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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 October 2008
In this postmodern era, God-talk is facing serious challenges. Is it still possible to have a meaningful concept of God after the demise of metaphysical realism? How can we make sense of the idea of absolute transcendence in a secularized world? In what sense can we still believe something as divine revelation when foundationalism is no longer taken for granted? While some believe that we can go about our old theological business as usual, others have entirely given up on the hope of any intelligible theology. It is my hunch, however, that there are ways of doing theology that can take our postmodern conditions into serious account. In this article, I shall argue that, however anachronistic it might seem, Hegel's God-talk, seen through the lens of Heidegger's understanding of Being, provides one such possibility.
1 Indeed these two are not very compatible concepts. Interested in Hegel's concept of God, what one should look for in Heidegger is not his concept of Being in his early works but his not so fully articulated God-talk in his later writings. For such comparison, see Derrida, Jacques, Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1989),Google ScholarRobinson, James M. and Cobb, John B., eds, The Later Heidegger and Theology (New York: Harper & Row, 1963),Google Scholar and Williams, John R., Martin Heidegger's Philosophy of Religion (Canadian Cataloguing in Publishing Data, 1977).Google Scholar Similarly, interested in Heidegger's concept of Being, what one should look for in Hegel is not his theological discourse of God in Phenomenology of Spirit and Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, but his philosophical inquiry of being in his Logic. For such a comparison, See Schmitt, Gerhard, The Concept of Being in Hegel and Heidegger (Bonn: Bouvier Verlag Herbert Grundann, 1976).Google Scholar
2 Heidegger once held that Hegel also belongs to the metaphysical tradition he set out to deconstruct (see his An Introduction to Metaphysics [New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 1959], pp. 187–8)Google Scholar, but he later changed his view (see his Hegel's Concept of Experience [San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1970]Google Scholar and Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980]).Google Scholar While Williams, Robert R. see Heidegger's later interpretation of Hegel as a distortion (see his ‘Hegel and Heidegger’, in William, Desmond, ed., Hegel and His Critics: Philosophy in the Aftermath of Hegel [Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989], pp. 135–62),Google Scholar Hans-Georg Gadamer regards it as authentic (see his ‘Hegel and Heidegger’ in his Hegel's Dialectic [New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 1976], pp. 100–16,Google Scholar and ‘Being, Spirit, God’, in Marx, Werner, ed., Heidegger Memorial Lectures [Duquesne University Press, 1977], pp. 55–76).Google Scholar
3 Hegel, , Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, 3 vols. (Berkeley, Los Angeles & London: University of California Press, 1984),Google Scholar 3:62. Further references to this work will be parenthetically indicated in the main text with volume and page numbers.
4 Hegel, , Lectures on the History of Philosophy, 3 vols. (New York: Humanities Press, 1963),Google Scholar 3:260. Emphasis added.
5 Olson's, Alan M.Hegel and the Spirit: Philosophy as Pneumatology (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992)Google Scholar leans towards such an interpretation. He argues that, in Hegel's reflection on pneuma, ‘one finds a rich and imaginative association of Spirit with a notion of psyche that conveys the meaning of the Latin terms of animus and spiritus as the embedded experiences of Atem and luft, breath and wind or air – precisely those sensory manifestations in and through which pneuma and Geist become initially manifest’ (132).
6 Heidegger, , Being and Time (New York: Harper & Row, 1962), p. 26.Google Scholar
7 See Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 59.
8 Hegel, , Philosophy of Mind (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), p. 16.Google Scholar Here mind and spirit are different translations of the same German Word Geist.
9 For example, the way Cyril O'Regan emphasizes the importance of activity is to argue that Hegel's God is a being ‘qualified by adjectives such as active and restless’ (O'Regan, Cyril, Heterodox Hegel [Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994], p. 47),Google Scholar is ‘identifiable with substance, though a self-mediating substance’ (Ibid. p. 138), and therefore combines Parmenidean idea of Being and Heraclitean idea of becoming (298).
10 Of course, for Hegel, the finite includes not only the human but also the natural. Yet for Hegel, ‘[t]he higher mode of viewing nature, and the deeper relation in which it is to be placed to God, is that in which the nature itself is conceived as something spiritual, i.e. as the natural aspects of humanity’ [3: 295, note 128). Thus, for the limited purpose of this essay and for the convenience of argument, my discussion of the finite will be limited to the human.
11 Hegel here means by ‘son’ not only Jesus Christ but also the world in general: ‘the other, which we have also called “son,” obtains the determination of the other as such… This other, released as something free and independent, is the world as such’ (3:292).
12 To say that God has created the world is to say that the concept of God has been transformed into reality. Thus ‘the concept itself is still burdened with one-sidedness and finitude’ (3:279). The concept with such a burden is God merely as Father, but ‘merely as Father, God is not yet the truth’ (3:284, note).
13 Hegel, , Philosophy of Nature, 3 vols. (New York: Humanities Press, 1970), 1:198.Google Scholar
14 See Harris, Errol E., The Spirit of Hegel (New Jersey: Humanities Press, 1993), p. 70.Google Scholar
15 For a similar statement, see his Phenomenology of Spirit: ‘the task of leading the individual from his uneducated standpoint to knowledge had to be seen in its universal sense, just as it was the universal individual, self-conscious Spirit’ (6).
16 Taylor, Charles is right to point out that ‘an sich God is incarnate from the beginning in all men… What changes in history… is that men become aware of this, or God becomes aware of this through men’ (Taylor, Charles, Hegel [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975], p. 208).CrossRefGoogle Scholar However, Taylor still identifies Hegel's God as the universal incarnated in men as the particular rather than the activity of men as concrete beings to realize in themselves the unity of the universal (the divine) and the particular (the human).
17 Thus far, it should be clear that, in this essay, ‘the divine’ is not used to refer to some other-worldly being; nor is ‘the human’ used to refer to some this-worldly being. Rather, they are used to express two distinctive aspects of humanity as concrete beings. Neither the divine nor the human in this sense can be identified as the true God as absolute spirit. God as absolute spirit is rather the activity of humanity as concrete beings to realize in themselves the unity of the divine (universal) and the human (the particular).
18 Hegel argues that ‘there cannot be two kinds of reason and two kinds of spirit’, one divine and one human (1:130).
19 Thus, Walter Jaeschke correctly observes, for Hegel, , ‘it is an incorrect way of viewing the matter to say that the Spirit proceeds from the father and the son as a tertium quid; the Spirit rather is nothing but their real unity’ (Walter Jaeschke, Reason in Religion: The Foundations of Hegel's Philosophy of Religion [Berkeley, Los Angeles & Oxford: University of California Press, 1990], p. 308).Google Scholar
20 Hegel, , Encyclopedia of Philosophy (New York: Philosophical Library, 1959), p. 196.Google Scholar
21 Hegel, ,. Phenomenology of Spirit (Oxford, New York, Toronto & Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1977), p. 473.Google Scholar
22 Hegel, Philosophy of Mind, 4. In this sense, Olson is correct to say that Hegel's ‘Absolute Spirit is nothing less than the Aufhebung of human spirit and divine spirit’ (Allan Olson, Hegel and Spirit, p. 140).
23 A critical survey of these different interpretations of Hegel can be found in Williamson, Raymond Keith, Introduction to Hegel's Philosophy of Religion (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1984), pp. 203–94.Google Scholar
24 See Harris, The Spirit of Hegel, p. 63. Harris also argues that ‘the Absolute, for Hegel, is a transcendent whole without being a separate or separable (and so another finite) reality. It is at once immanent and transcendent’ (Ibid.).
25 Heidegger, , Being and Time, p. 32.Google Scholar
26 Ibid., p. 62.
27 It should be pointed out that the divine standpoint here is not what Hilary Putnam ridicules as the impossible God's eye view. While the latter is supposed to be divorced ‘from the point of view of any of the sentient creatures in the world’ (Putnam, Hilary, Reason, Truth, and History [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981], p. 50),CrossRefGoogle Scholar the latter is one of the points of view (the universal one) of these creatures.
28 Hegel, , Phenomenology of Spirit, p. 460.Google Scholar
29 In this sense, Charles Taylor's statement that ‘man is God's vehicle of self-consciousness’ (Charles Taylor, Hegel, p. 481) is incomplete as a truth. If God here is understood as the divine (universal) aspect of concrete human being and man as the human (particular) aspect, this statement must be complemented by the one that says ‘God is man's vehicle of self-consciousness’. Taylor's interpretation, however, is not exceptional in Hegel scholarship. O'Regan, for instance, also believes that Hegel's Spirit is ‘a narrative elaboration in which the divine moves from an initial state of indetermination to a state of full determination’ (Cyril O'Regan: The Heterodox Hegel, p. 30). Similarly, for Pinkard, Hegel's ‘Christian story is one of the divine taking on human form’ (Pinkard, Terry, Hegel's Phenomenology: The Sociality of Reason [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994] p. 256).CrossRefGoogle Scholar They all ignore the point that Spirit is also a process in which the human moves from an initial status of finitude to a status of infinity or in which the human takes the divine form.
30 See Fackenheim, Emil L., The Religious Dimension in Hegel's Thought (Bloomington & London: Indiana University Press, 1967), p. 142.Google Scholar
31 See Hegel, , Phenomenology of Spirit, p. 457.Google Scholar For an interesting comment on this, see Küng, Hans, The Incarnation of God: An Introduction to Hegel's Theological Thought as Prolegomena to a Future Christology (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1987), p. 208.Google Scholar
32 Ibid., p. 457.
33 Hegel, , Phenomenology of Spirit, p. 476.Google Scholar
34 Burbidge thus observes that ‘the radical negativity of self-chosen death is also affirmed to be a central constituent of the divine self’ (Burbidge, John W., Hegel on Logic and Religion: The Reasonableness of Christianity [Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992], p. 126).Google Scholar
35 Hegel, , Phenomenology of Spirit, p. 465.Google Scholar
36 Ibid., p. 473.
37 One of the most recent criticisms of Hegel as a conservative comes from Burbidge, according to whom, ‘there is strong evidence to suggest that Hegel saw even his own system as a culminating act of understanding’ (Burbidge, John W.: Hegel on Logic and Religion, p. 150).Google Scholar One of the most recent defences of Hegel thus understood is made by Fukuyama, who argues that Hegel ‘did not believe that the historical process would continue indefinitely but would come to an end with an achievement of free societies in the real world. There would, in other words, be an end of history’ (Fukuyama, Francis, The end of History and the Last Man [New York: The Free Press, 1992], p. 64].Google Scholar
38 In this context, some recent attempts made to counter the charge of Hegel as a conservative are neither successful nor necessary. Pinkard holds that Hegel's claim of absoluteness of ‘our’ state or ‘our’ time ‘might be taken to refer always to “our time,” whenever our time happens to be’ (Pinkard, Terry, Hegel's Phenomenology, p. 435, n. 107).Google Scholar Yet it seems not ambiguous that Hegel means his time by ‘our time’. Harris explains that for Hegel the absoluteness of Christian awareness means ‘that it is the aim of all human activity, but it is not realizable in a final and terminating event in time’ (Harris, Errol E., The Spirit of Hegel, p. 216)Google Scholar; similarly, Maker interprets Hegel's absoluteness of philosophical knowing as ‘a radical critique of finite mind's blasphemous pretention to know absolutely’, a pretention to be divine knowing (Maker, William, Philosophy without Foundations: Rethinking Hegel [Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994], p. 130).Google Scholar Both Harris and Maker understand the absolute as the absolute unity of the divine and the human rather then the open-ended activity to realize this unity. Both try to defend Hegel from the charge of conservatism by moving this unity beyond the confine of human consciousness.
39 Quentin Lauer, S.J., Hegel's Concept of God (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1982), p. 287.Google Scholar
40 Stephen Rocker thus points out that, for Hegel, ‘philosophy, like religion, is not merely a human endeavor but is the result of divine activity’ (Stephen Rocker, ‘The Integral Relation of Religion and Philosophy in Hegel's Philosophy’, in Kolb, David, ed., New Perspectives on Hegel's Philosophy of Religion [Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992], p. 29).Google Scholar
41 Fackenheim, Emil L., The Religious Dimension in Hegel's Thought, p. 52.Google Scholar
42 Heidegger, , Being and Time, p. 58.Google Scholar
43 For example, Heidegger claims that ‘the meaning of phenomenological description as a method lies in interpretation’ (Being and Time, p. 61). Since interpretation for Heidegger is always involved with the interpreter's projection, his above claim amounts to saying that the meaning of phenomenological description lies in hermeneutic prescription.
44 Barth, Karl, Anselm: Faith in Search of Understanding (Cleveland & New York: The World Publishing Company, 1962), p. 16.Google Scholar
45 See Jaeschke, Walter, Reason in Religion: The Foundations of Hegel's Philosophy of Religion, p. 227.Google Scholar
46 Hegel, , Phenomenology of Spirit, p. 460.Google Scholar
47 See his Being and Time, pp. 56–7, and his Hegel's Concept of Experience (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1989), p. 38.Google Scholar
48 Thus Philip M. Merklinger is keen to point out that ‘the consciousness of God [revelation] and human consciousness [knowing] are blended together in the self-consciousness of absolute Spirit’ (Merklinger, Philip M., Philosophy, Theology, and Hegel's Berlin Philosophy of Religion, 1821–1827 [Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994], p. 187).Google Scholar
49 Here I agree with Lawrence Dickey that Hegel neither raises faith to the level of knowledge nor allows knowledge to supersede faith but tries ‘to steer a via media between the subjectivity of an anti-philosophical dogmatism and the sterile abstraction of anti-theological rationalism’ (Dickey, Lawrence, ‘Hegel on Religion and Philosophy’, in Beiser, Frederick C., ed., The Cambridge Companion to Hegel [Cambridge; Cambridge University Press, 1993], p. 311).Google Scholar
50 See Cobb, John B. Jr, Beyond Dialogue: Toward a Mutual Transformation of Christianity and Buddhism (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1982), pp. 126–8.Google Scholar
51 See Kaufman, Gordon, In Face of Mystery: A Constructive Theology (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), p. 415–18.Google Scholar
52 See Taylor, Charles, ‘The Validity of Transcendental Arguments’, in his Philosophical Argument (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), pp. 20–33,Google Scholar and Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989).Google Scholar
53 This article originates from a paper for Prof. Gordon Kaufman's Hegel Seminar at Harvard Divinity School years ago. It has since then gone through numerous revisions and Prof. Kaufman read and made comments on each of them. I would like to record my deepest thanks to him. I want to also thank Margaret and Francis Soo for saving me from many mistakes.