifestations of the absolute
emerges the true infinity of the absolute itself: "from the chalice of this realm of spirits there foams forth to him
[the Absolute Spirit] his infinity" (p. 564).10 It is the infinity of absolute Spirit to embrace within itselfand, thus, to
infinitizethe finitude of multiple spirits.
If there is one thing that the foregoing painfully brief summary of the movement of Hegel's Phenomenology of
Spirit should make clear, it is that phenomenology, as Hegel conceives it, consists in an investigation of
consciousness (whether by consciousness itself going through its process of development or by the philosopher
observing the process) which finds in consciousness itself all the evidence necessary for the objectivity of that of
which consciousness is conscious. What the investigation, then, discovers is that the process is throughout that of
rational thought, which is not a process of "inference" at all but a "thinking consideration," wherein thought raises
itself above the sensibleor else it is not truly thoughtand thus passes from the kind of limited perspective which
characterizes the sensible to the limitless perspective which characterizes the intelligible, the essential
suprasensible (EpW, nos. 7576). In this is contained a recognition that, if the finite is to be thought at all it must be
in the thinking of the infinite. This is but another way of saying that the true being of the sensible is its intelligible
being, or that the being of the sensible is to be found in its intelligibility, which is the object of thought, not sense.
Whatever one's propensities for explanation may beand these prephilosophical (perhaps unphilosophical)
propensities usually dictate what one's interpretation of Hegel is going to beit scarcely seems possible for anyone
to ignore that man is a peculiarly double being, composed of an organic body, subject in all its operations to the
laws which govern the physical universephysical, chemical, and biological lawsand a conscious activity which, no
matter what the efforts to explain it reductively on purely natural grounds, is uniquely characteristic of the human
organism. Hegel, for one, is thoroughly convinced from the very beginning of his
10. We have already seen, at the end of chapter 3, a striking parallel to this passage in VPR II, p. 320,
where Hegel is speaking of the "Realization of the [spiritual] community": "Out of the ferment of finitude,
because it is transformed into foam, the Spirit arises like vapor."


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philosophizing that man's conscious activity belongs to an order of reality, the spiritual, which is simply other than
the activity of physical nature. It is for this reason that, at the beginning of his mature philosophizing, he institutes
a study of human consciousness, a Phenomenology of Spirit, as a sort of prologue to the whole philosophical
endeavor. Added to his own conviction that consciousness is spiritual activity, all the resources for which are to be
found within the activity itself, is the conviction that man, any man, if he honestly examines consciousness
(Bewusstsein), will become more and more aware that the activity examined is spiritual, that is, not proper to the
order of physical (chemical, biological) nature. That the orientation of consciousness is ineluctably toward a
knowing which is knowing and only that, that is, in no sense dependent on what is not-knowing ("absolute" in that
sense at least), is a conviction which he will allow to grow as the result of the consistently honest examination. The
examination will proceed by stages, each stage both demanding that the examination move on to the next stage and
indicating what that next stage must be. The process might be likened to a progressive sloughing off of the
limitations of what consciousness only "seems" to be, until its true reality is seen to be without limitations, infinite.
Man is limited, dependent, finiteexcept on the spiritual side. The finite has to do with the other aspect of
man's existence. As spirit, to the extent that spirit functions non-spiritually, it has to do with external things.
When, however, man is spirit, precisely as spirit, then he is without limit. The limits of reason are only the
limits of this subject's reason; but when man functions rationally, he is without limitations, infinite. [EGP,
p. 182]
We might put it this way: A knowing which has not reached its ultimate goal of being knowing and nothing else is
only partial knowing and, therefore, partial nonknowing; on the other hand, a knowing which has reached its
ultimate goal is "absolute"; but a knowing which does not have "the absolute" (whatever that is to mean) as its
object is not itself absolute; and a knowing which has the absolute as its object11 has to be more than the merely
finite activity of a merely finite agent.
A basic premiss of the whole movement, to be confirmed in the process, is that in progressively examining that of
which it is conscious, consciousness will consistently find, not something over-against and independent of itself,
but rather its own product. This is to say that consciousness does not operate the way "things" operate (it is no-
thing); it does not act upon what is given to it from outside itself, the way natural "things" do; it
11. Here again the distinction between Gegenstand (object as over-against subject) and Objekt (object as a
goal of striving) is important. For authentically rational thinking the absolute is not Gegenstand at all, it is
Objekt.


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gives itself its own content. This is not to say that there are not "things" out there of which consciousness is
conscious; it is to say that it is conscious of them only by transforming them into its own product; the activity of
thinking has thought and only thought as its termnor is it acted upon by what is other than itself.
Initially what has just been said could seem to be nonsensical: How could consciousness give itself its own content
and still be in touch with a reality which, in fact, is not its own product? Unless, of course, the opposite is even
more nonsensical: How could a spiritual activity have as its content a reality which is other than spiritual? In
coming to grips with "things" we examine the ideas of things, which is all we have to examine (even a computer
does not scan things, only translations of them). In any event, it is not farfetched to say that in examining the ideas
we have of reality, we not only come to a more concrete grasp of the reality which reveals itself progressively in
ideasin coming to grips with the ideas we are coming to grips with the reality they reveal (e.g., the process of
scientific advance)but we come to know more and more fully the spirit whose product the ideas are. The question
then is whether the process will take us all the way to the infinite Spirit whose product is the very reality of the
real. If it does not, it would seem, we shall never resolve the paradox of the unity of being and the multiplicity of
beings. Scientific "understanding," as Hegel sees it, resolves the paradox by placing the abstract unity of the idea
over-against the concrete multiplicity of realities; but this is not enough. So long as concepts are no more than the
thoughts of individual subjects, they are as finite as are the subjects who think them; their unity (universality) is
abstract, not concrete, and their concreteness is not universal, merely cumulative. Only a thought which integrates
the multiplicity of the finite into the unity (totality) of the infinite can resolve the contradictions of finitude. The
essential relativity of multiple finite beings can be unified only in the absoluteness of infinite being.
The work to be done, then, cannot be performed by essentially finite understanding, which can see that only an
infinite mind could solve the problem but of itself cannot come to terms with infinite mind as reality. Reason, on
the other hand, whose function is not to break up unified reality into manageable fragments but to integrate the
diverse fragments into an intelligible unity, can perform the task, because it does not receive its content from an
alien source but rather is itself the source which gives itself a unified content. Here it is (at the end of chapter IV,
"Self-Consciousness") that Hegel comes up with the startling statement that self-consciousness becomes aware that
as reason "it is itself all reality." Initially this means little more than the triumphant assurance of the scientific
mind, flushed with all its successes since the Renaissance, that there is indeed no reality with which it cannot cope.
By stages, however, the claim will take on more and more profound significanceafter a large number of attempts on
the part


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of individual human reason to issue a principle which will serve to unify all reason in a finite way. The progression
in meaning which the assurance takes on would seem to be the following: (1) In seeking to come to grips with
reality reason has nowhere to look but into itself, since for reason to go outside itself does not make sense (Fichte),
but this is no guarantee that it will find what it is looking for. (2) The rationality it finds in reality is, strictly
speaking, not different from the rationality it finds in itself, since there is only one reason (Schelling), but this is
only an assertion, not spelled out, of two manifestations of one and the same reason. (3) Ultimately, both the
rationality of reality (which science must assume if it is to be viable) and the rationality of finite reason (which
philosophy must assume if thought is to get anywhere) make sense only against the backdrop of one infinite reason
which is the source of both (Hegel); "there is but one reason; there is no second, superhuman reason; reason is the
divine in man" (EGP, p. 123). (4) Finite reason is valid as reason only because it is not merely finite but infinitizes
itself in its conceptual grasp of the infinite object which gives meaning to all objectivity, as in itself the unified
totality of all reality and rationality (see VA I, pp. 204205). (5) The unification of diverse finite reasons in one
overarching (in space and time) human spirit will, again, be no more than abstract, if the diversity of spirits is not
seen as the self-diversification of one infinite Spirit which is more than human, more than finitethe lesson of both
chapter VIII and the preface to the Phenomenology.
A hint of where all this is going can be seen in the spiritual unity of the human communityas opposed to the
natural unity of the human species. Reason, then, will be able to see itself as truly "all reality" only as effectuating
reality, and this it can do initially as a communal spirit effectuating a moral order which applies to each and every
member of the community. If, however, the community in question is only a particular communitya particular
peoplethe moral order effectuated will be only a particular moral order, which must be rationally extended to the
total human community if it is to be effectively real. But even this universality is scarcely "all reality"; it is no more
than a hint of the kind of "allness" which has spirit as its source. It is also, however, a kind of relative "infinity"
resident in the human spirit, the infinity of self-containedness which gives itself a universal moral law.
And that, Hegel tells us, is about as far as human spirit can go without, so to speak, starting all over again. Spirit
does not really know what it is to be spirit if all it knows is itself as moral spirit. Even its own moral quasi-infinity
will come up empty unless it rises above the moral consciousness to a consciousness which has the truly infinite
being as its object, that is, religious consciousness. It can, of course, be saidand it has been saidthat any spirit
which finds all the objectivity it looks for in itself is in-


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finite, but its "infinity" will be a rather sad copy of the real if it simply stops there. There is a kind of infinity in
self-conscious spirit, but that infinity will be authentic only if the self-consciousness in question is at the same time
consciousness of the truly infinite Being who is divine. Religion, even in its most primitive stages, pierces through
the veil of finitude which hems it in to find an infinite which both is beyond the finite and inhabits it. But what can
it mean to say, as Hegel does, that religion is a Gestalt of self-conscious spirit wherein the human spirit, in being
conscious of itself is also conscious of the divine, the infinite Spirit? It means at least that the human spirit does not
know itself as spirit short of knowing all that being spirit implies, and this it cannot know short of knowing what
divine infinite (absolute) Spirit is, and only if divine Spirit communicates itself to human spirit can the latter know
this. The communication can be the self-revelation of the Absolute which takes place in what we call "creation."
But, says Hegel, even creation is an adequate revelation of God only against the backdrop of a more intimate
revelation of God in "revealed religion," where creation is seen as continuous with the inner life of God, as a
"moment" in the totality of that inner life.
Although revelation itself is a communication limited by the form which mediates it, a multiplicity of finite
"representations" of unique infinite reality, the content of that revelation, that is, absolute Spirit, God, makes it clear
that a human knowing which falls short of knowing absolute Spirit is not knowing in the fullest possible sense. For
Hegel, then, "revealed religion" (PdG), "absolute religion" (VPR), is the Christian religion, in which is
recapitulated the coming-to-be of the human spirit, as transcending any and every finite spirit. Until this
transcendent spirit, however, is concretized in thought it remains the cumulative total of finite spirits and, thus, still
a finite grasp of infinite reality; man is conscious of God as infinite reality but not yet conscious that this
consciousness is his own complete self-consciousness, which it will not be until God's consciousness of himself in
the finite spirit which is his creation coalesces with that finite spirit's consciousness of itself. Here Hegel's theology
enters in once more: God as infinite self-consciousness in thinking what is other than himself, that is, created
reality, "others" himself while remaining totally within himself. This, then, is the paradigm of spiritual awareness,
knowing that to know what is other than itself is not different from knowing itself. If this is essential to the
knowing which is proper to spirit, it must be true not only of God, the uniquely infinite Spirit, but also of the
human spirit, which as truly knowing must in some sense share this infinity. For spirit to know at all is to ''posit"
that of which spirit is conscious and to remain "with itself" in so doing. For the finite self to know the absolute self
is to know truly, and it is to know itself truly. This is to say that the "being" which the finite spirit


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knows in knowing itself is a "being-in" the infinite, where alone finite spirit can find itself.
As we saw before, in his Science of Logic Hegel sees "the infinite" as a "new definition of the absolute."
Whenever, then, in the Phenomenology, Hegel says "absolute" we can legitimately substitute ''infinite." This helps
to tie together the Phenomenology and the Logic. What the full import of this tieing together is we shall see if we
look at Hegel's Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, which he did not publish himself, and his Encyclopedia of
the Philosophical Sciences, which he did publish himself (in several editions). With regard to Lectures on the
Philosophy of Religion one could, by examining its three parts, find nearly everything that we have been saying
about Hegel's theory of infinite being. Most pertinent, it is true, is what he has to say in part III, "Absolute
Religion," section B, "The Metaphysical Concept of the Idea of God," where he spells out in far more detail what
he had already written in chapter VII of Phenomenology of Spirit. If, however, we are to see this section in proper
perspective we must pick up from the beginning of Philosophy of Religion, not forgetting that even this will be
intelligible only if we have first seen the foundation laid in the Logic and Phenomenology.
Philosophy of Religion
What becomes obvious from the very beginning is that, for Hegel, it is not possible to speak of infinity, unless that
of which it is being said is "spirit"and, conversely, that to speak of spirit without speaking of infinite spirit is
simply to miss the point of spiritual being, self-contained being. To say "infinite" is to say "spirit," that is, a being
which is free, effectuating its own determination, a being which is "object to itself" and is, thus, "with itself" in its
object: "for freedom means to be self-contained, or at home with itself" (VPR I, p. 65). Such a being need not look
elsewhere for what is requisite to being itself. Later he will define "consciousness of freedom" as "infinite being-
for-self" (VPR II, p. 260). What is most important to note here is that the infinity which is inseparable from spirit,
including human spirit, finds no obstacle in the finitude of the very same spirit. To say that for human spirit to lift
itself to a grasp of the infinite is to infinitize itself is not to say that in so doing it relinquishes its finite empirical
mode of operation (VPR I, pp. 6869); empirical thinking is truly thinking only on condition that the empirical be
aufgehoben, that is, canceled, retained, and lifted up. The finite does not cease to be finite, but its very finitude
reveals that its foundation is infiniteor else the finite simply is not (ibid., p. 107). Nor is it the thinking subject who
recognizes this and thus cancels out finitude; it is the finite content of thought, which, because it is


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not sufficient unto itself, bespeaks an infinite without which it would not be (ibid., p. 109). Finite reality is indeed
necessary; the infinite idea which is necessary to the very conceivability of the finite can manifest itself only
finitely (ibid., pp. 11314).12 We must, of course, remind ourselves again that, for Hegel, to know what thought
must necessarily think is to know what must necessarily be: If thought, then, necessarily passes beyond the finite to
the infiniteas a necessary condition for thinking the finitethis is itself proof of the necessity of the infinite (ibid., p.
165). We shall see this later as Hegel's interpretation of the "ontological argument" for the reality of God (chap. 5).
Here, however, he is speaking not only of the necessary infinity of thought's ultimate object but also of the
necessary infinity of a thought which is truly spiritual. For the human mind to be conscious of being finite is itself
a passage beyond the limitations of finitude, because it is to know itself as spiritual in the spirituality of its
knowing (ibid., pp. 16768). Thus, Hegel tells us, to affirm only finitude of self is not, as some would have it,
humility; it is the pride of holding a finite self to be adequate, to be the only infinite there is (ibid., p. 182).
It might well seem that, as this thought unfolds, the distinction between finite and infinite is gradually becoming
blurred; the finite is infinite and the infinite is finite. What has happened to the distinction? It is not being denied;
to do that would be to affirm "the dark night in which all the cows are black." The distinction is being affirmed, but
as a dialectical distinction of dynamic relationship, where finite and infinite are only in the passage from one to the
other (WL I, p. 125). To say that the "I" is infinite or that God is finite is not to employ the prepositional "is,"
which could result only in contradiction; it is to affirm ''activity, vitality, and spirituality" of both the "I" and God
(VPR I, p. 192). Hegel will later say that the created world is the finitizing of the infinite (VPR II, p. 236); God
himself cannot create an infinite world. Here he says that the infinite divine activity of creation both posits (puts
into being) the world and lifts it to infinity in the human spirit (ibid.). In the present context religion is the lifting-
up in questionnot the finite activity of a finite subject, but the infinite activity of the infinite in the finite (VPR I, p.
198), the presence of the divine in the human, which, as we shall see later, is what "revelation," "lifting-up"
(Erhebung) means (VPR II, p. 220). The divine spirit present in human self-consciousness (ibid., p. 305) is the
very "eternity of spirit" (ibid., p. 330). Thus, to say that "infinite" is the "ideal quality of thought" is to say that
spirit which is characterized by thought is the only being of which it makes sense to say "infinite." Although it is
Hegel's contention that only with the ad-
12. This, of course, brings up the thorny question, which we shall have to deal with more fully in chapter 6.
Can the infinite (spirit) be without othering itself? Can the other of the othering be other than finite? Hegel
will answer with a distinction: Infinite Spirit must indeed other itself, but this othering is both infinite
(Trinity) and finite (creation).


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vent of Christianitythe "absolute" religionis God recognized as spirit and only spirit, he nevertheless sees even in
the most primitive "religion of nature" a passage beyond the finite natural object of worship to the infinite divine
object (VPR I, p. 308). This is, however vaguely, to see the being of the finite in the infinite, to rise to God as
more than an abstract infinity (the sort of infinity which the mind as mere "understanding" cannot but think of
despite its inability to resolve the contradiction it finds here) (ibid., pp. 31112).
As we have already seen in our discussion of Science of Logic, it is not enough to recognize infinity in human
spirit as overarching totality. If it is true to say that the characteristic of self-determination has the quality of
infinity (VPR II, p. 10), infinity must also be said of the individual human subject. This is what Hegel means when
he speaks here (ibid., p. 128) and, more than once, in Philosophy of Right (e.g., nos. 35, 39, 125, 218) of the
"infinite rights" of the human subject, that is, the subject which, by virtue of its own being, is the source of its own
rights; they are not assigned to it by another.13 It is for this reason, too, that he can speak of the Incarnation (of
God in a human individual) as the paradigm of "infinitizing" the individual (VPR II, p. 141). The infinity of God as
Trinity is the uniquely concrete infinite (ibid., pp. 22829), an identity in difference which is not merely abstract and
which only reason (not understanding) can comprehend (ibid., pp. 23031). This permits Hegel, in a manner
reminiscent of Plato's Phaedo, to speak of human "immortality" as a qualitative not quantitative (durational)
concept, the infinite quality of the soul (ibid., p. 303).
All that we have seen up to this point in Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion is clearly, in Hegel's mind, for the
most part only preparatory to what is philosophically the most important section in these lectures, namely section B
of part III ("Absolute Religion"), which bears the implausible and clumsy title, "The Metaphysical Concept of the
Idea of God" (Der metaphysische Begriff der Idee Gottes). If, however, we bear in mind that the term Begriff as
Hegel employs it need not always be translated "concept" and that the verb begreifen from which the noun is
derived contains the overtones of "comprehend,'' we might be more accurate in speaking of "comprehending
metaphysically the idea of God." What is involved in comprehending" is: (1) that only if reality is itself conceptual
can it be thought and, therefore known; (2) that "idea," abstractly defined, is the "unity of concept and reality"; (3)
that "knowing" reality is a passage from the abstract idea of reality to the concrete reality; and (4) that this passage
is the self-concretizing of the concept (ibid., p. 205). Applying this to God, then, the first step is the abstract idea
of God, what we mean when
13. The sort of thing described by Hegel in chapter VI of PdG under the heading "The Situation of Right"
(Rechtszustand), referring to the Roman Empire.


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we say "God." This, Hegel tells us, is the pure concept which "durch sich selbst" is real, which can only be the
"absolute Idea," that is, Spirit in the fullest possible sense (ibid.), the "being than which no greater can be
conceived" of Anselm. In this context the transition from the abstract idea to the concrete reality, without which
the idea itself is not even a possibility, is what Hegel calls the "proof'' that God is real. "Proof," however, will be
meaningless unless the finite human spirit is real, as both the manifestation of the divine spirit and the spirit to
which the divine spirit is manifested. The proof, then, of the reality of "absolute Spirit" is the reality of the human
spirit, and the concrete idea of spirit is the "unity of divine and human nature," paradigmatically in the divine-
human nature of God incarnate and consequently in the divinizing of the human spirit which knows (begreift)
infinite Spirit. If the attempt is made to express the truth of this divine-human unity in a proposition, what comes
out is only difference: "The divine is not the human"; "the human is not the divine." The "is" of the logical
proposition simply cannot express the movement, the process which is the essence of spirit. "Spirit, then, is the
living process wherein (dass) the abstract (an sich seiende) unity of the divine and human nature is concretized (für
sich und hervorgebracht werde)" (ibid.). The implications of the abstract idea are progressively explicated, that is,
seen to be concretely real, and this is what has been traditionally called the "ontological argument" for the reality
of God, wherein the necessary reality of infinite Spirit is seen in its very idea. In other "proofs," on the contrary,
the movement is from the factual reality of the finite to the necessity of infinite reality. True "comprehension"
demands both movements: without infinite reality there would be no finite; an infinite reality which did not issue in
finite reality would not itself be real (in any intelligible sense). Hegel's concern, of course, is to say "infinite" in an
intelligible sense of an absolute Being for whom issuing in finite reality is a "necessity."
In any event, Hegel sees both movements of thought as philosophically necessary: Finite spiritthe only spirit that
philosophizescannot comprehend its own finitude without moving on to infinity, nor can it comprehend infinity
except as issuing in finitude. The path between concept and reality is a two-way street: Finite spirit cannot
conceive itself without positing the reality of infinite Spirit, and infinite Spirit cannot conceive itself without
positing the reality of finite spirit (in a finite world). "Neither [concept nor being] must have merely the
determination of remaining simply a starting-point, a source (ein Ursprüngliches);14 each must rather manifest
14. The play on words is significant but untranslatable. The term Sprung is ordinarily translated as "leap" or
"jump." The prefix ur, which signifies "Original" gives Ursprung, which is translated as "origin" or
"source," but it can carry the connotation of a "springboard," which remains behind, when the leap is
madeprecisely the connotation Hegel wants to eliminate.


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itself as going over into the other, i.e., each must be as posited [by the other]" (ibid., p. 206). Nor has much been
gained by saying that concept passes to being, since to say being is to say nothing (cf. WL I, pp. 6667) except
"abstract self-identity" (VPR II, p. 206); abstract concept demands no more than abstract being (ibid., p. 207). What
is significant is the concrete relation of concept to being, and this is "the profoundest interest of reason" (ibid.). To
grasp this concrete relation is to resolve the opposition between self-identity and self-differentiation, the infinite in
the finite and the finite in the infinite. "The appearing (Erscheinung) of this opposition is a sign that subjectivity
has reached the acme of its being-for-self (concretion), has achieved the totality of knowing itself in itself as
infinite and absolute" (ibid.). To put it somewhat crudely, it takes an infinite to know the infinite. "Within itself
finite spirit has achieved this grasp of its own infinity" (ibid.). The gulf between finite spirit and the infinite Spirit
over against it, however, would seem to be impassable (if, of course, infinite Spirit is ''over-against" finite spirit).
Only if the finite subject can recognize its own infinity can it resolve the opposition, seeing the relation as not that
of finite to infinite but of infinite to infinite. Thus, the condition for the finite spirit's comprehending infinite Spirit
as infinite is to grasp itself as infinite, having the infinite capacity to posit the infinite, or knowing that there are no
limits to its capacity to posit. "Spirit is simply this, even (selbst) in the opposition to comprehend (erfassen) itself
infinitely" (ibid., p. 208).
We are back again with the ontological argument, which proves to be not an illegitimate inference from a finite
concept to an infinite reality, precisely because it is not an inference at all. The "argument," it is true, does begin
from the "concept" of God, but we shall appreciate its force only if we ask the question, "What, then, is the concept
of God?" (ibid.). To answer the question is obviously difficultsome would say impossiblebecause it requires putting
into language, whose function is to express abstract concepts, the most concrete of all realities. If one were to reply,
"God is infinite Being," "God is the supreme Being," or even, "God is all reality," one would fall into the trap of
abstraction, thus indicating that God is a being unique in his distinction from all other beings, but actually limited
by this very distinction from others. The point, then, is not to find a linguistic expression which will adequately
define God, but rather to use language in such a way that the concept emerges without being defined at all.15 The
concept is "the most real of concepts"; "its content has no limitations"; "it is all reality and only as reality is it
without limitation." "Being is reality which belongs to the concept of God" (ibid.). Has Hegel's language performed
the task he set for it? To answer this second question requires two steps. (1)
15. Which, interestingly enough, would seem to be the Platonic dialectic also.


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We must recall a statement we already saw from the Phenomenology, "Reason is all reality," where the "is" of the
proposition indicates neither attribution nor identification, but the process of becoming. The concept of God, then,
is ''all reality" both as the source of the becoming of all reality and in the sense that to conceive God is to conceive
the totality of reality. (2) We must conceive of God as the only reality in which there is absolute identity of concept
and being; the concept of God is absolute reality. This can make sense, however, only if it can somehow be said
that the reality of any real being is its concept, that is, that which constitutes the reality of the real. That Hegel
should have said this in the wake of Kant's shattering separation of all concept and all being is a testimony not only
of Hegel's boldness but also to his unshakable conviction that only as thought is being really real, that reality shares
with thought the latter's conceptual structure.
What all this comes down to is that when Hegel says (thinks) "concept" he does not mean what Kant means when
Kant says (thinks) "concept." For Kant, conceptany conceptis simply other than the being of which it is concept;
because it is what mind forms for itself in thinking (Vorstellung), it merely stands for (vorstellt) a reality it does
not, cannot, contain. Even when thought says "being," the being it says "is no reality . . . being is not a
determination proper to the content of thought; it is rather pure form" (ibid., pp. 208209). If we go this far with
Kant, we are compelled to go further; that which is not part of the content of a concept cannot be derived from the
content of the concept16from the concept of one hundred dollars there is simply no way of deriving the reality of
the hundred dollars, nor can the reality ever be grasped conceptually. Then comes Kant's lyric leap: The reality of
God, therefore, can simply not be grasped conceptually, no concept can contain that realityor, perhaps, only God
can grasp conceptually his own reality, all we can do is believe it, or postulate it for practial reasons. It is easy to
see why Kant had to reject Anselm's "ontological argument." According to Anselm there is only one way of
conceiving God, namely, as most perfect being. But, if the God as conceived is only a representation and not
reality, then the God conceived is not most perfect, that is, is not God. Therefore, the God who is conceived is (or
else the conceiving does not conceive God). Hegel, too, is not quite happy with the form Anselm's argument takes,
that is, the formal-logical employment of concepts by a subject in order to come up with a conclusion. Hegel
would agree that the human subject does not prove the existence of God, but that rather, the concept of God proves
its own reality. But that is not Kant's objection. Hegel agrees with Anselm that to conceive of the most perfect
being is to conceive of the most perfect being as existing (ibid., p. 209). He also
16. This is the sort of thinking which characterizes formal logic (scientific "understanding"), where the
conclusion of argumentation is contained in the premises and permits no movement beyond the premisses.


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contends that nowhere does Kant prove "the difference between concept and being" (ibid., p. 210). What Kant fails
to see, Hegel thinks, is that, where the being in question is infinite being, the difference of being and concept does
not preclude the identity of being and concept. Where the propositional "is" signifies only identity, the concept of
God is not the reality of God. Where "is," however, says "bespeaks," the concept of God is the reality of God; the
concept itself is a possibility only if God is. The task Hegel sets himself, then, is that of transcending the difference
between concept and being, recognizing at the same time the risk of ending up with empty words, which is what
transcending by believing without knowing does (ibid.). ''Thus, what is to be demonstrated is that the determination
of being is contained in the concept; this, then, is the unity of concept and being" (ibid.). In this unity, however,
the difference of concept and being (they are not synonymous) is to be both preserved and reconciled, which they
are when the concept is seen as the movement of reconciliation, its self-objectification (ibid., p. 211).
The Necessary Connection of Thinking and the Reality of God

The problem, of course, is that the reconciliation, if it takes place only in the mind of the finite thinking subject (a
Vorstellung), gets nowhere. It is true that the concrete concept of "the most perfect" says "being," but if it is a mere
concept, without further determination, it says nothing, nor does the mere presupposition that concept and reality
are united in idea say anything more (ibid.). What is all comes down to is getting rid of the Kantian error of seeing
the concept as having no reality but that which our finite minds give it (ibid., p. 212); the error, which Kant
inherited from Locke and Hume, of considering as concrete only that which can be empirically grasped (ibid.).
That which pure (not empirical) thought alone can grasp is more truly concrete, but pure thought is not the activity
of the isolated human subject (ibid.). What "metaphysical" meant in the title of the section, then, was a grasp of
reality which has as its foundation, not an empirical reality from which the idea of God is derived, but rather the
idea of God which is the source of empirical reality (ibid., p. 213). The process, then, is one in which human
thinking, recognizing that its validation can be guaranteed only by infinite thought, to which it cannot but rise if it
is true to itself as thinking, progressively makes its own ("appropriates") what on inferior levels of conciousness it
merely "represents."17 In this sense all authentic thinking "proves" the reality of God. The "infinite object," God, is
the reality short of which human thinking cannot stop, if it is to be truly thinking and not simply opining. "It is the
work of 'proofs' for God's
17. For a more extended development of this, see Lauer, Essays in Hegelian Dialectic, p. 98.


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existence to carry on the march from finitude to infinity, which is a way of describing the movement of thought
from the abstract to the concrete: 'The abstract is finite; the concrete is truth, the infinite object'" (ibid., p. 226).18
What human thinking must be able to recognizewhich it cannot, so long as the objects it thinks are only objects of
senseis that the finite realities it thinks make sense only as objects of divine activity.19 The process of authentic
thinking, then, is summed up in the "ontological proof," which is the "passage from the essential non-being of that
which is merely finite to the essential infinity of being."20 "Infinite being," however, is "absolute truth," and
absolute truth is God,21 whose reality is to manifest himself to a thinking which is actively, infinitely receptive of
the manifestation.22 The finite spirit to which infinite Spirit reveals itself is only qualifiedly infinite, it is true, but
it is nevertheless an inexhaustible capacity which cannot be satisfied by other than infinite actuality.
All that we have seen so far regarding Hegel's thought on the concretely (actually) infinite Spirit which alone is
capable of satisfying the infinite craving of spirit, we can find masterfully summarized in the concluding section of
the Encyclopedia, entitled "Third Part of the Philosophy of Spirit: Absolute Spirit." It is perhaps the most
systematic treatment of the topic in all of Hegel's writings. "Absolute Spirit," for Hegel, is spirit which is only
spirit, endowed with all the predicates which are said of spiritinfinite, inexhaustible, self-conscious, self-
determining, self-contained, self-sufficientin no way susceptible of the limitations which accompany its finite
manifestations. It is the Spirit with which man has to do when he is operating at the highest peak of his spiritual
potential, in artistic creativity, religious exaltation, and philosophical speculation. It is in Spirit thus understood that
the concept of what it is to be spirit and the reality which is spirit are identicalidentified in knowledge of the
"absolute Idea," which is absolute Spirit wholly objectifiedto itself [EpW, no. 553). In one very important sense
religion has to be looked upon as the supreme human endeavor to have God, infinite Spirit, as its object, and in
this sense the believing which stretches out to God is not opposed to the knowing which seeks to conceive the very
same God, who dwells in the human spiritual community and thus makes possible both believing and knowing.
"Religion . . . is to be looked upon both as that which proceeds from the subject while remaining in the subject and
as that which proceeds objectively from the absolute Spirit, who is as Spirit in his community" (ibid., no. 554). In
this context artistic activity, both as creative and appreciative of the
18. See ibid., p. 129.
19. Ibid., p. 26.
20. Ibid., p. 127.
21. Ibid., p. 128.
22. Ibid., p. 132.


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supremely beautiful work of art, is at once a knowing and a believing whose ultimate object is self-revealing
absolute Spirit. Art is, it is true, first of all, an immediate grasp of a finite object, "the moment of finitude in art,"
but it is at the same time "the concrete contemplation (Anschauung) and presentation (Vorstellung) of the spirit
which as the ideal is in itself absolute Spirit." The work of art is, of course, finite, but "in it natural immediacy is
but a sign of the idea" (ibid., no. 556). Nor is this form of presentation adequate to the spirit it reveals: "it is not
absolute Spirit which enters into this consciousness" (ibid., no. 557). "Absolute Spirit cannot be made explicit in so
singular a manifestation; hence the spirit proper to fine art is a spirit limited to a particular people (ein
beschränkter Volksgeist)'' (ibid., no. 559). Because the work of art is the arbitrary product of this or that artist, the
artist is "the master of the god" (ibid., no. 560)and the art-work no more than a reminder of the true God. Art, then,
is not enough; its product is not adequate to the self-manifestation of Spirit; and an art such as this is a need only
of an inadequate religion. "With regard to the close connection between art and religion a more profound
observation should be made, namely, that fine art can belong only to those religions in which the principle is
concrete, interiorly liberated spirituality, which is not yet, however, absolute spirituality" (ibid., no. 562).23 The
true God cannot be manifested sensibly at all, neither in the beautiful nor in the nonbeautiful object of sense, but
only in thought, "the element in which alone pure spirit is . . . for spirit" (ibid.).
The religion of art, then, must give way to the religion of revelation, wherein absolute Spirit makes itself known to
finite spirit without the interposition of a sensible manifestation. The contact is strictly on the spiritual level, the
level of self-acting intelligence, "in such a way that the content of the idea has as its principle the determination of
free intelligence and is as absolute Spirit for spirit" (ibid., no. 563); spirit speaks to spirit. The point is that God
makes himself known to the human spirit; there can be no question of mere "feeling" or of a believing in a we-
know-not-what; a revelation which is not revelation to thinking spirit simply makes no sense. "Spirit is spirit only
to the extent that it is for spirit, and in absolute religion it is absolute Spirit which manifests no longer abstract
moments of itself but its very self" (ibid, no. 564); revelation cannot mean less than that. If God does not make
himself known to man, then in truth he is, as Plato and Aristotle had said, a jealous God, keeping himself to
himself, which, to say the least, is not very spiritual! "If, however, the word spirit is supposed to have a
thoroughgoing meaning, then spirit involves the revelation of itself" (ibid.). This means that God's self-revelation
demands the activity of
23. This should put an end to the complaints of those who object that Hegel's system spells the end of fine
art. Only religion's need of art to express its own truth is ended, precisely because art, however sublime, is
not adequate to what is to be expressed.


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speculative thinking, if it is to be received as revelation, not as empty words. "To grasp correctly and determinately
in thought what God as spirit is demands profound speculation. To say that God is spirit involves at the very least
the following propositions: God is God only insofar as he knows himself; further, his knowledge of himself is his
self-consciousness in man; and that is man's knowledge of God, which proceeds to man's self-knowledge in God"
(ibid.). It is all there: to know self and not to know that knowing self involves knowing God is not to know self;
self-knowing is itself infinite knowing.
It might seem strange to some that at this point, in speaking of man's religious relationship to God, Hegel should
choose to explicate what he has to say in terms of the threefold syllogism, of the universal, of the particular, of the
individual. If, however, we remember that, for Hegel, to say that God is spirit is to say that God is trinity of persons
and that the movement of trinitarian life involves (1) God in himself (universal), (2) the emergence of the reality
which is this world in creation (particular), and (3) the divinizing of one man in the Incarnation (individual), all
issuing in the dialectical identification of infinite Spirit and infinitized finite spirit, it may seem somewhat less
strange. It may be that Hegel is dealing here with purely religious-theological truth, but he cannot be too far wrong
in saying that only speculative thinking can come to grips with such truth at allif indeed, man is, as Hegel is
convinced he is, to come to grips with the truth that is God. We must remember, too, that in an Encyclopedia of
Philosophical Sciences, Hegel is less concerned with religious consciousness itself than he is with a philosophical
comprehension of religion, the model of which comprehension is the logic of speculative thought.
When, therefore, Hegel speaks of God conceived first of all as "creator of heaven and earth," we can catch
unmistakable echoes of "the presentation of God as he is in his eternal essence before the creation of the world"
(WL I, p. 31). Here, however, he adds the theological notion of God (Father) who in his infinite identity with
himself generates a Son who is at once different from and identical with himself, the model of spiritual
''conceiving," in that spirit in knowing conceives itself. "In this eternal sphere, however, [God] generates only
himself as his Son and at the same time remains in primordial identity with this differentiated one, who is
characterized as being he who is distinguished from the universal essence, eternally transcending himself and by
virtue of this mediation is essentially the first substance as concrete singularity and subjectivitywhich is what Spirit
is" (EpW, no. 567). To comprehend God, however, as at once generating the distinct Son and remaining identical
with that Son is to grasp also the movement of creation of a reality distinct and not yet identified with himself. "His
movement is the creation of the appearing (Erscheinung), the sundering of the eternal moment of mediation, his
only Son, into the independent


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oppositon of, on one hand, heaven and earth, i.e., of elemental, concrete nature, and, on the other, of spirit as
standing in relation to nature, i.e., finite spirit which as the extreme of negativity contained within itself signalizes
(verselbständigt) itself as evil" (ibid., no. 568). "Evil" is to be understood here in the sense of what Hegel takes to
be metaphorical "original sin," spirit's declaration of independence from nature, which is spirit's loss of
innocence.24 Hegel understands this movement under the heading of ''particularity." Taking up the theme of "evil"
in finite spirit's declaration of independence, he then sees the canceling of this evil through the Son's (as both
distinct from and identical with the Father) taking upon himself sensible temporal existence, without ceasing to be
infinite subjectivity identical with the divine self. Herein Hegel finds the reconciliation of universality and
particularity in the individuality of the God-man, model of the union of divine and human spirit, "the idea of the
eternal yet living Spirit present in the world" (ibid., no. 569). Whether or not one likes this "logicizing" of
Christian revelation, it is not difficult to understand Hegel's contention that philosophy as philosophy could not be
complete prior to Christian revelation.25 Nor is it difficult to see how the movement of thought Hegel describes is
not that of any individual thinker, not even of the sum total of individual thinkers; it is the movement of thought
transcending all finite thinking. Revelation itself, then, is syllogistic, explicating the self-othering and the return to
self of divine infinite Spirit.
These three syllogisms, which constitute the one syllogism of the absolute mediation of Spirit with itself,
are Spirit's self-revelation, which explicate its life in the movement (Kreislauf) of concrete representational
forms. Out of their dispersal, their temporal and external succession, the unfolding of the mediation resolves
itself in its result, in the reconciliation (Zusammenschliessen) of Spirit with itself, not only into the
simplicity of faith and emotional devotion but also into thinking, in whose immanent simplicity likewise the
unfolding expands, but consciously as an inseparable collecting of the universal, simple, and eternal Spirit
into itself. In this form of truth the truth is the subject-matter of philosophy. [Ibid., no. 571]
It is for philosophy now to think out the implications of revealed truth, to think the infinite thought of God.
Although, as we have seen, the content of fine art in the service of religion is absolute Spirit, both veiled and
revealed, so to speak, in the sensible imagery of the art work, neither the artist who creates nor the devotee who
contemplates is adequately conscious of just what this content is, because only in concept is adequate
consciousness possible. Only in concept is the necessity of the content known, and only as
24. See chapter 7, "Philosophy and Theology."
25. The theme of chapter VII, section C, "The Religion of Revelation," in PdG.


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necessary is the content known for what it is, absolute Spirit. By the same token, religion itselfwhich goes beyond
art-in-the-service-of-religionalthough it grasps more profoundly its own self-revealing content, is not up to
comprehending it, because the emotional element in religion still needs a form of objectivity which has not been
liberated from the imagination, which throws over the content a cloak of sensibility, what Hegel calls
"representation" (Vorstellung). This is the work of spirit, it is true, but of spirit functioning as understanding, which
abstracts from sensible conditions without both cutting its ties with those sensible conditions and penetrating
thoroughly to the reality they both embody and veil. As Hegel sees it, then, the task of comprehending the content
of both art and religion devolves on philosophical knowing in the fullest sense of that term, that is, Wissenschaft.
"Hence, this knowing is the concept of art and religion as recognized (erkannt) in thinking, the concept in which
what is diverse in the content is recognized as necessary, and the necessary is recognized as free [self-
determining]" (ibid., no. 572). The necessity of the concept is free in the sense that it is rationally self-determined.
Thus rational thought is the only form adequate to a content which is necessary with the necessity of absoluteness,
and this is where philosophy must step in. "This movement which is philosophy, is already complete, because at
the end it grasps its own concept, i.e., simply looks back on its knowing (ibid., no. 573). It is true, of course, that
religious faith, too, grasps the truth of the concept and that it does so because the divine Spirit in man bears witness
to the truth, but only philosophy is ''comprehending reason." What is more, the content of philosophical reason is
"speculative and, hence, religious." Still, it is rational in a way that religion is not, and only the human spirit at
peak performance, that is, as rational, can come to terms with the spirit within it "witnessing to" the truth (ibid.).
At this point, however, there arises a difficulty, which I need not go into at length since I shall do so in chapter 6,
"Hegel's Pantheism." The difficulty comes from the contention that any philosophical knowledge of God is bound
to be pantheistic, precisely because it cannot preserve the distinction between the knower and the known, thus
blurring both the line which separates the divine from the human spirit and the line which separates the infinite
Spirit, which the human claims to know, from the finite world, the knowing of which is not adequately
distinguished from the knowing of God. If philosophy seeks to assign a precise meaning to "infinite reality," which
religion need not do, the expression would seem at the very least to signify the "totality of reality," which would, it
is claimed, identify God with the sum total of finite reality. The objection, Hegel tells us, comes from "this new
theology which has turned religion into a subjective feeling and has denied any knowledge of God's nature. In so
doing it has diluted, emptied out, its God" (ibid.). Philosophically the difficulty stems from a


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failure to distinguish, when speaking of the world, between a unity of total interrelatedness and the unity of a
numerical onethe mathematicizing tendency of contemporary thought. What, after all, has been said, if the world is
said to be numerically one?which, Hegel tells us, is precisely what philosophy does not say. This can be said, he
further states, only at the price of ignoring the innumerable multiplicity of determinations which characterize this
one world. Philosophy, on the other hand, finds the model of totality in the spiritual unity of conceptual thought,
according to which only in thinking the infinite unity of divine Spirit is it possible to conceive the unity of the
world. "Because philosophy, it is true, has to do with unity as such and not with abstract unity, the unity of mere
identity, the empty absolute, but with concrete unity (the concept)and in its entire course has to do only with
thisbecause of this every stage of [philosophy's] progress is a special determination of this concrete unity, and the
most profound and ultimate of the determinations of unity is that of absolute Spirit" (ibid). In this context faith as
human spiritual activity cannot be simply divorced from conceptual knowing. As thus divorced "faith . . . means no
more than not proceeding to a definite notion (Vorstellung), refusing to enter more fully into its own content"
(ibid.). Does such a "faith," for example, know what it is talking about when it speaks of God's ''omnipresence" in
a sensible reality to which it accords independent substantial being? Philosophy, on the contrary, does not make
that mistake: "The esoteric consideration of God and of identity, like the consideration of knowledge and of
concepts, is philosophy itself" (ibid.).
As if he wants, so to speak, to heap coals of fire on the heads of his adversaries, Hegel goes on to say, "philosophy
is . . . the logical, in the sense that it is universality maintained (bewahrte) in the concrete content as in its
actuality" (ibid., no. 574).26 Reality as we know it is the actualization of concrete universality, which only concept,
in the full sense, can comprehend (Begriff is the "comprehension"). Once more Hegel's language is that of the
syllogism, two extremes united in a middle term. "The syllogism, whose foundation and point of departure is the
logical and whose middle is nature uniting spirit with the logical, constitutes the first appearing. The logical
becomes nature, and nature becomes spirit" (ibid., no. 575). Nature as we know it is an embodiment of reason (das
Logische), and in being known nature is spiritualized (universalized, infinitized). There is, then, a second
syllogism, in which nature is presupposedas to-be-knownand spirit is the middle which rationalizes nature (unites it
with the logical) (ibid., no. 576). Finally, there is a third syllogism, in which reason (das Logische) serves as the
middle uniting nature and spirit, in such a way that spirit can justifiably find its own true reality in considering
nature and find what the
26. Note the play on wahr in bewahrte.


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reality of nature truly is in considering itself, its own spiritual activity. This third syllogism has as its middle self-
knowing reason, the absolutely universal. This middle splits itself into spirit and nature: "making spirit its
presupposition, as the progress of the subjective activity of the idea; making nature into the universal extreme, as
the progress of the idea which is objectively in itself" (ibid., no. 577). Philosophy has come around full circle: It
unites concept (subject) and idea (object), spirit (reason) and nature (rational), infinite Spirit (God) and finite spirit
(man), in the all-encompassing activity of absolute knowing (activity without passivity), which has as its object the
totality of realitya reality which is and is not distinct from the knowing of it. The divine self-knowing which is the
knowledge of all reality becomes the human knowledge of reality. Man knows himself in knowing God; man knows
in knowing himself; man knows at all only in knowing God.


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Chapter Five
"Proofs" of God
When human beings reflect on what it is to be humanand we have no evidence that any other beings among those
we experience possess this power of reflection on the meaning of their own beingthe profoundest mystery that
confronts them is that, as human, they have the capacity to think, to ask questions and to come up with answers to
those questions. Whether or not that same reflection can reveal that the answers to those questions are
correctwhich, rather crudely, is what we mean by "knowing"may well be another question, which belongs to a
later, more sophisticated stage of human reflection. All the evidence of human history, no matter how far back that
may go, points to the fact that the survival of the human race has been due to man's capacity to think, and to think
successfullyif not correctly. Man has been able to survive, despite the fact that his predators have been physically
far more powerful than he; he has been able to subdue nature despite its recalcitrance; he has been able through
thought to produce what was necessary to survival, and to a more and more enjoyable survival; he has been able to
leave in his world marks of his presence which long outlive him; he has been able to seek and find explanations of
why things are the way they are, no matter how fanciful subsequent reflection may have proved those explanations
to be.
It may also be true to say that man's capacity to give a "rational" explanation of the reality he could not but
experience was very late in coming and still belongs to only a miniscule fraction of developing humanity. It is still
significant that human "rationality" has enabled man not only to survive but also to progress, and that man has
progressively turned the light of reason on more and more facets of his experience in order to find there more and
more satisfactory explanations. If we confine our attention to "Western" man, we can say that his capacity to act
rationally far antedated his capacity to explain rationally either why he so acted or why his world


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submitted to his power of acting rationally. For we know not how long, all the explanation man needed would
seem to have been mythical, even though the devices he employed for doing what needed to be done were
superbly rational. The time came, however, when man felt the need to reflect rationally even on his myths, which
ineluctably led him, by slow stages indeed, to reflect on his own rationality. There can be no question that, no
matter how far back we are able to go in tracing the history of man, we witness extraordinary marvels of human
ingenuityeven during that long period of time when the capacity to perform those marvels was explained
mythically. Western philosophizing, it is said, began with an attempt to explain rationally rather than mythically
the world in which man lives, and so the first myths to go were the cosmogonic. As primitive as they may seem,
the attempts of the early Greek philosophers to explain the cosmos on the basis of material principles or, more
sophisticatedly, by adding to these material components quasi-psychological principles, such as the nonV * of
Anaxagoras or the logoV* of Heraclitus, nevertheless marked a triumph of human rationality. By the same token,
when the "atomists" sought to explain human subjective activity on the basis of similar material principles, the
search for rational explanation went beyond the world to man himself. With the Sophists man became a much more
complex phenomenon, whose responsibility for his thinking, willing, and acting could not be reduced to material
principles. This movement toward a rational explanation of man was carried to its ancient highpoint by Socrates,
Plato, and Aristotle, who inevitably turned the light of reason not only on man but also on the gods. The relation to
the gods was still one of belief, but philosophy turned itself in the direction of giving reasons for beliefeven to
"proving" the very reality of the divine.
It is not without significance that philosophy, which, with the advent of Christianity, was able to attribute supreme
value to the human individual, whom, the Christians' faith told them, God loved and willed to be saved, had to wait
until the philosophico-theological flowering of the Christian Middle Ages, before it could set out on a quest for
rational "proofs" for the "existence" of God himself. It is not really strange that an age in which, perhaps, Christian
faith was at its strongest could turn the light of reason to the question of God, thus seeking to penetrate rationally
what man already believed. That it could do so was based on a double confidence: (1) in the rationality of man,
whose religious experience was no obstacle to the adventure of thought; and (2) in the reality of God, who the
Christian philosopher had no fear would be explained away, if the light of reason was turned on the content of the
Christian faith experience. The Medieval philosopher by no means doubted the reality of God, nor did he feel that
the "existence" of God had to be "proved" in any ''scientific" sense of the term. He was convinced, however, that
man would be shirking his rational calling if he did


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not demand that reason be applied to an antecedent religious conviction. That application of reason, nevertheless,
was also colored by the antecedent religious conviction. If human reason was to claim the right to reflect on the
whole of experience, then it had to be a reason adequate to the whole of experienceincluding the faith experience.
If mystery persisted, that was no obstacle to the rational quest; it was rational to expect that mystery would persist.
It was not until philosophers began the attempt to rationalize reason itself that the real trouble started. When
Descartes turned the attention of philosophers not only to the thinking subject as the one who thinks and is thus
related to the reality thought but also to the thinking wherein resides the ideal being of that which is thought, he did
something which needed to be done; the focus on ideality was necessary. At the same time, however, he raised a
problem which neither he nor those who followed him could solve: how to bridge the gap between the subjectivity
of thinking and the objectivity of that which was thought. He himself sought to guarantee the ultimate objectivity
of ideas by an appeal to the veracitas Dei, which in turn demanded that he prove the existence of the Guarantor (at
best a ticklish proposal). In their own individual ways, Malebranche, Spinoza, and Leibniz attempted to do the
same, but they failed because the God who was to do the guaranteeing turned out to be just too remote from the
thinking which was to be guaranteed. Across the channel Locke, Berkeley, and Hume, who, for reasons different
from those of Descartes, stressed the subjectivity of thinking, were also unable to solve the problem, with the result
that their empiricism quite logically ended up in the skepticism of Hume; not even God, whose activity was taken
to be causative, could enable human thinking to bridge the gap, since the very knowledge of causation had turned
out to be problematic. Back on the continent again, Enlightenment rationalism solved the problem by fiat: All that
was needed was to rely on reason, and all that was required to guarantee reason was to guarantee that thinking was
not influenced by tradition, custom, or authoritynot even the authority of God. The breakthrough came with Kant,
whose roots were in the Enlightenment but whose attitude was not nearly so negative. Reason could guarantee
itself, because by examining itself it could not only set down the conditions for its functioning as reason but could
also see to it that it observed those conditions. The only trouble was that, because Kant saw thinking as a purely
subjective function whose only guarantee of objectivity was the necessity and universality of its functioning, it had
to be given a content from outside itself, which left the reality of that content still in doubt (or, perhaps, it left in
doubt just what "reality" could mean). Sense experience could give a phenomenal content; practical reason could
give a moral content; and faith could give a noumenal content which reason could only postulate. In addition, Kant
compounded the difficulty by making God, who might have been


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appealed to as a Guarantor, not a content of human rational thought at all. There was simply no way for rational
thinking, which is essentially finite, to come to grips with the Infinite, who is God. The human mind couldand had
tothink of God as an "ideal," but could find in itself no resources to affirm that the ideal is real. Fichte and
Schelling, although they recognized the enormity of the dualistic dilemma bequeathed to them by Kant, were no
more successful than he in solving it.
It is all the more remarkable, then, that Hegel, following in the wake of Kant's demolition of all "proofs" for the
reality of God, should have insisted not only that human reason can "prove" the reality of God but that human
reason is the "proof" of that reality. To say that, however, is to anticipate what is to come. For the present suffice it
to say that Hegel is not concerned with proving the "existence" of God, that is, that God exists; he is concerned
rather to show that the "infinite being,'' which logic sees to be a rational necessity, coincides with the "God" in
whom faith believes, and that faith is in fact "blind," if reason cannot come to its aid and tell it what this God is in
whom it believes. Faith, if it is to be an authentically human endeavor, must seek illumination through reason, fides
quaerens intellectum, but its existential conviction that God is real need not wait for "proofs" in order to be
effective, no more, Hegel tells us, than eating must wait for a knowledge of chemistry, or digestion for a
knowledge of anatomy and physiology (EpW, no. 35). When Hegel speaks of "proof" (Beweis) he does not speak
of "existence" (Existenz) at all; the term he uses is Dasein, which is strictly speaking untranslatable but which
signifies the being proper to concrete reality. Existenz, on the other hand, properly signifies "external
manifestation," which, rather than needing to be proved, is itself the "proving" (EpW, no. 123, Zusatz). God
manifests himself to faithspecifically "Christian" faith (PdG, pp. 52331, 54445; VPR II, pp. 203204)and God
manifests himself to reason, precisely because that faith is not "blind." It is one and the same God who manifests
himself to both, and the process of self-manifestation is one and the same continuous process. Thus, to "prove" the
reality of God is to ascend in thought the existential pathway of acceptance which has preceded philosophical
thought. It is also to show that rational thought has the capacity to ascend that pathway. All of this is but another
way of describing the movement of Hegel's Science of Logic, the march of the concept toward objectivity (WL II,
p. 354). The question, then, is not whether God "exists," but what does God "do" in making his reality available to
human reason. Nor is there question of man's employing thought in order to prove God's reality; rather God
manifests himself to man in and through thought.


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Critique of Kant
There is, perhaps, no better way of appreciating what Hegel is saying than by consulting his critique of Kant's
insistence that of itself human reason cannot attain to the infinite being of God. Since in another place I have
already analyzed this critique in detail,1 I shall here confine myself to a summary of the principal points Hegel
makes. As is well known, Kant had in his Critique of Pure Reason assailed all proofs of God's reality on the
grounds that any attempt whatever so to prove God's reality involved an illegitimate leap from the content of a
purely subjective mental act of thinking (no matter how adequately universalized) to the affirmation that the object
of that thinking is a "reality" outside the mind (the so-called "ontological argument"). In one sense Kant is quite
correct in thus assailing "proofs": If human thinking is a purely subjective activity, then the only objectivity of
which it can boast is the objectivity of a mental content, which no amount of subjective manipulation of arguments
can turn into a reality. What Hegel challenges, then, is not the legitimacy of Kant's conclusion but rather the
legitimacy of the initial assumption that thought is nothing but the finite activity of a finite thinking subject and that
therefore knowing God exceeds the human mind's capacity to know. This does not mean, however, that he is
criticizing Kant for arguing from principles which are not Hegel's own; his claim, rather, is that Kant failed to see
the implications of his own ''Copernican Revolution," with its insistence on the autonomy of reason, which, Hegel
claims, could not be autonomous, if all it is is the subjective activity of a finite subject. The principle of "idealism"
Hegel had said in the Phenomenology is that "reason is consciousness' certainty of being all reality" (PdG, pp. 176,
178). "Certainty," however, is not enough, it is no more than the subjective conviction, nourished by one scientific
triumph after the other since the Renaissance, that reason needs no help from outside in appropriating whatever is
real. That "certainty" will become "truth" only when reason sees how it is all reality, and this will require the
tortuous meanderings of reason coming to an awareness of what it is to be reason, of reason realizing itself as
"spirit," of reason coming to grips with "absolute Spirit" in religion, of reason realizing itself as absolute in
"absolute knowing." But none of this will make sense without ultimately a dialectical identification of finite and
infinite reason; and it is precisely this identification that Hegel sees reason making: "There is but one reason. There
is no second supra-human reason. Reason is the divine in man" (EGP, p. 123). Only because this last is true, is it
true to say that reason is "autonomous." If Kant does not say this he is equivalently contradicting
1. Quentin Lauer, S.J., "Hegel's Critique of Kant's Theology," in Essays in Hegelian Dialectic (New York:
Fordham University Press, 1977), pp. 13157.


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himself and saying that reason is not autonomous. The "mere reason," within whose "limits" Kant had confined the
philosophical discussion of religion, was not in fact "autonomous," because (among other reasons) the "reality" of
religion's object, God, escaped it. If human thinking is to affirm the truth of this reality, it must do so as "faith,'' not
as "reason."
The Hegelian philosophy radicalizes not only the Kantian autonomous reason. It radicalizes as well the
Kantian and post-Kantian search for an existential matrix of philosophical thought. And in this process it is
driven into a unique philosophical confrontation with historical Christianity.2
As Hegel sees it, then, Kant has failed to distinguish adequately between understanding" (Verstand), with its
abstract and therefore necessarily finite categories, and "reason" (Vernunft), with its concrete and therefore infinite
scope.3 As no more than the "certainty of being all reality," Kant's "reason" is little more than a glorified
"understanding," for which "reality" itself is but an abstract category and "all reality" but an abstract cumulative
ideal. There can be only one concrete "all reality," and that is the "Absolute"; the "absolute Spirit" of
Phenomenology, chapters VII and VIII and the preface; the "absolute Idea" of the last chapter of Science of Logic;
"God as he is in his eternal essence, before the creation of nature or of a single finite spirit" of the introduction to
the same Logic; the "Concept" as the unique "concrete universal" unifying the whole of the Hegelian "system."
Kant had had, it is true, the merit of recognizing that, if knowledge is to be truly knowledge and not merely the
presence to a subject of a chaotic manifold of formless content, it must be conceptual. He had also seen that the
essential unifying force of the concept is "the originally-synthetic unity of apperception, as the unity of the I-think,
or of self-consciousness" (WL II, p. 221), which means that in conceiving an object the subject makes the object
its own in such a way that in knowing the object the subject knows the concept as its own and thus knows its own
self (ibid., p. 222). Because, however, the only concept Kant knew was the purely formal concept, a sort of
intellectual form which at once raised the manifold to unity and universalized it (ibid., p. 224), he was faced with a
concept which was of itself empty, containing no reality (ibid., p. 225). Out of such a concept, quite obviously, "no
amount of effort can hammer reality" (ibid., p. 223). Thus, the content of the only concept there is is not real, and
the only kind of reality there is is not conceptual. Strictly speaking, then, there is no
2. E. Fackenheim, The Religious Dimension in Hegel's Thought, (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
1967), p. 228 (emphasis deleted).
3. Understanding, so to speak, immobilizes what is essentially finite objectivity and then analyses it with the
aid of static categories; while reason permits the infinite process of the concrete to unfold.


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knowledge of reality, only a knowledge of the "experience" of reality or of reality's "appearing," and reality
"appears" only to the senses, the only direct contact the human subject has with what is not itself. What experience
does, then, is to trigger, so to speak, a process of concept-formation which has its own sort of objective validity but
which does not reproduce reality, nor does it afford the mind a way of guaranteeing that what it thinks is the way it
thinks it. Quite obviously a thinking such as this cannot think God, but one is entitled to ask whether a thinking
such as this is thinking. Hegel thinks it is not. What Kant has done, he asserts, is to substitute the "formal"
character of concepts of understanding for the ''concrete" character of concepts of reason (ibid., pp. 22728). If
concepts are separated from reality there seems little justification for asserting that sense-intuitions are not
separated from reality, since it is only thought that tells us they are not.4
As Hegel sees it, then, the rational knowledge of which Kant speaks is simply not rational, precisely because to
exclude reality from it is to exclude rationality (ibid., pp. 23132). It is not enough that reason be autonomous in its
formal function of unifying the concepts of understanding, which in turn depend for their content on the manifold
of sense; reason must be autonomous in regard to the content which it justifiably gives to itself, which it will not
be if all it is is a subjective funciton of the human mind, dependent on the receptivity of sense for a content. On the
other hand, Hegel says, Kant did have, in his notion of "the a-priori synthesis of the concept," a principle which
could have enabled him to bridge the gap between thought and reality, "but sensible matter, the manifold of
intuition, was for him too powerful to permit him to go beyond it to a consideration of the concept and the
categories in and for themselves and [thus] to a speculative philosophizing" (ibid., p. 233). Had Kant, faithful to his
own principles, gone this far, philosophical knowledge of God would not have remained closed to him.
What begins, then, as a critique of Kant's epistemology and of his antimetaphysical bias, turns into an attack on his
antitheological argumentation. We can recall that Kant refers to a concept of God as the ens realissimum, the
reality of all realities, a concept the objective being of whose referent human reason simply cannot affirm (WL I, p.
99; II, p. 61). The concept of God, then, is for Kant no more than a limit-concept. It is for this reason that Hegel,
not only in Science of Logic but also and even more caustically in the third volume of his Lectures on the History
of Philosophy, concentrates on Kant's inability to see any rational validity in "proofs for God's existence." Hegel is
convinced that Kant's drastic separation of faith
4. Fichte, of course, had seen this already, but the conclusion he draws with regard to ultimate reality is
scarcely less (rationally) skeptical than Kant's.


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and knowledge ("I had to suspend knowledge in order to make room for faith"5) was not only illegitimate but also
prejudicial to the very possibility of genuine philosophy. Thus, although Hegel applauded Kant's desire to make
rational sense of religion, he could not pay Kant's price of impoverishing that rational sense by confining the
philosophical account of religion to an investigation of the response to a God whom reason could not know. What
this criticism comes down to is Hegel's insistence that reason in the concrete is identical with spirit and that "spirit"
makes sense only if there is "absolute Spirit," the knowing of which is, precisely, the infinitizing of finite spirit
(EGP, p. 178). To say, then, that human reason cannot "know" God is to set unwarranted limits to spirit (ibid., p.
179).
It is not surprising, then, that when in his Lectures on the History of Philosophy Hegel turns to a criticism of Kant
he focuses on the limited character of the reason of which the latter speaks; on its inadequacy precisely as reason, if
it cannot ascend to a knowledge of God by breaking out of the confinement of individual subjectivity (VGP III, p.
333). Having put an end to the "dogmatism" of a causal metaphysics, Kantian philosophy turns out to be equally
dogmatic in its insistence on the supremacy of the finite determinations of understanding (ibid.). A reason whose
content does not exceed that of understandingin Kant's own words, "the faculty of thinking the object of sensory
intuition"6 (ibid., p. 343)says Hegel, is not reason at all; it is no more than "individual self-consciousness" (ibid., p.
349). The trouble is that, even though Kant speaks of reason as the "faculty of the unconditioned," the infinite, he
insists that the infinite is an "ideal,'' as opposed to a "real," content of reason (ibid., pp. 35152). To speak of reason
thus, says Hegel, is to make individual reason represent the totality of reason, but such a reason is only the abstract
expression of concrete spirit: "Spirit and reason are the same. We do, it is true, represent reason to ourselves
abstractly; but active, knowing reason is spirit" (EGP, p. 175).
In relation to this Hegel launches into a critique of Kant's treatment of the very notion of "proofs" for the reality of
God (VGP III, pp. 35253, 35565), something he will go into more in detail later in his Lectures on the Proofs of
God's Reality. Kant admits that God is an "ideal," that is, that which, if it were real, would satisfy the Wolffian
definition of "the most real being." Kant, however, denies that reason can be justified in ascribing reality to this
ideal. The basis of this denial is the contention that any attempt to ascribe reality to the ideal (to "prove" it)
involves an illegitimate passage from concept to reality, since reality is not a conceptual content at all and cannot,
therefore, be derived from the concept (ibid., pp. 35961). This, as Hegel sees it, is tantamount to saying that the
only concept there is
5. Kant, KrV B, p. xxx.
6. Kant, KpV A, p. 51.


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is the finite concept of finite understanding, out of which reality cannot be "hammered" (ibid., p. 360). What Kant
has done is to opt for an identification of "representation" (Vorstellung), which understanding forms to itself in
thinking, and "concept" (Begriff), which is reason's ''comprehension" (begreifen) of the real. Here Hegel becomes
sarcastic about Kant's example of the "hundred possible Talers," the concept of which cannot contain their reality.
Of course not, says Hegel, no amout of thinking is going to make them real; if one wants them to be real one had
better stop thinking and get to work! But authentic "thinking" (denken) is not to be confused with merely
"representing" (vorstellen). Precisely as "represented" the object of thinking is not realthat is why representation is
inadequate. Thinking in the fullest sense, on the other hand, grasps (begreifen) its object in its reality, and concept
(Begriff) is the grasping (ibid., pp. 36162). In "proofs" of God, then, there is no question of ascribing a
nonconceptual content to the concept; the real is the content of the conceptotherwise "objectivity" is mere
emptiness (ibid., p. 362). Kant's reason has no content at all; it is "no more than the formal unity for the methodical
systematization of understanding's cognition" (ibid., p. 363). Granted that, when subject and object, thought and
reality are separated in this way they cannot be put together again (ibid.), there is no justification for saying that
thinking God is this kind of thinking.
Despite Hegel's manifest debt to Kant in his own thinking, and despite his clear acknowledgment of that debt, he is
more critical of Kant than he is of any other major thinker. The main reason for this would seem to be that Kant,
having constructed a philosophy, a main position of which is precisely the unknowability of God, has had a far
more destructive than constructive influence on the ideal of philosophizing as Hegel sees it. It is interesting in this
connection that Hegel has little or nothing to say directly regarding explicitly atheistic philosophiesunless, of
course, one wants to consider Enlightenment "rationalism" as explicitly atheistic. In any event, Hegel does return
again and again to his criticism of Kantand Kantian philosophynowhere more in detail than in his Lectures on
Proofs for the Reality of God, which at this point need be treated only summarily. It is no coincidence, apparently,
that Hegel's critique of Kant comes to a head in his treatment of "objectivity" in "subjective logic," in his remarks
on the built-in unknowability of God in Kant's philosophy where Hegel treats that philosophy historically (VGP
III), and in the Lectures on Proofs. In introducing this course of lectures Hegel makes a remark which sheds
considerable light on the sequence of criticisms. Since he had intended to give only one course of lectures, that is,
on logic, during the Spring semester of 1829, the necessity of preparing another course for the same semester, he
says, made him choose a topic "closely related to logic and constituting a sort of supplement to it, not from the
point of view of content but from that


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of form, since the topic is simply a specialized form of the fundamental themes (Bestimmungen) of logic" (BDG, p.
1). The question, then, of knowing God as real is integral to the logical problematic, because an investigation of
thinking cannot sidestep the issue of what thinking necessarily thinks. Believing and knowing, faith and reason, are
not identical forms of thinking, but they are not completely separate operations, in the sense that faith could deliver
an object which is not an object for reason; if the object of faith is not an object for reason, it is not an object for
man. Believing and knowing are united in such a way that neither can be without the othereven though self-
determining thought supplements (not supplants) other-determined belief (ibid., pp. 89).7 It is by separating the two
that contemporaries (under the influence of Kant) think that they can investigate rationally the subjective state of
religious consciousness, while leaving God who is religion's object outside reason's purview. A philosophy of
religion is permitted, but not a philosophical theology! (ibid., p. 46). The result is that "we hear much, endlessly
much saidor rather, little endlessly repeatedof religion, and so much the less said of God. This continual
explanation of religion . . . coupled with an insignificant or even suppressed explanation of God is a characteristic
phenomenon of the intellectual culture of the time" (ibid.). What this comes down to is that, even though God and
divine revelation may still be loked upon as real, the terms are emptied of meaning, because the human mindall we
have to work withis considered incapable of coping with that meaning (ibid., p. 48). When Hegel, then, speaks of
"the ascent of thinking spirit to God'' (whether or not the expression carries overtones of Saint Anselm's definition
of prayer, ascensio mentis in Deum), it is clear that he is not speaking primarily of a purely rational discovery of
divine reality but of a philosophical thinking out of what religious consciousness represents to itself. As revealed
by God the content is thoroughly rational; as represented by the human mind in response to this revelation, it is in
need of a rational articulation, which its antecedent rationality makes not only possible but demanded.
One way or the other, clearly, we are back with a problem with which we are already familiar, the essential
finitude of the human mind over-against the infinity of Godassuming, of course, that the concept of "infinity" says
anything at all to that mind. If we are not to say that the human mind simply cannot come to grips with the reality
of Godand this Hegel will not countenance, since it equivalently means giving up the entire philosophical
enterpriseare we to make this coming-to-grips possible by finitizing the
7. "This religion which is manifest to itself, is in the second place not only manifest but is also the religion
which is designated as revealed. By this is understood that, on the one hand, it has been revealed by God,
that God has made himself known to man and, on the other, that it has come to man from outside, that it has
been given" (VPR I, p. 194).


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infinite or by infinitizing the finite? (see ibid., p. 110). Religion, it would seem, presents God to the human subject
as truly infinite Being. Either the human spirit is content to simply leave it at that or, true to its vocation as spirit, it
will seek to rise to the infinite, refusing to leave its infinite object "unthought," "unknown." What stands in the way
of admitting this rise to the infinite as a human possibility is (1) the assumption that the passage of finite thinking
to an infinite object is a "leap" (ibid., pp. 11112); (2) the presupposition that as "finite'' the human spirit is
sufficient to itself or, as Hegel puts it, is "absolute" (ibid., pp. 11213); and (3) the refusal to recognize that to speak
of the activity of the infinite in the finite is not to make that activity cease to be activity of the finite (ibid., p. 113).
What those who refuse to accept this last fail to see, says Hegel, is that the relation of God to man, unlike the
relation of things in the world to subjects in the world, is a relation of spirit to spirits. To know God is simply not
to know a "thing"; it is to be in communion with "Spirit."
That man has knowledge of God is, on the basis of the essential community [of God and man in spirit], a
communal knowingi.e., man has knowledge of God only to the extent that in man [in man's knowing] God
has knowledge of himself. This knowing is God's consciousness of himself, and at the same time it is God's
knowledge of man, and this knowing of man by God is man's knowledge of God. [Ibid., p. 117]
There are those, of course, who think that Hegel has spoiled everything with these words: In knowing God either
man is no longer manhe is "divine"or he no longer really knows, since it is God who is doing the knowing.8 If,
however, we understand the last sentence above in the light of Hegel's theology of creation (see chap. 7),
according to which creation, particularly that of "finite spirits," is God's "determining of himself" in the mode of
knowing rather than a "making" in the mode of efficient causality, the difficulty would seem to vanish.
Finite Mind and Infinite Being

The finite categories of understanding can no more come to terms with the infinite Spirit who is God than with the
ascensio mentis in Deum which is philosophical ("speculative") knowledge of God. Is it really too much to say, as
Kant would have it to be, that philosophical thinking can see more than its own finite self in its thinking of God?
Kant, of course, will see contradiction in such a unity of the finite and the infinite, and, as he consistently does
when reason becomes involved in contradiction, he solves the problem not by resolving the contradiction but by
blaming the contradiction on
8. See Lauer, Essays in Hegelian Dialectic, p. 150, n. 18.


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reason, not on reality. Hegel, too, sees contradiction here, as he does wherever he sees life, the perennial
contradiction, but he is convinced that both reality and reason can resolve the contradictionthat is what "infinity" is
all about. In fact, it is only by both recognizing and resolving contradiction that life of the spirit avoids stagnation.
In his lecture, "On Kant's Critique of the Cosmological Proof" appended to the course "on Proofs," he tells us:
In fact, however, reason can decidedly put up with contradictionand, of course, also resolve itand things too
are quite capable of putting up with it; or, rather, they are simply existing contradiction, whether as that
Kantian schema of the thing-in-itself or as empirical thingsbut only to the extent that they are rational do
they at the same time resolve contradiction in themselves. [Ibid., p. 148]
So little, then, does the unity of finite and infinite present an unresolvable contradiction, that it is the principle for
the very resolution of contradiction, the condition for the intelligibility of being itself. If we look back at the overall
movement of Hegel's Science of Logic we find that the movement is precisely the unfolding of the implications of
this unity. Logic begins with a being which is infinitely emptyand, therefore, in no way different from nothingand
ends with being which is infinitely full (determinate), and the path from one to the other is marked by a
progressive negation of the limitations of abstraction. What is important to note is that it is the same being which is
infinitely empty and infinitely full, and it is the self-determination of the infinite in finitude which constitutes the
filling-up process. The finite simply cannot make sense by itself but only as integral to the movement toward the
infinite. The question, then, is not whether reason can know that the infinite really is, but whether reason must
know that being is infinite (ibid., p. 152). Hegel is convinced, as we have seen, that the mistake which his
contemporaries have made is to have looked upon the finite as the originally affirmative which is negated in the
infinite. Rather the infinite is affirmative; it is negated in the finite and reaffirmed in the progressive negation of
limitation. "The essential point in this mediation, however, is that the being of the finite is not the affirmative,
rather it is by the self-transcending of the finite that the infinite is posited and mediated" (ibid., p. 153). Thus, there
has been no "leap" from the finite to the infinite; to posit the finite as real entails ("speculatively") positing the
infinite as real. Moreover, the spirit which posits both finite and infinite is itself both finite and infinite; the
movement of spirit and the movement of being are not to be divorced (ibid., pp. 15354). Kant was certainly not
wrong in criticizing the "form'' in which proofs for the reality of God had been presentedas though they were
syllogisms of understandingwhat he failed


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to do, however, was to see the profounder foundation on which they rested (ibid., p. 154). The exposition of this
profounder foundation, Hegel is convinced, is "logic," properly understood. Logic tells us that there is no being
which does not imply the infinity of being, no thought which does not imply the infinity of thought; and the real
infinite, God, is the perfect identity of thought and being (see JL, p. 159). God is that which thought must think, if
it is to be adequate as thoughtand this is "proof"! We must be able to make the move from the conviction that what
is inconceivable cannot be to the conviction that what must be conceived cannot not be ("What breaks up the unity
of the logically rational likewise breaks up the actual." EpW, no. 541, Zusatz)
Philosophy Is Not to Eliminate Religion

Just as in the Kantian way of thinking there is the danger already noted that the content of thought will be looked at
as given in one way and the form of thinking in another, there is the danger of misinterpreting Hegel in such a way
as to have him say that, when speculative philosophy "thinks out" the content of religious consciousness,
philosophy supplants religion. It is as though one were to read him as saying that the infinitizing of the finite, the
divinizing of the human spirit takes place only in philosophical thinking. On the contrary it is quite clear that
Hegel's position is far more nuanced than that. As he sees it, "absolute Spirit" bears witness in man to "absolute
truth," whether that be the truth of religion, of morality, of law, or of philosophy. It is true, of course, that he does
say, "The witness of the Spirit in its highest form takes the form of philosophy" (VPR II, p. 198), and it is also true
that he says this because, as we have seen in his treatment of religion in the Phenomenology, he sees thought or
concept in contrast to ''representation" as the form most adequate to the presence of absolute truth in the human
spirit. It is the concept, after all, which, "purely as such and without the presence of any presupposition, develops
the truth out of itself, and we both recognize it as developing and perceive (einsehen) the necessity of the
development in and through the development itself" (ibid.). The witness of absolute Spirit in and through the
concept, nevertheless, is not discontinuous with the witness of Spirit in other forms: "the witness of the Spirit may,
however, be present in man in manifold and various ways; we have no right to demand that the truth in the case of
all men be got at in a philosophical way" (ibid.).9 The "various ways" (including the religious) are not eliminated
by philosophical thinking. From the point of view of Phenomenology of Spirit, we can say that Hegel sees
9. It is not too often emphasized that Hegel quite clearly recognizes that the simple "believer," who simply
has no time to "philosophize," is not thereby cut off from the supremely rational content of thought.


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the culmination of spiritual development in that "absolute knowing" where spirit becomes conscious of itself as
infinite in and through many finite "spirits," but this is true only because all along it has been absolute Spirit
bearing witness in finite forms to infinite truth. "The spiritual necessities of men vary according to their culture and
free development; and so, too, the demand for and the trust in belief grounded on authority, varies according to the
different stages of development reached" (ibid.). What philosophy can do is to recognize that the presence of truth
even in finite form bespeaks the witness of absolute Spirit in the spirit of man; that human reason knows truth at all
bears witness to the self-consciousness of infinite Spirit in man. Finite spirit can rise to the infinite, be infinitized,
because infinite Spirit descends to man, finitizes itself in the very being of the finite, wherein infinite Spirit
expresses itself.
Religion too is consciousness and therefore involves finite consciousness whose finitude, however, is
superseded; for the other which absolute Spirit knows is itself, and it is absolute Spirit only in knowing
itself. The finitude of consciousness enters in, because Spirit differentiates itself. This finite consciousness,
however, is a moment of Spirit itself, which is its own self-differentiation, its own self-determination, i.e..,
positing itself as finite consciousness. Consequently, Spirit is only as mediated through consciousness or
finite spirit, and this means that Spirit is to finitize itself, in order through this finitizing to become
knowledge of itself. [VPR, I, p. 198]
Not only philosophy, then, but also religion is activity of absolute Spirit in finite spirit, which is to say that, like
philosophy, so too religion is not merely finite activity of finite consciousness. "Thus, religion is the divine Spirit's
knowledge of itself through the mediation of finite spirit. Accordingly in the Idea in its highest form, religion is not
a transaction of man, but is essentially the highest determination of the absolute Idea itself" (ibid.).
What all of this points to and which is of utmost importance in coming to grips with Hegel's thought is the
conviction that the "ascent" of the human spirit to the fullness of spirit and, hence, to the fullness of being in the
absolute Idea is at the same time and necessarily a "being-lifted-up" (Erhebung) in the community of the divine
and the human. It is precisely in the so-called "proofs for the reality of God" that this reciprocal movement is
described and worked out.
This raising-up is the same as what is presented in a more abstract way in the proofs for the reality of God.
In all these proofs the raising-up is one and the same; only the starting point and the nature of the Being in
question are different. The ascent to God, who is determined in this or that way, is only one side. The other
is the reverse: God who is determined in this or that way relates


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himself to the subject which has raised itself up. What comes in here is the way in which the subject is
determined; it knows itself as determined in God's way. [VPR I, p. 254]
Here it is that the importance of moral consciousness enters in. The ascent to God will not be triggered by mere
intellectual interest, fascination with the wonders of nature, or awe before the extraordinary capacity of the human
spirit to think; only an orientation toward the goodness in which alone the self-realization of spirit can be
accomplished will orient the human subject to the absolute, and only such an orientation to the good is thought in
the most authentic sense of the term. The accents of Plato are unmistakable here. Superficially it could seem that:
Thinking and thought would also be present in one who thinks the worstthat this too would constitute
thought, would be the activity of thinking, etc. This, however, is incorrect; for nonV * thinks only itself,
precisely because it is the most perfect [das Vortrefflichste]. It is the thought, the thinking of thought;
therein unity of subjective and objective is expressed, and this is the most perfect. The absolute ultimate
end, nonV, which thinks itselfthis is the good; it is with itself only, is for its own sake. [VGP II, p. 219]
In the light merely of what has already been said this could seem unexpected, the ringing-in of an entirely new
feature. If, however, we remember that Hegel has not completely rejected the legacy of Kantand particularly of
Fichtethat God is the ultimate goal of moral striving, we should not be surprised. Hegel, it is true, will not be
satisfied with a God who, as the object of this striving, is no more than a vague, indeterminate "moral order" of the
universe, but he still sees, as he did in chapter VI of the Phenomenology, the universality of moral order as the
springboard to religious consciousness and, ultimately, to the total self-consciousness and thus responsibility of
"absolute knowing."
The finite which here constitutes the point of departure is real ethical [sittliche] self-consciousness. The
negation whereby it raises its spirit to its truth is the actually accomplished purification, in the ethical
world, of its knowing from subjective opinion and the liberation of its willing from the self-seeking of
desire. [EpW, no. 552]
There will be no religion where there is no longing for moral goodness; only consciousness of self as a moral being
leads to religious consciousness of God as fulfillment.
True religion and true religiousness proceeds only from morality and is thinking morality, i.e., a morality
coming to consciousness of the self-determining


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universality of its concrete essence. Only in consequence of this is the idea of God cognized as self-
determining Spirit. Apart from the moral spirit, therefore, it is useless to look for true religion and
religiousness. [ibid.]
But, and this is of the utmost importance in measuring the distance Hegel has gone beyond Kant and Fichte,
morality will find its consummation in religion, only if the God of religion is the true God, corresponding to the
true Idea of God, which alone can be religion's object. "But, that the truly moral be the consequence of religion
demands that religion have the true content, i.e., that the idea of God of which religion is conscious be the true one"
(ibid.). It is philosophy's task to raise this Idea to its full truth in "knowing."
It would be a mistake, however, to conceive of "knowing," as Hegel envisions it at this level as some purely
cognitive process. Not only does it retain the object given to it in the religious consciousness which is faith, but it
must be accompanied by the "feeling" which is inseparable from authentic religious consciousness. The head is not
enough; the heart must be engaged too. We know, of course, how violently opposed Hegel was to the "romantic"
intuitionism of Jacobi and Schleiermacher, according to whom God is the object primarilyif not exclusivelyof
religious "emotion," but this opposition by no means precluded his reserving a place for profound emotion in
religious and even philosophical consciousnesshow else does ''spirit" respond to beauty?
Yet not only can there be a true content in our feeling; there should and must be, or as used to be said, we
must have God in our hearts. Heart is, of course, more than feeling; the latter is momentary, accidental,
transient. But when I say, "I have God in my heart," feeling is expressed as an enduring, permanent mode
of my existence. The heart is what I am, not what I am at the moment, but what I am in general, my
character. The form of feeling as a universal, then, signifies the principles or habits of my being, my
permanent manner of acting. [VPR I, pp. 14445]
It might, of course, be asked whether the element of emotion is not eliminated when the content of religious
consciousness, God, is given the form of thinking adequate to it in "absolute knowing." Although in the tightly
packed and very brief final chapter of the Phenomenology dealing with "absolute knowing" no mention is made of
emotion, it cannot be without significance that in this chapterparticularly in its closing pagesHegel himself becomes
very emotionally involved, poetic in his expression. The point is that emotionreligious or otherdoes not lose its
purity when raised to the level of thought, nor need it be abandoned; emotion is of the spirit and belongs to its
integrity (see EpW, no. 34, Zusatz).


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One is tempted to say that Hegel is more concerned with the "passion" of religion than is Kierkegaard!
If we look once more at Phenomenology of Spirit, we find that it is one long, complex study of the process wherein
spirit comes to a more and more adequate consciousness of itself as the active source of its own consciousness of
reality. In the penultimate chapter spirit comes to the awareness that only if it is consciousness of absolute Spirit,
absolute reality, will it fulfill its vocation of being "all reality." In the final chapter, then, it comes to the realization
that in knowing itself it is knowingnot simply being aware ofabsolute Spirit. In no sense does this mean, as we
shall see in greater detail in chapter 6, that Hegel is identifying finite spirit and infinite Spirit; what he does is
identify finite spirit's knowledge of itself with its knowledge of God, because the former knowledge ineluctably
entails the latter. It is in this sense that even finite spirit's knowing is "absolute," because in knowing the "Absolute"
who is the "object" of religious consciousness, finite spirit ''appropriates" that object in such a way as to be
dependent on nothing outside itself in so knowing; its knowing the Absolute is its self-knowing.
The reason why there had to be a Phenomenology of Spirit is that there is simply no way that the human spirit
could know from the beginningas Fichte and Schelling would have itthat spirit's self-knowing would be the totality
of its knowing. It had to make its laborious way through all the "forms" (Gestaltungen) of consciousness before it
could know that it could even attain to an "absolute" form beyond which there is no need or possibility of going.
What, at the culmination of this process, spirit can now do is to look back at all the "forms" (Gestalten)10 of
consciousness, discern and discard in each what was not its own doing, thus retaining as the moments of its
coming to complete self-consciousness all the Gestaltungen which are its own and which constitute the
absoluteness of its knowing. Here it can be seen once more than, for Hegel, the stage of religious
consciousnessindeed of the "absolute" or Christian religionis unquestionably essential to the ultimate in human
self-consciousness. The "object" of religious consciousness is an absolutely self-conscious Being who gradually
makes known to the human spirit what it is to be absolutely self-conscious spirit. This "making known," be it
noted, cannot be an "effecting" of knowing from withouta sort of "infusion"which would not be a "knowing" in the
proper sense of the term.
10. A certain amount of confusion is caused by Hegel's use of two terms here, Gestalt and Gestaltung,
whose distinction can scarcely be rendered in translation. Although both are translatable as "form," Gestalt
functions strictly as a noun and thus does not carry the dynamic participial overtones of Gestaltung.


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The Growth of Consciousness

What remains to be done is to recapitulate the "moments" of the process of self-conscious spirit in such a way as
to recognize them as its Gestaltungen, that is, as the "forms" of spirit which spirit itself (spiritual activity)
effectuates. On the level of religious consciousness it had been possible to see the universal Spirit, religion's object,
as giving unity to all the manifestations of spiritTrinity, creation, Incarnationand to relate this unity to the
development of human spiritFall, Redemption, and indwelling of the Spirit.11 Because, for Hegel, phenomenology
is of the human spirit, all of this is to be seen as throwing light on the ''movement of human self-consciousness,"
wherein are reconciled and unified all the "moments" (Gestaltungen) which constitute the human spirit's knowing
of itself, which is the very "manifest being" (Dasein) proper to it as spirit. The movement proves to be the "coming
together" (concretion, from concrescere) of moments, which only "seemed" to be separate, in what is now called a
special Gestalt des Bewusstseinsnot as a last but as the unity of them all"not only the contemplation of the divine
but the self-contemplation of the same" (PdG, p. 554). If, then, it is possible for the human spirit to see that in
being conscious of the universal self-conscious spirit it is conscious of itself, the goal of the movement has been
reached. The self-consciousness which is "absolute knowing" is as universal (in its knowing) as is its "object" in
religion (ibid.). Now human spirit can see each of its previous Gestalten as its own Gestaltung, "as a universality
of knowing which is self-consciousnessas a self-consciousness which is simple unity of knowing" (ibid., p. 555).
The form in which spirit now knows itself is that of "concept," the concretizing, all-uniting form, which alone is
adequate to the concretizing, all-uniting, "absolute" Spirit. "Thus what in religion was a content in the form of
representing an Other, is here the self's own doing; the concept brings it about (verbindet es) that the content is the
self's own doing" (ibid., p. 446). The knowing is the human self's own doing, not a being-acted-upon, and this is
true of knowing Godcall it "proving" if you wish, so long as that does not mean manipulating abstract concepts in
order to produce an abstract conclusion. This sort of "knowing" is God's supreme self-revelation: "Spirit appearing
to consciousness in this element or, what is here the same, produced by consciousness in this element, is science"
(ibid.), which is to say, to know in the paradigmatic sense of "know" is to know God.
In the sense in which it is now understood, then, "concept," the final form of spirit, is "absolute knowing," the
ultimate "gathering together": "it is spirit knowing itself in the form of spirit, or it is comprehensive
11. See Lauer, "Human Autonomy and Religious Affirmation in Hegel," in Essays in Hegelian Dialectic,
pp. 89106.


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(begreifende) knowing" (ibid.). What is known has received the form of selfnot of othernessit has been con-ceived:
"The content is conceived (begriffen) only because the I in its otherness is with itself" (ibid., p. 557). We might
say, to borrow a page from Hegel's "theology" (see chap. 7), that the human spirit in its self-knowing shares the
way God is in his creative self-knowing: for God to know himself is to externalize himself without ceasing to be
himself; for human spirit to externalize itself in knowing what is other is to find itself in itself. This means, in the
final analysis, that for the human spirit to find itself in a "knowing" which is ''absolute" is to find "absolute Spirit,"
God, the God who has antecendently revealed himself to religious consciousness: "The content of religion,
therefore expresses sooner in time than does science what spirit is, but only science is its true knowledge of itself"
(ibid., p. 559).
We are fortunate not to have to rely on only this final chapter of the Phenomenology to know what Hegel means
by "concept" (see chap. 2). It is important for us to note here that there is only one "reality" that corresponds totally
with its "concept," that is, "infinite Spirit." Because, however, finite spirit is not a reality over-against infinite spirit
but rather the latter's finite self-manifestation, then the human spirit is in a very significant sense the self-
knowledge of infinite Spirit, such that for human spirit truly to know itself is to know God as knowing himself. The
"concept" to which human spirit attains in "absolute knowing" is the "infinite" concept of spirit, without which
self-knowing is meaningless. "In [absolute] knowing, then, spirit has rounded out the movement of its formings
(Gestaltens: verbal noun), insofar as any of its forms is burdened with the unresolved distinction characteristic of
consciousness. Spirit has achieved the pure element of its reality (Daseins), the concept" (ibid., pp. 56162). Thus,
to know God, the absolute Spirit, is to overcome any fear that the human subject by going out of itself in knowing
what is other will surrender itself to the domination of the other: instead it will precisely find itself, because it is in
thus going out of itself that it is most authentically with itself; its being in the Absolute is its true being.
There are various spiritual activities in which the human spirit can go out of itself and thus find itself: (1) in the
contemplation of nature, surely, although the self it finds there is, so to speak, a nonconscious selfnature is not the
product of finite spirit, only the "thinking" of nature is; (2) in art, morality, and legal and political action, where
spirit produces the image of itself (modeled on its "concept") in which it can see its conscious self; (3) in religion,
where through worship it unites itself consciously with the self which is the self of all selves; and (4) in the
ultimate goal of adequate "knowing," what Hegel calls Wissenschaft, wherein it is totally "with itself" and
therefore, in this sense "absolute" (VGP III, p. 460). To use a slightly different language, in religion man is
conscious of being imago Dei,


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in philosophical knowing man is conscious of what it is to be imago Dei (VPR I, pp. 16768, 187, 31112). Without
going into the theological implications of this last statement, which can wait for chapter 7, we can, simply in terms
of Hegel's Science of Logic, say that the "Infinite" (Spirit) manifests itself in innumerable finite ways, chief of
which is human spirit, thus "finitizing" itself, only to return to its infinite self in the self-knowing of finite spirit
(see WL I, pp. 12545).
To see this "raising up" of the human spirit to the divine as culminating in Wissenschaft, may well seem and has
seemed to many an over-intellectualizing of the divine-human relationship. If, however, we recall that, for Hegel,
the divine, infinite Being is Spirit and Spirit only and that, therefore, he can be "for" spirit alone, then it is at least
not illogical to say that infinite Spirit is "for" finite spirit preeminently in the most spiritual of the latter's spiritual
activities, that is, thought. In addition, since Hegel sees philosophical knowing, Wissenschaft, as the apex of the
spiritual activity of thought, it is not strange that he should locate ''knowing" God there. We may be disinclined to
designate this by the term Wissenschaft, which is customarily translated by the English term "science," but it is not
necessary to carry prejudices which are occasioned by the English language into an interpretation of a distinction
which Hegel seems perfectly justified in making and for which he has considerable precedent, at least in the
writings of the medieval Scholastics. The "science" of which Hegel speaks bears little resemblance to the
contemporary notion of science, whose model is the mathematico-physical. Rather he is talking about knowledge
in the fullest and strictest sense of the term, a knowledge which is not characterized by the "exactitude" of
understanding but rather by the "comprehensiveness" of reason. If "science" cannot extend beyond the confines of
the exactly "measurable," then the consequences to be drawn can be only "materialistic," leaving "spirit" out of the
picture entirely.
In fact, our knowledge would be in a sad plight indeed, if with regard to such objects as freedom, law,
morality, even God himself, just because these objects cannot be measured and calculated or expressed in a
mathematical formula, we had to abandon the hope of exact knowledge and had in general to be satisfied
merely with a vague representation of them, thus surrendering the particular details of them to the good
pleasure of each and every individual, to make of them what he will. The practically pernicious
consequences which result from such a position are immediately evident; on closer inspection this turns out
to be . . . the exclusively mathematical point of view, which identifies quantity, a particular stage of the
logical idea, with the logical idea itself, a point of view which is no other than the principle of materialism.
[EpW, no. 99, Zusatz.]


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The point Hegel is trying to make here has nothing to do with "exact" science in this sense; what he is seeking to
bring out is that the "thinking" of God which takes place in religion is not "knowing" in the strict sense of the term;
the "thinking'' of God which takes place in philosophy is. Everything Hegel has to say about "proofs" of God
converges on that one point.
Now, however, this must be taken into consideration: when it comes to speaking of God, what is in
question is an object entirely different from a hundred Talers or from any particular concept, representation,
or whatever else one may want to call it. In fact everything finite is this and only this: its reality is different
from its concept. God, however, has to be precisely that which can be thought only as existing, whose
concept included his being. [EpW, no. 51]
To say, then, that "existence" cannot be contained in concept, as does Kant, is illegitimately to confine the meaning
of "existence" to sensible existents only; and it is to confine the meaning "concept" to the representation which the
finite mind forms to itself of things. It is not even logical to extrapolate from the conditions of sensible existence to
that of the suprasensible. To say that the existence of the purely sensible cannot be conceived is not the same as
saying that the existence of the nonsensible cannot be conceived. The nonexistence of the sensible does not make it
inconceivable. The nonexistence of the absolute would make the Absolute inconceivable.
If existence is not conceived, then what is in question is the non-conceptual, the sensorily perceived; and of
course the non-conceptual is no concept . . . . Granted that the absolute Being does not have that kind of
existence; or, rather, that that kind of existence has no truth, it is only a transitory moment. [VGP III, p.
362]
More than that, it must be said that a prerequisite for thinking God at all is the "negation" of all sensible conditions
(see EpW, no. 12). It is the task of logic, as we saw in chapter 2, to show that this can and must be done. To
conceive of the Being from which absolutely all sensible conditions are absent, is to conceive of this Being (Spirit)
as existingor it is not to conceive it at all.
The Condition of All Conditions

In a certain sense, strangely enough, in taking "proofs for the reality of God" seriously, Hegel is borrowing a page
from the "transcendental philosophizing" of Kant and Fichte: What is an absolutely necessary condition for the
very possibility of what we know to be the case we


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also know to be the case. But, we know it to be the case that there are phenomena in consciousness, and it is a
necessary condition of phenomena in consciousness that reality appear to consciousness. This even breaks down
the wall Kant had so laboriously constructed between the noumenal and the phenomenal: An absolutely necessary
condition for the very possibility of phenomena is that there be a subject, an "I," to which reality
"appears""originally synthetic transcendental unity of apperception." What Kant would seem to be denying, of
course, is that the absolutely necessary condition for the possibility of an apperceiving subject is that there be an
''absolute" Subject; but it is difficult to see how he can justify such a denialif, indeed, he ever considered the
argument at all. Could a finite subject make sense at all, if there were no infinite (absolute) Subject? In any event it
would seem to be an unjustified caution such as this of which Hegel speaks in the introduction to the
Phenomenology where he says that the "fear of error" which prompts the caution is in effect a "fear of the truth."
To speak of knowing the true without knowing the absolutely true, he tells us, is to play with words. This is not to
say that the only knowing there is is absolute; but it does say that a knowing which is not ultimately oriented to the
absolutely true is a truncated and, therefore, untrue knowing. There is finite knowing, of course, and there is
knowledge of the finite, but it qualifies as knowing only because oriented to the infinite. Of course, the human
mind can know particular truths, but only because it can also know absolute truth.
This consequence, fear of truth, results, because the absolute alone is trueor the true alone is absolute. The
consequence can be denied on the basis of the contention that a knowledge which admittedly does not, as
science wishes it to, know the absolute is nevertheless true and that knowledge in general, even if it is
incapable of knowing the absolute can still be capable of other truth. But we see quite clearly that this sort
of talking back and forth runs aground on a fuzzy distinction between a true which is absolute and some
other kind of true, whereas absolute, knowledge, etc., are words which presuppose meanings which have
yet to be arrived at. [PdG, p. 65]
Does Kant in fact know what he is talking aboutor what are the consequences of so talkingwhen he says the
absolute cannot be known? What all this comes down to is that, for Hegel, all true thinking is interpretive; the mind
does not simply reproduce in a universal way what has been presented to it in a particular way, it is driven to go
beyond the given to the ultimate source of the possibility of reality or of thought, which is not to be found in
reality qua finite nor in thought qua finite. This thought activity, of course, bespeaks a "logic" which few of Hegel's
contemporariesand, perhaps,


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fewer of our owncould accept, what James Yerkes calls an "onto-logic" or Martin Heidegger, somewhat snidely,
an "onto-theologic."12
Thus, we may say that God is the ontological or metaphysical ground of the "essential" nature of things
which Hegel speaks about by temporal analogy as God "before" the creation of the world. This means,
speculatively speaking, that to know in a conceptually adequate manner the permanent, but ceaselessly
dialectical structures or "essences'' of the world in its actuality, its Wirklichkeit, is also to know God as
ontologic knows himas the infinite or ultimate condition of all possibilities actualized in it.13
Only such a logic, Hegel is convinced, can afford to speak of "proofs" of God's reality at all. It is a logic which he
sees operative in the metaphysical thinking of Saint Anselm and other medieval Scholastics, a logic which he finds
obscured by Anselm's attempts to formulate "proofs" according to the rules of an "abstract" logic of understanding.
Hegel further points out, very interestingly, that the so-called proofs of the Divine Existence are not what
they are ordinarily thought to be: purely affirmative reasonings in which what we start from furnishes a
fixed, solid basis from which we pass on to something which has the same solidity as its premises.14 The
action of thought is to negate the basis from which it starts, to show it up as not being self-subsistent, and
so to have in it a springboard from which it can ascend to what is truly self-subsistent and self-
explanatory.15
Much has been written, and undoubtedly will continue to be written, about the "logical" inadequacy of all "proofs"
for the existence of God. What is more, those who write thus reason quite correctly: If there is one and only one
logic of proof, these proofs do not prove. For that matter there is no way of proving, by that sort of logic, the
"existence" of anything, which is by no means to say that there is no way of "knowing" the existence of
anythingalthough Hegel would say we have no way of knowing the existence of anything, if we do not know the
existence of God, and that is where "proof" comes in. But, where existence is concerned "proof" means nothing,
unless the thinking in question is "dialectical."
12. See M. Heidegger, Identity and Difference, trans. Joan Stambaugh, (New York: Harper & Row, 1969),
pp. 59, 7071.
13. James Yerkes, The Christology of Hegel, (Missoula, Montana: Scholars Press, 1978), p. 273.
14. It is, in fact, precisely the nonsolidity of the premisses that demands a much more solid, "absolute"
foundation, if they are to be thought of as true.
15. William Wallace, trans., Hegel's Logic, (Oxford: Clarendon, 1975), p. xii.


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Those who expect all thought-advance to be that of the deduction of conclusions from firmly established
premisses are quite incapable of dialectical thinking: in dialectics it is the insufficiency of the premises that
leads to the more sufficient conclusion.16
The initial mistake made by all those who criticize "proofs" for the reality of God is not that of saying that they are
not justified by the logical rules of inference. In fact, they are not. The mistake, rather, is that of taking the finite
human reasoning process governed by the rules of inference legislated by an abstract formal logic as paradigmatic
of "reason." Human ''reasoning" is but a particular manifestation of the process of "reason" which transcends all
particular manifestations. If we remember what Hegel has said about the Being which transcends all beings, the
Thought which transcends all thoughts, the Concept which transcends all concepts, the Spirit which transcends all
spirits, we should have no difficulty in at least grasping what he is saying when he speaks of the Reason which
transcends all reasonings. By the same token we should have no difficulty in comprehending what he is saying
when he claims that the validity of any reasoning process depends on its correspondence with reason as such, not
on its fidelity to a set of rules which finite reasoning itself has established. This is not to say that any and every
flight of fancy is eo ipso valid and permissible. It is to say that rational thinking, when it is truly rational thinking,
thinks what is true. It is a commonplace of all logic that strict adherence to the formal rules of logic is no guarantee
of the truth of thinking. It is, on the other hand, anything but a commonplace that, when thinking seeks to think the
Infinite, strict adherence to the rules of formal logic, geared as they are to the finite, constitutes an obstacle and not
a help. This, of course, does not mean that, when formal logic has reached the limits of its usefulness, logic is then
to give way to illogic; it does not even mean that formal logic is to retire from the picture; it does mean that, only if
formal logic is aufgehoben in a dynamic logic will thought be able to come to terms with reality as totality. Thus a
"proof" of the reality of the Infinite may be perfectly valid, corresponding to the demands of reason, even though
its formulationin "propositions" and "syllogism"may not satisfy the constraints of formal logic. Unlike so many
philosophers, both before and after him, Hegel had a great deal of confidence in the natural course of human
reasonif followed out sedulously. It is as though he were to say, putting it colloquially, "if reason does what comes
naturally, it will rise to the concrete infinite whose necessity forces itself on it," not because this "concrete infinite"
is contained in the premisses of a syllogism but because thinking will have to throw in the sponge if this is not
true. Thus, with regard to the "cosmological proof":
16. Ibid., p. xiii.


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Man contemplates the world, and because he is rational in his thinking, finding no satisfaction in the
contingency of things, he rises from the finite to the absolutely necessary and says: becaue the finite is
contingent, there must be a self-existent Necessary, which is the ground of this contingency. That is the
course which human reason, the human spirit, follows, and this proof of the reality of God is nothing but
the description of that elevation to the infinite. [VPR I, p. 165]
Quite obviously the validity of the "elevation" thus "described" is not tied to the adequacy of any syllogistic
formulation. To "prove'' in this case, then, does not mean to justify syllogistically the "elevation"; rather the
"elevation" is itself the proving, that is, that the being designated by the term God, "infinite Being," must be
affirmed to have the determination "real" (or "exists") (see ibid., p. 163). If "elevation" to infinite Being is the
necessary consequence of thinking "being" at all (Science of Logic), and "elevation" to "absolute Spirit" is the
necessary consequence of thinking at all (Phenomenology of Spirit), then the affirmation of God's reality is
necessary. It would seem that there is no way to get around affirming that finite reality exists. By the same token,
however, there is no way that finite reality can be said to exist "of itself." The existence, then, of any reality,
whether being or thought, is itself the proof of its prerequisite, infinite Being and Thought. To "think" what is
"given" to the senses is to come up with this conclusion.
Thought and thought alone has eyes for the essence, substance, universal power, and ultimate design of the
world. What men call the proofs of God's existence are, rightly understood, ways of analyzing and
describing the spirit's own movement, since it is a thinking spirit, which thinks the data of the senses.17
The elevation of thought beyond the world of sense, its passage beyond the finite to the infinite, the leap
into the supersensible which it takes when it snaps asunder the chains of sense, all this transition is simply
thought itself, and nothing but thought. Say there must be no such passage, and you say there is to be no
thinking. [EpW, no. 50]
Nothing could be clearer: As Hegel sees it, thought cannot but go beyond the data of sense (he has thrown down
the gauntlet to both the empiricists and Kant), and, logically speaking, it cannot go beyond the data of sense
without going all the way, to that Being which is the object of thought and thought alone. This is equivalent to
saying that not to think religiously, not to think God, is to be illogical. It is this which explains what Hegel means
when he criticizes Kant for employing a method which is "psychological"
17. Note carefully: it is not simply "human subjects" thinking; it is "thought" thinkingnot the psychology of
it but the logic. Hegel is saying that the passage from the finite to the infinite object of thought is logically
inevitable.


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and "empirical" rather than "philosophical" (VGP III, p. 339). Kant will agree that the human mind inevitably
thinks this way, but he will not admit that the necessity in question is "logical"; the human mind cannot, so to
speak, help thinking what it cannot logically justify. Once again, for Hegel, it is not that the human mind in its
essential finitude is so structured that it cannot but think this way; rather, it is thought, in its essential infinity,
which either thinks this way or is unfaithful to its vocation as thought. Kant, Hegel tells us, "describes reason very
well, but does so in an empirical manner from which thought is absent and which deprives itself again of its own
truth'' (ibid., p. 333).
It is not difficult to see, then, that Hegel is convinced that the traditional "proofs" for the reality of God do, in fact,
"prove"so long as "prove" is not taken to mean employ "propositional syllogisms" in order to show that the
relationship of concepts in the propositions coupled with the relationship of the propositions to each other
necessarily entail the conclusion that "God exists." He very clearly states that no single syllogismor, for that matter,
no set of syllogismscan prove that God really is, precisely because it is beyond the capacity of the syllogism to
capture the necessary "ascent" of thought to the reality of God's being (see VPR I, pp. 31415). Nor is it difficult to
understand why Hegel would contend that, ultimately, there is only one "proof," the so-called "ontological
argument," to which all other proofs are reducible. The "ontological argument," however, is not to be conceived of
as a movement (a "leap") from the finite mental existence of a "concept" of God to the mental affirmation that
"reality" is to be "assigned" to that concept. The substance of this argument, as Hegel sees it, is not that, because
thinking the infinite is a necessary condition for thinking the finite, therefore, if one thinks the finite one must also
think the infinitewhich is about what the syllogistic form of the argument, even in Anselm's classical formulation
of it does. What Hegel is saying, rather, is that, because the being of the infinite is a necessary prerequisite for the
very possibility of thinking the finite, the infinite really isor else thinking is not.
Knowledge and Experience

The difficulty of understanding Hegel's positionto say nothing of accepting itwould seem to stem from a very
laudable determination to get away from empty abstractions and root all knowing in experience. Reason can, in
fact, not be satisfied with mere abstractions, and so the modern empirical instinct to place both feet on the ground
and say, "show me," is both understandable and commendable (see EpW, no. 38, Zusatz). It is in fact a remedy for
reliance on principles of merely abstract "understanding": "The here and now, this world of ours, should not be ex-


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changed for an empty other world, for the spiderwebs and misty forms of abstract understanding" (ibid.). It may
seem strange, of course, to hear Hegel refer to this empirical world as "an infinite principlethat solid footing so
much missed in the old metaphysic" (ibid.), but the point he is trying to make is that the "infinite principle," which
it has always been the ''instinct of reason" to seek, is discoverable in the world of experience, if only reason knows
how to look. "The infinite principle, therefore, is in the world for reason to discover, even though in individual,
sensible form, not in its truth" (ibid.). The "truth" of the principle is in thought, and this is what empiricism,
because it relies too exclusively on experience, runs the risk of missing. Nowhere is this last more obvious than in
the effort (and this includes Kant) to give an "empirical" account of thought. If the thinking process is realand this,
it would seem, empiricism has no intention of doubtingit must be observable (although nowhere is any reason
adduced why the real must be observable), and so empiricism must content itself with seeking to describe what
happens when oneanyonethinks, without a hint that the answer might be sought in the essence of "thought" and not
in an "observation" of the unobservable. No one saw more clearly than Hegel that ultimate empiricism is untenable,
precisely because it cannot verify empirically its own principles.
It is Hegel's contention, then, that logic, and not psychology, can think the reality of thought and that, in so doing, it
will discover thought's inevitable infinity, the "infinite principle," that is, the "concept," the "idea," for which the
"instinct of reason" has been looking. Small wonder, then, that Hegel should cast his vote for the "ontological
argument" in his endeavor, not to "prove," but to "discover the proof" for the reality of God! If the "reality" of God
could be proved in the logic of empirical science, what is proved would be an unreal God. Unquestionably the
world is there to be observed, in fact it is to be "conceived," if thinking is to do its job; but to "conceive" without
penetrating to the reality of the "concept" would seem to be a rather fruitless endeavor. It may be difficult for us to
understand how Hegel could say that the "concept" is independent of our thinking, but it would seem even more
difficult to understand how anyone could say that the concept is dependent on its being contingently thought. To
give but one example, it is surely inconceivable that the concept of the "human," what it truly is to be human,
should be contingent on what Ior any number of "I's"think it to be. It would seem, then, that Hegel is making
eminently good sense when he claims that knowing has to mean something more than subjectively producing, that
is, "representing" a content which the mind on its own recognizance applies to reality. Knowing is, rather, thinking
a content which is already thereand this can make sense only against the backdrop of an "infinite" reality which is
already there. It is the work of "proofs" for God's reality, then, to carry on the march from


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finitude to infinity, since the reality of the infinite is the condition for the very possibility of both the thinking and
the being of the finite. "Proof" is a way of describing the movement of thought from the abstract to the concrete:
"the abstract is finite; the concrete is truth, the infinite object" (VPR II, p. 226). The "proofs," then, are not proofs
in the customary sense of that term: they are what Hegel's logic calls "comprehensive thinking" (das begreifende
Denken) of a content which is inescapable, the unfolding of the ''Concept" in the form of thought. This is the
specifically human relationship to the "infinite object," and the "logical element of this transition is contained in
those so-called proofs" (ibid.). Thus, the proof of God is but the logical working out of what thought already
knowsabstractly at first but progressively more concretely.
When we say God we speak of him merely as abstract; or when we say God the Father, the Universal, we
speak of him only in terms of finite existence. His infinitude consists just in this: that he supersedes this
form of abstract universality, of immediacy, and in this way difference is posited; but it is just his very
nature to supersede also this difference. Thus and only thus is he true reality, truth, infinitude. [Ibid., p. 227]
The "ontological argument," then, is not a movement in human thinking from a finite concept, which the mind
"represents" to itself, to an affirmation that what the concept represents is real. This would be an illegitimate leap
from the presence of a merely subjective, formal concept to a real object of that concept. Rather, as Gustav Müller
puts it in summarizing the sixth lecture on "Proofs of God's Reality," "the concept is in and for itself the proof of
God."18 Or, as Hegel himself puts it in Science of Logic, the ontological proof is the concept's own self-
determination to objectivity (WL II, p. 353). What this is saying is that God manifests himself in thought; the being
of thought is the self-manifestation of God, because in thought and thought alone (philosophical thinking) the
concreteness of the "God" in whom religion believes comes through. But, and this is the main point, the true being
of God will not be recognized in a concept which is not God's own doing, and God's own doing is thought, the
activity of that Spirit which is spirit and only spirit. Like all thought divine thought is self-determination, with this
difference that God is self-determining in himself, "before creation," and the self-manifestation which is the
existence of finite reality is a self-othering which in no way takes away from his identity with himself.
18. Gustav Müller, Hegel: Denkgeschichte eines Lebendigen (Munich: Francke, 1959), p. 368.


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God as a living God, and still more as absolute Spirit, is recognized only in his activity. Early in his career
man was directed to recognize God in his works; only from these can proceed the determinations which are
called God's attributes, just as therein also his being is contained. [WL II, pp. 35455]
If, however, we persist in recognizing as "real" only what can be experienced (seen, touched, possessed, like 100
Talers), God will in fact be unrecognizableto us. A philosophy which accepts no content not presented by the
senses, not experienceable in this way, must stop short of God. "When a philosophizing does not raise itself to a
being above the senses, by the same token, even in its concept it does not relinquish mere abstract thought; and this
latter stands over against being" (WL II, p. 355). There is simply no way that infinite Spirit could be the content of
such thinking. A thinking which "stands over-against being" can, admittedly, say nothing of the reality of what it
thinks, not even of the reality of the sensible. On the other hand, a thinking which does "raise itself to a being
above the senses" will not stop short of a pure suprasensible reality.
All of this might seem to be an application, in relation to God, of a process of concretization which takes place in
any passage from abstract formal conceptualization to an affirmation of the reality of that which is thus conceived.
It is not, however, an affirmation of what is true of thinking; it is the paradigm of all thinking, as the process which
is the process of reality. The "ontological argument" is not a proof which is justified by logic; it is the description
of thought as the concrete march toward ultimate reality which justifies logic. Hegel's Science of Logic depends for
its validity on the validity of the ontological argument.
Still, in the exposition of the pure concept it has further been indicated that this same is the absolute divine
concept itself. Thus, truly there would be no question of a relation of application; rather that logical process
would be the immediate presentation of God's self-determination to being. [Ibid., p. 356]
There is no attempt on Hegel's part to deny that the argument begins in concept; its validity lies precisely in
beginning there, because reality is there. If we cannot get to God this way we cannot get to God at all. To begin
with a reality which, by supposition, would not be God would be to condemn ourselves to stop short at an abstract
God, at a Kantian limit-concept, an "ideal" from which neither the being nor the nature of God could ever be
inferred. "All to the good," one might say, "let us leave it at that: Since the conditions for the verification of this
concept are not available, we cannot, in effect, know God." As Hegel sees it, however, this would condemn us to
not knowing anything, since all knowing would be empty abstraction, with nothing but contingent "appearing" to
fill itwhich is, in fact, what it is for Kant.


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The form which this mediation takes is that of the ontological proof of God's existence, wherein we begin
from the concept. Now, what is the concept of God? It is the most real of all things, to be grasped only
affirmatively, determined in itself. The content here has no limitation; it is all reality, and only as reality is
it without limits, thus leaving over, as previously remarked, only the dead abstract. [VPR II, p. 208]
Having seen as much as we have of Hegel's insistence on the "ontological argument" as the paradigm "proof" for
the reality of God, we might be tempted to wonder whether he is being serious when, in the sixteen Lectures on
Proofs for the Reality of God, which his editors appended to Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, he speaks in
the plural of "proofs." In the precise sense in which he speaks of "proof"not of "proving''it would seem that only
the ontological is truly a valid proof and that whatever other traditional proofs there are must be reducible to the
ontological if they are to be viable at all. There is a sense, of course, in which this is true. To the extent that the
other arguments are "proofs of understanding," they are not proofs at allbut, for that matter, neither is the
"ontological" if formulated in the traditional syllogistic way, as we have seen.19 Only a "proof of reason" is
adequate to the reality of God, and the ontological, the self-developing movement of the concept, is fundamental to
the very possibility of proof. But because there is a fundamental element of contingency in human thinking, there is
a diversity of possible starting points for the ascensio mentis in Deum which warrants speaking of a diversity of
proofs, even though the fundamental movement of thought in each must ultimately be the same (ibid., pp. 10,
2024); God is not limited to only one way in which to reveal himself. In the thought which progresses from the
finite and abstract to the concrete and infiniteor else it is not truly thoughtthere is an experience of God. This
experience can be repeated, and in a variety of ways, because it is in continuity with a variety of initial
experiences, which thought thinks throughand, thus, God manifests himself in a variety of ways. We might even
say that the variety of ways is integral to the diversity of self-determination of divine thought which is revelatory of
God.
The Meaning of "Proof"

In this connection it is necessary to say that the remark made earlier in this chapter (see "The Condition of All
Conditions") about Hegel's borrowing a page from Kant and Fichte regarding the reality of God as a necessary
condition for the possibility of finite reality could scarcely be ap-
19. It is for this reason, no doubt, that in speaking of Anselm's "proof" Hegel avoids the traditional
expression "ontological argument." It is precisely its form of "argumentation" that he finds defective.


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plied to more than the affirmation that God, the Absolute, is real. That the reality of the real is also revelatory of
what God is demands a far more profound reasoningand it is precisely this more profound reasoning which
concerns Hegel. Thus, he makes it abundantly clear that the initial revelation of God to man is through nature, not
only in the sense that historically speaking man's relationship to God expresses itself in the form of "nature
religion" but also in the sense that enduringly, the contemplation of nature as "God's handiwork" permits us to
speak of God's "attributes," which are facets, as it were, of divine reality, that which men attribute to the God who
reveals himself. We must bear in mind, of course, that nature reveals God only to man who alone can think, and we
must also bear in mind that the revelation is not in nature but in the thinking of it; there is no revelation to
nonthinking beings and, hence, no religion among them. Having said this, however, it is nevertheless important to
stress that, for Hegel, nature is not merely the environing external world in which the human spirit is
immersedincluding the ''human nature" which makes man a finite part of overall naturebut, even more significantly,
the world of nature is a world in which man confronts God. This by no means takes away from the primacy, both
ontological and logical, of the human spirit as revelatory of the divine, but it does indicate a sort of epistemological
primacy in the contemplation of nature. "The relation has to be considered as belonging within the sphere of
religion, and in such a way as to show that nature is for man not only the actual immediate external world, but a
world in which man recognizes God; nature is thus for man a revelation of God" (VPR II, p. 249). This revelation,
however, is least perfect, since it is at once an unveiling and a veiling. "Thus the consciousness of God on the part
of the finite spirit is mediated through nature. Man sees God through nature; nature alone, then, is only an untrue
embodiment of God which conceals him" (ibid.). The reason for this is that, at the level of nature, there is but a
finite revelation to finite mindthe "Spirit" of God dwells not in nature but in "spirit," nor is God finitized in so
indwelling. "It is the lesson of our consciousness, and particularly of our religious consciousness, that nature, no
less than the spiritual world, is a revelation of God: but with this difference that while nature never gets so far as to
be conscious of its divine essence,20 such consciousness is the express task of the spirit, which in this is initially
finite" (EpW, no. 140, Zusatz). If, of course, the "essence" of nature is contained entirely within nature, then it
provides no access to God. But, "all that God is he communicates and reveals; and he does so initially in and
through nature" (ibid.).
In saying what he says here Hegel is directly confronting those who say that nature, because it is finite and, as
finite, a self-contained system,
20. The familiar Hegelian contention that the "essence" of the finite is in the infinite.


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cannot be revelatory of infinite beingof course it could not be, were it not for the mediation of rational spirit.
Reason, then, conceives of [versteht] proof in a way totally different from understanding, and so does
sound common sense. Reason's proof, it is true, also has as its starting point what is other than God, but as
it progresses it does not let this other persist as immediate and real; rather, because it shows that the other is
both mediated and posited, it immediately becomes evident that God, as the one who contains in himself the
transcended mediation, is to be considered the truly immediate, the self-contained source. [Ibid., no. 36,
Zusatz]
When, on the other hand, mere understanding addresses the question of affirming God on the basis of a
contemplation of nature, it is caught up in the abstractness of an absolute distinction between finite and infinite,
seeing in the latter only negation of the former and thus comes up with no more than deism's indeterminate
"supreme being."
When understanding thus considers God, its primary concern is what predicates do or do not apply to what
we represent to ourselves under the title God. In this the opposition between reality and negation is taken to
be absolute, with the result that for the concept as understanding takes it there remains in the final analysis
only the empty abstraction of indeterminate being, of pure reality or possibility, the dead product of modern
Enlightenment. [Ibid., no. 36]
Acting in this way understanding can attribute no distinct, clearly delineated characteristics to God. As a
consequence it takes refuge in quantitative metaphors, attributing to God finite qualities which it then simply
"infinitizes" into meaninglessness.
The characteristics [of God], since they are still supposed to be determinate and distinct, have in fact been
swallowed up in the abstract concept of pure reality, indeterminate being. To the extent, however, that the
finite world continues to be represented as a true being with God over-against it, then there enters the
representation of different relations of God to the world. These relations, then, characterized as attributes,
on the one hand, as relationships to finite circumstances, must themselves be finite (e.g., just, good,
powerful, wise), and yet they are at the same time supposed to be infinite. From this point of view the
contradiction in question allows of only a hazy solution by means of quantitative extension which pushes
them to indeterminateness, to the sensum eminentiorem. In this way, however, the attribute is annihilated
and all that is left of it is a mere name. [Ibid.]
To say, however, that abstract understanding cannot speak in an in-


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telligent way of God's concrete relationship to a world of finite reality, is not to say what is the intelligible way in
which reason can speak of that relationship. Here it is that what we might call Hegel's most fundamental insight,
that of the unity of totality, comes into play. We all have a tendency to speak with considerable glibness of "the
world" or of "the universe," without reflecting too profoundly on just what such language implies. That it implies
at the very least an interrelatedness of parts of a whole, such that everything in a "world" or in the "universe'' is
related to everything else, in a way that resembles the interrelatedness of the vital parts of an organic body, we may
be willing to admit, if the parallel is not pressed too far. We may even be willing to admit that relationship and, a
fortiori, interrelatedness makes sense only in a framework of thought, since relationship is intelligible only if
thought can think itthat is what "intelligible meansand the fact that thought does think it is proof enough that
thought can think it, and there we stop! The human mind has the capacity to unify the totality of the thinkable;
what need is there to go further than that? But, just what does it mean to say that the mind can unify, if we do not
know what it means to say that what is thinkable can be unified? Can finite thought unify the disparate, if the
disparate is not antecedently unified in a thought which is infinite? As Hegel sees it, the whole question of the
"objectivity" of thought lies right there. If there is unity there is concept, and if there is total unity there is total
concept, the conceiving of which is not the activity of merely finite mind. The unity of reality, which cannot but
make its imprint on the inquiring human mind, is clearly not the product of that inquiring mind. If it is not the
product of mind, however, it is difficult to see what "unity" could possibly mean. It is, then, the task of philosophy,
of "speculative thinking," to plumb the depths of unity in multiplicity in order to discover that even the imposition
of abstract unity in finite understanding makes no sense unless unification in thought is seen to be reunification of
the diversified product of originally unified thought.
It is a fact that philosophy belongs to the sphere of thought; it deals, therefore, with generalities; its content
is abstract, but only in point of form, of its manner of being [dem Elemente]. In its own being the idea is
essentially concrete, the unity of diverse determinations. It is in this that rational knowledge distinguishes
itself from mere understanding, and it is the business of philosophizing to show, contrary to understanding,
that the true, the idea does not consist in empty generalities, but rather in a universal which in its own being
is particular, determinate. [EGP, p. 30]
There can be no question that abstract concepts, ideas whose only being is mental, cannot measure up to the reality
of God. What thinking is to comprehend is not a dead abstraction of its own making by which it seeks to
"represent" the real, but rather the concrete reality which is divine life, ac-


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tivity, movement. The mistake is to think of idea as having no other being than that which the mind gives it, and
that leads to the further mistake of thinking that the only connection between the Idea of God and the reality of
God is the connection which understanding thinks into it.
The Idea is not something dead, not an abstract essence. It is, therefore, incorect, irrational, simply bad, to
represent God, who cannot be something abstract, by means of abstract expressions like être suprême,
supreme Being, about which nothing further can be said. Such a God is the product of understanding, is
lifeless, dead. We must consider and distinguish in the movement, first the emergence from the one into
duality and, secondly, the return to the one. We have to direct our attention to the fact that the distinction,
to the extent that there is one, is disappearing, ideal, transcended, but only in order that the full concrete
unity, not the empty unity of the understanding, may come into its own. [Ibid., pp. 11415).
Idea and Reality

Although, as we have already had occasion to note more than once, Hegel is convinced that Descartes had taken a
step in the right direction in turning philosophical attention away from a contemplation of external reality, merely
as external, to a contemplation of ideas, he is also convinced that by confining his attention to ideas in the mind,
Descartes bequeathed to modern philosophy an insoluble riddle. Granted that, if mind is to discover the meaning of
reality, it has nowhere to look but into itself, to its "ideas," to find that meaning. Descartes, nevertheless, had failed
to provide a means of bridging the gap between ideas and the reality they were presumed to stand for, and it is
precisely because he bequeathed this gap to those who followed him, that neither rationalism on the continent nor
empiricism across the channel could come to grips with the fullness of thought. If ideas are nothing but the
products of the human mind's own conceptualizing activity, there is simply no way for that mind to go beyond its
own ideas to a reality which is the product neither of a finite conceptualizing activity nor of the ideas themselves.
Cartesian ideas may very well be considered as "real," but they are clearly dependent on the activity of finite mind
for their survival; and this is true even of ''innate" ideas. Reality, however, is equally clearly not dependent on
finite mental activity for its survival. If ideas are not from the first identical with reality, there is no way to identify
them with reality. The best Descartes can do is to be certain that mind is doing what it ought to be doing in
thinking them. It was for this reason that Descartes had to take refuge in the veracitas Dei, not because he wanted
to avoid ecclesiastical censorship (he was not a coward!) but because his thinking provided him with no other
adequate guaranteehe was unquestionably keen enough to see that. Willy-nilly Descartes was still caught in the
grip of a


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causal metaphysics, which could shift the burden of proof to the reliability of the cause of ideas. So was
Malebranche, so was Spinoza, so was Leibnizso in fact was Locke, and in his own peculiar way so was Berkeley.
And then came Hume: The causal cognitive bubble had burst! Kant did his best to put Humpty-Dumpty together
again, by appealing to what had to be true, if anything was to be true, to a "transcendental ego," which was more
than any and every finite ego. On the theoretical level this was of no great help, since it replaced one wall with
another between thought and reality. However, by revivingperhaps unbeknownst to himselfthe medieval elaboration
of the Aristotelian distinction between the theoretical and practical intellect, Kant was able to point his followers in
the right direction. Although theoretical concepts could not be identified with the reality they were calculated to
"represent," practical ideas were themselves the reality which moral action was geared to embody. The notion of
idea as antecedent to and condition for the valid positing of finite embodiment was at least on the drawing-board,
enabling Fichte to transcend the vagueness of ''transcendental ego," with its overtones of dualism, in an intuition of
the "absolute Ego" as the unconditioned condition of all conditions. This gave Hegel the opportunity, under the
influence of Schelling's "system of identity," to do what neither Kant nor Fichte had done: not to synthesize, but to
trace the self-synthesizing of the theoretical and the practical, of the idea as cognitive instrument and the idea as
vibrant living reality. The concrete idea as the condition for the possibility of all thought, of all reality, and of their
identificationthe "absolute Idea." "The absolute Idea is, in the first place, the unity of the theoretical and practical
idea, and thus at the same time the unity of the living idea with the cognitive idea" (EpW, no. 236, Zusatz). Of
itself the cognitive idea as idea posited in finite mind can only be abstract, but where cognition is process it is the
living process of concretization which progressively reveals itself as the antecedent validation of what issues from
it. "In cognition we had the idea in a biased, one-sided shape. The process of life has issued in the overthrow of
this bias and the restoration of that unity, which as unity, and in its immediacy, is in the first instance the living
idea" (ibid.). If, however, all we have is life, we have only an indicator of the unity of idea and reality, not concrete
synthesis. "The defect of life is in its being only the idea implicit or natural: whereas cognition is in an equally
one-sided way the merely conscious idea, or the idea for itself" (ibid.). In cognition there is idea oriented to an
object which is not itself; in life there is the imperfect realization of idea; only in the idea which is both knowing
and known, in the absolute Idea, is there the "supreme form of the idea," the knowledge of which is the necessary
condition for the possibility of any knowledge whatever.21
21. It should be noted that "knowledge of which" is interpreted here as both objective and subjective
genitive.


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The unity and truth of these two is the absolute Idea, which is both in itself and for itself. Hitherto we have
had the idea in development through its various grades as our object, but now the idea comes to be its own
object. this is the nohsiVno&104;se&119;V, which Aristotle long ago termed the supreme form of the idea.
[Ibid.]
By this time it should be fairly obvious that what all this adds up toall that Hegel has said of "being" (finite and
infinite), "thought" (finite and infinite), "reason" (finite and infinite), "speculative thinking," ''concept," "idea,"
"proof," and "lifting-up" (Erhebung) of the mind to its true objectis the contention that the so-called "ontological
proof" of God's reality is not only the paradigm proof to which all other proofs are reducible, but that it is also a
valid proof, precisely because it reveals the impossibility of any reality, thought, or knowledge which is not
grounded on and authenticated by the reality of the Absolute. In this connection it might be well to emphasize here
that, although Hegel frequently refers to the classical formulation of this proof in what has been traditionally called
the "ontological argument," he sedulously avoids using the term "argument" (except in those instances where his
use of Beweis might be translated as "argument"). Ordinarily, however, "argument" is used to designate that
formula which a thinker constructs in order to prove a conclusionor, better still, to prove that a conclusion he holds
is a true one. It is precisely for this reason that Hegel holds that the proof, which is in itself valid, is formulated by
Saint Anselm (and others) in a defective wayor, perhaps, that to formulate it as an "argument" is a defective way to
approach the issue. It is not that we "prove" the reality of God but that the reality of God "proves" to be undeniable,
if we "comprehend" (begreifen) the unmistakable self-manifestation of God in the thinking of whatever we think.
There can be no question that objects are constituted as objects by and in thought: that is what we mean by
"object," that which thought has before itself when in thinking it objectifies. It may be necessary to say that objects
do not depend on our thoughtor on any finite thoughtfor their objectivity; it does not seem possible to say that they
do not depend on thought for their objectivitywhat else could "objectivity" mean? By the same token, if we wish to
say that that which we think, the object of our thought, really is (and who in all seriousness contends that there are
no such objects: myself, the world about me, those to whom I speak, those to whom I listen, those whom I expect
to understand me when I argue that there are not) are we not saying that we can make reality the object of our
thought? In so doing, however, we are not constituting the reality of the real (Kant himself made that unmistakably
clear); only a thought which is the most really real can do that. Our affirmation, then, of any reality whatever
constitutes our affirmation of that without which reality is inconceivable.


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Strictly speaking, then, neither I nor anyone else "proves" the reality of God. If there is proving to be done, God
does it by manifesting himself to and in thought, and the mind's eye which is open will, in seeing the manifestation,
be true to itself in acknowledging the reality of God. We can, if we wish, say, with Anselm or with Hegel, that the
"concept" of God containsor is identical withthe reality of God, but it would clearly be stretching it to say that our
concept of God is identical with God's reality. What then, is our concept of God? It is the self-manifestation in us
of the one and only concrete reality which is identical with its concept and which, therefore, necessarily is because
its concept necessarily is. The question, however, remains, as to where "proof" comes in, since proof is meaningful
only as proof to finite mind. We might say that "proof" is the culmination of "manifestation,'' which takes place
only when finite mind has translated manifestation into its own conception; only then has mind come to grips
(begreift) with the reality manifesting itself, and only in its own concept can the mind see that the reality of God is
fully identical with the concept of God.
With regard to the question of beginning with being, it is to be remarked that being presents itself as
immediate, as a being of infinitely multiple determinations, a world in all its plenitude. This can be more
precisely characterized as a collection of innumerable contingencies in general (in the cosmological proof)
or as a collection of innumerable purposes and purposeful relationships (in the physico-theological proof).
To think this fullness of being involves eliminating from it the form of singularities and contingencies, and
to conceive of it as universal being, necessary in and for itself, being which is active in determining itself
according to universal purposes, which beingas Godis different from the being with which we began.
[EpW, no. 50]
We can begin to see now what Hegel means when he says, as he does so often, that we do not of ourselves think
God, know God, but that God knows himself in our thinking, which is at once our consciousness of objects and our
consciousness of self. My concept is not identical with the concept of God, in the sense of a one-to-one
correspondence, but in the sense that my concept of God, which is the issue of my thinking God's self-
manifestation, is the manifestation in my inmost being of God as real, not merely "existing."
Thus the outstanding statement of Anselm's, in which one can see the character of Scholastic understanding
in general, is a proof,22 not a comprehension (Begreifen) of God's reality. With proof in the former sense I
have
22. Here Hegel employs Beweis more in the sense of "argument" than in his usual sense of "proof."


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not attained to the ultimate, not to what I am looking for; what is lacking is the I, the interior bond,
inferiority as inferiority of thought. This latter is contained only in concept, in the unity of individual and
universal, of being and thinking. That this unity be comprehended it would be necessary to know that of
itself being determines itself to concept and, that, on the other hand, thinking and being are identical. That
is inferiority: not the necessary consequence of what is presupposed; it is not the nature of thinking and
being which is here the objectwhat they are is presupposed. [VGP II, pp. 59192]
What Hegel makes abundantly clear in his treatment of Saint Anselm (ibid., pp. 55460) is that the thinking
(thought) he is speaking of is not that of any particular thinker (or of the sum total of finite thinkers) but the "pure
thinking" which is identified with being. It is this which the individual subject is to appropriate, interiorize.
That there is thinking, reasoning, knowing means that what is a necessary prerequisite to this finite activity is real.
But, it means much more than that; it means that, if the concrete absolute thus manifests itself, the human mind can
come to grips not only with the "existence" of God but also with the what of the God who manifests himself and
that our knowing him is somehow a sharing in his knowing of himself. "Thus, when we contemplate the idea of
God in the philosophy of religion, we have at the same time before us the manner of his being represented. He
simply represents himself to himself; this is the aspect of the manifest being [Daseins] or existence of the
Absolute" (VPR I, p. 33). The "Idea" of God, then, is not confined to our thinking; God is the self-revelatory Idea
to which our thinking is the response. "In the philosophy of religion, then, we have thus the Absolute as object;
not, however, merely in the form of thought, but also in the form of its manifestation" (ibid., pp. 3334). Our
conceiving is itself revelation: "The universal Idea is thus to be comprehended in the purely concrete meaning of
essentiality as such, as active in presenting itself, appearing, revealing itself'' (ibid., p. 34). None of this means, of
course, that what we say of God from the point of view of philosophy will be different from what we say from the
point of view of religion; it simply means that from the point of view of philosophy we stand a better chance of
knowing what we are saying.
Although everything we have seen thus far in regard to "proofs" of God's reality could be directed against those
who reject God entirely, it is clearly not these that Hegel has primarily in mind. Rather he is concerned directly
with those who reject the possibility of "knowing" God, thus relegating the response to the divine reality to some
activity, however vague, other than thinking. We have already seen that Hegel considers a belief in we-know-not-
what to be scarcely a human response at all. Here, however, it has been a question of showing that a "thinking"
which does not rise to


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God is not really thinking at all; it is not true to itself as thinking. But that is not enough; in the context in which
Hegel writes, that last statement is not really problematical: even Kant would admit that we cannot think without
thinking the infinite. The problem arises when the contention is that thinking the infinite guarantees the being of
the infinite. That finite thinking cannot of itself guarantee the being of the infinite is too obvious to need mention.
If then, there is to be a conceptual guarantee of infinite Being, it must be found in a concept which is not the
product of finite thinking and which finite thinking can (must) recognize as objective and, thus, identical with the
being of its object. If it can be shown, and this, Hegel contends, "speculative thinking" does, that without infinite
thought finite thinking would not be, then the identity of thought and being in the infinite is seen to be necessary,
which is to say, finite spirit can know this. "That we cannot subjectively think the concept of God without at the
same time thinking the reality of God, Hegel contends as a consequence of his onto-theology, is possible because
the essence of God, his objective concept already contains in itself God's reality."23 This is what we mean when
we say God, and this is what Anselm means when he says that to have the concept of God is already to know that
God is real. This, of course, brings us around full circle to Kant's contention that reality (or existence) is not the
content of any concept, to which Hegel replies that any concept which does not contain reality is not a true
concept, in the fullest sense (VGP II, p. 559). One might want to argue that there are no true concepts, but with
someone who argues that way there is no point arguing. It is true, of course, that no finite reality thoroughly
coincides with its concept; it is the very nature of finite reality not to thus coincide with its concept, and it is for
this reason that there is an element of untruth in all finite reality. "God alone is the thorough harmony of concept
and reality. All finite things involve an untruth; they have a concept and an existence, but their existence does not
meet the requirements of the concept" (EpW, no. 24). Not only does no particular finite reality need to exist; it
must perish: ''For this reason, they must perish, and then the incompatibility between their concept and their
existence becomes manifest" (ibid.). The point is that it makes absolutely no sense to infer from the noncoincidence
of finite reality with its concept to the noncoincidence of infinite reality with its concept. More than that, it makes
no sense not to argue from the noncoincidence of finite reality with its concept to the necessary coincidence of
infinite reality with its concept; else reality as such makes no sense. To acknowledge the nonbeing of the finite is to
recognize the necessary being of the infinite, and to philosophize in such a way as not to acknowledge this is not
to philosophize.
Gruyter, 1970), p. 107.


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Anselm, consequently, neglecting any such conjunction as occurs in finite things, has with good reason
pronounced that alone to be the perfect which exists not merely in a subjective but also in an objective
mode. It does no good to put on airs against the ontological proof, as it is called, and against Anselm's thus
defining the perfect. The argument is one latent in every unsophisticated mind, and it recurs in every
philosophy, even against its wish and unbeknownst to it. [EpW, no. 193]
What, in the last analysis, Hegel is saying, then, is not that the reality of God can be "inferred" from the concept of
God in finite mind, but that only the reality of God makes it possible for the finite mind to conceive God; if God
were not real he would be inconceivableor, better still, conceiving would be impossible. Only by resigning oneself
to the impossibility of knowing truth at all can one resign oneself to the impossibility of knowing that God is true
reality. One can, perhaps, theoretically deny the human mind the possibility of knowing the true; practically one
cannot, because one cannot live that way.24 What one cannot do, theoretically or practically, is simultaneously to
affirm the mind's capacity to know truth and deny its capacity to know the truth of God's reality.
In the so-called ontological proof of God's reality we have the same conversion of the absolute concept into
being which has constituted the profundity of the idea in modern times, but which in our own time has been
presented as the inconceivable. To do this, then, because only the unity of concept and reality is truth, is to
relinquish knowledge of the truth. Because the consciousness which is understanding does not hold to this
unity but stops short in a separation of the two moments of truth, it still admits in regard to an object such
as this [God] a belief in this unity. [PR II, no. 280, Zusatz]
Faith may well be necessary, if thinking is to get off the ground; it is not to be taken as an excuseor a refugewhen
thinking refuses to get off the ground!
24. In PdG (pp. 15657) Hegel refutes skepticism, not by showing that it contradicts itself but that it
contradicts life; in practice it refutes itself.


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Chapter Six
The Question of Pantheism
Although it has to be granted that Hegel's "speculative logic" has made a good case for the necessity of affirming
the reality of a concrete "absolute," without which there is no coming to grips with any reality at all, it is,
nevertheless, still quite obvious that not all the questions which can be asked have been answered by that
affirmation. We have seen (chap. 1) Hegel's contention that the Absolute which rational thinking is compelled to
affirm is not other than the God in whom religious consciousness believes. We have seen also (chap. 2) the
speculative buildup for that contention in the ultimate identification of rational thought and concrete reality. Again,
we have worked through (chap. 3) the reasoning according to which neither the concrete absolute of philosophical
thought nor the God of religion can make sense other than as Spirit, because the only thinking which can be reality
is the self-thinking of spirit. This then led (chap. 4) to our grappling with the concept of the infinite, not as the
endless repetition of the same but as the all-inclusiveness of the totality of differences. Finally, we have seen
(chap. 5) Hegel's triumphant assertion that the human mind not only canor mustthink this Absolute, this Spirit, this
Infinite, this God, but that what the mind must thus think must indeed be real.
Hegel has indeed made a good case, but, the question might be askedand it has beenhas he made too good a case?
Is the God who (Hegel's logic tells him) must be real, so real that all else is not real, so all-inclusive that he is
simply to be identified with the totality of reality, so absolute that he is in no way relative; in short, is God's
infinity such that it leaves no room for a finite reality which is not God? Is the God whom Hegel's rational thinking
affirms not recognizable, not acceptable as God? To the religious mind Hegel may well seem to have taken the
mystery out of God, made him so rational that there is no room left for adoration. To the scientific mind, on the
other hand, Hegel's God may be too mysterious, too


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contradictory to be scientifically acceptable, the logic not adequately logical, the proofs not scientifically
compelling. To common sense, finallyand, as Descartes remarks,1 no one ever complains of having been granted
too little of thatHegel's God would seem to be indistinguishable from the sum total of finite reality and, therefore,
finite after all. One way or the other, then, the charge that has frequently been brought against Hegel is that in
trying to understand God in a way that makes rational sense he has depicted for us a God who is no God, either
because a God whose existence is inferred2 from the existence of finite reality is himself only finite or because the
attempt to make infinite reality intelligible leaves no room for the reality of the finiteand the result in either case is
"pantheism." When, however, we attempt to make sense out of the accusation we run into a difficulty: Is it a
logical, a theological, a religious, or merely an emotional accusation? It is interesting in this connection that, in
writing for the Century Dictionary of 1889, Charles Sanders Peirce defined "pantheism" as "the metaphysical
doctrine that God is the only substance, of which the material universe and man are only manifestations. It is
accompanied by a denial of God's personality.'' Peirce's definition would seem to be tailored to describe the
metaphysics of Spinoza, without being grounded in any clear understanding of that metaphysics. It is Peirce's next
sentence, however, which is of particular interest here: "Pantheism is essentially unchristian; and the word implies
rather the reprobation of the speaker than any very definite opinion" (emphasis mine).3 It may or may not be
significant that Peirce does not apply the definition to Hegel's position, but it does indicate the need of caution in
applying it to any position, since it looks very much like an abstraction whose only reality lies in the mind of the
accuserif it is not simply the only way the accuser can make sense out of reason's affirming God at all.
I can, I think, illustrate the problem by referring to two incidents in my own life, events widely separated in time
but closely related as milestones in an ongoing attempt both to affirm the reality of God and to know insofar as I
could just what I was affirming. The first event occurred not many weeks after, as a young man of eighteen, I first
set foot in the novitiate of the Society of Jesus. The novitiate was situated on the banks of the Hudson River three
miles above Poughkeepsie, New York, a setting in which nature
1. Descartes, Discourse on Method, part I.
2. We have already seen (chap. 5), of course, that Hegel refuses to call "proof" of God's reality an "inference,"
but there are those who dispute his justification for so doing.
3. A rather more pedestrian definition of "pantheism" is to be found in Webster's New Collegiate Dictionary:
"The doctrine that the universe, taken or conceived as a whole, is God; the doctrine that there is no God but the
combined forces and laws which are manifested in the existing universe." The implication would seem to be
that, if the being of God is not inferred from the being of the universe, it must be identified with the being of
the universe.


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was manifested in all its exuberant fullness, and I was a young man who had lived all eighteen years of my life in
New York City. The time was late September, and for three weeks my senses had been bombarded by a beauty I
had never previously been privileged to witness. Every tree, every leaf, every blade of grass, every rock, the river,
the palisades, the stars in the deep blue sky undimmed by competition with city lightsall shouted to me, and what
they shouted was "God!" Who can remain sane in a setting like that? One evening, the clearest of clear evenings,
the beauty became so overpowering that I exclaimed to my companions, "God is . . . all that; all that is God!" I was
quickly brought back to the world of commonsense reality by one of the older noviceshe must have been all of
nineteen''What you are saying, Brother," he told me, "is pantheism." The thought was a sobering one; quite
obviously I had said something silly, and equally obviously I did not know what I was saying. By the same token,
however, I did not know what he was sayingnor have I found out in the meantime.
The second event occurred seventeen years later. I was participating in a seminar on Hegel's Logic at the University
of Freiburg im Breisgau. It was not my first exposure to Hegel, but it was my first detailed examination of his
Science of Logic. The seminar discussion focused entirely on the first part, "The Doctrine of Being," and since I
was not yet familiar with Hegel's "speculative thinking" or with his dialectical mode of predication, I was
somewhat perplexed by his simultaneous identification and distinction of finite and infinite. One evening, as I was
walking home with another student in the seminar, I ventured to remark, "I find all this very interesting, even
fascinating, but to me it sounds like pantheism." My fellow student stopped walking, looked at me quizzically for a
moment, and then inquired, "Is that supposed to be a dirty word?" Since that time I have been trying to answer two
questions: "Was Hegel really a pantheist?" and "Is pantheism, in fact, a dirty word?" I have never found the
answer to either question, which in recent times has prompted a third question: "Does the term 'pantheism' really
have a meaning, in the sense that it refers to a position held by anyone?"
Hegel's Critics
Although I now seriously doubt that I shall ever get answers to my three questions, there can be no doubt that
Hegel has frequently been accused of pantheism, chiefly, but not exclusively, by Roman Catholic authorsalthough
one is led to suspect that those who, like Kierkegaard and Barth, find something frivolous in trying to approach
God through


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reason at all, might well agree with the charge, if they thought it worth the trouble to do so.4
In reading what Hegel's accusers have to say in this matter incidentally, one is struck by two significant
characteristics of what they have to say: (1) none of them is quite sure just what "pantheism" means or whether any
position can be unequivocally called "pantheistic"; and (2) they rarely, if ever, come out and say quite clearly that
Hegel was a pantheist; they say rather that his kind of thinking ''leads to" pantheistic conclusions, because, as they
see it, that thinking blurs distinctions which they consider essential to orthodoxy.
One can quite readily appreciate the first of the above difficulties; it is a difficulty inherent in any attempt at all to
think philosophically of God, of infinite Spirit, of absolute reality. Would a God who is not the totality of reality be
an infinite being; or would an infinite being who is the totality of reality be the Creator of a universe of finite
reality? But the whole issue has very subtly been falsified by the illegitimate insertion of the seemingly harmless
articles "a" with God and "an" with infinite Being; both logically imply that "God," "infinite Being" is a one
among many. In any event, two of the staunchest proponents of theism in its strictest sense have emphasized the
difficulty of distinguishing definitively between theism and pantheismparticularly where the position in question is
a philosophical one, where what is at stake is knowing God. Joseph Maréchal, who made heroic efforts to wed the
"transcendental method" with the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas, admits, "Nothing is so difficult as to define
pantheism in its necessary opposition to theism." The wording, it is true, is unfortunate, since it presupposes what
has not been proved, that is, that there is a "necessary opposition" between pantheism and theism, even though
pantheism has not been defined, but the meaning seems clear enough: "Nothing is more difficult than to define
pantheism in such a way that it is seen to be necessarily opposed to theism."5 José Gomez-Caffarena, writing in
the Maréchalian tradition at a later date, goes on to elucidate, "There is probably no final position which may be
unequivocally called 'theistic' or 'Pantheistic.'"6 Hegel might have helped both authors by pointing out that, as we
have seen, on the basis of a "transcendental philosophy" à la Kant there is no solution to their difficulty. A
philosophy according to
4. It is interesting in this connection that Feuerbachwho did not charge Hegel with "pantheism," that is,
could not, precisely because he would not distinguish Hegel's "reason" from "Enlightenment" reasoncame
to the conclusion that reason could assert no more than "atheism."
5. Joseph Maréchal, Le point de départ de la métaphysique (Brussels: Desclée de Brouwer, 1944), Cahier IV, p.
430. My own revamping of Maréchal's statement seems imperative, if we are not to find him begging the
question.
6. José Gomez-Caffarena, Metafisica Transcendental (Madrid: Revista de Occidente, 1970), p. 205. It might be
well to point out that Gomez-Caffarena, too, is presupposing that, if there were such "unequivocal positions,"
they would be unequivocally op-posed.


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which conceptual forms, without which there is no thinking or knowing, are essentially (1) forms of subjective
thinking and (2) only forms, not content, of that thinking, is condemned either not to know the infinite at all or to
know only a cumulative infinite, the endless repetition of finite instances. If such a philosophy, then, is to be
theisticwhich Kant's is not qua philosophyit is difficult to see how its theism could be distinguishable from
pantheism. By the same token, if the only criterion by which such a philosophy judges another position is its own
internal logic, it is not at all difficult to see why its judgment of Hegel's "speculative thinking" is that it inevitably
"leads to" a pantheistic view of God. There may, of course, be reasons for rejecting the very concept of a totally
rational system, but the reason for so doing can scarcely be that such a system, on the basis of a logic which is not
its own, would ''lead to" a pantheistic conception of God. The same argument, of course, might be applied to any
philosophic conception of God.
To illustrate the difficulty of coming to terms with Hegel's thought in terms of a logic which is not his own, we
need cite but one exampleperhaps the classic exampleof the charge of pantheism leveled against Hegel. The words
are those of Joseph Maréchal.
The world, objective creation, becomes then a necessary moment in the internal evolving cycle of God. God
achieves consciousness of himself and thus realizes himself fully only by making himself object [for
himself] in creation. Ultimately not only is the world related to God but God is related to the world; the
relation becomes reciprocal. By means of a verbal fiction God and the world, the absolute and the relative,
are still opposed, but, when all is said and done, there is only one God, only one Absolutethe totality. To
confuse the totality with the absolute is clearly what characterizes pantheism. Every philosophic conception
which eliminates the contingency of creation leads inevitably to this. [Emphasis mine]7
Before coming to grips with the overall argumentation here, in which with slight variations Maréchal is followed
by, among others, Auguste Grégoire, Franz Grégoire, Auguste Valensin, and, with slightly less assurance, by José
Gomez-Caffarena, Henri Rondet, and Hans Küng,8 it seems necessary to engage in what might be termed a bit of
"negative ex-
7. Maréchal, Point de départ, IV, p. 434.
8. Auguste Grégoire, Immanence et transcendance (Brussels: L'édition Universelle, 1939), pp. 211216. Franz
Grégoire, Études Hégéliennes (Louvain: Publications Universitaires de Louvain, 1958), pp. 140217. Auguste
Valensin, A travers la métaphysique (Paris: Beauchesne, 1925), pp. 97111. José Gomez-Caffarena, Metafisica
Transcendental, pp. 204205. Henri Rondet, Hégélianisme et Christianisme (Paris: Lethielleux, 1965), pp. 6671.
Hans Küng, Menschwerdung Gottes (Freiburg/Br.: Herder, 1970), pp. 32041.


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egesis" of the passage just quoted. Not only are the language and the concepts not those of Hegel, but no
justification is supplied for implying that Hegel should be bound by them. "The world, objective creation": the
expression, "objective creation," belongs to a Scholasticism, which may well have its merits, but which carries
overtones which are completely foreign to Hegel's way of thinking. It presupposes (1) an activity of God,
"creation" (among other activities?), which is completely distinct from and unrelated to its term, ''what is created,"
that is, "the world"; and (2) a creative activity which is a kind of "making," resulting in a something over-against
God, in no way continuous with God. This, then, "becomes . . . a necessary moment in the internal evolving cycle
of God": having made the unexplained distinction between an "objective creation" and some other kind of creation,
the author assumes that Hegel views what is external to God as "a necessary moment in the internal evolving cycle
of God," as though "external" and "internal" are other than metaphorical terms in their application to God.
"Necessary moment" and "internal evolving cycle" are emotional expressions calculated to prejudice the audience.
"God achieves consciousness of himself": there is an unmistakable note of both temporal succession and the
employment of means in the term "achieves," and there is an assumption that we all know exactly what God's
"consciousness of himself" is. "By making himself object [for himself] in creation" carries on the "means" motif
and implies that "creation" and "consciousness of himself" are somehow distinct activities in God. The next
sentence contains a note of horror, "The relation becomes reciprocal," the supposition being that the author has
made sense out of the concept of "nonreciprocal relation" and that Hegel is at fault in not sharing his enthusiasm
for the concept. The "verbal fiction" in the next sentence is predicated on the assumption that Hegel has made no
senseas in Kantian terms he could notin what he says of reconciling contradictions in the infinite. This, then,
permits the author to claim that what Hegel does is "to confuse the totality with the absolute"which, as we have
seen, Hegel claims is exactly what a "metaphysics of understanding" must doand that this "is clearly what properly
characterizes pantheism." The final sentence, then, carries the full thrust of the whole charge against Hegel: "Every
philosophic conception which eliminates the contingency of creation leads inevitably to this." If by "creation"
(presumably a noun in the context) is meant the totality of that which is not God, and if by "contingent" is meant
that which is not necessary, and if the only being of which "necessary" is an attribute is God, then to speak of
"creation" (participial) as necessary (noncontingent) is to blur the distinction between God and the totality of what
is not God. But that a difficulty yet remains, which "transcendental thinking," if it wishes to remain theologically
orthodox, is in no position to resolve, should be obvious. Not only (1) is it necessarily


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true that creation, whether taken participially or nominally, as activity or the product thereof, is divine, but (2) it is
also necessarily true that, although the creative activity cannot be distinguished from the infinite being of God, it is
of the very essence of the product of that activity to be finitewhich, of itself, does not say "contingent." What
distinguishes the world from God, then, is its finitude, not its contingency. If one wants to argue that a
noncontingent world militates against God's "freedom," the issue is no longer that of "pantheism," and it demands a
far more subtle analysis of the concept of "freedom" than has yet been manifested by Hegel's opponents.
Be all this as it may, what is being said in criticism of Hegel is that there are three principal characteristics of
pantheistic thought, all three of which are manifested in what Hegel says of God. (1) God creates necessarily
(which may or may not be synonymous with "God necessarily creates") and, therefore, the created world is
necessary; the contingency of the world has been eliminated. It should be noted that Hegel's opponents have no
intention of denying the simplicity of God, according to which there can be no real distinction between God's
necessary being and God's activity, including his creative activity. What they are denying is that the product of this
creative activity, the world, need be; that would negate God's freedom in creatingGod would need the world as
much as the world needs God (assuming, presumably, that "necessary" and "needed" are synonymous); to be God
he would have to create. Equivalently, then, a noncreator God who, admittedly, is not the God who isand the only
God who isis a possibility; whatever abstract "possibility" can mean in the context. How the finite human knows
that it is possible for God not to do what he does is an issue which the critics pass over rather blithely. They can, of
course, argue that God can do or not do whatever does not contradict their concept of God, but in saying that they
have painted themselves into a Kantian corner. "Their'' concept of God would seem inevitably to be subjective, and
in rejecting, along with Kant, the "ontological proof" of God's reality, they would seem to have cut off from
themselves that avenue of escape. If their appeal is to God's revelation of himself they are still in a somewhat
uncomfortable positionthat of asserting rather categorically that they understand God's self-revelation better than
Hegel did, which is at least open to dispute (but that will have to wait).
(2) The second pantheistic characteristic which, we are told, mars the purity of Hegel's concept of God has to do
not so much with the necessity of the created world in itself as with the necessity (again equated with "need") of a
created world for God's consciousness of himself. Because God's consciousness of himself is identified with God's
creative activity, and because Hegel blurs the distinction between the necessity of the creative activity and the
contingency of its product, the world which God creates


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becomes necessary if God is to be a self-conscious, spiritual being. Thus, the relationship of God to the world is as
necessary as is the relationship of the world to Godpresumably the relation is one of dependence on both sides.
Ultimately this means that, if there is no distinction between God's consciousness of himself and his consciousness
of the world, there is no distinction between the self of which he is conscious and the world of which he is
conscious. That this conclusion, which may or may not be legitimate according to a logic which is not Hegel's,
completely misses the point of all that Hegel is trying to say in Phenomenology of Spirit, the critics seem to ignore.
(3) Since a position is designated "pantheistic" according to the manner in which it conceives of God, the charge
must ultimately focus on what Hegel has to say about human reason's knowledge of God. If, as Hegel says, to
know God is to know the totality of reality, it must also be true to say that to know the totality of reality is to know
God, and this, we are told, is equivalent to identifying God and the totality of reality. Although it might be argued
that all of these charges stem from a theological and not a philosophical position, that is, that the God Hegel claims
to know philosophically is theologically unacceptable, it is interesting to note that all the authors referred to here
are convinced that by adhering to the authentic philosophical theism of Thomas Aquinas one can avoid the
pantheistic pitfalls of which Hegel has been the victim. Whether or not even Thomas Aquinas is safe, when the
"transcendental method" has been grafted on to his philosophy, is another question.
The Contingency of the World

Before going on it seems necessary to note that in effect all three points made in the indictment of Hegel are
reducible to the first, that is, to the claim that Hegel denies the contingency of the created world, which in turn
implies that the being of this created world follows logically from the being of God and that God's knowledge of
himself follows logically from his knowledge of the created world. The difficulties this creates, however, stem
from certain inevitable ambiguities in the use of language; if Hegel is saying one thing, then he must be saying a
second thing which, his critic knows, follows from the first. Thus, if it is true to say, as even the most ardent theist
must, that God's knowledge of the created world is indistinguishable from God's knowledge of himself, both
because there can be no distinction among God's activities and because the only adequate object of God's
knowledge is himself, then, to employ a language which cannot but be ambiguousif not falseGod's knowledge of
himself is a necessary condition for his knowing the created world. To state this in even more ambiguous language,
if God knows the worldand a "theistic" God doeshe must


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necessarily know it in knowing himself; there is no other way. Among theists who have not abandoned their faith
in reason there is general agreement on this. Still, the employment of such terms as "condition" or "must" in
language about God runs a great risk, especially if it accompanies the claim that this is what someone else is saying
(or has to be saying!). It can be made to look as though if one says that in knowing the created world God must be
knowing himself, it then follows that one is also saying that in knowing himself God must be knowing the created
world. Very subtly knowledge of the created world has been turned into a condition for knowing himself (even
though this does not logically follow from the preceding statement). It takes but a very elementary awareness of
logic to see that the second "must'' (or "condition") does not follow from the first. But that is precisely the point: If
the second statement does not logically follow from the first, it is worse than arbitrary to say that if Hegel does
make the first statement he must also be making the second. Mutatis mutandis the logic of drawing invidious
conclusions from what Hegel does say about human reason's knowledge of God should be examined with the same
care.
What, then, did Hegel himself have to say regarding the charges of pantheism which were leveled at him during his
own lifetime? We have already seen (chap. 2) that in 1830, while writing the preface to the third edition of the
Encyclopedia he responded with a rare emotional outburst against those who arrogated to themselves the right to
determine exactly what is and what is not compatible with Christian orthodoxy and who judged his philosophy
precisely from this point of view as unchristian. In 1829 he had promised reviews of five works containing specific
criticism of his philosophy. Only two of these reviews appeared, and in both of them he defended himself
vigorously against the charge of pantheism. The main point that he makes in these two defenses is that his critics,
who, wrote from the theological rather than the philosophical point of view, had failed to grasp the distinction
between a speculative metaphysics of reason and an abstract metaphysics of understanding and had therefore
illegitimately judged his philosophy from the standpoint of the latter. The point Hegel is making, however, is not
so much a defense of his own position as it is an attack on the prejudice that any attempt to come to grips with God
philosophically will end up in pantheism, precisely because finite human reason cannot properly distinguish
between the infinite reality which is God and the finite reality which is the world. If, of course, the only infinite
with which human thinking can come to grips is the mathematical infinite of endless extension of the finite, then
any attempt to identify such an infinite with God would terminate in an identification of God and the sum total of
finite reality.
It is precisely this sort of pantheism, however, that Hegel rejects in no uncertain terms. The chief text in this regard
is contained in the surprisingly


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long no. 573 in Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences, where he makes the point, among others, that it is the
pietistic religionists, who fear reason, and the metaphysicians of understanding, who misconstrue reason, who
accuse genuinely rational philosophy of being inevitably pantheistic. It is significant in this connection that no. 573
constitutes both a long introduction to and a summary of the third part of what Hegel calls "The Philosophy of
Absolute Spirit," which embraces art, religion, and philosophy, all three of which have as their subject matter the
ultimate reality who is God. It is Hegel's contention that a philosophy which does not culminate in God is no
philosophy at all, but it is also his contention that the God who is philosophy's object is one and the same God who
is the object of both art and religion. Art "makes present" to sensible intuition under a variety of forms one and the
same "substantial content," which is absolute Spirit, God (EpW, no. 572). Religion ''represents" to thought the
"self-unfolding" of the same "absolute content," which in philosophy is "lifted" to the content of "self-conscious
thinking" (ibid.). "Thus, this knowing (Wissen) is the concept of art and religion known (erkannte) in thinking.
Herein what is diverse in the content is known to be necessary, and the necessary is known to be free" (ibid.).
Philosophy, then, does what neither art nor religion can do: it can recognize both the rational necessity of the
"represented" absolute object and the rational necessity of art and religion as approaches to this object. Philosophy
can do this precisely because its "form" of rational thinking is the form proper to the absolutely necessary content.
"This knowing (Erkennen) is thus the recognition (Anerkennen) of this content and of its form, and it is the
liberation from the onesidedness of the [other] forms, lifting them to the absolute form which determines itself as
content and remains identical with the content. In this way it is the knowing of that necessity which is in and for
itself" (EpW, no. 573). Only when the absolute Spirit" to which art and religion are oriented is "known" are art and
religion "completed" (vollbracht) (ibid.). It is philosophy's task to "explain" what art can only "present" in external
form and religion can only "represent" interiorly.
It is here that "understanding" pulls up short. Religious belief can put up with the patent contradictions of the
Absolute which is the content of art and religion. "Understanding" not only cannot put up with such contradictions
but it has an easy task pointing out the contradictions in reason's "exposition" of faith. This is what "rationalism"
does, and in so doing it "finitizes" the religious content, thus in effect eliminating it. "Religion, then, is thoroughly
within its rights to defend itself against this sort of reason and philosophy and to treat it as the enemy" (ibid.).
Hegel's point is, however, that authentic philosophy is not rationalistic but "speculative" and that it is thus truly
"religious," in a way that "rationalistic"


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philosophy simply cannot be. "It is something else again when religion opposes comprehending reason and
philosophy as such, particularly when it opposes the sort of philosophy whose content is speculative and thus
religions" (ibid.). True philosophy, then, is attacked from two sides: from the side of "pietism" and from that of
"rationalism''; "for the former it has too little of God in it, for the latter too much" (ibid.). To put this another way
we might say that for the pietist a God whom reason demands is no God, since God far exceeds the capacity of
reason; for the rationalist metaphysician a reason which demands God is no reason, because reason is essentially
oriented to the finite. In the final analysis both pietism and rationalism agree in completely finitizing reason.
On these grounds Hegel goes on to say that the charge of "atheism" frequently leveled against philosophy in earlier
times has in his own day become rare. Neither pietists nor rationalists complain that philosophy has "too little" to
say about God; that is as it should be, because for both reason is not capex infiniti. For the very same reason,
however, he claims that the charge of "pantheism" has become more popular, because for the rationalist the only
meaning that "infinite" can have is "totality" of finite reality, while for the pietist the only meaning that "reason"
can have is finite thinking. The former, then, sees "speculative reason" as a process of infinitizing the finite, while
the latter sees it as a process of finitizing the infinite.
Having said this much about "pietists" and "rationalists," Hegel turns his attention primarily to the "new pietism,
the new theology," which simply takes it for granted that a philosophy which seeks to know God will identify God
with "the all." Such an antiphilosophical religious piety, however, runs a double risk: (1) that of engaging in a
critique of a philosophical position without the equipment for so doing, and (2) that of handing over the affirmation
of God's reality to "subjective feeling" rather than to "knowledge," with the result that its God is inevitably an
extremely vague reality "without objective determination." The point Hegel is here making is similar to that with
which he began no. 573: Only philosophy can "comprehend" the rational necessity of what religion says of God.
Philosophy, it is true, can very well recognize its own forms in the categories of the religious mode of
representation as well as, by the same token, its own content in the content of religion, and it can grant that
both the forms and the content are legitimate. The converse, however, is not true: for the religious mode of
representation does not apply to itself a critique of thought and, thus, does not comprehend itself, because
its grasp is exclusively immediate. [EpW, no. 573]
Because this piety relies on "subjective feeling" alone, thus eliminating all


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knowledge of God's concrete nature, it actually has no interest in a determinate and therefore real God. An abstract
God can be represented in any number of ways, and if thought were to adopt these many modes of representation
uncritically it might very well culminate in an identification of God with everything. If determinate being is other
than God, then to affirm a determinate God is to identify God with what is other than God.
But (and here Hegel grows sarcastic) pantheism is too ridiculous to be foisted on any philosophy, and "it is only
their own absence of thought and a consequent falsification of concepts which produces the notion or assertion of
pantheism" (ibid.). Now, if the accusers are incapable of seeing thisand since it is a question of comprehending
concepts, they are obviously incapablethey ought at least to have the good grace "to establish it as a fact that any
philosopher or, for that matter, any man has attributed to all things a reality and substantiality in and for
themselves and has then looked upon these things as God" (ibid.). Pantheism, Hegel says, exists only in the
"heads" of the accusers.9 There might, of course, be the remote possibility that someone misled by language might
understand the term "world" to designate one single thing which, since it is all inclusive could be identified with
God as the totality of the real (if indeed one can perform the mental gymnastics of thinking of either the world or
God as "things''). The burden of proof would still be on those who claim that in fact anyone does thinkor has
thoughtof the world in this simplistic way. The world is a multiplicity of disparate, empirically observable things
which can be gathered together under one heading as a linguisticperhaps even conceptualconvenience, but the
likelihood that anyone would identify this with a determinate God, Hegel holds, is remote.
It is, however, only such a confusion with empty unity that makes possible the introduction of so deficient a
notion as that of a pantheism. Only the notion coming out of the indistinct blue of the world as one thing,
the all (dem All) could be looked upon as linkable with God; only as a result of that would it be possible
that anyone would hold that what is meant is that God is the world. For, if the world is taken as it is, as
everything (Alles), as the endless conglomeration of empirical existences, no one would in fact have held it
to be possible that there should be a pantheism, which would assert of such a content that it is God. [Ibid.]
If there are philosophies that give the impression of stating precisely such an identification, Hegel goes on to say,
that stems from the need common to all philosophies and all religions to come up first with a notion of God and
then with a notion of the relationship between God and the world. An
9. The not uncommon phenomenon in the history of thought of attributing to the words of another a
meaning those words would have only if uttered by the critic.


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adequate philosophy will see that the determinate nature of God defines God's relation to the world, a relation
intrinsic to God, not attributed to him by rationalistic thinking. If, however, the mistake is made of separating God
and the world in such a way that they stand over-against each other as mutually exclusive, the infinite over-against
the finite, then comes the difficulty as to how the two relate to each other (if, indeed, the number "two" can make
sense in the context). "It is this connection which, by those who wish to know nothing of God's nature, is called the
incomprehensible" (ibid.). This, then, brings us back to our long second chapter on the nature of the "concept" as
the all-embracing, concrete, dynamic unity, the comprehension of which is the comprehension of reality. To say
that to know God in concept is to know the world in concept is not to say that what is known is one and the same.
It is to say that the totality of reality is not composed of God and the worldcomposition here makes no sense
whatever. The pious theologians who accuse Hegel of pantheism are "hoist by their own petard"; their faith tells
them that God is ''omnipresent," but their thinking does not permit them to distinguish between omnipresent and
identical withbetter not to think!
Because, however, they would ascribe to God an effectiveness on and in the whole of occupied space, on
and in the world in his relation to it, they would have the endless fragmentation of divine actuality into
endless materiality. They would have the deficient notion, which they call pantheism or the all-one-
doctrine, as in fact simply the properly necessary consequence of their own deficient notions of God and
the world. [Ibid.]
So much for Hegel's opinion of those who accuse him of "pantheism"or of "leading to" pantheism. Their accusation
stems from their inability to understand the concepts at the heart of his philosophy, from their insistance on
interpreting what he does say in the framework of thought forms proper to a "metaphysics of understanding," not
of "speculative metaphysics."
"Speculative" Philosophy and Religion

It may well be, of course, that Hegel's speculative mode of philosophizing does not sit comfortably with any
philosophyor theologyother than Hegel's own (as we shall see in the next chapter, Hegel's philosophy and theology
are practically indistinguishable). It is nevertheless true that we should make every effort to come to grips with this
sort of philosophizing precisely because of Hegel's claims that speculative philosophizing (1) has the merit of not
burdening religious faith with unresolvable contradictions, and (2) at once preserves the distinctness of God and the
world and yet avoids either infinitizing the world or finitizing God in a relationship which


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cannot but be extraordinarily intimate. The "theologians" who accuse Hegel of being a "pantheist" believe to a man
that God is the "Creator" of the world, even though, again to a man, they are inevitably vague as to just what it can
mean to say that God "creates" the world. No one, it would seem, can be particularly happy with the notion that
God "makes'' the world, simply because apart from God there is nothing out of which God could "make" a world.
How, then, does "infinite Reality" bring into being "finite reality" without finitizing himselfor does he, perhaps,
finitize himself without ceasing to be infinite, and is this an unresolvable contradiction? In his Lectures on the
History of Philosophy Hegel seeks to resolve the contradiction by appealing to what is a constant in his thought, to
the concept of God as the concretely universal, that is, universal by embracing, not by eliminating, all
differentiation. "The concrete, however, is the universal which particularizes itself and in this particularization,
finitization, still remains in itself infinite" (VGP II, p. 412). It is characteristic of the authentically infinite that in
"othering" itself it does not cease to be itself, that is, does not cease to be infinite. Although Hegel does not employ
the terminology, this is reminiscent of the Platonic "form of the Good" or of the medieval concept of "the Good"
which is "diffusive of itself." The God of "pantheism," on the other hand, is an abstract God, separated from his
creation in such wise that his self-outpouring can be expressed only through the metaphor of "emanation."
On the contrary, in the case of pantheism there is a universal substrate, a universal substance, which
finitizes itself and in so doing steps down. It is characteristic of emanation that the universal by
particularizing itself, God by creating the world, degrades himself in the particular, sets a limit to himself,
finitizes himselfand this self-finitization involves no return to self. [Ibid.]
To speak of the infinite "othering" itself, going out of itself, is meaningful only if the going-out is also a
remaining-with.
Hegel is speaking here of the difference between a God who is only infinite "substance," for which the reality of
another substance would be a limitation, and the God who is infinite "activity," infinite "Spirit," whose self-
othering is not self-limiting. Strictly speaking this language is intelligible, as we shall see in the next chapter, only
in the light of Hegel's trinitarian theology, according to which there is a continuity of God's self-othering in
himself and his self-othering in creation. This, in turn, raises the question whether Hegel's point of departure is his
logic of "being" or his theo-logic of "infinite being," to which we shall have to return later. In any event what we
see occurring here is a striking reversal of roles between Hegel and his critics: The accusation that by making
creation necessary Hegel is being "pantheistic" is countered with Hegel's contention that to hold for a non-


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necessary creation would be pantheistic. A finite reality which is only other than the infinite would limit the infinite
(see VPR I, p. 178); the finite which "is but an essential moment of the infinite" is at once other than and a
necessary consequence of the infinite (ibid., p. 191).
One might, of course, be tempted to argue that in all of this Hegel simply wants to have his cake and eat it. The
fact is, however, that he is trying (whether successfully or not is another matter) to strike a delicate balance
between according the world too much reality and according it too little.10 In a long Zusatz to no. 151 of the
Encyclopedia Hegel comes across as revealing a certain ambivalence in regard to Spinoza on precisely this issue.
Spinoza, he tells us, has been charged with "atheism," but in fact the reverse is true: By downgrading the difference
between the finite world and infinite substance Spinoza is not an "atheist" but rather an "acosmist." By the same
token, however, Spinoza is not a "pantheist'' either, "if pantheism means, as it often does, the doctrine which takes
finite things in their finitude and in the complex of them to be God." On the other hand, because Spinoza's
"acosmism" equivalently "denies truth to finite things and the world as a whole" (ibid.), it cannot be completely
acquitted of pantheismfor Spinoza only God is real! The point is, of course, that if God is "substance" and
substance only, and if God is infinite, there is no other substantial reality (see VPR I, p. 191). On the other hand,
Hegel is convinced, if God is activity, "Spirit," then the "substantial" reality of the world of things is saved without
equating this substantial reality with God. Hegel is further convinced that the reality of infinite activity, infinite
"Spirit," is no threat to the reality of finite activity, finite "spirit" (see chap. 4). All of which brings us back to the
characterization of spirit we have already seen, that in going out of itself it remains with itself, returns to itself.
Having come this far in our discussion we are, it would seem, faced with three questions which, even though they
may turn out to be not completely answerable, can nevertheless help clear the atmosphere. (1) Is anyone, in fact,
really a pantheist in the sense either of holding that God absorbs the whole of reality or of identifying the totality
of finite reality with infinite reality? Perhaps the real question here is whether meanings can be assigned to the
terms in such a way that the question is intelligible at all. One could, for example, take Spinoza's Deus sive natura
as an expression of either atheism or pantheism, but to do so would be to ignore the distinction which Spinoza
makes between natura naturans and natura naturata. Hegel, it would seem, is convinced that Spinoza is moving in
the right direction in making the distinction but that he does not go far enough, since the characteristic of the
personal is absent from Spinoza's God. (2) Does
10. The reverse, so to speak, of the complaint noted previously, which his opponents register regarding his
philosophy having either "too much" or "too little" of God in it.


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anyone who claims to find evidence for the reality of God in an admittedly finite universe lay himself open to the
charge of pantheism? Does not evidence of the infinite in the finite either infinitize the finite or finitize the
infinite? On the other hand it might be asked whether anyone really thinks it is possible to make sense out of a
merely finite universe, with no appeal to the infinite. What could a universe which depends only on itself possibly
be? It could be argued, of course, that there is no compelling reason to demand that the human mind should make
sense out of the universe, but it is doubtful that such an argument could satisfy a philosophercertainly not a Hegel.
(3) Does the claim that Hegel's philosophy is pantheistic stem from an attempt to interpret Hegel's thought on the
basis of a logic which is not Hegel's own "speculative logic"? Perhaps there is a hidden claim here that such a
speculative logic cannot possibly make sense, since it violates the infallible logic according to which nothing can
be stated in the conclusion of a syllogism which is not contained in its premissesand "infinite reality" is not
contained in the premisses of any ''proof" of God's reality. It is doubtful, however, that one can get away with this
kind of reasoning, despite the fact that it is so frequent in all philosophical criticism. To take what Hegel does say
and to conclude from it that, if I were on the basis of my principles to say the same, I should be uttering a
pantheistic statement, is scarcely an adequate reason for claiming that the same is true of Hegel. In a very
significant sense Hegel is saying that the reality of the infinite is contained in the finitude of the finite, because the
finite points to the being of the infinite without which its own being would not be intelligible.
God Makes a Difference

One thing is abundantly clear: Hegel is very much concerned that the God of whom he speaks make a difference to
the world in which he lives and which he seeks to understand, and a God who simply transcends reason will not
make that difference.11 On the other hand, a God who is in no way really distinguishable from that world will
make no difference either; he adds nothing to any possible account one could give of the world. It is relatively
easy, and undoubtedly true, to say that only if God truly transcends the world can he be immanent in it and,
conversely, that only if God is truly immanent in the world can he be said to transcend it. What Hegel is attempting
is (1) to show why reason finds this to be true and (2) to draw out the implications of this truth.
To have said this, however, is once more to bring up the question of the point of departure of Hegel's enquiry or, as
Hegel himself would put it, the
11. It is not enough to say that the world in which we live tells us something about God. Knowing God also
tells us something about the world in which we liveand this we shall not know if we do not know God.


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point of departure of philosophical enquiry as suchrecognizing that the point of departure will largely determine the
point of arrival. But to answer this question is not nearly so simple as it might seem, if for no other reason than
that, for Hegel, "point of departure" can have two almost antithetical meanings. In Science of Logic, for example,
he initially asks, "with what must the science begin," to which he gives the answer, "with being.'' Then at the end
he announces that the real starting point is the culminating point, the "absolute Idea," because the "goal" is the
"principle" of the whole process of enquiry. Only at the end can we see what was the "principle" all along. With
regard, then, to his philosophical enquiry into the reality of God, which, as we have seen (chap. 5), he says is an
enquiry closely related toif not identical withlogic, we might say that the point of departure is the God in whom
faith (and Christian faith at that) believes, and the process is one of showing that precisely this God is a demand of
reason.12 In the process it becomes clear that Hegel is saying that a reason which does not have the Absolute as its
object is not truly reason and that the Absolute to which reason is oriented is the God who is religion's object.
From another point of view it can be said that the point of departure for Hegel's process of enquiry is thought and
that only when thought and reality are thoroughly identified, as they are in the Absolute, in God, is the process
complete. From still another point of view it can be stated that the point of departure is the reality with which
philosophical enquiry seeks to come to grips and that to engage in the enquiry is to find it impossible to come to
grips with reality short of affirming the reality of the God in whom religion believes.
As so often happens when we seek to find out what Hegel meansor what he is trying to dowe are forced to turn
back to Phenomenology of Spirit, which is not only the introduction to Hegel's "system" but also, more importantly
perhaps, the constant underpinning of the system, since it is in the Phenomenology that he seeks to know what
"reason" is, which would seem to be foundational for knowing what reason "demands." In the initial stages of his
phenomenological investigation Hegel looks upon consciousness as simply the awareness of what is other than
itself. Rather rapidly, however, this consciousness becomes aware that in looking to a reality which is presumably
outside itself it is looking into itselfthere is nowhere else, to "look." The major portion of the Phenomenology, then,
is devoted to the progressive awareness that in looking into itself consciousness finds all the reality that is to be
found, and this is the discovery that in being thoroughly true to itself, consciousness is not merely consciousness,
not even merely consciousness of itself, but is "reason"; it
12. It should be pointed out again that Hegel never does say that the God of faith can be discovered by
human reason independently of faith. What he does say is that, given the God of faith, it can be seen that
this God fulfills the demand of reason.


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becomes aware that it itself "gives" itself all that of which it is aware, that its knowing is its own doing, which is
not to say that the real is not real, but that the knowing of it is the activity of spirit, not a being-acted-upon. This
discovery is signalized by the triumphant, even though as yet very vague, "notion of reason" in which the chapter
on "Self-Consciousness" culminates; that is, "the certainty of consciousness that in its singularity it is absolutely in
itself, or that it is all reality" (PdG, p. 171). This refrain is carried over in the introduction to the next four chapters
wherein the realization of reason is spelled out: When reason is all that it truly is, that is, ''Spirit," "Religious
Consciousness," and "Absolute Knowing," it is indeed "all reality," for there is no reality which is not reason's.
Reality issues from reason, but this can be so only if reason is in the last analysis "infinite." What infinite Reason
demands is so, and thus to know what reason demands is to know infinite "Reason," infinite "Spirit," "God." To
say, however, that "infinite Reason is all reality" is not to affirm a static identity of God and all reality; it is to
recognize that all reality is God's "doing. " Once again, then, we have to remind ourselves that, in Hegel's view, if
infinite Reason is the culmination of the enquiry, it is also its "principle," that toward which the enquiry was
moving from the beginning.
When all this has been said, it would still seem that Hegel is not yet out of the woods. What is at issue is not,
strictly speaking, whether God is real or not, whether the world is real or not, whether God is infinite and the world
finite, not even whether God and the world are distinct. The real question is whether the finite human mind can
legitimately make the move philosophically from its own finitude and the finitude of its world to an affirmation of
infinite Being, which involves knowing what "infinite" is, without running the risk of confusing the reality of God
and the reality of the world. It is all very well to say that reason itself does not make sense if there is not,
ultimately, infinite Reason. It is someting else again to say that finite spirit can know infinite Spirit without, so to
speak, cutting the infinite down to size or, perhaps, blowing up the finite to infinity. Is there an intelligible sense in
which finite reason is infinite, at least in its capacity to know, such that it cannot be satisfied with less than an
infinite object? To which might be added the further question: Is there any justification for saying that human
reason should be satisfiedis not "faith" enough for us poor mortals? As a provisional answer to the second question
we might say that a "faith" in a we-know-not-what could scarcely be enough and that it is not a question of
whether human reason should be satisfied but rather of whether if can be satisfiedespecially if faith cannot be
satisfactory if reason is not.13 With regard to the first question Hegel's
13. Lest it be argued, theologically, that faith is a "gift" which enables human spirit to do what as reason it
cannot do, it should be noted that reason too is a "gift" and that its "rising" to the infinite is a "being-lifted-
up," an Erhebung, beyond its own finitude.


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answer, as we have seen (chap. 4), is quite unequivocal: Reason in man shares in the infinity of "universal reason."
To take "proofs" for the reality of God seriously at all is to hold for an "infinite'' activity of human reason; that
there is human reason at all, that is, not merely understanding, is itself a revelation of divine Reason.
If from God's side there is no obstacle to his being known, then it is but human arbitrariness, affectation of
humility, or something of the kind, to insist on the finitude of human knowledge, on human reason only in
its opposition to divine reason, on only the radical limitations, absolutely fixed, of human reason. . . . It is
not so-called human reason with its limitations which knows God, but rather the spirit of God in man; it is,
according to the speculative expression previously used, God's self-consciousness which knows itself in
man's knowing. [BDG, p. 49]
The question might well seem to fall into the trap prepared for Hegel by his adversaries, but the point is precisely
that, just as the being of the finite is a manifestation of infinite beingor, of the being of the Infiniteso finite
knowing, which is ultimately self-knowing, is a manifestation of God's infinite self-knowledge. God can be known
only if he reveals himself, but the knowing is the revelation, by virtue of what Hegel calls "the community of Spirit
with spirit." It is not as though God's self-revelation and man's appropriation of it can be separated.
This consideration is the profoundest, the most sublime and therefore the most difficult object; it does not
come across in finite categories, which is to say that the modes of thinking we are accustomed to in
everyday life, in handling contingent things, and even in the sciences, are not adequate to this object. These
last have their foundation, their logic, in relationships of the finite like cause and effect; their laws,
classifications, and modes of inference are mere relationships of the conditioned, which on this higher level
lose their significance. They must, it is true, be used, but in such a way that they are constantly taken back
and corrected. The object, the community between God and man, is a community of Spirit with spirit.
[Ibid., pp. 11617]
In saying what he says here, Hegel is arguing with Kant and Jacobi who claim to know that a reason which is finite
cannot know God.14 In opposing Kant and Jacobi, it should be noted, Hegel is opposing all those who say that God
could be known only if his reality could be inferred from the finite reality men do know, and if the rules of
inference were precisely the same as those which are successful in the "sciences." Hegel is stating without
14. See Hegel, Wissenschaft der Logik, ed. Georg Lasson (Hamburg: Meiner, 1963), vol. I, p. 38; vol. II,
pp. 103, 38990, 440, 486; William Wallace, trans., The Logic of Hegel, (London: Oxford University Press),
nos. 9, 41, 50.


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equivocation that, when there is question of coming to know God as real and not as some sort of abstract possibility
there can be no question of "inference." Where there is question of "proof" of God there is no question of a subject
constructing an argument which will justify the conclusion that something is the case, not only because God is not
some-thing, but also because the "what" of what is the case could not possibly be contained in the premisses of
such an argument (see ibid., pp. 1517). This is not to say that the notion of "inference" (das Schliessen), as Hegel
uses it, is easy to pin down. That "inferred'' knowledge is "mediated" knowledge is clear enough, but since for
Hegel all knowledge is mediated (i.e., not immediately "given"), this does not help much. What he is trying to get
away from in describing the process of coming to know God is seeing it as a process in which the knowledge that
the finite human spirit has of God would follow from and be dependent on an antecedent knowledge of finite
reality, what Hegel calls "dualism," that is, making finite and infinite two realities "over-against" each other. This is
not to say that we can know God without knowing finite reality, but it does say that it is not because we know
finite reality that we know God. What Hegel is in fact saying is rather the reverse: Only because we know God do
we really know finite reality (see Ep W, nos. 95, 112). But, and this is important, there is no unmediated knowledge
of God; that would not be knowledge at all (see BDG, p. 26; Ep W, nos. 7475). To recognize the infinite is to have
mediated knowledge, but it is not inference (Schliessen), rather it is "revelation" (Scheinen) (BDG, pp. 7677), and
the rational elaboration of that knowledge is integral to the revelation, since "reason" in man is revelation, the
presence of the divine in man.
Only One God

Hegel also states without equivocation that there is only one God to be known, the God who reveals himself to
faith. In this he is throwing down the gauntlet to Fichte, Schelling, and any form of Romantic intuitionism, which
would grant that the human mind can know only an utterly indeterminate absolute, a God without meaningful
predicates, which, if they are supplied at all, are supplied by faith.15 It is interesting to note in this connection that
the "intuitionists" give no explanation of how, even through faith, finite mind could be the recipient of a revealed
infinite content. What Hegel is leading up to, however, is something far more important: There can be no so-called
"God of the philosophers," who would somehow be other than the God who really is. Philosophy cannot know a
God who is a sort of abstract possibility, who might do what God does not do or who
15. WL I, pp. 33839; II, p. 757; EpW, no. 36; BDG pp. 9, 2324.


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might not do what God does.16 An abstract God is one about whom nothing intelligible can be said. But, by the
same token, the concrete God must be one about whom whatever is said must be intelligible to man, or else
nothing is being said (see BDG, p. 172). What this ultimately means is that there is continuity between Christian
faith (the only "faith" there is for Hegel) and rational thought.17 This key notion of "continuity," as we have seen
and shall see throughout this study, is extremely important; it is precisely what Hegel's illustrious predecessors had
denied. More than that, Hegel will insist, even God can reveal himself only to reason, since reason alone is capex
infiniti, and to have God as the object of thought is not authentically "human" if the thought in question is not
rational thought. A revelation of which reason does not know the meaning is not, properly speaking, a "revelation.''
To say that reason can tell us that God (an empty term) is, but that only revelation can tell us who or what God is,
is to talk nonsense. Is it indeed possible to distinguish the knowledge of "what" God is from the knowledge "that"
God is, if the term "God" is to have any meaning? "God is; but just what is this that is supposed to be?"18 The
overriding theme of Hegel's Science of Logic is that to know is to know being as infinite, or else it is to know only
partially, which is really not "knowing" at all.19 But, quite obviously, it makes no sense to speak of knowing being
as infinite and not knowing what it is for being to be infinite, and to know what it is concretely for being to be
infinite is to know God. If, as Science of Logic would have it, the very being of the finite makes no sense except in
relation to infinite being, then knowledge of finite being makes no sense except in relation to infinite being. Since,
however, this makes finite and infinite mutually implicative, the specter of "pantheism" once again raises its ugly
head.20 Here the distinction between "concrete" and "abstract" becomes supremely important. There can be danger
of identifying God and world only if both are abstract; there is no danger of identifying concrete God and concrete
world, because a mutual implication which is dynamic (concrete) bespeaks not identity but continuity.21
Although the term "continuity" is by no means prominent in Hegel's vocabulary, the concept, it seems to me, goes
a long way toward resolving the contradictions which a thinking confined to "scientific understanding" finds in
Hegel's notions of "dialectical relationship" and "speculative thinking." This is particularly true if we employ in a
metaphorical sort of
16. See BDG, pp. 5, 42, 5051, 81, 17677.
17. See BDG, pp. 5, 9, 17677. One wonders, for example, how Karl Rahner (Spiritual Exercises [London:
Sheed and Ward, 1967], p. 48) can know that "God could certainly have created another world." Just what can
"could have" possibly mean?
18. BDG, p. 57; see pp. 1213, 1517, 2324.
19. WL I, pp. 31, 144; II, pp. 15960, 441. See EpW nos. 12, 51, 86.
20. See WL I, pp. 41, 80, 109, 117, 126, 128, 143, 145; see EpW nos. 36, 112.
21. See, once more, EpW, nos. 389, 573; VA I, p. 470.


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way the term "continuous"as opposed to "contiguous"to a variety of dynamic relationships which are calculated to
integrate rather than disintegrate reality.22 In the third book of Science of Logic (i.e., the second half of volume II)
Hegel, without employing the term, seeks to explicate dynamic continuity on three levels: subjectivity, objectivity,
and idea (as the synthesis of subjectivity and objectivity). (1) On the level of "subjectivity" he finds continuity
(integration) in the conceptual mode of knowing, and this he does by explicating the dynamic passage from
concept to judgment to syllogism. This is opposed to the disintegrating function of ''understanding," which sees
"concept" as no more than a subjective form unifying objective diversity, "judgment" as no more than the
subjective combining of concepts, and "syllogism" as no more than subjective "inference" from premisses to
conclusion. Hegel speaks of the integrating function of "reason," which sees into (speculare) the successive self-
articulations of the concept in (a) "judgment" (the unfolding of concept) and (b) "syllogism" (the grounding of
judgment). (2) On the level of "objectivity" Hegel moves from less adequate models to the more adequate models
of integrating relationship in (a) the "mechanical" model (relationship of cause and effect), (b) the "chemical"
model (relationship of selective affinity), and (c) the "teleological" model (relationship of purposeful movement).
(3) On the level of "idea" he presents successive stages of continuity, with the first two calculated to clarify the
third: (a) the idea of "life," both the organic continuity of the living animal and the continuity of life in all
organisms; (b) the idea of "cognition" in its essential orientation to both the true and the good; and (c) the
"absolute" idea, which is the all-embracing unity-continuity of the totality of reality-thought.
This quick summary obviously does not resolve all the difficulties of Hegel's identification of the identical and the
different, but it does help to bring the language into focus. It is doubtful whether it is possible to make any sense at
all of either "finite" or "infinite," if what is designated by the terms are realities lying, so to speak, side-by-side
(contiguous). However, if the terms connote a continuity in which they are intelligible only in relation to each
other, it ceases to be barbaric to say either "the finite is infinite" or "the infinite is finite," whether what we are
speaking of is "being," "thought," "concept," "reason," or "spirit." To speak, then, of a "lifting-up" (Erhebung) of
finite thought, reason, spirit to infinite reality is not necessarily to speak only of a supernatural elevation; it is
simply to say that the movement of thought is more than the activity of the individual finite subject. There is a
continuity between the finite subject and infinite "subjectivity," such that the finite subject realizes itself as what it
is and what it does only in its ultimate elevation to the infinite, and that elevation
22. It is in this sense that Charles Sanders Peirce so often employs the term.


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is its knowing, not merely its believing, and, above all, not merely its feeling or intuiting, or whatever other activity
may be designated as capax Dei.
Response of "Human" Spirit

There is no question in Hegel's mind that faith is a human response to divine self-revelation, nor that the response
and the revelation are continuous. He is convinced, however, that the response is inadequately human, inadequate
to the "spirit" in man, if it is not a "thinking," a "knowing'' response. Those who would dignify God by putting him
beyond the reach of human knowing are not upgrading God by shrouding him in mystery; they are downgrading
man by wrapping him in a cloud of mystification. It is not the mystery of God but the mysteriousness of human
language which makes God approachable by faith but unknowable by reason. Nor is this all too different from the
irrationality of a rationalism which so absolutizes the finitude of reason that it renders the very intelligibility of an
infinite object impossible. There may be something sublime in an irrationality which seeks to upgrade God and
something tawdry in an irrationality which seeks to downgrade man, but in effect they are both rooted in the same
denial of the continuity of the finite and the infinite, the human and the divine, believing and knowing. Hegel's
basic conviction, then, is that God does in fact reveal himself to man and that faith is a response of man to that
divine self-revelation (see BDG, pp. 44, 4748). But if man does not understand the revelation,23 the believing is
empty, and the revelation is scarcely revealing. Granted that both the believing and the understanding are finite
human activities, that creates no insuperable difficulties. God's self-revelation to anyone but to himself will
necessarily be finite (see chap. 7); it will not for that reason be discontinuous with the infinity of the revealer; in
revealing himself to man God renders himself finite, without ceasing to be infinite. Faith, then, must not only seek
understanding, it must also find understanding, and this it does when it knows what on the level of religious
consciousness it only believes; that is, it represents to itself on the basis of an external revelation the God who in
ultimate rational knowing presents himself internally (renders himself present) to man. Both the believing and the
knowing are products of God's self-revelation, but the believing will remain empty if man does not know what he
believes.
How, then, does God reveal himself? To answer that question we must first of all turn again to Phenomenology of
Spirit, the whole purpose of which is to investigate how spirit manifests itself as spirit. Spirit manifests itself as
what it is by its activity; of no being is it more true than of spirit to
23. Here there are no pejorative connotations to "understanding."


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say that its being is its doingand that doing is inevitably self-revealing activity;24 spiritual activity is self-
manifestation, and it manifests not only that but also what spirit is. If, however, the activity in question is to be
revelatory of infinite Spirit, it must be possible for man to know that the activity in question could not be other than
divine. But this kind of knowing can, in turn, make sense only if there is continuity between religious
consciousness, the initial awareness of the divine, and rational consciousness, the articulation of religious
consciousness. Here the distinction between "finite" and "infinite" becomes tremendously significant. Precisely
because the finite being who is man is not totally spirit, there can in man be only partial identification of being and
activity, of being and "concept"; it is essential to finite being that its "actuality" be not identifiable with its concept,
while it is essential to infinite being that its actuality be identical with its concept. The point, however, is not
simply that divine (infinite) being and divine activity are identicalthis, after all, is a commonplace of Christian
faithbut rather whether human reason can know this identity. Narrowly scientific reasoning (what Hegel calls
Verstand) can see in such identification only contradiction; only authentic rational (speculative) thinking (what
Hegel calls Vernunft), which is essentially oriented to the infinite, can comprehend that, where there is question of
infinite being, the identification of being and activity or of internal and external activity (self-knowing and self-
manifestation) involves no contradiction at allor, at least, no unresolvable contradictionbecause the very concept of
infinite being demands the identification. Anything short of this would contradict infinity, here understood as
complete self-containedness, whose self-manifestation to another in no way derogates from its enduring being-
with-itself.
If, then, it makes sense to look upon creation as divine activity and upon the product of that activity as the finite
manifestation of infinite Spirit, it makes equally good sense to say that human reason in understanding God's self-
revelation is itself the finite manifestation of infinite Reason. As we have seen, Hegel again and again calls
precisely the rational grasp of infinity a "being-lifted-up" (Erhebung), which signifies the presence of the divine
Spirit in the human spirit, which need not be confined to a "supernatural" divine indwelling. "Our theme, the
elevation of subjective spirit to God, immediately involves that in it what is onesided in knowing, its subjectivity, is
transcended, that the elevation itself is essentially the transcending."25 Human rational knowing, then, is a
revelation of God to man, and to conceive of reason as no more than the formal activity of the individual subject
24. Only in this way is it possible to come to grips with PdG, chap. VIII, "Absolute Knowing."
25. BDG, p. 44; see pp. 1213, 50, 78, 81, 122.


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is to miss this entirely. To recognize religious consciousness in man as God's work in human consciousness is
affirmed by pietists and denied by rationalists. Hegel will go beyond both in affirming that mediated (rational)
knowledge of God is such an elevation: "This elevation which is consciousness is thus of itself mediated knowing"
(BDG, p. 81). Thus, what had traditionally been taken as the prerogative of the theologians to expound, the
indwelling of the Spirit, Hegel has turned into a philosophical truth. He does not say that reason has the capacity to
discover this truth, in the sense that independently of religious consciousness reason could see its necessity, but he
does say that in virtue of the continuity of faith and reason, "speculative thinking" can grasp what the truth means
and can see it as fundamental to the very possibility of reason functioning as reason.
If the being of God and the activity of God are identical, and if the "activities" of God, no matter how variously
named, are all one, as Christian theology reflecting on revelation tells us, then the activities of self-knowing, self-
revelation, and creation (traditionally accepted as divine attributes) are all one and the samethey are what God is.
Moreover (as we shall see in the next chapter), Hegel identifies as one "continuous" activity the "procession" in the
Trinity through knowledge and love (God knowing and loving himself and thus being "three" without ceasing to be
''one") with creation, the incarnation of the Son, the redemption of the human race, and the descent of the Holy
Spirit to dwell in the Christian religious community (see PdG, pp. 53448). Up to this point no Christian theologian
would find fault with Hegel; this is all traditional Christian teaching. When, however, Hegel finds all this
philosophically intelligible in the light of his own Science of Logic, the theologians tend to part company with
himeven though the theological tradition itself has had to reflect rationally on the revelation in order to come up
with such conclusions. That Hegel does make them nervous may be understandable, but, if nothing else, his
contention makes it clear that his claim to think within the framework of the Christian revelation is to be taken
seriously.
The standpoint where we find ourselves is the Christian one. Here we have the concept of God in its full
freedom [self-determination]; this concept is identical with being. Being is the most impoverished
abstraction, and the concept is not so poor as not to contain within itself this determination. We are not to
consider being in the poverty of abstraction, in deficient immediacy, but being as God's being, as
thoroughly concrete Being, distinguished from God. The consciousness of finite spirit is concrete being, the
material for the realization of the concept of God. Here there is no question of being as an addition to the
concept or of a unity of being and conceptsuch expressions are misleading. The unity is to be understood
rather as absolute process, as the vitality of God, such that both sides are also distinguished in it, but that
this is the absolute activity of eternally producing itself. Here we have the concrete notion of God as


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the Spirit. The concept of Spirit is the concept which is in and for itself, knowing: this infinite concept is
the Spirit's negative relation to itself. . . . In the Christian religion it is known that God has revealed himself;
and God is precisely this, to reveal himself; to reveal is to differentiate oneselfwhat is revealed is precisely
this that God is the manifest. [BDG, p. 176]
It is clear, then, that Hegel's interpretation of revelation and his overall logic of the concept run parallel. What is
not perfectly clear is whether his logic is an articulation of his understanding of Christian revelation or whether his
interpretation of that revelation is an application of his logic. If we take him at his word, the whole truth, which is
God, is first made manifest to religious consciousness, subsequently to be elaborated in speculative thinking. In any
event, as Hegel sees it, revelation is intelligible only in the light of logic, and logic is adequate only if its content
recapitulates the revelation. Logic is at once the total framework of thought and the total framework of divine self-
revelation, for God reveals himself only to and in thought.
The question can now be asked: In how many ways does God reveal himself in his activity? It is clear enough that,
if the human mind can know divine activity as divine, it can know God. The question, as should be obvious, cannot
mean, How many different activities are there wherein God reveals himself to man? Rather, it must mean, In how
many ways can the human mind recognize divine activity as divine and thus come to know God? The answer to the
question reads like a description of Hegel's "system" of philosophy. Logically speaking, God reveals himself first
in creating finite mind which, in thinking, necessarily ascends to infinite being, even though chronologically
speaking that ascent may initially be no more than a vague "religious" awareness of an ''absolute" transcending
man. To speak of the mind ascending "necessarily" quite obviously cannot mean a psychological or
epistemological necessity, according to which no human mind could fail to ascend to God.26 Apart from the fact
that there could be no way of knowing such a necessity, it is too clear that many a human mind either does not
ascend to God or is not aware that it does. The "necessity" of which Hegel speaks is logical, such that the failure to
ascend to God is a failure in logic.27 It is for this reason that Karl Löwith could describe Hegel's Science of Logic
as a "continual defining of God."28 Nor does this mean that finite thinking necessarily infers from the empirical
fact of its
26. Unless, of course, one wants to say that, in knowing at all, the human mind willy-nilly has God as its
ultimate object.
27. If we follow the logic of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, we might say that, even if not each and every
human mind does ascend to God, the human spirit cannot fail to do so.
28. Karl Löwith, Von Hegel zu Nietzsche (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1950), p. 39. (Löwith is quoting Karl
Rosenkranz.) Cf. Gustav E. Müller, Hegel: Denkgeschichte eines Lebendigen (Munich: Francke, 1959), p. 386:
"The concept is in and for itself the proof of God."


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own existence the existence of infinite thought. Rather it means that the human mind which truly thinks logically
sees (speculare) in the activity of thinking the reality of infinite thought, without which the very being of thought
would be inconceivable. In the introduction to his Science of Logic Hegel speaks, as we have seen, of logic as "the
presentation of God in his eternal essence, before the creation of the world or of a single finite spirit." In these
words Hans Küng reads "unmistakable echoes of the eternal Logos of the Johannine prologue."29 If God is infinite
Spirit there is no more to be read in his "eternal essence'' after creation than before (if indeed "before" and "after"
have other than a logical meaning). Whether any logic, including Hegel's, can present a total framework within
which being is intelligible may well be a question. The point is that Hegel is convinced that the framework can be
elaborated without appeal to the empirical reality of the created world, merely from following out the implications
of thought as such and that what this reveals cannot be other than the divine thought which is the paradigm of all
thought. What has been said here about the inconceivability of any thought whatever if infinite thought is not real
is, of course, but an elaboration of the "ontological proof," which is the model of all proofs from divine activity.
Another way in which the human mind can read divine activity is in the contemplation of "nature." Not, again,
because the being of finite nature leads the mind to infer the being of an infinite God who must be the cause of it.
There is simply no way of inferring the existence of an infinite cause from the existence of a finite effect. The
mind, however, can see that nature makes sense only as created and that "creation" is an activity which can only be
divine, infinite activity.30 Nature is unquestionably real, but its reality is conceivable only as contained in spirit: no
spirit, then no nature, and no infinite Spirit, then no Nature, as totality. Nature reveals itself as essentially
dependent on Spirit, and the Spirit in question must be infinite, because only infinite Spirit is totally independent.
Nature is contained in spirit, is the product of spirit, and despite the illusion (Scheins) of its immediate
being [its giveness], it is of itself merely something posited, produced, ideal in spirit. When in the process
of knowing the move is made from nature to spirit, and nature is characterized as simply a moment of spirit,
the result is not a true plurality, a substantial two, one of which would be nature and the other spirit; rather
the idea, which is the substance of nature, when immersed in spirit, holds in this infinite intensity of ideality
that content [nature] in itself and is richer by the determination of this ideality itself, which is in and for
itself spirit. [BDG, p. 64]
29. Küng, Menschwerdung Gottes, p. 319.
30. See BDG, pp. 2728, 64, 8889, 11819.


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"Creation," then, is indistinguishable from divine self-determination, not because it is causal activity but because it
is love-activity, the same activity which "generates" the divine Son. "God is, it is true, correctly characterized as
Creator of the world, but he is more than this: the true God is such that he is his own mediation with himself, that
he is this love" (ibid., p. 28). This, incidentally, means that God is truly understood as God only if he is understood
as Creator of the worldand once more the theologians begin to shake their heads: Does this mean that God cannot
not create? It certainly means that a noncreator God would not be the God who is real. What more it might mean
we can defer until the next chapter. Suffice it to say here that Hegel sees a logical necessity of reading in nature
''created," and that this bespeaks God as "Creator"but not a Creator who simply puts into existence a world apart
from himself; in the very activity of creation God returns to himself (ibid., p. 27; see VPR II, pp. 9495, 21618).
Hegel is also convinced that the human mind can read a revelation of God's presence in the overall course of
historical events, where the divine activity in question is called "providence." This is not to say that human history
is not the product of human activityMarx was simply wrong in his criticism of Hegel on this count,31 as even a
cursory reading of Lectures on the Philosophy of History or "Philosophy of Objective Spirit" in the Encyclopedia
would show. What Hegel does say is that the working out of human purposes in the course of history effectuates an
overall purpose which transcends all individuals, all peoples, all civilizationsand that what such an overall plan
reveals is "rationally necessary," even though its individual events are contingent.32 It is precisely this reading of
"rational necessity" in history which has stirred up controversybut not from theologians, even though Hegel is
equivalently saying that a philosophy of history is inseparable from a theology of history. In effect he is but
enunciating his interpretation of the traditional theme of God's "omnipresence" in both space and time: "God is
everywhere present, and the presence of God is just the element of truth which is in everything" (VPR II, p. 241).
Human purposes are contingent, but in God there is no room for contingency.
Unsophisticated religious consciousness speaks of God's eternal and immutable decrees, and in so doing
implies an express recognition that necessity forms part of the essence of God. Because he is different from
God, man, with his own particular opinion and will, acts according to arbitrary caprice, and thus it often
happens that what results from his acts turns out to be something quite different from what he had intended
and willed. God, on the contrary,
31. See Karl Marx, Writings of the Young Marx on Philosophy and Society, ed. Easton and Guddat (New
York: Doubleday, 1967), pp. 314, 317, 31920, 322, 33234. (Economic and political manuscripts of 1844.)
32. The principal theme of Hegel's Reason in History.


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knows what he wills, is determined in his eternal will neither by accident from within nor from without, and
what he wills he also irresistibly accomplishes. [EpW, no. 147, Zusatz]
There is also a self-revelation of God, in the most commonly accepted sense of the term "divine revelation," in the
word which God speaks through the divinely inspired prophet or writer. Although Hegel has no elaborate theory
regarding this kind of revelation, he quite clearly thinks of Scriptureparticularly the Gospelsas revealing God, and
at key points he quotes the New Testament, chiefly John's Gospel, in support of his own "rational" position. The
word spoken in Scripture is a word spoken not only to the early Christians to whom it is directly addressed but also
to those who thereafter will build their faith on it. Clearly, then, the revelation in question has to do primarily with
"religious" rather than ''rational" consciousness, but once again we must remind ourselves of the principle of
"continuity." Precisely because the revealedand revealingword of God is seldom unambiguous, and because it is a
word which will speak to the human spirit only if human thinking "appropriates" it, comprehends its meaningand
"speculative thinking" is ideally suited to this comprehensionthe revelation must be thought out, rationally
interpreted. Here the theologians need not take umbrage; Hegel is speaking of what they themselves do constantly.
Saint Thomas Aquinasnot the least among theologianssays in his prelude to the whole discussion of the God-
question, "Now it can be shown how God is not, by denying of him whatever does not befit him."33 The
theologians' "rational principles" may not be those of Hegel, but they are rational principles nonetheless. Nor need
we think that Hegel is being unduly "Lutheran" in his approach to Scripture (even though he quite clearly states
that his faith is Lutheran).34 He is not saying that each individual is entitled to his or her "private interpretation" of
God's wordno more than Karl Barth is in writing his Dogmatics. The word is spoken primarily to the believing
community and only derivatively to individuals, and so the task of interpretation is primarily a community task
(see PdG, pp. 54348). The implications of this, it is true, Hegel does not elaborately spell out.
There is, finally, the revelation God gives of himself in the person of his Son, the Incarnate Word. He it is who
unites in himself the human and the divinehe is the paradigm of this union, infinitizing the finite, just as creation
finitizes the infinite. Jesus, then, is the revelation not only of divine being but also of authentically human being.
Because, however, his incarnation is confined to one individual, the divine revelation wherein the divine
33. Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I, 3, introduction.
34. See EpW, preface to the third edition (Sept. 19, 1830).


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Spirit speaks to the human spirit is not complete in the historical Jesus. He must dieHegel finds rational necessity
even in thisin order both that the abstract concept of God may die, to be revitalized in concretion, and that the
divine Spirit may come to dwell in the believing community, the Spirit who "will lead you to all truth" (EGP, p.
180). Here it is that Spirit speaks to spirit, because Spirit dwells in spirit. Properly speaking, all of this belongs to
the next chapter on the relation of philosophy and theology, but it is also pertinent here because of what might be
looked upon as its "pantheistic" overtones.
Spirit Speaks to Spirit

It might seem, however, either that Hegel has weakened his case for the infinity of "rational" knowing by
introducing an "indwelling" of the Spirit which is theologically considered "supernatural" or that he has
desupernaturalized the indwelling by making too rational a case for it. But to say that is, once more, to miss the
point of "continuity''of the natural and the supernatural. It is neither a downgrading of human reason to claim that
precisely as human it demands the presence of the divine, nor a downgrading of the supernatural to claim a natural
demand for iteven finite "spirit" is, for Hegel, elevated above mere "nature." It is for this reason that he sees all
human knowing, if it is to be authentically knowing and authentically human, as God's doingjust as is all
"creation." Short of a knowing which is in some sense divinetherefore infiniteand short of a knowing whose object
is infinite, hence divine, human knowing is not knowing in the full sense, "absolute knowing." By the same token,
short of a presence of God in the human spirit, whereby that spirit knows the divine, human knowing is not human
in the full sense (see PdG, pp. 54964). Again the theme of "being-lifted-up" is prominent: "God is movement
toward the finite and is thus elevation of the finite to himself; in the I, that which transcends itself as finite, God
returns to himself and is God only as this return" (VPR I, p. 192). The sentence which follows this, "Without a
world God is not God" (ibid.), it is true, causes the theologians many problems, but it need not. As we have already
noted more than once, Hegel is speaking of the only God there is, the Creator God, whom human thinking will
never comprehend if it does not see "Creator" as an essential predicate of God.35
Now, although it might be argued that the "lifting-up" of the human spirit need not logically (whatever "logically"
can mean in the context) demand the presence (whatever "presence," too, can mean) of the divine Spirit, it is clear
that Hegel sees the Erhebung as itself divine activity. "It is
35. We might paraphrase thus: "To speak of a God who is not creator of the world is not to speak of the
only God there is."


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not so-called human reason with its limitation which knows God, but it is the Spirit of God in man" (BDG, p. 49).
"The spirit of man knowing God is simply the Spirit of God himself" (ibid., p. 117). This is the way God, who is
"omnipresent," is present inand tofinite spirit, as "the element of truth" in it. All human knowing, then, is divine
self-revelation, and, since God cannot contradict himselfhe is all truth and only truthno human knowing, if it is to
be truly knowing, can contradict divine revelation, nor can God be known other than as he reveals himself. The
God reason knows cannot be in any sense other than the God faith believes, and what is necessarily true of God
must be necessarily true for both faith and reason. It is, of course, too obvious to need mentioning that, because
both believing and thinking are finite, subjective operations which are therefore fallible, both can be mistaken and
thus can contradict each other. But that is not the point; God's self-revelation in faith cannot contradict God's self-
revelation in reason. More than that, just as faith cannot stop short of reason if it is to be authentically faith, so
reason cannot dispense with faith, if it is not to go astray: "By the same token there is no thinking [God] without
faith. Faith is always the basis, is presupposed'' (BDG, p. 9; see p. 5). Faith and reason, then, must necessarily be in
agreement; there is only one God to whom both can ascend. It scarcely seems necessary to stress once more that
there is no question here of psychological or epistemological necessity; finite reason does not have to see that the
God of faith is identical with the God of reason; but reason is untrue to its own logic as reason if it does not.
What Hegel is at pains to bring out is that the relationship of the human spirit to the infinite, to God, to absolute
Spirit, is characteristically human. That human activity, however, which is most chacteristically human is thought;
it is that which distinguishes the human from all that is less than human (see WL I, p. 10; EpW, no. 2). If, then, the
relationship to God characterizes man, that relationship must be a thinking (thought) relationship, which is to say it
must be a rational affirmation. Whatever is distinctively human is so by virtue of the element of thought
inseparable from it. Thus, since art, morality, law, and religion are distinctively human, it is the element of thought
in them that makes them so. Believing, too, is distinctively human, which means that it must be characterized by
thought; a believing which is not thought out is something less than human, unworthy of man. Unthinking belief,
therefore, is not authentic belief, because it is not "continuous" with thought.
It is a mistake, however, to take as the paradigm of thinking narrowly scientific thought, which can see in the
affirmations of faith only contradictions. If, in fact, faith is both true and authentically human, that is, a thought-out
faith, there will be in it no contradictions. What Hegel calls "speculative reason" is precisely the thinking which
resolves apparent contradictionsbetter still, the contradictions will resolve themselves, if the


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thinking is authentically rational. To the "scientific" mind that God should be both three and one, that being should
be both finite and infinite, that creation should be both necessary and free, that thought should be both human and
divine, may be patent contradictions. To the authentically rational mind they are not: they are the inevitable
complementarities of absolute Spirit, of being, of divine activity, of thought itself. If the only being there is is the
being of finite individual beings, if the only thought there is is the thinking of finite individual human minds, then
both being and thought are essentially finite. But, just as being necessarily transcends the finite, the individual (the
particular), or else it is not, so too thought transcends the finite, the individual, or else it is not. Infinite (divine)
Being is the being of all beings; infinite (divine) Thought is the thought of all thought. Hegel does not employ the
Platonic concept of "participation" to explicate this relationship, but he does see in the Platonic "Idea" the model of
this infinite unity in multiplicity. If this be "pantheism,'' then Hegel is a pantheistbut so too are all those who seek
to give some sort of rational account of the relationship between the finite and the infinite, the human and the
divine, the world and God.
We can sum up Hegel's position in the following seven points: (1) There is finite reality, and this reality, even the
totality of it, is not identical with God. (2) The true being of this reality, however, is not self-contained; it is in
God, the only thoroughly self-contained reality there is. (3) The very reality of the finite, then, is to be God's self-
revelation, such that self-containedness and self-manifestation are continuous. (4) Furthermore, all of finite reality
is God's self-revelation; finite reality both is and is what it is by virtue of God's thinking it. (5) Although it might
be argued that God need not manifest himself to any spirit other than himself, he is constrained, so to speak, by
"love" to communicate both being and knowledge of himself to spirits other than himself. (6) Thus, God reveals
himself to finite spirit (to spirit alone can he reveal himself) in his infinite activity, which is at once that of
creating, becoming incarnate, redeeming (i.e., reintegrating disintegrated man), and dwelling within the human
spirit as the divine Spirit who "elevates" the finite to the infinite. (7) In short, divine activity, even though infinitely
self-contained, is essentially self-revelatory activity. As all of this is spelled out in the next chapter we shall see
not so much that the lines between faith and knowledge, theology and philosophy, are blurred, as that Hegel's
"speculative thinking" enables him to read a "logic" in the whole of divine self-revelation.
Back to "Pantheism"
At this point, it would seem, we are brought around full circle to the charges raised against Hegel's "rational
account" by those who claim that,


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despite his own demurrers, he is a pantheist. How can he read so much of the infinite in the finite without
identifying them? The first objection has to do with the necessity of creation, with the contention that the very logic
of infinite reality demands the being of finite reality. The charge is motivated by a legitimate concern that the
admittedly perplexing concept of creation be not "explained" in such a way as to compromise God's "infinity" (a
scarcely less perplexing concept); an infinity which must, if it is to make sense, include divine "freedom." It should
be noted, incidentally, that raising the objection presupposes that the objector knows what the concepts "infinity,''
"creation," and "freedom" must mean, when said of God. It also presupposes both that the metaphysics espoused by
the objector is adequate to the discussion of God and that Hegel's metaphysics must obey the rules of the objector's
game.
The basic supposition of the objection is that, if God "necessarily" creates, he does not create "freely"either
necessarily or freely, not both. If God is under constraint to create, God needs the world (and finite spirit) in order
to be truly God, which in turn means that God's own being is not self-sufficient but dependent and, therefore, not
truly infinite. On the face of it the objection would seem to make senseprovided that the concepts on which it is
based have the same meaning for Hegel as for the objectors; that is, provided they are quite sure they know what
Hegel has to mean. The proviso, however, introduces the importance of distinguishing from the very first between
"necessity" and "need." If God indeed "needs" the world and man in order to be truly God, then God is a
dependent being, and a dependent being cannot be infinite Being. But, Hegel is very explicit in denying that God
"needs" the world or man. Only if God has to create a reality which stood in its own self-sufficiency over-against
him would his relationship to that reality be one of "need" (see BDG, pp. 2628). To say that God is related to
created reality is not to say that in addition to creating the reality God is also related to itthe way a finite cause is
related to its effectbut that creation is the relation of God to created reality (see ibid., pp. 5859). It is only abstract
"understanding" that has to analyze the relation according to finite categories, thus breaking up the continuity
between the infinite activity" of God and the finite "being" of the world.
Dualism, which makes the opposition of finite and infinite insurmountable, fails to make the simple
observation that in this way the infinite, too, is only one of the two, that thereby it is made into a merely
particular in relation to which the finite is the other particular. Such an infinite, which is only a particular
alongside the finite, has by that very fact its boundary, its limit, in the latter. It is not what it ought to be; it
is not infinite but only finite. In such circumstances, where the finite is here below and the infinite up there,
the first placed here, the other there, to the finite is ascribed the same dignity of sub-


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sistence and autonomy as to the infinite. The being of the finite is made into an absolute being; in such a
dualism it stands by itself. [Ep W, no. 95]
It might be argued, of course, that Hegel is the one who is guilty of inconsistency in positing a distinction which is
no distinction at all, but the distinction he does make bears careful examination. He does say, it is true, that "if
there were no world God would not be the creator" (BDG, p. 131). The logic of this remark is so obviously
impeccable that it risks being trivial: God cannot be creator and not create, nor can he "create" nothing; unless, of
course, the remark means that to speak of a God for whom there is no world is not to speak of the only God there
is, the Creator. It might make sense to say that in the abstract the concept "Creator'' is not a necessary predicate of
"God." A noncreator God would not be a contradiction, or at least finite human reason could not of itself see the
contradiction. One wonders, however, if the expression "a God" is not contradictory: If all reason knows is "a
God," reason does not know God, the only God there is. If the God reason claims to know is not creator, he is not
God; he is only an abstraction taking the place of God; to say not creator is to say not God.36 If this abstraction is
all that finite reason can "know," then Kant is right: human reason cannot "know" God. It must also be said that
whatever is concretely true of God is also necessarily true; it makes no sense to speak of "contingent" predicates of
God. If, then, it is true that God is Creator, it is necessarily true that God is Creator. It might be objected, of course,
that this is precisely what merely rational thinking cannot know. The objection, however, would then be against the
possibility of rational knowledge of God, not against the inevitably "pantheistic" character of Hegel's God. (It
might be well to reiterate here that Hegel never speaks of reason discovering the reality of God, but only of
"speculative thinking" seeing the rationality of the God of faith.)
Having rung the changes on the nonsynonymity of "necessary" creation and the "need" to create, we might here try
to find out what anyone means by saying that God creates "freely." Our thinking is inevitably anthropomorphic
(nor is that necessarily a defect)we tend to say of God "something like" what we experience on the level of the
human. For the most part, then, "freedom" is taken to mean "freedom of choice." But it is definitely problematic
whether one can make sense of the concept of choosing" if it is to be applied to God's activity. If there is to be
choice, it would seem that there must be an "agent" who is faced with a set of alternatives, one of which he
chooses rather than the others; the choice being based on motives which make one alternative preferable to another.
Can
36. Theological thinking finds, it would seem, no difficulty in agreeing that we can speak meaningfully of
what God cannot not behe cannot not be God, not be triune, not be omnipotent, etc. Is it stretching the
point too much to say that he cannot not be creator?


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we, however, make sense of such concepts as "choice, "alternative," "motive," or "preferable" when we speak of
God? The identity of being and activity in God precludes the possibility that the determinant of God's activity be
other than the very being of God. Now, if the essence of freedom lies not in the element of choice but in that of
self-determination, then the necessity of the determination, like the necessity of God's being, need in no way be in
conflict with its being self-determination, nor is "necessary self-determination" a contradiction in terms. To say
that the being of God is ''necessary" and that the activity of God is identical with his being, whereas the activity of
God is not necessary raises too many logical riddles, which are not solved by distinguishing between the activity
and the term of the activity, since the term of activity is continuous with the activity. When we state the problem in
this way, however, we are back where we were in the difficulty of distinguishing the finite and the infinite while
maintaining their "continuity." Just as the finitude of the finite is no impediment to the continuity of the infinite and
the finite, so the contingency of the finite is no impediment to that contingency's being continuous with the
necessity of the infinite. By the same token, there seems to be no reason to declare incompatible the contingency of
"things" in the created world and the necessity of "creation" or the necessity that there be a created world.
Once again, then, the difficulty arises not from some presumably "pantheistic" implications in Hegel's conception
of God, but from the effort to conceive creation in any way that is not highly problematic. The difficulty is only
compounded if "creating" is conceived of, again anthropomorphically, as a "making" in the mode of efficient
causality, for which there is no analogy which does not limp so badly that it obscures rather than clarifies the
concept. There just does not seem to be any adequately intelligible sense in which God can be said to "make" the
worldScripture actually makes more rational sense when it speaks of God creating the world by his "word." There
is, after all, a highly intelligible way in which we can speak of God knowing and loving himselfhe could scarcely
be God if he did not. If, then, theologians can say that in knowing himself God as "Father" "generates" the "Son,"
his "Word," who is both other and not other than himself, and that in the mutual love of Father and Son God
"breathes" the "Spirit," so that in this activity of knowing and loving God determines himself as Father, Son, and
Spirit, may not philosophers say that "creation" becomes intelligible if it is seen as the very same self-determining
knowledge and love expressing itself in the being of a world and of a finite spirit which knows and loves, such that
the world and the human spirit are both other than God and have their being in God? Hegel's position may be too
theologicaltoo Christianto satisfy philosophers who do not share his theology, but it is not for that reason
unintelligible, nor need it be interpreted so metaphorically as to be no longer Hegel's posi-


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tion. One wonders whether, in the final analysis, Hegel does not turn out to be far more "theistic" than
"pantheistic." In any event, it is clearly not nonsense to say with Hegel that in knowing himself God knows all
there is to be known. But neither is it nonsense to say that in knowing all that is to be known God knows himself.
Nor need either of these statements mean that God and the world of finite reality are one and the same.
Nevertheless, for the critics, Hegel's cardinal sin comes not so much when he speaks of God's knowledge of
himself and the world, but rather when he speaks of man's knowledge of God. Apart from those who, like Kant,
deny that man has "speculative knowledge" of God at all, or those who deny that there is any God for man to
know, there are a host of those who, while granting that man can "know" God, feel that Hegel has simply gone too
far. It is all very well to say of God that in knowing himself he knows the world or even that in knowing the world
he knows himselfthe "mystery" of God and of divine knowing is preserved. But has Hegel not overreached himself
when he claims that what we know in knowing God is what God knows in knowing himself? This means, among
other things, that in knowing God we know the world and that in knowing the world we know God. Is this not,
once more, to identify God and the world? This becomes even harder to swallow when we recall that, for Hegel, all
consciousness is consciousness of self, with the result that in knowing God and the world we are knowing
ourselvesand vice versa!37 If to this we add that God's knowledge of himself, the world, and us becomes identified
with our knowledge of God, the world, and ourselves, there seems to be an unjustified identification of all that we
know and all that God knows in knowing himself. Hegel would, in fact, seem to be saying that God "needs" our
knowledge of him in order to know himself! "Man knows God only to the extent that God knows himself in man;
this knowing is God's consciousness of himself'' (BDG, p. 117). At the very least he would seem to be saying that
God knows himself only "because" human beings know him. Unless, of course, what Hegel is saying is that,
because there is no distinction between the activity wherein God is conscious of himself and the activity wherein he
reveals himself in human consciousness, we must try to comprehend rationally this concrete identification of
activity. At least this will free us from such utterly tendentiousand falseexpressions like "in order to" and "because."
There is simply no question of "dependence" on or "need" of man's knowledge of God for God's knowledge of
himself. Rather, the creative act whereby human consciousness is an actuality is God's self-knowledge, and human
self-knowledge is the finite actualization of God's self-knowledge. One need not experience any great difficulty
going along with Hegel, if what he is saying is that man's knowledge of God
37. Phenomenology of Spirit is but one long "demonstration" of this.


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would not be knowledge of God as he truly, concretely is, if it were not God's self-knowledge actualizing man's
knowledge. This is but another attempt on Hegel's part to articulate the concept of human knowledge of God as an
"elevation" (Erhebung). That man should know God is not man's doing aloneman does not lift himself up to God
by his own bootstrapsit is the doing of the Spirit of God in man, without whom man would not even be, much less
know, and this presence is self-conscious divine doing.
At this point the first objection against Hegel's interpreting "creation" in such a way that he seems to be making a
created world a necessity for God begins to shade over into the second major objection, that is, that in God
relations to the world and to man are real. The second objection makes sense only if the first objection is assumed
to be valid; only if it is purely contingent that there be a world would a real relationship of God to the world of his
creation be an addition to Godand to infinite being there can be no addition! Even the most traditional of
traditionalists admit that the activity of God is creative activity (although not solely creative), that God really
creates the world (whether it even makes sense to say that God "created" the world is a moot question). By the
same token it is traditionally claimed that there are relations in God, but these are the relations of the Persons in
God, which constitute them as Persons and imply no imperfection in God and need not, therefore, be excluded.
This contention, in turn, is based on the further supposition that a metaphysics of being is alone adequate in dealing
with the God questionand that a metaphysics of becoming is simply out of the question. That this constitutes a
reintroduction of the Eleatic concept of being, where the being of God is concerned, does not seem to have been
observed. According to this metaphysics of being (what Hegel calls a Verstandes-metaphysik), then, immanent
activity and transient activity are opposed in such a way that even in God the one cannot be the other. God's
activity must be one or the other; for it to be both would be contradictory. It is still said, of course, that God
creates, that he loves human beings, that he is omniscient, omnipresent, that he has revealed these truths to man;
and it is maintained that when we enunciate such predicates of God we are saying something meaningful and not
merely uttering sounds. The meaning, admittedly, is rather obscure, but that is as it should be; we are dealing in
''mystery." It is as though one were to say, God speaks indeed, but when he does he does not talk to anyone other
than himself; that would be beneath his dignity. The problem here is, however, that the objectors cannot have it
both ways. If the only direct object of God's knowledge is God's essence, and if the only direct object of God's love
is God's goodness (knowing and willing, essence and goodness, of course, being themselves only rationally
distinct), then God can know and love what is other than himself only to the extent that what is other than God is
in God. Being as both finite and infinite is dynamically


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"continuous," not statically "identical"but only a dynamic logic of process can come to grips with this. From this it
follows that the only being of their own that things have is apparent being; the real being is in Godwhich is what
Hegel says.38 It is what Hegel further says, however, that causes the difficulty. The apparent being of a world of
reality, he tells us, is the appearing of true being, its self-manifestation.39 The being of the world, then, is the self-
manifestation of Godto man. And since the self-manifestation of God is concretely identical with God's self-
knowledge, then man's knowledge of God is concretely identical with God's knowledge of himself. As
metaphysically reprehensible as Hegel's position may be to some, it has the advantage of not making nonsense out
of the words of Scripturewhose every line speaks in a manner which cannot but make the "metaphysician" writhe.
Perhaps it all comes down to saying that metaphysical reprehensibility is a small price to payfor comprehensibility.
Relationship in God to what is other than himself would be an imperfection in God only if it bespoke an addition to
God's reality. If a created world is not an addition to God's reality, why must a real relationship of God to that
world be an addition?
At this point we are forced to say that the first two objections count as objections only because in them the third,
the real objection, constantly looms large on the horizon. The very logic of Hegel's position, it would seem,
compels him to identify God with the totality of reality. In considering this difficulty we may justifiably begin by
changing our approach and trying not to identify God and the totality of reality. Presumably both God and the
world are real. Does this mean that the reality of God plus the reality of the world equals more than the reality of
God? In this case God would be part of the totality of reality, infinite being would be part of the whole of beinga
rather uncomfortable stance to take. Or, the question might be asked, Is the totality of created (finite) reality a
reflection of the infinite totality of reality which is God? How this could fail to imply a finite reality over against
God, which God is not, is not easy to see. Nor is it easy to see how God would not be limited by that which is but
which he is not. Perhaps we can look to Thomas Aquinas for a solution to the difficulty. Speaking of God's
omnipresence Aquinas says, "God is in things as containing them." Later he explains this by saying, "All things
must be in him [God] according to an intelligible mode." It may, of course, be countered that what Aquinas is
saying is that all things are in God according to an intelligible mode
38. See BDG, pp. 11821; see also pp. 8889, 95, 103.
39. Ibid., p. 172. When Hegel says that the being of the finite is only "appearing" (or "apparent" being), he is
not saying that the finite only seems to be but is not; he is saying that true being which is infinite appears
finitely. He is manifest to himself infinitelyin three personsand he is manifest to others finitely. Still, only if the
finite manifestation reveals the infinite is it true manifestation.


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("before creation") but that all things are in themselves according to an existential mode ("after creation").
However, this quite clearly leaves the difficulty where it was, and it is not easy to see in the context that the
"before" and "after" creation are not temporal rather than logical designations. If, on the other hand, we take
Hegel's interpretation of the ''before creation" which we find in Science of Logic, which is not essentially different
from "after creation" except insofar as the process of divine self-manifestation progressively reveals the God who
is complete truth "in himself" before creation, we are at least meeting the difficulty head-on.40 All being is in God,
because the being of all reality is to be in God, the way the being of reality is to be in spiritin divine Spirit as
creative, in finite spirit as "recreative."
It is this last contention, however, that suddenly reveals the true nature of the traditionalists' charge against Hegel.
It is not really his "pantheism"which is far too problematicalthat bothers them; it is his "pan-logism." Hegel wants
to know too much; he has taken the mystery out of God my making God fit into his logical system. There may, of
course, be some truth in thisprovided it is true to say that the "logic" precedes the theologybut it is also true of
every attempt to give a rational account (however partial) of God, since only if human reason attempts to interpret
what revelation says and what faith believes of God, will revelation make sense of God; it is reason's task to
interpret what faith believes. To paraphrase Kant: "Reason without faith is empty; faith without reason is blind." It
is not incomprehensible, however, that Hegel's words would make some theologians fear that his attempt to know
God rationally is an attempt to subject the content of faith to the autonomy of reason. The heart of the problem
would seem to be that, in effect, Hegel wants "logical reason" ("the logical idea") to tell revelation what it must
mean. But there is nothing really new or startling in that. Do not theologians tell us that when Scripture says that
"Jesus Christ sits at the right hand of the Father," Scripture is speaking metaphorically, since God has no hands, no
right or left side? Is it not reason which tells the theologian that this is metaphorical language, that the literal sense
of the words does not "make sense"? We can go further and say that any attempt to apply reason to the content of
faith will try to show that the latter does not conflict with reason or that reason can to some extent at least explicate
the content of faith. It is the theologian's task to explicate the "logos" of faith. What is new and startling in what
Hegel is saying is not that logical reason should seek to appropriate (in the etymological sense of "make its own")
what faith is saying. What is new and startling is his contention that the language of faith
40. See BDG, pp. 17677; cf. J. N. Findlay, Hegel: A Reexamination (New York: Macmillan, 1958), p. 354.


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demands an essential (concrete, dynamic) logic of thought (concept) to interpret it and that the logic he has
elaborated is equal to the task. There is to be no unthinking (unlogical) faith, but a static formal logic of being is
not going to make faith logicalonly a dynamic logic of becoming can do so. What Hegel is not saying, then, is that
logic lays down the law for understanding the meaning of faith. What he is saying is that in understanding faith we
find logic confirmeda logic that would really contradict faith would be a bad logic.


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Chapter Seven
Philosophy and Theology
To those who share neither Hegel's faith nor his theology it cannot but be disconcerting to find him so consistently
employing a language which is intelligible only to Christians. It is not only the language, however, which is
disconcerting; even a relatively superficial familiarity with Christian theology will reveal that his speculative logic
too has its roots there. But how is it possible to take seriously a philosopher who proclaims more emphatically than
any other the autonomy of human reason and in the very same breath makes that reason fit into the procrustean bed
of a theology which is all too clearly trinitarian and incarnational, which reasons in terms of a disintegrating "fall"
of the human spirit and a reintegrating "reconciliation" through the death of the God-man, and which makes the
presence of the "Holy Spirit" in the spirit of man integral to reason's capacity to come to grips with truth? Is this
not to utterly confuse faith and reason, theology and philosophy, in such a way as to make each thoroughly alien to
itself? Or perhaps it is not Hegel at all who is at fault, but me, as I persist in taking what he says too literallyas
many of my critics would have it.
One solution to the difficultyand it has been tried again and againis not to take what Hegel says literally at all. The
language of theology has simply provided him with a convenient vocabulary in which to express a "speculative
philosophy," which is in reality thoroughly secular. When Hegel says "God" he does not mean the concrete
Absolute who must be personal (Spirit) or else not be at all; when he speaks of "divine Spirit" he does not mean
the Spirit who transcends the sum total of finite "minds''; when he refers to the "God-man" he is not speaking of an
individual who ever really existedthe list of metaphors could be extended indefinitely. A solution such as this,
however, poses a number of other difficulties which it makes no serious attempt to solve. (1) Apart from accusing
Hegel of remarkably poor taste in employing the language of a faith he does not


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share in constructing a philosophy which is destructive of that faith, it accuses him of equally poor judgment in
employing a clumsy vocabulary which is not calculated to do the job he wants it to do. (2) As a matter of fact, it is
possible to make eminently good rational sense out of Hegel's "theologizing"provided one has no a priori
commitment to the view that no theology can make good sense. (3) An interpretation which requires torturing
Hegel's words in such a way that they are made to say something other than what they rather patently seem to be
saying demands more evidence from Hegel's writings than is given of what Hegel in fact intends. It might be
argued, of course, that Kant and Jacobi shared Hegel's faithif indeed that be truebut they did not share his rational
optimism that what faith believes reason can know. But that is precisely the point: There is no room in Hegel's
philosophy for a Kantian reason which is discontinuous with faith, just as there is no room in his religion for a faith
which is discontinuous with reason. It is not without significance, after all, that the final four chapters of
Phenomenology of Spirit (more than two-thirds of the book) are grouped under one inclusive heading, "Reason,"
and that "Spirit," "Religion," and "Absolute Knowing'' are all integral to the continuous onward march of "Reason"
coming to consciousness of itselfwithout religious consciousness the line of march would have turned out to be a
dead-end street!
Another possible solution, perhaps, to the difficulty of coming to terms with Hegel's "theologizing" (or
"christianizing") philosophy might be to say that he is an interesting curiosity in the history of philosophy, a
"seminal" thinker who can give others the impetus to a thinking which is radically different from his own but who
cannot seriously tempt us with his theologizing of philosophy. Feuerbach and Marx, after all, have made it
abundantly clear that Hegel's method can be eminently fruitful, independently of the content of his system; and
Kierkegaard has shown us what becomes of Christian faith when it is "speculativized" à la Hegel. It may be that to
Hegel Christian faith makes eminently rational good sense, but one need share neither his faith nor his concept of
rational good sense. If one does not share his faith there is little likelihood that one will find he has made rational
sense of it, but there is equally little likelihood that one will make sense of Hegel's philosophy at all. It would seem,
however, that no serious thinker today is quite willing to say that Hegel simply is not a significant philosopher. If
we are to say, then, that he is a significant philosopher, we cannot avoid taking cognizance of the close connection
in his thoughtand expressionof philosophy and theology.
What then are we to say of the seeming contradiction of an explicit affirmation of the autonomy of reason coupled
with insistence on a theological content of rational thinking? Perhaps the answer is to be found in his equally
strong insistence on the nonsynonymity of rationality and rationalism. The


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autonomy of reason no more bespeaks the narrow rationalism of eighteenth century "Enlightenment" than it does
the essential finitude of both reason and reason's object as presented in Kant's Critique of Pure Reason.1 Hegel
was quite consistent in his refusal to accept that the safeguarding of rational autonomy demanded progressive
opposition to basic Christian faith, as did, for example, the triumphal rationalism of the Enlightenment. It is true
that one could, as Hegel did, repeatedly lecture on the philosophy of religion without compromising one's
conviction that reason is completely autonomous. One could even, like Kant, write a Religion within the Limits of
Mere Reason, without altering one's conviction of the essential finitude of reason, especially if the light of reason is
turned only on the subjective response called religion and not on the infinite object to which religion is the
response. One could hardly, however, be convinced, as Hegel was, of the thoroughly rational character of the
content of religious consciousness, thus making it an essential object of philosophical enquiry, and at the same time
regard faith and reason, theology and philosophy, as radically discontinuous. For Hegel it was not inconsistent to
theologize philosophy; his philosophy demanded precisely that.
It might not be amiss to turn here to Emil Fackenheim, who can in no way be suspected of sharing either Hegel's
faith or Hegel's theology and who shares Hegel's philosophical convictions only minimally, but who, nevertheless,
has provided us with extraordinarily sensitive insights in his work, The Religious Dimensions of Hegel's Thought.
There is no need, Fackenheim tells us, to agree with Hegel in order to be able to see that the consistent goal of his
philosophy is the truth which is not partial, and this can only be infinite Truth.
For Hegel, the difference between philosophy (it is doubtful whether the term "metaphysics" should still be
used) and the whole remainder of human life (both theoretical and practical) is one of standpoint. All other
human activities are truly in contact with reality, but reach partial truths only, because they are limited to
finite standpoints. Philosophyor at any rate the true or final philosophyrises to an infinite or absolute
standpoint, and to encompass and transfigure the partial truths of the finite standpoints into a Truth no
longer partial is its sole aim.2
Hegel, then, has no difficulty in recognizing the reality of the finite or the truth of the partial truth, precisely
because he can view the finite and partial against the backdrop of the infinite and whole.
1. Hegel himself was remarkably aware as early as Glauben und Wissen (an awareness which carries over
to PdG, WL, and EpW) that both "pietism" (or "fideism") and atheism have their roots in one and the same
''Enlightenment" rationalism.
2. E. Fackenheim, The Religious Dimension in Hegel's Thought (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1967),
pp. 1617.


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First, Reality is dialectical in that the finite at once points to an Infinity which contains it while yet retaining
its own reality. For Hegel, as for Schelling of 1801, "the ideality of the finite is the main principle of
philosophy." But to Schelling this means that the finite merely appears real at finite standpoints and is seen
as absorbed in infinity at the absolute standpoint. To Hegel it means that the finite is overreached by the
Infinite and that it must be real as well as "merely ideal," if the overreaching Infinite is not itself to suffer
loss of all reality. It is this conviction which forces Hegel to recognize the partial truth of finite thoughte.g.,
natural sciencewhen Schelling can merely oppose or ignore it.3
It is thus that, for Hegel, ultimate philosophical thought cannot stop short of the concrete infinite. One might, of
course, wish to argue that this "concrete infinite" need not be identified with the "incomprehensible" God of faith
or theology, but it is difficult to see how anyone could argue that Hegel does not ''comprehend" the identification
as necessary. This is the lesson both of Phenomenology of Spirit and of Science of Logic. The Phenomenology
"will watch 'consciousness examine itself,' a process in which each finite standpoint, which is fragmentary because
it is finite, will point to one higher because it is less fragmentary, until finally, at the standpoint of absolute
knowledge, all fragmentariness is transcended."4 This realization is not too different from the pervading theme of
the Logic, wherein finite reason can comprehend itself precisely as finite only because it is not merely finite.
This reflection results in the discovery that, in recognizing the limits of the examined reason, examining
reason transcends these limits. Hegel's Logic completes this philosophical process, which is doubly-
examining because it attends to both the examined and the examining Reason. His work both recognizes
and indeed presupposes the categories of finite thought, and alters these categories, so as to integrate them
into the infinitely self-active thinking which it performs.5
To put all of this in a slightly different way, we might say that, for Hegel, as we see in the Phenomenology, it is
essential to the integrity of human consciousness that it be religious, that it be consciousness of the Absolute, the
Infinite, who is God. It is, furthermore, essential to the consciousness of God that it be theological, that is, a
thought-out consciousness, if it is to be authentically human. But a thinking which is not philosophical is not,
properly speaking, theological, because, as Hegel sees it, only philosophical thought is supremely rational.
Philosophical knowledge, however, will be
3. Ibid., pp. 2728.
4. Ibid., p. 34.
5. Ibid., p. 226.


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supremely rational only if its object is the supremely rational, absolute Spirit, and this meansalong traditional
theological linesthat a knowledge of God makes sense only if its paradigm is God's own absolute knowing, which
is absolute precisely because its object is absolute, God himselfthe paradigm of all knowing is God's absolute self-
knowing.
Faith and Knowledge

Now, even if we follow Hegel this far, we seem to run into the most insurmountable difficulty of all. If the
"absolute knowing," the acme of human consciousness and self-consciousness in which Phenomenology of Spirit
culminates, is modeled on God's infinite self-knowing, it would seem either to swallow up faith or to do away with
the need of faith altogether. If philosophical thinking can know what faith believes, what need is there of faith?
Even if we were to go along with J. N. Findlay who likens absolute rational knowing to "mystical" union, the
difficulty would seem to remain; what need is there of faith when union with God has been achieved? According to
Findlay:
Hegel's conception of the reasonable being what it is, it is not hard to see why he should liken it to the
mystical in religion. The mystics are precisely the people who tolerate a species of near contradiction in
reporting their experiences, and who reject those firm oppositions between God and the soul, the infinite
and the finite, eternity and the passing moment, on which ordinary piety and theology lay such stress.6
One might point out, of course, that the mystics themselves are the first to insist that, without faith, mystical union
would be inconceivable, but that is scarcely a philosophical answer to a philosophical difficulty. More to the point,
it should be emphasized that the difficulty is a difficulty only if faith ceases to be faith once it has achieved a
rational comprehension of its own content, but this would be true only if faith is radically discontinuous with
knowledge, which is precisely what Hegel denies.
We might explicate this further by swinging back to the overall pattern of the Phenomenology. There can be no
question that, as Hegel sees it, rational thought transcends sensation, perception, scientific understanding, and
immediate self-consciousness. That it transcends these, however, does not mean that it has no need of them; what
rational thought does is to transform them by "appropriating" their content at a higher level, all the while remaining
continuous with them; it does not dispense with them. By the same token, rational thought could neither reach the
culmination of its
6. J. N. Findlay, Hegel: A Reexamination (New York: Macmillan, 1958), p. 65.


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development, nor in that culmination have God as its object, as it does both in "absolute knowing" and throughtout
Science of Logic, if it did not constantly have faith as its underpinning. If this be the case, then philosophical
knowing neither swallows up nor dispenses with faith; it simply transforms faith into an explicit awareness of its
own implications. In so doing, admittedly, Hegel's "speculative philosophy" makes it difficult for those who do not
share his faith to share his philosophical experiencejust as does "mystical union"union with a God in whom one
does not believe cannot make sense to one who does not believe.
All of this becomes more explicitly theologicaland, therefore, more difficult to sharewhen Hegel interprets those
words of the Fourth Gospel, "The Spirit shall teach you all truth," as meaning that the divine Spirit will not simply
speak to the human spirit but will speak in the human spirit (nor will his speaking be simply the words of the
Bible). Thus the "absolute knowing" of the Phenomenology which is to be explicated in the subsequent "system," is
the actual presence of the divine Spirit in man. Here it is that it becomes particularly difficult for those who share
neither Hegel's faith nor his theology to share his philosophical position. In both Lectures on the Philosophy of
Religion and Lectures on the History of Philosophy, Hegel makes it quite clear that, in his view, neither theology
nor philosophy could be adequate to the whole truth until the advent of Christianity, the "Absolute Religion."7
Thus, for Hegel, it is necessary that there be the leap to Christian religion, to Christian revelation, a revelation of
what it is for God to be man and, therefore, of what it is for the human to be divine (a truth which no mere words
in a book could tell). Only thus can we know what it is for man to be truly man, the ''God-bearer," truly spirit.
Whatever one's reactions to Hegel's "Christian philosophy" may beno one has to agree with himone thing is clear:
For Hegel the ultimate goal of philosophical thinking is knowledge of God, which alone is knowledge of ultimate
truth. If he is also convinced that there is a progressive self-revelation of God in human religious
consciousnessfinding the divine in the working of nature, portraying the divine in the works of human artistry,
listening to the divine voice speaking to the inner ear of human spiritit should come as no surprise that Hegel
insists on identifying the God who reveals himself in religious consciousness and the God who reveals himself in
speculative thinking. The all-important questionand we are back where we beganis whether human reason can
know God. Under the influence of Kant and Fichte the "theologians" of Hegel's daywith Jacobi and
7. Lest it be argued that both series of lectures, coming to us as they do, not from the pen of Hegel but from
the notes of his students, are not reliable witnesses to his nuanced thinking, it should be pointed out that
neither Science of Logic nor the sections on "Logic" and on the "Philosophy of Absolute Spirit" in the
Encyclopedia are intelligible except in the light of this conviction of Hegel's.


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Schleiermacher in the vanguardwere opting for an intuitive grasp, an emotional response, a worship of they knew
not what; but Hegel would have none of this. He preferred the attitude of the medieval Scholastics, whose
philosophy was continuous with their theology, who did not have to contend with the opinion that the divine could
not be begriffen (BS, p. 80). "What is theology without a knowledge of God? Just what a philosophy is without the
same, sounding brass and tinkling cymbal" (ibid., p. 81). It is a question of knowing God as he is in himself, not of
knowing the countless predicates men have attributed to him (VPR II, pp. 22425), not of applying to the
incomprehensible the categories of mere understanding which are inadequate to him (BS, p. 351). The medieval
theologians were nearer to the truth than were Hegel's contemporaries, because their thinking was both theology
and speculative philosophy.
The essential, unique object of theology as doctrine of God is the nature of God; and this content is of an
essentially speculative character; thus such theologians can only be philosophers. Philosophy alone is
science of God. Among them philosophy and theology counted as one, and it is the distinguishing of them
which constitutes the transition to the modern period, i.e., the time when it was thought that something
could be true for thinking reason which would not be true for theology. In the middle ages themselves, on
the contrary, the basic principle was that there is only one truth. [VGP II, p. 543]
Once again it should be noted here that there is no question of confusing religion and theology or theology and
philosophy; to say that theology and philosophy are "one" is not to say that the terms are synonymous, it is to say
that there is one continuous movement which begins with the reception of a revelation from "outside," so to speak,
to which the assent, for reasons which can scarcely be analyzed, is ''immediate." The authentic human being,
however, cannot rest content either with an immediate assent or with the vagueness of the content to which assent
is given; thinking, meditation, and reflection must follow. If the thinking human follows through on this, the assent
becomes the sort of thought out rational assent which we can justifiably call "knowledge."
Inasmuch as the doctrines of the Christian religion are present in the Bible, they are thus given in a positive
way; and when they become subjective, when the Spirit bears witness to their truth, this can happen in a
purely immediate way, such that man's innermost being, his spirit, his thought, his reason is struck with
their truth and assents to it. [VPR II, p. 199]
There is no question here of finding reasons for believing but rather of finding the meaning of that which is
believed, and this will ultimately mean not


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dispensing with the immediate assent but transforming its immediacy into mediated rationalityas becomes the
human spirit.
What must further be said, however, is that, precisely because man is a thinking being he cannot rest in this
state of immediate assent to the testimony, but also he takes himself to thoughts, meditations, and
reflections on it. This accordingly leads to a further development in religion; and in its highest and most
developed form it is theology, scientific religion; it is this content, the testimony of the spirit, known in a
scientific way. [Ibid.]
There is clearly a danger that insistence on the incomprehensibility of God will degrade theo-logy from a doctrine
about God into a "historical" knowledge of what has been said about himpresumably by other people who did not
quite know what they were saying! One might well ask how one can know that the object of a non-knowing is true.
If the reply is that we do not know that it is true, we only believe that it is, we may well wonder what meaning the
truth of what we believe can have, if all rationality has been removed from it. The result is simply the denial that
there is any "theology" at all, which may well be precisely what both ''pietists" and "rationalists" want to say; it can
scarcely be what Hegel wishes to say.
Still, in recent times it is at the same time asserted that religion is authentic and true only after the manner
of religious emotion, only as an emotion. If, however, any insight into concepts with religious content is
denied, then so is any theology denied; for theology as a science has to be knowledge of God and of the
relation of man to God, a relation which is determined by the nature of God. Otherwise theology would be
merely historical acquaintance. The emotion in question has also been called the source of science and of
reason; but it is the absence of knowledge. If the emotion is to be true, then there must be reason in it; in
fact, the emotion itself must be the product of conviction and isight. [EGP, p. 194]
Hegel has no intention of denying that Christian religion has a "dogmatic" content, so long as "dogma" is not taken
to mean unthinking statements which are unthinkingly accepted. On the assumption that the statements are true
they ought to be capable of being reasoned out both by those who make them and by those who accept them. Nor
does it detract from the rationality of either group that the "reasoning out" is not separated from, but is
"continuous" with, the witness of the indwelling Spirit who makes rationality to be rationality and not mere
arbitrariness. If, however, all that both those who make and those who accept dogmatic statements have to go on is
"scientific" understanding, they will find in them unresolved contradictions. Perhaps it is better to prefer no reason
at


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all to that kind of reason. But what if there is a "speculative reason" which resolves the contradictions, precisely
because it is more in tune with the non-contradictoriness of infinite Truth?
The other subject matter, however, contains not only its own true content, which also constitutes the
interest of philosophy in view of the proper mode of its knowing, but this content at the same time retains
in itself an immediate connection with what is formal in speculative thinking. Under this heading I should
like here to mention the dogmatic content of our religion, because this content not only contains truth in
and for itself but also contains it as so thoroughly caught up in (entgegengehoben) speculative thinking that
it itself immediately involves the contradicting of understanding and the rejection of rationalizations. [BS, p.
546]
The real danger is that religious truths, precisely because for our accustomed way of thinking they involve
contradictions, will be presented in such a way that the contradictions are not resolved but merely shunted aside,
with the result that the truth itself is reduced to a meaningless blandnessand it is the refusal to think the truth out
philosophically that produces this result.
Whether or not, however, this content is to have the sort of coherence which is firmly constructed on the
basis of speculative thinking depends on whether in the presentation of religion the church's dogmatic
teaching is not somehow handled as a merely historical matter, whether in general truly profound reverence
for it is not inculcated, but rather the principal emphasis is put on deistic generalities, moral teaching, or
even merely on subjective emotions. When this is the way the Church's teaching is presented, more often
than not an attitude opposed to speculative thinking is created, the self-deception of understanding and
arbitrariness are given first place, and this either leads immediately to a simple indifference toward
philosophy or, worse still, falls victim to sophistry. [Ibid.]
What Hegel is saying, ultimately, is that religious truth, revealed truth, will be emptied of all meaning if speculative
philosophical thinking is not brought to bear on it. Revealed truth cannot simply be poured in from outside and
passively accepted; its meaning must be actively recreated in the human mind thinking for itself (see VGP II, p.
55). On the other hand if this mind really thinks with the freedom that constitutes thought, it will find the truth
about God revealed to it inescapable (see VPR II, p. 118). Human consciousness and self-consciousness is "other"
than God's only to the extent that God, infinite Spirit, "others" himself in it; otherwise finite spirit makes no sense
at all (see ibid., pp. 44, 202).


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Christology
Once more we are back to the Christian context within which alone Hegel's philosophical thinking on God is
intelligible. In this connection it is not without significance that in recent years a number of theologians have
turned their attention to what they call "Hegel's Christology." God who is Spirit, if he is to reveal himself, can
reveal himself only to man who is spirit. In one sense we can say that the very being of man as spirit is divine
revelation, but the paradigm of divine self-revelation is to be found in the divine-human, the God-man, who, Hegel
assures us, is Jesus Christ. He is not about to deny that Jesus is a person who is truly human nor that, as human, he
is an individual to whom can be assigned a place in the temporal course of history, but he is insistent that the truth
of Jesus Christ is not exhausted in his humanity. It is not enough to know who Christ was; we must also know
what Christ is, that is, a human individual inseparable from the divine nature, the paradigm of God's self-revelation
in human nature.
In the Christian religion . . . the person who is Christ is a determination belonging to God's nature. From
this point of view, then, he is not historical. Taken merely as a historical person, e.g., as a teacher, like
Pythagoras, Socrates, or Columbus, what he was would be just as much, as it is with the others, a matter of
indifference, uninteresting. But, according to Christian religion this person, Christ himself belongs in his
character as God's Son to the very nature of God. The who of revelation, to the extent that it says nothing of
God's nature, would not be a universal divine content, but it is a question of the what, the content of the
revelation. [EGP, p. 174]
What Hegel finds strange is that in his own day this truth which fits in so well with "speculative philosophy" has
been lost in "theology," to which the person of Christ says nothing about the "incomprehensible" nature of God. It
is as though the moral teaching of Christ could tell us what man's relation to God should be, could even inspire in
us a "feeling'' of devotion to God, but could not bring us any nearer to "knowing" God.
One can see that this Christian teaching, including the concept of Trinity, which in its fundamental
characterization is contained in what has been said, has found a refuge in speculative philosophy, after
having been brushed aside by the exegetical and rationalistic theology which, in the Protestant Church, is
almost exclusively dominant. Thus the appearance of Christ has been degraded to a mere object of
remembrance and of moral foundations. Thus too, God as unknowable has been relegated to what is in
itself an indeterminate empty out-there-God, a non-revealed being outside actuality. [BS, p. 186]
Perhaps there is a fear among "theologians" that in recognizing Christ as a


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divine "person" they will anthropomorphize God, thus likening him to the all-too-human gods of the Greek
Pantheon. Hegel's point is that it is precisely by making himself truly human in Christ that God most adequately
manifests himself as both "absolute" and "personal.'' This is "anthropomorphism" in the very best sense, far more
anthropomorphic than any Greek god! "For in Christianity God is in his truth and because of that is represented as
in himself thoroughly concrete, as person, as subject, and, to be even more explicit, as Spirit. What God is as Spirit
is explicated for religious apprehension as Trinity of Persons, which in its innermost reality (für sich) is at the same
time one" (VA I, p. 101). To be both "absolute" (infinite) and "personal" God must be three Persons.
But Hegel is saying more than that; he is saying that the continuity of the infinite and the finite, of God and
creation, must also be a continuity of the divine and the human, in such a way that a God who so completely
transcended the human as to be unable to express himself humanly would not be the personal God of Christianity,
the only God who can be. A divine person who has nothing in common with the human person would be neither
person nor divine.
Now, in order that spirit attain to its infinity it must likewise emerge from merely formal and finite
personality to the Absolute, i.e., the spiritual must present itself as the subject which is at once the
fulfillment of the purely substantial and thereby is self-knowing and self-willing. Conversely, the
substantial, the true, may not, therefore, be taken to be simply beyond humanity, such that the
anthropomorphism of the Greek view is completely eliminated; rather the human as actual subjectivity must
be made into a principle, and the anthropomorphic, as we have already seen, only thus brought to
perfection. [VA II, p. 129]
We may feel that Hegel has chosen a very tortuous way to say what he has to say, but we must remember his
overarching concern, manifested par excellence in Phenomenology of Spirit, both to comprehend the human spirit
in the light of the divine and to comprehend the divine Spirit in the light of the human. In chapter VII, "Religion,"
the self-conscious human spirit comes to a grasp of what it is to be spirit in contemplating the divine Spirit; in
chapter VIII, "Absolute Knowing," the same human spirit fills out its religious contemplation of the divine by
seeing in itself the infinite worth of being self-determining spirit and thus comes to a better comprehension of the
divine. It is only through Christian religion that man comes to appreciate what it is for man to be spirit; it is only
with speculative philosophy that man comes to a comprehension of what it is for God to be Spirit, the Spirit who
dwells in man and thus lifts him to the divine. According to Christian teaching:


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The [human] subject is the object of divine grace; each subject, man as man, has infinite value, is oriented
to the indwelling of the divine Spirit, to the union of his own spirit with the divine Spirit, and this latter is
God. Man is destined to be free and is thus recognized as in himself free. [Still] this freedom of subjectivity
is as yet only formal, based on the principle of subjectivity. [VGP II, p. 500]
This gives the religious side of the story. When the light of speculative thinking is turned on this it is at once
informed of a truth it did not discover and uncovers the more profound meaning of that truth.
The second point is that the principle of the Christian religion be developed for thought, be appropriated in
thinking knowledge, be thus actualized, so that the knowledge become reconciled to the divine idea it has in
itself, that the wealth of thought culture belonging to the philosophical idea be united with the Christian
principle. For, the philosophical idea is the idea of God, and the development of thinking knowledge must
be united with the Christian principle; for thinking has the absolute right that it be reconciled or that the
Christian principle correspond with thought. [Ibid., pp. 500501]
But just what is the "Christian principle" of which Hegel speaks? Quite obviously it has to be "faith," but it cannot
be simply thatdespite the fact that in other places Hegel calls Christian faith the only "faith" in the proper sense of
the term. Above all it cannot be simply faith philosophically defined. "Firstly, the Christian faith comprises in it an
authority of the Church," which means that it rests not on "a personal revelation'' but is a definite content revealed
to the believing community. "And, secondly, the Christian faith is a copious body of objective truth, a system of
knowledge and doctrine" (Ep W, no. 63). But the question has not yet been answered: In the broad compass of that
faith what is the "Christian principle"? It can only be the middle-point around which revolves "the spiritual
fullness of Christian faith, whether we look at that faith in the heart of the believer and the indwelling of the Holy
Spirit, or in the system of theological doctrine" (ibid.). The "middle-point" can only be the incarnation of the "Son"
of God, the theological and philosophical explication of which involves "a copious body of objective truth, a
system of knowledge and doctrine."
That is also why, in terms of its ultimate content, "theology"read, an adequate and true theologyis only
throughout what philosophy is, an attempt to articulate a true knowledge of God. And thus from the
perspective of its speculative interest, such a theology as a philosophy of religion based on the Christian
fact rests on the "speculative middle point" of the doctrine of the Incarnation. Both a "right theology" and a
"right philosophy" begin with the intuitive conviction that the Vorstellungen representing this event in
history


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have a final and consummate "disclosure significance" in relation to the question of God's essential nature
and his relation to the world.8
The Function of Speculation

We must, of course, remember that Hegel was not by profession a theologian; he was thoroughly convinced that
the contribution he could make to the reintegration of the fragmented European culture of his day was as a
philosopher. He was also convinced, however, that precisely as a "philosopher" he had something important to say
to the "theologians," that his own speculative philosophy was more a "science of God" than was the "theology" of
the theologians. More than that, he was convinced that this philosophy was appropriate for the explication of ''the
christological understanding of God and his relation to man and the world already normatively implicit in the
already present faith and witness of the Christian communityto which as a Lutheran he claimed to belong."9 Like
the Scholastic theologians of the Middle Ages whom, as we have seen, to a great extent he admired for their ability
to combine theology and philosophy, he did not think that either the Bible or the authority of the Church could tell
us all we need to know about God. The appropriate philosophy"speculative thinking"was, in his eyes, an important
hermeneutic instrument for opening up the meaning of what "faith" teaches. If philosophy is indeed "science of
God," then faith is indispensable to it; but, by the same token, philosophy is indispensable to the understanding of
what faith believesa progressive understanding. Philosophy, however, need not provide the truth which it
explicates: "In fact philosophy does no more than to comprehend (begreifen) this idea of Christianity."
As soon as what is called explanation begins, as soon as an attempt is made by inference and exegesis to
find out what the words of the Bible mean, then we pass into the region of reasoning, reflection, and
thought, and then the question comes to be whether the thinking is correct or notjust how one goes about
thinking.
It is of no use to say that these particular thoughts or these principles are based on the Bible. As soon as
they cease to be anything more than the mere words of the Bible, a definite form is given to their content;
this content gets a logical form, or, to put it otherwise, certain presuppositions are formed in connection
with this content, and we approach the explanation of the passages with these presuppositions which guide
us in the explanation given; they are
8. James Yerkes, Hegel's Christology (Missoula, Montana: Scholars Press, 1978), p. 277.
9. Ibid., p. 290.


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constants in the explanation. The explanation of the Bible presents its content in the form or style of
thought peculiar to each particular age. The explanation which was first given was wholly different from
that given now. [VPR II, pp. 199200]
By way of gloss on this passage we might remark that an explanation based on an Aristotelian metaphysics of
"being" is not likely to be the same as one based on a Hegelian metaphysics of "becoming." But whatever the
philosophy may be that grounds the explanation, that explanation will be more truly "theological" than will one
which abandons philosophical hermeneutic altogether. Because, as Hegel sees it, the theologians have abdicated
their role of guardians of the faith, it becomes necessary for "speculative" philosophers to do their work for them.
What Hegel wants to reject is the idea that a fully adequate "scientific" theology is merely, to borrow
Schleiermacher's terms, "an account of the Christian religious affectations set forth in speech," an in-house
confessional description of Christian beliefs fideistically expressed, but speculatively disinterested or
agnostic about the necessary, universal truth about God open to public philosophical discussion. This is a
theology which has lost its speculative nerve, its conviction that man has been made rationally in the imago
dei. It has lost its apologetic confidence that Christianity is the "revealed" and "absolute" religion, and the
philosophical confidence that adequate speculative reasons can be given to justify this.10
It may or not be paradoxical, but it is certainly interesting, that the Christian theologians of the Middle Ages could
base their explanations on the philosophy of Aristotle, a professed pagan, whereas the theologians here in question
had to reject the philosophical foundations of Hegel, a professed Christian. What it comes down to is that Hegel in
fact believes more firmly than do the "theologians" that God has revealed himself and that the revelation is
intelligible. At the same time, however, he is quite clear in his conviction that the revelation could not be
intelligible to those who have as a heuristic instrument only an abstract philosophy of "understanding."
This is the final standpoint which today has attained to great external importance. The enlightened, abstract
understanding, abstract thinking demands only the abstract. With regard to God it knows only that he is, it
has an indeterminate notion (Vorstellung) of God. That is the content-less. Thus, when theology is
grounded merely on abstract understanding, it has as little content as possible, has leveled dogmas off, has
itself been reduced to the minimum. But, the religion which is to satisfy the spirit must in itself be
essentially concrete, it must be something content-full. Its content must be what has been
10. Ibid., p. 258.


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revealed of God in the Christian religion, i.e., it must be a dogmatic [theology]. Christian dogmatic is the
sumtotal of doctrines which manifest what is distinctive of Christian religion, doctrines which make known
God's revelation, the knowledge of what God is. [EGP, pp. 19899]
This, incidentally, is not to say that there is no knowledge of God in other religions; Hegel is simply saying that the
Christian religion renders explicit the truth about God which is implicit in other religions. He goes so far as to see
"historical necessity" in the advent of Christianity, precisely as the culmination of religious consciousness of God:
"In the context of previous forms [of religion] it has been shown that this idea of Christianity had now to emerge,
and in fact had to become universal consciousness of the world" (VGP II, p. 497).
The Meaning of "Revelation"

When Hegel speaks of divine self-revelation, he refers primarily not to the words of the Bible but to the story these
words tell, and the story is essentially that of God's being in the world as " God-man, " the synthesis of the divine
and the human, the infinite and the finite. In one sense, as we have seen, Hegel's entire philosophy can be seen as
a philosophy of God, since to know, ultimately, is to know God. In another sense, however, Hegel's philosophy is
from beginning to end a philosophy of man; a response, so to speak, to the Delphic oracle's "know thyself." Nor is
there any contradiction in this bipolar description of the Hegelian endeavor: to know man fully is to know him in
the light of our knowledge of God; to know God adequately is to know him as the process of spiritual self-
determination which culminates in God's relationship to man and his world. The "story" of this is told in the Bible.
The "speculative reenactment"to use an expression of James Yerkes11is the ''theo-logical" interpretation of the
story.
Now, the "speculative reenactment" can be carried on in two ways: (1) "phenomenologically," by retracing the
process which begins with the incarnational event and then tracing out the implicationstrinitarian, creational, and
redemptiveof this event, the reenactment contained in the seventh chapter of the Phenomenology; (2) "logically,"
by looking first to the inner life of the divine Spirit who, in knowing himself, "generates" his own perfect image,
the Son, and in the mutual love of Father and Son "breathes" the Spirit. The rest follows from this: (a) the inner life
of the divine Spirit expressing itself outwardly in the creation of the world and of finite spirit; (b) the movement of
the finite away from the infinite in the
11. Ibid., p. 290.


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fragmenting "Fall," as preparation for and pointing to (c) the reintegrating incarnational event, which articulates
itself in (d) the reconciling self-sacrifice of the God-man and (e) the elevation of the finite spirit through the
indwelling of the divine Spirit. This reenactment is the summary of the whole "system."
We can begin, then, a detailed examination of what can be called Hegel's "theology" with the rather summary
account he gives in Phenomenology of Spirit (pp. 52848). In examining these pages we must remember that Hegel
is attempting to give an account not so much of the ultimate meaning of what God has revealed of himself but
rather of what this revelation means to the finite human spirit in search of adequate self-awareness precisely as
spirit. Having examined the degree of religious awareness which man gains from a contemplation of nature and
from the production of works of art which "embody" the divine, Hegel turns to the Christian religion, which he
considers to be the culmination, both historically and religiously, of the progressive development of religious
awareness, affording the highest degree of self-consciousness which religion as such can. He is impelled, then, to
interpret Christian religious consciousness in such a way that it elucidates all that any religion can regarding the
reality of human consciousness as "spirit." This religion is ''absolute religion" in the sense that religous
consciousness qua religious simply cannot go beyond it; there is no religious "beyond." If there is a consciousness
of the absolute beyond Christian religious consciousness, it must be, so to speak, a suprareligious (not, be it noted,
a nonreligious) consciousness. Before going into the question of such a suprareligious consciousnesswhich, if there
be such, would have to be continuous with the religiousHegel seeks to interpret "spiritually" five major themes of
Christian revelation, with a view to showing that the "mysteries" in question, when
properly"spiritually"understood, constitute a revelation of consciousness as spirit and of self-consciousness as a
consciousness of what it is to be spirit. In the context of Hegel's elaboration we can understand "spiritual
interpretation" in eitheror bothof two ways: (1) as roughly the equivalent of "demythologization," where the
language of the revelation is stripped of its inevitable metaphorical character in order to uncover its true meaning;
or (2) as a discovery of its meaning for spirit. The five mysteries which Hegel has chosen to interpret thus are
Incarnation, Trinity, Creation, the Fall, and Redemption.12
Hegel has quite obviously chosen wellif we understand the death and resurrection of Christ, the coming of the
Spirit, and the sacramental life of the Church to be included under "Redemption." It might be argued, of
12. As we have noted before, Hegel very rarely employs the familiar term "Redemption," which in German
is Erlösung, preferring the "speculatively" far more congenial term "Reconciliation" (Versöhnung).


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course, that the themes of Creation and Falleven of some sort of Redemptionare not uniquely Christian, nor need
they be. If, however, the mysteries as interpreted are meaningful only in the uniquely Christian incarnational
context, as Hegel claims they are, then all five themes are Christian and only Christian. Incarnation is, clearly, the
central event of Christianity, not only in the sense that from it Christianity derives both its name and its character,
but also in the sense that it is the central revelational event which renders the other four mysteries intelligible. The
trinity of "Persons" in God is necessary if God's entry into human history while remaining "with himself" and thus
transcending history is to be possible at all. Creation is necessary, if there is to be a history into which God enters.
The movement away from God in the Fall is necessary, if there is to be a reason for incarnation. Redemption is
necessary if incarnation is to be an effective presence of God in history, significant for the self-awareness of
human spirit.
Incarnation. In Christian religious consciousness the Incarnation is a uniquely concrete union of the divine and the
human in the individual God-man, whom history calls Jesus and whom Christians call the Christ. According to
Hegel Jesus Christ is the most totally human of all humans precisely because he is divine, the model of the
integrally human, because only the man who is more than merely natural man is integrally human, spiritual.13
Gone, says Hegel, is the fragmented divinity of the Greek pantheon whose only unified intelligibility is the abstract
unity of divine "substance," a sort of "class" to which all the "gods'' belongor from which, perhaps, all are derived.
This sort of substantial unity bespeaks no unity of self-consciousness either on the side of divinity or on the side of
a humanity related to the divine. The incarnation of the God-man, Jesus Christ, reconciles divine substance and
human self-consciousness. In Jesus the divine substance "empties" itself (the Pauline cenwsiz), becoming a
concrete human self and thus revealing a concrete selfhood in God. It is thus that Jesus reveals that God is
Spiritnot merely substance or "supreme being"and reveals too what it is for man to be essentially spirit. As Hegel
sees it, however, precisely because in Jesus Christ God is sensibly present in individual bodily form, Jesus is not
yet fully what he is; his body must die that his Spirit may live in the Christian community.
Trinity. The God of the philosophers, whether of Plato, Aristotle, or Plotinus, whether the deistic God of the
Enlightenmentor even the God of Kant, Jacobi, and Fichte, to whom philosophical thought cannot at-
13. The term "integrally" is employed here advisedly. Hegel might call it one of those "speculative" terms
which combines many meanings, all of which are simultaneously operative. In it are contained the themes
of wholeness as opposed to fragmentation; of reconciliation as opposed to falling-away; of integrity as
opposed to onesidedness (or wrong-headedness).


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tainis no more than an abstract "supreme being." The concrete God of Christianity is a trinity of "persons,"
revealed, not in the Incarnation alone, but in the Incarnation and the descent of the Spirit consequent on the death
of the God-man. Because the Spirit is present in and to the human spiritin the communitythe enspirited community
can see the man Jesus as the human revelation of the divine. The divinity revealed in and through Jesus is triune:
the divinity in itself, the Father; the divinity in the individual Jesus, the Son; and the divinity in the believing
community, the Spirit. Herein there is a reconciliation of transcendence and immanence only because the
transcendent Father is immanent in the Son, whose Spirit is immanent in the community, extended in both space
and time. To grasp conceptually (begreifen) the divine reality, human consciousness finds that its awareness of God
is of a God articulated into a related triplicity (Trinity). To articulate this triplicity in language, the Christian
community employs names to designate the members of the triplicity. Thus, the namesFather, Son, Spiritare
metaphors based on human relationships. The distinctions of persons are meaningful only if they are at the same
time grasped as non-distinctions in a reality of dynamic movement, self-movement, with which only ''speculative
thought" can ultimately come to grips. When religion, even "absolute" religion, gives names to the "persons" of this
trinity, it is articulating this self-movement, which is SpiritGod as Spirit. The "moments" of this spiritual
movement, says Hegel in an effort to transcend the metaphors of "names," are "being," "knowledge," and "love,"
united in the dynamic unity of self-comprehension which he calls "concept," thus foreshadowing the dynamic unity
of totally interrelated reality and totally interrelated conceptual thought.
Having given his "spiritual" interpretation of the Incarnation as the movement of God's supreme self-revelation, a
movement which extends through the whole earthly life of the God-man culminating in his physical death and
resurrection whereby the Spirit comes to dwell in and animate the community, Hegel has been able to interpret the
Trinity as self-movement in the interior life of God. This, then, enables him further to interpret a series of
figurative terms which occur in Christian theological speculation in the language of the "concept" understood as a
movement of "concrescence." "Creation," "Fall," and "Redemption" are themselves figurative terms, and in their
explication theology employs other figurative terms which demand interpretation.
Creation. If the term "create" is taken to mean "make out of nothing," a making which is, as ordinarily understood,
in the mode of causal efficacy, Hegel contends, then it is a "representational" (metaphorical) term designating
God's spiritual activity in relation to the world's coming-to-be. This divine activity Hegel sees as a "knowing"with
its distinctively Hegelian overtones of "conceiving," which is comprehending by concretely


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putting together. The Phenomenology has sought to establish that all knowing is a knowing of self. Thus even
God's knowing is a knowing of himself, and his knowing of the world is the explication of that self-knowledge in
conceiving and thus bringing into being a world as the outward expression of God's own being. If human knowing
is to be truly a knowing, then, it must be analogous to divine knowing, such that man in knowing his world knows
himself and in knowing himself knows his world in a manner parallel to God's "creating." Creation, then, is the
work of reason knowing, bringing into being and putting together what it knows. The world is the creation of
divine Reason and is, thus, rational, revealing both in its spatial dimensions (nature) and in its temporal dimensions
(history) reason as its source. By the same token the world grasped in human knowing is the re-creation of the
world in human reason; the primordial unity of divine creation having been fragmented by the abstractive activity
of scientific understanding is put together again by the creative (re-creative) activity of reason. Thus, human re-
creative reason whereby the human reason knows itself is a sharing in the divine Reason whereby God knows
himself.
The Fall. If it is true to say that the phenomenon of the human is a sharing in the divine, then it would seem
reasonable to say also that human failure to express the divine is a falling away from that which makes the human
to be integrally human. This, however, is not the way Hegel interprets the biblical account of the Fall. Rather, he
sees the creation of man as initially man's mere being in the world and man's "innocence" as no more than his lack
of responsibility for that world. Becoming responsible, then, is the movement which explicates creation; negatively
expressed, it is the loss of "innocence." It is worth noting that the German term for "in-nocence" (Schuldlosigkeit)
is literally translated ''faultlessness," a state which is proper to nature, not to spirit. Thus, if man is to pass from
nature to spirit, nature must, so to speak, be "faulted"; fault becomes a condition for the movement from being
innocent to being good. In this context the "tree of knowledge of good and evil" becomes the symbol of that
knowledge which puts an end to innocence; the "fruit" which the first couple, as comprising all humanity, pluck
and eat is the symbol of that self-knowledge which is the beginning of responsibility for a world of reality as
known; and the "Angel of Light" (Lucifer) who opens the eyes of humanity's first couple symbolizes the
awakening of consciousness which will ultimately culminate in the authentic life of spirit. It is all one movement,
but at the same time it is but the first faltering steps of a larger overall movement. Thus, the Fall itself is the first
step toward reconciliation; to know good as good and evil as evil is to be on the road to reconciliation, and the felix
culpa is truly "happy" because it sets the scene for "redemption."
Redemption (reconciliation). Looked at from the side of God, "creation" is not an instantaneous act but a
movement wherein man, who


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has come into being in a world of reality which is over-against him and unknown by him, makes that world of
reality his own by progressively sharing in the divine creative activity. Looked at from the side of man, that same
process can be looked at as the one overall movement of "redemption." Here, once more, "incarnation" becomes
central; incarnation is redemption. The abstract being of a God who is seen only as "Creator" is expressed in time
in the concreteness of a human self-consciousness. Creation, then, is the beginning of externalization of an
otherwise abstract God, and incarnation is the further concretization of the God who takes upon himself human
self-consciousness in order that man may take to himself concrete God-consciousness and thus be redeemed.
Incarnation, howeverand thus creation, toois not complete until the individual God-man dies physically in order to
rise spiritually in the community which is to live his life.
The Movement of Spiritualization

Whether or not this Hegelian systematization of salvation history, in which all events are "moments" of one
connected movement, can prove fruitful in coming to terms with religious mystery we can leave to the
theologiansor historians of theology. That, despite its sometimes quite obviously fanciful exegesis, it tells us a
great deal about Hegel's conception of the progressive "spiritualization" of human reality is unmistakable. It is also
clear that Hegel means to be taken seriously when he articulates the moments of this process "religiously." How
religious all this really is is disputed by manyon both sides of the religous divide. Secularists like Marx and
Feuerbach see the whole thing as illegitimate, precisely because Hegel takes God and the divinization of man
seriously. Secularists like Kojève, Kaufmann, and Findlay legitimize Hegel's account by seeing in it the complete
secularization of what is only metaphorically called "religious consciousness.'' Religionistsand their name is
legiontend to condemn Hegel because he has destroyed religion altogether. No one, however, denies that Hegel has
provided us with a fascinating, grandiose, and in some ways compelling panoramic vision of human development.
It is, perhaps, more difficult to go along with Hegel when he describes this very same developmentwith only one
change in the order of presentationin terms of "logical necessity." We must try to recall, however, just what
"logical necessity" means for Hegel. It is, first of all, not the necessity of formal-logical or mathematical
entailment, which both regulates and even compels the subjective assent of the finite human mind, but is, rather,
the necessity of the "moments" of organic process. Secondly, it is not the sort of necessity which could be
discovered or seen by the logically functioning mind antecendently to the revelation of its content. Given the
revela-


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tion, however, Hegel claims to "see in" (speculare) it the rational necessity of the "movement" described.
It is important to note here, once more, that the fullness of the revelation is not contained in the words of the Bible
which are frequently metaphorical, nor is it, for that matter, contained in the words of the Church's teaching:
Without the inner witness of the Spirit there is no revelation. We might put it this way: If it is the presence of the
Spirit, "who will teach you all truth," and not mere human words (spoken or written) which makes known to the
early community the divinity of Jesus Christthe Gospel does not "prove" thisthen it is reasonable to say that it is the
ongoing presence of the Spirit in the believing community that continues to bear witness to that same truth.
When we turn now to the "logically" first of the "mysteries" concerning God, the revelation that the inner life of
God as infinite Spirit requires a triplicity of persons, related to each other as different and yet the same, we can say
that the words of the New Testament make it abundantly clear that this was the belief of the primitive community.
The words, however, are not by themselves the revelation of the truth; it is the events of "incarnation" and
"outpouring'' of the Spirit (which also throw light on the event of "creation") which, through the witness of the
indwelling Spirit, reveal the triplicity of "persons" in God. It is the same indwelling Spirit who, through the
"Fathers" and the councils of the Church, guides the theological articulation of the mystery of the inner life of God.
But there is no "theological" articulation without "speculative" philosophical reflection. What Hegel is saying, then,
is that when reason reflects on God's self-revelation as trinity of persons bound together in an infinite unity, reason
can see in (speculare) the revelation the truth that God cannot not be three persons. To put this another way, reason
can see the rational necessity that, where there is question of infinite divine Spirit, there must be infinite "three-in-
oneness"but it cannot see this independently of revelation or of the witness of the indwelling Spirit. What God has
revealed of himself is the true "Idea" of the God who cannot be other than "triune."
For a "metaphysics of understanding," of course, all of this is shot through with contradiction, and thus those
whose only "rational" approach to the Trinity is through "understanding" have only two alternatives: (1) to declare
the trinitarian "Idea" of God incomprehensible to reason and so to take refuge in faith; or (2) to reject the Idea
entirely. The first alternative is chosen by those whom Hegel calls "modern theologians."
Thus it [understanding] says: this cannot be comprehended; for the principle of the understanding is abstract
self-identity, and not concrete identity, according to which these differences exist in something which is
one. For the


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understanding God is the one, the Essence of Essences. This empty identity without difference is the false
representation of God given by the understanding and by modern theology. God is Spirit, that which gives
itself an objective form and knows itself in that. This is concrete identity, and thus the Idea is also an
essential moment. From the point of view of abstract identity, however, the One and the Other exist
independently, each for itself, and are at the same time related to each other, and there is the contradiction.
[VPR II, p. 230]
Those who choose the second alternative are the "Deists" of the Enlightenment.
What is true is that the finite, and the Infinite which stands over-against the finite, have no true existence,
but are themselves merely transitory. To this extent this is a secret for the sensuous way of representing
things and for the understanding, both of which struggle against what is rational in the Idea. Those who
oppose the doctrine of the Trinity are men who are guided merely by their senses and understanding. [Ibid.,
pp. 22829]
For Hegel, neither the first nor the second alternative is "Christian": "Similarly the definition of God, given by
what is called Deism, is merely the mode in which the understanding thinks God: whereas Christianity, to which
he is known as the Trinity, contains the rational concept of God" (Ep W, no. 182). What it comes down to is that
those who can conceive only according to finite categories are incapable of conceiving the coexistence of identity
and difference which is proper only to infinite Spirit.
The copulative verb "to be," which indicates the identity of subject and predicate, is nowhere better
employed, nowhere corresponds more to the truth, than where it expresses the "being-in-each-other"
[circumincession, pewicwrhsiz *] of the divine Persons . . . to the extent the other is identified with the one
related to it.14
As we saw so abundantly demonstrated in chapter 3, Hegel is convinced that the only true way of conceiving God
is as "Spirit"; but he is further convinced that only as "triune" does "divine" Spirit make sense: ''God is, thus,
known as Spirit, only because he is known as triune" (WG, p. 722). What is more, it is precisely this trinitarian
concept of God which makes Christianity radically different from and "speculatively" superior to all other
religions.
14. Friedrich Malmberg, Ein LeibEin Geist (Freiburg im Breisgau: Herder, 1960), pp. 160, 176; quoted in
Jörg Splett, Die Trinitatslehre G.W.F. Hegels (Munich: Alber, 1965), p. 146.


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It is this Trinity which makes the Christian religion stand on a higher level than the other religions. Were
Christianity without it, it might be possible that the thought [of God] would be found more adequate in other
religions. Trinity is the speculative in Christianity, and it is as a result of this that philosophy also finds in
Christianity the idea of reason. [Ibid., p. 59]
"Concrete" God as Triune

It may very well be that, precisely because Hegel speaks thus of the "speculative" superiority of Christianity,"
because he conceives of Trinity as "the speculative in Christianity," the suspicion could be created in some minds
that Hegel is doing no more than finding in the Christian Vorstellung of God as triune Spirit a convenient peg on
which to hang his own speculative philosophy of the human spirit. This suspicion might even be increased by the
fact that Hegel devotes considerable space in his ''Philosophy of Subjective Spirit" (EpW, no 381, Zusatz) to a
comparison between the rational movement of finite spirit and that of infinite Spirit. What he is trying to show is
that the progressive spiritualization of finite spirit is a movement toward infinity, whose quality is "ideality." The
movement is, of course, reminiscent of the movement seen in the Phenomenology, which passes through religious
consciousness, in which the multiplicity of idealized objects is united in the one Idea, to philosophic thinking
which "perfects this idealization of things by cognizing the precise manner in which the eternal Idea, which
constitutes their common principle, exhibits itself within them." In this idealization finite spirit "returns to itself,"
but only inchoately: "It is in absolute Spirit that it is first perfected." The transition to absolute Spirit, however,
demands that the consideration of the nature of spirit transcend the ordinary consciousness in religious
consciousness, only to rise to a higher level of philosophical consciousness, to a comprehension of "absolute Idea."
One could certainly get the impression from this treatment in EpW that "ordinary consciousness" needs "religious
consciousness" in order to ascend to the "absolute Idea," but that "philosophical consciousness" does not. Once
again, however, we must remember the principle of continuity. It is neither a question of philosophy not needing
faith in order to rise to the Idea, nor is it a question of the idea of spirit being independent of the content which is
manifested in religious faith.
What we have said above about the nature of spirit is to be demonstrated and has been demonstrated
through philosophy alone, needing no confirmation by means of ordinary consciousness. Still, to the extent
that our nonphilosophical thinking requires, for its part, that the developed concept of spirit should be more
representational, we can remind ourselves that Christian


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theology too conceives of God, i.e., the truth, as spirit, and it regards spirit not as a quiescence, a
persistence in empty uniformity,15 but as necessarily entering into the process of differentiating itself from
itself, of positing its other, and as first coming to itself not through relinquishment but through the
preserving supersession of this other. As is well known, theology expresses this process in the following
representational manner: God the Father (this simple universal being-in-self), putting aside his solitariness,
creates nature (that which is external to himself, self-externality), begets a Son (his other ego), but by virtue
of his infinite love, beholds himself in this other, recognizes his image therein, and returns in this image to
unity with himself. This unity is no longer abstract or immediate, but concrete, being mediated through
difference in that it is the Holy Spirit proceeding from the Father and the Son, and attaining perfect actuality
and truth in the Christian community. Thus must God be grasped in his absolute truth as the actual being-
in-and-for-self of the Idea. It is thus that he has to be known, not simply in the form of the mere concept,
of abstract being-for-self, or in the equally untrue form of an individual actuality in non-agreement with the
universality of its concept, but in the full agreement of his Concept with his actuality. [EpW, no. 381,
Zusatz]
Clearly, then, as Hegel sees it, only as triune is God the concrete God who is.
Such a theological comprehension of God as triune Spirit is far from being a convenient peg from which to hang a
philosophy of human spirit; its content is the paradigm of concrete spiritual reality, whose movement the human
spirit must follow if it is to be spirit at all (see VPR I, pp. 43839). There are, nevertheless, some expressions in the
long passage just quoted which could cause difficulty for those who are not thoroughly accustomed to Hegel's
mode of thinking and expression. (1) "God the Father (this simple universal being-in-self)": not that the Father as
Person is an "abstract" person, but that to conceive of God only as Fathereven "our Father"is to conceive of him
abstractly; to conceive of God concretely is to conceive of the mutual relationships of Father, Son, and Spirit. (2)
The Father "creates nature" external to himself and "begets a Son'': not that "begets a Son" is somehow subsequent
to or dependent on "creates nature," but that to conceive of creating, "self-othering" in nature, as discontinuous with
God's self-othering in the infinite "Other" who is the Son is to conceive very naively of "creating." (3) "It is the
Holy Spirit, proceeding from the Father and the Son and attaining perfect actuality and truth in the Christian
community": not that the Holy Spirit as divine "Person" waits on, so to speak, the Christian community for his full
concrete realization, but that the revelation and conceiving of God as concrete in three Persons is completed only in
the Spirit dwelling in the community as love. All of this is
15. Far from being mere "persistence in empty uniformity," divine Spirit is paradigm of self-conscious
activity.


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summed up more briefly in, of all places, Hegel's Philosophy of World History.
First of all Father, power, the abstractly universal, as yet incomprehensible. Secondly, he is as object to
himself, an other of himself, a self-duplicating, the Son. This other of himself, however, is just as
immediately himself; he knows himself and contemplates himself thereinand precisely this self-knowing
and self-contemplating is, thirdly, the Spirit himself. This means, the whole is Spirit, not one or the other
independently. God, expressed in the language of emotion, is eternal Love, i.e., having the other as his own.
[WG, pp. 5859; see EpW, no. 567]
We can now begin to understand what Hegel means by saying that speculative philosophy "comprehends"
(begreift) the Idea which the Christian religion "presents" to faith. The uniquely Christian dogma of the Trinity is
the model of "spiritual" comprehension of the truly real, in comprehending which philosophy learns what it is to
comprehend.16 "In the Christian religion the absolute Being is represented but not comprehended as absolute"
(VGP II, pp. 408409); the grasp is not yet adequately "spiritual.'' "In fact philosophy does nothing but comprehend
this Idea of Christianity" (ibid., p. 409), or else it is not truly philosophy. There follows in this text from Lectures
on the History of Philosophy one more attempt to express "speculatively" the dogma of the Trinity, Hegel's
conviction being that "speculative" philosophy can "conceive" of God only as triune.
Whether or not Hegel has been successful in reconciling conceptually a "three" which is at the same time "one," or
a "one" which is at the same time "three," may still be a question in the minds of those for whom the cardinal rule
of logic is the principle of abstract noncontradiction. Or it may be asserted that Hegel is playing fast and loose with
number concepts, if indeed when applied to infinite Being they are really "number concepts" at all. In any event he
is well aware that he is not engaged in mathematics and that to say "three" and "one" of infinite "being" is not the
same as saying "three" and "one" of finite "things"the language of "things" is not adequate to the naming of
"spirit"internal spiritual relations are simply not comparable to the external relations of "things" to each other.
It is much the same when understanding attackes the notion (Vorstellung) of the Trinity. In this notion, too,
the inner thought-relation is conceived of in an external fashion, for number is thought in the abstract form
of externality. But here understanding holds fast the externality only, stops at numeration,
16. As we saw in the Introduction (pp. 910), the initial response of faith to revelation is the "immediate"
Vorstellung, which must be progressively purified of all links to the sensible or to images in "speculative"
thinking.


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and finds each of the three externally complete in relation to the others. Now, if this quality of number be
made the foundation of the relation, it is undoubtedly a complete contradiction that those who are perfectly
external in relation to one another should at the same time be one. [VPR I, p. 155]
Although in his later writings Hegel does not, as he did in Theologische Jugendschriften, Glauben und Wissen, and
Differenz des Fichteschen und Schellingschen Systems der Philosophie, put such copious emphasis on the internal
spiritual relation of love as the force identifying plurality and unity, the concept is not absent, and it retains its
significance. Love is a relationship of persons in which each gives itself to the other, is person in relation to
another, because giving is not giving away as it is with things. Where the persons are finite the self-giving can
never be complete, and a certain externality of one to the other remains. Where the persons are infinite, on the
other hand, the self-giving is total, and the one is absorbed in the other in such wise that, although one is
distinguished from the other, their multiplicity and unity are identified.
It is just this achieving of personality by the act of absorption, by the being absorbed in the other, which
constitutes true personality. Such forms of the understanding directly prove themselves in experience to be
of those which transcend themselves. [VPR II, p. 233]
If "understanding" asserts that, where there are three persons, there are three individuals, it would seem
commonsensical to say also that, where there are three infinite Persons, there are three Gods. Not so "reason."
In love, in friendship, it is the person or individual who retains himself, and by means of love has the
subjectivity which is his personality. If here, in connection with religion, the idea of personality is clung to
in an abstract way, then we get three Gods, and the infinite form, absolute negativity is forgotten, or if
personality is regarded as not dissolved, then we have evil [polytheism], for personality which does not
yield itself up to the absolute Idea is evil. In the divine unity personality is held to be dissolved, and it is
only in appearance that the negativity of personality is distinguished from that whereby it is superseded.
[Ibid.]
Creative Love
The theme of "love" becomes crucially important when we turn now to the theology of "creation." As we have seen
(chap. 6), Hegel has been accused of making creation ''necessary" and therefore of making it impossible to
distinguish between the "infinite" activity of creation and the "finite" term of that activity. Where, however, the
necessity in question is


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that of love, even though that be called "rational necessity," it is at least legitimate to ask whether the "necessity"
of which Hegel speaks is the same as the "necessity'' in the minds of his accusers. Here it is that we must make a
very nuanced distinction, not in the activity of creation, which is one and continuousboth in itself and in continuity
with the trinitarian movement of divine Spiritbut in that which is created, the world of "nature" or the world of
"finite spirits." Thus, when in the introduction to Science of Logic Hegel speaks of "the presentation of God in his
eternal essence before the creation of the world or of a single finite spirit," the distinction is important. What does
it mean, then, to say first of all that God "creates" a world of nature, a world composed of interrelated material
parts? The question has to be asked in the context of a God who is "absolute," "infinite," self-subsistent, self-
sufficient, needing nothing outside himself for the completeness of his being. It simply makes no sense to speak of
God as one who organizes a "world" out of a mass of preexisting materials, a sort of Masonic, Deistic "divine
architect of the world." The atheists are right in dispensing with that kind of Godor, for that matter, with that kind
of world. On the other hand, however, is it possible to make sense out of the notion that God "creates" a world "out
of nothing"? Only if the term "create" has an intelligible meaning which is other than that of "make," "produce,"
"form," "construct," "bring into being" is it possible.
Moreover, the conception of matter as originally present and as naturally formless, is a very ancient one; it
meets us even among the Greeks, at first in the mythical shape of chaos, which is represented as the
unformed substratum of the existing world. Such a conception must of necessity tend to make God not the
Creator of the world, but a mere world-molder or demiurge. The deeper insight reveals God as creating the
world out of nothing, and that teaches two things. On the one hand it enunciates that matter, as such, has no
independent subsistence, and on the other that the form does not supervene upon matter from without, but
as a totality involves the principle of matter in itself. This free and infinite form will hereafter come before
us as the concept. (EpW, no. 128, Zusatz].17
We might begin by recalling that, according to Hegel, the "categories" of finite thought cannot be applied to God at
all; they cannot but distort our view of God. If God, then, can be said to create, "creation" must be an activity
which is peculiar to God alone, to absolute Spirit, to infinite Spirit, to pure Spirit; creation must be purely spiritual
activity (see VPR I, p. 144). In addition, infinite spiritual activity in God cannot be different from the purely
spiritual activity whereby (wherein) God is what he is. But the activity wherein God is what he is is the "spiritual"
activity of "knowing" himself,
17. See in addition, VA I, p. 481; BS, pp. 35051; EpW, no. 163.


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the Father "begetting" the Son, and the activity of "loving" himself, the Father and Son ''breathing" the Spirit (of
love).
To get back to the notion of "creation" being "out of nothing," there is no other than God out-of-which God could
create; if there be an other of God, it must be God's "self-othering." The model, once again, is the Trinity, the self-
othering in God, where there is no introduction of externality in God. If there be that which is external to God, and
there is, it can only be God's "self-externalization." "God creates out of nothing but God himself."
The necessity that God is the positing of his power is the birthplace of all that is created. This necessity is
the material out of which God creates; it is God himself, and, he therefore does not create out of anything
material, for he is the Self, and not the immediate or material. He is not one as against an other already
existing, but is himself the other in the form of determinateness, which determinateness, however, because
he is only One, exists outside of him as his negative movement. [VPR II, p. 55]
Finite self-othering in creation is continuous with infinite self-othering in the Trinity, both because there is no real
distinction of activities of God and because divine activity, identical with divine being, is essentially eternal. By the
same token, however, just as the very being of the infinite Other in God is one and the same identical eternal being
of God (the mutual being-in-each-other of the divine Persons), so too the being of the finite other outside God is
one and the same eternal being of God, the activity which eternally returns to itself.
So the world as God's other does indeed externalize what he is in himself, and yet the world does not
exhaust God's subjectivity . . . for God's being consists in the eternal trinitarian movement of externalizing
himself, interiorizing what has been externalized, and remaining in all these identical with himself.18
Although the language Hegel speaks in giving this account of the what of creation, geared as it is to an explanation
of the being of a finite world immersed in matter, is complex and sometimes enigmatic, what he says is not too
foreign to what traditional Christian theology teaches. When he comes to treat, however, of the why of creation,
looking for answers to the question in the "speculative logic" of the absolute "Idea," it becomes rather more
difficult to reconcile what he says with traditional theology. Is he asking a question that cannot be answered?
Strictly speaking, only God himself can answer the question, and it is not easy to show that he has answered the
18. Raymond K. Williamson, Hegel's Philosophy of Religion (Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Newcastle,
New South Wales, Australia, 1979), p. 470.


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question, unless, of course, man's speculative rationality is part and parcel of God's self-revelation. It is Hegel's
contention that the unwillingness to askand answerthe question constitutes "arbitrary dogmatism" and not
"humility" in face of the "unsearchableness of God's decrees."
When our religious consciousness, resting on the authority of the Church, teaches us that it is God who by
his almighty will created the world, guides the stars in their courses, and vouchsafes to all his creatures their
existence and their well-being, the question, why, is still left to answer. Now it is the answer to this
question which forms the common task of both empirical and philosophical science.19 When religious
consciousness, failing to acknowledge this task or the right it entails, appeals to the unsearchableness of the
divine decrees, it is taking up the same agnostic ground as is taken by the mere Enlightenment of
understanding. Such an appeal is no better than an arbitrary dogmatism, which contravenes the express
command of Christianity, to know God in spirit and in truth, and is prompted by a humility which is not
Christian, but born of ostentatious fanaticism. [EpW, no. 136, Zusatz]20
Clearly this question will not be answered at all, if all we look at is the created physical world, as Hegel has
demonstrated so brilliantly in section A of chapter V of Phenomenology of Spirit, "Reason Observing." It will be
answered, if at all, only when reason has looked into its own depths, only to find that there are no depths to look
into except in the process of becoming what it is to be spirit, and that the process of becoming spirit is inadequate
until religious consciousness has told it what it is to be spirit in the full sense of the word. Religious consciousness
in turn will prove to be inadequate, until it has been completed in an "absolute knowing," which is the concrete
presence of "absolute Spirit" in human knowingthe unfolding of the "absolute Idea." We come, then, to the second
aspect of creation, the creation of "finite spirit.''
What is thus created, this being-other, of itself splits itself into two sides, physical nature and finite spirit.
What is thus created is therefore an other, and is placed initially outside of God. It belongs to God's
essential nature, however, to reconcile to himself this something which is foreign to him, this special or
particular element which comes into existence as something separated from him, just as it is the nature of
the Idea which has separated itself from itself and fallen away from itself, to bring itself back from this
falling away to its truth. [VPR II, pp. 21314]
The theological teaching that God has created man in his own image
19. Presumably "empirical science" can explain the rationality of the created world's being constituted in
the way it is.
20. One is reminded of the emotional outburst of the preface to the third edition of EpW!


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Hegel consistently took quite seriously (see BS, p. 187). This does not mean that in looking at human reason,
human spirit, we find a kind of faulted reproduction of divine Reason, divine Spirit, but that finite spirit finds in
itself that which enables it to know infinite Spirit, precisely because the human spirit is finitized infinity; it is
embodied spirit which is destined to transcend the sensuous conditions of embodiment in its capacity to
comprehend God's revelation of himself. Creation is not merely an act of divine "power"; it is the act of divine
self-revelation which can be revelation only to spirit. More than that, since it is of the "essence" of spirit to reveal
itself, the self-revelation is not simply an arbitrary decision:
A spirit which is not manifest is not spirit. We say that God created the world, and in so saying we state
this is an action which has happened once and which will not happen again, and we thus ascribe to the
event the character of something which could be or not be. By the same token, we say God could have
revealed himself or not revealed himself. The character we ascribe to God's revelation of himself is that of
something arbitrary, accidental as it were, and not that of something belonging to the concept of God. But
God as Spirit is essentially this very self-revelation; he does not create the world once for all, but he is the
eternal Creator, this eternal self-revelation, this actus. This is his concept, his essential characteristic. [VPR
II, p. 193]
If, however, there be no spirit to whom God reveals himself, there is not self-revelation; that is, it is the essence of
the revelation that it be to a spirit who is capable of comprehending it, which means that the creation of finite spirit
is the creation of one capable of "imaging" the infinite. Human reason, human spirit, is unquestionably finite; but it
does not stand in its finitude over-against the infinite as wholly "other." Precisely because finite spirit is the self-
finitizing of infinite Spirit, is it possible to speak of the former as in this very special way "image" of the latter (see
EpW, no. 441). Hegel goes so far as to say that the "image'' of God is the "divinity" of man. God, who is infinite
Spirit, accords wholly with the "concept" of spirit; man, who is finite spirit, accords only partially with the same
"concept," but man is truly spirit, the finite manifestation of infinite Spirit. "To manifest means to become for
another. As becoming for another it enters into opposition, distinction as such and is thus finitizing of Spirit."21 "In
accord with its concept or truth, however, spirit is infinite or eternal in the concrete or real sense of remaining
absolutely identical with itself in its difference. This is why spirit has to be considered the image of God, the
divinity of man" (EpW, no. 441, Zusatz). Finite spirit, then, is oriented to knowledge of infinite Spirit; it is infinite
Spirit's finitized self-revelation.
Gruyter, 1970), p. 220.


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"Rather than the finitude of spirit being regarded as something absolutely fixed, however, it must be recognized as
a mode of the appearance of spirit which in no way limits its essential infinitude" (ibid.). Knowing God, which is
the same as knowing the very concept of spirit, absolute Spirit and absolute Idea, is then finite spirit's transcending
of its own finitude. "This contesting of what is finite, the overcoming of the limitation, marks the divinity in the
spirit of man and forms a necessary stage of infinite Spirit" (ibid.).
Rational Necessity and Absolute Idea

Now, what has been presented up to this point as an interpretation or elucidation of "theological" teaching, Hegel
contends can be seen as "rational necessity" in the development of the ideaabove all the ''absolute Idea." This is
what "rationality" is all about, as we can see in the very last chapter of Science of Logic, "The Absolute Idea" (pp.
483506). It is essential to Idea that it "other" itself, that is, manifest itself as determinate actuality, only to return to
itself in its very self-othering.
It is the intellectual world, the divine world, the divine life in itself, which develops itself; but these spheres
of its life are the same as those of the world's life. This latter, which is the divine life in the mode of
appearance, or phenomenal existence, in the form of finiteness, is contemplated in that eternal life in its
eternal form and truth, sub specie aeterni. Thus we have finite consciousness, finite world, nature, that
which presents itself in the phenomenal world. It is precisely this which constitutes the antithesis between
the other and the idea. In God there is present also the other of the simple idea which exists still in its
substantiality. In God, however, the idea retains God's determination of eternity, and thus continues to abide
in divine love. This other which remains in the condition of being in and for self, is, however, the truth of
the other as it appears in the form of the finite world, and as finite consciousness. The element of matter,
the necessity of which we have already considered, is therefore in and of itself the same, both as it presents
itself absolutely in the divine Idea and as it appears as the wealth of the finite world; for the finite world has
its true and ideal being only in that world of the Idea. [VPR I, pp. 11314]
Hegel never tires of stressing that there is no independent matter out of which God shapes a world; matter, so to
speak, "inheres" in the very creative Idea out of which a world as finite manifestation of the Infinite is formed. If,
then, it is possible to unfold the logic of the idea even in finite form, it will be found not to differ from the overall
logic of the "absolute Idea""before the creation of the world or of a single finite spirit."
To speak of "creation," then, is to speak of a relationship, intrinsic to


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God himself, to a finite world and to finite spirit. Both the world of nature and finite spirit, however, are time
conditioned in their existence. This means, first of all, that creation is neither an instantaneous event nor an event
which took place in the past (whatever that could mean in the context); it is God's enduring relationship to the
world and to man. Secondly, from the point of view of Hegel's "speculative" logic, divine Reason is manifested not
only in the rational structure of naturemirrored in human reasonbut also in the temporal sequence of events which
constitute history. There is no need here to go into the elaborate presentation of this which constitutes Hegel's
Lectures on the Philosophy of Historylucidly introduced by what has come to be called "Reason in History." Our
concern here is Hegel's interpretation of Christian "theological'' teaching. Suffice it to say that Hegel's
"rationalization" of historical process is his way of interpreting the theological doctrine of divine "providence." To
speak of "reason in history" is to speak of God's continuous guidance of the overall historical process.
The truth, then, that a providencea divine Providencepresides over the events of the worldaccords with the
principle in question; for divine Providence is wisdom, endowed with an infinite power, which realizes its
aims, i.e., the absolute rational purpose of the world. Reason is thought determining itself with perfect
freedom. [VPG, p. 25]
We have already seen that, even in the brief account of Christian religious consciousness in the Phenomenology,
Hegel touches on the doctrine of the "Fall" (or "Original Sin"). Unlike most theologians, however, he does not look
upon the Fall so much from the point of view of the finite spirit falling away from its moorings in the infinite,
losing its essential orientation to infinite Spirit. Rather he is concerned (1) with the place of sin and "evil" in the
overall guidance of man through Providence (a sort of prelude to "redemption"), and (2) with the, so to speak,
necessary evil of man "faulting" nature, losing "in-nocence," and thus regaining the truly "spiritual," which is not
the mere absence of fault but a positive striving for the good. A harmonious integrity which is simply there, simply
natural, is scarcely adequate to the life of even finite spirit, which must achieve integrity through knowledge and
action. Hegel's interpretationdemythologization?of the Bible story is no doubt fanciful; he seems to be merely
using the story to make another point in his "rational" account. It does, nevertheless, highlight the difference
between the merely natural and the spiritual, the dynamic movement of spirit, finding itself through consciously
alienating itself from the natural, and the importance, in spiritual growth, of knowledge as opposed to mere
acceptance of authoritative teaching.


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Childlike innocence no doubt has about it something attractive and touching, but only to the extent that it
reminds us of what the spirit must win for itself. The harmoniousness, which we look upon as natural in
children, is to be the result of the labor and cultivation of the spirit. And so the words of Christ, "Except
you become as little children," etc., are very far from telling us that we must always remain children. [EpW,
no. 24, Zusatz 3]
It is not without significance that, apart from the treatment of the Fall in the Phenomenology, a book wholly
concerned with the movement from "natural consciousness" to the fullness of spirit in "absolute knowing, the most
detailed account of the biblical story is to be found in the three long Zusätze to no. 24 of the Encyclopedia where
his concern is with the "objectivity" of thought in the profoundest sense of thought.
As Hegel sees it, then, the story is concerned with the relation of knowledge to the life of the spirit: "Upon a closer
inspection of the story of the Fall we find, as was already said, that it exemplifies the universal relation of
knowledge to the spiritual life" (ibid.). If spirit is to become what it truly is it must transcend innocence and mere
immediate simplicity: "In its instinctive and natural stage, spiritual life appears initially as innocence and
unaffected trust; but the very essence of spirit implies the transcending of this immediate condition" (ibid.). The
immediacy must be negated, if the truth of spirit is to be realized. "The spiritual life separates itself from natural,
and more especially from animal life, in not merely continuing to be what it is in itself, but in realizing its selfness"
(ibid.). Separation, however, is disharmony and cannot be the final stage; spirit must by its own efforts regain
harmony, and it is thought which achieves this. "The final harmony then is spiritual; that is, the principle of
restoration is found in thought itself. The hand that inflicts the wound is also the hand that heals it'' (ibid.).
Having emphasized so often, as we have seen, that man is created in the "image" of God, Hegel wishes to make it
clear that to be "image of God" is a vocation to be actively realized, not a mere "given" to be acceptedand it is
through "philosophy," in the highest sense, that man realizes his vocation. "Philosophy is knowledge, and it is
through knowledge that man first realizes his original vocation, to be the image of God" (ibid.). Having eaten of
the "tree of the knowledge of good and evil," man had become like God; knowledge divinizes, infinitizes. "When
the record adds that God drove men out of the garden of Eden to prevent their eating of the tree of life, it only
means that on his natural side certainly man is finite and mortal, but in knowledge infinite" (ibid.). It may well be
that the exegesis is forced, that it is "eisegesis" rather than "exegesis," but it does bring out a profound
"theological" truth in philosophical language: Theology cannot be concerned with knowledge of God if it has
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say about the "image" of God. After all, the precise import of the story is up for grabs!
What Hegel is trying to do, and he returns to the task briefly in Lectures on the Philosophy of History, is to draw
philosophical meaning for the development of the human spirit from the biblical story. What Adam"the man"has
learned from God, "Behold Adam has become as one of us, knowing good and evil," ''man" must confirm for
himself: The reconciliation (harmonization out of discord) which is hinted at here, man must appropriate in a
knowledge which will orient him to God, to the good.
Implicitly and explicitly, then, we have the truth, that man through spiritthrough cognition of the universal
and the particularcomprehends God himself. But it is only God that declares thisnot man: the latter remains,
on the contrary, in a state of internal discord. The joy of reconciliation is still distant from humanity; the
absolute and final repose of his whole being is not yet discovered to man. It exists, in the first instance,
only for God. As far as the present is concerned, the feeling of pain at his condition is regarded as final.
[VGP, p. 390]
The process of reconciliation will effectively begin only when God himself enters history in order to make the
"lifting-up" (Erhebung) of man actualin the Incarnation.
As Hegel sees it, the Incarnation can be characterized as the infinitizing of one single human individual, thus
enabling that one individual to realize in himself at once what God truly is and what man truly is. As we saw
before, in treating the doctrine of the Trinity, God as Spirit necessarily knows himself and, in knowing himself,
God as "Father" necessarily begets the "Son," who is God's concrete self-knowing, the whole content of that self-
knowing. God is not revealed, however, in the Son"revelation" can only be to anotheruntil the Son is present to the
human spirit in the human form of the God-man, Jesus Christ. "According to Christianity, God has revealed
himself through Christ, his only begotten Son" (EpW, no. 383, Zusatz). It would be a mistake, however, to think of
God "using" Christ, so to speak, as an instrument of revelation: "In the first instance, representational thinking
takes this proposition to mean that Christ is merely the organ of this revelation, as if that which is revealed in this
manner were something other than the revealer" (ibid.). What God reveals is himself in his Son, who is incarnate in
Christ, and to reveal himself thus as what he is is to make known absolute Spirit.
The true meaning, however, of the above proposition is that God has revealed that it is his nature to have a
Son, i.e., to differentiate, to limit himself, yet to remain with himself in this difference; to contemplate and
reveal himself in the


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Son, and through this unity with the Son, through this being-for-self in the other, to be absolute Spirit.
Consequently, the Son is not the mere organ, but the very content of the revelation. [Ibid.]
What this means, then, is that, just as in the inner trinitarian life of God, the Son is the concrete self-knowing of
God, so in the order of manifestation to another, Christ, who is the Son, is the concrete self-revelation of God.
Now, if we go back to what Hegel has said about "knowing" God, that is, that only if man knows God does he
truly know at all and, consequently, only if man knows God does he truly know himself (and God wants man to
know himself, to be reconciled with himself), we can say that in revealing himself as incarnate God also reveals to
man what man is; the divinity of Christ reveals the divinity of man. Christ is in a very special way the self-
revelation of God, but so too is finite man, finite human spirit.
Furthermore, we see this abstract form in its most concrete manifestation, in its supreme actuality, i.e., as
the revelation of God, and this not in the formal, more superficial sense that God reveals himself in nature,
in history, in the destiny of each individual man, etc. Rather it is to be taken in the absolute sense that there
is brought to human consciousness that unity of the divine and human nature, as it is originally and divinely
in Christ, which is, consequently, the revelation of what the nature of God is and what the nature of man is,
along with the consequences which follow from that. [BS, p. 185]
This is what Hegel means when he speaks, chiefly in Lectures on Aesthetics but also in Lectures on the Philosophy
of History, of the "anthropomorphism" of Christian religion. The religion which expressed itself in the form of
classical Greek art was anthropomorphic only in the sense that it attributed to its gods human characteristics and
portrayed them in human shape, but Christianity is anthropomorphic in the much more profound sense that its God
actually is a concrete human individual: "for according to Christian teaching God is not a merely humanly figured
individual but an actual single individual, thoroughly God and thoroughly an actual man, having taken upon
himself all the conditions of [human] existence" (VA II, p. 23). From this Hegel draws a consequence that many
will find hard to swallow: In creation man becomes the image of what God is, and in the Incarnation God becomes
the image of what man is (to be)"As man was originally the image of God, now God is the image of man, and who
sees the Son sees the Father, who loves the Son loves the Father; God can be recognized in actual human
existence" (ibid., p. 112). The point is that the divine-human unity in Christ is a paradigmatic revelation, to those
who can read it, of the divine-human unity in authentically


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spiritual man (ibid., p. 152). From one point of view it can be said that if God is to manifest himself in sensible
form at all, it must be in human form, since only the human form is also spiritual; from another it can be said that
precisely in manifesting himself in human form God reveals the true spirituality of the human (see VGP, pp.
304305). The Son is the purely spiritual "image" of the Father: the Son incarnate in Christ is the individual sensible
"image" of God; each man is at once finite and, through Christ, infinite "image" of God.
It was then through the Christian religion that the absolute Idea of God, in its true conception, reached
consciousness. Here man, too, finds himself comprehended in his true nature, taken up in the determinate
conception of "the Son." Man, finite when regarded for himself, is yet at the same time the image of God
and a fountain of infinity in himself. He is the purpose of his own beinghas in himself an infinite value, an
eternal destiny. Consequently he has his true home in a super-sensuous worldan infinite interiority, gained
only by a rupture with mere natural existence and volition, and by his labor to break their power within him.
This is religious self-consciousness. [Ibid., p. 403; see VPR II, p. 141]
Jesus Christ, then, this concrete human individual who lives and dies on this earth as the uniquely actual unity of
the divine and human, is the perfect image of God. As Son he is other than the Father yet fully God, and while
manifesting himself in human nature is nevertheless wholly divine. This being at once both other and the same is
what is characteristic of absolute Idea.
This, too, we recognized as present in the divine Idea; for the Son is other than the Father, and this other-
being is difference, for if it were not, it would not be spirit. But the other is God and has the entire fullness
of the divine nature in himself. The characteristic of other-being in no way detracts from the fact that this
Other is the Son of God, and is consequently God; and so, too, it does not detract from the divine character
of the Other as it appears in human nature. [VPR II, p. 272]
In Jesus Christ, then, the divine Idea is fully revealed (see ibid., pp. 31011). His history is "the explication of the
nature of God" (VPR I, p. 216), "the unfolding of the divine nature itself" (VPR II, p. 291). He is uniquely the
perfect revelation of the divine Idea, but he is also the perfect revelation of the universal vocation of man to mirror
that divine Idea, which is what the reconciliation of fragmented man is. In the sense, then, that the unfolding of the
absolute Idea is rationally necessary, Hegel can see the incarnational event as rationally necessary, not, be it noted
agian, with the necessity of some sort of compulsionif that indeed could even have a


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meaningbut with the necessity of God's essential character as "love." What is never quite clear in Hegel's
presentation is whether the interpretation of revelation is guided by the logic of the absolute Idea or whether the
logic of the absolute Idea is somehow derived from the revelation. What is very clear, with regard to the
Incarnation, is that it is not motivated by the need of redemption as though God were somehow determined by
events beyond his control, but that it belongs integrally to the process of unfolding the divine Idea, a process which
embraces Trinity, creation, fall, Incarnation, and redemption (reconciliation).
If Hegel can see in the Incarnation the kind of rational necessity we have described, he can, by the same token, see
the same sort of necessity in the reconciling death of Christ on the cross, precisely because it too is a "moment" in
the unfolding of the "divine Idea." In the Phenomenology Hegel had spoken of the necessary "death of God," of
the man who is God, from two points of view. (1) Christ had to die, that the abstract concept of a God "out-there"
who either stood aloof from the affairs of men, like the God of the ''diests," or was so transcendent as to be
incomprehensible to man, like the God of the "theologians," might disappear. (2) Christ had to die so that the
unique union of the divine and the human in one individual might make room for the universal vocation of man to
live in the Spirit, through the indwelling of the Holy Spirit in the Christian community and, consequently, in its
individual members. This twofold necessity presented in the Phenomenology, however, is not really different from
the necessary unfolding of the divine Idea which is being considered here, and which is rooted in the most
fundamental of all Christian doctrines, that of the Trinity.
There is the sharpest of contrasts with Lutheran faith and with overall Christian faith, when today
professional theologians wish to be still committed to the Christian doctrine of reconciliation and at the
same time deny that the doctrine of the Trinity is the foundation of the doctrine of reconciliation. Without
this objective foundation the doctrine of reconciliation can have only a subjective sense. [BS, p. 259]
Only if man seeks to achieve in himself the image of the triune God can "reconciliation" have any "objective"
meaning whatever.
The Question of Reconciliation

The question, then, is that of reconciliation, and the need for it stems from the fragmentation of man in the "Fall,"
symbolic both of the estrangement of man from the abstract integrity of "nature" and of the not-yet-achieved
reintegration in "spirit." Basically this means that man has the task of finding his true self not in his own merely
"immediate" sub-


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jectivity but by achieving objectivity in uniting himself with the only subjectivity which is at the same time totally
objectivethe divine subjectivity. Through Christ God who is love shows the way, takes the initiative.
If then in the Christian religion God is also known as Love, because in his Son, who is one with him, he has
revealed himself to men as a man among men, and thereby redeemed them, this is only another way of
saying that the antithesis of subjective and objective is implicitly overcome, and that it is our affair to
participate in this redemption by laying aside our immediate subjectivity (putting off the old Adam), and
learning to know God as our true and essential self. [EpW, no. 194, Zusatz]22
In what follows, it may seem strange to rely so heavily on Hegel's Lectures on Aesthetics, but if we remember that
to reconcile is to harmonize the discordant, it may not seem so strange. There is something peculiarly aesthetic in
the concept of reconciliation-redemption as Hegel develops it. There is something strikingly discordant about
clinging to one's mere finitude to the extent of refusing to accord with the infinite which alone can give meaning
to the finite. In the Incarnation God took upon himself finitude, thus showing man that the unity of infinite and
finite is not an ideal of harmony impossible to achieve; finite man can rise to the infinite who is God.
For as God initially separates finite actuality from himself, so too finite man, who by himself begins outside
the divine kingdom, is given the task of elevating himself to God, of sloughing off the finite, eliminating his
nothingness and as a result of putting to death his immediate actuality becoming what God in his appearing
as man has made objective as true actuality. [VA II, p. 134]
The process, which Hegel calls "the process of negativity," corresponds with the life, suffering, and death of God
in order to make possible man's reconciliation with God. Now man must go through the same process "in order to
make the reconciliation actual in himself" (ibid., pp. 14647). By becoming an individual man God shows man what
human dignity really is. "This means that the human spirit in itself, according to its essential concept, is true spirit,
and, therefore, that each individual subject as man has the infinite vocation and dignity of being a purpose of God,
united with God'' (ibid., p. 148). Man must strive to fulfill this vocation, and when he has done so, "then within
himself he is free infinite spirit" (ibid.). Thus is
22. The risk of Feuerbachian interpretation of this passage taken only by itself should be obvious.


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described the movement from mere individuality (the one God-man) to universality (the divinizing of the
community through the indwelling of the Spirit)(ibid., pp. 14849).
To speak of man's "infinite vocation" is to speak of his orientation to being reconciled with himself by being
reconciled with God. What this ultimately means is the process of moving from the merely natural to the truly
spiritual, the voyage described at length in Phenomenology of Spirit.
Now, because in the salvation history of Christ the negativity of immediate individuality stood out as the
essential moment of spirit, then only by means of the conversion of the natural and of the finite personality
will the individual subject be able to elevate itself to freedom and harmony in God. [Ibid., p. 160]
Reconciliation, however, does not mean that man ceases to be man, a contingent being, immersed in his own
finitude. Just as God does not cease to be infinite in taking on finitude, so man does not cease to be finite in rising
to infinity (see VA III, p. 13).
The Church
It is here that the Church comes in: The merely individual spirit, without ceasing to be individual, is universalized
in the Spirit of the community. The link, then, which binds individual spirit to universal Spirit is that function of
the spiritual community wherein infinite Spirit "returns" to itself; that is, "worship": ''Worship, thus, is the relation
of the finite spirit to the absolute Spirit" (VPR II, p. 218). Worship, then, is the acme of religious consciousness in
man. That this, too, must be superseded by that "presence" of the divine which Hegel calls "absolute knowing" we
have already seen. We have also seen, however, that the Aufhebung of religious consciousness in philosophical
knowing does not mean "dispensing with" religion; if religious consciousness is not "retained" it is not aufgehoben;
it is the continuing condition for the very possibility of authentic knowing. Thus, the Christian theological teaching
of the "indwelling" of the Holy Spirit is continuous with Hegel's philosophical conviction that only the presence of
the divine Spirit in man makes knowing Godand, consequently, knowing at allpossible.
We must remember Hegel's constant contention that Christian theology"when indeed it is theology"tells us the
truth about God, about God's relation to man and man's relation to God. That this truth is more firmly, more fully,
more humanly comprehended in the light of the movement of the "abstract Idea" does not detract from the validity
of that contention. If we bear this in mind we can, perhaps, begin to understand


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what Hegel means by saying that only with Pentecost, with the coming of the Holy Spirit, do the Apostlesthe
"community"comprehend the truth about Jesus Christ, who is the concrete revelation of the truth about God. As a
condition for the definitive spiritualization, not of the one man Jesus Christ, but of "man"; the one man who could
be seen, heard, touched, believed, had to die in order that his "spirit" might live on in those whose "vocation" it is
to rise to the infinite.
Not until the feast of Pentecost were the Apostles filled with the Holy Spirit. For the Apostles, Christ as
living, was not that which he was for them subsequently as the Spirit of the Church, in which he became to
them for the first time an object for their truly spiritual consciousness. By the same token, we do not adopt
the right point of view in thinking of Christ only as a past historical personality. . . . If Christ is to be
looked upon only as an excellent, even impeccable individual, and nothing more, the conception of the
speculative Idea, of absolute Truth is denied. [VPG, pp. 39394; see VGP II, pp. 52627]
That final sentence strikes the keynote of the whole story, as Hegel sees it: The divine Spirit who comes to dwell in
the Churchtaken, so to speak, as representative of the whole human familyis the "absolute Idea," the "absolute
Truth," which makes "speculative knowing" a possibility. The truth is expressed religiously, theologically; but it is
also truth for philosophical thinkingif it is to be comprehended, philosophy must come to the aid of religion. "The
real question is as to what the content essentially is, is in-and-for-itself. The true Christian content of faith is to be
justified by philosophy, not by history" (VPR II, p. 318). It should be emphasized here that the Spirit of which
Hegel speaks is the Spirit as ''Love," without which knowledge is not knowledge, because without love spirit is not
spirit.
Thus this love is the Spirit as such, the Holy Spirit. It is in them, and they are and constitute the universal
Christian Church, the communion of saints. Spirit is infinite return into self, infinite subjectivity, not as the
represented but as the actual, present Divinity, and thus it is not the substantial reality of the Father, not the
true presence in the objective form of the Son, but the presence which is subject and actual, which,
precisely as thus subjectively present is the outpouring culminating in the objective contemplation of love,
with its infinite pain, which in that mediation is return. This is the Spirit of God, or God as present, actual
Spirit, God dwelling in his Church. [Ibid., p. 305]
The divine Spirit appearing in Christ is present to the Apostles; the Spirit of God as "love" is present in the
Apostles, and he it is who guides them into all truth. God in sensible form must disappear in order that God as pure
Spirit may be present in the community. What Christ has taught them the


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Apostles comprehend only through this presence of the Spiritand this, Hegel is convinced, is intelligible through
the intelligibility of "absolute Idea."
From this point of view the character of the text is to be looked at more closely, it contains the manner in
which Christianity first appears, this it describes. Now this first appearance cannot yet contain very
explicitly what lies in the principle of Christianity, only the merest hint thereof. This too is explicitly stated
in the text, Christ says: "When I am no longer with you I shall send the Comforter to you; he, the Spirit will
guide you into all truth"companionship with Christ will not, nor will his words. Only after him and after his
teaching contained in the text, will the Spirit come into the Apostles, only then will they be full of the
Spirit. . . . If Christ is to be God for man, God in men's hearts, then he cannot have sensible, immediate
presence. [VGP II, pp. 504505]
This situation we can call the domination of the Spirit, but not in the sense that the divine Spirit, so to speak rules
over, dominates, the human spirit. Because the human is truly spirit, the presence of the divine Spirit must be much
more intimate, "such that the Spirit in the subjective spirit is reconciled with itself" (ibid., p. 533). The "kingdom of
God" is the Spirit of reconciliation which unites God and man. The theme is one which is familiar to Hegel from
his reading of Jakob Böhme: the kingdom of the Father, the kingdom of the Son, the kingdom of the Holy Spirit.
With Hegel, however, the theme takes on a special twist, what we might call a ''philosophical" twist: The kingdom
of the Spirit is that situation in which the human spirit is liberated to authentic rationality, made capable of knowing
"absolute Truth."
To this reconciliation belongs that not only subjective consciousness, feeling, heart, but also the kingdom of
this world, its laws and institutions, human life, etc., to the extent that all of this stands in the Spirit,
become rational. We have seen in Plato's Republic the idea that philosophers should rule. It is now time to
say that the spiritual should rule. [Ibid.]23
We have finally come around full circle: The philosophy of which Hegel
23. It is interesting to note that in this passage Hegel continues with a play on words which might seem to
be not to the point. After saying that "the spiritual" (das Geistige) should rule, he remarks that the meaning
has changed, and that "spiritual" (Geistige) has been interpreted as "clerical" (das Geistliche), such that
"clerics" (die Geistlichen) are seen as rulers. The point is actually a good one: to identify the principle, "the
spiritual," with certain types of individuals is to falsify the principle.


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speaks has turned out to be startlinglyfor some, perhaps, frighteninglytheological, and yet, for all that it is not less
but all the more philosophical. If it is possible to identify God with infinite "Reason," absolute "Spirit," then it must
be said that God, in what he is and what he does, is supremely rational, that he is infinite "rationality." To know
God, then, is man's rational goal, and to be thoroughly rational is to know God. But this can make sense only if
human reason is somehow "divine," continuous with "infinite'' Reason, since "reason" is one, not many.


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Epilogue
When all that has been said in these pages has been said, might it still be argued, as it has been, that Hegel's
philosophy cannot shake off its this-worldly, non-transcendent character? Could it be that exculpating Hegel of the
charge of "pantheism" means no more than that Hegel's "Absolute"be it "absolute knowing," "absolute Spirit," or
"absolute Idea''is but a "logical" absolute which cannot be "ontologically" identified with religion's God? If it can
consistently be so argued, then Chapter 6 above is rendered unnecessary because not to the point. By the same
token, however, Chapter 7 too is rendered otiose, because, on this showing, the "theo-logy" we seem to have
discovered in Hegel's thinking refers to human "speculative philosophy" and to that alone, and this "speculative
philosophy" is the only "absolute" there is for Hegel. The "de-mythologization" of Christian theology we have been
following reveals no more than that Hegel found in the language of Christian theology a convenient matrix for the
expression of a logic which is only logic.
But, the thrust of the argumentation goes deeper than that. Its ultimate claim is that this whole book has been a
waste of timefor both author and reader. What Hegel has done, and it needed to be done, is to break definitively
with both the naively ontological significance of "absolute Spirit" and the abstractly noetic view of "absolute
knowing." It is true (Chapter 1) that Hegel does identify the content of religion and the content of philosophy, but
this shows, not that the God of philosophy is identical with the God of Christian religion, but rather that the God of
Hegel's "religion" is no more than the "logical Idea" which "absolute Spirit" (Reason) comprehends, and "absolute"
expresses logical necessity, and no more than that. The "Logos" with whom Hegel identifies God is not the
Johannine Logos, it is only Hegelian Reason.
It would seem, then, that Chapter 2 also goes down the drain. "The Con-


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cept" of which Hegel speaks is "absolute" with an absoluteness other than that of God. It is "concrete," yes, and its
activity is self-manifestation, but that says no more than the "concrescence" which characterizes "speculative
thinking'' and the systematic exposition of its eternal logical structure.
One wonders, too, whether Chapter 3 can hold up under the attack. There is no question that Christian religion
affirms that God is Spirit; nor is there any question that Hegel speaks of "absolute Spirit" as God. But, are we
justified in equating a spirit which is clearly "this-worldly" with the God who, religion says, is transcendent? Hegel
can be interpreted not as presenting the rational conceptual exposition of the God in whom faith believes but as
"deifying" reason itself.
With this Chapters 4 and 5 come tumbling down also. If "the Infinite is but a new way of defining the Absolute,"
then at Hegel's hands the Infinite has suffered the same fate as the Absolute. The logical infinity of speculative
philosophy, which is always on the march, always in process, has nothing in common with the infinite transcendent
God who is at once the object of Christian faith and the goal of Christian striving. By the same token "proofs" of
God's reality are no more than proofs of reason's infinity as it comes to a progressive awareness that it is concretely
all reality.
At this point one does have to wonder, of course, just what the terminology of such argumentation means. What is
an "absolute" which is only logical and not ontological? Is it, perhaps, "the dark night in which all the cows are
black"? Or, is it the clear light of a reason which has been infinitized by fiat? It may be that the Hegel of the
Theologische Jugendschriften (which he wisely did not publish) was in search of a religious substitute for Christian
religion and an absolute substitute for Christianity's God, but the Hegel of the preface to the 1830 Encyclopedia
and of the Berliner Schriften would seem to indicate that he had abandoned that early quest. If the argumentation in
question is to hold water, we must at the very least conclude that Hegel showed remarkably poor taste in
employing a Christian theological language in elaborating a conceptual system which does not need that language.
Perhaps the best way to approach this whole issue is to pass in review, very briefly, just what Hegel does say about
the identification of "absolute Spirit" and God, rather than to focus on what he must have meant. There can be no
question that Hegel does say over and over again, even in his most "mature" writings, "Absolute Spirit is God,"
"God is absolute Spirit." The identification, then, is no problem; but there is a problem as to whether he is saying,
"absolute Spirit is the same as God," or "God is no more than absolute Spirit." The question, of course, is
answerable, only if we are capable of comprehending the Absolute (Infinite) as all activitywith no passivitynot
merely an infinite "substance" which acts, but an infinite


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"subject" which is act (Hegel even dares to use the Scholastic expression actus purus). To this we might add that,
although Hegel never claims that faith is purely rational activity, he does claim explicitly that the content of faith is
an eminently rational content. It is true, of course, that this is but another way of saying that the content of both
faith and reason is the logos of being in its infinity, but this is precisely the point: is the logos of being to be
construed as merely "logical," or is the logos concretely real? Nor is there any need to claim here that this logos
does, in fact, correspond to the Christian Godonly that Hegel intends it to correspond. It might, of course, be
argued that the "Absolute'' of which Hegel speaks in the seventh chapter of the Phenomenology as the object of
religious consciousness is not truly religion's God, or that "the presentation of God" of which he speaks in the
introduction to the Science of Logic is not truly religion's God either, but it is not easy to make sense of that claim.
It would seem to be equally frivolous to claim that when he says "For philosophy, too, has no other object but God
and is, thus, rational theology" (VA I, p. 139), he intends a God who is not Godeven if one thinks that Hegel's God
does not measure up.
The crux of the difficulty experienced by those who claim that Hegel's "Absolute" is a purely logical, not an
ontological Absolute, it seems to me, is that despite the fact that, although they agree in distinguishing the logic of
speculative thinking (Hegel's) from the logic of scientific thinking, they surreptitiously impose on his thinking
conclusions which would be true only if his logic were scientific and not "speculative." Thus, to say that a logical
absolute is clearly not an ontological absolute is, for a logic of scientific thinking (Verstand), unquestionably true:
the logic of scientific thinking is unabashedly abstract. By the same token, however, to claim that Hegel's absolute
is logical and not ontological is to claim that it is abstract, not concrete, the opposite of what Hegel claims. One
wonders indeed how Hegelor anyonecould claim that a merely logical absolute could be "personal," as he does in
his critique of Spinoza.
Hegel is, then, making a claim which to some may be too enormous to acceptflying, as it does, in the teeth of
Kantthe claim that the mind is necessitated (logically) to affirm what speculative thinking sees to be trueeven if
what it sees to be true is the reality of the God of faithunder pain of being irrational if it does not. Nor does
"rational" refer only to the way mind (all minds) necessarily thinks; it also takes in the way reality necessarily is;
reality reveals to and in rational thinking what reality's own rationality is. This, however, cannot be, if the only
thinking there is is finite human thinking (even the totality of it), or if the only reality there is is finite reality (even
the sum-total of it). What this means is, at the very least, that the thought which rational thinking investigates
consists of a unified totality which is both antecedent to (logically) and the source of (ontologically)


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finite reality and finite thinking. The structures of thought are the structures of reality, because subjective rational
thinking and objective rational reality are products of the thought which transcends and embraces both. This, in
turn, means that the transcendent Concept (the producing) and the transcendent Idea (the produced) are identical
and constitute both the reality of the real and the truth of thoughtnohsiznohsez. Concepts (plural), then, are
"moments" of the Concept, each deriving its determinateness from identification with the whole, "absolute Spirit,"
the all-unifying concrete concept. This is the Spirit, wherein the initial total abstractness of mere "being" is
progressively concretized. In this context human subjectivity is the finite expression of infinite Subject, the
Absolute, the perfect subject-object. The ''ideal" content of the Idea, then, is the same as that of the fully
determined Concept, the former as total objectivity, the latter as total subjectivity; and they are identified. Hegel
comes to the conclusion that the truth of reality is not "represented by" ideas (plural) but rather "contained in"
ideas, to the extent that they are all embraced in the absolute unity of "absolute Idea," which is at the same time
"absolute Reason," "absolute Thought," "absolute Subject," "absolute Spirit"again, nohsiznohsewz.
It seems abundantly clear, then, that, for Hegel, to conceive of God other than as Spirit is simply not to conceive of
God. If to this we add that to conceive of "spirit" without conceiving of it as infinite (concrete) is not to
comprehend spirit, not to know what spirit is (which is true also of "being," "reason," "thought"), it will take
considerable mental prestidigitation to see in this a nonidentification of "infinite Spirit" and God. It may be that
Hegel is speaking of the "infinity" of the human spiritwhich he also clearly acknowledges to be finitebut it would
seem that he could not do that at all, with no reference to the Spirit who is unqualifiedly infinite, which is, patently,
not to say that God is the only referent of the term "infinite," but that he is the paradigm referent. The qualifiedly
infinite is, after all, intelligible precisely as infinite. With his own peculiar employment of the copula "is," with
which we are all familiar, Hegel does not hesitate to say, "Thus finite spirit is itself posited as a moment of God. . .
. Man is God only to the extent that he transcends the naturality and finitude of his spirit and elevates himself to
God" (VPG, p. 392).
As Hegel sees it, then, spirit is thinkable only because it is unthinkable that absolute Spirit should not be. To say
that the human spirit thinks absolute Spirit, however, is not to say that the human mind forms to itself a conception
of absolute Spirit; that is not at all the way absolute Spirit is objective. "The divine is not to be conceived of as
merely universal thought, or as something inward and only potentially real. The objectifying of the divine is not to
be conceived of simply as representing the manifold forms of the spiritual in general which the absolute Spirit has
in itself and which has to advance until it reaches the form of the Is, which is immediacy; that


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development would not be contained in that kind of objectivity" (VPR II, pp. 27576). There is no question that, for
Hegel," absolute Spirit" is concrete, not abstractly universal, real and not merely ideal, the unique concretely
infinite, Absolute. This is the "concrete" absolute Spirit which, according to the Phenomenology of Spirit, human
spirit must know if it is to know itself as spirit, if its "knowing" is to be ''absolute," which is, precisely, knowing
and not merely being-conscious-of "absolute Spirit."
Perhaps the conclusion to all this is that the interpretation presented in these pages represents the only way I can
make sense of what Hegel saysassuming that it is risky not to make sense of what he says. Does this put me back
in the embarrassing position of saying that what Hegel says is what I say he says? Yes. But it also puts everyone in
the position of judging which interpretation makes sensein itself and as an interpretation of Hegel. I leave it to the
reader to decide which interpretation makes more senseof Hegel and of sense itself.


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Index of Names
A
Anaxagoras, 204
Anselm, 26, 33, 37, 58, 99f., 192, 194, 212, 225, 228, 232, 238-42
Aquinas, 33, 37, 79, 246, 250, 271, 280
Aristotle, 23, 26, 46f., 66, 77, 79, 98, 105ff., 115, 118, 141, 156, 181, 197, 204, 238, 296, 299
Augustine, 33
B
Barrett, William, 19
Barth, Karl, 2, 245, 271
Berkeley, 69, 79, 205, 237
Böhme, Jakob, 49, 323
D
Descartes, 16, 49, 78, 87, 99f., 115, 205, 236, 244
E
Engels, 5, 63
F
Fackenheim, Emil, 6, 36, 39, 52, 55, 285
Feuerbach, 2, 5f., 45, 52f., 118, 146, 150, 167, 284, 302
Fichte, 2, 16f., 23ff., 30, 40f., 43, 45, 49, 52, 55, 58, 73, 79, 102, 115, 169, 187, 206, 217ff., 223, 232, 237, 288, 299
Findlay, J.N., 2, 168, 287, 302
G
Gomez-Caffarena, José, 246f.
Grégoire, Auguste, 247
Grégoire, Franz, 247
H
Harris, Henry, 39
Hartmann, Nicolai, 113
Heidegger, Martin, 225
Heraclitus, 71, 204
Herder, 24
Hume, 69, 78f., 115, 195, 205, 237
Husserl, 79
J
Jacobi, 2, 16f., 23, 30, 43, 49, 58, 169, 218, 261, 284, 288, 299
James, William, 11
K
Kant, 2, 3, 16f., 23ff., 28, 30, 33, 40f., 43, 45, 48f., 52, 55, 58, 64f., 68f., 78f., 96, 105ff., 115, 169, 171f., 194f.,
205-214, 217f., 223f., 227ff., 231f., 237f., 241, 246f., 261, 276, 278, 281, 284f., 288, 299, 327
Kaufmann, Walter, 2, 168, 302
Kierkegaard, 2, 45, 48, 169, 219, 245, 284
Kilmer, Joyce, 151
Kojève, Alexandre, 2, 168, 302
Küng, Hans, 2, 247, 269
L
Leibniz, 101f., 115, 205, 237
Lessing, 45
Locke, 66, 69, 195, 205, 237
Loewenberg, Jacob, 21
Löwith, Karl, 85, 268
M
Malebranche, 205, 237
Maréchal, Joseph, 2, 246f.
Marx, 2, 5f., 11, 45, 52, 118, 146, 150, 270, 284, 302
Metzke, Erwin, 12
Müller, Gustav, 85, 230, 268
N
Nietzsche, 2, 45
P
Parmenides, 71, 181
Peirce, Charles S., 244, 264
Petry, M. J., 141


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Plato, 18, 23, 26, 47, 79, 104, 115, 159, 170, 191, 197, 204, 217, 299
Plotinus, 26, 181, 299
Pythagoras, 292
R
Rahner, Karl, 263
Reinhold, 69
Ricoeur, Paul, 2, 4, 6
Rondet, Henri, 247
Rosenkranz, Karl, 68
S
Sartre, Jean-Paul, 2, 110
Schacht, Richard, 40, 168
Schelling, 23, 49, 73, 79, 115, 187, 206, 219, 237, 286
Schleiermacher, 16, 23, 30, 43, 49, 58, 218, 289
Schopenhauer, 45
Socrates, 104, 170, 204, 292
Spinoza, 23, 26, 45, 49, 79, 87, 99f., 115, 155, 181, 205, 237, 257, 327
T
Theunissen, Michael, 75, 138
V
Valensin, Auguste, 247
Voegelin, Eric, 45
W
Whitehead, 16
Williamson, Raymond, 144f.
Y
Yerkes, James, 47, 225, 297


Page 335
Analytic Index
A
Absolute (see also Infinite), 40, 47, 92, 101, 103, 113, 185, 189, 268
the Absolute, 22ff., 41, 50, 53f., 70, 73f., 102, 114, 136, 145, 172, 180, 183, 185, 189, 208, 219, 224, 238, 240,
247, 259, 283, 286
Abstract, 35, 42, 64, 68, 70, 86, 88f., 92f., 98-101, 105f., 116, 139, 164, 179, 182, 186, 192f., 230, 234, 254, 262f.,
272
abstraction, 41, 52f., 70, 72, 81, 84f., 103, 159, 172, 174f., 193, 196, 228, 234, 296, 306, 319, 327
Activity, 26, 42, 109, 122, 124, 133, 141-45, 150f., 156, 158f., 171, 207, 248f., 256f., 260, 266-69, 277, 300, 306,
309f
Actual, 3, 63, 83f., 118, 147, 155, 322
actuality, 17, 63, 114, 143, 150, 160, 266, 292, 306, 313, 320
actuality as "effectiveness", 62, 64
actualization, 82
Affirmation, 32, 89
Alienation, 13
Anthropomorphism, 317
Appearance, 70, 313
Appropriate, 37, 72, 128f., 195, 219, 240, 261, 271, 287, 294
Art, 131, 135, 153, 196f., 199f., 221
Atheism, 5, 6, 257, 285
atheist, 47, 155
deism, 152, 304
pantheism, ch. 6 (243-82 passim)
theism, 5, 152
Aufheben (supersede, transcend), 11, 30, 36, 83, 93, 101, 105f., 111f., 134, 143f., 147, 321
Aufhebung (supersession): 36, 57, 103, 321
B
Being, 46, 49f., 53, 76, 80, 82, 86f., 90, 98-101, 110, 122ff., 130, 139ff., 165, 168, 170, 176, 180f., 194, 206, 214f.,
228, 231, 238, 240f., 249f., 261, 277, 280, 296, 300
Belief. (See Faith)
C
Category, 50, 61, 68, 159, 163, 179, 213, 261, 286, 289
Cause, 38, 66, 78, 84, 106, 110, 237, 269
causality, 77, 79, 104f.
Certainty, 23, 73, 78, 123
certitude, 99
Christianity, 8, 34, 164
Christianity as "absolute religion", 34, 164, 188, 191
Church, 10, 137, 295, 298, 303, 311, 321-24
Community, 187, 196, 303, 321f.
Comprehend (begreifen), 3f., 31, 51, 58, 140, 152f., 161, 191, 193, 200f., 238, 240, 253, 293, 295, 307
comprehension, 3, 37, 136, 211, 255, 287
Concept (Begriff), 19, 34ff., 50, 52, ch. 2 (57-127, passim), 135, 137, 143, 159, 174, 191, 194, 199, 211, 237, 241,
243, 254, 266f., 300, 304, 306, 309, 328
Concrete, 11, 28, 35, 39f., 52, 64, 72f., 81, 86, 89f., 92f., 95, 97f., 104, 111, 114, 116, 118, 139, 145, 148f., 158f.,
164, 168, 182, 186, 192f., 195f., 201, 208, 210, 230, 235f., 240, 243, 254ff., 263, 286, 296, 299, 304ff., 317, 326,
329
Consciousness, 41, 51, 61, 65, 70, 99, 102, 132, 184ff., 216, 220, 239
religious consciousness, 6, 21-24, 26f., 29, 37, 85, 145, 155ff., 160, 166, 198,


Page 336
212, 215, 219, 233, 243, 267, 284f., 288, 297f., 311
self-consciousness, 27, 133, 154-58, 181, 186, 188, 190, 208, 210, 216
Contingent, 63, 65, 70f., 75, 93, 97, 107, 112, 136, 248f., 261, 270, 276, 279, 321
contingency: 232, 250
Continuity, 7, 30, 73, 156f., 263-67, 272, 277, 293, 305
Contradiction, 6f., 69f., 86, 93, 101f., 105, 121, 143, 175, 179, 190, 213f., 234, 252, 255f., 266, 273, 276, 291, 297,
303f.
contradictory: 7, 116, 135, 156
Creation, 40, 54, 82, 149, 156, 188, 220, 248, 266, 269f., 275, 277, 279, 293, 300f., 308ff., 313
Culture (Bildung), 13, 48, 52, 55, 294f.
D
Definition, 18, 52, 59f., 81, 93, 114, 120, 136, 151, 156, 170, 304
Determination, 83f., 88, 90, 94f., 98, 103, 122f., 133, 143, 168, 170, 172, 201, 214, 227, 230f.
determinancy, 83, 172
determinate, 50, 163, 172, 235
determinateness, 51, 82, 86f.
Dialectic, 10, 14, 43, 69ff., 81f., 87, 93, 103, 113, 116f., 121, 124f., 135, 160, 198, 225
Divine, 14, 16, 21, 26, 43f., 46, 53, 85, 134, 136, 139, 151, 182, 230, 249, 274, 293, 299, 313
E
Emotion, 8, 31, 54, 165, 218, 290
Enlightenment (the), 5, 12f., 16, 26, 30, 33, 37, 55, 205, 234, 285, 299, 304
Essence, 28, 53, 68, 70, 82, 87, 90, 94, 125, 134, 142, 145, 154, 173, 233, 312
Evil, 63, 199, 314
Experience, 18, 21, 29, 65f., 70, 75, 78, 130ff., 150, 162, 171, 174, 204f., 209, 228-32, 288
F
Faith, 17, 29f., 46, 53, 164, 166, 169, 200f., 204, 206, 208, 212, 259f., 262f., 271, 273, 282, 284f., 287-91, 294f.,
305, 307
Fall, 298, 301
fault, 301, 314
sin, 314
Finite, 24, 29, 35, 47, 58, 66, 68, 83, 85, 93, 95, 100, 102, 104, 110, 112, 116f., 132-37, 140, 142, 144, 146f., 242,
244, 308, 312
finitude, 27, 43, 89, 119
Form (Gestalt, Gestaltung), 144, 219f.
Freedom, 39, 46, 53, 76, 93, 141ff., 189, 249, 267, 275f., 291, 294, 314, 321
G
Goal (aim), 14, 44, 75, 174, 259, 288, 324
Grace, 16, 294
Grammar, 18f.
H
Harmony, 315, 320f.
History, 17, 30, 44, 74, 161, 299, 301, 314
Humility, 43, 164f., 311
I
Idea, 61, 64, 73f., 86, 103, 106, 112f., 116-22, 236-42
absolute Idea, 4, 30, 50, 64, 81, 91, 99, 122-27, 146, 192, 196, 208, 259, 310, 313-19
the Idea, 73
ideal, 64, 82, 101, 103, 110, 112f., 173, 180f., 190, 210
idealism, 79, 129, 176, 207
ideality, 173, 180, 182
Image of God, 40, 151, 312, 315, 317f.
Immanent, 6, 87, 258, 300
Immediate, 22, 32, 100ff., 123ff., 136, 154, 170, 176, 289f., 315
immediacy, 71, 118
Immortal, 77
immortality, 191
Incarnation, 140, 146, 191, 220, 294, 299, 316, 319
Indeterminate, 33, 40, 89, 98, 109, 163, 292
indeterminacy, 3, 99
indeterminateness, 160, 163
Individual, 21, 38, 48, 67, 83, 88, 109, 118, 146, 167, 173, 187, 191, 210, 240, 274, 317
Infer, 268f.
inference, 60, 184, 193, 261f.
Infinite, 24, 38, 47, 50, 100, 112f., 116f., 132-37, 144, 146f., ch. 4 (162-202, passim), 228, 243f., 253, 308
the Infinite, 68, 313
infinity (actual), 7, 51, 140, ch. 4 (162-202, passim), 214, 286
infinity (mathematical), 3, 163f., 169f., 173, 190
infinite Being, 4, 33, 260
infinite reason, spirit. thought. (See Absolute)
Innocence, 301, 315
Integration, 51, 264
disintegration, 16f., 51, 264, 283
fragmentation, 51, 55, 319
re-integration, 16f., 51, 283, 295, 298, 319
Integrity, 286, 314, 319
Intelligible, 19, 61, 75, 114, 122, 136, 143


Page 337
149, 158, 183f., 186, 235, 263, 283
intelligibility, 3f., 59, 90, 121, 129, 147, 162, 171
Intuition, 31, 43, 69, 165f., 170, 262
J
Jesus Christ, 271f., 292, 299, 303, 316, 318, 322
Judgment, 84, 86-91, 105, 124
K
Knowing, 100, 119, 121
knowledge, 29f., 40, 46, 103, 115, 235, 251, 300
L
Language, 2, 17f., 45, 60f., 80f., 164, 166, 175, 178, 193, 201, 254, 264f., 283, 300, 325f.
Law, 16, 51, 59, 65, 68, 70, 74, 82, 96, 184, 261
Life, 39f., 51, 106, 117ff., 121, 313
Logic, 2ff., 22, 37, 49, 61, 68, 70, 76, 78f., 81f., 85, 87f., 95, 120, 126, 131, 138, 168, 176, 206, 214f., 223-26, 229,
244, 247, 251, 256, 259, 269, 273f., 280ff., 307, 313, 325
Love, 270, 274, 277, 300, 306f., 308-13, 319f., 322
M
Meaning, 36, 54, 58f., 61, 80f., 83, 87ff., 101, 116, 162, 169ff., 187, 232, 257, 275, 282, 289, 297f.
Mediate, 32, 98, 123, 133, 170, 177, 214, 262, 290
mediation, 62, 70f., 85, 89, 95f., 118, 134, 176, 198f., 234, 322
Metaphysics, 11, 41, 46, 68, 248, 275, 279, 285, 296
Mind, 171, 213ff., 243, 283
Moment, 73f., 80f., 83-88, 91, 95, 97, 101f., 107-10, 113, 116, 118, 124ff., 132f., 141, 144f., 147ff., 151, 156, 220,
242, 257, 302, 304, 329
Moral, 44, 140, 205, 217f., 291
moral consciousness, 217f.
morality, 28, 217
moral law, 26f., 187
moral order, 140, 187
Mystery, 8, 203, 205, 265, 278f., 298f., 302f.
mysterious, 2, 5
mysticism, 49
mystical, 287
N
Nature, 23, 29, 38, 40, 53, 59, 74, 82, 124, 126, 128, 130f., 135, 140f., 150f., 153, 178f., 201f., 221, 233, 269, 272,
301
human nature, 14f.
Necessity, 6, 44f., 60, 63, 65ff., 70, 76, 78, 83, 91, 93f., 120, 136, 138, 151, 190, 192, 199f., 205f., 215, 243, 249,
253, 268, 270, 277, 297, 302f., 309f., 313-19, 325
necessary, 64, 74, 84, 87, 90, 94, 136, 162, 200, 227, 232, 239, 248, 257
Negation, 27, 95, 105, 107, 123, 136, 148, 158-61, 171, 179, 214, 223, 234
negate, 71, 99, 225
negativity, 171, 320
Notion (Vorstellung), 41, 136, 296
O
Object, 6, 21f., 28f., 41f., 48, 50ff., 54, 57-60, 65ff., 69, 71, 75, 85, 87f., 96f., 107, 110ff., 118, 121, 132, 142f.,
147, 162, 167, 170, 196, 208, 219, 230, 238, 259, 285, 287
objective, 24, 77, 103, 106, 122, 177, 242, 253
objectivity, 82, 92, 95f., 99, 101, 119, 121, 140, 205, 235, 315, 320
Opinion, 31, 34, 46, 73
Opposition, 52
Organic, 118
organism, 67
P
Person, 84, 148, 155, 167, 279, 293, 299f., 306, 308
personal, 257, 293
personality, 155, 158f., 293, 308, 321
Philosophy, 11, 17, 28, 30, 41, 48, 53, 59, 72, 187, 199, 201f., 215f., 235, 252, 262, 315
Pietism, 30, 45f., 285, 290
Posit, 83f., 87f., 90, 105f., 108f., 112, 119, 121, 123ff., 141, 143, 149, 181, 188, 190, 193, 214
Presupposition, 3, 75, 77, 79, 119, 122, 195, 202, 295
Principle, 45f., 72f., 81, 133, 140, 148, 228f., 259, 323
Process, 117-22, 144, 151, 160, 226, 259, 267, 286, 297, 302, 320
Proof, 38, 60, 85, 107, 120, 136, 192, 195f., ch. 5 (203-42, passim)
Proposition, 76, 87, 89, 95, 105, 109, 162, 192, 194, 228
Providence, 54, 63, 111, 270, 314
Psychological, 67, 87ff., 94
Purpose, 99, 101, 103-9, 270, 314
R
Rational, 24, 26, 30f., 38, 48, 58, 62f., 77, 79, 81, 92, 111, 134, 164, 171, 173


Page 338
178, 184, 204, 209, 226, 235, 243, 252, 272, 284, 301
objectively rational, 31f., 42
rationalism, 5, 8, 45f., 78, 205, 211, 236, 265, 284, 290
rationality, 16, 49, 65, 91, 128, 140, 187, 203, 313, 323, 327
Real, 63, 81, 96, 180, 186, 210, 227
realism, 129
reality, 3f., 29, 58, 64ff., 77, 79, 81f., 85, 88f., 91, 94f., 99f., 103f., 106, 108, 110f., 120f., 129, 136, 151, 161,
168, 174, 179f., 182, 186f., 194, 225, 231, 233-42, 244, 246, 249, 251, 253, 256, 259f., 275, 280, 285, 327
Reason, 9, 11, 24, 29-32, 35, 38, 42f., 48, 52, 66, 81f., 91f., 100, 111, 119, 122, 134, 139, 154, 156, 159, 161, 164,
169, 178, 181, 186f., 193, 202, 205-8, 210, 212, 226, 228, 234, 238, 250ff., 259f., 263, 273, 283, 286, 290, 301,
305, 324
Reconciliation (redemption)(Versöhnung), 298, 301f., 316, 319ff.
Reflection, 34, 50, 62, 64f., 67, 83, 87, 94, 116, 124f., 289
Relation (Beziehung), 213, 250, 255, 275
relationship (Verhältnis), 54, 88, 97ff., 134, 136, 143, 149, 157, 177, 181, 190, 222, 233, 235, 273, 280, 314
Representation (Vorstellung), 9, 14f., 28, 34-38, 40, 49, 54, 59, 61, 64, 83, 85, 96, 99f., 106, 109, 114, 134, 139,
166, 172, 200, 211, 215
Revelation, 4, 8, 37, 43, 46, 128, 151, 154, 156, 188, 190, 197ff., 220, 233, 239f., 261ff., 265, 267f., 271, 273f.,
281, 288, 296-303, 312, 316ff., 322
S
Science, 29, 37, 65, 68, 74, 78, 95, 103, 166, 187, 222
Sensible, 9, 61, 81, 184, 197, 200, 223, 318, 322f.
sensibility, 138f.
Soul, 110, 118
Speculative, 6f., 10, 17, 21ff., 28, 32, 39f., 42, 44, 50, 58f., 66ff., 72, 76, 81, 99, 101, 106, 108, 116, 123-26, 131,
136, 147f., 159, 166, 169, 198, 200, 215, 235, 238, 241, 247, 251, 253, 255-58, 263, 266, 271, 273, 276, 283, 288f.,
291ff., 303, 305, 307, 310, 322
Spirit, 13, 16, 21, 23, 26, 29ff., 39, 44, 48, 50, 53, 66, 69, 72, 102, 114, 118, 122, 124, ch. 3 (128-61, passim), 202,
214, 234, 243, 260, 269, 272ff., 301, 328
absolute (infinite) Spirit: 5, 13, 17, 19, 21, 26f., 32, 42-45, 50, 58, 76, 81, 99, 115, 143, 150, 155, 157, 160, 164,
177, 186, 188, 192, 196f., 200ff., 207, 210, 215, 221, 246, 256, 260, 266, 272ff., 283, 287f., 305f., 309, 312,
316, 324, 328
Holy Spirit, 267, 283, 319, 321f.
human spirit, 5, 16, 19, 21, 24, 40, 43, 59, 76, 151, 153, 167f., 171, 183, 187f., 190ff., 200, 221f., 233, 265-72,
283, 291f., 305, 316f., 323
Subject, 87f., 142f.
subjective, 24, 77, 94f., 98, 102f., 106, 116, 122, 142, 177, 207, 242, 253
subjectivity, 92, 96, 102, 119, 121, 149, 193, 205, 320
Substance, 15, 103, 136, 141, 149, 152, 155ff., 256f., 299
substantial, 117, 121, 292
Syllogism, 91-96, 198f., 201, 228, 258
System, 17, 19, 22, 73f., 114, 122, 126, 131, 167, 208, 247, 259, 285, 288, 294, 298
systematic, 36f., 126
T
Teleology, 103, 105, 107, 110, 112, 120
Theology, 58, 156, 188, ch. 7 (282-324, passim)
Thinking, 8, 10f., 36, 46, 69f., 83, 88, 91, 98, 138, 142, 164, 166f., 174, 179ff., 186, 211, 225, 240f., 247, 252, 291
thought, 17f., 26, 50, 82, 100, 103, 115, 138, 177, 186, 207, 218, 228, 230
Totality, 52, 68, 72ff., 79f., 84f., 90f., 95ff., 101, 107f., 113f., 119, 121f., 125f., 132f., 167, 171f., 176, 179, 187,
193, 201f., 235, 246f., 250, 254, 264, 280
Transcend, 79, 82f., 91, 95, 98f., 129, 140, 142, 179, 199, 214, 234, 258, 266, 272, 283, 286f., 312
transcendence, 4, 6, 300
transcendent, 2, 4f., 12, 80, 124, 326, 328
Trinity, 149, 191, 220, 293, 299f., 303, 305, 307, 310, 319
Truth, 11, 22f., 27ff., 46f., 51, 54f., 59, 61, 76, 78, 83, 91, 94, 102, 113f., 121, 145, 156, 165, 175, 177, 200, 242,
268, 270, 273, 283, 288, 291, 294, 303
absolute truth, 42, 44, 48, 57, 224, 285, 322
U
Understanding (Verstand), 6, 18, 24, 35, 38, 40f., 43, 46, 52, 64, 69f., 80, 82-85, 91f., 95, 106, 116, 119, 147, 156,
165,


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Page 339
173, 179, 186, 200, 208, 228, 234ff., 248, 251f., 255, 263, 275, 289f., 296, 301, 303f.
V
Value, 45, 294
W
Willing, 119ff., 142, 147, 161
World, 66, 149-53, 250, 254ff., 258, 260, 277f., 280, 297, 313
Worship, 36f., 157, 289, 321

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title: Hegel's Concept of God SUNY Series in Hegelian Studies

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Hegel's Concept of God

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Hegel's Concept of God

Quentin Lauer, S.J.

State University of New York Press

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The Intelligibility of Reality

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The Intelligibility of Divine Reality

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Object of Reason vs. Object of Understanding

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God and Philosophy

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God and Human History

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"Denaturalization" of the Human

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The "Divinity" of Thought

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The Rationality of the Religious

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Knowing and Believing

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