God, Otherness, and Community: Some Reflections on Hegel and Levinas

Abstract

Many critics have argued that the alterity of God is negated within Hegel's philosophy of religion. This paper will present the position that Hegel's approach to theology depends on a rigorous hermeneutic which does not negate the meaning and power of religious language and practice as they are found within various Christian traditions, though it does challenge the view that God is absolutely “other” than the human. Further, Hegel's approach to the interpretation of the divine-human relationship need not be limited to Christianity alone. Although Hegel regards Christianity as the highest, most spiritually developed form of religious life, certain fruitful correlations can be established between his work on the ethical dimensions of religious community and Levinas's ethical interpretation of Judaism. These correlations suggest that both Hegel and Levinas offer articulations of what can be seen as a “biblical” mode of thought in which the dialectical relation of God and human beings is central.

Notes

Notes

1.  For a thorough discussion of the connections between Hegel's speculative approach to religion and the major intellectual trends in the philosophy of religion during his own time and in the decades following his death, see Walter Jaeschke, Reason in Religion: The Foundations of Hegel's Philosophy of Religion (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1990).

2.  This question has been much discussed by scholars of Hegel's philosophy of religion. See, for example, Emile L. Fackenheim's classic analysis The Religious Dimension in Hegel's Thought (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1967) and Quentin Lauer's Hegel's Concept of God (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1982). The status of God in Hegel's thought has been a subject of contentious debate since his own day, with many thinkers arguing that Hegel simply supplants God and religion with secular ideas. However, others have recognized an important and deeply religious element in Hegel's philosophy. A good example of this interpretation is found in Glenn Alexander Magee, Hegel and the Hermetic Tradition (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001).

3.  Phenomenology of Spirit/Phänomenologie des Geistes. Chapter IV, Part B; and Chapter VII, Parts B and C. In A.V. Miller's translation, see paragraphs 207–230 and 744–754 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977). See 158–71 and 517–25 in Hegels Sämtliche Werke II (Leipzig: Felix Meiner, 1937).

4.  This position is developed in Hegel's other works as well, such as the Phenomenology, the Encyclopedia, and his lectures on the philosophy of history.

5.  I am appealing here to Heidegger's definition of onto-theology. See Heidegger's essay “Nihilism as Determined by the History of Being,” Nietzsche Volumes Three and Four (San Francisco, CA: Harper Collins, 1982), 209–11/“Die Seinsgeschichtliche bestimmung des Nihilismus,” Der Europäische Nihilismus (Stuttgart: Gunther Neske Pfullingen, 1967), 245–47. Heidegger's definition differs from that presented by Kant in the Critique of Pure Reason. Kant defines Ontotheologie as a form of theology which attempts to prove the existence of God through concepts alone without reference to experience (in contrast to Kosmotheologie). Kritik der reinen Vernuft, A 632/B 660. However, Hegel's approach to God via Christian community would be at odds with both of these definitions of onto-theology.

6.  I will concentrate on the lectures on religion because, in my estimation, they contain the best developed and clearest statements regarding the nature of the Christian community in Hegel's work. Though other texts contain material relevant to the topic of Christian community, none have the sustained focus or lucidity of the lecture series on religion.

7.  The transition from the religious to the political in Hegel's work is an important topic, but one that requires its own sustained analysis, and so I will not address it directly here. For an interesting discussion of the influence of religious ideas on Hegel's thought, see Alice Ormiston, Love and Politics: Reinterpreting Hegel (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2004). See also Andrew Shanks, Hegel's Political Theology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991).

8.  Michael Vater, “Religion, Worldliness and Sittlichkeit,” in New Perspectives on Hegel's Philosophy of Religion, ed. David Kolb (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1992), 210.

9.  Lauer, Hegel's Concept of God, 37.

10.  G. W. F. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion Volume III: The Consummate Religion, ed. Peter C. Hodgson, trans. R. F. Brown, P. C. Hodgson, J. M. Stewart, and H. S. Harris (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press), 140. Unless otherwise indicated, all words or phrases included in square brackets come from the editors of this edition of the lectures. Hereafter all quotations from these lectures will be cited with the abbreviation LPR III in the body of my paper. References to the original German will be cited using the abbreviation VPR III. Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Religion Teil 3: Die vollendete Religion, ed. Walter Jaeschke (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1984).

11.  It should be noted that this critique of the Enlightenment is more severe (at least in its rhetoric) than the discussion of the Enlightenment found in the lectures on the history of philosophy, or in the section on this topic in the Phenomenology. In the latter, the robust self-confidence and self-certainty of Enlightenment thinking is vitally important to spirit's development, and it also serves to reinvigorate thinking about religion (even if it does not recognize itself as doing this). For a thorough discussion of Hegel's treatment of the relationship between faith and the Enlightenment in the Phenomenology, see H. S. Harris, Hegel's Ladder II: The Odyssey of Spirit (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1997). There are many possible reasons for the variation in tone between the Phenomenology and the lectures on the philosophy of religion, but the substantive critique of the limitations of the Enlightenment interpretation of religion are broadly the same in both.

12.  Here Hegel seems to have diverse positions in mind, including Hume's skeptical position on God in the Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion and Kant's argument that God is beyond the limits of understanding (and so beyond the limits of knowledge) and is a speculative idea which we can hold negatively, that is, by virtue of the fact that it is not contradictory (leaving practical reason free to postulate God's existence). Kant closes his critique of speculative theology in the Critique of Pure Reason by claiming that “the supreme being remains for the merely speculative use of reason a mere ideal - but yet a faultless ideal, a concept that concludes and crowns the whole of human cognition. Although the concept's objective reality cannot be proved by this speculative path, it also cannot be refuted by it.” From Werner Pluhar's translation of the Critique of Pure Reason (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1996), A 641/B 669.

13.  See, for example, Hegel's claim in the 1827 lectures on the concept of God that, on its own, the theoretical relationship to God is merely immediate, that the mind is filled with God as its object, but only in an abstract way. With this abstraction, the faithful individual has not worked out in practice what that relationship means for her own subjectivity. See the section on “The Cultus,” in Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, Volume 1: Introduction and the Concept of Religion, trans. R. F. Brown, P. C. Hodgson, and J. M. Stewart (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1984), 441–43. German original: Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Religion: Einleitung un der Begriff der Religion, ed. Walter Jaeschke (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1983), 330–32.

14.  It is worth noting that the centrality of intersubjectivity to other areas of Hegel's philosophy, particularly his social, political, and ethical thought, has been discussed in much recent scholarship. See, for example, Robert R. Williams, The Ethics of Recognition (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1997). The issue is also discussed in Jean-Luc Nancy, Hegel: The Restlessness of the Negative (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2002). Commentaries on the Phenomenology by Terry Pinkard and H. S. Harris (see note 11) both offer substantial discussions of the culmination of spirit's self-development in a community of mutually recognizing subjects. Terry P. Pinkard, Hegel's Phenomenology: The Sociality of Reason (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996).

15.  Here Andrew Shanks's argument regarding the highly political nature of Hegel's interpretation of Christianity (specifically his Christology) is informative. See Andrew Shanks, Hegel's Political Theology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). For a discussion of how Hegel interprets the relationship between Christian ideals and political life, see Peter C. Hodgson, Hegel and Christian Theology: A Reading of the Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).

16.  For example, Fackenheim argues that both the Jewish and Christian conceptions of God's otherness cannot be subsumed within Hegel's philosophical comprehension of religion. See Emile L. Fackenheim, Encounters between Judaism and Modern Philosophy (New York: Schocken Books, 1980), 161. See also Yirmiyahu Yovel, Dark Riddle: Hegel, Nietzsche and the Jews (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania University State Press, 1998) for an interesting analysis of the deficiencies of Hegel's account of Judaism.

17.  Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 1969), 36.

18.  The merit of Levinas's philosophical critique of Hegel has been taken up by Peter C. Hodgson and Robert R. Williams. See Hodgson, Hegel and Christian Theology: A Reading of the Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion and Williams, The Ethics of Recognition. Hodgson is critical of Levinas's approach to Hegel and argues that many of the issues that Hegel's work on religion addresses regarding the constitution of the self through otherness are not taken into account in Levinas's reading. He further suggests that Hegel's use of Christianity is fundamentally different from Levinas's discussion of God's “infinite transcendence.” While his critique is compelling, Hodgson does not take into account Levinas's treatment of the connection between God's alterity and the ethical relation to the other.

19.  For Levinas's critical response to Hegel's interpretation of Judaism (a controversial subject in its own right), see Levinas, “Hegel and the Jews,” in Difficult Freedom: Essays on Judaism, trans. Seán Hand (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1990), 238. In the original French, “Hegel et les Juifs,” in Difficile liberté: essais sur le judaïsme (Paris: Albin Michel, 1976).

20.  Levinas, Difficult Freedom, 16/Difficile liberté, 32.

21.  Levinas, Difficult Freedom, 17/Difficile liberté, 33.

22.  Levinas, Difficult Freedom, 143/Diffcilie liberté, 191.

23.  Levinas, Difficult Freedom, 145/Difficile liberté, 193.

24.  For a discussion of how Levinas brings ethics together with God in his philosophical writings, see John Caputo, “Adieu sans Adieu: Derrida and Levinas,” in The Face of the Other and the Trace of God, ed. Jeffrey Bloechel (New York: Fordham, 2000). Caputo argues that for Levinas it is through ethics that God acts, or is made active: “it is only by loving and welcoming the stranger, by responding in the name of God who loves the stranger, that God can be God” (302). Tamra Wright makes a similar case in The Twilight of Jewish Philosophy: Emmanuel Levinas’ Ethical Hermeneutics (Amsterdam: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1999). See also Jill Robbins's discussion of Levinas's interpretation of God via Jewish textual sources in Altered Reading: Levinas and Literature (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1999).

25.  Levinas, Difficult Freedom, 178/Difficile liberté, 232.