Hegel - The System

 

The System

What I want to pursue is a summary of the system Hegel developed, not in historical sequence, but in its logical formulation.[1]

Many people at this time genuinely desired to be simultaneously critical and Christian, enlightened and believing, rooted in tradition and progressive, and such persons as these were overwhelmingly impressed by the fact that a thoroughly modern philosopher was here, endeavoring to transcend both criticism of and apology for religion, by furnishing a systematic and concise up-to-date version of Christian truth, which would enable critical modern humanity to give it his well-founded and thoroughly thought-through consent, dispensing him from having to give a naive consent to a heteronomous authority. That tension—wanting to think hard and still believe—has not gone away. If anything, it is sharper now. He set aside both nostalgia and cynicism. History is the grand theme for the philosophy of Hegel, culminating in the lectures on world history, art, religion, and the history of philosophy. Historicality is a term that would become prominent in the 20^th century, but Hegel is the first to use the term. For Heidegger, it is about thrownness, death, our inability to escape. Hegel may well be right in that his philosophy suggests Heidegger overdoes the dread. Time is not jail, but a classroom. Historicality does stress that the human quest is significantly impacted by “when’ we are. 

Hegel motivates us to ask a question. Is there not, however, too much speculative deduction in this system of Hegel? This is a question raised not only by empiricists. Anyone who has followed the development of Hegelian philosophy even a little knows that Hegel’s system, as he first substantiated it afresh after the arduous ascent of his phenomenology (from immediate experience to absolute knowledge), on the ridgeway of his logic (by the explication of the pure notion), and then recapitulated in the Encyclopaedia, contrary to first impressions, is not at all a facile, a priori construction. Certainly, it was planned willfully, extremely schematically outlined and very broadly drawn, in fact given an encyclopedic form. But this was possible only because of the immense detailed work of Hegel the empiricist—not generally known to the empiricists—which had preceded it: acute observation of natural and mental reality; industrious preoccupation over decades with the empirical sciences; untiring remodeling of categories and terminology; vital reconstruction and new construction of the system as a whole and in detail. “You know that I have been far too busy not only with ancient literature but also with mathematics, recently with analytical geometry, differential calculus, natural history, chemistry, to permit myself to get involved with the humbug of philosophy of nature, to philosophize without knowledge and by sheer fantasy and to take whims even of pure lunacy for ideas. This might count at least negatively as a recommendation.” So, Hegel, director of the gymnasium in Nuremberg, wrote—with an allusion to Schelling’s philosophy of nature—to the famous rationalist theologian H. E. G. Paulus, in Heidelberg. Only if we know the immense preliminary work of this unwearying searcher—his portrait shows his large, frank eyes—shall we rightly estimate Hegel’s importance as the universal systematizer of modern times. In every field of knowledge—stones or plants, Kepler’s laws or Newton’s theory of light, from electricity to association of ideas, even to police and property—he was a match, if not for any specialist, then certainly for any polymath. But what distinguished him from men like Varro, in antiquity, or Vincent of Beauvais, in the Middle Ages, what put him more on a level with Aristotle and Leibniz, was the depth of his insight, which he combined with breadth of vision and which made him become not a collector but a thinker and indeed more of a coherent encyclopedic thinker than Leibniz and more of a theological thinker than Aristotle.

So, I hope as we move through the system, we recognize that it represents the reflection on experience. His philosophy is the outcome of self-examination, through which cognitive self-consciousness arrives at a warranted understanding of the fundamental truth about itself that reaches Absolute Knowledge. However, this is a long journey through dialectical processes in nature, the emergence of self-consciousness, the anthropology of subjective mind, the expression of human activity in objective mind that builds institutions and cultures, and the absolute knowing that expresses what drives and animates humanity through the activities of Art, Religion, and Philosophy. The nature of the system is such that it shows how partial reality is dependent on the Absolute that in turn necessarily generates this partial reality. There is no reality, regardless of how humble and fragmentary, that could fall outside the system.  Such activities express the human desire of connecting to something larger than mundane survival, money, and power. This is why the connection between religion and philosophy is so close. Philosophy is a living, self-aware climb toward absolute knowing, a journey that must pass through the mundane, healthy psychological development, civil and political society, and finally, through art and religion. The complex unity in absolute knowing is achieved as the representational thinking of parables, icons, and doctrine, elevating them into something purer in the dialectic. Live breathes by tension, release, and new birth. 

I begin with a brief outline of the intellectual issues Hegel face in his time and how he sought to resolve them.

Hegel reacted against the Enlightenment. His notion of speculative reason was to overcome the mechanistic oppositions of the past by letting history and subjectivity return to philosophical reflection. Human beings are more than fact-gathering animals. He began his intellectual journey among the young Romantics, but even that idealism was disrupted by the terror of the French Revolution. He wanted to resolve the chaos into something lasting and rational. He had a pantheistic phase but abandoned it with a view that bound God and nature together in a way that did not sacrifice human freedom. Many romantics, Schleiermacher, Schlegel, and even Schelling, made their way back to orthodox Christianity. Hegel did not join them as he brought Christian theology through his philosophy, in which God becomes who God is through human beings. Romantics saw creative synthesis through endless and restless openness to the Infinite, thereby providing no direction, closure, or rest. One would never be at home in the world. Hegel would object with his notion of the Absolute directing the process. For Hegel, Geist will take on flesh through human history. While Romantics believed the unity between subjectivity and nature was achieved through intuition and imagination, leaning on poetry and art to do the work, but for Hegel, imagination will only give a glimpse of the whole, but will not let you live in it. The sought harmony is never complete. This is why Hegel caught a vision of moving beyond the understanding as described by the Enlightenment, which analyzes and divides, and saw the restless activity of speculative reason as a better means to the desired unity, the overcoming of opposition through the identity of identity and non-identity. Understanding is elevated into speculative reason, for the act of dividing reveals an original oneness. The subject-object split is a stage within understanding that is overcome in the synthesis represented by speculative reason. He is thinking through the tension between human freedom and necessity. The expressive unity of the Romantics is in opposition to the radical autonomy of the Enlightenment, a tension that survives today in the scientific method and in expressive individualism, but this tension is the engine that drives us forward to the Absolute. 

This tension drives Hegel from the young Romantic pantheist who is disappointed by the French revolution, art, and religion. This drives him to history and reason. What you see is Hegel realizing the whole show is not happening in nature, or in my heart, but in the march of institutions, of ideas, of freedom realizing itself. He starts seeing conflict as inevitable and essential, and that there must be a higher reconciliation, history healing wounds it has made. History does not move in a straight line, but in a spiral, unity giving way to division and then recovering unity at a higher level, bearing the scars of the division. History is tragedy that is also catharsis. Conflict is the fuel that drives the spiral of history toward healing. With the young Hegel still living in the shadow of Kant but then catches a vision of unity through reason as living, self-dividing, self-mending force. Separation, far from being an enemy, is the price of birth. His center of gravity shifts from humanity, focusing on our longing and our love, to Geist, so that the human story is no longer simply human anymore. The leap he makes is that Geist suggests that humanity is a spiritual being and related to a much larger scheme of spiritual activity. Humanity is not just a lawmaker (Kant), but world-maker, a history-maker. Once one recognizes the connection of an individual life with Geist, transformation occurs. For the philosopher, such transformations needed to be discerned properly, accepted, and lived into.  Like the owl of Minerva, the night is falling, the party is over, and only then do you see the point of it all. That is the cunning of reason. The changes at Jena in his life would have lasting impact and are related: the acceptance of separation as part of the ultimate reality, the shift to philosophy as the crucial medium, the shift from a human-centered theory to one centered on Geist, and the notion that humanity's realization is not planned by humanity, but only be recognized post hoc. So, there is a sense in which Geist is what a lot of people today would suggest that there is something more to life than just providing for your material needs or even having a family and friends. Geist is the hunch that individual life and death are caught up in a bigger pulse that animates the human story.

This self-positing Geist divides itself and comes back home richer, but not without the tension and violence shown in history. Geist overcomes opposition: the split between thought and being, spirit and nature, subject and object, self and world, freedom and necessity, finite spirit and Infinite Spirit. The awakening of self-consciousness distinguishes the individual from the tribe. The demands of human autonomy and those of participation in community and Infinite Spirit are necessary because freedom without the Infinite is bad faith and the Infinite without freedom is drowning. He has a hierarchy that moves from brute matter through life, through animal desire, to language and work, and reaches self-conscious reason. 

The achievement of reason occurs through history. These oppositions are not the finale, but driving humanity toward reconciliation, the recovery of unity through the healing of the wounds of the opposition.

Hegel keeps coming back to the formula of the identity of identity and non-identity. This is living thought. The self is self, yet the self is also what the self becomes, what the self loses. So, identity persists only by denying itself. Unity comes only by embracing its own cracks. And that is the only kind of identity worth having.  In viewing the self as a nothing that must become something by confronting its own negativity, Hegel is anticipating existentialism from Kierkegaard to Sartre. The difference is that while for Sartre, hell is other people, Hegel would say no, they are also your salvation. For him, difference is not an accident and identity is not static. The two are the same move: Spirit stepping out of itself, becoming stranger to itself, then recognizing that stranger as its own reflection. So, the formula works only if you stop thinking ‘different from' means 'other than.' The other is itself, seen from the back.

Rational necessity means Geist cannot be without finite spirits. Without the wound finitude there is nothing for infinity to heal. Being is contradiction and contradiction has no exit. Reality has an inner complexity that places in conflict what is and what is meant to be. Part of the great ingenuity of Hegel's argument will be to find this kind of complexity in any and every starting point, no matter how apparently simple and impoverished. Nothing is outside Geist, which can feel suffocating, but that is also what keeps it alive. This finite existence cannot be except as posited by Spirit; a cosmic Spirit whose nature is to posit its own essential embodiment. Hence the ascending movement shows us that finite reality is posited by a subject according to a necessary plan. The notion of necessity has changed. We are not just dealing with a necessity of inference. In saying that what exists in virtue of a rationally necessary plan, we are ascribing necessary existence to it. The necessity with which Hegel's argument concludes concerns the ground of existence of things. It is ontological necessity.

In theology, this suggests a self-positing God, which is decidedly not pantheism or emanationism. God becomes the creative impulse. The Absolute is not full at the start, but starts empty and in contradiction, and only becomes full by suffering its own lack. Whatever form of Lutheranism he embraced, it has gone through his philosophy. He believed the Trinity was the perfect symbol of dialectical movement, the incarnation the perfect image of Geist becoming flesh, the resurrection the perfect metaphor for return to the absolute. But symbol, metaphor—those are his terms. If we need a label here, Hegel is more panentheistic than anything else.

Absolute idealism suggests that humanity wakes up to see that everything is Idea, and in human beings realizing that the Idea completes itself. If everything is the self-objectification of Geist, the real is not over there, for everything that exists is manifestation of the Idea and therefore is rational necessity. Nothing is lost or wasted. Evil, stupidity, are the necessary dark before next dawn. 

Hegel explored some of his philosophical concerns in his preface to the Phenomenology of Spirit. It was the last part of the Phenomenology that he wrote, but it describes well the concerns that will guide his career.

Philosophy has as its object truth and goodness. The love of truth and the development of thought is the condition for philosophical reflection. Philosophy is the enemy of any arbitrariness or hasty suggestions. It follows a torturous path, even if its end is (or ought to be) noble.

The notion of truth and goodness awakens excitement and interest in a journey we can take together. Do we have the capacity to learn what is true and good? After all, we are clearly finite beings, and what is true and good seems vast and unapproachable. It seems as if humility demands that we pull away from the object of philosophy. Some philosophers will add their opposition, saying that truth itself has become obsolete. For them, the history of philosophy is nothing more than facing points of view foreign to me and my struggle.

Can we even start journey toward truth and goodness? Some of what follows may feel polemical, but Hegel is passionate about the key role of philosophy. Philosophy needs justification for its existence today in ways other disciplines do not. 

         First, some people are simply enemies of any philosophical discussion. They consider it a waste of time. The educational system itself has a prejudice against philosophy. Both student and teacher saying that philosophy deals with theory and therefore does not involve what students need immediately to get on with their lives. Philosophical reflection does not provide a practical skill for either public or private life. Some suggest that theoretical insight is harmful to the gaining of life skills. Philosophy from this perspective becomes a waste of time and a diversion of energy from the important matter of actual human life.

         Second, many persons feel competent to dismiss the questions philosophy raise without giving them due attention. 

         One example of this dismissal of philosophy is some forms of religion. Some in the religious sphere dismiss philosophy because it does not make the same assumption they do concerning revelation. In their mind, philosophy must be engaged in nothing more than vain reasoning, rather than joining them in the noble pursuit of truth and goodness. They can point to I Corinthians 1, in which Paul, to some interpreters, denigrates the Greek search for wisdom in favor of Christ crucified. In contrast, if one introduces God too early and too easily in philosophical reflection, one shows an unwillingness to face this world of human experience with the seriousness it deserves. 

         A second example is false humility, as if one is prideful for even thinking that one can have such noble objects as truth and goodness within their power to grasp. Such persons have honest questions. They reserve their skepticism for any conception of philosophy that preserves the nobility of philosophy in order to justify their contentment with the pettiness and finite quality of their aims. 

         A third example involves those who have a polite indifference to truth and goodness. Ecclesiastes begins, “All is vanity.” Pilate asked of Jesus, “What is truth?” Such persons have concluded that nothing in human life matters anyway, so why bother. 

         A fourth example is those who have a slothful mind. They might engage in some philosophy but want to remain unchanged by the pursuit. 

         No words persuade these persons that the philosophical pursuit is worthy of their time and energy. 

         Some persons in our time want to educate their spirits for higher purpose. One can only hope that the longing for something better still resides in this, the modern world. If you find this true, this is the time to continue reading. 

         As is often the case, however, philosophy has its greatest danger from its self-professed friends. Those who hate philosophy welcome abuses and perversions of it. They hope to use their reason by focusing upon the abuse and thereby discredit the enterprise of philosophy. 

         The worst example of this is the dogmatic person. Philosophy wrongly used places the entire philosophical enterprise at risk. The dogmatic person has an easy system in which to believe and apply. It draws a fixed line between certain terms and other opposite to them. It is a half-truth. The ideology, whether philosophical, religious, or political, has a closed and arrogant feel. Their intellect becomes a tool to close themselves from genuine engagement with others in a community of discourse. It becomes a way to keep truth and goodness at a distance rather than embrace it. Dogmatic thinking has no place in the philosophical journey. No one can reach into his or her pocket and offer “truth” as he or she might offer someone some pocket change. 

         Philosophical reflection requires thoughtful attention to its object. Yet, in far more serious disagreement with the philosophical task, one of the grand ironies is that some of the best philosophers also object to the supremacy of thought or reason. 

         First, my suggestion that truth and goodness in human life is an intellectual pursuit will not satisfy certain philosophers. 

         Some people will always seek the easy assurance of the value of their human journey through intuition, feeling, and immediate knowledge. They will look down upon the person who, from their perspective, thinks too much. 

Such philosophers use reason to denigrate reason. Creative persons like David Hume and theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher would be examples. In some agreement with them, whatever its origin, feeling is the dull and inarticulate breath of thinking. Often, thought begins in feeling. Hegel[2] used the image of a well-prepared dish in its use of salt. The salt permeates the dish with its flavor but ruins the dish if we find the salt in lumps. We find some difficulty in grabbing hold of the substance of light. Yet, it permeates through everything. In the same way, rationality enlivens everything that human beings touch. In fact, rarely does reason show itself in its essence. Yet, some philosophers seem to reject the rationality struggling to burst forth into thought through feeling and intuition. They disparage the rationality toward which philosophy strives with language, thought, and words. They disparage rationality with rationality. It seems trite to say it, but as Jesus pointed out, “From the heart” comes all sorts of evil. When philosophers attempt to make feeling or mood the criterion of what is good, moral, or true, one must remind them of such trite experiences. It seems trite to say it, but human beings have feelings in common with the rest of the animal world, while the complex level to which human thought has arrived separates humanity from the rest of nature. To run away from the difficulty of exploring feeling to reach the rational core is to rest in edification of the heart. In fact, words like beautiful, sacred, God, and many others, often short-circuit the truth that struggles to come forth. 

         David Hume is a powerful example. He could write that the sensation is what is lively, and thought is but a pale reflection of it. He did so, ironically, with powerful thoughts and words. As delightful as are the five senses, thought is what enlivens us as individuals, enlivens friendships, and enlivens human community. In fact, if a physical experience seems especially lively, whether delightful food, an especially beautiful experience of nature, or even a particularly intense sexual experience, is it not because our thinking has made it so. We often disparage thinking: “It is only a thought.” We often disparage discourse: “It is only talk.” Yet, thinking and talking are the way we work out the way of life we choose to take. We make our most important decisions concerning our lives through thought and talk, for good or ill.

Hume seemed not to realize that our experiences with our five senses are the lowest levels of our humanity. We must probe deeper into them, probe deeper into our experience of the world, and in the process lift ourselves to the nobility that belongs to us as human beings. In fact, this is a natural urge within us. What we immediately experience through the senses seems to bid us to go further, enquiring beyond facts, get beneath the surface, to know what is there, and achieve greater comprehension of the world within which we live.

         Second, a great many philosophers have given up on rational discourse by assuming that every thinker, every human being, creates truth and goodness to their liking. In this setting, everyone thinks he or she has the immediately given wisdom of the philosopher’s stone easily within his or her grasp. This self-styled philosophy asserts that one cannot know truth. The only truth available is what arises out of the heart, emotion, and inspiration. They have pronounced the pursuit of truth and goodness a wild goose chase. This way of thinking is another way of saying that truth and goodness does not exist. It reflects the diseased state of human thought in the modern world when we say that knowledge is only subjective. Such persons reduce all thoughts and all topics to the same level. The result is that whatever is true is nothing more than subjective opinion and conviction. I agree that truth requires personal conviction to attain, but to reduce truth itself to personal conviction is a denial of the labor of thought required to comprehend it. I do not like to say this for, while Kant accomplished so much, he may well have started us down this path when he turned thought into a tool that we place between us and the object at which we gaze. When he persuaded people of this view of our thinking capacity, he denied to our thinking its reason for being. The purpose of thought and language is to connect us with our world. However, Kant turned thought and language into tools that separated us from the world. Through his “critical philosophy,” we could never genuinely connect with the world. We would always be aliens in it. 

         An opposing thought, but just as dangerous to philosophical discourse, is the notion of an objective standpoint. Philosophy invites people to look at the form thought takes. Although it can feel tedious and annoying, the purpose remains the noble pursuit of truth and goodness. Since no one experiences the world without already having ideas about the world, since no one builds their notion of the world “empirically,” we need to divest ourselves of the notion that we have an objective standpoint from which we experience the world. Among the mistakes that empiricists make is that they pretended they could have sensate experience without thoughts. Human beings, of course, are never without thoughts. From this acknowledgment, we can then go to the basic experience of the richness of perception, to the analytical process of understanding our world, to the process by which we make judgments, to the importance of dialectical reasoning, all of which lead to conversion and insight. An important part of the philosophical task is to pay attention to this process and to clarify it.

         Frankly, philosophy receives far more damage from such friends than it does help.

In contrast, I invite you to consider another possibility. Philosophical reflection occurs in the world we experience. It seeks understanding of what is. Philosophy focuses upon the concrete, and therefore, in the highest sense, it focuses on the present. It explores the rational. As such, it does not erect a world beyond, a world that “ought” to exist, or that God wants to exist. Such a world may exist, but only in the error of one-sided and empty rationalization. This suggests that philosophers cannot transcend their time. They are a product of it. They seek to apprehend their time in thought. If one could leap over his or her time, and build an ideal one, as it ought to be, that world exists, but only in his or her opinions, an unsubstantial element where one could build most anything. Even philosophers do not want to admit that it arrives too late upon the scene, which helps us understand why philosophy is ill equipped to tell the world what it ought to be. The world we experience requires thoughtful attention to grasp the rational process inherent in it. In fact, in Roman mythology, among the many assignments of the Roman goddess Minerva was wisdom. She had an owl that accompanied her. It spread its wings at dusk. Such is the fate of philosophy. It can spread its wings only at dusk. The world we experience is far from ideal. In fact, the Christian symbol of the cross may be an appropriate symbol of the world of experience.[3] The present is full of suffering. Yet, philosophers need to give thoughtful attention to the rose in the cross of the present. The pain and suffering of this world is moving toward a rational destination. 

Reflecting upon the noble pursuit of truth and goodness is what enables human beings to find their destiny and purpose. In the Christian religion, for example, God has given humanity the means to know God in revelation. To know God, then, becomes a duty. God does not want narrow hearted souls or empty heads. God wants children rich in knowledge of God. For the religious person, knowledge of God becomes the only valuable possession. On this analogy, for philosophy, discovering truth and goodness means discovering what leads to a full, whole, meaningful life. Given that human beings arose from the “stuff that is there,” one has every right to believe that human beings have the capacity to discover such truth and goodness. Such a reflection will help us to know genuinely the present. It will lead to a hard-won reconciliation with the world we experience.

Philosophy has a unique form of reasoning.

         The modern period has focused upon the importance of method. Philosophy cannot borrow its method from other sciences. To be specific, it cannot be content with a form of mathematical philosophy. The efforts placed in symbolic logic are nothing more than a convenient means of avoiding the task of grappling with the noble pursuit intended for philosophers. In fact, math and science are among the earliest forms of rational expression. The conditions of nature are simply the form in which human life takes shape. Yet, humanity has a language, and in expressing themselves with it, is involved in something more complex than the expression allowed in math or science. To be blunt, math and science do not have the language for the spiritual quest in which human beings find themselves. Religious symbols evoke the basic drive and passion after which philosophy seeks far greater than does either math or science. Philosophy cannot restate what one learns in the sciences of physics or biology. It cannot become another form of psychology. Each of these disciplines has their place in gaining understanding of the world in an analytical way. In fact, we could hardly improve our lives in this world without such reasoning. Yet, the understanding can only help us appreciate the formal conditions that make human life possible. Such understanding of atoms and cells, such understanding of how living things survive in this world, and even how animals behave, provide only the formal conditions for living a human life. Philosophy will build upon understanding, but must move beyond it. The move beyond understanding is the central and controversial move philosophy must make.

Even Kant pointed out that the interests of reason stretch beyond the limits he has established. Kant admits that the interests of reason are “architectonic” involving the development of a system of beliefs within which one can understand experience. The interests of reason soar to lofty ideals and ideas, and yet, the nature of such reasoning involves us in so many opposing ideas as to how human experience fits together that, in the interest of practical life, reason needs to understand its own limits. It will not grasp the architecture of human life. In his view, we have a hunger that we cannot satisfy.[4]  

         The only way human thought can actualize truth and goodness is through going beyond understanding and toward a proper use of dialectical reasoning. This form of reasoning recognizes the problems of understanding, for it tends to be atomistic. Dialectical reasoning recognizes that human life involves the “sides” of abstraction, negation, and the lifting up of both into a new reality. It must negate the notion of a purely atomistic understanding of the world to accept the noble urge toward wholeness, truth, and goodness. People who use this method often give the impression that the objective is to negate and nullify what is present and valuable. However, the method recognizes the self-contradiction within what is present, a process in which what is present negates itself, but it also gives birth to a new reality, a process that both sets aside what is before us and preserves it. Therefore, the negative is just as much positive. The self-contradictory transforms itself by including what contradicts it. Here is what I find exciting and intriguing. What is impossible in pure logic, which almost begins with the principles of identity and non-contradiction, becomes the driving force of human life. Dialectical reasoning grasps the opposites in their unity; it grasps the positive in the negative. It holds fast to the positive in its negative, meaning in the content of its presupposition. Dialectical reasoning assumes relationship. The negation of what is present suggests that opposing forces have a stake in each other. In fact, if this was not the case, and they were indifferent to each other, they would not exist in relationship. What is other to the present is already within the present, making both non-identity and self-contradiction already within what is present. What pure logic regards as unthinkable is essential to the actual process of the human spirit as it pursues truth and goodness. The dialectical movement involves perceiving the unity contained in the relationship. As the reader can see, what I describe is hardly the simple, empty scheme of triplicity (thesis, antithesis, synthesis) that one often has in an introduction to dialectical method. Such a scheme would be trite and tedious. If it was that simple and formal, it could not help us in understanding the actual unfolding of the human spirit and its urge toward truth and goodness. 

This positive thrust is what Hegel meant by “speculative” philosophy. It unites the practicality of the understanding with the theoretical thrust of reason. In the hands of a great thinker, such a process inevitably expands into a system, and that is what Hegel delivered. The end of this process is truth and goodness. The dialectical method as a system becomes a circle of circles, in which each moment has an antecedent and an anticipated successor.

The Power of the Negative

Negativity is fundamental to contradiction, for opposites negate each other. And since within everything that exists there is opposition, we can also say that within everything there is negativity. Negative does not destroy but is the engine for growth. The in-itself and the for-itself contradict but emerge again in the synthesis of the in-and-for-itself. The thing comes to knowledge of itself through the encounter. The true Infinite includes the finite. The proper image of infinity for Hegel is not a straight line indefinitely prolonged, but a circle. A circle says: it went away, and came back, and was not away at all.

I want to explore his notion of dialectics at the beginning, since it can be a difficult notion but is also central to his philosophical project. His dialectical process is restless, as Truth emerges through unfolding contradiction. 

The Restless Pulse: Thesis, Antithesis, Synthesis

Every state of affairs (thesis) carries its own enemy within it, is pregnant with its own negation, thereby generating its opposite (antithesis), the clash sublating both, occurring through real world pain and suffering like slavery, war, and so on, elevating both into the birth of a new but scarred state of affairs (synthesis). The dialectic is a pulse: Idea, contradiction, and new life. The messiness is how progress happens. What this suggests is that while we often externalize the enemy, the greatest battle is within us, a notion both Hegel and Freud would approve. The real enemy, the negation of what is, is baked within the present, and we are birthing our own opposition or negation through ideas, desires, and contradictions we cannot escape. The dialectical process is the uncomfortable pulse of existence, happening in the engagement of life personally, culturally, and politically. Hegel saw the classical values of Truth, Goodness, and Beauty as that which drives humanity, an orientation, something like gravitational force in physics, that shapes decisions and is something all human beings share. The process is shared suffering and shared growth that involves much stumbling and fumbling. Thus, he avoids the intellectual laziness involved in solipsism, relativism, and dogmatism. Thus, what the ancient Greek thought considered dualistically, Eternal Idea separate from finite and temporal human experience, Hegel conceived as intimately embracing the movement of history, albeit stumbling as it unfolds. This struggle is not a bug in the system of life; it is the point of human life. This conception also differs from Kant, who wants pure reason to be timeless, ahistorical, floating above human experience, while Hegel wanted the Eternal in the messiness of history. Engaging in the dialectical struggle means setting aside the fake certainty of ideology and dogmatism. His summary term for this orientation was Geist (Mind, Spirit), the Absolute, which does not care about our intellectual laziness or our fake certainties, for it will continue marching toward its goal. The necessity of this movement, dialectically, has the goal of nuanced freedom, a freedom within the limits that honors tradition and cultural institutions. The real opposition of the dialectical process hurts, but only through that hurt is something newborn. In this way, as Hegel put it, the wounds of the world are not to be explained away-they are to be carried.

Dialectic Without the Total System

However, this dialectic can also be stated without the total system, where one simply defines a term, describe certain properties of the term, showing there is a conflict when we try, and leading us to see the conflict when we try to realize the definition in practice. Such a dialectic would find a starting point hereby some finite reality is to be seen as the attempted realization, goal, or fulfillment of a standard. Then a dialectic can get going, in which the first conception shown to be inadequate is replaced by another. An example is in Plato, Republic I, when Cephalos puts forward a definition of justice as telling the truth and giving back what one owes. Socrates refutes it with an example, that of a man whose armaments one is keeping, and who asks for them back in a state of madness. This example is enough to set aside the definition of Cephalos. As a definition of justice, it did not work, and at this stage in the dialogue we do not know the true definition. We know justice is something that should be done, and is therefore a good act. 

Thus, this narrow definition of dialectical argument is often successful. However, the success of the ontological and historical dialectics that Hegel uses to form his system is a hermeneutical or interpretive tool that relies upon the plausibility of the argument. The implication of this view of his use of dialectics is one Hegel would not like, for it suggests that final certainty eludes us. Which, as I will show, is the case. 

The system of thought offered by Hegel offered the hope of overcoming the oppositions sensed by the thinkers of his time. This belief aroused the deepest concern in his time and provided a powerful motivation for his philosophical effort. He sought an answer to the aspirations of the age in uniting the greatest rational autonomy with the fullest expressive unity with nature. Hegel's answer to the Kantian doctrine of the thing in itself is thus to throw down the barrier between humanity and the world and having the knowledge of finite subjects culminate in self-knowledge of the infinite subject. This means the unity of humanity and world, a finite and Infinite subject, does not abolish the difference. It also means the Absolute is understood in concepts rather than feeling and intuition as the Romantics said. 

Aufhebung: Lifting, Preserving, Canceling

The overcoming of duality finds expression in two terms. The first is Aufhebung. Aufhebung—lifted, preserved, canceled. The opposites do not vanish. They remain but stripped of their poison, made organs of a new organism.  And secondly, the unity does not just abolish the distinction. Hegel often speaks of the resolution as a reconciliation. 

Reconciliation Amid the Wounds

Such reconciliation implies there was a fight, and now there's peace, not amnesia. The wounds are there but bandaged with reason. And you still remember how you got them. Practical oppositions remain between humanity as agent and nature, between humanity and the state, between humanity and the and his fate. For Hegel, all of those fall under the same rule. You must live them through—the battle, the resistance, the broken nose—before you realize the state is not the cage, it is the ribcage. Nature is not the enemy; it is the raw material you must shape while it shapes you. Fate is not blind. It is your own stubborn will catching up with your blindness. In each case, the practical solution is recognition, not escape.  And that recognition of the opposition, the contradiction, leads to reconciliation at some level. Once you see the contradiction for what it is—necessary, not accidental—you stop resenting it.

I would like approach the rest of this as presentation as a conversation with Hegel. I will be suggesting alternative paths one could follow that might lead us toward applying Hegel today. This means making Hegel more accessible to the interested reader.

 

The Science of Logic: Mapping Pure Thought

His Science of Logic starts out from the dialectic of being, nothing and becoming, Hegel deals in three large sections with the logic of being, of essence and of the notion: an order of pure essences or—as Hegel is convinced—the eternal being of God before the creation of the world. The work is a tissue of powerful arguments which show the weakness of other philosophical positions. He wants to map out pure thought, which in Hegel's usage, means thinking stripped of all empirical content—categories unfolding from within thought itself, not derived from sensation or external reality. In the process, as I will show, he forgets that any speculative system must be anticipatory and provisional. 

Thus, for Hegel, Being is thought that has not yet seen itself. Most people think they already know logic in the form of common sense and the familiar. Thought exists in a dualistic relationship to the world about which it thinks. However, for Hegel, logic must become unfamiliar and strange, which will take effort, or we will miss the true unfolding of reason. The world is thought trying to meet itself. Further, the world of things exists because it embodies the rational structure embodied in categories. Reality comes to words in thought. He is overcoming the dualism of subject and object. 

Hegel is aware of the importance of philosophical tradition, but he is also aware that the tradition can be a hindrance. He uses the image that the building of a new city in a wasteland has many difficulties, yet, one will have no shortage of materials. However, the presence of the abundance of materials becomes an obstacle when the task is to remodel an ancient city, solidly built, and maintained in continuous possession and occupation. Among other things, one must resolve to make no use at all of much material that people so far have highly esteemed.[5]

In the process, he is arguing with David Hume, for whom the real is what you can feel, smell, see, while ideas are pale copies diluted sense-data, and thus when reason breaks away from sensation it is hallucinating. For Hegel, truth must be discovered, not just felt, and his logic describes the path. He even uses the image that his logic is the exposition of God in the sense that if there is eternal essence before creation, he is describing the emerging and restless pure concept or notion. Reality unfolds through reason's own rules. 

Plato saw forms through contemplation, and Aristotle catalogued them. Both contemplated them, and he wants to reintroduce contemplation into logic. He is arguing against the dead bones of the logic of Aristotle, not in the sense of negating it, but elevating them into human understanding so that they move toward resurrection in the dialectic of categories. The old forms of judgment, syllogism and category are not wrong, but his logic breathes life into them. Logic is living off old capital. Contradiction and negation clear the path for the next line to be written. Negation is positive and contradiction is a doorway. Understanding gives you 'this' and 'not that', sharp edges. Reason says—now look what happens to that edge. It melts. But not into nonsense. Into the universal, which still knows 'this' was real, but only as a member of the whole. So, it destroys, to rebuild. Negative first—positive only after. Opening the door is entry into metaphysics, something from which Kant wanted to save us. Spirit begs to be free to be what it truly is, the movement of reality as it comes to thought. For him, it is a tragedy when a nation loses its constitution, and it is just as tragic for philosophy to lose metaphysics. Without it, thought descends into private opinion, the market of ideas, where anything sells if it sounds clever, where the mob decides the law every morning. Modern life, with all its activity and impressive construction, is busy, clever, efficient, and hollow. Philosophy and theology give up thought for feeling and what is popular, pointing to Schleiermacher. When the focus becomes edification, what touches the heart, what modern life builds develops cracks. 

Certain concepts are both indispensable and incoherent. Now, some of Hegel's transitions seem to be based on simple inadequacy—for instance, that which occupies the first chapter of the logic, from being to determinate being. The contradiction is between the concept's claim to adequacy and its de facto inadequacy. But this stronger claim is made in other transitions. For instance, that between determinate being and infinity in chapter two of the logic, which plays a key role in the argument of the whole work. Here, it is not just that determinate being as limited is inadequate as a concept of reality and requires to be completed by a notion of the whole. Hegel also will try to show that this inadequacy is an inner conflict in which determinate reality will not accept its inadequacy, its defining limits, and in struggling against them fights against itself. We might say that in this case, the critical properties of reality conflict with each other. Reality is in contradiction. This, then, is how we exhibit a necessary conceptual structure of things. We show that our indispensable categorical concepts are contradictory, but as contradictory, each is necessarily related to another, which resolves the contradiction at its level. Hence, we have a necessary relation founded on a contradiction, and this suits Hegel's ontology perfectly. Necessity, for Hegel, is never logical or mechanical. It is dramatic. The thing must go on because it cannot stay where it is without tearing itself open.

What he is looking at here is atoms and cells are the formal condition out of which spirit, family, friendship, cultural and political order, arise to give life. Teleology occurs from within nature, but it occurs only through violence and the cunning of reason. Logic and nature are about the same thing. What looks like dead matter is already murmuring categories. An atom is Being, the cell is determinate being, and the violence of natural selection is the blind rehearsal of the cunning of reason. There is a sense in which The Science of Logic, which many people describe as a general ontology. It is an ontology of being revealed correctly in and by thought or speech or logos. The true and the concept are something logical and real at the same time a realized concept or a conceived reality. The real dialectic of existing being is the revelation of the real and of being by speech or thought. Speech and thought themselves are dialectical only because they reveal or describe the dialectic of being and of the real. Philosophic thought has the goal of revealing, through the meaning of a coherent discourse, being as it is and exists in the totality of its objective reality. Hegel starts with being, the category of simple immediacy, because it seems the emptiest and poorest. It thus presupposes nothing but that there is thought of reality. And it is for this reason also the farthest from the end that he is heading for, the notion of spirit. He will thus pass through all the other categories on the way.

The attitude of the philosopher with respect to being and to the real is one of purely passive contemplation. The Hegelian method is contemplative and descriptive, or phenomenological in Husserl’s sense of the term. The Hegelian method is purely empirical or positivist. Hegel looks at the real and describes what he sees, everything that he sees, and nothing but what he sees. He has the experience of dialectical being and the real, and thus he makes their movement pass into his discourse that describes them. What we normally think of as scientific experience is an abstraction, to the extent that the scientist things his or object is the entirety of the object known by the subject. The isolated object is an abstraction. Therefore, it cannot serve as a basis for a truth, which is universally and eternally valid. We might note that the Heisenberg principle of uncertainty has placed this observation of Hegel in mathematical form. Logic is not just dry categories. Being starts nothing, turns to nothing-becoming, spirals up to the Absolute. Ontology meets theology. The logic enjoys a logical but not a temporal precedence. It describes the first stage of God's one infinite and timeless path in terms of the pure notion and within the realm of pure thought. It is pure form: Being, Essence, Concept. In the eternal process of realization, Hegel laid the foundation for a comprehensive reconciliation of all antitheses, beyond every fissure and through every kind of alienation, Hegel upheld the primacy of the totality and of the whole over its finite, deficient, and contradictory parts and moments. The primacy of synthesis as opposed to strife and devaluation. In this being, whence the movement of thought proceeds, whether and whether it returns, all antitheses are sublated in both a negative and a positive sense. So, the Logic ends not in conflict, but in the Absolute Idea—where every split, every bad infinity, gets swallowed back up. Not crushed, but fulfilled—like contradictions were not mistakes, just steppingstones. 

What Hegel does succeed in doing is to portray the structure of things as offering traces and hints of his vision of embodied spirit. The suggestion is sometimes powerful, but at—but at the crucial points it falls short of conceptual proof. Hegel convinces you, moves you, makes the entire world click into place. But click, yes. Lock? Not quite. He does not demonstrate with syllogisms. He seduces with visions. And there is the rub: for some it is not enough. For others, it is more than enough. Does Hegel in fact make good this claim to show reality as contradictory? The whole thing rests on a sleight of hand. Hegel shows that determinate being—say, a leaf—cannot be content with its limits. It bursts into infinity, or at least into a bigger frame. But that does not mean the leaf conflicts with itself. It just means... we are done talking about the leaf, we have gone to talking about the whole forest. The transition feels smooth, but the contradiction is still external; it is not really the leaf negating the leaf. It is the leaf failing the test of being everything. And that is not dialectics—that is just change. So, the 'reality is contradictory' claim stays rhetorical, not rigorous.

What the logic gives us, therefore, is the basic formula of rational necessity which embodies itself and thus is manifest in the universe. The logic provides us a picture of the conceptual formula of rational necessity that is the essence of Geist or God. It shows us God in his inner nature, as it were, rather than as we may see God reflected in nature and history. An essential vision, but not sufficient by itself. Hegel was trying to say in secular language what the Trinity always meant: a life that is pure relationship, pure communication, in which the speaker and the spoken, the lover and the loved, are not three but one—yet not without three. The Logic gives you God as Logos. The rest of Hegel's work gives you God as Father and Son. And history is the Spirit.

Where does philosophical reflection begin? Geometry can legitimately begin with the proposition “There is a space, a point, a line, and so on.” Where can philosophy begin? The choice of a beginning contains in it philosophical decisions one has already made. The uniqueness of philosophy in comparison with other disciplines is that the beginning does not matter, for the end will influence or mediate the beginning anyway.

For empiricists, the beginning is to advance straight to the object of sense perception and then reproducing them in thought. It reminds us that philosophy has its primary concern the world of experience. It also reminds us of the freedom of our thought. However, it forgets that human experience is always mediated by thought, so there is no immediate experience. Analysis separates subject from object, but genuine knowledge involves re-uniting them.

Descartes began his reflections with the famous “I think,” the ego. We are certainly familiar with ourselves, and therefore it seems as if it should be a good beginning. 

Thinking about thinking, acquaintance with knowledge, is another beginning (Kant). Such an approach to human thought or rationality would either view it as an instrument human beings use to attain knowledge of truth and goodness, or the medium through which one can have such knowledge.

Our mistrust of our rationality can become nothing more than avoiding the demanding work of thinking. Philosophy needs to account for how knowledge arises.

The doctrine of being describes the path of being whose quality has found its measure in quantity. It concerns the coming to be of something out of nothing. This something becomes itself through measure. The vague possibility of hardens into a definite, limited thing, limits that are the inner mark of its own character. Magnitude is quantity taken as objective, something that one can count or measure. Thus, quantity is not just number, but the first time being shows itself. Being must measure itself, to draw a line around “this” to distinguish it from “that.” The math reveals a deeper process, but Hegel sees the promise inherent in finitude, which arises through contradiction.

a)    The Beginning: Being, Nothing, Becoming

Let us begin with the notions of Being, Nonbeing, and Becoming.^[6]

At this general level of reflecting on what is in the universe, philosophy has a term for the positive quality of Being (sein), that which is, and the negative quality of Nonbeing. That which “is” at one time “was not” and in the future will “pass away.” Yet, they are not mutually exclusive, for life as we experience it is the destructive and creative tension that defines the relation of Being and Nonbeing, which we can think of as Becoming. Becoming is a matter of finite entities relating to each other in ways that have their dialectical relation as well, creating tensions that have both a destructive and creative energy. Very simply, “to be something” is to be finite. To say that anything is anywhere, in a place, is to say it exists. Entities in the world do not just exist, but rather, they exist in relations that repel and attract, destroy and create, all moving forward to increasingly complex relation. The guiding thread of this discussion is determinate being (dasein), expressing his ontological vision of finite being as the necessary and yet inadequate and vanishing vehicle of infinite being. He relies on the principle of Spinoza that all determination is negation. Determinate beings are in a struggle to maintain themselves in face of others, negating each other in an active sense.

It is safe to agree with Charles Taylor that while the interpretation of things by Hegel is powerfully suggestive of his ontology, it is hardly a logical demonstration of it.

A speculative system would need to include the way in which beings like us, thinking beings, has risen from “the stuff that is there.” The “stuff” is finite, of course. It has limits but seeks to pass over the limits. Each finite thing must let go of itself to move beyond its limits. They “show” themselves. Yet, they become “illusory being” to us because they are between “being” and “nothing,” and thus always “becoming.”^[7]  

The finite implies a real ending in space and time. They limit each other. Every “something” is what it is in its particularity only by being differentiated from an other. Yet, as Hegel showed convincingly in his logic, one cannot think the border without thinking the other that lies on the far side of the border. All that is finite exists through the determination of its limits, which one must then “cut out” from the Infinite. The intuition of the Infinite is an unthematic thought within all representations of the finite. Our sense of space depends upon the primacy of the whole of space over its parts. If finite and infinite are in dialectical relation, we need to view them in dialectical movement with and against each other, a creative and destructive tension arising in the relation. The finite gains its power only as embraced by the Infinite, while the Infinite has power only as it actualizes itself in the variety and multiplicity of finitude. Their unity is of the nature of a transition of the finite into the Infinite, and the Infinite into the finite. The Infinite emerges in the finite, and the finite emerges in the Infinite. The process of this transition passes from the finite to the Infinite. Such transcending of the finite is far from an external act. Such lifting of the finite into the Infinite does not occur as if either is acted upon by an external force. Their mutual tense relationship is the dynamic that both abrogates and lifts. One must conceive the Infinite both as transcendent in relation to the finite and as immanent to it. 

This describes a movement, suggesting that nothing simply “is what it is” now, but exists now in a form that anticipates that toward which it moves. This suggests a teleological structure, at this highly general level, of Being and Time. In the Present, human beings cannot see clearly the goal toward which Being and Time move, for the goal is present in only an unthematic, implicit, tacit, and provisional way. The “end” is not yet present. In that sense, the present is the destructive and creative tension between what was and what shall be. The “horizon of expectation” includes the notions of hope and fear, trust and anxiety. We need both, for what I have suggested is that the Future is what constitutes what is. Yet, this Future is not clearly before our eyes as human beings. Nothing guarantees, from the standpoint of philosophy, a happy end or goal. Yet, we need to deal with the fact that our minds work in a way that strive toward wholeness and meaning, even as we feel the pull of disintegrating forces that we might think of as an unhealthy self-centeredness. Humanity does not experience satisfaction with any stage of finite development. Every stage has its limit, but humanity keeps pushing beyond that limit. To use a poetic metaphor, humanity hears a song that could have a beautiful, sublime, true, and noble end. Yet, from the standpoint of philosophy, humanity cannot know whether that such an end is true. It could be an illusion. As an aside, for someone who has an incredibly fragmented life that they do not think they hear a song, I would suggest that they in fact do, since they do not commit suicide.

At this general level of philosophical reflection, Hegel will want to introduce the notions of the Infinite. The Infinite unites finite and Infinite. He envisions an infinite life embodied in a circle of finite beings, each of which is inadequate to it and therefore goes under, but is replaced in a necessary order by another, the whole series not being boundless but closed on itself in a circle. The Infinite is the entire system of finite things and their relations which is not dependent or limited by anything else. The rise of the finite, limited, individual ego occurs in a way in which the Infinite embraces it. Here again, our experience as human beings confirms that Finite and Infinite are not mutually exclusive but have a dialectical relation. Our experience of human life is not simply a matter of counting sense experiences, but of experiencing a quality of life. The struggles of a human life toward meaning and wholeness, and the recognition that we will not have such experiences in this time and space, give rise to the positive and philosophic notion of the Infinite and Eternal.

The thought of the true Infinite as the unity that transcends infinite and finite as antitheses, is an intellectual that involves us in a paradox. In the abstractly logical form of the question, one cannot show their unity without expunging the difference. With his notion of the logic of concept and conclusion, Hegel does not solve the problem. The perfect unity of concept and reality in the Idea is itself no more than a mere postulate of metaphysical logic. The dynamic that in the process must be ascribed to the Idea leaps over the frontiers of logic. ^[8]

Hegel does not move this direction, but after his discussion of the Infinite, which involves Being, we need to discuss the importance of Temporality.[9] We can begin with the priority of the Future which suggests that the Present at one time was an anticipation that has come to be. It also suggests that nothing limits this process of coming to be, for the Present keeps pressing toward the Future, which is, of course, unknown. The Future is present only as an anticipation, but the anticipation itself may not come to pass. Such is the ambiguous quality of the Future. In fact, for human beings, awareness of finitude is anxiety.  Finitude is the possibility of losing one’s individuality and sense of belonging, losing one’s dynamism for life and creativity in a lifeless form, and losing one’s freedom and destiny. Finitude implies this threat.

To help us here, I want to suggest another dialectical relation, that of Time and Eternity. Far from being mutually exclusive, the priority of the Future suggests that the Eternal is the term we can use for the wholeness of lived time. The duration of entities in Becoming has its ambiguity, of course, since nothing is yet what it shall be, but duration also becomes an image of what shall be, even if we see unclearly. What I am suggesting is that Time is not just a matter of counting it externally. We also have a psychological dimension to Time. Very simply this means that the death of the individual is not constitutive for its wholeness and meaning. I am suggesting that we will need another light to gain such clarity, and it comes from the Eternal. If everything “is” by anticipation, then the “essence” of a thing is not something we can grasp, for what we see and experience is still an anticipation of what shall be. Individual beings are an anticipation of what they shall be. To apply this to us as human beings, the emergent self participates in the Eternal through expectation of its wholeness and the wholeness of all that is. However, as a reminder, peculiar to the Future is the ambivalence of possible completion on the one side and of possible failure and destruction on the other. Thinking philosophically, we can only speak of the possible wholeness of human existence as participation in eternity.

Such reflections anticipate the end of this reflection on Hegel and his significance for the present, focusing on the need to open a system Hegel viewed as closed. They also anticipate the profound gratitude thinkers today need to have toward what is now our heritage.

The discussion by Hegel moves from being to quantity to measure. The transitions are strained. They rely upon the science of his day and his thoughts about them. The themes will reappear in Philosophy of Nature. The difficulty is in explaining how differences arise. If the changes are not explained by the substrate, external factors are their source, but then we do not have the self-sustaining system Hegel is seeking.

As Schelling^[10] puts it, Hegel begins with the empty abstraction of pure being, but it must move out of its emptiness because, obviously, a richer content will emerge. Such a system of thought would need to begin with the pragmatic notion that the world is here, before us now, and we are part of that world. It would need to face the question of whole and part, of force and its exertion, of the inner and the outer. The physical sciences are the way in which we understand what is here. It does so through physics and biology. These sciences assume the necessity contained in the behavior of nature through their use of mathematics. Both physical sciences contain more philosophy than those who practice it will admit or even are aware. The current dominant theory in physics, that of the field theory, derives from Stoic philosophy and its conception of nature. In fact, when Hegel^[11] writes of existence proceeding from the ground, existence containing the ground in it, he seems to have in mind something like field theory. The dominant theory of evolution in biology is one that Hegel, a generation before Darwin, noted in Philosophy of Nature is one “that still flourishes.” In fact, Hegel described it as moving from the formless and toward form, from inert matter to living things in the water, to living things on land, and finally to human beings. He also noted that such an explanation without an end toward which it tends explains nothing. It postulates an indeterminate end. Evolution will find it difficult to grasp the significance of the arrival of beings like us. In particular, the necessity that governs nature gives way to the liberty that human beings experience through thought. Nature puzzles us in ways that attract us to it, due to the reality that thinking creatures like us have arisen from it, and repels us from it, due to the unique complexity with which we engage in thinking. As Aristotle noted, our first approach to nature is that of wonder. We have a practical approach to nature through our understanding. We rationally look upon ourselves as the finite end of the natural process. We have learned to use and master nature through our knowledge of it. The cunning of our reason preserves and maintains us as we face the dangers presented by nature. Nature becomes a means to serve its end, the sustenance of humanity. 

Schelling^[12] will not want to go with Hegel in the logical necessity of the movement that Hegel describes. The philosophy of Hegel itself will show how many sides of reality he has not grasped. Therefore, one cannot exclude contingency from the progression that Hegel identifies. What is contingent is the narrow view of the philosopher. Further, the movement from being to nothing Schelling finds confusing. The propositions give one nothing. He uses the analogy of wanting to carry water in cupped hands, which also give one nothing. The work of just holding onto something that one cannot hold because it is not anything replaces philosophizing. He does not think one should talk of the philosophy of Hegel at all, for it consists of such incomplete thoughts that one cannot hold onto long enough for a judgment about them. He will want to see the concept of process as dialectical movement as one in which no struggle is possible since one can see only a monotonous and soporific progression that hides true life. He tried to elevate logic above the philosophy of nature he encountered, but he took the philosophy of nature with him into his logical system. He presupposed intuition within the first steps of his philosophy. In beginning with mere concepts, he sought to breathe life into them through an inner compulsion to progression. His point is the concepts exist only in consciousness. He put them at the beginning of his philosophy. This withdrawal into pure thought is an attempt to win us over to his logic, deciding to think about thinking. However, for Schelling, real thinking is where something opposed to thinking is overcome. He will stress that at this point, the concept-thesis is God, setting itself against the sensuous antithesis of reality that we experience. Kant also saw God as an abstract idea of reason. What excites readers of Hegel is the system. He does not underestimate the value of many uncommonly clever methodological remarks found in his logic, but he threw himself into this discussion in way that he forgot the questions that lay outside it. The real point of the logic is that it would lead the speculative theology, that it constructs the Idea of God, being the result of the system. He thinks he is presupposing nothing and asks us to begin with extraordinarily little. However, what Hegel does in his logic is to suppose that the Idea completes itself in mere thinking, rather than in reality. He then wants to move from this logical result to saying that the Idea is also a real result in human life and history. Even then, would have to expect that philosophy would always be open to further discovery. Schelling wants to stress that Hegel, instead of developing a science of the Absolute, had recourse to intellectual intuition, even a mystical intuition, of which only a few people could boast of having. Schelling will also stress that the world opposed to the result of logic in the Idea is nature. Nature is the agony of the concept, a breaking of the Idea with itself. As he sees it, Hegel denigrates nature at this point. The Idea must, of necessity, go outside of itself in nature to realize or actualize itself. He could not stop with the logic, for he must move on to the real world, where the Idea must show itself. The Idea releases nature, a notion Schelling finds puzzling. The Idea has thrown itself into nature to become spirit again, which it can do only in the human spirit.

This means focusing upon the double-edged sword we affirm when we say that human beings are thinking animals. Thinking simultaneously makes humanity a unique part of the world and alienates humanity from the world out of which humanity came. The healing of this breach is one that humanity can approach only through thinking. 

In the end of our reflection upon how knowledge appears in the world through rationality, we will be able to see the various stages through which the human spirit must travel to arrive at a truthful conception of its destiny, its project, or its noble end.

Doctrine of Essence: Reflection and Appearance

 Book two, the doctrine of essence of being, asserts its reality in its appearance. If book one was the birth, book two is the first mirror. Essence (Wesen) here is the underlying reality that shines through appearance, the deeper ground that ordinary understanding misses. Something appears as what it means in that its essence shows through its appearance. Things have the foundation on an underlying basis we come to Essence by reflecting on Being, seeing that it does not suffice to itself, referring to what underlies it. The surface shines with what it is. The categories of Essence are determinations of reflection because they are categories of relation and mediation and categories of reflecting understanding. They deserve this name because they are both at once, grounded in conceptual necessity, the inner structures that mediate external reality are understandable as structures of reflective thought. He moves from reflection to ground, then to appearance, and then to reality. 

He will discuss a common inadequate of identity and difference. It is adequate because each thing carries non-identity within itself. He transitions to the category of Existence, Hegel has taken the crucial step to make us see Essence, as that which underlies external reality as fully manifest necessity. This will lead him to discuss the “thing” that possesses properties. The dialectic occurs in the relation of essence and attributes to II, 484ff. ^[13] The notion is valuable as Hegel describes it in the relation between books one and two as defining essence as a reflection of existence. Existence is the existence of essence. ^[14] For Hegel, the concept of essence is self-relation to something else. The relation between substance and accident is a special instance of the relational structure of essence. The other to which essence as the essence of a thing or phenomenon is primarily related is existence. The concept of essence always presupposes an existence into which essence we inquire. Not merely the qualities of an essence or thing, but its existence as well, may thus be seen as aspects of the rationality that specifies the concept of essence as such. ^[15]

He will move to discuss the category of Appearance, focusing on the idea of relation, that which appears, stepping out into exteriority, as moments of a larger whole. 

A general category in philosophy is that of the Whole and the Part.[16] What emerges out of the dialectic is the unity of the underlying relatedness. This is what gives the idea of a totality of elements, separate but essentially related. This section considers dualism between whole and part, and inner and outer. When we think of the category of Whole and part, every individual appearance occurs within a context that is itself unique. Each appearance is part of a whole. Language is an example of this process, for each word depends upon the totality of the language and the language itself depends upon the cultural context. Words depend upon sentences, sentences depend upon the discourse, and the discourse depends upon the situation of the discourse. The context may imply the cultural and world setting. The parts and Whole mutually imply and condition each other.

Another general category is that of inner and outer. To say they are the same, as Hegel does, is to say that reality is self-manifesting. Reality becomes the union of Essence and Appearance. 

He will be interacting with Spinoza in his discussion of Reality, modifying him along the way. He will discuss possibility, reality, and necessity, Substance, and Causality. He started the Book of Essence with the conception of a self-subsistent system of necessary changes that he established with Infinity. He has been spelling out the implications of this notion.  He showed first that a system of this kind is a totality of necessary connections where each element must be explained out of the whole chain. For an adequate explanation must exhibit its necessity, but its necessity only flows out of the entire system of necessary links. Thus in the dialectic of Ground, the necessary derivation of things from sufficient reason could only be satisfied by relating them to the whole of which they are a phase. The task is one of relating this whole with the multiplicity of its elements. 

Through the dialectic of things and properties, of law, of form and content, of whole and part, of inner and outer, we discover the whole of necessary connection cannot be seen as some force separate from and or behind the external manifold. For contradiction is the motor of necessary movement affects all reality. The inner connectedness of things, the totality, cannot lie behind but must be immanent to external reality. This is what is expressed in the category of reality. Necessity flows out of things themselves and is manifest in them.

Speculative philosophy unites the practicality of the understanding with the theoretical thrust of reason. This unity occurs through the notion of liberty, a liberty won not through an abstract assertion of its self-evidence, but through a torturous, dialectical path. Liberty will have opposition from its opposite, it will have temporary shining forth, only to have its opposition beat it back, it will shine brightly in some cultures and historical periods, but the end of these stages is the actualization of liberty. In the hands of a great thinker, such a process inevitably expands into a system, and that is what Hegel delivered. The end of this process is truth and goodness. However, each of the stages of philosophical reflection is significant, while containing within itself its own contradiction. Dialectical advances do not leave anything behind. Rather, dialectical movement preserves it all in the advance of thought toward truth and goodness. Each advance is a form of expanding outward and contracting inward; each extension is intensification. Given that any thinker, no matter how great, is part of the dialectical movement, the achieved system is provisional and hypothetical.^[17] The dialectical method as a system becomes a circle of circles, in which each moment has an antecedent and an anticipated successor. 

Doctrine of the Notion: Self-Determining Concept

Book Three is the doctrine of the notion or concept of this being, the subjective logic, appearing in its further self-determination as indefinite universality. The Notion (Begriff) is Hegel's highest category: thought knowing itself as the active principle that determines reality, uniting universality, particularity, and individuality.The Logic reaches its conclusion. It started off in the category of Infinite, presenting the Whole as totality, with the idea of a self-subsistent system of necessary changes. Through Essence, Hegel developed this further and saw that that necessity was inherent in external reality, even though it exhibited contingency. However, necessity posited this contingency. The necessity in things was not conditional on anything merely given. 

With the Notion, spirit becomes explicit to itself—being was blind, essence was behind, but now the Notion is the mirror facing the mirror. It is thought knowing itself, and so reality is now not just appearing as what it is—but knowing why it must be that way. The Absolute is no longer hiding. Hegel based his notion of the Idea on Plato, but for Hegel, the Idea is neither pure abstract thought nor brute reality—it is the real realized as purpose, the ideal actualized. The unity of Idea and reality is in-itself-for-itself. The whole book ends, you might say, when the notion comes to know itself as this world. Thought and being, one. And history has no more excuses. The Idea of the Idea is Life, understood as being the locus of inner teleology as both means and end (Aristotle). Life is the way thought moves, the way being breathes. The end is not some lofty abstraction. The Absolute knows itself not in stillness, but in this endless, self-renewing pulse. The Idea is the all-embracing goal of the system. Cognition is the system thinking aloud. Once you see everything as the self-cognition of the idea, then knowing, being known, and being are the same act. The universe does not just happen to be knowable. It is being known, right now, by itself—through you. Knowledge requires consciousness, the structure in which a subject is over against an object. There must be finite subjects both because as consciousness they must be over against a world of objects and because as existing subjects they must be determinate. Beyond Life, the Idea must generate the category of Knowledge, as the consciousness of finite subjects must be transcended. This is a struggle of finite subject to transcend the self, thereby concerning both knowing and willing. The category of self-consciousness has a necessary application because it is integral to the Idea. The transcending of finite knowledge brings humanity an infinite knowledge, that knowledge of the whole by the whole, which is the Absolute Idea. The subject must win through to the difficult grasp of its unity, thereby connecting the subject to the Truth and to the Good. The Absolute Idea becomes the synthesis of knowledge and life. Art and Religion are modes of grasping for an adequate existence, but philosophy is the purest way to the Concept.

He is arguing that Reality is for a subject, which means that the world-as-object-of-knowledge is structured by concepts. It shows the debt Hegel has to Kant, but it involves a profound transformation of the basic ideas of Kant. He agrees that the original unity of apperception, but he gives it a twist. This original unity unites the different representations. It is this unity that gives them objectivity. For Kant, this was the category was that of a simple form waiting for intuitive filling. For Hegel, the ontological reality is that the inner truth of things flows from thought, that they ae structured by rational necessity. The Concept is an active principle underlying reality that makes reality what it is. The Concept develops the reality which corresponds to it out of itself. The Concept is the principle underlying the real. The seed develops and articulates itself. The Concept is the seed or undeveloped form. The Concept underlies everything as the inner necessity that deploys the world, and human conceptual knowledge is derivative from this. The concept in our subjective awareness is the instrument of the self-awareness of the Concept as the source and basis of all. He rejects the Kantian notion that there is unbridgeable gulf between our thought the foundations of the real. Throughout the book thus far, categorical concepts generate contradiction and are linked to their opposites. Here, he will show how this occurs in the concept of a concept. He will do so by examining judgments and syllogisms of formal logic. The message of Hegel is that form goes over into its opposite, making a purely formal logic a chimera. Truth is the form something has when it is fully developed, when the form is in full agreement with its concept. 

This discussion of the Notion expresses the profound difference from Kant. Kant accepted the duality of knowing mind and reality. For Hegel, truth is within human grasp because reality is not foreign to thought, developing as it does out of thought itself. Kant thought of categories as finite because they are subjective. Hegel said they were finite because they are partial, having a place in the process of a totality. 

Hegel is arguing against Kant (Critique of Pure Reason, Transcendental Logic), when he defined categories as the necessary and inescapable conceptual structures the world of experience must exhibit if we are to have any experience at all, which brings Kant close to an ontology. These categories are valid only for us as human beings. For Hegel, there is not thing-in-itself that is unknowable and beyond, still over there. Kant cut off the relation between the subject and the object. By arguing that all the human mind can do is touch the categories of pure reason, he locked humanity within a room. For Hegel, if the categories are necessary for our experience of the world, and we are part of the world, then they are necessary for the world. Thus, Hegel will go all the way to an ontology in his transcendental logic. 

In the Kantian antinomies, we find contradictions which arise when we attempt to apply certain concepts in a pervasive way, that is, to the full extent of their possible application. The logic of these concepts permits two contradictory assertions. Thus, in applying the notions of division of space and time in a systematic way, or in applying that of limit to the whole, or in using the related notions of causation and freedom to their full legitimate extent, we seem driven by our understanding of these concepts to make two utterly unreconcilable assertions, which both seem equally well-founded. Hegel says Kant deserves our gratitude for having laid bare these antinomies, but he drew totally the wrong conclusions, for he still shared the error of understanding and opposing thought to reality, and out of a misplaced tenderness for worldly things, he sought the basis of these antinomies in the limits of our understanding and not in the real nature of things. Kant blames our head. Hegel blames the world. For Kant the contradiction shows that our tools are too big for the job. For Hegel the contradiction shows that the job was always too big—for what is real—but not too big for reason. Because reason itself must split, must argue against itself, to grow. The analytics of concepts is Kant's table of categories. He lists them—quantity, quality, relation, modality—and argues that these are the hinges on which experience hangs. Hegel does not like the list, not because they are wrong, but because they are static. For Kant, they are eternal, silent rules. For Hegel they should be verbs. They should fight, mate, die. So, he keeps the table—then kicks the legs out from under it. the transcendental analytic is where Kant tries to show how these fixed categories make sense possible. But they remain outside history, outside life. The antinomy is not an error of ours. It is an event in things. And philosophy's job is to attend the birth.

The totality of human knowledge embraces the present state of knowledge in the form of anticipation. Categories are truth claims in the form of assertions that must relate to each other and to the states of affairs in the world to which they refer. Although most of us do not apply ourselves to a systematic way of thinking, the assumption is that truth claims cohere with each other. The truth claim of an assertion has a link with the words of the sentence, but the realm of meaning relevant to the assertion extends beyond the sentence and discourse and to other states of affairs. The claim of every assertion to truth means one cannot avoid reflecting on the totality of all true assertions and thereby to the totality of what is. Of course, as a further reminder, the truth of the statement is in anticipation of the totality of knowledge, for human beings will never formulate categories that will fulfill the condition of there ever actually being a time when humanity will have the totality of all true assertions. At its most general level, then, the category of the whole plays the same role as that of law in the natural sciences.

Concept and Anticipation need to become basic logical categories.[18] Every Concept of the whole or totality is an abstraction, due to the anticipatory nature of all knowledge of the whole in a world that has not yet been completed and reconciled to the whole. Such reflections must have the character of a conjectural reconstruction in relation to its object, one that distinguishes itself from its intended truth while at the same time construing itself as a preliminary form of this truth. The philosophical concept will reveal itself to have the structure of anticipation. Concept and Anticipation cannot be in isolation from each other. What would anticipatory concepts and conjectural reflection look like? The physical sciences present one with examples in the formation of hypotheses and with their testing. Science reminds us that every assertion has an anticipatory structure. All such assertions are hypothetical and anticipatory directed toward reality. Anticipations look forward to the occurrence of future experience and to the content of such experience.

Such a view of the anticipatory concept makes the assertion ambiguous, for the anticipated future may not become a reality. The anticipating consciousness does not guarantee the truth of its content. Every form of the anticipatory concept has preliminary meaning, one that leaves open the ultimate truth of humankind. In contrast, the Concept is the act of conceiving some designated thing. When one focuses on concepts that are appropriate or which intend a given thing, construing them as anticipations draws attention to a structural component that otherwise remains hidden. The concept depends upon verification through the thing that it grasps, a verification that transcends the concept. Recognizing the anticipatory nature of all concepts does justice to rationality, in comparison with descriptions that conflate the true concept of a thing and the thing itself.

The notion of the totality of reason and reality is a thought, for it depends on the individual objects of possible experience bound together in reality. This idea is the condition for grasping and determining all the individual objects of experience. Anticipation is a real instance of something occurring in advance. The anticipated future is already present in anticipation. If the future does not occur, its anticipation will only be prophetic enthusiasm.

Anticipation is always ambiguous. The true significance of any anticipation depends upon the future course of experience. Anticipation cannot guarantee the truth of its content. The concept of anticipation helps one understand the two-sided character of both concepts and judgments. Both concepts and judgments claim for themselves an identity with the thing conceived. Yet, one can also speak of the “mere concept” and the “mere assertion” to point a difference from the asserted state of affairs. The concept of anticipation unites both aspects of identity and difference. Identity and difference have a temporal relationship. The anticipation is not yet identical in every respect with the anticipated thing. Yet, given the presupposition that the thing will appear in its full form sometime in the future, in the anticipation the thing is already present. The form of the anticipation must correspond to the peculiar character of whatever it is that one claims the anticipatory concept grasps and one can only grasp it in this way. Could it be that the anticipatory form of knowledge corresponds to an element of the “not yet” within the very reality toward which knowing is directed? If this were not the case, the result would be that anticipation is no more than a preliminary stage that one could leave behind by grasping the concept of the thing. If the answer to the question is yes, the identity of things is not yet present in the process of time.

The philosophical point here is that the broad categories of philosophy suggest an infinite horizon of philosophical reflection. Every philosophical boundary we may sense or imagine keeps being broken and moving us beyond.

The Idea of the True and the Idea of the Good are the highest expression of Geist, knowing what is and knowing what ought to be. They are separate for a while. With the Absolute Idea, we learn that in the end, the is turns out to be the ought, as the Absolute knows itself as willing itself. This massive articulation of the science of logic ends in silence. In this vision, God is infinitely perfect in the process of reason, which is moment or event, God unleashing the contradiction of being. God is not perfect in the sense of finished. God is perfect in the sense of perfecting—of endlessly, eternally, giving birth to difference, to pain, to night, out of love for what it needs. The process is not an accident. It is not a moment. It is the moment—always beginning. And we are the moment happening.  The meaning of true and good equals revelation of God in the realm of thought. God does not simply exist in secret. God comes out into the open, not by decree from on high, but through reason, God speaks, suffers, becomes. And philosophy is that speaking. The true is the world revealed as God's self-description. The good is God revealed as self-giving.

Being turns out to be contradictory, a conversion or turning point that comes when one sees the contradiction that strikes Being as a disaster (496-7). Therefore, contradiction has reality. This forms a circle. Contradiction is that which dissolvers Being, but this contradiction is also essential to Being, so contradiction also creates Being. Contradiction becomes a necessary movement that deploys Being. The contradiction of dissolving and creating brings a third term that restores, where the negative is negated and comes back to positive. Self-related Being is immediate, but contains and cancels mediation, the simple through cancellation of difference, the positive through cancellation of the negative, involves a return to self. One can see this return of pure Being to itself through the overcoming of mediation, the journey in Book One and Two, but we can also start with the Idea and see it go over into objectivity, exteriority, and indifference, and the return is recover unity with subjectivity, as in Book Three. This dialectic is what Hegel follows through the various stages of the Logic, especially in Essence and the Concept. Only a subject, a self-thinking rational necessity that posits necessarily an external world which it governs and in which it recognizes itself, that only this addresses the ontological issues, which Hegel wraps up in the Idea. Hegel presents a vision of the whole structure of things, including what is contingent, flowing necessarily from the one starting point, the Reason (Geist, Concept) must be. Hegel thinks he has fulfilled this incredible task. The circle is closed. Being is swallowed up because it exists necessarily. 

Hegel has designed Science of Logic as an ascending movement that takes the reader from finite consciousness to the vision of things as issuing from the Idea. The crucial support for the whole edifice reposes on the argument of the contradiction of the finite. That argument, according to Charles Taylor, is unsuccessful. His demonstration of his ontology can only have the force of a plausible interpretation of the facts of finitude, the levels of being, the existence of life and conscious beings, the history of humanity, as hints and traces of the life of an Absolute Subject, deployed in the world. However, if it is only an interpretive vision, the synthesis breaks asunder, dissolving into either Romantic pantheism or sliding toward orthodox theism, but of which Hegel would have rejected.

The supreme accomplishment of Hegel is that he showed how the ancient philosophical Greek Idea, summarized as Truth, Goodness, and Beauty, exhibited a form of historicality, doing so necessarily because of their energizing power in human thought and action, these ideas externalizing themselves in human life and social structures. The wholeness of this process was the necessary self-determination of the Idea, the Absolute, or Spirit (Geist). The logic that governs this developmental process is dialectic. The dialectical method involves the notion that movement, or process, or progress, is the result of the conflict of opposites. Traditionally, this dimension of Hegel's thought has been analyzed in terms of the categories of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis. Although Hegel tended to avoid these terms, they clarify his concept of the dialectic. The thesis, then, might be an idea or a historical movement. Such an idea or movement contains within itself incompleteness that gives rise to opposition, or an antithesis, a conflicting idea or movement. As a result of the conflict a third point of view arises, a synthesis, which overcomes the conflict by reconciling at a higher level the truth contained in both the thesis and antithesis. This synthesis becomes a new thesis that generates another antithesis, giving rise to a new synthesis, and in such a fashion the process of intellectual or historical development is continually generated. Hegel thought that Absolute Spirit itself (which is to say, the sum of reality) develops in this dialectical fashion toward an ultimate end or goal. The goal of the dialectical cosmic process can be most clearly understood at the level of reason. As finite reason progresses in understanding, the Absolute progresses toward full self-knowledge. Indeed, the Absolute comes to know itself through the human mind's increased understanding of reality, or the Absolute.

Hegel will be bold to say that the intellect of God lives in human thought. Human beings can participate in an intellectual intuition, as God’s thoughts is human thought. Hegel sneaks God in through the back door. Logic is not just what is; it is why existence mirrors the unfolding mind of God. It describes the path trodden by the divine logos in an act of dialectically creative self-determination, increasingly improving itself as it passes through every organically related form of being. It is like God's eternity is not static; it is this restless loop, logic-first but replayed in history. Logical precedence means the structure's baked in before time, yet the Logos keeps tweaking itself through us. Divinity is dynamic. Like evolution, but metaphysical.  Hegel executed the whole development of the eternal divine modes of being, through pure being to the speculative concreteness of the Absolute Idea, without explicit or implicit mention of the name of Jesus Christ in any of the intermediate stages. He flips the strife of the dialectic on its head. Even alienation is just a detour God takes on purpose. This makes his project hopeful. The essence of logos is dynamism, evolution, and dialectic. That dynamism is Hegel's secret sauce—Logos is not frozen truth; it is life pushing forward, splitting and healing, forever. Incarnation is momentum. The Omega, or end, is nothing but the informed Alpha, and it returns to this beginning. The God of the beginning and the God of the end must be the same God. And of course that would be very New Testament.The Absolute Idea circles back to pure Being, only now it is richer, scarred with history. The entire New Testament is so concerned that the beginning be defined in unequivocally Christological terms from the perspective of the end. The whole New Testament constantly reiterates its insistence of the Christological beginning (John 1:1-18, Colossians 1, Hebrews 1.They keep rewinding creation to make it about him, because from Easter Sunday backward, the Alpha is already bruised feet.

Hegel is making a bold claim for humanity, given the vastness of the universe and the smallness of earth, its sun, and its solar system within its own galaxy, let alone a galaxy that is one among 200 million galaxies. Through little us, the universe is seeing itself and doing so by the dialectical necessity of nature. The universe does not look like an emerging, anticipatory Mind. Science describes it as exploding gasses. Yet, the only way to ask what exploding gasses mean is to stand outside the process, which unites us with the end, a Whole toward which we are still moving. The only “thing” that allows us to step outside like that is thinking. Thus, little or vast, what matter is awareness. If there is one speck of awareness in all the darkness of the universe, then the darkness has been waiting for its appearance.

 

Phenomenology of Spirit: Pathway Human Knowledge Must Take (with insertions)

One can think of the Phenomenology of Spirit as an introduction to the System. Hegel traced the stages of this manifestation from the simplest level of consciousness, through self-consciousness, to the advent of reason. That was the original plan, later inserting the chapters oriented to world history on spirit, religion, and reason. Its function is to take the reader from the prejudices of ordinary consciousness to the threshold of true science. He chooses as starting points realities or categories or ideas as distant from the end as possible to strengthen his case, a distance that is approximate and intuitive. The Phenomenology of Spirit can be interpreted as a history of the Parousia of the divine all-encompassing being. The introduction, first few chapters on the consciousness (Par 73-230), and the rise of consciousness and the move toward absolute knowledge (Par 788-808). Hegel inserted into this original plan his long chapters on reason (Par 231-437), spirit (Par 438-672), and religion (673-787). He does not mention Jesus. He is providing a pathway that human knowledge needs to take. We stumble from sense-certainty to pure knowing. Aufhebung is lifting, negating, preserving, all at once, reminding us that absolute knowledge does not win by force. From the triple sense of the term, Hegel draws these conclusions: the truth regarded as absolute must continually be discarded; but, in being discarded, it must at the same time be taken up afresh—as relative moment—and raised up into a higher unity. For Hegel, reality is understood as the Absolute unfolding dialectically in a process of self-development. Hegel scarcely uses the words “thesis-antithesis-synthesis,” so often ascribed to him. But what is meant is the affirmation of a truth that turns into a denial and then again into a transcending of both affirmation and denial. In very ordinary terms, it might be expressed: so—and yet not just so—but so! In this way, rigid conceptual thinking is turned into a living, mental dynamism. Human consciousness thus shares in the dynamism of the divine Absolute itself, which is not emptiness and solid substance but a subject and spirit moving vitally through all contradictions. As the Absolute undergoes this development, it manifests itself both in nature and in human history. Nature is Absolute Thought or Being objectifying itself in material form. Finite minds and human history are the process of the Absolute manifesting itself in that which is most kin to itself, namely, spirit or consciousness.

From Sense-Certainty to the Despair of Consciousness

The book is his most brilliant and most obscure: a pioneer work in which his whole philosophy is already present. It recapitulates with pervasive industry Hegel’s previous development and gives to it a rich, concentrated and powerful if not unambiguous expression in a first broad outline: boiling and bubbling, sometimes and especially in the second part overflowing and yet in the last resort held together in disciplined passion. Given the circumstances, a work of youthful exuberance but already bearing many signs of maturity: despite all the changes of internal perspective, all the lack of uniformity in its accomplishment and all the unnecessary linguistic complication, it remains a profound work of consummate thought. Hegel also is a descendant of Descartes. The path that human natural understanding must follow here must be “looked on as the path of doubt, or more properly a highway of despair.” For the person should be led from the natural standpoint of common sense—which is so often wrong—to the genuinely scientific standpoint: one should rise from the immediate sense impression through all forms of consciousness to self-knowing spirit. The modes of consciousness are the vehicle by which Spirit knows itself. The development of Spirit towards self-knowledge lies through the initial confusions, misconceptions, and truncated visions of people. Hegel is confronting the weary struggle of the antithetical structure of real life. His dialectical dance turns life into this endless tug-of-war. The pathway to human understanding ls that of doubt and despair, burning through every false certainty. Consequently this “phenomenology of spirit” must be understood in the light of its definitive form as the “science of the manifestation of spirit” in its diverse forms. Hegel describes patiently, stage by stage, how natural or ordinary consciousness, which takes human beings to be individual, finite subjects set over against the world, becomes aware of absolute knowledge, which recognizes that Spirit knowing itself through persons is also in the world. It describes a dialectic of consciousness, showing ordinary consciousness carefully examined breaks down in contradiction, thereby pointing beyond itself to a more adequate form. This “path of the soul” has a psychological and pedagogical dimension, but it is also philosophical and historical. This educational path of individual consciousness—as Hegel himself makes clear during the further development of his thought in a way he had not himself expected—is simultaneously the way of manifestation of Absolute Spirit itself in its diverse forms in world history. The essential background of this phenomenology of spirit is that absolute knowledge and human knowledge from the very outset are not separate but are linked in a still unexplicated unity. And the path of experience followed here involves reciprocity: human consciousness becomes aware of the Absolute, and the Absolute becomes aware of itself in human consciousness. 

For Hegel, then, starting out from the individual subject simply does not mean subjectivist individualism: there is always a reference to the world. Connected with the reference to the world is the fact that the recollecting, outreaching experience is not exhausted—as it was with Descartes—in an initial “methodical” doubt but dwells on the doubt, from which in a vital antithetic movement the continually new dialectical sublation proceeds. Its concern is with the history of the subject, in which the subject is continuously being corrected by the specific object and the object by the subject: a mental process going on in constantly differing contradictions and negations, at increasingly higher levels, in increasingly concrete forms of consciousness and finally even world figures. 

The dialectic of Consciousness shows that consciousness can only provide us with the despair of attaining relevant knowledge. he offers a view of consciousness like that of David Hume and other empiricists. Consciousness is little more than practical reason or the understanding seeking knowledge of phenomena in the world. The untruth one gains of this world through understanding individual things in this world prepares us to receive, later, the truth to which human thought will bring us. This path educates the human spirit for what is to come. Skepticism is quite right at this point. Much of what we think we know at this stage is a matter of personal conviction, whether we have derived it from within or surrendered to an external authority. The mistake skepticism makes is that its product is emptiness and nothingness, if human thought must stop there. What it fails to realize is that consciousness is something that goes beyond the limits it has established. Skepticism does not see that the untruth gained through the understanding of the phenomenal world is an important stage along the path of human knowledge. In that sense, consciousness does violence to itself in that it spoils the limited satisfaction in which it could rest. In fact, when it feels the anxiety created by this violence, it could shrink away for the noble human project, trying to hold on to the little it has gained. It can find no peace. It might seek refuge in sentimentality, fear of the truth, or the conceit that learns how to belittle every truth gained. We can understand this better as we gain an understanding of the stages through consciousness must go to gain its knowledge. Being-in-itself involves what anything in the world simply “is.” Yet, everything in the world is in relationship with other things and thus is also being for another. Thus, sensible certainty, far from being the richest form of consciousness, is the poorest, for all knowledge is mediated. Anything in the world is being-for-it, but these same things in the world are also being-for-others and being-for-itself. These movements occur within human thought and thus the truth that it seeks.[19]

Philosophers will usually begin with exploring consciousness. This examination would include the experience of the senses and perception. For example, the liveliness of the senses and their immediacy appear as the richest and truest kind of knowledge. It gives the poorest kind of truth, that something simply “is.” Upon further reflection, we recognize that our rationality mediates even this experience of the senses. Therefore, even the knowledge we think we have with such certainty through the five senses is one we must suspend, considering it may not have the certainty the senses proclaim it to be. What is this? What is now? What is here? We may make the shift to our thinking process and consider it certain. This shift from considering the certainty of the object to the certainty within the subject does not yield the certainty we seek. It all contains ambiguity. In fact, the individual “parts” we have just considered must give way to considering the “whole” of the process of knowing through the senses. The use of language to express what we experience through the senses increases the ambiguity, we want to help it out by making physical gestures to clarify our “point.” We can only acknowledge the delusion that the combination of the senses and our thinking present to us. More than that, we not only doubt the senses, but we also despair at them. The senses get lost in our consciousness.[20]

Perception rediscovers the senses and resolves the tensions within consciousness concerning the senses through thought. In perception, we become aware of the relatedness of things. Things are “in-themselves,” but also “for-another.” To consider one or the other is to consider an abstraction. In perception, things in the world are in simple togetherness. The dialectic reappears in the form of negating and preserving, lifting subject and object into a new relationship. We who perceive are aware of the possibility of deception. The object itself is a community of properties. It exists in relation to other objects. Consciousness focuses on objects in the world and “also” returns to itself. Perception resolves itself into the independence of the object perceived and the one perceiving. In perception of this community of objects, the consciousness reaches outward, and then returns within itself, changing perception of the world and itself. Perception cannot get to the isolated object “in-itself,” for each thing is what it is in relationship. Everything is a “being-for-self” that is also “being-for-another.” Perception contains a certain sophistry. As much as perception seeks to overcome deception, it gets deeper into deception.[21]

Philosophically, consciousness that relies upon the senses and perception is the realm of “sound common sense,” which assumes itself as solid and realistic consciousness. I hope the above shows that we experience far more ambiguity in these areas than common sense allows. The proponents of common sense will attack philosophy at this point as focusing only upon mental games. These proponents do not realize that common sense is poorest where it proclaims itself richest. Common sense can only secure the untruth of perception.[22]

The next movement within consciousness focuses upon the object again. The objects in the world are a movement from unity to diversity to unity, and so on. They are for themselves, but they must also express themselves. This movement is force. The object is equally for-itself and for-another. The play of forces in the objects of the world re-asserts the independence of objects from consciousness. Our understanding seeks to grasp the “laws” of the play of forces in the world. This further movement within consciousness opens the sensuous world of appearance. We may think of this world as a surface show, but we need to get to the point of seeing it as a totality of show in the play of forces. In the understanding, however, we now open notion of a vanishing present world and the permanent beyond. The syllogism we open is the inner being of things as one term, our understanding as another term, and appearance becomes the middle term. We develop a problem for reason at this point by positing the notion that the inner realm of things is beyond our consciousness, and so therefore, reason has its limit. The limit is not in reason, but in our postulate as to the play of forces in the world. The flux of the world of appearance that the understanding perceives in the interplay of forces is a realm for human understanding through the laws it identifies. One does not perceive these laws directly, but the results of the laws the understanding identifies are present to perception. One might think here of the “law” of gravity, laws of motion, and so on. The force clearly present in the world does not submit to the laws the understanding identifies, for our understanding keeps identifying other laws. The understanding creates a super-sensible world of tranquil laws, but at the same time retains within it the principle of alteration and change. We must think of the interplay of antitheses of these two worlds, the antitheses of the essential nature of things and their outward manifestation. The notion of infinity comes into play, for the world of appearance is in constant inter-relation. Infinity is the soul of the world, the essence of life, and the lifeblood of the universe. Infinity both differentiates itself into the diversity of the world of appearance, while never surrendering the relatedness of the world of appearance. Infinity is the unrest of this self-movement of force in the world of force. As the understanding seeks an explanation of the play of forces leads to the realization that the world of appearance includes us who understand and thus becomes self-consciousness. In self-consciousness, we distinguish ourselves from ourselves, while recognizing their identity. We repel ourselves from ourselves, while immediately recognizing our identity with what we repel. Consciousness exhibits its unity with the external world through the syllogism of the essence and the inner self, with the “middle term” of appearance. Yet, consciousness gazes into the background lying behind appearance. In the process, the middle term vanishes. The curtain of appearance, which conceals the inner world, requires that we go behind the curtain, so that we can see, as well as see if something is there to see. Yet, in terms of this explanation of the development of human thought, we are not ready to do that. We still have more stages through which to go. Our reflection upon what consciousness knows when it knows itself has more complexity than what we have shown so far.[23]

Self-Consciousness and the Life-and-Death Struggle

         The next stage along this journey is to consider that consciousness is not only consciousness of objects in the world, but also consciousness of itself, describing a dialectic of self-consciousness. It is a dialectic of human longing and aspiration, and their deviations. The aim is integral expression, a consummation where the external reality that embodies human beings and on which human beings depend is fully expressive of human beings and contains nothing alien. Integrity is the goal.  It is this longing for total integrity which underlies the striving of self-consciousness, a striving through conflict and contradiction to arrive at the real thing. One attains this integrity in seeing oneself as intimately connected with Spirit. Seeing oneself in this way will lead to not seeing the world as an alien other. Humanity depends upon the world, so it will never feel integrity if the world is other. The dialectical transformations will raise one to a grasp of the universal, of reality, and this arrive at integrity. “I” am nothing without my body, and my body is nothing apart from the world. This movement between consciousness of objects and consciousness of itself is dialectical and defines the nature of human experience. Reflection upon this dialectical movement results in what does not appear, at first, to be common experience. In a formal way, we have consciousness of an object as it exists “for-us.” We think what we have grasped being-for-it. However, self-consciousness also perceives movement of self and object, to the point where we can conceive of the notion that everything “is becoming.” This process will yield its untruth as well, but it will preserve what reflection upon self-consciousness has gained.[24]

Humanness implies transcendence of one’s purely animal condition. For animals, there is no higher aspiration than survival. This is something that man must overcome to fully differentiate himself from animals. To attain humanness, one must negate the animal self; in other words, one must risk one’s life. Hegel claims that the desire for recognition is not just a struggle to subsist, as it appears among animals, but rather, and necessarily, a “life and death fight.”

To be human is to be self-consciousness.[25] Hegel summarizes here the fundamental difference between humanity and lower animals, which, in his eyes, are granted a mere “feeling of self.” This raises the question, however: what exactly constitutes human consciousness? Descartes’s conception of consciousness, or contemplation (cogito ergo sum), is insufficient for Hegel, for to concentrate exclusively on cognition would be to negate the significance of the ego. He argues that one can say “I,” that is, attain consciousness of one’s self, only after experiencing the desire for an object. However, if this desire remains directed at natural, tangible, or merely living objects, it resides on the level of animal instinct: Natural objects of desire, Hegel argues, cannot induce self-consciousness, but rather only the “feeling” of self conferred by animal desire. To attain self-consciousness, on the other hand, desire must be directed at an “unnatural” object: the desire of another. For humans to transcend their mere “feeling of humanness”—as with animals and their desire for merely natural object, “Desire must be directed toward another Desire.”

 

Human Desire, or better still, anthropogenetic Desire, produces a free and historical individual, conscious of his individuality, his freedom, his history, and finally, his historicity. . . . Anthropogenetic Desire is different from animal Desire (which produces a natural being, merely living and having only a sentiment of its life) in that it is directed, not toward a real, “positive” given object, but toward another Desire. Likewise, Desire directed toward a natural object is human only to the extent that it is “mediated” by the Desire of another directed toward the same object: it is human to desire what others desire, because they desire it. Thus, an object perfectly useless from the biological point of view (such as a medal, or the enemy’s flag) can be desired because it is the object of other desires. Such a Desire can only be a human Desire, and human reality, as distinguished from animal reality, is created only by the action that satisfies Desires: human history is the history of desired Desires.[26]

 

To desire another’s desire means to become the object of that other’s desire: It is the desire to be recognized by the other. Self-consciousness is thus for Hegel a function of the desire for recognition. Kojève argues that Hegel sees the essence of desire in negation; to pacify the longing for an object, in other words, that object must be negated or annihilated: “For Desire is absence of Being, (to be hungry is to be deprived of food); it is a Nothingness that nihilates in Being, and not a Being that is.” Negation and annihilation are integral to desire; both forms of desire, animal and human, strive for pacification through the negation of objects. In the case of human desire, e.g., that of recognition, this negation implies the assertion of man’s exclusive right to satisfaction, his right to certain objects, and his superiority and dominion over others. 

Hegel argues that to attain self-consciousness, multiple desires must be present, for only this way can another’s desire become the object of desire. Like Girard, Hegel sees humanity as a social entity that attains being exclusively by forging relations with others. The social act, however, is no harmonious or peaceful occurrence, but rather resembles the Hobbesian warlike state; multiple human desires directed simultaneously at general recognition lead necessarily to violent struggle. According to Hegel, all humans strive to subject others to their dominance.

Master-Slave Dialectic and the Path to Recognition

Hegel says that the origin of self-consciousness is found in the life-and-death struggle for recognition. It is in this fight for prestige that humans attain their humanness. This primal conflict ends in a dialectic of desire that Hegel expresses in the master-slave dialectic, a protracted process that drives history forward and ultimately brings about its ideological end. A crucial factor in the education of humanity, in the transformation that brings them to the universal, is the fear of death. War and the risk of death shake people loose from the narrow preoccupations of everydayness and bring them back to the universal. The master is the victor in the struggle of life and death, because he is the one who risks his life and chooses death over subordination. The slave is the vanquished, because his fear of death leads to the recognition of the master’s dominion over him, that is, his own bondage. The outcome of this struggle, however, does not result in an eternal division of humans into masters and slaves, as Aristotle suggests, but rather starts Hegel’s peculiar dialectic that leads to his concept of the “end of history.” The master’s dominion is recognized, but only from the menial self-consciousness of the slave, which for the master is insignificant. The master remains confined to a life of pleasure and is unable to contribute to the development of history. The slave, by contrast, is bound to a life of labor, but it is precisely this labor that enables him to develop over time a self-contained form of consciousness. As a master of nature, and by means of his labor, the slave alters the world and history. At the same time, the slave makes use of ideological means to reconcile his servitude with his growing self-consciousness in a bid to bring the two into harmony. 

Hegel distinguishes between three distinct stages of the slave’s ideological development, referring to them as stoicism, skepticism, and “unhappy consciousness,” the latter of which Hegel links to pre-Reformation Christianity. The point is that achieving integrity involves travelling both the master and the slave path. The stoic is the strategy of retreat, the free as a thinking subject in abstraction from the external circumstances of life. 

Unhappy consciousness is determined by recognizing what Hegel has called one's finite self-relatedness, and by at the same time finding one's identity to be determined by one's being is a self-transcending relation to something that presents itself in the domain of finite life in terms of its contrast with finite life. This link in human self-understanding between an awareness of finite self-relatedness and a specifically religious form of self-transcendence gives us realization—religion as the self-consciousness of spirit. Here is religion at its most raw. You are staring at your own dust, your smallness, and then suddenly—bang—something in you lifts beyond it because finitude itself points to infinity. Hegel may seem to be developing a position that coincides with views that Schleiermacher will come to present. Hegel insists that this consciousness does not start from its inner life, from thought, and unite within itself the thought of God with existence. On the contrary, it starts from an existence that is immediately present and recognizes God therein. Faith becomes a loving recognition of God in already present when what we see is the dust, the cross, the bread of communion, the plain and broken everydayness. 

The unhappy consciousness carries the contradiction within the self.  We go from one opposite to the other, first to the experience of the eternal and infinite, and then the finite and historical.  We do not rest.  We perceive our distance from the eternal, which leads us to experience devotion.  We feel the inward longing toward the infinite.  This is only feeling, however, and has not yet risen to thought.  We then engage in desire and activity, attributing our accomplishments to the eternal.  Yet, even as we deny ourselves satisfaction by renouncing, surrendering and giving thanks, we sense the division between God and ourselves.  We do not really surrender ourselves.  We then resolve this tension by viewing our desire and work as wretched.  We seek mediation with God through the church.  We deny ourselves satisfaction in our willing and working and give our resources to the church.  We also deny ourselves through fasting and other disciplines.  We deny ourselves inner and outer freedom.  In principle, however, we obtain relief from our misery through the mediation of the church.  We do not overcome the opposition between self and God.  We surrender the unity between work and ourselves by giving it to God.  Our sense of unworthiness leads to the need for a mediator, and the church fills that role.  The religious person is always unhappy because he or she must always renounce self and work and then attribute all good things to God.  True reconciliation does not take place.

The Christian idea of universal equality before God forges a path toward political emancipation and leads to the slave’s yearning to overcome his alienation and to force the master to recognize his liberty. According to Hegel, this final stage manifested itself historically in the French Revolution. He claims that Napoleon’s empire was akin to the forging of a universal, homogenous constitutional state in which masters and slaves experience mutual recognition, the consummation of the Ende der Geschichte, or the “End of History.” 

Absolute Knowledge: Reconciliation and the End of the Journey

And what is the purpose of the all-round reconciliation in phenomenology? Hegel calls it absolute knowledge. What is this? It is a grasp of the true nature of things, and this can only be expressed dialectically. Absolute knowledge is the full understanding that substance must become subject, that subject must go beyond itself, become divided, be over against itself as object, to return to unity with itself. It is aimed at reconciliation between stoicism and skepticism, faith and enlightenment, rationalism and romanticism. But also at reconciliation between master and slave, idea and feeling, desire and necessity, between the law of the heart and the law of reality, virtue and the course of the world. Finally, it is also aimed at reconciliation between exterior and interior, in itself and for itself, object and subject, being and thought, here and hereafter, finite and infinite, all at the end “sublated” in absolute knowledge—that is, in spirit knowing itself as spirit. All this, Hegel works out in many hundreds of pages. This section takes the subject of action and desire who at first seems to stand over against a world on which the individual depends and shows how this opposition is overcome. It is—as Hegel called it in old age—his “voyage of discovery” through the realm of spirit, which is revealed as the dramatic odyssey of the divine Spirit itself in this world and in its history. With Faustian restlessness and continually newly fulfilled, consciousness has passed through history, outpacing the finite on all sides, in order thus in a variety of adventures and struggles to reach the infinite, by which it has been encompassed from the outset: an arduous journey of the experiences of spirit ascending in spirals or triangular movements. It is the history of the divine Spirit itself, described by the philosopher faithfully hour by hour as he heard the clock striking. 

Philosophical thinking is a way of bringing together what seems opposed. The direct grasp of this process is philosophy. Science as we understand it in the modern world does not come along until the human quest achieved the awareness of itself that it needed. Time is the destiny of the human spirit, as it has not yet grasped itself in its pure philosophical notion. We can affirm that we know nothing of which we do not have experience. We must await the consummation of the struggle of the human quest to achieve a global status. One could trace this development in the various stages of world history. One could trace the development of philosophy in its various stages. The power of the human spirit is such that it does not fear externalization in these various shapes in history. At its heart, what we find is the shapes of freedom. The human spirit, knowing itself in this way, must gain full freedom when it sees itself in its opposite, in its limit. To know one’s limit is to know how to sacrifice oneself. This sacrifice is the process in which the human spirit becomes a shape in time and space. In space, we will need to think of a philosophy of nature. In time, we will need to think of a philosophy of history, which is the process of becoming as a slow-moving succession of the shapes of the human spirit that presents a gallery of images, each of which, endowed with the riches of the human spirit, penetrates the depth of human destiny. At each moment in history, the human spirit seems to start afresh, creating a new world and a new age. It proceeds as if it learned nothing from previous stages of the shapes of the human spirit. It begins at a higher stage than from which it began. One shape of the human spirit relieved another. Each took over from its predecessor. Their goal is the revelation of the depth of the human quest and human destiny. The revelation is this raising up of this depth. The revelation occurs in time, and is, therefore, history, conceived as the preservation of the various stages through which the shapes of the human spirit has taken. Yet, philosophy can comprehend this movement directly. Philosophically comprehend history considers history as making inward the human quest and its destiny on the one hand, and its Calvary on the other. Without this process, human destiny would sit upon the throne, lifeless and alone.[27]

In this sense, phenomenology is a theological philosophy of history and a philosophical theology of history. Hegel's reliance on Jacob Boehme, in whose philosophy the eminent trinity as holy gets explicated in such a way as to suggest deficiency, deficiency, moreover, which is only relieved when the so-called pure divine opens itself to the finite and enters its impurity. Finally, of course, subjecting it to transmutation. His trinity is wounded, incomplete, until it dives into mud and comes out gold. Hegel grabs that idea by the throat: the divine is not pure until it stains itself. Otherness melts in recognition, like lovers who see no gap. Not contradiction, but completion. Pure divinity is sterile. Thus, the merely eternal or abstract spirit becomes an other to itself or enters existence and directly into immediate existence. Accordingly, it creates a world. God does sit there, perfect and bored, but steps into time and creates. Creation is the point, and human nature is united with the divine essence. The truth about human nature is union with God. The secularity of the world may sense the absence of God, but this sense does not have the final word. The religious community integrates its diverse representations of the divine into an understanding of a single comprehensive process and can find that process most essentially to be one that is ongoing in the life of the community. It is through the activities that the community does in living the life that the community does live that the community allows the divine process that is indwelling in it to become manifest to it. In a beautiful way, humanity is not stuck in exile through its acts of piety and devotion.

This completes the original plan of the Phenomenology of Spirit.

Reason, Spirit, and Religion: The Inserted Chapters

Hegel inserts into the discussion a reflection on Reason, Spirit, and Religion. The Absolute is not above history, but placing its fingerprint on every page, which is why reconciliation matters.

The first insertion considers reason in its role as observer and experimenter. Observation re-discovers the world in rationality. What we will find is that this application of reason is restless searching, and its searching verifies that the satisfaction of finding is impossible.[28] When rationality observes, consciousness makes the world its own through its observation and experiments. It seeks a “notion” that explains what it observes. At this level, reason has an interest in the world because it is certain that the world present to it is rational. It may start with observing an object in nature, but observing reason will eventually lose interest in that singular object and seek universal connections. If it does not find satisfaction in this search for the “whole,” it will proceed to further analyze and dissect objects of nature. This restlessness of observing reason is insatiable, for it will never run out of material. It will find an inexhaustible supply of material for observation and description. Rationality discovers that application of reason to nature it is just as concerned with itself as it is with nature. It creates an artificial system that is supposed to coincide with the system of nature. Organisms are a system, and part of a larger system. Observing reason will pursue its descriptions of nature through number, thereby delivering the highest certainty it can deliver. One might describe the way of life on this earth in a dialectical way. From a universal perspective, each form of life peacefully divides and reproduces itself in successive generations. Yet, because it happens on this earth, individual living things will suffer violence in the process. [29] The paradox in all of this is that reason never actually discovers laws. It discovers beginnings of laws, traces of necessity, allusions to a system of nature, and ingenious connections. Clever remarks are not genuine knowledge, interesting connections are only of interest, and the friendly approach it makes to form a genuine intellectual “notion” can become childish if what it seeks is rational validity.[30] Observing and experimenting reason will turn itself upon the subject as well, developing laws of thought in psychology. Yet, individuals are so much a part of their environment, they are so open to it, that supposed “laws” could not account for all the factors the environment contributes to and gives shape to the individual.[31] Observing reason will also make human individuality an object of study. We are also “inner,” an end toward which we tend, and “outer,” an expression of who we are now. Speech and work are the way “inner” becomes “outer,” the way essence expresses itself. The act of a person removes the mystery of what a person “intends.” Some uses of observing reason focus upon the biology of the individual, as if it is the source of human spirit. If one has a paltry conception of the human spirit, one could reduce human speech and action to some biological or genetic structure. A particular form that the human spirit takes in a human life is greater than anything biology or genetics would dictate. The human spirit is not something fixed and immovable. Human beings are free. These observers use reason to be a subterfuge of true thought. They use the freedom and intelligence of human thought to deny the nobility of the human spirit. They pass off reason itself as a gene instead of the noble enterprise it is. They use reason to deny reason. This final stage of observing reason is its worst. It has turned the human spirit back to where observing began, a dead thing. However, this is also why we must reverse it. Rationality turns to its end, its purpose, and thus recovers the nobility of the human enterprise. It seeks to dispense with the importance of human beings engaging in the important intellectual process of developing “notions” that enliven human life and community.[32]

In antiquity, the Stoic believed freedom comes in thinking within the self.  The thinker communes with oneself. The Skeptic accomplishes freedom of thought by causing the reality of other things and persons, as well as the Skeptic’s relationship to them, to disappear.  The Skeptic removes all possibility of stability and experiences fully the insecurity of the world of appearance.  The contradictory nature of the Skeptic’s argument makes another shape of consciousness necessary. We are now ready to explore the way rationality makes the transition from independence to freedom. To begin with, this active reason is aware of itself as independent and must produce its reality in another. Next, this active reason becomes reason embedded in a social context, thereby gaining recognition in the social order. The inner drive of the human spirit seeks expression in a social order. This expression begins to form in the laws and customs of a people. Individuals sacrifice their individuality by being part of a people, and in the process are conscious of their individuality. Individuals “rest” in the might of the nation of the nation. When individuals labor for what they think of as their own needs, they satisfy the needs of others. In the same way, one can find satisfaction of one’s own needs only through the labor of others. A free nation actualizes rationality. Individuals find their home in the laws and customs of such a nation. However, this happy result will dissolve as the individual realizes that they have come to trust the social order, rather than have a rational grasp of it. As soon as one begins thinking of the social order in a way that one seeks to justify it or not justify it, one has placed oneself at a distance from it.[33]

The unhappiness individuality learns to have with the social order, the judgment it considers itself competent to offer of the social order, and the distance that individuality places between itself and the social order, gives rise to three new shapes of self-consciousness. The point is the importance of respect for individuality within a social order combined with the actuality of freedom within a social order. In the next three movements of self-consciousness, we are still considering the struggle that individuality has in its relationship with other persons who want their individuality affirmed and a social order that has laws and customs.

One form this self-consciousness takes is through individuals enjoying pleasure and encountering the contradiction of necessity. It reveals its levity in pursuing its pleasure, but gives way to the earnestness of a higher purpose, that of the welfare of humanity, thereby affirming its own excellence. The primary end of such a shape of self-consciousness is to discover its individuality in another, or to bring this other into itself. It leaves behind the trust in a heavenly union with the spirit of a people and plunges to the spirit of the earth. Yet, it forms an abstract circle of relationships, wanting the other within itself but also wanting to discover itself in the other, an experience that brings temporary pleasure, but suffers from the contradiction that, instead of taking the plunge from dead theory into life, this form of self-consciousness plunges into its own lifelessness.[34]

Two is the self-consciousness that discovers the law of the heart, combined with the contradiction of self-conceit. The law of the heart is only for self, while it has an urge toward expression in the social order. It now seeks the universal pleasure of all hearts. In expressing the law of the heart of one individual, the individual releases the law into the public space of the people. It now ceases to be a law of the heart. The individual must now entangle himself or herself in the public domain of the actual formation of ordinances. The heartthrob of the welfare of humanity passes into insane self-conceit. What perverts the law of the heart is religious leaders and political leaders who take the welfare of the people as an excuse to degrade and oppress others, a perversion which has led to the nameless misery of humanity. What it disregards is the actual social order, which has stood the test of time. The law of the heart wants to overthrow that which human beings have tested through time. The law of one heart will always run into the opposition of the law of other hearts. What appears as public order becomes a state of war, in which each heart wrests for itself what it can, judging the hearts of others, seeking the establishment of the law of one’s own heart, and which other hearts seek to nullify. The way of the world is the play of establishing and nullifying individuality. Played out as the way of the world, it has no discernible worthy end.[35]

Three is the self-consciousness that involves the contradiction of virtue and the way of the world. A free nation reflects the way of the world as citizens express themselves in the contradictions of affirming individuality within the social order. However, with the virtuous consciousness, the law of the land is the essential moment, while it must nullify individuality. It must discipline itself to live under the law of the land. Virtue has faith, even while it has little rationality behind it. The knight of virtue engages in a sham battle, risking its gifts and talents, but not the good itself. Virtue fights against individuality even while the human spirit is necessarily moving toward respect for the individual. No can come while one sacrifices recognition of the worth and dignity of the individual. Pompous talk about what is best for humanity disguises oppression and “sacrifice” for the common good. Such ineffectual words lift the heart up but leave rationality unsatisfied. They edify but build nothing solid. Such an individual, who professes to act with toward such noble ends and who deals in such fine phrases, only wants to appear excellent in his or her own eyes, and as a bonus, in the eyes of others. This person, who through such words expresses his or her inflated feeling of importance, has an inflated self-conceit. The tension is that the way of the world, containing as it does the struggle for individual recognition, is better than it can usually articulate. Individuals may think they act only in their self-interest (Adam Smith). However, individual action is, at the same time, action that has influence upon the entire social order. When the way of the world says that everyone acts in their own interest, they only show they do not know what they are saying. In fact, humans observe the cunning of self-interest and individuality, as both resolve themselves in actions that benefit the social order. The play of these powers in the social order gives life to the social order and to the individuals living in it.[36]

Individuality shows itself in action. The moment of individuality with the social order is one of both deceit and the matter at hand. An action consists of an end, a means or process toward that end, and the action finally bringing the individual into the light of day. Action must avoid empty show, floundering about in empty thoughts and ends. In fact, individuals do not know what they are until they act. Individuals begin with interest in something and then define themselves by the action taken. Evaluation of the action as good or bad involves comparing with others, but the action itself deserves full attention as an expression of individuality. Action brings the night of possibility into the light of day. Action expresses the specific character of the individual. The work, once done, comes into the public domain and becomes an interest and work of others who will transform it into part of their work. In that sense, the work of the individual vanishes into the public domain. Work has within it the antithesis of being and doing, willing and achieving. The unity of these antitheses in work is the significant part, which is the noble intention of work. As a work, the matter in hand has honesty and integrity that others, as they observe work, must judge. Self-interest, as the way of the world, seems anxious about its actions, but the matter at hand becomes part of the public domain and is therefore action for everyone. In showing an interest in the work, it is enjoying its own self. The nature of action and taking an interest in doing something is not self-enclosed private interest but rather becomes public. Self-interest causes an action from one individual that opens to the interest and action of others.[37] However, the matter at hand becomes a formal law (Kant), having little to do with how people live, because any such law will undergo change when considering actual circumstances. [38] Testing of laws is what rationality requires, for tyrannical insolence is always the tendency of legislating laws, arising as it does from the insolence of knowledge. Rational self-consciousness does not just believe and obey, as if master legislator to obedient slave. Enquiry into their origin, requiring validation from citizens, suggest individuals have already transcended the legislated laws and they need validation in the response of citizens. This reminds us of the importance of a social order that respects individuality and freedom. [39]

The second insertion considers Spirit (Geist). In this setting, Hegel wants to show how liberty manifests itself in a free social order. The nobility of the human spirit, which longs for recognition of individual worth and dignity, finds a home in a free social order. Yet, the tension is obvious. This quest shows itself in the laws and customs of a people oriented toward the recognition of individuality and the regard it gives to freedom. While the work of individuals contributes to the wholeness of a free social order, the self-interest of each person fragments society. Other types of ordering of society can allow for this nobility to be expressed in vague ways, but this nobility finds a home when a social order is free. [40]

Such a free social order has a large area of civil society in which citizens participate. Broad categories of civil society involve family, diversity of social arrangements, religious institutions, the press, and economic life. Civil society is the realm of custom. Culture determines the way in which people relate to each other within civil society. Because the free social order already respects individuality, individuals can see themselves reflected in it, as well as to see the respect and freedom of the culture within the individual. In this sense, a free society has every opportunity to become a home. A threat to this is the recognition that the Enlightenment has strong influence upon the cultural perspective of Europe, developing a negative relationship to the religious community and to the notion of faith. Thus, intellectuals threaten the ability of faith communities to experience European culture as a home. [41]

Family builds personality and character. It focuses fully upon the individual. Yet, it also runs into conflict with the social order as its members enter the larger context of the community. Its values and beliefs differ from that of the family. In fact, the individual who connects only with family, while refusing to connect as a meaningful participant in a free society, becomes an unreal and impotent shadow. Yet, within the family, even death finds some meaning. The community has its customs, and the State has its laws, both of which point the family beyond itself. The laws guiding family life and the laws guiding the community are different from each other. People try to obey the laws of both, but one cannot do so. They demand different decisions from us. We incur guilt because we cannot bring them together.[42]

Second, a free social order will move toward a full and rich view of individual freedom, in which individuals respect the freedom of each other, and participate freely in political power and wealth.  

One of the quite intellectual struggles within a free society concerns the judgment people feel competent to make concerning social arrangements, especially as they regard state power and wealth. These social arrangements occurred because of the regard political leaders had for individuality and freedom. Yet, in the self-consciousness of individual citizens, it feels like an alienated world. Citizens experience themselves as competent to make judgments as to the goodness or badness of either state power or wealth. In a free society, both are the “work” of individuality and freedom. Yet, in a spirit of judgment, citizens will often adopt a shape of consciousness that sees itself reflected in either state power or wealth, or it will see itself alienated from them. One may think of state power as oppressive, wealth as oppressive, or both as oppressive. One may also unite oneself to the state or to wealth, thus adopting a tranquil relationship with social arrangements. However, the self-centered self knows how to pass judgment on everything. It also knows how to give witty expressions to the contradictions in the actual social arrangements of a free society. It knows how to pass judgment. It has lost the ability to comprehend the actual social arrangements of a free society. In a free society, power and wealth are the supreme ends of individuality and freedom. Through renunciation and sacrifice, individuals contribute to the general health of state power and to the wealth of the nation. They do so while they pursue their self-interest. Individuals recognize the pervasive influence of state power and wealth but see it as a reflection of their work.[43]

Given that free societies first arose in Christian and Enlightenment Europe, one of the strongest cultural clashes has occurred between faith and reason. At least, that is how the Enlightenment mentality would want to describe the opposing forces. However, my description of the clash requires a significant difference in wording that I hope this paragraph will justify. I describe it as the clash between “faith” and “insight.” For the person of faith, the alienation it feels in this world has its reversal in a world beyond. This world exists in the form of picture thoughts. One of the things that Enlightenment analysts of faith refuse to acknowledge is that these picture thoughts are thoughts! This is very important in understanding the cultural clash between them. Now, the philosopher will see the alienation contained in the picture thoughts of people of faith, but people of faith will not experience their world that way. They will experience it peacefully. For the Christian, for example, the notion of God surrendering divinity and becoming a mortal self, and then the return into divinity to the point where we now live in the age of the Spirit, is a blessed thought for humanity. The person of faith offers service and praise, that is, acts of devotion, to overcome the separation between the divine world and this world. The person of faith is conscious of the realm of Spirit, that is, the destiny of humanity in God. However, the pure insight of the Enlightenment has supreme confidence in self, and indeed, it has certainty in reason and the ability of the self to attain truth through it. The Enlightenment begins with the intention of making “pure insight” into a universal experience. Now, this is why the Enlightenment mentality wants to remove its notion of “faith” from culture. It values its brilliant insights into the world. It seeks to clear up the confusion about the world with its simplistic and scattered thoughts. It hardly perceives the vanity of its content, the vanity of the self in proposing them, and the vanity of witty judgments it offers. For this reason, the Enlightenment does its battle against the superstition, prejudice, and error of faith. Faith and insight seem opposed to each other at this point. Insight delights to point to the common mass of people as naïve and unreflective. It views the priesthood as deceptive as it conspires with political powers to keep the people down. One hardly knows what is worse, the stupidity of the people or the trickery of the priesthood. In the process, the Enlightenment mentality isolates itself from the common people. Yet, such explanations by the Enlightenment mentality become part of the cultural air, in which persons of faith no longer live in the intellectual tranquility they once possessed. By the time people of faith are even aware of the intellectual struggle in culture, it is already too late. Faith is already in a battle. The Enlightenment mentality takes advantage of its position, raising a new serpent of wisdom to which everyone must bow. Here is the problem. What the Enlightenment mentality condemns as its opposite, “faith,” is nothing other than itself! If faith had no rational content, rationality could hardly recognize or condemn. Faith is thought in pictures, and thus rational. The rationality that the Enlightenment mentality elevates is also present in faith, even if that rationality is present in pictures. The Enlightenment mentality, which views itself as the teacher of new wisdom to an ancient faith, teaches what faith already knows. Further, the Enlightenment mentality speaks foolishly when it refers to some hocus-pocus performed by the priestly class that had the capacity to delude the masses. It speaks as if the priestly class could palm off upon the masses something alien to the human quest. Yet even the Enlightenment mentality will admit that religious people put their trust in what they believe. What it asserts is alien to the person is also the core of the person? Frankly, this is foolish talk. The idea that the source of religion is in the delusion of the people by the priesthood is out of the question.[44]

To speak more specifically, insight turns God into a thing, a view that the person of faith would not recognize. Faith sees God as in all and the ground of all. Insight tries to describe the certainty of the person of faith as grounded in historical evidence. The insight of faith is that a reality unifies the world of appearance.  We cannot replace God with emptiness. God is the whole of reality.  We perceive this truth through reason and thought, not through feeling. Of course, any person of faith who goes the direction of viewing history as a foundation or confirmation has already experienced corruption by the Enlightenment mentality. The certainty of faith arises from the “unsophisticated” relationship with the Divine, to the witness of the divine Spirit to the spirit of the person. It cannot rest upon historical evidence. From a positive perspective, however, the Enlightenment has much it wants to teach through its insights. Yet, one wonders if it is true. For example, with all its focus upon reason, its insight is that reason is rich only in its limits. Humanity must have the richness and fullness of human rationality. Further, the Enlightenment mentality teaches the basic goodness of human beings. Yet, the Enlightenment mentality itself resulted in the demand for absolute freedom, which eventually led to the reign of terror in the French Revolution. Human beings are far too complex, and morality itself far more nuanced, than the Enlightenment mentality suggests. In one other “insight,” the Enlightenment teaches, most famously in Kant, that one exhausts religion in its usefulness or utility. In so doing, it denies to religion the fullness and liveliness the person of faith gains from a relationship with God and from involvement in a religious community. For the person of faith, such “wisdom” or “insight” is an abomination and little more than platitude.[45]

In the matter of religion, most of us receive schooling in its objective content in such a way that it sucks out the needed subjective and heart-felt experience of religion. Religion is the concern of the heart arising from practical reason. The friends of religion do it no favors when they focus upon speculating about religion, transforming genuine religious experience into theology, developing the habit of replacing warmth of heart with cold cognitions. Such an approach often chills rather than warms the heart. From the reverse side of this experience, a heart that allows the understanding to take over the experience one has of religion is a small heart with which to begin. It has no love with which to begin. A religious person may fulfill the demands of their reason putting themselves against reason and science, but in the process do nothing constructive for themselves or for others. 

Some theologians, such as Schleiermacher, are willing to place the root of religion solely in the realm of feeling.[46] In that case, he would be right in saying that the best understanding of religion is that of absolute dependence. Further, in that case, a dog would be the best Christian. After all, the dog carries this feeling of dependence upon its master throughout its life. It also has feelings of hunger that it can satisfy with a bone. However, the basic drive of humanity is toward liberation, not dependence, of divine freedom rather than such a notion of religion as Schleiermacher has. Do not mistake me on this point. Religion must enter the realm of the heart, in the same way that freedom must enter the heart and enliven the whole person. However, to say that God, truth, and freedom have their source in feeling is quite another matter. An uneasy peace may exist between faith and reason when faith has no content and becomes an empty shell of subjective conviction. When we combine this attitude of faith with the added notion that reason renounces the noble human urge toward truth and goodness, the uneasy peace will result. It may appear that philosopher and theologian have removed what offends the other. They suppress the nobility of the human spirit that will disturb, eventually, this false peace born of indifference. 

Third, a free society will need to face the reality that individuals within a social order will still need to face the development of morality, which includes awareness of intention, conscience, welfare of self, and welfare of others. Morality involves the actualization of the thrust of humanity toward what is good. However, within a free social order, a moral consciousness distinguishes itself from nature. Nature acts without regard for moral purpose, while human beings develop a moral vision and purpose. However, the fully developed moral view does not seem satisfied with this limit upon morality. It wants to perceive behind the indifferent actions of nature a moral purpose. The moral consciousness looks to the notion of duty, and with duty, a universal ruler who will harmonize morality with happiness. The moral consciousness places the moral ideal in a divine being. It recognizes that morality and happiness will not harmonize in this world, but it will in the world beyond. If the moral person experiences happiness here, grace is the reason, especially given the imperfection of the moral person. The philosopher can see that the moral consciousness has created this realm of duty as an expression of the individual. In doing so, it gets itself into a nest of contradictions. Nature does not harmonize with moral purpose. The attempt to inspire moral action by saying nature does submit to a moral purpose is deceptive. Further, a moral purpose does not harmonize with human life. The moral consciousness does not allow for progress and development, for one is either moral or immoral. Although the moral consciousness wants to designate immoral persons, this possibility dissolves when one realizes the arbitrary nature of the content of moral duty itself. The contradictions eventually lead to the frustration of a pure conscience, which isolates itself from the real world of human activity. This conscience is free of specific content. The individual conscience has confidence in itself but has doubts about the conscience of other people. Language allows the communication of the content of conscience to become the property of others and gain at least some sense of community of moral values. The self-worship that conscience demands becomes communal as people of like mind gather. Yet, the “beautiful soul” is too pure to act. The conscience can now act in judgment upon the motives of others. In judgment, the moralist refuses to offer a confession of his or own sins and thus becomes a hypocrite. The only way out of the dilemma is for the moralist to accept his or her oneness with the one judged. The moralist breaks the hardness of his or her heart. The moralist renounces the divisiveness and hardness of heart contained in the act of judging. He or she opens the path toward reconciliation through forgiveness. The world of reconciliation is the realm of the actual destiny of humanity and its urge toward what is true and good. In fact, the best way to view God is as the one who reconciles antagonists.

The third insertion considers religion. Religion has a twofold meaning: self-revelation of infinite spirit in finite spirit and simultaneously contemplative absorption of finite spirit in infinite spirit. This is how the dialectical process—likewise philosophical in the last resort—of self-knowledge occurs: human consciousness becoming conscious of itself in the Absolute and the Absolute in human consciousness. 

Christ becomes the immediately present God. The remoteness of the time and place in which Jesus appeared from that of the present has no significance when we think of the core message of the Christian faith. We cannot elicit the spiritual significance of Jesus by unraveling the rich present spiritual life of the community and tracing it back to its original strands. The primitive community in which Christianity began was imperfect. Even tracing back to the actual words of Jesus will not enhance present spirituality. However, this tracing back to the origin is an attempt to get at the truth of Christianity, when what it needs is to recover the simplicity of the notion. It becomes a sign of the impoverishment of the Spirit of the present community when it tries to re-gain its fullness through an external source or the non-spiritual recognition of an historical past. This approach runs the risk of turning the content of religion into an historical idea, an heirloom handed down by tradition. This approach retains only the external element of a religion, something dead, and something no one can know now. The inner element of faith vanishes.[47]

Evil is the inwardly-turned consciousness, a self-centered existence. Yet, this existence suggests a relation to its opposite, good, which loses its sense of self in favor of an outwardly-turned consciousness. In religion, this conflict occurs as if evil is a happening alien to the divine being. Religion raises the image of the wrath of God against evil, a fruitless effort of struggling against its limitations of thought. God acts redemptively by bringing the thought of good and evil into relation to each other. In Christianity, of course, God takes on human nature, which participates in evil. Yet, if anything were genuinely “other” from God, if anything could genuinely fall from God, then God would become an empty notion. The wholeness of reality finds its completion in the movement of good and evil, rather than their separate identity. The urge toward truth and goodness, the nobility of the human project, and human destiny itself, must necessarily bring that which opposes it into reconciliation with itself.[48]

Dialectic is within God. In this whole painful-tragic and yet not pan-tragic but victorious history of the manifestation of spirit, throughout all positions and negations, externalizations and interiorizations, it is a question of a powerful, all-embracing process of reconciliation. It is a question of reconciling the opposites emerging in modern times from the standpoint of consciousness, in which, however, the whole of world history is reflected: the subjective line of Descartes and Kant is consistently extended into the area of world history. Thus, thinking philosophically is a way of bringing together what seems opposed. Philosophy is the direct grasp of this process. Science as practiced in modern times did not arrive in history until the human quest achieved awareness that it needed it. Time is the destiny of the human spirit, as it has not yet grasped itself in its pure philosophical notion. Human beings know nothing of which they have not experienced. One could trace this development in the various stages of world history. One could trace the development of philosophy in its various stages. The power of the human spirit is such that it does not fear externalization in these various shapes in history. At its heart, what we find is the shapes of freedom. The human spirit, knowing itself in this way, must gain full freedom when it sees itself in its opposite, in its limit. To know one’s limit is to know how to sacrifice oneself. This sacrifice is the process in which the human spirit becomes a shape in time and space. In space, we will need to think of a philosophy of nature. In time, we will need to think of a philosophy of history, which is the process of becoming as a slow-moving succession of the shapes of the human spirit that presents a gallery of images, each of which, endowed with the riches of the human spirit, penetrates the depth of human destiny. At each moment in history, the human spirit seems to start afresh, creating a new world and a new age. It proceeds as if it learned nothing from previous stages of the shapes of the human spirit. It begins at a higher stage than from which it began. One shape of the human spirit relieved another. Each took over from its predecessor. Their goal is the revelation of the depth of the human quest and human destiny. The revelation is this raising up of this depth. The revelation occurs in time, and is, therefore, history, conceived as the preservation of the various stages through which the shapes of the human spirit has taken. Yet, philosophy can comprehend this movement directly. Philosophically comprehended history considers history as making inward the human quest and its destiny on the one hand, and its Calvary on the other. Without this process, human destiny would sit upon the throne, lifeless and alone.[49]

The term “estrangement” or “alienation,” which became so important later for Marx’s theory of society, belongs for Hegel wholly and entirely to a theological context. The fact that God is seen in this dialectical alienation and in the overcoming of alienation has tremendous consequences for the notion of God. The notion of God thus includes the negative as a moment in God and is part of divine development: the seriousness, the pain, the patience and the labor of the negative.

 

“The life of God and divine intelligence, then, can, if we like, be spoken of as love disporting with itself, but this idea falls into edification, and even sinks into insipidity, if it lacks the seriousness, the suffering, the patience and the labor of the negative. Per se the divine life is no doubt undisturbed identity and oneness with itself, which finds no serious obstacle in otherness and estrangement, and none in the surmounting of this estrangement. But this ‘per se’ is abstract generality, where we abstract from its real nature, which consists in its being objective to itself, conscious of itself on its own account (für sich zu sein); and where consequently we neglect altogether the self-movement which is the formal character of its activity.”

 

To give expression in the very name to this purification and deepening of the notion of God, Hegel prefers to speak of God as spirit “Spirit” expresses the fact that God is a God who comes to be: a self-developing, a dialectical, self-externalizing God, coming to divine self-knowledge out of alienation. Development—dialectic—spirit: in the light of this God, all the contrarieties of the world and society can be comprehended in their interconnection and in their necessity. In the light of this God, the tragic, unhappy disruption of reality on its various levels can be healed and transfigured by the negation of negation.

Hegel could maintain that in his work nothing had been lost of what modern times had brought to the deepening of the (Christian) understanding of God. Had he not defined this new reality of God and reality of the world, the new God-being-in-the-world and world-being-in-God, without lapsing into fatalistic pantheism or irreligious atheism? On the contrary, in his phenomenology two things had become simultaneously clear: how God is the world and yet how God is not simply the world, since the world can be so terribly ungodly and nevertheless remain the outward form of God. Looking back on his phenomenology, however, in the light of its end, how did Hegel reach this position? By way of development: the world is not simply God, but it is God in development. This God externalizes the divine self to the world in development, in history, and leads the world as nature and finally as spirit through all stages up to divinity. All this in a mighty, all-encompassing circular movement, like that described long before by the Fathers of the Church and the medieval scholastics: exitus a Deo—reditus in Deum, outgoing from God—return to God. Or—better—as Hegel expresses it: outgoing of God and return of God himself. The difference is significant. The traditional dualistic paradigm has been overcome here in an up-to-date, modern way: not only the external dualism between heaven and earth, which natural science had relativized, but also the internal dualism—as seen by philosophy and theology—between God and humanity. The Deity encompasses everything but without removing the distinction. Quite the contrary: the distinction is seen even within God. The life of God really consists in the struggle with an opposite within the divine self: a conflict of God with God during which the world comes to be from God and the reconciliation of the world comes to be in God. In this way, the dualism is cleared up within God. 

To anticipate the theological consideration of Hegel for today: Who would have thought at that time that criticism later would set in precisely at this point and that the result would be—with Ludwig Feuerbach—the turning to atheism?

 

Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences: Summa of a New Synthesis

The Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences in Outline provides a new synthesis. Compared with a medieval Summa—which was anyway not intended merely for class work—the Encyclopaedia is a small book. All that was provided by the latter was an “outline,” a “textbook,” for use in connection with lectures. It starts with a strict dialectic in his smaller logic, establishing that there is no independent finite being, as all finite things are held together by the Idea, the rational necessity that creates its own external manifestation. This conclusion will be available for the succeeded dialectics of the philosophy of nature and the philosophy of spirit, which involves subjective and objective spirit, the latter developed in the final book he would offer for publication, the Philosophy of Right, and finally involves Absolute Spirit embodied in Art, Religion, and Philosophy.

a) In the first part of the Encyclopedia, Logic, a smaller, corrected edition of the earlier, larger Logic, written in Nuremberg, on the same basic plan, of being-essence-notion, again culminating in the “Absolute Idea.” 

From Logic, par. 194. God is the Object, and the Object out and out, confronted with which our particular or subjective opinions and desires have no truth and no validity. As absolute object God does not therefore take up the position of a dark and hostile power over against subjectivity. God involves it as a vital element within God’s self. Such also is the meaning of the Christian doctrine, according to which God has willed that all people should be saved, and all attain blessedness. The salvation and the blessedness of people are attained when they come to feel themselves at one with God, so that God ceases to be for them mere object, an object of fear and terror. However, God in the Christian religion is also known as Love, because in the Son, who is one with God, God has revealed God’s self to people as a person among people and thereby redeemed them. All which is only another way of saying that the antithesis of subjective and objective is implicitly overcome, and that it is our affair to participate in this redemption by laying aside our immediate subjectivity (putting off the old Adam) and learning to know God as our true and essential self.

Just as religion and religious worship consist in overcoming the antithesis of subjectivity and objectivity, so science too and philosophy have no other task than to overcome this antithesis by the medium of thought. The aim of knowledge is to divest the objective world that stands opposed to us of its strangeness and to find ourselves at home in it, which means no more than to trace the objective world back to our inmost self.

b) Then, in the second part of the Encyclopedia considering nature, based on the “externalization” of the Idea in nature, Philosophy of Nature: mechanics, physics, organics. Thus, it presupposes what he has already shown in the Science of Logic. It relies upon a hermeneutical dialectic. It is not an empirical biology, so its observations are pre-Darwin and quaint. The Philosophy of Nature offers a panentheistic vision of God necessarily related to all things, facing us with the inner unity of all things in God. It is a move toward a form of panentheism. God is in everything but unfolding through it. Nature is God getting missay, mechanical, organic. God is necessarily related to all things, facing an inner unity of all things in God. Being necessarily relates to that which composes it. Self-determination means creation is inevitable. Classical Christianity would have a problem here, for it protects the idea of God freely choosing this relationship. If one is thinking systematically, finitude, mistakes, and evil have a place in the formation of the whole, the rungs of the stumbling toward the end. The Absolute crawls out of graves, wars, and mistakes. The dialectic needs the resistance. It risks making God complicit in evil. Evil is just there, like the serpent in the Garden of Eden. Nothing is wasted. Philosophy must be concerned with the knowledge of God, seeking to find the ways of the Absolute becoming real.

At this point, Hegel commits a grave error. Hegel, who discovered the dialectical ontological categories of negativity and totality by analyzing the human being, extended his anthropological dialectical ontology to nature. Such unity between human dialectic and nature resided only in the imagination of Hegel. We cannot justify this extension. If the final foundation of nature is identical given static being, one finds in it nothing comparable to the negating action, which is the basis of specifically human or historical existence. Hegel’s monistic error has profound consequences throughout his system.[50]

c) In the third part of the Encyclopedia considering Spirit, based on the return of Spirit from nature to itself, is Philosophy of Spirit, likewise in three parts. The structure of the book is on point. He moves from a reflection on “subjective spirit,” what we would call individual psychology, focusing on anthropology, a theory of consciousness, to “objective mind,” what we call cultural institutions and values that are products of human beings, embodied in law, morality of conscience, and moral life or social ethics, and to “Absolute Spirit,” embodied in art, religion, and philosophy, that draws us to reflect upon that which is good, noble, and true. Hegel focuses on specific stages of human growth by their age, but he does so in this context. Note that the transition involved from one stage to the next consists of oppositions that need to find resolution. In addition, the transitions do not mean that one leaves the issues of the previous stage behind. The goal is not to develop an isolated individual. Rather, the goal is to bring the individual into participation in a social world in which one may well have problems and tensions, but one in which one needs to find a home. 

C.1 Subjective Spirit

The first stage of the dialectic of the philosophy of spirit is subjective spirit, what we would call individual psychology, focusing on anthropology and a theory of consciousness,

One finds a “home” in the social world through family and through work. One moves from self-centeredness to a focus on others. One moves from purely self-interest to an interest in the institutions built by others long before one came into this world. One becomes part of a social world built by people from the past, and thus, seeing oneself as part of that tradition is part of being at home. One way to look at this movement is that personal and spiritual maturity involves reflection on the gift you have received from your family, interpersonal relationships, and cultural institutions. Yet, one also needs to reflect upon the weaknesses of the family, the interpersonal relationships, and cultural institutions. Such judgments either will rest upon an intuition of what you believe proper ends of human life or sustained reflection on the nature of such ends that transcend self or the social world. From a spiritual perspective, anything can become idol that we really need to recognize as such and tear down. 

Hegel points out that any understanding of the stages of human growth anticipates acquaintance with “the formed and matured mind.” Given all that we have learned of Hegel, it should not surprise us that he will focus upon the historicality of the individual. He identifies four stages. Childhood is mind wrapped up in itself, at peace with oneself and with the world, and is free of oppositions of any serious interest. It lives in the innocence and love of parents. This unity with the world, this self-dependence upon the word, expressed in play, must be superseded by engaging the outside world, so it must not be a stopping place. The child learns skills necessary to engage the world. It will be through a transition to learn serious things and the discipline of obeying authority that the child will learn to engage the world. Picture-thinking is suitable for this stage. Youth is the beginning of desire to seek satisfaction, the feeling of power to act and to transform the world. It is the beginning of representational thinking. The attempt to discipline and train oneself to realize youthful ideals is necessary to become an adult, although excessive anxiety will block engaging the world as an adult. The world fails to meet youthful ideal requirements, which can heighten the anxiety and lead to prolonged adolescence. Adulthood occurs as one seeks individual action as part of conserving and advancing the world. This recognizes that the progress of the world occurs on the large stage, which few will engage. Finishing studies and providing oneself allows one to be active on behalf of others. Adulthood occurs as one accepts the reasonableness of the world as one finds it Becoming vexed and morose about the state of affairs in the world is common for the adult, but one finds one’s place in the world in the objective civil life of relationships and work. One becomes at home. Yet, this conforming to a role in the world leads to the extinction of vitality. Old age is without any definite interest, abandoning the ideals enjoyed in youth and accepting a future that holds no promise of anything new. Losing memory for details, the elder remembers maxims learned from experience and cannot resist preaching them to the young. It is the finishing touch of unity with the objectivity of the social world, which realistically passes into the inertia of deadening habit, and on its idealist side gains freedom from the interests and entanglements of the social world. One returns in old age to the lack of interest in the world. Each stage of human development anticipates such an end. As he sees it, the life-process of the individual is one in which the immediate individuality of early life becomes conformable to the social world. The abstract quality of the social world and its opposition to the individual becomes embedded in one’s life. This process of development is education. The animal will need to figure out its role as well, but the human being will do so through thought. The sequence of distinct stages is the series of ages in human life. The differences in the stages represent the differences of what it is to be a human being.^[51]

One classic form of personality type is to think of the feeling-oriented person as either melancholic or choleric and the action-oriented person as either phlegmatic or sanguine.^[52] Another form of examining personality also involves four areas of human activity. Some will be extrovert, receiving energy by being with others. Others, although drained by too much people time, will find energy in reflecting and meditating. Still others will enjoy thinking and analyzing, while others will rely more upon how they feel. Some will want to tie things together nice and neatly and as quickly as possible. Others are quite comfortable keeping many decisions hanging, keeping their options open as long as possible. Some will rely upon intuition, and others will rely upon their five senses. Thus, the extraverted person who prefers to bring closure quickly in decision making will be dominate in either the feeling or thinking aspect of their personality.  The person who prefers to keep options open will tend to be dominating in either their reliance upon their five senses or their reliance upon intuition and imagination.  The introvert reverses the situation.  If the introvert prefers to bring closure quickly in decision-making, there will be dominance of the five senses or intuition and imagination.  If the introvert prefers to keep options open there will be dominance in the thinking or feeling aspect of their personality.  This will give the four basic personality types, in accordance with this system of personality analysis. Nourishment is often in the opposite of your dominant personality type.  This is how we balance our personalities.  Mystery or energy comes from the inferior functions. One can learn much of growing in one’s own faith commitment by learning more in these areas.^[53]

Such reflections have implications for personal and faith development. Stages of growth in faith commitment will have a linear feel. I do not think I can avoid that. The danger is that one thinks of stages as if one must hurry through them. This can happen in human growth stages and spiritual growth stages. One cannot hurry spiritual growth. One cannot make it happen, but one must willingly engage the process. Further, anyone who looks down upon others, as if one has reached the mountain and others have not, has already failed to practice true spiritual growth.

John Wesley in his Sermon 40 on “Christian Perfection,” made a similar comparison. He noted that there are several stages in Christian life even as we observe them in natural human development. His primary contrast was between the newborn and the mature. I will offer more stages than that, but the principle is the same.

A faith commitment will lead to growth or development in that faith. Such growth admits to transformation throughout life. Such transformation will occur in stages. Of course, many would be outside of such considerations, for they have made no faith commitments. However, if one might think of the beginning stages of faith commitment as that of seeking to make a commitment, one is aware of the need to ask spiritual questions. The challenge at this level is moving from thinking that there might be many ways to committing oneself to a specific faith tradition. In a secular society, making the transition to the next stage is difficult. One hears many voices. The ambiguities of life are immense. Gaining enough clarity to make a faith commitment is not easy. One might dabble around the edges of spirituality and remain shallow and uncommitted. Even at this stage, however, one is aware of how far short one’s life has fallen to what it might be. There must be more to life than this, one might say. One might feel lost. Any faith tradition should love the seeker and seek to draw them within their sphere of influence. At that point, one becomes a follower. The primary issue is learning to identify who one is as an adherent within this faith community. Who am I? What can I be? One becomes part of a particular community and begins learning the faith tradition. Such a person needs to learn the core narrative of the tradition, the ritual, the institutional scene, the values, and its sense of the sacredness of place and time. One struggles with worldview and vocation. One is aware of the larger social world and the role one might play in it as an adherent. One is gaining an identity because one has made a commitment to a certain way of life. The human mind is such that it needs a sense of purpose and direction. Becoming a follower moves one from the undifferentiated sense of meaning and purpose, of that which ultimately concerns one, to a specific commitment to a way of life that shows what ultimately concerns you. The follower is leaving one way of life and embarking on a new journey. One became uncomfortable with one’s life as it was and is now embracing the risk of a new way of life. Such a decision may be easy, but it also may be dramatic. Such a person may have a dramatic testimony. The challenge is to develop the uniqueness of one’s journey rather than simply copy that of others. Such persons need to receive nourishment from persons already within the faith tradition. We might think of the next stage as becoming an adult in the faith tradition. The focus is love. The need is for intimacy and the fear is isolation. This will also lead to a concern creative and meaningful work within the tradition. One is adjusting, gaining a surer footing in the world. One is leaving behind illusions and false assumptions. The primary sign of this stage is learning to be life-giving. The move toward intimacy is also a move toward empathy and non-judgmental attitudes. One is developing a healthy worldview. The danger of this stage is skepticism, stagnation, dogmatism, narrowness and boredom. At this point, we see one of the greatest arguments against every faith tradition. At its best, however, such a person at this stage has gained a spiritual home. Here is a person of character. The final stage, which one might call the re-producing stage, confronts the question of whether, given the journey my life has taken, can I make my life count? Is it OK to have been me? Was the journey worth it? Such questions can lead to depression and hopelessness. The faith traditions can become too familiar and stale. One learns to love and care for the next generation of adherents. One has been nourished in this faith tradition, and one recognizes that now is the time to nourish others. It involves letting go. One learns to love genuinely. One is past the complexity of faith commitments and embraces a second naïveté. One embraces a simplicity on the other side of the journey through complexity. We may think we need to do go deeper with the divine, when what we need is to reproduce the faith in the lives of others. We need to gain the ability to share our hope, our love, our gift, with others. We need a commitment to life, to tend it, to defend it, and to help us share with others what we good news we can about that life. Where can one spend one’s time most effectively? Who can one mentor in the faith one has grown to love? The challenge here is to help others accomplish their dreams. One will ask spiritual questions of others and seek to help them come to answers that satisfy their spiritual quest. Such a person wants to make a positive difference in the world.^[54]

Another popular part of spiritual formation is consideration of the four temperaments. Hegel^[55] says Kant has a great deal to say about the four temperaments. For Hegel, the universality of the human soul finds differentiation in modes that nature gives it, such as in special temperament, talent, character, physiognomy, or other disposition and idiosyncrasy, of families or single individuals. He refers to the general differences of the races of humanity, which reaches into the national spirit. Particularization extends to the individual. The individual soul is the sphere of contingency. He cautions that this type of contingent modification, although of infinite variety, is not something one should rate too highly. He thinks it “idle chatter” for a teacher to adjust to such particularity. The teacher has no time to do this. The family can make such adjustments, but the school is the place where the student learns of general regulations that apply to all. Thus, the individual learns to lay aside idiosyncrasies and to know and desire that which finds universal acceptance in the specific culture. In fact, part of education is to lay aside these particularities. He refers to “disposition” as the natural endowments of an individual in contrast to what one has become through one’s own efforts. Such natural endowments include talent and genius, neither of which necessarily one will get extremely far in life. Now, he admits that the meaning of temperament is difficult, saying it does not relate to ethical action, talent, nor passion. For Hegel, temperament is the general way the individual is active, in which one objectifies oneself, maintains oneself in the actual world. With this definition, temperament is not so important as some in the past have suggested. In a highly developed culture, the various accidental mannerisms of conduct and action disappear. He also thinks that the attempts to distinguish between the various temperaments have produced such indefinite results that he finds it difficult to know how to apply them to individuals, since these temperaments exhibit the various temperaments in association with each other. As he reads Kant, the main difference between them is whether a person gives oneself up to the matter in hand (sanguine, phlegmatic) or whether one has more concerned with one’s own individuality (choleric, melancholic). 

For Hegel, difference of temperament loses its importance when general culture regulates conduct. In contrast, character remains something that always distinguishes individuals. By character, people establish the definite quality of their individuality. It demands the formal element of energy with which people pursue their aims, interests, and actions preserve their harmony with themselves. People lacking in character will remain indefinite and shift from one direction to the opposite. All people show character. A man with character impresses others because they know the kind of person with whom they deal. Character shows that the will should possess substantial and universal content. Only by realizing great aims does one reveal a great character, making one a beacon for others. The aims one has must receive inward justification. In contrast, if one clings to sheer particularities, to what lacks substantial interest, then it becomes self-will or caprice. For him, individuality can become so accentuated to a point where it has a disturbing influence on social intercourse. In all of this, he is quite close to Thomas Aquinas, who discusses temperament in the context of free will. The objection of some in his time was that people are not free because “to be of one quality or another” comes from nature and therefore to pursue certain ends. His reply is that temperament or disposition will incline people toward certain ends. However, such inclinations “are subject to the judgment of reason,” which one’s natural orientation must obey.^[56] He discusses the cause of anger as it may arise in the person. The specific nature of the person regarding the specific temperament “disposition to anger is due to a bilious temperament; and of all the humors, the bile moves quickest; for it is like fire. Consequently he that is temperamentally disposed to anger is sooner incensed with anger…”^[57] In a discussion of whether incontinence pertains to the body or soul, he refers to the impulse of passion arising from its quickness, as in bilious persons, or from its vehemence, as in the melancholic, who on account of their earthy temperament are most vehemently aroused. Another person fails to stand to that which is counseled, because he holds to it in weakly fashion by reason of the softness of temperament. This is like the phlegmatic temperament. His point is that such results are due to bodily temperament being occasional, but not a sufficient cause of incontinence.^[58] Gregory the Great notes that some are joyful or sad by circumstances and some by temperament. One can see the connection between certain defects and certain temperaments. The joyful may have lechery close at hand. The sad may have wrath close by. As he sees it, everyone needs to consider what one suffers from one’s peculiar temperament, but also what worse thing presses on him in connection with it.^[59]

Paul Ricoeur has brought the teleology of Hegel into conversation with the archeology of Freud. This is a synthetic and progressive movement toward Spirit. Every figure receives its meaning from the one that follows it. The truth of one moment resides in the subsequent moment. Intelligibility proceeds from the end to the beginning, which supports the idea that consciousness is a task. The concept of an archeology of the subject that we find in Freud remains abstract so long as it has not been set in a relationship of dialectical opposition to the complementary concept of teleology. To have an arche a subject must have a telos. Psychoanalysis was a reductive, demystifying hermeneutics. As such, it was opposed to a hermeneutics that is synthetic and therefore restorative. Freud has an explicit and thematized archeology. Whereas Hegel links an explicit teleology of mind or spirit to an implicit archeology of life and desire, Freud links a thematized archeology of the unconscious to an unthematized teleology of the process of becoming conscious. A dialectic that derives its clarity from opposition is always preferable to a patchwork eclecticism based on an unprincipled empiricism. The dispossession comes first, the reaffirmation only at the end. What is essential occurs between the two, namely, the whole movement through the constellation of figures. Master and slave, the stoic exile of thought, skeptical indifference, the unhappy consciousness, the service of the devoted mind, the observation of nature, the spirit as light. This process has nothing to do with introspection. This dialectic constitutes a progressive synthetic movement, which contrasts with the analytic character of psychoanalysis and the regressive. On this point, Hegel and Freud agree: culture is born in the movement of desire. What is the object of its desire? What it is seeking, with the help of this withdrawal from the sensible world is itself. But it will reach itself only through its relationship with another desire, another self-consciousness. In Hegel, the emergence or positing of desire is central to the spiritual process of the reduplication of consciousness and that the satisfaction of desire is inherent in the recognition of self-consciousnesses. This dialectic of recognition follows that of desire. The important concept that joins the two moments together is the notion of satisfaction. It plays the part of the Freudian pleasure principle. One must not forget that recognition is struggle. Struggle for recognition, and not a struggle for life, but recognition through struggle.

C.2 Objective Spirit

The second section of Philosophy of Spirit is a discussion of objective spirit, what we call cultural institutions and values that are products of human beings, embodied in law, morality of conscience, and moral life or social ethics. Hegel outlines his reflections on what become significant books on family, civil society, and the political state, which would become his last book, Philosophy of Right, Chapter 6 of Phenomenology of Spirit, and the Philosophy of History, published after his death from lecture notes and the notes of his students. 

The first expansion of what was in Philosophy of Spirit concerning Objective Spirit is the Philosophy of Right, expressing the realization that without politics the system could collapse into theory.[60] It is Spirit active in the forming of family life, civil society, and political arrangements. These are mundane operations, needed for an orderly and happy life, but we are never satisfied when we reach the goals established. We long for more. He sets forth a process of liberation that takes place in objective Spirit through a rational, dynamic system of voluntary associations and ethical phenomena. He is squeezing freedom out of institutions: marriage, family, civil society, political state. Such freedom occurs within limits. Once you are part of the ethical whole, limits are the rules of a game you enjoy. His ideal was the English constitutional monarchy. This is also a kind of political theology that sublates the antithesis between natural law and positive law to the notion of freedom, which has its historical origin in the Christian anthropology of the equality of souls before God and in the modern notion of equality before the law. Natural law is baked in by God, positive law hammered out by us, and freedom is when the two stop glaring at each other.

The modern social world has become a home, despite injustice and evil that remains. He has a melancholic, tragic sense of life. Freedom is what makes this modern social order a home but doing so within the institutional life of respect for the individual as part of families, possessing property, career, and political life. Individuals are also social members. We make this social order a home by overcoming alienation, the false feeling that it cannot be a home. Some homes are not consistent with this home, such as utopian communities, or even cultures dominated by Buddhist or Muslim law.

The modern social world forms a system or totality. The wholeness, harmony and unity of the modern social world exist with difference, opposition, conflict and otherness. Such difference is essential to an articulation, unfolding, and development of the human spirit to which the modern social world gives expression. Any conception of unity that excludes or eliminates conflict and otherness is inadequate. Such difference exists as reconciled, that is, a higher unity that preserves and embraces division, conflict, and otherness. The wholeness is complicated, subtle, and open to otherness. We can coherently ask whether a given social world forms an interconnected whole and to coherently deny that a particular social world forms a system or totality. The human spirit expresses itself in activities like language, customs, and social institutions. Every social world shows the principle, the set of ideas and values, that expresses the human spirit. The customs, laws, religion, system of justice, commerce, and political life of a people expresses their sense of human spirit. However, as various social worlds interact and collide, we see that human spirit is not simply a cultural phenomenon relative to a particular time and space but rather expresses the universal desires and hopes of the human spirit.

We are the kind of beings who show ourselves through the social arrangements and culture for which we are responsible. The self-knowledge that we gain in this way arises because we are spiritual beings. Yet, the social world for which human beings are responsible also exerts its influence upon us and shapes us through the form of life a culture establishes. We are social and cultural beings. We become ourselves as human beings only as the result of being raised in and socialized within a human community and actively participate in that human community. We cannot understand ourselves apart from that cultural context. Culture shapes our deepest needs and goals. The social world into which our parents give us birth shapes our biological drives, desires, and needs. We are children of our time. Our needs and goals vary given a specific culture and history. The constellation of knowledge and attitudes that exist in a particular country and religion determine what is right and acceptable. Historically and culturally determined moments define the human good. We show human spirit through the national communities of which we are a part. The collective spirit of a people is greater than the aggregate of individuals within the community. Such human communities reproduce themselves in individuals. Each culture raises its members to behave and understand themselves in such a way that will reproduce those social arrangements. National communities reproduce themselves through the individuals of which that culture consists. We can see this on a small scale within the family unit. As parents raise children with specific values, the family continues only as the children incorporate those values within themselves and carry them onward. Only as individuals find their social world expressive of their self-understanding can a culture reproduce itself. We become who we are through our social world.

Thus, no human being can speak from nowhere. Everyone has a place from which we view the world. Since human spirit transcends individuals and cultures, every culture partially expresses human spirit, suggesting that human spirit struggles to articulate itself beyond the historically and culturally conditioned moment. We gain partial understanding of that struggle of human spirit now, through reflection upon the social world. We cannot gain an authoritative view of that struggle until we catch a glimpse of the end or purpose of that struggle.

The famous dictum of Hegel is that what is rational is actual and what is actual is rational. Any existing social world can be an illusion in the sense that it distorts to a significant degree the articulation of the human spirit. The social world can fail to a significant degree to reflect the movement of human spirit. The underlying rational structure of the social world may fail to express itself in a way that most adequately articulates human spirit. We observe this distinction in ordinary speech when we speak of someone as a “real” poet, in contrast to poets who do not distinguish themselves. A “real” social world articulates the human spirit to the greatest possible degree. The point of human community is to help bridge the gap between the “real” social world and the social world that exists. Much of our world is illusion and self-deception. Unmasking the social world is an important part of the human project. We can carry on this project of human community only by appealing to norms and ideals, to principles and practices, to which we have already committed ourselves and that are rooted in what is real. Rational ideals have a claim to satisfaction. Their non-fulfillment constitutes an objective wrong. Our imagination or fantasy can give us a sense of a claim for satisfaction of desires that are delusional. The norms of valid ideals have power to bring themselves into a real social world. The realization of valid norms has the modest potential of realization to a significant degree. Thus, the ideals of family, the marketplace, political life, religious community, will never realize their full potential. The tendency of the social world is to realize its valid norms. These norms are intelligible, reasonable, and good. The basic tendency of the social world is to become more rational. The arrangements of our social world reflect an increasingly more adequate conception of the human spirit.

The modern social world most clearly articulates the drives, desires, and dreams of human spirit. The modern social world realizes its norms to a far greater degree than the institutions of other social worlds. The modern social world is, as it ought to be. We cannot say this about other social worlds. The institutions of the modern social world do not conform to their norms. In fact, they must fail to do so. The sphere of human action is arbitrary, contingent, and filled with error. Anything that is the result of human action exhibits defects, imperfections, and wickedness. Imperfections are necessary conditions of the social world being as it ought to be. The modern social world can be as it ought to be only in existing institutions. The price of realization in existing institutions is imperfection. Imperfection is the price of the modern social world being as it ought to be. Imperfection in existing institutions does not count against the claim that the modern social world is as it ought to be.

Criticism of the modern social world is not legitimate if it fails live up to purely personal ideals. Further, our tendency to judge the existing social world upon utopian schemes is not a legitimate basis for criticism. The only legitimate criticism is when the modern social world fails to live up to its own ideals. The only legitimate criticism is reformist in nature, aligning existing social arrangements closer to its norms.

Philosophical reflection leads to recognizing the modern social world exists by a process of reconciliation, overcoming conflict, division, enmity, alienation, or estrangement, the result becoming the restoration of harmony, unity, peace, friendship, or love. Healing estrangement is part of reconciliation. However, reconciliation also has a transforming dimension. The unity that exists after reconciliation is more flexible, complex, and stable than the unity that preceded it. We can experience genuine reconciliation with the modern social world while at the same time recognize the imperfections and evil in it and that specific aspects of modern institutional life have defects. Amid the problematic nature of the modern social world, we can experience reconciliation. Reconciliation involves freeing oneself from unreasonable expectations. Our unreasonable expectations do not constitute a real loss. The situation to which we become reconciled is genuinely good. Recognizing irrational expectations is an important feature of reconciliation. To experience reconciliation is to accept the present. One finds satisfaction in the present.[61] We cannot experience genuine reconciliation by putting on rose-colored glasses. We can look at the problematic nature of the world experience delight in the present. Reconciliation accepts the modern social world as a problematic world. The delight that we can experience coexists with full appreciation of the obvious suffering in the world. Reconciliation has a melancholic dimension; it accepts the tragic nature of human life. Reconciliation includes an element of negativity. We can experience reconciliation with the present only with a sense of melancholy and a sense of the tragic as a response to the suffering, imperfection, and wickedness of the present. Such melancholy is compatible with full participation in our social world. Reconciliation involves the coexistence of acceptance, melancholy, and delight. Although reconciliation requires a difficult balancing act, reconciliation is an attitude toward the modern social world. What I must show is that modern social world is worthy of the attitude of reconciliation.

         In a well-ordered social world, parents will raise children to have separate and specific interests, some of which conflict with each other. The demands of the social world, such as family and work, may also conflict. A well-ordered social world is a world that generates conflicts. Reconciliation embraces these tensions. Such ongoing tensions between our separate and specific interests and the demands of the modern social world are a necessary by-product of our individuality. Conflict is the price of differentiation. Reconciliation incorporates conflict and antagonism. However, reconciliation suggests that conflict and antagonism are not final. The modern social world has its unity in that it encourages such individuality, particularity, and competing interests, thereby fostering the conflicts that many other social worlds seek to avoid. People in the modern social world can lead coherent and non-fragmented lives, free of painful personal and psychological division. Reconciliation involves preserving and overcoming conflict. The preservation of conflict recognizes that a desire for perfect harmony is both utopian dangerous. It is utopian because human beings could never make it real. It is dangerous because it dissolves individuality. Yet, we cannot stop at celebrating conflict.[62]I am suggesting a conflict-embracing conception of unity. I hope I have shown that even if humanity never attained such a unity, it is a reasonable object of intellectual enquiry.

         The consideration of the need for reconciliation in the modern social world suggests that we need to justify the ways of modern social world to our thoughtful reflection. This means that the modern social world is a good that needs reflective justification, given the presence of the experience of alienation and the obvious social evil that exists. The problem of alienation exists primarily because we have not made the modern social world a home. The problem of social evil arises because of the problematic features of the modern social world, such as the breakdown of the family, moral confusion, poverty, crime, and the continued presence of war. How shall I relate to this imperfect social world? If I am successful in what I present, acceptance, support, and endorsement recommend themselves as ways of relating to it. If I am not successful, retreat, resistance, and revolution may recommend themselves as possible responses.

         We could raise many objections to such an analysis. Many are superficial, for it is easy to perceive the shortcomings of individuals, states, and the course of world affairs. A home can be dysfunctional, expressing itself in being alien to us, bifurcating, hostile, and indifferent. The need for reconciliation to the existing realities of nuanced freedom in the modern social world can feel like resignation to its imperfections, which can seem pessimistic and demoralizing. Such analysis forgets that continual reform is a feature of the modern social world, the conflicts being the fuel for elevating the social order to a greater actualization of the human spirit. The imperfections of the modern social world do not undermine its basic goodness and rationality. We need to appreciate the basic goodness of the modern social world. We need to cultivate an outlook of basic confidence and trust by providing the philosophical framework that would make it possible to see the true nature of the social world.

         The modern social world is a home if it makes it possible for people to actualize themselves as individuals and as social members. If one could not do this, one would be in alienation. The modern social world provides such opportunities. Private property is essential for actualizing our individuality. The possession of property recognizes us as bearers of rights. The possession of property is a precondition of the development and pursuit of separate and specific interests. We have the right to marry and form families, allowing us to actualize inner aspects of our lives. This involves romance and freely choosing each other. In the family, individuals find love and acceptance as the specific persons that we are. The family is the only sphere of the social world in which one finds this kind of emotional acceptance of one’s particularity. We also have the right to freely associate others, thereby influencing the social standing we possess. We do this in pursuing our separate and specific interests. This pursuit can take place in various civic settings, as in philanthropy, ongoing education, and religious affiliation. This pursuit also takes place in economic settings as we influence the direction of career or occupation.

The modern social world is a home of it constitutes a world of freedom. The central institutions of the modern social world promote the kind of freedom of individuals to pursue their own separate and specific interests and actualize their own freely chosen life plans, to act in accordance with their own consciences, and to assess their social roles and institutions from their own subjective standpoints. This freedom requires the absence of governmental interference as well as the presence of various institutional structures as well. The only threat to this freedom is to come face to face with something totally other than oneself. Otherness and difference do not constitute a limit to freedom; only that which is totally other or alien can do so. We experience this freedom as we recognize that nothing we face is ultimately other. To the extent that we lack psychological and personal unity and coherence, we contain fragments that are external and alien to ourselves and hence experience the lack of freedom. An integrated self is a free self. Yet, the only way we can become with ourselves is to relate to something other than ourselves. We develop our potential as we actualize ourselves in the external world. Our dependence upon things other than ourselves leads to the lack of freedom. We attain freedom by coming to be with oneself in the other to whom we must relate. We find ourselves in the other. The other shares one’s own essence. The social world does not have to fully realize these conditions. To demand this would be to succumb to utopian thinking. All the social world can do is promote the possibility of such freedom through its social arrangements. The actualization of individuality and social membership is only possible; it cannot be the necessary outcome of social arrangements. The social world can only open the possibility of satisfaction through domestic, civil, and political life. We see here that freedom and reconciliation join. We experience the social world as a home only if that social world is a world of freedom, and the way in which we become free is by coming to be at home. Reconciliation is a process of reconciliation. If we describe a social world as a world of freedom, it must make it possible for people to actualize themselves as individuals and as social members. 

The significance of what we have suggested thus far is that if the social world is a home, it makes it possible for people to actualize themselves as individuals and as members of society. Any social world that can do this is worthy of acceptance and affirmation, despite the inevitable imperfections, failures, and wickedness. The modern social world is not fundamentally other than its members. We find ourselves in the central social arrangements of society. This social world shows the correct understanding of the human spirit. This showing occurs, not perfectly, but to a significant degree. We enjoy both subjective freedom and the freedom of being with others. Although this social is a good worthy of affirmation, it does not mean that everything becomes wonderful. We have already suggested the sobering thought that the modern social world is a home amid unhappiness. Yet, happiness is a goal of the modern social world. Such a social world includes a social sphere, a civil society, in which people can pursue separate and specific projects and meet their material needs. Such a social world includes a system of public administration of the affairs of government. Such a world will encourage families in which people can find love, understanding, and support.

Behind what Hegel is suggesting is a form of civic humanism. He argues for a form of citizenship dignity. He argues for a form of the operation of an invisible hand mechanism at a certain level of civil society, but this could never be the adequate form for the political state. This form of civic humanism recognizes a common understanding about the good life and that there is this common recognition that the laws by which we organize our life are something admirable. This shared understanding of the good incorporates the sense that citizens with a particular history, a particular condition, and particular institutional forms are bound together in one such enterprise. To have a viable society requires not just that I and others think lit is a good thing, but that we have come to a common recognized understanding that we have launched a particular common enterprise of this sort, and this creates a particular bond around this society, this tradition, this history. Hegel called it ethical life, which he distinguished from moral life.  A free society cannot remain free without these elements of bonding. This requires a strong conception of a public space. The link between the space of evaluation for which persons exist and public space is that this kind of evaluation requires language. Language arises in conversation or between people. Each of us is inducted into language by conversation with others so that the language I speak is not at first my language but our language. We learn words that can express evaluation by applying them, and we learn to apply them in conversation. I become a person by entering the space of value, and this space of value is one elaborated in a common language. I cannot flourish as a person f this space of value is so laid out as to negate or denigrate me. One could question whether a society, organized around common values and a common sense of right, and an adversarial attitude toward the legal process, is viable in the long term.[63]

Such a social world cannot guarantee happiness. Careers still fail. Friends still leave. Illness still strikes. Children still die. Happiness has an individual quality that is particularly sensitive to luck. Happiness is up to us as individuals and how well they manage their lives. Since happiness has elements beyond the control of human action, we would be unreasonable to expect any social world to guarantee it. Unhappiness that results from our decisions, accidents, or chance does not reflect upon the social world. We may be dissatisfied with our lot; we have no right to be dissatisfied with the social world. No social world can guarantee the fulfillment of our wishes.

Alienation is objective when the social world is not a home. For example, if one is a Muslim who believes devoutly that Sharia Law needs to be followed, one will never be at home in a modern social world. Given the food laws and its notion of being ritually unclean, Hinduism would have a similar sense of alienation. Orthodox Judaism would have similar blockages. Alienation is subjective when the social world, but we do not grasp the way in which it is a home. Alienation is complete when one is bout subjectively and objectively alienated. 

The basic social arrangements of the modern social world make it a home. Therefore, it does not need fundamental social transformations. To accept its principle of freedom and its institutional life of family, civic life, and political participation, is to experience reconciliation. Individuality and freedom combine with social membership, allowing people to realize themselves as community members without abandoning or suppressing their individuality. Yet, such reconciliation incorporates ongoing reform of institutional life so that they increasingly articulate the desires of the human spirit. People who reconcile themselves to the modern social world can engage in social and political reform. Doing so represents one authentic way of responding to the defects of the modern social world. Reconciliation is compatible with taking an activist relation the modern social world. The experience of reconciliation with the modern social world does not require social activism; it does allow it.

Since nuanced and limited freedom is the greatest good toward which the human spirit strives, the modern social world is a home. It is a place of liberation and understanding, a place in which they can experience satisfaction in social arrangements and participate in its reform. I would not suggest this approach in other social worlds. For example, such a shift an attitude toward the social world created by Communism, Fascism, petty dictators, or Muslim fundamentalism. Such social worlds are not worthy of being reconciled to, for the objective conditions do not exist. In such social worlds, the objective social world is alien to the restless movement of the human spirit toward freedom. Consequently, transformation. Of such social institutions is a viable option. The tension between individualism and social membership constitutes the primary tension of living the modern social world. Modern individuality and social membership are not only compatible but also intertwined. Through their social membership, modern people actualize themselves as individuals; through their individuality, modern people actualize themselves as social members. The human spirit articulates itself in this process of actualization. 

The modern political state requires dispersal of political power across several branches of government. The reason for this is that no single institution can gain absolute political power. The competition between the authorities (judicial, executive, and legislative) suggests fluctuation of the actual exercise of power at various times in history. The pendulum will swing between them. However, over time, the point is that clear, distinct, and absolute power within the state exists nowhere. Such checks and balances ensure the fullest expression of civil society in the political order. The administration of justice provides the legal structure necessary for the regulation of the market economy. The focus of that system is the protection of private property and the contract. 

The system of government bureaucracy regulates and controls civil society: police, utilities and other public works, regulation of the market, public health, education, welfare, and prevention of unemployment. Public authorities must deal with crime, unemployment, and poverty that arise from the contingencies of the market system. The system of justice recognizes people as individuals in the strong sense by protecting their individual rights.

         The advent of the modern political state has brought the horrors of war on a massive scale. War is a normal feature of the modern political state, for it is a permanent part of human existence. The principle of pluralism and self-determination dismisses the idea that a world state could prevent the outbreak of war. Individual states and movements will always have the possibility of using their freedom to resolve disputes violently. The plurality of national peoples in whom the human spirit has actualized itself precludes the existence of a true world state. Individual states actualize themselves by distinguishing themselves from each other and attain recognition as to their independent status in relation to each other. Nations face each other as sovereign powers with no higher power between them capable of enforcing the peaceful settlement. The possibility of war arises out of the natural course of international relations. War is a failure of human social life. Each nation has its separate and specific interests that will conflict with those of other states. Contingencies will arise that lead to war. War has a way of uniting bourgeois involved in their private interests toward their common citizenship in a nation. Such external threats bring a people together as a people. The reality of their shared life becomes clear. It becomes something for which they will fight. The social bond of a people, often not perceived in time of peace, become clear when their nation is attacked. War appears necessary to maintain the internal life of the state. War is not good. It is not, however, an absolute evil. War is an evil with which we can and must live. The good of preserving family, civil life and freedom transcend the relative evil of war. We cannot preserve the benefits of freedom in any other way. 

The question of whether we can experience reconciliation with our social world is the question of whether the social world, can in any sense, be a home. The reason the question arises because of the felt experience of alienation. We feel alienated when we regard social arrangements as foreign, bifurcating, and indifferent or hostile to our needs. We feel split from our social world. We do not “fit in.” Contained within this feeling of alienation is a wish to be at home in the social world; we wish the social world could be a home. The social world is a home only if it makes it possible for its members to actualize themselves both as individuals and as members of society. Such actualization requires participation in civil society, family, and the political life the state. The family provides development of intimacy and emotional recognition. Civil society provides social membership within which people can pursue their associations. The political state, even if the individual has limits to direct participation, can pursue the common good of their nation through their involvement and votes.

This book would be the last magnificent work that he himself would prepare for publication. It ends with the state as history's current episode. He would also devote the greater part of his energies while teaching here to his lectures on the philosophy of history. These lectures feel like the next reel.

Hegel’s consciousness suffered more than any other philosophical consciousness before his time from the unreconciled state of reality and especially of modern human society. And to him it had become clear that all the lower levels of alienation are only the anticipation and the consequence of the supreme level; true reconciliation is possible only if a reconciliation is achieved between finite and infinite, the world and God.

The second expansion of Objective Spirit begun in Philosophy of Spirit is his Philosophy of History, published after his death from lecture manuscripts of Hegel and notes from his students. 

It starts in China and Persia, races through Greece and Rome, ends with... Germany. Basically, argues that freedom is not human nature—it is human destiny. And every empire's just a rehearsal. The real star is the World Spirit, using kings like socks. He writes it while Napoleon's corpse is still warm. World history, to him, is not past tense. It is happening. Makes you feel small. And weirdly included.  This is also where he talks about the cunning of reason, a phrase for which he became very well known, among his best lines, in that providence governs the world, that world history takes place for the glorification of God and to do the honor of God. The idea is that individuals think they are steering—Caesar wants glory, Napoleon wants boots on graves—but really, they are just God's fingers on the chessboard. The world's ends up smarter than we are. We bleed and scheme, and somehow the pieces slide toward freedom. Not mercy, exactly—just meaning. And when it is done? We will look back and say, oh, that was God all along. Hegel did not flinch from the cost; he just said the cost was not random. Like a river does not ask permission to carve the canyon.

Hegel’s Philosophy of History is not meant to be just any kind of study of world history, but an explicitly philosophical-speculative reflection on history. Hegel's reading history as salvation in disguise—providence pulling strings, empires rising and falling like parables. Freedom starts in Jerusalem, spreads through Athens, lands in Berlin. It is the cross without the nails, the resurrection without the tomb. He just calls it reason. “Whoever looks at the world rationally will find that it in turn assumes a rational aspect; the two exist in a reciprocal relationship.” Examined in this way, world history shows clearly enough that it is reasonable to assume “that the world is governed by providence,… that the world’s events are controlled by divine providence.” The events of world history are for “the glorification of God,” seeing them as ruled by the Spirit we “do honor to God.” World history, then, is the realization of the kingdom of God on earth. But what of all the disasters, wars and revolutions? Throughout all these things, the philosopher’s contemplative eye sees the unimpeded march of the free, good, but also cunning World Spirit. Forms and figures, nations, even the great world-historical individuals, must disappear: they must disappear to make a new place. The divine Spirit marches on and yet preserves everything it lets fall in the best possible form in the new place. At every time, the Spirit is present with the whole plenitude of eternity and consequently every time is the complete end of time. Every time has its good side—if it is considered as the Kairos, the “favorable moment” of the all-recovering World Spirit. Even the worst disasters have a good sense. Genuine pessimism is elevated and transfigured in the optimism of the Spirit. For God is in history. Throughout all wretchedness, all negations, the divine Spirit unfolds all its riches in time. Since God in the passage through history takes all wretchedness within divine life, evil, the negative in world history, is from the outset encompassed by good. World history is the “Golgotha of Absolute Spirit,” as Hegel said at the end of the Phenomenology. He seeks deliberately to surpass in historical terms the abstract “justification of God” produced by Leibniz with his secular piety: “From this point of view, our investigation can be seen as a theodicy, a justification of the ways of God (such as Leibniz attempted in his own metaphysical manner, but using categories which were as yet abstract and indeterminate). It should enable us to comprehend all the ills of the world, including the existence of evil, so that the thinking spirit may be reconciled with the negative aspects of existence; and it is in world-history that we encounter the sum of concrete evil. (Indeed, there is no department of knowledge in which such a reconciliation is more urgently required than in world-history.…).” 

Hegel wants to look at history and see a development, a process, that many of people would find difficult to see. 

First, the implication of the historical nature of rational thought is profound. Truth is not a fossil awaiting discovery, for it grows as we build upon the intellectual labor of others.

Second, Christianity is the consummate religion because it is the religion of revelation, and as such is a trajectory that says God becomes finite, suffers, and rises. Other religions are needed, but they are a rehearsal. The notion of the Incarnation of God in Jesus that then becomes a symbol of the intimate relationship between God and the world. The vulnerability of the Infinite in the cross is the secret of Absolute Spirit. Spirit reveals itself in nature, in the emergence of subjective Spirit, the activity of Objective Spirit in creating civil society, family, and the political state, but Spirit is most fully expressed in art, religion, and philosophical reflection, for these reflect the deepest desire and motivation of humanity, for they enliven humanity toward its best. The mundane activities of subjective and objective Spirit are important, for without them, the freedom sought in Absolute Spirit could not happen.

History becomes education of God has well as our education. The slaughter bench of human history is not just a death but a resurrection, for God is in it all, and thus, human beings are co-authors with God. Nothing in history is wasted. Suffering is the momentum that drives us toward new life. Hegel discovered a strange mercy in all this. With John Calvin, God is like a conductor with every note locked in before the orchestra even breathes. He has no real improvisation or struggle. For Hegel, there is no conductor, but we participate in the music, for we are not puppets. God learns through the mess we make of the music. Grace is more like partnership. God is becoming, as in process theology, and not simply an observer from the balcony. God does change, but through suffering so that resurrection can happen. All this stretches the Orthodox view that God is pure act, pure being, and thus untouched and unmoved, like a mountain that never erodes. The challenge Hegel provides is that if God suffers in the dialectic of our lives and of human history, then every tear matters. The cross, Good Friday, occurs every day and throughout history. The path Hegel charts may be a way, not setting aside Orthodoxy, but of elevating it, viewing it as doorway into a new way of thinking through the relation between God and humanity.

In view of all this, what is the function of philosophy of history? “Philosophy, therefore, is not a means of consolation. It is more than that, for it transfigures reality with all its apparent injustices and reconciles it with the rational; it shows that it is based upon the Idea itself, and that reason is fulfilled in it.” A theodicy—that is—no longer with the unhistorical categories of Leibniz but really in the concrete history of the world, organically throughout the great ages of the world. In a mighty East-West movement of growing freedom, from the oriental world as the age of childhood (China, India, Persia, Asia Minor, Egypt) to the Greek world as the age of youth and to the Roman as adult manhood and thence finally to the Germanic world as the ripe old age of mankind: dawn—Middle Ages—modern times. All irreversibly eschatologically oriented to the end of history: the reality of freedom. Equipped with seven-league boots, the philosopher follows in great marches along this path, follows this movement of the World Spirit. Both analytically and synthetically, Hegel thinks of political history—which clearly has priority here—in connection with the history of civilization and of religion. He combines his intuitive-integral view of spirit with a profusion of polyhistorical detailed knowledge and thus presents the history of humanity in its intellectual context: as a single unconscious-conscious, mysterious development toward an increasingly profound awareness, to increasingly great perfection, to true freedom. This world history, however, is by no means an innocuous, harmonious development (a charge made against Hegel by Schopenhauer and others). Hegel was not a naïve believer in progress, and he lived with the experience of an antagonistic society. For him, world history was a sacrificial slaughtering block, a violent dialectical sequence of stages of decline and ascent. At the same time, each stage has its definite, specific principle in the spirit of each and every nation, in which the actions of its tools, of particular individuals and of the great world-historical personalities, are sublated: that is, in the “national spirit” (Volksgeist), which, by ascending, reaching its zenith and descending again, continually reaches its home in the universal World Spirit. But it is the philosopher who is permitted, in this continuous world court of world history, to pronounce the judgments that have been passed on nations and states, their victories and defeats, their rise and decline.

The theme of this philosophy of history is that what is rational is real and what is real is rational. History is the self-realization of reason, but that means that at various stages reason will be less perfectly displayed. The world is not god-forsaken, but it takes philosophy to uncover this rationality. 

Hegel views the course of history as theodicy. He could emphasize strongly that the whole mass of concrete evil is set before us precisely in world history. However, the thinking spirit, the philosopher, will experience reconciliation to the negative by realizing partly what is in truth the gold of the world, and partly that this goal will be achieved in it. Thus, all that is negative will vanish as something that is subjugated and vanquished. Hegel viewed reconciliation of the finite spirit with God throughout renunciation of its autonomy, of its separation from God, by taking up the finite into the eternal, the union of the divine nature with the human. Incarnation is reconciliation. Such reconciliation only needed actualization in the world that the notion of freedom begun in the Reformation and furthered in the modern political state would advance. In this way, the course of history philosophically understood was a theodicy. For Pannenberg, the fault of the Hegelian system is that it lost the tension between what reconciliation accomplished in Jesus Christ and its eschatological achievement. What Hegel has done, however, is to sacrifice the particular, the good of the individual, to the general, the Idea of the actualization of freedom, a criticism he had himself leveled against the French Revolution. [64]

         He will say that understanding is important for practical purposes. We gain understanding because we take an interest in something. This interest is not just for private advantage. In fact, we accomplish nothing unless those concerned with an issue find their own satisfaction in it. They are individuals; they have their special needs, instincts, and interests. Nothing great in this world occurs without passion. Passion is human activity resulting from private interest and self-seeking design. The whole energy of will and character becomes devoted to one thing, while we sacrifice other potential interests to this aim.[65]

A speculative system of philosophy will need to offer a thoughtful contemplation of history. History itself relies upon historians who record it and keep it going in their accounts of historical periods. Some types of history have a pragmatic approach, nullifying the past to apply lessons to the present. Some types of history are so critical of the sources of history that it strips history of any content, thereby allowing the critic to place subjective fantasies in the place of every historical record. Yet, when we think of a philosophical reflection on history, we need to think in terms of the unique way philosophy carries out its task. It will bring to the study of history a vision of the human quest separate from that for which the historian searches. It does so, recognizing that it derives the notion of an “end” to human history, a teleology toward which human history trends, not through a study of history itself, but through an appreciation of its own reasoning. Philosophy presumes the rationality of the world of experience, meaning that if one gives thoughtful attention to experience, one will be able to express it rationally. For this reason, in much of the historical record, one will need to pay attention to the speeches of the great people of the age. We often hear the criticism that “it is only talk.” Talk seems harmless. Yet, such speeches are the basic way in which human interaction takes place. Yet, action begins in such talk, such words. The desire for rational insight is what the philosopher brings to an examination of history. If one looks at the world rationally, the world looks back rationally. If we abandon this confidence, we have a convenient license to indulge our own fancies. We find it easy to find deficiencies in great individuals and great states. We find it harder to discover their true import and value. 

As one often hears, experience and history teach us that people and government do not learn anything from history. They do not act on principles deduced from it. This may be a good thing. Each historical period has enough unique elements to it that considerations connected to the period ought to determine its conduct. Especially in the pressure of momentous events, a general principle gives little help. In fact, the vitality and freedom involved in the present will cause such an impression that the memory of a past event will struggle to live again for us. 

However, one thing we ought to learn from history is that if truth and goodness are to emerge, it will be with pain and suffering. Genuine philosophy of history is far from fatalism or deterministic. It becomes a form of theodicy. It will need to see that rationality is the substance and energy of human history. When we contemplate history, we can hardly avoid sorrow at its universal stain of corruptions.  We see this corruption in the display of the passions and the consequences of their violence, the unreason that is associated not only with them, but even with good designs and righteous aims.  We see arising from them the evil, the vice, and the ruin that has befallen the most flourishing kingdoms that the mind of human beings ever created.  And since this decay is not the work of mere nature, but of human will, our reflections may well lead us to a moral sadness, a revolt of the good will—if indeed it has a place within us.  Without rhetorical exaggeration, a simple, truthful account of the miseries that have overwhelmed the noblest of nations and polities and the finest exemplars of private virtue form a most fearful picture and excite emotions of the profoundest and most hopeless sadness, counter-balanced by no consoling result.  However, in contemplating history as the slaughter-bench at which the happiness of peoples, the wisdom of states, and the virtue of individuals have been sacrificed, a question necessarily arises: To what principle, to what final purpose, have these monstrous sacrifices been offered?[66]

         Freedom is the teleological end, the last cause, of the movement of history and thought. The actualization of this freedom is the final purpose of the world.  The history of the world is, from a philosophical perspective, nothing but the development of freedom. Philosophy avoids the weary strife of momentary passions that agitate the surface of society. It must enter the calm region of contemplation. In that sense, a philosophical consideration of history is a theodicy, the justification of God in history. In fact, this insight, the development of freedom in actual history, reconciles the noble pursuit of truth and goodness with the actual experience of human history. From a religious perspective, we must seriously try to recognize the ways of Providence, its means and manifestations in history, and their relation to our universal principle.  The wisdom of God must not be weak on a grand scale. In this way, history is far from being without God. Rather, history becomes the work of God. The religious person often hesitates to think in this way about human action and thought but readily ascribes nature as a work of God. Yet surely the notion of humanity as made in the image of God places humanity above nature, and therefore one must find Divine Providence in human history. Providence in this case lets people do as they please with their passions and interests. The result is the accomplishment, not of their plans, but the plan of God. The end that God seeks is decidedly different from the individuals carrying out their plans. In that sense, Hegel may be right in referring to the cunning of reason in history.  For those who think history is moving toward a worthy end, we must not forget that historical development is not the harmless and unopposed simple growth of organic life but hard, unwilling labor against itself.  One may innocently contemplate history from the point of view of happiness.  However, any reasonable person would have to say that history is not the soil of happiness.  The periods of happiness are blank pages in it.[67]

         World history is a court of judgment. Only in history does the human urge toward truth and goodness becomes exhibited in fact.  However, this is not the verdict of mere, raw power or blind destiny.  On the contrary, world history is the development of freedom, and therefore every stage of world history is a moment of that movement of reason and freedom. Development is change, a reality we witness in history. The negative side of this change is the destruction of past civilizations. Splendid leaders and marvelous civilizations are now gone. On the positive side of this change is that ruin is the emergence of new life. History has its dialectical stages, in which forces opposed to freedom will prevail in one moment, and the forces of freedom will prevail in the next. One can legitimately view world political leaders who lag behind this conception of their role in history as barbarian. One helpful image may be the legend of the Phoenix, a supernatural creature, living for 500 years. Once its life span is over, the Phoenix builds its own funeral pyre and throws itself into the flames. As it dies, it is reborn anew, rejuvenated, and fresh life, rising from the ashes to live another 500 years. 

Recognition of this reality moves us toward a conception of universal history. True, our freedom needs to find expression in social relationships, such as family, civil society, and political arrangements. This actual freedom will have a local character in terms of the national spirit of a people. Any attempt to impose political arrangements upon a people contrary to their tradition and custom, and those opposed to their national spirit, will find rebellion the theme of its arrangements. At the same time, the universal thrust of human thought will trend to universal arrangements that will cohere with each other through mutual recognition of the worth and dignity of individuals and regard for their freedom. Of course, as we have already seen, violence and pain will be a significant part of this move toward universal history. 

One can criticize this notion in Hegel as imposing reason or logic on the course of history. This will always be the danger. However, for Hegel, if one cannot show the development of the Idea, not only in logic, but also in history, it would have been a useless abstraction. [68]

Hegel was unable to demonstrate the ultimate speculative rationality of history. Hegel sets up this grand vision where every twist in history serves the absolute's unfolding, but he cannot quite prove it—it is more a hunch than a proof.The Holocaust, slavery's slow rot, all the quiet cruelties that never make headlines... you can call them dialectical if you want, but it starts to sound like forcing a smile through tears. He trusts the outcome too much. And yet, without that trust, what do you have? Despair? So, the failure is honest—reality's rational only if you are patient enough to wait for Sunday. But waiting is faith, not logic. Hegel had a vision in a sense of this holistic system that when it comes to history, there is a tremendous amount of empirical concrete studies of history in which it would be exceedingly difficult to show how the absolute was becoming actual in events. He sketches the big picture beautifully in the messiness of dialectic, but the fine print is trickier. Show me exactly how the absolute needed a particular famine or a child dying in a trench, and... it is hard not to flinch. Hegel almost acts as if the concrete is optional—you can taste the system in a cathedral spire, not in a refugee camp. But I think he knew that. He never wrote case studies on evil, only on how evil gets... used. The danger is that becomes a permission slip. Do not worry, it is dialectic. Still, without the vision you would have no way even to see the cathedral. The trick is keeping the vision without turning off the eyes. The dialectic explains too much and does not leave room for chaos, given that the system is whole, so everything fits. The random asteroid or the stray bullet is discordant noise that is eventually absorbed into the system. The system is brilliant poetry, but that is not consolation now. The ache we feel helps us realize that, while we can let the dialectic explain what it can, the rest stays messy. What can be difficult is to remember that the dialectic itself is rooted in suffering and the conflicts of suffering and evil and tragedy, that all of that is part of the dialectic. And so, you are not, you are certainly not looking at the world through rose-colored glasses. You are, as a person observing it, and as a person who experiences tragedy and evil and suffering, that what the dialectic does is hold out that hope that after the struggle and the death, and what may feel like death, is resurrection. You are not pretending evil did not happen, you are refusing to let it have the last word. And that is not optimism, really. It is stubbornness. Because resurrection does not erase the nails; it just bends them into something we can live with. Such hope is tougher than optimism, for it refuses to live in the darkness. The cross is not pretty, but the rose is not a lie either. And there is a stubbornness to the dialectic that somehow out of the tragedies and oppositions and struggles and suffering and the struggle with evil, that out of that, which at times can feel like death and abandonment, that out of that comes resurrection.

Hegel’s philosophy of world history can be regarded as the foundation for the subsequent historical presentations of art, religion and philosophy. For it is from the national spirits, in which world history concretely takes place, that civilization proceeds: the world forms of art, religion and philosophy.29 As perfect will took shape in the absolute state, so then perfect vision in absolute art, perfect sensitivity and feeling in absolute religion, perfect thought in absolute philosophy. These three world forms constitute various spheres of the one historical development of God in the world: a process of becoming conscious on the part of spirit, a process that is grasped in the three sciences of philosophy of art, philosophy of religion and history of philosophy. For Hegel, in all these sciences historical development and systematic presentation coincide. In Hegel’s system, they thus form both the continuation of the Philosophy of World-History and the working out of the systematization explained in the Encyclopaedia. Philosophy of right culminates in philosophy of world history, and both describe systematically and historically objective spirit (after the Encyclopaedia, Hegel never discussed in detail subjective spirit in anthropology, phenomenology or psychology). 

Is all this pure speculation? No—and yes. No: in the sense that—according to Hegel—the philosopher must not devote himself to theoretical structures devoid of reality, must not deduce reality “from above.” Yes: in the sense that he must be watching—“speculating”—and then forthrightly describe reality as it is manifested to him in its history, as he experiences it out of the whole abundance of the thoughts of his theoretical and practical, ethical, juridical, religious, philosophical consciousness. For consciousness is known through the world, and at the same time the world is known through consciousness: a necessary history of experience which—wholly in the modern tradition of Descartes, Kant and Fichte—starts out everywhere consistently from the human subject and in the light of this subject experiences the world (nature, society, civilization). Experience of the world from the re-collection of consciousness: a far reaching, inward going of the spirit, as Martin Heidegger has made clear from his own standpoint in his article on Hegel’s notion of experience. 

C.3 Absolute Spirit

The third section in the Philosophy of Spirit is a brief reflection on Absolute Spirit, which would after his death be organized by his students into lectures on Aesthetics, Religion, and Philosophy, this last becoming his History of Philosophy. To be clear, his discussion of Objective Spirit and Absolute Spirit are the richest interpretive or hermeneutical dialectics, representing that about which he thought deepest and in which his originality shines. What unites them is that is that contemplation is required to practice them. One needs to pause one’s immersion in everydayness and contemplated the Beautiful in art, the Good in Religion, and the True in Philosophy. This pause allows the human mind to reflect authentically upon the world. Thus, this final stage of the self-realization cannot be provided by the political and economic arrangements of society. Absolute Spirit underlies not just a specific political arrangement, but all his history and every culture. A mode of consciousness needs to contemplate the Absolute, which is at home in human thought.

Philosophy of art, philosophy of religion, and the history of philosophy are now supposed to represent—always systematically and historically—the three dialectical moments of Absolute Spirit. As humans learn to be fully free, self-conscious beings, developing personal, familial, economic, social, and political life, all of which are essential structure for freedom to express itself. Owning property, exchanging it, exercising freedom of conscience, and choosing an occupation, require institutions that secure these rights. These are necessities for human beings to become truly human in their freedom. Without such institutional life, fear would dominate. The purpose of human life finds its fullest expression in Absolute Spirit, expressing itself in aesthetic experience and works of art, in religion, and in philosophical reflection.  Even though art and religion in modernity prove to be cognitively deficient in comparison with philosophy, they nonetheless keep us mindful of the claims of particularity, difference, and otherness. Hegel's philosophy is thus more complex than is often assumed, for it contains within itself a principle of aesthetic and religious resistance to its own totalizing claims. Philosophy wants everything neat, but art keeps the loose ends wiggling, religion the tears flowing. Yet, if art and religion resist the totalizing claim of philosophy then that means the totalizing at which philosophy aims, and especially the philosophy of Hegel, never completes itself. There is always a song one cannot translate. Art and faith are the stutter in the system that says the system is never complete. Art and religion remind the system of the elusive quality of Beauty, Goodness, and Truth. 

A very brief survey will provide an outline of the content of the transcripts of varied quality by Hegel’s colleagues and published in several volumes. History, to him, is the big stage where everything plays out. Art shows the Spirit getting beautiful, religion shows it getting personal, philosophy shows it getting honest. But they all depend on the clock ticking—the clock of nations, wars, dead kings. Without that forward thrust, there is no point in painting or praying or arguing.

It is clear the position of Hegel in this regard is one succeeding generations have dismissed. The romantic vision has supplanted the synthesis envisioned by Hegel. Art has taken over from religion in the lives of many of our contemporaries, becoming for them the highest expression of human activity, connecting humanity with what is of highest importance. This age has moved out of the purview of the synthesis of Hegel.

The first dialectical moment of Absolute Spirit is considered in Philosophy of Fine Art.[69] It deals first generally with the idea of the beautiful as such, but behind it is the unfolding of the Absolute in material forms, the beautiful in nature and the beautiful in art, the Ideal; then with the systematic basic notions in the historical development of the Ideal to the particular forms of the beautiful in art, from the symbolic (oriental) by way of the classical (Greek) to the romantic (Christian) art forms; finally with the historical development of the hierarchy of the arts from the most external (architecture) by way of sculpture, painting and music to the most internal (poetry). He builds upon Kant in Critique of Judgment. Art is a vehicle of ontological vision, a mode of consciousness of the Idea, but it could never represent it and thus is not mimesis of the intellectual tradition. It is a presentation (Darstelung) or showing forth (Scheinen) of the Idea in sensible form (Gestalt). This is why the work of art is higher than all the works of human beings. With Kant, a work of art has finality without purpose. This lack of a message is essential to art, for it is a vehicle of another kind of awareness.

Some persons will discredit works of art in relationship to nature, especially with nature viewed as a work of God and art as human activity. Yet, works of art express the liveliness of the human spirit. Surely, God made human beings with the distinctive quality of thinking, and thus, its products must receive respect as well. Artistic production is an intellectual enterprise. Its contemplation of beauty through its various symbols lifts the human spirit toward what is true and good. The desire to produce fine art is an urge toward the nobler things of human life. Human beings seek self-realization in it. Even the manipulation of the material of art is toward that purpose. Fine art is a stage along the way of liberation of the human spirit. Yet, one might wonder if art is worthy of philosophical reflection. It relies upon external form. It seems to derive from fancy. It seems to focus upon sensual arousal. One can engage in the arts as a fleeting pastime. It shares this defect with human thinking. Philosophy seeks to discipline thought. In the same way, fine art has become the deposit of the intuition and heart of a people. The philosopher is not content to leave art in the realm of feeling. It often becomes the key to engaging their wisdom and religion. It can represent the highest ideas in sensuous forms. Further, truth must “appear” or “show” itself. We must not consider “appearance” to be a dreadful thing, in contrast to ideas. Fine art turns us away from itself and toward something “spiritual” that it intends to bring before us. In any age, one can wonder if art itself has lost its genuine truth and vitality. Some may question whether philosophical reflection on art will destroy art. This objection is the same fear others have that when thought it applies itself to anything, it mangles it. Yet, thinking is what distinguishes human beings from the rest of nature. Surely, doing what humans do cannot mangle it. It can only lift it up. 

         Everyone wants to be somewhat of dilettante or connoisseur of art. It has become the sign of a cultivated person. One cultivates a taste for fine art. Yet, all of us judge a work of art by our own insights, intuitions, and feelings. Yet, as the product of a human activity, we can know it, expound upon it, and learn from it. Far from being the product of genius or talent, it requires thought and discipline.

         What is the end human beings intend in producing a work of art? One can hardly say that a simple imitation of nature is that end. Such an end would be superfluous. Could the end be the arousal of feeling? This would be a good thing, if it arose from the soul of one person and spoke to the soul of another. Some think art can sooth hostile passion, and if it does so, it must arise from and speak to something beyond feeling. It can educate a person. It can thus teach. We may presume that art ought not to arouse immorality, but such a judgment depends upon the offering the judgment. 

In common with religion and philosophy, occupying oneself with fine art is a contemplative act. If we were to work out a systematic presentation of philosophy, we would begin with the abstract conception behind a work of art, which we might identify as the beautiful. We would then need to show how the abstract concept works itself in the various forms of fine art (sculpture, painting, architecture, music, poetry, novel, and so on) and show development in its stages of history. The philosophical study of art has to do with the way in which it creates a world of actualized beauty. The entire world of art has at its center, from a philosophical perspective, the presentation of truth and goodness to perception and to feeling. A philosophical presentation would need to show that art in its form and stages moves in a dialectical way, under the pressures of extremes and antitheses.

The highest act of reason is an aesthetic experience. It is Spirit grasping itself. He arrives at this conclusion after gaining an extensive and intimate knowledge of many of the greatest works of art. He was not pontificating. He roamed the museums of Berlin, got up close with the Greeks, Raphael, Correggio, and began reflecting on Wagner. Hegel wove insights on individual works of art into a systematic account of the nature of art and of beauty. This is what makes his lectures on Aesthetics still feel so alive today. History is a record of the understanding humanity gains of itself as it moves toward freedom. In like manner, as he moves through historical stages, he shows that Beauty is not static, but Spirit moving into differing forms. 

So, aesthetics or art is the beautiful, is the beautiful at the level, is the idea at the level of vision. The appearance of Idea through a sensual medium. Art is the first time the divine Idea steps into color, stone, sound. It is not decoration; it is theology for people who do not like words. We are multilayered, specific beings who need to relate to the truth through our eyes and ears as much as through feeling and understanding. Beauty reflects the Idea at work in the world and the movement toward freedom. Beauty is a specific way of expressing and representing the true. Art is not fluff. Art is first way in which human beings become conscious of the true character of God and humanity. People need to see and hear truth and freedom, especially as human beings freely create these forms. Yet, its creation is not enough, for the true purpose of art is to grant the observer the occasion to contemplate, dwell with, and mold the mind to the contours of beauty. We become what we behold, and beauty is the first thing that lets us see the self clearly. The cross in a Rubens painting is still crucifixion, but now your eyes do the suffering instead of your chest. And because it is sensual, it is provisional. 

The fact that human beings produce art says a great deal about who we are. We could have survived without cathedrals or symphonies, but we did not. We crave beauty like bread—something in us needs to give form to what we feel, to make eternity look back at us from a cave wall. Hegel would say: that is Spirit waking up. Art's our first stammer—Hey, something larger than me is happening. And we are right. This beauty-centered aesthetics regards beauty as essential to a life lived in the full and multidimensional consciousness of human freedom. It is indispensable in bringing our freedom and vitality into view. The creation and appreciation of beauty reminds us that we are not just animals with tools.

Much of Christian art focuses, and he thinks properly, on the death and resurrection of Christ, which thus focuses upon both suffering and hope. Christian art lingers on the tomb and the empty space, not just triumph. It is like we cannot look away from the hurt without seeing the light sneaking in. A good pieta does not hide the blood; a good resurrection does not hide the bandages. And Hegel likes that. He says beauty is not finished until it is broken and mended. The crucifix is not decorative—it is evidence. Same dialectic: thesis (glory), antithesis (agony), synthesis (the body walking out). Suffering and hope are twins in the frame. No hope without the wound.  

Hegel’s aesthetics move against both the Enlightenment view of the secularization of art, but also against German classicism and romanticism, which could view religion as an, or art as a religion. The Enlightenment wanted art neutral, like wallpaper. Classicism and Romanticism turned it into a new faith, all feeling and proportion. Hegel says no—art is neither neutral nor divine. It is a stage, like history. Once it served to picture God, now it pictures us. Now the idea needs naked words, not statues. So, he does not trash religion in art; he graduates from it. The Protestant withdrawal into the inwardness of faith freed art from subservience to religion, allowing art to become fully secular. Art became humans doing human things. Such art is still able to carry out a task of bringing humanity to its highest vocation because it can still create secular beauty by giving sensuous expression to specific human freedoms and life. 

Art is the heartbeat of culture with the task of bringing people into the presence of beauty. If it all it does is alienate and disorient, becomes dead, abstract, sterile, and negative, then it keeps in exile and stops short of its task of helping human beings find a home in their freedom. We need to see ourselves in the work of art. Thus, the function of art is to enable us to encounter our own complex freedom, humanity, and vitality in the form of beauty. We still have a profound and abiding need for beautiful art because we are sensuous, imaginative beings who require a sensuous, imaginative, imaginative vision, not just a conceptual or felt understanding of what it is to be free and human. Even in abstract art, if the swirl does not invite you to recognize yourself in it, it becomes morbid, leaving the viewer in exile.

The second dialectical moment of Absolute Spirit Hegel considers in Lectures on the Philosophy of Religionshows why religion supersedes art, for art grasps the Absolute by means of images and symbols.[70] In religion, the Idea speaks. It is the internalization of the sensuous form in the arts, using images and pictorial language to contemplate what they symbolize because they strain to render a higher content. He is specific in rejecting an account of religious consciousness that appeals to the ideas of projection and illusion. He hates the idea that religion is a fancy hallucination cooked up by needy minds. 

As Hegel reads him, for Schleiermacher religious consciousness has its origin in and derives its content from a feeling of dependence. Hegel comments that if we say that religion rests on the feeling of dependence, then animals would have to be religions too, for they feel this dependence. if religion in humanity is based only on a feeling, then the nature of that feeling can be none other than the feeling of dependence. And so, a dog would be the best Christian, for it possesses this feeling of the highest degree, um, and lives in this feeling. The dog has feelings of deliverance when its hunger is satisfied by a bone, whereas Schleiermacher intends something quite different by feeling, namely a pre-reflective awareness of the whence and whither of existence. Hegel does not present something of a caricature, does present, excuse me, something of a caricature of Schleiermacher's understanding of religious consciousness. Sure, it is a caricature, but the point's real: if you bottom out at feeling, you are one step from barking at bones. Schleiermacher meant something subtler—being oriented toward absolute mystery. But Hegel cannot stand it. For him, dependence without self-knowledge is not piety, it is pet food.  Hegel is closer to the mark in noting that for Schleiermacher, the knowledge afforded by religious feeling does not strictly include knowledge of God, whose infinite being is beyond all finite categories. And he adds Schleiermacher does develop a system of divine attributes, which follow from modifications in the feeling of absolute dependence, but do not describe the divine nature, but rather aspects of our relationship to God. in Schleiermacher, one can sense God. Hegel wants God knowable. Hegel's association of theology with philosophy has to do with the claim that the significance of the religious representation needs to be rethought in fully conceptual philosophical terms if the intelligibility and truth of that significance is to be properly expressed. The outcome of philosophical reenactment is a form of resurrection, of religion disguised in philosophical concepts.

The final philosophical consideration in religion is whether any religion can approximate the noble human aspiration toward truth and goodness. The philosophical question is whether God has revealed who God is in such a way that human beings can know God. Such a revelation would have to come from outside of humanity. All that is lofty, noble, and divine speaks to our spirit, becoming an authentic witness of the spirit. It may be nothing more than a general resonance, an inner agreement, empathy, or sympathy. Such a witness of the spirit may connect with insight or thought. They become how human beings form their character. One often hears faith and thought opposed to each other. One can come to faith only through thought. The witness of the spirit can come to individuals in many ways, including through philosophical reflection. For some persons, the witness of the spirit will come through the authority of witnesses. In any case, religion has its soil in the activity of thinking. The heart and feeling that senses the truth of religion is not that of an animal, but that of a thinking human being. For Christians, the Bible strikes a chord within them and offers firmness of conviction. In one sense, this is valid. One can hold to the Bible and lead a pious life. However, as soon as one uses language and thoughts that are no longer simply in the Bible, one has entered another realm of human reflection. The spirit with which one approaches the Bible now expresses itself in thought and its thoughts must now undergo exploration as to their truth. One goes beyond the words of the Bible and concerns one with internal feelings and thoughts. Theology does not really know what it wants when it seeks separation from philosophy. Further, when Paul says in I Corinthians 3:6 that the letter kills, but the spirit gives life, he hints at what the philosopher would say to the Christian who claims to cling only to the Bible. The spirit of the reader of the Bible is active in his or her reading and thus cannot have the objectivity that science can have in “reading” nature through mathematics. Of course, most people are not conscious of this activity of their thought in shaping their reading of the Bible. 

The question for philosophy is whether, in the context of the religious region of human thought, finitude and infinity can find a home. If so, it will only be through the difficult path already described. It must be at home with the notion of freedom. God must be creative activity and energy, especially in the movement of human life and thought, involving contradiction and its reconciliation. Thus, philosophical considerations of religion and Christianity cannot confine themselves to an exclusive occupation with religious experience or human religious involvement but must proceed to disciplined reflection concerning God. But it is also the case that one moves to reflection concerning God through a proper consideration of the components of religious involvement. In the end, a true concept of God is one that focuses upon reconciliation, resolving the contradictions necessary to human life. We might find some help if we view this in three movements of thought.

The first movement of thought and a vital component of religious involvement is the sense of separation from the divine. He makes the bold assertion that the human spirit discovers God because humanity realizes how small it is.

Finite human beings are at a point of separation from God, while still related to God. The contradiction of human life consists in this cleavage. The separation from who humanity is gives rise to the need for reconciliation. This reconciliation can only be with truth and goodness. God is actively reconciling to the divine life all that is alien. God reconciles what is particular and what exists in separation. God must restore to freedom that which is alien and fallen away from its true being. This suggests that the modern notion that humanity is good is wrong. It would suggest that no cleavage exists between truth and humanity, or between God and humanity. Rather, humanity is also evil. In the Bible, the story of Genesis 3 is a figurative account of this fall or separation. In eating of the fruit, it will be like God, even though God made them in the image of God. They were innocent, but now, they have knowledge of good and evil. Animals do not have this knowledge. Human beings have this knowledge, and it represents the separation that exists within humanity and with truth and goodness. Humanity exists in the condition of rupture from the world. This is the unhappiness and misery of humanity with itself. Humanity does not correspond to its truth, to what it ought to be. Humanity is also not satisfied in the world. Unhappiness drives us back within ourselves. 

Hegel believed that humanity was both good and evil by nature, and that humanity is good in as much as humanity surmounts the natural, and evil in as much as in this very act humanity falls away from itself. Kant thought we are pulled in two directions at once. We are animals, driven by instincts and self-interest—that is the evil part, where reason gets lazy and you just do what feels good. But we are also capable of rising above it: duty, law, the categorical imperative. That is the good part—not because it feels warm, but because it is what a rational creature would will for everyone. So, the same act that surmounts nature—obeying a moral rule, say—can flip into evil if you are doing it out of vanity or fear, not principle. We are good when we obey the rule for its own sake, evil when we twist it to serve the old animal. Short version: the higher you climb, the more ways there are to fall. And Hegel never pretended we land on one side forever. For him, we are not statically good or evil; it is the struggle itself. We surmount nature when the Spirit grows—building cities, writing constitutions, forgiving enemies. That is good, because it is forward motion. But the moment you think you have arrived, you fall away from yourself: arrogance, nationalism, any final solution. Evil is not lust or murder alone; it is the betrayal of growth. You become the enemy you just beat. So, the act of rising is already pregnant with its own negation. Kant thought morality was obedience; Hegel thought it was staying honest about the climb. Humanity is in contradiction. Humanity must become conscious of this contradiction and even experience sorrow over it. There is within humanity a need for universal reconciliation. That is Hegel's tragedy-beauty mix. We are wired for the Infinite but stuck in the finite—so, constant inner clash. The sorrow is not optional; it is what makes us human. And the reconciliation is not just forgiveness of sins—it is the day when every scar in history glows, and we stop pretending we are separate. Until then, yes, we ache. But the ache is the signal that the whole is near.  And in one sense, everything we have been talking about with good and evil, it would be Hegel's view of Genesis chapters 2 and 3, and the classical notion of the fall of human beings. For Hegel the garden story is not about a single slip-up—it is the blueprint for our whole situation. The tree is not just forbidden fruit; it is the first moment the infinite self meets limitation and wants to eat it anyway. Good is innocence, evil is awareness—and awareness is inevitable. The fall is not a moral lapse; it is the birth of conscience. God does not punish Adam; He evicts him into history. Because once you know nakedness, you cannot un-know it. And from there, every child, every war, every prayer is us trying to get back—not to Eden, but to wholeness.

Evil is the inwardly turned consciousness, a self-centered existence. Yet, this existence suggests a relation to its opposite, good, which loses its sense of self in favor of an outwardly turned consciousness. In religion, this conflict occurs as if evil is a happening alien to the divine being. Religion raises the image of the wrath of God against evil, a fruitless effort of struggling against its limitations of thought. God acts redemptively by bringing the thought of good and evil into relation to each other. In Christianity, of course, God takes on human nature, which participates in evil. Yet, if anything were genuinely “other” from God, if anything could genuinely fall from God, then God would become an empty notion. The wholeness of reality finds its completion in the movement of good and evil, rather than their separate identity. The urge toward truth and goodness, the nobility of the human project, and human destiny itself, must necessarily bring that which opposes it into reconciliation with itself.[71]

The second movement of thought and a vital component of religion is doctrine. We need to consider the notion of who God is. 

For Hegel, this requires an exploration into representational thinking, which is available to all human beings, and religion provides this language. Philosophical thinking is available to few. In Christianity, this movement refers to the creation of that which is separate from God. This release is the “play of love with itself.” God releases the other to exist as a free and independent being. This other is the world. Spirit is animated, “spirited,” and life-giving. God is love. Love is a distinguishing of two, who nevertheless are not distinguished for each other. The consciousness of the identity of the two, to be outside of myself and in the other, is love. I have my self-consciousness not in myself but in the other. I am satisfied and have peace with myself only in this other. I am only because I have peace with myself. If I did not have it, then I would be a contradiction that falls to pieces. The other has its self-consciousness in me. Both the other and I are only this consciousness of being-outside-ourselves and of our identity. We are this intuition, feeling, and knowledge of our unity. This is love. Now, creation suggests a world other than God, the opposite of God, what is without God, and thus, existing godlessly. The notion of creation carries the burden of one-sidedness and finitude. We need to move beyond this notion of creation to arrive at a religion that satisfies philosophy. Yet, the understanding can grasp only the finitude of things, not appreciated the fact that human progress comes only through contradiction and reconciliation of opposites. Hegel thinks Jacob Boehme offers some helpful clues within the Christian religion as to the way the Trinity can move Christianity toward the reconciliation toward which humanity aims.

Representational thinking, which in this context coincides with what we might call religious discourse on the contemporary scene. Representational thinking includes symbolic images, narrative discourses that take up and elaborate those symbolic images, and conceptual elements that are linked to but also different from symbolic images and their narrative elaboration. In connection with representational thinking, Hegel's most essential claim is that such thinking both calls for and requires reconceptualization or reenactment through a process of thought that is philosophical and strictly conceptual, and that, while retaining the content of representational thinking, is different in form from representational thinking. In an interesting way, Hegel anticipates more recent views concerning the symbolic nature of religious discourse and narrative theology proposed by such figures as Paul Tillich and Paul Ricoeur. Hegel saw it coming. Images are not pretty decorations—they are heavy with meaning, carrying more than they look like. And stories? They do not just tell what happened; they let the idea live in motion. Tillich and Ricoeur are just catching up—faith speaks in symbols because the Absolute will not squeeze into a definition. Yet for Hegel that is only the first draft. Symbols beg for unpacking. Hegel and Ricoeur overlap on this: the word God starts in a story, not a lab. But where Ricoeur lets theology wander back and forth between poetry and proof, Hegel draws the line. Speculation is not a spice. It is the finished plate.

         One should translate Vorstellung as figurative thinking or even representation. Hegel’s claim is that doctrines like Trinity, Creation, Fall, Incarnation, and salvation are not conceptual. They remain pictorial or figurative in a way that the speculative philosopher can delineate. The lifeblood of Christianity is through liturgy, song, and the stubborn hope of the faithful. However, Hegel gives pride of place to doctrines, paying special attention to the doctrinal component of religious representational thinking. Figurative thought is the closest to philosophical thinking. It is potentially speculative. Philosophy shows what has always been there. Kant could not allow for the self-presentation of the Absolute, for he developed a philosophy of limit. The acceptable role for religion is the realm of practical reason. For Hegel, religion foreshadows speculation rather than enhancing practice. What is religion? What are the diverse types or kinds of religion? What is the basic meaning of Christianity? The resurrection occurs in the community in a way that anticipates Bultmann. Ecclesiology absorbs Christology. Hegel is impatient with the resistance of picture-thinking to its sublation in and by conceptual thought. The unfolding Spirit proceeds from one shape to another. The necessary sojourn of Spirit among shapes gives rise to a tendency to abide in these forms. Figurative representation spares us the toil of Spirit. Figurative thinking tends to be equated with aborted Aufhebung. 

Hegel is fighting against the romanticist appeal to the inarticulate and the abysmal, appealing for determinacy and shape. Against the dogmatic claim for fixed symbolism, he pleads for the dissolution of all fixed forms in the flux of thinking. The problem of figurative thinking arises at the intersection of these two pleas. Thus, while religious discourse has as its mode figurative thinking, this form is not yet the self-consciousness of Spirit which it will achieve in the Concept. Religious consciousness will resist this move to another form. The religious community tends to historicize its origins. Speculative thought has the same subject matter as picture-thinking. In this sense, philosophy is religion in thought. The collapse of religion would entail the collapse of philosophy. 

The approach of Hegel to creation is a good example. The representational thinking involved in the doctrine of creation will lead him to call upon the speculative resources inherent in representational thinking. It will also lead to a critical discussion of the relationship between God and world. He will mine the images of creation. To say that God creates the world is to suggest that God differs from the world. Speculative thinking rethinks the content of the religious representation and attains a comprehension of that content that representational thinking as such cannot attain. It is also the case that the religious representation calls for a speculative rethinking of its own content and does this by presenting a content that suggests both determinate differences and overarching interrelations. And thus, forms of otherness and along and along with forms of unity that representational thinking on its own cannot grasp and that speculative thinking is precisely equipped to grasp. It is an eternal outpouring. Difference is not a gap; it is a tension. Behind the symbol is a concept waiting to be formed. Speculative thinking recognizes that God is the process by which the world thinks itself back to God. God and world are not two rocks. They are two notes in the same chord. And philosophy finally hears the harmony, while faith only hears the first two beats. God is this universal in which there is no limitation, finitude, particularity, and thus, absolute substance. Substance is a process, self-creating, self-relating, differentiating the divine self into the world. All this suggests the notion of participation. God is a dynamic unity, the heartbeat of all things. The world is the difference God loves within the divine self. Finite things have no being outside of the relationship to the whole, and thus outside God. Finite things are not self-contained. Finite being is real, but only as the tension between independence and total belonging. God is all and keeps on being God while letting be. Theologians of the 1820s did not like this, saying he killed God with dialectics. A. G. Tholuck liked Hegel the professor, hated Hegel the thinker, and said that Hegel was either pantheistic or atheistic. 

In philosophical and theological terms, this discussion will introduce a consideration of the adequacy of Hegel's conception of divine transcendence in relationship to what is required by a Christian understanding of the same. Aquinas and Hegel have some agreement at this point. Both say being is a gift, that the world participates, in the essence (Aquinas) or becoming (Hegel) of God. the finite clings to the Infinite, exhibiting necessary difference and necessary union. Both Aquinas and Hegel are attempting to account for the intimate presence of God to creatures on the one hand and the difference that obtains between the being of creatures and the being of God on the other, a holy distance that is not distance, intimacy without confusion, nearness without smothering. Transcendence is not the Kantian beyond, an alien other, but he reconsiders transcendence as so immanent that history become divine biography. This represents a valid philosophical and theological option and is a valuable and productive resource for contemporary theological work. He has a conception of God that entails a substantive and complex idea of transcendence that is worthy of theological consideration. He does not erase transcendence, but he does rethink it. God is beyond because God is everything without being trapped in anything. The world is transparent to the divine. Such transcendence is always pouring through. The interrelated issues of creation, divine freedom, and necessity are not easily sorted out. A whole has parts, and the parts must have integrity and independence from the whole. For this reason, a whole is not just identical with its parts, taken in their integrity and their independence from the whole and from each other, but a whole is also not something that is independent of the integration of its parts and their functions. The whole is not a bag of marbles, but a body, and organism.

The highest religion for Hegel is Christianity, for in Christianity the truth that the Absolute manifests itself in the finite is symbolically reflected in the incarnation. Schleiermacher jettisoned the Incarnation and the Trinity, while Hegel makes them the center of his speculative interpretation of Christian doctrine. The chapter on religion in Phenomenology of Spirit, while not mentioning Jesus, is full of Christian theology and Christology. Hegel is subtle, for the sake of his secular audience, but he talks about Jesus without mentioning his name. He lets the story breathe through symbols. The crucifixion is the unhappy consciousness, resurrection is reconciliation, and incarnation is the Absolute actualizing itself in the messiness of human history. He foreshadows the approach of Kierkegaard in Philosophical Fragments, who also writes about Jesus without mentioning his name, but from a position of opposing Hegel. This reminds us that there are many ways of doing theology, Hegel smuggling it into dialectics and Kierkegaard into riddles. 

The Absolute is lived, messy, incarnate. The dialectic follows the pattern of creation (thesis), fall (antithesis), and redemption (synthesis), moving toward the Absolute. Humanity unravels because of its sin, and God steps in and redeems. The dialectic feels like a secularized crucifixion, Spirit stepping in and healing, embracing the messiness of life and allowing resurrection to occur out of the messiness of life. Good and evil are opposites that constitute the selfhood of humanity. Selfhood is the battlefield of the necessary struggle of good and evil that gives birth to the freedom of Spirit. God and evil are God the internal quarrel of God. Trinity also involves a dialectic of the Father necessarily generating the Son and the Spirit reconciling the three. For Hegel, creation is like therapy for God, with redemption becoming the plot. The cross becomes necessary divine heartbreak. The work of the negative moment is within God, its seriousness and its pain. Negativity is the dark side of creation and the price of becoming, development, and dialectic. From this perspective, and such an understanding of God, the tragic and unhappy splitting up of reality. He emphasizes development, dialectic, and spirit. From this perspective, and such an understanding of God, the tragic and unhappy splitting up of reality in its various levels can be sublimated in a reconciliatory manner through the negation of the negation. Hegel's consciousness suffered more from the unreconciled state of reality in general and of human society in particular than did any other philosophical consciousness before him. It had dawned on him with great clarity that all lower stages of alienation are but an anticipation and consequence of the supreme instance of alienation. So, the genuine reconciliation is only possible in the event of its being achieved between the finite and the infinite, between the world and God. Hegel is mourning the cosmic divorce. However, Christ, and along with him Christianity as a whole, has been caught up in absolute knowing, caught up in an act of redemptive sublimation over against all who abandon Christ, either overtly or covertly. He universalizes the particularity of Christ and Christianity. He is dismantling those fences one by one. Faith is not blind if it is grounded in reason, and knowledge is not cold if it leads to awe. Tradition is not nostalgia; progress is not amnesia. You are not obeying some alien law—you are obeying the one your mind already knows. Objective truth does not hate your feelings; your feelings just need schooling. And immanence and transcendence? Not opposites—two doors on the same house. God is inside history, yet history cannot hold God. It is like Hegel is saying: stop picking teams. Live in the overlap. That is where the adult religion is.  He even goes as far as to say that God is the result of the other parts of his philosophical system, but in in his lectures on the philosophy of religion, God is at the beginning. The system builds up to God logically, but in religion, God starts everything. You cannot reason your way into the resurrection. You can only look back, after it has happened, and see how it was reasonable all along.  So, the task of a Christian philosophy of religion is to move against French atheism and Kantian agnosticism and every kind of romantic religion of feeling. It is concerned with nothing less than humanity's highest and truly Christian task, the knowledge of God. It must therefore be the knowledge of God that is at stake, notwithstanding all the false critical prejudices of the age. Do not let the French revolutionaries or Kant's neat fences scare you off. Knowing God is not fuzzy sentiment or dead letter—it is the point of having a brain. Christianity is not a mood—it is the only worldview big enough for a crucified God. Religion starts with raw pictures—God as power, as mystery. Then it gets concepts: Trinity, incarnation. Then it becomes ideal—Spirit in the world, not just above it. And Christianity is the final moment because it keeps all three. All religions are climbing the same rope toward knowledge of God, each religion contributing to the evolution of a religion of the Incarnation of God. Even modern atheism is a step along that path. There are preliminary historical forms and the supreme form of religion. Some of the preliminary ones include religions of nature, religions of spiritual individuality. And of course, the supreme religion is Christianity. Yes—preliminary religions are like childhood sketches. Nature gods: mountains, storms, fertility. Raw awe but stuck in matter. Spiritual individuality—like Greek gods, Zoroaster, Buddha—they get personalities, wills, but still separate from us. Monotheism in Judaism adds law, covenant—closer, but one-sided. Then Christianity flips the table: God is not out there; he dies in here. No more projections. Now it is participation. That is why Hegel calls it supreme: the idea finally steps into skin and bleeds. The others prepare the room. This one lights the match.

Hegel then discusses the Trinity where God is eternal love and God is spirit, which is much like the Gospel of John and working with the theology of John. God is love; God is spirit—those are not slogans; they are the engine. Eternal love means the Father is not alone; the Son is already there, as difference. Spirit is the breathing between them. So, when John says the Word was with God, Hegel hears the dialectic: self and other, united in act. The Trinity is not a puzzle—it is the pattern. Every relationship—friendship, marriage, even church politics—is a pale copy of that dance. And the cross? That is love refusing to stay abstract. God only is by being creator of the world. So that gets back to the notion of necessity. That just the very nature of God in a sense it required the externality of the world as we experience it.God's not a static monarch floating in emptiness. Being God means self-expression, and that cannot stay locked inside. So, creation is not a hobby, it is anatomy. The world is the externality of the absolute—like a thought spoken aloud so it can be thought better. And evil? It is not a bug. It is the risk that comes when love stops being monologue. The moment you give the other real freedom, betrayal is possible. So, God's goodness is not safe—it is exposed, nailed up. Which means the cross is not a failure; it is the price of real relation. And since God can't not love, evil had to be negotiated, not avoided. That is the dark side of necessity. But also, the light: everything that hurts are now inside God's chest, not outside divine rule.

Hegel then goes on to discuss the death and life of the God-man, that God was obliged to appear in the world in the flesh in order that humanity might be assured of this, the necessity for God to appear in the world in the flesh is an essential provision, in the light of the foregoing it can be deduced as necessary. In Christ, the implicit unity of humanity with God is assured, seen and experienced. Hegel does not treat incarnation as a rescue mission. if the infinite could sweat and bleed, then every human boundary—pain, fear, death—is already cracked open. Without that, we would stay trapped in our own heads, thinking unity is a metaphor. But touch the wounds, hear the heartbeat, and suddenly the gap between creature and creator feels like a rumor. So, Christ is not a sacrifice—he is a mirror. And once you see yourself in it, you cannot go back to loneliness.

Hegel does seem to have an interest in the historical Jesus in the sense that the life of Jesus Christ is the history of God. The awful mystery of this death is that it affected God himself. And so, Hegel now develops an idea which he had when he was younger thought through and formulated, the death of Christ. The death of Christ is the death of God. If God can die, nothing's off limits. Not even the divine. Hegel is not being dramatic; he is being honest. The cross is not just human tragedy—it is the moment the eternal gets a pulse and stops. The youth version was romantic: Oh, the dying god in myth. Now it is steel: the death of God is how God becomes real to us. Without it, incarnation is a statue. With it—it is earthquake. And that is why Sunday morning is not magic. It is rescue: the One who cannot die choosing to, so you can stop thinking you are alone when you almost do.  God's great act of love is the death of Christ and the reconciliation of the world with God, and therefore of God with the divine self. This death is love itself, and in it we contemplate absolute love. The death is not just payment—it is the collapse of the distance. God, in Christ, takes the wound into the divine chest, so no one else must carry separation as their middle name. Reconciliation is not God forgiving us from a throne; it is God, on a garbage heap outside Jerusalem.

Reconciliation can occur to truth and to the world only as human beings realize that such reconciliation and peace are possible. In Christianity, this reconciliation occurs in Jesus, as God appearing “in the flesh,” as said in John 1:14. 

Christ becomes the immediately present God. The remoteness of the time and place in which Jesus appeared from that of the present has no significance when we think of the core message of the Christian faith. We cannot elicit the spiritual significance of Jesus by unraveling the rich present spiritual life of the community and tracing it back to its original strands. The primitive community in which Christianity began was imperfect. Even tracing back to the actual words of Jesus will not enhance present spirituality. However, this tracing back to the origin is an attempt to get at the truth of Christianity, when what it needs is to recover the simplicity of the notion. It becomes a sign of the impoverishment of the Spirit of the present community when it tries to re-gain its fullness through an external source or the non-spiritual recognition of an historical past. This approach runs the risk of turning the content of religion into an historical idea, an heirloom handed down by tradition. This approach retains only the external element of a religion, something dead, and something no one can know now. The inner element of faith vanishes.[72]

In 20th century theology, Karl Rahner continues to link the ideas of creation and incarnation. If in the incarnation the Logos enters a relationship with a creature, then it is obvious that the formal determinations of the creator-creature, creator-relationship must also hold in this specific relationship. Rahner adds, in fact, the whole of Christology could be seen as the unique and most radical realization of the relationship of God to what is other than God, that is, to creatures. The incarnation is the climax of creation. Hegel would agree, saying that the integration of relation to another and divine self-relatedness that the incarnation represents is the most radical and therefore unique realization of the structure that belongs to the relationship between God and world. The Logos has been with the world from the first syllable of nature, but in Jesus, the relation gets perfect symmetry, stressing God with us, rather than stressing God as wholly other. 

Christianity represents the destiny of humanity in this one person, placing it before us. In his death, resurrection, and ascension, Christianity places before humanity the notion that the weak, fragile, finite, human life is a moment of divine life. They are within God. Finitude is within God. Death itself is within divine life. In this one human life, God shows that God is already reconciled with the world. We can pursue this notion further in Christianity with a reflection upon the significance of the cross. We can put it in the context of the “infinite grief of the finite,” which is a moment on the way to supreme truth and goodness. Pascal noted that nature testifies everywhere to the lost quality of God, both within and outside the human being. Christianity already acknowledged this grief in the cross. The philosopher must be able to face directly the experience of God-forsakenness. The serene style of Dogmatic religion and Deism must vanish. The highest aspirations of humanity can achieve their resurrection only by facing the harsh consciousness of loss, a loss that encompasses everything, and yet ascending in earnestness from its deepest ground to the most serene freedom of its shape.[73] In another reflection by Hegel in 1802, according to Karl Rosenkrantz, Hegel lectured on the notion of Christ uttering the suffering of humanity from the cross. He uttered the suffering of his time. Yet, he also had confidence in the reconciliation that God would bring through him. His existence became the starting point of the new religion, and in that sense, he is its founder. Given the way “the world” treated Jesus in crucifixion, and the willingness of Jesus to accept a course of his life that led to it, we can understand that the first experiences of this new religion would be rejection of the world. The symbol of this contempt for the world in general and the political state in particular would be the cross. The cross is the gallows of the world. One could not present a more distinctive and unambiguous signal of absolute division from the world. Further, however, in his person, Christ represents the reconciliation of God and world due to his union with God and humanity. Christianity views this reconciliation through the notion of infinite grief. Reconciliation has no meaning or truth without this grief. Christianity must eternally produce this grief to bring reconciliation eternally. It bears this infinite grief through its remembrance of the history of its God who has died the death of a transgressor. The union of Christ with God is what makes his death so significant for humanity. The divine experienced the bruising of the everyday routine of life. The thought that God had died on this earth expresses this infinite grief. Yet, the fact that God experienced resurrection also expresses the reconciliation of God and world. Through the Incarnation, God humbles Himself in the life and death of Christ, while in resurrection, Christ brings humanity within the divine life. In the Christian view of the history of God, we also find the history of humanity, which ends in reconciliation.

There are three proofs, the cosmological, the teleological, and the ontological. Kant said those proofs all break down because they leap from what we experience to something beyond experience—the thing-in-itself. Hegel answers, Sure, if you are stuck in the eighteenth century. Cosmological: Kant calls it a chain of causes, ends at first cause, but that is still a picture in our head, not the real God. Hegel says no—reason itself cannot stop at a cause; it keeps going until the chain turns into purpose. The whole universe is not pointing at God; it is God's next sentence. Teleological: Kant likes the watchmaker—order implies designer—but then says designer is just an idea, not access. Hegel flips it: order is not evidence for God, it is God thinking aloud. You do not infer the mind from the watch; the watch is the mind warming up. Ontological: Kant's big objection—existence is not a predicate; you cannot define God into being. Hegel agrees, then shrugs: of course you cannot. But reason does not define; reason unfolds. The idea of God is not a word-game, it is the last stage where pure thought says, I am, and suddenly the I has flesh, crosses, nations. The proof is not a formula—it is history happening. So, Hegel does not fix Kant's proofs; he outgrows them. Where Kant draws a fence around experience, Hegel tears the fence down and says, Experience was always God learning to spell his own name. They had a different understanding of experience. Kant saw experience as locked in the senses—useful but limited. Hegel says experience is reason waking up. For him, to experience a war or a poem is to feel the absolute flexing. So, he is not ignoring Kant's caution; he is saying the caution is temporary. Like training wheels. Once you have felt the dialectic—once you have suffered and loved and voted—you have already moved beyond experience to knowledge. And God is not behind a veil. God is the veil lifting.

Self-knowledge can come about only through recognition, only within the context of intersubjectivity. The idea of God is in fact the representation of this necessity as final and absolute. Even God knows Godself only through God's connection with creatures. Divine self-knowledge comes about as far as God externalizes Godself and dwells in the gathered community. The community's knowledge of God is God's self-knowledge as well as the community's knowledge of itself. In fact, the very conception of God is a representation of the overarching reality of the community, the intersubjective domain that each of its participants knows and in reference to which each of its participants gains self-knowledge, just as the self-consciousness of the identity of the community itself resides just in that self-knowledge. These propositions in turn entail the transcendence of the God who at the same time is related to Godself through God's indwelling in the human community that knows God and knows itself in God. This position integrates divine transcendence and divine immanence. The relation between God and world exhibits the self-subsistent being of God and self-knowledge, and consequently the world, in its essential relation to God, remains other than God their creator, just as God as creator is both transcendent and most deeply immanent in God's connection with the world. God becomes the difference that holds the world, the sameness that animates it. 

Absolute knowledge is the ability to recapitulate the process itself in the eternal present of time. It legitimates the shapes that lead to this ultimate stge. Absolute knowledge is the conceptual light within which each cultural context. Absolute thought is the process thanks to which all shapes and all stages remain thoughtful. It is the thoughtfulness of picture-thinking. His hermeneutics involves three components. 1) Immediacy in the given nonhermeneutical moment of revelation, which in Christianity is the historical figure of Jesus. 2) Figurative mediation presents revelation through narrative and symbol, a process carried out by the community. 3) Conceptualization, securing figurative thinking in speculative thought, the concept becoming the endless death of the representation, but the concept is nothing without the dying process of representation. It becomes a circular process that keeps starting from and returning to the immediacy of revelation, which keeps generating stories, symbols, and interpretation from the community, which keeps aiming at conceptual thought without losing its connection to the immediacy of revelation. [74]

The doctrine of the Trinity is another good example. He will explore the relation between the immanent and economic Trinity. In his lectures on religion, the absolute eternal idea is first in and for itself, before the creation before the creation of the world and outside the world. And second, God creates the world and posits the separation. God creates both nature and finite spirit. What is thus created is at first an other, posited outside of God. But God is the reconciling of the self of God to what is alien, what is specific, and what is posited in separation from God. God must restore to freedom and to truth what is alien, which has fallen away in the idea's self-diremption, in its falling away from itself. This is the path and the process of reconciliation. And in the third place, through this process of reconciliation, Spirit has reconciled with itself what it distinguishes, what it distinguished from itself in its act of diremption, of primal division. And this is the Holy Spirit, the Spirit present in the community. All this is restless activity, developed vitality of Absolute Spirit. It pushes itself out, becomes an other. But it cannot leave it there. It must go in after it, must become it, suffer the alienation to win it back. And when the other turns, looks back—then the Eternal recognizes itself. Thus, God differentiates the divine self but remains identical with the divine self in the process. This argument is much like that of Bonaventure, who teaches that God as self-sufficient must be necessarily productive and self-communicating. Because God is self-sufficient, he is self-communicating. Bonaventure's take is almost Hegelian before Hegel. Self-sufficiency is not static fullness; it is explosive generosity. If God were not spilling over into creation, God be less than good. The divine self-communication is necessary, not accidental. Hegel says the same thing; except he calls the spilling-over the idea or Absolute Spirit and makes it dialectical. Bonaventure calls it love. Bonaventure goes on to say that the highest self-diffusion is found only in the Trinitarian recessions, processions. Without the Trinitarian processions, we would not find in divinity the highest good, because it would be supremely self-diffusive. 

At the same time, there is direct connection between the immanent and the economic Trinity. Hegel presents an understanding of the Trinity that accords equal status to both the immanent and the economic trinities, rather than prioritizing one dimension of the Trinity over the other in a problematic in a problematic manner. They are the same show: the way God is in divine life is the way He is in history. The Son on the cross is the eternal Son. The Spirit in the church is the bond that has always been. That does not cheapen mystery. It grounds it. The more primary a thing is, the more productive it is. The inner life of God is the original act of giving. Father generates Son, breathes Spirit, and the sheer generosity of that act makes it impossible for God to stop at divine life. The world is just the echo. And because the Trinitarian dance is pure gift, it cannot not gift—it is the economic Trinity in advance. Same logic as Hegel's diremption and return, only wrapped in thirteenth-century silk. It is the highest form of freedom in perfect self-expression. A bird is freest when it flies. To have God not create would be a self-limitation, a holding back. Real freedom is the one that says: I must do this because not doing it would betray who I am. And since who God is self-giving love, then creation is the only honest thing. Like patristic and medieval theology, he identifies the Son, the Logos, with creation. Finite creatures exist in an essential connection to God. This connection is one that enjoins humans to transcend their condition of immediate and natural particularity through pursuing a relation to a good that stands as the telos of human development, and that surpasses that condition, namely to God, and to the universal standards of right that determine the rational will. But the self transcends a condition of immediate natural particularity by cultivating itself, and for the self to cultivate itself is for the self to assert itself.

However, Hegel intricately connects this doctrine of the Trinity and creation with fall, incarnation, reconciliation, redemption. Hegel has no Edenic perfection or total depravity. The biblical symbolic narratives show the structure of the experience. This process shows that evil or sin is in is in an original sense is something that one does rather than a wandering or veering off course that precedes the full awakening of conscience. It is at the same time a power which binds humanity and holds humanity captive. In this sense, sin is not so much a veering as a fundamental impotence. Sin or evil has an essential communal as well as an individual dimension, and it has a past. I do not begin evil. I continue it. I am implicated in evil. The Adamic myth unites these features in the symbolic narrative that deals with the first ancestor to disclose a structure belonging to the human condition at its roots. The fall is an essential possibility that belongs to the self-assertion is the possibility of asserting itself in its particularity, and thus in a way that its natural immediacy the specific self is external to the transcendent good that stands over against natural immediacy. The fall is a built-in temptation. To be a self is to be able to say mine and mean it. And the moment you do, God is not an aim anymore, God is an obstacle. You eat the fruit because you are already half out the door. Yet, being able to betray the good for which God made you is what makes freedom possible. Without that risk there is no return, no resurrection. The self wants the infinite but cannot help clutching its own toys. Neither angel nor beast. Just a self that must become itself, which means it can choose the wrong direction—but only to choose the right one later. The fall is not a detour. It is the road.

Thus, to summarize these two movements of thought, faith is not a shiver down the spine and theology is not just storytelling. These may be the raw elements, but one must become adult in approaching them. He wants to keep what these forms mean while dressing them up differently.

The third movement of thought and a vital component of religion is worship practices or liturgy, prayer, feast. Here is the training ground. He gives such practices high praise when he compares them to philosophical practice. Philosophy becomes a form of devotion or worship. You bow to what is there. It has as its object the true, the true in its highest shape as absolute spirit, as God. To know this true, not only in in its simple form as God, but also to know the rational in God's works—that is philosophy. It is part of knowing the true that one should dismiss one's subjectivity, the subjective fantasies of personal vanity, and concern oneself with the true. Thinking well is prayer without incense. It is another form of surrender. These practices of devotion express longing for union with God. As finite creatures, humans are cut off from the infinite. This union occurs through a return out of division. Worship practices seek to overcome separation from God. In these acts God comes to self-knowledge through humanity, and the unity of humanity with God is also the returning of God to harmony with the divine self. God comes to self-consciousness through the worshipping community. It restores the unity between finite infinite spirit. The return of humanity to the Absolute must be accomplished in thought as well as life. The human relation to Absolute Spirit requires worship practices of heart, feeling, and effective practice in life, supporting the contemplative practice of philosophy. 

Christianity presents the idea and the symbol of the rule of God. Implicitly, this contains the characteristic of negating the present world, the source of the revolutionary attitude toward the world. Such a proclamation is not yet coherent within the world consciousness and is not yet in harmony with the condition of the world. The proclamation suggests that things are wrong and that we do not get used to them. Hegel is not waiting for the end of time. The revolution is going on. 

According to Hegel, the proclamation of the rule of God has to do with nothing other and nothing less than the reconciliation of divine nature with human nature, or of God with humanity, that the incarnation exhibits and the presence of God through Christ in and to the human beings who are gathered in the community that is the outcome of reconciliation. The rule of God is not some distant regime. It is the moment humanity stops being a problem to be fixed and starts being a home to be lived in.

Hegel will unite the resurrection, and the indwelling of the Spirit in the gathered community. Hegel links his understanding of the resurrection and the indwelling of the Spirit in the gathered community closely together, which emphasizes the importance of both in discussing the worship life of the church. And that is because the link and the emphasis taken together play a constitutive role in the understanding of Hegel of the reconciliation of consciousness and self-consciousness that belongs to Christian religious consciousness, and that identifies this as the consummate form of religious consciousness. Christ is raised up through the indwelling of the Spirit that informs the consciousness of Christian community. The mystery is not so much what happened to Jesus, but what is happening to us. The answer is the same: resurrection. Hegel will show how worship practices and ethical life relate to the formation of a Christian life. For him, the Spirit is in the room, but only when we are all in there together, praying, yes, but governing, educating, marrying, and working. Worship is the rehearsal and ethics is the performance. Hegel can sound like Old Testament prophets in his insistence that worship and everyday life must connect. The faith, teachings, and sacramental practices of the church enable persons to attain a personal sense of the reconciliation that the church proclaims to its members. This reconciliation, however, takes fully concrete form only when extended to the world. There on one hand, the cultivation of the religious dimension of the life of the individual. There is on the other hand, conduct that extends the values of the infinite dignity of the free individual in a community of free individuals to the institutions of family, civil life, and state. The rescue of the human spirit needs to be appropriated and lived. The universality of truth, goodness, and beauty needs to become my resurrection. Thus, Hegel does not forget the anguish of the single, the individual (Kierkegaard). The process that aims at that goal has three moments. It begins with the institution of the gathered community in which reconciliation and the freedom that results from reconciliation are experienced in an immediate way. Then, as the community develops, it differentiates itself from the world. This leads to a contradiction between the church where reconciliation and freedom is experienced in a heartfelt way, and the world that is found to be unreconciled and unfree. This condition is surpassed to the extent that this contradiction is resolved in the ethical realm, or that the principle of freedom has penetrated the worldly realm itself, and that the worldly, because it has been conformed to the concept, reason, and eternal truth, is freedom that has become concrete and will that is rational. The dialectic does not end with the system, for it ends when the dialectic is internalized. Thus, while religious practice emphasizes the cultivation of the individual, it is not confined to this. There is also for Hegel a substantive ethical and social dimension to religious practice. If your faith and worship practices do not challenge the way the poor are treated or the way wars are waged, then you have not heard the Spirit. Blind obedience is regarded as holy, whereas the ethical is an obedience in freedom, a free and rational will, an obedience of the subject towards the ethical. Thus, it is in the ethical realm that the reconciliation of religion with worldliness and actuality comes about and is accomplished. The divine institutions of ethical life are family, law, the state, the church are such because they are the form necessary for freedom to breathe.

Faith is the religious consciousness considered on its subjective side, rather than regarding the object toward which it is directed. Faith is the dare understood with reference to certitude and feeling. Faith is the subjective side, the certainty of feeling. Faith is certainty since it is feeling and exists in feeling. And there is a strong connection in Hegel between faith and feeling. Hegel's understanding Hegel understands the way feeling makes something my own concretely. For Hegel feeling is not mushy—it is the gate. Certainty is not signed papers; it is in your bones. Faith starts the moment something grabs you, not your head. And yet it is not blind, not raw emotion. It is the first whisper that this God is for me, in me. One can say that faith and feeling is the source or seed of knowledge of God. Although Hegel adds, that is not saying very much. The enveloped being of the tree of the tree's nature, the simple seed, is the product or result of the entire developed life of the tree. And in feeling too, the entire genuine content is within our subjective actuality in this enveloped fashion. Faith becomes a public birth and arrival.

God becomes present in a community that experiences liberation from the antithesis and has consciousness of its freedom in God. In Christianity, this refers to the presence of the Holy Spirit within the community. It symbolizes this liberation in baptism, in the authoritative witness of the church, and repentance. The community knows evil as something already overcome, having no power of its own. The church undertakes its education of the human spirit that this is in fact true. The battle is already over. The church focuses upon freedom as the actual form that reconciliation takes. Flowing from the church are various forms in which it actualizes freedom and reconciliation in the world. For example, it can take place in the human heart. It can also take place in society. Thus, slavery is a contradiction of Christianity as well as a contradiction of reason. The monkish withdraw from the world is a form of freedom in that it places itself in a negative relation to the world. The church can also bring reconciliation by prevailing over the reconciled, worldly realm. However, the unworldliness of the world will enter the church, and thus become unfreedom. The ruling principle is that humanity is not at home with itself. Under this effort, the church will corrupt itself. However, another way of reconciliation is that freedom will permeate the world and the church through the creation of a social order centered in freedom. Neither the Enlightenment principle of formal freedom of reason that negates all knowledge of God, nor the nobility of the pious life that rejects objective content to religion, is the path to reconciliation. Rather, speculative philosophy provides a way forward to genuine freedom and reconciliation.

With his discussion of the spirit and the church, we would not understand the notion of the death of God aright unless we ee it as a provisional truth. Its purpose is to afford a sensational and paradoxical proof of the proposition that the death of God is the death of death. And in short, that means God lives. This death is therefore not an end, but rather a fresh beginning. That is the key turn. God is dead is not despair because by dying, death loses its sting. The tomb seals, yes, but it seals the tomb forever. The absolute crosses over into what we thought it could not touch—time, rot, Friday night—and comes out the other side wearing scars like badges. So, Hegel is not announcing atheism. He is announcing Easter with capital letters. The God who dies is the God who cannot stay buried. And if death cannot hold Him, it cannot hold you. That is why the church is not a museum. It is the echo chamber: He died, so we do not have to.  Out of death itself there follows resurrection. God has died, God is dead—this is the most appalling thought, that everything eternal and true is not, and that negation itself is in God, bound up with this in the supreme sorrow, the feeling of the utter absence of deliverance, the surrender of all that is higher. Yet the course of events does not ground to a halt here; rather, a reversal now comes about, namely, God maintains himself in this process. The latter is but the death of death. Out of the grave, a reversal—Hegel's reversal. The negation does not win; it gets negated. God endures the loss of everything, including God, and... keeps being God. And since that has happened once—on Golgotha—it is happening everywhere: in every failed marriage that revives, every empire that rots and sprouts something better. The death of death means sorrow is still real, but it is mortgaged. The tomb has an expiration date. And we get to live as if that is already known. There arises a community that believes, knows, and attests to the power of this death and resurrection in Jesus. People who stake their lives on this wild claim that death did not finish the story. And once you have felt it, you cannot keep it quiet. That is why the Spirit is not just some ghost—it is the crowd, arguing, worshiping, failing, forgiving, but somehow adding up to more than zero.

As important as the Incarnation is to him it had to pass away and be replaced by the presence of the Holy Spirit in the community. Yet, Jesus believed his unique messianic role channeled the action of the Spirit to all who accepted him in that role, and he also believed in a future kingdom in which the sensual and the spiritual would be unit3ed and over which he would preside. One lack is that his theology is this-worldly.[75]Hegel’s Absolute, the Concept, is multiform. It has the supreme form of being, Universality, which includes specificity and individuality. It is ineliminable (incapable of being removed or excluded from consideration) and necessary. It actively specifies and instantiates itself in every conceivable manner, and only is itself in doing so it is unique and unrivaled, suffering neither diremption nor composition, but is always present, whole, and entire in all its modalities, thereby lending them such self-sufficiency as they appear to have it satisfies the needs of the intellect, once one has got used to tis queer ways, and since its forms are also declared to be the patterns of goodness for individuals, it satisfies our feelings for value it is a transcendentally good Absolute. His Absolute is teleological, it necessarily progresses from forms that inadequately express itself to forms that express itself ever more fully and adequately, until a consummation is reached where adequacy is total. It is this dialectical aspect of the thought of Hegel that brings it into the closest relation to our religious aspirations toward what is best and most perfect, since all the phases of the progression have an axiological as well as an ontological aspect. The most perfect being of Anselm is slowly constituting itself by stages, though at the end it becomes clear that it was always there from the beginning, whole and entire. The Concept expresses itself in three basic manners. First, its being as a pure universal or category on the plane of abstract thought, differentiated into a ladder of ascending forms or categories. Second, its self-alienation in time and space is a ladder of inorganic and organic forms ascending from inert mechanism to fully developed and differentiated life. Third, its development through the forms of self-conscious Spirit, first opposing itself to the externality of natural objects, then dominating the latter and creating a second, social nature congenial and amenable to itself, and then, finally achieving full self-consciousness in the three forms of art, religion, and philosophy. God is Truth, Beauty, and Goodness.  And Being. The logical gambits of Hegelianism suit the mysteries of religion better than anything else: the presence within us, and beyond us, of a universal Spirit which both is and is not ourselves, and which only is the one because it is also the other. 

Hegel will point out that religion is primary, for it can exist without philosophy. Philosophy can only come later as it explores the truth contained in religious feeling and doctrine. He saw orthodox Christianity through the perspective he gained in his speculative philosophy. The union with God that is philosophy requires the union in heart and feeling that religion provides, which allows for the continuation of this union in thought that philosophy provides. That is why philosophy cannot replace religion. 

He turns to Christ in philosophy and says that the purpose of the philosophy of religion is that it does not point to itself but beyond itself, obviously into philosophy. The lectures end with Hegel saying, well, if you have gotten this far, then go further. Do not stay in the church pew, or the lecture hall. Think Christ into your politics, your art, your marriage. Religion gives you the image; philosophy turns the image inside out, so you live it. Philosophy is not giving a new revelation but reflects on what religion says and experiences. That is the modesty Hegel rarely gets credit for. Both need each other, or you freeze.  The veil of picture-thinking that we find in religion is a laying bare, a genuine expression of truth. Why should one wish to separate the light from its shining? All that religion requires is an explanation—it needs to be translated into spiritual and intellectual proportions. It needs to be made intelligible, which, given his whole philosophy, is based on reason. He wants to keep the glow, not kill it. Translate the myth into reason, and suddenly the virgin birth is not magic—it is God risking embarrassment to get close. The resurrection is not rumor; it is the absolute refusing to stay abstract. And sure, that sounds arrogant, but it is really love: he does not want us worshiping pictures. He wants us worshiping while thinking. Like, praise with your eyes open.

Thus:

His teaching on the Trinity is not an unrealistic conceptual arithmetic, but a trinitarian “economy” related to the world, salvation history. 

The creation of the world is regarded not as an abstract, arbitrary volition but as rooted in God’s nature: not as a kind of emanation (from the perfect to the imperfect, with a paradisial golden age at the beginning), but as evolution (from the imperfect to the perfect, although without evolution of species). 

Providence is not attributed to a despotic God, nor is it proved in an abstract, unhistorical fashion, but is observed speculatively in the concrete course of history. 

The non-Christian religions are evaluated not as purely negative or neutral-irrelevant phenomena but as pre-Christian religions approaching the one true God “from shadows and symbols,” as pro-visional forms already announcing the perfect. The Christ event is not minimized in a pietistic spirit as the object of private devotion or theologically appropriated for the institutional Church but is shown as a world event of the Spirit in its significance for humanity. The negative aspects of reality—sin, suffering and death—are not trivialized by a supratemporal, abstract theodicy but depicted by a theology of the death of God in a concrete justification of God and man as overcome painfully and victoriously by God himself in history. According to Hegel, therefore, the philosophical observer of history will not reject as illusions the contradictions, antagonisms and disasters in the history of the world and of man, but neither will he face them in bewilderment. He will neither be content to abandon all hope of understanding the world tragedy nor revolt in unreasonable indignation against the superficial meaninglessness. Instead, he will calmly accept history just as it happens, because reason tells him of the ultimate reasonableness of history, which is at present beyond our understanding. Could not such an attitude be a middle way between the superficial reasoning of the Enlightenment and the pious irrationalism of Romanticism, neither of which does justice to the reason in all unreason? Should faith have anything to fear in all this if it is understood reasonably, understood in the light of the reason of God himself? 

The Lectures on Religion become the Christology of Hegel, his Summa. Hegel finally lets the cat out of the bag. Not just philosophy, but a quiet Christology disguised as analysis. He walks through world religions like stages: magic, Oriental, Greek, then Christianity—the moment the idea turns personal. God does not stay up there; God walks in sandals. And the cross? Not tragedy—necessity. The system needs a scandal to be real. He is overcoming the alternatives that came on the scene with the Enlightenment between faith and knowledge, tradition and progress, heteronomy and autonomy, objectivity and subjectivity, imminence and transcendence.

I am sure this is overly optimistic, but I think it accurately relates how Hegel viewed the theological implications of his re-interpretation of orthodox Christianity. However, the instinct of piety, that something is amiss, is also a legitimate response. 

The third and final dialectical movement of Absolute Spirit is philosophy, which he explores in his History of Philosophy. Philosophically, humans need to rise above the picture-thoughts of religion and express the nature of the human quest, express the destiny of humanity, in direct terms. 

One could summarize the course we have taken. The core insight of philosophy is that it begins with the reality that “stuff is there,” operating by the necessity of atoms and cells. Yet, arising out of this necessity is beings like us, thinking beings, who have liberty. The actualization of this liberty occurs during human life, the arrangements of a social order, and the progress of world history. Within the social order, individuals gain legal status, freedom in economic and political arrangements gains expression, discover rationality at work in the secular and religious, and in forgiveness discover the underlying unity of the moral and immoral. We find the power of reconciliation at work in each of these movements of the human spirit. Only through action do we find the human spirit truly “there.” As such, it takes shape in various forms of consciousness, at moments in history, and in the spirit of a people. The end of human history is truth and goodness. Goodness is liberty, properly understood. Truth shall set us free. In addition, freedom is truth. 

In the History of Philosophy, the role of philosophy is a humble one, analyzing the picture-thought found in religion and giving it a rational basis. The Idea thinks. Philosophy grasps the Absolute rationally. Once this has been achieved, the Absolute has arrived at full self-consciousness, and the cosmic drama reaches its end and goal. Only at this point did Hegel identify the Absolute with God. "God is God," Hegel argued, "only in so far as he knows himself." He took delight in showing that the world spirit has come this far, that the final philosophy, which would be his own philosophy, is the result of all previous philosophies, so that nothing is lost, and all principles have been received, preserved, excuse me. It seems like Hegel delighted in the idea that he was philosophizing on the shoulders of giants, that he had received the inheritance of some very profound thinkers in history. You see it in how he treats the old names—Aristotle is not buried, he is resurrected. Plotinus, Spinoza, even the scholastics—they are all chapters in the same book. Hegel never sounds like he is proving them wrong. He sounds like he is thanking them. Thanks for the ladder. I am going to climb it, then hand it down to the next generation. That is the delight—not victory, but continuity. Nothing wasted. The Absolute does not discard. It refines. 

         The time has come when philosophy might receive attention and love. In many ways, people have become deaf to it. Have they have reached a time when they will listen to it again? Interests of everyday life consume people. Political and economic interests garner the attention. People have little interest in higher intellectual pursuits or in the development of the inner life. The times seem to have stunted the growth of the nobler impulses of humanity. The State seems to have swallowed up other potential and, I think, nobler, interests.[76]  

The truth and goodness that philosophy grasps cannot be abstract and timeless. Such truth is what human beings discover in the course of history. The history of philosophy is one in which attention to personality and character of the philosopher passes away while what the philosopher expresses in thought becomes the focus.[77] As part of the history of philosophy, the ideas are not just past, for they are part of our living present. This history becomes an inheritance we can treasure and build upon. This tradition is alive as a mighty river swells mightily the further it gets from its source. Of course, certain times and cultures can stop this river, becoming motionless. However, the move of human history toward what is true and good will not stand still. The thrust of human history is toward what is life-giving. The activity toward life works with material already given but continues to act upon it in the present. In the process, the material from the past experiences transformation as the philosophical tradition undergoes continuous change. The past has made a deposit into our inheritance. Receiving its inheritance is a matter of using it. Every generation has the responsibility of grasping the knowledge already present, to make it its own, and to raise it to a still higher level. It becomes something different from what it was. The course of history does not show the “becoming” of things foreign to us. Rather, it shows the “becoming” of ourselves and of our knowledge. The history of philosophy becomes an introduction to philosophy itself. Although one could focus upon many other aspects of this history, the history of philosophy focuses upon thought – thought seeking itself in history.

The history of philosophy is more than the history of opinion or folly. It is more than an idle tale. Philosophers contemplate truth and goodness, even though the devout will declare that human thought cannot comprehend it and therefore humans must rely upon faith in blind authority. the irony is that theologians will then use reason to defend that in which they have faith, in which they have applied subjective intuition or feeling, while denying to their opponents the validity of their reasoning capacity. However, even this objection to rationality with rationality shows that human beings are thinking creatures in search of truth. 

The history of philosophy does show great diversity of thought. It reveals error even in great minds. Yet, this diversity is not simply a matter of contradiction, it is not an intellectual battlefield littered with dry bones and lifeless systems. If it were, we might as well take the easy path of following our shallow opinions. An analogy with nature, which has diversity as its chief character, might be helpful here. We may satisfy ourselves with intuition and opinion for a while, but the hunger for truth will arise again. We need a deeper rationality to satisfy that hunger, one that recognizes the diversity of thought discloses the path of truth, which is the commitment to reason together. Even error gives birth to further truth that refutes it. The false has its place in the disclosure of truth. 

Truth and goodness must become what is, but this can only happen through development. It presumes that humans as thinking animals have the potential for intelligence, imagination, feeling, and will. The capacity is present, but the actuality is not. This movement from the potential to the actual is essential for development to occur. Development occurs because what was implicit becomes explicit. The process involves change, while remaining the same. The plant changes from seed to full flower, yet it remains what it is. The seed does not remain it is, and indeed, has this restless urge to become what it potentially is. Truth and goodness are a living and spiritual development, an organic and systematic whole, which reveals itself in stages and moments in history. One pulse throbs throughout all the members. The history of philosophy reveals the alienation and division involved in the development. Yet, the purpose of this painful process is for humanity to become itself. Such debates reveal the nobility of the human spirit, which thereby brings philosophers are nearer to God than those who receive nourishment from spiritual crumbs. They have taken part in a process that leads to the inner sanctuary. Humanity is still in the process of becoming itself. Its development means the retention of the diverse elements of the process. The actuality of the human journey is the unity of difference.

Development also suggests the importance of time. Truth and goodness are not at rest. Much of the past remains living in the present. Respecting time means respecting the intellectual ideas they had available to them and refusing to mold the past into a reflection of us. Each philosophy shares its culture and stage of development. We must not expect that the ancients will reflect our interests. The philosopher cannot escape his or her time. Each philosophy is a link in the whole chain of the spiritual question of humanity. Hegel took this history seriously. I can only offer a sketch of what attracted him to certain periods.

Philosophical reflection begins in Greece, recognizing the Orient as largely religious thinking. Anyone who wants to partake in the philosophic spirit must appreciate what occurred in Greece. It was a sign that humanity was beginning to be at home with itself. What makes the modern spirit at home with the ancient Greek spirit is that the Greek spirit was at home with itself. People at home with themselves do not desire something outside of themselves or above themselves. The Greeks were at home with themselves. They had a spirit of homeliness, that of being-at-home-with-themselves. They had a beauty and freedom that attracts the modern person still. In fact, one could say that philosophy is a means by which humanity learns to be at home with itself. Humanity learns to be at home with its rationality. 

Once one discovers Socrates, one discovers the philosophic spirit in full flower. He brought genuine subjectivity to consciousness. He is the most interesting person of ancient philosophy who has also taken on world-shaping significance. He represents an intellectual turning point in the world. In him, the freedom of self-consciousness breaks out. For him, the individual must find within himself or herself the end of his or her action. One must attain truth through oneself.  Humanity can dare to engage in this noble pursuit because of thought. Socrates showed the way. He daringly discussed moral philosophy with any person who came his way. He had a plastic nature, in that he viewed himself as a work of art in the making. Outside forces or persons do not form such a person. Rather, he had the courage and insight to form himself into what he could become. He became what he wished to be and remained true to that wish. A work of art arises out of an idea and becomes living and beautiful through the work of the artist. Such is also the case with the life of Socrates and all great people of history. Socrates formed himself through his art, which was reasoning. Through forming himself in this way, he continues to influence human thought today. His philosophy was of a piece with his life, and thus, never developed into a system. Yet, the Socratic Method, Socratic irony, and the art of midwifery have profound influence upon all who read it. He taught us that philosophy begins with a puzzle that brings out of us a reflective spirit. We must doubt everything. We must give up all presuppositions. We then become open to the noble pursuit of truth and goodness. Every discovery has its time, and Socrates arose at the right time and place to offer his discoveries.

Plato is a world-famed individual. He elevates the realm of consciousness to the quest of the human spirit toward what is noble, true, and good. In fact, Christianity has made skillful use of Plato because of this emphasis. Plato provided Christianity a way to organize itself rationally. Present-day readers need to focus upon what in philosophy it can learn from Plato that remains alive, and what is not there in Plato, simply because in his time it was not there to give. Come to think of it, if modern readers found themselves completely satisfied philosophically with Plato, it would not be a good thing, for it would give the impression that philosophy had become a finished product. Modern readers cannot go back to Plato, for rationality makes new demands upon us. Some think that in Plato humanity reached its highest plane in terms of rationality, and therefore all we can hope to do is recapture it. The reality is that the weakness of this time shows itself in that it does not want to bear the weight of the greatness of the human spirit. It feels crushed by this greatness and develops a faint heart. Modern philosophers need to stand upon the shoulders of Plato, becoming acquainted with thoughtful persons today – and becoming thoughtful persons ourselves. Plato is difficult. The dialogue form is difficult. We do not need to duplicate it, for his time was not ready for the systematic presentation of philosophy, a form that Aristotle used. He holds nothing back, for the extent to which truth is in him, it longs for expression. He could not keep it in his pocket. He does not speak in his own person. Yet, we do not have to separate “Socrates” from “Plato,” for philosophic truth is one. Every good philosopher draws from what has gone before, makes the tradition his or her own, and then attempts to move the philosophical discussion forward. Although some think the myths of Plato are the highest points in his philosophy, such is not the case. The myths would make little sense without the direct presentation contained in the dialogues. However, the myth does entice people to deal with the content of his philosophy. Modern readers do not mind reading in Plato of the pursuit of truth and goodness, but they do mind seeing the same concern arise from a present-day philosopher. Plato had the courage to recognize the need to bring philosopher together with actual governance. He also prepares the way for discussion of the “super-sensuous” world. Plato is superior to Deism in this regard. For the Deist, God becomes either an empty name or jealous in the sense of keeping to the divine self any knowledge away from humanity. For Plato, the nature of divinity is to reveal. Such a philosophy only shows our neglect of the good, true, and beautiful. 

Plato denied a social role to the family in the Republic he envisioned. The State raised children and women started behaving like men. In the process,[78] he disposes of the importance of subjectivity in favor of absorption into the collective State. Plato refuses to acknowledge the knowledge, wishes, and resolutions of individuals. The biological extended family is no longer present, for we train youth to leave home, developing their family and trade in ways satisfactory to them. Civil society in a free social order provides opportunities for people to build their extended family. The choices one makes in this regard are significant, for they reflect a vision of what constitutes happiness. We choose occupations, communities within which to live and voluntary associations (including bars) that reflect our vision of the future of our lives.

Aristotle is, in terms of a systematic thinker, still unmatched by anyone. He comprehends the phenomenal world as a thinking observer. The object of philosophy is the knowable, and therefore the rational. He defines the chief object of philosophy as knowledge of the end or purpose. He identified the source of philosophy as in the experience of wonder, for in wonder human beings anticipate the knowledge of something higher than their present. He honors the best. Therefore, humanity ought to seek the highest good. 

After these great thinkers, the Roman world arrived. In it, the noble and true passed away. The Roman world was one of abstraction that separated the experience of “world” from that of private life. It subdued the national spirit of the people as well as the individual spirit. It drove people inward. Forms of dogmatism and skepticism prevailed. Skepticism sets itself up as an opponent to philosophy. It dissolves everything into things and nullifies them. It seems invincible, for it suggests that the only difference in convictions is the decision one makes to accept it. The result is the disintegration of the noble, true, and good. One cannot refute such skepticism. “We” cannot put our arms around such skeptics. One is probably better off going on with one’s life as if one has never encountered them. After all, every brand of constructive philosophy is willing to allow skepticism to exist beside it, but skepticism is not willing to return the favor. If someone desires to be a skeptic, no one can persuade him or her differently. To attempt to persuade such a person would be like trying to get one paralyzed in the legs to stand. Skepticism is a form of intellectual paralysis. In addition, from the standpoint of any philosophic system, skepticism is a moment of the dialectic of anything that gains existence. Skepticism withholds its assent to anything true and definite. It becomes a subjective liberation from truth. The principle of skepticism is that to forms of reason, opposing each other, are the same and equally good. Skepticism grasps the negativity of human thought, to its credit. It recognizes that nothing in this human world is secure or absolute. The skeptic imagines greatness of individuality in this grasp. It tries to make the philosophical task nothing more than proposing determinate propositions in which it can find weakness and contradiction. It comprehends the philosophical task falsely. Skepticism reigned in the Roman world. It signals the decay of both philosophy and the world.

Hegel taught that philosophy finds its home today in Christianity. In Christianity, God has revealed truth to humanity. Grace dwells in humanity in such a way that it enables humanity to receive the truth God offers. Philosophically, this means that God does not remain an abstraction. Rather, God becomes a particular human being. The intellectual world is not a beyond, but actualizes itself in this world. The finite is an element embraced by the Infinite, although theologically, one could say that heaven embraces earth, God embraces humanity. For Christianity, reconciliation is the theme between God and humanity. God accomplishes this reconciliation in this world, and not in a heaven beyond. We could imagine a community of love, kindness, piety, and holiness, a community of innocent lambs concerning themselves with pretty trifling with spiritual things. Such a community will not exist on this earth. We can think of it only in our imagination in heaven. Reconciliation is also the theme of philosophy. The human and divine nature is present in Christ. Through this revelation, a revolution in world history has occurred. The suffering, death, and resurrection of Christ was the path He took to surrender his natural human existence to experience elevation to God. This pain, especially the pain of feeling the death of God, is the start of His elevation to God. This conversion of the finite into the Infinite is something Christianity views as accomplished in Christ. This is the leading idea of Christianity.

Philosophy needs to deal with the world-historical reality of Christianity. World-history is, at least partially, the history of the rational pursuit of truth and goodness. One can see in it the nobility of the human spirit. Christianity made philosophical issues available to the common person because of the form it took in “picture” thinking. The concern of philosophy is to take the principle of Christianity and make it also the principle of the world. With Luther, the elaborate system of the Medieval church reverted to the simple lines of the Bible. In fact, one part of modern theology insists that Christianity is nothing more than an exegesis of the text. Yet, the Bible also says, “The letter kills, but the spirit gives life.” In this case, “spirit” can mean nothing other than the power within the interpreter that animates the reading of the text. The conceptions we have shape our reading of the text. In fact, Christ said that the Holy Spirit will guide you into all truth. The apostles would receive this guidance of the Spirit after Jesus died. In fact, one could make the case that if Christianity reverts to the historical Jesus, it reverts to the level of its “unspiritual” condition, before the disciples even understood the significance of Jesus. The disciples heard him teach and saw him perform miracles. Yet, Jesus also warned them to beware of people who demand miracles. In fact, one could make a strong case that the disciples did not really understand the significance of Jesus until Pentecost. 

Philosophy finds in Christianity a dim groping for the idea of freedom. The effect of scholastic philosophy, for example, is a monotonous one. It is outdated, useless to us on its own merits. However, Luther became the first to experience the freedom of the human spirit, at least in embryo. With God alone is Luther himself. His conscience is at home with at itself. Others cannot destroy this sense of being at home. 

Christianity experienced a deep difference between church and world. Religious life was primarily in the realm of heart or feeling. It shut up its experience of freedom within the individual. The two worlds were independent from each other. The implicit union of the Beyond and Here was not satisfactory. Luther rejected the authority of the church and of Aristotle and emphasized the inward personal spirit. The finite and the present receive due honor. From this honor the work of science in the modern period begins. Worldly matters demand worldly judgments. Yet, the individual mind and heart connect to the truth of the eternal. God becomes the truest reality of the individual. 

Modern philosophy becomes independent. In the past, philosophy often found its home in a religion. No longer is this the case. Theology should not, on this account, set itself against philosophy. 

Some say that the philosopher in the modern period should live free of external relationships with the world. However, the modern philosopher needs to engage life with others in the social order. The modern world is this power of connecting with others. The modern world assumes the necessity of this connection with others for the wholeness of human life. The philosopher is part of an academic community. However, of genuine importance is to remain true to one’s aims.

A systematic treatment of philosophy would continue with thorough reflection upon those who started the modern philosophical period, such as Bacon, Descartes, Spinoza, Locke, Hobbes, and Leibniz. It would continue with Berkeley and Hume. Rousseau must receive special attention. Kant, Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel would continue this analysis. One needs to continue this analysis through the rest of the 1800’s and 1900’s.

The religious community does not have to turn its subjective feeling outward. It can keep such feelings within the religious community and make some accommodation with the State. When piety turns polemical, it becomes a sign of weakness. The claims of the pious heart are, of course, unimpeachable. If religion is the basis of our intentions and assertions, one cannot criticize them based on their shallowness or their immorality. Pious people like those in the Quaker tradition could never form a nation, any more than a parasite could exist on its own. [79] If such people were to constitute a nation, it would have lamb-like gentleness. It would occupy itself only with the individual self, pampering itself, while always contemplating its own excellence. Such persons raise to importance the smallest things. Such a state would have a lame and cowardly gentleness. Life in the real world demands energy, not so much for obsession with the self and its sinfulness, but with life in this real, actual, social order. One can have pious wishes, of course. Yet, if all one has is the pious wish regarding the great and true, a wish one can never actualize in the social order, we might think of it as a godless wish. In this case, the godly person could do nothing because of the holy and true needed to remain so. Further, definite action has its defects. If an ideal is too good to be actual, then something is wrong with the stated ideal. Human life is not too good for the true and good. 

The general result of the history of philosophy is the following. Philosophy has always pursued truth and goodness. The succession of philosophical systems represents the necessary stages through which truth and goodness must go to emerge from this intellectual struggle. Each stage incorporates previous stages. Therefore, we can be Platonists no longer. We must raise ourselves above the pettiness of individual opinions, thoughts, objections and difficulties. We must rise above our vanity, as if our thoughts were of any value. Individuals are parts of the whole. As such, individuals are like blind people driven forward by the indwelling spirit of the whole. A good history of philosophy will bring before the reader a successive series of forms that give shape to the human spirit and indicate the connection between them. In some ways, the history of philosophy is a kingdom of the human spirit. Beneath this history is a unifying quest of humanity for what is true and good. In that sense, this history cannot be just multiple and separate schools of thought or even a series that has no relationship with each other. The history of philosophy is the nobility of the human quest becoming knowledgeable of itself. Each school, each series, becomes a moment of this noble human quest. 

A good history of philosophy will inspire the reader to grasp the spirit of this time, which is present in us by nature. The individual can then bring the spirit of this time from its lifeless seclusion into the light of day.[80]

Such thinking meant the dissolution of eschatology in this Hegelian monism of the absolute Spirit, in which the independence of finite beings are only transitional points in the development of the Spirit. Ardor at the presence of the absolute had as its reverse side the tendency to dissolve the idea of individual immortality that Kant had made so significant as part of his notion of practical reason. The full presence of the Absolute means a full implementing of the eschaton in the present. [81] The Hegelian philosophy of history views the course of history as theodicy. He could emphasize strongly that the whole mass of concrete evil is set before us precisely in world history. However, the thinking spirit, the philosopher, will experience reconciliation to the negative by realizing partly what is in truth the gold of the world, and partly that this goal will be achieved in it. Thus, all that is negative will vanish as something that is subjugated and vanquished. Hegel viewed reconciliation of the finite spirit with God throughout renunciation of its autonomy, of its separation from God, by taking up the finite into the eternal, the union of the divine nature with the human. Incarnation is reconciliation. Such reconciliation only needed actualization in the world that the notion of freedom begun in the Reformation and furthered in the modern political state would advance. In this way, the course of history philosophically understood was a theodicy. The fault of the Hegelian system on this point is that it lost the tension between what reconciliation accomplished in Jesus Christ and its eschatological achievement. What Hegel has done, however, is to sacrifice the particular, the good of the individual, to the general, the Idea of the actualization of freedom, a criticism he had himself leveled against the French Revolution. [82]

The end of philosophy of which Hegel wrote is a turn. Everything essential in terms of the dialectic of freedom has happened. The plot of the Absolute, and therefore that of human history, has been resolved, and anything that comes after is epilogue. The restlessness of the World Spirit revealed in the emergence of nuanced freedom out of the dialectic of necessity and freedom. Nietzsche referred to this vision of World Spirit as God walking earth, learning through the struggles and miseries of human history. Nietzsche thought it was delusional, for there is no walker, but just blood and dust. Hegel presents a Christian vision of history that invited reflection on the God of the future. The future is spoken for, but it is not locked down. God is the momentum that has already crossed the finish line. In theology today there has been a turn toward eschatology and the God of the future, and that there is an openness, that in a sense transcendence itself is open to this future, this eschatological approach to the future. Hegel wrapped things up too neatly, but if you open transcendence to the future—like so many theologians do now—it becomes less a finished circle and more a widening horizon. History does not end. It leans into the future.

Does not the philosophy of art, of religion, of the history of philosophy—all interwoven from the outset with each other in a differentiated unity—reveal clearly with all the consequences what we underlined earlier in connection with his system? Mediating in the centuries-old conflict between idea and history, Hegel gave a surprisingly compact, inexhaustibly profound and consciously Christian view of history. Hegel’s whole thinking aims at being historical thinking, his historical thinking at being religious thinking. His religious thinking, of course, is meant to be understood philosophically and speculatively in the light of the incarnation of God: not as a timeless, static metaphysic of ideas, but as a comprehensive, dynamic Christian philosophy of history. Religion provides the poetry of human life and history, while philosophy places that poetry in the polished form of reason and thought. Thus, Christianity focuses upon the God-man, Jesus of Nazareth, but Hegel lifts that picture-thinking into the rational thought of God-humanhood, where the divine self is incarnated in history. Christianity focuses on the person, Jesus, while Hegel focuses on a process of human discover of the unity between God and humanity. We now discover the Christian origin of the dialectic: birth (thesis), death (contradiction through suffering and violence), and resurrection (synthesis). Suffering happens in the encounter of thesis and antithesis, and a form of dying, but both thesis and antithesis are elevated into the resurrection of a new if scarred synthesis, like the wounds that remained on the risen Lord. Every clash has a funeral dimension, such as ideas collapsing, egos cracking, and worldviews ending, but out of the clash a new thing breathes. Hegel’s onto-theo-logy has been manifested as a historical theodicy (justification of God), which, at the same time along the whole line and in all its strata, is meant to be a comprehensive divine historiodicy (justification of history). It was at this time that a more than two-thousand-year-old world picture was finally shattered and the older image of God and man was seen as historically transitory. Human history had been stripped of its magic and mystery and become secularized; new economic-sociological conditions, a revolutionary new “civic” society, had been formed. The French Revolution had left scarcely any political, moral or religious institution unshaken; the Enlightenment and the conflict it produced between faith and reason had spread far beyond the educated classes to the ordinary people; not only state and society but also Christianity and churches had suffered an immense loss of integrating power, and anti-Enlightenment, subjective romanticism was scarcely in a position to restore it. 

It was at this time that Hegel’s achievement made a tremendous impression on many people who wanted in intellectual honesty to be both human and Christian, enlightened and devout, rooted in tradition and progressive. Here is a modern philosopher, rising above criticism and defense of religion, in a grandiose compact system, producing a visualization of Christian truth to which even critical modern man could give his assent. An assent that was not merely a naïve belief in authority but one that was philosophically substantiated and thought out to the last detail. Instead of the modern schizophrenia of faith and enlightenment, a differentiated unity of philosophy and theology. Instead of the alternative of rationalism or emotional religion, a reason that united understanding and feeling. Instead of orthodox biblicism or a philosophical natural religion, a systematic effort to produce an up-to-date biblical hermeneutic. Anyone who reads for himself the texts from Hegel’s Philosophy of Religion and compares them with earlier passages on the subject will recognize that the author—who was admittedly not an exegete but a systematizer—had taken very much greater pains in interpreting Scripture particularly in this work. He tried here to be more precise about a number of difficult points that had not been clearly expounded in the earlier works and in the main published works: in his teaching on the Trinity, on good and evil in man, on the generation of the Son and the creation of the world, on the uniqueness of Christ (description of his message and fate), finally on the meaning of the Spirit and the Church. His philosophy of religion is certainly anything but orthodox dogmatics, but it is also anything but superficial rationalism. It is a new paradigm, a new paradigm-candidate. But will it be successful? Compared with normal theology—and this may be of interest not only to theologians—this philosophical-theological view of history, reached as a result of unsparing mental effort, presents some striking features: Hegel’s God is not a spirit beyond the stars, working on the world from outside, but the mind permeating all minds, in the depth of human subjectivity. 

---

[1] In addition to my own reading, I am indebted to: (Kung, The Incarnation of God: An Introduction to Hegel's Theological Thought as Prolgomena to a Future Christology 1970. 1987) (C. Taylor, Hegel 1975)

[2] Hegel, “Religion is one of our greatest concerns in life,” 1793.

[3]        Hegel Philosophy of Right.

[4]        Critique of Pure Reason (Book II, Chapter 2, section 3),

[5] Hegel, Science of Logic volume II, forward.

[6] (Pannenberg, Metaphysics and the Idea of God 1988, 1990) will be the basis for the following discussion, which he develops in dialogue with Hegel and Whitehead and in opposition to David Hume, atomism, analytical philosophy, and P. F. Strawson.

^[7] Hegel (Science of Logic book II, section 1, chapter 1)

[8] (Pannenberg, Systematic Theology 1998, 1991)Volume 1, 446. 

[9] (Pannenberg, Metaphysics and the Idea of God 1988, 1990).

[10] On the History of Modern Philosophy, p. 138. 

^[11] (Lesser Logic par 122-123)

[12] History of Modern Philosophy, 138, 141, 143, 145, 146, 147, 152-55.

[13] (Pannenberg, Systematic Theology 1998, 1991)Volume 1, 360. 

[14] (Pannenberg, Systematic Theology 1998, 1991)Volume 1, 354-5. 

[15] (Pannenberg, Systematic Theology 1998, 1991)Volume 1, 366.

[16] (Pannenberg, Metaphysics and the Idea of God 1988, 1990)

^[17] Science of Logic (1812, Volume II, Section 3, Chapter 3

[18] (Pannenberg, Metaphysics and the Idea of God 1988, 1990)

[19] Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, 1807, Par 77-84.

[20] Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, Par 90-110.

[21] Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, Par 111-130.

[22] Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, Par 131.

[23] Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, Par 132-165.

[24] Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, paragraph 85-87.

[25] (Girard, Deceit, Desire, and the Novel: Self and Other in Literary Structure 1976)

[26] (Kojeve 1933-1939, French)

[27] Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, paragraph 793-808.

[28] Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, paragraph 231-239.

[29] Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, paragraph 231-295.

[30] Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, paragraph 296-297.

[31] Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, paragraph 298-308.

[32] Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, paragraph 309-346.

[33] Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, paragraph 347-359.

[34] Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, paragraph 360-366.

[35] Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, paragraph 367-380.

[36] Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, paragraph 381-393.

[37] Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, paragraph 397-418.

[38] Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, paragraph 419-428.

[39] Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, paragraph 429-437.

[40] Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, 438-442.

[41] Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, paragraph 484-487.

[42] Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, paragraph 446-483.

[43] Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, paragraph 526.

[44] Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, paragraph 529-556.

[45] Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, paragraph 557-559, 562.

[46] Hegel, preface to Hinrich, Religion, 1822.

[47] Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, paragraph 764-771.

[48] Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, paragraph 776-787.

[49] Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, paragraph 793-808.

[50] (Kojeve 1933-1939, French)

[51] Philosophy of Mind, 396, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971, 1830, with zursatz of 1845. 

[52] Immanuel Kant, Anthropology From a Pragmatic Point of View, 1798, Hegel, Philosophy of Mind, 1830, Aquinas, Summa Theologica, First Part, Question 83, Objection 5 and Second Part, question 46, Article 5, Gregor the Great, The Book of Pastoral Rule, Chapter III, H. J. and M. W. Eysenck, 1958.

[53] Carl Jung and the Myers-Briggs personality inventory.

[54] James Fowler, Stages of Faith: The Psychology of Human Development and the Quest for Meaning, 1981, but I rely also on Erik Erickson, Identity and the Life Cycle, 1946, 1959. 

[55] Philosophy of Mind, translated by William Wallace, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971, 1830 and the Zusatze of 1845, Section 395. 

[56] Aquinas, Summa Theologica, First Part, Question 83, Objection 5 and the reply.

[57] Ibid, First Part of the Second Part, Question 46, Article 5. 

[58] Ibid, Second Part of the Second Part, Question 156, Article 1. 

[59] Gregory the Great (540-604), The Book of Pastoral Rule, Chapter III, “How the Joyful and the Sad are to be Admonished.” 

[60] (Hardimon 1994) (Drucilla Cornell 1991)

[61] This is different from consolation. In fact, Freud is the moved within the resignation and consolation circle in his book, Civilization and its Discontents. All we can do is resign ourselves to the discontent that results from the conflict between our instincts and the demands of society. Our consolation is in sublimation. For Freud, the split between the individual and the social world is of such a nature that reconciliation is impossible. Consolation is a response to disappointment and has an element of acceptance. A consolation prize provides a substitute for what one wanted; one is to receive comfort in it. Consolation can also represent compensation now; a stage along the way to something else. Consolation involves coming to terms with the failure of satisfaction of expectations that one still regards as reasonable.

[62] Nietzsche did this.

[63] Taylor, Charles, “Hegel’s Ambiguous Legacy for Modern Liberalism,” (Drucilla Cornell 1991)

[64] (Pannenberg, Systematic Theology 1998, 1991)Volume 3,635-6.

[65] Philosophy of History (1830-31), introduction.

[66] Hegel, Philosophy of History (1830-1831), introduction.

[67] Hegel, The Philosophy of History (1830-31), conclusion.

[68] (Pannenberg, Systematic Theology 1998, 1991)Volume 3, 502. 

[69] (Houlgate 2007)

[70] (Rouner 1982) (de Nys 2009)

[71] Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, paragraph 776-787.

[72] Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, paragraph 764-771.

[73] Hegel (“Faith and Knowledge,” 1802).

[74] Paul Ricoeur, The Status of Vorstellung in Hegel’s Philosophy of Religion (Rouner 1982)

[75] (Rouner 1982), J. N. Findlay, “Hegel as Theologian.”

[76] Hegel, History of Philosophy, 1816, Inaugural Address.

[77] Hegel (History of Philosophy, Introduction).

[78] Hegel, History of Philosophy, Greek Philosophy, section one, chapter iii A.3.

[79] Hegel, History of Philosophy, Greek Philosophy, Section One, Chapter III A.3.

[80] The end of Hegel’s History of Philosophy.

[81] (Pannenberg, Systematic Theology 1998, 1991)Volume 3, 532-3. 

[82] (Pannenberg, Systematic Theology 1998, 1991)Volume 3,635-6.