Hegel’s political theology

Hegel and social criticism

Hegel famously declared that ‘philosophy … is its own time apprehended in thoughts’ (Hegel, 2001: 19). In making this comment, he had in mind the problem in political philosophy of how to reconcile the self-regarding desires of individuals for independence and self-reliance with the reality of their dependence on cooperative modes of social activity. Attempts to solve tensions between individuals’ desire for self-reliance and their necessary immersion in networks of cooperative activity by reference to a shared standard of rationality (such as that of Hobbes’ fear of the state of nature, Kant’s Categorical Imperative, or Bentham’s ‘greatest happiness’ principle) were immensely dissatisfying for Hegel principally because he saw no reason why social agents should value the dictates of reason more than their own desires. Rather, philosophy must be responsive to the, as he saw it, necessarily experiential and historical context in which normative ideals are formulated. As we will see, expressions of this principle such as his even more famous comment in the Philosophy of Right that ‘the Real is rational’ (ibid.: 18) have often got Hegel into a lot of trouble with those who interpret him as seeking rational justification for a particular set of political or cultural institutions simply by virtue of their existence. Accusations of conservatism and even authoritarianism have been levelled at him for the abandonment of critical reflection of existing social and political ‘realities’ that is implied. But, as we will see later, this interpretation rests on a misunderstanding of what Hegel means by both ‘real’ and ‘rational’ and when we correct this misunderstanding he ends up making an important contribution to critical theory.

Robert Pippen (2008), for example, has attempted to demonstrate how Hegel arrives at a critical theory of freedom and that he does so by means of a historicized definition of rational agency. That is, Kant’s use of the Categorical Imperative as the condition of possibility of individual freedom – according to which the condition of self-reliance and autonomy was the voluntary subjection of the will to rationally agreed norms – was rejected. Hegel agreed that the condition of freedom was the definition of the subject as a rational agent but thought such a definition must attend to historical and contextual factors. As Pippen points out, Hegel did not simply mean that the subjective rationalities of free individual agents have meaning only in their immersion in social and cultural networks. Rather, individual agency itself is a product of that immersion. So Hegelianism rejects positing self-determining individuality as something ontologically distinct preferring instead to think that ‘being an individual subject is something like a collective or social normative achievement’ (ibid.: 9). Towards the end of this article, when I consider the political implications of Hegel’s theological metaphysics in more detail, I will refer to the position he rejects as methodological atomism.

The problem with the work of Pippen and others who wish to highlight Hegelian critical thought is that they have insisted that the price to be paid is the sidelining of Hegel’s own thoughts on religion and theology. This is precisely because it is presumed that any political theory that is informed by Hegel’s concept of God is more likely to involve rational justifications for dominant (and usually theocratic) social and political norms that frustrate the emergence of rationally autonomous agents. I argue that rather than posing a problem, these thoughts enrich and deepen Hegel’s critical theory.

Furthermore, they may even help us to uncover secular norms that marginalize religious opinion. In this way, Hegel can be recruited to the recent attempt in the academy and wider society to rethink and contest dominant narratives about the relationship between the religious and the secular. This is called post-secularism. I do not have the space to consider this term in detail so a brief summary of its significance will suffice. ¹ Post-secularism essentially is moved by the idea that religious beliefs are not necessarily best left to the preserve of the private sphere, as secularists would have it, but may offer valuable contributions to public discourses on key social, political and cultural issues. Indeed, important work has been done that suggests this ‘quarantining’ of the religious in the name of a non-partisan public sphere has in fact functioned to promote a form of abstract rationality – scientism. Purely secular justifications for our political values, more often than not, conceal the primacy of a scientistic rationality that seeks to silence alternative epistemologies. Roger Trigg, for example, in Rationality and Religion (1998), laments the view that science alone is capable of securing reasoned agreement in the public sphere because of the misperception that it generally adheres to a higher standard of rationality (ibid.: 14). The primacy of empiricist rationality is what lies behind what Charles Taylor has called the mainline secular thesis (Taylor, 2007) which, inaccurately in his view, credits the decline in religiosity in western societies to the triumph of science and technology. So there is an urgent need to formulate what we might call a post-secular social criticism, to protect against this marginalization, by exploring how normative values might be at the very least compatible with theological and religious discourse.

I believe Hegel’s political theology is valuable because it is a powerful example of how a position that is firmly grounded in rationalistic justifications for theological belief can illuminate the complex issue of how he accounts for the socio-historical emergence of rational subjective agency. And so, contrary to the views of even those who are sympathetic with Hegel’s critique of social contractarianism, but who advance the mainline secular thesis, it is a theological position that can contribute significantly to our understanding of Hegel’s critical thought. It is therefore most important that we have a clear understanding of what his theological position consists. I propose that we should regard Hegel as a panentheist rather than an unorthodox theist or, as he is more commonly viewed, a pantheist – because it is only in identifying his system in terms of the former that he can be said to contribute to social criticism. This will hinge on first distinguishing between theism’s and pantheism’s commitment to the idea of God as a fixed Substance on the one hand and the dynamical view of God as unfolding in nature and history (i.e. as dialectical) of Hegelian panentheism. The former renders individual self-determination difficult to conceptualize while, I will argue, the latter does not. Second, we will be introduced to the panentheistic concepts that underpin Hegel’s credentials as a social critic – finite self-transcendence and True Infinity (TI). It is these two matters that will detain us for the next two sections. I then widen the discussion to consider how all of this illuminates our understanding of his key arguments in the Philosophy of Right. In particular, I will argue that finite self-transcendence and TI are the key reasons why this text is an important contribution to social criticism and why it disallows atomistic treatments of individual rational agency.

God as ‘fixed’ substance or ‘dialectical’ subject? Theism, pantheism and panentheism

Panentheists think that God is neither straightforwardly transcendent to nature and history (theism) nor immanently identifiable with nature and history (pantheism), but rather is dynamically and dialectically immanent to the ongoing processes of self-transcendence that are nature and history. Panentheism’s primary interest to political thought lies in its concern to preserve human moral autonomy from what it perceives as the strongly deterministic content of both theism and pantheism. Theism’s postulation of God as a divine Substance, i.e. as an immutable, fixed and transcendent Deity as the architect of all creation (including human social, moral and political history), poses obvious difficulties to the notion that human beings can seriously be said to enjoy any real degree of moral and political autonomy. Given the threat of divine retribution via a ‘celestial dictatorship’, it is said to undermine the idea that humans are truly self-determining. The pantheistic solution of positing humanity as itself part of a divine nature divested of its transcendent aspect offers, it seems, its own dangers. This is because – certainly in its classical Spinozist expression – it risks dissolving human subjectivity into God while retaining the fixity and immutability of divine reality. Attempts to revise these deficiencies in the Spinozist system have also been problematic. Baruch Spinoza and Giordano Bruno retain the idea of Substance but diverge from theism by arguing that divine reality is identical with the world. Divine Substance is wholly immanent. That is, God is indeed fixed and immutable but is so in an entirely immanent fashion. And so they have a keen sense that the infinity of divine Substance is exhausted by the material universe. Without transcendent mystery, human reason (or that of any sentient species) is capable of complete knowledge of the divine. In fact, it is reasonable to postulate that we are part of divine reality in the sense that our rationality is identical with God’s Being. In contrast to the theistic contention of his otherness to the world (theological dualism), pantheists are wedded to the idea of their fundamental unity (theological monism).

The prevailing consensus among most Hegel scholars – even those who wish to identify his anti-authoritarian credentials – is that his concept of Absolute Spirit is basically pantheistic. Terry Pinkard, for example, grasps Hegelian infinity in terms of the ‘world-process’ – i.e. the process of finite things coming into existence and passing away taken as a self-subsistent whole. Construed in this fashion, infinite reality has no external (transcendent) dimension and is merely an internal, immanent world-process (Pinkard, 2002: 253). Similarly, Joseph McCarney thinks that the role of immanence is so great in Hegelian thought that the Christian Incarnation functions as a metaphor of the immanent unity of the finite and the infinite rather than as evidence of Christ’s unique nature as the second person of the Trinity (McCarney, 2000: 46–7). Raymond Plant also thinks that the Incarnation merely has a symbolic importance in the task of philosophically comprehending the nature of God (Plant, 1983: 181). He contends that Hegel’s entire mature philosophical system was the attempt to resolve communitarian issues he first identified in his youth. An immanentist rendering of Christianity, so that it becomes comprehensible philosophically, was a fundamental part of the politico-religious dimension to this. Plant argues that Hegelian philosophy provided ‘a rational, intersubjective account of the development of the modern world in its totality, exorcizing all transcendental elements and entities’ and that this was ‘key to community’ (ibid.: 88). And Charles Taylor, in his landmark study of Hegel, posits a Spinozist pantheistic synthesis at work in Hegelian logic (Taylor, 1975: 545).

The first thing to say about Hegel’s response to Spinoza was that he agreed that the world is ontologically contained within God in the sense that creatures such as human beings are not utterly other to him but are part of him. He accepts God’s immanence is a fundamental part of his nature. The Spinozist dissolution of ontological duality was a progressive move for Hegel because it offered the prospect of overcoming the external determinism of human beings of theistic transcendence. ‘Panentheism’ in fact literally means ‘all-in-God-ism’ (Cooper, 2007: 26). When Hegel is articulating his concept of God there is an important sense in which he wishes to retain the idea of divine transcendence. He does not, therefore, suggest a simple return to the difficult theistic attempt to think of God as Substance, yet also capable of personhood. Rather, he focuses on the conception of God as Subject inherited from an important predecessor in post-Kantian German philosophy, Johann Gottlieb Fichte. The latter was fixated by Kant’s theory that God was possessed of a Transcendental Ego which he uses to communicate with humanity via the gift of reason. In The Science of Knowledge (1982[1792]), Fichte was worried that this committed Kant to a form of moral determinism because, as a dualist, he operated with a disembodied moral self subject to divine moral commands from without. This imperils Kant’s claim that the Categorical Imperative was proof of our self-determining activity. The solution was to dissolve ontological duality by contending that human morality was an emanation from the divine Ego with the purpose of providing a realm for God’s moral-rational activity. In one move Fichte dissolved fixed Substance and posited God as an active world-constituting Subject. Crucially, it also meant that humans were participants in divine freedom – we become architects of God’s moral law. The problem, as Hegel and fellow panentheist Friedrich Schelling saw it, was that this risked dissolving human personhood (Cooper, 2007: 95–6). Hegel’s response to this problem produced his concept of True Infinity.

True Infinity: Hegel’s definition of the finite–infinite relation and its implications for human freedom

Hegel’s alternative to Fichtean Subject pantheism was dialectical subject panentheism. That is, God as divine Subject is in a complex inter-relation of dependence with his ‘other’ (i.e. the material world) as he unfolds immanently and historically within it. It is important to issues concerning Hegelian political theology because it had the fundamental ambition of rejecting the concept of God as a distant Absolute Substance (proposed not only by theism but also the substance panentheism of his onetime friend and colleague Schelling) while retaining the key role of human self-determination with which Spinoza, Fichte and Schelling had struggled. Hegel would have to rethink what was meant by the key terms of finitude and infinitude. I will consider two places – the Science of Logic and the Encyclopaedia Logic – where he attempts to do so. In both texts he posits finite and infinite realms as intra-relational. As we will see, however, this is not a symmetrical intra-relationality. In the passage I am about to consider from the former text he strongly implies that ontological primacy lies with finitude. In the latter text he seems to suggest the reverse.

Let us consider first how things are presented in an important passage from the Science of Logic. Nature and human history – along with all their polarities and differentiations – are integral parts of the Being of the infinite. Hegel invokes the concept of True Infinity (TI) where, contra Schelling, all reality is included in the Infinite. Without such an inclusion one would embrace a spurious conception of infinity where God is bounded (in the case of Schelling, his essence) rendering his very concept incoherent. Robert M. Wallace in Hegel’s Philosophy of Reality, Freedom and God (2005) argues that Hegel’s understanding of TI is arguably the most effective response of all the post-Kantian metaphysicians to Kant’s duality of freedom and nature. For the latter, nature depends on something that goes beyond it – freedom – in order for it to properly be at all (ibid.: 51). To define freedom in terms of the transcendence of thought from determinism is evidence of the influence of the Categorical Imperative (Beiser, 2005: 155–6; Houlgate, 1991: 43–4; Wallace, 2005: 49–50). But Hegel’s radical move beyond Kant occurs when the determinants of nature (including those of human nature – passion and desire) are posited as emergent properties of rationality itself. It is in this sense that nature must be seen as containing freedom. Rather than grasping freedom in an oppositional sense (nature opposing freedom), ‘going beyond’ is an internal feature of how freedom renders nature real (i.e. so it can be).

It therefore seems that when Hegel speaks, as he often does, of finitude as limited being/reality he means that it is a limitation of freedom in the sense that it is only partly able to achieve the status of ‘being’ because it is only partly able to demonstrate its self-dependence. Just as the finite is only its own transcendence so the infinite is (i.e. its Being) only the self-transcendence of the finite. As Hegel tells us in the Science of Logic:

… the unity of the finite and the infinite is not an external bringing together of them, nor an incongruous combination alien to their own nature in which there would be joined together determinations inherently separate and opposed, each having a simple affirmative being independent of the other and incompatible with it; but each is in its own self this unity, and this only as a sublating of its own self in which neither would have the advantage over the other of having an in-itself and an affirmative determinate being … finitude is only as a transcending of itself; it therefore contains infinity, the other of itself. Similarly, infinity is only as a transcending of the finite; it therefore essentially contains its other and is, consequently, in its own self the other of itself. The finite is not sublated by the infinite as a power existing outside it; on the contrary, its infinity consists in sublating its own self. (Hegel, 1969: 145–6)

If we follow Wallace’s account of things we are presented with some rather pressing problems. The intra-relationality appears not to be symmetrical. It may be argued that to define the infinite as finitude’s self-transcendence is reductive because it reduces the former to a state of dependency on the latter. Conversely, if the finite is only its own transcendence then does this not return us to something very similar to Spinozist pantheism where finite reality is ultimately dissolved? ² In The Opening of Hegel’s Logic (2006), Stephen Houlgate arrives at a similar conclusion to Wallace arguing that TI ‘for Hegel is simply the process that is generated by finite things themselves; it is nothing beyond them’ (ibid.: 434). He is motivated here, it seems, by a similar concern to overcome the duality of traditional theism. And, like Wallace, the key moment in this process – the moment when being becomes truly infinite – concerns subjective and objective spirit, i.e. the means whereby human beings secure their self-determination (ibid.: 425). This strongly suggests infinity’s dependence on the finite, that, if we follow this model of interaction between finite and infinite, we are left with something close to subjectivist interpretations of theology. This could be Kant’s postulates of practical reason which, in dissolving meta-theology, reduce the question of God’s existence to a mere subjective necessity (an ‘ought’ produced by practical reason rather than something that exits independently of us). A similar mistake is made with Fichte’s subjectivization of infinite Ego or (which is almost the same thing) a projection onto objectivity of human nature, as in the left’s Hegelian humanism. ³ To posit that infinity is generated by and therefore dependent upon the finite, is to side with the logic of the understanding and so, in Hegel’s terms, reinforces spurious infinity.

To avoid reductive errors it seems we should understand finite self-transcendence as it is described in the above passage from the Science of Logic somewhat differently than Wallace. Elsewhere in the text, Hegel invites us to think of the understanding as a form of logic that is characterized by a propensity to ossify contradictions: ‘what ought to be is, and at the same time is not. If it were, we could not say that it ought merely to be. The ought therefore is essentially a limitation’ (Hegel, 1969: 132–3). To say that something infinite is ‘an ought’ is to express a contradiction. It cannot simply be said to exist, otherwise we would not also say that it ‘ought’ to exist. It therefore expresses an antithesis. Understood in this context, to say that infinity ‘is only as a transcending of the finite’ is to posit an ‘ought’, i.e. a limitation brought on by the state of dependence on human understanding. It is an act of transcendence, to be sure, but it is not the realization of TI. Rather, it is an example of a spurious concept of infinity because it is ‘only the finite transcending, of the limitation’ (ibid.: 135) that is the anthropological act of postulate or projection of human freedom. In the Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion (1895) Hegel calls this ‘the culminating point of subjectivity, which clings fast to itself, the finiteness which remains and renders itself infinite in its very finiteness’ (Hegel, 1895a: 187). In ‘clinging fast to itself’, i.e. in maintaining the antithesis with infinity, it denies itself the chance to pass over into the infinite and so renders itself absolute. In so doing, its only option is to make its own demise its final determination (Hegel, 1969: 130). It is, in effect, the final act of finite subjectivity where it asserts its self-sufficiency as the only reality. In theological terms, it is an act of idolatry (Williams, 2011: 104).

So in its tendency towards abstract self-transcendence, finitude insists on its own disintegration and nothingness. It avoids this fate only in its reconciliation with the true infinite, i.e. where it ‘is only as a transcending of itself’ (a phrase now grasped in its proper context). This is achieved by looking at the cause of its disintegration – the ‘ought’ – as only the beginning of the process of the ascent to God in freedom so that not only do we avoid reducing him to a state of subjective dependence, we rescue finitude from its tendency to make nothingness its final act. Finitude achieves its ‘being’, to be sure, but it is not self-affirmation; rather it is a mediated affirmation via the infinite. What this means is that, rather than argue, as Wallace does, that finite reality establishes its ontological credentials by being the very process which gives rise to the infinite, it ‘is’ as it manifests the infinite as its basis and upon which it is therefore dependent. It transcends its own nothingness and is affirmed – the reverse process of that which Wallace proposes. ⁴ The following remark seems hard to reconcile with the definition of the infinite as finitude’s self-transcendence through which the latter secures its reality: ‘That the 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 above and beyond appearance, truth abides in God, so that true being is another name for God’ (Hegel, 2009: 180–1, § 50). Hegel appears to be suggesting that ‘the world, which might have seemed to be the means of reaching God, is explained to be a nullity’ (ibid.: 181, § 50). On this reading, the ‘unity-in-difference’ cannot be grasped in terms of the derivation of the infinite from the finite because in the process of moving to the Absolute, the finite must lose its being in the affirmation of divine reality.

So where does this leave the case for Hegel as a social critic, because if human freedom is but ‘a nullity’, then is Hegel not staking a claim for pantheism after all? I do not believe so. Crucially, we must not forget the reverse proposition – ‘infinity is only as a transcending of the finite’ – because it is the fundamental ground on which panentheism marks out its distinctive theological ground and provides the metaphysical basis for Hegelian social critique, as we will see later. Hegel does not wish to downplay the centrality of this aspect of the dialectic according to which the infinite is mediated by the finite and so the latter cannot simply disappear into the former, but is preserved as it negates itself in its sublation. Furthermore, we must keep in mind that it is in the nature of the finite to have the infinite as its basis. The process implied by saying that infinity is a transcending of the finite – i.e. the mediation of infinity by finitude – can occur through, and only through, the self-sublation of the finite (Williams, 2011: 108–9). This has crucial implications for the freedom of the latter. As Williams argues, when finitude understands itself to be ‘a manifestation of the infinite … there is an important reversal. In this reversal I am not eliminated, but rather included as free and my freedom is maintained’ (ibid.: 111). There is a strong onus on showing that when finitude negates itself as a determinate limitation, it does so in accordance with its own natural inclinations, rather than having those inclinations subsumed by some overbearing Absolute. Since it is as much in finitude’s nature to transcend its status as an ‘ought’ (i.e. as a limitation) as, according to the understanding at least, it is to be an ‘ought’, it must have the true infinite as its own ground. To be sure, for finitude to posit the infinite is not to create it but, rather, for finitude to posit itself as created by the infinite (ibid.). It achieves its ontological status by negating itself and in so doing becomes a moment of the true infinite – an ‘ideality’. But finitude can only become ‘a moment of the true infinite’ if it realizes its freedom in the transcendence of its determinate limitations. There is, therefore, still a relation of dependency of the infinite on the finite, despite the former’s ontological primacy. It is in this sense that infinity is only as a transcending of the finite because ‘the truth of the finite is … its ideality … the genuine [true] infinite, depends on it’ (Hegel, 2009: 239, § 95). It is therefore still correct to talk about self-determination even when finitude is recognized as having an ontological dependence on the infinite. There is intra-relationality, even if it is not strictly symmetrical. ⁵

The explicit linkage of freedom with natural inclinations – be they of the infinite or finite – involves the theory of compatibilism. I propose a compatibilist understanding of the foregoing discussion: that infinity is the negation of determinate being in the self-sublation of finitude and yet also its ground of being via finitude’s self-transcendence of its limitation. At this point, it is instructive to bring in a pre-Hegelian panentheist who unquestioningly had a profound influence on Hegel’s meta-theological views – Jakob Böhme – who invoked the Neoplatonic view of God by arguing that the finite–infinite dialectic was defined in terms of the emanation of the world from the divine nature. First, to posit infinity and God as the negation of all determinate finite difference invokes a Neoplatonic view of him as the negation of all being (i.e. God as beyond being, or No-thing). We should understand divine self-determination as the freedom to act in this way without external constraint or internal compulsion. God’s nature is eternal self-revelatory activity (Lauer, 1982: 159). And so, for Böhme, No-thing also designated the infinite potential to be – in the sense of nullifying its opposite (Cooper, 2007: 59). It is here that we can posit infinity as the ontological ground of finitude.

Thus, God as One contains within himself both negative (No-thing, which includes irrationality, darkness, chaos and wrath) and positive (craving to be, which includes reason, light, order and love) aspects. Presumably, freedom and necessity (i.e. the need to create) would be additional components of No-thing and Being respectively for Böhme. The implications of this dialectic on the panentheistic view of creation as divine self-determination are made clear when Böhme tells us that God’s will to be is grasped as his will to self-knowledge (Cooper, 2007: 60). That is, it is in his nature to create, because it is in his nature to know himself.

So, God as No-thing is the dissolution of determinate finite being and yet God is also the infinite potential to Be. Hegel’s conception of finitude as self-sublation helps us here. The latter, positive aspect of God is the moment when finitude transcends its determinate nature via self-sublation. The reverse aspect of the proposition – that infinity is finitude’s ground of being on the condition that the latter is self-sublating – is fundamental to this process because it is the moment when God secures finitude’s being in its negation and so secures his own self-realization in created nature. This also involves a compatibilist interpretation. The infinite can only be the ontological ground of the finite if it is the means whereby the latter realizes its nature to transcend its determinate status as an ‘ought’. For Hegel to suggest that it is in the nature of finitude to undergo self-sublation and that this is the prerequisite for divine self-realization is the key point in linking this rather technical discussion about panentheistic definitions of God and the world to the question of how much scope for human emancipative struggles there is in his system.

Compatibilism, in this context, suggests that the finite realm of the struggles for human freedom – as the domain of sublation – preserves its ontological status in the finite–infinite ‘unity-in-difference’. Grasping the realm of finitude, in its mediation of the infinite, as self-sublation of its determinate limitations is to posit it as the key participant in the dynamic divine process of self-determination. As Williams notes, ‘participation in the true infinite is liberation, freedom, to be at home with oneself in another’ (Williams, 2011: 111). As we have just seen, the prerequisite of securing human freedom is the positing of its ontological ground in the infinite because it is in our nature to transcend the determinate conditions so that we can be free. Precisely what kind of activity this involves and how it might be expressed using explicitly political philosophical concepts is a task to which I now turn.

Compatibilism and God as divine subject: Implications for human freedom

As should already be evident in the foregoing discussion, the panentheistic-compatibilist understanding of God stands in contrast with the standard Spinozist pantheistic model in an important way. According to the latter, human self-determining activity is denied by an immanently transposed Substance thereby rendering Spinozist thinking vulnerable to philosophical avenues to authoritarian denial of social critique that simply replaces theistic versions. This is, as we have seen, expressed most clearly by Spinoza’s insistence on the immanent and immutable unity of Substance which, in the end, does not provide sufficient scope for the self-determining activity of finite things. In short, Spinoza’s pantheism dissolves finite subjectivity because it lacks a conception of finitude as self-sublation which preserves it even as it is transcended. In the Lectures on the History of Philosophy (1896) Hegel criticizes the Spinozist Absolute for its dissolution of subjectivity:

… there is … in his [Spinoza’s] system, an utter blotting out of the principle of subjectivity, individuality, personality, the moment of self-consciousness in Being. Thought has only the signification of the universal, not of self-consciousness. It is this lack which has, on the one side, brought the conception of the liberty of the subject into such vehement antagonism to the system of Spinoza, because it set aside the independence of the human consciousness … because for Spinoza … there exists only absolute universal substance as the non-particularized, the truly real – all that is particular and individual, my subjectivity and spirituality, has … as a limited modification whose Notion depends on another, no absolute existence. Thus the soul, the Spirit, in so far as it is an individual Being, is for Spinoza a mere negation, like everything in general that is determined. As all differences and determinations of things and of consciousness simply go back into the One substance, one may say that in the system of Spinoza all things are merely cast down into this abyss of annihilation. (Hegel, 1896: 287–8)

Andrew Shanks’ Hegel’s Political Theology (1991) is a welcome intervention in this regard. He argues that Hegel’s meta-theology is important in uncovering emancipative aspects to much of Christian thought and in particular the Christological events of the New Testament. I do not have the space to consider the issue specifically in relation to its implications for a Christian interpretation of the Hegelian system. For our purposes, it is sufficient to point out that it is an important demonstration of the deficiencies in any attempt to classify Hegel as a pantheist (ibid.: 77–83). ⁶ In his attempts to do so, Shanks addresses the accusation levelled at Hegel – primarily by Protestant theologian Karl Barth but also from other theists ⁷ – that to dialecticize God is the elimination of divine sovereignty (ibid.: 83). Hegel’s argument that, in particular, the Incarnation and Passion were rationally necessary in accordance with the dictates of his ontological system dissolves the mystery to which theistic interpretations of these key events in Christian history are committed. For Shanks, however, to posit these events as even partly unfathomable to human reason is surely to give succour to the posited divine–human division characteristic of Hegel’s famous Unhappy Consciousness ⁸ under whose grasp the Incarnation is merely a sublime contingency, a highly unusual departure from the normal run of human history. Consequently, its fundamentally liberative message is lost (ibid.: 84). By contrast, if we understand it as a necessary moment in the process of the divine education of humanity then, as we will now see, its emancipative content is preserved and enriched.

Implications for the ‘rationality’ of human agency and the state

It is now time to justify how dialectical panentheism’s logical dictates (i.e. TI) are at work in the Philosophy of Right. I will argue that it is this concept as I have described it above that helps us mark out Hegelian political thought as of relevance to social criticism and we will see how it illuminates and enriches the proposition that Hegel rejects methodological atomism in favour of a conception of individual rational agency as itself a construction of sociality.

First, we must focus on the much maligned and misunderstood passage regarding the rationality of the actually existing social conditions: ‘what is rational is real; and what is real is rational’ (Hegel, 2001: 18). If we keep in mind ‘Reality’ as it is meant in the Science of Logic then it seems clear that Hegel is not seeking the rational justification of given contingent social conditions. As we know, TI disallows the practice of attributing rationality as such to mere empirical existence because this implies conceiving of the empirical in isolation from its natural tendency towards the realization of its being in its ground, the infinite (i.e. it is not self-sublating). ‘What is rational is real’ should be taken to mean that reality is that which exhibits freedom as TI defines it, i.e. that which fulfils its natural tendency to transcend mere empirical finite existence and connect with its ontological ground in infinity. And conversely, ‘what is real is rational’ should be taken to mean that when something finite – in this case the social structure – exhibits this self-negating transcendence it is securing its ontological status and so is deemed to be rational. Hegel alludes to the nullifying effect of finite self-sublation when he provides a clarifying comment immediately after the above dictum that ‘nothing is real except the idea …The rational is synonymous with the idea’ (ibid.). And later in the text, when speaking of the state, he strongly alludes to the view that the state is the site upon which finite things (including individual subjects) are ontologically dependent when he says that ‘the state as a completed reality is the ethical whole and the actualisation of freedom’ (ibid.: 197, § 258; emphases added).

There is an unmistakable logic to all of this concerning the status of human beings as rational agents – as ontologically dependent on socio-political forms (of which more in a moment) – and their role as political agents. I argue that this twofold logic corresponds to the ascending and descending strands of TI respectively. That is, agential dependence concerns finite self-sublation and the importance of actual rational political agency corresponds to finitude’s mediation of infinity. I will consider the second aspect first. There is an onus on rational agents to engage in struggles to ‘absent’ social structures that hinder finitude’s self-sublatory function as it is understood under the logic of TI. Their propensity towards the transcendence and negation of their condition in their quest for freedom ensures that no ‘rational transfiguration’ of social structures which frustrate this occurs. We may call social structures that deny self-determination to individual human beings many things but we, if we are Hegelian, may not call them real because they are not rational under the terms of Hegelian logic. It is only when social structures are connected with deeper (or higher, infinite) reality that they achieve the status of full reality.

Frederick Neuhouser in Foundations of Hegel’s Social Theory (2000) usefully alludes to this point when discussing the unfolding of rationality in Hegel’s philosophy of history. Detractors have often interpreted Hegel’s identification of the rationality of all stages in political history as amounting to a defence of political practices and values that are inimical to modern liberal principles. Neuhouser points out what critics seem to miss about the diminished and incomplete rational status of these past forms when he says that for Hegel

… since this mode of philosophical understanding justifies the past by seeing it as a historically necessary condition of spirit’s achieving its supreme goal, it will regard some aspects of the past as instrumentally rational only – that is, necessary as a means to the full realisation of reason’s ends but not themselves part of a world where those ends are finally and perfectly achieved. (Neuhouser, 2000: 217)

I now consider the issue of rational agency’s ontological dependence on state forms. If we follow Hegel’s logic concerning the ontological necessity of finitude’s self-sublating activities what is envisaged clearly is the conceptual necessity of non-instrumental desires on the part of individuals for social participation. Frederick Neuhouser calls a purely instrumentalist approach to individual agency methodological atomism, where individuals’ agency is considered ‘in abstraction from their membership of the particular social institution under consideration’ (Neuhouser, 2000: 176). Allen Wood expresses this idea as the extent to which ‘collective goods have value because they have value for individuals’ (Wood, 1990: 259). In rejecting it, Hegel proposes a state of affairs where the interests of individuals might only be achievable via non-instrumental participation, i.e. where I conceive of myself as not merely an isolated ego. Under such conditions and remembering TI, individuals cannot secure their own interests if they treat the social order as the instrumental means to their freedom because, by maintaining the externality of their relations with each other and the social whole, they are denying their chance to be self-determining. As finite beings, individual citizens overcome their status as the negation of their other by containing it within themselves. They must see their own will in that of the state. They must embrace a higher (self-sublating transcendent) conception of freedom that wills the infinite freedom of the state. When they do, they go beyond the externality Rousseau envisaged in his theory of the General Will (i.e. an instrumental embrace of the common good) and identify themselves in the common good (i.e. an internal relation). It is only then that they are real and rational because it is only then that they become self-determining:

… the individual finds in duty liberation … he is freed from that indefinite subjectivity, which does not issue in the objective realisation implied in action, but remains wrapped up in its own unreality … In duty we reach the real essence, and gain positive freedom. (Hegel, 2001: 134; emphases added)

As I noted in the introduction, it appears that Robert Pippen has come to similar conclusions, motivating him to propose that rational agency itself is an emergent product of individuals’ immersion in social conditions. Rather than thinking that individuals are possessed of ‘uniquely causal mental states … a certain sort of mindedness is constitutive of and so inseparable from the action itself’ (Pippen, 2008: 9). That is, Hegel discounts the possibility that freedom consists in some antecedent causal power latent within each individual but is rather the state of being in ‘a certain sort of self-relation and a certain sort of relation to others; it is constituted by being in a certain self-regarding and a certain sort of mutually recognising state’ (ibid.: 39). It therefore follows that ‘the putative independence of such subjects is thus always intertwined with a distinct sort of profound, even ontological dependence’ (ibid.: 9). We can here get a sense of the necessary inter-relationality of subjective and objective spirit in that it is only with the sociality characteristic of the latter that mindedness and agency become something distinctly human rather than a feature of mere animality, a feature of spirit’s ability to liberate itself from the immediacy of nature (ibid.: 15, 16).

Pippen’s ‘non-causal’ account of human freedom and Hegel’s political theology

The significance of Pippen’s intervention for our purposes is twofold. First, his argument that human agency is accounted for in terms of a non-causal account of human freedom does lend itself to the TI understanding of how humans, as finite creatures, secure their distinctively human ontological status. It is in their nature to negate their ‘mere’ causal powers as natural organisms and embrace a higher, social form of existence as, moreover, the condition of their very humanity itself.

Second, Pippen proposes that this process cannot be part of divine self-realization. To present it as such, he argues, hinges on defining human history as ‘the vehicle for the self-realization of Cosmic spirit’ (Pippen, 2008: 121) – ‘a vatic expression’ (ibid.: 11) as he calls it – where it is ultimately only Absolute Spirit that enjoys true self-determination. To assert that it is only Absolute Spirit that achieves this status, as Hegel clearly does, causes him ‘to reject accounts that construe reason as anything like a mere human faculty or power’ (ibid.: 9). Pippen wishes to sidestep the issue by pointing out that Hegel also thought it was perfectly acceptable to regard the domains of human agency and freedom as worthy of their own internal treatment in that they remain as pressing issues even after they are incorporated into his wider cosmological perspective (ibid.: 10). To understand the determinate struggles of finite subjects as purely moments in the self-realization of divine consciousness is to violate basic principles of the dialectic (ibid.: 11).

On first appearance, we may be in agreement with Pippen. It may seem that to regard rationality as ontologically formed in socio-political conditions and emancipative struggles that critique structures of oppression as part of some divine plan would be to undermine the importance of sublated finitude functioning as the mediation of the infinite. If this is possible, it may be perfectly valid to apply the principles of TI to subjective and objective spirit without having to invoke Absolute Spirit in order to make sense of them. The first thing to say is that conceiving them as ‘moments’ is, as we have seen, precisely how Hegel himself thinks of finite things, including human beings. Moreover, we must remember that his view of the divine–human relation does not mean finite things are simply dissolved. Remember that to speak in terms of finitude’s mediation of infinity is to say that the condition of the latter’s being is that it is the ontological ground for the former’s self-sublating activities. Thus, the sublation of our ‘antecedent’ causal powers as human beings is not their simple dissolution into infinite being. If this powerful bulwark is sufficient to prevent rational transfigurations of state power then it does not seem so fanciful to suppose it also applies to Absolute Spirit. And, of course, the importance of this bulwark, if we may call it that, is precisely the distinctive feature of Hegel’s panentheistic interpretation of the divine–human relationship. To insist that Absolute Spirit is the fundamental ontological ground of the finite world, rather than the reverse proposition advanced by Wallace, does not mean it can treat finitude as a mere means to its self-realization.

The sidelining or even outright dismissal of Hegel’s own pronouncements on meta-theological issues is a common approach by scholars who wish to advance a purely immanentist Hegelianism. As I have said, it may be perfectly legitimate to restrict the application of the logical categories to the domains of subjective and objective spirit. We do not need to be constantly aware of the meta-theological context in order to appreciate the significance of TI in diagnosing structures of social, political and economic oppression that threaten the rights of individual citizens and suggesting remedies. This I readily concede. But it is quite another to presume that there is a fundamental incompatibility. Unfortunately, the latter position has become the dominant one in contemporary Hegel scholarship. In fact, such presumptions usually depend on a dubious understanding of the role of human beings in Hegel’s meta-theology so as to make it look as though we are simply the playthings of Absolute Spirit. The problem is that this hinges on a definition of the transcendent–immanent relation at work in Hegel’s concept of God that sounds suspiciously like positing an external relation. No lesser a figure than Charles Taylor has made this move. In Hegel, he uses a ‘vehicle’ metaphor to describe the relation when he says that ‘For the mature Hegel, man comes to himself as the vehicle of a larger spirit’ (Taylor, 1979: 45). Notice the oppositional thrust of Taylor’s understanding of Hegelian ‘finite’ and ‘infinite’ which is more characteristic of dualism. The metaphor ‘vehicle’ suggests the appropriation of external finite spirits by infinite Spirit as the condition of possibility of its self-awareness. But it is precisely this which the panentheistic-compatibilist interpretation of finite self-sublation disallows. The activity of finite spirit is, as we have seen, the quest for selfhood as its (or rather our) condition of possibility of being. Its activity should therefore be appreciated less in terms of its appropriation by some essentially external divine authority and more as its own struggle to achieve reality for itself. This is the difference between interpreting finite self-transcendence as a self-sublating moment of infinity (with the complex relations of inter-dependency this involves) and as its mere vehicle or instrument. It is as though Taylor continues to place that to which Hegel attributes ontological primacy – freedom – in a domain external to the world of human history and society. I cannot conceive how else, in Taylor’s mind, we should grasp the ‘vehicle’ metaphor – that human beings are merely necessary instruments in what is an essentially divine quest for freedom. Although both Taylor and Pippen recognize that the divine’s dependency on the finite takes Hegelian theology beyond theism – where external relations are evident – it falls short of Hegel’s own purposes of classifying God in terms of intra-relationality and so retains at least echoes of the theistic oppositionality they know Hegel rejects.

To arrive at an essentially external view of God’s relation to human rational agents is, of course, possible only because both scholars seem also to think that Hegel embraces the pantheistic idea of divine substance. Pippen highlights how incompatible substance monism is with the idea of an individual subject’s self-legislating normative ethical and political constraints. He says that the latter ‘is not a claim about any sort of discovery that self and other are actually united in a monistic substance … but an achievement in practices wherein justificatory reasons can be successfully shared … this makes it impossible that Hegel himself proposed any sort of immaterial or material or … any “neither material nor immaterial” substance account of soul and mind’ (Pippen, 2008: 43). Pippen correctly argues that the anti-dualistic basis of Hegel’s claim that human mindedness and social practices ‘presuppose’ nature can be understood only once we have rejected the idea that the properties of spirit and nature consist of different substances (ibid.: 46) and so whenever Hegel famously says that spirit is the ‘truth’ of nature he cannot mean some immaterial substance. Rather, spirit ‘involves only nature’s own “ideal life” or its own immateriality’ (ibid.: 47).

It follows that human ‘spirit’ is not something ontologically distinct from nature as though, for example, modernity’s protection of the human rights of individuals resulted from the discovery of some underlying antecedent meta-reality or ‘matter-of-metaphysical-fact independence, as if it were a case of substance independence’ (Pippen, 2008: 55). Rather, modernity’s achievement is a purely historical and practical process of nature’s own progression beyond its empirical immediacy by means of ‘the “preserving sublation” … of human practices’ (ibid.: 57). All of this would be fine if Hegel’s theology did posit such an antecedent meta-reality but according to the dialectical panentheistic rendering of his system, this is precisely what he rejected and for precisely the reasons Pippen rejects it. As we have seen, finite self-transcendence does indeed agree that spirit is nature’s ‘truth’ in the sense that nature contains its other within itself as its act of self-transcendence whereby it goes beyond mere empirically verifiable phenomena in order to achieve its reality, its being. And so to say that spirit is the ‘truth’ of nature is no reason to suppose Hegelianism must be committed to pure immanentism.

Pippen is correct to point out that the issues concerning human agency and freedom persist even when they have been ‘transcended’ but the fact that they exist in Hegel’s mind as finite aspects of a movement that is ultimately part of a transcendent process that is intra-relational should offer no threat to their logical status as acts of each subject’s self-determination and relations with others. Cosmic Spirit, as I have presented it, does not and cannot involve any sort of exogenous imposition onto human affairs. We can remain within the parameters of his theological commitment and still do justice to the liberal thrust of his political and social criticism.

Conclusion

One of the main positions advanced in this article is that when viewing the organic intra-relationality of the state and the individual Hegel was reliant on the key concept of his dialectical panentheism, namely finite self-transcendence. This is not as Wallace (and indeed some of Hegel’s own contemporary ‘left’ commentators) interprets it – i.e. as placing ontological primacy in finitude – but in terms of positing the reverse proposition where finitude has the infinite as its ground. But, as the logic of panentheism dictates, the infinite comes to self-realization only as it is mediated by the finite via the latter’s self-sublating activities. Applied to Absolute Spirit, this involves relations of intra-dependency (if not a wholly symmetrical one) between God and the created world. Applied to objective and subjective spirit, it means that the state is only ‘in that allows the principle of subjectivity to complete itself to an independent extreme of personal particularity, and yet at the same time brings it back into the substantive unity, and thus preserves particularity in the principle of the state’ (Hegel, 2001: 199).

As I have argued, although political theorists do not have to thoroughly absorb Hegel’s theological treatise in order to understand and apply the logical premises at work in the Philosophy of Right, it is fair to point out that there are clear resonances with the onto-theology at work in the Hegelian system. Moreover, the tendency to dismiss or downplay the connection has usually been born out of the view, mistaken in my opinion, that Absolute Spirit conceals a theology that is inimical to modern liberal values. Hegel should therefore be seen as an important contributor to modern discussions focusing on the issue of post-secularism, as I have defined it.

In particular, I have argued that theism and forms of theological monism (most notably pantheism) embrace conceptions of the divine that are vulnerable to authoritarianism. This is because they are wedded to conceptualizations of God that preserve forms of logic that Hegel finds not only philosophically objectionable but also politically conservative. With traditional forms of theism these dangers are obvious. But there has been insufficient attention drawn to how pantheistic alternatives do little to satisfy Hegelian logical criteria. As we have seen, with the latter we have a theological immanentism that retains either the abstractness and rigidity of the divine (Spinoza) or the dissolution of it into a world-constituting Subject that is at the cost of the autonomy of individuality (Fichte). I would agree with the likes of Taylor and Pippen that this creates problems for any Hegelian political theory that wishes to employ the tools of critical social analysis. But thankfully this is not the theology that I see at work in the Hegelian system.

Indeed, it is hoped that the logical resources for a thoroughgoing critical interrogation of dominant norms and values, which may conceal social relations that frustrate human emancipative activities, may be seen as not only compatible with Hegel’s meta-theology but as actually conceived in the context of his dialectical panentheism. It is hoped that this article has contributed something to how Hegelian political theology might be of value to this vital task.