Hegel and the Spirit

Philosophy as Pneumatology

Alan M. Olson

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780691146690, 9780691074115
• eBook ISBN: 9781400832316
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Modern Philosophy

Hegel and the Spirit explores the meaning of Hegel's grand philosophical category, the category of Geist, by way of what Alan Olson terms a pneumatological thesis. Hegel's philosophy of spirit, according to Olson, is a speculative pneumatology that completes what Adolf von Harnack once called the "orphan doctrine" in Christian theology--the doctrine of the Holy Spirit. Olson argues that Hegel's development of philosophy as pneumatology originates out of a deep appreciation of Luther's dialectical understanding of Spirit and that Hegel's doctrine of Spirit is thus deeply interfused with the values of Würtemberg Pietism. Olson further maintains that Hegel's Enzyklopdie is the post-Enlightenment philosophical equivalent of a Trinitätslehre and that his Rechtsphilosophie is an ecclesiology. Thus Hegel and the Spirit demonstrates the truth of Karl Barth's observation that Hegel is the potential Aquinas of Protestantism. Exploring Hegel's philosophy of spirit in historical, cultural, and personal religious context, the book identifies Hegel's relationship with Hölderlin and his response to Hölderlin's madness as key elements in the philosopher's religious and philosophical development, especially with respect to the meaning of transcendence and dialectic.

I

INTRODUCTION

Der Geist erkennt nur den Geist.

(Frühe Schriften)

SPIRIT (Geist) is Hegel’s grand philosophical category. Of this there can be little doubt. He stakes his claim on Spirit in what arguably is his first major philosophical essay, “The Spirit of Christianity and Its Fate” (1797-98), and devotes the rest of his life to showing how it works.¹ What Spirit ultimately is and means, after this massive effort, is exceedingly difficult to specify with any real precision. Of this difficulty too, and as nearly two centuries of commentary on Hegel bear witness, there can be little doubt. The reason for this categorical imprecision lies in the fact that Hegel’s conception of Spirit, as in the case of Aristotle’s conception of Being, quite literally has to do with everything and with nothing. As such it is the most basic and also the emptiest of categories. Unlike Aristotle’s conception of Being, a category a priori in the order of logic, and a posteriori in the order of time, Hegel’s conception of Geist encompasses both dimensions of the question in such a way that they cannot really be separated one from the other. Therefore, while Spirit is the most immediate and least differentiated of categories, it also provides Hegel with the basis of infinite mediation and differentiation through a form of logic that can only be called hermeneutical. This is the uniqueness of Hegel’s category of Spirit—namely, that Spirit and the dynamic life of the concept are one and the same.

Failing to understand or appreciate this, many doubt whether Spirit is a meaningful category at all. Such individuals might argue, in the manner of Bertrand Russell, that those who evoke the language of Spirit, being contemptuous of conventional logic, do so in order to confound categorical coherence for the sake of advancing metaphysical claims that would be otherwise untenable. But there also are metaphysical objections. Nicolas Berdyaev, for example, believes that Hegel’s Spirit and Aristotle’s Being are necessarily vague because both are monists. He argues that Hegel, in fact, played Aristotle to Kant’s Plato thus signaling a major theoretical shift in both instances from the cosmo-ontological dualism implicit in classical Greek philosophy prior to Aristotle’s unified worldview, to some form of monism or pantheism. The traditional dualism in Western thought that is reinforced by the Judaeo-Christian-Islamic traditions of supernatural revelation, and preserved and reinstated by way of the Kantian noumenon, is dissolved, Berdyaev argues, in the transcendental monism of Fichte and his successors, including Hegel. Thus Hegel’s Absolute Spirit turns out, after all, to be another instance of human spirit, and this alone. What is important for Berdyaev, and more recently for Derrida, is the preservation of the ontological status of Spirit as wholly Other. Berdyaev believes that he accomplishes this by way of an ethical personalism grounded in the philosophy of freedom; and it is from the standpoint of a personalist ethics especially, Berdyaev contends, in a Kierkegaardian way, that Hegel’s system and the conception of Spirit upon which it is based falls short of the mark.²

Among other twentieth-century philosophers sympathetic to Hegel, Jaspers’s notion of das Umgreifende (the All-Encompassing or All-Comprehensive) probably comes closest to the overall intent and purpose of Hegel’s conception of Absolute Spirit. But Hegel would have been uncomfortable with the spatialized ontotheological nuances in Jaspers’s formulation that, like those of Berdyaev and Findlay, have a certain theosophical quality and probably owe more to Schelling and other mystical sources, especially Jacob Böhme, than to Hegel. Jaspers, in turn, was uncomfortable (as many remain today) with the many crudely temporalized, teleo-eschatological versions of Hegel’s Geist that have accumulated in the scholarly literature inspired by and indebted to Hegel—especially neo-Marxist interpretations in which freedom tends to be absorbed by necessity.³ On the other hand, Jaspers’s contemporary and erstwhile rival, Martin Heidegger, was a thinker simultaneously obsessed with and repulsed by the Hegelian legacy of Geist—so much so, as Derrida has observed, that the early Heidegger strenuously “avoided” all references to “Spirit” and the “spiritual” because of the allegedly ontotheological, semantic overload contained in post-Hegelian conceptions of Spirit. After his infamous Rektoratsrede in 1933, however, Heidegger (for reasons highly questionable) removed the brackets with respect to “Spirit” and the “spiritual” in the attempt to go beyond or, as the case may be, behind Hegel.⁴

But Heidegger’s “origin-heterogeneous” return, as Derrida calls it, to Geist can scarcely be viewed as definitive unless one is inclined to subscribe to the quasi-Romantic view whereby Spirit, as Ricoeur puts it, is always identified with an Other “anterior” to human experience.⁵ Needless to say, Heidegger, while he certainly has the virtue of having studied Hegel very carefully (in contrast to many of his contemporaries), does not elucidate the meaning of the mature Hegel’s under­standing of Geist in ways that get to the bottom of its religious dimension, nor is he interested in doing so. Nor was it really possible for the early twentieth-century sympathetic critics of Hegel, such as Jaspers and Berdyaev, or unsympathetic ones like Popper and Voegelin, to abstract Hegel from the Left interpretations that so dominated Hegel studies during the war years. Indeed, until the revival of Hegel studies in the mid-twentieth century, prudentially motivated scholars were inclined to conclude that the Spirit of Hegel, whether in its Right or Left instantiations, was best left alone.

Rather than survey the vast literature concerned with the Spirit of Hegel, my concern in this study is to probe the religious dimension of Hegel and the Spirit by way of a highly specific religious and theological hypothesis. The definite article in the title of this work, therefore, is to be taken seriously since the focal point of my argument is to show that Hegel’s philosophy of Spirit is a speculative pneumatology drawing its primary spiritual energies in this regard from the Christian doctrine of the Holy Spirit. By the qualifier “Christian,” however, I certainly do not suggest that Hegel was preoccupied with the theology of Spirit in a conventional sense, nor do I claim to measure Hegel’s conception against the wildly diverse conceptions of Spirit within Christianity as a whole. My concern rather is to indicate the manner in which Hegel’s conception of Spirit, and especially Absolute and Free Spirit are directly inspired by and contiguous with Luther’s understanding of Spirit—not the Luther so long debated by historians and theologians, but the household or catechetical Luther familiar to every thoughtful student of his Small Catechism. As such, I am distinguishing the catechetical Luther’s conception of Spirit from an officially Lutheran dogmatic conception and from whatever doctrine of Spirit might be extrapolated from painstaking analyses of Luther’s massive and notoriously unsystematic Werke. My argument turns rather upon what I view as being the performative character of the catechetical Luther’s notion of Spirit as the “symbol giving rise to thought,” in the phrase of Ricoeur, for those who, like Hegel, were very close to it. As such, it is my contention that the dialectic implicit in Luther’s formulation provides a great deal of the trajectory, both formally and materially, to Hegel’s philosophy of Spirit. By implication, I will also be arguing that the major impetus of German Idealism, for all of its variegated complexity, cannot be properly understood apart from this simple background, and that Hegel’s philosophy of Spirit may be viewed therefore as a theoretical completion of the pneumatology deeply embedded in the religious and philosophical Lebenswelt of Germany.

The identification of Holy and Absolute Spirit, needless to say, is problematical—especially for the many theologians who regard He­gel, and Hegelian philosophy generally, as the enemy of all things sacred, including the Holy Spirit. While many scholars certainly concede that Hegel’s philosophy is inspired by Christianity, at least initially, they also tend to agree that he offers very little in its support, especially as regards the Christian doctrine of the Holy Spirit, or pneumatology, in the strict theological sense. Thus Hegel’s philosophy, they surmise (but usually not in ways as profound as Berdyaev’s), may be about human but not Holy Spirit. Like all things human, Hegel’s finite Spirit must end, Hegel’s system being fittingly identified, therefore, with the end of philosophy.

Oddly enough, something akin to this view is shared by many entirely secular, antireligious thinkers who, especially in the modern period, tend to view all talk about Spirit as being obscure, mythical, and a subject to be strenuously avoided. This probably accounts for the predilection of many analytical philosophers, at least until recently, to discuss Hegel’s philosophy of Spirit in terms of a philosophy of Mind and to avoid, thereby, any association with theology or contamination by religion.⁶ But the alleged dichotomy between human and divine Spirit, between psychology and metaphysics, has greatly contributed to misinterpretations of Hegel, and it certainly has greatly inhibited the development of a truly comparative philosophy of religion. Until the advent of Pietism in the late seventeenth century, in fact, not even Western theologians wrote much about Spirit; and philosophers have yet to appreciate, much less appropriate, what phenomenologists have to say about Spirit in the history of religions. What is written about Spirit, especially in the Latin tradition of Christianity, has frequently been suppressed or deemed heretical, as in the case of Joachim of Fiore, the Spiritual Franciscans generally, and also the Anabaptist traditions of the Reformation. This legacy of alleged heterodoxy associated with Spirit has no doubt also contributed to the semantic association of Free Spirit with “free thinking”—especially in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. But serious philosophical and theological reflections on Spirit are conspicuous for their scarcity. Indeed, because the Holy Spirit, in the modern period, is primarily associated with conversion-oriented spiritualist religious movements both within and without Christianity (e.g., Pentecostal, Holiness, neo-Pentecostal, neo-Evangelical, Transpersonalist New Age movements, etc.), this benign neglect regarding the nature and meaning of Spirit has continued by way of what might be regarded as an elitist default by mainline, late-modern theologians, Spirit being hopelessly abandoned to the utterly banal and superficial rhetorical formulations that abound in popular religion.

Pneumatology thus remains the “orphan doctrine” in Christian intellectual history, as Adolf von Harnack once put it. By the term “orphan” Harnack means that Spirit seems always to have been treated as a subspecies of its own genus, so to speak, pneumatology being subordinated to a host of other theological considerations, especially christology and above all ecclesiology. A simple explanation for this neglect, of course, is that christology, with few exceptions, has always been the Anknüpfungspunkt of Christianity and, as such, its constant point of reference and controversy. Nor is this surprising since the doctrine of the atonement or redemption through the sacrifice of the God-man Jesus as satisfaction for the sins of the world is the metanarratological foundation of Christianity’s ordo salutis. By this supreme metanarrative “the power of death and the devil,” according to Saint Paul, has been “overcome” existentially and ontologically. The institutional task, zwischen den Zeiten, is to explain how this action is efficacious and salutary at practical, procedural, institutional levels. Having once established the hypostatic unity of the Father and the Son at Nicaea and Chalcedon, theologians necessarily turned their efforts to the business of defining soteriologically and instrumentally the proper mediation and appropriation of the divine-human identity.

At more subjective levels, of course, Christianity has always understood the personal appropriation of this mediation to be the gift of faith through the work of the Holy Spirit—whether by way of the simple confession, in the early Church, that “Jesus is Lord,” of baptism and participation in the cultic Eucharistic fellowship meal, or the rather more complex doctrine of John Calvin regarding the testimonium spiritus sancti internum. Nevertheless, with the transition from what Max Weber has called the charismatic to the institutional phase of Christianity, there also commences what might be regarded as the gradual subversion of the simple truths of the trinitarian mediation by the monarchical-triumphalist tendency of the church to identify itself with Spirit—whether through the vast mediational-sacramental structure of Catholicism or through the foundationalistic biblicism of Protestantism.

Obviously, what tends to get lost in this transition is a living sense of the power immanent to experiences of Spirit. Such experiences of transhuman powerfulness have been left to historians of religion and phenomenologists such as E. B. Tylor, R. H. Codrington, Rudolf Otto, Gerardus van der Leeuw, and Mircea Eliade, to identify and to explicate as das Numinose in ways that frequently imply Christianity itself has lost this power. Unfortunately such assessments and implications are, in many instances, painfully true. Indeed, the entire history of the development of religions, and certainly the development of the philosophy of religion, has in many ways been the history of the negation of Spirit. For it is precisely the power of the whole that the Holy qua Spirit most deeply signifies—and not only signifies but presences, in being one with what it signifies. Clearly, such awarenesses inform the scrupulousness of the ancient world with respect to the names of the Divine, and it is very likely the case that Jesus himself refers precisely to this aspect of Spirit when he says to his disciples that “you will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes over you”—in other words, that Spirit is the power underlying any possible existential bliss and moral serenification.⁷

That the simplicity of such soteriological allusions should change with the growth of institutional Christianity, that there should be a movement from immediacy to mediacy, of course, is the point of Weber’s Hegel-inspired hypothesis. Many feminist scholars today tend to understand this shift almost entirely in terms of the victory of patriarchy over matriarchy, the supreme dramatic example being the Petrine theory of Apostolic succession with the bishop of Rome or the Holy Father as supreme authority over all things, sacred and secular. By this thesis, the advent of male-dominated ecclesial absolutism signals the shift from the immediate and intuitive to highly mediated spiritual consciousness by way of fidelity to paternally administered sacraments deemed efficacious by their mere performance, ex opere operate.

Hegel’s analysis of Spirit, of course, does not begin or even end with what might be termed the bare outlines of the Christian idea of Spirit in its classical and medieval forms. Historical considerations alone will not suffice to isolate the essence of Christianity—nor will what has now fashionably come to be called the sociology of knowledge, unless philosophers of religion wish to be reduced to the status of “counting clerks” (which Hegel believed to be the inevitable consequence of historicism). What counts is philosophy’s ability to explicate the meaning of the “consciousness of God” or, more properly, “God consciousness,” which, for Hegel, is identical with the consciousness of Spirit (LPR 1, §§74, 278-85). Absolute Spirit must be comprehended therefore in ways that are true to its concept, which means that Objective Spirit, understood ecclesiologically, must give way to—indeed, must constructively prepare the way for—an adequate philosophy of the state or whatever shape the “spiritual community” might assume in the future. This is precisely what Hegel was attempting to clarify, I argue, during the Berlin period when he was presenting, side by side, his lectures on religion, history, aesthetics, and the philosophy of law.

By this pneumatological thesis I do not mean, of course, that Hegel should be viewed as a philosopher of spiritual immediacy. On the contrary, Hegel is preeminently a philosopher of mediation by way of his insistence on the primacy of the logic of the concept. Nevertheless Hegel’s philosophy of Spirit, inclusive of its religious roots, provides the dialectic of conceptual mediation with its existential and metaphysical energy. Hegel’s philosophy of the concept, therefore, ultimately derives its force from his position with respect to the immediacy of Being since the mystery of Being and the mystery of the concept, for him, are ultimately one ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Primary Text Abbreviations
• Chapter One: Introduction
• Chapter Two: Pneumatology
• Chapter Three: Pietism
• Chapter Four: Transcendence
• Chapter Five: Dialectic
• Chapter Six: Madness
• Chapter Seven: Enlightenment
• Chapter Eight: Absolute Spirit
• Chapter Nine: Free Spirit
• Notes
• Select Bibliography
• Index