Abstract
In this article, I draw upon the ‘post-Kantian’ reading of Hegel to examine the consequences Hegel’s idea of God has on his metaphysics. In particular, I apply Hegel’s ‘recognition-theoretic’ approach to his theology. Within the context of this analysis, I focus especially on the incarnation and sacrifice of Christ. First, I argue that Hegel’s philosophy of religion employs a distinctive notion of sacrifice (kenotic sacrifice). Here, sacrifice is conceived as a giving up something of oneself to ‘make room’ for the other. Second, I argue that the idea of kenotic sacrifice plays a fundamental role in Hegel’s account of Christ. Third, I conclude by sketching some of the consequences of Hegel’s idea of a God who renounces his own divinity for an idealistically conceived metaphysics. My main thesis is that the notion of incarnation is conceived by Hegel as the expression of a spirit that advances only insofar as it is willing to withdraw and make room for the other. A kenotic reading of the Hegelian notion of the incarnation is also useful in terms of a clarification of the dispute between ‘left Hegelians’ and ‘right Hegelians’ concerning the status of the idea of God in Hegel’s philosophy.
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Notes
Hegel describes pre-Kantian metaphysics as a ‘naive way of proceeding’ because it ‘regarded the thought-determinations’ it uses ‘as the fundamental determination of things’ (EL §26-28). Hegel therefore considers Kant’s conception of thought-determinations as mind-dependent as an important turn in the approach to metaphysics.
Another important strand of metaphysically oriented Hegel interpretation is represented by Houlgate, who has, however, a distinctive approach, especially in relation to the question of Hegel’s relation to Kant. See Houlgate 2005.
This is clearly a very distinctive and untraditional meaning of ‘metaphysics’. In this article, I nevertheless use the term 'metaphysics' to denote what I regard as the Kantian-Hegelian meaning of the term ‘metaphysics’, that is, as the discipline in which reason is concerned with its own products (as opposed to disciplines in which reason is concerned with natural products).
The extent to which an ‘idealist’ approach to metaphysics is also a ‘non-realist’ approach to God is something that I will consider in the final section.
In passing, I would note that Redding’s interpretation bypasses the problem of whether Hegel is or is not a ‘transcendental’ philosopher by claiming that Kant’s strong transcendental idealism overcomes weak transcendental idealism (that which is traditionally referred to as ‘Kant’s transcendental idealism’) and anticipates further versions of idealism—particularly Hegel’s absolute idealism.
Someone might wonder how can there have been a ‘first’ human being, if no ‘human being’ (properly speaking) exists without recognition from another human being. However, such an objection would entirely miss the point that it is mutual recognition we are talking about here. There is no such thing as a ‘first’ human being, but human beings collectively come into existence, as it were, through the ongoing process of mutual recognition.
The other obvious work to be considered in order to reconstruct Hegel’s theory of sacrifice is the Phenomenology of Spirit. In the Phenomenology, the sacrifice that is integral to the struggle for recognition is not necessarily kenotic (that is, it is not necessarily self-giving for the sake of the other), but also implies a suppressive dimension. It can be convincingly argued, however, that suppressive sacrifice is regarded in the Phenomenology as an inauthentic form of sacrifice, which is functional to the display (Darstellung) of the authentic sacrifice, namely kenotic sacrifice. See Bubbio (2012).
In The Accursed Share, Bataille refers to the rite of potlatch, practiced among indigenous peoples of the Pacific Northwest Coast, in which the participants destroy goods as an example of pure sacrificial expenditure. However, Bataille himself recognises that the overall goal of the ritual is a manifestation of power by a family or a tribe, so that he eventually admits that ‘the ideal would be that a potlatch could not be repaid’ (Bataille 1993, 70).
‘It is ordinarily supposed that subjective and objective are blank opposites; but this is not the case. Rather do they pass into one another, for they are not abstract aspects like positive and negative, but have already a concrete significance’ (PR §26a).
In the Philosophy of Right, Hegel refers to this notion, or phase, of subjectivity as ‘particularity of will, as caprice with its accidental content of pleasurable ends’ (PR §25).
From the Greek verb κενόω, which literally means ‘to empty’. In an extended sense, it means ‘to make ineffective’.
Literally ‘retraction’. Tsimtsum is a term used in the Kabbalistic teaching of Isaac Luria, a Jewish mystic of the sixteenth century. Tsimtsum is the first act of God: it is the retraction of his light from a certain space so as to reduce its intensity and allow created beings to exist.
German theologian Jürgen Moltmann, explaining the kenotic view of creation, writes the following: ‘God “withdraws himself from himself to himself” to make creation possible. His creative activity outwards is preceded by this humble divine self-restriction. In this sense God's self-humiliation does not begin merely with creation, inasmuch as God commits himself to this world: it begins beforehand, and is the presupposition that makes creation possible. God's creative love is grounded in his humble, self-humiliating love. This self-restricting love is the beginning of that self-emptying of God that Philippians 2 sees as the divine mystery of the Messiah. Even to create heaven and earth, God emptied himself of all his all-plenishing omnipotence, and as Creator took upon himself the form of a servant’ (Moltmann 1985, 88). For an introduction to the employment of the notion of kenosis in connection with God’s creation, see Polkinghorne 2001.
One of Eckhart’s most peculiar doctrines concerns the notion of Abgeschiedenheit. This term, usually translated as ‘disinterestedness’ or ‘detachment’ in English, effectively refers to the kenotic emptying of the self as a result of the imitation of Christ: ‘In Eckhart is found a profound mystical understanding of this twofold kenosis: the one occurs in the bullitio, the “boiling over,” of the Trinity from the nothingness of the desert and in which the Father pours the totality of his divinity into the Son; the other occurs in the ebullitio, “flowing out,” of the Trinity towards creation, and the Son's self- emptying of his divinity for the sake of the world’ (Lanzetta 1992: 260).
On Böhme and Hegel, see Weeks 1991: 2–3.
Eckhart remained consistent, in this respect, with Thomas Aquinas’ conception of a perfect and immutable God, which basically replicated the Aristotelian conception of God as ‘unmoved mover’.
O'Regan 1994: 216–231. For a theological account of Hegel’s reception of Böhme’s notion of kenosis, see Altizer 1967. Introducing the section on kenosis, Altizer writes: ‘While this radical expression of Christian mysticism was driven underground by the ecclesiastical authorities of the Church, it continued to exist in a subterranean form, finally surfacing in Jakob Böhme and his circle, who provided the germinal source for the one thinker who created a conceptual portrait of the incarnate or kenotic movement of God: Hegel’ (62–63).
Classical German Idealism, from Kant to Hegel, might be considered as transforming the Platonic world of ideas, in which the existence of objects is to be regarded as analogous to the existence of natural objects, into a realm of reason, in which objects are normative and regulative ideas, and hence, dependent upon human cognitive activity. Cf. Redding 2009: 63–69.
Properly speaking, there is no ‘subject’ until the absoluteness of one’s point of view has been renounced, at least to some extent (as mutual recognition is required even for ‘subjecthood’). The terminological problem derives from a predicament that Hegel himself often had to deal with, that is, the need of ‘spelling out’ a process or dynamic by distinguishing steps and phases that are not really distinguishable (at least not completely), because those process or dynamics are always already in place.
‘Self-consciousness exists in and for itself when, and by the fact that, it so exists for another; that is, exists only in being acknowledged’ (PS 177–178).
‘This does not make selves unreal or fictional, it simply makes their reality, unlike that of nature, conditional upon their recognition by others’ (Redding 2007a: 27–28).
‘For Hegel, ‘concrete’ means ‘many-sided, adequately related, complexly mediated’ (we may call this ‘concrete [H]’) while ‘abstract’ means ‘one-sided, inadequately related, relatively unmediated’ (abstract [H]). A concept or universal can quite sensibly be characterised as concrete [H], and at the same time, without paradox, as abstract [E] [the empiricist sense]. Sense particulars, or ‘sensuous immediacy’, will necessarily be abstract [H] and at the same time, unparadoxically, concrete [E]’ (Kline 1964: 34–75).
‘The Greek gods must not be regarded as more human than the Christian God. Christ is much more a Man: he lives, dies—suffers death on the cross—which is infinitely more human than the humanity of the Greek Idea of the Beautiful’ (PH 267).
Analogously, ‘Hegel’s philosophy of nature is just that, a philosophy of nature, not a competing scientific account of natural phenomena or a philosophy of science’ (Pippin 2008: 49).
There is a certain ambiguity associated with the word ‘withdrawal’, for ‘to withdraw’ can sometimes mean not ‘making room for others’, but also ‘holding oneself aloof, withdrawing into oneself’. This meaning of ‘withdrawal’ is, of course, not to be connected with kenosis.
Eberhard Jüngel credits Hegel with a deeply profound (but, according to Jüngel, misguided) understanding of the Trinity, which Jüngel uses to develop his own assertion that ‘God's being is in becoming’. However, Jüngel understands Hegel in a traditionally metaphysical way. Conversely, once Hegel is approached from the point of view of the ‘post-Kantian’ reading, the idea of God as a ‘being in becoming’ can be regarded as Hegel's ‘original account’. Cf. Jüngel 1983.
Some lines below, Hodgson adds that for Hegel ‘religion, like art, is mostly a thing of the past’. This comment does not do justice to the complexity of the relation between philosophy and religion in Hegel’s thought, as religion is not a ‘thing of the past’; on the contrary, philosophy ‘requires religion as its basis in life’ (Fackenheim 1967, 23).
‘It was through Christianity that this Idea came into the world. According to Christianity, the individual as such has an infinite value as the object and aim of divine love, destined as mind to live in absolute relationship with God himself, and have God’s mind dwelling in him: i.e. man is implicitly destined to supreme freedom’ (PM 101). Cf. Pippin 2008: 134–135.
This dynamic has been beautifully illustrated by Stephen Houlgate: ‘[…] divinity consists not in superhuman majesty and power, but in living a finite human life of love. In Christ, therefore, we see that human “frailty” (Gebrechlichhkeit) does not cut us from God […] but is precisely what enables us to manifest divine love must fully’ (Houlgate 2004: 93).
There is no room here for a more appropriate treatment of the importance of the Trinity in the context of Hegel’s project of an idealist metaphysics – a subject that definitely deserves further study and research.
Redding suggests that the ‘paganism’ of the young Hegel (and Schelling) might be connected with a critique directed at traditional metaphysical knowledge. Cf. Redding 2007a: 24.
‘Since all religion consists in this, that in all our duties we look upon God as the lawgiver universally to be honored’ (Kant 1960, 95).
Pinkard 2002: 227. Pinkard reads the entire history of German Idealism as a history of attempts at responding to this paradox and finding a solution to it. Redding claims that the idea of God as voice of the given law is ‘Kant’s attempt’ to resolve the incoherence involved in ‘the way that Kant classically conceives of the moral will’ (Redding 2012: 14).
Brandom seems to suggest such an instrumentalist view when he insists that ‘For Hegel all transcendental constitution is social institution’ (Brandom 2002, 216).
In other words, while a natural object (say, a stone) depends on human activity only in terms of its conceptual determination (the Kantian cognitive synthesis between the intuition and the concepts of the understanding), but not in existential terms (the stone is there ‘anyway’, even if it is not ‘thought’), the existence of an ideal object – an ‘object of reason’ or, to use the Hegelian term, a ‘concept’ (Begriff) – is not independent of the human recognitive activity (the existence of ‘marriage’, for instance, is not independent of the ways marriage is practiced and thought of). This issue is crucial, I think, for contemporary interpretative approaches to Hegel, but is also too complex to be more than alluded to here.
I believe Angelica Nuzzo provides an account along these lines when she contrasts the language of the ancient gods (the language of ‘concept’) with the language of speculative philosophy (the language of ‘dialectic’). She writes: ‘Truth is not gained by an improbably flight in the abstractness of thinking (where the “immortal gods” whose language we may imagine to speak are not the gods of truth but of mere fantasy). Truth is reached instead by recognizing and consequently rectifying (not revoking) its “incarnation” in ordinary language. To put it in Hegel’s figurative way, in speculative philosophy truth speaks the language of an incarnated god. The language of dialectic is not the incomprehensible language of fantastic gods (or of past metaphysics) but the language of “actual spirit” (wirklicher Geist)’ (Nuzzo 2009: 65–66).
Redding points out that the integration of Christianity in Hegel’s metaphysics is also connected with Hegel’s opposition to the scepticism that is associated with the discovery that the norms to which we hold are finite: ‘Because even God is affected by such finitude […], Christian mythology gives expression to a stance which undermines the normative assumptions upon which scepticism makes sense’ (Redding 2007a: 30). This emphasis on perspectivism might lead to the consideration of Hegel as a ‘hermeneutic theorist’ ante litteram, as suggested from different interpretative standpoints by Pagano (1992) and Redding (1996).
Yerkes underlines the importance of this passage, but seems to interpret it in a realist rather than idealist way. Cf. Yerkes 1978: 274.
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Acknowledgments
The research work for this paper was done as part of the project ‘The God of Hegel’s Post-Kantian Idealism’ funded by the Australian Research Council at The University of Sydney. I am grateful to Paul Redding for many hours of informative discussion and advice. A very preliminary draft of this paper was presented at the First International Conference of the Religion and Post-Kantian Philosophy Research Cluster ‘Hegel and Religion’ (The University of Sydney, 14-15 September 2010). Previous versions of the paper were subsequently presented at the ISRLC biannual conference (St Catherine College, University of Oxford, 27 September 2010) and at the annual conference of the Australasian Society for Continental Philosophy (University of Queensland, Brisbane, 4 December 2010). Helpful comments from conference participants are gratefully acknowledged. More recently, a version of the paper closer to the present one was presented at the 2012 Central Division Meeting of the American Philosophical Association (Chicago, 17 February 2012): I thank Mark Alznauer for his stimulating response. I also extend my gratitude to Damion Buterin, Stephen Houlgate, Dalia Nassar, and Maurizio Pagano for their many helpful suggestions and comments on earlier versions. Finally, I thank the anonymous reviewers of the most recent version of this paper, who provided detailed reports that helped to produce the final article.
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Bubbio, P.D. God, Incarnation, and Metaphysics in Hegel’s Philosophy of Religion. SOPHIA 53, 515–533 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11841-013-0391-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11841-013-0391-z