UNDERSTANDING HEGEL 5
OR: NO MORE THESIS — ANTITHESIS — SYNTHESIS
Win Corduan
This is the last preliminary post for "Understanding Hegel." If find Hegel's system incredibly intriguing, and, since he certainly had a lot of influence, we should get his philosophy right. So, in the insert, we see a summary of the prior three transcendental philosophers. Let me emphasize again that the transcendental approach inherently makes all knowledge heuristic. It can never say, "X is Y," but only, "If we know Y is true, then X must be true because X is a necessary condition for Y " So, to apply this method to Schelling, for example, if we stay true to the transcendental method (which Schelling himself eventually did not), we should not read him as saying, "The Absolute exists," but, "given our knowledge of ourselves and our place in the universe, we must stipulate the idea of an Absolute." Ontology gives way to the criteria for self-knowledge.
Let me mention one other philosopher and his system in order to try to stress the difference. This is John Scotus Eriugena, or variations thereof, such as John Scottus Erigena; the meaning is basically John, the Irish-born Gaelic man (AD 815?-877?). Ireland had been a refuge for classical learning during the early Middle Ages. For example, it was one of the few places in Europe where Greek was being taught, and Greek works were being read and copied. During the short-lived Carolingian Renaissance, Charlemagne and his grandson, Charles the Bald, attracted some of the better scholars of the day to the Frankish court in Aachen, and Eriugena apparently spent most of his life there. The story that he met his death in the English town of Malmesbury, where his students supposedly stabbed him with their writing quills, is most likely fictional. Nevertheless, professors and teachers today should be relieved that lap tops and tablets have replaced sharp pointy objects for note taking.
Contemporary with Eriugena, there was a monk named Gottschalk of Orbais (808?--867?). Gottschalk (lit. "God's Fool") had studied the works of Augustine and had devised a rather harsh doctrine of predestination and election, which he began to preach, teach, and promote with his writings. In fact, he insisted that predestination was double-edged; if there is an election to salvation for the saints, there must also be an election to damnation for the reprobate.
Gottschalk taught his doctrine wherever he went, which is a significant way of putting the matter because he went a lot of places, finding himself banned from one area, he would have to move somewhere else. Nobody much liked his doctrine, and apparently his personal disposition also annoyed people. Any number of ecclesiastical figures tried to get him to recant or suffer the punishment due to heretics (which, at the time, included physical violence, but not yet necessarily being burned at the stake). So, King Charles the Bald, together with his trusted advisor, the archbishop Hincmar, called on Eriugena to write a refutation of Gottschalk's teaching.
Eriugena went right to work on this project, but when it was done, nobody was particularly pleased with the book or the man who had written it. The Irish sage did indeed defend a position different from that of Gottschalk, but he had gone in the opposite direction from what had been expected of him. He expounded the idea that there is, indeed, no double-predestination. Instead, all of creation is predestined eventually to be united with God, which doesn't mean that they become God; the essential division between Creator and creature does not dissolve in the union.
The title of Eriugena's books was De Divisione Naturae, "On the Divisions of Nature." Following his grounding in neo-Platonic philosophy, he thought of all reality as ultimately, originating with the One, or God, emanating from him into the multiplicity of particular things, and eventually returning to him. He described "Nature" as the totality of all that exists, which is gradually moving in a cycle. The four stages are: 
- That which creates and is not created. This is, of course, God.
- That which creates and is created. This expression refers to the Platonic Forms, which is to say the ideal blueprints of creation, which serve as intermediary entities between God and the physical world. But, since they are emanations from God, they have not totally lost their identity with God.
- That which is created and does not create. That's the world of finite creatures, but--again-- they are divine emanations and, thus, share in the nature of God. Consequently, their finitude is only a temporary condition because eventually they will return to their creator into whom they will be reabsorbed.
- That which is neither created nor creates. This is God, once again, but this time after having completed his movement through the cycle of creation.
If you are at all familiar with Hegel's system, you may immediately recognize the similarity between the ninth-century Irishman and the nineteenth-century German. If not, hang in there, it'll be quite obvious shortly. For now, let me just say that Hegel's system is also a huge circle that includes God as not-creating, creating, and then again not-creating. But there is a huge difference. What we see in Eriugena is a description of what is real according to his neo-Platonic vision of things. His circle moves forward, from God's uncreated being through his creation, returning to his uncreated being once again. But Hegel's system, since it's transcendental, moves backwards, as it were. In the pattern we described above, he begins with our consciousness, shows that it cannot be true consciousness unless it is self-consciousness, moves on from there to show that true self-consciousness is not possible without God, makes the case that God could not be possible without an Absolute, argues that the Absolute could not exist without there being consciousness, which is ultimately self-consciousness, and so on. I'll supply details as we move on.
So, my point is simply to highlight the two different ways of building a system. In Eriugena's case we begin with a reality that produces a further reality, including conscious creatures. In Hegel's case, we will begin with our consciousness, which--as something that is a given--demands the stipulation of a "God-idea" and the "reality-idea" to make it work. This is the difference between metaphysical philosophy and transcendental philosophy. Next time, we'll begin actually looking at Hegel.
