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Abstract

The main goal of this paper is to argue the relevance of Hegel’s notion of the Trinity with respect to two aspects of Hegel’s idealism: the overcoming of subjectivism and his conception of the ‘I’. I contend that these two aspects are interconnected and that the Trinity is important to Hegel’s strategy for addressing these questions. I first address the problem of subjectivism by considering Hegel’s thought against the background of modern philosophy. I argue that the recognitive structure of Hegel’s idealism led him to give the Trinity a decisive role in his philosophical account. Next, I discuss the Trinity by analysing the three divine persons. This analysis paves the way for the conclusion, where I argue that the Trinity represents a model for re-thinking the ‘I’ in a way that overcomes a ‘naïve realist’ and a ‘subjective’ account of the self. I suggest that Hegel’s absolute idealism can be conceived as an approach to the ‘I’ that considers the role of acts of mutual recognition for the genesis of self-conscious thought, and that the Trinity is the Darstellung of the relational and recognitive structure of the ‘I’.

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Notes

  1. As Griffioen comments, ‘Although prima facie this phrase seems to refer to the birth of Jesus, in fact, as the context makes clear, it speaks about the doctrine of Trinity’ (Griffioen 2004, pp. 111–112).

  2. Lewis writes: ‘As important as the doctrine is, to try to further systematize it in non-philosophical terms—to elaborate the doctrines as if they were philosophical concepts rather than representations—is to fail to appreciate the distinction between these two forms of cognition’ (Lewis 2011, p. 212). While I agree with Lewis’ broad interpretative account of Hegel and believe his book represents an important contribution to scholarship in this area, I believe that, with respect to the notion of the Trinity, the distinction between ‘philosophical concepts’ and ‘representations’ fails to grasp the complexity of Hegel’s position. I hope my position on this issue will be clarified by the end of this paper.

  3. Thus, for example, Stern argues that ‘the characteristic feature of Hegel’s absolute idealism is his freeing of the Idea from Mind and from the thinking subject’—a distinction, that between Idea and Mind, which, according to Stern, was ‘impossible for Kant’s merely subjective idealism’ (Stern 1990, p. 115).

  4. The translation is based on Klaus Brinkmann and Daniel O. Dahlstrom’s recent version, but somewhat modified, as I believe certain terms are better translated in the Wallace version (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2nd edition, 1975), pp. 67–68.

  5. In the last few decades, a number of philosophers have emphasised the importance of recognition (Anerkennung) in Hegel’s philosophy. Williams (1997) drawing upon the work of Siep (1979) and Wildt (1982), has shown that the general pattern of Hegel’s Sittlichkeit is constituted by his theory of recognition. The theory of recognition is also central in the so-called revisionist approach to Hegel, where it is regarded as submitting that human beings, qua knowing subjects, exist in the realm of reason only in as much as they mutually recognize themselves as existing (see Redding 2009, p. 150).

  6. In Redding and Bubbio (2014), we suggest that the Hegelian conception of concept as (self-) positing might be regarded as modelled on Fichte’s self-positing ‘I’. In Bubbio (2014), I expand on this idea of a concept posited through intersubjective acts of mutual recognition, with particular emphasis on the concept of God. Thus, God should be considered as neither something merely given, nor exclusively posited by an absolute ‘I’; the community of believers effectively contributes to God’s positing by making the representation (Vorstellung) of God consistent with the content of God—thus generating the actual concept (Begriff) of God. The question is clearly too complex to be more than alluded to here.

  7. Here one can think of Hegel’s analysis of the cult in the Phenomenology of Spirit (PS par. 718, p. 435): by participating in the cult, the persons performing the sacrifice necessarily agree on that for which they are going to give up something without receiving anything in return. Pinkard (1996, p. 329) writes: ‘By making themselves into participants without whose participation the god could not appear, the members of the cult create the “social space” in which it will be possible for them to acknowledge their own determining power in the way in which things are conceived. They no longer take themselves to know the divine immediately but only in terms of the shared activity between the divine letting itself come to presence before them and their activity of calling forth the divinity’. See also Bubbio (2012).

  8. Schleiermacher (1980)§187. See LPR I: 127. Cf. (Hodgson 1985, p. 81).

  9. ‘Reflective Philosophy of Subjectivity’ is the subtitle of Hegel’s 1802 work Faith and Knowledge (Glauben und Wissen oder die Reflexionsphilosophie der Subjektivität in der Vollständigkeit ihrer Formen als Kantische, Jacobische und Fichtesche Philosophie).

  10. Pinkard, in his recent book Hegel’s Naturalism, clarifies this point in a footnote: ‘Hegel’s conception of divinity is thus to be distinguished from that of his student, Ludwig Feuerbach, who claimed that “we” were divine. For Hegel, that would make no sense. “We” did not create or order the universe, and so forth. On the other hand, “we” are also not simply projecting ourselves onto some fictional deity. Such a reduction of the religious point of view to the merely anthropological simply could not be satisfactory. There could be no “religion of humanity,” even if the divine principle of reason is realized only in the activities of human communities reflecting on their highest concerns’ (Pinkard 2012, p. 201, n. 52). Pinkard’s polemical target here is Harris (1995, p. x), who supports a similar thesis.

  11. The German text reads thus: ‘Wenn in der Tat unter der Religion nur ein Verhältnis von uns aus zu Gott verstanden werden sollte, so würde nicht ein selbständiges Sein Gottes zugelassen; Gott wäre nur in der Religion, ein von uns Gesetztes, Erzeugtes’ (Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Religion, ed. Walter Jaeschke (Hamburg: Meiner 1993–5), v. 17, p. 382). Feuerbach’s first book, Gedanken über Tod und Unsterblichkeit (Thoughts on Death and Immortality), was published one year earlier in 1830. Thus, the possibility that Hegel had Feuerbach in mind must be considered.

  12. For this definition of ‘spirit’, I am indebted to Redding (2009, p. 143).

  13. This dynamic can also by expressed by one of Meister Eckhart’s claims that Hegel quotes in the Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion: ‘The eye with which God sees me is the eye with which I see him; my eye and his eye are one and the same... If God did not exist nor would I; if I did not exist nor would he’ (LPR I 347-8).

  14. The definition of the Trinity as ‘decorative timbering’ (Fachwerk) is provided by the German theologian Friedrich August Gottreu Tholuck in his Die Lehre von der Sunde und vom Versohner, 2d ed., published in 1825. According to Hodgson, from the allusion to the ‘pious theologians’ and from the Preface to the second edition of the Encyclopedia (1827), it can be assumed Hegel was referring to Tholuck here. Hegel responds to this view critically in his letter to Tholuck on 3 July 1826 (Briefe 4/ 2,60-61). See the editorial footnote in LPR I, p. 157.

  15. To clarify this idea, Hegel uses the example of the definition of someone as a ‘true friend’, signifying that the friend acts in accordance with the concept of friendship. Hegel does not reject the Aristotelian ‘correspondence theory’ of truth, but he locates truth as correctness within a broader ontological theory of truth (I am grateful to the anonymous reviewer of a previous version of this paper for having drawn my attention to this point). This also means that the traditional ‘correspondence theory’ is not exhaustive of the notion of truth, as ‘The idea is the truth; for the truth is this, that objectivity corresponds to the concept, not that external things correspond to my representations; these are only correct representations that I, this person [lch Dieser], have.’ (EL, §213, p. 283). As Berthold-Bond (1989, p. 29) comments, Hegel’s point ‘is that there is ultimately no such thing as a purely external thing; precisely in being an object of thought, the object cannot be “external to thought,” if by “external” we mean wholly alien, unreachable’. In other words, as Redding (2007c, pp. 76–77) puts it in his discussion of McDowell as an interpreter of Hegel, ‘the traditional “correspondence theory” of truth presupposes there is [...] a gap between mind and world, asks how that gap is bridged, and answers with the idea of something mental, a “representation”, corresponding with something worldly, some fact’; but what if there is no gap to be bridged, and hence ‘no need of an intermediary “representation”’?

  16. The term ‘personhood’ is not used by Hegel in this context but is employed by Hodgson (1985, p. 28). I believe Hodgson’s expression captures well Hegel’s emphasis on the unity of the Trinity, of which the three traditional ‘persons’ are expression.

  17. ‘Although Hegel does not use the term “Trinity” to refer to the latter [the economic Trinity] and does not employ the language of the classical distinction (“immanent” and “economic”), the “economic” Trinity is in fact coterminous with the three “elements” or “moments” in the “development of the idea of God” as described in the later lectures’. (Hodgson, footnote 51, in LPR III: 77).

  18. In the light of these remarks, it is hard to understand on what grounds some interpreters (for instance Mackintosh 1937, p. 105; Bloesch 1995, p. 196) denied the presence of an immanent Trinity in Hegel’s philosophical theology. Of course, it is to be understood that Hegel is dealing with the Trinity as a concept; and that, therefore, the notion of immanent and pre-worldly Trinity is meant to capture the relationality of God as existing independently from the knowledge of the socially recognising community.

  19. See the 1831 Excerpts, LPR III: 362; cf. also the editorial note 8 on the same page.

  20. This identification between ‘pure knowing’ and the Father can also be found in the Lectures on the History of Philosophy: ‘Thought, as the object of thought, is nothing else than the absolute Idea regarded as in itself, the Father’ (LHP, vol. II: 149).

  21. LHP III: 4. Cf. (Redding 2011, p. 227).

  22. The claim here is that the notion of the ‘God’s-eye view’ is incoherent. The idea of a ‘point of view’ is used to characterise the knowledge possessed by finite subjects; thus, the very idea of a God’s-eye point of view is a contradictory anthropomophisation from the start.

  23. ‘Had the hidden God, who is one unified essence and will, not projected himself into divisibility of will, and had God not injected this divisibility into enclosedness or identity (return in the relation to self) so that this divisibility would not stand in conflict [with it]-how should God’s will be manifest to him? How might there be a cognition in one unified will?’ (Bohme, quoted in LHP, p. 126).

  24. LHP III: 126. Cf. (Redding 2012, p. 148).

  25. ‘Love is therefore the most immense contradiction; the understanding cannot resolve it, because there is nothing more intractable than this punctiliousness [Punktualität] of the self-consciousness which is negated and which I ought nevertheless to possess as affirmative. Love is both the production and the resolution of this contradiction’ (pr, 199, §158).

  26. LHP III: 196. (Cf. Redding 2012, p. 147).

  27. LHP III: 126-130. (Cf. Redding 2012, p. 147).

  28. To this brief survey of previous works addressing the relationship between the idea of God and the idea of the self in Hegel’s philosophy, Wendte (2007) must be added—which, however, does not emphasise the Trinity and confines it to the background.

  29. Although an analysis of Hegel’s critique of Fichte cannot be pursued here, that critique can be considered an area of speculation where the entire Hegelian conception is at stake. In fact, the theory of recognition is not intended to deny independence to the ‘metaphysical objects’. Indeed, the opposite is true: only through recognition can an object of reason achieve independence from an individual self-consciousness–that is, from the ‘I’.

  30. Clearly there is more involved in Fichte’s account of the ‘I’; here I am just providing a brief sketch of Hegel’s reading of the Fichtean ‘I’.

  31. Building on Hegel’s philosophy, Schickler (2005) argues that Christ’s appearance determines a development in human consciousness to restore humanity’s relationship to the world; however, Schickler also considers Hegel as unable to solve the problem of the ground of our sensory impression and ends up by appealing to Rudolph Steiner (the founder of anthroposophy) as effectively able to solve that problem. In my view, Schickler’s noteworthy book is nonetheless trapped in that traditional interpretation of Hegel that considers Hegel’s idealism as a peculiar type of ‘spiritual realism’.

  32. In the Phenomenology of Spirit, this dynamic is depicted through the episode of the ‘hard-hearted judge’ acknowledging his being historically located and eventually forgiving the ‘beautiful soul’ (PS, §665-671, pp. 403–409).

  33. Hegel’s use of Vorstellung in the context of religion, and particularly when he addresses Christianity, is mainly due to the fact that Hegel fundamentally refers to the mode of presence of Jesus to the community of believers: in fact, Christ can only be ‘present’ as memory—that is, he can persist only in an internalized form as a subjective content among his followers. The notion of the Trinity as such is not affected by this consideration (see Bubbio 2012).

  34. Some scholars disagree with this translation: for instance, Raymond Geuss prefers to use ‘representation’ as a translation of Darstellung. See Geuss (2005): 48, note 18.

  35. This is the expression used by Miller to translate Vorstellung.

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Acknowledgments

The research work for this paper was initially done as part of the project ‘The God of Hegel’s Post-Kantian Idealism’ at The University of Sydney, and then as part of the project ‘The Quest for the “I”: Reaching a Better Understanding of the Self through Hegel and Heidegger’ at the University of Western Sydney (both funded by the Australian Research Council). A preliminary version was presented at the Philosophy Research Seminar of the University of Western Sydney on October 2, 2013. More recently, a shorter version of the paper was presented at the 2013 Eastern Division Meeting of the American Philosophical Association (Baltimore, 29 December 2013): I thank Martin Thibodeau for his stimulating response. Helpful comments from conference participants are gratefully acknowledged. I would also like to extend my gratitude to Paul Redding and Damion Buterin, for their many helpful suggestions and comments on earlier versions of this essay. Finally, I thank the anonymous reviewer of a previous version of this paper, who provided a detailed report that helped to produce the final version.

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Bubbio, P.D. Hegel, the Trinity, and the ‘I’. Int J Philos Relig 76, 129–150 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11153-014-9451-8

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