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Hegel’s God

EXCERPT:

There is one major modern philosopher who deals extensively with the issue of God and who should have been taken into account in these recent discussions, but hasn’t been. This is Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831).

It’s well known that various liberal theologians during the last century and a half have wanted to produce a conception of God that could satisfy people’s spiritual longings without conflicting with Darwinian evolution and other well-established scientific discoveries. What’s not well known is that Hegel already did this, with remarkable power and subtlety, in response to the great modern skeptics, Hume and Kant.

Hegel’s philosophy is difficult to access because of his intricate manner of writing, and because of various misleading rumors that have become attached to his name. Karl Marx claimed that Hegel was an important influence on Marx’s own thinking, and since Marx was an atheist, many believers have wanted nothing to do with his supposed teacher, Hegel. On the other hand, S øren Kierkegaard made fun of Hegel for supposedly reducing faith to an arid and impenetrable rational ‘system’. So Hegel’s philosophical theology has been caught between the battle-lines of atheists who reject it or try to soft-pedal it and believers to whom its terminology is foreign and off-putting. As a result, there have been few commentators who’ve had enough sympathy for it to lay it out in a way that makes it seem attractive.

However, I think Hegel’s time should be now. Large numbers of people both within traditional religions and outside them are looking for non-dogmatic ways of thinking about transcendent reality. Writers like Karen Armstrong and Elaine Pagels speak to a large audience that’s less interested in tradition or dogma, as such, than in religious experience and religious thought. A readable account of Hegel will speak to this audience through the sheer illuminating power of his ideas.

What are these ideas? Hegel begins with a radical critique of conventional ways of thinking about God. God is commonly described as a being who is omniscient, omnipotent, and so forth. Hegel says this is already a mistake. If God is to be truly infinite, truly unlimited, then God cannot be ‘a being’, because ‘a being’, that is, one being (however powerful) among others, is already limited by its relations to the others. It’s limited by not being X, not being Y, and so forth. But then it’s clearly not unlimited, not infinite! To think of God as ‘a being’ is to render God finite.

But if God isn’t ‘a being’, what is God? Here Hegel makes two main points. The first is that there’s a sense in which finite things like you and me fail to be as real as we could be, because what we are depends to a large extent on our relations to other finite things. If there were something that depended only on itself to make it what it is, then that something would evidently be more fully itself than we are, and more fully real, as itself. This is why it’s important for God to be infinite: because this makes God more himself (herself, itself) and more fully real, as himself (herself, itself), than anything else is.

Hegel’s second main point is that this something that’s more fully real than we are isn’t just a hypothetical possibility, because we ourselves have the experience of being more fully real, as ourselves, at some times than we are at other times. We have this experience when we step back from our current desires and projects and ask ourselves, what would make the most sense, what would be best overall, in these circumstances? When we ask a question like this, we make ourselves less dependent on whatever it was that caused us to feel the desire or to have the project. We experience instead the possibility of being self-determining, through our thinking about what would be best. But something that can conceive of being self-determining in this way, seems already to be more ‘itself’, more real as itself, than something that’s simply a product of its circumstances.

Putting these two points together, Hegel arrives at a substitute for the conventional conception of God that he criticized. If there is a higher degree of reality that goes with being self-determining (and thus real as oneself), and if we ourselves do in fact achieve greater self-determination at some times than we achieve at other times, then it seems that we’re familiar in our own experience with some of the higher degree of reality that we associate with God. Perhaps we aren’t often aware of the highest degree of this reality, or the sum of all of this reality, which would be God himself (herself, etc.). But we are aware of some of it – as the way in which we ourselves seem to be more fully present, more fully real, when instead of just letting ourselves be driven by whatever desires we currently feel, we ask ourselves what would be best overall. We’re more fully real, in such a case, because we ourselves are playing a more active role, through thought, than we play when we simply let ourselves be driven by our current desires.

What is God, then? God is the fullest reality, achieved through the self-determination of everything that’s capable of any kind or degree of self-determination. Thus God emerges out of beings of limited reality, including ourselves.

(...)

I hope something else is evident from what I’ve outlined, as well as from the poets, mystics, and other philosophers I listed, and from the people you undoubtedly know who resonate with their writings. Religion that’s understood in Hegel’s way is a much more pervasive, much less dogmatic, and much more interesting phenomenon, intellectually, than what Richard Dawkins and his fellow critics identify as religion.

https://philosophynow.org/issues/86/Hegels_God