Hegel and Dialetheism Seminar

Second Lecture. From the Phenomenology of Spirit to the Science of Logic 1.3 Remarks on the Phenomenology of Spirit 2. The Science of Logic 2.1 The beginning of the presuppositionless theory Third Lecture. Hegel's Logic I. Quality 2.2 Negation as the first step within the background logic 2.3 Remarks on the logic of quality Fourth Lecture. Hegel's Logic II. From finitude to essence 2.4 The finite, the infinite and being-for-itself. An overview 2.5 From being to essence Fifth Lecture. Hegel's Logic III. The concept and the progression to nature and spirit 2.6 About the logic of the concept 3. Outlook into the Realphilosophie (of nature and of spirit) 1 These talks were given as video lectures at

Theology and Philosophy (ed. Oliver Crisp, Gavin D'Costa, Mervyn Davies, Peter Hampson, London: T&T Clark, 2011), 2011

The purpose of this essay is to describe some of the ways in which Hegel’s philosophy can serve contemporary theology. It is not concerned with Hegel’s relations to his own theological tradition, nor with Hegel’s own inventive recasting of central themes in theology, notably the concepts of God, Spirit, Trinity and the idea of evil. These are important, indeed central, topics that any theological account of Hegel must satisfactorily address. What follows is not a theological account of Hegel. I take it as generally agreed by the majority of Hegel’s interpreters that his own theology diverges significantly, but implicitly and probably unintentionally, from orthodox Christian doctrine, and that for this reason his theology (as opposed to the tools his philosophy offers to theology) is less relevant to the concerns displayed in this collection of essays. Those concerns (which Hegel shared too to a degree) presuppose a fidelity to doctrine, conceived within western broadly Catholic and Protestant tradition. The aim here is narrow. I leave to one side evaluations of Hegel’s explicit treatment of doctrinal themes, and present those aspects of his philosophical approach that can serve a doctrinally oriented theology today.

Despite Georg W.F. Hegel’s claim that “philosophy, at any rate, always comes too late” because, like the owl of Minerva, it “begins its flight only with the onset of dusk”, and beyond the contextual and contingent issues that might contribute to its return in auge, there exist important theoretical reasons to consider the question “why Hegel now and again?” still legitimate and current.

The Heythrop Journal, 1985

Although frequently pronounced to have no further influence, Hegel, God and religion are alike in that they simply seem unwilling to lie down and accept their fate. It was Hegel who first proclaimed the death of God to the modern world, and some of Hegel's better-known discipleschief among them Feuerbach and Marxwho considered his work to have hastened the demise of religion. God dead, and religion passing, it was not long before Hegel too was largely in eclipse. In this century it is not too unfair to suggest that all three have made something of a come-back. Certainly Hegel has. One hundred and fifty years after his death we are on the crest of a whole 'new wave' of Hegel studies, and, interestingly, a large number of them are concerned with his views on religion and the impact of those views on theology. It is my task here to describe some of the most recent of these books.

The John Hopkins Guide to Critical and Cultural Theory

There is no better way to characterize G.W.F Hegel (1770-1831) than as a philosopher of truth. Like most classical and early modern thinkers, Hegel believed that the task of philosophy was to furnish as comprehensive and true an account of reality as possible. As in Aristotle or Spinoza, truth as a category implied extreme rigor, a uniquely wide breadth of scope-ranging from physics and ontology to politics and logic-and a capacity both to reflect the world as it actually is and to express it in the form of a system. Systematicity was for Hegel proof of thoroughness and of the muscularity of reason, but it also mirrored formally an important aspect of reality itself: the latter, he argued, was also a kind of system-an organized, deeply interconnected, and (to some extent) living (or at least dynamic) whole. From a Hegelian standpoint, truth exists not just in the sense that it is possible, that it can be grasped, shared, and made actionable by humans (or perhaps other rational creatures), but that it is fundamentally thisworldly or immanent, rather than other-worldly or transcendent. Truth was not, as in Platonic Idealism, something that hovered over or preceded the world in the form of a static essence. Nor was it contained, ready-made, in the mind of God, an eternal logic or law that only had to be humbly recited by humans to be known. These ways of understanding truth, thought Hegel, reduced humans to passive instruments of a reality they had no hand in making themselves. Instead, truth was best understood as back-bendingly difficult work-a process that could be understood as simultaneously discovery (of something objectively there in the world) and invention (something we ourselves create and wilfully sustain). Despite Hegel's reputation in some circles as an austere theologian of eternity it is important to keep in mind the deeply existential dimension of Hegel's work, one that helps to explain why he was taken up so readily

2005

Hegel’s Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion is one of the most important resources from the nineteenth century for theology as it faces the challenges of modernity and postmodernity. A critical edition of these lectures was published in the 1980s, which makes possible a study of the text on a level of accuracy and insight hitherto unattainable. The present book (by the editor and translator of the critical edition) engages the speculative reconstruction of Christian theology that is accomplished by Hegel’s lectures, and it provides a close reading of the text as a whole. The first two chapters argue that Hegel’s philosophy of religion is a philosophical theology focused on the concept of spirit, and they provide an overview of his writings on religion prior to the philosophy of religion. The book analyses Hegel’s conception of the object and purpose of the philosophy of religion, his critique of the theology of his time, his approach to Christianity within the framework of the co...

Ars Disputandi, 2005

1984

The present project has been fortunate in receiving support without which it certainly would not have now been completed. Most importantly, a grant from the Translations Program of the National Endowment for the Humanities permitted full-time work on the volume in 1979-80. Appreciation is expressed in particular for the advice and encouragement of Susan Mango of the National Endowment. In the March 16, 1981, issue of Newsweek magazine, the lead-off question in an article on the Endowment asked: "if synthetic fuels and child-nutrition programs were on the block, after all, who would go to bat for. . . the first book-length edition of Hegel's letters in English" [p. 28]. Hegel himself, the reader will see, went to bat philosophically for the sort of European type of "rational state" which is prepared to support such undertakings, Of course, without the Endowment grant the project might still have been completed, though in less timely fashion, with the support given by the state of Indiana to its universities. But, without attempting to address here the serious philosophical issue raised by the above quotation, it is surely permitted to thank those who in fact have gone to bat for this particular undertaking. They include Professors Moltke Gram and H. S. Harris. Harris, who consented to serve as an NEH consultant for the project, painstakingly reviewed much of the manuscript. Appreciation is also expressed to Mr. Richard Meiner of Felix Meiner Verlag-publisher of the German edition of the letters which has primarily been used for translationfor his encouragement over several years, and for his willingness to make page proofs of supplementary letters to the German edition available prior to publication. The commentary is particularly indebted to the annotational and biographical work of Johannes Hoffmeister and Friedheim Nicolin contained in the Felix Meiner edition. Hoffmeister has been frequently cited with regard to specific interpretations, but throughout he has been the most frequent source of dates, titles, names, and immediate historical data. The American Philosophical Society and Indiana University must be thanked for funding Christiane Seiler to do bibliographical and documentary work at the Hegel Archiv in West Germany. A Fulbright Summer Travel grant to Clark Butler in 197 4 was the real beginning of the present commentary. Professor Otto Poggeler, Director of the Hegel Archiv, and his staff -especially Drs. Helmut Schneider and Walter Jaeschke-are to be thanked for their assistance. Assistance with Latin was obtained from Margaret Vojtko and John Brennan of Indiana-Purdue Ft. Wayne (IPFW), and from Professor Waldemar Degner of Concordia Theological Seminary, Ft. Wayne. Margaret Vojtko translated the one letter which is entirely in Latin [30a]. Finally, the help provided by students and clerical personnel cannot be ignored:

The history of philosophy risks a self-opacity whereby we overestimate or underestimate our proximity to prior modes of thinking. This risk is relevant to assessing Hegel’s appropriation by McDowell and Priest. McDowell enlists Hegel for a quietist answer to the problem with assuming that concepts and reality belong to different orders, viz., how concepts are answerable to the world. If we accept Hegel’s absolute idealist view that the conceptual is boundless, this problem allegedly dissolves. Priest enlists Hegel for a dialetheist answer to the problem with assuming that truth and falsity are mutually exclusive, viz., how certain sentences are both true and false. If we accept Hegel’s dialectical view that certain contradictions are necessary, this problem allegedly dissolves. For both McDowell and Priest, we find a true friend in Hegel. I argue that McDowell’s and Priest’s appropriations of Hegel overestimate Hegel’s affinity with quietism and dialetheism. McDowell reads Hegel as a quietist who silences metaphysical claims and the skeptical questions they raise against commonsense, but neglects Hegel’s adaptation of ancient skepticism against commonsense. Priest reads Hegel as a dialetheist who subordinates formal logic to dialectical logic by affirming the truth of certain contradictions, but neglects Hegel’s commitment to resolving contradictions for the sake of truth qua whole. I diagnose their misreadings in terms of what Hegel regards as the three moments of logic and argue that while McDowell jumps to its third moment, Priest stalls at its second moment. According to Hegel’s Encyclopedia Logic, logic has three “moments”: the abstractive moment of the understanding, which “stops short” at fixed categories; the negative moment of dialectic, which discovers the “genuine nature” of the categories, viz., that each “passes over, of itself, into its opposite”; and the positive moment of speculation, which grasps the “unity” of categories through the “dissolution” of their inner opposition. Hegel warns that if these moments are “kept separate from each other […] they are not considered in their truth”. I suggest that quietist and dialetheist readings of Hegel fail to consider truthfully the unified moments of his logic. In his quietist critique of metaphysics, McDowell enlists Hegel to dissolve the problem with assuming the duality of concept and reality. But McDowell helps himself directly to the third moment of logic, where the unity of the categories, and hence the boundlessness of the conceptual, would be fully articulated. Since he arrives at the third moment prematurely, ignoring its prior moments, he obscures its truth (§1). In his dialetheist critique of formal logic, Priest enlists Hegel to dissolve the problem with assuming the duality of truth and falsity. But Priest restricts himself gratuitously to the second moment of logic, where contradictions within the categories are not yet resolved. Since he stalls at the second moment, severed from its final moment, he obscures its truth (§2). I argue we can extricate Hegel from quietist and dialetheist misreadings only if we grasp the truth of the three moments of logic.