Hegel's Apotheosis of Logic [1 ed.] 9781443860925, 9781443816847

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Hegel’s Apotheosis of Logic

Hegel’s Apotheosis of Logic By

Stephen Theron

Hegel’s Apotheosis of Logic By Stephen Theron This book first published 2017 Cambridge Scholars Publishing Lady Stephenson Library, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2PA, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2017 by Stephen Theron All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-4438-1684-1 ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-1684-7

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Preface ....................................................................................................... vii Chapter One ................................................................................................. 1 Aristotle, Hegel and the Mediating Medieval Moment Chapter Two .............................................................................................. 27 Hegel and Scholastic Logic Chapter Three ............................................................................................ 43 Christology, Self-Consciousness and Personality Chapter Four .............................................................................................. 68 From Quantity to Essence Chapter Five .............................................................................................. 73 Content and Form Chapter Six ................................................................................................ 91 Hegel, Heidegger and Others on the Ground Chapter Seven.......................................................................................... 111 Self-Consciousness as Content Chapter Eight ........................................................................................... 135 Self-Consciousness Continued Chapter Nine............................................................................................ 182 The Object Chapter Ten ............................................................................................. 236 Hegel on Judgment Chapter Eleven ........................................................................................ 256 Hegel on Syllogism

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Chapter Twelve ....................................................................................... 271 Geach, McTaggart, Hegel Chapter Thirteen ...................................................................................... 282 Inciarte on Hegel Chapter Fourteen ..................................................................................... 295 The Necessity in the Content of the Absolute Picture-Idea Epilogue................................................................................................... 308 Method, Orthodoxy and Mysticism

PREFACE

In the case of a philosophical work it seems not only superfluous, but, in view of the nature of philosophy, even inappropriate and misleading to begin, as writers usually do in a preface, by explaining the end the author had in mind, the circumstances which gave rise to the work, and the relation in which the writer takes it to stand to other treatises on the same subject, written by his predecessors or his contemporaries. For… by determining the relation which a philosophical work professes to have to other treatises on the same subject, an extraneous interest is introduced, and obscurity is thrown over the point at issue… To help to bring philosophy nearer to the form of science… that is what I have set before me.

Thus Hegel begins his celebrated Preface to his The Phenomenology of Mind.1 It harmonises with this present essay in the philosophy of religion specifically in Hegelian spirit, where the universal, as authentic and concrete, is identically particular, the authentically particular universal. This is Hegel’s most characteristic doctrine, that of the Notion or Concept (Encyclopaedia Logic, 160) of the Absolute Idea. The Absolute Idea is the dialectical crystallisation of the concept of infinity. As such it enables speculative thinking. To deny divinity to the Absolute is to deny its absoluteness, its infinity. Infinity is that which absorbs all else, this “else” being just thereby, by infinity, nothing. The Absolute is thus separate or “holy” as separating away all that is not itself into nothingness. It is thus anyhow God. The distinguishing feature of God, however, is personality, on account of which “God” is generally reckoned a finite and hence un-philosophical conception, a representation. But personality, like number, admits an infinite extension or intensification indifferently. So God must contain it and the Absolute must be God. It follows that if it is true that personality essentially involves relation to its other, as to other than self within self, then God, the Absolute, is a unity in the sense of a community.

1

The Phenomenology of Mind, Harper, New York, 1967, p.67, J.B. Baillie’s translation.

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Yet it is an absolute unity, the unity or One as such. Hence any self or member of this unity is identical with each and all of the others.2 This is the condition of Love as a universal because actually and concretely universal, taking Love as quiescent or acquiescent union. So God is Love, that is, not merely system but, necessarily, and hence freely, systematic unity of the infinitely differentiated. This unity, as thus perfect, is within each self as constituting it. To each self, “closer than self”, belongs this universal love-relation of Self and other, its other, brought to light in the Trinitarian representation, in first picturing, first configuring, the Absolute thus revealing itself in such pictorial thinking, such as we call “religious”, for which, however, the Absolute remains mystery, other, holy. Devotion, as response to this holiness, is the necessary posture of individual consciousness and thus informs philosophy also.3 In sublating such individual consciousness, therefore, philosophy, or rather Sophia, which is thus sancta Sophia, becomes wisdom in discarding individuality (“my thoughts are not your thoughts”), thus completing or, Hegel says, accomplishing religion, finishing and/or perfecting it. Such wisdom, of course, is not the sole property of academic professors or of the proletariat or of any other social class. It may be spoken by a man hanging on a Cross, must indeed, we shall see, be thus particularly spoken. It ultimately requires just one Word, in unity. This will mean, however, that the Absolute, far from being immobile, is the unresting uttering or going forth of that one Word, while this becoming of self in other is revealed as the very essence of Spirit. Spirit is spiration “in act” as Spirit “is community”. “Spirit is its own community” (Phenomenology of Mind, p.778). “Spirit is Spirit knowing its own self” and “its figurative idea is the true absolute content”. “What moves itself, that is Spirit”. Its notion arises in “the sphere of religion”. Yet the “religious communion”, in its returning “out of its figurative thinking” is not yet “fulfilled in this its self-consciousness”. It is not “aware what it is”. The Absolute cannot be only good. It must include Evil since Being, says Hegel, is “just as good as”, no better than, Non-Being and vice versa. Inasmuch as they are or may be seen as an interchangeable identity their equivalence is not restricted to a first, abstract moment of the Science of Logic. The Absolute is in fact the indifferent play between them in a proto-identity. Or, we can rather say, just this is absolute Goodness, including its negative. Hence, we hear in King Lear, we are as flies to the gods; they kill us for their sport. This is indeed a moment of Spirit’s own 2

Cf. Daniel Kolak, I Am You, Pomona, New York, 2004, especially “Preliminary Acknowledgements”, pp. xiii-xxii (http://www.springer.com/978-1-4020-2999-8). 3 So Hegel speaks of philosophy as Gottesdienst.

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play with itself, with which we ourselves must or should identify, thus sublating our conceptions of our finite self or, it is the same, sublating our finite selfhood. The God-man himself cries out “Why have you forsaken me?” and that in the very moment of victory, of impending resurrection. Or, in God’s forsaking him he himself becomes God, Spirit. Spirit thus proceeds “from the Son” or, again, God is realised, incarnated, in the lowest become highest. This is forgiveness and reconciliation, many become one “in us” but, again, “as you and I, Father, are one”. At the same time as we, with Hegel, rate philosophy above religious representation, we are forced to acknowledge that a people formed in and by religion, the ancient Jews4, as “a nation of philosophers” (Porphyry, 234-301), here take from it, and hence from their own spiritual substance, in gradual development (flow from representation to concept) the power and means of forging new, that is, philosophical concepts of the highest order, as appears in the development of theologia thereafter, shown forth at least equally in the great Greek thinkers, however, whether in partial or complete independence, which is philosophy itself.5 In this way its concepts are after all abstracted from and built upon immediate historical experience and immediate experience generally, also called senseexperience, of all, namely, that is touched, heard, seen, tasted or smelt, inclusive of later but also immediate memory of these, as they are developed within “physical” Life as itself “the immediate Idea”.

4

This name, Latin Judaei, for the inhabitants of Judaea, a Roman province and seat of Judaism as a religion developed by this chief of the twelve “tribes” said to be developed from twelve sons, such as Judah, of the patriarch Jacob, renamed “Israel”, which can mean strong (sarah) either in or against God, after the night when Jacob was said to have “wrestled” with and hence against him (Genesis 32), thus seeing him “face to face” (32, verse 31), a kind of figure of philosophical method. 5 A different but related account should be given of the different but congruous developments of systems of thought and life away from the Mediterranean basin, some more strongly instancing the interflow, in proportions varying with their histories, between religion with its art(s) and philosophy proper, whether we consider Hindu-Buddhist traditions and systems or those of Australasian, African, (other) Semitic or American aboriginals, too often thoughtlessly dismissed as “primitive”. The same principle, of religious representation flowing towards the Concept, applies to later and derivative formations, such as Islam, separations within and without the basic tradition being yet profoundly identical in their proposed difference (of “inner and outer”, declared one in Hegel’s system of logic, as drawing an being drawn, in temporal representation, towards unity, as effect and cause in one, again.

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That is, “the mediation of figurative thought is necessary” in order, namely, to come to Absolute Knowledge (Phenomenology of Mind, p.780). This is Hegel’s conclusion after at length addressing the difficulties inherent in saying “evil is inherently the same as what goodness is”, which means that “both are really done away with”. Even for Aquinas Goodness or the Good was no more than an ens rationis. The reality was being, called good as the fundamental desire, true as the knowable, one as contrasted with phenomena.6 Evil and goodness meet and unite in religious figuration. So the apostle Paul says that Christ “was made sin for us”, a curse even.7 In becoming thus he did not cease to be what he was, the “beloved son” and so on. Hegel knows this and it informs all his thought, such as his discussion of conscience under Objective Spirit, which when absolutised he finds to be wicked as contravening Sittlichkeit or the first principles of ethical tradition or custom which make of ethics a science, also Aristotle’s view. This view leads Hegel straight into, or comes straight out of, a discussion of angelology, recalling but not merely reproducing that substantial, richly philosophical treatise in the Summa theologica of Thomas Aquinas, First Part. Hegel may well have taken inspiration for his view here from the Biblical fiction of Job. There God allows Satan not merely to tempt Job but to utterly despoil him or, at least, his phenomenal existence “on earth”, as we say. Yet Christians pray, “Lead us not into temptation”. This, however, confirms the thesis, that God as well leads into temptation as he blesses, and this abandonment by God to evil is often represented in religion as itself punishment for or consequence of failure in the face of previous temptations, as in the Indian karma theory. This however presents thought with an infinite regress in the sense of Hegel’s “bad infinite”, bad because opposed to thought. The “original sin” cannot be reduced to a totally innocent deception.8 The solution to this surd presents 6

See our “The bonum honestum and the Lack of Moral Motive in Aquinas’s Ethical Theory”, The Downside Review, No. 411, April 2000, pp. 85-110; also the first three chapters of Natural Law Reconsidered, Peter Lang, Frankfurt-am-Main 2002, subtitled “The Ethics of Human Liberation”. 7 Cf. Hans Küng’s exposition of and remarks on Hegel’s text in his Menschwerdung Gottes, subtitled as an “Introduction to Hegel’s theological thought as prolegomena for a future Christology”, Herder, Freiburg im Breisgau, 1970, esp. chapter V, 2 and 3. 8 At best it is, as essence of “what was to be”, failure of a necessary trial, as Abraham, later in Genesis, succeeded in his trial, accepting the pointless sacrifice as Eve refused the pointless prohibition (the fruit was “good to eat”).

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itself, in the Greek figure reaffirmed later by Nietzsche, as the selfcancelling circularity of Time or, in a word, the “Eternal Return”. This however cannot be thought of as falling short of affirmation of such a return not only of life, whether abstractly individual or in itself, but of each and any moment, yet the same time cannot be finally represented as returning upon itself afterwards, since it is not then the same. Hence there may be evil in God but evil as “redeemed” from its first inception, in Concept and knowledge, that is. Hence Hegel so to say deciphers it, phenomenal evil, as consequently one with the self-centredness inherent in knowledge. Since this cannot be evil in any straightforward phenomenal sense he effectively thematises or demythologises our everyday abstract notion of evil. This more profound, holistic view of it, he claims, was already present in religion as represented in the figure of Lucifer, bearer of light, who was, is, in fact the first and greatest of spirits. Even though he mentions his “fall” he later dismisses this concept as any kind of possible philosophical notion in the case of man. So the “other” created “at once” in the place of Lucifer is itself a pictorial representation of what we have expounded above. The non-thematised view, which takes the idea of evil straight from daily phenomenal life, leads eventually to the idea of an absolute evil or unredeemed Other in perpetual dualist opposition, thus robbing God of his own infinity.9 This is the final abstraction of the original abstraction itself. So it is that when we see each moment, in the Concept, in the Absolute Idea, as utterly one with as containing in itself all and each moment, as we ourselves as persons contain and are the absolute unity of all persons, and this itself is the unity of possibility and being or Act, then, in pardon, of self or (its) other, we conceive and are infinity, the thought that thinks itself. This alone, says Hegel, is “blessedness” (EL 159). It will be found that this notion, as concretising evil at its root, is one with the idea of Evil as not merely non-being but, it is the same, “sham-being”, as he calls it at EL35 Zus. So ultimately this conception is the same as saying, is a way of saying, that in God being and non-being are both transcended in their opposition, the very first thesis of Hegel’s logic. The conceptions of immortality or God, we might wish to say, are nonnegotiable as requirements of Reason. Without them, that is, the world is not “perfect”, McTaggart argues in his Studies in the Hegelian Cosmology (1903). This merely corresponds to the classical “argument from natural desire”, which it thus convalidates. It lies behind Leibniz’s logical 9

We find this in Hannah Arendt’s account of the evils of our own or recent times, e.g. in her The Origins of Totalitarianism, Vol. III.

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conception of the “best of all possible worlds”. However, both conceptions are initially figurative, in a measure, and opinions differ as to whether rational thematisation of them can still pass under the same names or not. To appreciate this is to see that there is no call, from, say, a Christian or even a philosophical point of view, for absolute exclusion of systems denominated, often wrongly (as in the case of Spinoza, Hegel argues), atheist. * Omne ens est bonum, Aquinas taught. So if evil were a being, evil would be good, it follows. This is what Hegel is pointing out, in consideration of those, like C.G. Jung, wishing to emphasise the reality of evil. Evil is thus a “moment” of the Absolute Idea, which Hegel instances as “the wrath of God”. He adds that while this is somehow an “unspiritual” way of talking it serves to bring out the abstract unreality of both good and evil taken separately and so “cancels” both of them or, better, subsumes both into the highest or total good, in affirmation of the whole Method or System of the Idea. The gods “know good and evil” but as one, in the self-known Idea. In this sense evil is only known as eliciting some greater good, goodness remaining all the while absolute in appropriation of the contradictions we call evil. The Good is Being as presented to Will, this, “the voluntary”, itself crowning Cognition while Being, as finally envisioned and hence showing itself, is normative and the only possible ground for normativity. It is disclosed as the Absolute Idea, Act thinking itself in entire and hence all-inclusive transcendence. This then is the Good with which Being had previously been identified, the “all in all” of universal Love or “blessedness”, harmony, absolute System, Reason. In becoming man God finally becomes God, as dying to any merely abstract conception of himself. This is merely Hegel’s teaching, in plasticity of concept, that the Last is really First, absolute and eternal, the End of history in every sense, last, time-destroying, eternal Act of “ungrateful Spirit”. So Spirit, God, comes first to his perfect existence with the incarnation and finally death of “the mediator”. The identity of the latter as individual or universal is wholly indeterminate in terms of these abstract or formal divisions. This follows from Hegel’s whole teaching on the Subjective Notion, his account, in fact, of syllogistic. This death is equally the death of the initially abstract God-figure, but also, even, of the abstractly taken Idea of the Logic. The logical system or method is thus self-transcendent. Only thus does it preserve each and every moment of itself, as having no

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existence and truth except as in the whole, which is the self-thinking Concept, not self-thought as in a past, that is, or as if lying dead and inert as a subject for anatomical science. What is there first revealed, in Logic, is all-sufficient Act, subsuming in itself all abstract possibility as realised. Act without limit (what would limit it?) is self-consciousness in and for itself, act of all acts, simple or perfect unity in infinite diversity, each element or aspect having the unity of all within itself as one with that unity. All is there accomplished as movement itself, unperfected act, is perfected in Act as, again, act of all acts. Freedom is identity with Act, transcending mere magic in unreserved affirmation of the factual, where what historically becomes is advance and perfection, again, of the dialectic, as each philosophy, Hegel teaches, is perfect in its time, since, in fact, there is no time, no Nature, but dialectic rather and, finally, the Speculative Concept which is Spirit, the Absolute. This is why, ultimately, the conception, the possibility or the dream of a thing and its actualisation are the same. This applies to Substance and is, incidentally, the pure Aristotelian doctrine. It means, incidentally, that there are no merely or abstractly possible persons. Ultimately it means that only persons are. If there are computers or, more probably, dogs then these are persons. Aquinas seems to deny this in teaching that plants and animals do not “partake in the resurrection”, their absence being more than compensated for by or in “the beauty of the bodies of the redeemed”. This may equally be taken, however, as saying that dogs are not abstractly or purely dogs and so on. If we want them they will be there, if we love them, rather, they are there. For Will, as rational, perfecting “Cognition proper” as included, in Hegel’s two works of Logic, in Cognition generally, is universal (what would limit it?). That persons are sexed, furthermore, is no mere biological requirement and this teaching of Aquinas opens, brings home to us in our world of shadows, a self-reflexive vista of erotic love without limit. Only thus would love itself be freed from abstraction and unreal limit, as is proper to the Concept. Renunciation is nonetheless a genuine moment in the apprehension of this truth, of Truth. The same applies to the habitual abstract or exclusive opposition of eros and agape (charity) in general. This general principle, however, must apply equally to abstractly finite sexualisation itself. For Wisdom the outside is as well the inside as vice versa. “Spirit is its own community.” Substance then is realised in Person, conceptually, as it is dialectically realised historically in person so as to be realised in persons. “I and my Father are one”. I is (hence am) “the universal of universals”. The transcendental ego of Kant, Husserl and other abstract practitioners is here either quite subverted or in its implications fully explicated, thus “saving”

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their own doctrines. In this way Substance becomes, is, Subject, as if coming to itself whether as concept or in actuality indifferently. In this way Aristotle speaks indifferently of the soul as a substance (402a 23) and of the substance of the soul (402a 8). These both refer to “the whole living thing”, Gendlin comments. Substances “are explainable from themselves”, for Aristotle. They are their own essence or, indeed, being. Ultimately this will mean that there is just one substance with which any “other” substance can only be identical. This move will itself involve transition from Thing to Subject, from Existence to Idea and from Idea to Spirit, Mind, “setting in order all things” (Anaxagoras).10 A basic liturgical invocation begs, lays down and elicits that God has become man that man might become God. Not phenomenal man but mind, spirit, nous, is God, as Anaxagoras and the others, back down to the aboriginal tribe whose ancestors were said by them to have created the world, clearly saw.11 For what is thus God is no longer abstractly phenomenal, but “becomes a living spirit”, as Paul said of “the second Adam”. Neither Adam nor anything else was ever simply Adam. Here again the figure of “ungrateful Spirit” is central. It speaks figuratively of the actual as ungrateful. Spirit itself, however, is etymologically a figure from the blowing of the wind, something that the Hegelian distinction between figurative and philosophical language has still further to surmount. For it is just this mixing of figure and truth which he criticises in Trinitarian theology, for example, while acknowledging its necessity. Spirit’s ingratitude lies in its forgetful climb “from shadows to reality”. Death to the phenomenal is itself eternal “life”, thought. Thus Life is and is not a figure corresponding to the category of “the idea immediate” (viventibus vivere esse). Every abstracted “thing”, such as the individual, is phenomenal, a partial and momentary appearance, Schein. The universal is concrete and, indeed, particular. In speaking of abstracted thing we come some way towards understanding Hegel’s use of or attitude to “reality”. Realitas, and the cognate German term Realität (as distinct from Wirklichkeit) derives from the Latin res, meaning very much matter and 10

Eugene Gendlin (Commentary on De anima, Endnote on 402a 8-23) refers here to Fernando Inciarte’s “The Unity of Aristotle’s Metaphysics” (English version as a chapter in Inciarte’s posthumous Substance and Action, Ohms, Hildersheim, 2002). 11 This distinction recalls the dispute between Heidegger and Sartre on “humanism”. For anthropo-psychological background (and more) see articles by Axel Randrup on Internet. Randrup’s Humean perspective is, so to say, incipiently Hegelian.

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thing, matter in the sense of an essentially particular conceptual content thus “materialised” (rather than literal materia or hyle, as we find also with Stoff: a unity in duality of meaning, cf. res-publica, republic). This sense of Thing, however, is transcended in the dialectic as finally abstract, like our everyday assumptions about “reality”. This Spirit, first emerging after this death, as the birth of thought, is (also) the life of the (religious, believing) community in a Christian culture, such as Hegel lived in. Even that is just therefore not yet its full manifestation, a shadow, as the Church itself is figure and sacrament, though no doubt “effective” of what it figures, sacramental theology teaches. A becoming God, as even or especially a God that becomes, is not literally an option. The becoming is internal to the dialectical System, its unfolding from within, for which time is a figure merely. It only unfolds as being “already” perfected, as the Form is seen in hylomorphism as directing development of the material composite (otherwise why would it unfold in either case?). Soul is unchanging and even, again, the whole substance.12 The possibility and the actual being of Substance are the same. There are no merely possible substances. Our first apprehension of contingency, therefore, is surmounted in reflexive thought. Being, after all or as emerges “at the end”, is act and actus actuum. Time is seen as working as well or better backwards. That is, there is no time. It gets kicked away, “for Spirit that knows itself”. Time “appears as spirit’s destiny and necessity, where spirit is not yet complete within itself”. It is thus compelled by time itself, “the pure self in external form… not grasped and understood by the self” (Phenomenology of Mind, p.800). So we witness the “realised End” (Hegel, EL210). Why is this so and not nothing? Because Nothing is what cannot be, since the Nothing that is is at once Being and so not Nothing, or both together rather, as evil good, falsity or contradiction truth (from some point of view, at some moment), the many one and this perfectly. As an old song says, “It had to be you, Wonderful you, Nobody else, Gave me a thrill, You always did, And you

12

See, again, Aristotle’s Metaphysics VII. ‘Affectability is what Aristotle means by “matter”… If the soul as such also had an affectability, it would have still another body’ (Gendlin). Yet the soul is “the whole substance”. The Infinite, as such, has no body. This cannot mean it has to manage without a body, or without anything. Ungrateful spirit, again, kicks body away. In figure, “it is raised a spiritual body”.

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always will.” Being, in a word, is friendly and worth knowing. It is, in fact, by the doctrine of the Concept, closer than self, magis amicus.13

13

“Plato is my friend but Truth is more my friend”. This is the sense in which Aquinas startlingly concludes that the “society of friends” is not essential, even if appropriate (bene esse), to eternal happiness. Identity transcends and fulfils likeness. “I am you”.

CHAPTER ONE ARISTOTLE, HEGEL AND THE MEDIATING MEDIEVAL MOMENT

“This active emphasis is characteristic of Aristotle. Even the simplest bodies are not atoms, but activity, an interacting, the hot acting on the fluid-dry (De Gen & Cor). Bodies are interactions, not stuff that fills space and time” (Eugene Gendlin, Line by Line Commentary on Aristotle’s De Anima, Focusing Institute, Spring Valley, New York, Vol. 2, p.16).

Our topic here is precisely this relation of continuity between Aristotle and Hegel and certain questions arising from this. The whole thrust of Hegel’s thought, whether in The Phenomenology of Mind (e.g. the chapter on Force, in the shape of Understanding) or in the two works of Logic, is to establish that bodies are “interactions”. Such interaction is in effect selfconsciousness itself and alone, to which bodies are assimilated as phenomenal. Also this last point is implicit in Aristotle, who emphasises accordingly the active role of sense, that colour, for example, is not in the bodies themselves when unobserved, nor therefore any other qualities of sense, or of intellect, we might add. This is the force of his saying “The sense in act is the sensible in act” and later, built fairly and squarely upon this truth, “The intellect in act is the intelligible in act”. Both of these sayings, when taken together, sabotage the division into active and passive just as does Hegel’s logic. * A further area still for discussion and clarification arises from the fact that Aristotle’s conclusions here are drawn within his book On the Soul, the foundational text of rational psychology as a, so to say, secondary branch of philosophy. This is not to deny that questions of the soul are further treated in his Metaphysics. That is, they are treated metaphysically in “first philosophy”. In Hegel, however, such matters are worked out within a focus that never deviates from “the Concept”. All is written with an eye to

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Chapter One

this Absolute, which is “the absolute Idea”. Yet it can be confidently claimed that this is also the final “unity of Aristotle’s metaphysics”.1 It seems that Hegel wants to treat the seemingly more specific topic of the Understanding, of reasoning, under the more general notion, as one might think, of Force (Kraft) and its expression. We must ask why he follows this line or path. This is made clear in the chapter on Understanding in The Phenomenology of Mind. If one only consulted the Logic of the Encyclopaedia one might miss this altogether, remaining puzzled as to why, in this Logic, “Force and its Expression” should be treated along with “the Whole and the Parts” and, thirdly, “Outward and Inward”, as main instances of “the essential correlation”. The risk of missing the point is increased by Hegel’s referring to a contemporary physicist, Helmholtz, who enunciated a “Law of Force”. One would not usually connect such force with Understanding, though this latter term gives the chapter its title. The point is, though, Helmholtz’s saying that “force is merely the objectified law of action”, if we remember Aristotle’s doctrine of the active intellect specifically (act, action). Hegel will stress how knowing, like sensing (which thus participates in and “grounds” knowing or thinking), is an act and ultimately Act purely or as such, precisely Aristotle’s position. Thinking thinks itself. Helmholtz, however, finds this characteristic reality most purely in its lowest instance, mechanical force. In the Encyclopaedia Logic, in place of this clue, we find an anchoring of Hegel’s more immediate historical sources in Herder, whose confusion it was to conceive God as force (Kraft, power), he tells us (Herder, Gott, Gespräche über Spinoza’s System, 1787). “Force” refers to God’s unremitting activeness. Hegel, we learn from the translator’s (Wallace) endnote, had criticised this doctrine before. Here he points out the finitude of Force as a concept. Force requires “solicitation from without”, as cannot be true of God, of the infinite. He promises to clarify this “when we reach Design”. There we see how the End is as such realised, without striving of any kind, in pure thought. Hegel in fact transcends the meansend duo from which one simply reasons from the fact of order (in nature) to an ordering intelligence, perhaps like a computer, as in Anaxagoras, or as in Aquinas’s fifth “way” to God, without however establishing its absolute infinity, i.e. that it is Spirit. “External design stands immediately

1

Cf. F. Inciarte: “Die Einheit der aristotelischen Metaphysik”, Philosophisches Jahrbuch 101, 1994, pp. 1-21. For the English version, see “The Unity of Aristotle’s Metaphysics” in Inciarte’s Substance and Action, Verlag Georg Ohms, Hildesheim 2002.

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in front of the idea”2 (EL205 add.). End as Idea excludes all projection beyond itself. There is no “and” of “force and its expression”. The Force or power (omnipotentia) is not a potency to be fulfilled further. The “object” is “merely ideal”. So “in the teleological notion as the selfexistent ideality the object is put as potentially null” (EL208, section 2). The End is realised immediately as one with its execution, as soul is realised in body (inherent particularisation of the Notion as syllogism: “everything is a syllogism”). We refer here to the “absolute Cunning of Reason” in its disguise as Subjective End, in religion the infinite activity of “divine providence”, by definition excluding nothing and no one as outside of its self-determination or realisation. This is “the overt unity of subjective and objective” and “this is the Idea” (EL212). Thus is the finitude of Force “clarified in Design… the object is the notion implicitly”. The action of the Idea “consists in getting rid of the illusion which it has created”. The Good is “eternally… accomplished”. Thus, “the notion is pure play” indeed, “sport”. This sport of “the gods” (King Lear: they kill us for their sport”) is thus not finitely wanton. So from this point of view force, even if it is a more general conception, does not get to the bottom of what thinking is or even, one might think, what understanding is as specified against speculative reason. It is thus already clear here that action and passion are superseded, are one, in thinking. There is really no force, no expense of power, and this, in fact, is the point of the identification, the “essential correlation”, of force and its expression, which is not its expression, since it is one with it. The “essential correlation”(EL 135 add.), as has to be faced, in fact “sublates” (aufhebt) also existence in the latter’s notion. It means even that what we might take as the whole is not whole, but subject, just as each and any item of it is subject and is, we could say, essentially correlate with all and each and, for that matter, with itself. We have not, in infinity, we cannot have to do with a composite whole, but only with an identical centre which, in the end, can be “neither one nor many”. Ex-istence then, any standing outside (ex-), is phenomenon, misperception. It appears, that 2

Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences 207, referring to Hegel’s paragraph as found in The Logic of Hegel, a translation by William Wallace, Oxford University Press 1873, 1965, of The Science of Logic, Hegel’s own title for this first part of his Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences. Future references to this work as a whole will by cited with “Enc.” and the paragraph number or, where particularised, for The Science of Logic, with “EL”, for The Philosophy of Nature with “EN”, for The Philosophy of Spirit with EG. References to the text of the “greater” Logic, Wissenschaft der Logik, Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt 1972, will be made with “WL I” or “WL II” and page number.

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is, at the level of finitude. Infinity, eternity, the Idea, takes existence, takes Life, beyond itself. That is, it is only by an analogy that one speaks of the ideal sphere, which is intellect or spirit, as life, even as the third type thereof after the two organic varieties, vegetative and animal. For life is “only the Idea immediate”. Or we can speak of the unity of essence with existence, of inward with outward, and so of force with its manifestation, in what becomes later the sublation, again, of the essential correlation in Actuality. This is only their “immediate” unity, however. Hegel is in fact here passing from Trinity in Unity to Unity in Trinity, the Father as Word, “in immediate external existence” (EL 143 with the addition) from which, as within which, Spirit, Mind, necessarily proceeds. Such procession, emanation, is in no way accidental. Evolution, that is, is not a philosophical doctrine. For the same reason he had dismissed the notion of the ancient Atomists, that the atoms only accidentally met within a “void”, as being picture-thinking for the essential relations, themselves also essentially correlated, of Repulsion and Attraction (I use capitals, on occasion at least, to denote categories). In fact only spirit, that is to say persons as each essentially universal, can correspond to as fulfilling the conditions for such atoms.3 The question whether we are “logicising” Trinity or “trinitising” Logic is not so much left open here as superseded. Logic as form of the world, of nature as mind considers it, is necessary as absolute Form. The absolute is the infinite and ideal4, compared with which Existence “is a poor category”, a category in fact in Hegel’s mediating Doctrine of Essence, placed between Being and the Concept in what is intended as a logical progression or Advance). So it is not meant that God, say, “falls short” of existence, any more than do we ourselves. In this affirmation, all the same, the “we” is sublated. I am not that individual taken as “abstracted” from others, nor is there any such5. The thought, that is, is Pauline throughout, though free of what Hegel takes as its husk of narrative representation. Mind, Spirit, is “neither one nor many” and “it is useless to count”, whether to three, to one hundred and forty four thousand or to six or seven 3

Cf. J.M.E. McTaggart: Studies in the Hegelian Cosmology, Cambridge 1901, Chapter Two. 4 My use of “ideal”, just here at least, is not to be confused with Hegel’s negative reference (EL95) to the “ideality” of all that is finite, meaning that it does not stand “in itself”, is precisely not absolute. 5 “A person is a person through persons” (Bantu proverb: umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu. This is supremely instanced in the Trinity or “absolute person” which, Hegel claims (EL151 add.), God is: “when the personality of God is before us, we are speaking of personality unalloyed”: EL63).

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milliards. “All one body we”, as the hymn has it. This is not so much an “eclipse of grace” (title of the recent book by Nicholas Adams) as its Rahnerian identification, in true theologia, as universal.6 “Everything is grace”, Rahner declares as superseding or absorbing certain finite representations of the latter. While Force and its Expression, the essential correlation, belong to categorial dialectic, as a stage in thinking, the understanding does not do so. Regarding “essential correlation”: Everything that exists stands in correlation, and this correlation is the veritable nature of every existence. The existent thing in this way has no being of its own, but only in something else: in this other however it is selfrelation; and correlation is the unity of the self-relation and relation-toothers.7

In the Phenomenology of Mind this category, Force, is used to explain understanding and, incidentally, to explain explanation. In the course of this explanation Hegel introduces the idea of an or, rather, the “inverted world”, implying that thought itself comes upon this as positing it necessarily. It is but a version of the momentary identification of the Outside and the Inside (in dialectic). The Essential Correlation is the correlation of opposites in logic (that is what is essential), in selfreflection, as reason itself is alone ad opposita, itself thus opposing Nature as in its idea determinata ad unum, un-free. So in (the Doctrine of) Essence, Hegel there says, everything is literally the opposite of what first appears. The inverted world recalls unmistakeably the paradoxes of Christian proclamation, inclusive of the latter’s “first” or, better, fundamental picturing as ethical proclamation in the “Sermon on the Mount” (happy are the poor, the mourners, the persecuted etc.). It is thus one of the most immediate instances of Hegel’s project of showing philosophy as the “accomplishment” (cf. EL212 add.) of religion, itself philosophy’s only or exclusive object, as he states here and there. This requirement, however, of openness to philosophical accomplishment, must be intrinsic to any 6 Cf. Georges van Riet’s “The Problem of God in Hegel”, parts II and III, in Philosophy Today 2/4, Summer 1967, pp.75-195, originally a Latin work delivered at a “Thomistic Congress” held at Rome, though here translated from the French version, Revue philosophique de Louvain 63, August 1965, pp.353-418 (incl. Part I). 7 EL135 add. Hegel, one may note, might just as well be speaking of the Trinitarian persons as of anything else, were it not for context.

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religion designated as absolute, as being a form (one of the three) of Absolute Spirit8. In abstract terms, that is to say, there cannot be an absolute religion as such. Religion is itself, like Art (first of the three), a mere moment of absolute spirit, of the development of philosophy, of Logic as “form of the world” (EL 162). The inverted world is not so much an instance as, rather. the very theorem of Essence, of what Hegelian Essence, its doctrine, is. Essence is the reversal or inversion of Being as fulfilling it, in progress towards the Concept or Notion (Begriff). Unlike Being in relation to Non-Being, the Positive without “essential correlation” with the Negative “has no sense” (EL111 add.). In understanding or explaining things, then, we invert or reverse them, mediating what was immediate. This alternative is presented, but as concealed, in Kipling’s “just so” stories, where in order to “explain” trunk or spots, the elephant or leopard is first presented, unimaginably, without them. As a further step, in the (post-Hegelian) logician Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, we get explanations that are not explanations at all but delightful nonsense, where indeed, but not in philosophy, “language goes on holiday” (Wittgenstein). It goes on holiday from philosophy, thus making a philosophical or “speculative” point (about the understanding, about explanation). Here we recall that philosophy, as thinking, must transcend language. This is the meaning of speculation. So Hegel points out that the truth is inexpressible in language since predication inevitably distorts, wrecked upon the rock of the pseudo-principle of identity, whereby two are one and conversely. The universal in fact is “neither one nor many”, again. Thus “it is useless to count”. In this sense intelligence is necessarily “bewitched by language” (Wittgenstein) and the Trinitarian “Word” is only figure for essential self-manifestation to self, of what is thus, since essential, manifestation itself, not specific, in genuine Inexistenz9, proceeding internally, transcending its, word’s, own notion. Of course Hegel needs language to say this, as also Wittgenstein speaks, against his own principle (Tractatus 7), of what can only be “shown”. So the “true being of things” is the opposite of what “exists immediately for consciousness”. This is how we get to self-consciousness as itself this true being of things, where any “thing”, however, is totally sublated in the subject, I as universal of universals, in me who am you. This “leaves 8

See the final section of the Encyclopaedia’s “The Philosophy of Spirit”. I borrow Brentano’s term. Compare the Scotist esse objectivum, coinciding finally, in Hegel, with that simple or “absolute” Being to which the Idea determines itself, in which all “other” things “have” their being, which is thus nonbeing. 9

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everything as it is” while, however, totally displacing it. This “movement”, that is, sublates the notion of movement, as Becoming is sublated early on in the dialectic. If all we could say about the inverted world were that it recalled or reproduced Christian proclamation we would not have come very far philosophically. It is in fact related to the “kingdom of laws” discerned or propounded by the understanding. These laws, however, as of this understanding, cannot remain in a plurality but must “coalesce” in one. Thereby, however, laws, whether of gravity or of identity indifferently, “lose their specific character”. The law “becomes more and more abstract and superficial”, the mere “conception of law itself”, of abstract identity, for example. Here (Phenomenology of Mind, the “Understanding” chapter) Hegel relates Newtonian gravity to that “universal attraction” of the atoms, to love in repulsion as he later analysed this in the Logic. Here, consistently, he will dismiss such “laws of thought” as “silly”. Yet “this kingdom of laws is indeed the truth for understanding”. What understanding (Verstand as against Vernünft) misses is that, within thinking, notion and idea are each self-identical only as involving distinction (EL115 add.). In fact this is present, one may claim, even in what Hegel construes as abstract or “silly” predications of identity, just in virtue of the predicational form he sees them as violating, so that they do not “mean” what these “silly” logicians would abstractly make them mean. Really, though, they do not and could not violate this form, which implies that in saying “Gold is gold” I do indeed say something further about this metal, whether I will or no, if only that it has the form that it has.10 This, for Hegel, must thus illustrate his thesis of the essential contradictoriness of predication, the falsity of “all judgments”, since, namely, I cannot thus state identity. The silliness he pretends to highlight here is really for him universal falsity as productive of this silliness. So he is here condescending somewhat to immediacy, as of “the true reason-world” or what “is indeed the truth for understanding”. Pretended seriousness becomes silly of itself. * These first three chapters of The Phenomenology of Mind represent, therefore, depict, the absorption of individuality into personality, though this latter category is not yet mentioned, or of knowledge into love (EL159), where there is nothing for knowledge to know but itself. 10 Compare what Hegel says about uses of “I”. Cf. our “Subject and Predicate Logic”, The Modern Schoolman, January 1989, pp. 129-139.

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Alternatively, they are a philosophical exposition, by chance or design (this does not concern us), of the Gospel injunction, often misrepresented as mere “Semitic” paradox or exaggeration, to hate one’s life in this world. Everything that appears here by that very fact disappears, even likeness, since the like is found to be unlike itself. The full force of this long book’s concluding chapters are here therefore anticipated. Hence religion teaches “resurrection”, not however to life in this world over again but to that other or eternal life that speculation, contemplatio, inhabits. Philosophy makes clear that it is not so much a rising again as a rising from. It also teaches, however, that this very distinction is the reverse side of a real and constantly practiced death to “common sense” or to “the world”. We learn here that there is no world, no being of self against others, or of others against self. To be more precise, contingent being is not being in its perfection, though it may be denominated as a kind of being. It adds nothing, is but our starting-point in finitude which “ungrateful spirit”, sophia, will kick away. The dialectic of the one and the many permeates everything at every level of “the method” later disclosed in the Science of Logic (in either of the two versions). There are many ones as there is one method or “reason world”. “What is the world without the reason?” (G. Frege). Philosophy discloses the nothingness of immediate appearance, which is just therefore a determinate nothingness, right from its beginning in examination of sensation, where “the object in its sensible mode of existence became transcended”, inasmuch as “sense-certainty is unaware that its essence is the empty abstraction of pure being”. Perception, and hence the temporal, is further deconstructed towards nothingness as the like gets found to be unlike itself. The whole is a play, a commentary, upon the self-contradictoriness of predicative judgment as a linguistic representation, performed within the medium of language but as intending its own beyond in thought. When I think, namely, and this is what a predicative judgment “pictorially” represents, I destroy the abstraction, chiefly of “the thing” and its property, the elephant and its trunk or greyness. It is important that both are abstracted, equally. Alternatively, also the thing is a property, of the community, of the manifold. This latter, however, is not “the world” but, rather, the subject thinking who is again abstracted from “thought thinking itself”, since it, being or the notion, is essentially or in essence Act. Such Act is the true face of “force”, reducible to the “power” of Understanding11, a power inseparable and yet 11 Consider here the double sense of potentia, exactly mirroring that of “being” as either esse commune or actus actuum, as lowest or highest, emptiest or most full.

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distinct (this is what makes it finite) from its expression. Still, what Understanding can understand it “already” does thus understand, as and when the thing to be understood, or itself indifferently, acts. Here begins the dialectical sublation of Object in Essential Correlation. The latter in fact subverts relation as it subverts in the same motion its own self or the self, which thus “dies” when understood as never having lived, as impossible. This is the answer to the question, “Why do I exist?” The “I” is, as I am, “the universal of universals” and so it does not merely “exist”. It is. I am. In religious terms, as self is the legitimate and indeed necessary object of philosophy as science of the universal (the Socratic “Know thyself”), so personal salvation is regularly because too literally misread as abstractly individual salvation, which defeats its own purpose if the individual, as abstraction, must die, is philosophically “ruined”, so as to be found in the Idea, knowing only itself, “that they all may be one in us”, words hardly expressive of a purely moral aspiration, if one reflect on them, or on these: “I in them and they in me”).12 * What we call the medieval period in philosophy is not to be cordoned off as “The Age of Faith”. There is fluid continuity with, let us say, both its cause and its effect. The dialectical relation of philosophy to theology, of how the servant (but which one of these is that, if each is but moment when put as excluding the other?) not merely becomes but in essence is master, is not our immediate topic here. It underlies Marx’s conclusion to the slave-class as the bearer of the Idea, of Part as Whole, of the Whole as this Part, or, in “religious” terms, as Messianic, as he or that which is to come. Marx here interprets a section of Hegel’s dialectical account of phenomenal history in The Phenomenology of Mind. As making absolute what is essentially merely a moment of thought in Hegel’s conception he transforms or even deforms, according to taste, the philosophic continuum. This moment, that is, applies equally to the relation between philosophy and theology or to any relation whatever, inclusive of the converse of this same relation, instancing the principle that a subject is itself in its other. In history, again, in the phenomenal world of immediate perception, revealed religion supplanted or superseded (aufhebt) previous philosophy. Philosophy returns and returned, however, to appropriate more fully to itself this concept of revelation. This is the truth underlying Joachim of 12

“There is no science of the individual”, was the classical teaching. Inevitably, however, there arises the science of this non-being of such a science, and that not merely alongside but as superseding, in Aufhebung, the first negation.

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Flora’s perhaps less than concrete notion of an age of the Spirit. It imposes a task which theology, which is thus “revealed” as “first philosophy”, revelation being now grasped in thematisation as divine essence, has yet to complete, thus becoming or revealing itself, in and as Reason (Vernünft and not merely Understanding or Verstand), to be philosophy or sophia, wisdom, lover become beloved. That this is that same divine foolishness the apostle Paul later makes into a theme is outlined already in the tale of Thales falling down a well while “foolishly” star-gazing and so is not extrinsic to philosophy. In Aquinas’s writings, however, the conception (of knowledge as revelation) remains dualistic, as of grace and nature. Close study, all the same, reveals this as an external constraint. “Everything is grace”, later theologians such as K. Rahner will teach and this might indeed be seen as “the eclipse of grace”13. Which is to say that nothing is grace in the old, ultimately negative sense. “Without me you can do nothing”, true enough. In its depths though this means that without me you are nothing and, ultimately, therefore, you are me, I you. This identity is the Absolute, where all being is had since it is being, der reine Begriff… welche Sein ist.14 In religion, then, this wisdom is represented as “coming from above”. Yet, as correcting this picture, we must grant that there is no contrasted wisdom coming from below. That would be finite, which contradicts all notion of wisdom. In the Apostle’s words, again, “In God we live and move and have our being” while, contrariwise, Aquinas clearly affirms, every idea, every notion, as viewed in its truth (i.e. by God), is “one with the divine essence”. The whole, ipsum esse subsistens, has no parts, as Parmenides apodictically laid down from and as philosophy’s beginning. That he did this also at philosophy’s beginning, thus indicating philosophy’s end in and as the End, can be no mere accident, is in fact an indication of the history of philosophy’s dialectical character, which is impossible without history itself being dialectical, that is to say not, absolutely speaking, temporal. On this dialectical view this is no mere equivocation, as between two putative senses of “end”, finis. As in Natural Law theory, the actual (not merely the “factual”) is itself normative and we are exhorted, in speculative self-contradiction, to “become what we are”. As Hegel demonstrates in his Logic, end as end is as such realised. This is affirmed in the faith that “all shall be well and all manner of thing” 13

This is the title of a recent study by Nicholas Adams. Wissenschaft der Logik II, Suhrkamp Verlag, Werke 6, p.572, penultimate page of this work, where, in the German, only Sein is italicised, and where this concept (Begriff) is equally identified with what Hegel calls die Methode of Logic, der sich nur zu sich selbst verhält. 14

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or that “all things work together for good to them that love God”, to those who see truly, that is to say. In my beginning is my end and conversely. There is not really such a thing as philosophy’s beginning, whatever may be the case with “philosophical science”, given that we distinguish science from wisdom as two different intellectual virtues.15 Hegel claims to see this philosophical situating of (revealed) religion as the second, transitory form of Absolute Spirit (philosophy is spirit’s final, third form as art is its first, immediate form16) touched on in the Pauline conception of “the fullness of time”, when, necessarily, “God sent forth his son”. The later writing this as “Son”, with a capital, is the first, Athanasian step towards incorporating revelation into the unity that is sophia, where, in Johannine form, “the Word” is God. God is his revelation. This, however, as God’s, as absolute, is revelation itself of itself, and not of this or that. Intentionality is here sublated in what works itself out towards the later name of Absolute Idealism, the Idea as absolute freedom coincident with necessity. To necessary manifestation corresponds divine glory in religion. This is clearly asserted and not merely figured in the doctrine of the Divine Ideas, which Aquinas did not just treat as an awkward inheritance from Augustine but saw it, in union with the latter and with Plato, as necessary truth.17 Bonum est diffusivum sui. * Eugene Gendlin, whom we cited at the beginning, in his commentary also points out that Aristotle consistently avoids differentiating between mind and minds, between, in a later terminology, the absolute and the created mind or spirit. This marks a sharp divergence from at least some medieval thinking. “It is evident that it is this man who thinks”, St. Thomas confidently declares18. But “man” is after all a phenomenal term, while thought is thought. What do we mean by speaking of a created spirit? To answer that we must begin by acknowledging that the term “created” is taken from the finite and hence phenomenal conception of making from something else, from a material. That this is contrary to the intention is declared when we go on to add: “made out of nothing”, a sheer contradiction, 15 See Hegel’s essay at the beginning of The Science of Logic (WL), “With What Must Science Begin?” Cf. also Aquinas, following Aristotle, on the “intellectual Virtues”. 16 See the final section on “Absolute Spirit” at the end of the Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences III, or of “The Philosophy of Spirit” (EG 556-563). 17 Cf. Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologica, Ia 15. 18 Aquinas, opusculum: “On a Common Intellect”.

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however, in true speculative style. So Trinitarians “believe” the Son to be “begotten not made”, genitum non factum. Characteristic of medieval writing, however, is the doctrine of the special creation of each “soul”. This is generally presented as a departure from Greek thinking under the impact of a divine revelation coming “from outside”. This expression is, however, already found in Aristotle when he declares that we must say that intellect as such comes “from outside”, is not, that is to say, integrated into nature (De partibus animalium). Only so, as he explains in the De anima, is any understanding possible, taken as the power to know the “natures of all bodies”. Anything natural, any thing or organ at all, would get in the way of or “appear beside” (paremphainomenon) knowing, rendering it not merely impossible but unthinkable, since knowing is self’s becoming other and remaining self just therein. This is conclusively explored in his Metaphysics, Book Seven. The soul, or ultimate difference of “a thing”, of animal, plant or man, is the “form” of all as giving or formally causing all that that thing is and not merely a crowning part. This is crucial for our account of matter, of bodies and of Nature as a whole. It lies behind Hegel’s conclusion that the Method of “the system of Logic” as content of the Absolute Idea is itself the form “for the idea”. Thus “each of the stages hitherto reviewed is an image of the absolute, but at first in a limited mode, and thus it is forced onwards to the whole, the evolution of which we termed Method”.19 In the end, it is demonstrated in Absolute Idealism, it is not merely Mind that comes, dualistically, from outside but nature as a whole that is neither outside nor inside but ideal (Enc. 95), and hence nothing except as mind. Now St. Thomas Aquinas knew all this perfectly well when he wrote theologically of the “separated” soul, in truth the substantive form of the person20, explaining, with some difficulty, how such an apparent fragment could be happy, beatus, prayed to or invoked and so on. This, surely, is not a failure of integration in his thinking. He just had no other language to hand, and so the richer conception continually pokes through. It pokes through when he says that the fellowship of friends is not necessary for eternal happiness, or when he says that God has no real relation to his creatures, any of them. All there, the blessed, are contained in or, less 19

Hegel, EL 237 and add. Yet Aquinas writes, in a Scriptural commentary: anima mea non est ego, a view, however, not confirmed in Aristotle and indeed overcome in Hegel’s logic, e.g. at Enc. 127-130. The view seems to depend on equating, in “reflective understanding”, the “absolute picture idea” of “resurrection”, re-surrectio (on which Aquinas was here commenting), with the content of this dogma, of spirit with its appearance(s). Or, anima is itself a finite and hence “momentary” concept. 20

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metaphorically, identical with each, recalling though that all real, nonabstract identity is essentially differentiated in order to be identical at all, as Hegel works out in detail and more than once. The real relations are the Trinitarian, though just these are not absolutely relations but ultimately three “persons” or substances, by the Scholastic definition of “person” at least, which are one (hence Hegel can still speak of God as “the absolute person”, whom we address in prayer, for example), though this again is a making finite of the object by the language perforce used, a necessary picturing or “picture-form”, as Hegel will himself acknowledge. Words, after all, “are like the film on deep water” (Wittgenstein). They never, that is to say, entirely capture thought.21 Three is not one or, as Hegel says in this context, “It is useless to count”, echoing St. Thomas’s numeri non ponuntur in divinis (in his treatise on just the Trinity). In my individuality I am, as (divine) idea, i.e. just as idea, one with the divine essence, “universal of universals”, and only thus does God know or relate to me, as himself namely. This is Hegel’s characterisation of I (one’s self) as what is named by the pronoun “I”, whatever we may wish to “mean” (meinen: there is a play on words here in Hegel’s German). It is the same with my or any particular specificity. Each is the form, the exemplar, as that in turn is mode of the absolute, “the absolute in modified form”. Hence “everything is a syllogism” because everything is, precisely, the Concept. Hence, again, all judgments are false, demanding syllogistic redemption, which, however, does not stop short of the one and final syllogism, really a form of the Concept. This at first strange sequence of thoughts actually exemplifies Aquinas’s Aristotelian doctrine of the verbum interius, which takes the form of this one word, i.e. as a concept, over each of these three “instruments of reason” indifferently, though thus giving the first, the Concept, verbum namely, a conceptual priority. This final self-ablating syllogism he mentions, then, that of Necessity, itself modulates into the category of the Object (finally the Idea): “the syllogistic process may be described as essentially involving the negation of the characters through which its course runs”. One and the same universal “is in these forms, and… explicitly put as their identity.”22 As Henry Veatch once or many times said, identity is the logical relation. This transition itself, in Hegel, of the syllogism into its other, the Object in this case, shows we are not concerned only with the abstract “syllogism of 21 One should keep silent, wrote the young Wittgenstein, I can write no more, said the mature Aquinas (not only because he had recently hurt his head). “God has spoken only one word” (John of the Cross, meaning the Word). Words as such were initially pictured as pictured hieroglyphs. 22 Hegel, EL 192. See also 193.

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Understanding” but with it as the rational principle in itself. Nor is syllogism “only an act of consciousness” (EL193). As St. Thomas truly and profoundly says, the premises cause the conclusion. It is ridiculous to read this as a primitive or “medieval” confusion of “reasons and causes”, recurring error, until not long ago at least, of a self-styled “analytical Thomism”23. Things flow or return into one another, lower into higher, not as literally absorbed but as returning into the unity from which they were first alienated. Such exitus and reditus is also St. Thomas’s whole scheme, as it is St. Paul’s, of reality as, in Hegel’s terms, a perpetual “movement” of becoming which thus in itself is one, assured and at peace. As Aristotle had put it, time, as movement itself, does not move.24 As absolute, as Act, however, such movement or “life” escapes Aristotle’s criticism of finite movement (or life) as “imperfect act”. It is the rational character of everything as thought or Spirit, itself as its other, namely, or as attraction in repulsion. “God is love”, is that, in consequent suspension of abstract being in favour of actus (essendi), of the “word” in the beginning as itself ever beginning. So, in Hegel’s final summing up, “It is the lesson of Christianity that God is spirit”. * We need, then, in general, to distinguish medieval thought from medieval language, which did not limit their world, any more than Biblical language, its limitations, limits the message it carries. The limitations of my language would only be the limits of my world (Wittgenstein) if I were limited to my language, as I, being the Concept in identity, am not. Or, conversely, again, “words are like the film on deep water”. It is a matter, recalling St. Paul again, of “understanding spiritual things spiritually”. For Hegel, the mystical and the philosophical are ultimately one, we noted, the mediated as opposed to the immediate. It is therefore plausible to argue that his and Aristotle’s thought thinking itself, or absolute knowing in just this sense, is the final knowing by not-knowing or is the “unknowing” of “the mystics”, preferably, of all of us as mystical or, using Hegel’s term, speculative. “There is one closer to me than I am to myself”, declares Augustine, philosophically in the Hegelian manner. That Augustine speaks frequently with the informality of express devotion, professionally excluded where possible in the later professorial writers, Aquinas and Hegel, is a 23

Cf. the issue of The Monist for October 1997 dedicated to “Analytical Thomism”. It includes articles by the present author, the late Hilary Putnam and others. 24 Aristotle: Metaphysics, 1071b.

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choice of manner merely, dictated by fortuitous circumstances. Still, a professor too may and should retain his freedom, his spirit, his “humanity” as we say, as “the spiritual man judges all things”. So, in considering views of personal identity, I note the following. Aquinas worked his way through to the pure Aristotelian position that rationality, an active form or principle, determines the human essence entirely. There is nothing over. Hence “the rational soul is the form of the body”. It absorbs all other forms. The corresponding matter is not the body but a pure passivity. Body, as organised, is a purely ideal or abstract “creation”, therefore, of interest only to logicians, Aquinas says in at least one place. Actually, it seems to follow, the rational soul is the form of man, the form which is man, such that “the body” is its expression and no mere fortuitous addition or complement even. Only thus does “man” denominate a unitary conception, phenomenal or noumenal, so to say, having both form and shape inasmuch as it also has form as shape, this point meant not purely or abstractly etymologically. For the Apostle man is finally “set to become”, has become indeed “a living spirit”. Flesh is phenomenal, “grass” in Biblical talk, yet it is thus amenable to transfiguration as spirit, in art to begin with, as were potatoes, themselves “splendour in the grass” after all, for Van Gogh as for Wordsworth. If this phenomenality belongs to the flesh in general, as philosophy establishes it, then it is not Docetism, the heresy, to say the same of the flesh of Christ in particular, that it is “real” in abstraction only from its being personal. The universal and the particular, still less the individual, must not be abstracted from one another. If this is true of all flesh, therefore, then we are no longer speaking against Christ’s shared humanity with us, which was the essence of Docetism as a heresy. Hence in eating this flesh we take him himself to ourselves, is the traditional teaching, as in this act we take, universally, one another, sumit unus sumunt mille, this being the ideal thrust, here finding fulfilment, of any shared meal in “table fellowship”, itself foreshadowing or anticipating the interpenetration of marriage, though that too still falls short of this all in one and one in all. The moment, i.e. in thought, in sacramental theology, of the transubstantiation of the elements, then, if we use that language, is a pure starting-point, then, for that spiritual transition (transition is of spirit’s essence, Hegel states) of which it forms part. It is in this sense that matter is the principle, the initial possibility, of individuation. Now logic as explored by Hegel shows, again, that a pure individual is an abstraction. In reality the individual is the universal and the same for the other relational syllogistic possibilities, particularity mediating. This was the Parmenidean position, we saw (“being has no

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parts”), which is first found to be realised in the pictorial or narrative modalities of religion, though they at first seem to be its opposite. “Religion must come first”, Hegel writes. “Now you are the body of Christ” and “members one of another”, wrote St. Paul. See also John 17, with its varied metonymic uses of the spatial preposition “in”. From here, clearly, Hegel drew his inspiration. His philosophy is not less pure “thought thinking itself” for that, just as the Christian must believe that revelation unfolds the divine or absolute mind, the inclination of which to itself as the Good we call, in God as in ourselves, will (cf. Aquinas, ST Ia 19, 1). Since in Hegelian logic the same is equally not the same, is different from itself in the other without limit, the classical problems of personal identity, either from moment to moment or from life (the “idea immediate”) through death, which is, Hegel declares, “the entry into Spirit”, to some extent fall away. So Hegel’s commentator McTaggart, holding immortality to be undeniable in view of reality’s rationality (the presupposition of science), was at the same time a professed atheist. He would have rejected the qualification “nonetheless” for this profession in relation to immortality and I do not write it. What he insisted upon, however, was the simple or “abstract” identity of the person we know today with this person’s eternal ever-present life in eternity, without beginning, end or change of any kind. A transcendent God, ipso facto, could annihilate any other being, which would not therefore be unrestrictedly immortal, he argued. He here employs, however, a finite and hence contradictory notion of transcendence. One sees though from his text that, on Hegelian terms, the same Idea that Hegel calls God is identified with the absolute or unrestricted unity of persons. One might comment that McTaggart lacked the concept of natural necessity, implying indestructibility, which for Thomas Aquinas applied thus far equally to God, angels, souls and prime matter, and of which therefore the Leibnizian logical necessity itself can only be a mere species. Only so is logic “the form of the world”. 25 . It is Hegel, however, who works out the implications of this view, arriving at what some have unthinkingly called pantheism but which, says Hegel, is rather acosmism. In fact he says this of Spinoza’s system but it applies a fortiori to his own, where subject, as “universal of universals”, has replaced the one substance. This truth is found in germ in the Scriptural statement that God “hates nothing that he has made”. Thus, 25 See the article on this question by Patterson Brown in the collection Aquinas (ed. A. Kenny), Macmillan, London 1970.

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when Aquinas shows that animals and plants, standing for natural or immediate life in general, have no place in the general resurrection26 he effectively denies the reality of the former, of nature, when taken in the immediate and therefore abstract or separate sense (materialiter spectata, in a phrase Kant uses). Nature is, rather, as a mirror. Against this immediate notion McTaggart holds of personal identity, however, the Christian might cite: “Whoever hates his life in this world will keep it to life eternal”, a dictum sharpened by the injunction to deny self, of him or her. What is it then that he will keep? If I hate my life, though this expression is often dismissed as Semitic exaggeration, then I will not expect to keep it just as it is in this world. Such an identity is in fact not according to logic, as Hegel shows in discussion of the word “I” as not in truth standing for myself, which is what “we”, as false because finite phenomena, want to mean or intend (German meinen, cognate with mein, Hegel points out, as I mentioned above), but standing for the “universal of universals”. The pronoun-analysis of the grammar books belongs to the same finitude. Rather, as McTaggart’s own analysis indicates and he professes, I will pass from death to life, “from shadows to reality” (Newman’s motto), as if, or confirming that, this immediate or shadow-life had never been.27 “The life that I live now is not I”, writes the Apostle Paul. “Thy love is better than life”, exclaims the Psalmist. “We know that we have passed from death to life because we love our brothers”, declares the other apostolic theologian. This seems implausible, but only so long as we forget the logical and ontological positions reached by Hegel as 26

Their place is taken, he says, in the Supplement to his Summa theologica, by “the beauty of the bodies of the redeemed”. 27 In defending a mediated philosophical conception as against the immediate perception of Jacobi and others it is not fanciful to see Hegel as striking a blow for the Lutheran (and Catholic) stress on the need, internal and not merely narrative, for a mediation, unique in just this necessity, finding its representation “in the fullness of time”, though of itself, like any individual on this system, demanding universalisation, e.g. in the mutual bearing of burdens as fulfilling “the law of Christ”. Aquinas, it is true, stresses the efficient causality of just Christ’s humanity in the redemption of humankind. Philip Reynolds, in a recent essay (“Philosophy as the Handmaid of Theology: Aquinas on Christ’s Causality”, in Contemplating Aquinas, ed. Fergus Kerr O.P., SCM, London 2006), claims Aquinas nowhere shows how such causality might operate. In saying, rather, that one “drop” of Christ’s blood would have equally sufficed he might seem to absorb reliance upon sacrifice into its very idea (the drop) as negating it in favour of spiritual or even underlying ethical interpretation. Note though that Aquinas spoke of Christ’s humanity per se as cause of such grace and not of his death exclusively.

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underlying this experience, namely that “I am you”28, we beget one another, that any indivisible consciousness, or atom as I, in repelling the other is attracted to it. Since the Hegelian account shows up the Biblical message, on which medieval thought very often formally depended, we can be sure of finding even the truth of the medieval positions in the later thinking. One finds confirmation of this in transitional Renaissance thinkers, like Nicholas of Cusa or Jakob Boehme, yet it is implicit in the threshold classical or Dark Age thinkers, Augustine or Scotus Eriugena respectively, or even Avicenna (Ibn Sina). The thinkers pass into one another and thus find salvation. One thinks truly, not falsely, by letting philosophy be itself within one. Your pain is my pain, the Gospel teaches, as part, again, of the Law of Christ, namely, the mutual bearing of burdens. Consequently, too, happiness must be communal and universal to be itself. True faith makes sight out of faith itself. * If we thus sublate theology back into a transfigured philosophy, recall that we have already noted political or societal implications for the emergence of the new and in itself ever final ecumene as “realised end” (Hegel). A Catholic may see this as heralded by the Vatican II “Declaration on Ecumenism” of 1964, as a philosopher may at least note. The note sounded, indeed, is once again that of “the fullness of time”. It is included in the religious insight itself, which thus endorses philosophy, that all schisms and separations are to come to an end, understood by the Apostle as including finally the healing of the divide with Israel or those who “sit in the seat of Moses”, thus fulfilling the Abrahamic promise, “In thy seed shall all the nations of the earth be blessed”.29 This unity, Hegel shows, is eternally realised, as McTaggart claims. In religion this is represented eschatologically as Christ’s delivering the kingdom to the Father, who thus shall be “all in all”. This narrative, however, but narrates the necessity while, on the other hand, the co-inherence of identities, of all in all, is virtually the warp and woof of the New Testament writings and may fairly be called, again, the ultimate mysterion of the perpetual eucharistic celebration that characterises historic Christendom as does nothing else. Sumunt unus sumunt mille, where one receives (takes) a thousand receive, 28

This is the title of Daniel Kolak’s recent book (Springer Verlag, Pomona, New York 2004), relating philosophy and the most recent physics, as Aristotle had once done. 29 Cf. Romans 9-11.

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Thomas Aquinas proclaims in Parmenidean poetry, again. This is the truth reflected in the Mormon practice of “baptism for the dead”. The being for self is itself being for another. This is Hegel’s final or, rather, constant position. More generally, it is the fault of both “heresy” and “orthodoxy” to assert itself against the other in a common finite objectification (for Berdyaev this was the “sin”, the tragedy, of knowledge itself) of the Idea, of truth. It is in this sense that “right belief” is that which moves mountains, moves, that is, the reputedly immoveable. For final truth, Hegel will say, is a “Bacchanalian revel” of perpetual motion, an idea approached in the dance of the Dantean paradise or represented, set forth (vorgestellt), in dancing everywhere. In discussing personal or any identity, in fact, we cannot sidestep the categorical nature of identity itself. It is not the absolute Idea. So Hegel treats it formally at the beginning of the middle section of his Logic, in, namely, the Doctrine of Essence.30 The true meaning of identity, as he there expounds it, is “being as Ideality” and not an “abstract identity, to the exclusion of all Difference”. His position is not the Lockean one that identity is the consciousness thereof, but rather that identity (and not merely our identity) is self-consciousness and is thus fully realised as itself being identical with God alone. Identity, that is, is identical not with itself but with God, with Being as ideality in both its negative (contingent being as held in God) and positive (God himself holding all) sense. Even man, distinguished as self-conscious from nature, he says (in the Zusatz to 115), thus “subsists only as the reflection” of God’s “power and glory”. Selfidentity, in short, is not in itself abstract, but things, even the idea itself, “are identical with themselves… only in so far as they at the same time involve distinction”. It follows that this must indeed be true of the idea of identity itself. So there is no requirement that the immortal self should be absolutely identical, in number or in anything else, with the phenomenal and finite self of immediate experience. This does not form part of that eternal happiness implicit in the very notion of reason as of the universal, to which all knowledge and love are in themselves from the beginning assimilated. We only need know, believe, that in losing all nothing is lost. By this reasoning, we can claim, the Argument from Natural Desire, for eternal beatitude, namely, is assimilated to the Ontological Argument, forever associated with medieval scholastic philosophy’s virtual founder, Anselm, for God’s truth. Aquinas rejected this argument as a proof of God’s existence, utrum Deus sit. It might still be a proof of God’s truth, as Scotus and the early moderns found and as Aquinas virtually concedes. 30

Cf. Enc.115 and additions.

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Thus Hegel, who endorses it through the length and breadth of his Logic, might accept his criticism31, replying, however, that Existence is not in itself a predicate worthy of God, that its retention in this context is in itself indication of the finitude of any theology held abstractly separate from philosophy or affecting to regard the latter as its handmaid (ancilla). Aquinas in his rejection of this argument as exemplifying not a via from the finite to the infinite but, rather, thought’s own inward annihilation of the finite (which he too accepts and stresses throughout) within itself, can be taken as making just this point, that God’s truth must transcend the relative notion of existence beyond all paradox. Thus, Hegel writes, “The phrase ‘Existence’ (derived from existere) suggests the fact of having proceeded from something.”32 It is “being which has proceeded from the ground, and been reinstated by annulling its intermediation”. Thus “the ground works its own suspension.” It is, again, “the unity of identity and difference”. The thought here is difficult but not therefore to be ignored. Existence, he claims, is of itself connected with relativity, while even the ground of a thing, in Ideal Being, can be looked upon as an existent, rather like the ens (entia) rationis of scholasticism, which in this style of postulation just misses its own truth in a merely implicit Absolute Idealism. It is clear that the Idea is itself the Absolute, as ens itself, we might say, is an ens rationis. What finally exists, namely ideal reason, the nous of Anaxagoras, I who “will be what I will be”, itself transcends existence, thus, incidentally, leaving the Ontological Argument intact. For Hegel the question about God’s existence has, strictly, no meaning.33 This, in fact, was the burden of Anselm’s argument, which Kant sought to belittle. Hegel simply remarks that it “does no good to put on airs” against this argument or movement of thought, compelling for sophisticated and unsophisticated alike (EL193). He does not though deny that the argument of Anselm, “in whom the notable suggestion of this proof first occurs” (sic Hegel), can be improved upon, whether by Duns Scotus, Descartes, Leibniz or a host of subsequent logicians. 31

Cf. Aquinas: Summa theologica I, 2, 1 ad 2um. Enc. (EL) 123 add. 33 In his (posthumous) Lectures on the Proofs of the Existence of God this corresponds to his finding that the a posteriori proofs, in contrast to the Ontological Argument, all have an improper starting-point. They thus even conclude, in a measure, improperly, towards God found still ex-isting as a one among many, which thus requires further corrective analysis, as we also find, therefore, in theological treatises De Deo Uno, like that of Aquinas, as the first of three, in his Summa theologica, Part I, DE DEO, the other two being De Deo trino and De Deo creatore. 32

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“Because it has no existence for starting-point and point d’appui the Idea is frequently treated as a mere logical form. Such a view must be abandoned to those theories, which ascribe so-called reality and genuine actuality to the existent thing and all the other categories which have not yet penetrated as far as the Idea” (EL213). We will not be wrong if we see in this “not yet” an allusion to the medieval period as past, as transitional. The way Hegel goes on to speak of the Idea just here repays careful study. As Hegel himself points out, it exactly parallels Aristotle’s final account of nous as “thought thinking itself”, noesis noesios, “which Aristotle long ago termed the supreme form of the Idea” (EL236 add.). I would only add that this “first occurrence” Hegel mentions should not be taken as absolute, that implicitly, so to say, Anselm’s argument is rather a version of what we find in the poem of Parmenides34, which doubtless in turn has its “genetic” ancestors. * So as regards our topic of personal immortality in an identity with our actual selves, as this was discussed within medieval philosophy, if we now recall that the topic should include the thought of Arabic and Jewish thinkers outside the bounds of a jurisdictional Christendom we have to say that the thought was as varied and heterogeneous as it is at any other time. The common basis for the truth of immortality, inclusive by implication of a continuity of identity, is the rationality of the world evoking the natural desire of rational beings for what is thus natural to them, namely the universal. The disputed premise is that “nature does nothing in vain”. Two further considerations are, first, that we can give no picture of this immortality and second, that there is no warrant for interpreting continuity in a specifically temporal sense. The idea of an “after-life” seems to be a finite representation, which, as applied to infinity and eternity, can seem repugnant. This was, in later times, the intuition of Nietzsche. His transcending of the objection in terms of the mythical Eternal Return has not been well understood. If time truly returns then time is no longer time, a second time no longer second, since the first returns. Furthermore, as a philosophical thesis this cannot mean that the whole of a finite life returns or is repeated without any and each moment within or as sectional to that life repeating identically. This can only mean that the myth represents eternity under the figure of successiveness, just as we all do “all the time”. 34

Cp. the article “Parmenides” by Paul Thom in Handbook of Metaphysics and Ontology, ed. Smith and Burkhardt, Philosophia Verlag, Munich 1991, Vol. 2.

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In religion the Gospel equivalent to this is the saying, “To them that have shall be given”. Thus far we vindicate “Nietzsche’s Metaphysics”35. That is, as absolute idealism explicitly claims in, for example, McTaggart’s interpretation, eternal life, immortality, is a quality into which the (false) appearance of temporality is absorbed (aufgehoben). This philosophical truth was first adumbrated in religion, where it finally issued in the concept of faith, as possession of the unseen and unfelt. The analogy with thought and reason, unseen and unfelt, is obvious. So St. Paul says that by faith you, we, “sit with Christ in the heavenly places”. He may or could have even omitted the explicit “by faith”. For this, in religion, in absolute spirit, is the simple reality, of which philosophy will perfect and “finish”, accomplish, the understanding in rational grasp. Such thinking might be seen as our, or Hegel’s, deference to the Pauline injunction, thus brought to a full logical consistency replacing mere intuition, to “use the world as though we used it not”. It is thus, we may hope, a fruit at once of the Spirit and of spirit generally, as Hegel says death is “entry into spirit”. Religion presents such rational necessity as narrative. It thus mediates it to all men, including philosophers. They start from there, as history dialectically pictures. They attain, however, or, rather, philosophy does, to a more perfect knowledge and this is a constant, reflected for example in the Gospel distinction between those who hear directly or know what is “revealed” and the multitude who get it in parables. The Christian religion, however, is the project of abolishing this multitude in terms of a universal spiritual aristocracy, as we mentioned above. Today this ideal has become recognisable under the notion of democracy as demanded by human dignity everywhere, though not necessarily (or at first) without mediation. This at least begins to confirm the visionary sense of Jeremiah or Joel that spirit must be poured out on all, “all flesh”, no man saying to another “Know the Lord”, in what has to be, still, a “taking of the manhood into God” and not, disgracefully, “conversion of the spirit, the godhead, into flesh” (Athanasian Creed, ninth century). The whole programme of absolute idealism is already here, as in the then contemporary Scotus Eriugena.36 35

This is the title of an article in the Handbook cited in Note 34 above, by Stephan Landolt and Peter Simons. 36 From this time dates also that movement of the separation of religion from the inwardly personal and mystical set in train largely by Pope Nicholas I (this is maybe why he is styled “the great”), according to Rudolf Steiner, who may have come upon something deeply significant for our cultural history. See Steiner’s lecture of 1922, “Drei spirituelle Strömungen im 9. Jahrhundert und ihre Umformung”, in his Geschichtserkenntnis: zur Symptomatologie der Geschichte,

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* A main difference, which medieval thought was inhibited from overcoming, was the distinction between grace and nature, dependent upon the equation between absolute or dialectically progressive revelation and simple temporality in phenomenal history. This again, the distinction, was necessitated or aggravated by a notion of contingently fallen nature, whereas the alienation of the Idea in nature is in fact constitutive of nature as such as a moment in absolute thought or being indifferently. Thus Cardinal Newman, in his poem, now a well-known hymn, went on to speak, ambivalently, of “a higher gift than grace” while in mid-twentieth century the whole dilemma became thematised, chiefly around a book, Surnaturel, by Henri de Lubac, he too later Cardinal. The higher gift, “God’s presence and his very self and essence all-divine” (Newman) amounts to the “beatific vision” or equivalent, “God with us” and only waiting, so to speak, though upon his own engineering or “decree”, for us to be with him, to take up a figure, or exact representation, of Augustine’s: “You were with me, but I was not with you”. Mind, simply, is mind, having as its object the non-abstract or concrete universal in absolute subjectivity or self-consciousness. God is ever perceived, but per speculum in aenigmitate. All is well, that is, as Julian, the seer of Norwich, intuited, in the light of her faith. Grace, that is, in its super-abundance, is not unnatural but rather “eclipses” its own self in this perfecting of nature, thus become normative. As Leo XIII once expressed it, (the) natural law is the eternal law (and conversely, one might well add). Behind this discussion lies, and lay, the unspoken need for a philosophy, by which I mean a philosophical thematisation, of revelation, which had hitherto been by and large taken as an immediate datum. Yet the materials for such a philosophy were present from the beginning, in the statement that “In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God” or “As the father has sent me, so send I you” and so on, already part of the project of “understanding spiritual things spiritually”. The elements of such a philosophy are given in the chapter entitled “Revealed Religion” in Hegel’s The Phenomenology of Mind, which forms the anteroom to the concluding chapter, “Absolute Knowledge”. In fact if we speak of medieval philosophy without qualification one can, again, find all schools represented there or prefigured, between

ed. Christoph Lindenberg, Verlag Freies Geistesleben GmbH, Stuttgart, 1982, pp.124-145.

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Augustine, Ockham and beyond up to thinkers such as Nicholas of Cusa. Established religion tended to ally itself with just philosophical realism, with “moderate” or even so-called naïve realism. Interpretation of the miraculous according to this viewpoint was routine, especially among Christians. They tended to make it the substance of their faith37. “If Christ be not raised your faith is vain.” These words were taken for the most part as identifying appearance(s) with the substance. This was routine assumption in the pre-Christian Jewish “ground” as it was in Islam’s Arabic background and foreground. The Christians themselves, however, interpreted the Old Testament, the events or the writings indifferently, spiritually, as do indeed the Jews themselves in varying measure, with Origen and later Newman as maybe chief theoreticians of this. “Orthodoxy stands or falls with the mystical interpretation” (of Scripture).38 The mystical interpretation, as mysticism generally, is attained through or, indifferently, itself gives rise to absolute idealism philosophically.39 Hence official representation of Christian doctrine does not include any particular secular epistemology, whatever the views on that score held in past ages, or the present, even by those most closely involved in the promulgation of this.40 What it does rather uphold is necessity of universal or “absolute” knowledge, as it then must be, able to know with certainty the truth of God, truth simply, that is to say, any appearances to the contrary notwithstanding.41 With this the natural is at once absorbed and put by (aufgehoben) in and by the spiritual or infinite, the Idea in Hegel’s language. Hence he says, as much negatively as positively (such as we can also find in the pages of Aquinas): “The Absolute Idea is the Absolute” (EL 212). Of being, says Aristotle, there is no genus. This perfection and accomplishment (Realised End) is represented in narrative form in religion. History, however, is itself representation. Prior to its being “intellectual comprehended”, 37

This view, which he calls Heilsrealismus, is competently defended theologically by Leo Scheffczyk in his Katholische Glaubenswelt, subtitled Wahrheit und Gestalt, Paul Pattloch Verlag, Aschaffenburg, 1977. 38 J.H. Newman: Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine, 1845. 39 Cf. Hegel, EL 82, especially the addition, last paragraph. 40 I have developed this view elsewhere, e.g. in my Reason’s Developing SelfRevelation, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, UK, 2012 (third of a series of four books on Hegel’s philosophy of religion, chiefly): see the first three chapters, earlier versions of which appeared in The Downside Review, Downside Abbey, Bath, UK, July and October 2006 and January 2007. 41 Vatican Council I, 1870, Constitution Dei filius. This is what I find is set forth, in philosophical terms, in the concluding chapter of Hegel’s The Phenomenology of Mind, or of spirit (Geist), as he calls it.

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obviously not within history over again, it is not an absolute42. Hence Hegel warns, in true Catholic fashion, against identifying religious truth too abstractly with its primitive and pre-philosophical seed(s). Hence the absolute religion, Christianity, according to him, fully answers to reason’s natural requirement of an unrestricted immortality, the absolute universal expressed by the word “I” or ich, in whatever languages it is found. It is simply included in as expressing the truth of God, of unrestricted or absolute being, the Idea which alone is, though this, like any predicate as Hegel says, might seem to destroy, in the sense of replace, the subject. This gives the rational ground for the Judaic bias against absolute naming, its necessity. Conversely all names are names of God, of the Idea in its freedom. Thus the final philosophy is implicit in the simplest or most primitive religious conceptions, as the notion of religion itself, an attitude to the whole as Hegel explains it (in LPR), is implicit in the most primitive art or art-forms, as it is not implicit in alienated, though still representational but notionless Nature, where the word spoken, as is the case with finite language, is no longer the word speaking. Hence natural phenomena only speak “as if a voice were in them” or “speak by silences” and hence cannot slake even the poet’s “drouth”. Natural mysticism, that is to say, is not a mysticism of nature or of anything finite exclusively. Ecologists need to “go up higher”. We naturally address those departed known to us, saying, perhaps, “Where are you?” We know that they are somewhere, we think or imagine, without being able to specify where or even what that is. It maybe does not occur to us that this is precisely the meaning of thinking, that, as Hegel says, “in the other, one meets with oneself”. Thinking “means a liberation” and so is called variously I, free Spirit, Love, Blessedness (EL 159). It was merely clumsy to dismiss this more general account of thinking, of its necessary connection with consciousness, as “psychologism”, whatever the specific needs of formal logic, or as if consciousness were tied to the empirical. This was never the meaning of the cogito. So Thomas Aquinas had described contemplative life, study, as participation here and now in eternity and as alone, in Augustine’s words, “desirable for itself”. His word for it, studium, also recalls the virtue named zeal, which, as studiositas, is opposed to the vice of “curiosity”. Hence death, willingly or lovingly accepted, in thinking, again, is itself, as if “inverted” by thought’s mediation, passage to Spirit, Hegel says. In this sense, “I shall not die but live” (Psalm 117, Vulgate). The philosophical 42 See the final paragraph of The Phenomenology of Mind for this phrase in relation to history.

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interpretation of religion is by no means a reduction since it is necessary to its accomplishment. By this Hegel would mean the exercise of speculative reason specifically, at whatever grade of culture we find ourselves, and which he calls the highest or final Gottesdienst. As summum bonum, says Aquinas, all things seek it and tend to it. One has however to beware of lapsing into empty edification when speaking of the Absolute Idea, the Good. It is in fact the scientific conclusion of the dialectical process, which is thinking, always of the Idea itself as Act, “in” us or we in it indifferently. Eternal life is not compatible, as neither is Hegel’s Logic, with an abstract individuality falling short of bearing one another as “burdens”. Each in fact shoulders the whole, like Catherine in medieval Siena feeling she carried “the whole church” on her back. This is thinking, nous, the gathering together into one, kat’holon, according to the whole, literally. Surely Hegel would have had this phrase, from which the term “catholic” emerges, in mind when thus defining “the religious standpoint” we mentioned above. “In God we live and move and have our being”, according to the whole. In the Idea we live, a philosopher would rather say, scorning all charges of pantheism in an overcoming of the world, in acosmism, to which religion, as philosophy should acknowledge, has given the original stimulus (mediation) as being, with art, the more immediate form(s) of absolute spirit. As one medieval thinker put it, in reference to representations of any particular individual or group or of anything at all, “This also is thou, neither is this thou” (cp. the Indian “I am that”), thus subverting all finite judgment. Thus the aim here has been to show how these perspectives are a constant of philosophy. Given these perspectives, a real advance is manifest, of which Christianity, one may well argue thus from the texts themselves, would be disclosed as both embodiment and motor. It is better, with Hegel, to say this outright if this is what one is thinking.

CHAPTER TWO HEGEL AND SCHOLASTIC LOGIC

Today we have a much fuller and more accurate understanding of the medieval development of logic than was available in Hegel’s time and place, quite apart from the mountains of prejudice that would have had to be overcome. What I hope to explore here, or follow up, is the suspicion, even perception, that much of Hegel´s logical insight repeats insights had in that earlier period, and to draw certain consequences from that. Hegel develops his notion of speculative thinking or Reason, as superior to the Understanding, in the Preface to The Phenomenology of Mind. In part it is a matter of invalidating the form of judgment, still, for Hegel, “S is P”. All judgments, he tells us, ignoring the contradiction in performance, are false. The Subject, in being identified with the Predicate, disappears into it, leaving only the Predicate, its Concept. Yet so does the Predicate become absorbed in the Subject, showing it to be more than a mere name. In fact it is with this disappearance of names that language itself becomes transcended or, rather, seen right through. Thus thought becomes possible, though still constrained to shake off this constraint. We thus see directly, we thus think thinking. Just as everything was linked in a web of predications, such that “the limits of my language are the limits of my world”, so all concepts are instances of this one unified web or the Concept. All names, all ideas, removed from that, are abstractions, arbitrarily shorn off from the whole design, one as in a painting. So, again, thought thinks or “thoughts” itself. This whole is the Subject, is Subjectivity as Act. This is Hegel’s system, of reaching the Absolute Idea, which cannot be gone beyond, by the method of dialectical speculation. He passes from Being, through Essence to the Concept, the latter being the final shape of Being again or, equally, Freedom. The first thing to notice about it is that here logic is an ontology. The earlier conception of formal logic was precisely that it was not to be ontology (logicus non considerat existentiam rei. So much for “existential import!”). However it was also pointed out

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that there was an “ontology of logical forms” themselves1. The study of them became a branch of metaphysics distinguished from the art of logic (logica utens) as logica docens. We will see that this discipline is every bit as “speculative” as Hegel’s logical system. * In a famous passage2 Aristotle explains the origin and character of language as follows. He says first that thought is a union of the subject with what it thinks. But now we cannot get the things thus thought, just as they are, into our heads, just as we cannot get them in the typically or specifically logical relation, that of identity, with one another. They remain one and, just in that oneness, other, like numerals. Each element, in being itself, is not the other, taken spatially or just as such, when considered according to the methods of the Understanding. Therefore one, or thought, needs, and indeed will self-constitutively create, a system of signs, spoken or written, for the “things”. In Hegel’s account the written sign or glyph gets priority, inasmuch as not standing in turn, as based upon it, for the vox or spoken sign. Already here an ambiguity enters because we find that we cannot treat linguistic signs in separation from thoughts. Hence thought itself becomes in some respects a system of signs, as the thought cannot be separated from the word or phantasma. So in some scholastic systems (e.g. that of John of St. Thomas or Jean Poinsot, Descartes’ exact contemporary) the thought or particular concept became itself the “formal sign” of a prior actuality, only to be reached, however, via just this transparency, this id quo or “intellectual species” (appearance: cf. Aquinas, Summa theologica, Ia 85, 2). In Hegelian terms, this might be seen as a failure of Being to be sublated, aufgehoben, in and by Essence. By this, namely, the idea, any idea, as identical with the Absolute, itself identified with the Idea, however, is itself the actual, whether or not in its particularity including the idea or category of Existence, for example. Non-actual possibilities are, precisely, non-actual. In Hume’s words, though I reverse them, whatever is possible is conceivable, recalling that for Hegel whatever is conceived is born into being, essence and, finally and truly, Spirit. It is possible, also, because it is conceived as being before it is conceived! Conceive something and you know it is possible, but then it is actual as conceived, this being the scholastic notion of ens rationis merely. It will thus be the other of itself, essentially and really, or a 1

Cf. Henry Veatch, “Concerning the Ontological Status of Logical Forms”, Review of Metaphysics, December 1948. 2 Aristotle, De soph. el. 1, 165a 7-16.

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moment (of Spirit). This is in fact the sense of at least one version of “possible worlds”, as giving absolute sense to the Absolute. But if we confine ourselves first to words, these words, which we then use in “combining and dividing”, “stand for” (supponunt pro) the things. However, as there can never be sufficient words to stand for each of the infinite array of individual things one word has to stand for many things or have many meanings, in equivocation and analogy. This gives rise to confusion among the unwary, to paralogisms, which it is more than half the battle of philosophy to free ourselves from in the very act of using such words. We can compare with this Hegel’s account of language in The Philosophy of Spirit. The differences in the two accounts correspond to Absolute Idealism’s differences from Aristotelian Realism, where words “stand for” things but, all the same, via the medium of thoughts. For only thus can language refer at all. In Hegel the word rather absorbs the thing which thus shows itself to be “unthingable”, that is unthinkable. Senseperception passes over to intellection of the universal, just as the very perceiving subject, I, becomes revealed as the universal of universals. Thus for Hegel the Word returns to the “bosom of the Father”, so to say, or to pure thought. One should add though that also in Aristotle this moment of reintegration is found, in the Metaphysics. He keeps it methodologically separate. Hegel however comes after the theological medieval period, where metaphysics and simple popular faith coincided in the explosion he calls speculative thinking, typically mysticism. The aim is now fixed of giving the absolute viewpoint and none other, this being the business of philosophy, as of theologians and of “good Christians”. It was the effort of Empiricism to destroy this synthesis of, as they saw it, the real and the imagined. Against this Hegel set his face as being impossible not only for philosophy but in itself. The next question, to be discussed either before or along with that of the form of judgment, is that of reference or supposition, standing for. Words stand for things. But how do they do this? One rule of thumb was that the subject-term stands for the individual thing thus named, the predicate-term for the quality or nature attributed to it. The difficulty with this is that anything at all can be attributed to anything at all, just as a thing can be attributed to itself. If roses are red, yet redness is typical of roses, nor does the question of unequal distribution or lack of it, such as that not all red things are roses, have any reference in regard to this point. Still, in explanation of predication by copula or “is”, the medieval logicians followed Aristotle in saying that we use this term whenever we

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want to say that some quality or “form” inheres in some “substance” because it is precisely the form, the universal nature, that gives being to a thing, to any thing. For the same reason some languages omit the copula, as in some way equivalent, after all, to the whole sense of things. This, anyhow, respective formality and materiality, remains the difference between the ways of standing for things covered by the predicate and the subject respectively. So even in a straight identity statement the same term functions differently when put as subject or as predicate. It is more “material” as the subject, more “formal” as the predicate. In any language which has the copula “Cicero is Cicero” differs from “Cicero Cicero” or from just “Cicero”. A judgment is passed, the thing itself affirming itself in act. This, the final movement, which is the concept, passes over us, as messenger of actuality, us who misconceive ourselves as “making” the judgment. Thus a moment, along with the momentary as such, is constituted, set up, posited. In a wider sense, however, corresponding to Hegel’s identity in difference as the only “real” identity, every predication is an identity, and also this is signified by the copula “is” (or “isn’t”). For the predicate “says” what the subject is, always. It is easy to see, in line with what was said above, that this leads to an identification of everything with everything, inasmuch as any abstracted object can be related in predication to any other. Upon this however it follows straight away that in saying or naming anything I am identifying it with the Absolute. It is a moment of the Absolute Idea. This is just another way of saying that if anything is real then it can be talked about, or that Reason is of the universal. What gets thus necessarily eclipsed here, along with all grace abstracted from the whole, are “possibilities and lots of possibilities” (Hegel), naming itself being the error through which the total truth of self-consciousness is finally or just therein known. “What’s in a name?” This is the first, hence last, negation of negation. Already, then, we observe far-reaching identities between logica docens of old and Hegel’s logic. This is only so, however, where the former held to the doctrine that not only do both the subject and the predicate have supposition or stand for something outside of the linguistic formality but, secondly, what the two elements of the judgment stand for is the same referent, as it were over again, albeit differently. This is because they put together, identify, what they first destroy in taking apart, even though we grant that such taking apart, abstraction, is the basis of all Understanding and of its modulation into speculative Reason in particular or rather, that is to say, universally. Thus reason achieves, necessarily, what neither Humpty Dumpty nor outside helpers in full force could do, after the great

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fall into abstract “naming”. This is the knowledge in or as certainty of self, aboriginal as rejoined “in the end” with the all or absolute, realised in at once its own and the particular subject’s idea. This eternal return is necessity as freedom, whereby philosophy “leaves everything as it is” (Wittgenstein) and only so. Only in this sense does Hegel mean that all anxiety and effort should cease and not out of any finitely evil quietism (Enc. 212 add.). It is Hegel’s version of the rational “peace of God which passes all understanding” (Verstand). The predicate, that is, is not a mere “function”, waiting to be filled or saturated by some concrete subject become “function”. It itself includes the latter over again. That is, in the sentence, in the actual judgment, “red” say, does not stand for redness as an abstract concept. In the sentence (“the rose is red”) it stands for the rose or, if the ambiguity here be taken the other way, for every rose or even for the idea of a rose. This is why we find Aquinas enunciating, in On Being and Essence, as a principle, that “only wholes are predicated of wholes”. We do not, for example, say that the rose is redness or that Socrates is humanity, since these two universals are not wholes but are, as abstractions, partial. Hence if we accepted these sentences as signifying they would signify, albeit falsely, that a given rose or Socrates was in the first place itself an abstract universal so as to be identifiable with the abstract universals respectively predicated of them. Only thus, in the scholastic perspective anyhow, could this principle, that only wholes are predicated of wholes, be satisfied. Aquinas explains such a whole as “man”, in predication, as including these bones, this matter, in a way that “humanity”, the abstract noun as we say, does not. That is, he gives a metaphysical (even physical) explanation of the logical point, just as does Hegel later on throughout, which is not to say, so far, that the two explanations are the same in anything more than their common character as metaphysical. The point is that Aquinas’s procedure, in enunciating this principle, rests upon the premise that also a predicate “stands for” something, though differently or “after the manner of a predicate”, i.e. formally or, rather, quasi-formally, that it in fact can stand for just anything, and not therefore, in virtue of its supposed “functional” or incomplete form, for just a certain kind of abstraction, only the whole sentence having meaning. Thus, just as we say “Socrates is a man”, or is human, so we can say “This man is Socrates”, even granted that this formal difference given by word-order is virtually absent from Latin, as it may be from certain “poetic” or archaic English usages. In fact a Roman, when fully awake, saying, with dramatic flourish, delenda est Carthago knows quite well that he only means that Carthage is to be destroyed and not that all that is destruction-meriting, still less destruction-

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meriting taken abstractly (we might neologise delendatio here) is Carthage. Otherwise we are saying, impossibly, as with “the contextual theory”, that a thought per se has no meaning, for example the thought of a book, tree or virtue. So Hegel keeps to this logic of the Concept over against a logic of the Judgment or Syllogism. These latter, however, are not, in Hegel at least, so much absorbed into the Concept, though they are that also, as the Concept, rather, is itself fully explicated as Judgment and Syllogism, is what these two dialectically become. * Absolute Knowledge, Hegel writes, “contains within itself this necessity of relinquishing itself from the form of the pure notion, and necessarily involves the transition of the notion into consciousness.” This reflects exactly, in fact it is, the Trinitarian process described in the antecedent chapter of The Phenomenology of Mind (Baillie p. 806). “For Spirit that knows itself is, just for the reason that it grasps its own notion” (this is the consciousness) “immediate identity with itself”. Consciousness is such an identity, is finally self-consciousness of all as within, inasmuch as without, the consciousness. This, moreover, “in the distinction that it implies, is the certainty of what is immediate or is sense-consciousness” (my stress). “This process of releasing itself from the form of its self is the highest freedom and security of its knowledge of itself” (my stress). This is the going forth freely as Nature with which Hegel ends his Logic, “its living immediate process of development” (p.807), complemented here, however, as the “other aspect… in which Spirit comes into being” (my stress) by History, which is thus or ipso facto speculatively transformed, precisely as “externalised and emptied into Time”, which is but Spirit’s “emptying of itself by itself” and not some independent reality or receptacle. It, history, “is the process of becoming in terms of knowledge”. In reality it is a gallery or procession “of spiritual shapes” (cp. Baillie 452, “articulated groups of the unity” and so on), “each of which is endowed with the entire wealth of Spirit”. It is impossible to assert this without implying the same for contemporaries, each and all, which is to say that the only mind of interest to Hegel, or to philosophy, is absolute mind, mind as such.. This entails that he preaches or proclaims a universal eros (translating now into agape in “self-emptying”) in the tradition of Plato, of Boethius or of philosophy itself, as when it is said there is no science of the individual abstractly taken. So also Nature is de-naturised or freed from its “material” aspect as

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being the place, rather, where Being, now revealed as Knowledge, meets itself without mediation. This is Hegel’s “percipient Idea” (Enc, 244) as distinct, already in Kant, from natura materialiter spectata (first Critique, §26). There is here total coincidence with the view of Aquinas, following Aristotle, that the proper knowledge of Being is grasped first in the analysis of change, or that specifically ens mobile, changeable being or being “in motion”, is the proper object of intellect, not, as Aquinas tends to interpret, as if this is a limitation on human knowledge qua human, but rather, as Hegel says here, that certainty, immediacy, in itself, is senseconsciousness. Sense, in a word, is not something specific or “material”. This Aquinas had understood, that the change that is sense-knowledge, is a spiritual change, that sensus est quaedam ratio, sense, it too, is something belonging to reason. So there is a tendency, amounting in Hegel to a determination, both active and passive, to lay bare an absolute necessity in creation. Now necessity is not need, a confusion that has often blocked the theologians at this point. In dialectic it is identified with the highest freedom rather. Here we may repeat the corollary, mentioned above, that the identity of subject and predicate in knowing anything, their “reduction” to the concept thereby, is consciousness and finally “self-consciousness of all as within, inasmuch as without” or outside of consciousness (see previous page). In the concept, therefore, logic and consciousness, knowledge and certainty, in self-consciousness, are healed of their mutual abstraction from one another. There is reduction neither to “psychologism” nor to “artificial intelligence”, neither to subject nor to object. The essential subjectivity is thus of a higher order than that of individual mutability or passion, as act is superior to finite movement(s). * Being, in fact, is grasped under the modalities of matter and form, but equally of privation (Physics I), of which the arch-exemplar (and not merely example), again, is evil (see Hegel’s study of this in the previous chapter of The Phenomenology of Mind). Not merely do we have to say this, we have to say this in the Hegelian sense that language itself says it, regardless of what we may “mean”, which, rightly, he does not distinguish from a wanting to mean. The ground-form of all assertion is the identity of Subject and what is said (Predicate). This “what” makes of “the predicate” something formal, as the subject is, purely as relative to that, “material”, in intention a pure “this” (irrespective of attaching concrete formal qualities in any particular predicate). So, “The Subject is the Predicate” is not

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merely the form of judgment. It is the judgment, of Identity, in virtue of which it is not itself finally a judgment but the Concept, as in the Trinity, since, or therefore, “all judgments are false”. The point, however, is that such an immediacy, inevitably and whatever we may wish to “mean”, while being, in merely apparent contingency, specifically a senseconsciousness, is actually the necessity and ground of all knowledge whatever. In this way sense appears out of the free necessity that is Actuality or Spirit. As Hegel says, the lesson of Christianity is that God, Actuality, is Spirit or, we may truly write, without proper capital, spirit. Its name is its nature. As if in confirmation of this, and with an almost paradoxical touch, Aquinas states that there are many necessary beings, “for example angels, human souls, God and prime matter.” Writing thus he highlights the philosophical impropriety Hegel finds in the term “God” by showing what improper things it eventually obliges one to say, as if God could be just one of a class of necessities. At the same time, however, this impropriety is a necessity of our language, of language. For Hegel this implies the essential superseding of the latter in the Concept. So we have here just the reverse of what first appeared. The object, which professed to be the essential reality, is now the non-essential element of sense-certainty; for the universal, which the object has come to be, is no longer such as the object essentially was to be for sense-certainty. The certainty is now found to lie in the opposite element, namely in knowledge, which formerly was the nonessential factor… Sense-certainty is thus indeed banished from the object, but is not yet thereby done away with; it is merely forced back into the I.3

Here we have Hegel’s notion of force as and by thinking. Hegel will later in life explore further this complex of themes under the notion of “recollection”, continued into “imagination”, in The Philosophy of Spirit. Under this head he will also, in union with the complex, give his main account of Language and associated reference (supposition of terms) as related to Logic generally. Yet it is this notion of recollection, Erinnerung, which is thus mysteriously heralded in this the climax to his Phenomenology, which is a presentation of Absolute Knowledge. This is the final face of Being, as object and essentially object (it has no parts, Parmenides had taught) of immediate sense as the earliest chapter had shown, thus already rendering this climactic conclusion inevitable. So by 3

Hegel, The Phenomenology of Mind, Baillie translation, New York 1966, p. 153 (chapter on “Sense-Certainty”).

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“sense” here is not meant an abstract sensation of some particular which is thus not known at all, but a grasping of universal being in the immediate individual. This immediacy alone is the meaning and character of sense, therefore, of sensing as act before abstract specification of its object as ens mobile or similar. The sensing itself is prior conceptually to the sensibile with which it becomes identified, this very identification, however, casting doubt upon the propriety of postulating such an ens mobile. It is therefore doubtful if this was indeed Aristotle’s intention, as has been too readily assumed. For metaphysics biology does not “exist” as more than abstract representation, the negative aspect of immediacy. Or, our knowledge of the immediacy of sensation, as set forth here, is not itself immediate. This relinquishment of self that is essential to Spirit, he goes on, is yet incomplete, i.e. in this explanation of it (which however is intentionally one with its own act of thinking). Just the fact of relation, between object and self-certainty, means that the latter, thus bound, “has not yet attained its full freedom”. This simply iterates the aspect we have singled out, the necessity within sense and Nature of their being superseded by, precisely, necessity. Knowledge, in the first place, knew “how to sacrifice itself” for the sake of its own realisation, in (self-)abandonment, to its own providence, as it were, and this “in the form of free fortuitous happening”. We should understand, that is, that what we thus formally characterise is in truth the form of the highest necessity. This is the process of Spirit’s becoming Spirit, in the sense, the very meaning of these words, that it is what it becomes, its own realised end and “future”, in self-made or free and ordained perfection. This involves, works out as, Spirit’s “intuitively apprehending outside it its pure self as Time”. Again here the essential Trinitarian motion and analogy in one is realised. Hegel adds as included in this apprehension of “its pure self” (as Time) the apprehension (“likewise”) of “its existence” as Space. This is not an added complication but the Kantian realisation that Time and Space are co-implicative. Together in fact they constitute Nature as indifferently a or the “living immediate process of development”. Nature is Spirit externalised or “divested of self” (impossibly), is nothing but “this eternal process of abandoning its (Nature’s) own independent subsistence” which it thus never has, ever reinstating Subject, rather, in Hegel’s words here (p.807). Hegel calls Nature the last “form into which Spirit passes”. Why? Hegel clearly has the Trinitarian processions in mind as metaphysically prior. Spirit, which he sees as processing from its own other in particular, which is its self-revelation, now processes again to what again is not-self. So also

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in Aquinas there are two “processions” of the Word, ad intra, from the Father generating, ad extra as patterning creation. As thought now develops this, as the common element of proceeding Spirit, is placed at the centre while, furthermore, the rationalist division between interior and exterior is superseded. All takes place “within” God, but only figuratively, since where there is no outside there can be no inside either. What we have is Spirit as itself revelation of itself as, again, revelation. Hence, although the figure of just two processions is common to both accounts, their continuity comes more to the fore in the later version. * Here, and for the remaining two pages of the book, and as we noted above, Hegel advances from Nature to History, as being the same “process of becoming”, what is called in theology creation, but this time in terms of knowledge rather than the less specified being which is Nature as ens mobile. By this mutability, however, Nature, which simply is “Spirit divested of self” and therefore both externalised and mutable, “is, in its existence, nothing but this eternal process of abandoning its (Nature’s) own independent subsistence, and the movement which reinstates Subject”, i.e. it is this reinstating simply and no actual tertium quid or third thing at all. It is, once again, like the formal sign of the scholastics, a pure id quo. Therefore we might say that it, Nature, stands in place of a concept in their realist systems, something only then “itself” considered reflexively “in second intention”.4 For Hegel we have to come to this way of looking at or rather through Nature. This looking through, in fact, is precisely looking at Nature as she is, or spiritually, just as Spirit formerly gave rise to the activity of the Understanding, which then in that respect is dependent upon Nature just as Nature and the concepts are dependent upon Spirit. But though the Understanding may depend upon Nature, upon anthropology, as Hegel has it in The Philosophy of Spirit, yet as transcending it by its own nature it is more fundamentally prior to it as founding it. We may add that Nature, when thus materialiter spectata, can be said, in Hegel’s sense, to be viewed abstractly, not as it stands in relation to the 4

Thus, in Hegel’s account of Subjective Spirit, of thinking, the phantasmata of Aristotelian scholasticism no longer play an essential role. Their place is taken by the name as vehicle of thinking. Of course we can if we wish regard the name, in its affirmed necessity here, as the proper aural or visual phantasm. Yet there seems to be an extended plurality of names, forming the unity or Word of language, in the same way as or for the same reason that there is Nature, as manifestation.

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whole, in just the same way as a word, or words, considered “in material supposition”, on the older medieval scheme, is not viewed according to its proper function or use in the discursive world, but is merely, as it came to be later expressed, “mentioned”. In this way the particular sciences, as even that of politics, of the State or of “objective spirit”, fall short of absolute spirit or of knowledge absolutely taken, which is that, for Hegel too, of being as such, which, ends The Science of Logic by saying, the absolute Idea or absolute simply. “The definition, which declares the Absolute to be the Idea, is itself absolute” (Enc. 212). The knowledge of history, which is the history of knowledge, is “a conscious self-mediating process”, a becoming of the sort we call Time. Or rather, it is not this but it is “Spirit externalised and emptied into Time”. For Time is only “the pure self… not grasped and understood by the self” (p.800). Spirit “necessarily appears in time… so long as it does not grasp its pure notion” and hence itself “annul time”, just as, Hegel says elsewhere, it necessarily appears in first manifesting itself as sense, upon which time depends.. Time, that is, “is just the notion definitely existent”, ex-istent, out there, though presented as “empty intuition”, Newton’s “absolute time”. Once intuition is itself comprehended as finite objectification, however, then this comprehension, as notion, “supersedes its time character”. So time is only relatively, or “for a time”, “spirit’s destiny and necessity”. It is this as “compelling spirit to enrich the share self-consciousness has in consciousness”, to know its identity with the concept as absolute ego, universal of universals. Ego, again, therefore, “is not merely self, it is identity of self with itself.” By the movement of spirit the self “empties itself of self and sinks within its own substance”. All is mine, the distinction in identity of object and content is superseded. History similarly, as a form of abandonment, is “the emptying of itself by itself”, in “a slow procession and succession of spiritual shapes”, “each of which is endowed with the entire wealth of spirit”, with Reason, in a word. Each has the world for his or her own, yet each has to relinquish it. The subject has, that is, to go fully into itself, leaving nothing of itself outside of this in-going (Insichgehen). That is, it does not so much “leave its external existence behind”, as if that were ever anything, but witnesses rather to its never having had such external existence. Death, that is, is the full and entire negation of “external existence” as being in itself, in esse et posse, nothing, as what we call Life is “ only the Idea immediate”, i.e. not actually the Idea, which is defined as mediated (by the whole logical process). This means that Death is actually not pure negation but rather that negation of the negation, which is the ultimately positive.

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Here we now come to recollection (Erinnerung), which we had mentioned as the common factor between thought and this account of History (and Nature) with which Hegel closes his Phenomenology of Mind. Here “Spirit leaves its external existence behind and gives its embodiment over to recollection”, an embodiment, that is, which is the direct contrary of normal embodiment and yet a true bestowal of substantive significance. Here, says Hegel, “Spirit is engulfed in the night of its own self-consciousness”, conserving its superseded existence as “born anew from the womb of knowledge”. Now this turn of speech might be applied equally to new life as emergence on life’s stage of a new generation or to “a new stage of existence, a new world and… a new embodiment or mode of Spirit”, like the Biblical resurrection. Which is it? Or is it both? Spirit itself, he says, as if supporting the first alternative, “has to begin all over again at its immediacy”, as if, but only as if, all that preceded it were lost. This is so, even though Spirit really never has to do anything. It does what it does. But “as freshly as before” says Hegel, almost as if denying the element of repetition he has himself introduced, precisely the way of Nietzsche with his “eternal return” of Time upon itself. Spirit, indeed, has and must have “learned nothing”. For it, for Wisdom as such, all is “pure play”. It is recollection, again, that conserves this experience of non-experience, or that is not, for it, and cannot be experience, since spirit is Act. Such conservation in Recollection is “the inner being and… the higher form of the substance”, which is itself progress or procession or development, wherein, necessarily, Spirit indeed begins again, always begins, but “at a higher level”. What is this height of level exactly now? “The realm of spirits developed in this way, and assuming definite shape in existence, constitutes a succession”, just like the categories of the Logic, or like what Hegel says in The Philosophy of Spirit about the world of Mind5. Each inherits the whole of its preparation, up to the Absolute Notion, which in fact has already occurred or is eternally realised, as we recognise in this very speculation (a speculation not unlike, or entirely to be divorced from, Hume’s essentially sceptical treatment of memory).. This “revelation” of History, as distinct from that of Nature with which, however, it is one or at one as “external procession”, is therefore also a superseding of “depth”, of inward Logic in ‘”extension” or spatial embodiment’, as in Ramist logic, which is precisely why it especially must 5

Enc. 380: “The Species and grades of mental evolution, on the contrary, lose their separate existence and become factors, states, and features in the higher grades of development”.

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be internalised again in the specifically re-collective (Er-innerung) activity that is Absolute Idealism and Mind itself. This parallels the “freely going forth as Nature” to which the Logic leads in Absolute Mind as such, it too in space as in time. The externalisation, actually nothing other than “selfrelinquishment”, is itself equally “temporal embodiment”. Embodiment itself, figured, in accordance with immediate or common-sense realism, as “incarnation” (as if flesh, caro, the “carnal”, were itself an absolute or abstract other-being than Spirit), is itself Spirit’s self-alienation and nothing specific or contingent, since, namely, the contingent is itself nothing, except as “ideal” (Enc. 95), this being “the truth of the finite” generally. In fact with Time ‘this externalisation in its very nature relinquishes (externalises) itself and so exists at once in its spatial “extension” as well as in its “depth” or the self’ (p.808, my stress). At once! This denies both of them as independent or more fundamental aspects, as, Hegel had once suggested, Spirit might with at least equal propriety (or more, he suggests) be spoken of as proceeding just from “the Son”, from Spirit itself over again, i.e. it is a self-procession equally, in its essential self-externalisation as revelation or manifestation and nothing other than manifestation, such as might in particular be manifested. We have here the final overthrow of dualism while losing nothing of the truths it would have encapsulated. “This also is thou, neither is this thou”, as an unknown “mystic” or speculative thinker had it.6 God, the Absolute, which is the Absolute Idea and nothing other, is neither abstract spirit nor materialised nature or history. There is no such thing in either case. The latter are rather the very being and presence of the Idea in its omnipresent or active “providence” or determining fore-sight, which not even the proverbial sparrow escapes, since the End as such is realised “without shadow of turning” or eternally, and of this Time is merely the “moving image”. Or, as Aquinas had had it, absolute knowledge is just qua knowledge determinative, while will and cognition, practice and theory, supersede each other in their final or speculative identity. No “force” is or was needed and this is the force of omnipotentia! It is precisely thus that “Absolute Knowledge or Spirit knowing itself as Spirit, finds its pathway in the recollection of spiritual forms (Geiste) as they are in themselves and as they accomplish the organization of their spiritual kingdom” (my stress). This last word may recall Kant’s “kingdom 6

The phrase is repeatedly cited in the speculative works of Charles Williams, in connection with his doctrine of the “way of affirmation (of images)”, which however he rather abstractly pairs against the “way of negation”. In Hegel there is no such choice, the apophatic remaining rather implicit in the cataphatic, differing somewhat from Eckhart, in this (cp. O’Regan, op. cit. 250-263).

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of ends”, who are precisely the Geiste. Of course Spirit doesn’t find or need to find anything. This, rather, is what Spirit is, freedom. Though as freedom and not, finally, as being all identities fall away, even this that spirit is freedom, into the absolute unity speculatively displacing them, in the falsity of all judgment. As to these Geiste we might refer to Hegel’s earlier chapter on “reason as testing laws”. Self is directly at one with essential reality, “in virtue of the universality of its own self” as I. Consciousness is not individual, “the principle of personality is universality”. It transcends the ever approximate nature merely of abstract belief, inasmuch as faith is fulfilled or accomplished in this self-consciousness, transcending itself as individual and thus itself “ethical substance”. So all that is found there, in self, is nothing accidental, but rather “spiritual forms”, again, articulated groups (Massen) of the unity permeated by its own life, unsundered spirits transparent to themselves, stainless forms and shapes of heaven, that preserve amidst their differences the untarnished innocence and concord of their essential natures (Ph.G. p.452).

Hegel is clearly anticipating his own development here, in circular or spiral form, recollecting “spiritual forms” in fact. The Scriptural “in”, as if of abstract difference though intending to overcome it, gives way here to “unsundered” identity “in” difference, or difference in identity. The conservation of these “forms” (the meaning Hegel preserves from the suspect term “soul”), “their free existence appearing in the form of contingency”, is History. Contingency is the immediate and hence mistaken or momentary intellectual apprehension of freedom, of what freedom is. In fact freedom has to be what it is not, we have already seen, and contrariwise. It is the final suspension of the copula in the identity the copula falsifies in abstractly asserting. So all speech is finally abstract, less than the concrete, the actual. We cannot, ought not, Hegel insists, “keep silence” about this, in vain perpetuation of vanity, as he puts it. For this free existence, “intellectually comprehended”, becomes Science, in particular the science of Phenomenology, the study of which Hegel is now concluding. His book is thus an exercise in the definition of its own subject, as of a book that would be written, in quo totum continetur. The poet (of the Dies irae here, referring to the liber scriptum of the “last” judgment) has totum, the whole, rather than all things, tota, as the guilty conscience wants fearfully to picture it. It is, would be, more like the book envisaged by Borges in “The Library of Babel”, the key to all books, which however no librarian qua librarian can or could hope to find. So all Hegel does is point us, implicitly at least, to the existence of

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such a “book” as the despair of librarians and thus indeed the very pathway of despair they meanwhile tread, while his own book lies innocently hidden among their shelved and worthless thousands. Yet it was only the first of several. So, he winds up, History and Science, “History comprehended” rather, “form at once the recollection and the Golgotha of Absolute Spirit”. Erinnerung again! In History Absolute Spirit recollects itself while relinquishing itself in externalisation, Golgotha, self-annihilation, completing its full manifestation, to and in self, its “outpouring upon all flesh” in the prophet Joel’s phrase. What is poured out is no longer in the bucket, yet in this case it is not only poured out in order to return but its very first or original being, that is being itself as freedom, is constituted in and by this pouring out. Such is Spirit, its being, as blowing where it will, with no path to be mapped out or “traced”, by itself or us. It does what it does, transcending programme, so that in very truth, at the end, “the factual is normative”. This then is the intellectual comprehension of the factual, of actual history as “the reality, the truth, the certainty” but of Absolute Spirit specifically, as the factual is specifically normative or veritas, also the name of a virtue. Only in this explained sense can we concur in Hans Küng’s wish, in his Hegelian study of “the Incarnation”, to make of History an extra “transcendental predicate”, otherwise a pretty misleading project, only in the sense, that is, in which The chalice of this realm of spirits Foams forth to God His own Infinitude. His own! One is left wondering whether the stress of “own” (Baillie’s?) is really implicit in the seine of Hegel’s adaptation of Schiller’s couplet here. It stresses that he has not here provided an alternative to a so-called “theological interpretation”. Yet the “only” (nur) immediately introducing this couplet might imply an abstractive or finite limitation upon any conceiving of God apart from or without this “realm”. It is precisely God’s other, however, that is his own. In this sense a man, even or especially that second first man, should mean exclusively the one seeing him in saying, as it were, only “he that has seen me has seen the Father” The parallel is with the infinite smallness of God as envisaged by Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa, stripping Anselmian absolute greatness, as being infinitude or the Idea, of all the conceptual finitude intrinsic to quantity. The theology, that is, is negative as freedom is negative or free of existential determination. This is the reverse of abstract nihilism, however, a going further rather than a

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refusal to travel, Yet both are the same, end as such, Hegel affirms, being “realised”. “Be still and know that I am God”.7 * We might either stop here or return to the topic of Erinnerung, to the deep pit or mine of specifically linguistic Memory (of names) and from there to Logic as “form and fabric of the world”. “What disorganizes the unity of logical reason, equally disorganizes actuality” (Enc., “Objective Spirit”, 541).

7

Cf., on this point, Slavoj Zizek: “Is it Still Possible to be a Hegelian Today?” in Levi Bryant, Nick Srnicek & Graham Harman (ed.), The Speculative Turn: Continental Materialism and Realism, (Melbourne: reprint 2011), pp. 202-223, especially the two sections “Hegel versus Nietzsche” and the following on struggle and reconciliation. Non-being is a subordinate “moment” of being and, hence, always specific, even in this its very last instance and “form” as not absolute negativity but the negativity of the absolute, of freedom.

CHAPTER THREE CHRISTOLOGY, SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS AND PERSONALITY

Consider, to begin here, the child alone. If he is excluded he feels it is of set purpose. If he, or she, is included… well, this is not possible. He has been expelled from the womb. That’s what a child is. So even the Christ, supposed as having no “earthly” father, yet had a mother. But this was a compromise, massive to the point of self-definition, the coming out “from my father” being made equal to the coming into and out of the mother, just thereby enacting Trinitarian act, the becoming man becoming, being revealed as, spirit’s act of spirit’s own self-constituting, never begun, never finished, imperfect as yet “in act” just thereby perfected. So, in time, the faith community would posit the mother too as one who “came down from heaven”, in or as “immaculate conception”. Such coming down, though, is an aboriginal image, or archetypal picture, of human consciousness, thereby equated with a “fall” from which alone the state fallen from, as pre-condition, must result. This was taken up, as a kind of pre-dogmatic opening, into the thinking of the first Patristic or “postapostolic” age in some of its most gifted representatives. Origen is the foremost example. So the child has come down, from womb or heaven both to the Ground, and no coddling or offer of the breast can remedy the damage. He is expelled, self-expelled, from both he “did not abhor” (Ambrose: Te Deum), neither womb nor heaven. This expulsion, however, as irremediable, though it is our immediate impression of ourselves, is absurd, as Sartre and others have emphasised, since the “true reasonworld”, delineated by Hegel, Leibniz, Aristotle or philosophy as such, is necessarily perfect even in its appearances of imperfection, of fall, as McTaggart, in Leibnizian spirit, had stressed. Therefore birth, its trauma, and other such posits of memory are pictures merely, necessary preludes to spirit, to the Idea, which, once attained, can tolerate nothing as prior to itself. Hume’s scepticism over memory here finds its best support while the “dark night” of the memory enjoined as a mere discipline by ascetic

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mystics is seen rather as the true state of the case, of that “dark night of the ego” Hegel rather posits as spirit’s ground. Spirit leaves its external existence behind… is engulfed in the night of its own self-consciousness… Here it has to begin all over again at its immediacy… as if, for it, all that preceded were lost… it commences at a higher level. The realm of spirits (cp. p. 452)… each takes over from its predecessor the empire of the spiritual world. The goal of the process is the revelation of the depth of spiritual life, and this is the Absolute Notion. (Ph.G., Baillie pp. 807-808)

Spirit, as infinite, transcends all notions of gratitude and thus is, though only in a picture again, “ungrateful”. The “outside” that Aristotle pictures reason as coming from (in On the Parts of Animals) is thus necessarily reality’s inside and core or determining whole of it as form and content in one. “We fall but to rise” is the popular or proverbial version of this, the Hegelian system as a whole, exit and return pre-supposing one another. The beginning is the system itself and contrariwise. The child’s feeling excluded is the same as his or her excluding the world. This is that basic religious response foundational to philosophy, in terms of which modern “saints” and “doctors”, such as Thérèse Martin or, now, Newman, plus a host of poets, the only spontaneous intellectuals, have delineated their childhood as, for them, privileged experiences. I understood, wrote the latter, of his childhood specifically, that there were just two beings in the world, “myself and God”.1 Thus St. Thomas Aquinas declares or “scientifically” defines that the “society of friends”, however good, cannot be necessarily required for participation in absolute happiness. All are in themselves or individually “members one of another”, universally, a state in its reproduction of the Trinitarian pattern transcending without denying friendship as constitutive of the true self. This becoming one might be called the trans-erotic or even “thanatic” perfection of such friendly intercourse, the love of being for itself in all that is its other. Love for the other “lays down” what is its own, this being the life, the motion, of Spirit.

1

Well-meaning investigators of autism might well take note of this witness to the final truth of the System, which is the Absolute, Mind, the Idea, God, Self or SelfConsciousness, the “true reason world” (Hegel), as contained in its origins, these being as non-temporal as Einsteinian space-time itself. This system is what the Hegelian body of propositions, their composition, represents and of which it is a moment, while the equivalences are necessitated by that absolute in that “concrete” simplicity it, whatever name we give it, necessarily is.

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This is the true meaning, further, of the Miltonic “Evil be thou my good”, of the mediator, essential for Hegel, “made sin (or ‘a curse’) for us”, “despised and rejected of men” and so on. This includes the mystery, as casting light upon it, of Christ eliciting Antichrist and thus returning to himself “at a higher level”. So Hegel says that death (thanatos) is opposite to, and not just other than, how it appears. Hence, in sharing this knowledge of exclusion, in active-passive plasticity, all become, necessarily, one, “of one mind”, as we say. * The others as others, the child has to think, therefore, are bad, false, unless, equivalently, he, or she, is that. Here we have the shocking equivalence of bad and good Hegel more than hints at. The child may come to see that he has set up the others himself, or they him, this being the more frightening or self-alienating thought, though greedily grasped at by finite thinking (in sociology, for example), which is not thinking. Yet where else could they have come from, or he in the midst of them? This is the riddle of specifically self-consciousness as first posed in its positing. One can come from nowhere (else), since anyone else would have served just as well for that, like a twin or more than a twin, Doppelgänger indeed, but not just I.2 Nowhere could produce me except as self-caused, not caused at all, that is, not posited but found rather, as “under a cabbage leaf”, to use a condescending maternal image which yet concedes the child’s autonomy in entirety, “begotten not made”. This is necessity, compared to which the definitional non-necessity of anything contingent has to make that thing false, as what both is and is not, in Plato’s phrase. As Augustine put it, of this necessity, necessarily personalised, he thought, as act (“actuous” is a term Hegel uses in one place): “You were with me but I was not with you”. Hence, in a post- or trans-temporal perspective, “I and my father are one” and have to be so, since “Before Abraham was, I am”. This, though, is the fatherhood “from whom all fatherhood in heaven and earth is named” and not, as is assumed by the charge of picturethinking here, contrariwise. Genetic life, that is, is a finite category, in 2 Just for this reason the I-consciousness is not to be explained in terms of atomic particles, such as the physicist Max Tegmark dreams of in his fascinating book, Our Mathematical Universe – My Quest for the Ultimate Nature of Reality (Brockman Inc. 2014), but the particles, rather, are to be seen in terms of, as a moment of, the self-thinking of an absolute logic of self-consciousness, which thus “leaves everything the same” (Wittgenstein). Cp. our “Other Problems about the Self”, Sophia (Australia), 1984.

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finite or abstract immediacy, at which Hegel’s logic does not allow us to stop. It is, in its finite way, the Idea but, as “only” immediately it, it is not the Absolute Idea, not, therefore, the Absolute. * Take now, after this introduction, the example, the prototype, of the definition at the Ecumenical Council of Ephesus in the year 431 A.D., a century or so after Nicaea, which gave the Church its written or spoken creed. It, Ephesus, gave the first of a series of Christological definitions culminating in the decree against monothelitism or the view that God incarnate could have only one divine or absolute will, without a particular human one, i.e. would not be truly a man, as is vital for orthodoxy to maintain. Such dogmatic decrees are not always or often pure philosophy, in view of their seemingly finite intention of teaching, but, in the freedom of a consent transcending political interference, they do and have regulated subsequent thinking, including philosophy, and that for a millennium and more, in areas where they have been recognised, just as, in difference, do the decrees of the Chinese communist party, recently ridiculed by Zizek3, in China. Hence it is best to build upon them as “the trunk” upon which “a gentleman works” (Confucius), thus preserving the collective or social image of man in any one time or place.4 This is of course to concede a phenomenal or only finitely free element to any act or theatre of writing or even speech. Hence philosophy, sophia, is never, finally, a textual matter but an intellectual virtue rather. In the phenomenal arena, and that includes church assemblies, such interference, mild or ferocious, is ever with us. For this reason modern orthodox theology denies that the Church is the Kingdom of God it pre-figures in working, living, to bring it about. It rather stands for, as icon or effecting sign, humanity as “made new”, despite the option of refusal. And in the strength of or expressed by forgiveness and reconciliation, with those who “know not what they do”. But nor, equally, is the self-finitisation of philosophy into a series of determinate judgments, e.g. in a written work, itself philosophy as the absolute in its perfect form and flow, as such “a greater revelation than the whole of religion and philosophy” in these its finite forms, as Beethoven said not of the musical art merely but of music, born as a whole at the commencement or finish indifferently of every stave of it or so soon as a 3

S. Zizek: “Sinitisation”, London Review of Books, 2015. Cp. C.S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man, a set of three lectures given at Durham University, Geoffrey Bles: London 1943. 4

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pattern behind and yet of the sound is mentally (geistlich) discerned. Thus every thought has ever included, like royalty, its successor(s) ad infinitum, yet or just therefore trans-durationally, this being the reigning “for ever and ever” proposed in religion. At Ephesus the Council “fathers”, that is the bishops, declared and defined that Mary is or became, again, and yet was to become (i.e. is essentially) “the mother of God”, theotokos, or God-bearer (in her womb), and not bearer of a man merely, taken as finite. Yet she was such a bearer and this definition, although primarily Christological (that God and man are one “person”), means that man, as God, as mind, is not finite, nor she, Mary, therefore. Each is the community or church, ecclesia, qahal. This is the rationale for the currently discouraged custom of private masses, celebrated by priest alone as himself “people” (of God). Thus the Apostle had already expanded this in his saying: “You are all one person in Jesus Christ”. The conciliar definition (Ephesus 431) can thus appear after all in the light of a devotional contraction, Gottesdienst, whatever the dogmatic requirement of the moment. The union of God and man, it all the same declares, is “personal”. Christ, the mediator, “this gemeinten Gestalt”, as Hegel puts it5, is not divided. Here we should note that in Hegelian thought the question, though natural enough, as to whether or not the Christian claims are true, in the sense of representing how it really is or was, in a “sacred” history, just cannot be put. Truth is what realises itself as fact and/or norm, narrative mediating the necessity, just as the Idea immediate or life is equivalent to being for those living. Viventibus esse est vivere. We are part of the story, phenomenally, as we should recognise. * Thus Hegel’s logic is perfected or fulfilled in his philosophy of spirit as mind, containing logic’s necessity as it contains, as issuing in it, the Idea’s free and hence necessary going forth as nature, “othering” itself and infinitely so, this being entailed in and by the Idea’s original selfconstituting othering as Word or Son, with which nature is not to be “abstractly” equated, Hegel declares in LPR. In German, one may note, otherness, Anderssein, and change, Änderung, appear etymologically, as they are indeed conceptually, connected. Thus even if O’Regan, for example, exerts himself, and that commendably, to show how Hegel came increasingly to stress the objective uniqueness of Christ in history as mediator, yet the truth of this uniqueness, it is shown by the logic, is that it 5

See The Phenomenology of Mind, chapter 7.

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is trans-historical, thus freeing the believer from enslavement to the “dead heirlooms” of a beginning in time, mistaking for the Notion what were only the first beginnings of understanding, as is especially exemplified, indeed, by the rich interpretations put upon these beginnings by the now canonical Pauline and Johannine writings of several decades later. In fact though, phenomenologically, any beginning becomes anyhow past right there in its beginning Concerning these two natures, human and divine, in one “person”, the higher must absorb the lower, the finite, which yet remains within or after its absorption, this being the ideal essence or “essential ideality” of the finite in a negative sense6. Otherwise we get an abstract “monophysitism”, in thinking of Christ, who would then no longer be truly man-as-we-are, the guarding against which elicited a further Council, at Chalcedon, twenty years later. The one thus born of the woman is eternally begotten as divine Son. In other words, by sublation, there is neither birth nor death as we separately represent them. Resurrection, it is clear, is itself a representation of this negative identity, though God himself may be represented as well as a man as be or remain bodiless. The Idea remains free from external determination. This means, however, metaphysically or “philosophically”, that body is as such appearance, this being the more general truth hidden in the particular or abstract error of Docetism, which would destroy Christ’s community with us (who appear). So the human nature of Christ is as real or unreal as our own, since it is our own as man mediating. If we too declare, however, that we have just one nature, in our thinking self-consciousness, does that make us all monophysites? Certainly this can be truly said, but not in the abstract and “condemned” sense. Spirit, mind, identifies itself in otherness. Hence a man, man as such, is never merely a specified animal or any other finite object/phenomenon. Church decrees, namely, quite as much as legal ones, are conceived against a for the most part, historically at least, unquestioned epistemologically realist background, one seeming to make God finite in the very act of declaring him infinite, since the finitude clings to linguistic representation as such, all judgments, Hegel hardily declares, being false.7 This applies even to natural law (lex), though not to

6

Enc. 95: “But the truth of the finite is rather its ideality.” In apologetic or often purely theological writing this dimension of things is sidestepped by a quasi-dogmatic or rather, hence, pseudo-dogmatic assertion of Heilsrealismus (Scheffczyk, op. cit., but see also Paul VI’s little post-conciliar pamphlet, “The credo of the People of God” from the 1970s). This view, which 7

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natural right (ius), law being aliqualis ratio iuris only (Aquinas), as life, one might thus say, is a ratio of the Idea (Hegel’s “idea immediate”). Realism deals with this by its doctrine of analogy, whereby it in fact sublates itself without, however, acknowledging this. Thus God is spoken of as the first of many causes and there the matter is left, leaving the proof itself equivocal, as when divine freedom is set beside our own as mere elder brother, so to say. Yet freedom is itself spirit or absolute mind, ad opposita. The case is the same, then, as we just mentioned, with the earlier heresy of Docetism, its condemnation being misread as canonical affirmation of that dualist materialism8 vitiating conventional religious consciousness. What was condemned, rather, is the thesis that Christ alone, in his person, fails to be one of us, becoming thus incapable of “standing for” us as mediator. So he has to have our nature, even if it is our nature to be a logically fleeting moment of the Idea, living, moving and having its being only within it. It is our nature therefore, as is the case with nature as a whole, to be identical with the Idea in our difference from the Idea. Logic finally overthrows language as mere shadow of its own self. This is the deep identity of Hegel’s thought with Hume’s, which it fulfils as, if differently, the New Testament the Old, by a negation of the prior negation, namely. Against all this, the very matter of faith, the doctrine of analogy is set as a defence, in order to maintain a working week against the claims of Sunday, so to say, religion becoming thus, as when set against philosophy, which perfects it, perverted at its root, like the art of the “art for art’s sake” movement, than which there is nothing more useless and effete. Absolute idealism, therefore, does not deny to Christ something that we have, a human nature. He has it as much or as little as we have it. Selfconsciousness “incarnates” the Absolute Idea, I is or am “the universal of universals”. The Idea is itself its own revelation, Hegel will say, revelation itself or what lies, unveiled, upon the surface, like a bush burning, like Christ walking “on the waters of Genesserat or of Thames”. It is not an abstractly particular revelation of this or that. By the same principle there is “a time for everything”, for all opposites, which are thus one in the freedom of the concept, which, this freedom, is the Idea, indeterminate as determined to all in all. There seems nothing in Christian dogma to outlaw

cannot be philosophically sustained, is equally no essential part of Christian thought, nor, in any case, does the truth of thinking depend upon it. 8 Such dualism, it is not always seen, develops naturally into dualist Manicheism, which was later condemned by the Church

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such a philosophy, to outlaw, that is, philosophy as such, sprung from religion as Hegel shows it to be. Absolute idealism, however, though it is far in advance of vulgar realism, is by no means restricted to philosophy. It lies at the root of all religion; for religion too believes the actual world we see, the sum total of existence, to be created and governed by God. (Enc. 45 add.)

Orthodox Christology is heir to Aristotelian anthropology whereby substantial, all-determining form absorbs all lower, partial or accidental forms, beginning with the “form of corporeity”, since mind is itself, as intellectual soul or form, the “form of the body” (the Council of Vienne accepted this doctrine, c. 1311). What this means is that knowing is absolute, is the Idea, before it is just something an agent does, and this is self-consciousness. Yet this definition retains the dualism it surmounts, It was left to philosophy, whatever be the case with theology thus far, to deny “body” as a false abstraction of interest only to logicians who, in Aquinas’s phrase, do not consider the being of things. There is no body of Christ separable from his person or, in Hegel´s terms, it is a representation of “the soul”, of spirit or mind ultimately as knowing only itself in itself as its own otherness9. There is no content outside of the form for it to be a form of. A philosophy of dance or of music, two things annihilating body and time precisely as lying formally at the heart of each of them respectively, might bring this out. Spirit annihilates matter in and through formalising or forming it. Thus Aquinas’s aphorism, anima mea non est ego, a phrase he once used in a scriptural commentary, when seized on by that vulgar realism Hegel mentions, retains this common-sense or immediate dualism through which doctrine is generally mediated. Really, though, mind keeps all that seems or is put as outside itself within itself, this being the essence 9

The dead body of Christ in the tomb is itself a representation, as indeed is death itself. This is the solution to the puzzles Peter Geach expressed while saying “I readily accept the teaching of theologians” that this dead body, namely, was hypostatically conjoined to the godhead or whatever the phrase used. The same Heilsrealismus is what led Scotus to postulate a “bundle-theory of forms” (including a forma corporeitatis separable from the soul as forma corporis) making apparently untutored nonsense out of the Aristotelian hylomorphism, the teaching that a dead hand (or body) is not a hand (or body), as it may appear merely. Moments of time are more truly moments of truth, true for spirit only “as long as spirit needs them” (Hegel). Death as resurrection itself explodes, rather, such Heilsrealismus, this figure (of a standing-up) even in inception challenging such consciousness to go further, to “understand spiritually”.

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of knowledge as itself infinite, without relation other than identity (a or the “relation of reason”, namely, the logical relation, not a “real” relation). It is itself the abode of all truth, as the Absolute Idea. Veritas est in mente and so, therefore, is anything else. Truth, that is, is not here a mere ens rationis in a would-be restrictive sense. For this truth, the Absolute Idea, is the true being, as Hegel declares at the end of The Science of Logic. It is being as found in the mind or in spirit. This one might call the “essential” reversal of realism as “upside down”, to which the Doctrine of the Notion by no means simply returns us, giving instead precisely the realism of this “notion”, of which anything else is merely an ideal moment. Thus it is that the Idea is the true being, as is said at the end of The Science of Logic.10 The principle of personality is universality, Hegel says, and conversely. I am, the subject is, “the universal of universals” and so not in essence someone’s son, for example. This universal solipsism is the redemption and denial of its own self. It is thus the principle of freedom, against which the moment of the genus is related as moment, like all the moments of the Idea, such as life itself in its pure immediacy. Yet also the Idea itself “goes forth” (EL 244) and this is Hegel’s recognition of the primacy of being, but precisely of being’s truth in the Idea, in mind, which it is or which is it. Omne ens est verum11. Yet also the resulting forth-gone, exteriorised Nature, is still not the Idea absolutely, is “the finite world which is outside of truth”, he makes explicit at LPR III 39, saying that the Son or Trinitarian Word is not the same as the world, as Nature, which “knows nothing of Spirit, does not herself enter into a relation with God”, who. to be known as Spirit, “must do more than thunder”. It is man within as crowning nature who exposes this negativity. For “Nature, poor stepdame, cannot slake my drouth” (Francis Thompson’s line on nature in “The Hound of Heaven”). The trees do not speak, or “speak by silences”, like Carthusian monks12 perhaps. Mind’s own or “natural” infinity, as constituted in and by the universal, is here bordered upon, as is the classical argument to God or beatitude from what this “natural desire” the poet expresses for an infinity from which consciousness is not excluded, which thus becomes self-consciousness, in a sense, however, necessarily 10

With this one should compare and contrast the doctrine of Aquinas at QD de potentia 7, where truth is considered as relative to being as prior, but as what it nonetheless is, inasmuch as being is considered by mind or “spiritually”. “I am the truth” might be the theological “proof text” here. 11 This Thomistic phrase was well explored in Joseph Pieper’s Wahrheit der Dinge, Munich 1948. 12 Cp. They Speak by Silences, by “a Carthusian” (who knew his English poetry), DLT London.

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able to encompass that “ruin of the individual” (as of language, see above) that logic demonstrates.13 The individual becomes undividual, one with all, on a day in which all cows are white, in which “I am that”. For McTaggart, atheist but absolute idealist, the necessary rationality of “the world”, not itself ideal or finite, itself posits this. We must indeed say that the Absolute Idea, as itself the Absolute (EL212), is not itself ideal, as is all that is finite only. Finitude, that is, defines ideality, only to be overcome as Spirit, which is in itself the other of itself or “its own other”. So, “to what will you compare me?” Answer: to nothing, not even to myself, thought here overcoming itself in its identity with will or absolute freedom and conversely, philosophy thus looking forward to its Nietzschean moment which, however, we are now living after, plumbing further the depths of negativity of self-othering being. “Oh death I will be your death”. The ancient prophet foresaw it all, as he should, the “true reason-world” underlying the finite primitiveness of language as such in any conceivable age. Death, says Hegel, is the entry into spirit, - and nothing else, that is to say. This “Bacchanalian revel” (of concepts) has its own order, however, an order the young Hegel had promised to unravel (un-revel). So it is that the Gospel, which philosophy, as absolute idealism, aspires here to interpret as representing itself, sophia, as, in a figure, “wisdom from on high”, personal just as universal, reveals or mediates itself and nothing else. It does this through presentation of one concrete individual or one meant as such, indifferently, in virtue of just this universality of (individual) personality, this personality, therefore, of the universal, hence particularised in a given historical representation. This last phrase, for Hegelian or idealist thought, is emphatically not self-contradictory, since history is itself a representation, a “moving image” of eternity, an abiding pantheon, like philosophy’s own history, of all its moments. That is, we might say, this pantheon is the history of history. This, like philosophy, is truly identified in our free action and thought, since these are not merely moved or pre-moved, as if physically, by God (praemotio physica), but are our spiritual being (actus humani) as in close union, unity even, with that principle of universality, the good and the true. We cannot deprive Hegelian thought of this, its heart, let the academy bluster as it will. The problem, the deficiency, was dealt with in Plato’s Phaedrus, the Socratic contempt for the non-lover there anticipating the Pauline “sounding brass” 13

Wittgenstein and Carnap were to accept this ruin of language, this Kantian tragedy of (finite) knowledge, each in his own way. What Hegel emphasises is that it, the ruin, is the logical price of “self-consciousness” as he “defines” or explains it, as illimitable, namely.

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or, in the implied positivity of love, by the Augustinian form of subjectivity as mind’s own intellectual love, this being a constant theme right down to Nietzsche and this our text here, once again. Mind is thus a poet, is poetry, in its own subsumptive way, however: “The fool sees not the same tree as a wise man sees”14. For there is no language, no discourse, without style determining it, while style itself is determined by love, by spirit informing, moulding. Style is ultimate content, namely. In this dance, however, of subjectivity as, precisely, infinite there is place for all, for each, as, precisely, if in a figure (what ex-pression is not this?), “members one of another”. Yet this infinite communion, proclaimed in the Christian preaching, is not thereby abstractly “religious” as if, just thereby, not philosophical. Such a view is the antithesis of Hegelianism. It is even a form of “Judaising”, to adopt the finitely imperfect phraseology of Paul who was Saul, Nietzsche’s “first Christian”. “Now you are the body of Christ”, he says, the true temple that overcomes religion in fulfilling it and is found neither at Jerusalem nor Mecca, still less Rome. Why Christ? Because if I am you15 and you are Christ then Christ others himself in his own conception, thus mediating annulment of “the things which are” and only thus able to say that “greater things than I have done shall you do”, “that all may be one”. This prayer (John 17) is meant, is set down, as selffulfilling, or as explaining what is in fact the case as “end realised”, for surely the author did not hear and recall Christ uttering just these words of the “prayer for unity”, which, as attributing it to the “sole mediator”, he posits as fulfilled, again, in utterance. No claim is made here or now, though, for the uniqueness (of inspiration) of the documents referred to. Thus I understand the faith-claim of “Jesus Christ, the solution of all questions” (Hugh of St. Victor). Logic is disclosed by Hegel as representing this, or, if you will, vice versa rather. As thus revealed death, again, takes all past and/or future dying indifferently up into itself, ending time. So “Time is just the notion definitely existent”. Spirit annuls it as what never was, as the never to be seen underside of the tapestry. “Time is the pure self in external form… of empty intuition… not grasped and understood by the self… When (!) this notion grasps itself, it supersedes its time character” (my stress here). Note the exquisite self-contradiction: truth cannot be written down, except, just therefore, in self-erasing sand denying, refusing, judgment. All judgment is false; Hegel says this in the plural form. “Time therefore appears as

14

William Blake: “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell”. Cp. Daniel Kolak: I Am You, Springer, New York, 2004, esp. “Preliminary Acknowledgements”, pp. xiii-xxii.

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spirit’s destiny and necessity, where spirit is not yet complete within itself.”16 So faith, as the spiritual grasp of these things as phenomena, “overcomes the world”. It is spirit’s or mind’s own victory. This is what Nietzsche, malgré lui, sought to express or carry further in his preoccupation with time. So the Apostle had said, again, “You sit with Christ in the heavenly places”, i.e. now. This applies, in a figure, to all spirit as appearing, in each and every manifestation, even as and when spirit must say of all such manifestations, except its own (and yet included necessarily within it), “You know not of what spirit you are”. This applies even or also to such figures, as they have become for us, as Moses, who only got to see, as by special privilege, spirit’s, God’s or the Idea’s “backparts”. Spirit is even here put, with a possibly comic touch, in human form, “the human form divine” (Blake) wherein, declares the Irish poet, W.B. Yeats, pointing up the speculative paradox of high and low, Love hath pitched his tent in the place of excrement.17 Love, now, in our tradition, names the highest, though, as here put in lowest “place”, without licensing any abstractly deadening separation between eros and agape. It is how life, the “immediate idea”, is both generated and, as and in love, maintained, as its first sustenance or food oozes from the breasts of maternal tenderness. This human form of love is realised in historical incarnation of that “Son of Man” shown to or figured by the prophet Daniel as in the eternal heaven of the notion, i.e. prior to as, in later understanding, conceptually of what has become known as incarnation, whether or not this original “son” were meant as an angel, rather, as only “like” to a “son of man”. This realisation of end as such, in fact, which is what such incarnation has to be, is what puts the historical itself into quotation marks, as we noted above, as “not the true story”, as a story, namely, a representation picturing realities. Severed from the vision or “body” of truth it relapses 16

Cf. The Phenomenology of Mind, “Absolute Knowledge” (final chapter), p.800. for this and the previous quotation as an account of time. 17 In 1951 at school in South Africa (whence, aged 12, I had just arrived from England) our Afrikaans biology teacher declared to us (half of the class were Jewish), in effect, that it was nature’s greatest tragedy that God had placed the erotico-sexual or reproductive and excretory systems in such interwoven proximity to one another. It is more reasonable, however, to find meaning and consequent necessity, as of “realised end”, in this profound arrangement.

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into the nothing of finitude, which it merely re-ports in finite or pictured “thinking”, as of judgment not redeemed or sublated in and by syllogism as a whole, that all-enclosing as closing Schluss (conclusion), become one with the object which is finally subject. Prophecy, that is, falls short of philosophy as not in its spirit transcending time, even if it should say “There shall be no more time”. Thus too is self-annulling theology disclosed as philosophy and the latter as logic, which opens out methodically, and/or methodologically, into spirit itself, as wisdom, true method knowing itself. This is the secret of the Biblical as of the philosophical books. These prophetic and fabled writings, of an earlier time, immediately naïve and pictorial as they in great part seem to be, are thus ideal as representing what a finitely objectified science, in writing or speech, can only fail to encapsulate, giving rise to widespread misunderstanding of the literally “incomprehensible”, since this is only to be reached in spirit, in trans-objective, trans-intentional identification, in the philosophical mysticism of stumbling self-negating speculation, as far as its linguistic discursive side, materially taken, is concerned. They show, rather, what cannot be “said”, in a critique, spoken or written but as first thought, of saying. Hence philosophy too, in the writing of it as in itself, in these latter days especially, must, willy-nilly, turn out to be or prolong Scriptural commentary, even though we may not be so soaked in Scripture as Hegel, along with his classicism, evidently was. Thus Hegel overcomes the young Wittgenstein’s too abstract separation between what one can and cannot speak of. If what one cannot speak of is nothing then there is, indeed, nothing of which one cannot speak. The proof of this conditional here, however, is the infinity of mind in its intrinsically universalising capacity, actuality rather. This, stigmatised often as Hegel’s rationalism, is thus, rather, eminently rational simply. What cannot be said is the true, i.e. the false, nothing, since nothing is made something by my utterance of this word “nothing”. Or, just this is the truth of the false. Thus philosophy too has all along known itself as theologia (Aristotle defining metaphysics), the “pure play of the notion”, as Hegel says. That’s what wisdom and “the notion” is, the very Idea, ultimately, the play of the gods themselves who “kill us for their sport”, as being themselves that progress of absolute method, of science itself, which Hegel himself delineates as the ultimate inasmuch as it is the spiritual Golgotha or “science of the Cross” (Edith Stein). This is the “way”, Aristotle’s athanatizein or active death-practice. Nearer my God to thee, nearer to thee E’en though it be a Cross

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That raiseth me. This “sickly” language of devotion (Hegel), from the hymn that was the final choice of the heroic musicians employed on the foundering Titanic (1912)18, treads the same path as he marks out himself, “titanic” in its conception. Life, despised or “hated” in this world, is kept unto “life”, that is spirit, eternal. Now that’s philosophy, necessarily of the lover, as Plato or Socrates stress. In founding the Academy, moreover, Plato had no intention of obscuring this. It is proclaimed in the very word philosophy, the prefix not being a restriction upon the sophia attainable, as is often pretended. It names love indeed, not as desideratio or desire merely but as delectatio, delight or play. For these reasons the upkeep the university philosopher receives from his institution, as do teachers generally, should be seen not as salary or wage, for what is “invaluable”, but as honoratio. An element, at least, of such honour may well attach to every work of man qua man (actus humanus as proceeding from “cognition” or mind and will), however. Or, the science of play, of homo ludens, is not itself play but absorbs and elevates play itself into love, again, this being the idea absolute or, simply, the absolute, as the singing or sport of a song, music, dance, including not only that “of the spheres” but being its own (Parmenidean) sphere rather. “This only is desirable for itself” (Augustine on contemplation or, in Hegelian usage, knowing). This, Aquinas wrote, is what all the arrangements of the world are intended to facilitate, “if we would but consider”. In any case, “It is upon the trunk that the gentleman works” (Confucius). The thus known, that is, was ever there in germ or trunk, awaiting even the first gentleman and/or lady. The sickliness of devotion, all the same, comes out in the common mistranslation of the Franciscan exclamation Deus meus et omnia as “My God and my all”, as if transmitting a private religious choice. What Francis, reportedly a whole night through in repetition, actually said, in true Hegelian spirit, was “My God and all things”. Hegel simply makes this more explicit in universalising the first personal pronoun as “universal of universals”, such that all things are indeed mine, but precisely in their remaining themselves, first now, in the subjective moment, true selfdisclosure and “self-consciousness”. Thus the mistranslation was “on to something” after all.

18

“Abide with me”, that other old favourite of “the true reason-world”, was reserved for the delayed beginnings of football matches in the London stadiums. Not degeneration but the coming to birth of a new, more miscegenous order is eclipsing these sweet domesticities.

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* Hegel designates the development here as “enriching the share selfconsciousness has in consciousness” (Ibid. p.800). It is the “transforming of Substance into Subject”. Nothing is known unless “given as an inwardly revealed eternal verity”. Nowhere is this truer than in the field of logic. The logical forms themselves have to be seen as ultimate, as selfvalidating arguments. They are the “form of the world” upon which everything rests. Hence alone can he say: “Everything is a syllogism”. These forms “really are, as forms of the notion, the vital spirit of the actual world. That only is true of the actual which is true in virtue of these forms, through them and in them” (Enc.162, my stress). This now is exactly what he says of God, of the Idea. Hence he identifies logic and its method with the latter.19 Hence there are no “laws” of logic save whatsoever principles thought itself reveals, the same applying a fortiori to ethics.20 This is “the transforming… of the object of consciousness into the object of selfconsciousness, i.e. into an object that is at the same time transcended, in other words into the notion”. Substance and time complete themselves as spirit, as expressing “what it inherently is”. Only as a world spirit does spirit “reach its completion as self-conscious spirit”. This is Hegel’s account of immortality, sure-footedly set forth in McTaggart´s Studies in the Hegelian Cosmology of 1901, chapter 2.21 Immortality is personal, whether or not it is abstractly individual. Hence it is embodied as concrete in a person. Precisely hence is it no part of faith, since it is no part of immortality in a person, if we think first now of Christ as mediator, to believe, as we may indeed do, that he existed phenomenally or, as is pictured at times, “walked upon England’s mountains green”. Thus, if heaven has to look Irish for the Irish (as begged in the text of “Galway Bay”) or Jesus has to wear a form of Arab dress and be long-haired for those devoted to “the sacred humanity”, yet the substance of faith is personal identification with that one as plenitude of the Idea, whereby “you are all one person”, in that person, in either case, as both faith and the Idea itself demand or, more fundamentally, posit. This is because phenomena derive from the Idea and not conversely, “ungrateful spirit” not depending upon them therefore or upon such seeming origins 19

On Aristotle, see Enc.187. Cp. Aquinas: Lex non est ipsum ius, proprie loquendo, sed aliqualis ratio iuris (ST IIa-IIae 57, 1 ad 2um: law is not the right, properly speaking, but some kind of expression of it). 21 See also Hegel’s Lectures on Aesthetics. 20

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generally. “The mind is its own place”. That is, more fundamentally, existence itself is but a finite or “momentary” logical category. This plenitude, conversely, is proper to self-consciousness as such, whether as many or as one indifferently, for also its personal name is “legion”, as being spirit. In this sense Hegel speaks correctly of the unitary personality of God without denying those concrete relations put as the Trinitarian persons. He also suggests, explicitly in an early writing, that Spirit proceeds immediately from the Son alone22 or, as the (Eastern) Orthodox say, “from the Father through the Son”, but personally, not as a mere conduit. That is, the Father and the Son do not each have a mere “part” in the procession of either spirit or world. Hence the suggestion at the same time appears ultraWestern. In the Son, in man, God, father, becomes spirit in this its selfconstituting other-generation, which, however, the Father is.23 Yet, “the Father is not the Son”. Nor says Hegel, is the Son to be equated with Nature (LPR III, 38). For he is “not the same as the world”, “made” through him, as Word the seat of all ideas and forms, as Bonaventure had stressed. Behold man, ecce homo, first attained here, in necessary mediation, as true concrete universal, man as man simply, soul or immediate life-form as Idea, merely or immediately pictured in the human body, wherein all subordinate life-forms are sublated, unless the body be true form and not picture, as is an option. Why or whence, though, would the artist devise such a picture, unless it were already the connecting link, closer than closer rather than “missing”? Nature, that is, is “the self-alienated” Idea, but the Idea, note, not an idea merely. In viewing Nature, exercising sense-cognition in whatever way, we do not essentially reason back to God in liturgical praise of its creator, though we can do that too. We look upon God directly or immediately, not regarding Nature in an abstractly material manner, materialiter spectata in Kant’s phrase, again.. In this “artistic” or non-material, as it were formal and synthetic viewing as apprehending, we through-see, perceive, the Word eternally generated as being spoken. Hegel’s aesthetics, again, give the lie to any one-sided separation of picture and concept. Nature, thus, is never that which is perceived, as if we actually perceived the mythical object that gets nullified in Hegel’s Logic, but, rather, nature is that by and in which the reality is grasped as finally what one’s own subjectivity mirrors. Narcissus, therefore, did not need to look into that particular pool, 22

Attention is drawn to this in Christine Malabou’s The Future of Hegel. The intention here, incidentally, is that prime relation of generation from which or whom “all fatherhood on heaven or on earth is named”, the opposite, therefore, of “picture-thinking”. 23

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its mirrored surface, which fatally stupefied him, though we may now see a deeper meaning in that myth, the pool now become nature as a whole, the outside wherein the inside is alone concretely known. The search for particular views and “prospects” in Nature is thus vanity, as Wordsworth often stressed. The whole is in the part.24 God, that is, as this perfect act, act of acts, is “the foundation of the world” from or “before” which, therefore, he, as absolute knowledge itself, knew all things as “realised end”. For this Nature “groans” in its alienation, abstracted from God (but by us), the Idea, as “all in all”, merely pictured narratively as achieved “at the end of time”. Rather, time is only a reality “as long as (the) spirit needs it”, i.e. never, except “in” time. So it is not yet seen here, as it is not seen in religion generally or in physical science abstractly considered, that this end or beginning of time cannot be a temporal moment. Any initiating Big Bang must be ever with us as time’s constitutive instance, rather. As we do indeed expand to the infinity we are and not merely or infinitely to filling up more space, which is how it “looks”, merely, again. * The finite taken on its own, abstractly, in itself and not as a moment of the absolute, is false, since it is not in itself but in another, in the Idea, that means. The Idea annuls time, Hegel says again. But where time is annulled we can no longer ask, did this happen or not, and so it is, therefore, with the Christ as that “gemeinten figure”. This is the background to Hegel’s radical claim that religion pictures or narrates what is necessary and true, known to and in spirit. So the Ephesus definition of Mary as theotokos, as even the Hegelian corpus itself, qua corpus, transcends its year or century of promulgation in itself or intrinsically. The “modernists” stopped at a halfway house here. Hence Hegel is not their “father” (Findlay). His aim is not to make finite the truths of religion but to bring out their true meaning and transcendence, “interpreting spiritual things spiritually” (St. Paul). Thus, in regard to the finite and hence to finite life, Shakespeare’s and/or Macbeth’s “tale told by an idiot, signifying nothing” is a true verdict, except of course that it does signify, even if it were only this 24 This standpoint need not deny possible pathological reactions to initial awareness of subjectivity, or at the start of the mystical journey generally, as might have been an aspect of Descartes’ philosophical journey, or as Prince Myshkin, describes, in Dostoyevsky’s novel, The Idiot, how, before his treatment by “Schneider”, he for a time viewd nature, in his horrified alienation, as monstrous.

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nothing or that it is nothing, since it is indeed “a tale” or, at least, what we tell a tale of, i.e. we make a tale of or out of it. To take it otherwise, just as it comes, unexamined, is indeed to take it, or nature, “materially”, abstractly, as not in the Idea and one with it as a moment of it, to take it as and in its immediacy, namely. Taken this way, in fact, the finite’s negative meaning lies plain or on the outside as in the deepest inside. This insight Hegel equates with the “victory of faith” over “the world”, become philosophy without faith’s ceasing to be or losing itself. As such it is not merely “the philosophy of religion” either, anymore than it is purely an aesthetic, though it be the terminus, the true idea, of this too, as the Idea simply, the “consuming fire” of the ancient (though this was way in the future for Plato) Letter to the Hebrews. Faith goes on, however, not only to make out of but to see in the world, the finite, a sacrament of its opposite, of the infinite, the Idea, hence therefore not merely opposed in this its oppositeness. The colour red was in the world as signifying blood and blood was there as signifying the redeeming or sacrificial blood of Christ, whether as efficient cause or in some other way, from the beginning, faith declares, and similarly with “the human form divine” (Blake). As what God was to assume it was never alien in form from the Idea, sight itself being nature’s analogue to knowledge as hearing is to spirit or as light is “nature’s first ideality”, as we read in The Philosophy of Nature, of all the idealities that make up the finite in its entire essence. This is the necessity founding the contingent, such divining faith not opposed to or cancelling knowledge at all. It rather fulfils it in its own constitutive certainty, itself revealing absolute freedom, proceeding from nature as this is begotten of the Idea in its constitutively generative fecundity as what it, the Idea, entirely is. The Idea, that is, is not the Idea. Nature itself elicits this infinity of sparkling equivalence or its opposite, this harvest-field it merely “dungs” with itself, now become, this field which is Nature, at once “rotten death”25, in appearance, and entrance gateway, in reality, itself, as subject, the entering into spirit. The hour for liturgy, for praise, joy or boredom indifferently, as thought leaves its cell, its books, descending, it may be as to a chapel, to this place of shared ascent, shared thought, the latter itself sharing in and ascending to that highest Gottesdienst, which thought, its self-thinking act, is and enacts, this is an hour that ever strikes, the kairos indeed. As precisely this verdict, of the tale, falsity is set forth truly as the truth in untruth of the finite Shakespearian drama. It, whether falsity or the drama, is a monument to this, to infinity, to the Idea, to true and eternal 25

Cf. Francis Thompson, “The Hound of Heaven”, for these phrases.

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Being, as conceived and ipso facto revealed in and by Absolute Spirit. Of this too religion makes, but precisely in order to mediate it, a finite picture with its quasi-legal or finite “picture notion”, as limited or “framed”, of uniquely canonical documents or, in fine, traditions, which may be oral only, even though these have no more force or strength (validity) than they find in their consumption, their assumption, in and by spirit, which is (philo)-sophia. That is, there is no philosophy of spirit that could be apart from and hence other than spirit itself. Spirit is wisdom and love, blessedness (cp. Enc.159). So “woe is me” (St. Paul) not only “if I do not preach the Gospel” but also if I do not “philosophise” or live in the spirit, the latter thus defining or elucidating the former, absorbing or assuming it as is proper to spirit, which alone “gives life”. Hence Hegel’s delineation of this as esoteric is relative and momentary. These are the same. Similarly, in calling St. Paul “the first Christian”, precisely as the one who came after or was “born out of due time”, Nietzsche could not have meant, therefore, a mere temporal priority but a foundation as first, and yet last, foundation, precisely like the cornerstone set to make “all the difference”, whatever those earlier disciples thought of him and even had he been, in his flesh, an epileptic, as some aver. This circumstance, indeed, might provide an ecumenical opening to Islam and its fable-spun Koran, were one so disposed, but one must discriminate among infirmities, moving cause of infamous killers and famous physicists both. The same is true of “logical truth”. It is not specified or exercised at second hand, since this would be contrary to its spiritual nature. This too is why it is I as self-consciousness which “escaped Plato’s intelligence”, which is “universal of universals” as grounding them. So Aquinas said, “It is a man who thinks”. More fundamentally, I think and, “therefore”, I am. Being is not being but subject. Man, therefore, is not just “a useless passion”, More radically, man is a natural phenomenon or appearance merely, as we began by intimating here. We use the term “man” analogously or, that is, metonymically, for “the rational creature” (Kant), for reason or mind itself, which is the absolute as infinity revealing itself in or as what is seen, handled or touched and, finally, consumed, “known in the breaking of bread”. Man is thus a part of nature, but a part as including the whole. Man thus cancels or renders relative Lesniewskian or any “mereology” as the formal theory of part and whole, since man is necessarily individual and one concrete individual, but as personal or “principle of universality”, to invert

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this equivalence toward its deeper truth26. Behold the man, said Pilate, prophetic like Caiaphas on that dreadful day, “of wrath and doom impending”, as it is represented in the Fourth Gospel, Jerusalem and Rome there bearing joint witness. Shall Athens then be left out and not represent them together in that Greek language here used for this “new” and yet oldest “testament”, first set forth, according to the tale of Noah, in “all the colours of the rainbow”, today’s symbol for indiscriminate if not infinite love? For the indiscriminate, like the many animals of Peter’s vision, is but a figure of infinite Spirit that “cleanses”, takes in, all, leading Hegel to declare, “unspiritually” he apologetically says, that “evil is the same as good”, i.e. neither of them are the Idea. “You are troubled about many things, but one thing alone is needful”, that “better part” which “shall not be taken away” and for which, Aristotle witnesses, it is worth and more than worth practising death (athanatizein). The one, indeed, holds the many together, in one as we say. For “this only is desirable for itself” (Augustine), while Aquinas declares, to repeat, that all rational arrangements in the world are to this end, “if anyone would but consider”. This point reached, “ungrateful spirit” no longer needs Bible or philosophers, yet they are still to be preserved or kept just in their being put by, “children of wisdom” as they are, necessary, as is art with its music and poetry, to life. Each man, therefore, each woman (woman is truly man), is to count for all, to take the place, in and out of season, of that one, individual, concrete and unique mediator, so that we are all “members one of another”. So Catherine of Siena, again, felt or knew herself as bearing “the whole Church” upon her back. Does one have to live in Italy, or Christendom, to feel so. Only in Christendom is man respected as man, Hegel consistently declares, but where are Christendom’s borders? It has none. Thus the aboriginal Australian tribe believed truly, after its fashion, that its ancestors created the world. Meanwhile this Pauline figure, “members one of another”, complements, as universalising, the later, in time of composition, evangelical “I am the vine, you are the branches”, which may, therefore, have intended clarifying commentary on Paul’s phrase as stressing the necessity of mediation on the way to the then contemporary and later stage where, all the same, “greater things than I have done shall 26

“University is the principle of personality” (Enc.163 add. Cp. “the principle of the Western World… of individuality”, contrasted against Spinozist substance, of the Absolute or “absolute Person”, at 151 add, as “the principle of individuality”. In between these contrasts, as they appear, Hegel has treated of individual “as a universal” (163, main text). The notion’s individuality is its self-effectiveness, is “the notion expressly put as a totality”.

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you do”, in the same (Johannine) writer’s words. The one prospect is contained in the other, mutually. Thus, Nietzsche can say, again, Paul (Saul of Tarsus) was “the first Christian”, both as first seeing the meaning in and as creating the foundation for expression of this meaning (this is the truest part of Nietzsche’s otherwise somewhat jaundiced view), instrument of spirit as he claimed his sole glory to be. Non nobis, Domine, but to your name give the praise. Philosophy concurs, sublates. So where are we? Right here, philosophy having left everything as it is or, rather, dug it up. Man, then, is a part of nature, but an uneasy part. There is a clash of necessity, of intellect, with contingency, or that which makes him man, that mere moment of spirit, yet standing for, as one with, the whole, the Idea, like everything in the Notion inclusive of the lesser whole, again, that is nature. Religion tells man to give thanks for his creation and so he should. Yet thanking too, despite ethical overtones, belongs with phenomena27, as does creation in the sense of making, even “out of” nothing, as a magician might do. What comes thus from nothing is always nothing. Yet the false is distinguishable from gibberish.28 In fact what freely proceeds is the Idea itself (Enc. 244) and such free creation is thus absolutely necessary, as every moment of absolute freedom is one with the necessary, “with whom is no shadow of turning”, nothing arbitrary. No act or moment of absolute knowledge, therefore, is other than a free act, of will, that is, without extrinsic determination and hence infinite, one with the being of the Idea and not added to it. Thus creation seems to give more beings, but never more being. So each is necessary for all, for the unity, as all for each. In Kant this is expressed ethically, but no less metaphysically for that, whatever his protestations, as the Kingdom of Ends. Necessity, however, is absolved from time, as is the “act of creation”, the Idea transcending real or temporal change, as if “in potentiality” to this or that. Time itself does not change, as Aristotle says. Thus rationality, self-consciousness, the I or concrete subjectivity, differ(s) from a rose or the wetness of the streets on a given morning, these being Hegel’s examples of speech that can be correct without uttering truth. In fact he applies this discrimination even to a bad man or deed, if we should mention ethics, just as Aquinas denies that blindness (“in a given eye”) is 27

This is what lies behind questioning which virtues may be attributed to God, which not, as Geach does in his The Virtues (CUP 1977). Obviously gratitude would not be a candidate, though general justice, of which it forms part, would do so. Justice anyhow is perfected in the “spirit of kindness” characterising God supremely. 28 Cf. Anselm’s dialogue “On Truth”.

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anything “real” or having being. In Hegel’s terms such correct ascriptions are false, as he will also say, however, of “everything finite”. Even where a rose or a man is not bad of its kind they are bad as abstract or “ruined” individuals in their notion. The man that Christ “became”, or that I am, is in itself a picture only of mind or reason, of the “rational world”. This means though that becoming itself is a picture, is the first category of the general picture-hood of the moments, in the treatment of which, truly therefore, is first signalised, in EL, the “vanishing of vanishing”. So, in the end, this evinces Hegel’s affirmation that the good and the bad are the same, are not, even conceptually, separable from one another, are, in short, abstractions. Angels are and remain angels and “it is useless to count” in the final analysis or, as Aquinas puts it, in divinis. This is “the” philosophic account, such as Nietzsche, Heidegger, Wittgenstein and modern or post-modern thought has variously realised. It is a further face of what Hegel called the dogma of philosophy, absolute idealism namely. It follows that if evil is “sham-being” (Hegel) then so is good. There is only being in the concrete simplicity of the Idea Absolute. All else selfdestructs in its “consuming fire” so if you can’t beat it or them then join it or them, cease to be just this “you”. This is just what we read in, say, the Bible, as Hegel himself knows. The only remaining need is to identify this community of “joiners” one should oneself join. For Marx it was the industrial proletariat as for every child it is first his or her mother. All must begin somewhere, knowledge itself having at first the appearance of evil, as Hegel stresses. Freedom as the good then includes, expresses, the freedom to deny the good. We will do it, this is the necessity, and do it before the cock crows even, immediately, that is, or in our very being in non-being. This necessity returns us to absolute spirit in the death of immediate life in which life as spirit itself issues, cancelling the immediacy or mediation itself in this act. As conscious of being able to do this we are one with man at his most free, bearer of light, as “made sin for us”, self-consciousness therefore being the denial of self in its finitude. The question why I, just I, exist loses its meaning and point in this its answer. In Scriptural terms, echoed in theological doctrines of “the elect”, one is “known from the foundation of the world”. Election exists in self’s knowing this or, as Thérèse Martin expressed it: “Every soul gets what it expects… If you want justice you will get justice”. Philosophy, then, offers no protection from the apocalyptic, the selfand other-obliterating, though we long to pass our time “in rest and quietness”. The only peace however is that of the Idea, infinite, which “passes understanding”, is speculative or “mystical”, peace of the “true

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reason-world”. This conclusion is what is pictured in the proclamation of the “shortness of the time”, of a “wrath to come”, the “wrath” Hegel mentions in that seventh chapter of The Phenomenology of Mind. What emerges, however, is that it is also a return, for if the vanishing vanishes nothing, once actual, goes away, nothing, that is, but nothing itself. This again is both necessity and the highest freedom. “I shall not die but live”, though of course I shall die, one thinks. Still, one might be the first not to, like those Christians Paul imagined as “drawn up to meet the Lord in the air”. As Wittgenstein puts it, no one, as self, experiences death or “the end of experience”, any more than he does a falling asleep. I must have slept, we say on waking. Aquinas’s distinguishes “is” as determining the truth of a proposition from “is” as form of all forms, actus essendi. The former is what Hegel calls “mere correctness” of such speech. Yet we use “is” “whenever we want to express the inherence of any form whatever in a subject”, explains Aquinas further (in his commentary on Aristotle’s treatise On Interpretation), just because “is”, being, is the first form of all forms, the perfection of all perfections. So mind is necessary amid man’s contingency, it being thus man’s natural duty and/or telos to realise his identity with this omnideterminative form, with mind, that is highest in him. There is no inward division in this intrinsic call to establish the nothingness of nothing walking, the falsity of the false. The felt disharmony is the ongoing dialectic process, of which death, again, is the ideal termination and “entry into spirit” as passage from the “Idea immediate” (life) to the Absolute Idea, absolute knowledge. Our immortality consists in, is built upon, as intimated in the Gospel, a freely lost life where each “had been” abstracted from the others. We pass, again, to being “members one of another”, in the Scriptural or Pauline phrase, transcending time and hence space. Here too “the I” ceases to be “we”, in perfect at-home-ness or as “one flesh”, each having all as its own. This is the perfect unity McTaggart, like Leibniz, claims that reason itself demands. Revealed first as represented obliquely in art and religion but as set towards philosophy, wisdom, but no longer as object, mind is the path or method absolute spirit thus traverses, the path being mind’s own self, from being to being. This is the gathering up (and hence putting by) of history into that Son of Man in eternity, “the heavens”, who is self of selves, for whom each is necessary as he is for each. In that way spirit is son, proceeds from the Son, in Trinitarian terms, as Hegel had suggested. Otherwise expressed, the Idea is one with its moments, so a moment’s gratitude resolves itself into a doubtless joyous identity. “I and my father

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are one” yet “I came out from him”. “It is he that has made us and not we ourselves”. This religious representation lies ever to hand, since as an enunciation it is, as such, valid, so that anyone may pass freely and easily, within a minute, a day, or a lifetime, from one to the other, from religion to philosophy, or art, and back again, just as he ceaselessly may unite the two in artistic creation, in imagination, as we say. The prototype of this is a language, any language. It is language itself that testifies, rocklike, to mind, logic and incarnation. In the end, with time annulled, as never having been, there is but one Word, superseding the recalcitrant objectivity of language while obliterating the prior privation of privacy in “the ruin of the individual”. It is as if, but only as if, we now see that the traumatic memory was all along a traumatic construction of our own, our own birth trauma, represented, in what is still trauma, as rebirth. Who and why am I, then? I am that. Hence that is not after all that, but I. Hence, again, I am not I. “You were with me, but I was not with you”. This is the principled falsity of judgment through which all of logic, its method, travels, faster than light, however, to the idea impelling it and itself as “pure act”. * Thus the same hermeneutical principle may and should be applied when we consider the final, so to say completing act of the Christological ecumenical councils, the rejection of Monothelitism, of the doctrine that Christ has just one divine will and not a second, human one. For this, it was perceived, contradicts Christ’s community, indeed identity, with all spirit everywhere as he is “the man” or “son of man”. For monothelitism taught, again, that the mediator had just the one divine will and no individual and human will at all, thus denying incarnation of “Word made flesh”, at its root. Here we may recall Hegel’s comment on Rousseau as failing to keep the distinction between a will of the majority and universal will in mind or, better, between the will of all and will in general, which “need not on that account be the will of all” (Enc. 163, add.). “The general will is the notion of the will; and the laws are the special clauses if this will and based upon the notion of it.” In fact. Hegel refers here to that “infinite form of subjectivity” in which all thought concretely coincides since it is, precisely, infinite, having no abstract particularity outside of it, which would make the infinity abstract or finite, upon which it might depend. He also refers here to Christianity. “Only in Christendom is man respected as man, in his infinitude and universality”.

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As referring us again to the infinitude of will, as of mind, as such, Hegel here denies the possibility of a particular monothelitism, peculiar to just one person. In that infinite subjectivity which is true and the truth of mind there is just one will that is the “will of all” or, rather, of each29 as, we have just noted, Hegel shows that logic already demonstrates. It shows itself, that is. What was condemned at the Council concerned was the divorce of community between Christ, God’s Son and very self, and men in general or as such, man as such or “true man”. This eventuality of thought can no longer arise within absolute or Hegelian idealism, which is thus, deliberately or not, built upon the work of these councils as, rather, they are a fruit of philosophy as such. We might say the same, also in both directions, of that “true reason-world”, which “may equally be styled mystical”, in the form in which Hegel celebrates it at Enc. 82, especially the addition there. The “Speculative stage, or stage of Positive Reason, apprehends the unity of terms (propositions) in their opposition”, is ad opposita indeed, this being the final truth of Reason as opposed to the determinatio ad unum characterising nature. Yet by the same token, as we say, nature and mind, “the affirmative, which is involved in their disintegration”, in affirming the propositions as opposed implies that “all judgments are false”, as he says elsewhere, inasmuch as they are themselves united just in their opposition. So all that we write, including this, is falsified in the writing, yet no one, if writing be accepted at all, and not just in sand, can be forbidden to write down just that, though falsifying it itself ad infinitum, a point Hume made about his own seemingly selfcontradictory conclusions. Yet Hegel goes on to speak of a “transition” to the speculative or to “a unity of distinct propositions”, though each be false on its own. Such is “concrete thought”, transcending the formal Understanding nonetheless employed in the process. Unity in Trinity and its converse is an example even the exemplar, of this, while by the same reasoning “it is useless to count”.

29

As far as I recall Hegel does not mention “the doctrine of distribution” in his discussion of “formal logic”, while Peter Geach argues against it at length, in his Reference and Generality (1962, Cornell U.P.) and again in his Logic Matters (Oxford 1972). Closely related is the need to distinguish “every”, omnis, from “all”, omnes, in syllogistic or quantificational theory, where, however, this distinction is explicit, indifferently.

CHAPTER FOUR FROM QUANTITY TO ESSENCE

Hegel’s claim is that the content is the same for everyone because the content is thought itself. This is why he further claims that “the true reason world” is, so to say, open to everyone, however he or she is placed, whether in childhood, maturity or old age, for example. This principle applies equally to the forms of spirit, relative, absolute or relatively absolute. Thus the content of art, religion and philosophy is the same and it is the absolute. This applies equally to these forms as such as it does to any instance of the forms. Thus any poem by Blake, say, has the absolute for content quite as much as does the whole corpus of Blake’s poetic art, a sentence in the Gospel expresses this absolute content quite as much as does the whole assemblage of church doctrines. Similarly the works of any given philosopher, acceptable as such, express as much the absolute and are therefore one with it as much as are the two doctrines of Being and Essence severally or together and so are as much the whole of philosophy as are whole and entire libraries of it. In this way Socrates, again, was instructed to know himself not as directing him to a part of the whole but as finding the latter within or as one with himself and himself therefore as all others and all that is other. Knowledge may be, as Hegel wrote, the making internal or one’s own all that is alien or external, but it is equally and just thereby the imposition of the form of self upon all things. Self, however, is I, the universal of universals. It follows that since the content endures over all change of form it is the same content which is contemplated as relative or absolute, as finite or infinite indifferently and this is what is meant by the absorption of the finite into the infinite, as art and religion are absorbed entire into philosophy, which changes their form into its own. Heard music is spirit knowing itself. Sensus est quaedam cognitio. This means that philosophy itself is contained in its own self-thinking, which as Spirit or Mind is disclosed as the reality as such in The Philosophy of Spirit, where nature and logic are united in their being superseded (aufgehoben), i.e. this is what spirit is, the infinite or all as all in all, this being, therefore, also the final message of religion as this message is trans-categorically

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apprehended in the silence of art, a silence supremely including poetry as “the music of words” though indeed in a sense not even glimpsed in Sartre’s reductive use of this phrase. This transcendence of distinction itself is the reverse, therefore, of a backward step. The contemplative mystic is the true philosopher, which is to say that the philosopher is thinker or knower before he is writer or extrinsic communicator, or else that in such communicating he does not cease this thinking or knowing but expresses it, for some finite moments, in a finite form. It is in this sense that both logic and the philosophy of spirit, mediated the one with the other through the philosophy of nature, themselves become and are spirit itself, as it was said that “the words which I speak to you are spirit and life”, as would not be said if these words had not been distinguished from spirit in the first place. This explains why, also, logic should be and therefore is, in its highest expression, itself the philosophy of logic, as “thinking itself”. It is logica docens not as the upper half of a two-part and composite whole made up, with logica utens, of theory with practice, but as itself including the thinking of the used or practical logic (thought, theoria, as highest praxis) within itself, within the concept as the Idea, as first part, viz. “subjectivity”, of Subjective Logic or fist part of the Doctrine of the Concept (it is called in the Encyclopaedia “The Subjective Concept”). Here also Objectivity is finally treated and not under the “Objective Logic” (in contrast with the subjective) of Being and Essence. This means that the Object (Gegenstand) gives way to the Idea as itself subject, just as formal or “used” logic, practical, is subsumed into the self-thinking logica docens succeeding upon it as implicit in it, as Hegel’s Science of Logic, itself prior to the “book” of it, is elicited by traditional formal logic, by the being of the logical forms themselves1. The old saying, therefore, that logicus non considerat existentiam rei, the logician does not consider whether or not the terms it analyses stand for real existences or not, ultimately means that ascent to the logical sphere, the sphere of thought, is the leap to the annulment of the world, the realisation that self-knowing thought is the whole truth and nothing but the truth (Enc. 50). “The third object of the Reason is God” (Ibid. 49) and thus, most importantly, “Genuine theology is thus at the same time a real philosophy of religion” (Ibid. 36 add,), though here too we may find that the latter must then absorb the former in so far as it gains “the right to the title of science”. “To get that, we must go on to comprehend the facts by thought, - which is the 1

Cp. Henry B. Veatch, ”Concerning the Ontological Status of Logical Forms”, Review of Metaphysics, December 1948.

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business of philosophy”. It follows, however, that the latter is or can be the result of faith, without the latter thereby ceasing to be in operation as a genuine virtue or habit of mind needed for human self-realisation. Philosophy is what theology has to become if and when it might not be it already. As such the latter imposes no limitation whatever upon that absolute freedom, even and especially as such, which is philosophy. It is for this reason that Hegel says, returning to the Beautiful Soul he has previously found wanting, in the final chapter, “Absolute Knowledge”, of The Phenomenology of Mind, that “the simple unity of the notion” is the reconciliation of consciousness with self-consciousness, whereas “the religious mind” as such or abstractly considered is contrasted with selfconsciousness as “the essentially independent” whereas unification follows upon a total “reflection into self”. This the beautiful Soul essentially possessed, as prime cause of its previous aspect of withdrawal, finitely identified with “a particular mode or shape of consciousness”. It was the first expression of “self-assured spirit”, as that which “keeps within its essential principle”. Thus, as in Hegel’s final and positive judgment (but are not all judgments false, one-sided?): That is to say, the “beautiful soul” is its own knowledge of itself in the pure transparent unity – self-consciousness, which knows this puire knowledge of pure inwardness to be spirit, is not merely inruirion of the divine, but the self-intuition of God himself. (The Phenomenology of Mind, p.795, my stress).

Thus he says of his earlier treatment, of this soul and/or state of mind, it was there “a one-sided shape which we saw before disappear into thin air”. Just therefore, though, we saw it “positively relinquish itself and advance further”. Like everything else, it had to “relinquish itself”, no longer “hold fast by itself” alone, as if in absolute possession of distinctive virtues (cp. Thérèse Martin: “I have no virtues”), such “determinateness” contrasting with the notion’s “fulfilment” or “realization” where, finally, “Its selfconsciousness attains the form of universality”, where “I live yet not I”. For Hegel this, “the notion in its truth”, is “pure knowledge”, knowledge of which is that which the soul in its beauty is, not in “abstract… duty” but as its “essential being”, the Idea, as will later emerge in “systematic science”: “this notion is the self-existent self” which, we may add, as transcending life (“only the idea immediate”, will never die. This self “takes upon itself objective existence, or acts”, then, as the “beautiful soul” at first would not. It is “the purity of the notion” itself which gives the “power” for this. Non nobis Domine, sings the Psalmist, “but unto thy name give the praise”. In the rock-opera’s broken-backed words, “It’s all

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fixed”, realised, as Hegel says of the End, which thus is “in my beginning”, yours, mine, his. This final embodiment of spirit, as self and nothing but self, is Absolute Knowledge, truth “at one with its certainty” as, in religion keeping abstractly to its finitude, it is “not yet”. We may see the ever outwardly rippling significance of the ripping of the Temple veil, in reality the notional destruction of temple itself, its transference, in religious representation still, to “the bodies of the redeemed”. These terms, as Aquinas explicitly says of “body”, have no application in the final truth of metaphysics, our subject here. The action required, then, of the beautiful soul is of the kind called “immanent”, remaining in the self, as the Father thus remains in generating his Word, ever finally, whether as son or world indifferently here, a verbum interius. The outside, after all, is the inside (Hegel). This is why, if we return to our discussion above of the relation between theology and philosophy, we might say that a certain atheism, as bearing upon God, is a legitimate form or moment of theology, as idolatry, truly understood in its falsity, is not. Thus, in the very worshipping of his idol the Hindu declares it as being one with the Absolute, as does the ordinary worshipper of his or her beloved. “Look well, I am, I am indeed Beatrice”, in the pupils of whose eyes alone, we read in The Divine Comedy, the poet sees reflected the glorified incarnate Christ, theos, whom he is not able to see directly, as Moses, we read in Exodus, might see, in only partial fulfilment of his ardent wish, by divine permission, the latter’s “back parts”, as a presence known first in its departure. “Then you will know that I am he”. For that, for the absolute content, philosophy or, rather, sophia, as “the absolute form”, is required and not poetry or visible beauty. Philosophy’s grey on grey, as an appearance of the white, includes all the colours shorn of their determinative shadings, their darkness, not as losing but as affirming and therefore possessing the negative truth of darkness as absence. This negative, therefore, is truly in God, the un-spiritual in the spiritual, where, however, it is, so to say, and as becomes it, totally pulverised, as is all finitude in absolute method, being thus retained, however, in its absolute pulverisation, as moment of the Idea. “Remember o man that you are but dust and to dust you shall return!” We should identify, therefore, and Hegel declares it is “our business”, with our own subjective reason, universal in its individuality, which tells us this. In the words of Aquinas, we know must about God when we know that we know nothing. There is a certain difference here between Hegel and Eckhart as a major source of his inspiration, which, however, as O’Regan points out, he rather falls back from acknowledging in what we may call his cataphatic enthusiasm, as appropriating the text: “This is eternal life, to know God”, a

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text, however, giving him the right, it would seem, over Eckhart’s traditional negative or apophatic “mysticism”, which O’Regan finds “more radical”: As Bataille has recognized, however, Hegel passes over the obvious difference that in Eckhart’s case the iconoclasm is unrestricted and applies to concept as well as religious symbol. (The Heterodox Hegel, p.257 and surrounding discussion).

O’Regan notes that Bataille ”strategically” cites a body of Christian mystics, including Eckhart, as enjoining ”nonknowledge” rather than a proto-Hegelian ”immodesty”. Hegel, however, he implies, may well be seen as employing the same weapon of iconoclasm, as “an internal Christian procedure” warranted by Eckhart himself, against those earlier reservations upon claims to know God as a Deus revelatus he so much criticised as brought again to undue prominence in the thought of contemporary “enlightenment” and often deist theologians. “He that has seen me has seen the Father” is for Hegel more of a standard than the whole Christian Neoplatonic tradition, true Lutheran that he was.

CHAPTER FIVE CONTENT AND FORM

Re Being-for-one, Hegel hardly if at all names this in the Encyclopaedia. This suggests it is not an essential variant upon Being-for-self, equated with Evil in the Phenomenology, but all the same seen as an authentic moment in dialectical development. Dialectical development includes all development whatever, including development of rational personality. Thus Hegel treats it in his account of the Mosaic Legend in the Encyclopaedia, appropriately. When Being-for-self identifies with the universal then it is good and the Good, the One identified with all other Ones, I as “universal of universals” (Hegel). The development of this category through Quantity and then Essence to the Absolute Idea in Hegel’s logic, but still more in reality, is seamless. We know this quality of the seamless from when we first start to think. When was that? Answer: the beginning is logical or necessary rather than temporal. To this knowledge we now attend. The beginning, “in” which God created heaven and earth, Augustine suggests, is God himself. One might almost though translate “In the beginning” as “To start with”, retaining a yet more dead temporal metaphor. Would it mean, then, “To start our account, God created” or would it rather mean “The account starts with God creating”? It seems a corrective when the Fourth Gospel opens with “In the beginning was the Word”, adding “and the Word was God”. Or, it is as if the author is saying that heaven and earth, as mentioned in Genesis, is God himself, the “all things” that “were made by him”, as one who essentially sets himself out, manifests himself, in this one word of manifestation, without which or whom “was not anything that is made”, such as matter, for example. Augustine, pondering upon these books of the Jews and now the Christians, anyhow suggests further that in this beginning, as a womb about to conceive or ever conceiving time (as, we noted, we still watch the “Big Bang”, our latest representation, going on, rippling outward), the angels, pure spirits, are created, in a kind of proto-time, “the time of the angels”. To the self-consciousness of each, which is self-consciousness as such, corresponds the infinite distance between each self, thus itself made

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all, which is thus realised end or self-consciousness as Hegel describes it. Thus the stars are indeed ourselves, we, I, first person(s), and not themselves. Concerning such spirits, Hegel will elaborate, it “is useless to count” (them), or even, it seems, count whether or not one or any of them forms part of or is additional to that identity in difference we call Trinity. It could as well be called Quaternity or Quinity, he suggests as if, it we can might on in infinite quantity to what would then most manifestly be as one, spirit, legion, that feature most apparent in the smaller life forms though a mere seven billion among us, who also however approach unity in our multiplication, the exuberant impulse to produce again being never finally stilled, as conditions in our homes for the more enduring aged now witness so clearly. McTaggart would have read this, of Augustine, with assent. The conception of angels as a materially separated spiritual choir is, we may say, put by, bypassed or absorbed, aufgehoben. McTaggart’s view of reality as a perfect unity in which only persons can participate and do so is confirmed. What he calls atheism is thus the correct view of the Absolute Idea, which is the Absolute and which is called by Hegel God. It is time, it seems, for us to give up abstract representation of this opposed linguistic usage. Hegel points the way here in speaking of spirit, as his interpreters, in splitting into two camps, appear to have ignored or passed over. * Maritain calls this development, as found earlier in Descartes, “angelism”. This, though, merely begs the whole issue. Man is not assimilated to the angels as if in simplification of a still essentially realist scheme. Rather, the consequences of understanding spirit as ultimate reality are more effectively drawn. It is the category of angels as standing higher than men that is assimilated, rather, but to the Idea, not to “men”. For men themselves, as composite of body and soul, are phenomenal, since the world or nature and flesh are phenomenal. They merely appear as “pictured” and picturing, though picturing as an activity will itself be absorbed along with its objects. What exists is spirit, Mind, as an identity in difference, of which body and bodies is a mere sign, not an arbitrary sign (like words) but a natural sign in the sense of being the Idea itself but in alienation. It is though a privileged sign as being the final truth in oneness of nature that is yet within nature, truth that is become active goodness or technique (art), in each of us as subject. This technique has as ever-present end to draw nature, again in seamless dialectical fashion, out

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of its alienation in harmonious return to the first and last principle, Being, now known as Spirit, “all in all” as it was and is to be, essence, that is, as defined by Aristotle, in Hegel one with being in “the concept” or Idea. Men, that is, are not the ultimate subject or subjects, not that ultimate Subjectivity which replaces Substance as Actuality and the Idea, the summit of Logic. All this is thus, quite naturally, apparent from the Logic, from the dialectic’s beginning with Being, having Being as its beginning, since it is clear that being is common to anything whatever, even negation or privation as such, though this is sometimes qualified as a “being of reason” only. Any kind of being, rather, is itself being and, therefore, being itself, since this has no parts (Parmenides). So McTaggart’s restrictive insistence that Hegel’s dialectic “only” deals with existences hardly signifies, given that Existence is a finite category within the mediating Doctrine of Essence only, unless we give thought, the Idea, nous, its universal due, of which the “I”, one of ones or “universal of universals”, subjectivity, is proto- or “readiest” instance. This more particular outline becomes clear already in Hegel´s account of Atomism, or in his ending his Doctrine of Being, passing to Essence, with Measure as final outcome of Quantity, which is itself shown to be superior to as “sublating” Quality. The term “collapse” here, therefore, should not, in my opinion, be made too much of. The apparent stripping of Being down to the bare category of One is as much its definitive enrichment in embryo as is Mind and Idea. The One unites in identity with all other ones. That this has to be so implies already that the Content of reality is entirely formed of this perfect unity of absolute and infinite spirits or minds as Mind. In this perfect unity the Whole or One is as essential to each one as each one is essential to the One. McTaggart makes this reflexive point the substance of his proof of immortality. Since this logical Necessity is the perfection, the true face, of Freedom and vice versa (i.e. the identity applies whichever of these categories stands higher in the dialectic, identity being the logical relation), it is totally compatible, indeed finds its expression, in the truth that each of the ones is freely begotten of the Idea or, in less figurative language, freely and eternally proceeds (a term of even less figurative nuance than “processes” as a verb) from the One, itself self-expressed or ex-posited in each of these free acts. * Hegel makes clear, in discussing Atomism, that classical atomism was not materialist, as was the “atomism” of German or other physicists in his own

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time, though we now can appear to be overcoming this postulate, of materialism, even in our physics. This indeed is part of his wider thesis that there is no materialist philosophy. The latter is essentially or absolutely Idealist. This is its dignity and spirituality, as “immateriality is the root of cognition” (Aquinas). Hegel’s achievement is, first, in his logic, to prove being itself as necessarily determinate, the “concrete universal”. Compare Aristotle: there is no universal class of the things that are, that be. Any being is determined, except, we shall see, for the indeterminate freedom to which Hegel assimilates, as a necessity of thought, all finalist necessity as ever realised in eternal liberty logically unable to have further ground. What this freedom thus manifests, as manifesting precisely free selfhood, is no extraneous limit upon itself. The appearance it may have of an inconceivable or self-contradictory, purely quantitative infinity, on the analogy of number extended into the doctrine of “possible worlds”, is precisely that, appearance at the threshold of unitary interpretation, which will be, as always, an absorption, a putting by, a taking up into self, in aufHebung. So Hegel shows, and does not merely eccentrically choose, his concept of it, that Infinity has to be not the Unbounded merely but that which bounds itself, thus or thus, just as being is in no sense bound from without or un-free. Thus it is causa sui, if we were to employ this finite category at all. In this sense it is unbounded, as “the bounds of reason”, his whole philosophy has been set to show, as against an impression created by the Kantian corpus, can only be a deeply speculative phrase. Thus Kant’s Religion within the Bounds of Reason Alone was itself “set to show” that religion, as purely rational, can have no bounds, cannot be otherwise bounded. Still, in this very assertion of religion’s freedom in this form of words there is a titular impression of a limitation tighter even than that of externally applied dogma. In effect, the unbounded character of the Infinite, i.e. its very infinity, will be shown to be identical, in the unity of transcendental predicates, with that conception of the Good as diffusivum sui, self-diffusive. For Hegel this meant or means that “God is not envious”, is, as he develops it, self-emptying. This philosophy, it is clear, bears directly upon existing theology. The diffusiveness is essential to God in his very concept, is the Concept, a more perfect conception than the finitely figured notion of God, called “God”, as chief person merely. An incidental consequence of this is its restoring of the forgotten implication of the notion of Immortality, again, accepted by McTaggart, that as annulling time it must extend in both directions, past and future, equally, as annihilating both of them or as being eternal. Yet this consequence is

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not in itself incidental, since it results directly from that first oracular “command” which defines philosophy as self, viz. “Know thyself”. The poet’s “Thou wast not born for death” has to imply a not being born at all. “No birth, no death” (Buddhist saying).1 Hegel further specifies such being, which is still Being, as one and the One, repeating the insight of Parmenides, as transcending all “mereology” (theory of parts and wholes) in advance, that “Being has no parts”. He thus restores the reality of Infinity from the routine contradiction, itself though a necessary step to or condition for the final “result”, of positing it as abstracted from a greater totality, making infinity itself finite, and is able to posit Quantity in its intensive magnitude (the true Infinite) as the qualitative dialectic of “quality superseded and absorbed” (Enc. 98, add.). This element of intensity or Degree itself presages the eventual superseding of Number, as One “and many ones”. If there are many ones then there are not two, three, four and so on. We thus witness, assist in or bring about the birth or first dialectical generating of something coming from nothing. The atomic “ones” of the classical Atomists are thus dialectically previous to Quantity (that great misconceived prop of “materialism”). The “readiest instance”, again, of the One as a-tom “is found in the ‘I’” (Enc. 98 add.), in absolute subjectivity, which will eventually absorb the Object and objectivity, along with any ‘I’ abstractly other than the One, which Hegel claims to be necessarily Three and even Five, this being a speculation of The Phenomenology of Mind underlined and confirmed in the Doctrine of the Concept (Enc. 160) where each “constituent function” is identical with “the very total” of it. One should conceive of the dialectic as a continual overcoming of abstraction and its concomitant partiality. This is a continuous process, from being to the Idea, in which, therefore, Quantity plays its part like any other genuine abstract category. Of course the movement is one of a swinging or zigzagging from side to side, corresponding to the continuous 1 This conclusion, or philosophical issue, opens a way to a more open, less final interpretation of the saying that “It were better for that man not to have been born at all”, viz. that he was never born and even that he is not finally “he” as in the immediate understanding. Thus we may read Hamlet’s disavowal before Laertes, of responsibility for Polonius’s death, as also due to the poetic (and hence speculative) understanding (Hamlet, Act V, scene 2, 244-253). This “disclaiming from a purposed evil” finds no limit, for either accused or would-be accuser, except as Spirit’s refusal of itself. As confined to phenomena, then, all are mad, “as mad as he”, not seeing straight, as would follow even from them all being mad just in England (Act V, scene 1, 169).

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evocation by any abstract concept of its opposite, like a sailing ship tacking from side to side as it moves forward against the wind, suggests McTaggart. Here, however, the advance is unfailing, since it is directed from the terminus being approached as ever actual, in reconstruction of what Mind cannot but have knowledge of, therefore, as of the Idea constituting it. Hence Hegel speaks of constituent functions. We have a similar development in ethics where mind passes from an initial grasping of externally handed down commands to an internal grasp of what ought to be done, expressed in a theoretical scheme before passing to that practical syllogism the conclusion to which, says Aristotle, is action itself. The original abstractions of morality, including even conscience and so on are superseded in a finally effortless virtuous living as the final Sittlichkeit. The paradigm of the dialectic is thus universal or, that is to say, Mind as such, the self-resulting Idea. This is “what is really going on” here. It means, further, that the Logic, that Logic, is finally Ontology, which is what McTaggart meant to say concerning The Nature of Existence, viz. that it is the universal itself in its universality that is concrete. If one does not see this then one does not see what is “really going on” and falls into perpetually accusing other students of Hegel of ignoring this. The necessary relation of the One to itself (as Being-for-self, determinate as self-determining) distinguishes it from itself, thus making many (ones) in immediate “reciprocal exclusion”, a general state of Repulsion later to be mirrored in Nature itself as first exitus of the Idea, as here that of Being (determinate). This general state of Repulsion, Hegel makes clear, is merely imaged or represented as the void (not, therefore, a category). The void “is repulsion and nothing else” (Enc. 98, my stress). Hegel, by a different route, is expressing nothing other than Leibniz’s entirely a priori hypothesis that “If there are composites then there must be simples”, except that he adds the minor premise that “there are composites”. Being is determinately. Thus the finite is “absorbed” as qualitatively characterising the Infinite. By the void repulsion is “presented under the image of the nothing existing between the atoms”, i.e. this nothing, as mere image, does not exist, is itself a Verdinglichung or reification in negative mode. Modern Atomism, i.e. Physics, “has surrendered the atoms so far as to pin its faith on molecules and particles”. This though remains metaphysics, but bad metaphysics, as Hegel devotes a page or more to showing (Enc. 98, add.). There is a strong parallel with his view of the then emerging evolutionary theory, describable philosophically as “transformism”. The mistake was “to put an attractive by the side of the repulsive force”, though in fact it is repulsion itself that “has an equal right

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to be called Attraction”, in two-sidedness that is not “by the side of” the “exclusive One”, which is being-for-self. This only “suppresses itself” in that it itself becomes Many. There is no absolute opposition of the physical to the metaphysical (as in so-called “physicalism”). “But the Many are one the same as another: each is One… they are consequently one and the same”, as every newborn child is man, I add. Here Quality passes to Quantity, “One and many ones” in one, by repulsion. Repulsion, it must be kept in mind, is a “figurative term” for the One’s “utter incompatibility with itself” on which Hegel based his view of a necessary Trinity or plurality of persons or relations in the Absolute or absolutely. This necessity, that is, is based upon, as founding or grounding it, freedom. Repulsion here is only etymologically derived from the “parts outside parts” of physics. The One does not repel the Many but is rather self-repellent and, in consequence, is itself Attraction of what is repelled, as attracting and attracted. For persons alone are each the universal particularised and, as such, a-toms as here arising dialectically and not later lost sight of. This view is not here yet outlined explicitly, however. So “science has come closer to sensuous conception, at the cost of losing the precision of thought”. This is its, the Understanding’s, celebrated “specialisation” and abstraction, “a source of much pride”. The “historical evolution of the Idea” has meanwhile continued on its own, or “for itself”. Yet, says Hegel, with massive simplicity, “The atom, in fact, is itself a thought”, a priori, a-tom, as the particle is not. “The only mere physicists are the animals.” Atomism was “one-sided”, leaving any “collecting the atoms” to “chance” or hazard (J. Monod), the world being “viewed as a many” abstractly. But, he claims to have shown, this nexus is the opposite of chance, “founded on their (the atoms’) very nature” as conceived. Attraction and repulsion are deduced, not “taken for granted” (as in Kant’s theory, he says). Matter consists solely in this unity (identity) of attraction and repulsion (sic Kant also), opposites that are the same. Had they been deduced, we should then have seen the How and the Why of a unity that is merely asserted. Kant indeed was careful to inculcate that Matter must not be taken to be in existence per se, as then as it were incidentally to be provided with the two forces mentioned, but must be regarded as “consisting solely in their unity. (Enc. 98, add.)

Matter, that is, must be disregarded, as must Nature materialiter spectata (Kant). Thus the phenomena of the various atomic explosions or of travel, in space or from London to Paris indifferently, neither confirm nor refute this. Even “German physicists for some time accepted this pure dynamic”, though the majority “have found it more convenient to return to the

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Atomic point of view…. have begun to regard Matter as consisting of infinitesimally small particles, termed ‘atoms’”. This “play of forces attaching to them, - attractive, repulsive, or whatever they may be” is bad metaphysics, one of “utter unintelligence”. The Understanding of course continues to resist this, the rational view, with an obstinacy paralleled by (or in fact the same as) that of abstract sense in continuing in secret to view the sun as itself moving while we stand still, though nothing in sense itself encourages this. Hegel’s opposition to the evolution of species as a final account (of Being or, as it would be, of Mind) is similarly derived from dialectic itself. Findlay, or Konrad Lorenz, in his measured (Idealismus als Forschungshemmnis) mockery of Kant (Die Rückseite des Spiegels, Piper, Munich, 1973, p.18f.), are just wrong here, are bad metaphysicians. Hegel does not maintain his position “in face of the geological record” (Findlay). He rather offers an account of this or any other such finite “record”, as he does of history in general. Only connect! * The transition from Quality to Quantity, indicated in the paragraph before us (EL98), is not found in our ordinary way of thinking, which deems each of these categories to exist independently beside the other… The fact is, quantity just means quality superseded and absorbed: and it is by the dialectic of quality here examined that this supersession is effected. First of all we had Being: as the truth of Being, came Becoming: which formed the passage to Being Determinate: and the truth of that we found to be Alteration. And in its result Alteration showed itself to be Being-for-self, exempt from implication of another and from passage into another; - which Being-for-self, finally, in the two sides of its process, Repulsion and Attraction, was clearly seen to annul itself, and thereby to annul quality in the totality of its stages. Still this superseded and absorbed quality is neither an abstract nothing, nor an equally abstract and featureless being: it is only being as indifferent to determinateness or character. This aspect of being is also what appears as quantity in our ordinary conceptions (EL98, add.).

Hegel goes on immediately here to endorse these conceptions, but only, note, as confirming this next step or moment of the whole dialectic, that “we get the conception of an indifferent and external character or mode” such that “a thing remains what it is, though its quantity is altered, and the thing becomes greater or less”. As conception this belongs to, is absorbed by, the Concept, I add. “Quantity is pure being, where the mode or character is no longer taken as one with the being itself, but explicitly put as superseded or indifferent” (EL99). So in The Science of Logic (GL) Quantity is defined as “Being-for-self overcome”. Nothing has “collapsed”

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in any normal or catastrophic sense. The dialectic here goes tranquilly on its way. The repulsion of Being-for-self, the unit, “is therefore its own creative forth-flowing” (Findlay). This unbroken continuity is at the same time plurality, due to the self-sameness of what is repulsed, the sameness of the other. We have here an almost exact parallel with Nietzsche’s Eternal Return, by which what comes back, as it were afterwards, is itself the same, movement and returning being thus themselves superseded. Thus digressing we ingress, we emphasise the very same point. Discreteness is continuity as repulsion and attraction are one or are two inseparable sides of the coin, as we say. * In this way the whole Logic is ontology, metaphysics therefore (doctrine of being qua being, as Aristotle defines it). In this it concurs with the doctrine of Fregean logic as the analysts have developed it, clearly an ontology, as Bochenski, its historian, or Quine (Word and Object, “To be is the value of a variable”) or Geach, who puts the whole Fregean corpus in an Aristotelian-Thomistic context (Three Philosophers), have variously made clear, while it, the Logic, as well concurs, again, in this, though with differences, with Aristotle himself and with Thomas Aquinas. Aristotle’s purely formal logic, by contrast, does not play much of an explicit role in his system, which is found in the Metaphysics, i.e. through Books IV, VII to IX and XII. Here the doctrine of being qua being turns out to be the doctrine of absolute mind, nous, just as in Hegel. So Hegel’s Essence is still a further development of Being as from measured quantity. “Essence, as simple self-relation, is Being” still, “Being coming into mediation of itself through the negativity of itself… self-relatedness, only in so far as it is relation to an Other… Being has not vanished: but… is deposed to a mere negative, to a seeming or reflected light – Essence accordingly is Being thus reflecting light into itself” (Enc. 112, my stress).

The same is true of the Notion or the Concept in Hegel, for which, finally, Being and Essence are, he says, “notions rudimentary or, what is the same thing, notions for us.” They “return to unity” in “the third”, the Notion, which is beyond abstract and hence finite universality. It is, in its “logical forms”, “the vital spirit of the actual world” (Enc.162). It is difficult not to include here recognition of Aquinas’s “God” as his name for ipsum esse subsistens, whatever form this is to take. It is after all in this spirit that Hegel speaks so frequently of God, for it can easily be shown that in the mind of Aquinas, whatever was the case with Spinoza, subsistens can be shown to be a very open concept indeed, subsistentia corresponding, just

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for example, to Aristotelian Act more closely than does the more usual substantia. So it is that Aquinas adds to the definition Boethius gave (Contra Eutychen III 4) of a person, viz. “an individual substance of rational nature”, the word “subsisting”. A person is “an individual substance subsisting in a rational nature”, adding though that in this nature the person “exists separately” (Summa theol. III 2, 2 ad 3um). This abstract restriction (or separation) tends to disappear in Hegel, for whom the “principle of personality” is, quite simply, “universality”, a development beginning to take shape in Scotus’ thought already.2 This definition, anyhow, should not be applied to God or the absolute which, though indeed the principle of personality (as indeed, as absolute, of universality itself) as “the highest to be found in Nature”, is not itself a person, at least in this Thomistic sense of “existing separately” from the nature3, but a perfect unity of persons, for Aquinas as, by implication, I consider it can be shown, for Hegel, though I add the restriction that it is not clear, as McTaggart at least came close to thinking it was clear, that such persons in unity remain those persons we “know”. It is a question as to how far the transformation thought is required to effect in the eternal light of spirit, of mind, must go. Hegel’s vision here comes closer to the New Testament one of “a new creature”, although, as befits the perfecting of religion in philosophy, this newness is rather to be discerned now as eternity supporting the appearance of time and matter, i.e. the “fullness” of time in a necessarily supra-temporal sense. “Turn but a stone and you touch a wing” (Francis Thompson, “The Kingdom of God”, poetry here, the “necessary picture-form”, expressing philosophy). So Hegel will say, at the end of the Logic, “We began with Being, abstract Being: where we now are we also have the Idea as Being: but this Idea which has Being is Nature” (Enc. 244 add.). Finally being will be identified as spirit, mind, as Aristotle had found, the true first, not for us but in itself. Quantity “overcomes” Being-for-self precisely in that “the mode or character is no longer taken as one with the being itself”. Here then, at a 2

Consult, for example, on Scotus, if somewhat negatively treated, R.P. Phillips, Modern Thomistic Philosophy (modestly subtitled “An Explanation for Students”), Burns Oates, London 1935 (1948), Vol. II, the chapter on “Subsistence and Personality”. 3 But compare Hegel: “It is true that God is necessity, or… that He is the absolute Thing: He is however no less the absolute Person… a point which the philosophy of Spinoza never reached: and on that side it falls short of the true notion of God which forms the content of religious consciousness in Christianity” (Enc. 151 add.).

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deeper or more profound level than that yet reached, Mind approaches yet closer to the Idea, each of whose constituents is identical with itself and thus have no other concrete specific character (Enc.160). “I and my father are one”. We approach closer, that is to say, to identifying being with “the things” manifesting it, to founding them upon being, rather than identifying those things with being as if founding being upon them. We ascend from “the world” to spirit or mind, Geist, wherein alone all is “found”. * So Quantity too, again, “is pure being”. “The expression Magnitude especially marks determinate quantity, and is for that reason not a suitable name for Quantity in general” (Enc. 99). This can, inter alia, be read back as a comment on Being Determinate vis à vis Being. The Logic advances but, as we noted, to the side or in zigzag fashion. Hence the passing or rather “passed” categories may well be ranged in a hierarchy of relative importance or centrality, distinct from their general development towards the Idea, in the way McTaggart attempted to do in his Commentary of 1910 and elsewhere. Thus Being remains the master-category as not being the nature or species of anything, as Aristotle had said. It is rather the emptiness, the true negativity transforming all to itself as, qua this very negativity, it gets conceptually, that is to say really, filled out. Conversely, Being Determinate, become One and the One, as much as it is “many ones”, determines Being precisely in its concept. So it should not be confused with some or other particularised being immediately “known”. For in seeing such a being we should, impossibly, know actually, and not as in a separate operation, what that being precisely is not, its abstract or alienated individuality. Phenomena efface themselves before Mind. “He that has seen me has seen the Father”. Father here, in religion, stands in for the Idea. Quantity as determinate, as magnitude, is mathematics, which takes for granted quantity in itself or as constituting the Idea. “The absolute is pure quantity” (Enc. 99). Hegel adds that this is “upon the whole” the same as defining it as Matter, in which, therefore, “form is undoubtedly present” (cf. Enc. 127-129). Yet form here is “of no importance”, the Absolute being here regarded as “absolute indifference”. It, Quantity thus absolutely viewed, he appears to say, does not even “fill up” space and time, still less constitute these, the forms of sensuous appearance. The logical notion of quantity, of magnitude, does not really include increase and diminishment, any more than movement as notion moves

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(Enc. 99 add.). Yet to say that a thing can be increased or diminished while remaining itself is a way of saying that it, magnitude and thus quantity, is beyond change, hence closer to the Idea than quality. Or, as remaining unchanged even when changed it negates, sublates4, change and movement. The magnitude of “a thing” is its indifferent or invariable variability. For if anything can vary it must stay the same, the original Aristotelian point under which change was first considered as a problem. What Hegel considers however, thus viewed, is accidental change. The thing itself does not change and cannot be thought as changing. There is thus only one thing, which is absolute unity, towards the knowing of which the whole of Logic is dedicated. Substantial change is at bottom an absurdity. The kiss transforming the frog concedes that “all the time” he was a prince and prince of princes. For that kiss is philosophy itself as Act. The original transformation into a frog, that “innocent” creature, is the game of self-alienation sophia plays eternally with herself, a wanton or “wicked” element in the Absolute which, thus far, exposes the abstract element in our immediate notions of wickedness: “All which I took from thee I did but take Not for thy harms, But just that thou might’st seek it in My arms.” Again, “We are as flies to the gods: they kill us for their sport” (King Lear). These assertions, in their different ways, are both true. For such games, all the same, Quantity, as invariableness in variability, is required. It is, we might say, in its whole speculatively analysed extent, the logical hinge in that process “from shadows to reality” described in its own “insider” terms, and hence over and over, in The Phenomenology of Mind. So quantity, routinely described as whatever can be altered, is just what cannot be altered, giving as it does the condition for alteration. For a thing to alter it has to be the same, as it is the (same) river that flows, irrespective of whatever one can phenomenally “step into”. The common or garden notion of alteration anyhow applies equally to quality. What was golden becomes white, for example. So mathematics falls short of showing “how far this particular thought is founded in universal thought, and in that way necessary”. Quantity therefore should not be “taken uncritically from our generalised image of it”, from the “partial and inadequate categories of understanding”. For here 4

This word is not really equivalent to “transcends”. It denotes an actual taking away, though of what just thereby was never there.

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one “identifies with the Idea one of its special stages”, thus falsifying quantity itself. Pointing this out then is not to “disparage mathematics” but to free it from confusion with an inadequate or “bad metaphysics”. Quantity remains “a stage of the Idea”, particularly presiding over (and in) the Idea as self-alienating or “creative”, however. Quantity has, Hegel goes on to say, two sources, “the exclusive unit, and the identification or equalisation of these units” (Enc. 100). We are returning to ground traversed, but differently, as happens throughout the Logic, since at each point the mind knows, just in that point, the whole, the Idea absolute, as the nineteenth century Hegelian “Ontologists” had correctly understood. At each point, I stress. Again, the harmony with the Eternal Return of Nietzsche is striking. The mind ever returns to what it never leaves, being now “in heaven”, as the atheist McTaggart does not scruple to say, while it reconstructs its way to what it has never left. Here is the true origin of Hegel’s condemnation of all judgments as false. Each constituent point of them, namely, is identified in advance with the whole. Each word or, we might hazard the saying, unit of meaning, stops short therefore at material syllables and letters, and no word more so than the “proper” name, of precisely an individual idea, understood always, however, according to an actual reference or suppositio. It is not true, this, of words in dictionaries merely, while two people named “Stephen” will be two ideas. Note, the people will be the ideas, standing for the whole, while without or apart from the idea there is no person. For the Inside idea is also the Outside manifestation, without which it would not be (thought). Ultimately, being is the act of being thought (the active/passive dilemma is transcended), such thought, or thinking, thinking itself or thought by another or, characteristically, thinking that other inasmuch as that other thinks it and vice versa exactly. This is what McTaggart christens, somewhat obscurely, “determining correspondence”.5 Existing is selfpositing. One can discuss whether to extend this down to “rocks and stones and trees” or not but the fact remains. The two “sources” of Quantity, in thought, are not two species of it. The Continuous magnitude of any determinate quantity (of its units), in “selfsameness made explicit by attraction”, is also, just because each unity is one (and the One), Discrete. Continuity has discreteness, as continuity of the Many; discreteness is no less continuous as one, wherever found, the unity or rather identity (“the self-same point”) of “the many ones”. The same whole is “put” now under one, now under the other. The infinite 5

Cf. P.T. Geach, Truth, Love and Immortality: an Introduction to McTaggart’s Philosophy, Hutchinson of London 1979, Chapter 9.

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divisibility of space or time means in its notion that its units are never arrived at, are not or are abstract, while the same concept means they are divided already in their notion. Such quantity is the proximate result of Being-for-self and not a side issue or distraction. For the process of the latter is attraction and repulsion, to the other as its other. A hundred men in a room or the uncountable units of its space each equally embody this principle of division and union or of being in or as one. This in fact is why every actual quantity is a Quantum or limited quantity. Such finitude within the Idea is precisely what Quantity, known as the necessary sublation (Aufhebung) of quality, prepares (Enc. 101). This quantum itself develops into or is perfected, in its idea, as Number. The number series, pattern of the discrete, as one is not two and so on, is yet the paradigm of continuousness, as being in itself and always a mere matter of “going on to the next number”, or adding One, without end or, really, beginning, zero or Nothing being a mere stage or stopping-place like any other. Equally, the very same quantity can be viewed as any number indifferently, five, six or seven. “It is useless to count” says Hegel from within a context of Trinitarian discussion specifically. So even Aquinas, in the course of expounding absolute three-ness, states that numbers are not posited in absolute or actually divine things, are not ultimate, that is. Numerical concepts, adds Hegel, are “inert and indifferent”, to be activated from without, by “external colligation” (Enc. 102), since the numbers themselves “are indifferent towards each other”. “Numbers are objects”, Frege had stated, though, questioned on this by Wittgenstein, he admitted to a doubt. In Hegel’s thought the object itself, objectivity, is a merely finite stopping-place for thinking. So Number, like quantity, does not stand, in the light of absolute spirit or truth. But it is only through working through this that thought truly comes to this truth in absolute self-knowing, itself constitutive of thought. Thought itself though is first thought at the end of thinking, this end determining its own selfconstituting process not so much to move (movement does not move) as to be what it necessarily is. Hegel goes on to derive the necessity of the three, or six, ways of making and viewing, or treating, number, though all of these are variations upon the one notion of counting or “telling the tale” of the identical units. They are addition and subtraction (of any amounts), multiplication and division (by any amount), specifically self-multiplication and rootderivation (any number of times). To these enumerations correspond all possible geometrical figures, points and lines, joined in the polygons, while squares, still as polygons, and cubes give the form of self-

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multiplication (of units) to any “power”. In the circle as ultimate polygon or as cubed to the sphere as meta-figure the very first point or Unity returns upon itself, figuring that primal impulse to self-figuration or revelation within the Idea as itself eternal return upon self. In the Encyclopaedia Hegel now passes immediately to Degree, to Extensive vis à vis Intensive magnitudes as sources, again, not kinds, of determinate quantity. While Continuous and Discrete magnitude apply to quantity in general, Extensive and Intensive magnitude apply to its intrinsic limit or determinateness as such. Each, again, involves the other reciprocally, having no actuality or concreteness apart from it. One might wish to extend this discussion to the notion of contraries in Greek science, hot and cold, wet and dry, as yielding place to that of intensive magnitude as exclusively making science as we have it possible. Peter Geach claimed, writing on Aquinas, that this notion came in through theology. Thus the degree, i.e. the intensity in magnitude, of grace would determine effectiveness in spiritual reality, an idea to which intensities in Nature would later be seen to correspond. Thus heat, as more or less intense, determines how cold or how hot it is indifferently, just as it determines the extensive expansion of mercury in a thermometer. Hegel, anyhow, takes intensive magnitude as entailed by extensive magnitude and vice versa, whatever notice was taken or not taken of this in Greek science. So in Degree “the notion of quantum is explicitly put” (Enc.104). The quantum itself is equated with Extensive magnitude solely (Enc.103 add.), as is Degree with Intensive magnitude. It differs from the Quantum “in its notion”. So the one cannot be reduced to the other. Rather, the reducing of everything to extensional language, equivalently extensional magnitudes, is precisely a reduction. Atoms, Hegel reiterates, are “beyond the range of sensuous perception”, are, we might say, intensive in their very extensionality, as belonging to thought alone. This then, reduction to universal extensionality, is to confuse, rather than to identify, in, again, a spurious metaphysics. The addition refers back to Enc. 98. It “is abstract understanding which stereotypes the factor of multeity involved in the notion of Being-for-self in the shape of atoms, and adopts it as an ultimate principle.” This diagnosis is not applicable to actual post-Hegel discoveries actually perceived, in their effects at least, at the micro-level beyond normal sensuous perception, of bacteria, viruses or electrons and other particles, though such particles, at least, are not decidably either discretely packaged (a-toms) or continuously “waved” as not being as well both. The same question, however, can be raised concerning the entities of this later physics in general. Does quantum physics relate to “extensional”

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quanta? If not and yet they are still “real”, does this mean that this later physics tends to confirm absolute idealism as earlier adumbrated by just Hegelian philosophy, adumbrated, moreover, not in Philosophy of Nature specifically but here in First Philosophy or speculative logic, logica docens? Intensive magnitudes, anyhow, have to be recognised “in their own character”. Again, though, how do atoms discovered in their effects differ from any “substance” as known alone from its effects? This was really Hegel’s point in separating empirical from ancient Atomism, that the latter was not empirical at all but an a priori reflection upon Being, itself not essentially either the first datum of experience or the merely specific beginning of just thinking or scientia, but precisely the Beginning and not a mere instance of beginning (WL, Suhrkamp 5, pp.65-79). We referred in beginning this present chapter to this theme, of beginning namely. * From Degree, in the Encyclopaedia, we pass on to Infinite Quantitative Progression. In the Greater Logic it is more immediately derived from Extensive and Intensive Magnitude, underlining the reciprocity of these two categories. This, though dialectically required just here, all the same instantiates further the self-contradictory, “bad” Infinite, as, therefore, do Time and Space as such. We tend to wonder at the massive spaces, empty save for in the main or everywhere lifeless geometrical if threedimensional shapes, as we do at the boundless stretches backwards and, we suppose, forwards, of Time. But what is wonderful, rather, or of significance, is the coincidence of the empirical reality uncovered with the shapes and forms of abstract thought, abstract mathematics in particular, where alone number, distance, a measure, so to say, can be endless, unmeasured, infinite in just this way. Nonetheless we are even supposing or discovering that the universe is approaching to just this Hegelian union of the possible with the necessary as if, Einsteinian curved space notwithstanding, with the absolute knowledge of that final logic within which all process and our very selves is embraced, in what is not merely the best but, as would follow, the only possible world as necessity’s own self-constitutive fecundity. In Quantity the limits are set where one will. Hence the spirit thus engaged is free from limit, in just this limited respect, however. This is the contradiction, a finitely specified Infinite as quantitative, namely. There lies always another Quantum beyond, lies always a beyond, it is the same to say. We import our animal terrain into our thinking. More generally,

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there is deep connection between the notion of “picture-thinking” that Hegel, somewhat pictorially, employs, when considering religion, for example, and that of the finitude of each of the categories. So when we look out upon the universe we are entering into ourselves, as what we make bigger and bigger is equally made smaller and smaller. We have no reason to think, therefore, to assume, that our latest “particle” discovery, in its particularity, will be our last: Big fleas have little fleas Upon their backs to bite’em And little fleas have smaller fleas And so ad infinitum. We should speak then of the absolutely “immense” in its literal, negative sense, as Nicholas of Cusa’s thought foreshadowed (as did Elijah’s “still small voice”). Immensity, un-measurability, because not itself measured, goes in both directions, as arithmetic so naturally confirms. Nor can one overlook the connection of finitude with the Good or praxis, which, as considered under the first or immediate form of Absolute Spirit, identified by Hegel as art, becomes techne, the (Greek) name for art itself, with poesia, poetry, as the final form of poesis or “making”. This techne, all the same, is itself abstracted, as making, from doing but, equally, from thinking, as flowing essentially from “virtue”, virtus, arête. For there are both moral and intellectual virtues indifferently and art, like synderesis (fount of “conscience”), is a virtue of the practical intellect, of intellect as directed to a work, ad opus, of making or doing. Of course the maker is ipso facto a doer, but the moral aspects of an artist’s activity are, notoriously, not intrinsic to it qua art, even if flowing from the same intellectual or spiritual source. It is ens precisely as bonum that is diffusivum sui, that diffuses, acts (emanation as action), is practical. Thus religion is first spoken of by Hegel as “the religion of Art”, the religion that is Art, in concept and manifestation nothing other than representational, productive, that is, and productive in the first instance of the “interior word”, verbum cordis or concept. This is the art that is prior to all art. We might even call it, by a certain displacement, ars logica. Logic itself, its praxis, comes first into view, is first proposed, conceived even, as an art, assimilable to style, of speaking. Now the issue of all these considerations is Quantity as transcending Quality, the very form of the experienced or “life-world”. The later separated philosophical “movement” called Phenomenology is seamlessly

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enwrapped in Hegel’s thought and writing. But no return to “things themselves” was called for, given that “thing” itself had been correctly diagnosed as a finite category of Thought, the self-thinking Idea, in which alone it, they, “live and move and have their being”, in which alone Movement and Quantity are both found, but as transcending themselves by themselves, in and by Self as the ever on-going Idea that summons without itself moving or changing and in that sense, as Dante saw, of causa finalis, the Hegelian “realised end”, “moves the stars”. But then, this means, they don’t move, and nor do “we”. Act is perfect, movement imperfect (act). “We” are not. Here, at last and in perfect “orthodoxy” or harmony with Self, West meets East but out of its, act’s, own plenitude, a plenitude set to evoke or discover indifferently its reciprocal other in that Other, be it “the East” (a picture) or Thought itself, which is, anyhow, its, act’s, self.

CHAPTER SIX HEGEL, HEIDEGGER AND OTHERS ON THE GROUND

The Category of the Ground arises in Hegel’s logic out of consideration of a necessary identity holding between identity and difference. This at first sight contradictory proposition, it becomes clear, derives from, as its proto-exemplification, the Trinitarian relation, whereby, for example, the Father and the Son, or God and his Word, are both equally the other of themselves in being themselves. “The Ground is the unity of identity and difference, the truth of what difference and identity have turned out to be…” (Hegel, Enc. 121). To this, however, Hegel immediately adds that the “maxim of the Ground runs thus: Everything has its sufficient Ground”, which introduces a relating of his doctrine to that of Leibniz. Here, however, Hegel explains this maxim as that “the true essentiality of anything is not the predication of it as identical with itself, or as different (various), or merely positive, or merely negative, but as having its Being in an other, which, being its selfsame, is its essence”, thus re-emphasising that unity of identity and difference we first noted. Basic to the argument is that Essence is what Being, in turn, has “turned out to be” (Enc. 110), as both, in turn, will “turn out to be” the Concept and this to be the Absolute Idea, “for itself the pure form of the notion” or concept (237). The thrust of the whole argument, therefore, is most directly instantiated in the idea of Being’s being something else or other, and not merely itself. In English we would not even use the distinguishing capital letter here. This other, that being is, is itself. Being is to be other as “what it was to be” (Aristotle) or its essence. Or, being is non-being, which is hence a being, as the measureless is a measure. It is due to this that, as Hegel will say, all predication, all judgment, is false unless, so to say, re-absorbed in the unitary concept, that of being or of any being, Aristotle’s “first act (of the three) of the understanding”. It is though, for Hegel as for anyone, the third of these three acts, namely syllogism or reasoning, that effects the return to the first.

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To this Ground, first appearing here as a category of logic, corresponds, just therefore, something in metaphysical or “spiritual” reality, just as there first corresponds something “ideal” in Nature itself as the mediating truth of the logical Idea going forth in a freedom the Logic itself has found to be one with the most final necessity as and of “what happens” in fact, to anticipate the Heideggerian Ereignis.1 For here, Hegel concludes his account of the Ground in the Logic, the ground is “not … an end or final cause; hence it is not active, nor productive” (Enc.122), i.e. not a cause at all. This negation, we must notice, is not a putting of a limitation upon the ground, but merely a further specification. In terms of value, it can as well be taken as a situating, to their disadvantage, so to say, of the attributes of action and production he has just mentioned. From one point of view it is the concept of finite explanation, generally reductive, which is here being cut down to size. Unless pursued “to the ground” it merely exchanges one explicandum for another. This itself “prepares the ground” for Hegel’s assertion of a universal access, even for children, to the speculative “true reason-world” previewed at Enc. 82 in the addition there. * Thus it is from this ground, and not from some cause, that Existence in general or any Existence proceeds. “An Existence only proceeds from the ground” (123), yet “The grounds are themselves existences”. As the unity of identity and difference the ground, distinguishing itself from itself, “works its own suspension” into (the resulting category of) existence (123 add.). Such a category is itself an immediate existence or ens. It has already been shown in Hegel’s systematic thought, however, that the immediate distinction between ens rationis and ens reale is superseded once posited, since, for example, the absolute in its own definition is itself the Idea (Enc. 213, cp. 95). It is in this way that “a ground can be found or adduced for everything”, while such a good ground “may effect something or it may not” unless or until it is received “into a will” and thus “made a cause”. What Hegel is discussing, he had earlier made clear, is (the principle of) sufficient reason. Hegel interprets this Leibnizian principle, however, as more than “this formal law of the ground”, as an absorbing, rather, of efficient into final causality as, indeed, this comes to be mirrored in Hegel’s own dialectic (203, 204). By contrast this “procession” of existence from the ground as determinate, i.e. it is only determined as a 1 Light, Hegel thus says, “is nature’s first ideality” (i.e. there are others) Philosophy of Nature, 1816.

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ground, some ground or other, “is therefore a formal matter”, in correlation with Existence as the immediately following category, whether or not, that is to say, any existences are really or phenomenally produced. The having of a ground is merely how any thing (next category) is to be thought and as such it turns out to be the basis of, the ground for, the inter-relation of all existents in the unity by which they “form a world of reciprocal dependence”. The grounds are themselves existences as any existence is a ground. In this “indefinite multitude of existents”, these “infinite interconnexion between grounds and consequents”, it is not only useless but without meaning to attempt further identification as of something “in itself” or “underlying” (substans). Nevertheless it is from the ground that logical reasoning must commence. The ground is itself ground of itself or, so to say, selfexplanatory or, equivalently, not to be explained and this is its explanation. Yet Hegel will see no “mystery” here. Insofar, even, as this is an affair of the analytical understanding it stays there, at the ground or, rather, says Hegel in a kind of despairing pun, “falls to the ground” (120). A chief aim of the present enquiry is to determine how much more than this, if anything, is implied, after Hegel, by the Heideggerian concept of Sein, of which the latter says that our chief error in philosophy has been the attempt to derive not merely this concept but Sein itself from beings, esse from entia, instead of deriving these existents, the beings, from being itself. This, however, is precisely what we find is done at this point of Hegel’s logic, which we are considering. The question would then be, for Heidegger, presumably, whether Hegel follows this order of procession, this way of proceeding, in reality as he does in his thought. For Hegel himself, we should note in passing, for absolute idealism, the alternative qua alternative hardly arises. In his own words idealism is “the dogma of philosophy”, meaning, of course, that it is not a dogma but necessary procession. It is striking, anyhow, that Heidegger does not seem readily or explicitly to acknowledge this Hegelian precedent for his own methodology. It is clearly implicit, however, as appears from the very titles of the works dedicated to this question as, for example, Vom Wesen des Grundes (1929) or Der Satz vom Grund (1957, reflecting a lecturecourse given eighteen months or so previously). For this reason we will pause here to give a further summary of Hegel’s position on just this question, this Satz rather in its essential meaning. *

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The Ground, Hegel points out in The Science of Logic, was interpreted in the whole of the metaphysics before him either as cause or, in modern rationalism, as reason. Here though it is important to remember that for Aristotle there were four types of cause, so the Ground, called here God, is both efficient and final cause. Final causality, however, was called in question in the modern period immediately prior to Hegel, first in relation to nature, in physics. Finality survived isolated in the human world of “morality”. Thus Kant distinguished between natural and free causality, namely rational, as the “reason of being”. This change led, prior to Kant, to the enthronement of the Anselmian a priori “ontological argument” over the five a posteriori ways of Aquinas for establishing the rationality of the object, be it world or God, from Descartes on. With Leibniz this becomes the principle of “sufficient reason”. Hegel himself complains, especially in his Lectures on the Proofs of the Existence of God, that the a posteriori ways to God, when enthroned as anything more than moments on the way to the a priori argument or conception, give the impression of the first or finite percepts having to remain as independently guaranteeing the infinite being otherwise found not only to support them, rather, but, self-contradictorily, to negate any absolute self-being in just what is supposed to entail infinity’s truth or even “existence”. Thus the ground gets interpreted as reason. Hegel criticises the identification of ground with efficient cause as “mechanical”, from outside only. He praises Leibniz for seeing this. It is not, as we saw above, a matter of cause but of an intrinsic relation to all other things as essential to any existence. This, we may note in passing, at once raises the question of the applicability of the attribute, for Hegel the finite category (in “The Doctrine of Essence”), of existence to God, or indeed to the ground, concerning whom Aquinas had argued that as infinite he has no real relation to anything outside himself. Instead, he is within himself a network of relations, thus including his own otherness and, a fortiori, everything resulting therefrom in the infinite freedom of immutability proper to mind or spirit as absolute self-knowing. Hegel, however, considered the Leibnizian theory of a dichotomy between the contingent thing and its necessary ground, as it emerges in its treatment by Wolff at least, to be false. Just therefore there is no sense in applying either the principle of causality or of sufficient reason, as interpreted by Wolff, Hegel concludes. No such dualism can be thought. It denies itself, as he shows, already in “the Doctrine of Being” (as found in both of his presentations of logic). It is a question, rather, of reconciling “creation” with infinite act, within which it is necessarily absorbed. Philosophy has to maintain and not give up this its high ground, this

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identity, in the Aristotelian specific difference, of basis and summit, which is the Concept and Absolute Idea as it is also an application, or ultimate cause, of the Aristotelian doctrine of the unicity of the ultimate or “substantial” form determining everything, above all itself, to what it is. All previous forms, of being or of explanation, yield to it as absorbing or superseding. It is at this point that from today’s standpoint one naturally recalls the Heideggerian utterance that, in effect, the truth of essence is the essence of truth. For it is essence that Hegel is here expounding as mediating between being and the Idea, as mediating the Idea from being as the first or originating concept. Thus he says, still following Leibniz, that “The maxim of the Ground runs thus; everything has its sufficient Ground”. This means that anything’s “true essentiality” is not its self-identity or lack of it, as “merely positive, or merely negative”, recalling the proximately previous categories, but its “having its Being in an other, which, being its self-same, is its essence” (121). Here already everything is led back from what is now exposed as untrue abstraction and particularisation to the Idea as only truth and final, essentially realised end. This process will not stop at reabsorbing predication itself, even of this self-same truth, into the Idea, in total agreement with the statement of Wittgenstein in the Tractatus after, it is often overlooked, having himself spoken of “the mystical” (6.522-6.54), that it cannot be spoken of. “All judgments are false.” This had to be said since it is Hegel’s recognition of his own, as later of Wittgenstein’s, method. Thus the propositions of the dialectic, its categories for that matter, “serve as elucidations in the following way: anyone who understands me eventually recognises them as nonsensical, when he has used them – as steps – to climb up beyond them” (Wittgenstein here). This is precisely the Hegelian “ungratefulness of spirit” and, properly, nothing new, though for Hegel the self-contradictory is not “nonsensical” without more ado. Thought was and is ever a circle. “And this we call God” (Aquinas), ratio or reason, itself however also a momentary category immediately generating measure or the transition, via the measureless (itself a measure) to essence. It, thought, was also called a “highway of despair” (Hegel, The Phenomenology of Mind). It is a réculer pour mieux sauter, a retreat to advance, without end or circular. Yet what is here despaired of, infinitely, is the finite. It follows immediately, or “to this extent”, that “the essence is not abstract reflection into self, but into an other” (Enc. 121). One might want to ask though: how does this differ from predication’s being of the subject, as it obviously does? “The Ground is the essence in its own inwardness;

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the essence is intrinsically a ground; and it is a ground only when it is a ground of somewhat, of an other” (121). This, though, is not convertible as subject and predicate, whatever formal stipulations are set, are always convertible. Inasmuch as John is wise the wise is John. This is in fact the basis of Hegel’s whole system, whereby the universal is the individual and vice versa, along with the other five or so identifications made in his account of formal logic as the Subjective Concept. He thus sidesteps “distribution”. It plays no role, is thus thoroughly superseded or set aside (aufgehoben), as effectively as is done, without reference to Hegel, in Peter Geach’s Reference and Generality.2 Strict analysis here falls together with the “mystical”. “This also is thou; neither is this thou”. This is the truth which is essence as infinite freedom, the insight that all, and not “only” God, speak “only one word” (John of the Cross). Thus philosophy has ever consumed itself as condition for its survival as, thus, every existence (or non-existence) is relation, is the whole as self-relating, every atom attracting its other in self-constituting repulsion. This is indeed the “collapse of the finite” or, put differently, the truth that the truth of finite reality consists in its Ideality (95), itself a finite category, however. This means, in its turn, that the infinite, as the necessity of all possibility, cannot be conceived without the finite on pain of itself becoming finite. This dynamic totality is in fact Spirit, mind, which as true or final ground is also an ab-Grund (hyphen added: Hegel is recalling Jakob Boehme) or abyss of nothingness, just inasmuch as it is the selfconsciousness of absolute mind or, simply, absolute self-consciousness. Ground is essence as the whole, the negativity of all else, which just therefore negates itself as this negativity. The negative is, becomes, the positive, in an infinity. This is infinity. It cannot be either cause or reason taken now as reason of being. Reason, rather (Vernünft), is the transcendent ground of all in immanence as holding it within itself, even should it thus, i.e. within itself, conceive what is outside itself or nature. The outside is inside. There are not, therefore, two separate “processions”, absolutely speaking, and to speak so, even to speak of “God before the creation” (though Hegel himself might do so), if taken without further conceptualisation, as we say, or without that insight commonly reckoned “mystical”, though it is eminently or “speculatively” rational (cf. Enc. 82 add., final paragraph), is ultimately to invite a self-defeating atheism. This is the meaning, too, of the Augustinian “closer than close”, intimior me mihi, i.e. not close at all but identical. Similarly reason, mind, remains 2

Cornell University Press, Ithaca and London, 1962, pp. 1-21.

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theoria even when put as guiding praxis, these being two identical names for Act. Thus God creates the world in effecting or thinking himself. Thus Aquinas, at Ia-IIae 94, 2 of his main Summa, is operating an analogy when he postulates principles of practical reason (natural law) as in parallel to the axioms of reason itself, as internal criticism can elucidate. If Kant had understood this then his whole philosophy as we have it would have been different.3 Any ground, as affirmative, is a good ground, “any point will do”, provided it is “in correlation with the immediate existence depending on it” (122).4 So “a ground can be found and adduced for everything”, just as it “may effect something or may not”. It is only a motive, effecting something, in connection with a will. Here Hegel seems in agreement with Darwinian views, whereby such a will is not needed. His point, however, is that it is needed. Thus, in logic, cognition in all its forms gives way to will and, in synthesis only with will, to the Speculative Idea (235), into which all is subsumed. This is why this evolutionary view is itself a momentary stage of the method, the development, it being after all the Idea itself, and nothing else, that must, of necessity, “go forth freely as Nature”, necessity being an inward quality of will in its infinite perfection and nothing else. Thus it is that cause too grows out of the ground, with which it is thus not identical or, rather, is identical in its difference, since the Idea itself and in itself must traverse all these stages of thought. Like it or not, this is a flat acknowledgement of the Absolute within the idea, the finite ideal even, of natural scientific explanation as establishing that it never merited exportation from it. It equates the search for the reason of being, however, with the positing, simply in and as infinite, of infinite personality or will, which just therefore succeeds upon cognition in the dialectic. This is the ground, too, of the final equation of knowledge with certainty, which Heidegger misreads (see below and above). This and this only is the divinity or absoluteness of reason as will, seen by Aquinas, for example, not as a competing or alternative faculty but as the intrinsic inclination of reason or mind (spirit) itself to the known good. So, no will no mind, “artificial intelligence” An intelligent computer will have a will though, like God, a will inseparable from the necessity of its operations. So this is but a new twist of the Scholastic appetitus, common to all beings, spirits, animals, plants, machines or stones, where it becomes gravity or a seeking of “the ground” merely. 3

Cp. our Natural Law Reconsidered, Verlag Peter Lang, Frankfurt 2002. This founds the poetical point (Wordsworth) that nature’s especial glory is not to be sought far off, in some special view. “Turn but a stone and you touch a wing” (Thompson, “The Kingdom of God”). 4

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This also means that Hegel accepts Hume’s post-Leibnizian critique of causality, in which he concurs when reducing it to his treatment of that ground above as founding the mental terrain where cause is considered, as in Hume, in abstraction from will. Nor is there reason to suppose that Heidegger dissents from this. Hume was a philosopher and this is the path, at this moment and forever, of philosophy. * Heidegger coincides, then, with Hegel in this critique of cause as of reason-of-being, but not in the identification of this ground with, for example, subjectivity. Hegel, he suggests, travels in a closed circle as knowing in advance where he wants to go. That is, he could not have gone there without knowing that. Thinking as such, “letting being be”, does not lead to that, so Heidegger tends to think. He relates this criticism to and in what he sees as a modern quest, un-Aristotelian, for absolute certainty in all things, as already instanced in Luther’s stress upon assurance in religion, in the Galilean quantification by mathematics of physics or, supremely, in the Cartesian philosophical project, though not because it is philosophy but because there Descartes establishes an objective ground for truth upon his existence as subject. Thus from there he argues to God as supreme, truth-guaranteeing object from the subject’s forming or, rather, possessing just this idea, thus yielding a basis for science. Here, however, Heidegger seems to forget that it is just this that Hegel rejects in his introductory essay to The Science of Logic, “With What Must Science Begin?” Here, indeed, he has Descartes very much, if critically, in mind. Science can only begin with being and not with the subject. It is this being, rather, which reveals itself to be subject and absolute subject, through the prior mediation of being as, first, essence, in Hegel’s sense of this. Descartes, in fact, misses the import of his own revolutionary discovery5, which is just what Hegel develops, following in the path, but scientifically, of the mystics, of “the speculative proposition”. This proposition though, of self in other and in all other, to the ruin of all finite predication, such as we find also in Wittgenstein, both philosophers finding a basis rather in the general form of a “logical atomism”, has nothing to do with establishing “assurance” but is rather a “highway of despair” as far as abstract objectivity is concerned. This aspect Descartes, as also Heidegger, turns almost immediately away from and it is that which is most striking, that Descartes shows no interest whatever in the 5

Compare our “Other Problems about the Self”, Sophia (Australia), 1984.

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self he has just discovered. There seems nothing in him corresponding to Newman’s repose in an essentially spiritual universe of “myself and God”. Such self-awareness, reflection shows, has nothing to do with a quest for certainty concerning finite things, except negatively. It is no kind of means at all. Rather, it is itself realised end. This, then, is what Hegel must be given credit for. In his discussions of the ground, however, Heidegger shows no awareness of, or chooses not to touch upon, this. It is true that Hegel does in fact discuss subjective certainty in relation to knowledge, just in order, however, to argue positively that the two are finally identifiable before either of them can be realised as itself. The truth into which certainty as such “mutates” is the truth of the divine being in its own absolute self-knowledge and nothing else. Certainty is thus founded upon “the ruin of the individual” and so is not subjective in the Heideggerian sense. This is indeed a philosophy of the One and why not? Here “unification is the business of philosophy”, remarks Heidegger disparagingly, immediately before embarking upon his supposedly more effective means of achieving this unity philosophy “needs” to be itself. What both thinkers find, however, is that unity is the achievement of spirit, of mind in its self-consciousness, which, as infinite, is the submergence of all consciousness as we know it, the loss of self in the other as of the other in itself, in having nothing as possessing all things. Such subjectivity, “according to the whole”, kat’holon, in fact, is precisely what makes religion, for Hegel, a form, though imperfect, of absolute spirit, of which, in turn, philosophy is the absolute or final Gottesdienst.6 Heidegger, however, claims to discern as condition for this way of reasoning an inability to think through, to account for, “the ground of subjectivity”, which, the latter, Heidegger equates with just any particularised being. This ground Heidegger calls Being (with a capital B), Sein, which, as accounting for beings, as ground of the ground, cannot 6

As he puts it, again, in LPR 1 (1821), the “religious standpoint”, as a form of absolute spirit, is defined as a concern with things according to the whole, kata holon, or universally inasmuch as they form, necessarily for spirit or reason, Geist, a system. This in time will become what “grounds” philosophy, this itself being found “in time” specifically only so long as “ungrateful” spirit thus needs it, “does not annul time”, “does not grasp its pure notion” (The Phenomenology of Mind, Baillie p.800). It is in this sense that philosophy is not without injury classed as an abstractly academic subject and hence as not a and the way to and of spirit, any more than, thus classed, is physics, though it has issued in the destruction of cities. Philosophy, as athanatizein (Aristotle), issues in the annihilation, the Aufhebung, not merely of cities but of the finite self and hence of the world as such in its finite ideality, or of the object itself in self-consciousness, “according to the whole”.

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itself be a being as, thus, accounting for itself or causa sui. Just how or if it could not be this, however, is the question itself which Hegel answers in the affirmative. It is a question of necessity and therefore, first, logical. Heidegger must also show how his demurral, to be valid, does not involve an infinite regress, of grounds of grounds of grounds, which are thus not grounds at all. He has here in fact founded the post-modern dismissal of this quest as “foundationalism”, fundamentalism, preferring the groundless. Against it all Hegel affirms that non-being too is a being or, in the first instance, this Being with a capital b. Nonetheless Heidegger’s project and his question are of the deepest interest. His not finding his answer in Hegel’s system appears to be at least helped along by a certain prejudice, however, one shared by that other culturally Catholic thinker, Descartes, and which one finds also in Adorno. John Henry Cardinal Newman had none of this but that is precisely because Newman, a Catholic convert (1845) when more than forty years of age, was a man of deeply Protestant culture, for which reason surely Pope Paul VI declared the Ecumenical Council (Vatican II) he had recently (1965) closed to be “Newman’s Council”. For Heidegger the way of dogmatic theology depends upon a rationalism on all fours with that of the Enlightenment, upon a rejection of the mystical stretching back, at Rome, to at least the days of Pope Nicholas the Great in the ninth century and reproduced institutionally, later, in an inquisitorial tribunal based upon a rejection of precisely the speculative as such. Heidegger’s project, though, is of interest because, like religion, it is nonetheless mystical. Being as such cannot be a being. But nor can it be non-being, as coinciding with just that ignoring of it which has characterised the ontotheology Heidegger reprobates. The question is one of how we “heed the clearing (Lichtung) of Being”. Hegel “cannot ask the question”, Heidegger claims, “re the clearing” as “primal phenomenon”, not so much a lighting up (Licht-ung) as that which lights up, as “the ground of all beings”, which itself has no trees (in the forest in which it forms a “clearing”) and still less is itself a tree. Yet it is necessarily in the forest. The forest, then, is the unity of all in all, just as in Hegel. Thus, for Hegel, the ground too is in the end the Idea, everything coming from and going to the ground. In itself, therefore, the ground supports or underpins nothing, being “essence put explicitly as a totality”. The other it “supports” is necessarily within it and not merely by a foreseeing decree of Hegel himself expounding it. This aspect of the logic amounts to a subversion of our immediate notion of explanation itself, as Hegel makes explicit more than once. Causal explanation reduces to a giving of grounds as it pleases us. Peter Winch made just this point, without reference to Hegel, in his essay “On

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Understanding a Primitive Society”.7 The resulting “universes of discourse”, though, are not, as Winch thinks, separate, as their typically historic blending confirms. They form, says Hegel, a mutual network of identity in difference, any particular ground only becoming a motive, as in fact it does, Hegel makes clear, upon “its reception into a will”. Nonetheless, actuality is firstly possibility, which otherwise considered is a mere abstract modality, as in Kant. So will as such, the Idea, is the actuality of every possibility, which means that the formal notion of ground remains as grounding any causality, for example. Thus all causality is first found to depend upon a first cause as ground before one can conclude, just therefore, to this first cause as cause, as will. That this is just one possibility, however, as argued, is the very ground, again, for rejecting actual possibilities. As actual they cease to be merely possible while conversely, in the free concept, all possibilities are necessarily realised and what is not realised was never possible. In an infinite time “what can happen at some time does happen”, wrote Thomas Aquinas. Was this a motive for his appearing, in some texts, to speak of a beginning at once in and of time? * The doctrine of the ground, then, as thematised after Hegel in a new phenomenology, proceeds from Heidegger. For him, as for Hegel, being as foundation or ground is not a being. Rather, and this Hegel shows more than does Heidegger, being itself is shown to be at once non-being and idea and this idea, ultimately the Absolute Idea, is itself not merely absolute qua idea but is itself the absolute. Non-being, or a “being of reason”, is itself the final shape of being, for which Existence, as emerging immediately from the ground, is not itself a worthy predicate, Hegel says, echoing the Neoplatonic tradition, but as a result of his own categories, which are yet not his own. God, or being, does not properly “exist”, as we can see if we try to apply this predicate precisely to being, but nonetheless “is”. Being is what it is not, inasmuch as it is not what it is. It is important, however, not to confuse being, das Sein, with the esse commune of Scholastic abstraction. It should rather be identified, in difference, with that act of being proper to God alone, to which all other being or beings indifferently is or are, backwardly, or from the absolute viewpoint, analogical. Hence we say that God’s being is analogical or, with Heidegger,

7

Reprinted in his Ethics and Action.

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that Being is not a being since, he thinks, negating this negation is precisely the error of onto-theology. Heidegger begins his consideration of the ground8 by referring to Aristotle’s doctrine of arche, of the four principles (archai) or causes. Aquinas had transmitted the definition of a principle as “that from which something proceeds in any manner whatever” and in fact Hegel says that Existence, as well as “an” existence, “only proceeds from the ground” as “a formal matter”, as what can be adduced for anything, for “any immediate existence depending on it” whatever, as we may ask always for what a person’s grounds are for what he says, in no way assuming either cause or especially valid reason. A ground can always be found and any ground is good. Is not Heidegger then rather making a mountain out of a molehill? The ground in Hegel is not connected as such, as Heidegger seems to claim, with a will to conclude towards absolute subjectivity, since, as he expressly there adds: “there and there only it becomes active and is made a cause” (Enc. 122). Heidegger passes now to analysis of the Leibnizian sufficient reason. Not much or no specific attention is paid to Hegel’s careful exegesis of this, for him, key thinker, philosopher of contradiction perfected (Enc. 194). For Hegel the ground is not phenomenal but formal. The ground and the grounded merely differ in form as immediate and mediated. This, which is “the law of sufficient ground, … merely asserts that things should essentially be viewed as mediated”. Yet logic lays down this law “without exhibiting its mediation”. Thus we reach what Hegel has shown to be “the true business of logic”: it is to show that all our thoughts, appearing often as “neither understood nor demonstrated”, “are really grades in the selfdetermination of thought”. Logic, in this way, finishes the inherent task or riddle we call consciousness. In this process the individual is lost, ruined, in the universal and contrariwise. As the Psalmist had it, “In God alone is my soul at rest”, any soul, we might interpret. Thus far “the ground is yet without a definite content of its own”. Yet a variety of grounds may always be asserted for the same fact. This, following the logic of difference (the ground is both the unity but also the difference of identity and difference: this is its significance), we get an “opposition of grounds pro and contra”, always and necessarily. Thus the phrase “sufficient ground”, Hegel now says (121 add.), “is either otiose, or of such a kind as to carry us past the mere category of ground”. So, because any ground suffices, no ground is identifiable as mere ground and this, says Hegel, is actually the meaning of the Leibnizian law, namely that 8

Vom Wesen des Grundes, 1944.

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only a self-acting content suffices for the ground, which without it is insufficient, mere formalism. This is the self-acting concept with which everything actual or real is identical as a moment. The word “sufficient” shows, for Hegel, that Leibniz was not offering a mere formal “law of the ground”. He thus rejected efficient causes in favour of final inclusive of formal causes as the principle of true explanation. Light, heat and moisture may be the efficient causes of a plant’s growth but the final cause is the notion or concept of the plant itself, its active and determining form. This is that nature by which bodies in general heal themselves before any doctor gets involved or by which minds grow in wisdom from within, prior to determinate nudges by any teacher. What is being prepared under Ground, we begin to see, is the later reciprocity entailing quasi-Humean rejection of an inward core to appearances, of cause to effect, of inside to outside, of God to nature, of invisible to visible. “He that has seen me has seen the Father” could well be taken as Hegel’s guiding text or insight here. To call this atheistic would be to miss the point and not merely to jump the gun. But neither is it pantheistic, since what is first rejected is any idea of a composite whole (Enc. 135) of parts, in spatial as in temporal explanation, of history therefore as “time-slices”. This, the “immediate relation”, is mediated, logically absorbed, as itself the whole (and not just a whole) inasmuch as each diverse part possesses “independent being” and is thus not truly part, not related to any abstract other, the other itself being the same or not other. If the whole is the part and the part is the whole then there are neither parts nor wholes, just as there is no ground otherwise than in pure or abstract formality, corresponding to the child’s indiscriminate “Why?” (in saying which he shows that he has learned the concept). This, that “being has no parts”, is the ancient Parmenidean insight, faithful to the Oracle’s principle that self-knowledge is universal of universals in its final individuality. So in general the ground of the phenomenon “is no less phenomenal than itself”, the appearance of analysis a merely inward, this itself though the outward, phenomenon of thinking as it appears to us. Thus “the mediation of substance by means of form”, and thus equally by non-subsistence, is endless or without result, since this truth is itself the result. This, it seems to us, is the background to Heidegger’s independently initiated discrimination of Being from beings, of the Being that cannot itself be a being. By the Hegelian logic, however, it can and must be such, although the opposite of this is equally valid, namely the difference in the identity as the identity in the difference. “This also is thou, neither is this thou” is the formula for this, which, indeed only personality can support,

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as McTaggart argues9, since here individuality is itself posited as principle of universality, its opposite. God, Hegel says, intending to improve on Spinoza, “is the absolute Person”.10 So we will have a being that is not a being, in further sublation of the category of Existence as it emerges or proceeds from the Ground. This though is in consequence of the truth that being is, necessarily. So theology asked, anciently, if God is, utrum Deus sit, and not whether God exists merely, this being an “unworthy” predicate for Being itself, avers Hegel, making of God himself a part of a larger whole, in a contradiction not in the least speculative. Thus in rejecting the Anselmian proof as proof Aquinas conceded the Anselmian point as to the necessity of the Idea. So, too, Being as such, as sought by Heidegger, is not merely necessary but necessity itself. This indeed is the salt whereby or in which one “tastes being”, in D. Caputo’s analogy, of the outside as inside, in that light which is already “nature’s first ideality” (Hegel, The Philosophy of Nature, 1816), it too, as, philosophically, is the case with each of the atoms, its own other. We might compare that saying, “In thy light shall we see light” (my stress), that light through and in which anything at all is seen, figuring therefore absolute knowledge. Or, in seeing being, we could say, we see system and method, but these just are beings or “what something is (to be)”, which was just Aristotle’s phrase for essence as a being or what it is, again. *

9

McTaggart, Studies in the Hegelian Cosmology, CUP 1901, ch.2. Hegel, Enc. 151, add. Hegel adds here, in effect, that this, “the true notion of God which forms the content of religious consciousness in Christianity”, is reached absolutely in his own philosophy. Spinoza offers “upon the whole the Oriental way of seeing things”, where “the finite world seems frail and transient”. This is indeed “the basis for all real further development” but is not “the final idea”, “the principle of the Western World, the principle of individuality”, first appearing philosophically “in the Monadology of Leibniz”. Here we have it, what Leibniz’s thought, “contradiction in its complete development” (194), means in Hegelianism, where all is in each, each in all, excluding “not one sparrow”, we might say. Each monad “is the whole notion in itself, only distinguished by… greater or less development”, This finite world is less than “frail and transient” since, as ideal (95), it is infinitely more. Hegel, therefore, does not reject this reduction “to ‘ideality’ and insubstantiality”. The “antithesis of subjective and objective is completely overcome”, adds Hegel, as himself then going beyond or, it may be better to say, clarifying Leibniz as it were to himself. Since God is “our true and essential self” it is only relatively that the Monads “are each an object”. This is the interpenetration of persons in one person, our “essential self”. 10

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To return, then, to Heidegger and the ground as precisely phenomenological, the warning not to confuse the ontological with the ontic, necessarily converting God into an idol, a being, not to employ the ontological categories of cause and sufficient reason here, is also a call to “disobjectify” God.11 Recourse to the Ground, again, is free of “reification”12. For Leibniz, in contrast, truth is necessarily predicative or the giving of a “reason”, Heidegger states. This leads him (in Vom Wesen des Grundes) to ask if there can or must not be a more originary truth than that of the enunciation, a pre-predicative truth or ground, of that which predication manifests and so is not itself predicative but a primordial phenomenological experience. Heidegger calls this “ontological truth”, while, he finds, the merely ontic and its beings need not be true, whether in the particular case or in general. Anxiety, Angst, is the acknowledgement of this (on the part of Dasein, a term neither taken from nor referring to Hegel, though it cannot but recall its prior use in his texts). Thus is unveiled the truth of beings not manifested by them alone. This truth though is not separate, is always of the being or beings. This alone is why it is called Being, being as such, and not something else. Yet it is not a being. This is the same ground as that of negative mysticism, of PseudoDionysius, Eckhart, Augustine (non aliquo modo est, sed est, est…). But since it is only Dasein, the particular being, and not merely consciousness, that perceives or questions this reciprocity of Being and beings, it seems to follow that the roots of this “ontological difference” are lodged precisely in the essence of this Dasein. Heidegger calls this, in anticipation, he says, “the transcendence of Dasein”, who thus is essentially a being “in and as transcendence”. Well, this is a clear enough recognition of reason’s absolute character. What thus transcends itself, though, is being as such (das Seiende, not Sein) as transcended in its totality. This that is thus transcended we call “the world”, such transcendence “being in the world”, making this concept, world, itself transcendental. It is not the merely physical or cosmic conception, namely, of things abstractly thus considered, but of what appears (to Dasein). Thus the world is not a being, but that from which Dasein can be and has to be. This then is Heidegger’s version, coyly un-idealist, of I that is the whole or “universal of universals”. * 11

Cf. Diego Garcia Guillén, “El problema del fundamento”, Zubiri ante Heidegger, Herder Editorial, Barcelona 2008. 12 Cp. Fernando Inciarte, “Metaphysics and Reification”: Philosophy, vol. 54, 1979, pp.311-327.

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God in Scripture is always spoken of in connection with beginning, “ground” in Hegel. In the beginning God created. In the beginning was the word. Augustine had already found unsuspected depths in that “in”, in principio, en arche, loosening its imagined tie with temporality. This is further fulfilled in Hegel’s derivation of “realised end”. Word and world are identical in difference, as are world and God, God and his or the Word, logos. For the world, nature, is the Idea “in alienation”, an alienation dialectically, hence truly, countered by development, but development according to necessity as the true understanding of freedom as spirit. God, as final reality in truth, is spirit. Sin comes in with our beginning to understand this, starting with Eve and Adam. Hence Hegel dismisses morality as a key to the genuine “world-souls”. Operating in a finite perspective, they commit worldshaking errors, in the correction of which we advance but always as one, necessarily. We cannot and do not wait to become perfect, to “get right” with God, since that is the essence of all process as such, or logical method, in mutuality. All is well, since the ground we are on, our present consciousness, is always, necessarily, the ground from which to start, in freedom. In our striving to advance, until we advance, we are neither better nor worse than we ought to be, a point stressed by McTaggart as following from Hegel’s logic. This is the felix culpa, but as a constant of finitude, not a moment in a finite narrative. The world is not other than God in any abstract sense, abstracted from its identity with God, that is to say. This is not pantheism but its opposite, the nullification of the world as anything on its own, anything other than relation. The world abstractly considered could not possibly be God, not even as one of the Idea’s moments. It is not, that is to say, a category, but “only an appearance”, which is a category (Enc. 48, 131). * Is there a “statistical certainty”, then, concerning rational minds, spirituality, “on” other planets? Such an assertion is inconsistent, depending on the sense of “statistical certainty”, with “the idealism of speculative philosophy” as distinct from “the metaphysics of understanding”, which “maintains half-truths in their isolation” (Enc. 32 add.). According to such idealism rational “minds” are not “on” planets, are not “embodied”, though neither are they “disembodied”, nor are they either one or many exclusively. The perfection of unity in difference is as such achieved as end realised. Thus the fire that, it is said, shall and yet does destroy the world (and not merely cities) is the eternal power of thought itself.

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This is the abiding truth of Ptolemaic astronomy, as expanded in the Copernican, concerning which, therefore, Kant should rather be spoken of as attempting a counter-revolution in his account of the transcendent ego. Ptolemaic astronomy, namely, presents not only the immediate, and therefore false, appearance of things. It presents things speculatively inasmuch as it affirms and denies astronomy at the same time, inasmuch as it takes the subject, or the collective subjectivity, as absolute or “central”. We should not therefore lose its insights, any more than we should lose those of ancient atomism in the interests of a purely extensionalist atomic physics presenting itself, in total contradiction of this extensionalist character, as absolute or metaphysical. Philosophy, then, as declaring the necessary absoluteness and hence the divinity of mind (Cicero), to which it offers the perfect Gottesdienst (Hegel), is the ground for the theological declarations concerning the immortality of the soul as directly “infused” (sic), since it “comes from outside” (Aristotle). It is then this mind that constructs or projects a universe, just as it constructs or projects, in fact begets, “other” minds which in turn beget it. That is, it constructs the Inside. Self, as Hegel says when outlining Ground in Essence (see above), is itself other and the other of itself, as the one is many, the many one. It is absolute inasmuch as, again, God is “our true and essential self”. This is not to be confused with the medieval Averroist proposal of “a common intellect”, which was pure abstraction, against which Aquinas asserted, equally abstractly or immediately: “It is evident that it is this man that (or who) thinks”13. The incarnation is not repeatable on other planets for the simple reason that it never occurred on this one, being rather the abiding truth of the universal as in itself particularised and individual. Palestine, “where”, in the language of religious representation, incarnation “occurred”, is not some abstract area on this abstractedly particular “planet”. We have nothing to do with Zionist politics here14. The place, rather, is the place or “temple” of the mind, in sacramentum, housing such manifestation as being its cultural milieu. In this sense “I am with you till the end of the world”, always, that is to say, as subject subverting substance. This “with” 13

Aquinas, opusc.: “On a Common Intellect”. On the day that a comparable dimension of consciousness is achieved in Islamic religion the Kaabah, along with the whole dar el Islam as now imagined, will become obsolete, preparing a reconciliation only less momentous than that foreseen with the chosen tribe of Judah. Ecumenism is nothing other than religion’s finding in philosophy its own perfection in one movement with its bringing to philosophy its own self-developed riches, in what is from both sides theology.

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is decoded in another Gospel as “I in you and you in me” or as selves being, in the Pauline representation, “members one of another”. None of this occurred “on a planet”, nor did it occur at all but rather the phenomenal realisation of this in Christian or related witness occurred and occurs. The saying of this, however, can only be the opposite of what it is, since it is itself its own opposite, and hence this position, recalling that of Bultmann, should by no means be taken as reductive but, rather, ampliative. It exemplifies the failure of the realist consciousness to be other than “unhappy”. So if we return to the original question, concerning the statistical certainty, we can best begin by recalling the theme of Kubrick’s film, 2001. Here the lost or adrift astronaut, “accompanied” by the “understanding” Hal (a computer), arrives at the “end” of the universe only to discover nothing other (or less) than himself, annihilating all distance since he himself, who was here, is now there. This seeing or thinking double, or speculatively, is represented as a seeing of his double. It is the simple speculative truth concerning local movement, which such movement itself first begins to unravel, annihilating the imaginative representation of “those faraway places”. Similarly it took a while, within the temporal horizon, to recognise ourselves, seen as the “explorers”, in the peoples of “the new world” or worlds, to see Christ in them, as religion, in fullest focus, expresses it, just as it had taken time to see Christ, done to death in, for “us” again, a distant land as it must be for some, in ourselves and thus, eventually, ourselves in one another, thus rejoining in the revolutions of grace the natural knowledge that I am human and think nothing human alien to me, in the words of Terentius, the pre-Christian Roman playwright. Thus grace as perfecting nature can only be nature perfecting itself, inasmuch, at least, as nature is spirit and the Idea. Absolute idealism, that is, begins from this graced point of outlook which religion first reveals in but not as a historical achievement or happening on the part of being itself! The Heideggerian inversion of this is a natural further step, therefore, reflecting, deliberately or not, the necessary truth that, given the Trinity, the Father is himself the active relation, the actual ceaseless speaking or begetting of his word or son. This transcendence of the static, this happening or, rather, this ceaseless act is essential to the infinite. So, again, “we” are not “on” any planet but in one another, in an identity in difference, and “the life that I live now is not mine”. Philosophy may borrow the language of religious proclamation to best indicate, for the moment, its own tranquil conviction. This question is no different from

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that of style and “the truth of poetry”15, this expression by no means intending a reductive attack on truth in general. Such proclamation, similarly, along with religion itself, is first grounded in art, in immediate spirit, before assumption, as its own proper destiny, into philosophy or spirit absolute. Kant anticipated what we are saying here when, in his philosophical writing, he referred not to man, nor yet to Dasein, as do both Hegel and Heidegger, but to “the rational creature”. This phrase expresses no mere preference of the genus against the species, not being biological at all, but rather singles out the form, which is spirit as both matter and content, as Hegelian dialectic will later think it. The Kantian phrase retains the representation “creature” as if “out of” something, as if not containing the perfect unity of all within itself. This unity, as perfect, already embraces every rational instance, whether actual, possible or, what it comes down to, actually possible or possibly actual indifferently (Enc. 143). Speculation concerning life on other planets is thus, if pursued in abstraction from philosophy, opposed, as mere curiosity, to studiositas, the virtue, and to genuine zeal (studium), life itself being anyhow “only the idea immediate”. The question has no philosophical or, therefore, theological significance. Yet, by the same token, what is first reckoned a vice is actually the ground of virtue, precisely as in Hegel’s interpretation of the Eden narrative in relation to this same knowledge, the concrete and true universal found only and ever in the particular as its seed. So to ask about life on other planets is actually to begin to transcend notions of particularised space and time. That these have to finish or “end” reveals their “ideal” character even as first given. * In what has been handed down as a sermon Thomas Aquinas offers a different definition, verbally at least, of natural law to that given in the main Summa (Ia-IIae) as, he says there, “participation of the eternal law in the rational creature”, eternal law being the divine reason, as “governing” creation, in God (Q91, 1 & 2). Participation, again, is metaphor for a having in difference. The natural is the eternal law, Leo XIII did not scruple to declare, confirming, without saying so, the Hegelian and Cartesian or Ciceronian insight into the “divine light of reason”. In the sermon, however, Aquinas calls natural law, specifically, “a reflected divine light”. That this refers to reason as a whole resolves the 15

Cf. Michael Hamburger, The Truth of Poetry, Pelican Books, UK 1972.

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dualisms of praxis and theory as of prescriptive and descriptive language or laws. This is the knowing of truth from the inside, where alone it can be known, recalling however that the inside is the outside (Hegel: Enc. 140) and the only outside, whence the outside, nature, is truly and uniquely inside. Mind is not “on planets”. So anyone, however highly placed, who wishes to tell us that evolution is true should bear this in mind, that biological evolution, or indeed biology, is not a philosophical truth or discipline. The category of life is only the “first form” of the idea, “in the form of immediacy”, that is. The second form of the idea is “that of mediation or differentiation… in the form of Knowledge”. Dualistically appearing as “the Theoretical and Practical idea” this form, knowledge, “eventuates in the restoration of the unity enriched by difference”, once again, and this “gives the third form of the idea, the Absolute Idea”. This, though, discovered last, is “the true first”, ipsum esse subsistens (Aquinas) as found “to have a being due to itself alone” and that uniquely (Hegel, Enc. 215 add.). This is the Being that Heidegger distinguishes from beings, such that it is not “a being”. This it is in which all and any reason participates in identity, ideally “hating itself in this life” as itself not being itself. But then neither is “this life” being itself. It is thus not open to abstract consideration on its own as “itself and not another thing” or as other than its indwelling opposite.

CHAPTER SEVEN SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS AS CONTENT

We have passed with Hegel from the Object to the Idea. We have seen something of how this relates to religious development or “change” (Hegel). We now consider “revealed religion” as the intermediate form of absolute spirit, following, to begin with, Chapter VII of The Phenomenology of Mind, section C in particular, while not forgetting or ignoring the previous sections on “Religion in the Form of Art”, culminating in “The spiritual work of Art”, “expressive of social life”, as the chapter-heading adds. For it is here, concerning the Epic and Attic tragedy in particular, before we come to Comedy and what Hegel finds in it, that we find him saying, concerning the opposed powers of gods, men and everything else: This destiny completes the depopulation of Heaven – of that unthinking blend of individuality and ultimate Being – a blending whereby the action of this ultimate Being appears as something incoherent, contingent, unworthy of itself; for individuality, when attaching in a merely superficial way to absolute Being, is unessential. (Baillie, p.743)

To this he adds the following important consideration: The expulsion of such unreal insubstantial ideas, which was demanded by the philosophers of antiquity, thus already has its beginning in tragedy in general, through the fact that the division of the substance is controlled by the notion, and hence individuality is the essential individuality, and the specific determinations are absolute characters.

This is important as showing the continuity of art, and hence of the religion of art, as it thus becomes, with philosophy in conscious thought. If he did not think this he would have no motive for this whole discussion of Greek drama. But similarly, then, philosophy must work back upon religion, religion upon art, as it does in Hegel’s thought. We also see here how Hegel repudiates the abstract deism or atheism of the Enlightenment. He considers, namely, what will be worthy of this

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ultimate Being, as will not any incoherent or contingent action. Such superficial or immediate individuality is not of the essence of, is inessential to this ultimate Being or absolute, which yet cannot be finitely abstract. It is thus personal, as subject to worth, but not reducible to an individual person (as the name “God” can easily suggest to the thoughtless: Aquinas corrects this by declaring that Deus est deitas). Yet, because personal, it has individuality, but not of the superficial or limited kind characterising material substances or qualities. The One God in Trinity of Christian proclamation fits these stipulations perfectly, as Hegel was doubtless aware. Allah, the merciful individual tyrant, thus far does not. It is here, in exploration, within philosophy again, of Comedy but of comedy as, before philosophy, actualising the true philosophical stance, that he introduces self-consciousness. But self-consciousness, the simple certainty of self, is in point of fact the negative power, the unity of Zeus, the unity of the substantial essence and abstract necessity [which he has just distinguished]; it is the spiritual unity into which everything returns. (Ibid. p.744)

In accordance with this it happens in comedy that the distinctions, of actor and his mask, of stage and audience, of chorus and hero, breaks up. The constitutive expression of this “spiritual unity into which everything returns” is the spontaneous laugh proper to (constitutive of?) selfconsciousness. Hegel could not have avoided thinking of the Buddha here, though, inasmuch as the laughter is convivial and not cruel (as mere laughter, not attaining to comedy, can be), he might as well have been thinking of the shout of joy of the “sons of God”, this being essential, since they are “sons”, to creation. The more privileged spectators after all, at a theatre, in English idiom, are spoken of as “in the gods” (up on the balcony)! This presentation of self-consciousness, therefore, already has its beginnings in the religious representation: “I live now, yet not I, but Christ lives in me” or, in the reverse direction, “In God we live and move and have our being”. The merely apparently more sober philosophical development of this cannot and may not, therefore, reduce it. It is the “ecstatic” outwardness to its own inwardness or vice versa which Hegel singles out as what is proper to Spirit as such, finding itself in or at home with the other, and that mutually. For the other of the finite is the infinite. * So we have a connection with Section C, of his Chapter VII, in The Phenomenology of Mind, in making which he begins by presenting for

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consideration a proposition, “The Self is Absolute Being”, not unaware, certainly, of the parallel presentation, in his Preface to the book, that “God is Being”, namely. We are going to find, in fact, that the whole thoughtprocess here vindicates the Cartesian “I think therefore I am”, throws further light upon it, in fact. Not until some nine pages on, however, does the insight this proposition expresses fully emerge: There is something in its object concealed from consciousness if the object is for consciousness an “other”, or something alien, and if consciousness does not know the object as its self. This concealment, this secrecy, ceases when the Absolute Being qua spirit is object of consciousness. For here in its relation to consciousness the object is in the form of self; i.e. consciousness immediately knows itself there, or is manifest, revealed, to itself in the object. Itself is manifest to itself only in its own certainty of itself; the object it has is the self; self, however, is nothing alien and extraneous, but inseparable unity with itself, the immediately universal (p.759).

This, in fact, is the same as saying that “We know nothing about God”, as Aquinas says that we know most about God when we know that we know nothing. The conclusion, once given God all the same, is that “the divine nature is the same as the human” and this is what, according to Hegel, is revealed in the “incarnation of the Divine Being” as “the simple content of Absolute Religion”. If it is the Absolute Religion, on Hegel’s scheme, then Christianity of itself has one foot in the philosophical door, thus puncturing any impression of abstract discreteness that may be given by Hegel’s classification of Absolute Spirit into three forms specifically. He thus, consistently, extends this fluidity in the other direction: “This incarnation in human form of the Divine Being begins with the statue”, inasmuch as this “has only the outward shape of the self”. This is so, even though it is men who make statues. It witnesses, though, if witness were needed, that Hegel does not simply mean that men as such are divine incarnations, since this process can “begin with” the statue. It implies though, on the face of it or from one side at least, that it is man’s (growing) self-consciousness that incarnates God, rather than or as well as saying, indifferently, the reverse. This might appear crucial. Yet there has to be just one mediator, individual and/or concrete, he will argue. In “the religion of art”, sculpture, drama, it follows, man is attaining to the requisite self-consciousness, in comedy particularly, where the spirit is “perfectly certain of itself” and generates, or comes upon, this truth, that “the Self is Absolute Being”, namely. Only in virtue of this truth could the Oracle have enjoined upon Socrates, as his entire task, to “know thyself”,

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not, merely abstractly, to know self, but to know thy self, as conceding this self as place of the Absolute, namely, such self-knowing being the Idea which it is, thought the closest embrace, in and of identity, namely. This is in fact the Cartesian starting-point over again, while in saying that, as if reversing history, we point to the constant renewal of spirit normatively prior to any notion of a “history of philosophy”. Descartes, however, seemed to miss his own point in claiming that God would not require of him any conversion to the ideality of the finite but guarantee, rather, creation’s independent reality as first appearing. The Humean reaction was not long in coming, such philosophies being governed by the (false) principle that “each thing is itself and not another thing”, espoused by G.E. Moore as if Hegel had never written his section on “The contradictoriness of the perception of things”, mirrored later in “The contradictions in the moral view of the world” (to use Baillie’s accurate representations of Täuschung or Verstellung in the original headings). Moore’s reaction to Hegel’s negation of Hume’s negation was a kind of philosophical version of a will to the year 2016’s “Brexit”, having a similarly unmistakeably populist appeal. These philosophers were at one in not seeing scepticism as the finite spirit’s true way of approach, its “Golgotha”, to infinite spirit, by which, in effect, such spirit itself, the infinite, knows itself, finite spirit(s) having no absolute or independent being, as Plato or even Parmenides had laid down as philosophy’s own foundation or, rather, essence, its “dogma” as Hegel does not scruple to call it. Self-consciousness is defined as that “over against which nothing appears in the form of objective being”. That is, there is no object. Thus “spirit has lost its aspect of consciousness” as implying such objective opposition or, its own consequent “intentionality”. This is the true import of the Cartesian discovery. It is not simply that one becomes certain of one’s own existence and can then (if only one could) go on to prove the existence of others (inter-subjectivity). The category of other, rather, in its abstractness, falls away, for you as for me. That is, we are one. Thought is its own subject, in every sense. It is not really true that you or I think, except as this can be seen as equivalent to thought thinking itself, since for such thought too there is no “other” object, just because thought is what is “at home” (Hegel) in and not, in final analysis, merely with its other and precisely in what is now seen to be its (own) other. * That is, the other (which is otherness), belongs to “the concrete actual spirit” that thinks it just in its thinking itself (subject as object), this being

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defined as “knowledge of self in a state of alienation of self”. Yet this proposition, “The Self is Absolute Being”, Hegel adds, belongs on the face of it “to the non-religious” or “the concrete actual spirit”. Religion, after all, if it is the attempt to get to the Absolute, must, as spirit, seek alienation from itself, from the merely religious or “churchy”. Rather, the converse proposition, that “absolute Being is I, the Self”, also holds. This is not a reinstatement of substance again, this time as self, but adopts another standpoint altogether, that of the Subject. Self-consciousness, that all is mine in my knowledge, brings this about. This subject, however, as universal, is “self-relinquished”. In denying itself in favour of the whole it “remains its own very self” (p.751). Hegel’s “leap” from Greek theatre to the incarnation theologically considered is disconcerting only so long as we regard his method of exposition, in The Phenomenology of Spirit, as some kind of engaging, even inspired, eccentricity, as if his whole developmental philosophy of mind were basing itself upon an analogous historical development. The truth in this is that analogy, as the late Ralph McInerny’s work on it demonstrated, even convincing the international body of professional Thomists in large part, is itself a logical form in the sense of a form of speech, a variety of the equivocity of terms, namely, seen as a departure from univocity but one which rather mediates the true with the false, the positive with the negative. So when we describe analogies in nature we are really or, more truly, simultaneously uncovering analogies in mind’s description of them. We are, in a word, using the term “analogous” analogously, in infinite if innocent regress. If, with Hegel, we hereby take up the standpoint of an absolute self-consciousness, then we assert an identity, in difference, between the being of things and their “appearance” to spirit (Geist), namely, between things and their notions. “Thing” itself is a dialectical notion. Analogy is real or concrete identity of what has been separated only by an abstraction. It is indeed “the bond of being”.1 If one now asks why it is the bond of being then one is on the road to Hegel’s philosophy. History, together with nature, makes up the same phenomenon, namely, the alienation of the Idea. To speak more truly, the Idea alienates itself to the being of a phenomenon and hence this alienation is not itself phenomenal but contained within the Trinitarian processes or processions, not indeed as one of them but as only apparently pre-figuration of what is progressively revealed, rather, as incarnation and not mere figuring of the 1

Cf. J.F. Anderson, The Bond of Being; Herder, St. Louis and London, 1949; also Stephen Theron, “Cajetan”, Handbook of Metaphysics and Ontology, Philosophia Verlag, Munich Philadelphia Vienna, 1991, pp. 109-111.

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Word proceeding. The world itself is not a picture but the thought of a picture, inclusive, as “whole”, of those pictures it may “contain” as representing it wholly. In thinking it thought does not picture its self over again but is self-manifested or immediate or, overcoming the opposition, mediated in its immediacy. The inwardness of nature, as of history, is thus at its surface, is not esoteric, whatever we say of philosophy. Such saying, indeed, the function of word as such, puts even the non-word, the esoteric, at the surface. The opposition, between it and the exoteric, between philosophy and religion, is already cancelled in the conceptual flow underlying and enabling the discreteness of this dialectic. This is Hegel’s final view of it, which he accordingly set about demonstrating, having, in logic, denied that there can be truths “above” reason. It is on this account, ultimately, that the incarnation is no contingent whim on the part of the Idea or of that ultimate freedom which is necessity and “realised end”. In this sense the theologically “fore-ordained” (Scotus) is the necessary and the logically necessary, is true freedom in and as essence. So the latter was, for Aristotle, “what was to be”, a phrase giving, so to say, the essence of essence. So, therefore, in following this method, the historical, Hegel is following the most logical or systematic form of exposition in accordance with his account of the science of logic, itself engendering his philosophy of history. Many commentators either do not see this or are unable to take it seriously, even after it has been demonstrated. To the carnal man, as phenomenal, discourse in the spirit, of things unseen, appears as “foolishness” (St. Paul). It would be myopic, even “foolish”, again, to assume that the Apostle here speaks only of that seemingly particular revelation which has recently both occurred and, in occurring, caught hold of him, “the first Christian” (Nietzsche), since already to him this “occurring” was, rather, “revelation itself” (Hegel). The whole of religion and therefore philosophy is involved and only accordingly could Hegel have declared this book, this Phenomenology of Spirit2, to be the first part of his system or at least have accepted this description (Enc. 23). Because, however, nature and history are the Idea in alienation from itself, specifically, we cannot expect to find the dialectic itself represented or incarnated there in its own triadic and pristine form. Nature and history have their own “leaps”, rather, of which time is the measure, simply 2

The use of the term “mind” here, in English translation of Geist(es) can suggest a reversion to Kantian subjective idealism, just what Hegel sought most to avoid. His main thesis is that mind (nous), like or as God himself, is spirit, while he will not deny the converse, that God, spirit, is mind, as is impossible to think under the Kantian presentation.

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because they themselves condition the appearance of time as real change. Thus the leaps are measured, they are not random or arbitrary. Here Findlay, for example, in stressing and thus apologising for this supposed arbitrariness, misses or plays down the whole essence or point, the point d’appui even, of Hegelianism. There is in Hegel, undeniably, a connection between incarnation and divine abdication, to speak figuratively and in accordance with the hymn in Philippians 2, whoever composed it. For the mind of Christ, this text declares, which should be our mind also, it was no mere conceit (or “fantastic extravagance of mind”) to think oneself equal with God, as having the same form (mind, namely). As such, or just therefore, he, being thus equal, emptied himself (the kenosis) as receiving, accipiens (and not merely taking as if in an initiative against God: this is a work of God), the “form of a servant”, made to the likeness of men (those already made to God’s “image and likeness”). This is therefore the pattern of what we each of us should do as self-consciously of that same form. Thus the thinking that Hegel uncovers in texts of this sort is a logical, a realised speculative progression from analogy to infinity, so “fulfilling” the Scriptures. Found thus “in fashion as a man” (spirit’s own “fashion”) he, Christ, “lowered himself in obedience unto death, even the uttermost death of a cross” (Gk. thanatou de staurou, no definite article). So God exalted him and gave him “the name that is above all names”, even this name itself, namely. He is made Lord (kyrios), in short, as lowest is highest as upholding it, and here the mystery of personality everywhere, its immediate universality, the immediacy of mediation, is declared or revealed. “He that has seen me has seen the Father”, these words are no less and no more ambiguous than Hegel’s “the divine nature is the human”. Honi soit qui mal y pense!3 Even a lady’s garter can be bearer of the divine, of the universal difference4, the “still small voice” heard by Elijah. Analogy, namely, its existence in discourse, represents, incarnates in our thought and speech, and this is of course the Hegelian reversal of the concept of incarnation as taken in realist thought, the love bonding all beings together in the unity of being.

3

King Edward III of England, 1327-1377. A difference also as of one lady from another and, just therefore, in all ladies and in the Notion, the all itself, according to Hegel’s deconstruction of formal logic in “the Subjective Notion” (see Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences). The King here, helped along by various cultural manifestations, such as “courtly love” (or art as form of Absolute Spirit), inhabited “the true reason-world”.

4

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Love has pitched his tent In the place of excrement, as we quoted above, or love has done so near enough to elicit these words of the poet (W.B. Yeats). It, love, “did not abhor the virgin’s womb”, wrote another (Ambrose of Milan, Te Deum). Analogy of high and low, of opposites in their very opposition, as discerned by Hegel, is thus the very structure and texture of our concrete being, to which we maybe come closest in this magic of the sexual, making of us self-producers and conceivers willy-nilly (the full force of the prefix in “reproduction”). We do not produce another, absolutely. So we must allow poets their license, highest lowest, last first, outside inside, whole parts, this is the Hegelian insight of an absolute poetry become, therefore, philosophy.5 “Only connect” (E.M. Forster). Thus Hegel’s own philosophy, i.e. his thought or sophia, can be spoken of, with no reductive intent, as finally an aesthetic, exalting this latter realm, rather, as in that routinely misunderstood aphorism of Keats, asserting the identity of truth and beauty, juxtaposing their names in both directions exactly as Hegel juxtaposes self and absolute being (or substance) throughout this chapter, since “true spirit has not become objective for it”, for the self, but absolute being must “from its side also be emptied of itself, and become self-consciousness”. Thus “God shall become all in all” as we have here in philosophical transcription. Or again, this is what the Gothic cathedrals attempted to represent in their being the ordained places for the assembly of all (as was of course only possible under a sacral or consecrated regime6), thus subverting or superseding the very concept of a particular place in the act of thus delimiting it as temple, as universal presence. So, “Destroy this temple and I will build it again in three days”. Such isolated moments, Hegel will explain, are not just themselves, for in being themselves they transcend, are not, themselves and just this is the truth of spirit, of mind as supremely “at home in its other”, even when that other has become just self again. 5

Cf. the chapter on Nietzsche and Rilke in Erich Heller’s The Disinherited Mind, or Hegel on the forms, art, religion and philosophy, of Absolute Spirit at the close of the Encyclopaedia. 6 The medieval might thus from one viewpoint be explained as a kind of compromise between Jewish religiosity and the new outpouring of spirit. This compromise would have been demanded by the Roman state, which the new peoples imitated, and its demand for the protection and assistance of a visibly and liturgically sacrificial state religion. In return the state had to subject itself to the spiritual power, though this, in whatever the chosen form, is its plain duty anyhow and on this fact the dignity of philosophy is based.

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This abdication, for Hegel, as mind’s continuous and hence constitutive note, is like, but only like, a sort of game that wisdom plays with herself. We should rather say our games are like, indeed participate in, that one, that exemplar, making, so to say, the only apparently longest way round the shortest way home, a phenomenon familiar to car-drivers negotiating city streets.7 The hill must be made low, the valley exalted, always. In this way being appears, but only appears, as becoming, as change, which itself does not change. * In fact, then, there is no leap from the mind of comedy, the identification of Absolute Essence and the Self, in lightness of heart or not, to the incarnation. “I and my Father are one” and “He that has seen me has seen the Father”, so why do you ask me, me, to show him to you? Fatherhood is here in fact “sublated” (aufgehoben), a point Hegel will make and repeat about the incarnate mediator (756, 784), or about his or its religious representation, “if we wish to use terms drawn from the process of natural generation”. He “has a real mother but a potential or an implicit father”, himself emptied in or as the generating, the speaking or “conceiving” of the son. In this sense, Hegel means, God comes to himself in Christ. We need to understand that in saying this he intimates the unreality of time as we immediately experience it, as indeed of all our experience. Many (not all) atheist Hegelians, namely, have not understood that history is in its essence, which is opposed to it as it immediately appears, a timeless dialectic, which Hegel compares to a still pantheon, just as he does the particular history of philosophy, just as he will say that death is in essence its opposite, the opposite of how it appears, is the entry into life in the spirit. Self and substance, in fact, are two moments in reciprocal kenosis each becoming the other, while spirit is their unity in this process and so not divided thereby. Consider this reciprocity. It is not a case of all existence being spiritual reality only from the standpoint of consciousness, but “not inherently in itself”. Such a renunciation would remain abstract, an “extravagance of mind”. It is being in general, substance, hence God, that is self-emptied, thus becoming, when viewed merely from the appearance of an event, the self-consciousness that it essentially is. Yet in this self-consciousness all is comprised and even cancelled. There is nothing that those who see God do 7

The Zen Buddhist, D.T. Suzuki, tells us in an autobiographical memoir that he could not have become a Christian because he could not understand why God, as it were in abdication, as we may now add, should have made the world.

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not see (Gregorius Magnus). The meaning Hegel sees in history is manifest, is what it is. There is nothing “esoteric” about it (p.756). To it corresponds, yet as though “happening” within it, the appearance, the coming, the mediation of the Idea, by the latter’s approved (subsequently? antecedently?) mediator, at just the historical point at which it, he or she in fact appears. In view, however, I add, of history’s nature, of the logical identity of individual with universal, this point will be found at all points. It is, so to say, always (and everywhere, evil notwithstanding) Christmas or “everlasting Easter”, this being what the event of Christmas, whether liturgical or historical, at once brings about and celebrates. “This incarnation of the Divine Being, its having essentially and directly the shape of self-consciousness, is the simple content of Absolute Religion” (p.758). And now, at the point he focuses on, “all the conditions for its production are present”, after the death, so to say, of the “religion of art” chronicled in the despair, no doubt painful to Hegel, of his friend Hölderlin whom he cites at times almost word for word. These forms, centred on “yearning agony” (he surely speaks there of his friend, a particular universalised), “attend, an expectant and eager throng, round the birthplace of spirit as it becomes self-consciousness”. The incarnation, as its final ground, is not to be extrapolated from that central historical and therefore natural development, only called supernatural, in theology, by a kind of abstraction. It is, rather, if anything at all, the necessity of necessities, prior to all that was prior to it but is now “gathered up” in one notion. It is thus wrong, thoughtless rather, to take Hegel’s speculative interpretation of Christian faith as a kind of upstaging of it, as a reduction, as if indeed he were but a “modernist” in the sense in which this movement was once condemned by the religious or spiritual authority (c.1907). Where if not here is the promised spirit leading, without pause, “into all truth”? What Aristotle or Hegel leave unsaid those coming later, like Aquinas, in the case of Aristotle, and now our unworthy self and colleagues, whoever we are, have to draw out of them, but as what they themselves knew all along, as did the slave-boy in Meno, not differently but just so. The possession of reason, the being rational, is its own and entire exercise. This is “the true reason-world” of which Hegel spoke. * That Absolute Spirit has taken on the shape of self-consciousness inherently, and therefore also consciously to itself – this appears now as the belief of the world, the belief that spirit exists in fact as a definite self-consciousness, i.e. as an actual human being; that spirit is an object for immediate experience; that the believing mind sees, feels, and hears this divinity. Taken thus it is

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not imagination, not a fancy; it is actual in the believer. Consciousness in that case does not set out from its own inner life, does not start from thought, and in itself combine the thought of God with existence; rather it sets out from immediate present existence and recognizes God in it. (pp. 757-8)

This is true, not because Spirit finds “itself in some alien element, but as being there within itself” constitutively, i.e. so far as it is subject or self. This is the relation between knowledge and certainty Hegel discusses elsewhere in the book. It is also the reason why knowledge and belief are the true because spiritual or “notional” way of apprehending truth as finally spiritual. Thus is overcome the contradictoriness inherent in the finite notion of fact, which, seen now as if lying on the ground before us, now as a logically constructed proposition assented to by the mind, is a disproportionate attempt to “get at the notion”. Findlay’s comment shows failure to grasp this: It will be noted… that what Hegel thinks important is not the Incarnatio Filii Dei, but the belief in such an incarnation: if this incarnation is said to be actual and not imaginary, its actuality is one in the believer, rather than in the historical person of Jesus.

Hegel. Findlay concludes, is “the father of ‘modernism’”, as an “authentic expression of Christian belief”. There is, we can already see, some confusion here. For given that idealism has been adopted, then the historical person viewed in its light is not separable, unless negatively, as less real, from the idea, the conceiving, of this person as, moreover, one with the self, in self-consciousness. Similarly, the belief in the incarnation is the incarnation. In this case Hegel is discerning correctly, it seems to me, the saying, “This is the victory that overcomes the world, even your faith”. Except on an absolute idealist reading this is merely paradoxical. For only this measures up to the reality the “naïve” believer immediately tries to pin down by assertions of historical immediacy, not seeing that this itself is “a gallery of pictures”. Yet how, we might ask, is any picture then at all possible even qua picture? This was maybe Suzuki’s question as to why God made the world and the answer is that a picture is not possible. Pictures are part of a way of speaking, an immediate “way of life” (Wittgenstein). What is the basis for immediacy, against which only can any mediation be thought, absolutely speaking? If we can’t answer this then mediation is already a figure, though not surely for what is merely immediate over again. Hegel’s answer is that perception of itself “begins” in misperception (McTaggart’s term). Does God then misperceive? No, since he is knowledge itself, the method. It is the finite which reaches its

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term and end there as becoming what it always was, existing nowhere else. In this sense Hegel indeed begins with the nothing in order to show that it is nothing, that the pure nothing is not. Or it is the evil in the Idea itself and thus good too. In this sense theologians can speak of sin, say, as foreordained, the knowledge that only at first appears as evil, the serpent, as wisdom, but making the promise that God sees as in himself (“man has become like ourselves”) fulfilled. In this sense each person, beginning with Adam or the first or proto-man, is no better or worse than he or she should be. Neither ethical science nor human freedom are affected or harmed by this, which, as “factual”, determines the contrary to be the case. Equally, however, the whole notion determines each of its constituents. This relation, however, can only be sustained by elements we recognise as persons, as that individual particularity of which “universality is the principle”. In this sense God “is the absolute Person… a point which the philosophy of Spinoza never reached” (Enc. 151 add.). This, “the principle of individuality”, first appeared, “under a philosophical shape”, and that “in the Western world”, with Leibniz. We can recall Aristotle’s view that there is no providence for, because no science of, individuals. But here the individual, I, as person, is and am the universal. This, that “the principle of personality is the universal”, Hegel directly relates to a supposedly unique disappearance of slavery “in Christian Europe” (Enc. 163, add.). Thus “the moment of existence is present in the content of the notion” (Phenomenology of Mind, 758) and only there. As with all its moments the notion, the concept, makes it, Existence, to be what it is in its being at all, “in the first place” as we say, and as the concept in turn is their “ground”. The same is true, therefore, of the moment of the Thing, and thus God is “the absolute Thing” too (Enc. 151, add.). Yet here, in the notion, every place is thus first as is the last particularly. This is just the basis, if we consider, upon which Aquinas distinguished esse divinum from esse commune as heaven from earth, while not to do so, to identify God with the abstract esse commune, he called, uncharacteristically when discussing this opinion of an “objector” (one David of Dinant), very stupid, stultissime. This same distinction is precisely that whereby Hegel identifies the finite, abstractly taken or not as born up by and within thought, God or the Idea, with non-being, with evil or the false. It is just on this account (of Logic) that Absolute Spirit has, as such, “taken on the shape of self-consciousness inherently”, definitely, “as an actual human being”, the most actual of all in that case, to be seen, felt and heard or, finally, touched, within the community of cognising subjects as proto-principle of all community, even though such sensors ipso facto become and are those who have seen, have touched, in one manner or

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another, knowing this actuality, just because absolutely actual, no more “after the flesh” but by faith or, this is to say, within this very (absolute) knowledge, “above all names”. In this way spirit, as religious, becomes “simple positive self”. The “self of the existent spirit has in that way the form of complete immediacy.” It never goes outside of itself because its own principle, its inside, is thus what is, and thus is not, exterior to self. “All things are yours” (my stress), the Apostle declares, anticipating and yet enabling, historically, the Hegelian mode of philosophical vision as also, we may note, the Franciscan intuition, Deus meus et omnia.8 It is in this way that “consciousness sets out from immediate present existence, and recognizes God in it”, in hearing or reading a or “the” word, in the sublime effect of some music or poetry, in a trans-finite apprehension of nature, in love for the spirit and form of another. When Hegel says “Absolute Spirit has taken on the shape of self-consciousness inherently” he speaks speculatively, since to take on “inherently” is always to have had it. Spirit “exists in fact… as an actual human being”, In similar speculative vein he calls this “the belief of the world”, as faith must consider it to be, the Part which is the Whole, the one the many, this being the ultimate meaning of the (religious) representation of what is “chosen”. It is for philosophy later to internalise, as we say, this initial recognition consciousness finds in “setting out”, in an experience of spirit as Hegel explains the latter, the vita nuova of Dante, incarnated for ever in the “dead” child Beatrice. “It is expedient for you that I go away”. This, however, is true of all these beatific experiences as such, that they pass into the habit called faith as a form, the highest, of knowledge, “victory” overcoming the world in the eternal sophia evoking also philia. * This human being, and so every one qua human, qua spiritual that is to say, as we now see, is revealed as “the Subject itself”, transcending therefore not just predicates but predication itself, of good, righteous, holy etc. It is “revealed as self” and, as such, “as the proper certainty of that self”, reflected into itself as Hegel puts it. It is thus “that which reveals and is revealed”, since this being, we now see, is “the true shape of spirit”, 8

Literally this means “my God and all things”, an exclamation which a now traditional translation as “my God and my all” seems to limit to the confines of an individual, often called “personal”, subjectivity. Yet, on Hegelian principles it will be personal to each person, while the “all things” remains within the confines of an objectivist “realism” this very insight must supersede.

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which is what we are after here. This shape is “alone its very essence and its substance”, as the name of spirit was traditionally said to be gift, donum, as having, unlike the other two Trinitarian persons, no other or “proper” name.9 It is the subject as predicated, as “given”, Hegel concurs here (p.759, “for which it is given”). Spirit is known as the selfconsciousness to which it is directly revealed. “The divine nature is the same as the human”, Hegel adds again, purposely not distinguishing, not separating, Christ from “others”, as Aristotle had declined to distinguish, since he saw no distinction, mind from minds. Here, then, we find as a fact consciousness, or the general form in which Being is aware of Being – the shape which Being adopts – to be identical with its self-consciousness. This shape is itself a self-consciousness; it is thus at the same time an existent object; and this existence possesses equally directly the significance of pure thought, of Absolute Being. (760)

Here Hegel speaks plainly, uniting the absolute religion with philosophy and conversely too. The wisdom from above, from the highest principle, is wisdom indeed, as faith is knowledge. Pantheism is transcended in “pantheologism”, no longer a term of reproach analogous to “fideism”, but the absolutisation of philosophy itself as ultimate or freestanding knowledge. Thus in saying “the divine nature is the same as the human” Hegel excludes what is abstractly called “the body” from human actuality or, that is to say, from actuality. It is not a component of humanity with some other thing, still less a despised component as in certain misinterpretations of what gets to be called Platonism. “It is only, however, when the living being is dead, that these two sides of the idea are different ingredients” (Enc. 216). It is characteristic of finitude in this sphere that, by reason of the immediacy of the idea, body and soul are separable. This constitutes the mortality of the living being.

Here Hegel comes as close as anywhere to declaring his acceptance of immortality, not of “the soul”, but of man the subject. There is no further component with which we think. “It is a man who thinks”10 and a man, any one man, as subject, is “the universal of universals”, since being itself 9

This simple fact tends to support Hegel’s giving a certain primacy of abidingness to Spirit as expressing a true instinct for the traditional faith. God as revealed is donum. 10 Cf. Peter Geach, “What Do We Think With?” in God and the Soul.

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is subject and not substance, is self-consciousness or “absolute knowledge”. When we progress beyond the abstractly immediate idea, Life, it gives way to spirit. In itself it is being (of the subject) without limit. This is Hegel’s understanding of the figure of “resurrection”, which we misperceive, in our finitude, as death. Such finite thinking, indeed, is not of the essence of the subject, of what exists in and as absolute spirit, universal of universals and thus supremely particular, the divine that is the same as the human as showing, as “living (and dying) out” that the human is that which is divine and not an abstractly particular biological species. Biology is a finite science, set for simultaneous absorption and cancellation, viz. Aufhebung. As thus set it already is so, in Realised End. Thus it is that Aquinas remarks, commenting on Aristotle’s Metaphysics, that “body” is a term for logical, not metaphysical treatment. These considerations are relevant to the nuanced assessment of Hegel’s supposedly negative view on biological evolution. Is it explicable as part of his whole negation of the finite or did he simply, that is “absolutely”, deny any flow between species at the same time as he manifestly champions conceptual flow in general? The question, the alternative posed, applies equally to his integral view of nature and history, with which we have dealt above. * The Absolute Being existing as a concrete actual self-consciousness, seems to have descended from its eternal pure simplicity; but in fact it has, in so doing, attained for the first time its highest nature (760).

If we grant this we must apply it to each one of us. It is the negation of otherworldliness, a term always used by Hegel with contempt. Yet he adds that only thus is “the notion of Being… both the absolute abstraction… and immediacy or objective being”. “The lowest is thus at the same time the highest” and this is the dignity of sense-consciousness, of “the surface”, inclusive of the consciousness of time. Surface is depth as, we may recall, to forgive is divine. Absolute being and an existent self-consciousness, as “meanings”, Hegel goes on, “are inseparable”. That is, sense, sense-perception, is absolute, is spiritual, as Aquinas, building on Aristotle, had also affirmed. It is “the lowest which is thus at the same time the highest” and not abstract. The senses do not themselves understand what they present to the mind. More exactly, they are never just themselves or on their own, as is expressed in the very affirmation that sensus est quaedam cognitio. The sensation of the animals is not under discussion and this is in fact the

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significance of the introduction into later Aristotelian natural philosophy of a vis cogitativa transcending the animal vis estimativa, that form of apprehension already, as form, transcending the mechanical, whereby the sheep cognises the wolf as dangerous, the animal flees the fire rather than merely reacting mechanically or passively to the alien form of heat. Thinking, cogitatio, is this estimation become self-conscious. All the same, there is not anywhere, in man, in babies even, a sense-consciousness on its own, as a pure vis estimativa without trace of the cogitative as the (self-) conscious. Otherwise we would find it in plants, as some indeed would claim we do, just as it is conventionally asserted of animals.11 This is abstract, as indeed is Nature as a whole if materialiter spectata, abstracting from “the form” or from mind, spirit. In this sense God is said to be “pure form”, the Idea. Matter indeed is “featureless”, unless when viewed as “the totality of form” or formally, which is direct contradiction of it (Enc. 128, 129), of matter as such, that is. Is existence itself something material, not absolute? This is what Hegel denies here in treating of the incarnation. Consciousness, put after all now as essentially human, but not biological merely, or at all, is “the general form in which Being is aware of Being”. The shape which Being “adopts – to be identical with its self-consciousness… is itself a self-consciousness”. What is it that is said here? That this shape, because it is “a selfconsciousness”, one merely, is thus “an existent object”, though we know we are going to have done with this very category of Object, never mind Existence. Hegel is already situating “religion” within the hierarchy of Absolute Spirit, in the sense that the text, “He that has seen me has seen the Father”, has already, on his reading, thus sublated or cancelled seeing. Awareness of this was always part of “the true reason-world”, as was acknowledged in the ancient figure of God’s responding to Moses’ urgent desire to see him that he would (could?) only show him his “back parts”. Incarnation superannuates this inability by upstaging sense, immediacy, to the heart of the mediated, which, mediation, but also immediacy, is thereby done away with. We are left with pure presence, with “realised end”. This is the final truth, where absolute knowledge is itself the known and the true, where truth is being, last as first, the “first thing that falls into the mind” (Aquinas) which, by that very fact, however, first “falls into” itself, is self-conscious, just as, in fact, there is a mind, are minds, for it to fall into. The mind being would “fall into” is a mind, as man “self-falls” 11

It seems that among non-vertebrates only spiders (or other arachnids?) react to sight of themselves in a mirror, in concrete blurring of the abstraction we would make. The next step would be to look for some spider-like insect with this capacity.

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into being man, as consciousness’s fulfilled nature is self-consciousness, in and of or “according to the whole”, kat’holon, as Hegel categorises (we cannot say “delimits”) the religious or, a fortiori, philosophical “standpoint”, though in philosophy it is no longer seen as one standpoint among others. This in fact is the reason why Hegel, as some complain, treats Christianity in its ideal aspect while treating other religions phenomenally. He calls it absolute only as already become or becoming philosophy, its “picture-ideas” already partaking, like the immediacy of sense-experience, of that necessity. The “revealed which has come forth entirely to the surface” (as if from a “dark pit”, source of language as he says elsewhere) “is just therein the deepest reality” Phenomenology of Mind, p.760). That is to say, speaking generally, mind cannot be conceived of as a being prior to being, nothing (no being) can. So “this existence (sc. of the mediator) possesses equally directly the significance of pure thought, of Absolute Being”. In saying this Hegel might, so far, seem to be relying on the consensus gentium, an argument for “the existence of God” that he himself later judges relative and thus “certainly not sufficient” (Enc. 71, especially the footnote), but as part, this reliance, of the “poverty” of Enlightenment (72, 73). Yet, when discussing faith, we noted that the “very idea” of something believed is more concrete than any historical occurrence. Where the end is “realised” nothing can contingently “occur” since the perfection of act is pure or universal presence, of all in all and to all. There is no reduction from pure actuality to actuality in the believer, once given, as absolute idealism reasons, that they are the same. This can apply to God as it does not to an island (cited in Gaunilo’s self-styled fool’s reply to Anselm) but hardly, too, to a particular man as God incarnate just here. In a Fernandel film the claimant to deity, an escaped lunatic, is recognised by just one elderly woman. Yet if faith depended on the extent of this consent it would never have got off the ground. Rather, the world must be seen as overcome totally in each believer, as Christ himself first said, had to be seen as saying and as making it true (but how?): “I have overcome the world”. How does Hegel answer this, as he clearly believes he does? He does so in part when he says that a life that has not yet risked itself for the Idea has not yet come to its full being, come to birth, so to say. The narrowness of the way to life (“strait is the gate”) is that it admits just one at a time. But to get to the root of this we would have to study the pre-eminent role of Will (Enc.), the Good (WL), in knowledge itself as charted in the two logics. The desire to share belief is not the same as the desire to convert others to one’s opinion. It is an offer of “good news”. It is for the other, rather, to raise the question whether the news is truly good, a

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question that Hegel as philosopher and not as herald engages himself to answer. The Absolute Being only seems to have “descended from its eternal pure simplicity”, he says, incidentally subverting temporality. It attains “for the first time its highest nature”. This first time is not and cannot be “in” time, a consequence already subverting, again, sense on its own. To subvert is to sublate (aufheben). Pure Thought is reached as Being, Hegel seems to say, when I look at the horizon, or eat a piece of bread.12 In this sense anyone might be God incarnate, it could seem. This is indeed the practical outcome of Christian faith. But is the faith itself then to be abandoned, like finite reality after the mind’s leap to the infinite, such that people say: “We don’t need it any more”? If so, then it could never have brought this about, unless the false can bring about the true, which, however, according to Hegel’s dialectic, it can, it alone can. Still, the alter christus, countless numbers of them, is a basic notion, a datum, of orthodoxy, is as “Scriptural” as can be. This is “the finger of God” come among us, is the claim. The meaning of this, nonetheless, is: “The lowest is thus at the same time the highest”. What you do to the least of these you do to me. Hegel remains “scriptural”. The revealed at the surface is just therein, he says, the deepest. How can he say that? Consult his Logic. But this is still an idea. Being as such, the divine being, is Idea absolute, i.e. is the absolute qua or just as this idea. This is the truth that is constitutive of the system as a whole. There is no getting out of it. It is not the mind of God. It is mind as God or simply, mind supreme, not merely the highest but all height. God himself dies, in this sense, as becoming indeed “all in all” (St. Paul). Religion is consumed in the wisdom it adores and is nothing but the desire for this, in or as philosophical eros, the “true reason world” equally of those never set to be philosophers, a merely finite category of finite beings, after all. This, says Hegel, “is religious consciousness”, all the same, as we might add. The Absolute Being is “purely thought-constituted” and it is Christianity that has effected this fusion of thought and being that was 12

Aquinas had taught, from a different perspective, that specifically material or changing being (ens mobile) was “the proper object” of the human or created and, simply thus, finite mind. For Hegel it is rather that this is the immediate object – for mind anywhere? Thus God is only preserved from finite emergence from this scheme, which is contradictory, if he is, as much as he is anything (else), this scheme itself, the Method, as propounded at the end of both of Hegel’s Logics. Matter, as a metaphysical principle, is no mere divine or other invention but rather the beginning, but qua immediate being only (i.e. matter is nothing else), on Mind’s own ascending scale.

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ever awaiting its revelation. Revelation, that is, is effective, the Word of God a sword, rather like a magic word or spell, God’s spell. Abstract praxis too is here overturned, subverted. The meanings, of existence and thought-constitution, “are inseparable”. This is what Anselm saw, and now it is why God must “become” man and did so. Cur Deus homo? This was the name of Anselm’s other full-length treatise. Whatever we think of it, Hegel is following the same programme, of God and man in tandem. “What is God? What is man?” This is one question, inseparably. The empiricists thus far start at the wrong end. Yet he is still talking here of the existence, even at that time and place, of Christ. “This immediacy means not only an existent self-consciousness, but also the purely thoughtconstituted or Absolute Being; and these meanings are inseparable.” Even then, that is, what counted was how one thought of him more than how he was; or, rather, regarding how he was, this was itself a question of how he was to be, in a future determined by primordial essence. But the future, in Thomism as in Absolute idealism, is an ens rationis, no longer viewed however as a reduced ens but as what really counts, again, thus being “of reason”, just as being. And yet this being, of the future, attains its full reality here in the immediacy of sense, to be felt, seen and touched. We have here “the unity of being and essence”, from which Spirit, the Idea, proceeds, as the very paradigm and shape of logic as such, as it would have ultimately to be, if it is anything, this Trinitarian notion. Thought is immediately existence, in the transferred sense that we as living beings use this term, otherwise naming a limited category of the dialectic. Viventibus esse est vivere. “For the living to be is to be alive.” It is the unity of being and thought, which “actually exists” and is self-consciousness in an existence simply forgetting if it is alive or dead. For this unity is God, Hegel says (Ph.G. 761), revealed as he is, as this speculative knowledge, namely, as a real existence “as the negativity of itself”, at once an individual “this” and a universal self. In discovering this we discover ourselves, the world discovers itself, Hegel writes here, in joy. This, he goes on, “is still the immediate notion”. The immediacy is thought, or “pure mediation”. Spirit, as immediate, is this “individual selfconsciousness set up in contrast to the universal self-consciousness”. It appears as “an excluding unit”, a “sensuous other” to those for whom it exists. “The other does not yet know spirit to be its own”. “If I go not away the Spirit (parakletos) will not come unto you” is the text that springs to mind. Spirit has to “lose its form as an individual self”, come to exist “as all self”, as in a kind of possession, which is identification, by and as Spirit, if we avoid the Scriptural metaphor of “in”. Thus it, Spirit, ours or in itself indifferently, assumes “the form of the notion”, the

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universal self which is thought, “without losing its reality in this universality” but quite the contrary. Here we approach reconsideration of ecclesial theology under, or within, the banner of philosophy. “You being many are one body… are all members one of another”. We approach its particular concept in the universal concept, in absolute thought, in God, that is to say. The time will come “when those who worship God shall worship him in spirit and in truth” (John 4), words purposely put as spoken to an illiterate woman. As for citing ancient texts, Hegel was indeed shyer than myself to cite Scripture, as befitted his more defined circumstances, but not as regards ancient texts in general, as when he says that the older book by four centuries on the Soul, by Aristotle, is indeed the best book to read on that topic. * The preliminary and similarly immediate form of this universality is, however, not at once the form of thought itself, of the notion as notion; it is the universality of actual reality, it is the “allness”, the collective totality, of the selves, and is the elevation of existence into the sphere of figurative thought (Vorstellung).13

Hegel compares this, which is the Church, to the “thing” of perception, already transcending the “this” of sense, that yet is not the “universal” of understanding (Baillie has “not yet”, envisaging the temporal more than the logical progression it mirrors). Similarly the attempt to “read” some written marks is not yet, yet not, the understanding of them. Thus the theologians too can speak of Church as on earth or in heaven interchangeably. On earth it, the organised community, is pure sacrament or sign, since earth itself is none other. Just in this way does the Protestant ecclesiology rejoin the Catholic, in transcendence of Heilsrealismus. In heaven, in the soul, as idea and Absolute Idea, it, the community, Hebrew qahal or “God’s assembly”, church14 (and yet no longer church specifically), is the perfect unity of each in all and all in each. It is the love and blessedness of free Spirit enjoyed as it is in itself and yet also prefigured in thinking (Enc. 159), inasmuch as thinking too can be said to mediate thought or the Idea. Thus the community is called the “bride of 13

Hegel, Phenomenology of Mind (Baillie), p.762. “Church” reflects an ambiguity of thought reflecting what is in reality an identity. Thus, as Greek kyriakos it comes from kyrios, Lord, and oikia, house. The latter, however, is at once building and extended body, typically of a genetic or national unity, as in “house of Israel” or “house of David” or “Windsor”. 14

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Christ”, whether still “in church” or ascended to the flower-bedecked marital bed, enfolding in the Idea the whole multitude of children born or to come, yet from which none fall out, roll around as they may. We were all once babies, as we are all set to be “ancient of days”, equally phenomenally, however. “But our citizenship is in heaven”, its passport, cognition and its method, sewn on heart and mind. All these, however, are still representations, falling short of the thought that each is its other in all others as “one man in Jesus Christ”, as the overcoming of such representations is represented. Hegel next applies this threefold process to Christ himself as Absolute Being. Immediately he is “present God”. In mediation he is perceived, in consciousness, as “having been” and thus and therefore he becomes “spiritual consciousness”, “arisen” in other words as he “rose before consciousness as object existing in the first place”. The implication is that mind sees all in God, in the Idea, from the start, in “the true reasonworld”, which was the interpretation of Hegel by the nineteenth century mainly Catholic “ontologists”, suppressed or excluded from teaching by ecclesiastical authority in 1860. They looked back to “the noble Malebranche” (Hegel). Here Hegel clarifies that the consciousness seeing and hearing Christ, known to be Absolute Being, by sense “has not cancelled and transcended the disparateness of objectivity”, knows this individual but not itself as spirit. It is in this individual’s disappearance that Spirit, still immediate, “remains the immediate self of actual reality, but in the form of the universal self-consciousness of a religious communion”, discrete as to its body and hence finite, of which, maybe, “I through grace a member am” but, thus far, no more than a member. Implied, though, in positing this “self of reality” is that reality as such is personal, as in McTaggart’s vision of things. Only a person can be, as individual, “the complete whole of the individual spirit”, the walking church universal or ultimate “private Mass” that is in itself communal, community. This is why, ultimately, Aquinas can say that the “society of friends” is not essential to final happiness (or “realised end”). One is and has to be his or her “friends” as one is oneself. The friends, therefore, in themselves abstractly, do not exist. This position was represented as “I in them and they in me”. One goes through life not “realising” this, which philosophy teaches. We can’t realise it, condemned rather to “one thing at a time”. Thus “this whole is not so constituted that it can be surveyed in one single glance”.15 15

Erwin Schrödinger, 1964, cited in Daniel Kolac’s I am You, “Preliminary Acknowledgements”, as brought to my attention by the Hegelian scholar, Dr. Robert M. Wallace.

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Yet these conditions of “past” and “distance” are “merely the imperfect form in which the immediateness gets mediated or made universal”. It is a superficial dip, Hegel says (763), into the element of thought, still “kept there as a sensuous mode of immediacy”. Here he appears to be characterising time itself. This is the finitude of theology abstractly considered. The actual if phenomenal community is characterised by pictorial or sacramental presentation and representation. Self-consciousness, outwardly at least, is not yet reached or, we can say, represented. Philosophy is never outwardly represented, however. Spiritual life is “cumbered” by the dichotomy of “here” and “beyond”. Yet the treasure is in fact “in one’s own back-garden” (Chesterton, as from a tale in Arabian Nights) or, closer still, closer to than self, Augustine’s intimior me mihi. It is a becoming of the path. The “content is the true content” in all its moments. “This also is thou”, to which, though, we must add: “neither is this thou”, otherwise there would be no sense in saying “this is thou”. Even the Son, therefore, as the Absolute Being, yet distinguishes himself from the Father, who yet, Hegel says, is first fulfilled and “made concrete” in him. But in this otherness it has, likewise, ipso facto, returned into itself again; for the distinction is distinction in itself, i.e. the distinction is directly distinguished merely from itself, and is thus the unity returned into itself (Ibid. p.767).

What is it, then, to “believe in God”, in abstraction from believing in or loving those we see. Nothing, declare the Johannine texts in effect. Yet this works both ways, as demonstrating that self-consciousness too is ultimately not of the seen phenomenal self that is born and dies, the self that is to be denied. “No man has seen God at any time”. The Son, the mediator, “has declared him”. Hegel’s exposition follows these texts, if we know them, astonishingly closely, but as if impelled by thought itself and not by external design. Consciousness therefore “must pass to a higher plane of mental development”, necessarily, says Hegel, to self-consciousness, to that of the Spirit leading “into all truth”, all truth, namely. Nothing less can suffice for mind, our laziness notwithstanding. “I bring not peace”. This “has already taken place objectively or for us” here analysing the process of experience. It is nothing “mystical” or far away. It is what, I venture to suggest, is represented by “the infallibility of the Pope” and has to be the true meaning of that doctrine, only firstly or superficially, though not literally falsely, grasped in adhering to the words expressing or locating such an earthly primacy to this “gemeinten individual figure” (Hegel,

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Baillie p.765)16, in a kind of transferred and phenomenal Sittlichkeit. This is entailed by the idealist superseding of Heilsrealismus. The falsehood, that is, is general, as “there is none good but God”. “All things are yours”. This saying is not well referred merely to some chocolate in a shop window, to “things” abstracted at their own “proper” level, as is not the case with the Franciscan “My God and all things”. In either case, anyhow, the barbarism “things” does not appear in the classical language. Selfconsciousness is indefectible, unlike a phenomenal papal consciousness, or temporal government, at this or that time. It is more like Newman’s “aboriginal vicar of Christ”, though Newman refers this rather to conscience, which as “private” Hegel finds “wicked” in tendency at least, than to consciousness, The Pope, however (“vicar” indeed as to his office), represents communion in himself, that communion which is Christ, as does any priest and downward to any consciousness or even this leaf on this tree, this piece of bread given to me. To this Hegel’s texts conclude, as it is the ultimate dream and desire, the private Mass, of thought, of protest, of consciousness, of poetry, seeing “the world in a grain of sand” or in an old shoe or chair. It is musical form, the whole in the moment, time’s selfannihilation. These “things”, therefore, the no-things we here consider, in passing, only realise themselves as persons, as universally conscious individuals, as in a tale of Andersen’s (where the pot calls the kettle black), as children indeed are less shy to acknowledge, while God, says Hegel again, “is the Absolute Person”, not limited by any “thing” at all.. But “it is useless to count”. The thing is ego… is transcended in this infinite judgment…. The trained and cultivated self-consciousness has, by giving up itself, produced the thing as itself. (Ibid. 791-792)

Thus the thing “has essentially and solely a relative existence”, though it “stands for something that is self-existent”, as, however, “a moment which merely disappears”. Hegel here as it were captures, explicitly, the case of the Kantian “Moral Self-consciousness” but in order to resolve the paradox of “the Beautiful Soul”, earlier dismissed by him as itself a moment. Thus action too is now made to “return out of this division” which had led such a soul to renounce it. It is indeed annihilated under the Kantian concept of Duty, and this is the element of metaphysical truth in 16

By “the Pope” however must be meant the “Petrine” office, not the individual officiating or on occasion identified with it. By Hegelian logic, however, all such representations are, after all, false. They depart from the self-consciousness which is faith, as speech is fulfilled in its being transcended.

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this, in the field of pure ethics, one-sided Kantian notion, as, in religious obedience generally, the “the ego is the thing”, is any and every thing genuinely appearing but thus, by the speculative judgment, swallowed up in the ego. In this sense, “whether we live or die we are the Lord’s”, whether active or inactive, in unbroken contemplation, in “absolute knowledge”. We are not ourselves, just because “the ego is the thing”. Self-consciousness is no longer consciousness, as being rather “certainty of itself” (Hegel, ibid. pp. 791-794). Absolute Spirit finally, the upshot is, is not merely “the reality of the religious communion”, but Subject. This it realises itself in its communion, of two or three or a billion or as finally “countless”. Thus every self generates its other, exponentially. There are never enough, subject’s truth is object, self is other as its own, in mind’s essence and notion, which is thus not “got at” by “reversion to the primitive”. Every last thought of ours is “the primitive” still. This is the meaning, again, of “looking for” the Second Coming, as of a new “age” or saeculum, which is now as eternal, however, and no mere aevum as one in a series. The primitive expression of this thus transcended or cancelled the primitive. The notion is reached, Hegel implies, through the life and “idea of the communion”, even amid all and any of its divisions. I, the I, as universal, might as well have been, i.e. might be, a palaeolithic caveman as a twenty-first century male or female European, say, or as Hegel, in final speculation, is not Hegel but being, which is itself its other, is (in contradiction of “this soulless copula”) spirit. A fortiori it is forbidden, ultimately, to exclude, to draw boundaries. What goes out from us cannot have been, as would follow, “of us”, but this, such going out, is impossible for the infinite, where “outside is inside”. “Them also I must bring”, as we do here. Anything less is “merely the historical manner” or appearance. “Have we known Christ after the flesh we know him so no more” (my stress). “After the flesh” here means a knowing in this fleeting and “naughty” world, which is indeed “naught”.

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Even the pastness of sensuous presence (of the mediator or anything else) is an imperfect representation, of time, as added element, as equally, together with all pictorial consciousness, of space. The past is what we picture as if present to sense. Implied is that a true or spiritual understanding of what is viewed as a past would be of an eternal presence. Why then are some things but not all discriminated as past? The answer is that this question is itself a false representation conditioned by our picture of pastness. Things are past, become past, in and as they happen. Hence even what has “just” happened becomes, in that reflection, not (and not merely “no longer”) what has just happened or what has happened at all. This means, however, that it happens, as we might say, absolutely. Thus we are looking forward to the Heideggerian conception of happening, event, mediated by the Nietzschean “eternal return”, of what never goes away, namely. For what we call a life cannot thus return eternally, or never go away, without this being true of each and every moment of it, of that consciousness, as just one moment as such lacking all discreteness whatever. This is precisely the representation of divine or absolute knowledge familiar to metaphysics, inasmuch as to be such it must also be omniscience and absolute freedom, open to no determination (negative omnipotence), which would necessarily be by way of a change, from without. Nor is this destructive of any and every narrative from, as this comes merely to represent the logical order itself, of which time is nothing other than a figure, i.e. it is not. This means, for example, that what is “really” put in the past, or in narration, is not the real Christ but his “figure” (Gestalt1) or imperfect form. What Hegel does here, therefore, is often misread as a reduction of orthodoxy, as being a misleading use of its own terms, to a finite or “secular” philosophy. He rather utters the same appeal as St. Paul to his converts to “understand spiritual things spiritually”. Nor is a “gnosis” in the, for the orthodox, pejorative sense implied. One recognises rather that 1

PS, Baillie, p. 765. The German text has “gemeinten Gestalt”.

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“this is eternal life, to know God and Jesus Christ whom he has sent”. Hegel is not shy or “embarrassed” to take his stand on that name, as some (Findlay) would maintain. Rather, he recognises that this is the one, the mediator, who, it was said, has been given “the name which is above all names” and not just above any other name. It is above itself in the first instance. Regarding this posited “unsurpassability of the unique individual, Christ,” and “the when of his appearance”, of this gemeinten Gestalt, one can ask if these are realised through a historico-phenomenological examination or through “deduction”? Does Hegel merely oscillate in ambiguity here or is his position “quite complex”? Is the Christ-event irreducibly historical, in a way that Spinoza would not have allowed for “religious truth”? It might be hazarded that really Hegel does not see an either/or here and that he wishes to maintain both options in tension with each other as aspects of a more complex, differentiated position.

This position, O’Regan seems to indicate, and one may recollect other texts here, is one “whose rightness can be only retrospectively understood and validated”, along with what he lists as “refractory features” such as “Jewishness and unletteredness”, using the in fact Scriptural notion of the fullness or ripeness of the time. How far Christ was unlettered or identifiable with Jewishness in its finite aspects, so to say, is anyhow questionable, more so however than O’Regan’s main point here as to retrospection, in my view.2 * So, “have we known Christ after the flesh then we know him so no more” (St. Paul). It is not accidental that this apostle, routinely called the apostle, is just the one, of the “apostolic college”, who never knew Christ after the flesh and who here summons his brothers to a higher vision or grasp of what they proclaim. This religion of itself transits into philosophy and utters the call to this transition, in contemplation, from within itself. What Hegel does, accordingly, is of a piece with what those often called mystics, as he himself notes (Enc. 82 add.), within or without orthodoxy, St. Paul being the first, have routinely done and do. It is not a reduction but its opposite, an annihilative transformation of “the flesh” in union with spirit and spirituality, arguably the very form of the perfecting of the Idea 2

Cf. Cyril O’Regan: The Heterodox Hegel. Pp.203-204.

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in death and “resurrection” into spirit. Nor is the element of systematisation unique to Hegel, though he can be claimed to have perfected it, to have presented the true “ascetic theology”, which ultimately therefore is entirely an ascesis of mind, of spirit, what we call philosophy in fact. Thus it is not necessary to deny in advance a possible coincidence with the later secular outlook. This may or may not be the case. On Hegel’s own view it would be a matter of “finding God in it”: the believing consciousness “sets out from immediate present existence and recognises God in it” (Phenomenology of Mind, p.758) rather than starting from thought, proofs of God and so on. Thus there is really no finitely “sacred science”, such as theology has often been represented to the Christian community as being, in the sense of defining itself against the pagan “wisdom of this world”3, in a fundamental dualism of two beings rather than the monism of Being and Nothing (the nothing of finite wisdom or finitude in general being absorbed, of logical necessity, into the infinite: i.e. that is what makes it, on its own, nothing). Thus, to avoid being guilty of an unworthy slur against what is noble in the extreme, they resorted to hypotheses of a special revelation made to the Greeks, or of a specifically Jewish, and therefore “from above”, influence upon such as Plato and Aristotle, in what remained after all a finite apprehension of the infinite, of the divine nous. The ripping of the Temple veil instanced in Matthew’s Gospel, however, signifies not merely the birth of a new age but the end, the transcendence, of ages as such. The reason and only possible reason for an age to be thus superseded, in view of eternal truth, is not that it has “had its day” merely (though this is what is immediately represented in what is itself a representation) but that it, along with time itself, is a “sham-being” altogether. Hegel says this of evil, but he says it

3

Cf. Georges van Riet, “The Problem of God in Hegel” (Parts II-III), Philosophy Today, summer 1967, pp. 75-106, esp. pp. 76-78: “we think that there are two systems in Saint Thomas… faith and reason… The notion of supernature is tranced on to that of nature… Hegel rejects all dualism. For him there is only one order, that of reason… Hegel is not a theologian, for he does not give preference to any religion at the outset. In his eyes none has the prerogative of proceeding from a special revelation of God; each, in its place and order, translates the discovery that humanity makes, or which God makes in man, of what God is and what man is… a logical progression… 1. religions of nature… 2. religions of spiritual individuality… 3. absolute, manifest religion.” The question thus arises whether ”absolute”, in the final phrase and phase, does not contradict or clash with “religion”. Is Christianity truly just a religion or does Hegel mean it is the transcendence and absorption of religion, hence “religion itself” (Henri de Lubac’s thesis, in The Drama of Atheistic Humanism)?

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of all things finite as such. In this sense evil has its place in the good, is “in God”, as Hegel somewhat apologetically insists. So, says Hegel, consistently with the above, “this” individual human being, the Christ, follows this logic of sense-existence. As “the immediately present God” he, “in consequence”, “passes over into His having been”. It is because consciousness “only has seen and heard Him, that it first becomes spiritual consciousness” (762). In other words, writes Hegel here, “He has now arisen in Spirit”, This “now”, however is so unrestrictedly determinative, not, that is, just one passing moment of continued sense-perception, that the first or immediate appearance loses all contrastive status. It is in his community now, that Spirit, “above all names”, in its personal character can alone be known. Now this nameless name of Spirit is “gift”, donum, according to Aquinas, thus pointing to the source of all theologies of “grace”, a term which in fact must give way, be reformulated, in the self-deconstruction of this very notion since, for example, existence cannot be given, by grace or curse, to what does not have it or is nothing, while if it does have it, as idea, then, conversely, nothing further is needed. “In God we live and move and have our being”. Hence these words that I write, all words, are evanescent, written on sand as abstracted from the Idea. This is the self-consciousness of which Hegel speaks. It is the special fruit and wisdom of precisely orthodoxy, which, Newman declared, again, “stands or falls with the mystical interpretation of Scripture”, which is otherwise, Scripture too, “written on sand”4, as was the injunction to stone straying women. It would be odd, however, if the only revolution to be recognised were a past revolution, that of the first “Christian” moment, given that this was and continues to become a call to continual renewal, to ever new wine in an unbroken series of broken bottles. We have, namely, to overcome “the disparateness of objectivity”, where truth or the Christ is seen outside of oneself. Thus we have to “withdraw… into pure thought”, since we have to know ourselves equally, or primarily, “as spirit”, subjectivity. Spirit is “the immediate self of actual reality”. This is intrinsic to its meaning. Hence it is highly and positively significant, first of all, that Hegel says it is this “in the form of the universal self-consciousness of a religious communion”, as any nineteenth century ultramontane might have said. Yet for both these and Hegel it must ultimately refer to that invisible membership, invisible precisely because transcending mere membership towards identity, a process in which mystics and Hegelians make common cause. Some speak of 4

Cf. John 8, 6. No one need “erase” what is anyhow “written on sand”.

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members of an invisible church, others of invisible members of the church. Either way the visible church undeniably gets a bit sidelined; it even shows some interest in sidelining or transcending itself. This “form”, however, of the religious communion, is itself imperfect as looking to a “past” foundation in the first place. Such tradition cannot escape being the Traditionalism that this community itself, in the person of its leading representatives, once condemned. True tradition is not “damned custom” but continual adaptive life. This development, as continuous, is, as Newman, the “new man” for that immediately post-Hegelian season, again pointed out, “the only evidence of life”. In its continuousness development must itself develop, in its concept, since nothing is discretely fixed, so as to overthrow and cast away its very “historical” foundation, since in the sweep of its thought it absorbs and cancels history itself, as first and last in one. “You have heard… but I say unto you”. No apology is needed. Hence Hegel places will or Volition as succeeding upon Cognition Proper (in Wallace’s translation at Enc. 226-233), yet as itself still a form of Cognition (223), in the dialectical run-up to the Absolute Idea (236) or to absolute knowledge such as God must be said to have and yet not be limited by. Pictorial presentation constitutes the characteristic form in which spirit is conscious of itself in this its religious communion. This form is not yet the self-consciousness of spirit which has reached its notion as notion; the mediating process is still incomplete… In order that the true content may also obtain its true form for consciousness, the latter must necessarily pass to a higher plane of mental development… where consciousness is for itself brought to the level of its self-consciousness… (Ph.Sp.763-4)

We shall see why. Theology has ever been in transition to this and Hegel, in his conception of the true reason-world especially, looks (if he does not “appeal”) equally to the sensus fidelium as final touchstone, inclusive as this is of aphorisms of unlearned doctors (of the Church) such as “I am he who is, you are she who is not” or, more close to the dialectic, “Every soul gets what it expects” or “All shall be well and all manner of thing”. I purposely cite three women, in no case learned, in two of the three illiterate or nearly We must distinguish this supervening of perfect form from any tendency to “reversion to the primitive”, confusing the supposed origin of the notion with its simplicity, which emerges rather at the end of the day. We must not “clear away the idea of the communion”. This is Hegel’s sense of church, which nonetheless he will purify and spiritualise. Thought of itself descends into existence “or individuality”. This, we saw, is his

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understanding of (the) incarnation. But thought must return, essentially, from the otherness into which it essentially passes, object becoming, as having been found to be, subject. This is “the element of selfconsciousness itself”. It is therefore willed. This is “the life of spirit”, its spontaneity. Here Hegel refers back to “the unhappy consciousness”, equating it for once with the “believing” consciousness (Ibid. 765). For the latter “the content of its consciousness” is that Spirit is (“Spirit is content of its consciousness”), simply, or is its “pure consciousness” of “passing into otherness” of Spirit (as its object). This is produced from consciousness. As such it is “a content wherein the spirit can never be satiated nor find rest because the content is not yet its own content inherently and essentially, or in the sense of being its substance”. Yet Hegel here distinguishes this “believing” consciousness, of the individual, from “the consciousness of the religious communion”, which indeed, “on the other hand, possesses the content as its substance”, as the certainty it has “of its own spirit”. This is contrasted with “the first, imperfect religious communion”, which, however, it too, as consciousness, had to “come to know the object as itself” (my stress). The self, that is, must become the communion, precisely as incarnate Absolute Being has now “arisen in Spirit”, “the immediate self of actual reality… in the form of the universal self-consciousness of a religious communion… the complete whole of the individual spirit”, Christ or ours, “in him” as he is “in us”, in the Scriptural presentation, “in” being a spatial metaphor for logical identity. Christ’s ascending and Spirit descending are one and the same act, the sense of “If I go not away the spirit will not come to you” put as spoken by “incarnate Absolute Being” (758-9). The communion is constituted as depending upon “imaginative presentation” as such, from which all members, however, are summoned, by dint of spiritual “gifts” (seven traditionally), or are called to exit, an exit put by Hegel in particular as a “return from this presentation and from that otherness” on the part of self-consciousness itself. To clarify, there are “three moments” constituting the life of Spirit. It passes from pure thought to self-consciousness via the mediation of imaginative presentation or of religion proper, so to say. This, then, is “only one” of Spirit’s three moments. To live in the Spirit is more comprehensive than being religious. Otherwise whatever was rational, a regime for example, would have to be sacral, as occurred in medieval times or under the kings of Israel, anointed always by prophets. It is not a matter of getting reductively secularised but of widening the existing horizon, so there is no need to murder the kings, a speculative and practical error and crime in one, like all wrongdoing,

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however. The imaginative presentation has a proper and constitutive unity of its own, as does a picture or symphony but such as is not, for example, possessed by “wild” nature, Hegel claims. So the same content is at one moment, so to say, unhappy, at another, logically succeeding moment, happy (echoing the bona consequentia, that which truly follows, of medieval logic: happiness as realised telos and conclusion: we draw what is “to be concluded” precisely as standing ready). That is the moment when all content has become its own “inherently”, where there is no “dark outside power”, no object as “other” or alien. It is a kind of passage from belief to knowledge, only partially recognised, one might wish to say, in the system of Aquinas, under the heading of revealed truths knowable in principle by reason. Hegel reasons that there can be nothing reason cannot of itself know. Belief holds to a picture, external to the immediate world as its represented content, “the essentially objective content of imaginative thought”. Imaginative thought here can stand for theology, where, for example, one speaks without demur of the Son or the Word. For even words are phenomenal and fleeting. Since this pictorial thinking “seeks to escape the actual world altogether”, like the flight into art, it “has not the certainty of self-consciousness”, since self is in the world and vice versa. It is rather “conceit of knowledge” or “pure insight” (into something else, namely). In this sense, we recall, contemplative souls “are meant to cease all thinking”. They are even advised, by the masters of the via negativa, not to think about the humanity of Christ as mediator. This, Hegel too shows, is the very outcome of thought itself, whereby one sees that “all judgments are false”. It is maybe not fanciful to see this point as reached by a contemplative soul, not destined for the study of written philosophy, as corresponding to a final understanding of philosophical system, with which it might all the same be eventually identical, unless we are to identify such a system with a finite collection of words in a given language, an illusion made nearer to hand by the invention of writing, certainly. Hegel contrasts with such belief, again, “the consciousness of the religious communion” viewed as one, possessing “the content in its substance, just as the content is the certainty the communion has of its own spirit”. What then is this “substance” as falling short of the final Absolute Knowledge? Spirit, represented at first as substance in the element of pure thought, is, thus, primarily the eternal essential Being, simple, self-identical, which does not, however, have the abstract meaning of essential Being, but the meaning of Absolute Spirit.

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This is ultimately “the negativity as found in Being per se”, resistant to thought, which yet elicits existence, Hegel has said. Just so is Being “absolute distinction from itself, is pure process of becoming its other” (my stress) in and as self-generation, causa sui. In this way abstraction moves on from itself, when absolute, when it is “the inherently negative”. That is, it is that. Negativity “inheres” in it, as malum est semper in subjecto, evil is always in a subject. So, Being, “simple, essential”, is subject and Subjectivity, “universal of universals” and, hence, utmost particular, recalling to some, perhaps, the “class of all classes”. Just as negativity “it is for itself, it is the self, the notion”. Hegel could hardly be clearer or more explicit. So it too, this subjectivity, is objective. What is pictured and apprehended as an event is here “expressed as the necessity of the notion”, of the eternal Being begetting, so to say, for itself an other. Thus it returns to itself again, in what is distinction in itself and from itself and only thus “the unity returned into itself” (767), returned however so as to exit, to descend again, though without parting from itself, and this again so as to return so as to descend again, as Spirit indeed, the Trinitarian act, to speak with Hegel himself. In my going out is my coming in, first and last. The same, ancient idea is contained in that of the subject’s becoming the path he treads. * So we have the three moments, distinguishing themselves: “Essential Being; explicit Self-existence, which is the express otherness of essential Being, and for which that Being is object; and Self-existence or Selfknowledge in that other” (767). “The whole Trinity therefore lives enshrined in the Cartesian Cogito”, as we might comment with Findlay (Hegel: a Re-examination, p.140): Hegel uncompromisingly holds that it is only in speculative knowledge that God can be truly reached: he holds indeed that God’s being consists solely in speculative knowledge. The content of this knowledge is, however, held to be one with that of Revealed Religion. Philosophy is therefore alike the saviour and the salvation of men, though this need not be in every way patent to those whom it saves. (Ibid. p.139)

It may not even have been immediately patent to the mind of the “mediator”, Jesus Christ. Thus Maritain, in On the Grace and Humanity of

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Jesus5 (his last book), relegates it to “the heaven of his soul”, to selfconsciousness as transcending consciousness (and therefore “happy”), as we might say. Hegel, however, we need to remember, uncompromisingly holds that the idea of incarnation in itself includes the historical as idea, includes a sensible world and identity with a particular consciousness “in” and of that world. That’s why he speaks of any historical figure, including our selves or himself, as gemeinte. This is an abstract level from which we have not merely to rise in any finite sense, but of which resurrection, though figuratively, expresses the final and eternal truth for Absolute Mind. It is a level which genuine self-consciousness is never at. The world of sense is not where we are at and yet it is from there that our eternal selfconsciousness has to result. This is why it is no reduction, as Findlay seems to wish to imply, if we say, somewhat inexactly: “what Hegel thinks important is not the Incarnatio Filii Dei but the belief in such an incarnation”. For this is to condemn any Christian believer, as intended in contrast to Hegel, to a dogmatic commitment to a naïve philosophical realism he cannot justify, since it is false and anyhow impeaches the divine infinity. What Hegel thinks important is incarnation as an idea in Absolute Mind as we have explained it, where, in Hegel’s words, the “moment of immediate existence is present in the content of the notion”. This thought itself, in fact, is the immediate content of the so-called “ontological argument” for God’s necessary existence, for a necessary self-consciousness in absolute subjectivity as the final truth. Hegel thus offers a gnoseological critique of Gnosticism, that “fantastic extravagance of mind”, surpassing even that of Irenaeus from the second century after Christ. The absolute or self-saving knowledge stands, as absolute, on its own. We, ego, as universal of universals, become or participate in that knowledge as what we are essentially, as God, the infinite, is, has to be, his knowing and self-knowing, in benign regress. It is not therefore itself essentially an achievement of some more clever people, such as the Gnostics. In this sense philosophy saves, “though this need not be patent” to the saved. This is exactly how Hegel presents and characterises “the true reason-world” as inborn (innate) in all the born (nati), universal because there is no one who is not born. That is why we cannot truly ask: why was just I born, since I, the subject, have always been, am eternal and have to be, as self-consciousness. But I am only all this through identity with the whole, in a unity transcending community. “And this we call God” might as well be said of it as of the 5

Jacques Maritain, On the Grace and Humanity of Jesus (Herder and Herder, 1967, tr. Joseph W. Evans), Burns & Oates Ltd., London 1969.

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various conclusions reached in the Five Ways of Aquinas, since it might be said of any final, as transcending any finite, conclusion. As regards its content, the true reason world, so far from being the exclusive property of philosophy, is the right of every human being, on whatever grade of culture or mental growth he may stand; which would justify man’s ancient title of rational being… Thus the reason-world may be equally styled mystical, - not however because thought cannot both reach and comprehend it, but merely because it lies beyond the compass of understanding. (Enc. 82, add.)

The insight, as regards Trinity, is, Findlay suggests, direct recall of Augustine on Hegel’s part. Assent, qualified or not, has, after all, to have something to assent to. This is the rationale of tradition as necessary. On the hypothesis of an “eternal return” of time itself, as made explicit by Nietzsche, there can no historical first man to whom to return, but then there can really, i.e. philosophically, be no “first Christian” either, as Nietzsche characterised Saint Paul, or a temporally first anything, since time itself returns or becomes second in being first. Here is where we should situate Hegel’s at first fantastic-sounding dismissal of evolution of species from earlier and extinguished forms. They belong with phenomena, not with philosophy. The past, that is, is not ultimately distinguishable from the grammatical past tense (of verbs), able to be called, by extension (with the casus, “cases” or fallings from their represented, nominative being of nouns), “oblique”, as of what falls into obliquity or is forgotten. Really one cannot re-member the phenomenal. It is not true or straight insight but “a semipictorial form of universality”. In talk of anything as past, we may say: “though the content of what is referred has become universal – what is past is always a such rather than a this – it is still pictured as if present to sense” (Findlay, 139). In fact, talk of what is past is straight selfcontradiction, the past naming what is not. Grammar is a phenomenon, pure and simple, and if it is essence (Wittgenstein’s suggestion) then recall that essence too is but a dialectical moment on the path to the Concept, to negativity. In this way specifically Religious Consciousness “never wholly rises above the externality of imaginative presentation”, as witness canonised talk of “the Son” (of God). So the religious communion refers its origin, which it supposes it must have, back to “the soulless recollection of a presumably (gemeinten) individual historical figure and its past” (Baillie, p. 765). So Findlay reports it, yet Hegel does not say that the “religious communion” essentially thus “untwines” and “reduces” its own life’s

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content “to its original and primitive strands” but rather (764) that it must guard against this tendency, which is a very Catholic and orthodox view. An indication that Findlay is forcing the text here to where it does not want to go is the way he exploits the translator’s apparent hesitation, shown by Baillie’s giving us in parenthesis the original German term, in order to alter, in his own translation6 of die geistlose Erinnerung einer einzelten gemeynten Gestalt und ihrer Vergangenheit7, Baillie’s careful words, viz. “the soulless recollection of a presumably (gemeinten) individual historical figure and its past”, to “an ideally constructed individual figure and its existence in the past”. In terms of Hegel’s philosophy his rephrasing may be unexceptionable, the adding of “existence in” even, possibly, an improvement.. Hegel, however, either does not seem to give us his whole philosophy at this point or, in addition to gemeinten, some phrase corresponding to “ideally constructed” was not required. By that philosophy, namely, the whole of history as such is “ideally constructed” or is, rather, ideal simply, as is emphasised by Hegel’s general discussion of “pastness” here, while the point, therefore, is made against “reversion to the primitive” generally. By “ideal” here is meant precisely the opposite procedure, for philosophy, to that followed in a (phenomenal) trial or investigation within (phenomenal) positive criminal law or investigation in the finite sciences generally. So there is no particular reduction of Christ intended as against a background of “real” history. Everything there, rather, is gemeint. Findlay, however, wishes for or at any rate gives this impression of a particular reduction, concluding to theism as “an imaginative distortion of finite truth”, making outside what is inside. On the contrary, though, such theism is rather a moment and belongs to Hegel’s true reason-world just referred to, whatever the grade of culture, wherein the inside is in fact the outside and contrariwise, this being the essence or, rather, the notion, of self. Yet we do not have to “respect” such a moment in the patronising manner suggested by Peter Winch’s “On Understanding a Primitive Society”8 since the moments of themselves yield, one after the other, to the Notion, to the Absolute Idea. We can teach expansion of the relevant concept from within, as expressed in the concept of “fulfilment of the Scriptures”, to give an appropriate example, where we discuss “theism”. Religion, like theology, is in itself a 6

See Findlay, op. cit. p. 139, together with p.5, “translated afresh”. Although this is Findlay’s practice throughout, at the same time as he gives the Baillie reference, my point can still stand on its own grounds. 7 Hegel, Phenomenologie des Geistes, in Hauptwerke in sechs Bänden 2, Felix Meiner Verlag, Hamburg, p. 409. 8 In P. Winch, Ethics and Action, London 1972.

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yielding approach to “final truth” and not its “distortion”. As well say John the Baptist distorted Christ. “He must increase, I must decrease”. So Findlay rightly says that the shift of the Incarnation into the past “does not veil vision, but rather adds to its acuteness”. In this sense we have the words “Greater things than I have done shall you do” or “the Spirit will lead you into all truth”. Hence the Christian shows a tenderness towards even the sacrifices of the Old Law, or the to notion of the Temple, in reading the Psalms of David, say, or in exegesis, denying, by the principled “mystical” interpretation, “not one jot or one tittle”, a tenderness such as was not always shown towards Christianity by typical protagonists of the Enlightenment, against whom Hegel makes the stand, as I interpret, that any revolution is validated uniquely by its showing a yet deeper grasp, in spirit, of the whole of the one existing tradition9, as also Maritain, a co-author of the UN Charter of Human rights, interprets the development10. So much for the ideological insistence that Hegel’s account of God is not his main theme but mere padding or worse. “Skip a line” when God is mentioned, advises one Marxist “expounder” of Hegel in his Internet “course”. It thus appears that the dispute between theist and atheist Hegelians, always sharpened by the latter particularly, resembles nothing so much as the proverbial Scholastic dispute (disputation) as to how many angels can dance on the tip of a pin. History, rather, with its “figures” as gemeinte, must be taken up into a present “pantheon” of mind, which is large enough to include, in the Idea, even historical existence and, indeed, must include it. The point, once explicated, becomes, as is usual with philosophy, obvious, otherwise the point, or all truth, would remain forever unseen and unknown, though this, if it were true, could not even then be stated, and is therefore impossibly anything but false. In this sense we have always known what history is (as the slave-boy in Meno knew the theorem and as we therefore, know he knew it, this being “the true reason-world”) and known, therefore, that we must transcend this, a transcendence represented in religion as resurrection and ascension to glory, these term themselves being representative of the happiness of self-consciousness, which is one and absolute, which is knowing, as Hegel expounds it. “Only the Father knows the Son and only the Son the Father”, is the word of theology as coded for believers. Philosophy, however, must transcend all codes, even the one code it stoops to use, remaining a necessarily finite and particular 9

This, I affirm, is the same point as is so carefully made in C.S. Lewis’s three lectures, The Abolition of Man, given at Durham University, Riddell Memorial Lectures, 1943 (London, Geoffrey Bles, later Fontana Paperback). 10 J. Maritain, Christianity and Democracy, Geoffrey Bles, London, 1944.

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language, namely, despite all Carnap’s efforts, since themselves linguistic products, in his Meaning and Necessity, for example. This is precisely Hegel’s view, his Johannine interpretation, of Incarnation, his attempt to say what it is, namely, (the) Word. In celebrating this, therefore, we celebrate ourselves, the being “born again”, however, giving the meaning of rather than cancelling our first or “actual” birth.11 * “This movement” in three moments “within itself expresses the absolute Being qua Spirit”. When not thus “grasped as Spirit” Absolute Being “is merely the abstract void” at the beginning of knowledge or science, “just as spirit… not grasped as this process is merely an empty word” (The Phenomenology Of Spirit, p.767). The truth is “this self-closed circular process”. “The essential Being beholds only itself” in its “express otherness” or “explicit self-existence”. If we wonder “how come” or why this is so, Hegel is here giving and has given the answer from the heart of his logic, of self and other (later to be written down in, for him, a final version: but what is a version, a “turning”, as of a screw, if not constant development?), as “self-validating” in otherness. But the pictorial thought of the religious communion is not this notional thinking; it has the content without its necessity; and instead of the form of the notion it brings into the realm of pure consciousness the natural relations of Father and Son… absolute Being is indeed revealed to it, but… this figurative thinking retreats from the pure object it deals with, and takes up a merely external relation towards it. (767-8, my stress)

Hegel refers here to “an alien source” of revelation, without specifying further whether “this thought of Spirit” is pre-eminent, except as implying it is unrecognised “pure self-consciousness”, which, the latter, thus becomes the ultimate category. This transcendence, therefore, of figurative thinking again, including that from some “alien source”, is “a compulsion on the part of the notion”, engendering, among other activities, theology, at least when it does not “reject the content along with the form”. The 11

Cp. Herbert McCabe, Law. Love and Language (US. Title, What is Ethics All About?), London 1968 or, on sacramental baptism as interpreting or enacting birth as such, his subsequent book, The New Creation. But then if enactment is interpretation and vice versa then neither is abstractly its own self merely. Here this Thomist Wittgensteinian writer. In propounding a sacramental theology, recapitulates a basic Hegelian whole system.

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content is then degraded to an “heirloom” of a dead tradition. In such case “the inner element in belief has passed away”; these mournful poetic tones reassert themselves here. We no longer would have “the notion knowing itself as notion” but lose contact with “the true reason-world”. So we must not reject the content along with the form. That is the thesis, yet to be asserted, here. Trinitarian theory, of “the moments of the process, which Spirit is”, has to transcend “figurative thinking… by means of relationships derived from nature” and here we might also remind ourselves that spirit itself has as its first meaning a breath, as of what is breathed (Latin spiratio; Hebrew ruach) or as air. Also the three-ness is not to be taken numerically, so to say. “It is useless to count”. Such transcendence is “a compulsion on the part of the notion”, utterly free as it is. * We picture, Hegel claims, the Absolute Spirit “in the element of pure essential Being”. This is the Trinity as represented in catechetical or dogmatic formulations. But Spirit “is not indeed the abstract pure essential Being”, simply because this latter “is merely a moment in the life of Spirit”; “abstract essential Being has sunk to the level of a mere element (in which Spirit lives)”. This is surely true, given that Spirit lives in essential Being not dependently but as what it actually is, proceeding for just this reason and not out of a dependence. Just here progress is made towards the true concept of God, as spirit, namely. The “spirit” of the Lord is thus the Lord, as containing, possessing and giving sense to him, the sense that he is spirit. This is so, even if “the Lord” signifies that the first conception formed of God, in the “fear” of the Lord, is rather that of precisely the disposer and governor of all (this “all” thus being seen outside of him, the infinite, in a direct contradiction, unless that Lordship reduce the dominated or “lorded” (from dominus) to an explicit nothingness in its finitude, as in fact finds expression in many Old Testament texts. So representing Spirit as “in” this element has the same defect, inherently, of abstraction, which “essential Being” itself has. As abstraction this essential Being negatives its necessary simplicity as being an other, Hegel stresses. So Spirit itself, in this element, is “the form of simple unity”, though, just therefore, it is “essentially a process of becoming something else”. Similarly, or in the same way, the relation of eternal being to its self-existence, Hegel now says, is, in pure thought, an “immediately simple relation”. That is, otherness is there already but “is not as such set

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up independently”, but is, rather, the “recognition of Love” without opposition. Or it is “distinction in pure thought”, not abstract but “immediately no distinction”. So Spirit, in the element of pure thought, is yet not thought as simply in that element as if received afterwards, but is the concrete and actual element itself, element, that is, as such, like, say, a unity of air, fire, water and earth in nature as, rather, elementariness, the element. That is to say, otherness itself “lies in the very notion of Spirit”. This element, if it is once first posited, becomes, just thereby, “the other of its own simplicity”. We cannot think it, therefore, without, just thereby, sinking into imagination, of separate and opposed existences or subjects. That was why we were “meant to cease all thinking” if we would know God, the distant goal of Hegel as of Wittgenstein, as though philosophy, as abstractly conscious of itself, as an assembly of propositions, were what stands in the way of this. The final “atomic” propositions, whatever they are or could be, cannot, as speculative, be of this composite nature. So it is as Spirit that Being becomes its other in its own concrete identity as “the form of simple unity”. It is not only its other but it is every other, in being otherness itself or the “process of becoming something else”. This is knowing in and as absolute. Yet spirit does not, cannot be said to become a stone or similar, a phenomenal object, since objects are indeed phenomenal. The principle of personality is universality and, however, contrariwise. Universality is personality. Thus the all is represented as a Trinity of persons. Now a person was earlier identified as “an individual substance in (or as) a rational nature” and that is what it is. Or, it is rational nature individualised, and that variously. Variously, because there is, at least as it immediately appears, any number of abstractly separate persons, each of which is it, the universal, identically, however. It is impossible (useless) to count them because they are indefinitely bounded as within a flux of exchange, bearing one another’s burden(s), the burden of self, as we shall also see in the case of angels as anciently conceived. This impossibility, however, is also a judgment, a verdict, upon number itself, inevitably. Thus there are not stones or objects as such existing absolutely in their very supersession. So spirit does not become one. Rather, as one, it becomes, as its other, beings, persons, who ascend to its concept, a concept necessarily subtending existence as being its other, in a knowledge necessarily rooted in the appearing otherness called sense, or stones or bones or even sounds to which such persons have given significance. So the one is first three and then three many times over as known precisely in that plurality, imaged in a triadic multitude, which is yet uncountable as being the perfected concept in absolute self-

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identity. This is the perfect unity discerned in and outside of Hegel, which is yet held within him, what we call his thought, discerned by McTaggart, for example. Having trans-reciprocal identity as its principle it quite transcends that organic unity, the body (of Christ), often used to figure it. We are collectively this body of Christ, in terms of Hegelian Christian theology, only because or inasmuch as we are each ourselves Christ whole and entire, the last being first. This is the evil as the good, the evil that is knowledge, even, of which Hegel later here goes on to speak and it is no mere stammering. That is, he speaks with authority as no one does who merely repeats, spiritlessly, ideologically, or who, conversely, fails to understand “through and through” what he is himself saying. This failure, for both Hegel and Aquinas, is the finitude of prophecy. It is not entailed, in contrast, merely by the hearers’ not understanding. Thus Caiaphas’ utterance, finite and therefore false in its notion of expediency (“it is expedient that one man die for the people”), was genuine prophecy, though or, rather, just therefore not fully understood by himself, while Jesus and John were, as represented, “more than prophets” both, as Word and its precursor.12 So those hearers said, as we say now, if differently, of Hegel: “No one has spoken like this man”. We can say that of anyone but only as referencing his or her distinctive name, the “white stone” founding all authority in shared divine knowledge of just that name. Thus we speak of so-and-so’s world. The “element of thought”, the “very notion of Spirit”, as abstract, “passes over into the proper element of imagination”. Thus Spirit, even thought, wisdom, sophia, founds religion as itself leading on to it. Animals do not have religion, therefore, as Hegel remarks. Here, however, the moments each “acquire existence in opposition to each other” and “are subjects as well… confronting each other”. They are not, that is, related merely notionally in “recognition of Love”. Then, or thus, also Spirit “becomes an other to itself: it enters existence”. Thus it is that Hegel’s thought is no merely facile optimism but is also in harmony with the considered view of Aquinas, rejected by Scotus in view of the incarnation’s intrinsic necessity, that the incarnation finds its origin in and as response to man’s sin or “the sin of the world”, the felix culpa. This is true, even if Hegel should here be referring to Spirit when it “creates a World”, while this “sin of the world” is none other than its necessary finitude as created. For the meaning of the first creation is what is shown in the “second creation”. It is as in Adam all die that all are “made alive in 12

On the exegetical question, from which, however, we entirely prescind here, one might with profit consult Laurent Guyénot: “Jesus as Elijah’s Apostle” in The Downside Review, No. 425, October 2003, pp. 271-296.

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Christ”. That the “as” takes away all suggestion of contingency in this most fundamental of realities is what Hegel, like no one else, yet demonstrates. Thus Findlay may well comment on the “logical” and necessary character he gives to “the Christian mysteries”. It belongs to their own dignity that they should have this character, to which we should add, sotto voce, “if they exist at all”. The concept, it is worth repeating, necessarily subtends existence and so this that exists is the concept. Everything, but most especially any religious or “spiritual” reality, though there is but one unity of all such, necessarily, exists first and most truly in the Idea. More truly, it does not merely have “existence”, which is the name of a finite category in Hegel’s Doctrine of Essence (as itself a vanishing moment to a higher degree). It “in-sists”, rather, is a sistological reality, namely.13 Such “existence”, to repeat, is irreducibly personal, so that where the orthodox speak of stones on earth, say, or of staircases in heaven they add that the very stones of the latter are “made up of life”, the Idea Immediate (Hegel), “of holy, blessed and immortal beings” (Newman, The Dream of Gerontius). “Turn but a stone and you touch a wing”, Francis Thompson writes, not separating “the world” from the heaven “filling” it, referring, in theological poetry, to angels as Parmenides, in philosophical poetry, referred to Being as absolute. Wings, that is, precede things, are not their own dead bones, such “ingredients” lying on this side or falling short of knowledge (Enc. 216; Phen. Of Spirit, next or end chapter). Pictorial thought, speaking of the spirit’s creation of a World (though not from pre-existent materials) expresses that the simple absolute or pure thought, “moving on the face of the waters”, as abstract “is really the negative and hence opposed to itself”, is “the other of itself”. Thus the abstract is the concrete, even, as evil is good, as he will later say. Essential Being is thus “simple immediacy, bare existence”, called by Aquinas “the perfection of perfections” when not viewed abstractly merely, even if “barely”. Yet in this bareness it is “without Self… is passive, or exists for another”, even if Self dwells in it. We can as well say it is nothing, however, one might wish to add. “This existence for another is at the same time a world” or what in itself is not, adds no being to thought, its creator (non plus entis sed plura entia), as the realists are content to leave it. Yet, since Spirit itself “created” the world it is itself Spirit as itself “existing for another”, Hegel claims. It is Spirit that is “the undisturbed separate subsistence of those moments formerly enclosed within pure thought”. But 13 Cf. Richard Sylvan: “Sistology”, in Handbook of Metaphysics and Ontology, Philosophia Verlag, Munich 1990.

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still he says “subsistence” and not “existence”. They remain, I interpret, thus enclosed within even as alienated from spirit, in view of the latter’s intrinsic infinity. Such is dispersion into particularity as “natural” to nonabstract or “simple” universality. But the world is not merely this, since Spirit, we have seen at length, “is essentially the simple Self”. The world, as in the self, distinguishes itself as world from itself and thus has consciousness and so is not the world as it may at first seem. It is individual self even before this exists as spirit, is “innocent” but not strictly “good”. So we come to “the fall”, but as that of a whole world, which is yet this individual self or Adam/Eve. This self has “first to become an other to itself”, namely, thus concentrating self upon self in knowledge or thought as containing otherness, the “self-opposed thought of good and evil”. Spirit is first actualised axiologically, it appears. This supplies the condition for dramatisation or, rather, drama takes its being from this “primal scene”, as of “what happened once as an event, with no necessity about it”, just as in any other pictorial representation. Thus man “lost the form of harmonious unity with himself”, lost Paradise, in a word. Evil appears as this “first actual expression of the self-concentrated consciousness”, which is thus itself “merely evil”, the “mark of Cain”. Yet just by this very opposition the good consciousness is first present as good and not merely innocent. There is a slight Kantian twist here in the denial of such goodness to the innocent. This is easily resolved though if we merely note that univocal goodness, as applied to rational consciousness, takes on this character as reciprocal opposition to evil, on account of reason itself being, qua reason, determined ad opposita or determined to be undetermined, free. Sin, anyhow, is inseparably bound up with action, as a supposed division in contemplative being, action whether of “thought, word or deed”(!) indifferently. In subsuming all action as duty, however, Hegel, in inspired interpretation of Kant, cancels action within its own self for the so-called moral consciousness, thus making it accessible to the achieved unity of “the Beautiful Soul” (the phrase is not merely ironic for Hegel, whatever blemishes such a soul is, it seems, bound first to incur) not by mere way of concession but in its, action’s, true meaning. It is within an unbroken contemplation or knowledge, whether evil or good, which indeed becomes good in knowing itself as evil, as finite. Hence the knowledge of God, which alone is knowledge absolute, is the cessation of discursive or finite thinking (PS, Baillie, p. 793). Since all this is due to the self-concentration of thought as such, however, “the fact of becoming evil can be removed further backwards away out of the actually existing world and transferred to the very earliest

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realm of thought.” Transferring pictures into this realm, we may then say that angels, good or bad, are “our” first or philosophical incarnation, not in literal or immediate enfleshment, not after all “immediacy itself”, but rather as thought’s first thought of itself, its first reflexive projection. The angel’s first notion, therefore, is, in Scripture (where we or Hegel get it from), the angel of the Lord, the one sent, even or especially then or “to begin with”, coinciding with the sender, as the divine mission or sending (of the Son, say) “projects” the Trinitarian processes in religion, as religion subtends philosophy as bringing it forth, the he that “must increase” becoming itself the final I decreasing, released from the dungeon of its finitude only to be beheaded. The final verdict on religion, abstractly or individually considered, is thus that “he that is least in the kingdom of heaven is greater than he” or, as was said in the morning of such absolute religion, non moriar sed vivam (Psalm 117, vulg., 118), “I shall not die but live”, routinely interpreted and affirmed “mystically” in orthodoxy, “understanding spiritual things spiritually”. Hegel’s thought too, I affirm, is not separable from this envelope, expressing as enveloping it, itself a picture as standing for all such pictures, for incarnation namely. To abstract from poetry or religion itself is not a philosophical option. The dying Socrates orders a cock to be sacrificed to the god of health, albeit a god pictured in separation (from the Concept). Thus, by Hegel’s thinking, in speaking to another I first speak, am known, to myself. This is the doctrine of Aquinas too concerning self-knowledge, self-consciousness, that “the soul” is only known in knowing other things, “in this life”, he adds. It is in the Idea, in eternity, however, that life is “first” known for what it is, as Being, namely, with which science begins. This is not the prison of ideology but the universality of system, in Hegel, as in Aquinas. Thus we find the latter teaching that the honourable good is not finally the ethical but God himself, virtue only being thus denominated honourable inasmuch, and only so, as leading to God, per ardua ad astra. This is the final, trans-moral significance of Kantian duty.14. * Thus Hegel brings us to his angelology, revolutionising, as we might say, the thought of Thomas Aquinas, in spiralling or ascending return. These “sons of light” are, rather, the first expressions or particularisations of the universal in its essential self-consciousness, known first, so to say, by 14 See our “The bonum honestum and the Lack of Moral Motive in Aquinas’s Ethical theory”, The Downside Review, April 2000, pp.85-110.

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what is itself known, as being itself the first angelic and human shape. Thus far each or any angel must duplicate in identity that light of which it is ray or beam, as actualising it in act or as repulsion first witnesses to attraction or love, the many, the countless yet not infinite multitude, to the one. Self-consciousness, therefore, as thought, necessarily pictures, that is to say images, such self-shinings in the likeness of itself, the “human form divine” or absolute, which thus in turn is put as calling forth itself as positing it, the rational creature, in Kant’s phrase. Thus man, it was said, is the measure of all things and if angels are to appear they appear in human form and as such are “entertained unawares”. Since we are thus all messengers to one another angels must necessarily be viewed as abstractions, shaped shapes of ourselves, products of self-consciousness, which, nonetheless, can as such no longer be properly called “ours” or given taint of subjective or, it is the same, finite idealism, that idealism, namely, which the objectification of the finite in alienated otherness simply is. By this Adam remains the first or oldest incarnation of his “sender” to come, in logical definition of this his name, both proper and the name of a (his) nature, as Aquinas says of the name “God”, that Deus and deitas are the same. Necessity is indeed the mother but both of and as invention. This entails that the invented, as invention, is necessary, that the invention to be manifested is invention manifesting, as thought thinks itself in supersession of action and passion or as the infinite must include or absorb the finite. The invented is discovered (inventum) like America and yet, just as invention, discovery, it was actual “all the time” in its necessity, fruit of methodically unfolding self-knowledge and not merely pictured, like some cloud-cuckoo land, since it is “no strange land” but “home from home”, like, indeed expressive of, that “true reason-world” proper to each as to all, upon whichever rung or segment of time’s ladder or its spatial trajectory. “Does the fish soar to find the ocean?” In these words of the poet I but pose or posit philosophy’s own self-constituting question to itself, the question that is its final statement and solution, outflanking rhetoric. No ocean, no fish. Words, mine, yours, are indeed empty, as judgment is not judgment, which is “false”, but free concept, self-knowing, spirit’s sameness in difference. God-language, that is to say, belongs to thought’s vocabulary, as what is above and beyond and thus containing what is to hand and finite or human, as we say. Thus far Sartre was right in saying that if God exists man does not, though he drew perhaps the wrong conclusion, containing the infinite in the finite, not getting heaven into his head nor his head into heaven (Chesterton). Yet mind, self-consciousness,

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simply is in heaven, as its own place, which, rather, it simply is. It is not merely “in” it. Contained and container are both faulted, are pictures. Hegel’s message is thus simple in the extreme, fulfilling as anticipating Wittgenstein’s wish, based upon an identical penetration, to “have done with philosophy”. Mind dismantles itself faster than “the elementary powers of objectivity” (Enc. 219, add.) could ever manage to do, in its own self-instance as, namely, instant. It is because, as has been shown, “immediate existence is turned round into thought” as subtending it, as “more precisely” determining “the transition to otherness on the part of the inner self”, that “the fact of becoming evil”, as thus inherent in thought as such, in its pretence of objectification, “can be removed further backwards away out of the actually existing world and transferred to the very earliest realms of thought”. Yet we have and must have always known this, as the thinkers we are. Here Hegel uses the locution “it may thus be said”, as consciously introducing a kind of innovation, deeper than previous penetration, into theology: It may thus be said that it was the very first-born Son of Light [Lucifer] who, by becoming self-concentrated, fell, but that in his place another was at once created. (Phenomenology of Mind, 771)

This is his recommendation, as a new Aquinas, a second Aristotle, to theology. “Lucifer” means literally bearer of light, not son, so we must take him, in saying “son”, as making a special point with this change, justifiable anyhow in the light of Lucifer’s second or other title, Son of the Morning. Self-concentration is Hegel’s essential characterisation of knowledge, which, as supplanting or rupturing innocence, is per se knowledge, actualisation in effect, “of good and evil”, in the first place as it were. Eden is this first place, is not, therefore, Eden. Note, however, that “innocence”, in the first place again, does not denote ignorance or notknowing merely but a state of not harming (nocere), of being harmless. This innocence is thus lost by knowledge, by mediation of its disharmony only, inasmuch as knowledge, as self-concentration (Hegel), breaks up the harmony in function denoted by harmlessness, as equally a harmony unharmed, neither active nor, therefore, passive. The Genesis narrative, Hegel would imply, though not as if basing himself upon it, can hardly be referring to a mere particular form of knowledge as making “all the difference”. In knowing simply we are or become “as gods” and thus, more obscurely, in knowing good, now for the first time truly, we know evil as well and just as well. That is, first as or in knowing that something is so we ipso facto know that it is not otherwise, since this, the sic et non,

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is precisely or abstractly what knowledge is, namely that otherness in which “the world” was made. It thus appears to thought along with the fourth transcendental concept, after being, truth and goodness, namely, as aliquid, something, literally something else or other, aliud quid, otherness, though in self, yet denoting, abstractly, for thought specifically, precisely not-self. Knowing is thus a doing and the first or archetypal doing, of that and not this. This is Hegel’s insight that willing falls under cognition. We do evil, but we do that as or in the very doing itself, of anything, in consciousness of thus acting. It is the first deliberate eating of a tree as such. It is self-constituting will consequent upon the truth that there is no such thing as not wanting to know. Hence “All men desire to know” is more of a necessary truth than Aristotle’s words here lay bare. The Goethean Mephistopheles, that “capital fellow”, is not far away from this thinking, which will thus have to redeem Gretchen’s despairing cry, Meine Ruh ist hin Mein Herz ist schwer, Which is also that of philosophy, a consolation itself needing consolation, yet “What’s done is done and cannot be undone”, as Macbeth, Shakespeare’s Gretchen, declares. In the end Faust is Gretchen, Lady Macbeth her husband, the corrupter the corrupted, as he or she needs to become in the perfected self-knowledge desired. This is the strictly diabolical mirth, therefore, of coupling couples all around the world, making it go round as returning upon itself, in self-concentration, in endless increase of such multiplied gyration. What thus “makes the world go round”, however, is love, eros, of which charity, agape, is the flower and not merely the seed. Neither, however, is open to a first “innocence”. This, rather, is regained at the end, at the total comprehension, of process as such. “Them also I must bring”. With this, however, Hegel simultaneously removes the sting from evil and its attendant death in one, as his Logic confirms, where death is merely proper to life as “the idea immediate”. In Christianity, however, the two fight and death itself lies dead at the end, mors et vita in duello mirando conflixere. This ultimate duel, therefore, transcends the ultimate dualism. Everything, therefore, must depend upon the “at once”, as in “in his place another was at once created”, and what Hegel means there. He surely means that the two creations are one. Lucifer is Christ beheld, in self-knowledge, as “falling from heaven”. Antichrist, similarly, will be Christ’s latest incarnation or step up to the next rung, our self-concentrated selves (“our sweating selves” was Hopkins’s figure for the lost harmony).

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So “the Prince of this World has nothing in me”, since “I have overcome the world”. What an extraordinary statement! Did the evangelist called John merely or, as we say, really just hear it said, in discourse, or does he naturally present what has become his own consciousness in narrative form? The latter version can seem in the end to give yet more force to the assertion, that the world is overcome, yet still in precisely that founding consciousness, mirror yet of ourselves merely, alone yet not disconsolate upon the hillside, with the one “closer” than self and only thus able to narrate or poetise at all. This overcoming, after all, cannot be less than a restoring, in subjectivity. It is in fact more, this being the meaning of Hegel’s long section on “pardon”, of and by self first of all. He chooses, throughout this “first part” of his system, this whole book namely, to dismiss phenomena in phenomenal terms and this is therefore implicitly a “philosophy of language”. Satan must “get behind” him as, therefore, the shadow he must bear as he walks in the sunlight. Who can truly bear or look upon this shadow of Christ, of the light itself? Hegel speaks of a necessary evil in God, as if he were forgetful of the text: “God is light and in him is no darkness at all”, posed as the very essence of the new message. The poet, however, reconciles the two styles, they are more that than they are two “approaches”, affirming, or at first asking, as expecting the answer “yes” (a phrase schoolchildren learn as giving the sense of the Latin nonne as determinative of the relevant question’s import): “and is my gloom but shade of thy hand outstretched caressingly”, poetry here (of Francis Thompson) stealing a march on analytic reflection as thinking a contradictory pair as one and not merely in one, as in the reductively rhetorical view of poetry, which is first or ground-form, analogous to logic, therefore, of spirit, and thus itself absolute. Where Aquinas had determined that, necessarily, malum est semper in subjecto, evil is always in a subject (i.e. whenever it occurs), never absolute, Hegel would seem to add, demurring: all right, yes, but yet, semper est malum in subjecto, there is always evil in this subject (i.e. it always occurs), in any subject whatever, in subjectivity (knowledge’s selfconcentration), in God, therefore, though he feels he must apologise for this “unspiritual mode of expression”, which, nonetheless, “may thus be said” (p.776). “Fallen”, he points out, is figurative. Lucifer does not fall from the notion, an important point indeed. Thus far it, the term “fallen”, is ‘just like the term “Son”’. There is, in such “imaginative thought”, a transmutation and lowering of the moments of the notion into separated instances of it, such as we find in alienated Nature (before poetry and painting get to work) or “the world” as a whole. It is, however, what elicits

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poetry or art, upon which all absolute spirit appears to rest as thus engendered, if it were not that it also leads to the discovery that the being engendered just is the engendering. Yet in that sense does it not rest upon Nature rather, as Hegel’s account of incarnation and its meaning might seem to suggest? Likewise, in very truth, it is “in loving that we are loved”, “in dying that we are born” (the Franciscan prayer), and so on throughout, if we recall this nonetheless logical interpretation made upon the Christian mysteries that Findlay mentions, not seeing, perhaps, that this is meant as the proper exaltation of logic and so is not the debasement of “the Christian currency”. * To “co-ordinate a multiplicity of other shapes and forms” with this “simple thought of otherness in the Being of the Eternal”, he goes on (p.771), is “matter of indifference”. Co-ordinately we may transfer to them “that condition of self-concentration”. Conversely, as we may add, “there is none good but God”. Being created as such thus signifies evil, nonbeing, but, as the Manicheans denied, such evil, as it is when viewed apart (Hegel’s “idea in self-alienation”), is the work of this good God, of goodness itself, to speak philosophically, though then we must generalise “work” too as effect, reflection, emanation or similar, whereas really God and his working (act) must be the same. The Christian or theological resistance to this last term, emanation, we might note, has lately begun to crumble.15 One transfers, then, to the posited multiplicity “that condition of selfconcentration”, in a co-ordination that “must win approval” as a harmony of the whole, since through it “this moment of otherness does express diversity”. It should do this, Hegel simply declares, making more a logical than an ethical point, not as “plurality in general” but as “determinate diversity”, itself a Dasein as we might say. One “part” of it, of the diversity of thought’s “moment of otherness”, is the Son, simply knowing itself, himself, to be essential Being, the “other part” is that “abandonment of self-existence” which it or he is (though not as if having earlier had it). He (one might as well say “she”, though it becomes more usual, for good or ill, to appropriate femininity to procreative Spirit) “merely lives to praise that Being”. Hegel here, as it were naturally, slips back to religious, 15

Cf. David B. Burrell: “Aquinas’s Appropriation of Liber de causis to Articulate the Creator as Cause-of-Being”, in Contemplating Aquinas (ed. Fergus Kerr, OP), SCM Press, London, 2003, UND Press, Notre Dame, USA, 2006. pp.75-84.

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in this case liturgical, figure. He is not shy about it, as Findlay, “that ironical being”, likes to insinuate. Hegel, we may note, seems to regard irony as an insidious foe.16 To this second part, however, one may assign resumption, in part(!), of what was abandoned, “that ‘self-centredness’ characteristic of evil”. But then, the part called otherness, as otherness of the first other, now falling into two parts, Spirit, which is here diagnosed, “might, as regards its moments, be more expressed numerically as a Quaternity, a four in one”. Or, viewing now the multiplicity in the light of the “new” self-temptation, itself “breaking up” into those remaining good and those becoming evil, a significant contrast eliciting comparison with the Fall-narrative, we might just as well or “even” have or speak of a Quinity, “as regards its moments”. Hence this evenness, so to say, which equally reflects back on the quaternity as it looks forward to a quinity, finding this last move insufficiently distinguished, in what Hegel gives us, would not as such be matter for reproach. Moments, in short, are just what “it is useless to count”. Why? In the end they are themselves all pictures. One “either transmutes and lowers the moments of the notion to the level of imaginative thought, or transfers pictures into the realm of thought” (p.771). There is a precise analogy, a correspondence rather, therefore, between the religious succession of pictures and the moments of the method, of Logic itself, as they successively give way to the Absolute Idea containing, as having absorbed, them all, as itself “all in all”, as religion says of God, of any conceivable God. Representation, primarily language, as such itself represents or pictures over again the end, the concept, as its own selfrealisation. It is its own process and is process itself, is its own necessary self-command over itself as infinite and hence omni-potent, a property of which the subtending of its own ex-sistence, its enduring status, not to be equated with stasis, in otherness, such as this existence itself is, is chief or general expression. Yet in the sense in which God alone is, absolutely, as the good and the true, as will and mind, there is no room for speaking of existence. Hegel here agrees with the Neo-Platonists, Christian or otherwise, with Pseudo-Dionysius, for example. Counting the moments, however, can be regarded as absolutely useless, since, for one thing, what is distinguished is itself just as truly one and single

16

Enc. 571. He also, one has to note, refers elsewhere in one place to woman as “that ironical being”. Here though, at 571, it is thought itself that almost, it seems, inevitably falls back into this “vanity of wilfulness” he calls irony.

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- viz. the thought of distinction which is only one thought – as the thought is this element distinguished, the second over against the first. (p. 772)

The thought of distinction, that is, of moments, is itself just one thought distinguished, and this again “one and single”, this being what lies behind much of the previous discussion, as might be clear for and from set theory generally. The objection to counting thus takes account of and dismisses Aristotle’s “third man” objection to forms treated by him as moments in a discourse, of what it is “true to say”. Hegel’s whole philosophy is a war against such a reduction of truth to correctness and against the reduction of logic to this in particular. The “in virtue of” relation, itself a moment, has to yield to identity, in a general negation of all by all, realised end as omnipotent scepticism, again, only misread as generalised despair, to use Hegel’s own image. One cannot anyway count in disregard of differences of logical type, like adding a man to humanity or the number one to infinity or beings to being. Not only is there then not more being but, to defy the Scholastic tag, there are not “more” (as if counting) beings either. Creation adds nothing to God in any way. We conclude to acosmism, however it is to be further specified as between Spinoza and Hegel. A second consideration against counting the moments is that any thought grasping the many in one has to keep to both sides of the equation, has to “be dissolved out of its universality” and be ever more distinguished. Absolute universality is not the numerical one as principal number but “indeterminateness in relation to number as such”. We must refer back to Hegel’s Doctrine of Being, where quality yields to quantity and specifically the latter to essence. We cannot speak of a number of distinctions. It is the same with “the bare difference of magnitude and multitude”. It “falls outside conceptual thought”. This principle is essential here to Hegel’s treatment of “the angelic hosts”, with which Baillie, in a footnote, equates “a multitude of other shapes and forms”, apparently going beyond the letter of the text, though Hegel clearly had such traditions in mind. Just the same consideration, however, applies to the individual moments of human subjectivity, to yours and mine, and Hegel makes this plain when he characterises resurrection “in Spirit” as “a selfconsciousness which rests in its own proper substance, just as in it this self-consciousness is universal subject” (763). For, a consciousness which sees and hears Him by sense, is one which is itself merely an immediate consciousness, which has not cancelled and transcended the disparateness of objectivity, has not withdrawn it into pure thought, but knows this objectively present individual, and not itself, as spirit. In the disappearance of the immediate existence of what is known to

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be Absolute Being, immediacy acquires its negative moment. Spirit remains the immediate self of actual reality, but in the form of the universal selfconsciousness of a religious communion…

The past and distance, however, are “conditions”. They are “merely the imperfect form in which the immediateness gets mediated or made universal”. This determines Hegel’s conception of history as such before it applies as being applied to any “incarnation” specifically. This is the sense of “I and my father are one” and not the reduction of the first to the immediate human being. This, rather, is assumed and “taken up” while being “put by” (aufgehoben), “not by conversion of the godhead into flesh but by taking of the manhood into God”, i.e. conceptually (Athanasian “creed”). In this way the ever past and visible “religious communion” is itself, qua abstractly religious, sacrament and sign or pledge of that eternal and perfect union it itself is not, liturgy being “merely dipped superficially in the element of thought” and “kept there” if we do not go on to consider the gift(s) of the Spirit “understanding spiritual things spiritually”. This is philosophy or what is called mysticism, as Hegel explains this, whereby the believing worshipper, “in spirit and in truth”, is made one with what he adores, spiritual marriage, as it has unabashedly been called. It is therefore, as Findlay correctly notes, ultimately philosophy, the eternal wisdom, that saves the believer as what, ultimately, he believes in, the lady philosophy, consolatrix, of Boethius (identifiable, many conclude, as San Severino of Mantua).17 This conception, nonetheless, to be true, must 17

This figure either needs adapting to the perspectives of feminine spirits, if they are not to see themselves as merely figures of men, of Christ, as, conversely, Isaiah attributed the maternal quality to God the Father, or we must attribute spiritual validity to what comes out as the specifically Sapphic impulse, at least in this the spiritual realm, corresponding to the self-abandonment of the male contemplative before “one greater Man”. He is thus made female or receptive, in what is yet a freedom of self-bestowal, absolute knowledge as realising Will in and from its own spontaneity. It was in this or like perspective, one may surmise, that Edith Stein, now “raised to the altar” as one says, insisted, in further development or contradiction of canonised Augustinianism (she herself, saint and martyr, has been “canonised”), that women have specifically feminine “souls”. Augustine, after all, insisted that women remain women “in the resurrection”. This may surely, in “development or contradiction”, be absorbed into the Hegelian system. The meaning is that what we are eternally determines our sex here, along with whatever pre-obtaining biological conditions, and this, once more, affirms the human reality just as it is, though this again can include the typical Jungian (Hegelian) perspective of interchange of Inner and Outer in fusion of opposites, as of now and forever.

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be applied in one and the same act of conceiving it, to the whole body of a self-conscious humanity, which the individual therefore, in view of the self-consciousness, is free not to join, though this does not as yet or as such imply that anyone takes this perverse option. It applies, that is, to that whole new condition of secularism properly understood, the condition of moving into a new saeculum or “age” that was to come, vitam venturi saeculi. This, however, as itself in essentially an imperfect or unfinished (imperfecta) motion, since motion is itself imperfect act (Aristotle), can never be identified, as sign with signified, with the “for ever and ever” (in saecula saeculorum) of “absolute knowledge”, where “all shall be well and all manner of thing” (Julian of Norwich) and necessarily has to be, as the atheist McTaggart insisted, with Leibniz perhaps, that “the world” as rational has to be perfect, not unfinished or imperfect in a perpetually produced “past”. It is what it “was to be”, in and as essence; for it is, as progressing from Being, precisely Essence and, finally or absolutely, the Idea. * We return, thus armed, to the mutual abstractions of Good and Evil in human life, just because this more generalised “co-ordination of shapes” is thus distinguished into what “are not accidental characteristics”, up to Quinity and beyond, in terms of what remains good and what becomes evil. These very distinctions Hegel calls “articulated groups (Massen)”, with all kinds of connections and joins, that is, “of the unity permeated by its own life”, as indifferently singular in its plurality and conversely, just as it is indifferently good or evil, the one being a form of the other, Hegel will specify, all being “unsundered spirits transparent to themselves, stainless forms and shapes of heaven that preserve amid their differences the untarnished innocence and concord of their essential nature” (singular), in the singularity of unity, that is (Baillie, p.452). There is evil in God, where it is of course therefore good, just as there is good there that might be seen as evil. That is, they are not the abstract opposites we would make out, just as we found in the close relations between Lucifer and the Son. So since the opposition, of good and evil, is not “broken down” even at this generalised spiritual level, making or representing them as “essential realities of thought”18, i.e. at the logical level, again, and not an abstracted ethical or “practical” level, it follows, Hegel seems to say, that 18

Compare the bona (good) consequentia as a clear concept within Scholastic logical theory, precisely as logical, as was pointed out to me by the late Peter Geach.

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man is the self with no essential reality of his own and the mere ground which couples them together, and on which they exist and war with one another.

The meaning of this is the disappearance of “man”, his reduction to a function or locus of thought or thinking, or, we might equally well say, his elevation, to what, in Hegelian terms, will be absolute personhood, in line with his saying that God, the Idea, “is the absolute Person”. It is precisely man we have been projecting in this angelology. Man is his thought just inasmuch as thought is its own thought or “thinks itself”. At this level good and evil find one another, or wear one another’s colours, as the poet Blake intuitively grasped. Or we can equally say that angels and not only men disappear from the concept, while this development of thought would lose all sense and point were it not clear that it intimately affected our view of the absolute or divine persons, of divine personality, whom or which, as the same, we should not try to “count”. From this point of view it comes about that, as evil is nothing else than the self-concentration of the natural existence of spirit, conversely, good enters into actual reality and appears as an (objectively) existing selfconsciousness. (Ibid. p.773)

Thus the necessity of incarnation is intrinsically bound together with this view of good and evil. Hegel says here that the Divine Being’s “transition into otherness” is “merely hinted at” when interpreting Spirit “in terms of pure thought” (how, though, does one “merely hint” this?) but “here, for figurative thinking, comes nearer its realisation”. Surely he himself hints here at a plus for such “figurative” thinking in the approach to what in the end cannot be said, though surely it can be thought as (spiritually) perceived, as McTaggart suggests, as the heavenly mode of cognition itself become, or replaced by, perception specifically. This is also, in that case, a nod towards Art as the lowest that is highest “form of Absolute Spirit”, offering an opening to the then contemporary view that (perceived) “music is a greater revelation than the whole of religion and philosophy” (Beethoven). Just listen to it, as opening the ear. “He that has ears, let him hear.” Or, a novel, say, may be able to communicate, if not to “teach”, what philosophy cannot, a view, however, that Hegel is in general keen to “put in its place”, a more modest one, as he does for prophecy and the like. The immediate is never the Idea, Hegel states. Yet he himself dissolves, “sublates”, this very pair, mediate and immediate. The “realisation”, of good in evil and conversely, “is taken to consist in the Divine Being ‘humbling’ Itself, and renouncing its abstract nature and

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unreality”, more starkly put by the Apostle Paul as his, that Being’s, being “made sin for us”. This is the good realisation in evil, this initiative. The “other aspect”, we noted already, “that of evil” as no longer extraneous or alien but, as we try to grasp, “in the Divine Being as the wrath of God” (though why just wrath?), is this same figurative thought’s supreme effort and severest strain (“to what will you compare me?”), fruitless though just because it, the effort, “is devoid of the notion” and, like counting the moments of personhood, “falls outside conceptual thought”. This, as a comment on the mathematical as a whole, is a linguistic point, the point about predication as self-ablating identity: “and yet they are not two but one”, i.e. they are. It can also be seen, however, as a negative comment (“fruitless”) upon religious representations when not open, in the contemplative consciousness, to notional or “spiritual” transformation. The norm. anyhow, is that this should happen when Scripture is read, i.e. taken at the letter, which “Kills” as “the spirit gives life”, one may read “at the letter” in the same scripture. So one should not take that too literally, i.e. without intelligence, either! “In God alone is my soul at rest”; the word, as utterance, is written only in volatile sand. The dying Francis refused to have Scripture read to him, to say nothing of philosophy or even music. Thought, then, is its own being alone, the concept. This perdures in sleep, even or above all in death, Hegel states. * With the disappearance of man in the mutual deconstruction of good and evil we are approaching absolute knowledge as what, after all, is alone good. We are approaching God as being born in us, our second birth as the meaning of the first. We were thus not really born in that first, immediate sense. Our fancied birth, its contingent contingency, is rather the necessary appearance of Spirit in time as this, time, is “the notion itself”. So “we”, each and any “I”, as noted above are the Ground. It is useless, outside notional thought, to count, again. Here everything is swallowed up, from man himself to God, to Jehovah, as and along with all and anything particular, despair itself become hope as hope is fulfilled in despair. It really is. No one says: “Know the Lord” (Jeremiah), because, really and truly, all know him as and inasmuch as we, Socratically, know ourselves. The seed of all “the things that are” is here brought to nothing, to death, by “the things that are not” in its falling into this ground, which Hegel equates with man as he thus deconstructs or cancels man and all memory of him, as particularity rises to universality, bearing not simply much fruit but being rather itself its own fruit. Apophatic mysticism here finds its

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fulfilment and explanation. We cannot now “live” because life itself has been revealed, exposed, that is to say, as “the Idea immediate” merely, i.e. not the Idea. In this sense too knowledge is absolute, not a mere panacea for something else. One may think perhaps of Nicholas Stavrogin, Dostoyevsky’s “creation”, caught sitting in apparently mindless contemplation in the run-up to his hanging himself, as something he has already done. “No man takes my life from me, I lay it down of myself”. This is freedom, such as the madman Kirilov (in this same novel, The Possessed) aspired to but failed to find. Why did he fail to find it? Dostoyevsky’s answer is that he failed because he scorned our common spiritual tradition here developing itself in the revolutionary consciousness, in self-consciousness. “I am come to cast fire upon the earth”. To say more, to comment on the remaining ten pages of the “Revealed Religion” chapter might, therefore, be merely to repeat oneself. We postpone it for a separate chapter, a different “frame of mind”. * “Good and Evil were the specific distinctions of thought which we found” (773). This is entirely in accord with Hegel’s Logic as later set down, that the Good (and hence its negative) is the anteroom to the Idea, as here to Absolute Knowledge, as precisely what is known (“what”, quid, itself names pre-cision, leading on endlessly, but hence staying ever with itself, to “what’s what”) in simple self-knowledge as “universal of universals”. Good-and-Evil, in fact, is the extended name for Good, both being the same, Hegel eventually finds, as Lucifer figures Christ as his opposite, something that strikes most readers of Milton’s epic poem, namely that he, Milton, “was of the devil’s party without knowing it”19, as can hardly be said of the later prose epic (on the same epic subject) with respect to its author, J.R.R. Tolkien. Abhorrence of the evil depicted shines forth here. It is, however, an entirely abstract evil, depicted merely in impossibly vile agents and milieus, as in the Hell of C.S. Lewis’s The Great Divorce, clearly a refusal of Blake’s and a fortiori Hegel’s vision.20 Yet Lewis 19

William Blake, in the long poem, “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell”. We have discussed Lewis’s troubled relation to Hegel in both our New Hegelian Essays (first chapter: “No Regress from the Hegelian Wood”) and in the Postscript to The Orthodox Hegel: “Hegel’s point about good and evil as essentially correlate stands. Non-being, that is to say, is finally being, as ‘the non-being of the finite is the being of the infinite’ or, in Biblical terms, as ‘in God we live and move and have our being’. There is thus, after all, a difference between the ‘relation of opposition’ in which ‘good and evil exist merely’ and mere correlation. Implied 20

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shows himself elsewhere, his spirit moving freely between art, religion and philosophy, I dare to judge, in the last three pages or so of The Last Battle, concluding the Narnia series, along with many other indications in his oeuvre, to be, with McTaggart or Royce, one of the most consummate Hegelian thinker, perhaps without knowing it, to have written in English. For Hegel evil lies at the root of our separately existing being as individuals; “evil is nothing else than the self-concentration of the natural existence of spirit”, something that we cannot but find good, like all of “creation”. Only hence is it that “good enters into actual reality and appears as an (objectively) existing self-consciousness”. Here Hegel speaks simultaneously, in one “leap of thought”, of the creation of man by God and of God’s incarnation in Christ, the man. This reflects or realises, nearly, his view of Spirit as “transition into otherness” as what being is, as absolute or “divine”. The realising figure is “the Divine Being ‘humbling’ Itself”. This also applies to man’s creation as well. Hence a Breviary hymn refers to Adam as having the face of Christ, as “already”, we might say, “the heavenly man”, whereby man is not man but God and, more nearly, Ground. In this Ground both God and Man (“the mere ground”) vanish as having been, separately considered, mere figures of one another, as having “fallen to the ground” of consciousness. Evil, that is, self-consciousness, is root even of God himself, thus having itself no root, as non-being, from which the divine being, which is non-being, affirms itself just in its transition to its other, being. This act is what God is. God, therefore, never became becoming, since God is (this act of) Becoming, is thus Act and Actuality and, as concerns Logic, therefore, Method. This decision against himself as Lucifer (his first “son”), this constitutive “event” of all that occurs, is the (eternal) birth of Necessity. Its “what” (essence) is its “this” (existence). It is the self-diffusion of Good noted by the Greeks. Philosophically, however, it is the ultimate jealousy, in which there is no here is Hegel’s recognition of the finitude of Existence as a category, not ‘worthily’ applicable to the Idea or God, as also his recognition of the ‘ideality’ of the finite in toto, the truth, that is, of the finite or of the false. We may recall Anselm’s distinction of the false from the nonsensical (dialogue De veritate). Insofar as there is mere reciprocal correlation between self and God, between subject and subjectivity, then self is no longer self, has both dialectically and…. speculatively passed over. I am what I am not” (The Orthodox Hegel, p.405 footnote). Good and Evil are the same. "Hell is here: nor am I out of it” (Goethe’s Mephistopheles, moment of us all). Hegel surmounts Frege’s “logical Manicheism” (P.T. Geach) of the True and the False in regard to judgments. They are the same, as witness Hegel’s true judgment: “All judgments are false”. Speech, in other words, is a finite moment (cp. Wittgenstein, Tractatus 7). “We” should or must and will be silent, as ourselves word(s).

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envy, of absolute self-consciousness, that “I am God and there is none other”, the “universal of universals”, subjectivity as Mind or Spirit. By contrast, our usual notion of evil is in fact “devoid of the notion”, is missing the notion as itself the prime “missing of the mark”, hamartia or sin. Our notion of evil is the root of sin, that is to say. He that is born of the spirit, therefore, as conscious of these things or of the notion, which is his consciousness, “sins not”. The injunction to the finite or merely reflected Spirit remains, however: “Let him that thinks that he stands take heed lest he fall”. This too, however, this paranese, lies “outside the notion”. The alienation of the Divine Nature is thus set up in its double-sided form; the self of Spirit, and its simple thought, are the two moments whose absolute unity is Spirit itself. Its alienation with itself consists in the two falling apart from each other, and in the one having an unequal value as against the other. This passage, a passage indeed to a coincidence with Trinitarian theology, which it therefore is, can appear opaque until this is progressively grasped as we read on. At the same time the rift between “positive” theology and philosophy seems to close, by reason of treating thought itself, for this is what is here treated, as religion’s object, but specifically in and because Good and Evil are found here as the distinctions of thought itself, “becoming evil” being “traced back to the very earliest realm of thought”, therefore. It is from just this distinction, as primal, that Hegel derives divine and logical process as threefold, as something too close to our sight to have been perceived previously. The strife of life and absolute knowledge coalesce. Hence, “We can save whoever strives”, sing the angels in Faust. This would have to include, therefore, even those later given over to the total perversities of Nazism or Bolshevism, which it is futile to distinguish, just inasmuch as they include or envisage the salvation of the Son of the Morning himself, the principle of evil at the very origin of thought or self-concentrated knowledge, a universalism epitomised in the affirmation that Good and Evil are the same. What is saved, however, Hegel’s thought makes clear, is not a mere bunch of “abstract” because abstracted individuals but a supra-organic community, that of thought and hence of “experience” itself. “Gather up the fragments so that nothing be lost”. What other sense or intention could that saying, preserved and/or coined by just that community, have? This universalism is one of the aspects of that surrender to Sittlichkeit Hegel advocates and defends as security against the potential wickedness of individual conscience. It realises that supersession of abstract moralism that the present identification of good and evil embodies. Hegel compares

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the move, the passing over, to a Protestant’s submission to Rome as to an external authority, without dissociating himself from the latter option or explaining why it is less acceptable than the passing over to Sittlichkeit he defends. This, I maintain, exemplifies the ecumenical character of his system as a whole, wherein, for example, an equally particular Protestantism and profoundly Latinised Catholicism, for example, not so much must as will, simply, each lose their particular characters in a final or pre-final union of all with all. We need to “go over” to Sittlichkeit as we are set to go over maybe not to Rome but to “the centre of unity” (John XXIII), whether based in Rome, Los Angeles or Wittenberg at some given time. By the same reasoning, however, since neither Rome nor Sittlichkeit can be possessed of a literal infallibility in all manifestations of their life indifferently, conscience must remain operative, in the face of mass defections, psychoses, etc. not as some private individual and vain fad but as public in the sense of preserving the individual “I” as universal of universals. This is the condition for an appearance of a Moses, a Jesus, an Athanasius, just as it is the condition for the appearance of any “Antichrist”, personality being the principle of universality as “the principle of personality is universality” (Enc. 163 add.). * The two, meanwhile, that fall apart, in unequal value, are the thought and the self of Spirit. In the one, the Divine Being stands for what is essential, while natural existence and the self are unessential and are to be cancelled. In the other, on the contrary, it is self-existence which passes for what is essential and the simply Divine for unessential. (Baillie 773-774)

In this way the Philosophy of Nature will be counterpoised to the Logic as the Son was first counterpoised or, rather, posed, as Lucifer, against the Father. These are the Good and Evil that are the same. “Their mediating, though still empty, ground is existence in general”, is the same, in a community of two moments, says Hegel. “Judge not”, don’t separate “before the time”, is the ruling spirit here. For the dissolution of this opposition is not to be effected in a struggle, as envisioned in imaginative or abstractly objectifying apocalyptic, since each element kept apart must “dissolve itself”, as we have seen in the case of God and man, separately considered. The struggle only takes place where both cease to be this mixture of thought and independent existence and confront each other merely as

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thoughts. For there, being determinate notions, they essentially exist merely in the relation of opposition. This is a simple presentation of the Augustinian-Thomist account of the Trinitarian “relations of love”. Which way is Hegel facing, however? Are the persons “merely thoughts”? No, they are independent, he says, and “have their essential nature outside their opposition”. Here, namely, they are not just opposed because they are not just thoughts. Simple or absolute opposition is not found in actuality, of good and evil, for example. They are free and self-determined, it being understood, however, that Hegel is not about to lapse into the absurdity of a literal tri-theism. Our immediate picture of individual personality is not determining here, but rather that neutral ground mentioned. His whole angelology was based, we saw, on recognition of the sub-notional uselessness of counting. The two, still typified as Good and Evil, the “alienation of the divine Nature… set up in its double-sided form”, are necessarily unequal in regard to one another, mutually, the autocratic as against the insolent. Yet the movement starts only in the one that is “inherently essential”, called God or, here, good, though only “as contrasted with the other”, once again. What we call the movement “is pictured as a spontaneous action” on the part of this essential being. What action is this that is so pictured? It is a “selfabandonment” that is, Hegel says, necessary and apparently logically so, since the inherently essential, and this will be absolutely known, “gets this specific character merely through opposition”. So, therefore, it abandons what has “no real independent subsistence”. It abandons nothing then, that is to say. What is thus represented, as (self-)abandonment, is simply its own nature, that is to say, the nature of self as such, for which abandonment (Fr. abandon) is a figure, a figure involving the “action” of an event. Self is in any case its own other. This is the basis of all or any knowledge, of the other namely, in which first the self knows itself. In this sense the divine nature itself is indeed not “robbery” or something to be jealous of. Reason is our very own principle and freedom as such from all tyranny. So it is “simple being”, and not “independent self-existence”, as if this were actually possessed by or embodied in anything, that “empties and abandons itself”, as this is represented. But what is this simple being, given up to death, Hegel says, unless it is in itself a, or, rather, the reconciliation, in the first place conceptual? It reconciles Absolute Being with its own self, he says, though the sense must rather be that it first gives being to this thought of the inherently essential, makes it to be in this its own act of self-causation in a first self-“emptying”, here again the negative as the positive, evil as good, death as life, “made sin for us” in the

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prophetically allusive view of religion. This is simple being’s or thought’s own manifestation of itself as spirit. As estranged from its self, specifically, the otherwise (not though in the sense of “previously”) abstract being “has natural existence and the reality of an actual sense”. In this sense man is God, even God in himself as in this prime (not “first”) proto-instance. Absolute religion is here born as philosophy, whether in this Hegel’s writing, at Bethlehem or in the positing of Adam. Hegel sounds all three notes in one “common” chord, denoting the super-session of man specifically, of biology. This whole account, therefore, is one “where existence turns round into thought” (Ibid. p.771), as was said earlier of the “removal” of “the fact of becoming evil” “away out of the actually existing world… to the very earliest realms of thought” and the creation, the begetting rather, of the two contrasting “Sons of Light”. In positing evil as, in so far as it is anything (elsewhere, though, he calls it “the absolute sham-existence of negativity in itself”, at Enc. 35 add.), as therefore necessarily in God, in the Idea, Hegel brings these two opposed principles closer together in spiritual reality, though without any rationalist fall into Manichaeism, the point being that good and evil are not really separate, are even “the same”. He had probably read Milton with attention, with his (Satan’s) “Evil be thou my Good”, though Blake’s “marriage of Heaven and Hell” lay still in the future. Yet in any case it is immediate existence, the finite category, that is being put in its place as against thought, the Idea, as appears from our account of Hegel’s thinking above. We are dealing in fact with figured thoughts, but that precisely on the assumption that “real” existence, in its immediacy, should be itself such a figure, the resumption, rather, of this position as previously reached. Heilsrealismus is not the name of this deadly serious game, except in some profounder sense of Realismus, where only the Idea is, as not finite, not ideal. The truths of faith (as of philosophy) do not depend upon mere facts of existence, he says elsewhere, adding that it is impious imperceptiveness, in effect, to imagine that they do. To call this a “modernist” reduction is simply to fail to understand the further penetration into spiritual reality here performed, in harmony, moreover, with previous moments of this, of the development. We have to note here that the “sensuous” is given a necessary, in the sense of an a priori character, like that accorded anciently to matter, Greek hyle (actually meaning “wood”), philosophically considered, which does not aspire to because not concerned with a tabulating of final “particles” or the building of huge phenomenal structures or “smashers” in order to find them. All that “lies outside the notion”. Matter, as the principle we call potentiality, perishability, is as profoundly negative as the accompanying

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privation of form in Aristotelian change as analysed. What is distinctive here in Hegel, however, is the bringing to the fore of the necessary link of matter with the sensuous and hence with subjectivity.21 Matter too, therefore, is finally nothing, non-being, though itself an active moment of Becoming. Nature, that is, does not just happen to “fit” with a fivefold sense-apparatus which itself just, in nature, happens to be. First here, rather, in Hegel’s analysis, it gets its necessity or is “created”, in the crucible of thought, which we just therefore call philosophical or, it is the same, idealist. So, “What is man that thou art mindful of him?” What are you, wherein mind, which is self-consciousness, minds itself? “There is one closer to me than I am to myself” (Augustine). “I live yet not I but Christ lives in me” (Paul). “I in them and they in me… He that has seen me has seen the Father” (Gospel of John). This is Hegel’s “true reasonworld”, known to all since self-knowing. Philosophy, looking “back”, though no longer in time, spirit “now” annulling time (cf. Baillie, p. 800), finds its own “beginning” or prefiguring in “absolute religion”, each evoking the other. Hence, again, what is “inherently essential”, merely getting this essential character through opposition, “has just on that account no real independent subsistence”, is not objectified, as the Logic will soberly make plain, is closer than self to self as indeed “the absolute Idea” and nothing else. This sheer negativity is the absolute or finally positive, both categories here “abandoning themselves”. In figurative term again, if I am what I will be then I am not what I am. This is the heart of Hegel’s thought, where not only good is evil and conversely but, yet more radically, The difficulty people find in these conceptions is due solely to sticking to the term “is”, and forgetting the character of thought, where the moments as much are as they are not, - are only the process which is Spirit. (777)

This is essential for understanding Hegel’s statement that the Absolute Idea is its own content, distinguishing itself from itself as “the system of Logic”, of which the form is the “Method of this content”, even set forth as “the system of terms describing its content” (Enc. 237), an incarnation indeed. What might still be needed is an elucidation of the term “term”, 21

Like Aquinas he denies the logical possibility of matter in the “separated substances” or angels, though also, for Aquinas, in the “human soul”. Yet these are potential to their creator (or are they?), once thought. Such thinking, rather, is itself the source of necessity, as thought first thinks itself. Hence, in Aquinas again, thought, God, is only one of the “necessary beings”, quite differently from in Leibniz, whom Hegel faults for reducing all difference to ideality (Enc. 194, add.).

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terminus, adopted by Hegel in his discussion of “ceremonious syllogising” under “The Subjective Notion” (Enc. 184), which he finds not “incorrect” but even the triadic form of all reasoning, pinpointed by Aristotle. The difference, of such “term logic”, from the “mathematical” line pursued from Frege to Quine and beyond is palpable and not reducible to Hegel’s or Aristotle’s living earlier in time.22 * Thus simple being, as Nature, in “giving itself up to death… manifests itself as spirit”. It corresponds to essential being’s self-emptying, which the kenosis on the part of Christ exclusively, of which Scripture speaks, must necessarily mirror, and not merely “historically”. There is a total negativity making up the final or essential positiveness, as we see logically in the Idea, always of some other as finally being its own other. Being is “affirmed as superseded” and, therefore, universal. It could not otherwise be universal but only be treated as if it were a being, precisely Heidegger’s criticism and where Hegel finds Anselm’s proto-version of the Ontological Proof falling short. His whole philosophy is thus a correction and representation of it. By this, too, the immediate existence of “something alien and external” is seen, it too, to be in the Divine Being, God, generating this and all notions, as living and moving there. Again Hegel is anticipated by St. Paul’s proclamations, a reason perhaps why he so seldom if at all mentions him. So “this death (of immediacy) is therefore its rising anew as spirit” (my stress). When the self-conscious Being cancels and transcends its immediate present, it is as universal self-consciousness.

One has to say that so far as this is true it cannot be equated with the corresponding positive Christian dogma of redemption unless one understands and shows that there can only be and is just one “selfconscious Being” in the sense intended. It should therefore be implicit and 22

See our own writings on this topic, e.g. “The Interdependence of Semantics, Logic, and Metaphysics as Exemplified in the Aristotelian Tradition”, International Philosophical Quarterly, Vol. 42, March 2002, pp. 63-91, along with various monographs by Hans Sluga, Henry Veatch and others. Interpretations of Frege himself as found in Wittgenstein or Peter Geach are also important. I end the article with the suggestion that “a new relationship between theology and philosophy may be looked for, beyond both medieval subservience and Enlightenment hubris”, such as I have sought to develop in later work.

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explicit in the preceding twenty or so pages here as following Hegel’s own text. In fact the dilemma is resolved by the alternatives not so much fusing again as dying down on either side. The ideal, namely, once infinity is reached, in this form of self-consciousness, for example, ceases itself to be the finite and finitude’s badge. Instead, necessity “lies in the notion”. Salvation is ultimately gnoseological, not one of mechanical or efficient causation. That alone is why it was never in doubt. The gnoseological truth here leaves that “fantastic extravagance of mind” and “comes down to earth” from heaven. This notion of the transcended individual self which is Absolute Being, immediately expresses therefore the establishment of a communion which, while hitherto having its abode in the sphere of pictorial thought, now returns into itself as the Self: and Spirit thus passes from the second element constituting it, - figurative thought – and goes over to the third –selfconsciousness as such. (Baillie, p. 775)

This “self-consciousness” as such came to expression, to exemplification, in the natural “reason-world” of believers, in the enacting by contemplative priests of their desire to celebrate the “mass” of the whole communion, on earth and in heaven, “on their own”, on occasion, as what came to be called, somewhat disapprovingly, “private masses”. The sacrifice of Christ, a believer might say, was itself “private” in this sense, that no one else could do it, unless, that is, Christ is the self’s own other. If this is true, furthermore, it reinforces the necessity of the notion beyond questions of existence, even my own. Both sides die away. Saying the Divine Being “takes on” human nature, Hegel claims, asserts, in “pictorial” form (divinity is not a “taker on”) that the two are not separate. Küng, Rahner and other “theologians” entirely miss or ignore this further reach of Hegel’s thinking when they assert real change in God. Thus they remain pictorial. Similarly, however, as showing how very much hangs on it, it is pictorial that God emptied himself of himself or that his existence “became concentrated in Itself and became evil” (in the lightbearer, Hegel means). Per se this evil existence (of the light-bearer) is not alien to the Divine nature, while Absolute Being “would be an empty name” if there were any other being(s) external to it as “falling” from it. Nothing can fall from it. This is the secret pre-condition for angelology. The aspect of self-concentration really constitutes the essential moment of the self of Spirit (775). Here a link is made between God having to be all, outside of which there can be nothing, and the necessary selfconcentratedness that follows and which, since in any other context it is evil, is evil here too. This, however, as being found in God, redeems or

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“makes good” evil qua evil, which is thus “the same as good”. It is the absence of that good in the ideal or finite moment, thus de-fined as a finite good, which evil is. Hence, whenever it, the finite, is made the good as such, simply, that is, by taking it on its own or in self-concentratedness, then the finitely good, but not only that, is evil, either as our own knowing or as we thus know it. It is thus evil for a finite good to lack the good, which is also the evil, intrinsic to it. That is, their coincidence says itself. Illustrations of the thesis may be found in behaviour we call obsessive. It should be noted, however, that distinctions between physical evil and moral evil, or between what is due or not due to or from “the creature”, “do not belong to the notion”. This, Hegel finds, is the significance of forgiveness, as introducing and enabling this whole chapter (our subject here) and, more largely, religion as such.23 Self-centredness as belonging to God, to the Idea, i.e. especially there, seems inconceivable, especially as a “happening”. The meaning seems to be that just therefore pictorial thinking supplies the “Fall” narrative as applied to the creature called “man”, as being what would otherwise be “an inconceivable happening”, namely, the Divine Being, taken first as “an indifferent objective fact”, becoming evil (or self-centred?). That “absolute Being and self-existent Self” can be separated occurs to figurative thinking, as possessing the real content, afterwards, Hegel stresses, wanting perhaps to explain the apparent contradiction of absolute monotheism involved. As it first appears, God’s self-emptying in being made flesh specifically, this figurative idea “is still immediate and not spiritual”. Here we need to recall his saying, negatively, that man is but the ground where good and evil meet. The assumed human form is not rightly viewed, that is, as “merely a particular form, not yet as a universal form” (my stress), such as, in any case, man actually is, biology or zoology notwithstanding. This idea only becomes spiritual when God, in the assumed “shape and form”, “surrenders again His immediate existence, and returns to his essential Being” as Spirit “reflected into itself”, that is to say, I would add, when the manhood is thus “taken into God” (“Athanasian Creed”). This is the true manner in which God ever becomes man or, it is the same, generates his own other.

23

The Phenomenology of Mind, Ch. VI, “Spirit”; C, Spirit Certain of Itself; c. Conscience: the “beautiful soul”: Evil and the forgiveness of it; 3, Evil and forgiveness (headings inserted by Baillie). The next introductory section, “Religion in General” (pp.683-694) is actually the summary and hinge on which the whole book and its system turn.

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The reconciliation of the Divine Being with its other as a whole, and specifically, with the thought of this other – evil – is thus presented here in a figurative way. (Baillie, p.776, the last four words translating “vorgestellt”)

So the evil in God, as we find, is still his other and that entirely, as he is this, his other, in close conciliation, as being Self. That this other is thought or idea is as true as that God is himself Idea and all, as identical with him, both distributively and as one, is idea as one with the Idea, with God. He does not “have” ideas, but by his truth nature and all things are one and system. Hegel continues: If this reconciliation is expressed conceptually, by saying it consists in the fact that evil is inherently the same as what goodness is, or again that the divine Being is the same as nature in its entire extent, just as nature separated from God is simply nothingness, - then this must be looked at as an unspiritual mode of expression which is bound to give rise to misunderstandings.

To understand this better the preceding three or four pages of his text must be read carefully (and frequently, until they are fully understood). In the identification of good and evil made here we find that both, evil in general as self-centred self-existence and goodness as self-less simplicity, “are really done away with”. Sincerity is as impossible (Sartre) as is the lie without truth (cf. Anselm: dialogue De veritate). Just as certainly, Hegel adds, they are “absolutely different”. Both theses must be insisted on together as “equally right”. We must not stick to the term “is”, again, and forget the character of thought as spirit, ever in process as or towards what it is not. “Their truth is just their movement”. In what is said here and following the fear is easily evoked that reality is being depicted as finally without grain, that we are back with the featureless Being at the beginning of the Logic. Now Being, as most universal concept, must, like the I, in its darkness knowing “nothing more outside it” (782), be featureless, but it will be found here to be featureless just as containing, and yet cancelling, all features conceivable (and hence conceived), such universal conception, necessarily, being in the mode of endless process and return to and from any one from and to its opposite and, indeed, all that is other. Both plenitude and emptiness eschew equally the partial and particular, whether by surpassing or shortfall. They are thus, then, in effect the same. This sameness, however, removes the sting from nothingness, as from death, shows how we could have confused them. Confusion, of course, is the opposite, the falsification, of identity. The darkness shall be my light, it was said. This is the two-sidedness of

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ideality, the strength made perfect in weakness, even. How does Hegel put it? But we might ask first if Hegel would deny that the beauty, say, of God, of the Idea, is greater or other than that of the sum total of his creatures. The question, given the system, is malformed, since every so-called creature is itself an idea identical with the Idea or, in traditional terms, with “the divine essence” as a whole. That is why, in the same thought, the individuality of any creature thus oned with the world falls away as never having been. They are rather garments, appearances that God takes on, to use an Old Testament figure. Each of my garments clothes me wholly, albeit putting me in that particular light. This helps to explain why nakedness or nudity is generally found, and proclaimed, innocent or unerotic. There must be some vestige, some appearance of the indwelling concrete spirit drawing us. As for the sameness in difference or difference in sameness of good and evil, each productive of contradiction, Hegel says that neither one has truth: “their truth is just their movement”, “simple sameness is abstraction and thus absolute distinction” (my stress). To abstract a true thing, since it is a quasi-surgical procedure, is to make it entirely false or different from itself, absolutely. This is Hegel’s conviction. Yet absolute distinction itself, he adds, with total consistency, as distinction per se “is distinguished from itself and so is self-identity”. This is no more than an analysis of the simple sameness mentioned, with which we can all agree. Where though does it get us, what have we found out? Precisely this is what we have in sameness of the Divine Being and nature in general and human nature in particular: the former is nature so far as it is not essential Being; Nature is Divine in its essential Being. But it is in Spirit that we find both abstract principles affirmed as they truly are, viz. as cancelled and preserved at once: and this way of affirming them cannot be expressed by the judgment, by the soulless word “is”, the copula of the judgment.

(p.777) Hegel seems to say the Divine Being is nature not as essential Being, but rather as this is in the Logic, in “the Doctrine of Being”. In Essence, however, in its essential Being, “Nature is divine”, though, again, “nature separated from God is simply nothingness”. Yet it is in Spirit, in the Doctrine of the Notion or Concept (third part of the Logic), that we “find both abstract principles affirmed as they truly are”, viz. identity and difference, in a manner eluding judgment. Hegel’s thought thus corresponds exactly to the adage: “This also is thou, neither is this thou”.

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Nature then “is nothing outside its essential Being”, nothing outside God; “but this nothing itself is all the same”. This is nothing other than what we have just been saying. It might be called Hegel’s version of the analogy of being, clearly something more now, as in Aquinas, than a “logical” being. It is a logical doctrine only in a somewhat extended sense. That is, he uses here the word “is” itself to overcome the ‘soulless word “is”’ that he mentions in both the previous and succeeding sentence, referring to the sense in which nothing is, something like the old ens rationis, again in a more ample sense, however, here where the rational notion is the finally real. The moments “are only the process which is Spirit”, where all (momentary) distinctions are transcended. This was known pictorially as an “atoning reconciliation” by an event, he writes. But now it, the unity, “is the universality of self-consciousness”, which thus is no longer figurative or pictorial, is itself the process, as “Spirit is its own community”, its actual life and being. Absolute religion, as it is now seen as, had prepared this by the “going away” in death of the Mediator, with his promise of coming again. “I will see you again”, not however at the end of time since time can have no end. The end, rather, in its own notion, is realised.24 There is no mere equivocation upon “end” here, as Geach and Anscombe both rather too hastily assumed, as if making some perspicacious discovery. This community, Hegel declares, is that of self-consciousness. This is the spiritual communion in community, of and for which, it is implied, the Church is both sign and preparation while being, in itself, nothing, the “not yet” of the actual Kingdom, though in a sense making of the temporal aspect a pure figure, as the Church must be itself the first to admit or, rather, proclaim. It, the community, is consumed, i.e. ingested but not destroyed, in the consuming of the bread of faith, overcoming the world with all that is in it, such as ecclesiastical buildings or giraffes indifferently, as “its own community”. Thus it “distinguishes itself from its figurative idea” (778) or, we might say, sacramental representation, as itself a representation, in incarnation, which makes really present, as thought is really present in the thinking man in his biological figure, again, product of nature as thought is not, not forgetting, however, how Hegel’s mediation inverts or reverses the immediate sense of this “really”. What was man escapes to his thought. Rather, in becoming it he escapes both 24

I know of no better account, for the present, of the Scriptural resurrection texts than that given by Herman Hendrickx in his The Resurrection of the Synoptic Gospels, Geoffrey Chapman: London 1984 (1978, East Asian Pastoral Institute, Manila).

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from language and, a fortiori, from biology. We have not here a dualism with all its problems of “souls”, interaction, infusion, transformism etc. “I shall not die but live and declare the works of the Lord”. I who shall not die am not some special part of myself. So the movement of this community as self-consciousness “consists in bringing out what has implicitly become established”. This cannot consist entirely in clarification of even the absolute religion, since it is declared to be (“as”) self-consciousness as such. The name “God” as naming a being, therefore, is necessarily bound to be dropped, to be universalised in the notion along with the notion of his Temple, neither in this place nor in any other, “in spirit and in truth” (John 4). The spiritual worship of God deobjectifies God himself and every other. This is not so different from the Jews’ own reverence for this unspeakable name. The Human God, implicitly universal self-consciousness, has to become this explicitly “for this self-consciousness”, the transcendent transcended in what is, in effect, the taking of man, the manhood, into God (as in the “Athanasian Creed”), of the finite not as being one with the infinite as in equal partnership but as absorbed into it (Enc. 95). In becoming God I become myself doubly nothing, dead to any life not “hidden in God”, in that ruin of abstract individuality which is love. This is the overcoming of idolatry upon which the God of Israel took his stand, in the blessing and uniting of “all the nations of the earth”. To know truth one has thus to know its whole method, which is not only logical. This method is identity and not synthesis. Reconciliation is effected in the overcoming of this very concept in its duality. And yet, since this self-consciousness “constitutes… the side of evil” (in figurative thought, i.e. evil itself is a figure, a moment, along with Good and Will, as the Logic shows), taking natural and individual existence as “the essential reality”, it has to “raise itself in and for itself to the level of spirit”, revealing the latter’s process, as merely its own Ground, in itself. This process, however, becomes a new idol if it is ever identified with some particular historical process, then called “history itself”. The process of history is the emergence of the Idea in its becoming known and nothing else, least of all the victory of the proletariat who, in its phenomenality, would then have nothing else to do, nothing to enjoy even. The Idea becomes known to itself, ultimately, which, this truth, in itself, cancels becoming and thus idealises history. Contemplation, philosophy, stands forever, beyond all distinction of now and later, or before. In this sense the end is realised not merely now but in every generation. Not even the Crusades, therefore, in their time, or the Third Reich, were absolutely a mistake, as Hegel has to admit. “Offences must come”. So must the

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fighting of them. This is not to make them less evil than they were but to acknowledge their finitude and consequent “ideality” (cp. Enc. 95), the final evil or “sham-being” in Hegel’s thought. They can only be and therefore only be thought in the Idea. Philosophy is alike the saviour and the salvation of men, though this need not be in every way patent to those whom it saves.25

Findlay speaks truly here, malgré lui, perhaps. He speaks of her whom Boethius imagined visiting him in his martyr’s death-cell, sophia as constantly feminised in the Old Testament “wisdom literature”. Hegel goes on from this (PS 777f.) to remark, surprisingly perhaps, that self’s entering into itself, already per se evil, consists “in persuading itself that natural existence is what is evil”. One had been thinking that it was! What is wrong though is seeing the world’s evil “as an actual fact” and not “ideal”. The atoning reconcilement, by or in the Absolute Being, is then “viewed as an actual existent phenomenon”, to repeat. For selfconsciousness, namely, this pictured form of truth is, as superseded, “merely a moment”. Hegel now sums this up in relation to the main points he has made and from which we so easily lapse in forgetfulness: for the self is the negative, and hence knowledge – a knowledge which is a pure act of consciousness within itself. This moment of the negative must in like manner find expression in the content. Since, that is to say, the essential Being is inherently and from the start reconciled with itself and is a spiritual unity, in which what are parts for figurative thought are sublated, are moments, what we find is that each part of figurative thought receives here the opposite significance to that which it had before. By this means each meaning finds its completion in the other, and the content is then and thereby a spiritual content. Since the specific determinateness of each is just as much its opposite, unity in otherness – spiritual reality – is achieved: just as formerly we saw the opposite meanings combine objectively (für uns), or in themselves, and even the abstract forms of “the same” and “not-thesame”, “identity” and “non-identity” cancelled one another and were transcended. (779)

The clarification next appended further expounds this negativity of the self. The essential Being “is inherently and from the start reconciled with itself and is a spiritual unity”. The self, meanwhile, is knowledge because of its being as “the negative”. Knowledge is the “pure act of consciousness 25 J.N. Findlay: The Philosophy of Hegel, Collier, New York 1966 (copyright 1958), p. 139.

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within itself”, its self-concentration or evil, as negative, what must be “hated” or moved on from as moment of the process which is spirit. Absolute Knowledge is the very method of this procession of moments towards spirit that is spirit. This is the Idea’s or God’s negativity, the “still, small voice”, which thus “brings to naught the things which are and exalts the things which are not” (St. Paul), as freedom in spirit. Spirit is thus not merely accidentally unsayable or ineffable. It is the peace that passes understanding, for this is what we should understand, the darkness of the I. This I asks why, or how, I am and receives here its answer. Reflection shows that no other answer, no objectification, is conceivable. If I must be that then this, this that is, is not. This is the negative basis for all shape, colour or personal distinction or beauty, the identity of all with all but only because each is identical with the Idea, all ideas being necessarily one with it in essence. “This also is thou, neither is this thou”. So, even for denying God an I is required, having absolute universality as its principle. Death here, “the non-existence of this individual”, “becomes transfigured into the universality of the spirit, which lives in its own communion, dies there daily, and daily rises again”. Hegel renders exactly here the spiritual character of the mass liturgy. Here “where one receives a thousand receives”, sumit unus sumunt mille.26 This is perhaps ironical in view of his stated opposition to it, in The Philosophy of Spirit, in its “realism”. The objectivity involved, however, need not be understood as objectification but rather as a necessary movement, hence also moment, in the process towards spiritual understanding, as alone real and true, of, here, the Eucharist and this is the sense of Hegel’s protest, his “Protestantism”. In heaven, the ultimate of the last Biblical “book”, the seer sees no temple., not even a “meeting-house” distinct from the Holy City in its entirety. So what dies here is “the abstraction of the Divine Being”. Spirit is not “the simple abstract element of thought” merely, but “concrete reality” and, just as such, “essential being”. Inmost self-knowledge “has simply self for its content” and so says, precisely of this abstraction, “God is dead”. In spiritualization “substance becomes subject”, even beyond life as now apparently lived, as substance. “For me to live is Christ, to die is gain”, the Apostle accordingly exclaims, inasmuch as Hegel is according with him, in the only possible account of this spiritual reality, this real spirituality. We have reached “universal self-consciousness”. Spirit is “Spirit knowing itself” and that alone, necessarily.

26 From a hymn of Thomas Aquinas composed for the then newly inaugurated feast of corpus Christi, the (eucharistic) body of Christ.

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This “unity of Essential Being and Self” is seen imaginatively only as “reconciliation”, as of two disparates. The temptation is to make the pure negativity positive by external addition, in thought. Hegel cites Krishna elsewhere. The “opposition of a beyond” is set up, corresponding to the picture of a reconciliation achieved in the beyond or behind, rather, of the past as like the or an “actual mother”, herself immaculately conceived maybe. But just as, in contrast to this “only actual” mother, the “individual divine man” has an “implied” (essential, an sich) father only, so, universal as is the spiritual communion (not merely the “religious” communion), he, i.e. this communion, “has as its father its own proper action and knowledge”, but as its mother “eternal Love”, an abidingly determinative feature of spirit, within as without indifferently. Without love we, I, are or am nothing. As made nothing we would be nothing made, vernichtet in idea. So if we say, of the community, “its reconciliation is in its heart”, as if of two sundered elements, we fall short of spiritual reality, where all is achieved, realised, and end is thus beginning, is being, that is to say, with which science “must begin”. What is here still merely implicit, therefore, is made explicit in absolute knowledge, of religion as of anything and everything else. “This is eternal life, to know God”, inclusive of its mediation by the method, also, of “Jesus Christ whom he has sent”. Hegel is able also to explain this supplementary phrase found added to the Gospel affirmation of eternal life here. However, “have we known Christ after the flesh we know him so no more”, having found ourselves within the spiritual communion. What remains? The time is short. Let us “use the world as though we used it not”, use it as not using it, “whether we live or die”, as seeing through these phenomena, since this alone means using it to the full and not abstractly merely or “piece by piece”. Every phenomenon, after all, is but an appearance of itself, of its appearing, ad infinitum, otherwise contingency would be part of that necessity proved from it, in a circularity of “sham-being”.

CHAPTER NINE THE OBJECT

The Object is immediate being, because insensible to difference, which in it has suspended itself. It is, further, a totality in itself, while at the same time (as this identity is only the implicit identity of its dynamic elements) it is equally indifferent to its immediate unity. It thus breaks up into distinct parts, each of which is itself the totality. Hence the object is the absolute contradiction between a complete independence of the multiplicity, and the equally complete non-independence of the different pieces. (Enc. 194)

On the one hand, Being1, the beginning (of science), is still with us in this new form (as object). On the other, we are not at the End (telos, 204), immediately Inner Design (teleology), as third form, after Mechanism and Chemism, of objectivity as explaining the Object. For finally the End, as will show itself, is the Idea, the character of which, as of all thought, is Freedom (158) as “the truth of Necessity” (147). Thus as explicit and not merely implicit, as in this category of the Object, the Substance is itself disclosed as, has indeed “become”, dialectically, subject and Idea. This is not just a making our terminology more precise, still less is any “quip” involved. It is an investigation of “the ontology of logical forms” (Henry Veatch) by thought’s naturally instrumental (organic) reflection upon itself. This is what being finally is or be-s, which the category of Existence, like that of Thing, Hegel had found too “poor” to characterise. In this sense “God is not being; God is freedom” (Berdyaev: in his Spirit and Reality). This is what the author of the passage cited, Hegel, has in mind. He is thus offering an explanation of explanation, what it is, after having earlier neutralised the idea of it as a giving of grounds, since, as belonging to the notion of Ground, any ground will do for this. There (121 and add.) he had Leibniz in mind, to whose thought he here (Enc. 194) explicitly returns, saying that this definition of the Absolute as the Object (each category is in turn a definition of the Absolute and therefore false precisely 1 In this chapter, discussing the Encyclopaedia text, I follow the Wallace translation in regard to its highlighting Hegel’s category-names in bold type.

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as bounding, de-fining, the ab-solute or unbounded) “is most definitely implied in the Leibnizian Monad” (194). But whereas in Leibniz’s theory each monad is itself the whole while remaining forever separate (“contradiction in its complete development”) the truth is that each atom, self or subject is one with all those other selves or subjects it conceives, as they conceive it, are one or identical in their superseded difference. “I live yet not I” is the rule, the truth, of Spirit, in “the ruin of the individual”, since in fact “Individual and actual are the same thing” and thus each as not being the other is some third thing which will disclose itself as absorbing both, this being the rule of Logic in its perfected form, wherein again, however, it will transcend itself to Spirit, the Absolute. Hegel confirms the doctrine that God or the Absolute is Spirit and speaks of “the phenomenon of individual existence (Enc. 224, my stress). Note, however, that it is the object itself that it is the object itself, this category, and not merely Leibniz’s philosophy, that is “the absolute contradiction”, namely that “between a complete independence of the multiplicity, and the equally complete non-independence of the different pieces” (194). * There follows an addition (Zusatz) to the paragraph 194, one of those “valuable excerpts from Hegel’s lectures” with which the Encyclopaedia almost doubles its length and loses its character as “an outline”. I see no reason to neglect or belittle these additions, which “lend lucidity and life” to the whole (Findlay) as being indeed part of it, though calling the main paragraphs “desiccated” (Findlay) does not really help us and is even frivolous or abstract. For not only is style inseparable from content. Equally, content determines style. This “mutual revulsion” of Form and Content (133) is “one of the most important laws of thought” and nothing less than our liberation from textual materialism, from “the letter”. This process in fact governs this investigation as one of what Reading is. This itself is the investigation of the Object here, leading from the materialist literalism of Mechanism and Chemism to the freedom of realised (210) End as Inner Design (204). The above-mentioned “absolute revulsion” (151), however, only becomes explicit (in The Doctrine of Essence) when considering Substance and Causality as two relations that are one. “Substance is Cause” (152). The identity of the latter’s supposed independence with its dependence on the Effect “ is the absolute content itself; but it is no less also the form characteristic” (as diffusivum sui?). As always, with this particular identity Hegel is firstly speaking of or “referencing” what he calls God, the Idea, which, though it may create

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“more beings”, cannot be said, in logic, to create more Being, as might a finite or “ideal” cause, lacking all self-representation in self-knowing, He is speaking of the Absolute Idea, this being the business of Logic as he expounds it, “the form of the world”. In general, the “form-characteristics” of style or language (itself a style) belong to the “ideal” sphere of the finite as the content, thinking, which in one motion uncovers and supplies form, does not (159). God’s manifestation, “creation”, “incarnation”, is to and for self as constituting it. Hegel is thoroughly Scotist here, the felix culpa merely supplying the occasion of “what was (ever) to be”, as essence (Aristotle’s definition of this). Yet culpa itself, he makes clear, is but the finitude set up (24, add.), and so we reach his “unspiritual” affirmation that there is evil in God, after some fashion requiring further delineation, we may feel bound to add (The Phenomenology of Mind, chapter “Revealed Religion”). As Fichte in modern times has especially and with justice insisted, the theory which regards the Absolute or God as the Object and there stops, expresses the point of view taken by superstition and slavish fear. No doubt God is the Object, and indeed the Object out and out… (Enc. 194, add.)

Hegel is not going to stop here, however, since he is here deconstructing the Object as such, as being but a passing moment, within which, however, “God is the Object… out and out”. But God, he goes on, is not the Object abstractly, any more than the Absolute is abstract. Object taken thus is itself a finite and therefore false category. All the categories are false: there is a kind of agreement between Hegel and Kant here. Yet It is no less false to imagine the Idea to be mere abstraction. It is abstract certainly, in so far as everything untrue is consumed in it: but in its own self it is essentially concrete, because it is the free notion giving character to itself, and that character, reality. It would be an abstract form, only if the notion, which is its principle, were taken as an abstract unity, and not as the negative return of it into self and as the subjectivity which it really is. (213)

The absolute object, rather, is a kind of opposite of the abstract and hence finite object. God, as infinite, therefore, says Hegel, does not, and he means logically cannot, “take up the position of a dark and hostile power over against subjectivity. He rather involves it as a vital element in Himself”, like anything else intrinsically susceptible of infinite elevation, such as happiness or health but not like any determinate quality, such as a colour or mood. I can become ever more irritable, or evil, or red, but such quantified qualities do not reach the infinity of thought, or are examples of

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the “bad infinite” rather, piling sin on sin without ever reaching an ultimate end or true self-realisation, as Aquinas says of evil, which is just therefore semper in subjecto, always in a subject itself good. In this sense Hegel speaks of it too as “in” the good God, as being first in the good, namely. Being or the good, however, are perfectly themselves and this is the very definition of happiness, which thus has the character of a formality. Doubtless one must then distinguish its presence “in” God from how it is identified with some projected angelic or other being proceeding from God. As finite these are anyway all evil when abstractly or not ideally considered. Hegel, that is, is concerned, in true orthodox or antiManichean spirit, to demystify or “de-demonise” evil. It cannot be any absolute principle over against God. Hegel explains the absolute divine will for the good of men in accordance with what we have just said, such that “the blessedness of men is attained when they come to feel themselves at one with God, so that God, on the other hand, ceases to be for them mere object” (Enc. 194 add.). This feeling or subjective sense of unity with the absolute is the latter’s own vital involvement of and in that sense. Mind naturally passes to, as never leaving, the absolute point of view. The judging faculty itself, its freedom, is nothing other than this. Hegel here calls this overcoming of this antithesis, between subject and object, Love. Some Hegelians would put this as final category, in place of the Method, as one with the final Idea. An example of this was McTaggart, an atheist, whereas Hegel, the Christian, finds love implicitly included in Cognition and the Idea, as can be seen especially in the Greater Logic, end chapter. There the Idea “has personality” and, as such, is “impenetrable a-tomic subjectivity” (Hegel’s equivalent to the divine incomprehensibility of Aquinas and the tradition?), universality and itself knowing (Erkennen). This is ever first cousin to love in inclination to the known in this very knowing. In its other it makes its own subjectivity object. “All else is error”. “Only the absolute idea is being, life and all truth”. McTaggart could have found closeness enough to Love, though it is not mentioned explicitly, in this. God, Hegel says, has revealed himself as “a man amongst men, and thereby redeemed them”. Instead of explaining this theological metaphor of redemption, usually explained via the concept of grace, he says it is “only another way of saying that the antithesis of subjective and objective is implicitly overcome”. We “participate” in this “by laying aside our immediate subjectivity”, the same as “putting off the old Adam” (194 add.), Hegel does not hesitate to remind us. In this we are “learning to know God as our true and essential self” (my stress). Now we may take this as equivalent either to affirming or denying God, here identified as

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what at least appears as something else, an aspect, namely, of the Absolute Idea. Hegel’s view, in fact, is that God is above ex-istence, to use a spatial metaphor. The latter is a “poor” category, as is taught under “Essence”, by no means yielding the final idea of Being, as does the Idea (die Idee sich… somit in die Unmittelbarkeit des Seins zusammennimmt… das einfache Sein, zu dem sich die Idee bestimmt, bleibt ihr vollkommen durchsichtig (Wissenschaft der Logik [WL], final paragraph). Hegel here gives a theology, which as true is philosophy, of “creation” as Äusserlichkeit, which only is “in the mode of the abstract immediacy of being”. Yet in the Idea just this remains (bleibt) the whole concept and science of the divine (göttlichen) knowledge of Nature. This self-exteriorisation is the Concept’s own free self-mediation back out of it into its own exclusive, this time trans-categorial, Existenz, into that Science (philosophy) of Spirit with which, as through its own self, both its own liberty and Hegel’s finitely systematic exposition of it are fulfilled or completed. The outside is the inside, as “incarnation” fulfils all religion, makes it “our affair” (Enc. 194, add.). This, I conceive, is what Marx, as a finite and ideal individual himself “ruined” nonetheless, as are all individuals taken alone, wished to say. So Hegel here denies himself as feeling himself, on that condition, “one with God”, as we reported above, thus known as “our true and essential self”. What could be clearer? Marx, nonetheless, by Hegel’s own principles, with Nietzsche following, succeeded negatively upon him, while now, or a little before now, Wittgenstein and Heidegger compete or coalesce in worked out absorption and synthesis (Aufhebung) and now I, universal of universals, and hence, relative to here and now, final arbiter, write this. But one more worthy is coming, as always, after me who was and is before me. Hear him, or could it be her, philosophia namely, consolatrix? Some Cambridge academics (“philosophers”) tried, through shameful recourse to a public newspaper, to get Derrida, who was philosophy today in his day, yesterday, declared non grata, not part of the “great chain” of philosophy. Hegel too is still similarly dismissed, in some quarters, as “peculiar”, his system “not controlled or even disturbed by the existence of logic” (Smith and/or Burkhardt, co-editors of A Handbook of Metaphysics and Ontology, Munich 1990, Introduction), though he in fact extensively discusses this existence in his own continuation of logica docens under the heading of “The Subjective Concept” (Enc. 163-193), using the Aristotelian form of the three instruments (organa) of the understanding specifically. So who is “peculiar” here? *

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It is indeed most striking that Hegel says that “all” of “the Christian doctrine”, i.e. its meaning, is “only” something. It is only “another way of saying that the antithesis of subjective and objective is implicitly overcome” (Enc. 194 add.). Implicit here though, as we may fail to see, is that it is explicitly overcome in philosophy. Hegel’s theology, that is, as distinct from his Scriptural exegesis, is philosophy, at the same time as we find him asserting, with Aristotle, that true or “first” philosophy is theology, thus silencing any identification of reduction, of difference, with deconstruction. The whole history of religious or mystical advance is one of the Idea’s own deconstruction of the momentary notions men or groups of men, or the Idea itself, rather, have formed either of God, or more generally, of what has been revealed to them, not excluding but rather necessitating reflection upon the limits of these two terms, determinative of theology as a separate discipline or controlled activity, namely God and revelation. Hegel has in part achieved this through his seeing the identity in re, or his making it indifferently, of these two terms, God and revelation, with one another, in order to yield, by the triadic rule, absolute knowledge.2 Religion, that is, brings philosophy to birth or fosters it. Hence the periodic need of these two, parent and child, to persecute one another, while art, the grandparent, would remain in its hoariness outside the fray, comparatively. The artist, however, always needs a philosophy and just thereby he or she gets involved, or they involve themselves, periodically again, in the familial strife, as do Dante, Shelley or Blake, as do Beethoven or Modigliani. The difference is, though, that a parent persecuting his child demeans himself while the child’s rebellious immaturity, even issuing in great crimes, cannot demean him as child. Here, of course, I am viewing the parent, philosophy, as coming after the child only as having been before it. Philosophy therefore gently rebukes “the religious party” as in duty bound to gratitude to it as “the perfect Gottesdienst”. With philosophy, reached explicitly, the child himself becomes parent, in “turn and turn about”. Thus the Jews, Israel, were only “a nation of philosophers” (Porphyry) implicitly or in voto.

2

Thus it was that after the systems, taken immediately as consciously atheistic, of Sartre and Heidegger had appeared the German Thomist Joseph Pieper remarked that “once again” one could taste the salt of theology upon one’s tongue. One might only add that Hegel’s message is that this is how philosophy anywhere tastes, it tastes theological, as was obscurely felt, though not at first acknowledged, in the excitement first generated by the fitful phenomenon of Wittgenstein at Cambridge.

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So religion and “worship” consist in overcoming the antithesis and just so do “science too and philosophy have no other task than to overcome this antithesis by the medium of thought”. That is the central importance of this section on the Object, whereby we pass from Mechanism via Chemism, i.e. not in equal measure but in a mediate advance, to Teleology and the telos, after which we can say “It is accomplished”, tetelestai, the last word (in Greek or Latin translation, it is surely implied) from the mystic tree3 or Cross, consummatum est. Thus, I mean to say, Hegel, the theological and Biblical student willy-nilly, is undoubtedly conscious of applying this saying, in the sense of unveiling its profound meaning, in writing (at Enc. 212, add.) that “the End has been really secured”, not, “in the end”, by this means so much as in itself, as the representational narrative indicates or implies, again. So we continue to “divest the objective world that stands opposed to us of its strangeness” in the overcoming of all distance of discipline in realised freedom, as love at once fulfils and abrogates the law, to cite a purely philosophical proposition more frequently found in religious writing. In fact, though, both art and religion, as forms of absolute spirit, are implicit philosophy. It thus lies hidden, as a slumbering giant, in the more obedientially naïve forms of Christian proclamation (kerygma), the implicit explicit. This, says Hegel, “means no more” (is only another way of saying?) “than to trace the objective world back to the notion, - to our innermost self” (my stress). Subjectivity and objectivity “are wholly dialectical”. Hegel gives us the discipline of subjectivity. Hence he is regarded, in confusion of discipline with objectivity itself confused, as undisciplined (free of the finite academic discipline, as philosophy must be, if we are to avoid “institutional double-truth”4), “not controlled or even disturbed by the existence of logic”, write Burkhardt and Smith (see above) in their undisciplined forgetfulness, which is concealment, of Hegel’s precise 3

We should be conscious, as Hegel was, of the Biblical typology. The tree of wood, mystically, is indeed, tree of life just in being tree of death, as it is written of that earlier tree, whether of knowledge or of life (don’t ask which, the point is the tree as common factor), “On the day you eat thereof you shall surely die”. Death, however, Hegel writes and reasons, is itself the entry into spirit, an Idea that life, as finite idea, only immediately represents. So the tree, we can add, prolonging the typological mode, stands (as trees all stand) for the dialectic, “whereon the death of death was wrought, and conquering grace’s battle fought”. Hot stuff indeed, and not to be sniffed at! 4 See my The End of the Law, Chapter Six, “Hypothetical Morality and Institutional Double-Truth”, Peeters, Louvain, 1999, pp.67-70.

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treatment, in the form of logica docens, of precisely formal logic. Despite this we may add, all the same, that the social circumstances of the occupation of an academic chair at a time of Enlightenment prestige naturally gave to Hegel’s expression of an essentially mystico-theological thinking a certain discreetness which was never dishonesty. The case is similar with that of mystics themselves. So Hegel compares philosophy with mysticism as two varieties, which must yet be one, of speculative reason, when writing under the social constraints of an established religious system. It is the subjective notion, concept, that objectifies itself, Hegel writes here, by “its own action”, even “in obedience to” it, an obedience wholly internal or to self, however. This is the “process” of the object itself as moment, itself, of the notion, of the Idea ultimately, to which indeed it thus processes as not having left it. It is only after saying these things about Objectivity that Hegel identifies its three forms as Mechanism, Chemism and Teleology. How so? As a preliminary he gives us his final analysis, as so often. Thus, the mechanical object is “immediate and undifferentiated”, the “different pieces” are “without affinity”, only “extraneously connected”, in denial or ignorance, a scholastic would say, of “the analogy of being” which holds all together in one system. In chemism, contrariwise, “an essential tendency to differentiation” is exhibited or discovered because disclosed. Differentiation stands here for (other-)relation. Relatedness, now emerging, is based upon “this tendency to difference”. What is different, it is here seen, is what is not differentiated! In chemism, however, the objects are each “what they are only by their relation to each other”, as in the Christian Trinity, one should note, if wishing to keep Hegel’s thought as a whole in mind, as he himself will certainly have done. The third form, teleology, “is the unity of mechanism and chemism”, it really is, though this may not immediately appear. Hegel immediately names it Design (anticipating 204). It is of course true that there being an end implies design, be it subjective or objective design, as design implies an end in view. This “in view” refers to the Idea, as personal since viewing. This is much more than being “ensouled”. The Idea is rather allconsuming spirit itself, whether computing or decreeing (designing) or both. This design, Hegel says, “like the mechanical object is a selfcontained totality”. This design, that is, is what, under teleology, we are now considering, while within mechanism or chemism, allowing only “pieces” related by affinity merely, we could not so consider it. The lovers can see one another but not their relation. They must proceed to design,

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become philosophers, in a word. They will not lose their love thereby but quite the opposite. This totality, Hegel hardly need have added, is “enriched by the principle of differentiation which came to the fore in chemism”. Of course it is. So, however, he inspiredly deduces, design “refers itself to the object that stands over against it”. We “see the world in a grain of sand” or the atom (though we may discount the materialist analogy implied here, as being precisely an analogy5), the part as the whole, which is the very essence of the notion (160, 161) as, indeed, it is the notion of the essence. This “realisation of design”, by which he means its being realised as the accomplished truth, i.e. he keeps to the original philological sense of realisation as making to be a res, which is different from illegitimate “reification”, “forms the transition to the Idea”. Here we are as if carried sleeping over a frontier from the materialism of “scientific realism”, as first or rather second “attitude of thought to objectivity”, into absolute idealism. The frontier we thus entitle ourselves to leave out of immediate consideration, though Hegel acknowledges a source of his Inner Design category in Kant’s “resuscitation” of it (from Aristotle, however), is rather “the critical philosophy” than it is the diversions associated with Jacobi’s thinking (the “third attitude”) from which Hegel, at the proper place, found it necessary to dissociate himself. The Wallace translation, as we noted, follows by an implicit principle the rule of printing the actual categories, and they alone, in heavy type, whereas the German texts often differentiate them by rather using doublespacing of the letters of the words concerned, while yet using the same convention to emphasise terms in general even when not necessarily actual Hegelian categories. We find here in the Wallace, anyhow, that the socalled three forms of Objectivity first named in an addition (to 194), viz. Mechanism, Chemism, and Teleology, are not the categories concerned per se. Rather, I surmise, these forms are derived from the categories. These, if we accept the convention, would be Formal Mechanism, Mechanism with Affinity and, thirdly, Absolute Mechanism. So there is no category, it would seem, of Mechanism simply denominated. Would it be fanciful to interpret this as the denial of a place for material or materialist (as opposed to formal) mechanism? Nor is there a category, by this scheme, called Chemism. Instead we have Affinity (199), in the Wallace text but not in at least the latest

5

Compare Hegel’s discriminatory remarks on ancient atomism in the earlier sections of the Logic.

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German texts6. This is distinguished therefore, in Wallace’s translation, from Mechanism with Affinity. Similarly, there is no category of teleology but, rather, End (telos). One might find an analogy with Heidegger’s distinguishing of being and beings, of ontic and ontological. Before End, however, we find (201) in heavy type, as “product of the chemical process”, the name Neutral (as qualifying “object”), which Hegel explains in terms of his immediately previous analysis of syllogistic, relating it to the mean or middle term as uniting the respective “bias” of any two objects or exploiting the affinity just mentioned. After End, as generating and generated by it, comes Inner Design, mentioned above, leading straight on to Idea, between which and End there is no other category listed as mediating, though the usual opposition of means, described as “objectivity made directly subservient to purpose”, and End(s) is gone through in detail. It would seem impossible to make sense of this typographical and thus far mechanical (!) phenomenon without recourse to some sort of ranking of the categories with respect to one another which would need to be more exhaustive than what Hegel himself gives us and such as was attempted by McTaggart in his A Commentary on Hegel’s Logic (1910)7, which distinguishes five grades of importance among them. The value of such recourse, however, must remain uncertain until one has made careful comparison of this translator’s praxis with the original text of, in this present case, the Encyclopaedia in, an added complication, its various versions. * Our analysis, above, of the final paragraph of the addition to Enc. 194, in a measure anticipates the extended treatment Hegel now gives to these three forms of Objectivity (or of mechanism). We should keep in mind, also, to mention it once more, that Hegel specifically prefaces the whole Logic, in the later Encyclopaedia version we have here, with a fifty-page 6

E,g, Hauptwerke in sechs Bänden, 6, Felix Meiner Verlag, Hamburg, p.199: So ist das Objekt als in seiner Existenz gegen sein Anderes different zu setzen (if we apply Wallace’s convention, who, however, has “not-indifferent”, rather, as paraphrasing his interpretative “Affinity”). 7 It is a peculiarity of this title that it does not refer to a commentary on a text, since Hegel’s logic is set forth in at least two texts, neither of which is named (though WL, called GL, is mainly followed). It must therefore be taken as a commentary, or a reflection, rather, on Hegel’s actual thinking (of course as recorded for us) and all the more valuable for that.

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(paragraphs 26 to 78) section on the three “attitudes of thought to objectivity”, distinct, of course, from these three “forms”. Hegel distinguishes, namely, the “attitudes” of realism, more or less naïve, of empiricism and “the critical philosophy” as final form of empiricism plus, finally, that of “immediate or intuitive knowledge” (Jacobi). Although “the concrete formations of consciousness, such as individual and social morality, art and religion” are just what are distinguished from but yet presupposed, as existent and even as “forms of absolute spirit” preliminary to (philosophical) knowledge, it is this knowledge itself which finally takes the place of or supplants that Objectivity to which, as Object, thought at first assumes an “attitude”. The Idea, that is, “is the absolute unity of the notion and objectivity”, “is truth in itself and for itself” (213), while objectivity itself retains a taint of the original naivety.8 The whole topic of mechanism receives fuller treatment, though of a more material kind, later on, in The Philosophy of Nature section of the Enyclopaedia, namely, a reading of which can further illuminate what is set forth here, where it is our thinking and its knowledge that is “said to be mechanical” (Enc. 195). For this Formal Mechanism the object (of thought) is the notion or idea “only potentially”, since the latter is “subjective” and “primarily outside” the object. This imposition “from without” makes of the “unity of differents” that is our thought “a composite, an aggregate”. This characteristic, moreover, remains a property of any expression controlled by the tongue, i.e. of any language, the successive words and the phonemes within the words inevitably falsely representing or picturing the unity or non-successiveness of the thought intended thereby. This intension as enabling mental intention is denied, often along with the mental itself, by what in the twentieth century called itself the extensionalist account and school of logic and, hence, of philosophy. It was, however, an expression of this formal mechanism, this moment of thought, merely. In a mechanical relation one object acts externally on another, just as we found it in Hegel’s presentation of ancient or philosophical atomism. 8

This essay, Drei Stellungen des Gedankens zur Objektivität, originally scarcely seventeen pages long, was prepared for publication and amplified by Leopold von Henning with additions taken from student copies, or rather notes, of Hegel’s slowspoken lectures so as to form part of this expanded version of the first part of the Encyclopaedia. It appeared thus in Werke, Bd. 6, Berlin 1840, pp. 61-162, the second edition of the Encyclopaedia from 1827. Thus Karl Löwith can say it was conceived as an introduction to the earlier Science of Logic. See the Nachweise to Hegel Studienausgabe 3, which includes this essay, from Fischer Bücherei, Frankfurt 1968.

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Any agglomeration of such indifferent units, therefore, can form one object. It is quantity without delimitation. Objectivity is itself object, therefore, at this stage. Applied to knowledge, this is “said to be mechanical or by rote, when the words have no meaning for us, but continue external to sense, conception, thought”. So we might equally say that this is said to be knowledge when we consider this particular “formation of consciousness” as a way of behaviour. Hegel indeed proceeds straightaway to behaviour in just this connection, citing, as mechanical, conduct or piety determined by laws, which he qualifies as “ceremonial”, whether outward or inward, or by an external “spiritual adviser”. We might go further and apply this category of finitude to conduct itself whenever abstracted, in our thought, from thought and thinking contemplation, of which such action could be viewed as a lower variety, given that, conversely, “thought (theoria) is the highest praxis” (Aristotle), recalling now Hegel’s polemic against the assignment of “force” to mind absolutely considered, to deity. Here a category of Love as accomplishing all things in the abolition of Inward and Outward (Enc. 138-141) would find place (it does not, in Hegel, but see 159), where mind and will are in one’s so-called actions, which thus cease to be “extraneous” (195), are themselves “act”, it follows. Thus he relates this first form of objectivity (mechanism) to our first attitude of thought to objectivity. As logical, however, the form rather coincides with or returns to this latter. This, Formal Mechanism, is, indeed, “the category which primarily offers itself to reflection” when viewing “the objective world” as we first conceive it to be. Many go no further, though it is “shallow and superficial” as a “mode of observation”, precluding both Nature and Mind from us, Hegel says in effect. In both natural science and psychology (anthropology) adhesion to the paradigm of mechanical law obscures clear perception and understanding. Hegel’s example here is the division of man into soul and body as two self-subsistent “things”, “associated only from without”, like the supposed forces and faculties within the soul itself, confirming what we said above about the indifferent delimitation of objects, thus themselves become extremes of subjectivity. Thus Hegel transforms the mechanism of Kantian duty itself into the assimilation of all action, as duty, into worshipful contemplation, thus vindicating after all the Beautiful Soul (see final chapter, “Absolute Knowledge”, of PS, Baillie, p.795). So “the mechanical mode of inquiry” may not “arrogate to itself the place of rational cognition in general” as if absolute. It is not an absolute category (there is no such thing) but “a general logical category”. But this is precisely why one may not “restrict it to the special physical department

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from which it derives its name”, as theology is named from God. Hegel in fact consistently distinguishes physics, where it is most extensively applied and appealed to, from mechanics proper. The laws of mechanism, however, are here not final or decisive but occupy “a subservient position”, a judgment that our contemporary physics has in its development confirmed. Still, in nature itself, as distinct from logic, mechanism takes over wherever the form loses its hold on the matter, in the various “forms” of decay and decomposition, as we say, and this extends to “the world of Mind”, whenever we abstract mere memory, for example, which we then call mechanical, as we might reading, writing or playing an instrument. The mechanical is indeed essential to memory, though not as explaining it or as what should be further studied in such a psychological investigation. So at Enc. 196, in highly speculative mode, Hegel points out that liability to “pressure and impact” (195), as “want of stability”, presupposes “a certain stability” (as poverty presupposes a measure of wealth, the early “Franciscan” problem). Only through this lack of independence does the object “close with itself” or become independent. But what negatives this “outwardness” of any such object to the other objects ad infinitum is what Hegel now calls Centrality, naming this category in parenthesis as “subjectivity”, meaning that this independence forms “a negative unity with itself”. Here “Each thing is itself and not another thing”, in Bishop Butler’s words, with which G.E. Moore, during an anti-Hegelian moment, he himself mired in this logical mechanism, was so entranced. Hegel universalises subjectivity, and hence consciousness just here, however. There is a parallel with the Scholastic extension of appetitus to “rocks and stones and trees”. Hegel recapitulates this too in his account of gravity, in nature (EN), as love (mentioned above), or, in the doctrine of being, of the mutually simultaneous attraction and repulsion of atoms, which is mirrored here, the unifying thread being speculative logic, embodied (and not merely instanced) in nature, affirmed as spirit. Again, the Scholastic parallel or pre-vision is the “analogy of being”. Yet, in the thrust of Hegelian thought, I am analogous to you if and only if “I am you” (Daniel Kolac), as I “ideally” am (Enc. 95), every part of the notion being identical with the whole notion (160, 161) and hence, ultimately, with any other part, this being the basis for that sympathy of love once identified as “the analogy of being”, without which “all things would fall apart” (Aquinas).9 9

This does not leave our or, supremely, Hegel’s notion of history untouched. Yet we find theologians even of the stamp of Rahner or Küng neurotically insisting that we must admit change in God, the eternal, the immutable. Küng, actually in his study of Hegel (and the incarnation), suggests that “historicity” be declared a transcendental metaphysical predicate, along with being, one, good and true. He

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As such, then, “the object itself has direction and reference to the external”. This is its negativity. Yet this is true of every other external object too, which is thus identically referred back. So each “has its centrality in the other”, concludes Hegel in a somewhat enthymematic move. The point is, though, that each couldn’t have its centrality without the other thus equally doing so. The centre then is everywhere. We have reached, as if without noticing, Mechanism with Affinity, and are on the way to “chemism” and teleology and the Idea. This affinity names a bias or subjective difference. It is yet, in this difference as condition, my affinity to you before you become an alter ego (the model for alter Christus in theology, where, however, the originary Christus is already alter to what he is one with). The beginning, as being, like and as the centre, is omnipresent, thus cancelling, in intimate contradiction of mechanism’s supposed extensionality, all mere ubiquity, as found, with differences, in the four elements of ancient physics. For this, the dialectic, is metaphysics, newly unveiled relative to its previous moments. So Hegel himself mentions gravitation and appetite here, along with “social instinct” and an intriguing “et cetera” (Wallace’s “&c”.). In general, however, we are dealing here with a metaphysico-logical category, not restricted “to the special physical department from which it derives its name”. This relationship, says Hegel of affinity, “forms a syllogism”, and in fact the two terms, relation and affinity, are scarcely distinguishable in Hegel’s own texts. He speaks, in discussing Ratio and Measure, of Wahlverwandtschaft and, here and under chemism, more generally of Verwandtschaft. Goethe, in writing as a novelist of human loverelationships, had, a decade or so previously (1807), used for his title the first, more specific term (often translated as Elective Affinities), in conscious chemical analogy, while Findlay situates human love of this “elective” kind precisely under Hegelian chemism.

thus, through a particular “interest”, which he need not have harboured, knowingly or unknowingly misrepresents Hegel at his most essential. If history were to be such a transcendental predicate, in this Scholastic sense, it would be precisely as having been conceptually sublated, as indeed time itself, at the end of the Phenomenology of Mind and elsewhere, along with the moment of Nature herself (cf. Enc. 50 on “the world”), is simply nullified. The consequent reshaping thus required of theology, still awaiting her new Athanasius, must have appeared, in preconception at least, too arduous.

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In that syllogism the immanent negativity, as the central individuality of an object, (abstract centre,) relates itself to non-independent objects, as the other extreme, by a mean which unites the centrality with the nonindependence of the objects, (relative centre). (Enc. 197)

This, Hegel says, is, as third variety of it, Absolute Mechanism. The wrong individuality of non-independent objects in which formal Mechanism is at home, is, by reason of that non-independence, no less universality, though it be only external. (198)

This is the Object’s “insensibility to difference” (194), “whereby it breaks up into distinct parts, each of which is itself the totality”. Leibniz’s implied falling short lay in his stopping here, thus “representing”, however, “contradiction in its complete” or abstract “development”. Hegel’s thought, in “family resemblance”, would appear clearly dependent upon this historical antecedent nonetheless, Kant forming rather the negative moment in this particular triad. This wrong individuality, of things or persons, is what he later says is “ruined” in and by philosophy (213). “The individual by itself does not correspond to its notion”. This is what Marxism and all the later totalitarianisms one-sidedly imbibed. These objects, the yet purely ideal individuals, form the mean between absolute and relative centrality, “kept asunder… by this want of independence” though they, the absolute and the relative (centrality), are as well “related to one another”. The absolute, that is, is related to the relative! This relationship, though, is the final Aufhebung. Compare here 215: “the infinite overlaps and includes the finite, thought overlaps being, subjectivity overlaps objectivity” (my stress). In this it is to be distinguished, he says, from the “one-sided infinity to which it descends in judging and defining”. They will not form part of Cognition, therefore. A one-sided infinity would not seem distinguishable from a Hegelian “bad” infinite. So in writing this, for example, we are “descending”, as in con-descending. Absolutely or as with God, identified by Hegel as (absolute) spirit, there is “only one word” animating the restfully seething silence and that is self in its multi-faceted manifestation as “full of eyes”, each eye necessarily seeing whole as itself manifesting self again. The mirror image, which is the image of the mirror, stands for all seeing, seeing all.10 Attachment to it, one might say, would be, by a figure of speech, the superior wisdom of women, as representing a 10 In McTaggart’s derivative system this is called, obscurely, “determining correspondence”.

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universalised quality, rather than the ruin of Narcissus, put as masculine, the groping proto-Hegelian thinker. The woman, or indeed any man, errs in this act of self-admiration or looking but only when the person doubts his beauty in its spiritual quality here reflected. The mirror, that is, stands for itself as truth’s own reflected form, the absolute related to the relative, again. Maybe “the man who looks at himself does not shine” (Chinese proverb), yet the mirror governs all other-relatedness, equally for the one related to, in an actually infinite reciprocity which, McTaggart argues, only persons, as universal unities, as rational, can or could, indifferently, sustain. Absolute centrality, the third of these syllogisms embodying the syllogism of absolute mechanism, as illustrated (in nature?) by universal gravity, as of necessity, “as pure negativity”, including and thus ruining the individual within it, mediates the relative centre with the nonindependent objects, necessarily become a plurality although each remains the universal unity in its centrality. This is the disintegration of objectivity into mutual solipsism, conscious or unconscious. We see it reflected, prefigured rather, in animal consciousness. Every animal, unless tamed, would consume the world if it could. Witness also the psychopathic selfishness of children, traced back, by M. Klein, to the pre-natal stage of life. This mutuality supplies, all the same, as universal and absolute, the “identical bond of union” in Socratic or Delphic “self-containment”, whether active or passive indifferently. Self-consciousness is universal consciousness. This, furthermore, is the absolute centrality of philosophy, known to Christianity, such as Hegel professes, as Trinity, as “unity in difference”. Within logic, however, this further identification is not imposed. It is not “imposed” anywhere: one must see “if the cap fits” before wearing or rejecting it. Nor indeed can it oblige to any consideration at all, if it should fail to attract. Christianity, as a young Swedish seller of sapiential or “spiritual” books remarked recently, when interviewed, in explaining the absence of Christian writings from her stock, stands for “bad sex”. Hegel though, her fellow Lutheran, along with Blake and the poets, dismisses this misperception in a parenthesis, as well as in this section of the Encyclopaedia here. Thus affinity will shortly reappear as the “Affinity of the Sexes”, though this is not explicitly put, as is Kind, Gattung, as a category within logic11. Affinity thus appears in 11 One might argue, however, that viewing this Affinity in Opposition as a category, albeit of a lower rank of less importance than many other categories, is not excluded a priori (but what would that phrase, that “category”, mean here?) in a logic describable, in Renaissance Scholastic classification, as a material logic put formally, as, literally, the deeper revelation of an identical content. In terms of

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three guises in this section of the Encyclopaedia we are considering and rather takes the place of the involvement with the then contemporary Physics in the earlier Science of Logic. This affinity of the sexes, closely connected therefore with Affinity, the category, as chemism, does not seem to be referred to as such in the earlier work (as it was, in different mode, in the Phenomenology of Mind). Rather, “the Universality of the Notion is said to be revealed in sexual intercourse” (Findlay, who nonetheless translates Begattung as “generation”), coupled directly, in Findlay’s reading, with the Bad Infinite’s immediate finitude in wearisome reproduction (Fortpflanzung), ad infinitum, as we say. “In generation the immediacy of the living Individuality perishes: the death of this life is the emergence of the Spirit”, as is clearly stated at Enc. 222.12 Findlay’s reading is tied to the root of what is perceived as “bad sex” in Christianity in its Augustinian or Pauline moment of contrast between spirit and flesh, inner and outer, unseen and seen, being and nothing. This “moment”, however, is more vocabulary or mood than it is a genuine moment.13 In the Absolute Idealism, woman, her notion, is identical, in her specific difference, with the Absolute in an identity of Content. Thus hylomorphism is itself sublated. In this sense it is complained that Hegel “changed (mutavit) logic into metaphysics” (Philosophiae Scholasticae Summa, Madrid 1953, Tract. II, Logica §11, p.79). What is missed here is that, following the inner logic of logica docens, he really or justifiably did so, really showed forth logic in its perfection of form which is its content, this in fact being the nature of all Hegel’s dialectical “changes”. On possible changes in categorical listings not changing their terminus in the Absolute Idea see McTaggart’s Commentary (1910) or even Hegel’s free praxis in his two accounts of Logic. He did not claim to have discovered a materially fixed dialectic, but its principle rather. 12 But also in The Phenomenology of Mind: “In spiritual self-consciousness death loses this natural significance… ceases to signify what it means directly – the nonexistence of this individual – and becomes transfigured into the universality of the spirit” (Baillie, p.781). Hegel would call interpreting this as denial of “personal” immortality “malicious”, since it says no more than the New Testament expressions such as “I live yet not I” and so on. How this immortality is in detail “we shall no sooner know than enjoy” (Hobbes) or even already enjoy it (Wittgenstein), 13 Speculatively viewed, this “judgment” might apply, though again, as speculative, it might not, to dialectic as a whole. Mind ever seeks, though knowing it cannot finally succeed, to approximate the letter closer to the spirit (Cf. Wittgenstein, Tractatus 7), transcending discourse even in the very use of it. Hegel, however, can and does speak, in full consciousness, of that “of which one cannot speak”, under the banner, precisely, of the speculative. This is his form of the “showing” to which the Wittgensteinians appeal: it is, namely, a linguistic showing.

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mature Hegel, therefore, as in “romantic” civilisation generally, this moment is absorbed and sex becomes, slowly, seen as the “place” where flesh transcends itself through its own inner energies, in excreting its own individual self-substance, in pro-creative joy, form enacting form’s selfexpression. In belonging to the merely ideal sphere of life generally, however, this in no sense coincides with classical Traducianism, the heresy, only thinkable on a realist “religious” model, of Heilsrealismus. Only, Hegel would have found our word “sex” abstract in his well explained, rather than defined, sense. Thus he refers, rather, to “the affinity of the sexes”. Love itself is not made a category in the Logic, as McTaggart regretted, but receives its full due at Enc. 159 and elsewhere. We are, then, with these syllogisms of centrality, at the heart of the erotic, of “natural desire”, which is absolute will and knowledge in one, as we come up to chemism’s affinities, elective or not, and to “realised end”. The message of Christianity, that “God is spirit” (Hegel), is also, just therefore, that the heart of the erotic is agapetic (agape as love) self-denial, the Indentität mit dem anderen, die Allgemeinheit des Individuums (WL II, Suhrkamp, p.485). “How can he who does not love his brother whom he has seen love God whom he has not seen?” it is asked. This text, in fact, rather than being a moral corrective to one-sided piety merely, elicits the dialectic, implying as it does that the brother or sister is and is not the ultimate object of love, thus far (but how far is that?) considered as passion or as virtue indifferently – the means is the end, the “inward power of the notion” (208). So “my eros is crucified” when it has, in effect, thereby entered into life in the spirit, Hegel declares. Ignatius of Antioch, on his way to martyrdom at Rome, did not here merely mean that he had “given up sex”, though maybe he had. Let these reflections count as a step towards a positive philosophy of “the sex industry”, as it is miscalled. We should rather speak of the sexual explosion, though a slow one, of modern post-Renaissance consciousness, though it is really slower than that. This is not something Hegel could include within logic, however “material”, in his time and place, though his discreet markings, on life, the process of kind and the affinity of the (opposed) sexes, exclude nothing even as they knock upon the door of logic, not content to be abstractly relegated to nature only or its philosophy, any more than we have seen is the case with Mechanism itself here. So these remarks occur not as digression but as indicating where, in Freudian spirit, one may consider that the discussion was ever headed. It is, without saying so explicitly, “recollection in tranquillity” (Wordsworth). The “feeling intellect” this poet mentions is not some sublimation, merely, of sense-based emotion but denotes feeling’s (Enc.

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159) essential character as a fulfilment transcending the abstractly sinnlich, a fulfilment in which all previous moments are necessarily and in truth, by Hegel’s principles, “absorbed”. Whether this makes Hegel a “romantic philosopher” is a mere matter of words. We mentioned state totalitarianism and so it is that Hegel turns here, but not aside, to a comparison of the state with the solar system, implicit in his mention of gravity as illustrating absolute centrality as “universal substance”, giving us precisely the mean between abstract individualism and the collective, by use of the same “three syllogisms” (I-P-U, U-I-P, PU-I). Particular needs mediate the individual with universal law. The concrete individuals, as each willing, mediate as, in supplying particular needs, fulfilling or actualising society overall. This overall state itself, however, finally mediates needed satisfactions to the individuals.14 Hegel immediately identifies this state, along with this solar system, with “functions of the notion” (160), still under Absolute Mechanism however, extremes coalescing as the notion produces itself in what Hegel identifies as self-preservation, of itself as centre or of any individual as relative centre. Such is the final “organisation” of any whole, even or especially a supra-organic one in identity, as McTaggart will show. By the same reasoning there is just this one ideal whole, which cannot thus be a whole as we immediately use the term in self-contradiction, every whole being built up of wholes within wholes without end. It is the concept, mind’s own, or Absolute Idea. In this way, however, “the immediacy of existence” is negated, overcome, absorbed, which, though, we may be tempted to feel, referring to our remarks on immortality above, is a pity. It is not, since individuality’s very immediacy is derived from (mediated by?) these “connexions”, guaranteeing the (individual) objects’ “want of stability”, which, as truth, it is a liberation to realise, though by no means in a merely indulged “togetherness”. The object itself, rather, in being what it is, in 14

Both state and solar system are ultimately “ideal”, however (Enc. 96, cp. 552, placed immediately before the section on Absolute Spirit and its forms), as is syllogism itself as being a transitional category of the dialectic. This is shown by the separation of substance from properties (e.g. of movement). Thus, in EN, Hegel can compare the animal organism, higher up the simultaneously logical and natural ladder to the Idea, to a solar system in which the sun has absorbed all the other bodies. It is for the same reason that Hegel is misunderstood as teaching a real necessity for just seven planets. Nature is not an “exact illustration” (Findlay) of notions but an approach, “really” containing contradictions. in precisely its ideality, to “the Notion”, to the absolute ideality, and thus reality, ipsum esse subsistens, of the Absolute Idea.

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existing at all, has Affinity, “bias” even, towards not merely others like itself but to its other, to its own other, therefore, as, again, in the turbulent “affinity of the (opposed) sexes”. The parenthetic “opposed” is my own addition. The object, that is, is not indifferent (egoism, solipsism), but the centrality within itself, as relative, is fulfilled as being central only inasmuch as it is identical with absolute centrality, the absolute relation again. “This also is thou, neither is this thou”. This, in fact, though I have not seen it stated, is the only possible nerve of the Kantian “kingdom of ends”. Each is not merely his or her own relation but relation itself, as is also found true in Trinitarian thought. The persons, while being each “his own person”, are yet one, absolutely, in absolute simplicity as being each entire in his gift (of self). All persons, if once the Trinity be admitted, are assimilated to it since this, as “inclusive” finally and not merely “immanent”,15 can have no relation to, no cognisance of, anything supposed, in flat contradiction, to be outside of it. Scripture leads here: “I in them and they in me”. The word “in” acts as prepositional and spatial metaphor for concrete identity in all difference. The Outside is Inside, in Hegel’s words. Here it both is the inside conceptually and yet or a fortiori actually inside or contained qua outside as in its representation. Given these Hegelian perspectives, one not only sees how a Heidegger could come to maintain that “the truth of poetry” (title of a book by Michael Hamburger) was the further truth, in apparent reversal of Hegel’s scheme for Absolute Spirit. One sees further, in at least apparent reversal of Heidegger, how poetry itself is fulfilled in philosophy. Thus even in this scheme (of threefold absolute spirit) the notion and its functions are identified and this is precisely how it functions, in that differentiation which might be called Hegel’s philosophy of creation - by some: others would call it his denial or at least transcendence of this highly analogical and even metaphorical or “pictured” notion. The whole of language, however, even down to syncategorematic terms, has to be in origin a picture or sensuous representation, inclusive of onomatopoeic noises and the like, which it is the business of philology to unravel. Language, as Hegel clearly shows he is aware, in his discussions of it in The Philosophy of Spirit, is a historical phenomenon, as, indeed, the whole of history is phenomenal. It is only thought, in what for Hegel is philosophy’s “dogma”, that cannot be deemed, cannot deem itself, phenomenal. But an absolute dogma is of course not a dogma, but truth. So, anyhow, by means of speech we picture even the non-picturable, in philosophy as in art or 15

For this distinction see Cyril O’Regan, The Orthodox Hegel, State University of New York press, 1994.

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religion, between which three there is no final delimitation, as Hegel himself teaches, saying, for example, that “philosophy is religion and nothing but religion”. This is the reconciliation of Hegel and Heidegger, with Nietzsche, the Christian Antichrist, as a profoundly analogous middle-term (cp. Cajetan, The Analogy of Names, c.1498, on the valid use of analogous middle terms in syllogisms). * We can hardly leave this topic without considering Hegel’s thoughtprovoking remarks, in WL, on the Keim (WL II, pp.485-6), seed or germ, here within logic but, as it seems, building on and transforming the earlier Naturphilosophie of his Jena text on this and related matters. They appear within the Logic, again, but after the discussion of Chemism. Findlay remarks airily on Hegel’s “not very convincing or clear attempt to differentiate a treatment of Life as a logical category” (compare our remarks above on the Affinity of the Sexes and “material” logic) from life as a “phase” of Nature “or a presupposition of Spirit”, in his own airiness here playing Hegel’s own game, however. He finds it “ill-placed in a general treatment of organismic categories” (p.256), a judgment in which McTaggart in his 1910 Commentary concurs. We shall stay with Hegel for the moment, first noting his later more summary presentation, in the Encyclopaedia, of this material, as of a transition, which can appear for the conscious subject as the transition of transitions, until he become more “spiritual” by making this very transition, away from the “material” and mechanical. There is a parallel, since in truth it is a component or moment indeed of the same truth, in the remark on time at the end of the Phenomenology: Hence spirit necessarily appears in time, and it appears ín time so long [i.e. with the priority of (logical) necessity, not of time itself to itself] as it does not grasp its pure notion, i.e. so long as it does not annul time. Time is the pure self in external form, apprehended in intuition, and not grasped and understood by the self [i.e. time is a misunderstanding, a misperception, McTaggart rather says], it is the notion apprehended only through intuition. When this notion grasps itself, it supersedes its time-character, (conceptually) comprehends intuition, and is intuition comprehended and comprehending [i.e. these are the same here]. Time therefore appears as spirit’s destiny and necessity, where spirit is not yet complete within itself; it is the necessity compelling spirit to enrich the share self-consciousness has in consciousness [i.e. in the true, final and realised self-consciousness as end], to put into motion the immediacy of the inherent nature (which is the form in which substance is present in consciousness); or, conversely, to

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realise and make manifest what is inherent, regarded as inward and immanent, to make manifest that which is at first within – i.e. to vindicate it for spirit’s certainty of self (Phenomenology of Mind, Baillie p.800. The passages in square brackets are my own comments).

Spirit has to complete itself “as a world-spirit”. Until it does this it remains an “immediate self”, as well say a shadow. Only in this completion does it “reach its completion as self-conscious spirit”. There is a parallel here between philosophical science and death, which is thus not what it appears immediately to be. The cart is really before the horse, after all. For a realist consciousness, as against the idealism constituting philosophy, this appears as just one more variety of the ancient Gnostic heresy or bunch of heresies. They were indeed philosophical moments earlier than this present one, which reveals realism itself, concerning the finite world, as more profoundly heretical if pressed absolutely, abstracting from the contrary truths. The error had been to view the material or finite world as evil while according positive reality to this evil, thus failing to recognise in the nothingness, sc. the ideality, of the finite the goodness of God alone. The world is pronounced “very good”, meaning precisely its existence exclusively in God, since “there is none good but God”. This absolute idea is the absolute itself, Hegel infers and declares. So, if we return to the Encyclopaedia, “Life, being no more than the idea immediate… The living being dies, because it is a contradiction” and hence a shadow, not completed “as self-conscious spirit”. This completion is the transition we spoke of (p.211).16 “Implicitly it is the universal or Kind, and yet immediately it exists as an individual only.” This, as immediate, is a false or abstract existence, as shown directly in Hegel’s preceding reduction of traditional syllogistic, which “ruined” what had never stood firm. Thus “Death shows the Kind to be the power that rules the immediate individual” in the sense that he is indeed more dead than alive. In the process of Kind, however, the mediated offspring is generated only to generate, in a new “bad infinite”, Hegel judges, here in company with St. Augustine almost, who thought we had better stop doing it, thus hastening “the end of the world” and the return of Spirit once revealed, whether interiorly or at what would then be “the end of history”, a notion recently revived by Fukuyama as if it were not thereby the end of time itself as, “all the time”, anything other than ideal, as we have found Hegel showing. “Life thus runs away”. That is, it never was or is. What is, rather, is life’s notion, this moment in dialectic. What is achieved in this passage, 16

See also Enc. 369f. in “The Philosophy of Nature”.

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this transition we mentioned, rather, is “to merge and overcome that immediacy with which the idea, in the shape of life, is still beset” (Enc. 221, add.). Augustine would have loved this. The Idea not only will discard but “has thrown off… this first immediacy as a whole. It thus comes to itself, to its truth”, i.e. the moment was necessary. This idea, life, thus “enters upon existence as a free Kind self-subsistent”. McTaggart and others have criticised this conclusion, and the wording, whether originally or in this translation, is not the happiest. Yet in context the meaning is clear. The “free Kind self-subsistent” is not abstractly different, as if replacing the individual thus subsumed within it. It is selfconsciousness that is itself completed as world-spirit or kind of kinds, necessarily analogical in itself, however, since, as Aristotle remarks, there is no such kind or category as a kind of “things that are”, of being(s). Everything is being. Truth, or being, is thus irreducibly analogical, hence known speculatively, such that of myself I must say, anyone must say, as even of the fancied whole, “This also is thou, neither is this thou”. So here it is not “the party” that rules, but “free Kind”, which is only free in just this cake-and-eat-it, speculative way, where each is the whole and the whole each, negating the purely abstract universal from both directions. “The death of merely immediate and individual vitality is the ‘procession’ of spirit” (Enc. 222. my stress). I will continue to be what I was, since I am (now) that. * So what of the Keim? It forms no explicit part of the account given in the Encyclopaedia of how the idea of life or even the Idea as such “comes to itself, to its truth” and thus “enters upon existence as a free Kind selfsubsistent” (222), even though this is just what it is introduced to explain in WL. Referring back to it, however, helps one to see, I judge, how both accounts relate directly to Hegel’s Christology as outlined in The Phenomenology of Mind VII, which, as with the “Athanasian Creed”, he sees as representing man’s redemption or fulfilment, simply, “not by conversion of the godhead into flesh but by taking of the manhood into God”, in the freedom of the Idea or Kind as universal of universals, the apotheosis and realisation of all and any individuality. We will need to set out the parallels. After making this point, we will return to Chemism and the End. So “the Universality of the Notion is said to be revealed in sexual intercourse, and in the living germs passed from one individual to another” (Findlay, p.258). This is part of Hegel’s unconvincing endeavour,

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according to Findlay, to distinguish Life as a logical category from Life as “a phase of Nature”. So it is in Logic that this judgment on sex is made and not in EN, while “the living germs” seems to be a translation of der Keim, a term, again, only appearing in the earlier WL of the main texts of the two presentations of Hegel’s system of logic.17 It has perhaps more the meaning of a shoot, as used of a plant. Or of the “ground” of that shoot, the seed in its first sprouting or, as it were, dying to or away from itself (the Scriptural image offered to “some Greeks” at John 12, 20). This of course raises a question, though in the addition to Enc. 203 one reads that “the liberation of the notion in chemism and mechanism was present only in the germ, and not yet evolved” (my stress), as it will be later in the Logic specifically. There seems to be, namely, a purposeful equivocation, of analogical type, on the germ as at once physical and logical, the “living germ” and the “germ of the notion”. This is the same analogy, or forerunning moment, as we have of life as the immediate idea to the Idea itself, the notion “freed”. The Hegelian “pull”, indeed, is in general towards thinking that the logical, as a placeholder, for Absolute Mind, as thought’s own method, as a whole causes the physical (244), which is thus held within it, even after having gone forth “freely as Nature”, as Mind’s own analogy in the form of its self-alienation. Yet it is just here that causality as a notion is transcended, as was the basis of Hegel’s criticism of Herder’s definition of God as force, as falling away from Aristotle’s account of the “unmoved mover”, of nous as Grund, as Wesen der Welt, cause itself as external (äussere), a “thing” needing its own cause over again, having no necessity even in its concept, as he says here as both confirming and transcending Hume. This “essential knowledge” belongs to spirit, natural causality being a mere representation of it.18 * Being, with which science begins, has it in itself to be that analogy of itself as being the pure idea, with itself as the being of all things and of all their qualities indifferently. The other is the same. In older philosophy one thus finds frequently or without question even, as a supposition, that the analogandum causes its own analogies, “like causes like”, which thus 17 It appears fleetingly in the earlier Jenenserheft der Naturphilosophie, treating of das Organische (Jenaer Realphilosophie, Felix Meiner Verlag, Hamburg 1931, 1969 p.133). 18 Ibid.p.152. This is the sense, also, of the “still small voice” of God transcending natural “force” as Elijah hears it in the Scriptural account.

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proceed from it, not merely as from universal to particular but as from the universal’s self-particularisation down, without break, to the “concrete individual”, thus forming part of an implicit necessity, in both directions, which Hegel finds it philosophy’s business to make explicit. Divine or absolute necessity, namely, is necessarily universal. Thus this causality, which is not a causality but an actively determinant knowing, of the physical by the logical has first to appear, to be thought, within Logic itself, and the details consequent upon this, such as life, only “seem illplaced” (Findlay) in our abstractly lazy notion of logic. Without this active or creative knowledge omniscience is a contradictory notion, just inasmuch as not absolute. This, since it is speculative philosophy’s own project, is not reducible to being a “Christian philosophy”, not because the man Hegel must not have “been a Christian” by profession and indeed “at heart”, but because thinking itself is its own form of faith and revelation in one, as follows from Hegel’s own thought, most systematically preserved in or as The Phenomenology of Mind, Chapter VII. It could not be set forth in the Logic itself for the reason stated, science having to begin with being while wisdom, as ground of science, must ground itself. Thinking, as thus moving mountains, in the Scriptural representation, thus grounds the analogy of faith too as its own participatory analogate. It may thus be the case, in the historical development of philosophy as a phenomenon, that Hegel’s thought is enabled by experience of Christianity, “religion must come first”, but it nonetheless or just therefore asserts and retains absolute independence as, in Hegel’s phrase, “ungrateful spirit”.19 In this sense we may accept that “What reveals the universal truth of the incarnation for philosophy is not the historical figure of Jesus but thinking itself”.20 This figure or Gestalt may thus be argued to be the indispensable or necessary enabler of philosophy’s further development, from the ancient achievement, even as thought itself, as Aristotle explains it, depends upon that sensation of the individual, which is itself quaedam cognitio, Thomas Aquinas declares21. The question of whether such an enabling, conscious or unconscious indifferently, reflects or does not mirror actual faith in Jesus as Christ remains personal and hence scientifically indeterminable 19 This coincides with the view set forth by Georges van Riet, “The Problem of God in Hegel”, in Philosophy Today, 1967, a work often cited by us. 20 Fr. P. Jamros, SJ. 21 One can think of Aquinas’s vis cogitativa as a kind of Hegelian “in between”, bridging the chasm between animals, with their vis estimativa, and man as rational (animal). See also Sheldon M. Cohen, “St. Thomas Aquinas on the Immaterial Reception of Sensible Forms”, The Philosophical Review, April 1983.

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and hence, again, not relevant to thinking as such, while for the believer this thinking may be judged either a fruit of the grace of the incarnation or its speculative misrepresentation. This is the same as asking whether or not Hegelian philosophy is theology and true theology, as Aristotle had said of his “metaphysical” thought, which is yet, one may argue, development of and not departure from his physics as inclusive of his logic, as the effect is the cause and vice versa. The difference from theology is that speculative philosophy or indeed theology will or should, as it were incidentally, ground that upon which theology itself is based. This transition backward from experience into thought, operative in any case throughout Hegel’s Logic, is nonetheless here facilitated by what we might call a not so well grounded empirical presumption, the Keim such as we have already studied it as used here. This notion was only displaced around the year 1900 by the discovery within physiology that this Keim in Hegel’s sense is exactly as much ovum as it is semen. The immediate consequence is that there is no such homunculus transmitted in sexual intercourse, the “process of kind” (an expression again hovering, for us, between logic and physis). Suspicion of this, that his knowledge was not complete, might have led to Hegel’s reticence in the later Encyclopaedia account of this passage, this passing or “throwing off” on the part of the Idea. These considerations recur as background to Hegel’s saying that the mediator, identified as Jesus (the Christ), had an earthly mother but only an implicit father (The Phenomenology of Mind). In this respect the mediator is referred, but only implicitly, to the homunculus or universal seed that in its concreteness is yet particular while remaining universal. Given a Virgin Birth there would not be such a concrete homunculus. Ecce homo. Behold the man or behold man, though the ambiguity does not go through so clearly in the Greek original, more definite in the article lacking to Latin. Idou ho anthropos (John 19, 5). This definiteness, though, is reflected in the Greek and Platonic theory of forms, which the Latins took over, where the “third man” puzzles arise, of that in virtue of which two men are both men or “the man”, whole and entire. This is Hegel’s “concrete universal”, revealed to Reason, passed over by the Understanding. It is in a unique likeness to this homunculus, therefore, that the mediator is represented as that individual who is uniquely universal in his having only an implicit father. It is thus, Hegel is saying, contrary to a modern theological view, embarrassed by the traditional belief in the necessity of “miracle” and hence denying this necessity, that he must be represented, the Virgin Birth reflecting such an “implicit” fatherhood or, Hegel says,

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“potential” father (Ph. Spirit, p.757). Thus, too, the universal reality of the homunculus, with respect to its function at least, is denied, rendered implicit, in its very affirmation. The same verdict must apply to fatherhood as such, and so we find Hegel teaching that the Father is first “realised” in his word or revelation and that it is from this Word or Son that Spirit most immediately proceeding This seems the simplest clarification of the more than usual obscurity of Hegel’s suggestions here. Has loyalty to a moment merely of Christian self-understanding led Hegel astray here though in a way itself incipiently self-corrective? One can relate this puzzle to the case of Jovinianism. Jovinian was convicted of heresy in the fourth century for affirming that Christ, though vitginally conceived, opened the maternal womb, rupturing the hymen, in being born. He rather passed through his portals as, after death, he passed through the locked doors of the upper room, each happening anagogically signifying the other. By contrast we find today foremost exegetes on the Catholic side, such as Raymond Brown, affirming that Luke, say, must have been misled by his sources on this point. Here we touch on the necessity of a point where doctrinal development becomes metamorphosis, undecideable once we concede the this doctrine of a development of doctrine implies development also of this very doctrine, whether or not Newman in the 1840s himself saw this. The enrichment of the Keim by its by no means subsidiary or merely supervening female hemisphere does not invalidate this conception, however, which our reflection on the development of physiological science only deepens in clarifying the res considered. If no one has regarded the ovum as equally a homunculus on which to pattern humanity’s necessarily unique mediator, if there is to be one at all, between heaven and earth, universality and individuality in the foundation of perfect community, then this is only because the ovum, hence and more suitably a neutral term grammatically, was only discovered in the dissolution of the privileged position of the homunculus or “seed” (Keim), this discovery being both cause and effect of the latter. We thus have an ideality within nature or history, corresponding to Hegel’s positing of light as “Nature’s first ideality”. In the Idea, not itself an ideality since it is that to which the latter is referred, the (exterior or interior) word “was life and the life was the light of men”, of men and women specifically, that is, as spirit, the “natural light” for Descartes, but as “coming from outside” (Aristotle, De partibus animalium), thus anticipating the alienated natural phenomenon (whether of life or light indifferently) implying or grounding it. So although Hegel himself seems to see or to reflect some bearing of these complex questions upon how we should understand Trinitarian

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fatherhood, or fatherhood of the Word specifically, there does not in fact seem to be any call for such a bearing if the modern theological view is correct that the virgin birth, once found so fitting a notion, given biological transmission of original guilt or “sin”, such as Augustine and others tended to immediately read off from the more careful or multi-level Scriptural texts, is not a necessary condition, whether true or not, for the divinity of Christ, still less as grounding his appeals to “my father”. Thus he teaches all to appeal to our father, made sons in him alone though we may be. We all shall “call no man father” This has nothing to do with promoting the practice of addressing our parents by their first names only., having but one, in heaven namely. Or doesn’t it? Common to either view though is that the potentiality of universal fatherhood as lying in the eschatological ever-present future “when God shall be all in all”, this passing world but a “shadow of shadows” “when that which is perfect is come” and motherhood itself fulfilled. * We return to chemism and teleology, as concluding the absorption of the Object into the Idea, of which Life is the immediate and hence finite form. Since Life is thus a later development of thought, as a category within the third and final part of the Doctrine of the Notion, it follows that Realised End, as finalising the Object, is included within Life, as a logical category, as well as in Cognition generally. Life, that is, cannot be otherwise thought than as in essence realised, as we say, for example, that the child is father to the man or that the tree shall fall as it leans. That is, the leaning is the falling and the having fallen is essence of the latter or “that which was to be”. Length and shortness, all quantity in fact, has been logically quite transcended here in what has resulted, what results, from them. So as both better to understand chemism and to understand better the “passage” (Übergang) from chemism to teleology I shall concentrate upon that passage, that transition. Hegel’s treatment of Mechanism in The Science of Logic is rendered difficult by its close entanglement with his Physics. One grasps without confidence at the wraiths of discarded doctrines through the double fog of scientific misunderstanding and philosophical obfuscation. (Findlay, op. cit. p.248)

That is as it may be. It reflects the same scepticism this author shows, or chooses to exhibit, in relation to Hegel’s identification of Life as a logical category before treating of it as a necessary part of nature, within which it

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may or may not be destined for supersession in a way analogous to how it is treated in logic. Thus in nature too, as this same idea in self-alienation, there is development from the biological, as the means and ambience of this very development, to the spiritual and “technical”, of which a fruit, a manifestation, is logical science known as itself a self-science. The transition, however, is no less difficult in the later and, we may hope, more mature version given in the Encyclopaedia. I add here, however, that this, stressing this “more mature”, is a mean way to speak of genius. It goes against Hegel’s whole account of the speculative, where each part, each moment, encloses the whole enclosing it. Thus any early sonata or string quartet by Beethoven, Hegel’s exact contemporary, will in general be found as perfect and, I dare say, profound, as the Hammerklavier or the Grosse Fugue and may even possess qualities later lost or discarded.22 As it is said in religion, the faces or “angels” of “these little ones” behold or truly reflect the “face of my father”, reflect the Idea in its entirety. In the later work, to continue, we have the remark, as an addition, that The passage from chemism to the teleological relation is implied in the mutual cancelling of both of the forms of the chemical process. The result thus obtained is the liberation of the notion, which in chemism and mechanism was present only in the germ, and yet not evolved. The notion in the shape of the aim or end thus comes into existence. (Enc. 203 add.)

Here we have again the reference to the germ or Keim we have discussed above. It seems to be a pivotal constant governing Hegel’s thought, as the way that that thought governs itself, throughout this second half of the logic as being indeed the germ, the preliminary shoot, of the burgeoning Notion itself. The individual’s urge to universality, to becoming the whole that it is, foreshadowed in the animal function of eating and fundamental to cognition as spirit, realises in self-transcendence an identity of self with Kind (Gattung) as of the latter with self. Its individuality is thus far that of life itself, the “form” here again transcending abstract universality as actively bestowing it in bestowing being in this Entzweiung or doubling of itself. 22

I might instance here the fifty- eighth of the one hundred and thirty-five or more opera, the mystical fourth piano concerto, or the first number of the Opus One trios indifferently. The “vernal wood”, in Wordsworth, similarly, is the world, the worth-filled “impulse” can come from any part of it, of this “wood”, any tree as bearing knowledge and life or spirit issuing from death (lignum cruces, wood of the cross).

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Sie ist insofern the Individualität des Lebens selbst, nicht mehr aus seinem Begriffe, sondern aus der wirklichen Idee erzeugt. Zunächst ist sie selbst nur der Begriff, der erst sich zu objektivieren hat, aber der wirkliche Begriff, der Keim eines lebendigen Individuums. In ihm ist es für die gemeine Wahrnehmung vorhanden, was der Begriff ist, und das der Subjektive Begriff äusserliche Wirklichkeit hat. Den der Keim des Lebendigen ist die vollständige Konkretion der Individualität, in welcher alle seine verschiedenen Seiten, Eigenschaften und gegliederten Unterschiede in ihrer ganzen Bestimmtheit enthalten [sind] und die zunächst immaterielle, subjektive Totalität unentwickelt, einfach und nicht-sinnlich ist; der Keim ist so das ganze Lebendige in der innerlichen Form des Begriffes. (Wissenschaft der Logik II, pp. 485-6)

In general, “the death of this life is the emergence of spirit” (p.486) and this is the Idea, of knowledge first of all, while rooted in this whole account is the absorption of the abstractly separate idea of matter into a continuous flow from and towards the concept. The Keim or first “germ” of both life and its transition to knowledge and the Idea, via a liberating consideration of the End, both is and is not matter, which is thus in itself nothing but pure potentiality and perishability indifferently, like that “first matter” of the Scholastics which was emphatically not “stuff”23. Thus it is that mechanism and chemism, rooted in seemingly pedestrian physical science, make their appearance not in Being or Essence but in this doctrine of the Notion as we pass from Objectivity to essential Subjectivity, no longer carrying, however, the taint of one-sided self-limitedness. This account of the Keim, to be appreciated, needs to be joined to the reflection that, in German, Keimdrüse is the or a word for the gonad(s) or seminal gland, containing animal seed as semen. The parallel, therefore, is with Hegel’s account of atomism, which is a restatement, much improved upon, of ancient philosophical atomism as against its reduction by “German physicists” who “have begun to regard Matter as consisting of infinitesimally small particles, termed ‘atoms’”. This says Hegel is a metaphysic and one marked by its “utter unintelligence” (Enc.98 add.). Abstract understanding “stereotypes the factor of multeity (involved in the notion of being-for-self) in the shape of atoms and adopts it as an ultimate principle” (103 add.). Atoms and even molecules, he says, “are beyond the range of sensuous perception; and thought alone can decide whether they are admissible”. This might in some sense apply to whatever is perceived using post-Hegelian microscopes and similar instruments and even to the extremely costly atom-smashing machines, very effective bombs and the 23 It was asserted to be this (for Aquinas) in Peter Geach’s Three Philosophers, writing on Aquinas. But compare the latter’s opusculum, De principiis naturae.

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like which physicists and statesmen now manage to get built for their use. Here Hegel even resorts to the analogy with pieces of money for which he had castigated Kant when Kant applied it to “the ontological argument”, i.e. to what was more certainly, it might seem, beyond the range of sense. But here, as with the Keim, an analogy is being maintained, one, moreover, which in terms of absolute idealism, Hegel’s philosophy, leaves open, or even reverses, as in the treatment of cause and effect, the question of which is analogandum and which analogatum. For instance, he maintains that the Greek theory is very largely a pictorial representation too. The Void “is repulsion and nothing else, presented under the image of the nothing existing between the atoms” (98, my stress). This void, one thus sees, could be the absolute idealist equivalent of those expensive and occasionally murderous atom-smashing activities of today and yesterday. They, like murder or money, are purely or abstractly phenomenal, as is the finite category of Law, whether of Thought (Enc. 115), where Hegel does not reckon it as a category, or as Law of the Phenomenon (133). Hence the nothing between the atoms, like the spaces between the planets, is itself a mere image or phenomenon. There is in fact “no Matter without Motion” as its principle, he states in EN, in continuity with the Scholastic or philosophical principle of perishability or materia prima. The generic or specifically seminal “proof”, in the male at least, of an erotic ecstasy is more the sign or Schein of that moment of spirit, of, it may be, Begattung, in which “the universality of the Notion is said to be revealed” (Findlay), where “the immediacy of the living individuality perishes: the death of this life is the emergence of the Spirit”. “The death of merely immediate and individual vitality is the ‘procession’ of spirit” (222). This too is said in the first place, though, of Life as logical category, not as natural phenomenon, as “the immediate Idea” (216: this whole paragraph should be carefully studied). Here, rather, it opens on to Cognition as idea of the Idea, something with which a study of Teleology, succeeding in the Logic upon chemism, will have made us familiar. In the End the notion has entered on free existence and has a being of its own, by means of the negation of immediate objectivity. (204). In that sense, however, the notion has become practical. * While mechanism preserves the contradiction between the totality of the notion and the special “immanent mode” of the object as naturally “biassed” or “not indifferent”, hence partial, chemism is the fruit of its, the object’s, “constant endeavour to cancel this contradiction” and to be

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“equal to the notion”, this being the founding urge (Trieb) of human selfconsciousness as a phenomenon. Hegel tells us that chemism’s process produces “the Neutral object”24. What is this process? It is, namely, the associated process of thought, as is everything considered in the Logic or even in logic generally. Logicus non considerat existentiam rei, Aquinas had declared. In his system, however, it looks as if the existential is the main object for consideration, which is taken up in metaphysics specifically. For Hegel, however, what the logician considers is everything, including itself therefore. What is left out is always just thereby a purely finite or “ideal” object. Hence it too is an object of thought. That is why there can be no question, ever, of mixing the finite and the infinite. This, in turn, is precisely what is meant or should be meant by those who speak of an “ontological discontinuity” between finite and infinite. They are not univocally two types of being. The infinite is, the finite is not. That means there is no unity between them properly speaking, even if Hegel himself shall have on occasion spoken of such a unity (Enc. 95). The proposition that the finite is “ideal” constitutes Idealism. In nothing else consists the Idealism of philosophy than in recognising that the finite has no genuine being,,, The contrast of idealistic and realistic philosophy is therefore of no importance. A philosophy that attributed to finite existences as such a genuine ultimate absolute being would not deserve the name philosophy… By “ideal” is meant existing as a representation in consciousness; whatever is in a mental concept, idea or imagination is “ideal”: “Ideal” is just another word for “in imagination,” – something not merely distinct from the real, but essentially not real. (Hegel, Werke. iii, 163, reference as given in Wallace)

We may compare Enc. 95 and the addition to 92, citing Plato’s Timaeus, ch. 35, where “we have in general terms a statement of the nature of the finite… the inherent contradiction which originally attaches to determinate being, and which forces it out of its own bounds”. Existence, Hegel adds, “stands in the character of something solely positive” for “materialised conception” although, we know, “mutability lies in the notion of existence… The living die, simply because as living they bear in themselves the germ of death”. Here “the germ” is transposed to 24 One may wonder if the word “object” here should not also be in bold type, on Wallace’s own typographical scheme for indicating that a category is being spoken of. The addition to §200, anyhow, begins: “Chemism is a category of objectivity” but this name, “chemism”, though heading the section (b) here, is nowhere thus boldly “typed”.

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consciously ideal conception, albeit in metaphorical representation, simply because Nature and its processes are already in themselves ideal, so much so that even “God” and “religion”, Hegel states in LPR, are in themselves “representational images”25. As names of our finite language they, and so presumably any text, even that of the Logic as a whole, are merely moments of the Idea. Hence “all judgments are false”; there is only one Concept. Life, for its part, is “only” the “Idea immediate”, in “materialised conception” namely. Hence immortality cannot be, or be said to be, an immortally extended existence merely, just as this term is not properly applied in place of or to absolute being, such as we call God.26 This alone explains the huge or pivotal role given by Hegel to forgiveness or “pardon”, as it is given in the Gospel word, “Thy sins are forgiven you”, as faith is “the substance of what is not seen”; or in the saying that the faithful “sit with Christ in the heavenly places”. The coincidence of Hegel’s account, his “doctrine”, with these texts is patent, whether affording favour or disfavour to the one or the other. So chemism here is not the associated chemical process itself but a way of thinking, typically but not essentially consequent upon empirical observation or awareness of this latter process. That is, we conceive two associated processes, the logical process being rather a processus of thought having nothing to do materially with what might be said to “happen” in a test-tube, though that may give the finite thinker, though never thought itself, his or her stimulus. Thus what the ideality of the finite, inclusive of existence, shows is that it is the Idea itself that is finally real, is final being. Hence Being, thus conceived as real (the Idea), includes existence, the abstract or finite category, within itself, just as it includes the abstract category of being with which logical thinking or science must begin, as also that category, being, must include it, is not, that is to say, abstractly abstract. In logic, that is, the abstract itself is the material for consideration. What Henry Veatch named “the ontology of logical forms” needs to be investigated. This, thought thus thinking, and nothing else is the liberation of the Idea as End. It has now “entered on free existence and has a being of its own, by means of the negation of .

25

Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, 1821, translated by Peter Hodgson, volume 1, p.222. 26 “God”, says Aquinas, is at once a nomen naturae and a proper name, since Deus est deitas. Hegel simply says that God “is the absolute Person”, not here considering questions of naming or language generally. For this, see the excursus on language at Enc. 459, which Jacques Derrida, studying it, marvelled to find placed as a mere footnote (“Speech and Writing according to Hegel” in G.W.F. Hegel, Critical Assessments, ed. Robert Stern, Routledge, London, 1993).

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immediate objectivity” (204). These forms, namely, are “the form of the world” (Hegel) inasmuch as, it turns out, they constitute, in their reciprocal unity, form itself. So clearly this existence, as free, is not the aforementioned finite category thus named but rather that being itself, which is now found to be freedom, the Idea, as Hegel will finally specify. So it will be precisely out of this category of End that the Idea itself will process logically. We will now comment on this development in more detail. * The End is at first subjective only, as negating immediate objectivity, which is made to be merely for the sake of it, as means, therefore no longer standing in itself. It is also subjective inasmuch as this logical move is abstracted from the purposiveness of things in general and even from their final nullity, their ideality as finite. This contrast, of object become means with the end, signals finite duality. It is also the first taking into logic of the practical itself, of the view of things, all “things”, as merely useful to the End as lying outside of them, Hegel’s view, however, recalls more the Aristotelian practical syllogism, in which the conclusion is an action, than any concurrence in the philosophy of Utility. Yet this action is always a means to the subject’s, to my, end. One cannot reason practically, or to the action, of or for another, insofar as reason is abstracted, theorised, as a particular faculty, but at most to an imperative or recommendation within the “matter” of verbal formulae, merely, to a “Do this” which is not yet the actual doing.27 This negative consideration, Aristotelian, is already the incipient liberation of the notion. Viewing it thus as subjective, however, is for the End itself one-sided, compared with the notion of which the End is itself a moment. This, though, is no more than what can be said of any category. Yet here “all specific characters have been put as subordinated and merged in the End itself” (204). It is the notion itself as Final Cause (203). For the End the presupposed object “has only hypothetical (ideal) reality, - essentially noreality”. The End in short is a contradiction of its self-identity against the negation stated in it, as the antithesis to objectivity. Being so, it contains the eliminative or destructive activity negating the antithesis and rendering it identical with itself. This is the realisation of the End: in which, while it 27 Aquinas’s long study, in ST Ia-IIae, on the human act in general, can profitably be studied here.

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turns itself into the other of its subjectivity and objectifies itself, thus cancelling the distinction between the two, has only closed with itself, and retained itself. It is, therefore, as such, as end, necessarily realised, as something of which we might say, in the most “perfect” of tenses, that it ever has been accomplished, tetelestai. This is the “word” from the Cross in John’s Gospel, using the perfect tense, often called “present perfect” therefore, of the Greek verb formed from just telos. It is thus Hegel’s very serious hence by no means “little” joke, joke as final or speculative truth, such as that all judgments are false, or that good and evil are “the same”. The symphonic scherzo, meaning joke or jest, comes to mind, as replacing the scholastic stately minuet, as itself such an opening to the speculative. “Call for me tomorrow and you will find me a grave man”, the dying Mercutio heart-rendingly (it must be, had he existed) quips. At this level of the spirit nothing binds one, “must bind me” (Beethoven), to life. Life, again, is “only the idea immediate”. Here we have the true “postmodernism”, characteristically pre-dating its own self. What prevents us from seeing that the end is realised, in fact, is just this finitely piecemeal character, this “petty pace”, of time itself as peculiar moment of subjective spirit in what is yet, in the end, to speak most aptly, logical process, thought thinking itself. This is the only true reason Aristotle had for denying a particular providence since, in fact, the only deficiency, in virtue of which it might find qualified denial, is on the part of its (finite) object. Providence, that is, is itself absorbed in realised end as religion is absorbed, perfected, in philosophy, this, in turn, being the latter’s highest dignity. This is, then, on account of its recognisable sacral historical reference, at once a theological and, self-evidently, a metaphysical account of teleological process as it must, the claim is, realise itself, the notion or infinite, the Absolute Idea, progressively realising, again, or revealing or uttering and positing itself as what it is, as End is essentially “realised End”. In theological terms we have the positing of God as infinite and therefore also subjectivity itself negated by an antithesis, the object, creation, intrinsic to the notion, the category, of End. This antithesis itself is thus necessarily negated, again, as being itself necessarily identical with God as act in self-objectification, even as and of the Idea, in what is for us the happening of Incarnation, as what we call abstractly man (or men), which is in fact God’s closing with or retaining himself as absolute or infinite. This is variously viewed as Hegel’s essential Christianity or his subversion (i.e. not the “sublation”) of the same. What the finding excludes is a Hegel unconcerned, untouched, by the phenomenon of religion so explicitly and extensively treated in The Phenomenology of

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Mind, as noted above, and this firstly under the sign of mutual forgiveness as specific to Christianity or “the perfect religion”, as he forthrightly denominates it. Forgiveness here, however, is no longer act in the sense of event, merely. It is more like the Noachite rainbow “set in the sky”, like as the “dream” come “in that sleep of death”, succeeding upon the flood of destruction, life’s reverse face, in which Hegel recognises “the entry into spirit”. In one and the same act of thought, however, Realised End is an entirely philosophical process, definitive indeed of philosophy itself as allabsorbing absolute spirit or, again, God as his knowledge, as Absolute Knowing (title of the concluding chapter of the book just cited). Insofar as realised end is still End, however, we still fall short of the Absolute, which is the Absolute Idea specifically (213). This corresponds to the earlier recognition that the Fifth Way of Aquinas, namely the “teleological argument”, establishes, from the phenomenon of order in things, not yet an infinite being, which can only be the Idea, but an ordering intelligence, determinative of all things thus seen as determined, which might yet, thus far, be finite since, as Hegel says, the things to be ordered are posited as external to it. Teleology thus becomes the progression, in its self-sublating or self-transcending in and by thought, towards the Idea (213) as “truth in itself and for itself, - the absolute unity of the notion and objectivity”. As Hegel puts it, The abstract universal of understanding… only subsumes the particular, and so connects it with itself; but has it not in its own nature. (204)

The latter conception is what he calls “Design or End”. It corresponds to what in religion is put as a particular redeeming change in the deity itself, thus falling short of the Absolute Idea as immutability, the essence of Realised End (212 add.). “Objectivity is thus, as it were, only a covering under which the notion lies concealed”. Its consummation, therefore, “consists merely in removing the illusion which makes it seem yet unaccomplished”. As such it is the determinative misconception and “misperception” (McTaggart) of all finite knowing, the Kantian “tragedy of knowledge”28. Yet “Only out of this error does the truth arise”. This is a breath-taking claim, the claim of philosophy, expressed here in metaphor, however. Error is in fact non-being or nothing posing as something, “sham-existence of negativity itself” (Enc. 35 add.). Something as it is thus eternally realised, is, rather, End as eternal reality. Only in knowing this, therefore, do we discover in self-consciousness our own eternal 28

N. Berdyaev, Spirit and Reality.

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reality in the notion and hence see our own existence whole for the metaphysically first time, that is, eternally. “Behold I make all things new” (Apocalypse, my stress). Who or what is this I? It is myself and not another. Specifically, this other is the other of myself, of I, as its own other, hence closer than self to self. “Know thyself”. This leads Hegel to uncover the “distinction between the End or final cause, and the mere efficient cause”, this being why he rejects the a posteriori proofs of God in terms of the latter. These first four of the Five Ways of Aquinas one and all fall short of disclosing absolute infinity (Enc. 50), the whole of which should be read here, however). The Fifth Way, the “teleological”, finds its own perfection in the Ontological Argument he has just considered (Enc. 192, under the Object), in which indeed the whole science of logic consists as culminating in the Absolute Idea, one thus with the Method of the whole as realising the end. This unity is consequently the absolute and all truth, the Idea which thinks itself, - and here at least as a thinking or Logical idea. (236)

Hegel could hardly be clearer. Of the final cause, meanwhile, he says: “The End… is expressly stated as containing the specific character in its own self” (204). So the End “carries into effect itself only”, while remaining what it was primordially since “Until it thus retains itself it is not genuinely primordial”. Thus it “requires to be speculatively apprehended as the notion, which… suspends that antithesis” of subjective and objective, of self and other, or as well say of antithesis itself, in the final count, where logic is absorbed or put by while yet retained (aufgehoben) in absolute spirit, which philosophy discloses as itself being it. So End is much more than what first appears to “us”, more than “a mode of mere representation”. Here Hegel refers to Inner Design, whereby Kant has resuscitated the Idea in general and particularly the idea of life. Aristotle’s definition of life virtually implies inner design and is thus far in advance of the notion of design in modern teleology, which had in view finite and outward design only. (204)

The reference is not merely to paragraph 62 of Kant’s Critique of Judgement but to the whole second part on teleological judgment, as can be seen from the relevant earlier discussion of Kant’s account in WL (Greater Logic), Suhrkamp 6, pp. 440-445, in the section introducing teleology in general as succeeding upon and absorbing mechanism and chemism. It is here we should look for that grounding of a category of Life

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within Logic, identifying it as “the immediate Idea”, which Findlay, possibly influenced by McTaggart’s perplexities in 1910, finds so inappropriate.29 To make his conception clear Hegel now refers to “animal wants and appetites” as “some of the readiest instances of the end”. Instances! The unitary discussion which now follows in the Encyclopaedia, as leading up to “the Idea”, including with these “instances” discussion of the means and of “purposive action” as conclusion to the Aristotelian practical syllogism, but transformed within the Hegelian frame, stands instead of the tripartite division of WL into subjective end, means and realised end. There is no call to say it “replaces” it, however, and the two accounts should be studied together. Meanwhile we have this as a kind of coda to the long introductory paragraph (204), passing without pause from animal wants to the rising of the mind to God (50) as “the same negation”. Hegel contrasts “inner design” to “finite and outward design only” or, that is, a design of or imposed upon something else, most generally matter. So within the “living subject” as such these wants are “felt contradiction”. The implication is that such finite, hylomorphic beings are themselves thought as or in contradiction, the theme of Logic as a whole, a theme which in reading Hegel we tend no sooner to absorb than to forget, allowing it to drop from consciousness, rather as we do some of the horrors of real history, though without meaning to deny their reality. This, however, is to our ordinary consciousness more of a miracle than a horror, as are many of the discovered truths of the finite sciences also. The tendency, in fact, is common to all knowledge as mediated. One knows the beloved will die but this is not considered without forcible abstraction when in her presence. Hegel, just as much as McTaggart, rejects the validity of this abstraction, first operation of intellect according to Aristotle, in any but a mediating or momentary sense. The truth, rather, is that “this life of yours which you are living is not merely a piece of the entire existence, but is in a certain sense the whole”, “numerically one in all men”.30 So, “no birth no death” (Buddhist saying). It is undeniable that Hegel’s philosophy of death as “the entry into spirit” does not contradict but rather interprets this saying. Thus the felt contradiction “exists within the living subject”. Contradictions, that is, exist in what does not “exist” (123) or is not 29

Compare, here, Eugene Gendlin’s detailed study: Line by Line Commentary on Aristotle’s DE ANIMA II & III, University of Chicago Press. 2010. 30 E. Schrödinger, whom I cite again as quoted in D. Kolak, I am You, Pomona, New York 2002, p. xv.

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absolutely. In truth, contradiction is this positing as existent of what does not exist and it is as such that the “felt” or discovered contradictions declare themselves. So such existing contradiction, whether felt or not, “passes”, of itself, as itself a moment of absolute thinking, “into the activity of negating this negation which mere subjectivity still is” (my stress). Hegel could hardly be clearer. He does not mean that the animal itself performs this negation logically. It rather instances it (“substances” it?) as, it is said here, it instances End by its individual dying to its individuality, as of necessity. The animal is itself a word, or rather an idea, hence ideal, whether as individual, species or genus. Hegel here transcends the position, touched on above, that nous, or even “science”, does not consider individuals as such. This would make mind finite again. It is just in their consideration, in the consideration of the individual’s “ruin”, as in that of the individual moments of thought, that abstraction is overcome and thought itself results as its own absolute thinking. The historical Scotist moment of haecceitas is here absorbed, which is to say reabsorbed, in individual exemplification of what for Hegel is the constant of philosophy’s history as, a fortiori, of history (and nature) as such. This “activity of negating this negation” is thus, instantiates, “satisfaction of the want or appetite” which had instantiated it and which, as such, “restores the peace between subject and object”. It removes the felt negation (negare as itself contra-dicere). The objective thing which, so long as the contradiction exists, i.e. so long as the want is felt, stands on the other side, loses this quasiindependence, by its union with the subject. Those who talk of the permanence and immutability of the finite, as well subjective as objective, may see the reverse illustrated in the operation of every appetite. Appetite is, so to speak, the conviction that the subjective is only a half-truth, no more adequate than the objective. But appetite in the second place carries out its conviction. It brings about the supersession of these finites, “eats them up”. The “so to speak” here does not imply, as the English phrase often does, a demurral. One shall so speak. Things, “these finites”, “do not stand on the other side”, but are always merely ideal. What, anyhow, is the absolute will to be absolute that constitutes the absolute as good or will absolutely? This is indeed the “sovereignty of good”, of praxis over theoria since the latter is itself the highest praxis (Aristotle); that is, it shows itself in dialectical development or advance (from “cognition proper”, theoria) to be more fundamentally or absolutely praxis as realised end and, in final analysis, the Speculative or Absolute Idea.

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* Hegel goes on to speak of “the action of the End”, which is energeia (see 142, add.), without, in the Encyclopaedia account, any further founding of this notion. The dialectic he here claims to be merely allowing to develop is in fact this action and not only all action but act as such, that act of selfaffirmation which in Christian Trinitarianism, never far from Hegel’s mind, brings forth the Word from which Spirit proceeds. In this selfconstitutive act the origin reveals itself as itself the End. It remains abstract until thus thought or until thus thinking itself, so that its being at all consists in this self-thinking. Self thinks self as not otherwise self, a truth that cannot do other than cast light upon all selfhood anywhere. In this notion, constituting freedom as self-generation, all are assimilated to the Word as spirit proceeding. But the Word as concrete is individualised as matter at once sensing and sensed, consciously or known (sensus est quaedam cognitio). This is “the rational creature” (Kant), manifested or “appearing” (Gk. phainomein, to appear) as man. Hegel refers here, though not in mere illustration, to “the practical syllogism”, the conclusion of which had already been stated by Aristotle to be an action, seen either as non-verbal or, in line with what we have just discussed, a supreme form of the verbal or even of representation generally. The end is shown as “closing with itself by the means of realisation”, inasmuch as “the radical feature is the negation of the termini”. By this all the a posteriori arguments to God from contingency, as Hegel analyses them in his last Lectures on the Proofs of God’s Existence, might be classed not so much as formally improper but as aboriginal practical syllogisms, no longer in Kant’s reductive sense of this but as elucidating Aristotle’s statement that theoria in its inmost essence is indeed the highest praxis. This, the practical syllogism as realised end, is in fact negation of both immediate subjectivity and immediate objectivity, he says. All praxis is as such negation. This means that in their thought immediacy these two immediates, or even all immediacy, are and is ipso facto abstract. They are imprisoned in or have not “escaped from language”. Hence thought must negate them. Subjectivity appears in the end as such, is thus mediated (to “us”) while objectivity is “seen in the means and the objects pre-supposed”. This is the finitude of teleology, that it has still to progress to and disappear as absorbed in the Absolute Idea, which it both is and is not. Hence Hegel adds that this necessary negation “is the same negation, as is in operation when the mind leaves the contingent things of the world as well as its own subjectivity and rises to God” (Enc.50). In this way “the analytic form of syllogisms”, of

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reasoning, like “the contingent things of the world” themselves, “work out their own abolition” in what Hegel will call “the Cunning of reason”, which he equates with Divine Providence (209, add.). Mind’s negation of real finitude is theoretical and practical, as it is passive and active, in one, in that it abolishes such finitude in thus knowing it. We return to paragraph 205, initiating a more thorough discussion of the notion of the Means, of means to end in general. This will show that the realised unity of subjective and objective “is the Idea” and further, that this Idea as Absolute Idea is itself the Absolute, is Truth (212). It is not an Idea of something else, of being, say, but is itself final being (84). “Pure Being makes the beginning: because it is on the one hand pure thought, and on the other immediacy itself, simple and indeterminate” (86). So it is equally just the Nothing of which the subsequent dialectical process, up to the Absolute (212), is the negation. In all teleology as first taken, then, “the notion confronts a presupposed” and hence external object. “The End is consequently finite”, as we noted concerning the fifth, teleological “way” of Thomas Aquinas for knowing the being of God. Commentators have known this, that a further step is needed to demonstrate that the ordering intelligence is infinite. This Hegel here supplies. The End, he says, is finite “partly in its content”, that it shall order the external, the world merely, as if this were needed for its own perfection, “partly” in having an external object, “which has to be found existing”, as material for its own realisation. It is not so easy to see the difference between these two perspectives, which is alone what they are, of content and object, and just for that reason. God, so to say, appears solely as the “God of Israel” or of the world, giving her, him or it its shape and destiny, the “leap” having precisely therefore not yet been made. This End’s object, as constituting an external approach to the End, is just therefore assumed, reducing the End’s (which is in reality the Idea’s) subjectivity to something abstract and separate from its notion. Taken thus the content of the End will be “quite as limited, contingent and given, as the object is particular and found ready to hand”.31 We have here the situation considered and rejected at 215, owing to “the negative unity of the Idea”. Hegel sees such “external design” as a self-contradictory making absolute of the Utilitarian point of view, since this negative nonultimateness of finite things “is their own dialectic”, out of which the true infinite arises as making the viewpoint in question impossible. External

31

One might wonder, though in a first or immediate reflection only, if Heidegger is not here, so to say, refuted or eliminated in advance.

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design, as standing on the immediate threshold of the Idea, is just therefore “least adequate” to capture that with which it is contrasted. Hegel now returns again to the syllogism(s) involved (206), making clearer than before, above, that the middle term “is purposive action”. The duplication reflects and continues the confluence of means and end in the original WL schema. The subjective end “coalesces with the objectivity external to it, through a middle term which is the unity of both” and is, we saw, an action, finally to be identified with absolute knowing as that means which is at once end and hence not means at all but “objectivity made directly subservient to purpose” in the unity of cognition proper and will, namely. This “theological” truth, stressed by the Thomists against the Suarezian Jesuits in earlier times, is just what Hegel, first under the rubric of “cunning of reason” and then of “realised end”, sets, re-asserted, against Kant’s “tenderness towards the empirical” as, for himself, in favour of the a priori, just as Aquinas in his day had reasserted the Aristotelian uniqueness of the determinative substantial form in any substance or of freedom in its own life of virtue as superior obligation, not compulsion (coactio), of the end which it is. Form as such must act of or, hence, according to itself in order to be at all. There cannot be a “liberty of indifference” as property of any subject, self-constituting or not, especially where this self-constitution is, has to be, the highest wisdom. Upon this Aquinas founds the free necessity, as opposed to the necessity of compulsion, of what we thus merely metaphorically call moral “obligation” as what, in the “ought”, is owed to self-being as such, is rather what we “would owe” in order to continue as this self. This, and not some deference to external law, is the essence of conscience as selfconsciousness, which is thus, on pain of being “wicked”, not an alternative legislation specifically, Hegel declares. It is rather the act of reason as or in its exercise, theoretical still as the highest praxis and conversely an act of “pure reason”. But in fact the denial of reason is always an action, which explains our responsibility for our opinions. In Hegelian thought that “of which one cannot speak” (Tractatus 7) asserts its primacy just for that reason. It is the primacy of praxis, of act, such that even speech is act and not its own self merely, to which all syllogistic concludes as “caused”, “motived” and not merely motivated, by the premises. This, ultimately, is why Scotus, in surface contradiction of Aquinas, designated theology a practical science. Its conclusion is an action, as is the one Word its own going forth, in inward action, immanent and hence subsistent as is the Idea, which it is, as absolute knowledge. Language itself is not thought, since it is, down to the infinitesimal division of the phonemes, a little bit at a time. There is no eternal

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language, the Word is not one among the words. The End as accomplished or realised ceases to be consequent upon beginnings still remaining, is revealed itself rather as beginning in being end. By this, though, the teleological moment is itself suspended, done away with, and we have indeed “become what we are”. This was ever the office of becoming as absorbing that being found still to be nothing. This praxis as the end of syllogistic is thus a contemplation (subjective notion) that is itself “the highest praxis”. The Marxist conception of praxis is abstract, as they express it. All revolutionary action is itself performed contemplatively, whatever we say about drunken driving. In doing things, anything, we do not cease to see but rather actualise our vision as such and this is indeed the redemption of language too. Intellectual virtue thus fulfils moral virtue taken on its own or abstractly and is thus more noble, the bonum honestum being honoured for the sake of the bonum absolutum to which it leads and in which it not merely participates but is absorbed. The development from End to idea ensues by three stages, first, Subjective End; second, End in process of accomplishment, and third, End accomplished. (Enc. 206 add.)

The process here is called in WL simply das Mittel, meaning both the mean and the means as a term in German already suggestive of active effect also, like a means for curing a cough, provided the cougher first himself acts in purchasing the more immediate medium or mean (Mittel) of being cured, which is thus no more mediation of it inasmuch as immediate or assimilated to the cure itself, something which would be evident if its beneficence were guaranteed, as food is assimilated to nourishment, whereas that of sex to procreation remains questionable or at least not so immediately felt. Various peoples and groups have not known about it. In general the pleasure proper to the end realised is not merely abstracted but separable from such realisation, while the having of the end is only abstractly separable from this end itself. That is, an end not had is not an end, as a person not living or actual, such as Hamlet or the Toad of Toad Hall, is not a person. So it seems that if we should desire the end wholly we should not desire to have it, but rather delight in its being had or enjoyed (fruitio combines these two ideas) as delighting in this end itself, since, as Hegel concludes, end itself is essentially realised, while the means, consequently, is no more than a chimerical, sc. dialectical moment. There can in fact only be one end, End as such, including all possible mediate ends (and vice versa, however: i.e. mediated end is superseded in its notion). So we essentially have it. Even so:

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Within the range of the finite we can never see or experience that the End has been really secured. The consummation of the infinite End, therefore, consists merely in removing the illusion, which makes it seem yet unaccomplished… This is the illusion under which we live. (Enc. 212 add.)

This, if we consider, is Hegel’s account of religious faith and hope, faithhope, in its perfection or, indifferently as it has turned out here, fulfilment. We might perhaps call this (philosophical) account charity, the third theological virtue, in action, though it is more customary to identify it with the fourth or finest intellectual virtue of wisdom, sapientia, a gift and therefore giving of spirit rather than a virtue. For, as Hegel says, things wear a different face once we have started to think about them. As regards this “illusion”, however, he adds, concerning it: In the course of its process the Idea creates that illusion, by setting an antithesis to confront it; and its action consists in getting rid of the illusion which it has created. Only out of this error does the truth arise. In this fact lies the reconciliation with error and finitude. Error or other-being, when superseded, is still a necessary dynamic element of truth: for truth can only be where it makes itself its own result.

In the light of the immediately previous citation this illusion can only be time itself, needed “for as long as spirit needs it”, Hegel says. Thus McTaggart was correct in his basic idealist interpretation of Hegel. Here, anyhow, is summed up the final, most difficult part of Hegel’s system, which is also the nub of mind’s passage from mechanism and chemism through teleology to the Idea. We need to continue under this “illusion under which we live” until or unless we depart from it either through death itself, “which is the procession of spirit”, or through essentially zealous study (studium) or contemplation (theoria), which, as spiritual activity, are the preliminary practices of dying and hence self-immortalising, athanatizein, says Aristotle, even a little of this being worth more than all the rest combined. That is, this good does not depend upon the immortality it yet presages in virtue of this very superiority of worth. They, study and/or contemplation, are thus in themselves assimilable to the Latin conception of mortification, which they therefore free from an habitual abstraction, endemic to its enthusiastic popularisation at one time at least, free from its supposed fulfilment in an essentially future time (purgation followed by illumination and “spiritual marriage”), which is actually nothing but its own other or true face as, again, Hegel states, death is the entry into spirit. If he knows it we can know it. Hegel has found a way of saying these things not dependent upon the metaphors of piety, but as it

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were accidentally, in the development of (his) philosophy under its own steam, precisely since, as we have noted, this, as a and the “highest praxis” (Aristotle), is itself a form of mortification and not its merely abstract recommendation. It even, Hegel rather suggests, dispenses us from this abstract requirement, since it is itself, precisely as its supreme instance, its consummation in “blessedness” (159). We may or may not, in the pursuit of it, consume a chocolate bar or break off to embrace the beloved, herself or himself always an incarnation of philosophy as itself “consolation” (Boethius). Such is the final nobility, gnostic or gnoseological but not Gnosticism. Rather, even intentionally, it is not this in its abstraction welldefined set of attitudes and beliefs from which the community took distance in ancient times as being, albeit by but a hairbreadth, separated and separable from the truth. The same applies to Docetism vis à vis absolute idealism, as it does not, however, to religion vis à vis philosophy. The latter does not take distance from religion or art (how could it?) but fulfils them (553ff.). In general, ascetic detail, where unduly stressed, distracts from realised end, to realise which, and enjoy it, is the supreme effort, a Golgotha indeed, of spirit. Part at least of today’s animosity against religion, in Anglo-Saxon countries chiefly, but there mainly among the half-educated, neither folk nor faculty, is due to an abstract quality infecting several of the first Protestant movements in their immaturity, separating themselves in horror from all art as they battled against the excesses, as they saw it, of a resplendent Renaissance Catholicism, “sitting in the place where it ought not”, as they found in the Bible they rather saw as exclusively their own. But when art and religion find each other again they tend to order themselves to “the true reason-world” (Hegel) as well. We seem to want to ask, though, where exactly the material objectivities of mechanism and chemism are left behind. This, however, is not a genuine problem insofar as these are names here of logical categories, of ways of thinking, not only about phenomena but also as such. That is, thought from the beginning is set to think only itself and so it is rather that whole guiding principle, which the dialectic in assuming finally proves, that one is over again questioning. Dialectic, that is, assumes the legitimacy of logic’s reflection upon itself in logica docens as matured in the Hegelian dialectic. We have crossed the frontier, whether we were asleep at the time or not, and must now learn the language we hear spoken all around us. Or, as Hume puts it, every conscious perception is rather an impression, with no implication of a prior impressing agent, and reflection forms ideas out of these impressions, again not as caused by the latter, which are simply themselves presupposed, if we do presuppose

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them, like cause itself, in idea. So Hume professes not to know where we get this idea from, admitting only that we have it, universally. It was this universality, of this empirical having of this idea, that gave Kant his awakening clue to his subjectively idealist system, thoroughly Humean (and not merely Hume-ish) as it is. In Hegel’s logic, however the genesis of ideas is explained as internal to ideas themselves and even to the Idea itself, as also thought, in and as the Idea, goes beyond and cancels all other abstractly other or finite ideas, such as cause in rigid difference from effect. Similarly, it is internal to being to be itself that genesis. It itself, as covering even nothing, needs no generation, while the same applies “analytically” to nothing. Hence they are the same, themselves generating. This is necessity. Hume’s reduction of subjective idealism, to the point where he himself destroyed its basis in the self as subject as yet another spurious concept, is replicated in Hegel, therefore, as not merely, in contradiction of the former, an absolute objectivity but as the Idea uniting and hence cancelling, while retaining, each of these categories in a relation of union with one another and with the Idea itself in its constitutively exceptionless dynamism as its moments, each of which is the Idea itself as, like the original finite (sic) self, never going out from itself, not as imprisoned but in its infinite freedom, which is the freedom of its infinity. The unity of philosophy as going out in order to return upon itself, ceaselessly, is thus demonstrated. The physicists and chemists of this world naturally claim that with this turn away from the categories after which they, their professions, are named, a relativisation which they do not recognise, in the main, such philosophy has put itself outside the sphere of science, and it has become, in general estimation at least, the office of the new invention of “the philosophy of science”, as distinct from the philosophy of nature, to recognise this. With the progress of such sciences generally, and of quantum physics and allied investigations in biology and its offshoots in particular, a scientifically “sapiential” philosophy of nature, superior to or more fundamental than natural science, as the name indicates, is now called for as having a necessary role to play, within “systematics” as the task of science, precisely as is given it in the frame of the Hegelian system, which can now at last, therefore, be further developed, after this first moment of negation that it itself, by its own principles, knowingly provoked. “It was necessary that the Christ must suffer and so enter into his glory.” This saying of religion, like the works of great or genuine art, finds universal application in its own fulfilment, in self-clarification (equals glorification, claritas) in philosophy. Philosophy itself, this is to

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say, as vita contemplativa or studium, yet originally itself meaning zeal simply, it has ever been recognised, do not belong to “this world”, but to the true outside, ever inside itself only, from which, as Aristotle says of reason itself, that it “comes from outside”, they come. They come, that is, as Hegel says, to “pound and crush” the world to their own image and likeness, in the action of thought, ever and without exception sure of itself in its own certainty, this certainty being that “dogma of philosophy” from which the spirit, even under extremest political and social pressure, is “physically” unable to abdicate. This is the truth that Augustine, Anselm’s and hence Hegel’s foundational “teacher”, both of these staring upon truth “with unveiled faces”, had justly celebrated. Thus philosophy, but with all science, with science itself as thus founded and beginning, loses the world as the world loses it in Aufgehobenheit or as if “translated” in its nullification. Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen. ”I have lost the world”. The accompanying Mahlerian sadness, however, is an abstraction, itself calling to be ”cut off” in negation of negation, ”as having nothing and yet”, or just therein, “having all things”. Philosophy finds not its confirmation but its endorsement in poetry and proclamation, in words. * McTaggart, in his 1910 Commentary, tends, we have noted, to see in Hegel’s presentation of the category of Life a merely regrettable return to the logical universal in the sense of the formal logic of the understanding. I feel his own understanding, as expressed in earlier treatment of this theme (Studies in Hegelian Cosmology, 1901, chapter 2), rather deserts him here in 1910. Findlay, on the other hand, while fully appreciating how Life functions as a category of Hegelian logic specifically, yet questions the clarity or appropriateness of thus differentiating “the treatment of Life as a logical category from its treatment as a phase of Nature (in EN) or a presupposition of Spirit (in EG)”.32 Here, indeed, McTaggart stresses the need to keep the logical category free from the biological phenomenon from which, one has to understand, it has borrowed merely the name. Hegel, he claims, fails here to do this. Life, the category, should have been rather presented, for example, as a unity, as just one individual. He can find no place in a presentation of logic for an account of biological reproduction in a negative infinity of repeated acts of generation. Close inspection confirms, nonetheless, that the category identified under the name of Life is indeed nothing other than the Idea Immediate, which 32

Findlay, op. cit. p. 256, parentheses added.

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throws us back a page, for a moment, to the Idea as just reached. This is the category-name for a perfect unity and balance between the “Subjectivity” he studied in the Universality, Specificity and Individuality of the Pure Notion, and the Objectivity treated under the three headings of Mechanism, Chemism and Teleology. (Findlay, p.254)

Findlay adds that the “origin of the Idea in the notion of Teleology throws immense light on Hegel’s philosophy”, though the light comes rather from Findlay’s own singling out of this relation here. He thus continues: The Idea does not explain things by being their cause, or their underlying Substance, or the Whole of which they are the parts: it explains them by being the End towards which they must be thought of as tending.

This has to be true, as an account of Hegel’s thought, since it emerges from its own self-presentation, Idea deriving from Teleology. Thus excluding First Cause paradigms or Spinozism or materialist pantheism Findlay goes on to stress the view of the Idea as a quasi-practical urge (Trieb) intrinsic to all things, and while this harmonises with the “analogy of being”, of all beings with one another, as outlined by Aquinas, it also goes some way to reconciling the Hegelian and the Kantian account, which Hegel thus appears to have simply stood on its head, as Marx will later claim to re-invert him in turn. The mutuality, in Aquinas as in Hegel, of all beings as such, in their (act of being) as well as in their consequent active appetite (Trieb, appetitus), makes of analogy itself, of the yearning ideality of the finite, an analogy of the mutual love, of self and other, crowning both systems in their respective accounts of the Absolute. This reflection, at the same time, serves merely to bring out the analogy of the two systems with one another, of each with its other. The Idea, the Concept (der Begriff), is both Selbstzweck and Trieb thereto (WL II, 466).33 Findlay comments: “since the Idea is by nature inspirational and regulative, the fact that it is such cannot be set down as showing it to be imperfectly realized”, which is rather question-begging. Thus he has just acknowledged that Hegel “refuses to treat it as a merely regulative conception… not possible to reach”, as with Kant’s practical postulates, but he how contrives to suggest that even this Hegelian refusal is no more solidly based than if it were a refusal simply, a thus far 33

As far as I can tell from Wallace’s translation the term Trieb is dropped from the Encyclopaedia account. If so this might or might not be significant.

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arbitrary attitude. This is unwarranted, though, and Findlay contradicts it himself when he says, in an exact recollection of the classic “ontological argument”, that the Idea can only “fall short of actuality” as and when it is “inadequately conceived”. The self-directed unity of the organism is “the type” of “all that is intelligible”. That is, Life is indeed the Idea immediate. McTaggart misses this, or contests it, rather, objecting, for instance, to Aristotle’s claim that a severed limb is only equivocally a limb. His example shows that you cannot be Hegelian, as he had wished to be, without being Aristotelian, though it remains false that he “wrote Hegel out of his system”, as Peter Geach would have it in his Truth, Love and Immortality, a portrayal of McTaggart in relative abstraction from the latter’s lifelong immersion in Hegel. To understand McTaggart better, however, one may recall that he had earlier, in 1901, explicitly claimed that the ideal unity reached in Hegel is more perfect than that of a transient organic formation, as indeed it is. Hegel, however, is not committed to disputing this in his presentation of Life as the first or immediate attempt of thought to conceive of or identify the Idea. His commitment to Aristotle, for that matter, is, as always, a commitment to the fuller accomplishment of Aristotelianism in this his own later age and not a fixation on the Idea’s earlier “historical” moments. The organism, in Sensibility, in its “universality”, takes, like the Idea in this, all that is outside itself into itself or, rather, in apprehending it overcomes or “nullifies” its externality. “The sense in act is the sensible in act” (Aristotle). Specificity and Individuality (focus of pain and “irritation”) are overcome in Reproduction, a term, however, used primarily of the individual’s own self-continuance, so that the coincidence of this with propagation of the species, in that both are “reproduction”, itself signifies what Hegel wants to say. This perpetual propagation of the species, contrary to McTaggart’s understanding as to the understanding generally, is itself, thus rationally viewed, in reality self-perpetuation “in the life of the Genus or Kind”. That is, it is perpetuation of Self in the self-fulfilling Trieb of the Concept, universal of universals. The Trinity, again, is the type of this, or this of the Trinity, where the Father simply is this generating relation to the Son as the Son, correspondingly, is the “word” as standing for the being generated as such in every “moment” of this act or “method”. “Of myself I can do nothing”, the individual declares, while we are exhorted more generally to “work out your own salvation in fear and trembling, for it is God that works in you”. This process, like, similarly, death too is not as it first appears to us but “the emergence of the Spirit”. This immediate union will be yet more

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adequately instanced in the Idea, the category, of Cognition or of Knowledge. Meanwhile, the above illustrates what Hegel calls the naturalness of the Speculative, of the “true reason-world” as the “right of every human being on whatever grade of culture or mental growth he may stand” (Enc. 82, add.). What, it now becomes clear, is gained by positing the Idea as the End of all finitude is that it is (and there is) a logical necessity that governs all, and which is thus the true “natural necessity” also, as coterminous with the power and name of God, of the Absolute, such that freedom is only to be conceived as within or expressive of just this necessity and not as underpinning some possible alternative account. This indeed was the force of Leibniz’s conception of the necessarily “best of all possible worlds”, which Hegel preserves. The finites, as purely ideal, are one and all possibles, as even finite existence itself is never more, therefore, than a possibility. True being, like goodness, the dialectic elicits, is of the Absolute alone and all else only is at all in its identity with that. What is come upon here, in Hegel, is once more the truth of the analogy of being, of all being as the love binding all together, as, in fact, just this unity as (the) unity as such. In this way Hegel recovers the sense of the Platonic form as more than, as distinct from, the mere logical universal. This is nowhere more in evidence than in his presentation and treatment of this category of Kind. Any lion, as thought in its truth, is the lion as such, the abstract individual being “ruined”. This does not change where there is or might be just one lion and thus it is that in Aristotle’s account of epagoge, which is neither precisely a doctrine of abstraction nor precisely Humean induction (of the form from its several instances), the mind can, though it need not, grasp the universal from its first encounter with some representation of it, whether or not others follow34. What is decisive, rather, is the universal’s “coming to rest in the soul”, at whatever empirical point. So universally true is this truth concerning the universal that, of anything presented, the spiritual man, philosopher, worshipper or artist, can say: “This also is thou; neither is this thou”. * This step, from finite End to Inner Design, seems to be the key to unlocking the profoundest puzzles of the Hegelian system, where we encounter talk of truth needing to be a result and even or especially its 34 The supreme example of this, in its difference, is the necessary identity of Deus and deitas.

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own result, just as, even more startlingly, we find Hegel claiming, after his sharp and continuous criticisms of “the Critical Philosophy”, that “Kant has resuscitated the Idea in general” (Enc. 204) and has done that “by means of the notion of Inner Design” (my stress). So long, anyhow, as the End, in our thought, is encumbered by the necessity of a contrasting means, then we have not yet to do with the End as infinite and absolute and thus truly End. That is why the result must be the End’s “own result”. It is its own method, as Hegel also says. There is process, as immutable processions, however, in God, circulating upon themselves in a movement of “eternal return” upon itself in the only abiding and hence true “present moment”, the moment of which all else and everything else is a moment or are moments indifferently, singular and plural being equally finite as contrastive terms. The Absolute, since it is movement, does not itself move. It is without motion as transcending motion’s inherent imperfection35 and not as if lacking some positive quality in abstraction from it or from anything. It is, thus, the Idea as described, as conceived, at Enc. 160-161. This is its “inner design” such as infinity bestows upon itself in being infinity, absorbing all as itself all in all, transcending here all questions of logical distribution. We can perhaps see this view beginning to emerge in Kant’s treatment of the End in his ethics, in his metaphysics of morals, rather, where he argues that any person, qua person, ought, in conformity with reason namely, to be treated as an end, never as a means. Thus all persons form a “kingdom of ends” from which, clearly, means are excluded as inevitably finitising the ends, which would themselves, from time to time, then function as means. End, so to say, comes into its own here and we can begin to see how just End as the category is described leads into the Idea as itself, in its first guise at least, a category. That is, just to recap, not even the Idea can be assumed to mean quite what we normally mean by this word. One can puzzle over this. Hegel draws no distinction between subjective acts by which logical entities are brought to mind, and the entities which exist independently of such acts. The thought-determinations and categories of Hegel have no subsistence apart from the life of thinking and self-conscious Spirit. (Findlay, p.153)

Thus “objects of Nature”, however imperfectly, “exemplify an unconscious thought or a petrified intelligence”. Each, thought or nature, 35

This inherent imperfection is shown in Aristotle’s definition of movement in Physics III as the act of what is “in potency” to some future state insofar as it is in potency (to that state).

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reminds of the other. I have heard “analytical Thomists”, such as Geach or, in a measure, Anscombe, put the objection, to Kantian ethics, that a person can’t possibly be an end, that an end is necessarily a state of the agent, his having obtained some object or further state treated as an object, for example. What is it that is wanted, as the end of action, if a person or, it has been suggested, a mud-pie, is regarded as an end? They don’t see that this is just the point at issue, just the point where the jump is made from finite teleology over to Inner Design and from thence, the Idea. One question might be whether Hegel really finds all this in Kant, as he claims to do. It would anyhow be an error, I think, to simply parallel this difference with that between a static mechanism and a dynamic Darwinian perspective. The development of Nature’s concepts, as logically viewed here, as indeed of any finite concept, depends entirely upon their aforesaid ideal character, implying that there is no Nature at all except as within or as one with the Idea at which we have now arrived and of which it and they, nature and her concepts, quite equally, are moments. Nature “groans and travails” not as bringing forth God precisely but as superseding, if it could, its own self-illusion. It is, so to say, designing its designer. How can that be? Aristotle’s definition of life virtually implies inner design, and is thus far in advance of the notion of design in modern teleology, which had in view finite and outward design only. (Enc. 204)

Hegel refers here to the mechanistic designs of a watch-maker, uncritically absolutised by Paley and others, mercilessly pilloried in Hume’s Dialogues on Natural Religion. What, however, in its contrast, was “Aristotle’s definition of life”? In the course of giving five or six definitions of life, or of “a living thing”, Aristotle states: “the soul will not be a body” (later discussed by Aquinas under the rubric utrum anima sit corpus), since it is “predicated of a subject” (hypokeimenon) as the body is not. Gendlin comments that he “is opening a science of internally-arising (“natural”) activities”. Here is the key to “inner design”. The first definition of the soul, meanwhile, is that it must be “substance qua form of a natural body which has life potentially” (Aristotle, 412a 19-20). Gendlin comments: “what he means by ‘form’ here is internally ongoing activity”. The power for such activity is its “actuality” (entelecheia), substance as source of function, as what becomes subject in Hegel, even though the soul first appears as predicated (of the “body”, which yet is nothing without its actively organising form). Aristotle speaks then of the form or soul as “self-organising”, a real “kind” of causa sui, even granted that the self-cause is in the end one as

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Kind and ultimately kind of kinds (this though will not be just one more kind), even in Aristotle already. But viewed as kind of kinds (i.e. not thus as one kind among many) the McTaggartian objection (to the self-caused) that Hegel, for his part, re-introduces a merely logical universal does not apply. So Aristotle speaks of the “self-organising” of the soul, or of the living (ensouled) thing by its means. Gendlin begs us to “notice that it is the living things themselves which act for the sake of this. They arrange themselves in relation to eternity; they are not arranged by it”. This is the account given in what Hegel termed the only book still worth reading on the soul. Aristotle, like Hegel, definitely identifies that-for-the-sake-ofwhich as Trieb or moving desire from within, active “internal design”. From this spring all the later identifications, ultimately with God, from which Aristotle refuses to distinguish any form of individual nous. At least we do not find him doing so. To this end, sc. eternity, “it is the most natural work in living things… to produce another thing like themselves”. Kind, that is, receives here, already in Aristotle, a dynamic interpretation beyond the statically logical, even though eventually, in Hegel, within Logic (which admits of this) as an active “process”, in Hegel’s later words. Things, as active (a wider category than “alive”), want to “partake of the everlasting and divine in so far as they can”, says Aristotle (they have appetitus), and this is the origin of Hegel’s identification of Nature in the whole as the alienated Idea. Thought and act are not separable. Yet it is this desire, and not the alienation it springs from, that is “in accordance with nature”. From this too spring all the later theological debates about “natural desire” and whether or not anything can be desired that it, nature, does not desire, even if it be its own supersession. And that a higher gift than grace Should flesh and blood refine, God’s presence and his very self And essence all divine. (Newman) The “refine” is too weak, as religion’s story-form, taken on its own, is too weak, though Newman probably chose it in part at least to rhyme, merely, with “divine”. Flesh and blood are already ensouled, with their Trieb. That is, for Aristotle, there is no flesh prior to such ensoulment. This is, inasmuch as reason is involved, “our” necessity, the universality of I as, simply as subject, universal of universals. Here in Aristotle, Hegel points out, we have the determining idealism of philosophy as such, just as much as in Plato, but with the active element of entelechy added to the forms.

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Inasmuch as Nature actively desires, however, Nature participates in the Trinitarian or threefold process of Spirit, of reality, whereby the latter is “its own result”, and this is inner design, in the whole as in all things to the extent that the very category of whole and part becomes overthrown or cancelled. This, we might say, is the inner design of Hegel’s thought, of thinking itself as, actively, thinking its self. Accordingly the fourth century Christological heresy, as it was judged to be, of Bishop Apollinaris was rejected as opining that the “flesh” assumed by the Word in “hypostatic union” did not already include, as formed by, its own formal determination and Trieb, mind as capax Dei, to use the later phrase. God came to man as like to like, we can say, even after granting that this likeness is found infinitely more in the creature than in God, as was picked up or made more precise (some might say more mystifying) at one of the twelfth century Lateran Councils of the Church, here too simply following, while thus bringing to birth, sound philosophy. We can, at any rate, now see how it is that the End, as interpreted in this teleological view, plays an essential and determining role in the advance, both dialectic and real, Hegel would be claiming, from the Object to the Idea. This very use of the (definite) article, more natural in German than in English, signals confirmation of a deeper understanding of Plato in regard to his “forms” than would be supplied by later debates concerning “universals”. The true universal is as concrete as it is individual, active and determinative of all things and itself firstly. This, therefore, is the final truth of being, namely that “I will be what I will be”. I spoke above of Nature designing its designer. That is merely to stress that Nature is not designed, that “inner design” is not design at all, as “own result” is not result, as members mutually “one of another” are not members. The Idea itself, rather, “in its own absolute truth” resolves to “go forth freely as Nature” (Enc. 244). Put less metaphorically, this is its self-constitutive necessity in its or the eternal beginning.

CHAPTER TEN HEGEL ON JUDGMENT

Beginning at paragraph 166 of the Encyclopaedia Hegel makes clear that what we have to do with in the Judgment, as the second of the three divisions of the Subjective Notion, is the specification of the Notion. “The judgment is the notion in its particularity”. That is, we have to do with the notion or concept as self-specifying, in predication, before coming on to the kinds of judgments, which are themselves the kinds, conceptions as conceived qua judgments. Prior to this, as it were innocent of Frege, we say the Subject Notion, S, is this or that, P. Thus we identify it, falsely, Hegel will agree. “All judgments are false”, whether or not we are adverting to Hegel’s thesis here (167) that “All things are a judgment” since, anyhow, “Everything finite is false”. This, however, is compatible with and maybe does not go further than Aquinas’s analysis whereby even a literal statement of identity specifies the subject “quasi-materially” before identifying it with itself “quasi-formally”, which is logically different, even though, within logic, Hegel identifies matter and form concretely. That is, judgment itself specifies difference precisely as identifying what begins as two, the subject and the predicate, the being and its essence, thus made the concept as “true being” (WL, final paragraph: das einfache Sein, zu dem sich die Idee bestimmt). That is, the term "judgment" names specification. The Notion admits of specification inasmuch as qua infinity it necessarily requires infinite differentiation, without, however, the finitude of composition. Each “part” is the whole (135). This relation of specification is one of identity specifically between what are mutually other. Hence ambiguity arises in our (notional) apprehension of the notion prior to this present development. For in awareness of the subject as now independent of the predicate we take it "to be a thing or term". The predicate indeed we see, qua predicated, as just such "a general term… somewhere in our heads."

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In this sense, McTaggart pointed out1, apparently correctly, the Individual is not restrictively or subjectively a notion. That is, "the true distinctions in the notion", viz. universal, particular, individual, are not in fact species of it, as they seem "when kept severed from each other by external reflection". For the third of them, again, the Individual, is not a subjective notion at all but is objective and finally absolute, absolutely concrete, the "system" even and "method" too. The "finite" individual, in contrast, is unreal and hence "ruined" ab initio or in essence. The individual, ultimately, which is the same as to say any and every individual, is the universal and this, that the individual is the universal, is the very form of the judgment, rather, it is the judgment, "in its abstract terms". Presupposed, however, is the relation of naming, itself an identity.2 Presumed to the discussion, therefore, is what is presumed to discussion itself. Discussion not so much incarnates3 as projects or represents the actual dialectic as Thought thinking itself, which is System, Method and the absolutely concrete Individual. Upon or within this Individual all subjective notionality rests, just because the Individual, individuality itself but even "this" individual, is the Notion. Subject is "thing" before it becomes term. These various entities are in reality an infinity of reciprocal relations. The relations themselves are reciprocal. They do not, even as relations, exist independently or abstractly. The reference, therefore, is no longer to any specific relation of reciprocity but to the reciprocity of relations themselves as forming a unity in identity, not a merely compositional unity as in the superseded part-whole category treated in the Doctrine of Essence. So these relations, as varieties of judgment, are contained in perfect identity in the Judgment of the Notion, which they even constitute. They cannot be manipulated "by us", ourselves such judgments, in our finite efforts to set them in rational order. Therefore we have had to devise terms, as standing for, in intention, all these elements. Yet any one such an essentially suppositious term frequently has to stand or go proxy for several different supposits or elements connected by likeness and hence, in our naming, where they are nomina or terms, by analogia.4 Thus the judgment "is a connexion which is also a distinguishing", as the form "S is P" faithfully reflects. That is, as itself a judgment it reflects the infinite 1

J.M.E. McTaggart, Commentary on Hegel's Logic 1910, §191. Hegel discusses this in Encyclopaedia III: The Philosophy of Spirit. 459 add. 3 Cp. W. Wordsworth: "Words are not thoughts dressed, They are its incarnation." 4 Cf. Aristotle, De soph. el. I, 165a 7-16, where this is equivalently stated. This text formed the basis for post-Aristotelian elaboration of supposition theory (suppositio). 2

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particularisation of the universally individual and as such it names the Absolute more perfectly than any category hitherto treated. The form of judgment is and has to be itself a judgment.5 Such particularisation, subjectively notional as it is, yet reflects and is intentionally identical with the necessarily infinite differentiation, again, of the absolutely infinite, the Absolute. All things, Hegel therefore says, are a judgment, "for to judge is to specify the notion" (165). Judgment is its active self-specification, as a thinking thought and nothing other than this thinking thought without limit of itself. This indeed is the ultimate result, self-unfolding or manifestation or self-constitution (thinging*6, thinking) of Being in its full self-realisation as actively self-thought. Being becomes Thought wherever it is not confined to being just one "thing" or determinatum ad unum, the essence of Nature as Thought's (or, therefore, Being's) self-alienation. Thought has the self as other or, Hegel will gloss and expand, is itself just in the other. It transcends self in the latter's (finite) notion. Full marks, thus far, to Hume! But we might also relate to it Aquinas’s doctrine that the soul only knows itself in knowing the other or others. The function/argument explanation of judgment can never fully replace the paradigmatic denotational identity of Subject and Predicate since the former, functionalism, has to be explained in terms of the latter, identity, when one states, for example, what a function or an argument is (identical with). This is also why judgment in the dialectic replaces or supersedes the subjective notion as notion. Thus any subject, of which something is said (predicated) in judgment, must always itself be explained under the same form or, here, category. Unless we are able to say what S is it will be a mere "proper" name, simply standing for (supponens pro) one or more individuals, without any rationale, precisely as Hegel analyses the necessary arbitrariness of linguistic signs in The Philosophy of Spirit.7 Thus I say that "telephone" means or rather names what I use to talk with those not present. Even this first suppositio materialis or, rather, naturalis, prior to or abstracted from sentential context, begins already to express a

5 Cf. our "Argument Forms and Argument from Analogy", Acta Philosophica, Rome, Vol. 6, 1997, pp. 303-310. 6 I use the asterisk to signify a neologism. 7 Enc. 459 add. Cf. J. Derrida, "The Pit and the Pyramid: Introduction to Hegel's Semiology", Margins of Philosophy 1972 (tr. Bass), also in Philosophy Today 1985, reprinted in G.W.F. Hegel, Critical Assessments, ed. Robert Stern, Routledge 1993.

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judgment, an identity of "telephone" with something else8, precisely in its being taken as a word. This is more immediately apparent in the German Fern-sprecher, but I apply it even to such a word as fern, once received as word. It implies a judgment about itself, that it stands for something, is supposing something (else). Even where it stands for itself it stands for it as something else. In Fregean terms, the subject-variables are never wholly unbound, the boundness is equivalent to a judgment, whether asserted or not. Again, though, any possibility is in fact asserted as a possibility, whether we speak of horses or unicorns, or even of "impossibilities". In the simple understanding of notion as notion, therefore, we have, again, "a connexion which is also a distinguishing", essential judgment. Judgment is, therefore, the notion itself in its particularity. The subjective notion as notion itself passes into judgment. The judgment is saying what things are and therefore itself embodies that abstraction according to which concepts are formed. The explanation of judgment, therefore, as in essence the putting together of concepts, is false unless it is made clear that any concept is itself already either composite (put together) or a coincident unity. As such it is superior to that towards which composition and order (hierarchy) strive, as uniting together in an infinite identity all its aspects or elements whatever. But as such, again, it will be the Absolute Idea. The concept, that is, is infinitely judgment. If there are composites there must be simples, Leibniz declared. It is this judgment, however, this final identity, which alone is absolutely simple precisely as being (an) infinite and, hence, multiply differentiated identity. Infinity is itself judgment and a judgment, though not as initiating an enumeration simply. Platonic "third man" difficulties are sidestepped here in roundly declaring everything finite to be false where taken for itself merely. In this sense Being is not distinguished from anything else, since it is (is!) the basis of any

8 By suppositio materialis the term as a material or individually occurring item stands simply for itself and not for its supposedly invariant non-contextual meaning (suppositio naturalis). Even this most unequivocal identity is thus made into a judgment of "standing for", thus making suppositio a broader category than "going proxy for", as in some later theories of reference. It belongs with a universal theory of signs in which everything has a predicational relation to every other thing, even in affirming its own identity (since the predicational relation is itself identity). Cf. our "Subject and Predicate Logic", The Modern Schoolman, LXVI, January 1989, pp. 129-139 (esp. section IV), together with "The Supposition of the Predicate", Ibid., LXXVII, November 1999, pp. 73-78.

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"finished" perfection whatever. In this very first sense too, then, "the factual is normative". In this sense too, as Hegel says: "The copula 'is' springs from the nature of the notion", of the notion specifically. The notion is that which is "selfidentical even in parting with its own", i.e. it doesn't just happen to be that as one of its properties. This is what it is, the truth of Self and Other, as "the principle of personality is universality" (163, Zus.). This copula, however, constitutes judgment in identifying individual and universal in a "genuine particularity". At the same time, however, the copula should be assimilated to the predicate (the "functional" interpretation where, so to say, "is P" is P) as expressing act or entelechy9, something alike proper to the grammatical verb and to verbum or word in its universality, formal before it is abstract. Hence this formality of judgmental predication is not essentially predicamental, as if finitely marking off qualities from abstract because totally unspecified individuals. It first rather brings the individual into view in its inherent universality. We have here "the identity which is realised as identity or universality" (my stress), leaving behind the correlations of Essence. * Judgments are not then just "combinations of notions" (166 Zus.), as it were presupposed to them or made afterwards, as if these notions were themselves quite heterogeneous to judgments. Notions as “subjective” do not in fact "differ in kind" from either judgment or syllogism. All three are verba mentalia or acts of the understanding, all three are imperfect moments of the Absolute Idea, das einfache Sein (WL, the concluding paragraph), that they presage and reflect. They do not form three species even of the finite understanding, since the individual is already the 9

This apparent or initial ambiguity was understood by Aquinas, commenting that is "means that which is understood after the manner of absolute actuality. For is, when it is expressed without qualification, means to be in act, and therefore it has its meaning after the manner of a verb. But the actuality, which is the principal meaning of the verb is, is indifferently the actuality of every form, either substantial or accidental act. Hence it is that when we wish to signify that any form or act actually inheres in any subject, we signify it by this verb is, either simply or according to some qualification - simply in the present tense; according to some qualification in the other tenses" (Aquinas, In periherm. lect. 5, no. 22. Cf. our "Does Realism Make a Difference to Logic?" in The Monist, April 1986, esp. note 24). The implication, as in Hegel, is that also languages lacking the copula "is", such as Russian, would be subject to this logical interpretation.

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universal. This, the judgment's basic form, is already the form of reality, of the Absolute, which is thus, to this extent, itself Judgment, as having judgment's form, that of identity (itself however identified as act10). The Notion itself, here as "subjective", extends into judgment and is "the Notion as Judgment". So what is "combined" in the judgment does not at first exist independently or as if separated. Affirmation and negation cannot be reduced to combination and separation in a final metaphysical analysis. Similarly, what is separated was never combined, as we see more immediately, although prima facie this raises the deeper problem of how a negative judgment can be a judgment at all as this is described here. What Hegel is saying brings out what is misleading in the Venn diagrams and other mathematical analogies as illustrative of syllogistic and hence in the mathematical model of logic as a whole, as distinct from any projected logical model of mathematics. The logical relation is not the real and extensional relation of containment or inherence but identity, a relation of reason alone. Hence identity effectively excludes the duality of relata needed for any real relation, since this relation, as a rational relating in actu, declares them to be one. The written word records this, the vox exterior manifests it. In this sense hearing is a superior or more spiritual sense than sight, something Hegel accordingly reflects in his aesthetics. Both music and poetry, the highest art, are primarily heard and so writing and notation here, like today's computers, are primarily tools of convenience. Dialectically, of course, the extremes of such convenience pass over into something more than itself in the general continuum, from moment to moment so to say. One might say further that the musical instrument generally is a tool of the voice, whether "intoning" words or more fundamental sound-patterns.11 So one might wish further to see words or speech as in their innermost reality an instrument of such an absolute pattern of supra-composite unity in absolute "harmony", the "music of the spheres". Or one might not. Hearing itself, after all, is finite and subject to decay. Yet a deaf or a dumb man, it is known, may create music though thought may not be conceivable as co-existing with a total congenital insensibility. The Absolute, therefore, includes the immediate as mediating itself to itself. Sense-cognition and intellectual cognition seen 10

That identity is identified as Act (and act as identity) and act as Notion is reflected in religion by the axiom "God is love". 11 Further still, it is difficult not to identify speech or intoning with hearing, as Stravinsky spoke of when he first "heard", in mente, his "Rite of Spring". This merely testifies to the reflexive unity of thinking in the Absolute Idea. "My doctrine is not mine but his that sent me." This becomes a general point.

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as separate phenomena are unreal abstractions, an insight opening to us the mystery of the animals or, at the other extreme, of the planets and heavenly bodies, given that space is itself a species of finitude and hence "momentary" and an alienation of the Idea. Within a scientific perspective we dismiss planetary cognition and "influence" as baseless. At the same time it may on more general principles be a free or reasonable attribution, a way of looking at what is in the first place unfounded immediacy, the "manifest" image of man himself12, self in other, other in self. Thus, to return to our narrower theme, one does not "ascribe" predicates to a subject. Rather, the predicate is not thus ascribed since the judgment itself declares its antecedent identity with that subject and nothing else. It is not a case, therefore, of the subject being "self-subsistent, outside somewhere" and the predicate "somewhere in our heads", in either case exclusively. Nor does even the Fregean model imply this, once the foundation of the judgment in the notion, which it specifies without going beyond, is understood. Henry Veatch's trenchant criticism of Fregean procedures13 rather overlooked this point, whether or not it might remove the ambiguity of some formulations of Peter Geach when expounding Frege as in final harmony with Aquinas and Aristotle14. The subject, namely, must itself always expand or extend into a judgment in order to be known at all. Similarly, we shall see, judgment itself is a concealed syllogism, "the reasonable, and everything reasonable" (181), the Idea, in a word. The point that form and matter apply only analogically in logical investigations is a valid one, to be born in mind when interpreting the concept-object schema of Frege. The subject signifies quasi-materialiter, the predicate quasi-formaliter.15 Formal logic for a long time ignored the intrinsic or essential nature of this "advance" from notion to judgment, making the latter "look as if it were something merely contingent". From this point of view the later postHegelian thesis that words only have meaning in sentences, or in context, 12

Cf. W. Sellars, Science, Perception and Reality (1966). Sellars uses this term in contrast to the "real" or scientific image (of man). This, more rigorously followed, however, would exclude even perception "at a distance". The outside would be the inside, as emerged dialectically in the Doctrine of Essence. 13 Henry B. Veatch: Intentional Logic, Newhaven 1952. See also his later “St. Thomas’s Doctrine of Subject and Predicate” in St. Thomas Aquinas (1274-1974), Commemorative Studies, vol. II, PIMS, Toronto 1974. 14 For criticism of this project, see our “The Resistance of Thomism to Analytical and Other Patronage”, The Monist (General Topic: “Analytical Thomism”), October 1997, Vol. 80, No. 4, pp.611-618. 15 Cf. Aquinas: Summa theologica Ia 85, 5, ad 3.

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is itself an advance, despite the limitations we have found in it above. For the earlier supposition theory offered a unified view of meaning in both cases. Thus what a word "stands for" outside of its sentential use, its lexical meaning or significatio extends even to its bearer in the case of proper names. Yet one will not so easily escape the puzzle of whether "David" stands for all Davids* (there is no need to say "men called David") living and dead. This puzzle rather supports the thesis of the comprehensiveness of the contextual theory. Used out of some context "David" is just a noise. One has at least to intend that "David" is a nice name or some such. But this too will be a species of suppositio. The true state of things, alone able to explain the necessity, which we recognise, of this advance, is that the notion does not "stand still" but is as such or essentially "self-differentiating". This is an advance upon the more figurative phrase diffusivum sui. This, "the native act of the notion, is the judgment". "It is… an infinite form, of boundless activity, as it were the punctum saliens of all vitality." All, Hegel says. One cannot but think of the ceaseless procession of the Word in Trinitarian belief, well known to, indeed shared (of course, as with all believers, under an interpretation) by, Hegel, or of "the wonderful effects of divine love" as described or envisioned in The Imitation of Christ (cp. Enc. 159). Thus Hegel would make good his final Encyclopaedic claim that philosophy has all the Content of Religion and Art and more perfectly too. This much is plain. "A judgment therefore means the particularisation of the notion", which is yet in itself "implicitly the particular", made explicit in the subjective notion here as or under the aspect of judgment. "All things", it follows, "are a judgment" (167). This "all" is to be taken both distributively, in the sense of each and everything, and also as undistributed. In this latter sense all things, precisely as universally particularised, are a judgment, are judgment, are the judgment. The judgment is their particularisation, as sheep, goats and whatever else, taken verbally (in the sense of the predicative verb), in act or, that is to say, vitally (166, Zus.). Hegel refers us again here to his analogy of the plant: as we remarked before… the germ of a plant contains its particular, such as root, branches, leaves, &co.: but these details are at first present only potentially, and are not realised till the germ uncloses. This unclosing is, as it were, the judgment of the plant. (166, add.)

In the notion as notion, the germ, that is, "the particular is not yet explicit". This "not yet" of course refers to a moment of thinking dialectically considered, under the figure of temporality as standing for a more general series. Ultimately, temporal development is itself a figure for dialectical

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series, for the action of thinking and hence of judgment, the proper activity, itself made explicit in syllogism as is the notion in judgment, of thinking. Logic, we see, is science of science. The temporal therefore happens, since it is our name for "what happens", and yet, as merely figure, does not happen. Hence the Apostle wrote of the Old Testament history, as he believed it to be, of Abraham, Sarah, Isaac, Hagar and Ishmael, that "these things happened in a figure". The Latin, I noted above, has per allegoriam dicta, but dicta, as interpretative limitation upon Greek allegoroumena, does not appear in the original language of the preferred manuscripts. For our purposes, however, the intuitive felicity of this classic English version may stand on its own merits, witnessing to the Hegelian vision of things as in line with this ancient manner of perceiving events. They happen in a figure. The whole notion of predestination, itself figuratively temporal, is here involved, thought’s dialectical necessity entraining even or especially personality, even more the principle of universality than the latter is, indeed truly, the principle of personality (Enc. 163 add.), along with “our” more or less phenomenal personalities as moments of the Idea while yet, in our freedom, its “very total” (160). No moment is abstractly merely that, as “being has no parts” and the Idea is being. With this in mind references to Jonah and the whale or Moses lifting up the image of a serpent show no disposition to see these things as stories and not events at all. Precisely as events they figure, just like the words of the prophets, partially misunderstood as prefiguring. So, equally, what they prefigure will not just be, is not, event over again. So according to this vision those err, "just miss the notion", who ask: "Did Christ rise from the dead or not?" once the idea has been broached. It is a form, as Hegel develops this in The Phenomenology of Mind particularly, of "seeking the living among the dead", of limiting oneself to Understanding rather than Reason, which "understands spiritual things spiritually". We might hazard that the approach lies behind the evangelical protagonist's confident affirmation of his own resurrection in the sources, rather than mere pre-diction, as developed finally in the Johannine "I am the resurrection". From this the Eckhartian "The eye with which God sees me is the eye with which I see God" develops, again generalising an original figure, along with those of mission, election, messenger, sacrificial lamb and so on. These are not denied but aufgehoben, at once put by and taken up into the final sophia. The questioner overlooks, as dead metaphor, that “resurrection” is a wholly figurative and time-bound notion, as recognised in the liturgy when stating that Christ returns to what he never left.

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The same applies to Julian's "All shall be well". It is a characterisation of present consciousness in temporal figure, whether or not this is fully clear to the speaker. As Hegel puts it, we cannot always say what we mean or would mean. We utter something different, willy nilly, as is attested even in Scripture in various forms. Thus Balaam’s wish to curse Israel came out as a blessing (Numbers 24, 5): "Oh Israel how lovely are thy tents", and later Caiaphas prophesied precisely as high priest the expediency of Christ's death, but in a sense not desired or meant by him personally. Here magic has given way to a spiritual signification in things, while not yet discerning the falsity of the finite as such. It is notion-laden representation. Not merely, therefore, is the factual normative, as Hegel is often reproached with saying, as if conditioning “norms”, but the normative is rather factual, in the sense of absolutely true, things agreeing with their notion (where they truly are "things"). This means, however, the notion's agreeing with itself, since it is this agreement while, Hegel says repeatedly, "everything finite is false". In further consideration, not only of the "not yet" as figurative, but of the notion particularised as itself "all things" and exclusively so, yet not then as Thing but as Judgment, we can take the notion of the plenitude of power. If the Pope, say, has this plenitude then he is not bound by the sins and errors of his predecessors in office or by anything at all, not by those ways of acting and therefore of speaking now called "unfortunate". The Popes are increasingly realising this, to the dismay of the more literal, enmeshed thereby in the initial contradictions of pure Understanding, of religious rationalism. As identified with or acting for the all-powerful he, the Pope, may declare, of his predecessors, "I will not remember their sins any more". This, then, is the secret essence of forgiveness, that it annihilates the past as past, in implicit denial of temporality. It happened "in a figure" and not merely "as in a figure". This is the philosophical leap of ingratitude (50), the kicking away of the ladder. "No birth, no death". Hence we posit the normative as determining the factual, the Good as constituting Being, itself or another's indifferently. In acting thus, however, the Pope simply assumes the intrinsic power and virtue of any person whatever, the Logic here shows, of personhood as such. He ceases to be a merely abstract universal. "The principle of personality is universality", where each is End in itself, or in self. It is a "kingdom" indeed, but "within", precisely put as transcending the outward. At the same time, however, it declares this outward to be actually inward (140) reciprocally, since the inward is itself outward or the real, beyond all figure or alienation. For we have implicitly identified alienation into

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Nature as nothing other than figure, since nature is temporally (and spatially) determined. Thereby is it determined to one and not another, determinata ad unum, instead of being, as is Reason, ad opposita, not as called upon to choose between the opposed in the freedom of judging, in the sense of arbitration, but rather to determine, in yet ampler freedom their mutual relation. Since consciousness of reason and indeed of understanding just is realised freedom so freedom must realise itself to the uttermost. "My kingdom is not of this world". All should say this or, more philosophically, less figuratively, "Everything is a judgment", in particularisation, that is to say, of the Notion, which simply is thought of itself as thinking. We here pass the point where it might be meaningful to ask concerning the credentials of that speaker, in finite abstraction from his actual or factual appearing as "the Christ". We have implied that he would appear, that there would be such an appearing, in normative determination. This is the birth of each person writ large. The two, factual and normative, are reciprocal as in reality one. This is the foundation of any natural law, which, however, applies as much to history as to biology, psychology or anything similar. It "takes Fate by the throat" indeed. Thus self-preservation is natural law’s first precept, for Aquinas as for Hobbes, and all the precepts following develop this thought, up to the life of the spirit in self-renouncing self-consciousness, in mutual subsumption of individual and universal in one another as the only true being of each. Anyone may see, again, that these categories of messenger, mission, "the one who is to come", are, as finitely positivist, necessarily transcended in the infinite, in Notion, which rather declares one will come, is ever present, not this or that one but the universal particular or personal, the Notion. This is equally the Beloved, being consciousness as such (159). "Believe me for the very work's sake." Whoever listens to you listens to me and in listening to me you listen to one another and thus build the Eternal City, the community, the body, the Idea. This latter ever stands realised, though the Cunning of Reason, says Hegel, is bound to conceal it from us, since it is essentially Result, as otherwise seeming contradictive of the Appearance which must mediate it, as the senses must mediate reason. So then Hegel's plant, the judgment, is the unclosing of the seed, the notion, which thus dies to its abstract generality in what is ipso facto its fruition. This refers, still, to the "subjective notion as notion" and not to the Idea Absolute, the Notion's true form and "the very heart of things". Everything inside is outside, and makes things what they are, for these two are one, their initial reciprocity itself overcome as heralding this unity merely.

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The judgment is usually taken in a subjective sense as an operation and a form, occurring merely in self-conscious thought. This distinction, however, has no existence on purely logical principles, by which the judgment is taken in the quite universal signification that all things are a judgment. (Enc.167).

It is the distinction, of spirit from logic or contrariwise, that “has no existence”, existence being anyhow a finite logical category, a finite moment of logic of spirit, as logic itself is a moment of spirit, which is the other of itself as “its own” other, as Son and Father are one in theological representation. As Aquinas has it, logicus non considerat existentiam rei, here, however, for the seemingly opposite reason that logic has revealed itself as itself the final ontology, and not a mere guide to speaking about ta onta. Thus, for Aquinas too, God, the Infinite, is one with his act of selfintelligence, while, as he also saw clearly, there is no empirical nature of the thought-process, which depends upon a self-consciousness transcending that and all externalised “objectivity”. Absolute subjectivity is knowing, scientia, and not con-sciencia along with some objectivised finite subjectivity. Just upon this basis we have constructed computers and are confident that we can rely upon them. The subjective is objective, I the universal of universals as I am the source of all the categories (Enc. 42). Here Hegel reveals Kant and also Descartes to themselves (Enc. 20), while answering the ancient Psalmist’s question: “What is man that thou art mindful of him?” This is the very Ground and support of the humanist movement, the affirmation provoking the negation within itself as the false must transiently generate the true as negating it, in Hegel’s explanation. All things are a judgment, the above passage continues in explanation: That is to say, they are individuals, which are a universality or inner nature in themselves, - a universal which is individualised, Their universality and individuality are distinguished, but the one is at the same time identical with the other. (Enc. 167)

* Hegel now distinguishes judgments from "propositions", passing here beyond the formal abstraction of traditional logic. Such a move might seem to coincide with that of a beginner in logic who has not yet grasped the intention of abstract formality as governing or indeed founding this science of argument forms and schemata. This very intention, however, of the so-called "propositional calculus", quite ignores in practice the first two "instruments of reason", viz. notion and judgment. So p, or q as a second p, the simples or elements of the calculus, leave "S is P", Fx or any

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other propositional structure, as distinct from structures between (simple) propositions, out of account. The calculus is only later, after it is formally perfected, applied to concepts or classes of individuals denoted by x, y and following in a way which, far from being a sophisticatedly mathematical abstraction, assumes without discussion a simple or common-sense ontology of individual substances. Such a logic is quite capable, all the same, of being used, and often is used, to question this ontology reflexively, e.g. in propounding various versions of the Ontological Argument which might negate any possible finite reality in the concrete16 or for formulating reasoning within quantum physics. Similarly, the notation in terms of a series of predicative relations, monadic, dyadic, nadic, need not be made incompatible with a philosophically strictly "monadic" affirmation of predicative identity17 as the logical relation in terms of which real relations are expressed. So even if it might be thought a logic "which cannot say what anything is"18, of itself, that is to say, yet it does not render impossible this saying what anything is. What Hegel rather stresses, attending to the S-is-P form as taken from grammar originally, is how this form of judgment yet more fundamentally contradicts any such a mere ascriptive interpretation of it as what some given speaker happens to propose. "The rose is red" is the judgment. "The rose seems red" is a different judgment, viz. "The rose is red-seeming". Rather, the latter is not a judgment at all. It is only a proposition, like, Hegel suggests, "Caesar was born at Rome in such and such a year, waged war in Gaul for ten years, crossed the Rubicon, &co.", "I slept well last night" or, as leaving mood (indicative, imperative etc.) out of account, "Present arms!" All these have a temporal reference, to McTaggart's A or B series (as forms of time) indifferently. They can become judgment, "subjective at best", only where some doubt or specification is being 16 See Jan Salamucha’s paper in the collection Aquinas edited by Anthony Kenny, London (Macmillan) 1970; also the second entry, on specifically contemporary “ontological arguments”, in Handbook of Metaphysics and Ontology (ed. Smith and Burkhardt), Philosophia Verlag, Munich 1990. 17 Peter Geach pointed this out, in his Logic Matters particularly, though his conflation of such predicative identity (involving, on the old theory, an identical suppositio or reference of the predicate) with the Ockhamist “two name” (sic) theory he routinely attacks complicates comparison of his thought with Hegel’s. See our own discussions of Geach’s logical thought cited above, as also the 1974 article by Henry Veatch. For extensive discussion of a relation or lack of it to Hegel’s thought see my four previous books on Hegel published by Cambridge Scholars Publications, Newcastle-on-Tyne, during the last five years. 18 Cf. Henry Veatch: Two Logics, Evanston 1969; "On Trying to Say and Know What's What", Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, September 1963.

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clarified, such as that I slept well last night but not the night before that, or that I slept well even if no one else did. Hegel thus subscribes to the outand-out contextual theory of meaning inherent in supposition- or reference-theory according to which "roses are red" qua affirmation denies that they are blue, lack colour etc. The judgment, that is, "is an expression of finitude" (Enc. 168, my stress) while the proposition is merely asserted or proposed within finitude's ambience taken as such, as abstractly "final", in the sense of finished, bounded. All finite things as such are a judgment. We come back to that, that we do not make judgments. Peter Geach exclaims in wonder at McTaggart's daring to say, i.e. to judge, that this is so. It does indeed imply that McTaggart is not McTaggart, or that Geach is not Geach. Rather, we beget one another indeed in a reciprocity only explicable as identity, as Father cannot be Father without Son and vice versa and yet father is all the Father is, this relation namely, and not some abstract element waiting to be related or related "potentially". The potential essentially is not (actual). Aristotle's celebrated distinction, we may say, is two-edged. There were never two species of Being, of Actuality. The logical copula, that is to say, is never "is potentially", just as it is never "is deontically" or "is to be". It is always and absolutely just "is", with potentiality, gerundive force or any other such finite attribution belonging with the conjoined predicate, rather, as said of or identified with the subject as notion. Judgment as it were generates finitude in self-alienation, productive of its other, differentiating just in order to unite in and through this very differentiation, as Nature is for Spirit, the dialectic is for its result, war indeed is for the peace of victory. It is a "play" indeed, a pattern, as in a game, for which we might say with the bard, "all the world's a stage". Shakespeare indeed, we know, his "plays", were virtually normative for Hegel and his German contemporaries, and not without reason. The predicate in its universality "must have particularity", as concrete and "abstract", indeterminate, universal again, are united or connected by "is". This, realised identity, thus no longer affected by this "difference in form", of S and P, "is the content". This Content, this universal identity, is what is finally posited as common to art, religion and philosophy. As such, as content, it is, there too, indifferent to the threefold hierarchy of specifically formal excellence they represent in their difference. Music, work of the muses, passes into liturgy or service of the Absolute and liturgy passes into contemplation or theoria, the eternal theory of theory itself. This is, so to say, the "finished" or perfected "comedy", the encyclopaedic circle indifferent to and unaffected by any chosen point of entry, since it is only entered by those already within it, i.e. entry, as if by

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us, is the wrong "notion". It is not we who "make" judgments, again, since we are not we. In religious terms, "How can the gods see us face to face until we have faces?"19 But the "I in them and they in me" of the Scripture is eminently susceptible of the philosophical treatment it has evoked. You, or we, are "members one of another", i.e. not parts at all. Sumit unus, sumunt mille (Aquinas, on communion as intercommunion, of self with other). Seid umschlungen, Millionen (Schiller), quite well translated, and ipso facto interpreted, by "O ye millions, I embrace thee", this I, as absolute subjectivity, being the universal without which a universal cannot be thought. It is certainly not merely a question of a finite number, millions, of people embracing one another, though that is included by necessary absorption (Aufhebung).20 That is why we read the newspapers, watch television, study philosophy and so on, giving the subject "its specific character and content". "The Absolute is the self-identical", uniquely, it is meant. Every notion as notion thus becomes a judgment. Even, therefore, where we would further specify the subject, the "empty name", of this judgment we do it precisely as making another judgment. Nor can the notion as notion ever be an empty name. It, this "subjective notion", is therefore as such superseded (in the dialectic) by Judgment. Hence To define the subject as that of which something is said, and the predicate as what is said about it, is mere trifling.21 It gives no information about the distinction between the two (but merely posits them over again). In point of

19 Till We Have Faces, a remarkable novel by C.S. Lewis, a Hegelian against his own protests. 20 This, the necessity, is why there can be no love of the unseen without love of the seen. No moral consideration is involved in this Johannine argument. 21 Wallace (translator) cites a text from Whately's Logic that Hegel might have had in mind here. Whately, I find it interesting to note, was Newman's teacher and master at Oxford (cf. Geoffrey Faber, Oxford Apostles. and Newman's own Apologia) and Newman went on to write The Development of Christian Doctrine (1845), which might well be described as discretely Hegelian, whether or not Newman had read Hegel. He sketched it first while still an Anglican. After the rejection of Ontologism (a Catholic movement under strong Hegelian influence) by the Roman Holy Office (1860) as “not safe for teaching”, leading to the papal reendorsement of Thomism (1879), such a book would have been impossible of immediate acceptance in the Catholic world, though it later became the secret driving force behind the Second Vatican Council (1964.1966), called “Newman's council” by the then Pope, Paul VI (d.1978). Hegel, in sheep’s clothing, had entered by the back door.

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thought, the subject is primarily the individual, and the predicate the universal.

Primarily! Or as Aquinas says, the subject signifies quasi-materially, the predicate quasi-formally, thus allowing the development Hegel now makes explicit. As the judgment receives further development, the subject ceases to be merely the immediate individual, and the predicate merely the abstract universal; the former acquires the additional significations of particular and universal, - the latter the additional significations of particular and individual. (169 add.)

We pass, that is, as developing the same thought (it stands for the Absolute, as Frege's assertion that the sentence or judgment "denotes the True" confirms), from "This is red" to "This rose is a red rose". Particularity is thus the middle term of the syllogism, to which the judgment gives way or develops in dialectical supersession:

The individual is particular The particular is universal So the individual is universal. The key insight enabling this development is that "this" is always concretely "this A", this is this rose. Only thus is sameness or identity thinkable, although the purely abstract "this" or "now" is identical with itself irrespective of species, time or place (the starting-point of Hegel's The Phenomenology of Mind, main text). "Thus while the same names are given to the two terms of the judgment, their meaning passes through a series of changes." This Hegelian remark would apply first of all to the terms "subject" and "predicate" themselves, thus presaging their eventual supersession, the freeing of intelligence from the trappings or bewitchments of linguistic form. Yet we have noted above that the logical intention of identity already shows independence of the (form of) composition habitually employed to express it. It means in turn that the judgment which things, or all of them taken together even, are is a particularisation not into parts but into differentiated aspects of the Unity. This unity is not properly therefore called the Whole, a more correlate term than "unity", though all terms, even "absolute", are in some or other respects correlate. Therefore, concern with the Absolute names the translinguistic (Wittgenstein’s point at Tractatus 7, after all).

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So "The subject as negative self-relation (163, 164) is the stable substratum in which the predicate has its subsistence" as, we saw, determinately standing for something (real or "rationate", ens rationis). The predicate is therefore "ideally present" in the subject, which thus has the nature of the Idea from the start. We do not attach ideas to or form them from "bare" individuals, like those indistinguishable "points" in time or space Hegel speaks of. Hence the predicate, it can be said, "inheres in the subject". It will connote "only one of the numerous characters of the subject". Nor could this ever be the only character we know or are conscious of, as in the abstract "F of x"; x, that is, can never be "unbound", variability is essentially within limits, the possibilities of further specification never closed. These two extremes, as impossibilities, are thus identical. So, conversely, "the predicate as universal is self-subsistent and indifferent whether this subject is or is not." It "outflanks the subject" which had appeared "ampler and wider", "subsuming it under itself". Hence this judgment of inherence is also called one of "subsumption". Each is "on its side" or from its own viewpoint wider than the other. Yet the "specific content of the predicate (169) alone constitutes the identity of the two." At first, subject, predicate, and the specific content or the identity are, even in their relation, still put in the judgment as different or divergent. By implication, however, that is, in their notion, they are identical. For the subject is a concrete totality, - which means not any indefinite multiplicity, but individuality alone, the particular and the universal in an identity: and the predicate too is the very same unity (§170). - The copula again, even while stating the identity of subject and predicate, does so at first only by an abstract "is". Conformably to such an identity the subject has to be put also in the characteristic of the predicate. By this means the latter also receives the characteristic of the former: so that the copula receives its full complement and full force. Such is the continuous specification by which the judgment, through a copula charged with content, comes to be a syllogism. As it is primarily exhibited in the judgment, this gradual specification consists in giving to an originally abstract, sensuous universality the specific character of allness, of species, of genus, and finally of the developed universality of the notion. (171)22

Hegel refers here to the final Absolute, which all and any judgment implies and imperfectly names. This leads us on to "the continuous specification of the judgment itself", the chain of its various forms 22

Cp. notes 8 and 9 above.

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"usually stated as the kinds of judgment". Yet these are really mere markers in a developmental flow at every point of which the Notion or Absolute Idea is totally if but implicitly present. Hence the ordinary discrete enumeration (of judgment-types) seems "purely casual", is "superficial". Really the different judgments "follow necessarily from one another" as the continuous specification of the notion. The "judgment itself is nothing but the notion specified." It thus disappears. We make no judgments (in absolute reality or in “heaven” as McTaggart picturesquely puts it), since they are as such subsumed to the notion, as are "we" ourselves. Hence and finally we are thus not ourselves subjects. This negation of judgment itself, however, is perfected in direct perception, which is rather enjoyment as ultimate, no longer of this or that. The instrumentality of thought as ratio is here concerned, though ratio too has its place in the dialectic too (cf. 105), qualitatively somewhat quantitative, however, and therefore finite (in quality). Reason (ratio in Latin) is indeed a ratio and reason itself (Vernünft) perceives or beholds (intueor, intuitus, placed in earlier thought above ratio, along with sapientia, a tasting, of "sap") this. So judgment also, we can now see, recapitulates Being and its transition to the reflectiveness of Essence, "but put in the simplicity of relation peculiar to the notion", viz. as continuous development of thought as thought, i.e., at this stage, of judgment. Hegel refers to Kant here as first having shown that "the various kinds of judgment are no empirical aggregate" but "a systematic whole based on a principle", viz. that the individual is the universal. This principle is "the logical idea itself", namely. Hence, Hegel finds, the three kinds of judgment are "parallel to the stages of Being, Essence and Notion" now as it were ideated or even, we might say, taken in second intention. Yet Hegel has wished to show that absolutely this is first, since things are grounded in the Idea, reflected in earlier thought as "the divine Ideas", plural, since the Idea, the Notion, is essentially differentiated or, rather, self-differentiating and that infinitely. "The second of these kinds", however, "as required by the character of Essence, which is the stage of differentiation, must be doubled" (into judgments of reflection and, secondly, of necessity). The Notion, as "the unity of Being and Essence in a comprehensive thought" (159), must, in its unfolding (Hegel's term) "reproduce these two stages in a transformation proper to the notion", thus moulding together what are genuinely grades of judgment (171, add.). This is the "inner ground" for this orderly and systematically graded hierarchy to which we now come.

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* Thus these judgment-types are in no way "of equal value" or on "the same level" of thought or, hence, reality, forming as they do, Hegel again emphasises, "a series of steps", i.e. a series simply, The difference between these steps, however, "rests upon the logical significance of the predicate". Such logical significance we have found Hegel denying to be of a purely "formal" or abstract character. Logical truth, that is, is truth indeed.23 So the differences in value are "evident in our ordinary ways of thinking". In illustration Hegel cites the material or concrete distinction in "subjectmatter" between judgments concerning mutable phenomena, of colour or temperature, for example, and those identifying beauty or goodness. In explanation he says that in the first kind of judgments "the content forms only an abstract quality" needing no judgment as such since its presence "can be sufficiently detected by immediate perception". It is, so to say, a judgment of sense, hovering, in Aristotelian or Scholastic terms, between the vis aestimativa and the vis cogitativa, both relatively immediate.24 The second kind, on the contrary, concerning beauty, goodness and the like, "requires… a comparison of the objects with what they ought to be, i.e. with their notion." Hence it is mediate and we might wonder whether a more formal or properly logical distinction between mediate and immediate judgments (not then exclusively or necessarily those of sense that he cites) might lie behind as either founding or expressing and testifying to this difference of value he introduces here. The dialectical sequel, concerning the four grades of judgment in specific consideration, may shed some light on this. Meanwhile we find Hegel saying in effect that judgments of value have more value as judgments than judgments concerning more "value-free" or phenomenal matter! This is but consistent in systems where all is "ontologically" assimilated to the Notion as, anciently, to the Good. Rather, the ontic itself is thus assimilated in freedom of spirit or mind, which is Necessity (Enc. 147) here where nothing can be new or contingent, nothing old either, but "pure play" indeed. What is this play? This, reflection shows, can only be a playful question, so the answers are not likely or desired to be serious or "categorical" either. Have a cup of tea, as the Zen master says, and stop looking down your nose at Hume and his backgammon board, trust and be

23

Cf. Henry Veatch: "Logical Truth and Logic", The Journal of Philosophy 53, 1956. 24 Cp. our "Meaning in a Realist Perspective", The Thomist, 55, 1, January 1991, pp.29-51, esp. section VI.

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not forever confounded, as loving darkness rather than light. The individual is the universal.

CHAPTER ELEVEN HEGEL ON SYLLOGISM

The section on Judgment in the Logic of the Encyclopaedia ends (180) with the affirmation that the unity of the notion itself, and hence of subject and predicate, is more absolutely achieved in the syllogism than finally in the (apodictic or most perfect from of) judgment. This is not unconnected with the fact that the word for syllogism used here in the German is Schluss. For Schluss in general means conclusion, a closing or finish of what was open or ongoing. The syllogism is closure in the notion or, more immediately, in the Object, as we shall see. This means that the conclusion of a syllogism is not a mere part of it, together with the two premises. It is the whole syllogism, as the Effect was the result or meaning or issue of the Cause. Indeed, the premises cause the conclusion, inasmuch as this finite category might still be applied. So, the oneness, the absolute super-organic unity of the Notion, is approached more nearly in the syllogism than in the notion. This is true, even though the syllogism, extensionally considered, is generally represented as consisting of three separate judgments. These judgments, however, unite in a triple identity. Just thereby have we in this unity a more absolute identity than the single identity now achieved and discerned in the twofold structure of the judgment. Any identity is single and double at the same time. That is why it is a relation of reason only. When, however, two such doublenesses are placed as overlapping in one of their terms then reason is revealed as the whole notion or, rather, the notion that is the whole. Here is shown at the same time how the syllogism is the paradigm of all reasoning, or rather of reason as such, in its creativeness. It is therefore wrong to represent it as a mere small part of formal logic as if lacking this further dimension, based upon the very nature of thinking.1 What is eliminated here is real or “objective” progress 1 Cf. our "The Interdependence of Semantics, Logic and Metaphysics as Exemplified in the Aristotelian Tradition", International Philosophical Quarterly (New York), Vol. 42, No. 1, Issue No. 165, March 2002, pp. 63-92; also "Argument Forms and Argument from Analogy", Acta Philosophica (Rome), vol. 6, 1997, pp. 303-310.

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to new knowledge, as if all were not already “formally” possessed or known, in agreement with the thesis of Plato’s Meno. Hegel states here that "subject and predicate are each the whole judgment". This oneness is "the Notion itself, filling up the empty 'is' of the copula". This “is”, after all, posits this oneness in identity, and what are identical are indeed each the whole as not being distinct from one another, except in ratione, a condition transcended in intellectual vision. Hegel is at one with Aquinas here, rather than with Scotus, in implying rejection of what Scotus would put forward as a distinctio formale a parte rei in such cases.2 The whole movement of the dialectic proceeds as a realisation of the oneness, in reality, without such a clinging qualification of particular identities discovered. Such formalities are to vanish along with everything else finite as night yields to day. Scotus no doubt wished to explain or justify the “existence” of such intellectual formalities as in itself rational, deriving from reality, in his defence of the truth of thought, that omne ens est verum as Aquinas had said. Paradoxically, however, this move led historically into subjective idealism. For objective idealism, however, "the individual is the universal". It, such idealism, is latent in the thought of Aquinas, as we have tried to bring out earlier on here. It may thus be viewed as the synthesis, historically, of Thomistic Aristotelianism and of that conscious antithesis to it which Scotus developed and which mutated through Suarez and Wolff up to Kant and beyond. For this synthesis the universal indeed is found in another way, alio modo, in the mind, viz. abstractly, to how it is found in reality or concretely, as Aristotle had said. However, it goes beyond this frank impasse into an absolute monism. Here "everything finite is false" except inasmuch as we amid our finite world "live and move and have our being" in the Notion, nous, i.e. are one with it, since the Notion is not some kind of a container. The Notion, rather, the Concept, "fills up the empty 'is' of the copula" as giving final face to this “is”, to Being as fullness rather than emptiness: The most perfect thing of all is to exist, for everything else is potential compared to existence. Nothing achieves actuality except it exist, and the act

2

Unless, that is, the Scotist view be interpreted as not being the contradiction of Brother Thomas that Scotus himself had seemed to believe it was. Such an interpretation can then be found in Hegel's system, insofar as the "formalities" discussed, or rather traversed, in the dialectic are of course considered formally. The dialectic embodies a (formal) theory of such formalities as its very form.

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of existing is therefore the ultimate actuality of everything, and even of every form.3

This "filling up" of the copula is the denial of an absolute equivocity in the two senses of "is", viz. existence and the truth of a proposition. They are closely related, something Peter Geach's comparatively excellent expositions in Three Philosophers and elsewhere leaves rather obscure. Thus: [is] means that which is understood after the manner of absolute actuality. For is, when it is expressed without qualification, means to be in act, and therefore it has its meaning after the manner of a verb. But the actuality, which is the principal meaning of the verb is, is indifferently the actuality of every form, either substantial or accidental act. Hence it is that when we wish to signify that any form or act actually inheres in any subject, we 3

Aquinas, Summa theol. Ia 4, 1 ad 3, my stress. Although Aquinas speaks here of existence as the actuality of the form he insists in general that form is prior to existence as giving it. Forma dat esse. In a way, then, actuality is better or more formally seen as prior to existence, as in the Aristotelian conception of nous or God as actus purus. In line with this, therefore, Existence is put as a finite category in Hegel's logic and that within the Doctrine of Essence merely. Hence it is also that Aquinas himself can speak of God as "pure form", giving existence rather than being it. The word Being, however, in contrast to "existence", might include this. In general, the thought of Aquinas, ultimately regulated by Scripture, is expressed so as to be in line with the Exodus proclamation to Moses, immediately interpreted, of God as I AM. For Hegel too, however, this "I" is "the universal of universals", absolute subjectivity being thus placed prior to existence, just as the latter is not placed first in Platonist thought necessarily. In this respect it remains true, even of the "filled up" being or copula, that it is "not a whit better" than the non-being of the Buddhists (Enc. 87 Zus.). The implication of Hamlet’s question thus remains, that non-being can without contradiction be considered better and hence more "actual". Thus Hegel says that Reason can survive its own demise, i.e. that life is not after all life (Cp. Teresa of Avila: “O life that is no life at all”), though one may grant that viventibus esse est vivere. For esse is not vivere since, also, life is not life, but a finite category implying a “true reason-world” as its inherent self-contradiction therefore, as with all things finite, as “the entry into spirit” (Hegel). “I live yet not I”, exclaims the Apostle, not, that is, until “I shall know as I am known”, in one act, it is implied. Hegelian subtlety, as he himself emphasises, is in the service finally of that “true reason-world” which, “so far from being the exclusive property of philosophy is the right of every human being on whatever grade of culture or mental growth he may stand; which would justify man’s ancient title of rational being.” “This speculative truth”, he adds, “means very much the same as… Mysticism” (Enc. 82 add: The whole passage should be read).

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signify it by this verb is… - simply in the present tense, according to some qualification, in the other tenses.4

However, Hegel's thought here is by no means dependent upon use of a language which has developed a particular word for such general realities as existence or actuality, as Aquinas might be taken, though wrongly, as implying when he sticks so close to grammar and the use of tenses. In fact the copula, along with the whole self-contradictory form of the judgment as such, appears for Hegel in the light of an obstacle to be got rid of. One fills up the copula as one fills in a hole, making explicit the oneness. The notion "is put" as the unity of that subject and predicate which the judgment distinguishes or, in fact, extensionally takes apart. Hence we said that language is an ad hoc device, replacing, as we might speculate (with Rudolph Steiner and friends), the intellectual clairvoyance of prehistoric peoples and not found, according to the speculation of Aquinas and others, in the life of angels or "separated substances". Substance as such, however, is itself an ad hoc stopping-place in the perspective of the dialectic. This unity, however, which the Notion signifies or stands for or puts itself as, is itself embodied as the Syllogism, Hegel says at the end of Enc.180. At least for now or, rather, at this "moment" of the dialectic, the notion is "put as their unity”, of subject and predicate, “in short, as the Syllogism." The Notion is also put "as the connexion which serves to intermediate" these "constituent elements" of the judgment. Implied is that no truth, no true judgment, is arrived at except as Schluss, as Syllogism, and this is just what the achieved or developed Notion will finally show, that there are no "first principles"5 upon which we finally rely and from which the rest depends. Hence Hegel writes: "certainly the judgment does in every case refer us to the Syllogism" (181 add., my stress). The centre rather is at all points since "everything is a syllogism", in this sense, namely, of Schluss, conclusion, closure. The Result, as already or eternally achieved, is that from which we trace our steps to "constituent elements", such as "first" principles, which are merely abstract. Even as we move through the dialectic itself it is "illusion" which makes the end seem unachieved, as if a process of reasoning, of syllogising, has to be gone through. The Good is "already accomplished", a position McTaggart was unable to stomach but which is fully in accord with embarking upon this dialectic at all. "This is the illusion under which we live" and the viewpoint has nothing to do with advocating some kind of practical 4 5

Aquinas, In I Perih., lect. 5, no. 22 (already quoted above). Cf. 209 add. See especially, 212 add.

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quietism. It rather advocates the faith and hope of religion, though fulfilling them under the more perfect form of philosophy where, though as no longer to be represented as future, "all shall be well and all manner of thing", where God shall be "all in all", but all is well and accomplished, as philosophy "accomplishes" religion.6 For only out of this illusion, that the Good "waits upon us", only "out of this error does the truth arise". That is, as Hegel had written with perfect consistency: Time is but the notion necessarily existent, and presented to consciousness in the form of empty intuition. Hence spirit necessarily appears in time, and it appears in time so long as it does not grasp its pure notion, i.e. so long as it does not annul time. Time is the pure self in external form… it is the notion apprehended only through intuition. When this notion grasps itself it supersedes its time character, … is intuition comprehended and comprehending. Time therefore appears as spirit’s destiny and necessity, where spirit is not yet complete within itself… as a world-spirit… its completion as self-conscious spirit.7

* The Syllogism, then, "brings the notion and the judgment into one" (181). We may take "notion" here as referring primarily to the subjective notion as notion (object of apprehensio simplex as Aristotle's first of the three "acts of the understanding") studied above. It is notion and it is judgment and is in fact, as syllogism, "the reasonable, and everything reasonable" (my stress). It is notion as "the simple identity into which the distinctions of form in the judgment have retired." This is implicit as Schluss. It is judgment, all the same, as "put in the distinction of its terms", the clinging extensionality, although even within judgment Hegel has overcome this. The "distinctions of form in the judgment" retire into simple identity on reaching the Apodictic Judgment (179), the "precise point by which we pass to the Syllogism" (181, add.). "In it we have an individual which by means of its qualities connects itself with its universal or notion." This action, man, woman, statement etc. is good, beautiful, true etc. "Here we see the particular becoming the mediating mean between the individual and the universal." We see, that is. that the individual, this individual, is the universal, once again. For the judgment itself "puts itself as Syllogism" which "is the reasonable, and everything reasonable". Just here at 181, 6

Cf. Georges van Riet, "The Problem of God in Hegel" (Parts II-III), Philosophy Today, Vol. XI, Number 2/4, Summer 1967, pp. 75-105 (French original in Revue philosophique de Louvain, Vol. 63, August 1965, pp. 353-418. 7 Phenomenology of Mind (Baillie), pp. 800-801.

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including the addition, we find Hegel's profoundest statement of the grounds for his view. It appears characteristically at the beginning of the material (on the syllogism here), before, maybe, the first-time reader will have had much chance of grasping it but illustrating Hegel's own perfect or out and out command of the thought he is thus transmitting in extensional or linguistic, semiotic form. Thus he does not neglect tackling that most fundamental deficiency of so much discourse upon logic, that the "name of reason is much and often heard" but "no one thinks of explaining its specific character, or saying what it is, - least of all that it has any connection with Syllogism." They do not think of it but stare open-mouthed at anyone's raising the matter. Thus logic, and notoriously syllogistic, is taught as if one can thus learn how to think, as if the forms of syllogism are of any use or relevance at all to anyone who does not himself see their validity. This is what is wrong with the whole notion of "logical form" as generally presented. In general, arguments cannot be truly evaluated by such forms precisely because the validity of the forms is itself seen in exactly the same intuition. In pretending to "abstract" the form from individual arguments we merely present the most general argument of that form we can think of. That is, the putative "form" is itself an instance of the form. This situation is only saved from being a reduction of the whole of logic to argument from analogy upon our understanding that any particular argument is as central or universal as the form itself. Here too the individual (argument) is the universal and this of itself makes the universal ultimately individual. Everything is a notion, the existence of which is the differentiation of its members or functions, so that the universal nature of the Notion gives itself external reality by means of particularity, and thereby, and as a negative reflection-into-self, makes itself an individual. (181, my stress)

So "at the present stage the definition of the Absolute is that it is the Syllogism", i.e. "everything is a Syllogism." The claim, we should note, is that these three “instruments of reason” (Aristotle), with all their categorial subdivisions, here simply arise at this point of “the development of (Hegel’s) logic”, i.e. of logic’s own self-development in this case. They are not just pushed in as offering an arbitrary connecting point with the more usual notions of logic. So, too, ”Everything is a notion, the existence of which is the differentiation of its members or functions” (181) indeed but of members that only become members in and as that differentiation. This in religion is creation, which in Hegel is no mere afterthought of divinity but constitutive of it, as Freedom is Necessity. As Aquinas put it,

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again, every divine idea is identical with the divine essence.8 This in fact is logically true also of every idea in relation to Hegelian “essence”, Hegel claims to show, as of the Part to the Whole. Parts are not parts, hence by analysis, in the Understanding, of the whole into parts the whole is lost, unless we apply always the correction expressed in the saying: “This also is thou; neither is thus thou”, just as Hegel insists in what he writes on Good and Evil, in The Phenomenology of Mind, though there we do not indeed appear at first to have a whole and a part. Hence, it must be said that good and evil in this their conception, i.e. so far as they not good and evil, are the same, just as certainly it must be said that they are not the same, but absolutely different; for simple self-existence, or again pure knowledge, are equally pure negativity or per se absolute distinction. It is only these two propositions that make the whole complete; and when the first is asserted and asseverated, it must be met and opposed by insisting on the other with immovable obstinacy. Since both are equally right, they are both equally wrong, and their “wrong” consists in taking such abstract forms as “the same” and “not the same”, “identity” and “nonidentity”, to be something true, fixed, real, and in resting on them. Neither the one nor the other has truth; their truth is just their movement, the process in which simple sameness is abstraction, and thus absolute distinction, while this again, being distinction per se, is distinguished from itself and so is selfidentity. Precisely this is what we have in the sameness of the Divine Being and Nature in general and human nature in particular; the former is Nature so far as it is not essential Being; Nature is Divine in its essential Being…9 *

The maxim of Pantheism, says Hegel, is "the doctrine of the eternity of matter, that from nothing comes nothing, and that something can only come out of something" (Enc. 88). This would abolish Becoming even in his non-temporal (as I have argued) understanding of it. For, on a pantheist view, that “everything is God”, as contrary to the truth that God, to be God, must be everything, the ultimate something, which here would be or include matter, will never become. This, he says, "is the maxim of abstract identity as upheld by the understanding." Creation, however, is precisely ex nihilo and thus Hegel confirms the Thomistic thesis that the eternity or, rather, non-beginning of the world would be compatible with creation. 8

Cf. Aquinas, Summa theologica Ia, question 15. Hegel, op. cit., pp. 776-777. The paragraph should be read to its end, where the process or movement mentioned, having become “known to pictorial thinking” in the Christian preaching of “the atonement”, is “turned back into” (the universality of) self-consciousness. Here, I rather believe, we have the heart of Hegel. 9

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Creation is this free differentiation which is the notion, for, as Hegel once remarked, logic is "nothing but creation". This remark in fact was adopted by the Italian philosopher Vicenzo Gioberti (1801-1852) as a kicking-off point for the plainly Hegelian movement of thought known as Ontologism. From this standpoint the differentiation between creation ex nihilo and creation ex Deo, made so much of in O’Regan’s study10, seems not to signify, as is perhaps O’Regan’s own final point. Thus theologians today seem to be reconsidering their rejection of emanationism, as found, for example, in Proclus, as being an unsuitable or opposed figure (could it be more?) to or for free creation.11 If, though, as I hardly imagine, Hegel were ignorant of Aquinas's thesis, mentioned above, concerning the divine ideas, this would merely strengthen his testimony as exhibiting an independent confluence of the greatest minds, to which Aristotle forms a third as representing (Greek) philosophy as a whole or, rather, Mind. Mind sets in order the things that are, have been or are to be (Anaxagoras) indifferently, in the sense, that is, that these are ultimately the same. Otherwise what is the force of Anaxagoras' remark? Precisely in such an ongoing and self-consuming series there would, otherwise again, be no order, no ordering mind, nor the possibility of saying so. This is why there is no creation in time and no time either, absolutely speaking. So Aquinas, in saying that creation's having a (temporal) beginning is a truth of faith alone may well, as assigning to it this absolute opacity, be interpreted in the light of the later Hume's (Dialogues on Natural Religion) transparently deferring merely to ecclesiastic authority and hence not really deferring at all. In each case though the authority is at least put in its place, though not, for Aquinas, directly mocked. In any case that is what faith in this sense, of external or obedient confession, ultimately is. This, however, is faith in the abstract, not real faith, which is ordered to rational understanding. Credo UT intelligam. Aquinas in his own time, however, could not so easily look forward to an eventual improved formulation of the doctrine or dogma, or reinterpretation of the existing formulations, Biblical or traditional, so as to remove the apparent contradiction, that if the creation is not in God’s time, since this is impossible, then it is in created time, which is self-contradictory.

10

Cyril O’Regan, op. cit. pp.171-187. See for example David B. Burrell’s essay on this topic, “Aquinas’s Appropriation of Liber de causis to Articulate the Creator as Cause-of- Being” in Contemplating Aquinas, ed. Fergus Kerr OP, SCM Press, London 2003. 11

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I replied that time, we now know, is something whose properties are contingent, is something whose properties are contingent; for example, according to General Relativity, whether there is a finite or an infinite amount of future time depends on such things as the average mass-density of the physical universe, and I asked whether putting God in time wouldn’t amount to abandoning utterly the idea of God’s transcendence. He did not reply. Frankly, this conception of God – if it really was my interlocutor’s – the conception of God as a being undergoing change in time – seems to me unacceptably anthropomorphic.12

Such a reformulation is what Hegel offers, as was also offered by those Catholic thinkers papally condemned en bloc in 1907 as "modernists". The previous Pope, Leo XIII, he who "restored" Thomism, had endorsed that very modern and indeed "modernist" essay, as in the modern spirit, namely The Development of Christian Doctrine of 1845, by, John Henry later Cardinal Newman. Calling what one sees as heresy "modernism" betrays a melancholy lack of confidence in the face of developments quite the reverse of the thirteenth century optimism and adventurousness on the part of the "Christian movement" at that date. Things have maybe improved somewhat since then, however, with official and Conciliar recognition of "ecumenism" as a force within the Christian movement though it is perhaps not yet fully recognised that universal reconciliation, since the infinite differentiation is the Notion, is the very centre of this movement. "I if I be lifted up will draw all men unto me" (my stress). Hegel identifies the implicit overcoming of the "antithesis of subjective and objective" with this universalism (194, Zus.), which itself he universalises, as we find in a measure already in the thought (Biblical) of John or Paul. Seid umschlungen, Millionen, exclaims the contemporary poet-philosopher. Each of these millions, eternally viewed, in being drawn thus draws all the others, even retroactively, as can be seen from Hegel's musings around the figure of Krishna at the end of the Encyclopaedia. In our own tradition, which again is really that of all, tradition of traditions, in a self-effacement mistaken for arrogance, the first is said to be last, the last first. Hegel, indeed, is the great self-effacer. That is the meaning of his 12

Hilary Putnam: “Thoughts addressed to an Analytical Thomist”, The Monist, October 1997, Vol. 80, No. 4, pp. 487-500. Putnam’s first remark on time might seem to fall foul of philosophical idealism’s view of time, as found in Hegel, vis à vis absolute knowledge, but the point about God and time stands independently. In any case, though, once given that “the real nature (sc. of the object)… is a product of my mind” (Enc.23, parenthesis added from Hegel’s previous sentence) then all finite scientific knowledge, as now a dialectical moment merely, is as such assimilable to that view. For the “untruth of the finite”, see our following section.

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system, which thus incidentally negates the empirical notion of self in making the other, otherness, intrinsic to it. "You are all members of one another", as this unity is figuratively expressed by the Apostle. "Everything is a syllogism" as eternally reconciling within, as constitutive of its, the unity’s, selfhood and individuality, the infinite differentiation which is the notion. There are thus really no members nor even relations, where there are no members to be related. "The principle of personality is universality". * Remaining for a while with the untruth of the finite, one observes that the imperfection, due to its figurativeness, of the form of religion as apprehension of the Absolute, the Content, is reflected in much apologetic writing (and even in much of the metaphysics of the early modern period). This results from the apologists not acknowledging this imperfection of form. They prefer to rely for the defence of religion exclusively upon the (in such areas) blindness and finitude of the Understanding, rather than to apply the transformations of Reason, which make everything clear in the Notion. A good example of this, Hegel points out, is provided, as mentioned already above, by the a posteriori argument for God's existence, the "rising to God from out of the empirical view of the world": And what men call the proofs of God's existence are, rightly understood, ways of describing and analysing the native course of the mind, the course of thought thinking the data of the senses. The rise of thought beyond the world of sense, its passage from the finite to the infinite, the leap into the super-sensible which it takes when it snaps asunder the chain of sense, all this transition is thought and nothing but thought. (Enc. 50)

The passage, namely, the transition, is from shadows to reality, kicking the ladder away. This is "thought and nothing but thought", "in its sovereign ingratitude", beyond the animals, which "in consequence have no religion". Now, says Hegel, "the merely syllogistic thinker" may "deem this starting-point a solid basis… as if it were only reasoning from one which is and continues to be, to another thing which in like manner is." But the great error is to restrict our notions of the nature of thought to its form in understanding alone. To think the phenomenal world rather means to recast its form, and transmute it into a universal. And thus the action of

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thought has also a negative effect upon its basis: and the matter of sensation… at once loses its phenomenal shape. (Enc. 50)

Hegel refers us here to Enc. 13, which argues "the necessity of defining more exactly the relation of Universal to Particular", essential to his account of Syllogism, from all the particular differentiations and systems of Philosophy as product of "one living Mind". At paragraph 23 he states that "the real nature of the object… is a product of my mind." My reflection brings it to light, "in my simple universality… in my Freedom." Yet "philosophy may be acquitted of the charge of pride… submitting to the sway of the fact." "Logic therefore coincides with Metaphysics." (24) * If the world is only a sum of incidents, it follows that it is also deciduous and phenomenal, in esse and posse null. That upward spring of the mind signifies that the being which the world has is only a semblance, no real being, no absolute truth; it signifies that, beyond and above that appearance, truth abides in God, so that true being is another name for God. The process of exaltation might thus appear to be transition and to involve a means, but it is not a whit less true, that every trace of transition and means is absorbed; since the world, which might have seemed to be the means of reaching God, is explained to be a nullity. (Enc. 50)

Yet of "God" he says that the form "retains… sensuous limitations", the content, on the other hand, "is… a product of pure thought." In the Absolute we transcend God as philosophy transcends, in form, its own religious (and artistic) content. Theism and atheism might thus, it seems, be reconciled. "I and the Father are one." The positive religious claim finds theoretical universalisation. Yet it is posited as End in what Hegel calls "the absolute religion", in the doctrine of the Mystical Body. This is accorded a "head" at the same time as it is said that all are "members one of another", even this (future) "head" saying "I in them and they in me" ut omnes unum sint, that all may be one. So the Analogy of Being, to which Hegel alludes here, the mere fact that "being is said in many ways", does not direct us to an "ontological discontinuity", as the phrase goes. The finite is rather absorbed in the infinite, in which “we live and move and have our being”. Rabbits do not live alongside or discontinuously with animals, or cherries beside fruits, or accidents beside substances, or the body beside the soul, or man beside God. Hegel goes on to say, referring to Spinoza, that "charges of Pantheism and Atheism" do not here hold, for a philosophy affirming "that God and

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God alone is". That men are inclined to believe it impossible "to hold that there is no world", though not "to entertain the idea that there is no God" is not much to human nature's credit, he says. * Hegel does not merely treat but presents the Syllogism of Quality or of existence under the aspect of an absolute progression through its three "figures" towards the Object, the subsequent Syllogism of Reflection and Necessity mediating this. That the progression is absolute entails that it is as it were a closed circle in having no privileged point of entry from without. It depends upon and is “the necessity for every function or characteristic element of the notion to become the whole itself, and to stand as mediating ground.” (Enc.187). Here too the point made above holds that the three figures of Aristotelian logic, now called “traditional”, stand just here as genuine categorial moments of that content or system discovered by “speculative method”, which, Hegel claims, logic is, the “system of terms”, rather, describing the content of the Absolute Idea. This “is its own content”, that “it contemplates… as its own self” (236 add.). Of every reality properly contemplated the Notion13 is to be predicated. "This also is thou." This is to be said not of ash-trays and such but of persons. Conversely, anything of which it is said, dogs, artworks, people and such, again, will thereby be predicated as personal or as ends-inthemselves. Only persons are ends-in-themselves, Hegel is at one with or follows Kant here, forming thereby the "kingdom" of reciprocal and transreciprocal identity, "I in them and they in me" as each may say, making of the spatial preposition “in” a figure for identity. "The principle of personality is the universal", again, principle because persons are not substances and not even, just therefore, relations, except as relating to one another in infinite regress (the universality).14 They are neither one nor many, but "thought thinking itself" (194, Zus.). In this thought, in nous, in God, we (sic) "live and move and have our being". "I am the universal of universals", for thus I refer to myself (Enc. 20) but where each is all and conversely (160). This is no mere solipsism. Even, it seems, again transcending religion's positivity, we beget one another, though a 13

Introduced already in its full sense in the Introduction to The Phenomenology of Mind. "Suppose we call knowledge the notion etc." 14 Compare "determinate correspondence" in McTaggart's system, where each perceives the other(s) perceiving him/her ad infinitum.

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mutuality of begetting shows the figurativeness. Rather, the exclusion of a linear causality is confirmed and consistently pursued. The doctrine of the Mystical Body is religion's approximation to this, as this is the "accomplishment" of the in some sense prior religious doctrine and/or intuition, expressed universally in the harmony of art, representing and/or producing individual objects such as Van Gogh's chair, i.e. the portrait thereof. In this sense it might even be (a portrait of) an ash-tray. Again, however, an ash-tray, before such representation, may be viewed as a function of human life (though now deprecated) and hence of the Notion. Hegel distinguishes the Syllogism of Understanding from the Rational Syllogism. The former "begins" with a representation of mutually alien elements, which are just thereby abstracted notions not thus found in final reality. The syllogistic forms themselves depend upon such a method, uniting the abstracted elements, the "subjective notions", which Judgment itself still keeps separated in their very identity. In the rational syllogism, on the contrary, the subject is by means of the mediation coupled with itself. In this manner it first comes to be a subject… (182)

We are seeing progressively what this means. The formal Syllogism of Understanding "contains reason, but in utter notionlessness". The objective meaning, he says, of this "subjective" or abstract formalism is only "the finitude of things", their falsity, "in the specific mode which the form has here reached" but which we are in process of setting aside (aufheben). Here alone we separate things from their universality, making of "genus and notion" mere "beings of reason". Such empiricist realism stops short of the philosophical, whereas the idealism of speculative philosophy carries out the principle of totality and shows that it can reach beyond the inadequate formularies of abstract thought. (Enc. 32, add.)

In the Rational Syllogism its matter must derive from its form exclusively, and of course vice versa, since matter and form have in reality already at this point been superseded (in the Doctrine of Essence) as a category. We cannot work with or think alongside a finite frame of outward forms. The "mere syllogism of understanding… has no claim to the honour of being made a form of rationality" (182, add.). Just as the Notion cannot be "degraded" to the "faculty of forming notions" in the subjective understanding, so Syllogism, Reason, cannot be degraded to this abstract and finite system of reasoning.

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With all the descriptiveness and analytical faculty which Aristotle after his fashion is substantially strong in, his ruling principle is always the speculative notion; and that syllogistic of "understanding" to which he first gave such a definite expression is never allowed to intrude in the higher domain of philosophy. (187)

The distinguishing of syllogistic moods, or "whether they (the propositions) may be universals, or negatives" is "a mechanical enquiry" for drawing "correct" conclusions. This would be part of Hegel's answer to Trendelenburg's objection that he confounds contradiction and contrariety. He wishes to get behind this ultimate "irrealism", as it is now called, whereby every theory can only to be assessed in terms of a prior theory or particular formal representation. We said that the form and the matter must coalesce. The ultimate syllogism is a demonstration of itself, with Particularity, Individuality and Universality as the three terms or, rather, moments. For the syllogism "is contingent in point of its terms" and these three are to be consumed in the one "concrete universal", the Notion or "universal of universals", absolute subjectivity. In so far as this is in itself immediate there is no proper middle term. This applies even to Nature, which as it mediates between Logic and Mind is yet absorbed in them, while at the same time it "unfolds itself into the two extremes of the Logical Idea and Mind" equally (187, add.). For at the same time Nature and the Logical Idea form the extremes between which Mind alone mediates. Where each of the mediated in turn mediates there is no longer mediation as such but mutual coinherence or perfect, supra-organic unity in identity. So Reason does not stop short at abstract contrariety or negativity but negates them. Thus freedom merges with necessity as its ultimate expression, divine unity merges with Trinity as the ultimate identity. For Reason, considering even our highest concepts, of God, freedom, right and duty, the infinite, even these are "only negative objects" and the question remains of was in allen jenen Gegenstände ist, um dessen willen sie vernünftig sind (GL353), “what it is in all these objects on account of which they are reasonable”. Thus Hegel had objected that no one thinks of explaining reason's "specific character" (181). But "any reasonable matter", again, “can only be rational in virtue of the same quality by which thought is reason, it can be made so by the form only and that form is Syllogism” (181). It is syllogism in the way to be explained, however. That is to say, we have not to do with the notion of formal Syllogism that "really presents what is reasonable in such a reasonless way that it has nothing to do with any

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reasonable matter." Yet it does "present what is reasonable", as Reason will now show. In view of Hegel's negative evaluation of the initial posture of the formal syllogism as manipulating three mutually alien terms, any one of which may mediate, what remains to sufficiently characterise this third and final instrument and act (as in Aristotle) of reason as a triple or trinitarian (small t) syllogism has to be the three moments of Individuality, Particularity and Universality. Moreover, to avoid this spectre of alienness once again it will have to be the case that the third absorbs and "accomplishes" the other two, that the individual is the universal and vice versa. The case is similar with the Particular in relation to the two others, the individual nonetheless retaining pride of place as "universal of universals" and not otherwise. "I if I be lifted up will draw all men unto me." Such texts find unsuspected application confirming that philosophy "accomplishes" or perfects the Content of religion, and art, in scientific, non-figurative mode.

CHAPTER TWELVE GEACH, MCTAGGART, HEGEL

What we have here are “three philosophers”1. Each must be taken as his own person. The list is, however, chronologically in reverse order, so as to offset, as it were, the greater importance one might otherwise attribute to Hegel as, so to say, generating the other two. Rather, each one is identifiable as a moment of philosophy, thus identifiable in difference with the Idea, as such, in the Hegelian terms endorsed in this present work. So we get, as rationale of our procedure, not, as in the other chapters here, an interpretation of Hegel, but an interpretation, by Geach, of the interpretation of Hegel by McTaggart, plus my own critical assessment of aspects of this Geachian interpretation, which of course may be called, with circular or linear intent, interpretation over again. The aim here and throughout is to show that philosophy, whether or not Hegel can be said to have identified with philosophy in his time, continues as one in those coming after him who can most obviously be said to rest upon or to have built upon him, whether by agreement or deliberate contrast. Reference to Hegel’s time should serve to show how Hegel’s life and oeuvre, his philosophy materialiter spectata, is itself but phenomenal, by his own reasoning, as are all things finite. This principle need not itself be merely Hegel’s perspective or “view”, as if itself something finite. Finitude does not itself possess such discernment. As falsity and nonbeing, indeed, it logically cannot do so. Considering things materially is never anything other than mistaking their symbolic representation, the script, for example, for what it represents, this being always the Idea in its infinite freedom. This consideration must reflect back upon the notion of system. The system is the idea, whether we think now with Anselm or with Descartes, as one, each of them in their word to us, of its moments, not necessarily 1

Cf. Geach & Anscombe, Three Philosophers: London 1964, where the three, rather, are Aristotle, Aquinas and Frege. The more natural trio, by the argument of the present book, would be Aristotle, Aquinas and Hegel.

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the most important one. Many thinkers, for example McTaggart, explicitly rate what McTaggart himself suggests calling “love” above the moment of system as embodying or giving a face to the idea, while Christian thinkers in general would reverse this, claiming that system, and hence the idea, is itself one of the faces, the moments, of that eternal love which God, the idea essentially or in his notion and being, is. Hegel himself characterises the idea as final expression of that freedom which, as a category, strives to express or encapsulate it, connecting love, rather, with “feeling” (Enc. 159). We may leave this matter there. A corollary is that every philosophy participates in philosophy’s own system, which we may or may not think, with McTaggart, is most perfectly expressed in Hegel’s thought as expressed and thus represented in script, again. That is, the script is not the thought. Regarding script we must in the end “understand spiritual things spiritually” insofar as we are ever to understand them at all. Language and life are formally directed to this alone, to spirit, as death and its silence, for Hegel, syllogistically demonstrate. “Everything is a syllogism”. As for representation, it is a cardinal principle of Aristotle’s that verbal or, hence, any other representation is a use of what, as a thing, is other than (other) things, the res, for re-presenting those things, one “thing” therefore, the word, presenting or “standing for” another, in what is the logical relation of sign, of an identity not merely specifically but functionally in difference. We cannot get the things themselves inside us, he says in effect, himself using thus a spatial representation to say it, and therefore we devise a system of sounds as signs (which, Hegel will further specify, must hence be wholly “conventional”) for this purpose. What we think in the end, however, is our own thinking over again.2 This representation or “picturing” from which thought in fact results and must result, as finally (telos) anticipated as itself active, is not merely a but the main cause of error in our thinking, 2

This is the true significance of John (Poinsot) of St. Thomas’s paradoxical doctrine of the formal sign, whereby he would apply the paradigm of representation to conceptual thinking itself, basically the Kantian error he hoped, like Scotus, to forestall. This idea of a linguistic or notional distinction being formally repeated on the part of the thing (a parte rei) was really, however, in the development of systematic philosophy, indicating the demise or absorption of such a thing-in-itself set dualistically over against absolute knowing, as the light illuminating an otherwise dark nature. With the “formal distinction on the part of the thing” the latter effectively disappears from the mental scene. Thus God’s creation, inclusive of any specifically human or finite viewpoint and, indeed, of man himself, is eternally withdrawn into himself by God as its and his “creator”, necessarily. The procession ad extra is ad intra, as is shown and declared in the trans-formalities of Hegelian logic.

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which is thus therefore itself error or finite inasmuch as representational or, which is ultimately the same, propositional or “logical”, dyadically relating, by identity of subject with predicate, what was never separated except by our own categorising abstraction. This, the falsity of all judgments (sic Hegel), is the error out of which truth necessarily or of itself arises. It also helps to explain a preference for silence noted of deepthinking persons generally. The reason for this, for error acting as ground-cause of truth, is that the signs, themselves but phenomena, invented and ipso facto systematised by any again phenomenal human population, while there are or can at least seem to be (as with religions) many such “systems”, are inevitably, in any such case, finite in number, i.e. they are numbered or numerable, as words in a dictionary, apart that is from a possibly perpetual facility for selfmultiplication. By contrast the “things themselves” (Aristotle) are indeed infinite in number or, better, non-numerable, “the world itself could not contain” a list of them, as even of the “things that Jesus did”, if they were singly written down.3 How many things are there in this room? This is a nonsensical question. Reality, rather, which is the idea (and not anything in a room), is infinite, transcending number. Thus we are prone to fall, oblivious of the analogies language creates, into “paralogisms”, Aristotle concludes, compounding and separating, affirming and denying. In general, one may well find, following Hegel, that logic, as absolute, is to language as Christianity is to religions. This is the explanation of, the basis for, “modern” atheism. In this way, anyhow, we see how thought, as spirit emergent, must begin with phenomenal history, with “human populations”, in order to explain itself as the wholly self-contained result of such notions and pictures, which it thus “ungratefully” casts away. This ingratitude is Hegel’s own picture of thought’s necessary self-sufficiency or, indifferently, self-sufficient necessity. Inviting to a possible modification of this Aristotelian view, however, is the fact that though the number of signs in a given language may seem finite, by virtue of the convention of a discrete quantity of single words, separated by the convention of the space, in writing at least, the number of combinations or, which is the same, divisions of these units as stipulated may well, one might argue, must be innumerable (we already indicated this above), which is all that is meant equally by an infinity of things. If judgment as such is false, so then is language and Aristotle’s point, as regards error at least rather than signs as such, defeats itself. This returns 3 See the self-comment with which the author of Gospel of John ends or “breaks off” his manuscript.

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us to the Scotist mental distinction of things in parallel with themselves, so to say (actually, then, it is itself incipient idealism), as outcome of Thomist Aristotelianism itself, to be succeeded by the Hegelian Idea in place of words as just the one verbum interius of thought’s own eternal selfmanifestation, philosophy finally reaching fully to the height of Scripture as its destiny. “God has spoken only one word” (John of the Cross on silence): now the Idea is itself silence, achievement, where all stress and anxiety cease, Hegel himself, amid properly phenomenal verbosity, declares. In this way though, reverting provisionally to the afore-mentioned Aristotelian paradigm, the thought of apparently unsystematic thinkers, of Nietzsche or, as he later wished to present himself, Heidegger, as indeed of the apparently systematic McTaggart, can be assimilated to that system which is philosophy, as religions are assimilated to religion. Thus we get talk of “the absolute religion” or of “religion itself” just as we get talk of philosophy’s own system. This is by the same token assimilated to or absorbed into philosophy, into the idea or sophia, just as absolute spirit, itself both system and Gottesdienst, is itself absolute self-knowing, selfconsciousness or absolute knowledge. Representation of this ends Hegel’s The Phenomenology of Mind. Hence philosophy’s necessarily systemic character, implicit or explicit, yields the formal liturgy constituting, implicitly or explicitly (yet, Hegel says, philosophy has nothing to do with the merely or abstractly implicit), such Gottesdienst. * The object of study here, all the same, or in consequence, is McTaggart as interpreter or, rather, developer of Hegel’s thought as moment of philosophical system, of the idea. So what then is the system? For McTaggart it is a perfect unity of persons eternally loving one another, though by no means to the same degree in each case. We might think here of the singling out in Scripture of a disciple “whom Jesus loved”, even though it goes without saying that he loved them all. Each person, anyhow, has the unity of all within himself, such that “each counts for all”, since he is, as necessary, himself that unity, while this unity, in turn, necessitates each actual person as one without which it, unity, could not be at all. In Eckhart’s words: “If God did not exist then I would not exist while, equally, if I did not exist God would not exist”. That is the claim. McTaggart, however, professed atheism. The term “God”, that is, is optional for philosophical system. Deliver me, Eckhart prayed, from speaking too much of God. This is not, though, that “blow in the face” to

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God that Heidegger claimed, it seems paradoxically, that philosophy itself constitutes. If God were not then he could not be struck, while since, as God, he is or, equivalently, since he is, as God, absolute, then only he himself can initiate such a blow. Spirit, anyhow, itself propels us beyond any exterior word and name for what is “above all names” and is thus, also in religion, finally called “spirit” or that which “blows where it wills” as itself both gift (donum) and giving. Philosophy, said Hegel, is idealism, since God makes the world “out of nothing” as needing no matter, which might come back and strike him.4 What Heidegger apparently misses, and one might say the same of Adorno, Kierkegaard and many others, is that religion itself, as absolute spirit, itself elicits this reduction, this expansion rather, of what they mistakenly see as its essence. It is the philosophical or ultimate Gottesdienst, as in its time was Israel’s protest against idolatry. Such an annihilating protest is ever raised by the infinite, by spirit, against the finite. In this sense an abiding “protestant” or protesting moment cannot be outlawed from the universal or catholic system of thought, from the “true reason-world”. Since this has no limits, the limits or borders of “the eternal city” are continually threatened from within themselves, the outside being, therefore, inside. There is, all the same, a “centre of unity”, everywhere since the circle is infinite, and this is thought itself, as well say I myself. I think: no one else does, except as himself I. Hence, “In God alone is my soul at rest” (psalm of the warrior-king). As Hegel expresses it, personality is only secured by being put at risk, whether once or continually, the warrior-principle after all and “true reason-world”, again. But McTaggart, like Hegel, presents a system of infinitude, based upon the very idea of personality, of which Hegel had said the principle is universality, the very opposite, as it might seem in the abstract, of individuality. This seems though, I will maintain, incompatible with personality’s exclusivity or incommunicability as McTaggart understands it. There is the rub, unless indeed a deeper compatibility underlies his final account of this exclusivity as itself exclusively relational. For that is how he goes on to present it, in the system that in his supposedly post-Hegelian stage he called “determinate correspondence”. Here the persons are the 4

We have already noted here growing appreciation among theologians (we mentioned David Burrell on Proclus: one might also cite John Millbank) of an equivalence between this notion, “out of nothing”, and the classic view of an emanation of what pre-exists , so to say, in God, certainly as eternally known by him in his immutability. On this point O’Regan (op. cit.)seems to hang back a little, building upon the seemingly fictive alternative, “from nothing” or “from God”. This is not unrelated to his making much of an “immanent” vis à vis an “inclusive Trinity. The reality is surely one.

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perceptions, these persons, remember, being all that there is, rather as or just as, in Hegel, nature is seen or characterised as “the percipient Idea”. That this indeed corresponds to or is what in Hegel’s case is called Nature, even if in McTaggart’s case the factor of a self-alienation of the logical Idea is not so much to the fore, is shown by this common, so to say Humean link of perception but also by the fact that in McTaggart’s consciously Hegelian writings, Studies in the Hegelian Cosmology (1901) in particular at Chapter Two, entitled “Immortality”, McTaggart takes up this matter of the persons as precisely what he calls cosmology, meaning an application of the truths of logic, in this case Hegelian logic, to immediate phenomenal experience on the part of finite consciousness. This application is at first also a priori, but the “cosmological” conclusion arrived at relates directly to ourselves in what, by these tokens, corresponds to nature as forming the essential link in Hegelianism between logic and spirit. In Hegel himself too, I think we could say, the Anselmian conclusion to God or to the Idea itself or, hence, to final being in non-being or freedom plays this “cosmological” role. In this sense logic, the a priori, demands within itself such a cosmology, in Hegel’s system at least, as overcoming the one-sided negation of immediate logic in what is only thus such an “absolute liberty” as logic itself has found itself to require as characterising precisely (thought) itself. Thus the final or at least further developed outcome of Hegel’s philosophy of nature, in which he attempts to see an all-pervading necessity, according to his account of the latter as perfect freedom, but admits that he cannot, though this is partly due to imperfection on the part of the object as necessarily presented, this final outcome might well be in terms of his identification of the possible with the actual, here infinite actuality. It would be in terms, that is to say, of an infinity of possibilities or possible “worlds” in a “multiverse” which is, as philosophers say, “in act”. This must transcend immediate experience, not as finitely hypothesised like “black holes” but as limited by logic alone, which is to say it is unlimited, the ciphers for such infinity, which is none other than the Idea, being the a priori “series” (McTaggart’s term) of space or time. Geach, as some kind of empirical realist on, still, the Russellian model, complains of this method, inherited from Hegel, as the “wrong way to do philosophy”, claiming that it hampers McTaggart still in his final work and magnum opus in doing what he wants to do. Yet it is effectively the method of Hume, whose consequent and “cosmic” scepticism Kant, for all his “tenderness to the empirical” with which Hegel reproaches him, was never able to refute, as Hegel forcefully shows in his long critique of “The Critical Philosophy” as a “subjective idealism” only and even as

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something less than philosophy (Enc. 40 to 60), a judgment recalling Maritain’s dismissal of Husserlian phenomenology as “ideosophy”. Maritain indeed, like all the Thomists and Thomas and Aristotle themselves, is and are unconsciously Hegelian, as Hegel himself is bound by his own system not to doubt. Those who are not are not yet philosophers, a judgment, however, that Hegel freely applies even to himself inasmuch as being something (someone) phenomenally timebound and unable to jump over his own shadow, as he puts it. So we must make our choice before “going forth freely” into Hegelian necessity, which, like all spirit, scorns compulsion. * The system of “mutually reflecting perceptions” cannot be applied to anything material. This indeed is part and parcel of McTaggart’s argument(s) against the coherence or truth of matter as a concept. But with the d.c. system of mutually reflecting perceptions, we can work out descriptions of parts of perceptions (these will again be d.c. perceptions) in as much detail as we wish, all from the original specifications about who has d.c. perceptions of whom; we need not introduce any new specifications for a stage of more detailed differentiation.5

This will “guarantee that the principle of ontological determinacy is satisfied” (Geach refers here, on his page 128 still, to McTaggart’s The 5

P.T. Geach, Truth, Love and Immortality: an Introduction to McTaggart’s Philosophy: Hutchinson, London, p.128. The expression “d.c.” stands for “determining correspondence”, as mentioned above. Note that McTaggart, as he consistently should, treats actual and nameable persons as fundaments of his metaphysical system, thus as we might do with “God” as name of a nature, the divine, but also a proper name. We each have ourselves, as one with all in just this way, the “white stone” with out engraved (secret) individual name: it need not, then, be “given”. Here too spirit is “ungrateful”. In this way, if God is selfpositing, he does indeed seem “one of us”, all of whom are members “one of another”, Thus Hegel presents the incarnation as abiding self-revelation, only pictured as event. The “mystical” body is the true body – of Christ. Put differently, the stance of “theism” need not be the last word, could not be, about just God, ho theos, since it remains a finitely abstract representation or objectification, a onesided and thus far false judgment, as are all judgments, Hegel, if one-sidedly, claims. “The moments “as much are as they are not”. Here, in process, “selfconsciousness has ceased to be figurative or pictorial” (The Phenomenology of Mind, p.777-8), the subject being absorbed with its object in “absolute knowledge”.

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Nature of Existence 418). This principle is Geach’s version of what McTaggart calls, surely ill-advisedly, the “presupposition” of “The Contradiction of Infinite Divisibility” (NE, chapter 23). A related principle (presupposition) for McTaggart is that of Perceptual Determinacy: “Nothing can have a determinable characteristic without having it in a perfectly determinate form”. This indeed he calls “Total Ultimate Presupposition”, an eccentric label, Geach comments. The third of his three principles or “presuppositions” is that “every substance has content, has proper parts, has an internal structure”, the latter being due to “some definite mutual relations”, Geach (p.69) adds. He informs us that McTaggart “sometimes expresses this by saying that every substance is divisible or infinitely divisible”. This indeed will be the death of material substance in McTaggart’s system, by the above principle. Geach comments critically that McTaggart has assumed that the notion of parts and whole, like those of “complexity, internal structure, content”, are univocal, which is “extremely doubtful”. If so, then McTaggart certainly departs from Hegel on this point. We might say that he treats his immaterial substances materially in this respect at least. For Hegel no finite concept, anyhow, is univocal, this being the insight and principle moving logic towards the absolute idea. Analogy, indeed, is classically a form of equivocation and so Hegel too, I maintain, adheres to this negatively critical view of it, in maintaining, in his turn, but with its own twist, that “everything is itself and not another thing” (Butler, G.E. Moore). Everything as one word, singular, transcends reference to “all things” as plural or to “each thing” as singular. So Hegel “merely” adds to this that since it is indeed everything that is itself then beings, “things”, are all one in this, in being themselves, precisely thus excluding others as such (universal solipsism, ultimately the reach of “absolute subjectivity”, the many as one, the one as many). This is nothing other than the “analogy of being” as expounded by Aquinas, it may surprise to note. Hegel, whether or not consciously following Aquinas, claims this as the final identity, which is the idea in which all is held together as one “system”. This is in truth then, again, “the analogy of being” without which all would fall apart more completely than once envisaged as chaos. The expression, “analogy of being”, of course, is not used by Hegel, heir nonetheless to Cajetan’s The Analogy of Names. It seems to me something of a pity that Geach, in his book, did not compare this account, in the posthumous (c.1927) The Nature of Existence, with McTaggart’s account of Hegel’s reasoning on this same topic of immortality in the 1901 chapter referred to above. This would show how he saw Hegelian thought as straddling also the Cambridge

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philosophy of his time and place in terms of which he sought to re-present it. The faults he claims to identify in his 1910 commentary on Hegel’s logical theory and argumentation in no way contradict this aim, as Geach effectively concedes in his book, for all his talk of “Hegelian hangovers”, and as the concluding paragraph of that commentary makes clear, which Geach himself has the grace to cite. McTaggart asserts there, namely, that no philosopher has penetrated closer to “the nature of reality” than has Hegel, presumably not even himself. It is therefore misleading simultaneously to assert, as Geach does, that he ever “wrote Hegel out of his system”, as would be an example of “ungrateful spirit” indeed! Where McTaggart speaks, as cited above, in terms of “who has perceptions of whom” we seem to have the root of his difference from Hegel. He speaks of persons where Hegel speaks, advisedly, of personality. Thus Hegel, by contrast, does not speak lightly, hardly at all in fact in his major works, of individual immortality. He aims to free personality from the material taint of individuality, without, of course, thereby losing its personal character. It is precisely his logic that both enables and necessitates this, taking us, he would claim, a step nearer than hitherto towards spiritual reality, to the reality of spirit, of “I in them and they in me”, what Hegel in some places equates with becoming a “worldsoul” (in a sense distinguishable, as a function of self-consciousness, from application of this term to history’s great figures). In just this spirit he interprets, we may say, the Scriptural losing of one’s life “in this world” to “keep it unto life eternal”. The theme of self in other, other in self, in Hegelian identity, is thus brought into play. It is important to see, however, that this theme is preserved in McTaggart, for all his eagerness to defend the incommunicability of individual personality. Each person is essential to the whole as the whole depends upon each person. He defends this as the perfect and therefore rational notion of unity as such, which must belong to “the world” as rational. For what is the world without (the) reason? With Frege he might have rhetorically asked this, answering that to attempt to give any account of such a notion, of an irrational world, would be like trying to “wash the fur without wetting it”, as we noted above. In this sense then each person is “syllogistically” identical with every other person as all are identical with the same unity as having it “in” themselves. In McTaggart’s later, effectively final work a different account is substituted for this, whether or not it is preferred to it. The advantage of the system of “d.c. perceptions” (Geach), of perceptions in determinate correspondence, over any “material” account of reality is precisely the infinitude of this system, which holds firm as much if there are just two

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persons in the universe as if there are any number or even an infinite number. This latter necessity or eventuality, however, might well be regarded as the Aufhebung of number as such, thus rejoining Hegel’s view. Geach anyhow, ignoring this, explains: If A’s internal differentiation depends on perceiving differentiation ad infinitum within another person B, and B similarly depends for his internal differentiation upon perception of a third person C, and so on endlessly, we plainly have a vicious infinite regress. But if this series runs in a circle instead, do we not get a vicious circle? The winning move in McTaggart’s intricate game is his realisation that this need not be a vicious circle. We see this clearly if we assume a mini-society of just two persons, each of whom perceives each of the two clearly and distinctly, so that all the inner states of either are represented both to himself and to the other. A’s content, on this hypothesis, will consist simply of A’s perception of A and A’s perception of B, and B’s content will consist simply of B’s perception of A and B’s perception of B. Since the perception is entirely clear and distinct, each of these perceptions will have further parts. B’s perception of A, for example, will have as parts B’s perception of A’s perception of B and B’s perception of A’s perception of A; and B’s perception of A’s perception of B’s perception of A and of A’s perception of B’s perception of B will in turn be perceptions together making up B’s perception of A’s perception of B. This inner differentiation of A and B into perceptions can be worked out indefinitely; it is clear that McTaggart can satisfy the principle of infinite differentiation. (Geach, pp.126-7)

This, of course, was precisely what could not be satisfied in the case of matter though matter nonetheless required it, thus entailing matter’s impossibility. As Hegel once put it, “Mind is the existent truth of matter – the truth that matter itself has no truth” (Enc. 389). Whereas for matter the “obstacle” is that we are compelled to further and further divisions and/or specifications without end, of measurement as of shades of colour indifferently, here, in this system of mutually reflecting perceptions, to which might correspond the otherwise exotic notion that we beget one another, once it is understood that the “we” are nothing more or other than perceptions, we “can work out descriptions of parts of perceptions… in as much detail as we wish”. In fact, I observe, this situation closely corresponds to Hegel’s statement that “Nature is the percipient Idea” (Enc. 244), which closes Part One, Logic, of the Encyclopaedia. As being precisely a system of persons, that is, the universe is one and perfectly so by logical necessity, as the many differentiations themselves are one, perfectly, and not by some legal or “moral” proviso, or as the one itself is infinitely differentiated. This last

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requirement disposes of McTaggart’s objection that there cannot be just one person. The One of historical philosophy is not “just” one in this sense of a reducible counting. It is, just therefore, “useless to count” (Hegel). Numeri non ponuntur in divinis (Aquinas). The Idea, in perceiving itself and itself alone as infinitely differentiated, makes itself concrete or nonabstract. This is its act, the pure act that it is and has to be, Aristotle shows (Metaphysics XII, 1072b 13f.). If it is any specific kind of act, other than this primal freedom, the argument does not go through. Non aliquo modo est, sed est, est (Augustine). This brings us closer towards the Ontological Argument as later objectified by Anselm. It is indeed with reference to this that Hegel’s transcendence of the principle of bivalence within his logic is to be seen as a fusion, a synthesis, superseding both, of logic and metaphysics as is already implicit in Aristotle. In this sense there is never anything new in philosophy, as in the world as a whole. As Hegel declares, the end is, as end, realised, is act and no mere possibility.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN INCIARTE ON HEGEL

In an article1 found on his computer after his death Fernando Inciarte discusses, as an aspect of “post-modernity”, the “theorem of the death of God”, starting-point for thinkers such as Foucault or Lacan, which, he points out, “goes back to Hegel”. “The whole of post-modern thought lives upon the decomposition of Hegel’s system.” Hegel sets the standard and gives the rules for the later philosophical developments, but he does it in a Christian key and this, Inciarte thinks, gives an advantage to those placing themselves in the Hegelian perspective. One might wonder why exactly. Inciarte, however, in the same sentence appears to cast doubt on the quality of Hegel’s Christianity, saying it is “without doubt” coloured or even stained (Sp. teñido) by Gnosticism yet Christian al fin y cabo. One recognises here a touch of that mystery of an individual’s final thought who remains aware of institutional brethren (in this case his brothers in the Opus Dei) looking over his shoulder the whole time. It is something one can generalise not only to all who carry a commitment, Christian, Marxist, Muslim, into the philosophical arena, and not merely the “academy”, but to the whole relation of religion to philosophy. It is the religious mystery, which is yet “for all men” (Hegel) and hence no mystification. In general, or at best, it makes for a commendable subtlety. To write or speak at all, use language as we oddly say, is both to subject oneself to and to go up into the community. Inciarte speaks, with frankly or perhaps unconsciously Roman Catholic tendentiousness, of Hegel as “not wholly emancipated from Christianity”, in contrast to Nietzsche (sic). This is what makes the way Hegel sees this theorem of the death of God central to the initially obscure theme of Inciarte’s article, that of the “melancholic bend” or buckling (bucle). It invites, however, to a potentially one-sided, even finally distorted way of viewing Hegel, tendentious as we said. Thus Hegel is, it seems, assumed to have begun such an emancipation. The alternative, that Hegel rather 1 F. Inciarte, “El bucle melancólico en perspectiva”, Nueva Revista, Universidad Internacional de la Rioja, Spain, No. 071, September – October 2000, pp. 46-63.

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wished to demonstrate the emancipation which Christianity itself is or represents, is not allowed to suggest itself. The link with Gnosticism, by no means unambiguous, is thus presented as a colouring, and later in the article as even a bad taste, “without doubt”. Los resabios gnosticos en esta visión del cristianismo son evidentes. Thus the Alexandrian Fathers, esteemed by the Orthodox (in both references of this term), certainly had a Gnostic connection, whether or not it was a colouring. Inciarte, like Thomas Aquinas, wrote under a certain external and, doubtless, conscious constraint, such as that under which Shostakovitch composed his music. There is no call, I mean, to discount such production. We all, again, have our non-negotiable loyalties, to the universal (of universals) first of all, even if there are very few things deserving this posture, as Pasternak’s Dr. Zhivago remarks. According to Hegel, Inciarte continues (under the heading Hegel, cristianismo y psicoanálysis), when “the Son of God made man, i.e. the Son of the Father and God himself”, dies then not only God-Son dies but God as such, i.e. also God-Father. What then remains, better, what then rises to die no more, is the Holy Spirit, he interprets. Hegel thus passes directly, “in a certain way”, from “what he himself calls the speculative Holy Friday” to Pentecost. The “feast” of the Resurrection, “as in all good Lutheranism”, is “for him too” less important than Holy Friday (Good Friday in the English-speaking world). Again, however, this quasi-sectarian linkage seems unjustified, not leaving us time or space to think properly, so to say. Nor is it clear that Hegel ignores the resurrection in this very act, rather, of bringing out its spiritual significance, of being alive in heaven because dead upon earth as St. Paul virtually says. The essential spiritual identity of Cross and Resurrection and of both with Pentecost is an ancient and profound Christian theme, in sounding which Hegel avoids and transcends whatever might be “sectarian” in his Lutheranism. This finding, in fact, can be further developed when considering Hegel’s criticisms of the then Catholic system, as against Lutheranism, in The Philosophy of Spirit II, “Objective Spirit”, principally at the long addition to §552. There one may see how the whole difference in ethos turns upon whether or not the advance of theological thought to absolute idealism has been made or not, irrespective of the procentual degree, so to say, to which this development has occurred among the members or, inclusively, official representatives of the two communions. The “Petrine” attitude to the great theologian St. Paul (2 Peter 3: 15-16), to his “spiritual” interpretation of apocalyptic

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mysteries and predictions in particular, which the author has just mentioned, in earlier days, might well serve as model here: Our brother Paul, according to the wisdom given him, has written to you of these things as in all his letters. Some things are difficult to understand in these letters, which the unlearned and the unstable pervert, as they do the rest of the Scriptures, to their own perdition.

Some things don’t change. The Holy Spirit, anyhow, is God in his full unity. It is with that understanding that Hegel’s text is about God the Holy Spirit. All right, Inciarte says, But after the total death of God through the death of God-Father due to the death of God-Son, of God made man, the meaning of “God” in “God the Holy Spirit” is not able to be the same as before. The Holy Spirit now identifies itself with the Christian community, with the Church in its historical trajectory. He continues surely to be God, but is God posited by that community in such a way that the community posits it as a presupposition.

Does Inciarte mean to say here, rather, that the community posits itself as a presupposition (to God)? I have given reasons above why this identification “with the Christian community” is not to be reduced to a historical temporal moment “on earth”, so to say, whether as found in Hegel or in the great Patristic theologians of the Church, which is ever trans-historical. Fides sola, Inciarte appears to be thinking of here. The community posits the conditions for its own existence in the future as positing its own past, he thus interprets. This now is the philosophical nucleus of the melancholic buckling or looping back of his title, he says, the philosophical root of the psychoanalytical “temporal loop”. He associates it with “the night of reason”, and with assertion of, he himself says, a fictitious Basque national past. This, he supposes, is how Hegel thinks of the Christian community’s own past as privileged witness. That is, he views it as critically as Inciarte, not viewing that community thus critically, views the Basque nationalist claims! Now there is certainly a (dark) night of the understanding specifically, systematised in Saint John of the Cross’s commentaries (on his own poems), but this is just what Hegel claims Speculative Reason can overcome. There is not much mention of this here, unless under the discrediting rubric of “gnosticism”, even, indeed concretamente, the specific “heresy” of Marcion in early Christianity. This Hegelian vision, of the death of God-Son, anticipating Freud’s more complete version of the death of the Super-Ego, liberates us from God-Father the evil God or, it

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must follow, from evil per se. This now is the final petition of “the Lord’s prayer”. This God-Father, Inciarte, however, adds, is God the creator, no less. Here though he is merely citing the theses of ancient Gnosticism as if Hegel had simply taken them over without deeper penetration. Every heresy, however, turns upon some truth, as malum est semper in subjecto. This is a first principle, requiring eventual transcendence or “sublation”, as impossible, of an initially one-sided ecumenism. Inciarte, of course, shows abundant recognition and exploitation of this principle as the article proceeds. One point though is never cleared up or not immediately. The meaning of God after Hegel’s speculative Good Friday, he says, is not able to be the same as before. We could rather say it fulfils it, as the death of the Son, it is plain, fulfils the hidden meaning, brings it to light, of God the Father (of Israel). That the Spirit is “identified with the Christian community” is simply the doctrine of the Body of Christ, “members one of another”, as being spiritual and not merely organic, as the Church at first appears. This Church now, however, its movement, is one with that of humanity, of Spirit indeed, as sketched in The Phenomenology of Mind. The Church, that is, is sacrament and symbol of the Kingdom of God, “for all men”, the regained paradise which was never really lost: All which thy child’s mistake Fancies as lost, I have stored for thee at home. What God is represented as becoming, as changing into, even in Hegel’s own language, is fundamentally still the dialectical reality methodically set forth in the Logic. This Idealism is the common denominator of religion and philosophy and so is not interchangeable with “realism” as some Hegelian commentators have suggested. The world is not to be “viewed materially”, Kant had already seen. In a word, there is no “after” the “speculative Good Friday”, precisely because it is speculative. That is, it is the coming-to-see, on our part, coming-to-have a more adequate notion of God, of the Absolute or of the divinity “we call God”, as Inciarte himself notes. It is in this sense that Spirit proceeds from the Son. God is not declared evil at all. Rather, the notion of “an external dark power” is rejected as unworthily thought or, better, as a past moment of conception, in line with Augustine’s intimior me mihi or the whole Pauline and Johannine legacy. Augustine also says that “You were close to me and I was far from you” and this can be applied to history, as to much of earlier philosophy, theology or, above all, religious praxis.

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So the life and death of Christ teaches us not to see God as previously often seen (the prophets too do as much). In a way to be specified it makes us, as united with him, to have the same Spirit-outflowing relation to him and others as he, Christ (God in fact) has to himself, as being indeed the incarnation, embodiment and realisation of God-Father, ho theos, the hidden God of Israel and, indeed, the Absolute Idea, though still in representational form, but as eliciting a perfection of philosophy as religion’s accomplishment and completion. Not that philosophy takes the place of religion. The latter is “for all men”, including philosophers, who may often be found, as was Hegel, attending church, reading the lessons maybe, maybe, again, wearing a monk’s cowl, Christian or Buddhist or something else altogether. They may similarly, for that matter, paint or make music or write poetry, like Aquinas or Nietzsche or Adorno, this being the first form of that Absolute Spirit to which they, like all men, no more than all men, are in essence consecrated. The believing community does not fully understand itself as the new humanity, as Hegel intends it to be. This is the force of calling Christianity the absolute religion, in a certain speculative contradiction, since religion is itself a non-absolute or provisional form of Spirit, Hegel argues. This is again though entirely Biblical. In the New Jerusalem, in “heaven”, to use McTaggart’s term for the true view “of things”, there is no temple while or just because God is, as and since he “shall” be, all in all. For Hegel there is no distinction between Spirit and Holy Spirit and this is a position he is well able to defend, also theologically if required. The view is both effect and cause of his logical theory of the Subjective Notion, whereby the individual is equally universal and vice versa. This is especially clear in the case of spirit or spirits indifferently, as Hegel demonstrates in his discussion of angels in The Phenomenology of Mind in particular, recalling, again, many scriptural passages. So it is not so much that the Holy Spirit identifies itself with the believing community as that that community is called upon to identify with, to receive, Spirit. There is no reduction but rather an amplification of the immediate and, we may say, human. This again is the force of the saying that “no man comes to the father but by me”, that I namely am the father, am divine, one with him, and his true word and expression moreover, such that through me you will receive the Spirit. It is not clear, philosophically, that the Son had to die and Hegel does not, since it would be false, make it clear. As Aquinas says, one drop of his blood would have been more than enough “satisfaction”. He had to die only in the deeper and universal sense that it was “known from all eternity” and hence “foreordained”, as theologians and others like to represent it. This lies behind

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the aboriginal Christian representation, as preached first to Jews and by Jews, of “the fulfilment of the Scriptures”, the “mystical” or anagogical interpretation of which remains the touchstone of orthodoxy as indeed of Christianity’s accomplishment, and not replacement, by philosophy. Aquinas and guardians of faith generally had indeed taught that the literal interpretation is always to be preferred yet, besides this being contrary to the Scriptural examples of the Gospels or Pauline writings themselves, and others, the letter, littera, is itself a representation merely. It is not what “gives life”, as does spirit alone. “All flesh” therefore, “is as grass”, burden of the most impassioned of music as it is the essence of the minor key itself, to adapt, or rather distort a line of Browning’s as “the great C minor of this life”, this “idea immediate” only. Even the greatest or “choral” symphony of Beethoven is put as in a minor key, of D minor, though not its final theme, and such lugubriousness is an inevitable accompaniment of religion and art in their abstract finitude. In philosophy, as is represented in the resurrection achieving this, it is absorbed and superseded in Isaiah’s “everlasting joy”, Jeremiah’s prophecy that “all shall know the Lord”, Joel’s of the Spirit poured out upon “all flesh”. This, in final philosophical view, is Realised End (Hegel), all else in its abstract finitude being “misperception” (McTaggart). Once again the duplication of Hume’s thought in Hegel, though as in a mirror, stands out., with the difference, which one might claim Hume merely didn’t find words to express, that “the moments as much are as they are not”, in “spiritual unity” of “the universality of self-consciousness” (The Phenomenology of Mind, p.777), which is again implicit in Hume’s scepticism concerning the immediate self. Here one might say the thought of Hume, of which Kant’s was the negative moment, is tranformingly fulfilled in Hegel. This should offer a lesson to the theism–versus-atheism debate and the crudely onesided terms in which it has been lately conducted, not least in “philosophical” forums. But who then is this Son, if not the particular as universal, who shall “taste death for every man”? He is the Subject and he is Subject and Subjectivity and on these lines Hegel argues forcefully for the necessity of one individual as the mediator, who thus has to die, as does “all that lives”, in whom, however, all, “subsequently” or accordingly, are found, as mediator, all being branches of the whole vine, as it is said. Pilate has thus to say, “Behold the man” (Ecce homo!), as meaning rather, unbeknown to Pilate, “Behold man!” As Aquinas puts it, in a remarkable concordance, God assumed an individual human nature, not human nature itself in the abstract or universally, which, he merely says, would be inconveniens as not agreeing, not only with the tenor of religion but with the whole truth of

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things, the truth, namely, that this individual, necessarily by his death, is revealed after all as the true universal, which is man become spirit or “universal of universals” in self-consciousness, goal of the “mystical way” or of the way simply, “I in them and they in me”, the figurative element here flowing into the sapiential or philosophical, in what Hegel calls the necessity of the absolute picture-idea, absorbing his own distinction in its speculative destruction. This is the significance, says Hegel in effect, of this individual’s having no father, of this representation, as the bride in the psalm is exhorted to “Forget also thy father’s house”. “In my father’s house are many mansions”, declares the Johannine Christ. How would he know that, we might be tempted to wonder, should we suppose the meaning is clear? Because he “saw Satan falling from heaven” and so on? Clearly not and Hegel does not think so. This is all religious and figurative representation of the unity of all men or, ultimately, of all ideas in one another (hence the many mansions in one house), as all of these are “divine” or absolute, in what is now necessarily, as exposing the abstraction of our finite thinking, an “identity in difference”. We have no right or warrant for ruling out this form of interpretation of the doctrine which we “shall know”, that doctrine which “is not mine but his that sent me” (John 7: 16-17). Regarding sending or mission, it is a philosophical necessity, a necessity of the Concept, of Infinity and Eternity, that message and its sender become one, as with Father and Word antecedently, a process merely begun by the sending of actual persons bearing the message, always the same message as Word of Unity. “The Word was God”. The universal, again, is first (and last) realised as particular. This too is embodied, figured, in religion as, without question, in Art. In this indeed Art first seems to differ from philosophy as preferable, easier. But Art too requires philosophy for its completion and so itself elicits it, as creation elicits its own supersession or “return” (to the Father, to the Idea). The Word is first deed (German Der Tat), as Goethe reminded us in Faust, is first its own expression as perpetual self-generation as other. Is in this sense that Hegel can say, while heresy-hunters prepare to swoop, that the Trinitarian distinctions, compared to what we generally regard as distinct, are distinction of play or, even or rather, of love (as is not the case with Sabellianism, say). This thought is a strong preservative against tritheistic perversions. The “ancient of days” is thus, in this defining or perpetual self-generation, ever young, ever new, and the same is true of philosophy and each of those reposing in philosophy’s pantheon, as Hegel describes in his “history” of it.

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So it is said that I, the man beheld (ecce homo), “will give you another advocate to be with you for ever, that Spirit of truth” (John 14, 16), that he “will remind you of all I have taught you”, that he will “take of mine and give to you”. The “spirit of truth” is named repeatedly throughout the last Johannine discourses, so Hegel’s thought, from the point of view of being a genuine development, is right on target in this respect. Indeed, the speaker goes on, I go away so that this will happen, as I choose the time and the hour2. To which, however, he adds the words “in obedience to my Father”. “I and my Father”, however, “are one”. Is this obedience then vowed to “the Super-Ego”, or to the evil Creator-God gnostically posited? Hardly. These words and those like them are not so much overcome or “sublated” as they are assimilated in identity, first now becoming concrete in Subjectivity, the outside inside. We shall “obey” the highest in us, however construed, a truism Shakespeare felt able to present as a mere Polonian platitude. Viewed thus the Freudian Super-ego as externalised, as hostile to man, is rather a decline from what philosophy has attained, inclusively in Nietzsche’s work which Freud read so often. Man, spirit, is his own super-ego as ego is ego, universal of universals and just therefore necessarily in concrete particularity. Yet philosophy did not attain this but always had it, in Augustine (intimior me mihi), in Aristotle, in Anaxagoras (what else is “mind”?), as in the tribal thinking of pre-literate peoples. In Hegel’s teaching it is written into the fabric of Nature as but externalising and incarnating the eternal Method and “shapes” of the Logic, of Spirit. So it is interesting to recall here how even or especially the Idea of the Logic, as “a truth in process”, freely releases itself into Nature, i.e. in the freedom of thought, into the mediate place of “groaning and travailing” towards the eternal “all in all”, true being and whole method of the Idea as first broached.3 We find the same at least momentary falling away in Newman or Kant, with their doctrine of absolute conscience, finitely transcendent but precisely as being from elsewhere, external, the Law.4 Hence Hegel 2

O’Regan tends, inaccurately I rather think, perhaps through the association with Joachim de Fiore he so brilliantly uncovers, to view stress on the removal of Christ in Hegel as idiosyncratic. It rather recovers the deeper pneumatic insight as reflected in Acts of the Apostles and elsewhere. 3 This reflection I first caught a glimpse of in the discourse of Dr. Alan Ponikvar of “The Hegel Society of America”. 4 Thus C.S. Lewis, in Mere Christianity (“Broadcast Talks” originally), took this as his main argument for the truth of God as proclaimed in religion, despite himself being philosophically initiated, so to say. It was and is a moment, and yet, if absolutised, a falling away. For man himself is, has to be, “from elsewhere”, in

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dismisses it as “wicked”, abstract indeed. The New Law written in the heart is actually the new discovery or revelation of the one and only eternal law of an active principle itself making all things one, of “bringing to naught the things which are” in this very process, denominated as Love. Love is its own conscience, as “Spirit is its own community”. This community is first (and last) expressed as the Trinity, the many in differentiated or perfect unity or, in Plato, neither one nor many, the concrete universal, of which the things which “both are and are not”, the appearance which they are (and hence are not), is but a moment (of the Idea). But “it is useless to count” (Hegel), numeri non ponuntur in divinis (Aquinas). Hegel then, on this interpretation, brings to conclusion, or takes further, what was begun by the addition of the filioque, in the West specifically, to the long accepted Creed. The Spirit proceeds from the Son. What begins as a division, an antithesis, a mere et or “and”, will later unite in a superior, more durable unity. The same may be suspected of the Lutheran additions, reformulations, reformation. The initial loss to orthodoxy is destined to further perfect it as it, orthodoxy, so positively celebrated by Chesterton (Orthodoxy, 1908), with its rights upheld by Hegel, goes “from strength to strength”, a face of “everlasting joy” (Isaiah). The principle can be generalised as recapitulation of what each heresy in its day separated and affirmed as other. It can also be generalised over space as well as time, in broadest ecumenism, engulfing even abstract atheism. That is why the movement was originally identified as an atheism, the heathen crying all the day “Where is thy God?”, as the Psalmist complained. “As for our God, he is in heaven” and so, it follows, are we. This is Absolute Idealism, the “sitting with Christ in the heavenly places” (St. Paul, now himself, if we sublate questions of authorship, knowable “in the spirit” as Nietzsche’s “first Christian”). Who then is this Jesus? He is the one that was to come, just in that he is affirmed as having come. Inciarte, as we presented his text above, reads rightly here. That the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church just means that he, Jesus, is necessarily the one that was to come, in that he will be affirmed, since in destroying him you propagate him, as Cross is Resurrection. But why not someone else? Because he is himself the other, as are each and all. We have seen it though, learned it, in him, whom proper self-consciousness transcending himself. The mystics know this, mysticism being the proper perfection of Christian or religious discipleship as falling under the developed doctrine of the Scriptural seven “gifts of the Spirit”. (cf. David Knowles, What is Mysticism? Sheed & Ward, London, 1967). The act of conscience, Aquinas teaches, is rather an act of rational recognition like any other.

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philosophy has thus assimilated to itself as himself being Word, without which nothing is or can be made or done. So “the whole round world rejoices”, as is celebrated in the daily news summaries, with bulletins of disaster and development together. “Have we received goodness at the hand of the Lord and shall we not receive evil?” asked the ancient if storied Israelite, while to this Hegel’s account, dialectic, of good and evil, responds and corresponds. He is, says Derrida, “always right”, the “new Aristotle” indeed, succeeding to the one reckoned for a millennium or more as the Philosopher, as thus Hegel himself clearly rated him. Hegel argues that this, there being one coming, must be a philosophical truth if it is anything. That is why he does not name “that individual figure” and not because of some embarrassment, as Findlay avers. Hegel has shown that infinity has to involve self-alienation within itself, as we have had to alienate our thoughts from ourselves in language. This selfalienation takes form in, again external nature and a sensible world generally, at the head of which stands reason as able to conceptualise and thus take back to infinity, to the Idea, all that was alienated. Thus this must be something that happens eternally, in logical priority to “the historical” as representing it back towards the sensible. Reason, the logos, finds its concretisation in one unitary individual, without component parts, in whom, in an identification, all others are “gathered together in one” as sequel to perpetual but strictly innumerable reproduction, of which time is the figure. The greatest mystery here is maybe the necessary role of the sensible. In questioning this, however, we have already answered the question. If sensation is immediate knowledge, quaedam cognition (Aquinas), is not this true of the knowledge, or something better than knowledge, necessarily attributable to Absolute Spirit, the infinite? Hegel answers this by explicitly denying abstract absoluteness (as it would be for him) of any distinction between mediate and immediate. Not so much immediacy but potentiality or possibility as the logically necessary negative of act is the clue to the external and material world of partes extra partes, parts outside parts, where “each thing is itself and not another thing”. So it is, accordingly, with immediate (sense) knowledge. It is the negative stimulus against which the positive, the actual, is affirmed, the transfigurable as required by transfiguration, the evil and false, finally, as required by the good and the true, as Hegel argues this matter. What one cannot ask is why logic itself takes the form it has, as asking for a logic of logic. One can only proffer absurdities unamenable to rational choice, thus descending into psychopathy.

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He, Christ, then, was the one that is to come as the one sending himself. Mohammed too, however, was the one sending himself and this is made a reproach to him and his followers. Today everyone and anyone sends himself or herself or themselves, but not all gain a hearing or, indeed, love. These so-called false Messiahs are a well-known phenomenon in later Judaism while the Shiites have thoroughly thematised this conception under a system of Imams and of a “hidden” Imam, one that, each in his time, “has to be”, institution and person in one, as with the Papacy in fact. Analogous structures exist in Tibetan and other forms of Buddhism, while Hinduism, one feels, might say anything of anything or anyone and some will say we are moving here in the same direction. The underlying truth for us, however, is the system of inter-substitutivity in identity, particularly of individual and universal, worked out in Hegel’s logic but in response to, we are claiming, as elicited by, Christian doctrine and tradition as this itself has grown from the primary preaching and writings. These themselves, however, as a new collection, arise out of age-old reflection, alternating with experience of life and history, upon and within Israel’s self-consciousness, in appearance exclusive and yet borrowing continually from all that surrounded her, as these peoples themselves have borrowed from her and, later, from the Christians. The same phenomenon(!) is repeated in the Greco-Roman world. The note of exclusivity, inherited from the Hebrew tribe, however, remains in the Christian body in the very act of a total universalisation. Thus the doomed Jewish war of independence takes the form now, in the “new” Israel, the Church as Christian body, of total spiritual conquest of the occupying power as such. “Spiritual warfare” (Newman) sublates and fulfils the “sword of honour”, even generally in the world. The death of Christ at Jewish instigation paradigms the truth that one’s co-religionists are always the last to see this and hence that such sublation is always, as principle of this universal truth, one of particular, that is concrete, inspiration before it can be in any sense institutional, be it divine or not. It can be divine. God, the infinite, can think or “create” an institution as well as she can create me or you. Aristotle’s view, that there can be no providence for individuals, seems to exclude this, which may be a not so commendable reason, after all, for his speaking of mind, nous, where Descartes says “I think”. The eternal and unseen, and the temporal or “seen”, are for a long time confused. Empires are holy and liturgy is developed in a context of offering sacrifice for the State, its rule and rulers in particular. The temporal and spiritual “powers” are treated of as if in parallel, with the debts of an unmistakeable finitude to one another. Only gradually is the

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total supremacy of Spirit made manifest as heart of the original message, original act, as death of and to self in resurrection to infinite blessedness in the Idea, in Spirit, represented as the Trinity of Father, Son and Spirit, which is actually itself the System of progress from abstraction back to Spirit as its own accomplishment. So it is only within and as belonging to this process that man is ever conceived as conceiving himself in progress towards it in self-abnegation, saving the lost, as it is put. This “lost”, however, is conceived doubly. One loses one’s life to save it, yet that life is itself lost by the original sin, not as from the summit of an earlier blessedness, as notions of a literal “fall” might suggest, but as maturing to breakage in active and deliberate transformation of an innocence that is neither good nor evil. The process of Spirit returns us to all that was positive in that original “preternatural” state, or rather in the conception of it, as included, absorbed in and yet superseded by a greater, infinite Good. So today and out of its inner necessity Western civilisation, truly identified as Christian by Moslems, if not always by Jews who claim their own right to participate as the ancestors5, spreads throughout the world with its own particular universal institutions. The Jews, meanwhile, as not always recognised here in their true dignity, as indeed persecuted in the name of this “new” religion (which is their own), as by Moslems, are strongly tempted to a false secularism that would falsify their own past and person. An ancient wound, inflicted anew and worse than before in our own times, calls for healing, as “religion is for all men”. Yet it is now no longer religion finitely taken. In calling Christianity the Absolute Religion, by his own system a contradiction in terms, Hegel signals the coming of Spirit to full self-realisation and incarnation. The ecumene is not an opposite of religion, nor is it coincidence with it in its historical and finite manifestations, necessarily past even when they seemed or seem present. It is, as Spirit, “its own community”. This is “objective spirit”, an account of which is falsely equated with what is called Hegel’s “political philosophy”. Political ideology, as finite, is rather here and in its sequel especially overcome, sublated or aufgehoben as such. That is why, in the concrete, what is called Capitalism is not a system. It is not even a (way of) life. It is the Idea as particularised in each and every individual. People in phenomenal life may have their “isms” and surely need them. Yet Capitalism is not truly one of them6, not a system of economics, for 5

Hence universal toleration, as preached by Lessing in Nathan der Weise, has to be born out of as rooted in this particular instance. 6 The same might be said of Communism, if fully worked out, but it would then be found that each was the other and each, furthermore, was speculative, hence

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example. The true economy, of all things or of itself indifferently, is more than financial. It is rather the system of ideas and categories which in Logic, i.e. in actuality, are absorbed in the Absolute Idea as its necessary “moments”, its activity and motion. Or, it is the Idea of happiness. So when we say “of all things” this, the Thing, is a material figure, treated of in Hegel’s Doctrine of Essence (in Encyclopaedia I), for Being itself, emerging at the end of that system, which is a circle, as the Absolute Idea and vice versa, as described in the earlier The Science of Logic. Mind is as it were dismantled, superseded, as indeed Hegel urges philosophy not to remain abstract, set over against experience or reality as a whole with all its moments. It is only in exercising the part that we oversee the whole7, since both are abstractions without one another. In that way language(s) and its or their compositions themselves point beyond themselves, as wholes to the whole. Thus it was taught in formal logic and its metaphysics (logica docens) that “only wholes are predicated of wholes”8, as we can (truly) say that Socrates is a man but not that Socrates is humanity. And yet in the Hegelian system we can after all equally say the latter, individual and universal comprising concrete identity in overcoming all abstraction. Each is the whole. McTaggart will argue later that only persons can sustain this equivalence and that therefore the universe is out and out or in toto personal, not in abstract selfcontradictory solitude but with each bearing the unity of all, so that each is alone precisely as “its own community” and that universal. “The principle of personality”, Hegel accordingly says, “is the universal”. In this sense Aquinas reasons that the society of friends is not essential to beatitude, namely, that this unity which is more than union is beatitude (as Hegel says in effect at EL159), that each has all within him or her. The “in”, as in John’s Gospel, Chapter Seventeen, stands, in figure, for identity. Each is “his own community”, is Spirit.

brought about by thought alone. If it is done on the street then that, therefore, has, to be valid, to be describable as thought. 7 That is the problem with prayer, that we try in vain to focus directly upon the whole, but also with philosophy! 8 Cf. Aquinas, De ente et essentia,

CHAPTER FOURTEEN THE NECESSITY IN THE CONTENT OF THE ABSOLUTE PICTURE-IDEA1

In Hegel’s account of Absolute Spirit the latter’s final form is philosophy, in which revelation is consummated. Even here, however, what is meant is not philosophy as a merely particular form, that, namely, of the written down text. For this is an abstraction, of sorts, a mere phenomenal trace, rather, momentarily “sparked off” from the Absolute Idea, from Absolute Knowledge as itself nothing but spirit whole and entire, indivisibly one, as act, with its “actuosity”, to employ a gloss of Hegel’s upon the Aristotelian term, singling out what he finds differentiates the Aristotelian Idea from that of Plato.2 What is meant, rather, is not some mere textual leaving but Truth as self-thought or “truthed”, the Absolute Idea which is, he says, the Absolute, the Absolute as mediated and yet, as “its own result”, immediate no less (Enc. 213, add.). It seems to follow from this that “the course of the dialectic” is (the Idea) “itself”, as is confirmed at 237: All that is at this stage left as form for the Idea is the Method of this content – the specific consciousness of the value and currency of the “moments” in its development.

The method, this is as much as to say, is pure contemplation or, to give it Hegel’s name, “absolute knowledge”. The Notion, anyhow, Hegel says, pairing it with Being as, also, its opposite as implicit is opposite to explicit, “is the certainty of itself” as “completely self-identical in its 1

Hegel, Encyclopaedia 573. Hegel, Enc. 142, add. While for Plato, Aristotle finds, the idea is a mere dynamis, Aristotle “establishes, in opposition to Plato that the idea, which both recognise to be the only truth, is essentially to be viewed as an energeia, in other words as the inward which is quite to the fore, or as the unity of inner and outer, or as actuality, in the emphatic sense here given to the word.” (my stress). 2

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otherness” to being, which yet is “its self-specialising act” (my stress). Here, as can be confirmed from the concluding chapters of The Phenomenology of Mind, is affirmed the identity of faith, its certainty, and the notion, not as reducing faith but as assimilating it to its necessary status, if accepted at all, as “victory overcoming the world”. For this certainty, it is affirmed, is what the notion is (238). Philosophic thought here “evinces itself to be the action of the notion itself”. We should not overlook that Cognition, as “the merely conscious idea, or the idea for itself”, is equally one-sided with Life itself (these are category names) as “being only the Idea implicit or natural”. The Absolute Idea, their unity, is “both in itself and for itself”, i.e. absolute or without real relation. When Hegel says the Idea’s beginning, as it “is taken from sensation and perception… is a synthetical as well as an analytical beginning” he confirms the Thomistic (one can hardly say “scholastic”) doctrine of the analogy of being, just as he does in saying that “the true reason world” is the rightful “property” not merely of philosophy but of every human being, child or otherwise uncultured though he be (82 add, 238 add). From beginning to end it is one Notion, “in whom we live and move and have our being”, a citation he might well have added. So this is not pantheism at all, though some might want to call it panentheism: Though the label (sc. panentheism) is potentially misleading unless care is taken to dissociate the term panentheism from too close an association with a particular modern form of construing the relationship between the infinite and finite, i.e., Process Theology, the label does accurately capture both Hegelian commitment to the divine as ultimate definition of reality and the close proximity of the finite to the divine infinite by which it is subtended.3

* Spirit is thus realised as ever “realised End” (Enc. 210) in and as its own Other, self-externalised Reason returned to itself as never having left itself, in whom and with whom alone every and each constituent is actual as being identical with the Idea, as being itself ideal. “And this is the Idea” (210), “infinite End”, the “consummation” of which “consists merely in removing the illusion which makes it seem yet unaccomplished” (212 add.). Philosophy, that is, consists in this removal, of this temporal illusion, as we might say, as, in words of a later moment of philosophy, time’s “eternal return” upon itself in continuous self-sublation, in the 3

Cyril O’Regan, The Heterodox Hegel, p.297.

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inwardness of a now absolute subjectivity or idea, self-consciousness first figured in religion where it is said, still mysteriously, “I live yet not I”. This is equivalent to or, equally, development of “the analogy of being”, originally postulated from within logic, as a species of equivocation merely, simply because the Idea alone or entirely is Actuality, as the thinking of thinking, whether in Aristotle (236 add.) or in Hegel. This, as infinite, is self-knowledge, where “self” stands for the consequently knowing knowledge. This is at once, therefore, equally system, universal and person, in the sense of absolute personality. “The principle of personality is the universal”, or, as we know from the Logic, the universal, the Idea, is the final individual. Only in, as identical with, the Idea is any existence actualised. It is thus improper, a concession to finitude, to speak of the Idea as itself existing. The Idea is, is the true form of Being in that being itself is truth, or indeed freedom, the final elucidation of Being as “that with which science must begin” (238, but see especially the beginning, again, of GL, after the Introduction). So in saying that “God is the absolute person”, in explicit supersession of Spinoza (Enc. 151 add.), Hegel simultaneously frees the Idea from all taint of objectivity, or, as he elsewhere says, commenting on Fichte: No doubt God is the Object, and, indeed, the Object out and out, confronted with which our particular or subjective opinions and desires have no truth and no validity. As absolute object, however, God does not therefore take up the position of a dark and hostile power over against subjectivity. He rather involves it as a vital element in Himself… The salvation and the blessedness of men are attained when they come to feel themselves at one with God, so that God, on the other hand, ceases to be for them mere object. But God in the Christian religion… has revealed Himself to men as a man amongst men, 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. ((Enc. 194 add., my stresses)

This and similar passages are taken by some today, in all good faith perhaps, in what Hegel nonetheless declares to be “malicious” misinterpretation, as being an implicit atheism. I would add, at any rate, that if it can be so taken then Christianity is taken as from the beginning itself an atheism in the sense of the final overthrow of idolatry or objectified worship in general. In this way the brutal opposition of theism and atheism was in principle superseded, taken away (aufgehoben) before it began, as not corresponding to the opposition between the godly and the ungodly, destined to be “rooted out” (Psalms). The religious colouring of

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Christianity, as “the absolute religion” (Hegel), is thus optional, according to the degree of culture obtaining among this or that group of believers, all nonetheless being one in the risen Christ, who is himself the community, as he is in them, each of them, equally and without distinction.. By this philosophy both Marxists and Christians are called upon to revise, or upgrade rather, their account(s) of these things.4 In the Idea, further, freedom is finally Necessity (Enc. 147), necessity freedom. That is to say, knowledge is finally Will, or practical, even though the “consequent” Absolute Idea is “the unity of the theoretical and practical idea” (236 add.). Duns Scotus wished to make of theology a practical science so as to show its superiority to and freedom from the theoretical necessities of philosophy. It perhaps did not occur to him that philosophy itself might be practical, that the higher reach of Reason itself is Will (higher than “cognition proper”), as is shown in Hegel’s Logic. Such will, of course, is by no means the abstract or finite will that we naturally envision as “self-will” or caprice. As the absolute (the Idea), will is actuality itself as conscious or self-determining. It is, in a word, goodness defined as what all tend towards or necessarily seek, as itself the principle of seeking, of self-tending or, again, will. The theoretical, truth, is thus included as a moment (of Being, of the Idea presented to the will as goodness – compare here Aquinas, QD de potentia, VII) as indeed is Necessity itself and its freedom, which, thus, is Freedom itself. It is not a moment as something left behind, like a temporal moment, but as something retained in being put by, like all partial abstractions (abstraction is setting apart), in that free ascent to the Absolute which is the System (of logic and spirit, of Reason. *

4

Thus a one time good friend of mine, the late Irene Brennan, who had been for a time a nun, became the leader for a time of the British Communist Party, never ceasing to deny the incompatibility of this her stance, any more than did Margaret Thatcher of hers, with Christian religion, of which historically a declared “atheism” (not shared by Irene) is certainly, by Hegelian principles, a “moment”, as has been increasingly recognised in ecumenical discussions, often sponsored by papal “secretariats” and the like, since the 1960s, firstly in Europe but spreading throughout “the Church”. In their respective representations declared atheists, such as McTaggart for one, are not to be demonised, nor the pious idealised. Here too a historical dialectic is at work.

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So one might describe Hegel, like all modern culture, according to the historian Etienne Gilson, as Scotist.5 He would, however, as might also Scotus, be equally Thomist, Aristotelian and Platonist. There is one system of philosophy and it is necessary. According to this system goodness, specifically, as will or the Good (233), is diffusive of itself (diffusivum sui) or, as Hegel transcribes back to religion, with Plato in mind, “not envious”, not, that is, finitely infinite or conceived as infinite in a bad or finite way. This goodness is not the idea of goodness but the Idea simply. Being is “friendly” (Leo Elders), or absolutely one (Enc. 96), unity as unified, in itself. Thus, to illustrate, “my God and my all” is a bad or falsely subjectivist translation of the Franciscan Deus meus et omnia, more literally rendered as “my God and all things”. This rather shows forth speculatively instead of sacrificing, as does repetition of “my”, the infinite subjectivity of “my”, of I as “universal of universals”. This one system, therefore, necessarily includes what is known in religion as Creation. In truth, Hegel shows, this is absolute selfhood’s selfmanifestation. It is, that is, not manifestation of this or that but manifestation itself, Nature as he calls it, whether extrinsic, macrocosmic, or intrinsic, “microcosmic” (yet in any event inclusive and more than so of “human nature”). Such manifestation, as the very being or essence of the Absolute, of Self as “self-emptying”, is thus absolutely necessary just inasmuch as it is Freedom. As a general principle (of philosophy), a necessity of nature is not a restriction upon that nature, and here we speak of nature as intrinsic to a given being, as a “principle of movement and rest” in just anything, inclusive of the rational being or Mind itself, which has cognition as finally become will (Enc.233) for its “nature”. Mind speaks or utters itself, is thus Word and the Word, of which our words are mere echoes and pictures. The would-be exclusivity of theology, in the past, when speaking or writing of this, is thus abstractly finite, or calling for absorption in supersession. What is called “inspired” is thus, rather, in truth marked as of the Spirit, of spirit, belonging to sophia or knowledge, wisdom (the corresponding intellectual virtue) and its inherent philia (cf. Enc, 159). How then do we, just we, come to know it? Necessarily, it is known “in the fullness of time”, that fullness which is eternity, of which, it was said, time is “a moving figure” or, rather, eternity figured as finite motion. The 5

E. Gilson, On Being and Some Philosophers, Toronto 1952. Gilson excepts modern neo-Thomism, which he thus removes from the actual movement of Spirit, leaving it fixed in a previous, superseded moment. For Hegel, however, all thinkers of the past are taken up into actual thought in the very same movement in which it puts them by (aufhebt).

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motion, the activity or Act, is rather infinite and thus coincident with our notion of changelessness, immutability, conceived not as negative restriction but as transcending the imperfection of any finite motion as such, the latter defined accordingly by Aristotle as the act of a potency inasmuch as it is (still) in potency, so that it is “still moving”, as we say. The fullness of time is thus time’s acknowledgement of eternity.6 This, however, is accomplished in and by consciousness as such, of which humanity is the figure and, so to say, incarnation. This is the sense in which man is self-transcendent, or not man, as death is the proper fulfilment and actualisation of Life or of the Idea Immediate. This revelation of self to self, Hegel says, is merely pictured in religion as an historical event, inasmuch as history itself is a “gallery of pictures”, no more, in which “in the fullness of time God sent forth his son, born of a woman, subject to the law”.7 In reality this is eternal truth while, as the Moslems like to remind us, God, the Absolute, does not have sons. Nor does it, as absolute, give commands or pass laws, however. It follows, anyhow, that we should rather say “sends” than “sent”. The past is not actual, nor is it properly the object of memory therefore, or of Erinnerung, inwardisation, that deep pit or mine where our words and scheme of language lie buried (Enc. 459 and add.).. Now religion also pictures such revelation or manifestation, as it properly is, in the form of free gift, which is easily understood and so often represented under the explanatory rubric that God “might have done, or not done, otherwise”. This, it is not seen, is simply to finitise the act in question, or act as such. The Absolute, however, is essentially Act and not substance, as act itself is thought or, again, manifestation, utterance. Hence even Scotus represents what is called, represented again, in theology, since quite a while ago, the incarnation or taking of flesh by God, by the Absolute and not by some finite “angel”8 seen as creature9, as necessary or as, in his representation, intended from all eternity in formal distinction or, it seems, separation, from whatever finite free action, sinful or virtuous for example, was to take place. 6

For amplification of this view, see O’Regan, op. cit., especially pp. 303-309. Galatians 4,4. 8 It was the effort of Athanasius, in the fourth century, contra mundum, to establish what here Hegel further thematises. It, the appearance in immediacy, is the full reach of the exteriorisation, the speaking, which the Absolute is and which is thus absolute. 9 As is not the case in Hegel’s discussion of angels, or of anything else, in The Phenomenon of Mind, VII. The creature is in esse et posse null, save as itself the Idea. 7

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For philosophical idealism, however, there is no flesh, no face even, in abstracto. Face, we might say, is expression. These are all fleeting phenomena, false therefore, apart from what they represent, from their office as representing, “in act”. It is in this sense that Hegel speaks of the Absolute, of God rather, as he at this point prefers to say, as first coming to himself in concrete fullness in this his revelation which he himself, or the divine nature, the Absolute, is. He really is himself as not being himself apart from this his coming to himself, in the eternal novelty of Act.10 Ecce omnia nova facio. Equally, the Absolute is here first known, touched, by us with certainty, as by those “then” living but, all the same, just as we touch one another. So religious teaching and tradition echoes this identity (in difference) continually, reaching back to the “command” to “love thy neighbour as thyself” and, behind that, to the figured insight that God, absolute, has “made” man, Kant’s “rational creature”, “to his own image and likeness”. Nor, therefore, is it peculiar to Hegel to stress that the Absolute is, and is hence knowable, in manifestation. Further though, as Hegel explains, this manifestation of man is not particular or specific manifestation. The body, like the all-purpose hand, is essentially the sign of this self-sustaining generality in infinite self-multiplication, even this notion, however, being extendible to the larger “body” reaching into education and shared culture as, in religion, into the “mystical” body, of either of which, again, the individual or “physical” body is the sign. It is even like or identical to that “formal sign” characterising in later scholasticism (Jean Poinsot “of St. Thomas”) the “subjective” concept of formal logic, never itself perceived as object at all without a new formal sign “at second level” mediating. So it is, mutatis mutandis, with the body and all nature(s) in Hegel. Hegel calls this certainty we mentioned the certainty of faith, belief, as specifically a form of knowledge, fully aware of course that belief and knowledge are precisely what the Understanding would keep apart, that there my knowing that p entails the truth of p as my believing it does not. Knowledge, that is, is not grounded in sensation or sense-observation as the empiricists teach, since the objects of sense, the here, the now, are themselves false. What they deliver to reason, rather, is the denial of themselves. In and through them alone, however, do we ascend to reason, seen as the act of their denial. The ascent of the ladder is in fact the ladder’s literally gradual (one step, gradus, at a time) “sublation”. It is not merely cast away “afterwards”. The passage from shadows to reality is not literally a passage, from one thing or place to another. It is more passage 10

Narrative itself is absolutised in the divine. Cf. O’Regan, p. 308.

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itself, as an action. Orpheus is not merely forbidden, as the tale would have it, to look back at Eurydice in this passage. She is not there to be seen, not yet herself, and so to attempt it is the final crime or sin of nonsensicality. Justifying what Hegel calls spirit’s “ingratitude”, forgetting the Father’s house (Psalm 44, 11, Vulg.), we can only look forward. What “lies behind” is not even there to be forgotten. In this sense the prophet represented God as saying “I will not remember their sins any more”. What God forgets is intrinsically unknowable, is not, since, and Hegel can be seen to concur, omne ens est verum, all that is, every being, is true or is thought, is not forgotten. So God too, subjectivity itself, the Absolute, is self-known in that manifestation, to us or as such indifferently, which it, he (she), essentially is. It is in this sense that Hegel suggests the Spirit might most properly be said to proceed immediately from the Son alone. He obviously has no conception of the Absolute as itself becoming temporally. This is plain misreading, as is shown by any number of passages from Hegel’s works, but supremely in the reading of that text of the Logic (either version) where Becoming is presented as itself a vanishing in equal proportion as it is a becoming category! “The vanishing is vanished”, and there is no “varnishing” over this vanishing! That is, the presentation of the Son in religion, that moment of Spirit, presents or makes visible the true assessment and philosophy of temporality and of the things of sense, of what appears immediately, like Life itself in the first instance. “He that has seen me has seen the Father”. “I and the Father are one”. Generalising, “The Outside is the Inside” while, furthermore, “The Inside is the Outside”. There is no rind as, consequently, there is really no “pulp” either. With this, then, theology as a special discipline disappears, it has finally to be realised, since theology, called “sacred”, cannot allow itself to be thus (mis-)represented. It is rather assumed into that theurgy, which philosophy is now shown essentially to be, in perfected Gottesdienst (Hegel), effecting the Absolute as true form of the latter’s own constitutive self-positing. Thus the sacred itself disappears, the veil of the holy is ripped away, when everything is revealed as consecrated, as the Idea itself, an identity in which, finally, there are no cows to be black or anything else. “What God has cleansed call thou not common”, Peter hears in his dream (Acts 10, 15). They are, the cows, in that they are not, abstractly. They are the Idea or, in an older realist terminology of the theologians, they are one of the myriad ways in which God sees himself as imitable, such that any and every one of the divine “ideas”, thus viewed, is identical with the divine essence, the Idea, and so, in isolation, is not. The Idea alone is Being. Hence though it is not

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a being and even, by that finite yardstick, non-Being, i.e. that is what it is, since it is the Idea. All judgments are false (and yet, just therefore, not so), that being the one true judgment, or judgment itself, rather. The advance from Plato is thus no finite advance but spirit’s, infinity’s, continuous advance upon itself. This, however, must also include the idea of existence, albeit “sublated”. Given this idea, there is, for every idea, an idea of its not being an idea (not being the case), and vice versa. Thus the necessary is possible, the possible necessary. Not merely so, but this contradiction is endemic to each and every realisation or exemplar, that it is in not being, is not in being. This is what makes it Idea as even the Idea itself can pass from Being to Non-Being without destruction, Hegel says (in reference to death), which, like also death, would be one-sided non-being over again. In our time even physics approaches to this and it is echoed, mutatis mutandis, after Hegel, as I have mentioned before, in Nietzsche’s espousal of “Eternal Return”, ultimately annihilative of time. Hence becoming shows itself a category, the ceaseless motion, which as ceaseless is rather immobile, rocklike, immutable, in the sense of supra-mobile or of perfect act indeed, as movement, change, is in the first instance, so to say, essentially imperfect act, is nature.11 It is the same with Self and Other. The Other of the Absolute is the Absolute, so that from that Other, specifically and more properly, Spirit proceeds, thought is born as Act.12 We do not die because we never truly live. We more than live. Ultimately, we are not we, exclusively, anymore than is the Absolute. “The eye with which God sees me is the eye with which I see God”, Hegel quotes approvingly from Eckhart, a Dominican “theologian”. It might seem that what is anticipated here is the Feuerbachian reduction, if reduction was indeed Feuerbach’s intention. I believe this is a mistaken reading. We would then have to reduce absolute idealism itself and philosophy with it, along with speculative knowing. Referring to incarnation the document known as the Athanasian Creed, but in fact more or less contemporary with Scotus Eriugena in the ninth century, states that incarnation is achieved “not by conversion of the godhead into flesh but by taking of the manhood into God”. Religion once again portrays necessary truth as an event. This truth, it is apparent, is that, as religion itself clarifies, “in God we live and move and have our being”. That is, the Concept, the Absolute Idea, Infinity, is one and sole, in perfect 11

Cp. Aristotle, Physics III. If we capitalise one we must capitalise all, though McTaggart, more consistently, reserved initial capitals for the names of the categories, or so he tells us.

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differentiated concrete unity and system, unrelated to anything as external to it, as already Aquinas had declared, though for him we are really related to what has no real relation to us. But in Hegel there is no such category as “real relation” and this is the negation of the negation. Furthermore, the spirit perceiving this is our spirit, as spirit as a whole is for us, as I is and am “the universal of universals”. Nor is there flesh into which the godhead or Absolute, unchanging after all, might be converted. The taking of flesh is the othering of self to non-self, as proper with and as intrinsic necessity to infinite selfhood. That is, the emptying of being is not realised in its fullness until or except as an assumption of non-being, bringing to nothing the things that are and itself supremely, as “the death of God” which, it too, is no death but life eternal or, less figuratively (life is the Idea immediate only), spirit. McTaggart affirms repeatedly that while the Absolute is “for us” “we” are in no sense for the Absolute. Yet on Hegel’s view we must “put off the old Adam” (as he quotes at Enc. 194 add.) in the sense of “laying aside our immediate subjectivity”, as is surely implicit ab initio in McTaggart too, to where each has the unity of all within as identical with himself and conversely (I, every I, is necessary to the unity of all which is the world). So for him too in becoming for the Absolute, for God (as he himself would not say), we are supremely for ourselves in, as Hegel says. “learning to know God as our true and essential self”. In this sense, in this truth, everything has to return into the Logic as itself the final ontology or actuality absorbing as superseding ontology. For the content, that which is thought, is the same throughout and just therefore, in fact, is the Idea. Thus, then, what was in religion content, or a way of imagining (Vorstellen) an other, is here the action proper of the self. The notion is the connecting principle securing that the content is the action proper of the self. For this notion is, as we see, the knowledge that the action of the self within itself is all that is essential and all existence, the knowledge of this Subject as Substance and of the Substance as this knowledge of its action.13

Here Hegel states what was to be the essence of McTaggart’s vision of things, even though he culled it especially from his study of the Logic of Hegel, rather than the Phenomenology. The “particular moments, each of which exhibits in principle the life of spirit in its entirety”, disclose severally, though in the most perfect unity with one another, its content. 13 Hegel, The Phenomenology of Mind (Baillie), Harper Torchbook, New York 1966, p. 797

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That is, the content “had already presented itself in the form of a mode or shape of consciousness”. The phrase “in principle” means to correspond to Hegel’s original derivation of the Notion or the Concept as absorbing back into itself all appearance or that manifestation (Oeffenbarung) which it is, which never left it and conversely. Once this ground has been gained philosophically the variegated and yet unitary witness of “religion” must be understood accordingly. Of theological representation Hegel remarks, in effect, that it can just as well be seen as an elevation of picture-thinking into the sphere of pure thought as it can be seen as a falling short of the latter. What is “common to all philosophies and all religions” is “the one need… of getting an idea of God” and of God’s relationship to the world, determined by God’s nature as naming the infinite.14 The syllogistic identity of universal and individual that Hegel expounds perfectly mirrors the doctrines of, especially, New Testament religion, understood, as it should be, spiritually, in the spirit. This spirituality of knowing is not exclusively “modernism”, a pejorative term until recently in Catholic circles particularly, but characterises the procession of Spirit as such, leading, ever leading, as the phrase goes, “into all truth”, where no one shall say “know the Lord” because all shall know him. Such was the prophet Jeremiah’s contrasting judgment upon the religious ideology of his time and place, in which he by no means took distance from religion but just the opposite. He both anticipated the then future Plato there and in a sense went further than Plato, of whom Hegel says that “the infinite form of subjectivity… still escaped his intelligence”, so that “subjective liberty” remained wanting to his ideal state or republic.15 So, in his account of “revealed religion”, die geoffenbarte Religion, where the “die” is surely not exclusively idiomatic German, Hegel clearly means Christianity as an historical phenomenon manifesting precisely Absolute Spirit, first evident in Art, perfectly manifested in Philosophy. He universalises this individuality (common to all religions qua religions in some sense or other) and individualises the universality, philosophy being declared the final manifestation, however, the place, consequently, where, if anywhere, Jesus Christ, as “the mediator” become philosophy itself or Word, according to Hegel, is solutio omnium quaestionum and not only of some of them. Philosophy thus completes or perfects religion, in full and self-constituting respect for it. Thus if it is in a religion precisely that the individuality of the supposedly (gemeinten) historical Jesus Christ, 14 15

Enc. 573. first line. Ibid. 552.

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his figure (Gestalt), is actualised, this phenomenal fact is not to be confused with its universal significance as expressive of the Thought to which the phenomenon gave rise in, precisely, the phenomenal world, thus and to that extent subsuming it and preparing its subsumption in absolute and perpetual renovation. This, it should be kept in mind here, as we remarked in comparing and contrasting idealism with the early Docetist heresy, is part of a general reduction of immediate history to the phenomenal, to “picture”, and not a diminishing of historical Christian reality as against or in comparison with more “neutral” sources of our historical consciousness. But who is the more “neutral”? For “in the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God.” So “what God has joined together let not man put asunder”, to adapt the Gospel word on marital divorce. Therefore that “the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us and we beheld his glory as of the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth” (John 1) means, can only be so interpreted, given philosophy, that the Absolute does indeed “dwell among us”, not in a side by side relation but as the identity of all the constituents of the Concept, as Hegel outlines at EL160. It means that we do, “in principle” see his glory. “In the fullness of time” this “appeared”, was “manifested”. The water of appearance had all along been the wine, the “living water”, of actuality. All is thought, that thinking, of itself, which is “blessedness”16. There is thus no “euphoric moment” merely, as one among others. Blake’s fool, therefore (“A fool sees not the same tree as a wise man sees”), is an essentially phenomenal figure, i.e. is figured, while the “wise man” is philosophy itself, feminine for Boethius, in which all consciousnesses, all consciousness, are and is eternally united, “full of grace and truth”. Thus the individual in which all consciousness is alone concretised is one with the community (“now you all are the body of Christ”, writes the Apostle Paul) and hence the grace of this community, ultimately universal and, as I, again, “universal of universals”, is intrinsic, is grace itself, if we retain that concept, of grace, of reason as spirit. “Everything is grace” (K. Rahner). Modern spiritual advisers often advise their penitents, as seekers of forgiveness, to forgive themselves first. By the same token they can also learn to thank themselves and thus to make that “upward spring” Hegel speaks of (Enc. 50). So Augustine had said, in full accord with religion’s intention and “orthodoxy”, as it is spoken of, “There is one closer to me than I am to myself”, a saying (other) philosophers have more approximated to than improved upon. 16

Cf. Enc. 159.

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There are of course theories of happiness, such as may be adumbrated at universities or other institutes as abstract as the theory it is their business to guard and develop, to which all the same the man Hegel in his day became beholden. Philosophy itself, however, utterly transcends these and their situation, as including poetry, dance and all of religion, along, above all, with the self-immolation of mysticism, the return of image to imaged which is rational process, “learning to know God as our true and essential self” rather than as an object “of ours” merely (Enc. 194). December 21, 2015. [email protected]

EPILOGUE METHOD, ORTHODOXY AND MYSTICISM

My motto here is John Henry Newman’s declaration: ”Orthodoxy stands or falls with the mystical interpretation”, of Scripture namely. The basis for that assertion, I want further to claim, can only be that orthodoxy is itself a or even the mystical apprehension of reality and further, that this is precisely what is meant when, within orthodoxy, this apprehension is called faith. The form, of life or, better, of spirit, often termed spirituality, finds especial or normative expression in those scriptures gathered together, first by Jews, and later, on a similar principle, by the Christian or new faith-community, reckoned by those writing these new scriptures, however, as one community with the old, through the mediation of just one man. The expression of faith as the mystical finds especially concentrated expression among those new documents in the long eleventh chapter of The Epistle to the Hebrews, long attributed to the Apostle Paul and certainly Pauline, which begins: “Faith is the substance of things hoped for”, the conviction of what is not immediately apparent or seen. I have argued that this view of faith and its certainty forms a substantive part of the Hegelian system of ideas. The “things which are seen” are temporal, are as grass, those same Scriptures declare, meaning that they do not abide, are as phantoms, phantasmata, to use Aristotle’s term, apparentia indeed, phenomena, that, in general, which merely appears. Texts are indeed themselves phenomenal; they pass away (“are temporal”). To these thoughts correspond exactly the first two chapters, on sense-certainty and perception, in Hegel’s The Phenomenology of Mind. Therefore the mystical interpretation of them in a sense annihilates them or annihilates what is in itself or from inception annihilated, vanity itself being made vain. The same thought can be expressed, by this faithprinciple, which is also the philosophical, as a subsumption, a taking up (Aufhebung) of text into thought, what we call reading it. Reading thus viewed is in itself interpretation and, it is here claimed, mystical interpretation. Faith, thus viewed, is the acme of thought, thought’s final issue, and nothing else, just as thought itself is nothing other than this,

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than faith in its beginnings. That is what alone can be legitimately meant by those who like to say, to claim, that “the Church is the home of reason”, understanding here by “the Church” the community bound together by the one faith, God’s “own community” where, according to Hegel (Enc. 5541), God is alone or uniquely known. It can be shown that Hegel, the philosopher who merits the title of theologian, could not there mean simply this phenomenal community on earth at some or other given moment. All such moments in his system are indeed just moments, having no reality except as known to Absolute Spirit or, that is to say, in relation to everything else, to the universal, namely, which is eternal, necessary and without change or shadow of turning, as the phrase goes. They are like the means that in Hegel’s system are absorbed into the “realised end”. God, as faith has it, is at once alpha and omega, beginning and end, thereby superseding both these finite notions2. The model, therefore, the original, for Hegel’s or our use of “community” here is the divine Trinity itself, a perfect unity identical without composition with certain relations “of love”, as Hegel expresses it, meaning that no real composition of parts is implied, whatever some may “intend”, by this concrete plurality in unity, these two themselves also, the one and the many, being equally identical, as is shown in the first part of Hegel’s logic in either version of it. It is clear then that for this thinker, as for the Biblical tradition, love plays a crowning or omni-determinative role, without which the whole edifice of faith falls. This will be our key for an investigation of what should be finally meant by method, whether in philosophy, in theology or, in an ultimate analysis, in so-called catechetics. Method, we will find, is finally prayer or liturgy, Gottesdienst, of which the final or perfect form is wisdom or philosophia, literally the “love of wisdom”, where “of” may be taken in all its multiple meanings, whether we take it as love for wisdom, namely, or love which is wisdom, as form even of the Aristotelian intellectual virtues as of the three “theological” virtues and not only of the moral virtues. These, namely, are the same. Only so could Socrates, qua 1

See also our “Faith as Thinking with Assent”, New Blackfriars, January 2005, pp. 101-113. 2 “While it is possible to accuse Hegel of directly narratizing the Trinity, it is not possible in the same way to accuse him of directly historicalizing it.” O’Regan, The Heterodox Hegel, pp. 306-307. O’Regan adds in a note: “Pannenberg and Schlitt… have a point in suggesting that Hegel nay have been guilty of projecting a finite model of becoming onto the divine. But this is not to be confused with the suggestion that Hegel reduces the divine in any direct way to time and history. Hegel clearly does no such thing.” (pp. 450-451)

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philosopher, or perhaps qua Plato, have expressed his resounding contempt for the non-lover as thinker (in Phaedrus). Here we introduce a certain development, even Aufhebung, of Hegel’s at least partial stasis by the divide of exoteric religion (for all) and esoteric philosophy (for the few), immediately apparent though this be. The phenomenon of an, in intention at least, universal democracy, of “free thought”, impels to this in some way prophetic vision, corresponding to Jeremiah’s or Joel’s visions of a “time to come” when all shall “know the Lord” and not, therefore, presume to dictate to or teach one another in these matters. This development is anyhow implicit in the Aristotelian or Hegelian eschewal of talk of individual mind when discussing the latter, mind or reason, operating as a whole in each person in what Hegel calls3 “the true reason-world”, at the same time as he concretely identifies it with “the mystical”, rightly understood, which it, speculative reason, “means very much the same as”. * At the time of the so-called Thomist revival, promoted prior to Leo XIII’s Encyclical letter of 1879 by and through the Jesuits’ journal at Rome, Civiltà cattolica, where it was claimed that the scholastic method perfected by Saint Thomas Aquinas was the right one for philosophy as such, at least in the sense that it should receive preferential promotion in whichever teaching or, in general, tertiary institutes claimed to stand in the service of the Church or faith-community. It was claimed, e.g. by a certain Cardinal Kleutgen, that Catholics, the faithful, “need” no other philosophy. A kind of barbarism, a nakedly political Procrusteanism, was plainly at work here, however favourably we evaluate the fruits of this neo-scholastic or even neo-Thomist movement, as it came to be called. Our only interest in it here turns precisely upon this question of method viewed in relation to mysticism and how it came to be used, especially by the post-Luther Roman Church, at least up to the Second Vatican Council (1962-1964), in a political manner, by the immediate servants of the teaching authority (magisterium), thus tending to marginalize that mysticism essential to both faith and philosophy beside a kind of pseudorationality seriously compromising, if indeed this was or ever could be possible, the Christian movement as a whole. 3

Cf. Hegel, Enc. 82 and the addition. He also says there that the result of Dialectic, which is the Speculative, is “a unity of distinct propositions”. This corresponds to his intention of orthodoxy as against the relatively formless religiosity of Jacobi or Schleiermacher or, equally, the partly coinciding view of Schopenhauer.

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Clearly Church leaders have at times, or for quite a long time, called upon the “political arm” for help, acquiescing in a classification of heresy as a civil crime making one liable to being tortured to secure confession and, as frequent sequel, the death penalty. The Church had itself previously promoted the founding of military religious orders. What was new here, however, in the “Thomist revival”, was the perilous closeness to an attack upon the free essence of philosophy itself and hence, by implication, faith in presuming to identify it with a finite, once historically instanced and therefore extrinsic method, whereby “each thing is itself and not another thing”, in a catechetical order reaching back to Augustine’s Enchiridion and even the Nicene Creed, if not to earlier models. Defenders of the absolute validity of this system today invoke “moderate realism” and an “ontological discontinuity” of creation from God, but as something rather than nothing, stressing with Paul VI’s “Credo of the People of God” the ungrounded need for a corresponding Heilsrealismus4, ignoring the witness of philosophy and religion to the truth of Absolute Idealism, philosophy’s dogma, says Hegel. Method, now, was introduced by Descartes or, conceivably, by Aristotle in making it, method, the very foundation, even the substance of the discovery of formal logic though this, its proximity to logic, points already to something divine in it, in “method” as “the way (hodos) to go”. Yet Aristotle paid little heed to this discovery in pursuing his metaphysical enquiries. Nor, maybe, did Descartes. For philosophy, however, Hegel was to show, the method of thinking is indistinguishable from the goal of thought itself, which goal is, indeed and precisely, thought, thinking, itself, as is expressed in the citation from Aristotle which ends the Encyclopaedia. Here, where Hegel remarks that thought is infinite, we might reverse this without departure from his view, in identifying infinity with thought. Method, indeed (meta-hodos), or the way (hodos) to go, again, means, as “speculative”, standing still as being, all the same, in perpetual re-volution in and as a return upon self, once pictured as a dance “in the round” by Dante (The Divine Comedy III). This method is in fact “the specific consciousness” of the value of the logical “moments” of “the system of logic”. It is, that is to say, itself the Good or Mind, nous, infinite as free, inasmuch as it is necessity itself, identified by Aristotle with God (ho theos). This then, and not the material details of a historical moment in thought’s continual self-exposition or “revelation”, is the method of philosophy, is philosophy as method, the way of truth and the life of the 4

For development of this notion see the late, eventually Cardinal, Leo Scheffczyk’s Katholische Glaubenswelt, Pattloch Verlag, Aschaffenburg, 1978.

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spirit. Death or the transcending of life, says Hegel, is the entry into spirit (Geist), as Aristotle had said that the apprehension of mind, as study or contemplation, a little of which is worth more than “all the rest”, demands a practice of death, athanatizein, since, Augustine was to add, “this alone is desirable for itself”, is, therefore the Good and one with the Good, no longer therefore abstractly object but the redemption of our own subjectivity, as being subjectivity itself. The finite individual is thus “ruined”, swallowed up, as something it or we never was or were, a shadow or reflection as upon the wall of a cave. Plato, Aristotle and Hegel here join up as philosophy, as sophia, which is itself love, philia, unto death indeed. Thus we can understand Hegel’s saying that the concern of philosophy is “religion and nothing but religion”, itself however departicularised, along with logic here, in apotheosis.