Posted on: July 24th, 2018 How Hegel’s Wrong
In the oral component of my comprehensive exams in my PhD program (about 15 months ago), one of my examiners (in fact, my dissertation advisor, a man who cares deeply about theology) asked me if I regard Hegel as a heretic, and if so, why.
I said yes, but stammered out some half-baked reason as to why (something about hubris).
Thanks to some recent reading, however, in connection with my dissertation, I have identified two ways in which Hegel errs (nevermind, for now, the language of heresy).
First, something about Hegel’s God. William Desmond and Joseph Ratzinger have provided (or help me to come up with) some good wording. Hegel’s thinking about God leaves no room for overdetermination. That is, Hegel’s God is not truly an “other,” much less a sovereign, supernatural, totally transcendent other. He is totally grasped by Geist. Now, we must remember that the Geist which grasps God is God … but it is also human Geist, and so Hegel does think, at the end of the day, that man / human being / Hegel himself can grasp the concept of God, without remainder, that Geist’s concept of God fully captures the reality that is God.
And, as Desmond says in his book Hegel’s God, if that is how Hegel thinks of God, then it is not God (the God of Christianity) that he is thinking about.
Second, Hans Georg Gadamer, a thinker I’m finally getting around to appreciating (again, through dissertation research). Now Gadamer thinks–and I totally agree–that everything a particular person thinks is historically conditioned. That is, all of our thought takes place within a historical horizon. Further, even though much of the philosophical or hermeneutic task is to “lay bare” the features of this horizon of thought, we can nevertheless never fully do so. Hence, “our hermeneutic situation can never be made completely transparent to us.” Amen.
But that’s also precisely the problem with Hegel: he thinks that he has so risen above his historical thought horizon that it is completely transparent to him.
So, on these two fronts–one theological, one philosophical or hermeneutic–Hegel is “zero for two.”
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