Externalization (3): Philosophy of Religion

In a scene set in the London of the early 1920’s, the Academy Award winning 1981 film, Chariots of Fire, portrays a prominent, young, female opera singer going to a restaurant with a prominent, young, male Olympic-athlete-in-training.  At one point during dinner conversation she languidly, yet forcefully, expresses the spirit of their age toward religious differences: “People don’t care!”  This response would also seem to encapsulate a common Western attitude toward religious differences in the 2020’s: All legitimate religions are said to be aiming not only at the same truth but also at a therapeutic Zeitgeist (spirit of the age).  One thinks of Philip Rieff’s 1966 book, The Triumph of the Therapeutic: Uses of Faith After Freud, in which the psychological person is said to have replaced the religious person.  Rieff maintained that - - in the perceived race to provide consolation - - therapy and techniques of self-realization would rapidly replace religion.  More recently, the ascendency of the psychological person has also been seen in the Oprah television phenomenon.

      Among some Western opinion leaders of the 2020’s, nothing could be less therapeutic than Hegel’s fairly opaque writing on religion and Zeitgeist dating back to the 1820’s and even earlier; but yet his views on developing natural consciousness, Reason, Nature, Spirit, Religion, and Absolute Idea continue to find intellectual resonance.  The Absolute Idea is self-determining Reason externalizing itself as Nature and Spirit in order to entertain movements of thought (theses, antitheses, and syntheses) leading to enhanced knowledge.  Externalization amounts to “losing track of one’s self-consciousness while thinking about a topic.”  Spirit (both individual spirits and societal Zeitgeister) returns to the Absolute Idea with each synthesized increment of knowledge, consistent with the final cause of Absolute Knowing.  In Hegel’s terminology, “entäuβern” means “to externalize, renounce, relinquish, divest, dispose, or part with.”  Externalization (Entäuβerung) into Nature and Spirit is also called bifurcation (Entzweiung) or unfolding (Entfaltung).  [An introduction to Hegel has been given in the last two months’ blog posts, as well as in the Hegel chapter in my book, An Initial View of Final Causes.]

      Synthesis preserves whatever elements of truth are originally present in thesis and antithesis, even as apparent contradictions between them are cancelled (aufgehoben).  Hegel’s Axiom, “Thought is Being,” implies that Thought reaching higher levels of knowledge is the same as Being perfecting its essence and becoming self-aware.  Over time, Thought and Being each become more of what they truly are.  This spontaneous development of natural consciousness is the Absolute (virtually the same as the Absolute Idea).  The Absolute is not a freestanding power that thwarts the will of individuals and societies; it is the expression of the efforts of individuals and societies; and it does not exclude unintentional effects.

      The development of natural consciousness leads to Religion, or self-aware Absolute Being. The present writer reads Hegel as follows: Religion, immanent in a matrix of particular religions existing at any one time, has evolved from natural to aesthetic to revealed.  Over time, any particular religion has the possibility of asymptotically approaching the status of revealed, true Religion, in which Spirit knows itself as Spirit.  Which particular religion, if any, in today’s matrix has the best chance of asymptotically leading to true Religion is an enigma.  Until the end of time, Spirit is always evolving and updating the matrix of particular religions.  This evolution does not exclude unintended consequences and surprising discontinuities on its route towards unshakeable orthodoxy.  Thus, any current particular religion could turn out to be a dead end, superseded by the development of some other particular religion.  Hegel’s successors could not agree whether the final orthodoxy would be left-Hegelian (proto-Marxist) or right-Hegelian (orthodox Christian).  The present writer concludes that Hegelian theory presents the development of natural consciousness as the key to understanding the process of philosophy and theology, but does not guarantee the ultimate content of Religion.

      God, the ultimate condition for the possibility of religious experience, remains only an abstraction until the Absolute Idea externalizes itself as Nature and Spirit in pursuit of Absolute Knowing.  Hegel maintained that natural consciousness recognizes an immediate presence of God and does not rely on introspection of its thoughts in order to infer the existence of God as an external entity (¶ 758 in Phenomenology of Spirit).  Speculative knowledge (das spekulative Wissen) regards God as pure Thought, Essence, Being, Existence, and Self (¶ 761). Existing independently of any finite being, God is Being itself, i.e., Absolute Being or the highest degree of reality.  Finite beings are more or less real in proportion as they are more or less self-determining, which is to say, more or less rational.  Thus, one arrives at the familiar Hegelian principle, “the real is the rational, and the rational is the real.”  In view of Hegel’s Axiom, God is also Thought itself, possessed of Absolute Knowing, devoted to the recollection of its lived experiences, and “sunk in the night of self-consciousness” (¶ 808).  

      In the Introduction to his Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, Hegel observes that “one could easily arrive at the view that a widespread, nearly universal indifference toward the doctrine of the faith formerly regarded as essential has entered into … public [consciousness, and] … the work of salvation has taken on a significance so strongly psychological … that only the semblance of the ancient doctrine of the church remains.”  Thus, even in the 1820’s Hegel was battling against the indifferentism expressed on the 1920’s film vignette previously cited.  The task of the philosophy of religion is, in Hegel’s view, to show that God can be known cognitively.  Hegel proposed a four-fold theory of religious knowledge: Faith, or immediate knowledge, is the certainty that God exists, albeit without insight into the necessity of that existence.  Feeling, or the subjective aspect of immediate knowledge, has the critical shortcoming that it cannot make judgments of true or false, or of good or evil, until it has been fortified by thought.  Representation (Vorstellung) is the content of faith in pre-rational form, as in Biblical stories that bear allegorical, metaphorical, or mystical senses.  Finally, thought is the content of faith in rational form, which provides context, relationships between ideas, and universality.  In a memorable passage, Hegel emphasizes the preeminence of thought in religious knowledge: “Animals have feelings, but only feelings.  Human beings think, and they alone have religion. 

      For Hegel, Christianity was, generally speaking and from all indications, the fullest expression of revealed, true Religion available in his time.  There were parallels between orthodox Christianity and his dialectical philosophy.  For example, in the Biblical text, Philippians 2:7-8, divine consciousness appears as Christ, who “emptied himself … obedient to the point of death …” (English Standard Version) or “entäuβerte sich selbst … gehorsam bis zum Tod …” (Schlachter 2000).  This emptying was an essential part of the process of God reconciling the world to himself in Christ (Second Corinthians 5:19).  This divine emptying and reconciling is an analog of self-consciousness externalizing itself while resolving contradictions in its understanding of the world and, thus reconciled, returning to itself. 

      In summary, and in the opinion of the present writer, the Hegelian dialectic proposes to specify the process by which on-going philosophical and theological developments occur and to facilitate an understanding of the religious past and present.  In Hegel’s philosophy of religion, God can be known cognitively via faith, feeling, representation, and thought, thereby increasing the chances of successfully “walking by faith and not by sight” (Second Corinthians 5:7).  The Hegelian dialectic does not, however, predict the relative future success of any particular religion (including the many branches of Christianity), because unintended consequences of rational actions jeopardize the future development of any particular religion: A promising and orthodox particular religion today may become a desiccated husk tomorrow. 

      (Unless the author is swept away by the rapidly evolving coronavirus pandemic, the next posting date for this blog will be July 1, 2020.)