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Some Implications For The Doctrine Of God Of Hegel'S Concept Of Thought As Mediation

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Some Implications For The Doctrine Of God Of Hegel'S Concept Of Thought As Mediation

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Content This d issertation has been 65-9969
m icrofilm ed exactly as received
CHRISTENSEN, D arrel Elvyn, 1923-
SOME IMPLICATIONS FOR THE DOCTRINE
OF GOD OF HEGEL'S CONCEPT OF
THOUGHT AS MEDIATION.
U niversity of Southern C alifornia, P h.D ., 1965
Philosophy
University Microfilms, Inc., Ann Arbor, Michigan
Copyright by
Darrel Elvyn Christensen
1965
SOME IMPLICATIONS FOR THE DOCTRINE OF GOD OF
HEGEL'S CONCEPT OF THOUGHT AS MEDIATION
by
Darrel Elvyn Christensen
A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(Philosophy)
June 1965
UNIVERSITY O F S O U T H E R N CALIFORNIA
THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY PARK
LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA 9 0 0 0 7
This dissertation, written by
Darrel Elvyn Christensen
under the direction of h.Jh$..Dissertation Com
mittee, and approved by all its members, has
been presented to and accepted by the Graduate
School, in partial fulfillment of requirements
for the degree of
D O C T O R O F P H I L O S O P H Y
Dean
Date J.Un e A 1965
DISSERTATION COMMITTEE
Chairman
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Chapter Page
I. INTRODUCTION ................................ 1
Objectives of the Study
Procedure
II. THOUGHT AS MEDIATION........................ 11
Introduction
Monism
Negation
The Concrete Universal
III. a r t, religion, and philosophy— the problem
of the religious and the philosophical
CONSCIOUSNESS.............................. 41
Art, Religion and Philosophy
The Problem of the Religious and
Philosophical Consciousness
IV. NATURAL RELIGION AND THE PROBLEM OF
FORM AND CONTENT.......................... 56
Natural Religion
The Problem of Form and Content
V. THE RELIGION OF SPIRITUAL INDIVIDUALITY
AND THE PROBLEM OF THE CONFORMITY OF
THE DIALECTIC TO THE FORM OF DIALECTIC . . 84
Dialectic as it Pertains to Religion
The Religion of Spiritual Individuality
The Problem of the Conformity of the
Dialectic of Religion to What
Dialectic Should Be
The Historical Exemplification of the
Moments of the Dialectic
VI. ABSOLUTE RELIGION AND THE PROBLEM OF THE
RELATION BETWEEN CONCRETE UNIVERSALS
INCLUDED WITHIN THE DIALECTIC AND
THOSE THAT ARE N O T ...........................132
Absolute Religion
Chapter
The Problem of the Relation Between
Concrete Universals Included Within
the Dialectic and Those That are Not
VII. HISTORY AS THE ODYSSEY OF GOD AND THE
PROBLEM OF THE RELATIVITY OF THE
CONCEPT OF GOD ........................
The Philosophy of Religion and the
Philosophy of History
History as the Odyssey of God
The Problem of the Relativity of the
Concept of God
VIII. HEGEL'S DOCTRINE OF GOD AS THE HIGHEST
MEDIATION OF THOUGHT .................
IX. COMMON CRITICISMS OF HEGEL'S DOCTRINE
OF GOD ................................
The Criticism Pertaining to the
Role of Reason
The Criticism Pertaining to the
Denial of Role to Religious Faith
The Criticism Pertaining to the
Role and Status of the Individual
The Criticism that Evil and Suffering
are Rendered Illusory or Unreal
The Criticism that Hegel's Concept of
God Renders Worship Meaningless
X. SOME IMPLICATIONS FOR THE DOCTRINE OF
GOD OF HEGEL'S CONCEPT OF THOUGHT
AS MEDIATION ..........................
Four Perspectives
Further Observations on These
Perspectives
BIBLIOGRAPHY ....................................
iii
Page
162
173
195
225
265
CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTION
Objectives of the Study
In view of the vast amount of literature on Hegel's
thought the attention given to his philosophy of religion
is relatively meager. Excepting a work by J,M, Sterrett,^
a few scattered articles and brief references within works
devoted mainly to other interests are all that is to be
found in English, If the German sources offer somewhat
more, this is, for the most part, in works that reflect
the uncertainty of the two decades following the death of
Hegel, a period marked, on the one hand, by reaction
against Hegel, and on the other, by a development of
germinal ideas found in Hegel, but in such a way as hardly
to aid the scholar who wishes to understand Hegel's
philosophy of religion as such, or its inplications.
This want of scholarly research is reflected in
the way in which his philosophy of religion is treated
in textbooks. The frequency with which he is regarded
Sterrett, Studies in Hegel's Philosophy of
Religion (London: Swan Sonnenschein and Company, 1891).'
The most adequate brief summary of Hegel's doctrine of
God for religion in the English language is perhaps that
of Leighton. J,A. Leighton, "Hegel's Concept of God,"
Philosophical Review, Vol. 5 (1896), pp. 610-618.
as being a rationalist, according to the classical sense
of that term, is only one of the more notable misunder
standings reflected in that literature. Whatever problems
may be inherent in any attempt at genuine dialogue between
the classical theological tradition and Hegel's philosophy
of religion, it can only be concluded that much misunder
standing and confusion prevails concerning the nature of
the issues that would be involved in such an attempt.
This, along with the fact that Hegel remains both a
significant point of reference in the history of modern
thought and an important source of germinal ideas which
have achieved prominence in various philosophical move
ments since his time and which continue to be prominent,
seems ample justification for the type of study that has
been undertaken here.
The misunderstanding and confusion to which I refer
is doubtless partly owing to the character of Hegel's
philosophy. As J. Hutchison Stirling once remarked, it
is not a completed philosophy. Moreover, Hegel's language
is in places novel to the point of being obscure, even to
the reader who has given sufficient attention to "the
system” so that he may reasonably hope to be rewarded by
2
J. Hutchison Stirling, "Schopenhauer in Relation
to Kant,” Journal of Speculative Philosophy, Vol. XIII,
1 (January, 1879), pp. 1-50, p. 38*
understanding. Owing partly to this obscurity, and
partly to conflicts and competing interests at work within
Hegel’s thought, the arrival at a single interpretation of
Hegel, correct in all respects, may be too much to antici
pate . The variations in the interpretations of such com
petent Hegel scholars as W.T. Stace, J.E. McTaggart, and
J.H. Stirling is fairly conclusive evidence that this is
the case. While a substantial basis of agreement may be
found among these scholars as to the general character of
Hegel's philosophy, disagreements are also present.
Particularly when one turns to the work of a number of
other interpreters, the area of disagreement becomes so
large and particular disagreements take on such a charac
ter as to make it seem improbable that they may be
accounted for except upon the assumption that there has
been a lack of careful scholarship. If a single correct
interpretation of Hegel is too much to hope for, the
range of possibilities would appear to be much narrower
than works on Hegel have led the writers of our secondary
sources to suspecto The presently growing interest in
Hegel scholarship may hopefully result in a clarification
of Hegel's philosophy for contemporary scholars and in a
more adequate assessment of his place in the history of
modern philosophy.
From the time that he took up theological studies
at the University of Tllbingen in preparation for the
Christian ministry in 1788 until his final course of
lectures on the philosophy of religion during the year
preceding his death, the philosophy of religion remained
3
a primary and fundamental interest for Hegel.
In the years following upon graduation he wrote
"Das Leben Jesu," and several other essays on religion
4
which have since been published in one volume. These
writings reflect a mind under the impress of Kant and the
spirit of the enlightenment. He states, for example, that
the end and essence of all true religion is the morality
of man.5 Christianity is portrayed as having been well
suited to the special needs of a culture in which indi
vidual freedom has been eroded by the Roman emperors, so
that the Greek and Roman religions, better suited to free
men, could serve less well.
In another essay, faith is portrayed as a relation
of love and trust pertaining between two spirits. Faith
comprehensive account of Hegel's life and the
development of his thought is to be found in Gustav E.
Muller, Hegel; Denkgeschichte eines Lebendigen (Milnchen;
Francke Verlag, 1959).
t t ^Herman Nohl, Hegel's theologische Jugendschriften
(Tubingen; Verlag von U.C.B. Mohr, 1907). ’
5Nohl, theologische Jugendschriften, in "Die
PositivitMt Aex Christlichen Religion," pp. 137-240,
p. 153.
^Nohl, theologische Jugendschriften, in "Der Geist
des Christentums und sein Schicksal," pp. 241-342,
p. 313.
in what is godly is possible, moreover, only because the
person who has faith contains in himself what is godly.
Although the spirit of these essays may seem
alien to that of classical Christianity, they suggest the
synthesis which he was trying to achieve throughout the
course of his life and the serious interest in the
philosophy of religion which again comes to the fore
during the last several years of his life when he several
times repeated a series of lectures on that subject.7 It
is in this latter work, and the period in Hegel's mature
intellectual development which it represents, with which
this study is to be primarily concerned. It is in this
period that he most nearly approaches a synthesis of the
interests and emphases of his earlier essays, above
mentioned, with his own system and with the primary themes
of the Christian faith. It is doubtless owing, at least
in part, to the fact that interest in Hegel's work was on
the wane very shortly after his death, that this latter
work, published posthumously, would seem to have received
less recognition than it deserves, and particularly when
it is his views on the philosophy of religion which are
i -
being considered.
7These lectures were compiled by former students.
George Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Vorlesungen Uber die
Philosophie der Religion, Zwei BSnden, mit einem Vorwort
von Philipp Marheineke. A more extended note on this
work is provided on p. 40.
The specific objectives of this study are (1) to
set forth Hegel's doctrine of God from a perspective that
recognizes the concept of thought as mediation to be a
dominant and controlling notion within Hegel's metaphysic,
(2) to propose three interpretative perspectives--teach a
solution to a problem of interpretation too significant
to be ignored where Hegel's doctrine of God for religion
is to be considered, (3) against the background of Hegel's
doctrine of God understood from the standpoint of these
perspectives, to assess some common criticisms that have
been made of that doctrine, and (4) presupposing various
aspects of Hegel's doctrine of God to assess some impli
cations for the doctrine of God of Hegel's concept of
thought as mediation.
In this study I have attempted to proceed in such
a manner as to make clear to the reader what aspects of
Hegel's doctrine of God are found to be clearly and
unambiguously set forth by Hegel (and generally in keeping
with his system of thought) and what aspects are in some
way problematical and subject to interpretation. By pro
ceeding in this way, if I am not in every case fortunate
enough to choose the best path, the one that is chosen
will at least be clearly marked so that others may avoid
it if they wish. This is not to suggest that the inter
pretative perspectives are regarded as so tentative that
they may be lightly dismissed. In the case of each, I
hope to show that to suppose it as representative of
Hegel's own view makes his philosophy of religion appear
as more intelligible and coherent than it might otherwise
appear•
That the concept of thought as mediation is a
controlling idea in Hegel's doctrine of God seems beyond
dispute; it is not anticipated that the reader will find
ground for calling in question either this fact or the
understanding of Hegel's doctrine of God which follows
upon giving this fact proper recognition.
To an important degree, the success of this dis
sertation hinges upon the adequacy of the solution pro
posed to the three problems of interpretation treated
within Chapters III, IV, and VI, respectively. It has
been possible to find little direct help toward the
solution of these problems in commentaries on Hegel. I
propose to show that each of these problems is crucial
and that the solution proposed to each may, in the light
of evidence that will be furnished, be regarded as
implied by Hegel's primary concepts and as probably having
been held by him.
If the understanding of Hegel's doctrine of God
for religion which follows upon the adoption of these
interpretative perspectives is accepted as authentic, it
is not anticipated that serious exception will be taken
to the critique of the form of the dialectic in Chapter V,
or to the delineation of the problem of the relativity of
concepts of God in Chapter VII.
Procedure
Hegel’s concept of thought as mediation will be
set forth in the chapter immediately following. It will
here be shown how two concepts basic to Hegel's dialecti
cal method, the monistic principle and the principle of
determination by negation, together principally constitute
a third concept of the concrete universal, the process
form by which thought mediations are determined. This
exposition will furnish a basis for the analysis of
Hegel's concept of Spirit, the highest mediation of
thought, in Chapters III through VII. In Chapter III
consideration is given to the context of the dialectic of
religion within the dialectic as a whole, and to the
problem of the relation pertaining between the religious
and the philosophical consciousness. In Chapter IV, the
consideration of natural religion will provide a context
for the discussion of the relation that obtains between
the form of Hegel's dialectic and the content which per
tains to that form. In Chapter V the consideration of the
next phase of the dialectic, the religion of spiritual
individuality, will provide the context for a summation
of the results of an analysis of the dialectic to deter
mine its internal consistency and adherence to what Hegel
regards as the principles of dialectic. In Chapter VI a
discussion of absolute religion provides a context for
considering the problem of the logical relation of con
crete universals included within the dialectic with those
that are not* The issues considered in Chapters IV, V,
and VI are thus treated within the context of a discussion
of successive phases of the dialectic of religion. While
the intention has not been to provide complete outlines
of these successive phases of the dialectic, the brief
exposition that is presented of each may aid the reader to
recall some significant aspects of that phase, at the same
time that it serves the primary function of providing a
context for dealing with a particular issue or problem.
Chapter VII will consider particular emphases and con
cepts pertaining to Hegel’s philosophy of history, and
most particularly to the concept of history as a theodicy.
The consideration of these emphases and concepts provides
a context for considering the often neglected relativity
of Hegel's concept of God. Chapter VIII will set forth
a summation of Hegel's doctrine of God as informed by the
analysis and interpretation set forth in the preceding
chapters.
In Chapter IX consideration will be given to five
typological criticisms which have most frequently been
made of Hegel's doctrine of God. In the concluding
chapter, Chapter X, some implications for religion of
Hegel's concept of thought as mediation for the doctrine
of God will be set forth within successive contexts which
presuppose various aspects of Hegel's metaphysics.
CHAPTER II
THOUGHT AS MEDIATION
Introduction
Thought, for Hegel, is mediation, and what is
mediated is thought and nothing but thought. Thought is
self-transcending, but the thought which transcends is
something more than that which is transcended. In each
instance of a self-transcending of thought, something is
overcome, and in this overcoming there is an increment to
thought. That which is overcome is a contradiction or
polarity of principles within thought itself. This con
tradiction or polarity of principles, wherever it mani
fests itself, is both the finitude of thought which
strives toward the realization of its own implicit truth,
lying within it as potentiality, and the dynamic of the
process by which this is to be realized. This reali
zation as explicit of the implicit truth of finite
thought is a synthetic unity in which the contradictory
principles out of which it emerges is aufgehoben (held
in abeyance, contained, and transcended).
Thus, in mediation as understood by Hegel, there
is gain and no loss. What is gained is that an implicit
finitude has been discovered, made explicit and, in
principle, overcome. Every category of philosophy,
12
excepting one, namely, Absolute Spirit in-and-for-itself,
may be found to contain within it finitude in the form of
1
an inherent contradiction. Its complete truth can be
realized only by the explication of this finitude and by
its ultimately being taken up, aufgehoben, into this all-
comprehending Absolute. This Absolute is thought with all
its mediations complete. It is that whole which is the
fullness and truth of all that is. It is more than a
mere concept of mind about what is, for such a concept,
even the fully developed Notion of the logic of the Idea,
would be a finite category standing over against being,
against what is. Hence, it would be in want of mediation.
It is thought thinking itself, and therefore the most
comprehensive form of self-consciousness.
Thought, for Hegel, also possesses other functions
than mediation, such as finding coherence in the natural
order, determining the necessary relations of abstract
ideas, and deriving synthetic concepts by means of which
better to deal with perplexing problems. These functions,
however, are contained in, and so intimately bound up
with thought conceived as mediation, that they cannot be
defined except within the context of this notion. The
^It would seem implicit in Hegel's view that what
is true of every category of philosophy in this regard is
equally true of every substantive whatever.
13
concept of thought as mediation, along with the "what” and
the "how1 1 of mediation, may be regarded as the regulative
notions of Hegel’s system, which effect their way into its
every part and aspect, and apart from the consideration
of which no basic component can be appropriately viewed.
The "what" of mediation is unity which is the third
moment of every phase of the dialectic and culminates in
the final and all-inclusive unity, Absolute Spirit. The
principle of movement toward unity is the monistic prin
ciple. The "how" of mediation is determination by
negation. These two notions are inextricably interwoven
so that they cannot actually be considered separately. On
this account, the titles of the two sections following
indicate emphasis rather than content. In the section
which, in turn, follows these two, I shall set forth the
concept of the concrete universal, in which the monistic
principle and the principle of negation are embodied, and
the discrete moments of which constitute mediations of
thought. The account of these principles as they relate
to the concept of thought as mediation will be supple
mented in the chapters which follow, wherein there will
be occasion for considering particular developments of the
dialectic of religion within which these principles are
embodied.
Monism
Nothing in Principle
Unknowable
For Hegel, the world is rational through and
o
through. There is nothing that is in principle unknow
able. All knowledge, moreover, is conceptual in the
sense that it can be apprehended by mind in the form of
thought. The capacity to apply suitable concepts to a
thing constitutes knowledge of that thing. Existence is
a concept; hence, to say that an unknowable exists is to
propose to apply a concept to the unknowable, which is
absurd. The concept of an unknowable is thus likewise
absurd.
It is only by having knowledge beyond a limit
that it is possible to be aware of a limit. On this
account, if knowledge were limited it would not be pos
sible to be aware of this fact. Limits are provisional,
and for the mind's own use in discriminating its own
provinces of reality. Hence, the limits which have been
set up to define the proper province of thought do not
hold. At best, they merely define the province of cer
tain particular kinds of thought. They do not hold
2|,Was vernUnftig ist, das ist wirklich; und was
wirklich ist, das ist vernunftig,” George Wilhelm
Friedrich Hegel, Per Philosophie des Rechts, mit einem
Vorwort von Eduard Hans (Stuttgart, 1928), p. 33.
15
because their propounders know more than they pretend,
and this more belongs to thought. That of which a man
knows nothing he bears no witness to whatever except the
witness of silence.
Thought is Inclusive
Thought, thus inclusively defined, is the repre
sentation of the universe in its concreteness and from a
certain point of view as identical with it in its process
of becoming. That "certain point of view" is that which
is coming t o realize the transitions and mediations within
thought as correspondent with, and parallel to, the
transitions and mediations within its object. The "what"
of mediation is the achievement by thought of this reali
zation, which is itself a mediation.
There are other dualities which sure also mediated
to unity. In each mediation of thought, the monistic
principle expresses itself, and in the complete reali
zation of the principle in that inclusive unity, Absolute
Spirit in-and-for-itself, it expresses itself completely.
The awareness of the Absolute that is achieved
through the realization of the "what" and the "how" of
mediation belongs not merely to the province of feeling
or intuition, but to thought as well.^ Thought that has
George Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, PhSnomenologie
des Geistes (Stuttgart, Fr. Frommanns Verlag, 1927),
p. 15.
16
transcended itself to grasp the Absolute in this way has
simply come to understand its own process and the route
it has traversed. That route includes the traversing of
the sensuous and empirical world which determine thought
and are taken up into thought.
Thought is not limited either to sense experience,
on the one hand, or to the necessary relation of abstract
ideas, on the other. Sense experience, as will shortly
be noted more adequately, is comparatively barren and
empty; apart from its being taken up into universals,
into abstract thought, it is not even able to make its
impression explicit to consciousness. As to the necessary
relation of abstract ideas determined by sense, these must
be taken up into the determination of concrete thought
or reason (Vernunft) as its moments. Concrete thought or
reason is thought going about its business, the progres
sive overcoming of the polarities and contradictions
inherent to its nature. The process form of concrete
thought, which contains abstract universals and issues in
mediations, is the form of the concrete universal.
Thought in this form is no mere representation of the
realm of abstract universals which have entered into its
determination. Concrete universals of thought more
nearly resemble organic growth, wherein a pattern of
development is followed out, issuing in an end result
that all along lay within the germ of thought as its
17
undeveloped potentiality.
Substance and Subject
To reach rational knowledge by our intelligence is
thought, has levels of development. In the initial stage
of science the material which it works upon is immediate
and intuitive. At a more mature stage, science is in
possession of a wealth of material derived by reflection.
The content of this latter science is an outgrowth of
that of the former. However, the concrete immediacy of
the first science, and with it the principle of unity by
virtue of which science can only be such, is lost from
view. This expanded system is not reached by one prin
ciple taking shape in divers ways, but is constituted by
the application of formulae of abstract reason by virtue
of which these abstract sciences move toward the achieve
ment of what for them constitutes completeness. This
completeness is limited by virtue of the fact that their
formulae are abstract. Taken as complete, their con
ceptual worlds are, on this account, worlds of seeming.
The aggregate of their formulae does not constitute a
unity of principles inherent in substantial reality, but
is merely artificially imposed upon this reality. Science
the just demand of science.
4
Science, however, like
18
which is to achieve this unity of principles must achieve
it through the mediation of concrete immediacy (the first
science) and abstract universality (the second science).
The ultimate truth must be grasped as substance— and
reflective thought sets this goal--but this cannot be
accomplished except it be grasped in its immediacy, as
subject, as well.5
The unity of inherent principles within substantial
reality may be apprehended by thought as thus inclusively
conceived. In this supposition the basic postulate of
monism is expressed. On the side of the subject, thought,
at all levels of its mediation, moves toward the explicit
realization of the unity implicit within its diversity.
5 . .
Moreover, it is only when it is so grasped that
the subject may know himself.
When the ultimate truth is grasped as substance
and as subject, the forms of thought and those of its
object are comprehended as identical. Thus, in the vision
of the Absolute which is the culminating mediation of the
series, the dichotomy of subject and object is, in prin
ciple, overcome.
"Indem der Begriff das eigene Selbst des
Gegenstandes ist, das sich als sein Werden darstellt, ist
es nicht ein ruhendes Subjekt, das unbewegt die Accidenzen
trkgt, sondern der sich bewegende und seine Bestimmungen
in sich zurucknehmende Begriff.” George Wilhelm Friedrich
Hegel, Ph&nomenologie des Geistes. Mit einem Vorwort von
Johannes Schulze. Stuttgart, Fr. Frommanns Verlag, 1927,
from the forward, p. 56.
Moving from this notion of the supposed implicit
identity of subject and substance already set forth with
force and clarity in the Ph&nomenologie, the identity of
the structure of the dialectic of the religious conscious
ness and the dialectic of history, which will be subse
quently considered, necessarily follows.
19
When the principle of this unity is seen, the thought of
the subject has achieved objectivity and the form of being
has taken to itself the subject. This, however, is a
simplification of the schema into which another factor
must now be introduced, which will make the last step more
intelligible. Both subject and object, at all levels of
their determination, are mutually determinative of each
other. Thus* the complete development of either is merely
an aspect of their mediation into a unity inclusive of
both.
Negation
Negation and Identity
Spinoza developed the notion that to determine
anything is to negate what is not to be included within
that determination. Hence, to posit an identity was to
negate the infinitude of the divine substance that lies
beyond that identity. For him, the infinite was regarded
as the undetermined, as that upon which no limit has been
imposed. Conversely, the finite is that which is
determined. Yet the finite is known as such and as
determined only by and in relation to the infinite out of
which it is determined,
Hegel adopted the essence of Spinoza's principle,
altering it in several ways. In the first place, he
reversed the order of the positing and the negating.
20
Rather than saying, Mto posit is to negate,” he, in
effect, said, "to negate is to posit." In view of the
place accorded to process and development within his
philosophy, this reversal of order "had great significance.
In the second place, by making the development of thought
a logical process, this priority of negation was rendered,
not merely a causal priority, but a logical priority as
well. Negation now becomes the reason and dynamic by
which an identity is posited and explicitly realized. In
the third place, negation is conceived as the negation
not of just anything that is excluded from the concept,
but of a specific other, an other, this is to say, which
can be seen to be specifically contradictory to that
which is negated at the particular stage of the develop
ment of thought under analysis. In the fourth place, and
this is implied by the above, the infinite, rather than
being conceived as an emptiness, is conceived as a full
ness of determination in itself, containing in itself
discriminations and particular forms of thought.
Finitude and Negation
The finitude of thought consists of the inner
contradiction by virtue of which it must undergo a suc
cession of negations and further mediations to unity.
This is to say thought is negated by the antithesis
which, upon examination, is found to be necessary to its
21
essential truth at any given level. Thesis (the first
posited identity) and antithesis (at first regarded as
the other of this identity) issue in the determined
identity which is a synthesis of the preceding two
moments. This synthesis must follow from the discovery
that the identity is negated and hence determined by its
other. On this account it must be essentially one with
it. The concept of this unity presents itself in the
synthesis.
The analysis by which the components of a determi
nation of thought are derived is a retrospective analysis.
One begins with a concept and analyzes out of it the
thesis and antithesis of which it is the synthesis. In
this way, for example, the concept of becoming, as it is
philosophically defined in the beginning of the Logic,6
is found to be the mediation of empty abstract being and
nothing. The complete philosophical definition of be
coming, however, must include not only those concepts
which are contained within it, but also its essential
relation, in terms of dialectical principles, to concepts
which include it as a part or moment. From the stand
point of quality, becoming is a moment negated by
6George Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, EnzyklopHdie der
philosophischen Wissenschaften im Grundrisse und andere
Schriften aus der Heidelberger £eit (Stuttgart: Fr.
Froxnmanns Verlag, 1927), p. 54f.
22
determinate being. Quality, in turn, is a moment within
measure, and so on. The complete definition of becoming
involves the complete delineation of the Logic, the
system wherein the philosophical categories are defined
in this manner as a unity of the forms of reason.
One of the practical consequences of this method
of defining philosophical categories is that, with the
exception of such terms as are regarded as inclusive of
all others, i.e., Notion, Absolute Idea, Spirit, et
cetera, all of the categories are correlative. Of each
of them it may be said that it cannot be defined except
in relation to its particular correlative. Thus, being
cannot be defined except in relation to its antithesis,
which, in different instances, is nothing and becoming.
In like manner, quality cannot be defined except in
relation to its antithesis quantity, and likewise in the
case of form and dynamic, thought and being, freedom and
necessity, et cetera. This holds with respect to any
term which ranks inclusion within the dialectic. By
implication, it holds for any substantive whatever,
although explicit philosophical definitions are not
required in the case of most of the categories of the
understanding. It should be noted, however, that
determination by negation involves more than the corre-
lativity of terms as this is usually understood, since
23
its issue is not merely an abstract definition but a
determination of thought or essential reality*
Through negation, then, all such philosophical
categories as being and becoming, quality and quantity,
form and dynamic, thought and being, and all other
antitheses which, viewed from a perspective which trans
cends them, are constituted by abstract philosophical
categories, are mediated to a unitary concept that
embraces the terms out of which it is mediated. The
negation and mediation to a new unity of each of these
and a multitude of other antithetical terms contributes
to, and partakes of, that all-comprehending unity of
thought, the Absolute, in-and-for-itself, in which all
finitude is overcome. This unity, when completely
realized, is for Hegel the fullness of formed content.
The complete realization of this unity, embracing the
mediation of the whole of the content pertaining to each
of its parts, is not to be accomplished within history
but as the culmination of history. The rational prin
ciple, the Notion, by which this unity is to be realized
can be determined, however, and indeed has been deter
mined.7
7
The exposition of the logic of the Idea, the final
and inclusive mediation of which is the Notion, is first
set forth in a relatively complete and finished form in
the PhHnomenologie in 1807, and later in the larger and
shorter works on logic, published between 1812 and 1816.
24
Abstractness and Concreteness
From the perspective which has transcended a par
ticular category, the finitude of this category may be
seen to be constituted by its abstractness, by its being
what it is and having the truth it has only as abstracted
from the unity and wholeness of the organic process of
becoming, which transcends it. In mediation via negation,
an increment of concreteness is gained. The whole course
of the mediation of thought is a development that begins
with the most empty and abstract categories and progres
ses toward the concreteness of the notion. Moreover, the
form of this becoming is the form of a concrete process,
thesis and antithesis moving toward synthesis. As repre
sented in abstract thought (in the Logic of the Idea) the
concept of this form is an abstract concept, yet that
which it represents is a concrete phenomenon--a concrete
g
phenomenon, moreover, which is universal. This concrete
phenomenon is universal in the sense that it is a form of
Q
The dialectic of the Logical Idea realizes only an
ideal concreteness. This is to say, concepts are concrete
only in the sense that they represent for thought the
concreteness of Absolute Spirit realizing itself. The
fact that Hegel sometimes refers to thought as something
over against nature, thought in its finitude, and some
times to thought as transcending the duality of subject
and substance, complicates the treatment of the theme,
abstractness and concreteness. As will be noted in the
chapter following, thought in this latter sense achieves a
greater and qualitatively different concreteness than
thought within the logical Idea.
25
thought issuing in a mediation which, belonging to the
phenomenology of Spirit, is actual or potential for the
consciousness of all rational beings. This form
of the concrete and particular, which is universal, is
designated the concrete universal.
The Variety of Negations
As in the case of several other terms which Hegel
employs throughout the system, contradiction (Widerspruch)
and negation (Negierung) take on differing connotations in
different contexts. These terms are least likely to seem
deceptive when employed within essence, physics, and
objective spirit, second moments within the logic of the
Idea, Nature, and Spirit, respectively, because, within
these contexts, the antithesis is distinctively and
decisively other than, and stands over-against, the
thesis. In the abstract immediacy of being, within the
logic of the Idea, on the other hand, contradiction takes
on the connotation of simple opposition. These simple
oppositions flow into one another without negation in the
more radical sense. The contradictions, being at this
point between comparatively empty and abstract categories,
are no more than analogous to contradictions between full
blown ideas. But contradiction has a still different
character within the Notion and within Absolute Spirit,
though this character is not uniform throughout these
26
developments. This different character is generally
owing to the fact that the subject, by virtue of having
partially realized its inherent identity with objective
spirit, has partially overcome the finitude that char
acterized him as standing over against an alien world.
Here contradictions assume the character of mere tran
sitions of consciousness. These transitions are generally
presented as having a reasoned necessity. Conflict taken
up into reason, however, has a quite different character
than conflict at the lower levels of the development of
9
thought•
Q
Stace observes that the transitions within art do
not take the form of deductions. W.T. Stace, The
Philosophy of Hegel (London: Macmillan and Co., Ltd.,
1924), p. 484. Contradictions, he claims, are neither set
forth nor annulled. He concludes, on this account, that
these transitions lack the objective character of medi
ations. This judgment of Stace that Hegel was not able
to carry out with complete consistency the dialectical
principle of determination by negation is well founded, as
I shall show in Chapter IV. His contention that Hegel is
guilty of a "laxity of deduction" in his treatment of the
whole sphere of Absolute Spirit, however, fails to give
consideration to the fact that little contradiction re
mains to be resolved at this point in the dialectic, and
that further resolution, given Hegel's overall program,
would necessarily have to be of a different character.
McTaggart would seem to have provided a more adequate
bases for evaluating the consistency with which Hegel was
able to employ the dialectical method in the various
phases of his philosophy. This basis is suggested by the
employment of the analogy of a ship tacking against the
wind, which I will quote in part.
"The movement of the dialectic may perhaps be
compared to that of a ship tacking against the wind. If
we suppose that the wind blows exactly from the point
which the ship wishes to reach, and that, as the voyage
continues, the sailing powers of the ship improve so that
27
It was the greatest audacity on the part of Hegel
that, having adopted the program of determination by
negation, he not only applied this program to the deduc
tion of the categories of reflective thought, but to the
categories which he conceived according to this principle
as sub-specie and supra-specie to reflective thought as
well--to the categories, that is, which lie within the
spheres characterized as abstract immediacy and concrete
immediacy. So certain was he of the universality of this
principle that he reconceived the total content of
philosophy under its direction. On this account, negation
passes under one name in various parts of the system, even
though it assumes a quite different character within these
various parts.This extension of the principle of
it becomes able to sail closer and closer to the wind, the
analogy will be rather exact . . . the change in the
ship's sailing powers which allows it to go nearer to the
wind, and so reduces the distance which it is necessary to
travel in order to accomplish the journey, will correspond
to the gradual subordination of the elements of negation
and opposition, which we have seen to take place as we
approach the end of the dialectic." John McTaggart Ellis
McTaggart, Studies in Hegelian Dialectic,Second edition,
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1922), p. 144f.
McTaggart's insight into the changing character of
successive moments within the dialectic has been found
relevent to the setting up of criteria, in Chapter V, by
which to judge the conformity of the various moments
within the dialectic of religion to the form of dialectic.
lOsome considerable attention has been given to
this point by McTaggart. John McTaggart Ellis McTaggart,
Studies in Hegelian Dialectic, Second edition (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1922). Especially note
Chapter IV "The Development of the Method," pp. 119-156.
More recently it has been considered by J.N. Findlay, with
negation, if it can be regarded as plausible, implies
that thought, conceived according to true principles, has
before it an unrestricted scope of comprehension, and
that what it thus comprehends is essentially itself made
explicit. The plausibility of this extension of the
principle of negation, insofar as this most directly
affects his doctrine of God, will be considered in
Chapter V. A few comments respecting Hegel's method of
justifying it will, however, prove relevant to the expo
sition of the concept.
Synthetic a priori Concepts
The necessity which attaches to this movement of
thought by negation is, at least in most instances,
derived from the consideration that what is being ex
plained is not merely hypothetical, but is a concept
(or concepts) of which the mind is in full possession.
Hegel, like Kant, began his philosophizing with the
supposition that we make synthetic a priori judgments.^
results which seem somewhat more damaging to the dialec
tical method. J.N. Findlay, A Reexamination of Hegel
(New York: Collier Books, 1962). Especially, see
Chapter III, "The Dialectical Method," pp. 55-80.
^Thus, the beginning of the dialectic presupposes
the Notion from the perspective of which this beginning
is set forth, and the entire exposition is the analysis
of the highest and most comprehensive synthetic concept
attained by consciousness. "Das Wahre ist das Ganze."
Hegel, PhMnomenologie, p* 24. The deduction of the parts
presupposes the whole.
29
The thinker thus finds himself in possession of concepts
of which he cannot give an empirical account* By the
principle of negation as the dynamic of the process of
thought, Hegel proposes to explain how these concepts are
constituted in the dynamic process of thinking. His
program is to traverse the route by which thinking has
arrived at its primary categories, and to do so in such a
way that the principles by which they are constituted,
and by which they constitute a formal unity, is exhibited.
The principle of this unity is the principle of the
organic interrelatedness of these categories in their
unfolding. Species being contained in genus, the highest
category of thought, i.e., Absolute Spirit, which issues
as a mediation of thought, will comprehend within itself
that principle of unity.
The One and the Many
Hegel proposes, by the principle of negation, that
it is not only possible but necessary for two opposites,
an identity and its other, to be essentially identical
while there yet remains a sense in which they are in
opposition. Upon the movement from unity to duality in
concrete thought, he based his proposed solution to the
12
problem of the one and the many. Moreover, throughout
^Stace writes, MWe shall find that Hegel explains
with perfect precision and clearness how and in what sense
the thought (category) of unity is identical with that of
30
the dialectical schema, the second moment, which issues
as a mediation out of the identity that is set forth as
the first moment, contains the principle of plurality.
Thus, in the dialectic of the thing (thesis) and its at
tributes (antithesis) the attributes constitute a
plurality which must be determined to unity. In dialecti
cal fashion, the mind moves between the concept of the
thing, an empty abstraction, and the attributes which are
to determine what the thing is in concrete thought and
existence. Thus, the mind mediates unity and plurality
13
in its determination of a higher unity.
The idea of unqualified difference is regarded as
an abstraction. So also the idea of bare tautological
identity is an abstraction. Neither identity nor differ
ence can stand except as an abstraction. These abstrac
tions, which cannot stand by themselves, point to a
higher truth of a particular consisting in a unity of a
plurality of mutually related elements.^4 A plurality of
such unities is, in turn, mediated into successively
multiplicity, and how and in what sense they are different.
We have already seen that he explains, perfectly logically
and rationally, without any mystery, how being can be
identical with its opposite, nothing." W.T. Stace, The
Philosophy of Hegel (London: Macmillan and Co., Ltd., 1924)
p. 96.
^PhSnomenologie, pp. 93-98. Phenomenology,
pp. 163-168.
^Mackintosh, op. cit., p. 134.
31
higher unities within the system. Since the highest and
most comprehensive unity is God, Absolute Spirit, this
proposed solution to the problem of the one and the many
may be seen to have important consequences for Hegel's
doctrine of God, From the supposition that plurality
always implies a unity of a plurality, Hegel moves
naturally to the conclusion, that the unity of the essen
tially real and actual (both form and content) within
experience (experience, that is, conceived as most essen
tially constituted by the phenomenology of concrete
universals) is in God, and that our knowledge of this
unity is an essential aspect of our knowledge of God,
The Concrete Universal
The Form of Essential Reality
In the consideration of negation, the concept of
the concrete universal has already, and of necessity, been
introduced. The concrete universal is the universal form
of essential reality in its particularity. As a generic
name, it designates the form of all particular concrete
universals though these, as the name implies, are not
classes but unique particulars. As pertaining to the
empirical world and finite consciousness, these unique
particulars may perhaps be most appropriately thought of
32
as eventsAs pertaining to Absolute Spirit, they are
eternal moments* Each of these unique particulars ex
hibits within itself both the principle of negation, in
that the antithesis negates the thesis, and the monistic
principle, in that, in the synthesis, a new and more
comprehensive unity is achieved*
On the page following may be found an outline of
the dialectic as a whole.As may be observed from this
outline, the system as a whole is constituted by the
concrete universal in which the logical Idea is the
thesis, Nature, or the Idea outside itself, the antithesis,
and Spirit in-and-for-itself the synthesis. Each of
This judgment would seem warranted if it is kept
in mind that events are found to conform to thought and
are taken up into thought.
This is not to say that a thing, i.e., a chair,
conceived as an ordinary common sense phenomenon, is an
event, but that the essence of the chair is constituted by
concrete universal events. The chair is constituted by
positive and negative electricity, and by quality and
quantity which is synthesized in quantified quality, or
measure, etc. Furthermore, the concept ”chair” is formed
by a dialectical movement of thought between the bare
abstract notion of a thing and the qualities or attributes
that may properly belong to the concept at a given time
or place. The chair may also be viewed as a partial
mediation of time and space, and these moments contain
all of those above mentioned. The concrete mediation of
time and space realized in the chair thus constitutes the
essence of the chair. Thus the total structure that
constitutes the essence of the phenomenal chair may be
conceived in terms of a variety of types of concrete
universals, each inclusive of others.
■^This outline, though by no means complete, will
serve to locate the dialectic of Absolute Spirit (right
column, final category) to be taken up in the two chapters
following.
33
DIAGRAM OF THE HEGELIAN SYSTEM
(following the Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences)
fthe Idea in itself
(The Logical Idea)
The Idea
(All Reality)
The Idea outside
Itself, or Nature
'feeing
S Essence
The Notion
Mechanics
^ Physics
yOrganics
Subjective Spirit
The Idea in and for ^Objective Spirit
^Itself, or Spirit
^Absolute Spirit
34
these, in turn, contains a concrete universal within
which each of the triad of moments contains concrete uni
versals subsumed under it, et cetera* In parts of the
dialectic, there are as many as six levels of subsumption
of concrete universals within the Idea. Each concrete
universal, in turn, constituted by thesis, antithesis,
and synthesis, is regarded as constituting a phase of the
17
onward march of the Idea in its unfolding.
Each of these moments within the dialectic consti
tutes a mediation of thought. The terms, "mediation" and
"dialectic," are often used interchangeably by Hegel. In
the course of this essay I have found it useful, however,
for reasons which will become apparent, to use the terra
dialectic to refer to the process by which Hegel finds
mediations to be effected. While process and product
cannot be strictly separated, in referring to a particular
issue of the development, or to the whole of it, as a
mediation or a mediated concept, I shall refer most
chart of the dialectic as a whole may be
found in W.T. Stace, The Philosophy of Hegel (London:
Macmillan and Co., Ltd., 1924) in the back of the book.
This chart is adequate for gaining an understanding of
the comprehensiveness of the schema. It should be kept
in mind, however, that there are notable changes in the
developments of the dialectic of the logical idea in
Hegel's various major works that set forth that develop
ment.
35
specifically to the product of the dialectic rather than
to the process whereby it is proposed that this product
or result has come to be. Both the second and third
moments of the concrete universal are regarded as medi
ations « Since the synthesis becomes, in turn, the thesis
of the successive phase of the dialectic, every thesis or
first moment in the dialectic excepting the case of being
conceived as a pure abstraction, is also a mediation.
Pure abstract being, with which the dialectic begins,
must be presupposed to be an absolute datum of thought,
and apart from which thought is not possible.
Being, Nothing, and Becoming
The general character of the concrete universal may
be seen as exemplified by the dialectic of being, nothing,
and becoming, the first development within the logic and,
hence, also the first triad within Being. As in the case
of every triad, the first category is presented as a
positive assertion. In the case of being, what is
affirmed is that something, a "this,” is. Hegel regards
this as a necessary presupposition, apart from which
thought cannot proceed. The affirmation of a "this,”
however, implies something that is "not-this," or, with
respect to "this," nothing. Thus, the "this” in one
respect "is" and in other respects "is not." What "is
not," however, is essential to the determination of what
36
it "is," seeing that it cannot be affirmed to be apart
from its delimitation from what is not. This non-being
thus contains the potentiality of being, what it implicitly
is and may become explicitly. Thus, the "negation" of
being by nothing issues in the becoming of being, this is
18
to say, in its enrichment.
Thus, the contradiction between the first and
second categories is always reconciled in a third in which
is found the unity of the two preceding, which third con
tains the difference between the two and their underlying
harmony and unity. The determination of this third cate
gory involves the employment of the principle of reason
corresponding to the syllogism. This is to say, the
thesis constitutes an assumed identity to which univer
sality is attributed, the antithesis a proposition res
pecting a plurality of particulars,^ and the synthesis
the mediation of the abstract universality of the first
and the concrete particularity of the second. What is
derived from each category is an explication of what,
when seen within the dynamic process of thought's
development, may be seen to be implicit within it.
*SHegel, EnzyklopSdie der philosophischen
Wissenschaften, pp. 51-67.
■^In the case of this particular triad, in view of
its position at the very beginning of the dialectic, the
plurality of particulars pertaining to the second moment
would merely consist of unspecified abstract and inde
terminate potentialities.
37
Reason and the Understanding
Conceiving the categories of thought as related as
species and genus, at the same time that Hegel conceives
the development of thought as dynamic process, he finds
his problem was that of passing from species to genus in
spite of the differentia. His method was to conceive the
differentia as always the negative of the species. In so
doing, he rejected as less than the complete truth of the
matter, the old view that genus excludes differentia. The
level of thought, on the one hand, that holds two opposites
to exclude each other is the level of the understanding.
The understanding deals with discrete identities, with
A and not A, the origin of which it can never comprehend
and which it can only relate as abstract members of the
alphabet of existence. Each category remains an insulated
self-existent being, static and lifeless, without any
essential or necessary connection with any other category.
For the understanding, there is no passage. The cate
gories of essential reason, on the other hand, are alive
with movement, flowing into one another as being was noted
to flow into becoming. Only reason can deduce the cate
gories. Breaking up the rigid schematism of the under
standing, reason sees that A and not A are identical in
their difference and that the truth of them does not lie
38
in the either-or of the understanding.20
The Dialectic of Logic,
Nature, and Spirit
21
As may be noted by reference to the outline,
the dialectic of religion (within Spirit), to which I
shall shortly turn, presupposes the complete development
of the Notion as Logical Idea, abstracted from all con
crete reality. The Notion is concrete in the sense that
it is self-contained. Its development is conceived as
exhaustive of the essential moments in subjective thought.
It constitutes a unity in which subjective thought as
such can come to rest. The dialectic of religion is con
ceived as a part of the dialectic whereby this notion
realizes itself in the concrete determination of the
religious consciousness and in the concrete determination
of the facts and events of history. The spiritual con
sciousness and history must be found to contain the form
of the Notion and to exhibit the stages of its realization
in their own process of unfolding in time. In this sense,
the hierarchy of concrete universals constituting the
religious consciousness and history are conceived as
representing a greater increment of concreteness, and a
different kind of concreteness than that realized in the
20G.R.G. Mure, A Study of Hegel's Logic, p. 101.
2^See page 33.
39
Notion. What we have here presented is the process
whereby not merely an idea as abstract is realized but a
process whereby Idea realizes itself as embodied in his
tory and in spirits. In the course of this process,
history and spirits are in the course of realizing their
o o
essentiality as Spirit.
It may be queried why the dialectic of the logical
Idea is developed as separate and distinct from the dia-
23
lectical developments of nature, religion and history.
Hegel, following Kant, held the forms of reason to con
stitute a unity of forms in the mind. He held, and here
he departed from Kant, that these forms arise not only
with experience, but also from experience, from experi
ence, that is to say, in the sense that they arise in the
dialectical relation between subject and object. Wishing
first to exhibit this unity of forms in the mind, however,
he left their exhibition within nature and history
^2As Stace has noted regarding the subjective and
objective aspects of the Idea or Reason: "Objective and
subjective reason are identical, and the Logic is there
fore the science of both. As the science of the objective
reason, the Absolute, the supreme reality, it is an
ontology or metaphysic. As the science of subjective
reason, of the categories with which we think, it is an
epistemology. . . . And lastly, since it is the science
of human, i.e. subjective, reason, it is also, in the
usual sense of the term, a logic." (5-p. 123.)
23
The dialectic of religion and the dialectic of
history are essentially one dialectic developed from the
two perspectives of the religious consciousness and
objective history.
40
comparatively undeveloped within the logic. While these
spheres furnish the content for determining the forms of
thought, the purpose of the logic is to exhibit the pure
form of subjective thought which is the residual of
thought determined by this content. By way of contrast,
the chief aim within the dialectic of history is to ex
hibit that part of this form which pertains to conscious
ness, within the content of history. Just as everyday
consciousness is conceived as bringing to experience the
a priori forms of reason, so Hegel approaches the con
crete content of consciousness and of history with these
forms. In his case, the explicit and detailed development
of the Notion preceded these analyses, since he held that
the inner structure of these spheres must necessarily
conform to the form of the Notion. This was, at least, a
24
hypothesis to be tested.
This brief introduction to the concept of
thought as mediation may be supplemented by reference
to the following discussion of the dialectic: Alexandre
Kojfeve, Hegel: Versuch einer VergegenwHrtigung seines
Denkens. Herausgegeben von Iring Fetecher* (Stuttgart:
W. Kohlhammer Gmbh, 1958), Chapter IV, "Die Dialektik
der Wirklichkeit und die Method der PhHnomenologie,"
pp. 113-191. John McTaggart Ellis McTaggart, Studies
in Hegelian Dialectic (Second edition; Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1922), Chapter I, "The
General Nature of the Dialectic," pp. 1-31. W.T. Stace,
The Philosophy of Hegel (London: Macmillan and Co.,
Ltd., 1924), section on "The General Nature of the
Dialectic," pp. 1-31.
CHAPTER III
ART, RELIGION, AND PHILOSOPHY
THE PROBLEM OF THE RELIGIOUS AND THE
PHILOSOPHICAL CONSCIOUSNESS
Art, Religion, and Philosophy
The essential forms of the many definite religions
of the world emerge within that portion of the dialectic
designated "Absolute Spirit." The developments within
Absolute Spirit constitute the synthesis of subjective
spirit and objective spirit. Subjective spirit is soul,
sensation, intellect, appetite, and understanding. It is
defective in that it is merely inward, one-sided. Objec
tive spirit, as presented in the family, in moral law, as
the state, exhibits the opposite defect in that it is
merely outward and objective and without consciousness--
merely out there. Subjective spirit and objective spirit
axe, hence, two extremes that limit each other. Each is
finite. Since each is the other of the other, a negation
and further determination must follow. The overcoming of
the division between subjectivity and objectivity is the
content of this determination, one of the most significant
and strategic in Hegel’s program. Absolute Spirit must
be both subject and object at the same time. Man, to the
extent that he is to realize that potentiality by virtue
of which he is uniquely human, must likewise realize
himself to be both subject and object at the same time.
The mediations within Absolute Spirit are asserted to
express the realization of this identity. The infinitude
of Absolute Spirit consists in this, that, in contempla
ting itself, it contemplates its object. Here we have the
transcending of the finitude of an object that cannot be
essentially what it is except for an other, and a subject
which, in turn, cannot be what it is except for an
objective world which is its other. The mind is to appre
hend the Absolute as self and substantial reality at once.
The mediations within that phase of the dialectic,
designated Absolute Spirit, fall into three subdivisions:
art, religion, and philosophy, respectively.1 Within the
dialectic of art,2 the mind apprehends the Absolute as
pure immediacy. Since pure immediacy has no content which
strictly belongs to it, this immediacy attaches to the
form under which it is apprehended. Thus, the Absolute is
first manifested under the guise of external sense objects.
The shining of the Absolute through the veils of the sense
world is sublimity. In classical art, the art object is
*See p. 33 in Chapter II.
2
For the brief comments upon Hegel's dialectic of
art on this and the page following, I have drawn upon
W.T. Stace, Philosophy of Hegel (London: Macmillan and
Company, Ltd., 1924), pp. 443^484.
no longer merely the vehicle fox a beauty not intrinsic to
itself. It is itself beautiful. Classical art is essen
tially anthropomorphic; it finds human form most suitable
to embody its content. Man now comes to see the Absolute
primarily in himself. The Greek gods created by this art,
however, are neither free nor infinite; they are limited
by each other (by their differences). Likewise, the indi
vidual is one among others and unfree. There is again a
withdrawal from the sensuous (now the subject's own) into
subjectivity, a divestment of material embodiment. Spirit
predominates over matter, and this is romantic art. Spirit
has now not only entered into material form, as in classi
cal art, but has also passed out beyond material form.
Having found no sensuous embodiment adequate to it, Spirit
now rises to the dignity of being possessed of an inward
life untrammeled by material forms. The antithesis
between the Absolute (manifested as beauty) and its con
tent now become a conflict which the soul knows as a con
flict within itself. The soul, thus constituted, has
achieved to a level of concreteness in itself whereby it
can sunder itself and reconcile itself with itself. It is
thus the soul in inner conflict striving to effect its own
3
unity which is the subject of romantic art.
3
This conflict and unification of the spirit are
envisaged in the Christian consciousness as the life,
death, and resurrection of Christ, and in similar experi
ences of the apostles, saints and martyrs. The story of
44
The raising of this conflict to the level of
thought is the theme of the dialectic of the religious
and of the philosophical consciousness* The transition
between the dialectic of art and the dialectic of
religion, while not quite consistently maintained,4 con
stitutes no particular problem for the comprehension of
Hegel's doctrine of God. A like clarity does not obtain
respecting his conception of the relation of the
religious and the philosophical consciousness. I shall
Christ sets before the imagination the truth that the
divine, no longer mere universality, but concrete spirit
sundering itself into particularity, becoming flesh and
entering the actual world. In his life, death, pain and
suffering, the divine enters into all the conflicts of the
finite world. In the resurrection and ascension is pre
sented the return of spirit into itself as concrete unity,
the overcoming of the division it has made within itself
in its self-sundering. It seems fair to presume, however,
that the aspect of these envisagements pertaining to the
level of art is only such a foreshadowing of the signifi
cance of these themes as Vorstellungen, as is in keeping
with the mediations that have been affected.
4Aside from the matter which I am shortly to
consider, the outstanding difference in the treatment of
the subject matter as given in the Ph&nomenologie and in
the Vorlesungen lies in the fact that, in the
PhKnomenologie, natural religion precedes art, which is
followed by revealed religion, while, in the Vorlesungen.
religion is defined as belonging to that stage of con-
sciousness which has Spirit as its object, making of
religion a single discrete subdivision of the dialectic
as a whole, following art. Another difference lies in the
fact that magic, under immediate religion, gains status
as religion proper within the schema followed within the
Vorlesungen, whereas, within the Phitnomenologie, it
precedes religion proper.
45
turn now to the problem of interpretation that arises in
this connection, noting its significance with respect to
the implications of the concept of thought as mediation
for his doctrine of God.
The Problem of the Religious and
the philosophical Consciousness
In the Phanomenologie, the dialectic of philosophy
as such transcends and contains the dialectic of religion,
whereas, in the Vorlesungen uber die Philosophie der
Religion,5 this is not the case. In the Phanomenologie,
the philosophical consciousness is presented as possessed
not only of a form but also of a content which transcends
that attained by the religious consciousness. The claim
made on behalf of the philosophical consciousness within
Siegel, Vorlesungen Uber die Philosophie der
Religion, Zwei Banden, mit einem Vorward von Philipp
Marheineke, (Stuttgart, Fr. Frommanns Verleg, 1928). The
one English version which has been made of this work is
Hegel's Lectures on the Philosophie of Religion, trans
lated from the second German edition byE.B. Speirs and
J. Burdon Sanderson; the translation is edited by E.B.
Speirs, in Three Volumes (London: Routledge and Kegan
Paul, 1962). Where this translation seems less than ade
quate to the above work, I have provided my own trans
lation of quotations included in the text.
The lectures in the philosophy of Religion, having
been compiled by former students, do not come entirely and
directly from Hegel's pen. Nevertheless, they reflect his
mature thinking on religion during the last years of his
life. In addition, they contain a fuller development of
religion than that found in the Phanomenologie, the other
main source of his views on religion. Hence, it seems
appropriate to regard the Vorlesungen as the primary
source of Hegel's doctrine of God.
46
the Vorlesungen is notably more modest« Here it is the
declared task of philosophy to set forth the literal
6
truth of the Vorstellungen of religion in the form of
the Idea. It is explicitly stated, however, that the
content of the Vorstellungen of religion and the content
of the philosophical consciousness are the same. The
difference is one of form only. What is presented to the
religious consciousness in the form of Vorstellungen is
presented to the philosophical consciousness in the form
of thought.
Der Philosophie jLst der Vorwurf gemacht worden,
sie stelle sich uber die Religion: diess ist
^A Vorstellun^ is a pure thought or universal
clothed in sensuous imagery (or Kantian intuition), the
figurative bodying forth of some rational truth. Its
essentiality lies on the side of thought, which it repre
sented, as opposed to art symbols, which have their
essentiality on the side of unmediated nature. Thus,
popular thought conceives creation as an event whereby
something is caused to happen after the model of mechani
cal causality. This idea is a Vorstellung. The philo
sophical truth for which it stands is that the Absolute
puts itself forth into externality and otherness and be
comes world. Again, the persons of the Godhead are
represented as Father and Son. The relation of father and
son cannot be taken literally, but is rather the finite
relationship which most nearly corresponds to the truths
of the differentiation of the Notion within itself. The
popular idea of God as a person is likewise a Vorstellung.
What is presented here is the truth that the Absolute is
Spirit and not merely logic, mechanical cause, or the
vital principle of life. The Absolute is more than
personality, as that term is defined within the dialectic,
and this more can most adequately be presented to the
finite religious consciousness by the term "personality,"
though this is conceived, at least by the theologian,
as a Vorstellung.
47
aber schon dem Factum nach falsch, denn sie
hat nur diesen und keinen anderen Inhalt, aber
sie giebt ihn in der Form des Denkens; sie
stellt sich so nur uber die Form des Glaubens,
der Inhalt ist derselbe.7
The distinction is a crucial one for the understanding of
the implications for the doctrine of God of Hegel's con
cept of thought as mediation. If the philosophical con
sciousness transcends the religious consciousness in form
as well as content, the conclusion that Hegel viewed the
philosophical consciousness as more mature than the
religious consciousness, and that he viewed the latter as
a transitional state on the way toward the realization of
the former, is difficult to avoid. This understanding of
Hegel has been very common and has given credence to the
view that his philosophy is inherently inimical to the
status of religion, and that ideally religion is for the
masses who have not yet attained philosophical conscious
ness, If one holds that the philosophical consciousness
is to be distinguished from the religious consciousness
by a difference of form only, then the conclusion seems to
follow that the former represents not so much a more
7,,Philosophy has been reproached with setting
itself above religion; this, however, is false as an
actual matter of fact, for it possesses this particular
content only and no other, though it presents it in the
form of thought; it sets itself merely above the form of
faith, the content is the same in both cases."
Vorlesungen, Vol. II, p. 353, The translation is from
Lectures,"Vol, III, p, 148,
48
DIAGRAM OF ABSOLUTE SPIRIT
(Vorlesungen Hber die Philosophie der Religion)
(Art
The Religion of Nature
I. Immediate Religion
II. The Division of
Consciousness within
Itself
III. The Religion of Nature
in Transition to the
Religion of Freedom
The Idea
in-and-for
Itself,
or Spirit
< Religions B.
N c .
The Religion of Spiritual
Individuality
I. The Religion of
Sublimity
II. The Religion of Beauty
III. The Religion of Utility
The Absolute Religion
I. God in His Eternal Idea
in-and-for self; the
Kingdom of the Father
II. The Eternal Idea of God
in the element of con
sciousness and ordinary
thought, or difference;
The Kingdom of the Son
III. The Idea in the Element
of the Church or
Spiritual Community;
The Kingdom of the
Spirit
^Phi los ophy
49
mature view as the product of the seasoned reflection of
specialists whose task consists of analyzing the concrete
forms of thought's development realized by the natural
consciousness, whether religious or philosophical.
In this study, I shall interpret Hegel's doctrine
of God, with respect to this issue, in terms of the
position set forth in the Vorlesungen. This seems justi
fied on two grounds. In this work, Hegel specifically
sets out to present his doctrine of God for religion. On
this account, he would seem to have been released from the
need to pursue certain aspects of the polemic on behalf of
his philosophy, and the status of philosophy as such,
which is present in much of his work, including the
Phanomenologie and the two works on logic. Secondly, this
work, being based primarily upon his lectures given during
the years preceding his death, may be supposed to repre
sent his most matured thought on the subject.
While Hegel does not attribute to the religious
consciousness the capacity to attain to the comprehension
of Universal History as Idea or Reason, any more than he
attributes to this consciousness the capacity to trace out
the dialectic of religion implicit in the Vorstellungen
of his faith, this consciousness is constrained to view
the world as God's world, and, hence, as inherently a
world of order. This consciousness has not determined
this order in such an explicit and detailed way as to
50
provide ground for the comprehension of history as a
necessary sequence of concrete universals. If this con
sciousness is not fully and explicitly aware of what the
philosopher knows, that the determinations of nature and
of thought are contained in Spirit and that these realms,
as a consequence, must have the same form within objective
history as within the determinations of the religious
consciousness, it sees in history a divine drama of recon
ciliation, It knows history to be a divine drama, this is
to say, even though it has not necessarily arrived at the
explicit realization of all of the concrete events within
history which may be viewed as moments of that drama. The
fall, the Christ advent, reconciliation within the history
of the spiritual community, and the reconciliation of the
world by the spiritual community are all, of course,
conceived as historical and as central to the conception
of history. The realization of these moments in the form
of Idea, the analysis of the discriminations and sub
moments within these, and the subsequent realization of
history as a whole as embodying Spirit explicitly and in
concrete form, remain the distinctive role of the philo
sophical consciousness.
The relation between the religious and the philo
sophical consciousness is, however, less simple than the
division of labor, thus implied, would suggest. The
51
traversing of the dialectic within absolute religion pre
supposes, on the part of the spiritual individual, self-
consciousness of that phase of the dialectic. Further
more, since the moments within absolute religion contain
within them the developments of the discriminations worked
out within natural religion and the religion of spiritual
individuality, it would seem that Hegel meant to imply
that the religious consciousness at the level of absolute
religion contains a presentation of such moments as its
own overcoming of good and evil and the conflict of
beautiful individual (sub-moments within the dialectic of
religion). The traversing of the stages within the dia
lectic of absolute religion, thus, presupposes a con
sciousness of the moments of the dialectic itself, though
perhaps only in the form of Vorstellungen, in which
discriminations are not strictly maintained. It must be
remembered, moreover, that rational and moral choices are
prominent in the determination of the religious conscious
ness, at this level. In a genuine sense, the religiously
mature individual constitutes his own essential being
through his choices. As a consequence, there would seem
to be no question but that the individual is conceived as
having a certain comprehension of the form of his own
spiritual development. Thus the distinction implied by
the position set forth in the Vorlesungen proves to be
52
somewhat ambiguous.
Whatever may be the precise limitations of the
religious consciousness as such, from Hegel's perspective,
it would appear, as I noted, that the superiority of the
philosophical consciousness is a superiority with respect
to the performance of a distinctive function and not
necessarily a superiority owing to having attained to a
dialectically more advanced stage of consciousness. In
virtue of this function, the philosophical consciousness
comprehends the same truth in the form of idea, and pre
sumably, with an added increment of discrimination, which
the religious man comprehends as Vorstellungen. The form
of dialectic, as such, however, would appear to be
regarded as equally evident to the religious consciousness
as to the philosophical consciousness.
When one recognizes the prominence within Hegel's
thought of the notion that form and content mutually
effect each other, it can hardly be denied that the
position which he sets forth in the Vorlesungen, the
implications of which I have developed above, seems out
of keeping with his system as a whole. The philosophical
consciousness, by virtue of having a more adequate grasp
of the form of thought than the religious consciousness,
this is to say, would seem also to have a more adequate
grasp of its content. This, however, can hardly be taken
as adequate evidence that Hegel did not come to hold the
53
position he sets forth in the Vorlesungen. Even a pre
cursory examination of the various renditions of Hegel's
"logic" would suggest that he did not hesitate to alter
it on account of an alleged inviolability of the system.
An analysis of the relation of the form of the
dialectic and the content pertaining to the dialectic
will be set forth in the succeeding chapter, where it
will be noted that, even in the case of the forms of the
philosophical consciousness, a certain finitude clings to
them. This is because (to anticipate the fuller discus
sion of the issue), while Hegel conceived the forms of the
philosophical consciousness as concrete forms derived
from the process by which a content enters into the
determination of the form, there is always a content per
taining to these forms which has not yet entered into
their determination. On this account, allowance is made
(especially where it is the phenomenology of the
religious consciousness and of history which is being
considered) that these forms will be determined more
adequately.
To recognize that the philosophical consciousness
remains a finite consciousness makes the relation between
the religious and the philosophical consciousness held by
Hegel in the Vorlesungen somewhat problematical to define.
Both are more or less aware of the form of the development
54
of thought. The philosophical consciousness is more
explicitly aware of this form, and seeks to establish it
explicitly, as a coherent and continuous sequence of
determinations of thought related by logical necessity.
For the religious consciousness, this form may be grasped
as a kind of vision of history. The drive to make this
vision completely rational (rational, that is, in terms
of what that term may mean when the object of rationality
is the knowledge of concrete universals) and to relate it
to particular significant contents of history may be
lacking.
If Hegel ever held the view that the religious
consciousness ought ideally to be aufgehoben, he evidently
ceased to hold this view. From this it would follow that
the classical doctrines of the Christian faith (the
Vorstellungen), by the aid of which the religious con
sciousness is brought to the explicit realization of its
own potentiality and inherent nature, while subject to
modification as a result of the unfolding of Spirit in
the Church, are not viewed as likely to become irrelevant
or fall into disuse. The doctrine of God which issues as
the highest mediation of the religious consciousness,
while subject to certain modifications commensurate with
the concept of history as essentially constituted by the
acts of God, which are continually being unfolded, is not,
as such, to be set aside either by a few great
55
philosophers or by the large majority of ordinary
(Christian) religious persons. The religious conscious
ness will continue to be the consciousness that partici
pates in the resolution of contradictory actual
(wirklich) forces in culture in self-negation and
suffering. These views, which seem to follow from the
position taken respecting the relation of the religious
and philosophical consciousness in the Vorlesungen, are
consistently reflected throughout this work.
CHAPTER IV
NATURAL RELIGION AND THE PROBLEM
OF FORM AND CONTENT
Natural Religion
In the most primitive phase of immediate religion,
according to Hegel, the individual affects nature by a
mere assertion of a will, at first essentially undiffer
entiated from nature. The discrimination of will from
nature results from trial and error in affecting change
in nature. Then particulars in nature are perceived as
possessed of force to affect other things. The discrimi
nation of these particulars into universals then follows;
like particulars, these universals are understood as
possessing a certain force. Through further discrimi
nation, complexes of universals are construed as living
things, which are seen to have a determining power in
themselves. Thus, the concept of the self as a willing
power emerges. In like manner, a succession of discrimi
nations are each followed dialectically by a determination
of the resultant plurality as necessarily contributing a
higher unity. This unity, in each case, proves to have
been presupposed by the consciousness that makes the
discrimination. The dialectic between the plurality and
unity of the powers of nature is the central concern of
57
natural religions. The issue of this discrimination and
the mediation to unity of the plurality thereby distin
guished, is the consciousness of the self as an identity
and of God as object for the religious consciousness which
now emerges, Diremption within God and within the self,
that is, the distinction between good and evil, and the
realization of the unity of Spirit as other, presupposed
by the religious consciousness for whom this disremption
is real, constitute the second and third moments within
natural religion. This leads to the dialectic of the
religion of spiritual individuality which will be con
sidered in the subsequent section. Within the religion
of spiritual individuality, the teleological view of the
world, as a result of a series of discriminations and
determinations, comes to be understood in the form of an
implicit affirmation of the concept of God as Notion,
With this, Hegel arrives at the dialectic of Absolute
Religion. The principle by which one doctrine of God is
judged more comprehensive than another, and hence, as
belonging to a higher place within the hierarchy of
doctrines of God, is its greater increment of discrimi
nation mediated to unity within it,
I shall now sketch in the primary developments
within natural religion to provide a context for the
consideration of the problem of the relation of form and
58
content as this pertains to Hegel's concept of God.
In the religion of magic, the individual is only
in the course of clearly distinguishing himself from
nature and its power* Consciousness, at this level, is
mere passion that seeks to influence particulars of
nature, i.e., the sun and the moon, by a mere exertion of
will. These particulars prove recalcitrant to this
passion. They, and later, members of the animal kingdom,
come to be recognized as powers independent of will.
This independence is a threat to be overcome by magic
rites and fetish-worship, which also gives token of
active independence of subjectivity in the magician.
Life is the form by virtue of which man now makes his
self-consciousness objective to himself. Independent
spirituality is embodied in man himself, first in ideal
men who fill the roll of spiritual leadersMan now
comes to submit his immediate will (the only form of will
yet realized) to something which exists objectively for
him as substantial, in-and-for-itseIf. By bringing his
will into accordance with this something, he acquires a
2
certain dignity.
^Vorlesungen, Vol. I, p. 323f.
2when this third moment is viewed within the
context of the dialectic as a whole, it becomes clear
that the capacity to discriminate between living and non
living objects has not arisen at this point. This is
animism. If this capacity were to be expressed here, it
would be contingent upon the conception of the qualities
59
God has been reached by thought, but He is not
known to be thought. He is known as simple universality
without particularity, as the substance of the finite and
the power over it. Before this power, the finite con
sciousness seems swallowed up, a nullity. The second
moment within natural religion exhibits this universal
substance as self-determining. This substance is seen to
produce all finite existence as transitory and unessential
modifications of itself and then cause them to vanish into
itself. These modifications, which constitute the new
discrimination that has arisen in its pluralistic phase,
3
are the accidents of substance. The finite mind, being
in things as universals rather than the perception of the
things themselves as universals. The classification of
things in accordance with their qualities and the discrimi
nating attribution of particular powers to particular
classes of things would follow. Such discrimination has
not arisen. If it had, there would be a notable omission
of the dialectical development between the mention of
power as exemplified in universals as objects and power
exemplified in living things. Both are living things in
the same primitive sense that can be attributed to life
in this context. Hence there is no transition at all
between the third moment within immediate religion and the
first moment of the section following in which God has
become the abstract power of substance manifest indis
criminately in all things. This is in conformity with the
pattern of the dialectic, whose concluding moment is now,
however, to be viewed as a thesis or first moment, to be
viewed, in other words, in terms of its deficiency.
^As substance, God is absolute power, but the
power is blind and not determined by ends.
60
one of these accidents, is not free,
4
In the first phase of the religion of substance
the power of the laws and the rules of measure constitute
the nature of substance. These are practical in deriva
tion and nature. Substance is not spiritual. In the
second phase, substance is wholly abstract and without
attachment to anything concrete. It is formless abstract
unity as opposed to which existence, though it proceeds
out of it, is, paradoxically, unreal and accidental.
Subjectivity is the power of this substance in itself
apart from its operations,^ the infinitude which the
finite individual, as abrogated, posits or supposes as
within itself. At first this power is merely a basis
*The phases are exemplified by Chinese, Hindu,
and Buddhist religions, respectively.
^What Hegel apparently intends is that the concept
of substance is at this level identical with the harmony
of geometric figures and the laws pertaining to them
expressed in terms of simple mathematics. Figure and
number, however, are conceived as qualities of things.
^"Die SubjectivitSt ist Macht in sich als die
Beziehung der unendlichen NegativitHt auf sich . . ."
Vorlesungen, Vol. I, p. 365.
This transition may be imaged by reference to
an outline sketch of a stairway, which some will view
as representing a stairway leading up and others will
view as a stairway leading down. To view substance
as abstract or as concrete may seem at first an almost
arbitrary difference. This difference proves to have
consequences, however, which have now to be worked
out.
61
posited in the mind to account for the particular shapes
or existing forms. This posited basis proves to be neces
sary to the dialectical advance. An alternation between
unity and difference in the plurality of existence now
issues in the coming together of the differences into
unity. Self-consciousness, this is to say, now knows
itself to be in conformity with the substantial unity
which is its abstract object. Substance is apprehended
j
as thought, and as the essential element of self-
consciousness. God, while undetermined except as object,
is no longer in principle unknowable. Apprehended as
thought, God is simply the eternal. The individual, by
emptying his mind of content and engendering a state of
solitude and nothingness, finds himself identical with
God. He thus finds his soul to be persisting and
essential.7
Being-within-itself, now realized as thought, con-
a
tains the principle of determination within itself. On
7It is difficult to know what the import of this
» transition might be, other than that, once the mediation
to unity has reached a certain point, the unity contains
sufficient enrichment as to admit a greater increment of
difference to be mediated into it.
®nDass dieses Allgemeine ist durch Selbstbestimmen
des Geistes, von dem Geist bestimmt ist und fttr den Geist,
ist die Seite, nach der es Wahrheit ist. Insofern es
durch ihn gesetzt, ein Selbstbestimmen seiner Einheit
gem&ss ist, sein Selbstbestimmen ist, wodurch er in seiner
Allgemeinheit sich getreu bleibt, nicht andere Bestimmun-
gen hervorkommen, als jene Einheit selbst; danach ist es
62
this account it is the principle not only of unity, but
of totality as well. At first the unity of Being-within-
itself was merely constituted by the disappearance of
differences in the sense world into unity* Now, however,
o
the reflection of manifoldness into itself appears* What
is determined as having substantive content is so
das Gute." Vorlesungen* Vol. I, p. 422. This trans
lation is from Lectures, Vol. II, pp. 70f.
®At this point the soul comes to have a greater
increment of determinate thought. In the development
being described, the soul is at first an abstract some
thing essentially undefinable, an immediate center of
consciousness which, by stages comes to contain all of
the plurality of relations of the substance which is its
external object.
This phase of the dialectic may be imaged by
reference to what one sees in a kaleidoscope. One may
examine the contents of the several prisms and find
little if anything more than interesting random relations
between the pieces of colored confetti, though there is a
center of the whole image which each prism touches at
one point. The eye is somehow drawn toward this center,
which is now seen to be importantly related to the
unity of the outline figures of the prisms. When one
begins to note the repetition of patterns which, in each
of the several prisms viewed singly, hardly even
appeared as such, one is soon led to discover that the
unity of what is seen involves far more than the unity
of the outline figures of the prisms. One is led to
discover, eventually, that every detail of relation be
tween bits of colored confetti within each prism is
repeated in each of the other prisms. The whole con
figuration that appears in the kaleidoscope thus takes
on the character of a unity only intimated by the center
and by the outline of figures of prisms first seen.
This analogy will be misleading, however, if
Hegel is supposed to be describing merely alterations in
the experience of being. Being is concretely realizing
itself in the process Hegel is attempting to describe.
63
determined by being reflected into this unity* Here, it
would seem, Hegel conceives the beginning of thought as
self-consciously extending itself as system* The notions
of freedom and of objectivity are posited* The Divine
Notion becomes the unity of the discrete finite and the
infinite now established. The thought which only exists
within itself, pure Substance, is the infinite* The
finite, as thought determination, is the many gods. The
submergence of this many in the One of pure substance is
a merely negative and abstract unity.The finite is
only affirmative outside of the infinite. Now this
determinate finite being, negated by the infinite, is
11
taken up into the infinite. Its form is found commen
surate with the infinite substance, which thereby gets a
form and is no longer to be a merely abstract power*
The empirical self-consciousness for which God has
attained true objectivity remains distinct and intact,
■*-®Thus the reflection of manifoldness into unity
achieves only a limited degree of unity of the manifold
ness* The unity achieved is at first a unity of many
gods, i.e*, an abstract unity. Here we have exemplified
again how the dialectic progresses by degrees, with a
maximum of detail commensurate with the complexity of the
phenomena of the religious consciousness*
^The historical exemplification of the moment
being considered is Buddhist religion, in which everything
(including the many Bodhisattvas who act as mediating
spirits) stands as nothing before an infinite which is
conceived as nothing except power, Nirvana.
64
however. This is so by reason of the fact that it is
contained in, but does not contain, the mediation just
12
mentioned. It lacks the objectivity of the Absolute
and of consciousness in its own right. The substantial
unity determined by reflection, and thus mediation, into
the One as a determinate One remains the possession of
empirical self-consciousness. By reflection into this
unity consciousness advances and extends itself. Further
determination will be required, however, before this
consciousness will be found to be essentially constituted
by a context that rises above, but contains, the deter
minations of the sensible world.
It is no longer the case that God is man and man
is God in the empirical mode of existence, and as the
substantial unity of the sensible world. Retaining His
determination as subject, as a result of the mediation
^Vorlesungen, Vol. I, pp. 418f. The significant
passage which I have thus summarized seems less than
explicit. What would seem to be involved here is an
acknowledgement that the mediation of the empirical con
sciousness and abstract unity cannot be brought to
completion due to the inadequacy of that consciousness to
determine the complete content of nature available to it.
It is commensurate with this limitation that the unity of
substance must remain other to the empirical conscious
ness. Since the Divine as other, gains its concreteness
through the negation of its other (the substantial world
of measure), however, God shares this finitude, and in
the form of diremption of good and evil within Himself
to be subsequently treated. The emergence of this
finitude within the divine and the struggle to overcome
it, significantly enough, is the hallmark of His
emergence as Person.
65
just traversed, God is now a self-determined object
standing over against man, God in this self-determined
unity, however, is found to be a unity only in the course
of being realized. As a determination of self within
self, by having taken a negativity for assimilation, He
is in strife with an other within Himself. As simple
substance (and power), neither good nor evil can be
predicated of Him; He is good, this is to say, only in
the sense of being a unity. But good and evil now
emerge, whose reconciliation is, at first, merely some
thing that ought to be. They are, this is to say,
undetermined, and only when determination is achieved
does good in itself emerge as an increment to concrete
unity. In the ensuing strife Spirit wrestles with
itself to come to itself, to attain freedom by gaining
this increment of concrete unity and thereby becoming
self-determined.
The moment of power (the power of substance) is
still also present as subordinate to the principle of
Spirit proper. This moment of power is concrete life
and the manifold world. The Good as something immediate
(not a predicate) is identical with power, an element
posited in the Absolute to constitute an affirmative co
relative of the good and true that is self-determined to
be such by God.
66
The mediation of good and evil first appearing on
the side of Spirit now shifts to the side of the indi
vidual, whose consciousness is in God, and appears in the
i q
form of strife and pain. The loss of one’s own self,
the contradiction between this self and its "other,” which
also proves to be an aspect of this self, and the annul
ling of this opposition are the essential determinations
of spirit which now make their appearance* Since the
self is not yet posited as Spirit, as Subjectivity, this
course of estrangement and return cannot yet be posited
ideally, i.e., in thought. The moments of this determi
nation must be represented symbolically in external
nature. Thus, in Egyptian religion the chief god, Osiris,
comes to be represented as having the element of negation
1 4
in himself. The transition of consciousness here
represented in nature is one in which the strife and
struggle of the individual and of God are given in a
15
moment. It is through this moment that the individual
■^In Syrian religion.
14While the conception of Spirit is thus reached
in Egyptian religion, this religion generally remains a
religion of nature.
5 Like every moment within Hegel's dialectic, this
one, being eternal, is both a dialectical moment and out
side of time, and a moment being concretely realized in
time. This "being concretely realized in time," however,
refers, in the case of a given moment, not merely to its
first exhibition, but to its steady and continuous con-
cretization of a content pertaining to it throughout
history*
67
achieves spiritual individuality* What was realized on
the side of the divine in the preceding moment is now
realized in the individual.
McTaggart, perhaps by failing to grasp the re
lation between the form and content of the dialectic,
and by failing to comprehend what is implied by the fact
that space and time are thesis and antithesis being
mediated within the dialectic, has, it would seem, been
in error in construing that the dialectical moments are
logical moments and not moments, if eternal moments, in
concrete time. These moments are for Hegel the very
concretization of time. J. Ellis McTaggart, "Time and
the Hegelian Dialectic," Mind, Vol. II (New Series),
1893, pp. 490-504.
J.O. Wisdom has also arrived at the conclusion
that moments within Hegel*s dialectic are construed as
both logical moments and moments in time. J.O. Wisdom,
"Hegel's Dialectic in Historical Philosophy," Philosophy,
Vol. 15, 1940, pp. 243-268. Professor Wisdom has not,
however, developed the role of dialectical moments, once
they are manifest, in the steady and continuous forming
and concretization of content pertaining to them. So far
as I have been able to discover, this role has been
entirely neglected by Hegel scholars in the past. This
would seem to have been due to a lack of attention to the
relation of the form and content of the dialectic,
shortly to be considered.
16Spiritual individuality, born of the mediation
of good and evil to Good, is not to be realized until
this unity of the good is first apprehended as other.
This is in conformity with the dialectic: an increment of
discrimination to be realized in the religious conscious
ness first confronts that consciousness as estrangement
or otherness. This fact, understood from the perspective
of Hegel's method, necessitates that a mediation occur in
the other by virtue of which the unity is realized which
will, in turn, effect this mediation on the side of finite
spirit.
In a very significant sense, for us who view the
process, God, as He is presented at any given stage within
the dialectic short of Spirit in-and-for-itself, is finite.
While He stands as Absolute with respect to particular
contradictions that have been mediated and with respect to
the contradiction in the course of being mediated to
unity, He is finite with respect to those discriminations
and determinations which have not been unfolded.
68
The differences between good and evil which merely
vanish in Brahma are now explicit and in principle taken
up into this unity. The religion of nature and the
religion of free subjectivity appear intermingled in the
process whereby this unity is in the course of being
realized. Thus we have in these mediations the natural
element and inner substance. To natural being, a foun
dation other than itself is attributed, a foundation in
Spirit. The natural represents or means something other
than itself.
In Egyptian religion this other first achieves
such independent status as to survive the dissolution of
substantial being, which is, at this stage, substantial
being in nature. This development represents the final
phase of natural religion. Spirit now images itself as
free from sensuous perception, and even in such a way as
to imply clearly that its alliance with the sensuous
17
element is such as permits it to be free.
The Problem of Form and Content
The solution of the problem of the relation of the
For the religious consciousness, He is, however, absolute,
in the sense that He is the unity within the disparity
which for that consciousness is in want of mediation, and
the necessity of that mediation.
17
As over against Lamism, the departed may now
live on and without reincarnation into another body.
69
form and the content of Hegel's dialectic which is now
to be proposed has important ramifications with respect
to the character of the dialectic and with respect to the
character and extent of the knowledge of the Absolute
to which human consciousness could attain. Hegel has
often been charged with proposing that the philosopher can
attain, not only to the knowledge of God but to knowledge
essentially identical with that of God. By his consistent
habit of viewing the world from the perspective of the
goal or synthesis toward which the dialectic relentlessly
moves, Hegel would seem to provide some basis for this
conclusion. It is false, however, though the issues
relating thereto have often been regarded as moot.
The approach which is herein taken to this problem
has, so far as I have been able to ascertain, not pre
viously been taken. It is hoped that its employment may
render Hegel's understanding of the relation obtaining
between the Absolute and finite consciousness, and along
with this the relationship obtaining between the trans
cendence and immanence of the Absolute, in a clearer
light.18
18
Sterrett, in his exposition of Hegel's philosophy
of religion, presents considerable evidence that Hegel
regarded himself neither as an atheist nor as a pantheist.
He also makes it quite clear that Hegel neither held God
to be merely immanent nor merely transcendent. J.
MacBride Sterrett, Studies in Hegel's Philosophy of
Religion (London: Swan Sonnenschein and Co., 1891),
pp. 197, 200-211, and I64f.
70
The unity of substance, it may be noted, is first
realized on the side of Spirit, and is first apprehended
by the religious consciousness as other* In like manner,
the bifurcation of indeterminate good and evil and the
realization of the unity that accrues from their mediation
as determinate Good is first apprehended by the religious
consciousness as other, and as taking place on the side
Stace has also given attention to these themes
with substantially the same findings. W.T. Stace, The
Philosophy of Hegel (London: Macmillan and Co., Ltd.,
X924), pp. 484-515. In setting forth his own philosophy
of religion, which is very significantly informed by that
of Hegel, moreover, Stace develops a generally compatible
position with respect to these issues. W.T. Stace, The
Philosophy of Religion (New York: J.B. Lippincott Co.,
1§52), especially Chapter X, "The Problem of Religious
Truth," pp. 211-247.
Both Stace and Sterrett reflect a very different
view of these issues than, for example, Ostwald, who
finds in Hegel support for a monism of physical energy of
which even the will is an expression. W. Ostwald,
Grundriss der Naturphilosophie (Leipzig: P. Reclam Jun.,
1908). Also see Benno Erdmann, ttber den Modernen
Monismus (Berlin: Paetel, 1914), pp. 23-27. Feuerbach
also takes an extreme position, in that he finds Hegel's
theology to be anthropology. Ludwig Andreas Feuerbach,
Zur Kritik der Hegelschen Philosophie (Berlin: Aufbau
Verlag, 1955). Strauss, on the other hand, by his "left-
wing" rendition of Hegel's philosophy of religion, finds
each man to be his own God; man may approximate mystical
identity with Spirit. David Friedrich Strauss, Der Alte
und der Neue Glaube (Bonn: E. Strauss, 1881).
While these latter mentioned extremes of interpre
tation seem to reflect the views of their respective pro
ponents more adequately than Hegel's own position, they
are still occasionally reflected from different quarters
as representative of Hegel's position. It seems not lost
labor, on this account, to present additional supporting
evidence for the understanding of these issues as set
forth by Sterrett and Stace. This will be done within the
treatment of a critical problem of interpretation rela
tive to Hegel's doctrine of God which has not yet been
treated.
71
of Spirit. In these two instances a general principle
held by Hegel, pertaining to the dialectic within the
philosophy of religion, is exemplified. Unity at each
level of the dialectic first realizes itself in the other,
following which this unity becomes a unity realized in
and by the finite consciousness. This unity realized in
and by the finite consciousness, at first an abstract
unity, which is then taken up by finite consciousness and
mediated with a plurality of particulars, thereby gains
an increment of concreteness. For example, as the Divine
suffers disremption within itself, it is split between
that content (substance) mediated into unity within the
first moment of the dialectic and a content not yet
mediated in the second. This unmediated content is, at
this point, undetermined good and evil. The process
whereby good and evil are determined to unity issues in a
unity which is more than mere substance, it is personality
as well. This unity, first apprehended as other to the
individual (and as abstract in this sense) now becomes
a unity into which good and evil as confronted by the
individual consciousness are in the course of being
determined to a higher unity (than the unity of sub
stance), a unity of Good.
Thus the general principle that the form of the
dialectic belongs to that potentiality for finite
72
consciousness contained plurally as eternal moments
within the divine, expresses itself in the case of particu
lar phases of the dialectic. This form becomes explicit
when it is mediated with a finite content, which mediation
is, at the same time, an actualization of both form and
content. In its first phase, this mediation is not
appropriated by consciousness. When it has progressed
to a point, consciousness grasps an abstract unity and, in
turn, the form whereby this unity is seen to stand opposed
to a plurality which, in the ensuing synthesis, is under
stood as having issued from this abstract unity. This
suggests a relation between form and content in Hegel's
philosophy which it would seem he has nowhere made
explicit, but which is nonetheless supported by converging
lines of evidence. Much of the misunderstanding of
Hegel's philosophy, and more particularly, his philosophy
of religion, seems to be owing to a lack of clarity
19
respecting this relation. Following a statement about
this relation of form and content in Hegel's philosophy,
some of these converging lines of evidence will be noted.
The realization of the form of a given dialectic
can never be construed as implying that all of the
content to which this form pertains or might pertain has
undergone the aufheben, the principle of which is thus
^See footnote 18 above.
described. This remains true despite the fact that this
form is realized concretely through the formation of a
content. While the form of a concrete universal is
determined and shaped by content and is not concretized
apart from content, the concrete realization of a form
should not be taken as implying that all the content
lying potential to this form has entered into its deter
mination. The forming takes place by degrees, and the
character of the form appropriate to the forming is
altered in the several stages along the way. Moreover,
when all of the forms of the series have been described,
the concretization of all content pertaining to that form
is not on this account accomplished, though it is cer
tainly proposed by Hegel that the principle whereby con
cretization takes place has been in essence described.
Failure to recognize the truth of this last state
ment has led, on occasion, to the view that Hegel held
that the philosophical consciousness which has traversed
the stages of the dialectic has come to view the world
from the perspective of the Absolute, as a completely
formed and finished content, as a world in which nothing
remains to be done. That the philosophical consciousness
is not conceived by Hegel as having ever achieved this
exalted status becomes clear if it is observed that,
while nature is the development of idea in space and
history is the development of Spirit in time, the
74
mediation of time and space is not envisioned as occurring
within history. While it is clear that Hegel holds the
philosophical consciousness to be capable of realizing at
least the approximate form of this mediation, and while
he conceives that form to have been derived through the
examination of concrete thought and the world as deter-
mined in thought, there was presumed to be a residual of
content that had not yet been mediated or formed by that
form. The claim that the form of the dialectic of space
and time had been set forth did not involve a claim that
the mediation of time and space, the culmination of
history, had been realized, even in Hegel's own philosophy.
Moreover, I maintain that this principle pertains
not only to the dialectic of space and time as such, but
to every concrete universal within the system. Brief
reflection upon the dialectic of religion will provide
support for this thesis. Regardless of the adequacy with
which the stages of the religious consciousness have been
described, and regardless of the doctrine of God held by
the religious community, every individual must traverse
anew the route of development by which this consciousness
has been realized. How is this retraversing of this route
to be regarded if not as an extension of the form of the
religious consciousness realized by the religious com
munity over a content (the consciousness of other indi
viduals) not previously formed?
75
In the development of the doctrine of the church,
it is evident that the spiritual individual is regarded
as remaining a finite consciousness in the course of
realizing, in his own life and activity, the reconcili
ation of the world within the framework of the spiritual
community. What becomes known to the member of the
spiritual community in this development is that the world
is, in principle, reconciled to Absolute Spirit, not that
this reconciliation has actually been fully embodied in
concrete relations. It is, however, realized as a moment
objectively present in Absolute Spirit, outside of space
and time. It is realized as Idea (if, perhaps, as idea
presented in the form of Vorstellungen).
From the above it may be seen that, while his life
is in Absolute Spirit and his essentiality is known to be
in God, this spiritual consciousness is never conceived
as coextensive with God. He remains a limited and finite
being, seeking the realization within the framework of the
world, of the Universal End which is now held to be only
implicit in the world.
The key to understanding this lies in noting that
the relation holding between form realized in a content
and the vast sea of content which is yet undetermined by
form. At each level of the dialectic there is a forming
of content pertaining to that level. This forming cannot
76
proceed beyond a certain limit, however, before that form
has undergone such an alteration that a new moment is
brought about. The movement from Being-within-itself to
reflection of the manifold into itself, which has been
reviewed, is an instance in point* Here the mediation is
a unity enlarged and enhanced by the dialectic which
precedes; the content, informed, in turn, by being medi
ated with this form, takes on an increment of discrimi
nation owing to a passing beyond this limit.
The forms of the dialectic which have been tra
versed are contained within the forms of the dialectic
now in the course of being realized, either by the indi
vidual or within the social order, even as they are con
tained within Absolute Spirit. It seems clear enough that
for Hegel these aufheben particular forms continue their
particular functions within the consciousness that has
transcended them at the same time they are taken up into
successive forms of the dialectic, at the same time, this
is to say, that they have entered into the determination
of the dialectically higher forms. This being the case,
they are aufheben only in the qualified sense that a
dialectically higher form has been derived from them
according to the logic of the dialectic.
Consider, for example, the dialectic of the thing
77
and its attributes as set forth in the Phanomenologie.20
This dialectic, by which the mind is seen to determine
the content and qualities that pertain to a thing, seems
to be the delineation of a process that is envisaged as
continually operative. It is difficult to understand
this dialectic otherwise than as always and everywhere
taking place when the mind is called upon to determine
the minimal qualities that shall constitute the concrete
unity of any particular thing, i.e., chair. These partic
ular determinations are ever being displaced by concepts
of things (such as chair) more appropriate to a time and
place than those which have been given. It is difficult
to avoid the conclusion that, for Hegel, the dialectic of
the thing and its attributes retains its particular
function after its form is aufgehoben by the forms which
transcend it in the dialectic.
Consider the dialectical development of quantum
21
out of quality. This dialectic sets forth Hegel's
understanding of the process of thought by which quality
is quantified, a process which he found exemplified in
the work of the physical scientist. It is difficult to
conceive that he viewed the work of the scientist
Ph&nomenologie, pp. 92-95.
2lWallace, The Logic of Hegel, pp. 190f.
78
otherwise than as a continuous application of this form
to the subject matter (qualities) with which the scientist
works, and which he seeks to reduce to number.
There would seem to be no alternative to recog
nizing that, for Hegel, a given form within the dialectic
retains its particular function within a system of such
particular forms, as well as gives rise to, and is taken
up into moments dialectically higher in the system. This
no doubt qualifies the sense in which a particular form
is held to be taken up into the forms which succeed in the
dialectic. In any case, if it was intended to be asserted
that aufheben forms of the dialectic are continually
operating upon (forming) particular contents that pertain
to them, this constitutes additional evidence to support
the interpretation which I have set forth regarding the
way in which Hegel conceives the relation of form and
content, namely, that upon which these forms are continu
ally operating is the content that has not yet been
determined by them.
Another source of supporting evidence for the
position taken respecting the way in which Hegel holds
form and content are related is to be found in his
conception of the relation of philosophy to the history
79
22
of philosophy. Each great philosophical synthesis, he
holds, contains and includes the essential developments
within the history of philosophy. Writing a great
synthesis involves the rewriting of the history of
philosophy in such a way as to exhibit the forces that
have entered into the determination of this new synthesis
and the goal which it posits for the history of a period.
In this rewriting of the history of philosophy, the
dialectical moments emerge in a new purity. Thus the
principle that content and form mutually effect each other
is not abrogated by the fact that the philosopher is able
to arrive at the essential form of the dialectic while a
vast sea of content lies undetermined. This is so because
the form of the dialectic which he sets forth, while de
serving the status of truth, is proximate and subject to
modification as it is further determined by content in
the work of later thinkers. From this it seems to follow
that the only aspects of his philosophy which Hegel
regarded as irrevocably and finally absolute are those
having to do with the method and principles of the dia
lectic. The forms of the dialectic are subject to
modification. Croce was quite correct in affirming
22
Darrel E. Christensen, "Philosophy and Its
History," The Review of Metaphysics, Vol. XVIII, No. 1
(September^” ^.$64), pp. SS-83, especially pp. 69-83.
23
This relation obtaining between form and content,
as these terms pertain to the whole of the dialectic, is
80
that, for Hegel, "all history becomes sacred history,
In this relation would seem to lie a key to the
fundamental discrepancy and irreconcilability between
the left and the right wing Hegelians, By the left wing
Hegelians, I refer to those dialectical philosophers, such
as Feuerbach, Ostwald and Marx, who gave emphasis to the
material and to what they regarded as the "hard," that is,
the historical factual and the empirical, strictly
defined. By right wing Hegelians, I refer to those
philosophers who gave emphasis to the Spirit side of
Hegel, such as Rosenkranz, Bosanquet, and Stirling. With
this latter group might be classed those who defined
spirit in a narrow way, making it the spirit of German
nationalism. In the case of Stirling, for whom the notion
as the immediately intuited a priori form of thought is
the secret of Hegel, this notion is given such prominence
that it tends to shift the emphasis away from concrete
determination of thought by natural and historical
contingency.
to be distinguished from form and content as these terms
pertain to the dialectic of appearance within essence
within the dialectic of the logical idea, though the terms
as I am employing them here may be viewed as, in like
manner, dialectically related.
24
Benedetto Croce, What is Living and What is Dead
of the Philosophy of Hegel" Translated from the original
text of the third Italian edition by Douglas Ainslie
{London: Macmillan and Co., Ltd., 1915), p. 69.
81
We still agree with Hegel, then, that, possessed
of the notion, we feel ourselves lifted high above
the historical, the external, the contingent, and
we shall only smile at the necessarily futile
efforts of a Strauss and a Renan to paw the
horizon.25
Both of these emphases have their rightful place
in Hegel*s system, and the determination of the proper
balance between them constitutes an indispensable ingredi
ent of an interpretation that does adequacy to the system.
The above outlined position respecting the relation of
form and content would seem to provide the basis for such
a balance. In experience the forms of reason become
mediated, concretized and brought to reflective and then
notional consciousness. Experience, of course, is not
limited to what is given in sense, since this is not
given apart from the transforming power of thought
operating upon it. Experience is the coalescence of the
form of the mind's apprehension and the matter of
experience, and it is this coalescence that reveals what
is at once transcendental and an approximation of the
transcendent.^ The unity of the forms of reason are
25James Hutchison Stirling, The Secret of Hegel,
(New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1898), p. 732.
2^I have taken the liberty of importing Kant's
term, "transcendental" in this context as an aid to
expressing what is really involved in Hegel's view of the
relation between the forms of thought determined within
finite consciousness and the same forms, except raised to
the level of perfect determination, as they exist in God
as the other of the world.
82
realized in this way and the spiritual individual faces a
world of unformed content with this unity grasped in
thought, a unity that stands to be further determined by
that which it is to determine.
Of all of the interpreters of Hegel, Stace appears
to have best achieved the balance that must be sought
here, and the relation of form and content as it has been
herein outlined seems to be as clearly implied in his
27
major work on Hegel as by Hegel himself. Thus, in
inquiring whether, for Hegel, the Absolute is Spirit or
the system of categories, Stace concludes that it is both.
There is an identity in distinction between Spirit in-and-
28
for-itself and the system of the categories. The system
of categories fully and finally determined would be a
system in which this implicit identity would have been
made explicit. This result, expressed in terms of the
present discussion, would follow the exhaustive determi
nation of the content of nature and history.
In the above, I have set forth what I understand
to be Hegel's view of the relation holding between the
form of the dialectic and the content pertaining to this
form at its various levels. The problem of interpretation
27
Sterrett has followed Stace in this matter, as
in many others.
28Stace, op. cit., pp. 118f.
83
which I have resolved in this way is too fundamental to
be avoided. It is clear that Hegel does not identify
either a mature religious consciousness or a mature
philosophical consciousness with the Absolute, A recog
nition of this fact necessitates a solution of the problem
of form and content something like that which has been
proposed.
This theme has been given emphasis partly on
account of the serious consequences for the understanding
of Hegel which have followed from his neglect by most
contemporary theologians.
The discussion of the program of the dialectic
and the problem of form and content was based primarily
upon developments within Hegel's account of natural
religion. My interpretation also seems to be supported
by other parts of the dialectic of religion, one instance
of which I shall shortly note, and to provide an important
key to understanding the dialectic of religion as a whole,
I shall now turn to the consideration of the problem of
the conformity of the dialectic to what Hegel apparently
holds dialectic should be. The discussion of this
problem will be based primarily upon the primary develop
ments within the religion of spiritual individuality.
The consideration of a fourth problem of interpretation,
that of the relation between those concrete universals
included within the dialectic and those which are not,
to be considered subsequently, will be based upon
developments within absolute religion* By proceeding in
this way, each of the problems of interpretation will be
taken up, in turn, immediately following the exposition
of that portion of the dialectic which provides the most
adequate context for its consideration. The expository
sections of the text will appear in the same order as the
various phases of the dialectic appear within the
Vorlesungen, so that, taken together, they constitute a
kind of summary presentation of some of the principal
developments within the dialectic of the religious
consciousness *
CHAPTER V
THE RELIGION OF SPIRITUAL INDIVIDUALITY AND THE
PROBLEM OF THE CONFORMITY OF THE DIALECTIC
OF RELIGION TO THE FORM OF DIALECTIC
Dialectic as it Pertains
to Religion
There is a widespread belief among scholars that
Hegel’s dialectic is arbitrarily conceived, and that it
does not adhere to principles upon which judgments might
be based respecting the truth or falsity of any particular
phase of the dialectic*1 Especially in view of the fact
that there is little research to which one may appeal for
help in formulating a certain answer to this belief,
insofar as it pertains to the dialectic of religion, it
has seemed appropriate to give particular attention to
the form of the dialectic of religion and the adherence
*-H,R. Smart writes, ”* • • dialectic, as Hegel
understands it, is a quasi-mechanical scheme, and the
alleged logical necessity of the development is actually
imposed upon it more or less arbitrarily.” . H.R. Smart,
Philosophy and its History (LaSalle, Illinois: The Open
Court Publishing Company, 1962). Leonard Nelson notes
that Hegel's dialectic rests upon the proposal that truth
is multifarious, and that, in effect, it provides no basis
for judging between the truth claims of various historical
philosophies. Leonard Nelson, Fortschritte und
Rilckschritee der Philosophic (Frankfurt am Main: Verlag
Offentliches 'Leben, 1962), pp. 26f.
86
of its various phases to that form. This treatment will
provide a basis for judgments, in the chapters to follow,
relative to the applicability of dialectical principles
to the phenomenology of the religious consciousness.
A substantial amount of scholarly research has
been devoted to the analysis of Hegel’s dialectic of the
2
logical idea and to the dialectic as a whole. The
results of this work remain indecisive at several crucial
3
points. The concern here being the dialectic of the
religious consciousness, it will not be necessary to
consider in detail the results of these works as they
pertain to the dialectic as a whole.
The analysis of the dialectic of religion is a
less complex undertaking. The specific character of this
development is stated clearly and generally adhered to in
the Vorlesungen. Moreover, a greater degree of uni
formity in the character of the necessity by which the
developments within this phase of the dialectic unfold,
2John McTaggart, Studies in the Hegelian Dialectic
(Cambridge: University Press, 1922); Jean Hippolite,
Logique et Existence; Bssai sur la Logique de Hegel
(parrs: Presses Universitaires de France, 1955)'; John
Baillie, The Origin and Significance of Hegel's Logic
(London: Macmillan and Co., Ltd., 1901); Gustav Emil
MUller, Hegel: Denkeschichte eines Lebendigen (MUnchen:
Francke Verlag, 1959)•
JIt is doubtless owing to this fact that no major
philosopher of the Hegelian school, with the possible
exception of Stace, has retained what could be considered
a semblance of Hegel's hierarchy of concrete universals.
87
renders less problematical the judgment as to whether a
given development adheres to the form of the dialectic.
Before proceeding further, it is relevant to
consider two notable conclusions which seem to follow
from the analyses of the logical Idea, or the dialectic
as a whole, to which X have referred.
In the first place, the nature of the necessity by
which one moment follows another within the dialectic as a
whole is highly varied. It is so varied, indeed, that
attempts to classify the mediations into types tend to
break down. The failure of such attempts suggests that
whatever necessity pertains to any movement within the
dialectic is a necessity peculiar to that movement. This
conclusion may seem not to do full justice to all of the
statements which Hegel at various times makes about the
dialectical method; but in making the validity of the
method contingent upon the analysis of its every part, it
is compatible with the concreteness and particularity of
the concrete universal.
To discover a connotation properly belonging to
the concept of Widerspruch that pertains to the relation
of all theses to their respective antitheses may be an
4
impossibility, as Findlay would seem to suggest. The
^"The dialectical transition from one notion or
phase of being to the next also differ vastly from case to
case. Sometimes a term plainly involves an inner absur
dity or contradiction which only the next term can remove.
88
term, "opposition,1 1 removed, as it is, from such conno
tations as the term contradiction receives from its use in
deductive logic, would seem more aptly to suggest the
quality of relation which Hegel understands to hold
between every thesis and its antithesis. The particular
instances of negation within the dialectic, however, by
whatever name they are called, are always subordinate to
the synthesis. Negation in the sense of "opposition" of a
concept to that which it is not, this is to say, is the
dynamic of the process that moves toward synthesis.^
, , , In other cases a term merely involves an incomplete
ness of which the next term furnishes the required comple
ment, . . . In yet other cases a subsequent phase merely
represents a more explicit version of some character ob
scurely manifested by its predecessor. . . . In yet other
cases the transition resembles the passage from talk which
obeys certain rules, to meta-linguistic talk about that
talk and about its rules. . . . In yet other cases the
transition is really a philosophical joke. . . . The de
vices by which the Dialectic is made to work are, in fact,
inexhaustible in their subtlety and variety. Hegel admits
that they change systematically from one section of the
Dialectic to another, but the change is much greater and
less systematic than he ever admits," J.N. Findley,
Hegel: A Re-examination (New York: Collier Books, 1962),
p. 70.
5
McTaggart seems to have been mistaken in assuming,
on this account, that the principle of negation, as such,
is subordinated in the dialectic, John McTaggart Ellis
McTaggart, Studies in the Hegelian Dialectic (Cambridge:
University Press, 1922), pp. 131, 10. Since, for Hegel,
there can be no dialectic apart from negation in the sense
of an identity in opposition to that which it is not (note
the development of the principle of negation in Chapter
II), the principle as such is never subordinated, but only
particular concrete instances of negation. What I wish to
suggest, by way of contrast, is that a quality more proper
ly expressed by the term "opposition" is a dominant
feature of the dialectic.
89
"Completeness” seems likewise attributable to
every mediation. If one assumes that the truth is the
whole of Absolute Spirit in-and-for-itself, this is to
say, every mediation, to the extent that it is found to
necessarily follow from the moment which precedes by the
necessity peculiar to it, presents an actualization of
potentiality present in that preceding moment, and in this
sense constitutes its completion.
These quite general terms, opposition and complete
ness, then, would seem to be applicable to all or at least
nearly all of the developments within the dialectic.6 It
would seem improbable whether any development which
cannot be characterized in these terms may properly be
considered dialectical. That a given development repre
sents an opposition to a completeness appropriate to that
which precedes would seem to constitute it a dialectical
development. It would seem at least problematical whether
a much more explicit characterization of the necessity of
6These terms seem sufficiently general to embrace
all of the types of dialectical transitions which Findlay
outlines with the possible exception of those cases which
he finds to consist of philosophical jokes. The recog
nition of the wide variety of types of transitions doubt
less renders the understanding and interpretation of the
dialectic more difficult than it would otherwise be.
This would not, of itself, seem to constitute the dia
lectical method a failure. It would rather seem to force
a recognition of the uniqueness which Hegel attributed to
each phase of the dialectic and of the fact that each
must be judged for its conformity to the form of dialec
tic in consideration of this uniqueness.
90
the developments within the dialectic can be determined
apart from the analysis of particular instance. It is
primarily upon the result of the analysis of the particu
lar phases of the dialectic that judgments respecting
both its success and its significance must be based.
Findlay would seem to have been hasty in drawing
the conclusion that, because of the variety of relations
between philosophical categories which Hegel treats as
Widerspruch, the dialectical method breaks down. He
would seem to have been too hastily led to this conclusion
by failure to give due emphasis to the particularity and
concreteness of the concrete universal.
A second conclusion which may be drawn from the
analyses which have been made is that what the dialectic
presents is not a series of deductions according to a
strict usage of that term, but an attempt to account for
the interrelation of philosophical concepts which, due to
an inherent characteristic, overlap and shade into one
another. It is an attempt to account for the advances
of thought from the simple and elemental (i.e., bare
sense percepts) to the complex and comprehensive modes
(i.e., purposive striving toward a universal end).
The most characteristic features actually exempli
fied within the dialectic as a whole seem to be as
follows: (1) each antithesis and synthesis represents a
91
completion and opposition to the moment that has pre
ceded, and the particular necessity of the development
must be determined by the particular character of the
moment that has preceded, (2) each triad represents a
further discrimination mediated to unity, and (3) every
synthesis contains the preceding two moments within it.
If allowance is made for the peculiar ambiguity with
which Hegel employs the term Widerspruch, these are the
principles in terms of which he himself most constantly
and in practice defines the dialectical method.
Additional guidance to what may be anticipated in
the dialectic of religion is to be found in Hegel1s
characterization of the major subdivisions within the
The abstract form of the advance is, in Being,
an other and transition into an other; in Essence
showing or reflection in the opposite; in Notion,
the distinction of individual from universality,
which continues itself as such into, and is as _
an identity with, what is distinguished from it.
In general, the character of the dialectic within
the notion might also be expected to be the character of
the dialectic within religion. In the latter, as in the
former, it is notional knowledge which, according to the
over-all schema of the dialectic, is being determined.
Hence, the opposition between thesis and antithesis may be
^William Wallace, The Logic of Hegel (London:
Oxford University Press, 1950)t p. 377.
92
expected to be less radical than at the level of mere
8
reflection. There is, then, an identity with the oppo
site that is already explicit as the opposite is perceived
as such, and as a consequence there is a flaw in the
development of the dialectic of religion. McTaggart's
likening the dialectic to a ship tacking against the wind
is especially helpful to an understanding of the character
of this phase of the dialectic.
The movement of the dialectic may perhaps be
compared to that of a ship tacking against the
wind. If we suppose that the wind blows exactly
from the point which the ship wishes to reach,
and that, as the voyage continues, the sailing
powers of the ship improve so that it becomes
able to sail closer and closer to the wind, the
analogy will be rather exact . . . the change
in the sailing powers which allow it to go nearer
to the wind, and so reduce the distance which it
is necessary to travel in order to accomplish the
journey, will correspond to the gradual subordi
nation of the elements of negation and opposition,
which we have seen to take place as we approach
the end of the dialectic.9
The Religion of Spiritual
Individuality
With this I shall turn to the consideration of
various developments within the dialectic of religion.
Since the most notable deviation from what is being re
garded as the true form of Hegelian dialectic is contained
^Note the discussion of "the variety of negations"
in Chapter II*
^McTaggart, op. cit., pp. 144f.
93
within the religion of spiritual individuality, the focus
will be primarily upon that development.
The metaphysical notion of the religion of
spiritual individuality is found to be expressed in the
following triad: (1) unity as reflection into self,
(2) necessity, and (3) conformability to an End. These
moments conform to the religion of sublimity (Jewish
religion), the religion of beauty (Greek religion), and
the religion of utility (Roman religion), respectively.
In the religion of spiritual individuality, God is
first God in the souls of free men. The freedom which
men possess is a very limited freedom, however. Men as
selves do not yet exist apart from the negation and
struggle involved in the relation of this determinate
unity, which is God, and nature. In declaring man's will
to be free from the contingent element of consciousness,
the finite consciousness turns toward God and to his own
nature as in God. There is more freedom in servitude to
God than in servitude to natural contingency.
^The individual refuses to be swallowed up in the
contingency of nature. His determination has not yet pro
ceeded to constitute a self which can be mediated with the
entire content of natural determination and maintain its
identity secure. Thus we have a recurrence of what is
now becoming an expected motif. While external nature
(now in the form of thought) is an indispensable moment
in the attainment of selfhood, the negation must be
negated if the self is not to be overwhelmed. This is to
say, there is in effect a drawing back and limiting of
the sphere that belongs to the self proper, distinct from
what it knows as contingent.
94
Sublimity is the character of God shining forth in transi
tory natural things.11 Sublimity at first gives only the
general idea of power and not yet that of an end. The
idea of God as an end has its first beginning in the mind
in the immediate idea of God as absolute person not
reflected in his othering. This consciousness, in turn,
finds reflected in nature an external conformity to an
end. There is thus presented the bare beginning of
reflection upon the immediate idea of God. The essential
end is now seen as the moral end which the individual must
fulfill by obedience to law, now emerging in externality.
The individual must be righteous and thus fulfill the
requirement of God. In this way, externality is to be
brought into correspondence with and determined by what
is inner and right.
In the first determination of unity as reflection
into self, God judges out of His wisdom. This act of
judgment involves distinction within Himself, a separation
Here again is exemplified the principle discussed
in the preceding section. Only a part of the content
that pertains to a form of thought is mediated to deter
mine that form, the residual remaining at this point
unformed.
^This is not, however, the mere level of art.
"Things" here, insofar as they manifest the Divine, are
things in thought. The beauty of art, of course, is
conceived as contained and transcended in the beauty
that is contained in thought.
of Himself from Himself. The "other" that is distin
guished in this act is, however, actually nothing. As an
abstraction of wisdom, a mere positing of His power, this
"other" has the form of immediate but completely abstract
being. The annulling of the abstract identity of this
power is the positing of difference and hence, determi
nateness. This determinateness is matter (an abstract
category). According to the second determination, the
mode of production, in connection with which God is
subject, is infinite activity, an eternal creating
intuited by the individual. That God remains the sub
jectivity that is first and primary is presupposed with
reference to this creating. God is determined, in the
third place, as related to the created world as its
other. The attributes of God are the attempts of the
understanding to express this relation in such external
terms as are available to it, by dividing and determining
the relations between discrete identities. These attri
butes are drawn from these discrete identities and
applied to God understood as unity. The understanding so
employed cannot but find the world as incomplete in
itself and as unable to maintain itself independently.
Its being-for-itself, its real existence, is the power
itself in differences, in the creation, preservation,
and passing away of the things in this created other.
96
Since things arise and pass away, the power which pre
sents itself in the Being of things is both their being
and not-being. The individual negates this creation,
expressive of the contingency of the process, the nothing-
ness of things.
While the above dialectic is perhaps not to be
regarded as a major phase of the dialectic of religion
as sublimity, I have included it because it presents a
difficulty similar to the first triad within the Logic,
consisting of the three moments within quality, being,
nothing, and becoming. This difficulty is at least
partly owing to the fact that the categories in both
cases are in a particular sense ontological and primitive
in character. If the presentation seems somewhat vision
ary and illusive, its significance, from the standpoint
of the dialectic of religion, is perhaps largely metho
dological, It is a way of conceiving the initial othering
of God in the world, while maintaining and leaving for
further development the relation or connection between
God and the world. The progression within the development
seems almost imperceptible. It may be noted, however,
^ ■ 2This creation in God*s othering of Himself is
likened to nthe sinking of intelligence into sleep,"
"Das Setzen der Natur fHlit nothwendig [sic] in der
Begriff des geistigen Lebens, des Selbstes und ist das
Fallen von der Intelligenz in der Schlaf," Vorlesungen,
Vol. II, p. 51.
97
that the second determination views the process from the
side of the "created1 1 other, and that the third repre
sents at least an attempt at a synthesis of the preceding
determinations. While there is no negation in a radical
sense, mediationsbear the form of dialectic.
As the dialectic proceeds, this state is found to
be defective in that, though God is One, this unity is
determined only within itself and not within external
reality. Wisdom is contained in the knowledge of uni-
versals abstract and not of this world. The first mani
festation of a concrete embodiment of this wisdom is in
the form of the family. The form of the family achieves
a restricted recognition as present in God as other. In
the family as the concrete embodiment of wisdom, spiritual
individuals know themselves as constituting a unity. At
this stage, however, they merely act morally, which is to
say, they conform, in freedom, to the family, but not as
the end of divine wisdom. The end of divine wisdom,
which was void of concrete content, now begets concrete
determinate content in the concretely realized concept of
the family achieved through this free moral action.
Thereby God's end becomes known to be the family. He
becomes the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.
The individual, first as head of the family, now
images God in a sense quite superior to the sense in
98
which the world images Him. Here we approach the point
at which the religion of sublimity breaks over into the
religion of beauty. At this point, however, God remains
in thought and is worshipped only in thought. Good and
1 ^
evil being in the world and not yet in the divine being,
man has realized a certain dignity that goes with free
choice. Thus, he has anticipated the embodiment of
Spirit in individuated form. The servant of the Jewish
God regards himself as nothing before God. Only through
obedience is he able to gain a certain justification of
himself. Self-consciousness, thus, gains for its object
its own nature, its universality as manifested in the
Divine Powers, though this object is not yet recognized
as its own nature.
As soon as it is seen that the finite world is
put forth out of God, it follows that this world as His
- * - 3It will be recalled that the principle of the
overcoming of good and evil in the world is set forth
within the second moment within natural religion. The
good and evil referred to here are good and evil from the
perspective of the individual. The fact that the bifur
cation of good and evil in the world still remains a
problem at this level of the dialectic implies either a
radical inconsistency on the part of Hegel or a position
something like that which I have set forth relative to
the relation of form and content implied by the dialectic.
If it is an inconsistency, it is of such a type as may be
found repeating itself in other parts of the dialectic.
When one considers the care with which the dialectic is
developed, it does not seem reasonable to believe that an
inconsistency of this type could have gone unnoticed.
other is itself a part of Him. Nature is now not the
opposite of God and worthless* God is in nature, and He
manifests Himself in the sensuous. This is the general
concept of Greek religion (the religion of beauty). Since
the sensuous is pluralistic, the one God of the Hebrews
becomes the many gods of the Greeks. These gods are
spiritual, this is to say, genuine persons, and not merely
personifications of abstract principles as were observed
in natural religion. While Zeus is the atmosphere,
Apollo the sun, Poseidon the sea, these gods are charac
ters each with a wealth of individuality; they are not
merely personifications of particular attributes. They
are fundamentally human, friendly, and free. Man, no
longer annulled with nature, is likewise self-determined
and no longer afraid. The gods have within them the very
content of nobility and truth which is at the same time
that of man. His confidence in the gods is, thus, con
fidence in himself as well.
The gods are at first not known in their essenti
ally existent rational and natural content. They are at
first known as brought forth by the imagination of the
poet and the muse, in contrast to what actually exists.
They are at first pure subjectivity as self-determining
power. Coming forth as essential forms, these products
of the mind's immediacy are recognized as what is
100
essential.^
The ends of these gods are now affected by being
limited by the natural sensuous element which forces its
way into these forms. The unity of wise power is lost by
virtue of differences. This unity, however, is a con
dition of the determinations of these ends in their
plurality.
Because the unity of necessity is not yet carried
back to the ultimate point of infinite subjectivity,
the spiritual and essentially moral determinations
appear as disconnected or lying outside of one
another; the content is the fullest possible, but
its constituent parts are disconnected.
The power of nature as opposed to the fundamental
determination of spiritual subjectivity becomes an
essential power in its own right, to be negated and over
come. This negation and overcoming takes up concrete
content into the gods. Thus, the gods emerge out of the
power of nature with the content of nature's determi
nation*
The dialectic of the notion of the religion of
^^Hegel notes that the finitude of these forms, at
this point, does not consist in the fact that they are
anthropomorphic, but in that they are determined by
nature (in thought) and not anthropomorphic enough.
■^"Weil die Einheit der Nothwendigkeit [sic] noch
nicht zum letzten Punkte der unendlichen SubjectxvitMt
zurilck gefUhrt ist, so erscheinen die geistigen,
wesentlich sittlichen Bestimmungen als Aussereinander, es
ist der gehaltvollste Inhalt, aber als Aussereinander."
Vorlesungen. Vol. II, pp. 98f. The translation is from
Lectures, Vol. II, p. 228,
101
beauty, the three moments of which have been summarized,
is followed by a detailed and carefully presented expo
sition of the outward forms of this religion, which is, in
turn, followed by an exposition of worship. While the
dialectic of religion which precedes generally exhibits
this trifold method of exposition at this same level of
subsumption, it is not until the dialectic of the religion
of beauty is reached that these three phases of the expo
sition first appear to bear the true character of dialec
tical moments (only at this point may each be found to
introduce an increment of discrimination to be mediated
to unity) and it is not until absolute religion is reached
that they again bear this character. While this want of
conformity of the several parts of the dialectic of
religion to the schematic design of the exposition leaves
one with the sense of an incompleteness in the formal
exposition, it does not involve a breach of the character
of the dialectic as set forth in the first part of this
section. While there are fewer moments within the
dialectic where the notion, historical manifestation, and
worship do not constitute distinct moments than there
otherwise would be, this would in no way appear to alter
the essential character of the dialectic that is presented.
One can only judge whether each moment presented follows
what has preceded in accordance with dialectical form.
102
McTaggart, in a chapter devoted to his own concept
of dialectic,^ holds that it should be possible to
traverse dialectic in various ways* Thus, one may tra
verse the main triad without giving consideration to
triads subsumed under it. One may traverse the dialectic,
this is to say, with as much or as little regard to
details as one's purpose makes expedient. If Hegel con
ceives the dialectic in such a way as to allow this (and
certain statements which emphasize the importance of every
phase of the dialectic as constituting an essential part
of the system as a whole may be interpreted as counter
manding this possibility) then, of course, no problem is
created by his failure to follow out the plan of the
dialectic of religion in this regard. What is presented
as dialectic does not take on the character of falsity
because the original plan to present the notion, the
historical exemplification, and the worship pertaining to
each religion as genuine moments of the dialectic of that
religion proved unworkable.
Passing over Hegel's lengthy and impressive expo
sition of the religion of beauty, the final issue of this
religion is spiritual individuals who have taken over the
^McTaggart, Studies in the Hegelian Dialectic,
Chapter IV, "The Development of the Method," pp. 119-139,
103
content of the determinations of the gods. At first the
soul as natural and untutored is negatively related to
Spirit. Its natural will must be abrogated and subjected
to what is moral and acquire a second nature that is moral
and spiritual. The following out of this self-negation
and dying to self is contingent upon the pictorial pre
sentation of this movement as essential in the divine
objects themselves. These' pictorial forms correspond with
those presentations of the divine life set forth in
tragedy and comedy. The gods in their death and resur
rection are now presented symbolically. The literal,
natural and sensuous significations of the myths that are
relevant in this connection, are now but conveyances for
a higher truth about the divine which transcends nature,
which higher truth has not yet attained adequate outward
presentation.
In the second place, sickness, death, and mis
fortune in general must be negated. The prophets explain
misfortune as related to transgression. Sacrifice and
forfeiture are employed as a means of restoration of the
culpable, until this is judged old-fashioned, and the
determination of the not explicitly determined is regarded
as the further determination of fate.
The final form of reconciliation implies that the
individual as negated is a crime, not merely a crime that
is supposed as a plausible explanation of misfortune, but
crime in the sense that the individual stands finite in
his essential nature before the other. From the human
point of view, the punishment is propitiation for the
crime of revenge or punishment. The individual expresses
himself now as a free spirit, in that he makes what has
happened as though it had not happened by an internal
determination. The guilty soul, thus, willingly takes
upon himself the price of a compensation for his guilt.
In purifying itself from guilt, the soul takes unto
itself an increment of freedom. Empty and undetermined
necessity remains the ruling principle of the religion of
beauty, however, despite this series of determinations by
virtue of which the attempt is made by the individual to
deliver himself from the abstract necessity which he
encounters as fate. The final issue is that the finite
ends stand negated by the abstract universal which floats
above the particular.
The next demand of thought is for the union of
abstract universality with particular and individual
ends in such a way that abstract necessity has its empti
ness filled with particularity as end. It is proposed
that the unity in the form of abstract subjectivity of
the religion of sublimity and the moral substantiality of
the empirical self-consciousness of the religion of beauty
are mediated in the religion of utility. The end of the
105
religion of sublimity, when it took concrete form, was
the family. Now this end is widened to correspond with
the compass of power of the Roman State. The unity of
the One is now to represent determinateness in definite
form. Thus the abstract necessity of the One is to be
filled with a concrete particular end*
Hegel makes it clear at the outset that, while
the one-sidedness of both the preceding religions of
spiritual individuality is to be overcome, the true
principle of these religions is not taken up in this
development, but only perversions of it. On the one hand,
the religion of beauty loses the concrete individuality
of the gods as well as their independent moral content and
character. The gods are to be degraded to the rank of
mere means. The religion of sublimity, on the other hand,
is taken up minus its occupation with the supernatural.^
This amounts to the tacit admission on the part of
Hegel that this development does not conform to the
dialectical principle of determination by negation. The
want of conformity of the form of the dialectic is to be
found not only in the over-all treatment of the religion
of utility but within the parts as well. The three
principal parts found in the sub-sections of the expo
sition of religion--the notion, historical manifestation,
17Vorlesungen, Vol. II, pp. 157f.
106
and worship--do not appear here as moments of the dia
lectic but merely as a series of discussions of Homan
religion from several perspectives. This would not stand
out as unusual, since these subsections of the treatment
do not fulfill the requirements of dialectic in those
religions that preced the religion of beauty, were it not
for the prominence they have again in the dialectical
development of absolute religion immediately following.
More worthy of consideration, however, as I shall note,
is the fact that sub-triads of a lower order of sub
sumption do not conform to the dialectic, or conform only
in a problematical way.
This digression from the form of the dialectic,
of which Hegel is at least partially aware, is of interest
in that a mediation of the abstract universality of the
religion of sublimity and the concrete particularity of
the religion of beauty, as he develops these, does not
seem to offer any particular difficulty. Furthermore, one
is not hard pressed to find a historical expression of
religion which would reflect and express this mediation,
as I shall shortly show. The dialectic, so altered,
moreover, provides a more natural transition to absolute
religion as this is developed, than does the religion of
107
18
utility. Following a few further comments on the
religion of utility, I shall shortly propose the religion
of vision as the synthesis of the religion of sublimity
and the religion of beauty.
The gods of beauty, taken over from Greek religion
by the Romans, are only opposed to one another as they
are independent and free to act on their own. Their
character is generally such that, if they act on their
own, they can be put in their place. They are mutually
determined by one another and by overarching fate; where
fate gives way to concrete determination (and hence,
freedom) this determination is immediately taken into this
mutual determination.
While, accordingly, in necessity one determination
depends on another, and the determinate character
passes away, the end is posited as identity with
difference and reality in it, the unity which is
determined in and for itself, and which maintains
1R
AOThis raises the question as to why Hegel accords
to the religion of utility a major place within his
exposition of religion and the mediations within his
concept of Spirit. If it is difficult to find any reason
within the dialectic as such, for granting to Roman
religion any other status than that of a particular form
of Greek religion, this reason can be found for the
essentially non-dialectical development of the religion
of utility in the historical prominence of the Roman
State, and its status, for Hegel, as a model of the modern
national state. Holding, as he does, that the state is
the highest concrete embodiment of Spirit, and that re
ligion is the foundation of the state, he seems to accord
to Roman religion a status which he failed to justify by
the dialectic.
itself in its determinate character as against
the determinate character of something else. ^
The notion thus determined, insofar as it stands
free in its own nature, stands confronted by reality as
negated before it. Taking unto itself this negated
reality, it throws off its peculiar individual character
to become Spirit in-and-for-itself. According to Hegel,
this is not, however, achieved in the religion of utility
it is achieved in the first moment of absolute religion.
Up to this point, within the dialectic of religion, and
generally within the dialectic as a whole, the synthesis
of one concrete universal becomes the thesis of the
development following by a mere shift of perspective,
whereby it is viewed in terms of its finitude rather than
merely in terms of what it contains. The final outcome
of the deviation of the dialectic of the religion of
utility from the true form of the dialectic lies in the
abnormality that the succeeding thesis within absolute
religion constitutes a further mediation and not merely a
synthesis viewed in its finitude.
In the religion of utility, what is realized is a
^ ’ ’ wShrend daher in der Nothwendigkeit [sic] eine
Bestimmung von der andern abh&ngig ist und die Bestimmt-
heit untergeht, so ist der Zweck, als Identitfit unter-
schiedener, wirklicher gesetzt, die an und fur sich
bestimmte Einheit, die sich gegen andre Bestimmtheit in
ihrer Bestimmtheit erhSlt." Vorlesungen, Vol. II, p. 160
The translation is from Lectures^ Vol. II, p. 293.
109
particular determination or particular determinations by
negation and not a totality of ends of the gods determined
to unity. This limited determinateness of concrete
reality, moreover, is given only a qualified universality,
without necessity commensurate with it. Accordingly,
action is in accordance with an end which lies outside
the individual and which also is devoid of spirit. It is
an end which is finite and which is elevated to univer
sality. The end of Roman religion is sovereignty as
represented in Jupiter Capitolinus. Unlike Zeus, the
father of gods and men, Jupiter Capitolinus carries out
his role of sovereign for the Roman people, the universal
family. The many gods, being brought under the sovereign
ty of Jupiter Capitolinus, embody finite ends raised to
quasi-universality. The service of these gods is for the
sake of a human end. The content being in this sense
human, their outward form can hardly be distinguished from
the worship paid to them. The truth proposed in them is a
truth which has a realized existence. Worship is pri
marily merely the process whereby this content is given
recognition above subjective necessity.
Thus we see evidenced the lack of cumulative
import, previously noted, in the exposition of worship.
There is little if anything in the exposition of Roman
religion not explicit in the notion of that religion.
The fact that no sub-moments within this development are
110
identifiable as such, moreover, would seem not to be
accidental. In the nature of the case, a spurious
dialectic could hardly contain subdivisions which adhered
to the principles of the dialectic. Progression could
hardly be gained by fractioning a lack of progression,
which, from the standpoint of the dialectic, would seem
to be what we have in the religion of utility. No other
conclusion seems possible except that the development of
this religion as a whole constitutes a false moment within
Hegel's dialectic.
The Problem of the Conformity
of the Dialectic of Religion to
What Dialectic Should Be
I shall now sketch in the religion of vision,
which I propose to be in keeping with the schema of the
dialectic and to rightfully belong in the place of the
religion of utility.
Within the religion of sublimity, the individual's
end is negated. The notion of a unitary end is given in
concrete immediacy, which end is posited in external
reality. This positing, in turn, finds a concrete con
tent in external reality. In the head of the family,
this positing of subjective immediacy first gains suf
ficient external content to approach the position of the
religion of beauty, in which free individuals have their
ends in themselves. In the religion of beauty, ends are
Ill
not merely posited but are contained in the individual
and constitute the individuality, first of the gods and
then of men. Here we have a plurality of ends emerging
from the unitary end, but in such a way that the source
at first is lost sight of, as this plurality of ends
enters into the further determination of the external
world. What must properly follow, in the third moment
within the religion of spiritual individuality, is a
further reflection of these many individual ends into the
immediacy of the one end, given in the religion of sub
limity. The essentiality of the individual as person now
consists in the capacity to posit Universal End as his own
end. His finite end as a beautiful individual is now
not only taken up into Universal End; his essentiality
lies on the side of Universal End, which at this stage,
however, he knows only as subjective Idea, as Notion.
The world and consciousness of the world is not at first
seen as containing Universal End implicit within it. The
first objective embodiment of the Notion of Universal End
is the vision of heaven.
Before Universal End can ever be posited in the
proper sense in objective history, before the mundane
contents of consciousness can be determined and known as
determined by it, the negation of earth by heaven must
occur. The vision of heaven must be revealed to be what
112
20
could not be hoped for on earth but ought to be, Earth
first appears as of universal significance when it stands
as negated, as a nothing, before heaven. The earth is
the manifestation of Spirit first as merely sublime;
Spirit shines forth in its other. Following this, earth
stands possessed of Spirit as the beauty of the divine in
its otherness. The final issue is the resolution of earth
and heaven into a unity, in which Universal End is
posited as present and life eternal. The moment of this
negation (and its sub-moments) is exemplified in the
period when apocalyptic hope grows dim, and spirit's
othering presents itself as the people apart from the
world in church and monastery.
All this lies beyond the religion presently being
considered, which may be called the religion of vision,
the religion of the "last days," when old men see
visions and young men dream dreams. The negation of
earth by heaven has not taken place, nor the proper
positing of universal end in the world as thus mediated.
What is envisaged is the Kingdom's descent from above
upon a world which foreshadows this Universal Kingdom
only negatively, by being of no account, a mere nothing
with respect to it.
20Earth and history, at this level, refers to
earth and history determined in thought.
113
In romantic art, Spirit was raised to a dignity
that exceeded its material form; so now, religion has
risen to the dignity of being possessed of inward Spirit
that has risen above this world. The individual, having
taken possession of himself in Spirit, is confronted by
a destiny compelling, but undefined, of which he takes
possession.
The first other of Spirit as Universal End is
perceived by the individual as completely other--other
to his subjectivity and other to the world— as heaven.
This other of Universal Spirit is presented in symbols
ranging all the way from envisagement of deliverance from
the four horsemen of the apocalypse to streets of gold
in the heavenly kingdom to the coming of a perfect
Kingdom or City of God at the end of the age. These
symbols, taken from the external content of empirical
history found negatively related to Spirit and its Uni
versal End, have this in common, that they envisage ful
fillment. The individual for whom they envisage
fulfillment comes to know that they envisage his fulfill
ment. Thus he comes to possess this other as his own
subjective truth, and its concrete realization (which he
falsely construes at this point, as unrelated to the
historical process which he perceives as other to
Universal End) as the object of his own longing. Heaven
is imaged as the place in which God shall wipe all tears
114
from the eyes of the faithful and remove them from the
seemingly futile struggle and conflict which exhibits
nothing of the Universal End which they know as their own
immediacy. The only concreteness which that immediacy
knows is that which is to be realized in another sphere.
Now that the vision has come, earth, which looked
bad before, merely in that no hope of fulfillment of
Universal End could be justified with respect to this
realm, now becomes the utterly foreign province of
21
Satan. What is now found there is by no means even a
fragmentary content in conformity with Universal End, but
something which must be overcome. The first way in which
earth is overcome is by dismissing it from consciousness,
as a thing of no account, for that realm above, repre
sented by symbols taken from earth, but in all respects
the opposite of earth. The world stands in a certain
ambiguous sense as negated by heaven. It is not genuinely
negated, however, but done away with. Heaven alone
remains. Rome and the New Jerusalem are not yet seen as
related, as Twin Cities (as in the Kingdom of the Son)
21
Earth is not merely indeterminate Good--and
hence the sphere of good and evil--as in the case of the
religion of light. It is in determination with respect
to ends, the overcoming of aimlessness, that is the
problem to be overcome, or the burden to be borne, by the
spiritual individual who knows himself as an end-
positing spirit.
115
much less, as implicitly One (as in the Kingdom of the
22
Holy Spirit. Heaven is conceived as owing nothing of
its essential nature to the world or to what transpires
there. The symbols of earth in which it is negatively
imaged are known by this consciousness as symbols.
The religion that belongs to this place in the
dialectic stands in at least a vague and unprecise kind
of antithesis to the religion of utility, which can only
be related to it in a negative way. It comes into exis
tence in opposition to all that for which this religion,
and the empire with which it was in league, stood. The
religion of utility, insofar as it relinquishes the pure
immediacy of the religion of sublimity for a practical
end or ends, is a retreat from the sorrow that accompanies
the religion of vision. This religion exhibits the
extremes of both joy and sorrow*
This stage in religion, characterized by seemingly
incompatible extremes, the reconciliation of which cannot
be envisaged, but only the result of such a reconcili
ation, is the most difficult in the development of the
religious consciousness. On the one hand, the religious
^^The characterization of the Kingdom of the
Son and the Kingdom of the Holy Spirit relative to the
Twin Cities is not found in Hegel's work, but is my way
of suggesting how these kingdoms might be viewed as
related to the religion of vision.
116
consciousness, as spirit, now self-consciously has its
subjectivity in Universal End, From an external point
of view, it is sporadically fraught with the expectation
of the realization of this potentiality as actuality.
Knowing this End to be its own, it no doubt tries to see
the possibility of its being concretely realized in the
world, and to see the world as the potential sphere for
its realization. The sphere within which this reali
zation must be ultimately effected, however, is finally
found to be overwhelming for all but the contemplative
soul. Thus overwhelmed, the rank and file remain
within the religion of sublimity, the religion of beauty,
or some ambiguous mixture of part-elements of both such
as may be found exemplified in the religion of utility.
The religion of vision occupies a higher position
than these, in that it holds, as a kind of premonition,
that Universal End must be realized in other than the
mundane world, that is, in heaven. To us who view
the process, it may be observed that, due to a want of
mediation, there is a bifurcation in the Other of
Spirit. If this premonition is in some sense false,
this falsity is one that must be overcome through
mediation, and not simply dismissed. The religious
consciousness for which this bifurcation is real does
not retreat entirely into subj'ectivity, nor is it
117
23
overwhelmed. It maintains the principle that Universal
End must be present as other, if in an other that is also
other to the world. What is shaped is the vision of a
Universal Kingdom not yet conceived as made with hands,
and indeed not yet made with hands, but existing only
as Notion and most particularly as Universal End, which
end is willed from freedom and presented to the under
standing in symbols. Repentance involves forsaking the
supposition that righteousness can be justified by the
world and the dire consequence of this attitude. True
righteousness, righteousness justified by the Notion
held in thought and as containing Universal End, makes
one a member of the envisioned Kingdom of Heaven. The
member is taken up now into this Kingdom in ecstatic
visions or eventually at the end of the age, or both.
23At least ideally, it is not overwhelmed. Indi
viduals exemplifying the religion of vision, both in
ancient and modern times, have of course often been con
sidered quite mad. Such individuals are doubtless, in our
own day, often confined to hospital wards for the mentally
ill. The annals of saints and mystics of all times con
tain reports which such individuals have brought from
heaven and hell. Who has preached more eloquently the
message of reconciliation than those who have most keenly
felt the need of it and kept within recall the anguish
belonging to the religion of vision?
I do not, of course, wish to imply that all mental
disease is to be attributed to difficulty in transcending
this particular level of the development of the religious
consciousness, or to plead for Hegel's theory of mental
disease or the part this proposed revision of the dia
lectic of religion might play in the reconception of that
theory. Hegel's theory of mental disease, and problems
related thereto, cannot be taken up in this essay.
118
If both, the ecstatic vision furnishes a preview of the
glorious fulfillment already implicit in quasi-concrete
immediate thought for the member.
The religion of vision, on the whole, finds no
adequate objectification or concretization for the uni
versality of its vision in external reality. Hence it
remains merely an outward representation of inwardness.
Its worship is the celebration of this inwardness, in
which lies tremendous, if for the most part unrealized,
potentiality. Merely by being shared and vivified,
however, the vision does not leave its beholders in
isolation and aloneness. It is found substantially exem
plified in such first century Jewish sects as the John
the Baptist movement and the Essenes. The vision of a
certain John, on the Island of Patmos, set forth in a
work within the Christian Canon, exemplifies this religion
of vision, which was probably not uncommon within the
persecuted church from 64 A..D, and well into the second
century; it is with us even today. In Islam, the sages
and bards of the Sufi sect would exemplify the religion
of vision.
The deviations of one other triad in the dialectic
deserve mention. This is the development of the doctrines
of the Lord's supper within absolute religion. This
development is irregular in two respects. In the first
place, the exposition of the second moment lacks the
119
technic&l character of dialectic. While the form of
dialectic seems clearly implied, it is not made explicit
that the second doctrine of the sacraments is determined
by the first. This kind of lack of explicitness would
seem to be present in one or two other instances within
the dialectic of religion, both of which, like the case
of the second moment of the dialectic of the Lord's supper^
are submoments several orders of subsumption removed from
the primary triad of religion.
The other irregularity is in the third moment of
the dialectic of the sacraments. This irregularity is
similar in type to that exhibited in the case of the
religion of utility. According to this conception, God
is present only in memory and His presence is thus merely
immediate and subjective. Here, Hegel holds that the
truth has been lowered to the prose of the enlightenment.
The mediation of the representation of God as outer and
the inwardness of faith, which, were the form of the
dialectic followed out, would constitute the third moment,
is apparently conceived as taking place in the second.24
24Ihis is particularly curious when it is noted
that the second moment sets forth the Lutheran concept
of the sacrament. Hegel seems to have missed a natural
opportunity to assert the superiority of the Lutheran
doctrine over others by not making it the third moment.
As the treatment stands, he asserts the superiority of
the Lutheran doctrine, even though, curiously enough, it
is the second moment. The third moment that follows it
(the Reformed doctrine) is anti-climactic, and on this
account quite out of keeping with the form of the
120
Owing to its position in the dialectic, this deviation,
while interesting, is of less consequence with respect to
the doctrine of God than the other false moment I have
considered*
In this section I have set forth the results of
an investigation of the conformity and want of conformity
of the various phases of the dialectic of religion to the
principles of dialectic* The aim has been to present
enough of the dialectic in outline to exhibit its more
problematical aspects and parts in their true character*
The peculiar character of the first triad within the
religion of spiritual individuality was noted, and this
development found in conformity with the form of dia
lectic. Note was taken of Hegel's failure to con
sistently pursue the schema he had apparently intended to
carry out, whereby the notion, the historical manifes
tation, and worship were to constitute dialectical
developments within each of the nine major sub-types of
religion, and it was concluded that this could hardly
constitute grounds to justify the judgment that the
dialectic* Had the Lutheran doctrine been made the third
moment, it is difficult to guess what he might have done
with the Reformed doctrine*
In general, it may be observed that, in the treat
ment of the sacraments, Hegel would seem to have found
that the subject matter he wished to include within the
dialectic did not lend itself to the form of the dia
lectic, but included it nonetheless*
121
dialectic, as presented, either adheres or fails to
adhere to dialectical principles. Two deviations were
noted in connection with the dialectic of the Lord's
supper, one of which constitutes its third moment as
false. Two moments within the dialectic stand out as
false in the sense that they do not exemplify the form of
dialectic, namely, the case of the religion of utility
(and its sub-moments), and that of the dialectic of the
sacrament of the Reformed Church.
It may be concluded that the dialectic as such,
with its many parts, of which only a few have been
mentioned, is possessed of a remarkable degree of con
formity to the form of dialectic. This conclusion can
only be strengthened by noting that, in the case of the
"false moment," it was possible, by the employment of the
principles of the dialectic, to set forth a substitute
moment which may be seen to be in harmony with the dia
lectical schema.
The question as to whether, in the case of each
major religion within the dialectic, a certain other
religion and no other must necessarily follow what has
preceded, has not been dealt with. That the religions as
set forth dialectically follow one another in the order in
which they are set forth seems clear, excepting the case
of the religion of utility. While the historical exempli
fication of the moments of the dialectic of religion
follow one another in a time sequence, it would appear
that Hegel may have had it otherwise, had he chosen. It
would certainly have been possible to have found more of
the moments exemplified within the historical development
of Judaism and Christianity had he chosen to do so. More
over, it would have been possible to have found some of
the moments exhibited "out of time,” The fact that the
historical exemplifications of the moments within the
dialectic do follow one another in a time sequence con
stitutes evidence that Hegel regarded them as both
logical moments and moments in the mediation of time and
space, i*e., the concretizetion of time. No other inter
pretation is possible if the relation between the form and
the content of the dialectic is correctly understood.
McTaggart was mistaken in supposing that the moments of
the dialectic are logical moments and not moments in
25
time. The concrete nature of the moments is lost when
they are so understood. This is not to argue that Hegel
always supposes history to move in a steady and continual
line of advance. Certainly he allows that there are
"unhistorical people" who lag far behind the onward march
of Spirit, There are throwbacks of history, and regres
sions as well as progressions. As a whole, however,
Ellis McTaggart, "Time and the Hegelian
Dialectic," Mind. Vol. II (New Series) 1893, pp. 490-504
123
there is advance, on which account philosophical history
is possible. John Wisdom has given this matter more
26
adequate treatment than McTaggart. Wisdom's position
that dialectical moments are at once logical moments and
moments in time is the only tenable one. This position
is given more force and cogency when viewed against the
understanding of the relation of the form of the dia
lectic and the content pertaining thereto set forth in
Chapter IV. To fully comprehend this position, it is
necessary to see that every moment in the dialectic as
continually and throughout history effecting its form
upon the content that pertains to it. The question as
to whether the dialectic is sufficiently comprehensive
seems answerable. Since the objective of the exposition
is to set forth and exhibit all religions as essentially
contained in absolute religion, it would seem justified
to suppose that a place could be provided within the
dialectic for any religion found actually exemplified by
the religious consciousness or by a religious community
which the dialectic in its present form does not explicit-
27
ly set forth. To fail to draw this conclusion is to
2<\J.O. Wisdom, "Hegel's Dialectic in Historical
Philosophy," Philosophy, Vol. 15, 1940, pp. 243-268.
27xhis is a significant point. With respect to the
issue as to whether the dialectic is flexible so that it
will admit any and all phenomenology of the religious
consciousness, the position here taken is in agreement
124
deny the analytic character of the sub-moments of the
dialectic which Stirling labored so carefully and effec
tively to show that Hegel regarded them as having. Viewed
from the perspective of the unity of the forms of reason,
they are concrete embodiments of partial aspects of this
unity. This perspective, of course, presupposes the
notion, and a consciousness of the notion as such. With
out this, there is no alternative but to proceed by
relating religions to one another synthetically. This
approach, pursued apart from the analytic, would provide
no such basis for asserting that the dialectic can accom
modate any possible development of the religious con
sciousness. Neither would it provide for the possibility
of dialectic in any sense at all, as Hegel conceived it.
The Historical Exemplification
of the Moments of the Dialectic
The judgment that the dialectic sets forth, and in
plausible order, the principal developments of the
religious consciousness, seems not ill founded. One may
even find that the religions as set forth seem to consti
tute the most essential developments of the religious
with that taken by Sterrett. Without giving his reasoning
in support of this view, Sterrett writes, "The study of
religions since Hegel's day undoubtedly compels consider
able change to be made in the characterization that Hegel
gives to some of them. But it does not change or invali
date the method, which can readily adapt itself to any
amount of new information as to religious phenomena." J.
MacBride Sterrett, Studies in Hegel's Philosophy of Reli
gion (London: Swan Sonnenschein and CoT, 189l),p. 253.
consciousness. The problem as to whether this form, in
the case of each religion, is embodied in the historical
religion which Hegel has chosen to exemplify it may be
found more problematical. The problem may be seen to be
crucial, moreover, when it is remembered that the concrete
character of concrete universals requires that they be
exemplified in the phenomenology of the religious con
sciousness and also in objective history. In the presen
tation of Jewish religion as exemplifying the religion of
sublimity, for example, Hegel is pressed to present a
rather stilted image of that religion. The naturalism
of the wisdom literature, the emphasis upon the individual
found in the writings of Jeremiah and Deutero-Isaiah, the
nationalism of David and the fifth century restoration
movement, the overcoming of polytheism, the emergence of
the concept of God as universal, are among those prominent
developments in Jewish thought which, had they been given
recognition, would have effected a less obviously one
sided and partial characterization of Jewish religion.
There is ground for supposing that certain of the develop
ments which are found to have their classical expression
within Greek and Roman religion might also have been
found within Judaism. When these and like criticisms have
been made, however, it may be seen that Hegel generally
recognizes an essential characteristic of each historical
religion which is chosen to exemplify a moment in the
126
dialectic, even where that essential characteristic,
when presented by itself, constitutes a caricature of a
particular religion. The requirement that the form of
the dialectic be concretely embodied in history is served
if each particular development is found concretely em
bodied in a historical religion. It is not necessary,
and it would perhaps be too much to expect, that a histori
cal religion should exhibit this form only and unalloyed
with all others. The character of the dialectic would
itself imply, along with common sense, that a religion is
a complex development involving stages of maturity that
overlay each other and blend into one another.
For this and other reasons, there is a certain
artificiality in Hegel's assigning a place of prominence
in the dialectic to each of several of the world's great
religions. Doubtless, many questions may be raised con
cerning his treatment of history. What is of immediate
interest here is that a plausible case is made that the
moments of the dialectic are exemplified in history. It
remains unclear whether these moments can be shown to
follow one another within history in the order which they
are set forth in the dialectic. There seems ground for
suspecting that the student of Hegel will need to follow
the course which Hegel himself followed. He may first
need to become convinced that these or similar moments
follow one another in the phenomenology of the religious
127
consciousness before he seeks to justify empirically,
by the examination of history, the belief that they are
necessarily determined uniformally according to a certain
order. He may hope to discover the same over-all schema
exhibited in history as he finds exhibited in thought.
If this hope is fulfilled, however, it might be expected
that the principal support for the order of this form
would come from the side of thought. History is too com
plex a process to serve a hope to discover its threads
unless they be first discovered elsewhere, in its residual,
in thought determined by history. To acknowledge this
is perhaps to arrive at the judgment that the philosophy
of history cannot be justified by history alone, but by
the historian. Such a point of view is less far removed
from that held by Hegel than may be supposed, as I hope
subsequently to show, in treating his concept of the
historical consciousness.
As in the case of Hegel’s treatments of the
religion of sublimity and the religion of beauty, the
development of the historical manifestation of absolute
religion raises questions. The claim that absolute
religion is exemplified exclusively in Christianity, and
more particularly in the Christian Church, would seem to
rest principally upon two contentions.
On the one hand, it is maintained that those
formulations of the Christian faith which Hegel regards
as most adequately expressive of that faith are
Vorstellungen, whereas the doctrinal formulations of
other religions are, at best, more or less adequate
symbolic representations of the divine as manifest in the
empirical world, and of the religious consciousness that
has not negated itself as a self possessed of the sub
jective notion in its completeness of development. The
significance of this distinction is very great, if one
accepts the status accorded the Vorstellungen of the
Christian faith, if one accepts, that is to say, the
proposition that the content which these Vorstellungen
present is an inherently rational content of ideas, which
the philosopher or theologian may comprehend as such. If
one does not, the distinction has less significance. In
any case, however, one may suspect that some exponents
of non-Christian religions might claim with good cause
that doctrinal concepts of their faith might be justified
as Vorstellungen at least as well as Christian doctrines
can be justified as such* Hegel would have been less
open to the criticism that his treatment of Christianity
betrays a polemical interest and gives his theology some
trace of an apologetic flavor, had he, at some point, set
forth a doctrine of "the church invisible*" This notion,
however, apparently found no place in his thinking* If
he allowed that non-members of the institutional church
129
who were members of a Christian culture, were brought
under the influence of the form of Spirit, he made no
allowance for the possibility that adherents of absolute
religion might emerge, for example, within Greek culture.
On the other hand, it is maintained that Christi
anity alone, of all of the religions of the world, con
tains within it the principle of adaptability to the
course of history. Christianity alone is not to be
aufgehoben, because Spirit, containing the Notion in its
completeness, in the course of returning to itself, is its
exclusive possession.
Perhaps all that can and need be said of these two
contentions is that they do not appear to have been demon
strated philosophically. If they are judgments based upon
the superiority of western culture, their justification
rests upon the supposed demonstration that Spirit has
there been realized as containing a greater increment of
discrimination mediated into unity. The concept of
Universal End realizing itself through reconciliation is
supposed not to have arisen outside of Christianity. -
The authenticity of the dialectic of absolute
religion as such does not, however, rest upon exclusive
claims made on behalf of any particular religion, but
rather upon the claim that religion of this form has an
historical existence. That religion of this approximate
form exists within the history of religions seems
130
plausible, though it seems likely that its existence
could be affirmed upon no other basis than the testimony
of adherents to a faith.
In summary, it has been shown that the various
phases of the dialectic are falsifiable. They may be
analyzed to determine their adherence to dialectical
principles. The analysis of the particular phases of the
dialectic of religion, some of which have been included
in the brief exposition at the beginning of this chapter,
reveals a generally high degree of conformity with what
Hegel held as dialectical principles. Some minor in
fractions were noted, together with two "false moments"
one of which, because of the strategic position it occu
pies with respect to the hierarchy of doctrines of God
which issue as mediations of thought, was found deserving
of special consideration. The fact that a substitute
moment could be put in the place of the "false moment"'
tends to substantiate the dialectical method as lending
itself to consistent and systematic application to the
phenomenology of the religious consciousness.
The dialectic being, as it is, essentially
"descriptive," the result of this application must be
appraised by the assessment of the adequacy with which it
presents the various developments of that consciousness
and the various developments within the history of
religions in their interrelatedness. A final judgment in
131
this matter is perhaps not to be had. There would seem
to be firm ground for holding that the various doctrines
of God are inclusive of one another as the dialectic
suggests. This and other implications of the foregoing
analysis must await development in Chapter VIII. The
purpose of this chapter was to show to what degree dia
lectical principles lend themselves to consistent appli
cation to the phenomenology of the religious consciousness
and to suggest whether history may be found to exemplify
these forms of the religious consciousness. Hegel
presents at least a plausible case that history does
exemplify these forms, though it is suspected that the
identity of the forms of historical religions with the
forms of the religious consciousness is a notion that
cannot be justified by appeal to history alone apart from
metaphysical considerations, apart from the form of
thought which the historian brings to the apprehension of
history. Since the latter is always in the course of
being determined, so must the former be. I do not wish to
suggest that Hegel was not himself aware of this problem,
to which I shall give further attention in Chapter VII,
where I shall consider the problem of the relativity of
concepts of God.
CHAPTER VI
ABSOLUTE RELIGION AND THE PROBLEM OF THE RELATION
BETWEEN CONCRETE UNIVERSALS INCLUDED WITHIN THE
DIALECTIC AND THOSE THAT ARE NOT
Absolute Religion
The criticism has often been made that Hegel's
doctrine of God affords an unsatisfactory status to the
individual. His concept of the nature and status of the
national state is usually cited as evidence. Reference
is sometimes made to the individual being swallowed up in
the ethical substance. Certainly there is some ground
for this criticism, though there is also contrary evi
dence .
In this section, I shall set forth a problem of
interpretation the solution to which has an isportant
bearing upon the role and status which Hegel accords to
the individual, and will be taken up within the section
following. The problem to be considered here is that of
the relation between the concrete universals included
within the formal dialectic and those that are not,
including the myriads of instances of negation that con
stitute the activity of spiritual individuals affecting
the reconciliation of the world. Hegel has not spoken
decisively to this problem. The position which one
133
attributes to him, on the basis of available evidence, may
be seen to have notable ramifications. A brief exposition
of absolute religion will furnish a context for setting
forth this problem.
In absolute religion the notion has itself for its
object. The notion is completely realized in itself,
this is to say, God is realized by the individual as
immediate. He is realized as thinking His own thoughts
before the creation of the world. He is first known in
the abstract element of thought as self-identity. This
thought, however, is not merely the notion of the Logical
Idea, it is a unity intuited,1 the idea as it exists for
the thinking subject--as object.
Ordinary thought expresses what God is by the
classical attributes as predicates. Such predicates,
"Diess Denken kann auch reine Anschauung genannt
werden, als diese einfache Th&tigkeit des Denkens, so dass
zwischen dem Subject und Object nichts ist, beide eigent-
lich noch nicht vorhanden sind." Vorleaungen. Zweiter
Band, p. 225.
This is one of several instances in which the term
"Anschauung" is employed to describe how God is known at
this level of the dialectic. While it is a comparatively
barren concept of God and one in want of mediation which
comes in this way, it may be construed that Anschauung
remains the mode by which God is known at more advanced
levels of the dialectic. Fully matured notional con
sciousness of God, this is to say, may also be viewed as
coming as die Anschauung, now enriched by further deter
mination.
The immediacy of the knowledge of God pertaining
to this level is retained in the mediated concept.
134
being particular determinations, inevitably come into
conflict with one another and cannot be harmonized. If
the difference between these predicates is not mediated,
either the attributes are conceived as finite or contra
dictions result.
The thought reflecting Spirit has a content for
this notion (as abstract element of thought). Thus there
is a transition from the notion to being. With this, the
notion is conceived as existing in its other, and the
Judgment (third moment) is now made that the other, which
is put in contrast to the notion as universal, is God*
Spirit, so conceived, is the Father, identical with the
notion as universal.
The contrast between the finite and the infinite is
transitory and without true existence. The contrast is
there, in the fact that life has needs; but the satis
faction of these is the removal of the contrast, in the
case of impulse in the presence of need, I am distin
guished from my true self. There is internal diremption.
But life consists in harmonizing this contradiction. The
alternation is the act of differentiation whereby unity is
realized. The alternation constitutes the removal, in
principal, of the contradiction. The feeling of self,
and the negation of the feeling of self, is a passing
beyond the defect. It is only for the understanding
135
that this contradiction is insoluble, beginning as it
does, with the presupposition of its existence.
Thus Spirit comes to be known in its other in the
world. The idea exists for the concrete self-
consciousness of the thinking subject, so that what is
other to that consciousness is never other in any serious
sense, the principle having already been determined by
which this otherness is overcome. Through further
determination, in acts of judgment the other being as the
Son receives the whole idea in estrangement, and acts
from the freedom thus gained in this estrangement. Thus
Spirit in the world raises Itself to the condition of
truth. This content of truth, however, is manifest un
equally in the various kingdoms into which nature is
broken up. With this, the determination of specific
qualities in space and time are brought into view. God
here comes out into finitude in the sense that what is
implicitly identical is seen as maintaining itself in its
separation. From the side of subjective Spirit, this
separateness is posited as pure thought.2
2"Der gottliche Begriff ist der reine Begriff, der
Begriff ohne all Beschr&nkung; die idee enth<, dass der
Begriff sich bestimmt, damit als das Unter schiedene
seiner sich sesst: das ist Moment der gottlichen Idee
selbst, und weil der denkende, reflektirende Geist diesen
Inhalt vor sich hat, so liegt darin das Bedilrfniss dieses
Uebergangs, dieser Fortbewegung." Vorlesungen, Vol. II,
p. 231. In the above, "sich bestimmt" has been translated
"posited." The term carries the connotation of risk.
Something is posited or proposed which is not yet com
pletely vindicated as actual.
136
Life, the highest form in which the Idea exhibits
itself in nature, has as its highest destiny the negation
of itself through sacrifice. Thus its essence is to
become Spirit, which it intrinsically is. The finite
world is set over against the unity of the Idea with
itself, realized by life in this negation of itself
through sacrifice. In this form nature enters into
relation with man only, and not on its own account into
relation with God, seeing that it is other than God and
3
unable to be aware of this otherness. Man knows God in
nature, however, in that he understands that reason is
in her, though this reason has not been made explicit. In
the transcending of the position according to which Nature
Viewing this from the perspective presupposing the
religion of vision as the preceding moment, the "purity"
of the vision has now been lost. It is no longer detached
from struggle and toil. Barth has been negated by heaven
and Universal End has a content in the world for the
individual. In the Kingdom of the Son, this content,
through reflection into the subjectivity of the individual
whose life is in God, is viewed, for the time, as the
essential side of man. Biblical injunctions to corporal
works of mercy and doctrines such as that of the corporeal
resurrection exhibit this position. Vision has acquired a
concrete content through which fulfillment is to be
realized, and this fulfillment is a determination of uni
versal end, that is, as shaped by and contingent within
the consciousness of the natural man. Thus Spirit passes
into plurality.
Universal Bnd will reassert itself in the Son and
His humanity will be negated and taken up into conformity
with it. The form in which Universal Bnd reasserts itself
deserves to rank as something higher than vision.
137
is negatively related to man as spirit, it is necessary
that she be conceived as something which is the natural
side of man's nature. His potential natural being, as
bound to the necessity of nature's laws, is evil. The
fact that man is will implies that he is no longer an
animal in his essential being, but this will has mere
natural inclination for its content. Man's consequent
estrangement is presented in the doctrine of the fall.
Hegel's treatment of the fall clearly implies that
man is at this stage of the dialectic evil and estranged
from God due to the fact that he is a particular and hence
4
finite spirit. It is this apparent tendency of Hegel to
play down the significance of individuality by the employ
ment of the very principles of the dialectic whereby all
particularity is finally to be viewed as taken up into the
unity of the Absolute, which unity seems to transcend all
plurality, that renders problematical the concept of
thought as mediation as this concept is expressed within
the dialectic and the doctrine of God as a whole. I shall
shortly give further consideration to this problem.
The "I" exists in immediate relation to the natural
will and to the world, and is at the same time repelled by
them. Repelled by them, it nevertheless knows itself as
that which thinks the Universal and this has the value of
4Stace, The Philosophy of Hegel, p. 513.
138
something posited. Both sides of this opposition are
abstractions which can find completion only in the Other.
(Neither of itself, this is to say, contains the truth of
a concrete moment of experience.) The first inplies a
self-adequacy that cannot stand. It seeks to deal with
the problem of its inherent contradiction by fleeing from
the world.
This fleeing from the world was anticipated in the
proposed preceding development called the religion of
vision. The infinite suffering, referred to above, was
also anticipated in the tension between the individual who
is aware of having his substantiality in the possession
of Universal Bnd as Idea and, at the same time, is without
the means for objectively realizing this Universal Bnd,
but of only envisioning it. What needs to be noted is
that this suffering can now be redemptive, owing to these
moments, whereby the natural side of man is gaining con
crete determination by the Notion as Universal Bnd.
The reconciliation of mam as spirit with himself
as determined by nature, here in the course of being
realized, is to be the reconciliation of the world, since
the world is now being taken up into the determination of
natural man at the level of Notion as Universal Bnd. The
reconciliation here being realized is entirely at the
level of thought determined by Universal Bnd, though
preceding their mediation the determination of the two
139
sides are not identical in their determination.
The reconciliation of man and nature which is to be
realized is at first only the realization of a "moment."
While it is inplicit in this moment that history as the
other of Spirit is the divine story, the concrete and
explicit determination of it as such must await the
descent of the Spirit and the dialectical development
within Spirit working in the church.
At first the reconciliation and overcoming of this
alienation is affected from the side of Spirit as other to
the individual. The increment of reconciliation thus
affected leads to the achievement by individual spirits
of a substantial unity capable of self-negation. This
is, reconciliation takes place within the consciousness
of the individual, now possessed of the capacity for
tension and stress engendered by the negation of the
natural side of consciousness. This shift first occurs
in the consciousness of a particular historical individual,
the Son of God. The outward self-negation of the
natural side of consciousness effected by Christ in
history now becomes understood as a negation within the
divine life. By faith, this individual is now known to
possess divine nature, and in Him God is known as present
in the world. Other individuals, in this faith, now
effect their contributions to the reconciliation of the
140
world. This presence of the divine nature now comes to
be understood in a spiritual way as a presence in each
individual. The Holy Spirit thus forms the church.
This presence of Spirit is first known in immediacy.
The retreat into inner self-consciousness which is in
volved in the conversion that takes place here takes the
form of a self-consciousness which endlessly yields up
its particularity and individuality and finds its infinite
value in the love contained in and arising out of infinite
sorrow. It is thus that citizenship in the Kingdom of
God is gained.
At first the only presentation of divine history
confronted by this consciousness is the content of the
divine drama known to faith, but which is only in the
course of having its meaning made explicit in concrete
history. In the dialectic between this that becomes the
internal presentation of divine history and the conscious
ness of history in time there now issues a unity in
thought determined by history. This affects, in turn,
the concrete realization of divine history.
The individual born in the church is destined, if
unconsciously, to share in this truth of reconciliation.
While the natural heart remains an enemy to be overcome,
the overcoming is already known to have been accomplished
in spiritual history embodied in the church. The infinite
141
sadness (unendliche Wehmuth) which is birth sorrow
(Geburtschmer2 ) is his lot, but it is softened by the fact
that he is within the fellowship for which the enemy has
5
already in principle been overcome* The spiritual truth
of the spiritual community, like all truth, comes at first
in the form of authority. The good and the true, first
known through this authority, becomes ever more inward to
the subject as it becomes identical with his self.
Divine history is at first realized in concreteness
within the church. The spiritual community stands aloof
from the world and takes up a negative attitude toward
it, and, not getting a concrete expansion in it, remains
undeveloped. Since it is the nature of Spirit to develop
itself, however, the church is found to stand opposed to
the secular unreconciled element aspiring to rule over it,
and finally to force its way into the secular life. The
spiritual individual thus finally comes to know the
essentiality of the world as embodying the inwardness of
his own nature as notion, to take on the form of the
notion.
It is arresting to note that in his account of the
^ Vorlesungen, Vol. II, p, 333,
, . es kommt die Wahrheit nothwendig [sic]
zuerst als AuctoritUt [sic] an den Menschen," Vorlesungen,
Vol. II, p. 334. —
final triad of absolute religion, within which the notion
as inward is mediated with the historical world, Hegel
includes no mention of an over-all unity of the conscious
nesses of the many individuals being achieved. The
dialectic closes with a plurality of individuals partici
pating in a spiritual community in which the individuality
of each is maintained, and in which the reconciliation of
the world goes on apace, the form by which this recon
ciliation is to be affected having now been realized in
individuals. At this stage of the dialectic, spiritual
individuals are conceived as not containing difference
not mediated and contained in Spirit. Whatever diversity
is present in these spiritual individuals is a diversity
in harmony rather than a content subject to further
negation and determination. This is an item which, while
7
it has generally received adequate recognition, will be
of significance to a point I wish shortly to make with
regard to Hegel's position respecting the immortality of
the soul.
7This is developed in a lucid way, for example, by
Stirling in his critique of Rosenkranz on Hegel. Here he
declares, "only Hegel clearly saw the peculiarity of the
notion of Kant (as in his latent theory of perception)--
the necessity, that is, of a union of the universal with
the particular to the production of the singular, which
concrete singular alone is any reality, whether as notion
or thing." James Hutchison Stirling, The Secret of Hegel
(New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1898), ppT 622f. Also see
pp. 614-618.
143
The Problem of the Relation
Between Concrete Phlversais
Included within the Dialectic
and Those that Are Noi
I shall now turn to the problem of the relation of
concrete universals within the system to those without,
and consider especially those myriads of instances of
self-negation which constitute the individual members of
the spiritual community effecting the reconciliation of
the church and the world. To act from freedom is for
Hegel to negate the self in its finitude, and this act
of self-negation is the means whereby the individual
contributes to the reconciliation of the church and the
world. Certainly a great portion of these acts of self-
negation are universal in character at the same time that
they are the form of concrete and particular acts of
thought repeated in and out of season. Hence, they may
properly be designated concrete universals. Nothing
could be more clearly evident from the development of the
dialectic of absolute religion than that such acts of
self-negation are conceived by Hegel as playing an indis-
pensible part in the realization of mediations set forth
within the dialectic. It is through the member of the
spiritual community and his acts of self-negation that
history, known through faith in the Son to be in prin
ciple divine history, is concretely realized as such,
first within the church and finally within the world.
144
This participation by the many is likewise indispensible
to the realization of other developments within the
various religions. The negation of finite individuality
within Greek religion and the negation of good and evil
within the religion of pain are cases in point. While
this receives fuller treatment in absolute religion, the
principle may be seen to be operative throughout the
dialectic of religion. With the increment of freedom
gained through successive developments within the dia
lectic, the role of the individual as a willing agent
becomes increasingly more prominent and his self-
conscious willing of advance in accordance with dialec
tical principles more significant.
McTaggart has made several proposals about the way
in which Hegel's dialectic must be conceived if it is to
be regarded as a workable scheme. One of these proposals
is that it is necessary to conceive the dialectic as a
unity out of which its various parts are derived by
analysis. In keeping with this theory, he holds that it
should be possible to traverse the dialectic in various
ways, employing as many of the orders of subsua$>tion
under the primary triad as interest and practical con
siderations may seem to justify in a particular case or
circumstance. He makes the interesting proposal that
although an argument which confines itself to only the
145
major sub-divisions of the dialectic would be more
obscure and hence doubtful than an argument which is
based upon dialectical developments subsumed under these,
it is nevertheless meaningful. He finds the lack of uni
formity in the number of orders of subsumption of sub-
triads under triads in the various parts of the dialectic
to constitute evidence that Hegel may have regarded the
dialectic in this way.
If the individual categories were ultimate
units, such discrepancies in their size and
importance would be strange and inexplicable.
But if we regard the whole of the dialectic
as logically prior to its parts, and the parts
as produced by analysis, we have an easy and
natural explanation of the inequality--namely,
that it is due to some circumstance which
rendered Hegel, or which perhaps renders all
men, more interested or more acute when dealing
with one part of the process than when dealing
with another.8
Apart from what Hegel's view may have been,
. . . the fact that the dialectic process can
go from one to another of the larger divisions,
ignoring their sub-divisions, will confirm us in
supposing that the dialectic is not a chain of
links, but rather a continuous flow of thought,
which can be analyzed into divisions and sub
divisions .9
The view McTaggart has taiken here seems to point
to the position that the concrete universals included
within the dialectic constitutes a kind of summary
O
McTaggart, op. cit., p . 146
9Ibid.
146
presentation of reality and that concrete universals not
included in this summary presentation might be included
as lower orders of subsumption within a more detailed
exposition. To adopt this position would be to regard
concrete universals outside the system as fundamentally
of the same character as those within the system, to
conceive their development as contributory to the develop
ment of concrete universals (within the system) under
which they are subsumed, and to account for their being
deleted on practical grounds.
This position seems clearly inplied (though not
quite stated) by McTaggart as he sets forth his exposition
of an interpretative perspective on the dialectic that
renders the dialectical method justified. He does not
make the claim that Hegel regarded the dialectic in this
way;^ but I would maintain that, by its emphasis upon
the role of the spiritual individual in effecting the rec
onciliation of the world, the dialectic of religion, and
10The chapter in which this position is set forth
begins thus: "My object in this chapter will be to show
that the method, by which Hegel proceeds from one
category to another in his Logic, is not the same through
out, but changes materially as the process advances, l
shall endeavour to show that this change may be reduced
to a general law, and that from this law we may derive
important consequences with regard to the nature and
validity of the dialectic.
"The exact relation of these corollaries to
Hegel's own views is rather uncertain." McTaggart,
op. cit., p. 119.
147
more especially the dialectic of absolute religion, may
be seen to furnish notable evidence that Hegel himself
regarded the dialectic in this way.
Accordingly, the most natural way of conceiving
the relation of concrete universals within the dialectic
and those not set forth in their dialectical relatedness
within the system, is to conceive the latter as belonging
to orders of subsusption within (or under) the former.
The form of mediations within the system, to the extent
that they are adopted as authoritative by the individual
member of the spiritual community, doubtless serves as
models of many acts of self-negation in which the indi
vidual will realize anew for himself what has already
been realized by the spiritual community. This recapitu
lation by the individual, however, is evidently also
regarded as an extension of reconciliation to a greater
sphere of concrete particularity in the world, and
hence as more than a mere recapitulation. It actually
brings about that dialectical moment in which the church
confronts the world, a moment formally set forth within
the dialectic. This moment is brought about by the fact
that the realization of the reconciliation of the spiri
tual community is regarded as always in advance of the
reconciliation of the world. The more restricted com
munity of the faithful thus comes to find itself in an
tithesis to the world, the reconciliation of which is its
148
end. Thus the myriads of moments of self-negation consti
tute essential moments in their own right within concrete
universals which rank inclusion within the system, under
which concrete universals, it would seem, they must be
conceived as subsumed. Thus the conclusion would seem to
have been reached, based upon principles contained in the
dialectic itself, that the mediations formally set forth
within the dialectic cannot be accounted for apart from
those not thus formally included therein.
While the evidence is hardly ground for concluding
that this is the view which Hegel uniformally holds
regarding the relation of the concrete universals within
the system and those without, it does seem to justify the
conclusion that this is his later view. I shall now
argue that it was his view all along.
The supposition that he held this view all along
renders more tenable the supposition that concrete uni
versals are exhaustive of essential reality, which suppo
sition, so far as 1 have been able to ascertain, he
consistently held. In addition, it renders intelligible
and harmonious the roles Hegel accords to the hero of
history and that accorded to the spiritual individual,
who though he effects the reconciliation of the world,
does not, as is the case with the hero of history, antici
pate the aim of culture or of Spirit in such a decisive
149
way as to have a primary part in the constitution of a
new mediation that will rank as a moment in the dialecti
cal schema of history. The solution proposed by the
problem being considered provides a way of conceiving the
relationship, or a way of completing the definition of
the relation, between the works of reconciliation wrought
by these two types of individuals, which seems in accord
with Hegel's philosophy as a whole.
Moreover, the position thus set forth follows
naturally from the very nature of the Notion, which con
cept, according to Stirling, contains the secret that
unlocks Hegel's system and renders it intelligible.
Notion is that in the other which is identical
with itself; it is substantial totality, the
moments of which (singular, particular) are
themselves the whole (the universal), totality
which as well allows the difference free play
as it embraces it into unity within itself.11
The Notion as idea precedes the realization of the
Notion in its concreteness. Viewed from the standpoint of
the Notion as idea, this realization is an analyzing of
particularity out of this unity and wholeness. It would
seem to be self-evident that such an analysis must proceed
by stages and that the number of such stages relevant to
any particular analysis would be determined by expediency
and the purpose lying behind any particular analysis.
-^Stirling, op. cit., pp. 607f.
In this delineation of the system, of course, it
is synthesis and not analysis with which Hegel is mainly
concerned, which sufficiently accounts for the fact that
those aspects of the Notion which Stirling has carefully
developed as "the secret of Hegel" have to many remained
not merely a secret but a mystery. Hegel makes it amply
clear in many contexts, however, that the "deduction" of
the system presupposes the Notion (or, in other contexts,
Absolute Spirit) which is the final issue of that deduc
tion, The totality of the deductions, this is to say,
are analyzed out of the (notional) concept which the
deductions presuppose as their source and to which they
stand as parts. This analytic side of dialectical method,
presupposed throughout Hegel’s major works, is found
especially prominent in the Vorlesungen, since he is here
concerned to exhibit the role of Spirit in the transfor
mations of consciousness. On this account, Stirling's
basic hypothesis is strengthened by appeal to this work.
What needs to be remembered, when the analytic side of
Hegel’s method is emphasized, however, is that, as the
whole determines the parts, it is equally true that the
parts determine the whole. Accordingly, in the dialectic
of history, the emphasis is placed upon the synthetic
side, i.e., upon the mediations being culturally deter
mined. Viewed from the standpoint of what is empirical
151
and concrete for consciousness, the whole is in course of
being derived from the parts. This derivation is regarded
as possible because of the unity of the forms of reason
known, from this perspective, as abstract idea. These two
emphases are not only conceived as compatible, if one
views them from the perspective of Hegel’s philosophy as a
whole, but as complementary and necessary to one another.
This, of course, implies that all possible parts, no
matter to what level of subsumption they might belong--
whether to a level contained within the formal system or
not— are necessary to the wholeness of the notion or
Absolute Spirit.
That Hegel does not make explicit the relation he
thus evidently holds to pertain between the concrete uni
versals within the system, and those without, may be due
to the fact that he simply assumes it and finds no
occasion that requires its being mentioned. The point
deserves consideration here because of the grossness of
the misunderstanding of his philosophy which is likely to
accompany its not being understood and because it would
seem generally not to have been understood. The very high
status accorded to individuality, which Hegel's entire
dialectic is designed to support as its culminating
outcome, has been generally lost sight of because it is
supposed that he conceives the residual of the dialectical
152
and historical process in terms of those concrete uni
versals set forth within the system. While Hegel
conceives the spiritual individual as having his life
contained in Spirit (in God), this, correctly understood,
does not imply a loss of individuality. This is so
because every reconciliation of contradictory or opposing
forces in thought which is conceived as constituting the
essence of spiritual individuals is also a moment within
Spirit, and from one point of view, a moment in the
reconciliation of Spirit with Itself, This would imply
that the series of such moments of reconciliation which
constitute the essential individuality of a person, and
which are exhaustive of the individual's essentiality,
are conceived as eternal moments within Spirit.
The doctrine of the immortality of the soul, which
no
Hegel explicitly holds within the Vorlesungen, h a s often
been regarded as incompatible with his system.
Raju has given thoughtful treatment to this problem.
He writes, "it is still a controversial point whether
Hegel held the view of personal immortality. Some like
McTaggart believe that he did, but. others do not."^ From
*2Vorlesungen, Vol. I, p. 89.
13P.T. Raju, "The Hegelian Absolute and the
Individual," Philosophy, Vol. IX, 1924, pp. 336-342,
p. 514. Within this context, Stace, Haldane, and
Bosenquet are specifically mentioned in connection with
their views that Hegel did not hold a doctrine of the
immortality of the soul.
153
McTaggart's point of view, he goes on to note, Hegel
cannot dispense with the organic conception of immortality.
The Absolute is the unity of the selves, and the unity is
not external to them. The problem with this view,
according to Raju, is that while the unity must be com
pletely contained in each individual if he is to be truly
free (to be free is to have all determination within the
self), yet it must also be the unity that contains what
is essential in discrete individuality. Raju argues that
if the individual really achieves freedom, as Hegel
supposes, then it is impossible to conceive how an indi
vidual can exist in his own right.
It is difficult to see how Raju's argument can be
decisively refuted, at least without introducing another
discrimination. It leaves us, however, with the
necessity to account for the fact that Hegel, in the
Vorlesungen, does hold to the immortality of the soul or
to assume, as others have done, that he is insincere in
affirming this doctrine. In view of a lack of evidence
of insincerity, it seems appropriate at least to try to
conceive how he may have found the doctrine compatible,
or most nearly compatible, with his doctrine of God. The
understanding of the relation of the form of the dialectic
to the content pertaining to that form together with the
understanding of the relation of concrete universals
within and without the dialectic that has been set forth
154
provides a basis for what would seem a fresh approach to
the problem.
Hegel holds the freedom of the individual lies in
his notional knowledge of God, presented as the
Vorstellungen of those moments set forth within the formal
dialectic. Presumably the individual realizes freedom
and immortality apart from the comprehension at once of
those myriads of concrete universals which constitute the
individuality of all other spiritual beings. By the
common apprehension of God, moreover, spiritual beings
know one another as such while retaining individuality
owing to the uniqueness of the system of concrete uni
versals which constitutes the essentiality of each.
Stace proposes that Hegel holds immortality to be
a present quality of Spirit and not a future fact or
event.^ Considering that the employment of present and
future tenses with respect to immortality, from Hegel's
point of view, can only be a symbolic use of language,
this distinction can have no real meaning. Immortality
is for Hegel the state of being that apprehends those
primary moments of God as an eternal "now," irrespective
of time and finitude.
It would seem compatible with Hegel's doctrine of
God to suppose that he views the immortal soul as
14
Stace, op. cit., p. 514.
155
co-present with God and yet not as identical with God*
What would distinguish the individual soul from God would
lie in those myriads of moments of self-negation concrete
ly realized by other spiritual beings in the world which
are also moments in God, but which are embraced by no one
particular soul* The distinction may be seen to be
problematical, however, when it is considered that, at the
culmination of history, all submoments of the dialectic
are supposed to be contained within those under which they
are subsumed* This would follow from the relation that
obtains between the form of the dialectic and the content
that pertains to that form* At this point, the principle
moments of the dialectic which constitute Spirit in-and-
for-itself would be exhaustive of essential reality. It
would follow from this that the distinctions between all
spiritual beings would be dissolved. The logical conse
quence of this would seem to be a view of immortality
similar to that held by Radhakrishnan, for whom the soul
is ’ ’immortal” only until the culmination of history.
"The two elements of selfhood, uniqueness (each-ness) and
universality (all-ness) grow together until at last the
most unique becomes the most universal
15S. Radhakrishnan, An Idealist View of Life
(London: George Allen and Unwin Ltd., 1932), p. 274.
156
Whether Hegel consistently holds a genuine
doctrine of the immortality of the soul would then hinge
upon whether or to what extent he regards the concept of
the end of history as merely a limiting concept, and
whether he in fact holds that history will reach a
terminus« I have up to now discovered no positive evi
dence upon which to base a solution to this question. It
seems at least probable, however, that he regards the
concept of the end of history as merely a limiting con
cept.
Irregardless of this, it seems inappropriate to
hold that the later Hegel is not sincere in holding that
the soul is immortal, at least in the qualified sense in
which Radhakrishnan holds to immortality. Moreover, to
assert that the unqualified doctrine of immortality is
less than completely consistent with Hegel's doctrine of
God, and there is ground for this, is hardly to justify
the position that he does not hold the doctrine, which is,
as I believe I have shown, somewhat less alien to his
later thought than has generally been supposed.
No doubt the character of the system influenced the
way in which immortality is conceived in a way that has
not been mentioned. The notion of the resurrection of
the body (o-u)ju.c\), for example, certainly is regarded as
no more than a symbolic representation or Vorstellung of
157
a mediation of thought. Considering that, from his point
of view, the sensuous is taken up into the determination
of thought without residue, this, however, is hardly
ground for questioning the fact that, for the later Hegel,
individuality is not lost or done away with at death.
That Stace arrived at a different conclusion can only be
due to a failure to adequately take into account the fact
that for Hegel individuality is the final development of
the dialectic. Stace holds that Hegel does not take the
doctrine of immortality literally, but regards it as a
Vorstellung for the infinitude of spirit and the absolute
value of spiritual individuality. ’ 'Immortality is a
present quality of the Spirit, not a future fact or
event.If by present quality Stace were to mean
"eternal moment" then this statement would reflect Hegel's
position, and it would affirm a doctrine of immortality,
if not necessarily a doctrine of the immortality of the
(individual) soul. Hegel, however, actually affirms the
latter as well as the former. If, on the other hand,
Stace means to refer to time by the term "present quality,"
then his assertion cannot possibly be justified as
representing Hegel's position.
Hegel notes that, at first, the prominent element
in the concept of immortality is continued existence in
16Stace, op. cit., p. 514.
158
17
time. If it seems fair to presume that this presen
tation of the concept of immortality would for him be a
Vorstellung; it does not seem fair to conclude, as Stace
does, either that immortality, as such, is regarded as a
Vorstellung, or that Hegel finds it not to be present in
the mature religious consciousness in the form of idea.
If the position taken by Stace seems unfounded,
Stirling's denial that Hegel's doctrine of immortality may
in any way be problematical would seem to constitute an
over-simplification, if his affirmation that Hegel seri
ously held to the immortality of the soul seems justified.
As for the Immortality of the Soul, that lies
secure in the Notion. The notion is the vital
heart of all, and for the notion self-consciousness
is but another name. The subject and the concrete
notion are identical, and they have not in them
the character of the finite, but of the infinite.
The system of Hegel, from stage to stage, is full
of utterances on this head, and he who can read
there has no room to doubt. Abstract absorption
into the universal is not Hegel's doctrine, and
need be a fear to no one. 'The One is Many, and
the Many One•'18
Whether or not Hegel actually resolves the problem
of the one and the many as Stirling holds, there can be no
question but that he envisioned it as resolved, and without
the loss of individuality. The achievement of individu
ality is the highest moment in the dialectic, at the same
*7Vorlesungen, Vol. I, p. 89.
18
xoJames Hutchison Stirling, The Secret of Hegel
(London: Macmillan and Co., Ltd., 1$24), p. 720.
159
time that this moment is one with the knowledge of God or
Spirit in-and-for-itself,
The solution I have proposed to the problem of the
way in which Hegel conceives the relation between concrete
universals within and without the formal dialectic accords
well with the concept of immortality that Hegel professes.
If this relation is accepted as demonstrated, then this
demonstration, when placed along side Stirling's analysis
of the notion, would seem to render indubitable the fact
that Hegel seriously holds a doctrine of the immortality
of the soul* Whether this doctrine is consistent with
his doctrine of God, as Stirling holds, would seem in the
final analysis, to depend upon whether Hegel believed that
history would reach a terminus.
That the notion of the immortality of the soul was
not accorded a prominent place even in Hegel's later
philosophy may be accounted for otherwise than by the
presumption that Hegel was not sincere in holding it. To
have accorded it a place of prominence would have de
tracted from the significance of self-negation as a
moment in reconciliation, a consequence of which our own
time is better aware than was his. Holding, with Kant,
that the moral act needed no promise of reward to justify
it, it seems not improbable that Hegel conceived man as
best able to know his own spiritual nature as a negator
160
without a vision of fulfillment held as abstract and
detached from self-negation. Like an apocalyptic vision,
the doctrine of the immortality of the soul may have ap
peared to Hegel to lend itself all too readily to this
kind of detachment.
In this chapter, against the context of the
dialectic of absolute religion, I have set forth what
would seem to be rather conclusive evidence that Hegel
regards concrete universals not explicitly delineated
within the formal exposition of the dialectic, as moments
within Spirit and as intrinsically a part of that network
of concrete universals which is essential reality. The
role which he attributes to the spiritual individual in
effecting the reconciliation of the world through myriads
of acts of self-negation provides important evidence,
which would seem not to have been previously brought to
bear upon the problem, of the role and status of the indi
vidual in Hegel's thought, in support of this view. Other
sources of evidence have been sighted, and the attempt has
been made to show that this view renders the concept of
the notion more intelligible, and that it renders less
pronounced the problem of reconciling the later Hegel's
view on the immortality of the soul with his philosophy as
a whole. Thus a view of dialectic which McTaggart found
it necessary to presuppose if the dialectical method was
161
to work, but which he lacked ground for attributing to
Hegel, has been developed and found to have been almost
certainly held by Hegel. Most significant for this
thesis, a source of evidence apparently not previously
recognized has been found that Hegel exalts the role and
status of individuality within his philosophy, and more
particularly, his philosophy of religion, with more con
sistency than has often been recognized. Hegel's concept
of thought as mediation did not lead him to set forth a
doctrine of God in which individuality is swallowed up in
the infinite. Rather, individuality is maintained, even
in the infinite, and this not merely as an accidental
result, but as a result which Hegel, at least, was
satisfied had been built into the character of the dia
lectic itself.
CHAPTER VII
HISTORY AS THE ODYSSEY OF GOD AND THE PROBLEM
OF THE RELATIVITY OF THE CONCEPT OF GOD
The Philosophy of Religion and
the Philosophy of History
In dealing with the problem of the relativity of
the concept of God, I do not, of course, wish to imply
that Hegel conceives God as being relative or finite. As
conceived by the individual, at whatever level of spiri
tual maturity the individual may be, and as for Hegel
himself, God is Absolute, To the philosophical conscious
ness, however, the relativity of those concepts of God
which have been aufheben is apparent. To the religious
consciousness, inasmuch as that consciousness is also
possessed of a certain (if, perhaps, a less precise)
awareness of having traversed a developmental sequence of
concepts of God, the relativity of representations of
God which have been aufheben is also apparent. This rela
tivity of the concepts of God pertains even to the con
cepts of God held by the consciousness that has traversed
the developments set forth within the dialectic of abso
lute religion. It is this that I wish to consider.
In dealing with the problem of the relativity of
concepts of God, as Hegel views the matter, it is not
163
proposed that a problem of interpretation is being
resolved. The principal concern here is to clarify an
aspect of Hegel’s doctrine of God that has often received
inadequate consideration or gone unrecognized. In order
to import a somewhat different emphasis into the dis
cussion of Hegel's doctrine of God than that found in the
philosophy of religion lectures, I shall draw upon the
Vorlesungen uber die Philosophie der Geschichte,^- here
after referred to as Geschichte.
Except for the fact that, in Geschichte, the
amorphous and, for Hegel, admittedly problematical
development that is Egyptian civilization is now pre
sented as a synthesis of Persian and Jewish culture,2 the
formal dialectic within this work is, in all essential
respects, identical with the dialectic set forth in the
^George Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Vorlesungen uber
die Philosophie der Geschichte, mit einem Vorwort von
Eduard Gans und Karl Hegel (Stuttgart, Fr. Frommanns
VerTag’ i If928). This work has been published in English
as "The Philosophy of History,” translated by J. Sibree,
and with an introduction by C.J. Friedrich (New York:
Dover Publications, Inc., 1956).
The work was compiled from lecture notes by Eduard
Gans. It is based largely upon a course of lectures as
delivered in the winter of 1930-1931, just preceding
Hegel's death. According to Karl Hegel, the work is
based exclusively upon his father’s own notes for the
course of lectures, which had been given periodically
during the preceding eight years. Geschichte, pp. 16f.
2Geschichte, pp. 264f.
164
Q
Vorlesungen, The same moments and mediations present
themselves within history as within the religious con
sciousness, Nature and thought being conceived as
mediated and taken up into the self-consciousness of the
spiritual individual, this identity of form of the
spiritual consciousness and of the world in process of
reconciliation would necessarily follow. The primary
differences pertain to content only, A vast array of such
concrete and particular historical occurrences as
Alexander the Great, Charlemagne, the invention of the
magnet and the printing press, wars and sociological
changes, that had no place in the account of religion,
are given place in the philosophy of history.
The outstanding difference of emphasis between the
Vorlesungen and the Geschichte is that, whereas in the
former the form of consciousness is viewed as most promi
nently determined by Spirit as transcendent, in the
latter, the form of consciousness is viewed most promi
nently as determined by concrete actual forces in history.
While the same doctrines of God emerge, the emphasis
shifts from that perspective which analyzes the moments
of the dialectic out of Spirit in-and-for-itself to that
perspective which, by a succession of syntheses of thought
^The form of the dialectic is identical in
virtually every detail, though this form, as such, stands
out less prominently in the exposition of history.
165
determined by cultural forces, arrives at Spirit, These
emphases would appear to be entirely compatible.
Certainly Hegel intends them to be. An adequate compre
hension of Hegel's doctrine of God as the highest issue
of the mediations of thought is not possible apart from
4
understanding that, for Hegel, this is the case.
History as the Odyssey of God
To view history as the Odyssey of God is the
standpoint of the consciousness which has traversed the
developments outlined within the dialectic of religion.
The religious consciousness views history as a divine
drama. While this consciousness may only in a limited and
partial way comprehend historical events as the concrete
embodiment of this drama, history is regarded as consti
tuted by the acts of God and, hence, as an inherently
rational process.
The philosophical consciousness seeks out the
direction of developments or movements within history.5
It brings thought to the analysis of this development--
thought, that is, which contains discriminations and
4See Geschichte, Chapter VI, p. 17.
5"Wenn nun die reflectirende Geschichte dazu
gekommen ist, allgemeine Gesichtspunkte zu verfolgen, so
ist zu bemerken, dass, wenn solche Gesichtspunkte
wahrhafter Natur sind, sie nicht bloss der aussere Faden,
eine ttussere Ordnung, sondern die innere leitende Seele
der Begebenheiten und Thaten selbst sind." Geschichte,
p. 33.
166
mediations within it and which is a mediation of the dia
lectic of the logical idea* What the philosophical
historian at first consciously brings to the analysis of
history is the conviction that history must exhibit an
intelligible process, i.e., a process in conformity with
the forms of the dialectic of thought. He brings this
conviction as a hypothesis to be tested.
Our intellectual striving aims at realizing the
conviction that what was intended by eternal
wisdom, is actually accomplished in the domain
of existent, active Spirit, as well as in that
of mere Nature. Our mode of treating the subject
is, in this aspect, a Theodicaea--a justification
of the ways of God. . . .?
What thought finally apprehends, in history, is a
pattern of development in conformity with itself, that is,
with its own dialectic of becoming. Indeed, history is
analyzed with the view to discover this form embodied
within it. As this form is discovered, all of the facts
6"Der einzige Gedanke, den die Philosophie mit-
bringt, ist aber der einfache Gedanke der Vernunft, dass
die Vernunft die Welt beherrsche, dass es also auch in der
Weltgeschichte vernilnftig zugegangen sei. Diese Ueber-
zeugung und Einsicht ist eine Voraussetzung in Ansehung
dez Geschichte als solcher Uberhaupt; in der Philosophie
selbst ist dies keine Voraussetzung." Geschichte,
pp. 34f.
"Unsere Erkenntniss geht darauf, die Einsicht zu
gewinnen, dass das von der ewigen Weisheit Bezweckte, wie
auf dem Boden der Natur, so auf dem Boden des in der Welt
wirklichen und th&tigen Geistes, herausgekommen ist.
Unsere Betrachtung ist insofern eine Theodicee, eine
Rechtfertigung Gottes. ..." Geschichte, p. 42. The
translation is from History, p. 15.
167
and events which contribute to the unfolding of each of
its phases is developed as a part of the account. The
forms of the development of thought are found to corres
pond with the watersheds of history, those primary
developments which constitute the central structure of
history and lend intelligibility to all of the other
Q
developments which may be subsumed under these.
History is thus conceived as an inclusive schema
of concrete and actual forces in the social order opposing
one another as theses and antitheses within the conscious
ness of spiritual individuals. It is here that their
syntheses must ultimately be effected. To the extent
that the spiritual individual takes conflict into his own
self-consciousness, even the conflict between his own
self-consciousness and Spirit, and accepts his own self-
negation by Spirit as other to him, to this extent is he
free. He is free, this is to say, to the extent that he
is self-determined and not determined from without. It
is through acting from freedom that the actual contra
dictories within his consciousness are overcome and
brought to syntheses.
In the course of realizing himself as free, the
Q | |
°For an account of this within the Phanomenologie,
see "Herrschaft und Knechtschaft," pp. 152-158, or in
Baillie's translation, pp. 152-158.
168
individual is, however, often unaware of the end for
which he is striving. He is blind to these forces which
determine him but are not yet explicit to his conscious
ness. He may take up one side of an antithesis and make
it his own purpose. In pursuing what are merely his own
personal ends, however, he nevertheless, through "the
cunning of reason," contributes to the fulfillment of
Q
Spirit's (to him) inexplicit directive.
The form of history conceived as a theodicy is
thus a hierarchy of concrete universals, each of which is
constituted by antithetical actual forces which have
issued in a synthesis in which both are contained and
taken up. This synthesis, from the standpoint of
religion, is also viewed as a phase in the reconciliation
of the world with God. Each successive mediation within
this hierarchy of concrete universals is conceived as
containing all mediations which precede it in the order
of the dialectic. The most inclusive mediation is one
that is only in the course of being realized as the issue
of the contemporary struggle within the cultural per
spective from which the historian views history as a
whole. This is regarded as the goal of history. The
philosophical historian writes history in such a way as
^For the development of the concept of "die List
der Vernunft," see Geschichte, pp. 58-65.
169
to show that the goal he has posited is determined by the
previous moments of the dialectic of history. In the re
writing of history, the moments of the dialectic are
determined in a new purity. Thus, the goal and its
moments are viewed as mutually determinative of each other.
The historical consciousness is that consciousness
which negates the past for a future in das Jetzt. The
past, present to consciousness as the terms and categories
of the dialectic of history as ^previously determined, is
negated in das Jetzt, which these are inadequate to
express. Out of das Jetzt, living concepts are born.10
The Problem of the Relativity
of the Concept of Go5
From this it may be seen that, excepting moments
of synthesis in das Jetzt, when the concept is identical
*°A. Koyr&, ’Etudes d’Histoire de la Pensee Philo-
sophique (Paris: Armand Colin, Cahiers" des Annales, 196£)•
Several sources in this collection of articles might be
referred to, one of which is "Hegel a Jena," p. 172.
By attributing to this consciousness the capacity
for self-negation, Hegel certainly implied that this
consciousness was one that had attained to the mediations
within absolute religion. The individual possessed of
this consciousness participates in the realization of the
goal of history. He need not be a professional historian
or philosopher, or even comprehend the philosophical
formulation of the goal in the realization of which he
participates. The philosopher, or philosophical historian,
possessed of a consciousness of the essential movements of
history, however, is uniquely endowed with the capacity
for seizing the antitheses that are actual in his own
culture and projecting their synthesis, thus effecting an
extension of the dialectic of the primary mediations
within history.
with the object, the concept of the God whose acts
constitute the thread of history is, in the final
analysis, a relative concept. It is a relative concept,
this is to say, by which the Absolute is re-presented.
The concept may be observed to be relative in three
respects. It is relative to the culture and religious
tradition of a people. Further, it is relative on
account of the uniqueness of the history of the individual
which he does not share with his culture, or which he has
not yet shared with his culture. In the third place, it
is relative in that the hierarchy of concrete universals
of which it is constituted may be expected to be deter
mined in a new purity in a new moment. Within the context
of Hegel's development of his own doctrine of God, seeing
that this doctrine is viewed as inclusive of all others,
it is the latter two types of relativity that figure most
signif icantly•
While the abstract idea of God in thought is pre
supposed by every anticipated resolution of opposing
actual forces in culture, it is only through the synthesis
itself that this notion is concretely realized. The con
cept becomes relative when the moment of this synthesis is
past. The concept of God for religion, then, is consti
tuted by that hierarchy of past syntheses which have been
or are in the course of being aufheben. It is more than
this, however. As a concept of the Absolute, it is a
171
concept of such syntheses as partial and not totally
adequate representations of the Absolute. The aspect of
the concept over and above the hierarchy of concrete uni-
versals of history, presents itself in the form of
abstract idea only, however. Thus it would seem that,
for Hegel, the concept of the Absolute that is possessed
of the quality of the concrete notion (which Stirling has
labored so diligently to expose) is indeed a concept
belonging to the religious experience of individuals and
not one which can be presented with adequacy, but only
imaged, in the formal doctrines of religion, even of
absolute religion. Neither can it be presented with
total adequacy by the presentation of the dialectic of
history with its several moments set forth in the form of
idea. The identity of the concept with its object only
takes place where the individual participates in history
and undergoes self-negation in the process.
The doctrine of God for religion is constituted
by the delineation of the series of significant acts of
God in the divine drama of history. The philosophical
concept of God is constituted by the moments of the
dialectic. Neither becomes a concept that achieves
identity with the Absolute as its object apart from self-
negating participation of the individual in the living
moment, and from the reconciliation of the world to God
through the resolution of actual contradictory forces
in culture*
chapter VIII
HEGEL1 S DOCTRINE OP GOD AS THE
HIGHEST MEDIATION OF THOUGHT
In this chapter, I shall present some implications
of the concept of thought as mediation issuing from the
dialectic for Hegel's concept of God, which he regarded
as the highest and most inclusive mediation of thought*
The solution to the several problems of interpretation
presented in the preceding chapters will be presupposed.
This chapter will, for the most part, be a summation of
the results of the critical interpretation that has
preceded, along with some interspersed comments. Some new
material from Hegel's works will be introduced, which
does not seem to require the kind of justification which
the interpretative perspectives set forth in the preceding
chapters were thought to require. I shall outline
significant features of Hegel's doctrine of God under
thirteen headings,
1. Each of the mediations within the dialectic
traversed may be regarded as embodying the essence of a
doctrine of God, Since the mediations are related to one
another within a hierarchical schema in which the higher
contains the lower, and the highest comprehends all, the
same may be said with respect to the doctrine of God,
174
Furthermore, the program of the dialectic implies, con
cerning these concepts of God, not only that men have
apprehended the divine in these various mays, but that
God in His own determination of Himself, in His realiza
tion of Himself as concrete, contains these stages as
determinate movements within His own nature* These
stages and the dialectical transitions between them con
stitute the immanence of God, and His embodiment in space
and time, His existence in and for finite minds*
Since, for Hegel, potentiality is regarded as
ontologically prior to actuality, these forms, which,
viewed from the perspective of finitude, are forms of the
becoming of being, are also to be conceived as within God
in His infinitude and transcendence as a unity at rest*
This unity as Absolute Spirit in-and-for-itself speaks a
world into existence and suffers diremption* In its
other, Spirit seeks reconciliation with the unity implicit
within itself which is also reconciliation with its own
original unity. The various doctrines of God represent
transition stages within the realization of this unity.
Hence they are all true in the sense that they all repre
sent moments within Absolute Spirit at the various levels
of its concrete realization of this reconciliation which
lies implicit within it. The essential truth of each
doctrine of God is taken up within the more comprehensive
unity of those doctrines which succeed it in the
175
dialectic. The essential truth of each of these
doctrines of God is in Absolute Spirit as an eternal
moment, even as the world in its becoming is in Absolute
Spirit* The course of the dialectic is the traversing
of the stages by which this being in Absolute Spirit is
realized by the finite mind, which is God in his other
aspect taken up into thought. It is by the realization
of the mediations thus traversed that individuality finds
its fulfillment and reconciliation, and the reconciliation
of the world as taken up into the determinations of
thought within that consciousness*
A comment seems in order at this point. The com
parative study of religions during the past century has
given a great deal of credence to the view that concepts
of God in the various religions of the world are not
mutually exclusive but overlap and have much in common.
Hegel affirms, in addition to this, that when each is
conceived in terms of what, from the perspective of the
dialectic, may be seen to be its essential truth, the
lower is contained within the more advanced without
residual. He thus proposes a standard for the comparative
study of concepts of God which is practically applicable
if one accepts the principles of the dialectic as these
pertain to the doctrine of God and the principle that the
most adequate concept of God contains the greatest incre
ment of discrimination mediated to unity.
176
The enormous complexity of Hegel's doctrine of
God can be appreciated when note is taken of the variety
of concepts of God which he maintains are contained within
it* One may be left with the impression that God, so
conceived, is all things to all men. He is the fulfill
ment and completion of that which constitutes the essen
tial truth of every man. The profundity of the doctrine,
however, lies in its recognition that God is also the
negation of all things for all men and that the individual
himself, as a past, stands negated before Him.
2. From the perspective of each of these several
doctrines of God which issue as mediations of thought, God
is determined and known in His finitude and He is also
apprehended as infinitude. His infinitude, however, is
imaged in terms commensurate with what is revealed or un
folded at each stage, and hence, in terms of what, from a
higher perspective, is to be regarded as finite. Spirit
presents itself as in the world by a progression of
stages of manifestation and also, where mediation is
being effected, as other. From the perspective of the
religious consciousness, the infinite is ever being
determined (because it is determining itself), as finitude;
yet infinitude as the other remains, as such, for the
religious consciousness. Thus, Hegel conceives God as
both immanent and transcendent.
177
3# The form in which Spirit realizes itself as
concrete and in terms of which it is manifest as such, is
culturally determined. The acts in which God is made
manifest, in addition to being His own acts, and, in
large part, the acts of self-conscious finite individuals,
are acts which necessarily follow as the resolution of
actual forces at conflict in the world.
The Geschichte exhibits an emphasis upon the
cultural determination of mediations not present in the
dialectic of religion. In the dialectic of religion,
mediations are first manifest in the consciousness of
Spirit as- other, whereas in Geschichte, each mediation of
thought is viewed as a necessary outcome of unreconcilable
forces active in culture itself. The conflict between
church and state,^ for example, is a conflict between
actual cultural forces with conflicting claims upon the
allegiance of men. This conflict is viewed in such a
way as to show that a new synthesis had necessarily to
issue out of this conflict, due to the very nature of
these actual forces and the way in which they have shaped
each other.
Thus Spirit finds its concrete determinate nature
in its wandering through the world in time, as Odysseus
wandered for twelve years on a wilderness search for
^Geschichte, pp. 439ff.
178
truth. His odyssey was a seeking. No historical phe
nomena which are relevant as determining factors with
respect to one or the other pole of a conflict are ir
relevant to the account. The moments which rank inclusion
within this dialectic of history are of such significance
that it may be presumed that little if anything in the
sphere of culture is totally unrelated to them. This
general significance may be viewed as the hallmark of
their eligibility for membership in the hierarchy of the
dialectic.
Hegel has often been charged with imposing the form
2
of the dialectic upon history in an arbitrary fashion.
This is a charge not easily assessed. Certain artifici
alities in his historical exemplification of the moments
within the dialectic of religion have been noted in
passing. What can be affirmed with certainty, however,
is that Hegel is himself convinced that the inner form or
thread of history is identical with the form of thought,
which he believes he has determined, at least approxi
mately, in the PhSnomenologie and the works on ”logic."
2
See, Leonard Nelson, Fortschritte und Ruckschritte
der Philosophie; von Hume und Kant bis Hegel und Fries,
aus dem Nachlass herausgegeben von Julius Kraft (Frankfurt
am Main: Verlag bffentliches Leben), pp. 26f, and
H.R. Smart, Philosophy and its History (La Salle,
Illinois: The Open Court Publishing Company, 1962),
p. 69.
179
That he supposes this form could be found in history
independent of being deduced from thought seems doubtful,
and could almost be disallowed by the statement about his
3
approach to history quoted on page 166, This would
suggest that the search for the historical exemplification
of the various moments of the dialectic in history is
directed by metaphysical considerations as much as by
history itself. Certainly the dialectic is not an obvious
and external aspect of history. This Hegel would have
conceded.
If one accepts the phenomenology of concrete uni-
versals as pertaining to mind, it is natural to be led, as
was Hegel, to suppose that history must exemplify a like
phenomenology. Apart from whether certain specific con
crete universals may be found in history, the vision of
history as a series of resolutions of conflicts in suc
cessive moments of self-negation would seem neither a
meaningless notion nor one without theological signifi
cance for a doctrine of God. History does seem to
exemplify some of the specifically defined moments of the
dialectic, such as the dialectic of the bondsman and the
freeman. Others, such as the dialectic of substance as a
unity and the many powers in nature, exemplified in Hindu
Religion, less evidently constitute necessary historical
^See Chapter VII, footnote 6, p. 166.
180
developments. In the justification of such phases of the
dialectic, logical criteria seem to figure more promi
nently than historical criteria.
Even if the dialectic were jsupposed to constitute
the inner thread of history, however, its thorough-going
exemplification as such would, in the nature of the case,
be problematical, since many of its moments (i.e., the
overcoming of good and evil) run through the whole of it,
even if for many it is aufheben. The applicability of the
principle of the dialectic to history, however, is perhaps
not dependent for its success upon the pin-pointed deter
mination of its very specific phase within history.
Whether we will or not, history is a scene of conflict.
To live in hope is to live in hope that these conflicts,
named or unnamed, have an issue that is fulfillment. The
categories of that (at least partially) conflict-
determined history are all that we bring to experience in
the present, and that experience offers something which
these categories cannot represent without being recast
into the image of the living present. This would seem to
be a necessary supposition, if hope for a better world is
to survive, which hope may be a necessary condition of
survival.
4. The reconciliation of the world to God may be
viewed either as effected by Spirit or through the work of
the spiritual individual. As has been noted, this is made
181
clear within the dialectic of absolute religion. The
part of the spiritual individual in effecting reconcili
ation is made prominent throughout the Geschichte in the
person of that special kind of spiritual individual, the
hero of culture* Here, that side of the dialectic of
religion which is Spirit realizing dialectical development
within itself as other to finite spiritual consciousness
is not given prominence. Spirit is now that which is
realized in the phenomenology of history through key
individual participants in that history. The focal point,
here, is the mutual negation and determination of the
individual and the cultural forces he confronts. The
individual is coauthor with Spirit of many of the advances
of the dialectic of history. Spirit does not move forward
only through the individual's seeking of his own ends,
which, through the cunning of reason, may, from a higher
perspective, or from a retrospective view upon history,
be seen to fulfill the end which Spirit has in view. The
individual may advance the realization of Spirit in
history by his steadfastness and courage, in the self-
conscious pursuit of the fulfillment of Spirit in the
world. Hegel's position in this regard says, in effect,
that through self-negation the spiritual individual may
exemplify the Son in himself.
5. Das Jetzt is the moment, the now, in which man
exercises that capacity by virtue of which he is uniquely
182
human; he negates himself, denies the consciousness that
constitutes him as he is, denies, that is to say, the
abstractions that constitute his consciousness of what is
past, his self-consciousness. As a consequence of this
negation, he realizes a future. This self-denial involves
the denial of the adequacy of the concept of God which the
individual has previously held, which concept must be
informed by God's new act in the moment. In this now,
divine history as known inwardly by the spiritual indi
vidual becomes known in external history in time. In
this now, the concept of God achieves momentary identity
with its object as apprehended by the individual at what
ever dialectical level of spiritual maturity he has
attained.
6. There is a sense in which, from Hegel's point
of view, God is personal. According to the order of
progression of the dialectic, God is first conceived as
personal in the religion of sublimity, as exemplified by
Jewish religion. Since the doctrine of God as sublimity
(as exemplified in Jewish religion) is contained within
the doctrine of Absolute Spirit, the latter, at least in
a qualified sense, is conceived as personal. That is to
say, God, as conceived within the dialectic of absolute
religion, cannot be less than personality. Though the
discriminations by virtue of which God comes to be
183
realized as person are not the last or highest develop
ments within the dialectic, the concept of God as personal
is contained within the higher mediationa Since Absolute
Spirit contains the essentiality of existence, however, a
problem is seen to arise when It is regarded as person.
As ordinarily understood, personality as such involves
relatedness to externality. Absolute Spirit in-and-for-
Itself emerges above personality as thus conceived, since
Its complete realization involves having nothing outside
of It. The ascription of personality to Absolute Spirit
may thus be seen to be problematical.
It may be felt that since the philosophical con
ception of God is freed from all religious Vorstellungen,
and hence from much of the anthropomorphism {which, from
Hegel's perspective, constitutes a part of the "freight”
of religious conceptions), the question might be answered
less equivocally from this perspective. It may be
observed, however, that personality also has a place
within the hierarchy of metaphysical determinations
contained within the Absolute. Hence, personality as such
is not a mere Vorstellung, but a part of that literal
definition of God constituted by the hierarchical
structure of the dialectic contained in the metaphysics.
Hence, the answer to the question, "is God personal?,"
which may be found by turning to Hegel's metaphysics, is,
184
in general, in conformity with that somewhat problematical
answer to be found in the Vorlesungen. It may be observed,
however, that the personal aspect of the divine receives
more ample expression within the Vorlesungen than within
any other of the major works accredited to Hegel, This
is perhaps primarily owing to the close attachment of the
concept of God as person to the Vorstellungen of
Christianity, which Hegel wished to justify as the
absolute religion,
Stace would have it that the term personality is
for Hegel applicable to the divine in other than a meta
phorical sense, the view that I have noted seems implied
by the metaphysics,
, , . (T)he assertion that absolute spirit is the
final phase of the human spirit means no more
than that the human spirit is of essentially the
same kind as the spirit of God, and that every man
is potentially divine . . . this metaphorical
language concerning God must not be misunderstood.
Hegel most certainly did not believe in a personal
God in the ordinary crude popular sense in which
God is conceived as a particular person among other
persons. The Absolute is personality--another
name for the category of the Absolute Idea--or
spirit, but not a particular person or a particular
spirit,--which would mean a finite spirit.^
This approach to the problem would seem to make
personality a transcendent quality and to make man a
being who, in becoming like God, in whose image he is
created, is achieving personality. I find no evidence
4Stace, op. cit., p. 119.
185
that Hegel uses the term personality in this way.^ Royce
and Hocking, in affirming that Hegel does not conceive
God as personal, would seem to err more substantially
than Stace. If the position that I have attributed to
Hegel is equivocal, it seems better founded than the
position that denies personality to God or the position
that attributes personality to God unequivocally*
The attributing of substance to Absolute Spirit
would involve a similar problem as the attributing of
personality to It. Spirit is more than substance, as
Hegel employs that term. However, one may say that Spirit’
is substance, so long as the qualification is added that
it is more than substance, and that the attribute is
relative to this more. This employment of mediations
belonging to the various levels of the dialectic as
attributes of God may be extended. Indeed, the philo
sophical exposition of the attributes of God consist of
all of the moments of the dialectic (the dialectic of
5C.C.J. Webb also views personality as a quality
of being that in a significant sense transcends human
nature and is perfectly realized only in God. Man is
achieving personality. This point of view is based upon
an impressive historical analysis in which Webb proposes
to show that the fully developed concept of God as
personal does not appear until the 18th century. The view
is interesting in view of the obvious influence of Hegel
upon Webb’s philosophy of religion, though it cannot be
attributed to Hegel. Clement C.J. Webb, God and
Personality (London: George Allen and Unwin, Ltd., 1919),
see especially pp. 65, 247ff, 259.
186
religion and the dialectic as a whole), which, in the
final analysis, are the primary moments of what are
regarded, from the standpoint of religion, as God’s acts
of reconciliation of the world,
7. The concept of God for corporate religion is a
relative concept. It consists most fundamentally of the
acts of God in his reconciliation of the world, celebrated
by a spiritual community in worship. The passing over the
Red Sea and the deliverance out of the hands of the
Egyptians, the "giving" of the promised land--these and
other significant acts together constitute the way God is
most prominently conceived. Out of the pattern of these
acts, destiny and fulfillment is envisaged. An exhaustive
account of such acts is, of course, not practically
feasible, though such an account would, for Hegel, have
been theoretically possible. There is, moreover, no
fundamental separation between these significant acts
which are a part of the formal account of reconciliation
celebrated in worship and those myriads of acts of self-
negation which constitute the pilgrimage of members of the
spiritual community. We may presume that, for Hegel, it
is in such acts, which cannot become a part of the formal
concept of God (at least not at the time in which they
occur) that the spiritual individual comes to know his
essentiality as in God, the God whose Odyssey constitutes
187
the extension of His own story and the ground of His own
destiny.
8, The classical attributes of God, omnipotence,
omniscience, omnipresence, perfectly just, merciful, et
cetera, pertaining, as they do, to the level of the mere
understanding, while appropriate to worship, belong to the
Vorlesungen of religion. Thus these attributes have
symbolic meaning only, and the relativity of the concept
of God is not alleviated by appeal to them. Hegel rele
gates these classical attributes of God to a secondary
status.
9. The system of concrete universals is exhaustive
of essential reality and is identical with the concreti-
zation of Spirit in the world so far realized. History
is the process of the mediation of the logical idea and
nature, along with all of the submoments of this process.
Whether Hegel conceived that the mediation pertaining to
any submoment is brought to completion (in the sense that
all content pertaining to that submoment is formed by the
mediation) is doubtful, and it would seem to follow from
the solution to the problem of the form and the content
of the dialectic which has been proposed that he did not.
However this may be, the completion of the mediation of
the logical idea and nature, together with at least most
of the submoments of these, is envisaged by him as lying
beyond history. Except as abstract idea, Spirit is not
188
complete, in-and-for-itself, within history* Its
embodiment in the world is in the course of being
realized. The apprehension of the divine in the world is
the apprehension of the struggle and conflict and its
overcoming, and especially in the participation in this
overcoming.
10. The containment of the mediations of the
ethical consciousness within the religious consciousness
issues in the consequence that the self-negation of the
spiritual individual is an ethical as well as a religious
act. It is a willing of the good from a sense of ought,
which good becomes explicit in the process, at the same
time that it is the actualization of the reconciliation
of the world to God and the realization of the potenti
ality of the individual.
This conception of the relation of the ethical and
the religious consciousness, from Hegel's point of view,
makes it unnecessary to conceive of these as mutually
exclusive, as did Kierkegaard. Presupposing the identity
of the divine nature with the rationality inherent in the
universe in its becoming, Hegel held that the self-
negation of the individual must issue in moral action.
The intended sacrifice of Isaac by Abraham would have
been understood by him merely as an exemplification of
the primitive custom of child sacrifice and not as an
exemplification of absolute religion.
189
11. Perhaps the greatest significance of the
supposition that concrete universals are exhaustive of
essential reality lies in this, that all struggle and
suffering within the world are also conceived as the
struggle and suffering of Spirit in its diremption. This
diremption of Spirit pertains not merely to the negation
of Himself in his Son, but to all of the submoments of
this negation in nature. Quality and quantity, positive
and negative electrical energy, subject and object, male
and female, and all of the other polarities issuing in
mediations, down to the last concrete universal which
constitutes a part of essential reality, are exhibited as
aspects of the struggle and striving within the divine
life. The solution proposed respecting the problem of the
relation of concrete universals within and without the
formal structure of the dialectic renders more clear this
conviction held by Hegel. All progress is to be achieved
by advance through conflict* Happy times in the history
of the world are lost times.6 Spirit realizes itself in
infinite sorrow and anguish, which infinite sorrow and
anguish is also that of the spiritual individual who
6"Die Weltgeschichte ist nicht der Boden des
Glttcks. Die Perioden des Glticks sind leere Blotter in
ihr; denn sie sind die Perioden der Zusammensfimmung, des
fehlenden Gegensatzes•1 1 Geschichte, p. 56.
190
7
finds his identity in the Son. The issue of the conflict
in history is resolution of the antithetical actual forces
into a new synthesis which embodies the essential truth
of these actual forces. Right and justice are the recon
ciliation of these actual forces. Hence, right and
justice are always subject to change in the crucible of
conflict. By virtue of being a rational being, whose
very existence is a becoming, man is thus destined to an
infinite series of conflicts and his life consists in
their resolution.8
While it is quite clear that Hegel viewed war as
one form of conflict that has served the ends of Spirit,
it should not be concluded, on this account, that he
regarded it as the only or even the most adequate means
for the realization of reconciliation. The overriding
principle of the phenomenology of Spirit is that, in
spiritual beings, conflict may and ought to be raised to
the level of explicit thought, and be conceived in terms
of the Universal End. While war may be the means whereby
conflict is finally taken up into thought, the practical
Sorrow and anguish are in this way bearable, by
virtue of the fact that the principle of reconciliation
is understood; the resurrection is understood as an
eternal moment in Spirit.
g
The above consideration is one that is often
neglected, with the result that Hegel's philosophy is
portrayed as the philosophy of unqualified optimism.
191
import of this raising of a conflict to the level of
thought, where it is sufficiently general among the con
tending parties, is that it may be thought out rather than
9
blindly acted out. This thinking out is not an act of
mere contemplation, however, according to the common
usage of that term. It is a thinking with passion,'*'®
intensity and concern. The syntheses of thought come as
a knowledge through participation in the actual conflict.
True freedom is only attained to the degree to which the
individual spirit thus takes conflict into himself,
realizes their resolutions, and wills in accordance with
the inward determinations thus contained in himself. He
is able to bear conflict and its determination because
God, too, as he conceives Him, is the bearer of conflict,
12. The state is regarded as the most complete
embodiment of Spirit in the world. Hegel found that the
. . . truth is the unity of the universal and
subjective Will; and the Universal is to be found
in the State, in its laws, its universal and
%hile this judgment seems the only one consistent
with Hegel's system as a whole, it can hardly be concluded
that he was optimistic respecting the possibility of an
end of all wars. On the contrary, passages may be found,
and are often quoted, which seem to glorify war, Sidney
Hook has collated a fair sample of these, Sidney Hook,
"Hegel and the Perspective of Liberalism," in A Hegel
Symposium, Edited by D.C. Travis, pp. 39-64. See pp. 50,
55f •
10". . . so mussen wir iiberhaupt sagen, dass nichts
Grosses in der Welt ohne Leidenschaft vollbracht worden
ist." Geschichte, p. 52.
192
rational arrangements. The State is the divine
idea as it exists on earth.
The German State of his time was regarded as the
most advanced mediation of the dialectic of history. The
end posited by the historical consciousness of its
citizens, it may be presumed, was found to be most ade
quately embodied in that state. Hence, the Universal End
of history is conceived as the fulfillment of that state.
The State, thus viewed as the embodiment of Spirit,
is more than a political order. It is laws, mores, insti
tutions, language and customs— in short, a culture— that
embody the spirit of a people, a Volksgeist.^ The German
state, and any state, while it advances in the concrete
realization of Spirit that can be judged as such by a
philosophical historian, is found, moreover, to embody
not merely a Volksgeist, but a Weltgeist, i.e., Spirit in
its universality, attaining an increment of concreteness.
Such a state can most adequately bring to fulfillment the
potentiality of the spifftual individual.
While Hegel's posture is generally that of a
. . . (D)as Wahre ist die Einheit des allgemei-
nen und subjectiven Willens; und das Allgemeine ist im
Staate in den Gesetzen, in allgemeinen und verniinftigen
Bestimmungen. Der Staat ist die gottliche Idee, wie sie
auf Erden vorhanden ist." Geschichte, p. 71. The
translation is from HistoryT p» 39.
^Hegel holds that a culture must necessarily be
founded upon, and be the outgrowth of, a religion.
193
political conservative, in the sense that it is difficult
to picture him promoting a revolution, it may be noted,
in this connection, that he views the authority of the
state as justified only by its capacity to reflect the
truth and essential character of the individuals consti
tuting it,
13, Hegel’s doctrine of God, informed by the con
cept of thought as mediation, makes the development of
the mature spiritual individual the highest aim of history.
If it seems impossible to rationally reconcile the claim
that individuality and Absolute Spirit in-and-for-itself
are both the highest aims of history, there can be no
question but that Hegel claims these aims to be not merely
compatible but complementary. The secret of how this can
be may be one which Hegel keeps to himself and one which
can be apprehended, if at all, only by the mystical con
sciousness of Stirling and a few others.
The key to the achievement of mature individuality,
for Hegel, lies in the achievement, through participation
in the reconciliation of the world, of the concept of
Spirit in its concreteness. True individuality is
achieved only by the individual who knows his life as in
God, and shares the tension and suffering commensurate
with this state of affairs, and who knows his overcoming
through self-negation is overcoming of diremption in the
Divine. This individuality with all of the moments that
essentially constitute it, is never lost, at least not
before the culmination of history. If individuality is
finally absorbed into the Absolute this, from Hegel's
point of view, is not loss. Nothing is lost, except from
the perspective of one who is not "there." It seems
probable that Hegel's concept of the end of history was
merely a limiting concept, in which case available evi
dence would indicate that he held an unqualified doctrine
of the immortality of the soul during his later years.
CHAPTER IX
COMMON CRITICISMS OF HEGEL*S DOCTRINE OF GOD
In this chapter, consideration will be given to
five criticisms which, have commonly been leveled against
Hegel*s doctrine of God* While I shall state these
criticisms in ray own words, it is anticipated that the
reader will recognize them as types of the most common
criticisms made of Hegel in contemporary exegesis. The
discussion of these criticisms will generally presuppose
the solution to the critical problems of interpretation
which have been set forth in preceding chapters.'*’ At the
same time, the resolutions of these problems of inter
pretation will be regarded as at some points open to
question.
The Criticism Pertaining to
the Role of Reason
It is not possible for the finite mind to encompass
the infinite in thought. Neither is there a vantage point
to be had from which to comprehend totality in such a way
that this comprehension deserves to be called knowledge.
^These problems of interpretation and the resolu
tion that has been proposed for each will not be reviewed
here, since each has already been summarized at or near
the end of the chapter in which it is considered. The
reader may wish to review these summaries before pro
ceeding .
196
Hegel's doctrine of God claims too much for reason.
Moreover, if this claim could be justified, it would be
placed on a par with the divine mindj and it would follow
that this self would be the highest object of religious
devotion and worship.
This criticism, although it reflects an inadequate
comprehension of how Hegel viewed the relation between
the finite spiritual individual and Spirit in-and-for-
itself, defines the problem that is perhaps most central
to Hegel's doctrine of God viewed from the perspective of
Christian orthodoxy or neo-orthodoxy. However, before
considering this problem, it will be well to take note of
the claim which Hegel made for the finite consciousness.
Hegel certainly did not envisage a finite mind as
determined by the totality of the content of the ideal
world as it pertains to thought at its various levels.
(He did, however, conceive content as always entering
into the determination of the form of the concrete uni
versal.) Owing to the limitation of the finite mind on
this account, the finite mind falls short of the infinite
mind. Put differently, this amounts to the assertion that
the finite mind does not transcend history, within which
time and space are in the course of being realized as a
concrete mediated unity. This mediation, however, is in
the process of being realized by, and sometimes through,
the activity of the finite individual, and the form of
197
its realization (which it is the business of the philoso
pher to discover and set forth) is held to be essentially
one with the form whereby all time and space are to be
determined. It is in this supposition that Hegel makes
what may be regarded as a leap from the finite to the
infinite. That this transition is not more explicitly
regarded as a leap accounts for the above noted criticism.
That the transition from the finite to the infinite is
not radical, as Hegel conceives it, is principally owing
to the fact that the essential forms of thought exhibited
by finite minds are held to exhibit the character of God
in His diremption and reconciliation with Himself and, in
fact, to constitute moments within that diremption and
reconciliation, as viewed from the perspective of fini-
tude. Moreover, these forms of the determinations of
thought are conceived as existing in purified and
perfected form as eternal moments in God. The supposition
that the essential forms of thought, realized by finite
consciousness, are eternal moments in God provides the
metaphysical basis within Hegel's thought for the concept
of revelation. This is not to suggest that each of the
phases of the dialectic may properly be regarded as
arising in consciousness as revelatory moments. What from
Hegel's perspective arises in consciousness, not merely
through the analysis of thought, but as living concepts
198
born in das Jetzt, might appropriately be regarded as
revelatory moments* Revelation would thus have the form
of thought for its content.
The plausibility of the supposition that the
essential forms of thought, realized by finite conscious
ness, are eternal moments in God is grounded in the
immediate MexperienceM of unity in particularity which
characterizes the concrete notion given in das Jetzt.
When particularity of the forms of thought have been
discriminated out of this unity, the unity may be recon
stituted by deducing it from the particularity which
issued from it in concrete immediacy. Such a deduction
does not restore the immediacy of the moment, though it
yields an abstract concept that represents it to reflec
tive consciousness. When subsequent encounters yield an
identical discrimination of forms of thought, or an
increment to such particular forms, from which, in turn,
the original synthetic concept may be deduced, this gives
rise to the supposition that these essential forms of
thought are eternal moments in God.
The individual who again and again negates himself,
also again and again emerges from death into life. Having
realized the principle of the mediation of Spirit,
negation of the self is exemplified in him and for his
self-consciousness as determination by Spirit. He knows
his essentiality as in Spirit. This is the highest form
199
of self-affirmation. He is thus provided a basis for
supposing that, in the future, experience will conform to
the principles by which the world is in process of being
reconciled to Spirit--principles presented as Vorstel-
lungen of his faith and reified in his own self-
consciousness. Thus the absolute unity of Spirit in-and-
for-itself is found to be verified in experience. It is
found to be the ground of the polarities, and polarities
subspecie to these, which emerge from it--a ground which
may be reconstituted in synthetic concepts ' ’deduced1 1 from
these in accordance with the logic of the dialectic.
As with Kant, Hegel presupposes a synthetic a
priori unity of the form of reason, the Absolute being
that form. It is this transcendent ground of reason
which is reconstructed by dialectical logic. The moment
this reconstruction is seen as identical with that ground
is the moment when thought attains the form and status of
the concrete Notion. The Absolute cannot be known for
what it is apart from the recognition that it is Itself
the source of the concept of the Absolute that is identi
cal with its object. Thus, the absolute unity of Spirit
in-and-for-itself is presupposed by the deduction that
issues in its reconstruction and that presupposition and
the reconstruction are both indispensible ingredients of
this apprehended unity.
It appears, then, that knowledge of Spirit in-and-
for-itself is a knowledge given in concrete immediacy.
Hegel does not propose that his doctrine of the Absolute
rests merely upon a logical deduction in accordance with
dialectical principles, or even upon an activistic
willing of successive syntheses. Rather, the results of
this deduction and/or these syntheses is first given in
the notional ground as potentiality* In the final
analysis, Hegel's argument for his doctrine of God is not
merely (or even primarily) an abstract philosophical
argument, although such arguments are built into its
exposition.
What Hegel's doctrine of God claims for reason is
that the forms of essential thought are exemplified in
conflict and its overcoming, which can be determined by
the dialectical method to be moments within Spirit.
A further consideration of the relation of the
religious and the philosophical consciousness will make
it clear that these two forms of consciousness are both
fundamentally religious in character.
If Vorstellungen represent ideas, then these ideas,
once arrived at by the philosophical consciousness,
contain without residual the meaning and significance of
the Vorstellungen. However, according to the view set
forth in the Vorlesungen, the Vorstellungen of religion
are not submoments of the idea as such. Hence they cannot
be said merely to represent subsumed developments within
the Idea--developments belonging to a less comprehensive
level of the development of the Idea than that attained
through its complete determination* Nevertheless, while
in the Vorlesungen there is evidence of a recoil from the
consequences of such a result, it, -is difficult to avoid
the conclusion that, for Hegel, the determination of the
literal truth (i.e., of the meaning and significance of
the Vorste1lungen in the form of Idea) is ranked as an
advance over the religious consciousness which, from this
point of view, does not, as such, attain to this determi
nation. If the content of these two forms in which the
Idea presents itself is the same, but the forms differ,
then, in the light of Hegel's system as a whole, it still
remains impossible to hold that the pictorial form of
truth is possessed of a dignity equal to that of the
literal form. This fact would seem to make of religion a
precursor of philosophy and to cast the theologian in the
role of one who formulates religious doctrines for the
realization of Spirit in the lives of individuals and
cultures that have not yet attained philosophical con
sciousness. Understandably enough, theologians have been
inhospitable to this conclusion. These critics have
2
The problem here is not that of the relation be
tween philosophical and theological knowledge. From the
perspective of Hegel's system, philosophy and religion are
equivalent. It is rather in the relation of philosophical
knowledge to religious affirmations.
202
often taken this conclusion as the plainest of evidences
that he did not understand the peculiar nature of faith,
and have affirmed that faith is not properly regarded as
a kindergarten form of knowledge prerequisite to more
advanced forms of knowledge, as Hegel's view would seem
to imply. As I shall show in the section following,
Hegel conceived the nature and role of faith in his own
distinctive way. His doctrine of faith is not easily
reconciled with the Protestant Christian tradition of
which he considers himself a part and to which he seems to
be addressing himself.
The problem of the relation of the roles of the
religious individual and the theologian is by no means
unique to Hegel's theological formulations. However,
owing to the fact that, for Hegel, the form of the idea
is set forth in literal terms, the problem here takes on
special seriousness. In connection with it, several
things' are worthy of note.
1. Although Hegel holds that Spirit is apprehended
in the form of ideas, he does not, on this account,
envisage the displacement of the Vorstellungen of
religion. Not only have the Vorste1lungen informed the
consciousness that rises to the philosophical comprehen
sion of the idea; they remain to inform the consciousness
of others, both those disposed to philosophy and those not
so disposed. This is so because everyone who is to attain
203
to true spiritual individuality must recapitulate for
himself, through trial and suffering, the mediation of
thought•
2. The limitations of philosophical comprehension
must be born in mind. Neither the religious nor the
philosophical consciousness becomes identical with Spirit.
That the religious and the philosophical consciousness are
on a par in this respect, their content being the same,
is made amply clear in the closing pages of the
Vorlesungen. The affirmation that man can and does
think God's thoughts after Him may be taken as implying
that the distinction between the spiritual individual and
Spirit becomes blurred. Except with respect to particular
concrete realizations of Spirit, however, there is no
identity between the spiritual individual and Spirit
in-and-for-itself. What the knowledge of God consists in,
for the spiritual individual, is the concrete realization
of Spirit in his own conflict and its overcoming, and the
certainty that all conflict is resolved in God. It does
not consist in the immediate comprehension of Spirit
concretely realized as the totality of mediated moments of
space and time.
3. Hegel's philosophical conception of God is not
acquired passively or by mere contemplation, but by
■^See Chapter III, p. 47, footnote 7.
204
engagement— engagement of an intellectual nature, to be
sure— with actual forces within the social process. In
this engagement there is investment and, viewed from the
perspective of finitude, there is sacrifice. The need
for self-negation is not done away with for the philo
sophical consciousness. The philosophical consciousness
is one with the religious consciousness in its under
standing that self-negation is necessary, and wills it.
Whether or not the normal individual is capable of
willing his own negation is a problem, of course, and
one to which attention must shortly be given.
4. The religious character of the philosophical
consciousness is exhibited in the fact that, as in the
case with the religious consciousness, the content of
this consciousness is revealed truth. The revelation
that informs both the religious and the philosophical
consciousness stands in antithesis to reason as contained
in those concepts which, as representative of the past,
have been taken up into concrete moments of Spirit
realizing itself, but which are now mere concepts of the
understanding. Whether or not what Hegel regards as the
knowledge of God will pass muster for many philosophers
as philosophical knowledge, the thoroughly religious
character of this form of knowing seems beyond doubt or
dispute. What Hegel regards as philosophical knowledge
205
contains existential encounter with the otherness of
confronted mystery as a moment within reason and within
the Logos itself.
When the character of what Hegel regards as
philosophical knowledge is understood, the pretentiousness
of the claim for the human faculty of reason appears in a
somewhat different light than otherwise. If one accepts
the monistic principle and the principle of determination
by negation as essentially descriptive of successive in
stances of a thinking activity which, on the whole, may
be found to have a cumulative content, then there is at
least a basis for the theological assertion that these
principles pertain to the infinite mind at work in the
universe. That is to say, if one accepts these principles
as normative and regulative concepts of philosophy they
furnish a plausible basis for Hegel's claim concerning
what reason can attain with respect to the knowledge of
God. If one is unable to accept the premise that the
development of thought is cumulative in the sense that, at
least potentially, it involves not merely an accretion of
content but transformations of form as well, then the
claim cannot be seen to be well founded. On the other
hand, if one accepts the principles of the dialectic, the
explication of the movement from the finite to the infi
nite (attempted in the Vorlesungen) is one that, in
principle, at least, can be carried out with consistency.
206
The assessment of the significance of this result
is, of course, difficult. The fact that Hegel's method
can be applied with consistency may, of itself, hardly be
taken as conclusive evidence of its supremacy. But it
suggests that his dialectic of religion, taken as a whole,
is a tenable system that can be compared in its overall
adequacy with other tenable systems.
The Criticism Pertaining to the
Denial of Role to Religious Faith
Hegel's concept of God leaves room for faith only
in the sense of acceptance of authority. Faith in the
sense of basic trust in a divine being has no place in
his thinking. This acceptance of authority is essentially
the acceptance of human authority, and hence it may easily
lead to the blind acceptance of a totalitarian religions
and a totalitarian state.
That this criticism, typical of Protestant and,
more particularly, of Lutheran orthodoxy, possesses a
certain cogency is not to be denied. While faith in a
certain sense is implicit in the dialectic of absolute
religion, the classical expressions of the doctrine of
faith stemming from Paul, Augustine, and Luther, is hardly
present even in the characterization of absolute religion.
Hegel gives little, if any, place to the explicit expo
sition of faith in the sense of basic trust in God and a
207
divine ordering that transcends human comprehension and
in principle must transcend human comprehension. It
cannot be concluded, on this account, either that his
doctrine of God is inimical to faith as such or that the
development of the concept of faith within a more dis-
4
tinctly theological exposition of the dialectic of
religion may not be compatible with his doctrine of God.
A concept of faith compatible with Hegel's concept of the
nature and role of reason, however, will inevitably have
its own peculiar character. Three considerations seem
especially relevant in this connection.
1. Thought as transcending itself is conceived as
having its own inner dynamic. This dynamic is the prin
ciple of negation. At the level of self-consciousness,
and most particularly at the level at which self-
consciousness attains to the principle of self-negation
(in identification with the sacrifice of the Son), this
surd quality within thought (conceived as spirit) has
become explicit to self-consciousness. However optimistic
the supposition may be that the individual, viewed from
a contemporary perspective, can be sane and still will
his own negation, basic trust in a divine order that
4
This would imply a giving way to a distinction
between theology and philosophy, if not in matters of
principle, at least with respect to emphases, within the
dialectic of absolute religion.
208
transcends the negation (presented in the Vorstellung of
the resurrection) is, for Hegel, clearly a precondition of
the individual’s capacity to will his own negation. That
faith, as basic trust, does not receive explicit emphasis
is owing to the fact that Hegel believes he has discovered
the forms of the development of thought which are rational
and are present to any rational consciousness which has
traversed them. These forms are also asserted to be the
forms of the Divine Logos; i.e., they are modes of God's
becoming in the world. The object of faith is then con
ceived as an object with the emerging discernible form of
a coherent body of occurrences in self-consciousness and
in the world, i.e., it is conceived as an explicitly
rational object. If the emphasis upon the rationality
of the object of worship leads to a neglect of faith,
this is owing, not so much to the sense that faith is no
longer required, as to the fact that, at the level of the
Spirit, the determinative power of faith is taken up into
the concept of rationality.
2. Faith, as something opposed to the deliverances
of reason, is something that belongs more prominently to
the level at which the reasoning faculty has attained to
nothing greater than the categories of the understanding.
Faith in this sense, for the spiritual individual within
absolute religion and in the course of becoming, is
disclosed as that which I have chosen to call the surd
element within the Logos itself. What may be regarded as
the problematical treatment which Hegel accords the con
cept of faith is largely owing to the pretension that the
concrete universal forms of thought are eternal in God,
and not to any hostile intent toward the concept of faith
as such, or to any inherent incompatibility of the con
cept with his doctrine of God. There is no problem in
reconciling the role of reason as more generally conceived
("abstract reason" to Hegel) as an attitude or disposition
that does not anticipate revelation in rational terms (in
the Vorstellungen of the Faith) as the issue of such
faith. For Hegel, this kind of reason belongs to other
than absolute religion and is aufgehoben in the moment in
which God gives Himself in His Son. It belongs to the
moments that precede that moment in which the individual
through his own self-negation knows the form of notional
reason (Vernunftig) at least in the Vorstellung of the
sacrifice of the Son.
3. It is also worthy of note that what Hegel
regards as the highest comprehension of the divine, (if
one wishes to employ this category in what has become its
more usual sense) might be viewed more appropriately as a
form of religious consciousness than as a form of philo
sophical or theological consciousness. Hegel's insistence
210
that this highest comprehension of the Divine may appropri
ately be regarded as philosophical consciousness derives
its force from the claim that the form of philosophical
consciousness lends itself to philosophical exposition by
the employment of the principle of determination by
negation.
It is certainly implicit within Hegel's perspective
that faith, in the sense of trust on the part of man in
his finitude that the reconciliation of the world insofar
as this has not yet been actually realized, will be
realized. The syntheses of conflicts between actual
forces in culture is not determined when it is first
envisioned, though this first envisionment and the venture
that belongs to it are essential to its realization. The
will of the historical consciousness to pursue the
realization of the synthesis of contradictory actual
forces in culture implies a trust that such a realization
must and can be effected, and that the final issue of
such ventures, whatever form this may finally take when
modified by the ebb and flow of historical developments,
will be an expression of the divine order. The fact that
the forms of the development of thought in history are
regarded as subject to revision, in order to bring about a
coherence with the successively emerging goals of history
as determined by the consciousness of the philosopher and
211
the historical consciousness, may be held to give addi
tional status to faith as viewed from the perspective of
Hegel's concept of God.
Thus faith, under Hegel's auspices, becomes faith
in the rationality of the world not yet manifest, trust
in a destiny bound up in God as transcendent. As finite,
the individual shares the privation of knowledge which
God Himself suffers (as the other of this transcendent
One) in His wandering through the world, in His Odyssey.
Given the understanding of the relation of the
form of the dialectic to the content that pertains to that
form,^ so long as history has not reached its culmination,
faith as Hegel understands it has a place in religion. At
the level of absolute religion, however, Hegel displays a
dominant tendency to permit faith to be absorbed into the
concept of knowledge. At this level, apposition between
faith and reason is in the course of being done away with.
What was apprehended in faith is, here, ever in the
process of becoming God revealed; this revelation, more
over, has a rational content, which content is the form
of rationality. The position might be summarized by
saying that faith has a content which is dissolved in
reason in its unfolding; and this reason is conceived as
5See Chapter IV, pp. 68-84.
212
containing what Hegel regards as the dynamic of faith.
Thus, with respect to his doctrine of the relation between
faith and reason in religion, Hegel might be described as
a neo-gnostic.
His radical revision of the classical doctrine of
faith may be viewed as in the direction of the Logos
doctrine associated with the Fourth Gospel.^ In the Fourth
Gospel, the concept of faith in the Pauline sense is
conspicuously absent. Even as in the case of Hegel’s
r
philosophy of religion, it would seem to have been dis
placed by an inward and immediate kind of spiritual
knowledge•
There is still another aspect to the objection to
Hegel's doctrine as initially stated. Holding, as Hegel
does, that the truth of God's manifestation is a deter
minate truth, he is naturally led to regard this truth
as authoritative whenever it is objectively embodied in
persons and/or cultural institutions. At the level of
the notion, this truth is first embodied in its univer
sality in a particular person, i.e., in Christ as the Son
6The term "Logos” is explicitly mentioned only in
the "Prologue" to the Fourth Gospel. If one takes the
position that the Gospel as a whole reflects the concept
of Christ as the Logos, and there is much ground for
holding this position, then a scriptural precedent is fur
nished for the general tendency to treat faith in some
thing like the way in which Hegel treats it. This is not,
of course, to suggest that a simple equation is to be made
between Hegel's position and that of the author of final
redactor of the Fourth Gospel.
213
of God* Finally, it is found to be embodied in the
church through the continual work of the Spirit, and in
cultural institutions and in the state as a whole* The
abuses to which this investment of status in cultural
institutions lends itself has been widely recognized. If
the conception of the individual as capable of self-
negation and notional knowledge implies an exalted and
problematical concept of man, the expectation that the
state will conform to such notional knowledge seems at
least equally problematical* Such an expectation seems
to claim too much for the capacity for men to realize the
ideal in practical affairs.
It needs to be noted, however, that the authority
of the state is ultimately determined by its capacity to
reflect the highest potentiality of the spiritual indi
vidual and to furnish the continuing concrete objectivity
of Spirit within which his implicit essentiality, his
* * 7
spiritual nature, can be realized. The spiritual
7T.M. Knox proposes to give reasons for denying
(1) that Hegel the man is justly accused of servility to
the Prussian Government, and (2) that there is any war
rant in the text of his Philosophie des Rechts for the
charge that Hegel the philosopher was an exponent of
"Prussianism" and "frightfulness.1 1 Knox has appreciated
the fact that Hegel's more extreme statements in glorifi
cation of the state must be understood within the context
of his philosophical system. T.M. Knox, "Hegel and
Prussianism," Philosophy, Vol. 15, 1940, pp. 51-63.
Sidney Hook takes a quite opposite view. Sidney
Hook, From Hegel to Marx (New York: The Humanities Press.
1950),_p. 424, 49.
214
individual is conceived as possessed of the means of
effecting change in a state that falls short of embodying
and reflecting his own spiritual development. If,
perhaps partly owing to the historical circumstances of
Hegel's time, a certain want of explicit development of
the way in which the spiritual individual contributes to
the constitution of the state is evidenced, he has never
theless made it amply plain that he conceived the indi
vidual and the state as mutually and reciprocally determi
native of each other. The immature experience church and
state as authorities, whereas the spiritually mature, who
appropriate the otherness of the state, and are able to
apprehend its want with respect to the embodiment of their
own historical consciousness, will those laws and mores
which conform to their own essentiality and freedom. They
thus contribute to the laws and mores of the state.
In a time in which Kant's vision of the cosmopoli
tan state is ever present to the public consciousness, and
in which the power of national states is widely regarded
as a hinderance to the realization of this vision, Hegel's
alliance between the power of church and state hardly
strikes a responsive note. The fundamental truth
Also see D.C. Travis, A Hegel Symposium (Austin, Texas:
The Department of Germanic Languages, the University of
Texas, 1962), "Hegel and the Perspective of Liberalism,"
by Sidney Hook, pp. 39-64.
215
expressed in the development of this theme is that the
spiritual development of the individual does not occur
merely in his aloneness or in a social vacuum. It occurs,
rather, in a spiritual community which embodies and
expresses the successive spiritual attainments of a
people, and which has the inherent need to extend the
sphere of reconciliation in culture. This truth is of
enduring value.
The Criticism Pertaining to the
Role and Status of the Individual
Hegel's doctrine of God robs the individual of
his true dignity as a person created in the image of God
and free to determine himself. The value of uniqueness
is depreciated to the extent that the highest to which man
can aspire is dull conformity to the state, the most
complete objectification of Spirit, and the gradual ab
sorption into the infinite mind.
The individual in the world is possessed of a
dignity commensurate with the notion that the highest
order of universality is concrete universality. The
particular finite mind, the concrete embodiment of Spirit,
is the highest finite actuality. While this statement
may be felt to be contradictory to Hegel's assertion that
the state is the highest objectification of Spirit in the
world, it may be seen not to be when it is remembered that
the state is a concept and a system of concepts contained
216
within the thought of the individuals comprising it. It
seems, however, that the kind of uniqueness exhibited on
the part of the individual to which Hegel gives major
emphasis, particularly in his major works other than the
Vorlesungen, consists in those acts which transcend, and
add an increment to, the concrete realization of Spirit.
It is these acts of mediation of contradictory actual
forces which prove to be pioneering ventures and which
become universal, and which, once they have been tra
versed, are recapitulated again and again. Thus, there
is displayed an emphasis upon the great man and a neglect
of the individual whose only uniqueness consists in the
fact that he embodies a unique combination of mediations.
From a higher perspective, the latter individual appears
to exist only in dull conformity to the form of the
culture that surrounds him. From that person's own per
spective, however, the case must seem otherwise. To the
extent, for example, that he is lacking in the capacity
to will the laws of the state, i.e., to embrace within
his mind the conflicts and determinations thereby neces
sitated, the individual is nevertheless participating in
a struggle the outcome of which ought ideally to be the
realization of this conflict and struggle in his own
thought. He, too, is involved in the realization of the
reconciliation of the world, though the primary moments
of this realization are not first exemplified in his
consciousness•
The claim that the state is the highest realization
of Spirit in concrete actuality is less damaging to the
status of the individual when two things are kept in mind.
The first is that the state and the individual are mutu
ally constitutive each of the other. The second is that
the objective embodiment of the state is in the form of
thought at the level of the Notion--thought having a
Universal End. Such thought is certainly exemplified
primarily in the consciousness of individuals who con
stitute the state. It would appear that it is only in a
secondary sense that it is exemplified by cultural insti
tutions as such. Hence, if individuals are lost in the
state, it follows that, in principle, their subservience
is to those individuals, those leaders, who most ade
quately embody culture.
Each of the many acts of reconciliation on the
part of the spiritual individual contributes to the
advances formally set forth in the dialectic. But the
extent to which this fact constitutes evidence that the
individual is lost in the wholeness of the state and the
wholeness of spirit is difficult to appraise. If the
proposal that I have made respecting the way in which
Hegel conceives the myriads of acts of reconciliation on
the part of individuals as related to the formal schema
218
of the dialectic of spirit in history, is accepted, the
individual may be viewed as having a greater worth and
dignity for Hegel than is usually conceded. This would
be owing to the independent status thereby accorded to
the soul within Spirit. From the perspective thus
afforded, the individual can hardly be said to be swal
lowed up in the infinite in a radical sense, though, of
course, his essentiality is conceived as in God. But
whether or not this perspective is conceived as doing full
justice to Hegel's view of the role and status of indi
viduality, his understanding of freedom contains a notable
difficulty.
It has often been argued that, by defining freedom
and determinism as, in effect, correlatives, by saying
that freedom is willing the thesis and antithesis which,
at the level of essentiality, determine the individual,
Hegel denies freedom in the sense of a choice between
alternatives. This is not, however, precisely the
Hegelian position. Choice, in the sense in which that
term is employed by the ordinary empirical consciousness,
is not denied. Hegel holds, rather, that freedom per
taining to instances of choice is a merely abstract
category. The truth for which it stands is not demon
strable. As a concretely determined category--as a
category, in other words, determined within the schema
219
of the dialectic--freedom is one way of viewing determi
nation, The person who acts from freedom wills that
which determines him; he wills this, moreover, not merely
as his fate but as his destiny. As pertaining to the
categories of the dialectic, this means that he wills the
synthesis of thesis and antithesis.
It cannot be denied that the complex order of
concrete universals, exhaustive of essential reality, is
envisioned as a completely and explicitly determined
order such that to admit freedom, taken in any other sense
as pertaining to it, would be to admit inconsistency and
incompleteness in this order. In deference to the suppo
sition that it is possible to construct a coherent meta
physical schema of essential reality on the basis of the
principle of determination by negation, Hegel found it
necessary to deny freedom in the ordinary sense within
this schema.
The problematical character of this way of dealing
with freedom is made only a little less problematical by
the fact that the schema of concrete universals is in the
nature of the case hypothetical and subject to review.
The aim of the exposition is to show that the essential
route of the development of thought is determined. This
being the case, it is difficult to see how the notion of
(
freedom in the sense of choice between alternative acts
can be given any real standing either within the schema
220
of concrete universals (and even if this schema is con
ceived as inclusion of those myriads of concrete univer-
sals pertaining to the daily acts of individuals) or as
pertaining to the ordinary empirical consciousness.
Perhaps this is a necessary outcome in the case of any
metaphysical system that makes a pretension to complete
ness. Precedents for this outcome may be found in
Aquinas, Luther, Calvin, Descartes, Leibnitz, Kant, and
many other notable contributors to the literature of the
philosophy of religion.
To have accorded the notion of freedom metaphysical
status within his system, would seem to rank as a notable
accomplishment on the part of Hegel, even though it leaves
unanswered the age-old question as to whether man, of
himself, is possessed of the capacity to select one of
several alternatives. To effect reconciliation and, thus,
make explicit the order and rationality of the world is
to realize freedom, and to fail to do so is to remain in
bondage. It remains unclear, however, whether the freedom
thereby gained can be other than freedom to effect further
reconciliation. If the background context for Hegel's
view of freedom is Kant's a priori ethic, as it would seem
to be, then the individual is ultimately free to make
concretely actual only what ideally is, and what is meta
physically established as being such. To assert otherwise
221
is to deny the transcendent side of Spirit and to make
Spirit finite, and this is not consistent with the
position set forth in the Vorlesungen. In this work it
is made amply clear, though this is not given equal
emphasis in Hegel's other major works, that man is con
ceived as thinking God's thoughts after Him and not merely
for Him.
The Criticism that Evil and Suffering
are Rendered Illusory or Unreal
Since, from the perspective of Spirit, evil and
suffering have no essential existence, Hegel's doctrine
of God implies that evil and suffering are merely an
illusion of finite minds. Partly on this account, the
doctrine leads to a passive and callous attitude toward
suffering, toward the very antithesis of love and mercy.
It follows from the interpretation of the
Vorlesungen to which I have come that the individual is
ever determining good and evil in terms of an overarching
concept of good determined and as ever in the process of
being further determined by Universal End. Hegel regarded
evil as very real for the individual. It is clearly real
within natural religion, the religion of spiritual indi
viduality, and absolute religion. The fact that the
formal determination of good and evil is within natural
religion implies that this determination goes on within
determinations which occupy a higher position in the
222
dialectic*
The historical process in its completeness is en
visioned as Spirit, in which all duality, including the
duality of good and evil, has been overcome. Except as
an ideal, the individual presumably never knows such a
circumstance. Evil is so fundamentally real, in fact,
that it constitutes an aspect of the finitude of God as
He realizes Himself concretely in the world, realizes
Himself in His own other.
However, a problem may be felt to be constituted
by the fact that evil has no place in Absolute Spirit
in-and-for-itself, But Hegel's position in this regard
is no different from any other monotheism which maintains
the transcendence of God. If God is regarded as being or
the ground of being, the purely actual who is not acted
upon, then there can be no evil that affects Him.
While the criticism that this leads to a callous
attitude toward suffering may be felt to have some ground
in Hegel's exposition of the Logic, suffering has been
appropriately dignified in the Vorlesungen. The fact
that all reconciliation is the overcoming of conflict,
and that this overcoming is accompanied by a certain
amount of suffering, speaks clearly as to the status
accorded to evil and suffering in the world. While they
are ultimately overcome and viewed as taken up into the
unity of Spirit in which they are seen as having been the
223
means for creative advance t the overcoming is not the
overcoming of mere dreams and fantasies but of actual,
though finite, forces. So real is suffering that its
absence may be regarded as a sign that the onward march
of Spirit has been brought to a temporary halt.
If a problem arises because of the dual view of
freedom and evil, according to which each appears differ
ently from the perspective of finitude than it does from
the perspective of the transcendence of God, Hegel1s
treatment of evil receives its predominant emphasis and
fullness of treatment from the perspective of finitude.
For this reason, Hegelfs proposed solution of the problem
of evil is more adequate than is his proposed solution of
the problem of freedom. If one can accept the validity
of the principles of the dialectic, the proposed solution
to the problem of evil is not particularly problematic.
The Criticism that HegelTs Concept
of God Renders Worship Meaningless
Hegelfs conception that the world is in God and
is a part of the body of God renders worship meaningless.
If God is actual for the worshipper only to the extent
that he has realized himself in concreteness in the world,
if our knowledge of God is limited by our finitude; and
if, as a man, the worshipper is himself the highest
realization of that finitude, then worship is no more
significant than is communion with the inner self. *
224
Worship is not possible unless the worshipper conceives
God as other than himself, and as objectively real in his
otherness.
This criticism is based upon failure to recognize
Hegel's conception of the transcendence of God. While an
increment to the self is realized in worship at its
various levels, God is never equated with the larger self,
g
as in the case with Royce. Spirit in its transcendent
aspect remains other than the self and, as other, from
the perspective of the individual who has attained to the
highest mediation within absolute religion, the one
perfectly and objectively realized actuality. It is
perfectly and objectively realized in virtue of the fact
that the forms of its realization have been mediated for
consciousness. The content pertaining to this form is
not determined in its entirety. Worship involves self
negation. In the experience of worship the model of
self-negation is given whereby further content is to be
determined by this form, whereby God realizes Himself
concretely in the reconciliation of the world. Worship
is not self-worship.
8Josiah Royce, The Spirit of Modern Philosophy,
edited by Ralph Barton Perry (New York: George Braziller,
Inc., 1955), Lecture X, p. 379.
CHAPTER X
SOME IMPLICATIONS FOR THE DOCTRINE OF GOD OF
HEGEL’S CONCEPT OF THOUGHT AS MEDIATION
Four Perspectives
The implications for the doctrine of God of the
concept of thought as mediation naturally vary depending
upon the context in which the concept is incorporated.
The centrality of the concept having been considered,
along with the way in which it works itself out within
Hegel's system, and most particularly with respect to
Hegel's doctrine of God, I shall now set forth its impli
cations for the doctrine of God from four perspectives.
The first of these will presuppose the essence of
thought is the capacity of thought to transcend itself.
The attempt will be made to assess the implications of
this notion for the doctrine of God apart from the
particular "what*1 and "how" of mediation within Hegel's
view.
The second perspective will presuppose, in addition
to this, the principle of determination by negation and
orders of determination in which each determination is
inclusive of others in a series, no one of which rises
above being a finite unity.
The third perspective will presuppose, in addition
226
to what is presupposed in the first and second, that God
is a determined infinite unity of thought, but such an
infinite unity of thought as stands over against a world
that remains essentially other to Him. This unity of
thought is not identical with the being of the finite,
empirical world. Thought represents being; but being is
not conceived as taken up into thought without residue,
nor is its form presupposed as identical with the form of
thought.
The fourth perspective, in addition to what is
presupposed in the preceding perspectives, will presuppose
the identity of being and thought. It will thus pre
suppose not merely the concept of thought as mediation,
but also several of the most significant regulative
notions within Hegel's metaphysic.
The treatment will thus proceed through a series
of four stages which presuppose progressively more of
Hegel's primary concepts as a context for the concept of
thought as mediation. This concept will be seen to have
different implications for the doctrine of God from each
of these perspectives. I propose to show, (1) that the
concept of thought as mediation need not necessarily pre
suppose Hegel's system as a whole, or even the dialectical
method, as an accompanying context of thought; (2) that
the implications of the notion are varied, depending upon
the context of thought within which it is incorporated,
227
with respect to such issues as the relation between faith
and reason, the relation of ethics to religion, and the
relation of religion to culture; and (3) that certain
implications are constant, regardless of the context of
thought in which the notion is incorporated.
The development of the perspectives to follow has
not been undertaken without thought to possible corre
lations with positions taken with respect to the doctrine
of God either before or following Hegel, The reader will
be left to note, on his own, certain affinities of these
perspectives with philosophers and theologians since
Hegel. Recognizing that few, if any contemporary thinkers
are prepared to accept Hegel's doctrine of God in its
entirety, even while his thought continues to be a source
of germinal ideas, I have outlined what seems to follow
as a logical consequence of accepting the concept of
thought as mediation within the context of these several
perspectives. My aim is thus neither to defend nor to
reject any part of Hegel's doctrine of God, with the
possible exception of the bare concept of thought as
mediation which, as I am shortly to develop it, almost
all men hold.
First perspective.--The concept of thought as
mediation, apart from any presupposed view of the "what"
and the "how" of mediation must of course remain a
228
meagerly defined concept. Such a concept, nevertheless,
implies that the human race is not limited by a set of
fixed concepts which are representative of a static
reality, and which can only be discovered and analyzed,
but which do not lend themselves to syntheses which
exhibit genuine novelty. It implies that genuinely new
synthetic concepts are produced by minds which, in turn,
become the source of other concepts which may be analyzed
out of these. It is by the analysis of these concepts
that systems of subconcepts are derived which may be seen
in their interrelatedness by the employment of the various
schemas and systems of modern logic.
The assertion of this implication in turn implies
that this natural process by which the mind creates
concepts must lend itself to some kind of examination,
that thought aware of itself as possessed of the capacity
to transcend itself must also be possessed of the capacity
for analyzing the process by which it performs this
function. Whether this examination is to take the form
of a transcendental deduction (Kant), an immediate appre
hension of Platonic Ideas (Schopenhauer) or an immediate
apprehension of the category-making process (Hegel), is
not determined upon the basis of the concept of thought
as mediation alone. The possibility would seem to be
implied, however, in the case of one or more of these
229
methods of deduction or analysis, that the synthetic
process by which concepts are formed may be affected by
conscious awareness of the process.
The concept of thought as most essentially
mediation, even without explicit specification of the
what and the how of this mediation, imply several things
for the doctrine of God, It implies, at least as a
possibility, that the content of a man’s concept of God
might be identical with the highest and most comprehensive
synthetic concept to which he has attained. This would
imply, in turn, at least as a possibility, that the con
cept of God (and this would follow regardless of whatever
transcendent status may be accorded the Divine) might
adequately be accounted for upon the basis of the nature
of thought, (The alternative would be to hold that the
concept of God arises in an entirely different way than
other concepts, and independently of them.) This is to
say no more than that if thought transcends itself, it is
not self-contradictory to assert that the highest concept
of thought is ”a,” if not necessarily ”the,” concept of
God. That the highest mediation of thought is necessarily
identical with the idea of God cannot be demonstrated
except within a context of thought which presupposes more
than does this perspective.
Secondly, if the highest concept of thought is
held to be a concept of God, then this might reasonably be
230
taken to imply that the concept of God is a finite
concept, whether or not it is maintained (as a doctrine
to be accepted upon faith) that it is a finite concept of
an infinite God. One would not, without presupposing
something more than the bare concept of thought as medi
ation, have ground for affirming one's concept of God to
be a completely adequate representation of a transcendent
being.
That the concept of God is a finite concept implies
that it is subject to change in the course of time. Thus
the concept of thought as mediation provides a basis for
supposing that the concept of God will also undergo
change during the course of the maturing of the individual.
This would, in turn, give rise to the suggestion that some
concepts of God are in some way inclusive of others and
hence indicative of a certain, if inexplicit, degree of
maturity on the part of the individuals who hold them.
The above noted implications for the doctrine of
God of the bare concept of thought as mediation involve
notions which are today so commonplace as to be taken
almost for granted. They were, however, lost from view
when certain philosophers, beginning with Hume, attempted
to make a radical separation between logical truth and
factual truth, and as a consequence, failed to observe
that logical systems are derived from and modeled after
concrete relations. The concept of thought as mediation
231
stands as contradictory to this point of view. If one is
true, the other is false; both cannot be true. The con
cept of thought as mediation implies that, however
convenient it may be to distinguish logical truth from
truth as pertaining to facts, these must ultimately be
judged by appeal to a common point of reference, and
hence they must ultimately be one.
The synthetic moment in thought is viewed as
primary to and as preceding its analysis. The conclusion
which has today been reached that no natural language is
completely logical^ is precisely the conclusion that the
concept of thought as mediation implies. The concepts of
our ordinary language are derived by analysis, not from a
single synthetic concept, but from many synthetic con
cepts, which may perhaps be related according to some
organic scheme, but are not logically deduced from one
another according to any accepted concept of logical
deduction. Even if a system of logic was found that is
homogeneous with one such synthetic concept, and hence
adequate to setting forth the relation of the subconcepts
contained within this concept, it is not nor (in the
nature of the case) can it be homogeneous with all or
even with a substantial plurality of such synthetic
■^Willard Van Orman Quine, Methods of Logic
(New York: Henry Holt and Company"J Inc,, 1959), p, xii.
232
concepts.
A recognition of this state of affairs would seem
to point to the desirability of ascertaining what kind
of relation might obtain between successive moments of
thought in its self-transcendence.
Second perspective.— The second perspective, in
addition to the concept of thought as mediation, pre
supposes the "what1 1 and the "how" of mediation as Hegel de
velops the concept. It presupposes the monistic principle
and the principle of determination by negation, that is,
the primary principles of the dialectic, without, however,
presupposing an infinite and transcendent unity of thought.
The mediating function of thought as further defined and
specified by these principles implies several things
relative to the doctrine of God in addition to what is
implied by the first perspective.
The successively more comprehensive concepts of
God held by the religious consciousness are viewed from
this perspective as accruing to it as a result of struggle
and overcoming of polarities of thought. This struggle
and overcoming is participated in by both men and God.
Indeed, this perspective provides for no sense in which
God is above this struggle and overcoming, as perspectives
subsequently to be considered do. God, from this per
spective, is finite and limited in the sense that the
struggle going on in the world is not regarded as com
pletely resolved in Him. God is conceived as realizing
Himself through the historical process in time, as His
Odyssey, and the final issue of this Odyssey, if it is
forecast at all (and this perspective does not imply that
it is) is a forecast of faith. His being extends no
farther than the collective syntheses concretely realized
by the members of the religious community. God is trans
cendent to the individual only in the qualified sense that
the individual incorporates within his thought the synthe
ses achieved by other individuals. God is simply the
collective representation of the moments of self-negation
realized by the collective of finite minds. The indi
vidual accepts upon authority the concepts of God which
transcend the concept which he has concretely realized
in his own consciousness. These concepts which are at
first known to him as abstract, are set before him by the
spiritual community. He is only in the course of
realizing these successively as concrete syntheses of his
own, of finding his own essentiality in them. The wor
shipping community is one in which this qualified "trans
cendence1 1 of God comes to be known and shared through the
sharing of struggle and the celebration of its overcoming.
God is not transcendent to the spiritual community as
such, however.
From this perspective, which does not presuppose
234
the identity of being and thought, the world is plural
istic. This is true regardless of the degree to which
the ideal of the religious community belonging to this
perspective is achieved. Being is not conceived as
taken up, without residue, into the determination of
thought. Thus God, though immanent, remains an ideal
unity which stands over against this pluralistic world,
alien to it in the sense that, if it is in conformity
with Him, this conformity has not been wholly manifest.
There is thus a sense in which He might be regarded as
transcending nature.
The principal moments of this struggle and over
coming are universal for rational beings. Men not only
share various concepts of God, they traverse the same
succession of principal concepts of God, Worship may be
described as the corporate experience in which the uni
versality of the highest and most comprehensive concept
of God is in the course of being realized. This is, of
course, a concrete concept. Only retrospectively, after
it is no longer, in the strict sense, a concrete concept,
may it be abstracted from the memory of the lived
encounter. As history can only be written retrospectively,
the concept of God held by a religious community can only
be comprehended in the abstract by a retrospective view.
This retrospective view is to be taken, however, from the
perspective of a religious community concretely realizing
a yet more comprehensive concept of God.
Worship has as its aim the exemplification in the
world of the ideal unity belonging to God as conceived by
the religious community. What this amounts to is that
each member of this community should come to share the
conflict and overcoming of every other member. The
knowledge of God lies in the sharing of conflict and
overcoming.
Because concepts of God are universal, from this
persoective, they may be viewed as an interrelated
series, some more comprehensive than others, and one as
comprehensive of all. Every individual's concept of God
is comprehensive of all that is actual (Wirklich) for
him. This concept engages the individual in the reali
zation of his potentiality without inundating him in an
other not his own other. He only gradually comes to
share and make his own the conflict and its overcoming of
every other member of the religious community, which, to
the extent that it is a community of fellowship in
struggle and suffering, accepts the limitations of the
individual in this regard. The finitude of this concept
is exposed in the other that he encounters as actuality
not contained within it. This other is determined as his
own other. His concept of God stands negated and thus a
new concept of God is determined in his consciousness.
236
The ideal outcome, never more than approximated, is that
the individual's concept of God contains all of the
principal antitheses and their syntheses attained in the
consciousness of the members of his religious community. ,
It implied, by this perspective, that man is
capable, under the guidance of concepts which he may come
to through the employment of his own reason, of realizing
the moral demand he conceives as divine. This being the
case, it is also implied that he stands under the judgment
of his own most comprehensive concepts and the moral
demands they invoke.
The doctrine of God belonging to this perspective
may be restricted to a doctrine of divine immanence. God
is conceived as identical with the totality of mediations
achieved within the consciousness of individuals within
the religious community. In contrast with the concept of
God belonging to the perspective shortly to be considered,
this might be regarded as a concept of God belonging to
"natural" religion, seeing that it is one arrived at by
virtue of the intrinsic dialectical character of thought.
Man not only thinks God's thoughts after Him; he thinks
God's thoughts for Him, and ideally, (an ideal which is
perhaps never completely realized) he thinks the thought
which not only is representative of God, but which pre
sents God so adequately as to be identical with God. To
the degree that he concretely embodies the concept of God
237
in his own consciousness, this is to say, that concept is
one with its object. To the extent that this ideal is
realized, the concept of God is not merely representation
al, but presentational. Regardless of how nearly this
ideal is achieved, God is not simply thought in the sense
of a static concept but a synthesis being achieved in
thought. God is conceived as other, and hence as an
object of thought; however, only in the restricted sense
that the anticipated synthesis of those specific conflicts
which the individual is seeking to overcome is only an
intimation, only partially grasped in thought. On this
account, the radicality of the opposition of the theses
and antitheses that constitute these conflicts is only in
the course of being exhibited, seeing that this opposition
is fully manifest only at the moment of synthesis.
Each successive concept of God which becomes
reified, first in the consciousness of the sage or
spiritual leader, and subsequently for the members of the
spiritual community, is a concept which, in relation to
other concepts, stands in a relation of transcendence to
them. These other concepts are aufheben within it. The
"transcendence1 1 pertaining to this perspective is thus
only provisional and temporary. The experience of a
succession of such provisional and temporary concepts of
God must give rise either to allowance for a plurality of
gods or to the notion that these concepts do not present
238
the literal truth but merely symbolic representations of
a Spiritual Being beyond each and all, which (or who) is
the ground of all of them. Thus the concept of thought
as mediation, placed within the context of the dialectical
method as Hegel conceived it, may point to the next per
spective to be considered. This perspective is to pre
suppose, in addition to what is presupposed in the second,
that God is an infinite unity of thought standing over
against a world that remains, at least provisionally and
during the course of history, essentially other to Him.
From this perspective, the concept of God that has been
characterized in the above is a concept of a God who is
finite without qualification.
Third perspective.--The third perspective pre
supposes, in addition to what is presupposed in the first
and second, that God is a determined infinite unity of
thought, but such an infinite unity of thought as stands
over against a world that remains essentially other to
Him. This unity has not been concretely realized as
present in the world, nor is it presupposed that it shall
be. The reconciliation of the members of the religious
community to God which is to be concretely realized does
not include the reconciliation of the world being
mediated and taken up into thought without residue.
Thought represents being, but being is not conceived as
239
taken up into thought without residue; neither is its
form presupposed as identical with the perfect and com
plete form of thought in God as other to the world.
While concepts of God remain synthetic concepts
which contain all other concepts of the individual
spiritual consciousness (and may be shown t o ' ' do so by the
employment of the dialectical method) they are viewed as
given by Spirit as other. While they are eternal moments
within Spirit as a unity of thought, they are nevertheless
relative with respect to Spirit as an infinite unity of
thought, being merely moments within that unity, and
hence imperfectly representative of Spirit in its infini
tude.
In the case of those concepts of God belonging to
the second perspective, each is the issue (at least
initially) of an overcoming of conflict. For many within
the religious community, concepts of God are accepted
upon authority and are not at first concretely realized
as synthetic concepts that contain in a unity, each in
its turn, all other concepts within the consciousness of
the individual. For those for whom these concepts come
first upon authority, but within the context of a
religious community within which the concrete realization
of these concepts by the individual as his own is possible,
this concrete realization may be said to come as a free
gift of grace. This gift of grace is free in the sense
240
that the knowledge of God comes through the toil and
suffering of others. These concepts are known as gifts
of grace, however, only as the consciousness of the indi
vidual is found to be successively contained within each,
only as he is able to make each his own.
From the recognition of an infinite unity of
thought over against the world it follows that grace
expressed by the members of the religious community is at
the same time a representation of a grace that is infi
nite, whereby God is in the course of reconciling (not
necessarily the world as a whole, but) the members of the
religious community, thereby realizing Himself concretely
in the world. Also representative of God's grace are all
those myriads of acts of negation and mediation from
times past by virtue of which the historical religious
community has come to the concepts by which God as an
infinite unity of thought is now represented. Apart from
these myriad moments of grace, the historical religious
community would not be in possession of the synthetic
concepts by which it represents God as an infinite unity
of thought.
Thus the concept of an infinite unity of thought
over against the world implies a religious community now
expanded to include the historical heritage of conflict
and its overcoming belonging to a people or a culture,
and by successive stages, those belonging to all peoples
241
and all cultures. Thus God is conceived, from this
2
perspective, as truly universal.
The form of past moments of grace being conceived
as present in God as an infinite unity of thought over
against the world, it would be quite natural to suppose
that moments of grace not yet expressed in concrete
thought are also present in God. The concept that grace
is infinite is expressed in the designation of an indi
vidual who is exalted as the Son of God, who performs the
vicarious toil and suffering and overcoming of conflict
which the individual in his aloneness cannot bear.
Interpreted spiritually, this means that, viewed from the
perspective of finitude, God, though transcendent, is at
work in the toil and suffering and overcoming of men, and
that the mediation of actual and essential forces in
conflict is assured.
The concept of God implied by this perspective is
such that no spiritual individual, through the exercise
of the practical faculty of his reason overcoming
conflict, is possessed of the capacity to adequately
present or impose the concept of such a universal God
upon the religious community. Such an individual, at
best, may represent God by the presentation of the
2If God as conceived from the second perspective
might be conceived as having all of history and cultures
as His Odyssey, certainly the universality as pertaining
to God would seem to be necessarily implied by the per
spective presently being considered.
242
conflicts and overcomings of a people reified and made a
part of the conflicts and overcomings of present actual
conflicting forces in individuals and cultures in which
he shares. The sharing of conflicts and their overcoming
in the religious community, in which all members ought
ideally to participate, now has the effect of representing
or giving intimations of the grace of God as an infinite
giving.
From this perspective, the presentation of specific
acts of self-negation as acts of God verges on idolatry.
Instances in which new syntheses of thought are concretely
exhibited are now regarded as representational of the
infinite unity of thought which is God. These are also
moments of grace, since, from this perspective, moments
of grace and moments revelatory of God (synthetic concepts
inclusive of those that have preceded) are one and the
same. Each individual member of the particular local
religious community is a recipient of grace wrought by
the toil and suffering of other members of that community,
but this grace is now conceived as representing, rather
than presenting, the grace of God, now conceived as
infinite.
This perspective might admit faith as pertaining,
not to the knowledge of God, but to that unfolding and
fulfillment of His Odyssey that is supposed as lying
243
beyond the presently anticipated resolution of contra
dictory actual forces in culture and in the consciousness
of individuals. The form of religious knowledge being
the form of the concrete universal, thesis and antithesis
being made explicit and concretely actual in a posited
synthesis in the course of being realized, the object of
faith would need to be conceived as lying beyond the
destiny and fulfillment which reason, possessed of this
dynamic form, promises. Since the identity of being and
thought is not presupposed, from this perspective, faith
would not propose that all is in God or that the lives of
all individuals are in God. The essence of a particular
individual soul, conceived as constituted by a hierarchy
of concrete universals, is in God. The individual
realizes his essential being and knows himself as in God
through self-negation. The religious community, whether
formal or informal, provides the security of a fellowship
of conflict and its overcoming whereby his anxiety will
not prevent self-negation and the consequent synthesis—
knowledge of God as living and realizing Himself in the
world. It is possible for the individual to center his
life in unessential being, and to subvert and lose sight
of his essential being, his being in God. The unessential
being of the individual may be held to be neither known
by God, nor in God, from this perspective, since there is
a residue of being that is conceived as lying both
244
outside of thought as determined by the world, and as
outside of the destiny apprehended by faith as "to be
accomplished" within the Odyssey of God.
As in the case of the preceding perspectives, the
vivified knowledge of God remains a knowledge by partici
pation. This is because grace perseveres. It prompts
the mediation in the consciousness of the spiritual indi
vidual of his own personal conflicts, and conflicts
between forces which are actual in culture. Thereby, in
turn, grace accruing from toil and suffering other than
his own is vivified for his own consciousness, and thereby
he comes to a full sense of participation in the concrete
realization of Spirit in the world, not merely through his
own toil and sacrifice, but through that of others as
well. His knowing of God and God's knowing of him may be
regarded as one and the same event.
From this perspective, grace and the performance
of moral duty, legislated by the inclusive synthetic con
cept (the synthesis is present in the form of an ideal to
be realized concretely) which constitutes the individual's
spiritual consciousness, are mutually supportive of each
other. Grace provides the ego strength for the toil and
suffering which are involved in the performance of moral
duty. The performance of moral duty reifies grace by
deepening the sense of gratitude for the knowledge of
245
God which comes through the toil and suffering of others,
even for that which has come through the toil and suf
fering of those who know not grace but only duty.
The succession of concepts of God, from this per
spective, as from the second, contain a surd element,
which is also the moral ought. Being a demand of reason
in its practical faculty, the performance of duty is not
an act of faith.
The religion of grace and duty is a religion of
culture in the sense that its concepts of God, viewed
from the perspective of finitude, are informed by the
actual contradictory forces the resolutions of which are
being anticipated and lived out by the individual. That
each mediated concept of God is construed as a moment
within infinite spirit in no way modifies the fact that
successive concepts of God are, from the perspective of
finitude, culturally determined. This religion trans
cends culture in that its concept of Spirit as an infinite
unity is informed by syntheses achieved in toil and
suffering in cultures antecedent to our own. It cele
brates God’s acts in antecedent history. It also trans
cends culture in that it anticipates that the Odyssey of
God and the concept of God must ultimately be informed
not only by the as yet unrealized reconciliation in the
future of one culture, but of all cultures.
246
Of the four perspectives from which the impli
cations of the concept of thought as mediation for the
doctrine of God is being considered, the third per
spective is undoubtedly most nearly akin to the classical
Christian doctrine of God. By the omission of Hegel's
concept of the identity of being and thought, this per
spective leaves room for something like a traditional
concept of sin and guilt, and it leaves room for man to
choose or reject salvation. This perspective also averts
Hegel's pan-en-theism and thus maintains the transcendence
of God in a way that is distinctive, yet more easily
reconciled with the classical perspective than the fourth
perspective, shortly to be considered. Furthermore, a
place is provided for supernatural grace more in keeping
with classical doctrines than the doctrine of grace which
is found to be reflected in the second perspective, and
without significantly altering Hegel's concept of history
as a theodicy and the formula for conceiving the relation
between actual forces in culture and the historical
religious heritage therein contained.
The roles implied for faith and reason by this
perspective are essentially identical with the roles
assigned to faith and reason by Hegel, and hence, viewed
from the perspective of classical Christianity, equally
problematical. For the religious person, God is the
object of knowledge. Faith has as its object destiny
247
bound up in God and not yet revealed. This revelation is
anticipated in a form that may be apprehended by man’s
rational consciousness, which apprehension the philosopher
may know as an apprehension of the form of reason. The
perspective allows for no data of the religious conscious
ness which are and in principle must remain outside of
reason thus inclusively defined. On this issue, even
theologians with a sympathetic disposition toward Hegel's
3
philosophy have found it necessary to take issue.
By excluding the concept of the identity of being
and thought, this perspective accords to evil and
recalcitrance in human nature a status that is clearly
more in keeping with the classical doctrine of "the fall"
than in Hegel's doctrine of God.
It may be objected that any residue of being that
cannot finally enter into the determination of thought
can only be an unknown, a bare x. With this judgment
Hegel would doubtless concur. The man of common sense
to whom religion speaks, however, knows a recalcitrance
both in nature and in his own nature that is not deriva
tive from something more noble or essentially real. On
this account alone, this perspective may be the most
significant for assessing the implications of the concept
3Clement C.J. Webb, God and Personality (London:
George Allen and Unwin, Ltd” 1919), p. 159.
248
of thought as mediation for the doctrine of God for
religion.
Another point may be made regarding Hegel’s concept
of the identity of being and thought* The complete con
crete determination of the unity of reason, which is God
for Hegel, comes only at the end of history. (This
concept of an end of history may be a merely limiting
concept.) When it is recognized that the exhaustive
determination of being and thought projected by Hegel as
an idea was not envisioned as being accomplished within
history, the alteration affected upon Hegel’s doctrine of
God by the deletion of this notion appears less signifi
cant than otherwise.
McTaggart has noted the problem of conceiving how
the procession of the categories with advance through
opposition can ever present the absolute truth of the
4
Notion as Hegel supposed. The problem roust doubtless be
genuine for those who, like him, construe the dialectic
in its entirety as a logic and -play down the significance
of time in its unfolding. The dialectic is both a logical
development, according to Hegel's usage of ’ ’logical,” and
McTaggart, "The Changes of Method in Hegel's
Dialectic,” Mind, Vol. I (New Series), 1892, pp. 56-71,
188-205, pp. 7017 Also see "Time and Hegelian Dialectic,”
Mind, Vol. II (New Series), 1893, pp. 490-504, especially
f.
249
a developmental sequence in time,^ It can be regarded in
no other way if the relation obtaining between the form
and the content of the dialectic is kept in mind. To
regard it otherwise is to presume that Hegel did not
intend Absolute Spirit fully concretized in the world to
be conceived as inclusive of the whole creation. For
this no evidence is available. From this it must follow
that the final Absolute Truth is not envisaged by Hegel
as established by the logic, but the principles of its
unfolding, which unfolding is the mediation of space and
time, that is to say, it is in time. The concept that
being is to be exhaustively determined as thought is one
that is vindicated only in the concrete determination of
the Notion, Since the concrete determination of the
Notion does not occur in history, but is only envisioned
by Hegel as a logical culmination of the dialectic and of
history, the Notion properly understood, can have little
consequence for practical religion.
The position here taken is not, in the main
opposed to that taken by McTaggart, when he declares that
the dialectic is regarded by Hegel as eternal, McTaggart,
Studies in Hegelian Dialectic, Second edition, (Cambridge:
University Press, 1922), p. T68. The issue is whether the
moments of the dialectic are concretely realized in a time
sequence and, if so, whether McTaggart has accorded this
proper emphasis. While there are doubtless problems con
nected with the view, there can be no question but that
Hegel regarded the moments of the dialectic as concretely
realized in time. See John Wisdom, "Hegel's Dialectic in
Historical Philosophy," Philosophy, Vol. JL5, 1940,
pp. 243-268, especially p. 257.
250
This third perspective, then, would seem to suggest
the principal lines upon which an appropriation of the
implications of Hegel's concept of thought as mediation
for the doctrine of God for the Christian Religion might
proceed. That certain problems must accompany such an
appropriation seems clear. These problems principally
center around the concepts of faith and reason and the
roles assigned to faith and reason.
Fourth perspective.— This perspective, in addition
to what was presupposed in the third perspective, will
presuppose the identity of being and thought. The concept
of thought as mediation, when this concept is placed
within the context of the principles of the dialectic
(the "what" and the "how"), the concept of an infinite
unity of thought over against the world which becomes
concretely realized in the world, and the identity of
being and thought, can hardly imply a doctrine of God
radically at variance with that of Hegel summarized in
Chapter VIII. These four suppositions constitute the
principal regulative notions within Hegel's system. If
any one is omitted, the system is fundamentally altered.
Given them all, it is difficult to envision the system as
fundamentally different than it is. The dialectic might
be revised and simplified, and such inconsistencies as are
mentioned in Chapter V might be eliminated. The faultiness
251
and artificiality of the historical exemplification of the
moments of the dialectic might be partially or largely
overcome* These alterations, however, would hardly
deserve to be regarded as fundamental*
The concept of the identity of being and thought
contributes to the logical completeness of the encyclo
pedic system of concepts culminating in Absolute Spirit,
that synthetic concept which includes all others* On
this account, it has important philosophical consequences
even though, properly understood, it has meager signifi
cance for a doctrine of God for practical religion and,
improperly understood, it renders more problematical than
otherwise the employment of insights derived from Hegel's
concept of God for (at least the Christian) theologian
and philosopher. It is this logical completeness of the
development of the dialectic that gives it the appearance
of having been written from the perspective of Spirit-in-
and-for-Itself, the very characteristic which somewhat
alienates it from the spirit of religion. This logical
completeness, while it doubtless has philosophical
significance for the system, seeing that without it
the principle of coherence of the system would be altered,
would seem to have less significance, and perhaps even
negative significance, for a doctrine of God for religion.
Since much of the content of Chapter VIII pertains
to this perspective, this discussion may be brief. From
252
this perspective, unlike the third perspective, all is in
God. The final culmination of history will be when all
is God, that is to say, when the perfection of all things
has been accomplished. This is pan-en-theism. From this
perspective, as was noted in Chapter VIII, it is difficult
to conceive that there can be, in the final analysis, any
real freedom to choose salvation or reject it for a lesser
good, there being no lesser or negative reality to choose.
Moreover, if evil has a kind of status within this
perspective, there being always a negative'principle to
overcome at any point in historical time, this status may
be expressed in terms more familiar, at least to Western
religious tradition, from the third perspective. This may
be accomplished without the loss of the identity of the
moral and the religious object and act which pertains to
that perspective. To choose to center one's life in a
purpose not to be taken up into the actual, into thought
conceived as having the form of the concrete universal,
is to choose evil. This seems unambiguous. If, however,
this is conceived as identical with grasping a finite
being for itself and apart from its dialectical related
ness to all that is real, then there is no difference
between the two perspectives in this respect.
Further Observations on
These Perspectives
Perhaps the role and status of faith in religion
253
that follows from Hegel’s dynamic concept of reason,
possessed of the form of the concrete universal, presents
a more serious obstacle than any other to the assimilation
of the implications of the concept of thought as mediation
for a doctrine of God adequate to the requirements of
religion. While the second perspective provides for the
possibility of a meaningful (if perhaps problematical)
doctrine of faith, the third and fourth perspectives
hardly provide the basis for a doctrine of faith adequate
to or compatible with the Spirit of (at least typically
Western) religions. Where the concept of thought as
mediation is presupposed along with the dialectical method,
and where God is conceived in terms of the highest and
most inclusive concept of thought, it may seem most
natural to conceive His existence as known, and hence not
"merely" as an object of faith. Faith thus pertains to a
destiny not yet manifest in the forms of thought to be
shared by God and men, and yet to be made manifest.
Because this destiny is neither known to God or men, the
demand is for a very radical faith, though this faith need
not pertain to the existence of God. The radicality of
this faith is due to the lack of a specifiable object of
faith.
In the case of the third perspective, the object of
faith is a destiny conceived as bound up in the trans
cendence of God and not yet manifest in the form of
254
reason. As in the case of the second perspective, God's
existence is known by reason and (to the philosopher and
theologian) His immanent aspect is embodied in the form
of reason. In each of these perspectives, as in the case
with the fourth, forms of the ontological argument are
valid.
The place accorded to faith by the third and
fourth perspectives may be found problematical for
religion owing to the fact that, ideally, faith is con
ceived as something to be displaced by reason conceived
in Hegelian terms. The seriousness of this result for
religion that is constrained to accord to faith a higher
and more abiding status than to regard it as a primer to
knowledge or as a rudimentary form of knowledge, hinges,
in part, upon whether history is conceived as moving
toward a culmination. The problem must doubtless remain
a serious one, however, owing to the fact that that which
is given in revelation is reason, and the drive toward
rationality (as Hegel conceived it) can hardly be
seriously qualified in a theology informed by Hegel's
dialectical method.
In all fairness, however, it must be acknowledged
that there is a compensation for this (which may be found
to be an) inherent weakness in a doctrine of God
informed by either the second, third, or fourth perspec
tives. The basis is provided for clear, specific, and
255
historically cogent answers to the query: Religion claims
not only that history is revelatory, but that specific
events in history are particularly revelatory; what, then,
tell me (in terms that may be apprehended by finite
minds) has been revealed? These answers refer to resolu
tions of conflicts within history and within the religious
consciousness, and without neglecting the self-negation
without which they cannot be concretely realized by the
individual. However problematical a legacy Hegel has
bequeathed to the history of Christian thought (with
which history he self-consciously identified himself) he
was not one of those who like the Athenians of long ago,
set up altars to an unknown God. He resolved, if perhaps
at a price which contemporary theology rightly judges to
have been too high, what may be seen to be one of the
outstanding problems of modern times. On this account
alone, his doctrine of God as informed by the concept of
thought as mediation, which latter concept is in some
sense held by most men of our time, remains a source of
germinal insights for contemporary thought.
The requirements of a concept of faith adequate to
the Christian religion would suggest a greater emphasis
upon the finitude of successive formulations of the
Odyssey of God than is characteristic of Hegel. Perhaps
partly owing to the polemical attitude he assumed in
256
setting forth his philosophy and partly to an optimism
about the prospect of progress in history which he shared
with many others in his time, Hegel envisaged the dia
lectic as one that would emerge in greater purity with
the unfolding of history without envisioning the need for
radical alterations of it. Neither did he find a need
for a radical distinction between the system of reason
apprehended by the philosopher and these moments as
present in Spirit as other to the world. If either the
third or fourth perspectives are presupposed, the
determination of how radical the distinction between the
moments of the dialectic and these moments conceived as
raised to the level of perfection in God as other to the
world should be, is difficult to determine. The most
radical possible distinction might reject the view that
the forms of reason as apprehended by finite minds are
moments in God. This would open the way for holding that
God, and not merely destiny bound up in God (and not
manifest in the forms of reason), is an object of radical
faith. The price of so radical a distinction is that
revelation with a content which may be identified and
reported as such would seem thereby to be rendered
impossible. Doubtless a more moderate distinction would
serve more adequately than either this or Hegel's
position. Such a position would conceive God as revealing
257
Himself in such a way that revelation is neither in
competition with nor unrelated to knowledge, in accordance
with more customary and mundane usages of that term. At
the same time, this knowledge is in continuity with that
which has accrued to particular religious traditions.
This unfolding revelation, the issue of toil and the
resolution of actual conflicts in culture, it is felt,
must come in such a way that its content may be stated
with at least provisional adequacy.
By linking the concept of God to destiny-laden
historical events, Hegel has found a means for dignifying
these events and lending them eternal significance. The
certainty that any particular event adequately reflects
the nature of God might easily be lost with the making of
even the moderate distinction I have above referred to.
Such a loss seems hardly compatible with the Hebraic-
Christian tradition, considering the long-term investment
that tradition has made in a cumulative view of history.
That tradition, at its best, it would seem, dignifies
history by according to certain acts within history the
status of divine acts, while averting that idolatry with
respect to history, to which Hegel’s doctrine of God as it
stands is doubtless prone.
To properly dignify history, however, requires that
more than one event in "empirical” history be included in
258
the Odyssey of God. To discover history to have a center
(i.e., the Christ event) does not in itself render it
significant, nor does it render it a tenable site for a
Kingdom of God. At least to many moderns, whether for
good or ill, no other site presents itself as suitable for
such an establishment. For others, the faith that another
site may be tenable would seem to be in some sense de
pendent upon finding history to be, at least in part,
God's story.
Whatever problems must accompany the appropriation
of Hegel’s doctrine of God for religion (and I have tried
to suggest the nature of some of these problems) Hegel's
concept of reason leads to such a reconception of history
as furnishes the ground for reinstating the sense of
historical destiny which lies close to the heart of the
great western religions at their inception, and which has
been diminished in modern times.
Hegel’s concept of reason, informed by the concept
of thought as mediation, also points the way to a point
of view which both contains and transcends some of the
more central and vital themes of existentialism within the
context of an essentialist doctrine of God. It has been
one of my purposes in this exposition to give expression
to what may retrospectively be regarded as the existen
tialism in Hegel, which has only been taken note of in the
259
post-Hegelian era, and which has up to now received scant
recognition in philosophical literature that has appeared
in English.^*
A theology that appropriates the implications of
the concept of thought as mediation for its doctrine of
God will most naturally be charygmatic in character.
Such a theology must express something of the weight of
responsibility commensurate with Hegel's conviction that
religion is the informing foundation of a culture. This
implies that theology, far from taking as its task the
mere reconception of its doctrines so that they accord
with the world view held in a period, abstracts the
structure of hope which a spiritual community, sensitive
to its historical heritage and informed by Spirit in its
concrete encounter with living social and individual
issues, experiences.
Granting that Hegel's doctrine of God may not
appropriately be taken over "whole cloth," it nevertheless
may be seen to suggest insights and a direction which
contemporary theology may find relevant.
In the interpretation of Hegel's doctrine of God,
I have striven for balance between the emphasis upon
helpful resource, in this connection, is to be
found in Alexandre Kojeve, Hegel: Eine Vergegen-
wKrtigung seines Denkens (Stuttgart: W. Kohlhammer
Verlag, 1958), V. Kapxte1, "Die Idee des Todes in der
Philosophie Hegels," pp. 192-234.
subjective mind and the emphasis upon objective Spirit,
each of which is made prominent at alternating moments
within his work. This is the only approach commensurate
with the character of his philosophy. The reader who has
come this far may now understand that the speculation of
n
such materialistic philosophers as Feuerbach' and
Q
Ostwald, on the one hand, and the Christ mysticism of
Q
Strauss, on the other, while they may stand in their
own right as having a certain significance within the
history of thought, have contributed meagerly, if at all,
to the understanding of Hegel. Hegel is neither a
materialist nor an idealist (if this term is to be
employed in its usual sense). His position is one that
envisages the mediations of the material and the ideal
as abstract and separate from the actual. The real
is the concretely ideal, the actual (Wirklich), and this
abstract thought is ever trying to grasp more adequately
from its retrospective view of the lived concrete moment.
It is finally abstract only in the strictly qualified
^Ludwig Andreas Feuerbach, Zur Kritik der
Hegelschen Philosophie (Berlin: AufbauVerlag, 1955).
«W. Ostwald, Grundriss der Naturphilosophie
(Leipzig: P. Reclam Jun., 1908).
Q
David Friedrich Strauss, Der Alte und der Neue
Glaube (Bonn: Verlag von Emil Strauss, 1881), especially
pp :'”5T2ff , 368f .
261
sense that it is representative of the concrete actual.
(It is concrete in that it is representative of the
concrete actual, and not merely of accidental and external
appearances.) The overcoming of this abstractness is
envisioned, grasped as Idea, but never attained in history.
It may, of course, be objected that Hegel failed
to demonstrate this mediation.^ This issue must be
^Croce bases his argument that he does not on the
proposal that nature and Spirit are not opposites in
thought (to him tantamount to their being two abstractions)
but two distinct realities. Benedetto Croce, What is
Living and What is Dead of the Philosophy of Hegel,
translated from the original text of the third Italian
edition by Douglas Ainslie (London: Macmillan and Co.,
1915), p. 199.
Two misunderstandings would seem to lie at the
root of Croce's argument. (1) He has failed to understand
that it is nature determined in thought that is regarded
as an opposite of thought possessed of greater determi
nation, since for Hegel, when he is dealing with thought
above the level of bare immediacy, as for Berkeley, we
never compare thoughts with things, but only, at most,
with what are supposed as being thoughts of things. If
nature is not apprehended in thought, it is not known.
Since it is known, the dialectic of nature and thought
is the proposed explanation of how it is known. (2) To
attempt to accord what Croce refers to as "distincts"
a proper definition within the dialectic is not, from
Hegel's point of view, to rob them of their abstract
meaning (for the understanding) as distincts, but to
accord them metaphysical status and usefulness by showing
how they stand related to other primary synthetic con
cepts of philosophy, other concrete forms of thought.
Due to these two misunderstandings, Croce's judgment that
dualism is not overcome in Hegel's dialectic is based
upon criteria not intrinsic to Hegel's philosophy, but
rather to his own.
By the above remarks I do not wish to imply that
Hegel's dialectic of nature, upon which Croce mainly
draws for examples of "distincts" which Hegel allegedly
failed to recognize as such, was a success.
decided on the basis of the system of the dialectic as a
whole. If Hegel's dialectical method has not provided
a plausible account of the mediation of external objects
and thought, the method may be said to have failed. While
it is evident that Hegel began a task which he did not
bring to completion, that it has so failed is not evident.
On the contrary, he would seem to have established that
it is feasible, at least in principle, if it be difficult
to carry out, to systematically define the categories of
philosophy by the dialectical method. Whether the cate
gories so defined are more adequate to the needs of
philosophy and/or more adequately reflect the
phenomenology of mind than that afforded by other syste
matic approaches is another matter. There is no simple
criteria to bring to the evaluation of the relative
merits of tenable metaphysical systems. Even if an
affirmative judgment is made concerning this matter,
there may be those who, as a matter of principle, must
resist the infinitely expandable definition of notional
knowledge which the concept of thought as mediation
within the context of Hegel's dialectical method implies.
There will be those who resist, and not without cause,
the exhaustive inclusion of the phenomenology of the
religious consciousness, including affects found to be
universal or potentially universal in that consciousness,
within this notional knowledge.
263
It has not been my intention, in this dissertation,
to deal definitively with the several crucial problems
that must be treated in evaluating the overall success
with which Hegel employed the dialectical method. Atten
tion has been generally restricted to the dialectic of
religion. On the basis of the foregoing analysis of the
dialectic of religion alone, however, it may be noted that
the allegation that the dialectical method leads to unre
solved contradictions presupposes that Hegel envisioned
all contradictions overcome within time by simply doing
abstract philosophy. This allegation thus hinges upon a
misunderstanding of the relation obtaining between the
forms of the dialectic and the content pertaining to those
forms.
One may, of course, choose some other analysis of
this mediation of externality and thought than Hegel's--
some analysis more akin to the spirit of philosophical
realism— but that such mediation in some way occurs, only
the person who denies reality either to external objects
or to thought can deny. Hegel, like most moderns, was
content to deny reality to neither. The final judgment
of Hegel's work may have to await further attempts at
the explication of this mediation, almost universally
presupposed. Even if it be allowed that this account is
less than completely adequate, it seems at least proble
matical whether, to date, a more plausible comprehensive
264
account of this mediation has been provided, except by
methods more or less derivative from that which he
employed* On this account alone, if for no other, Hegel's
concept of God informed by the concept of thought as
mediation is deserving of continued careful consideration*
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Asset Metadata

Creator Christensen, Darrel Elvyn (author)

Core Title Some Implications For The Doctrine Of God Of Hegel'S Concept Of Thought As Mediation

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program Philosophy

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag OAI-PMH Harvest,Philosophy

Language English

Contributor Digitized by ProQuest (provenance)

Advisor Werkmeister, William H. (committee chair), Long, Wilbur H. (committee member), Macgregor, Geddes (committee member)

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c18-166562

Unique identifier UC11359229

Identifier 6509969.pdf (filename),usctheses-c18-166562 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier 6509969.pdf

Dmrecord 166562

Document Type Dissertation

Rights Christensen, Darrel Elvyn

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Access Conditions The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the au...

Repository Name University of Southern California Digital Library

Repository Location USC Digital Library, University of Southern California, University Park Campus, Los Angeles, California 90089, USA