Hegel's Trinitarian Claim

A Critical Reflection

Dale M. Schlitt

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9781438443744, 9781438443751
• eBook ISBN: 9781438443768
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Hegel's philosophical interpretation of Trinity as a dialectically developing movement of Spirit is one of the most profound readings of Trinity in Western thought. In Hegel's Trinitarian Claim, Dale M. Schlitt provides a careful, detailed presentation of this claim in Hegel's major published works and in his lectures on the philosophy of religion, taking a critical look at how Hegel presents his claim that to think of God as subject and person one must think of God as Trinity. Although agreeing with Hegel's conclusion, Schlitt argues on the basis of an immanent critique of Hegel's thought that Hegel is not able to defend that claim in the way in which he proposes to do so. Schlitt argues instead that Hegel's trinitarian claim can be justified when Spirit is no longer seen as a movement of thought but as a movement of enriching experience. This close analysis provides an excellent point of entry into the wider study and critical consideration of Hegel's systematic philosophical project as a whole. Originally published in 1984 and available now in paperback for the first time, this edition features a new preface and postscript.

PART ONE

LOGIC—HEGEL'S REFORMULATION OF THE TRUE CONTENT OF TRINITY

1

Logic as Movement of Trinitarian Divine Subjectivity

1. Logic—the Movement of Pure Thought

The widely differing contexts within which Hegel referred to Trinity and within which he articulated his trinitarian claim indicate not only the importance attached to this claim¹ but, more profoundly, the multiple problematic to which his attempt to establish God as trinitarian responded. He saw that the orthodoxy of his day with its supernaturalistic theology tended to reduce God to an object and that its otherworldliness could lead to a this-worldly atheism. He realized as well that the developing bourgeois society might easily set itself over against the unified state and fragment it. This double estrangement in religion and society was for Hegel expressed in Kant's philosophical dualism. Together with that dualism this estrangement formed the Enlightenment-grounded alienation which Hegel proposed to overcome by adopting, but more so deeply adapting, Fichte's notion of the positing Ego. In order to acknowledge the necessary passage through alienation as the way to integral and integrating Selfhood, Hegel employed a dialectic of trinitarian self-revelation speculatively interpreted as self-positing Subject and philosophically reformulated as absolute reconciling Spirit.² He conceived of the trinitarian God as a movement of absolute logic³ constituting the triadic structure of inclusive subjectivity. This “inner trinitarian God” or inclusive Subject was for Hegel equally the structure of absolute Spirit, although not as yet its realization. The Subject needed an other to come to itself as Spirit.⁴ For Hegel the final reconciliation of Subject and object, religiously speaking, of God and world, was to be attained by the mediation of both Subject and object in true philosophical thought, in the movement of absolute Spirit.⁵

Hegel's understanding of triadically structured subjectivity and its realization as absolute Spirit are to be explored and critiqued by means of an examination of appropriate texts. First, this present chapter argues on a more general level that the Science of Logic⁶ is a study of logically reformulated trinitarian divine subjectivity. Chapter Two will concentrate on specific texts in the Logic in order to analyze and challenge the structure and movement of Hegel's overall response to philosophical alienation. Chapter Three turns to texts from the Encyclopedia⁷ to present an overview of the syllogistic structure of Hegel's explicitly trinitarian thought and then to Hegel's more general hermeneutic texts from the Phenomenology of Spirit⁸ in order to set the stage in Chapter Four for an examination of Hegel's systematic breakthrough within the specific context of the distinction between consciousness and its object. Chapter Five focuses on particularly relevant references in the Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion⁹ to investigate Hegel's further argumentation in the appropriate “realphilosophical” (realphilosophische)¹⁰ spheres. Finally, Chapter Six will work toward a reconstruction of Hegel's trinitarian envisionment and a reformulation of Hegel's trinitarian claim on the basis of insights gathered from a critique of the explicitly trinitarian texts and from the Logic itself.

Beginning with the Logic brings advantages and disadvantages, both of which are rooted in the depth and complexity of Hegel's multidirectional, many-leveled thought.¹¹ The advantages are both practical and systematic. Practical, in that starting with the Logic allows for an initial, clarifying stance and briefer argumentation vis-à-vis Hegel's overall proposal while, early in this study, acknowledging a critical dependence on a particular interpretation and critique of Hegel's notion of God.¹² Systematic, in that it respects and generally follows¹³ the encyclopedic ordering Hegel himself most fully develops.¹⁴ Argued internally, that is, from within the framework of the Hegelian systematic, logic is the structure and movement of reality in its universal truth,¹⁵ so that an adequate treatment of Hegel's systematic realphilosophy inevitably involves reference to the Logic. To approach his thoughts without some understanding of the Logic would be to proceed naively.¹⁶ Discussing his notion of God without immediate reference to the Logic borders on the impossible.

Working first with the Logic does bring with it certain disadvantages. Systematically considered, the most serious of these is the danger of underrating logic's multiple significance for Hegel. This could be done either by inordinately stressing any one of its functional aspects or by implicitly isolating it from the realphilosophy. However, the centrality of the subject matter here in question, coupled with its being handled further in the following chapters, should help correct any tendency toward a one-sided treatment.

More practically considered, an additional disadvantage is the difficulty involved in beginning with a relatively unknown or at least misunderstood and historically disputed text. The Logic develops neither formal logic in the traditional sense of the word nor modern logistic, but the logic of absolute form and the science of pure thought. Logic grounds the further development of the Hegelian system, and yet is itself grounded by the systematic return to it in the form of philosophy. It forms for the mature Hegel the first as well as the last science.¹⁷ A brief overview will facilitate further specific reference to and interpretation of this central Hegelian text.¹⁸ For present purposes the survey remarks found in the Logic's “Introduction”¹⁹ plus supplementary observations in what might be termed a second introduction²⁰ supply a sufficient basis for this overview.²¹

Without intending either to follow the Logic's Introduction in detail or provide a direct commentary, it can be pointed out that Hegel initially posits logic as a fundamentally presuppositionless science.²² He criticizes the general understanding of logic as a merely formal science of thought, devoid of specific content,²³ and whose categories are usually treated statically and without internal reference to one another. The correction of this latter, logically isolationist attitude toward the categories of thought constitutes the basis of Hegel's own conception of logic and for Hegel addresses the root cause of the misunderstanding of logical categories as empty forms.²⁴ It is this question of category content which first explicitly occupies Hegel's attention and in response to which he develops his own original conception of logic.²⁵

Hegel stresses that even the older “formal” logic had its own content in the sense of rules and forms studied.²⁶ But while appreciative of Kant's giving logic a place of honor,²⁷ he opposes Kant's reduction of thought's revelatory validity to the realm of the phenomenal and to a subjectivist position.²⁸ With brief reference to the incompleteness of Fichte's attempt to establish the positing ego,²⁹ Hegel describes logic as the pure science of self-determining thought. For Hegel this pure science both presupposes and itself establishes the overcoming of the Subject-object opposition characteristic of consciousness, a task accomplished according to Hegel's view at the writing of the Logic in the Phenomenology.³⁰ Logic, this pure thought, constitutes of itself its own objective content:

It [the pure science of logic] contains thought in so far as this is just as much the object in its own Self, or the object in its own Self in so far as it is equally pure thought …

This objective thinking, then, is the content of pure science…. Accordingly, logic is to be understood as the system of pure reason, or the realm of pure thought.³¹

Further, the objective content, which thought itself is, constitutes the true “matter” of pure science, “but a matter which is not external to the form, since this matter is rather pure thought and hence the absolute form itself.”³² Logic is for Hegel the science of pure thought, which is its own objective content and is therefore absolute form.³³

No external, mathematical, quantifying methodology is applicable to this pure science of absolute form.³⁴ The only adequate philosophical method is that found in the Logic, “for the method is the consciousness of the form of its inner self-movement.”³⁵ This self-movement is a speculative dialectical method, of which the Phenomenology is a concrete example.³⁶ Method could be described for Hegel as:

… the recognition of the logical principle that the negative is just as much positive, or that what is self-contradictory does not resolve itself into a nullity, into abstract nothingness, but essentially only into the negation of its particular content, in other words, that such a negation is not all and every negation but the negation of a specific subject matter which resolves itself, and consequently is a specific negation, … Because the result, the negation, is a specific negation it has a content. It is a fresh Concept but higher and richer than its predecessor; for it is richer by the negation or opposite of the latter, therefore contains it, but also something more, and is the unity of itself and its opposite. It is in this way that the system of concepts as such has to be formed—and has to complete itself in a purely continuous course in which nothing extraneous is introduced.³⁷

The method is the content itself, the true dialectic,³⁸ which contains the negative within itself and which progresses by means of this negative, by means of necessary contradiction.³⁹ Since the dialectical method consists in the grasping “of opposites in their unity or of the positive in the negative,”⁴⁰ logic can be described as the speculative dialectical method in and through which the Concept⁴¹ determines itself as a non-temporal movement of thought categories.⁴² These categories progress immanently and consistently⁴³ on the basis of self-contradiction according to a triadic rhythm describable on the widest level of logic as a movement from being to essence to Concept (Sein-Wesen-Begriff).

Considering logic or pure thought as absolute form has enabled Hegel, especially later on in the Logic, to describe pure thought as its own objective content. This total correspondence of form and content allows him to speak of pure thought as the truth.⁴⁴ Hegel's seeing logic as absolute form grounds his relating of logic to the other sciences of nature and Spirit, the latter two seen in terms of “reality,” “realization,” “realized content.”⁴⁵ Logic does not contain the reality, “which is the content of the further parts of philosophy, namely, the philosophical sciences of nature and of Spirit.”⁴⁶ The relationship between logic and the spheres of nature and Spirit remains mutual, in that logic both is and contains the spheres of nature and Spirit in as it is their “archetype” (Vorbildner) and the latter spheres in turn are and contain logic as their “inner formative principle” (innern Bildner).

As contrasted with these concrete sciences (although these have and retain as their inner formative principle that same logical element, or the Concept, which had served as their archetype), logic is of course the formal science; but it is the science of the absolute form.⁴⁷

This identification of content with the self-development of absolute form⁴⁸ roots already within the Logic the relationship of logic to the other concrete sciences by providing the presence of an “other” totally mediated within this realm of pure thought. The self-development of the Concept is ultimately conceived as pure self-mediation. Without this objective conten...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Preface to the Paperback Edition
• Abbreviations of Works by Hegel
• Introduction: Hegel's Trinitarian Claim
• Part One: Logic—Hegel's Reformulation of the True Content of Trinity
• Part Two: Hegel's Explicit Trinitarian Texts
• Part Three: Reconstructing Hegel's Trinitarian Envisionment
• Postscript: From Thought to Experience
• Notes
• Bibliography