UNDERSTANDING HEGEL 20
OR: NO MORE THESIS — ANTITHESIS — SYNTHESIS

Win Corduan

Part 20 Some Conclusions

Finally, I'm ready to bring this series to a close. As I said earlier, as long as the faucet is producing potable water, I will leave it open to flow. In my humble estimation, from hereon out the water may still be fit to drink and of interest to anyone who wants to dig deeper, but it would drip rather then flow. So, after several abortive attempts turn the handle to "off," this will be it. ---That is, as I always stipulate, unless there is a serious question or comment requiring an entry-long response, which would be fine with me.

My over-all major point has been very simple: The only way to understand Hegel properly is to understand him as a transcendental philosopher in contrast to a metaphysician.

Whereas a metaphysician asks, "What is the world like?" or "What is being?" or "What is reality?", the transcendentalist asks, "What are the conditions that make knowledge of reality possible and certain?" Their answers may look very similar (cf. the systems of Scotus Eriugena and Hegel's system), but they arrive at them very differently, the metaphysician (at least in the best cases) beginning with the fact that something exists and that there is being, the transcendentalist with the heuristic assumption that we can have knowledge of something existing, or that we believe that there is being.

Skipping over all of the intervening explanations, digressions, and personal anecdotes, there are two points connected as the bottom line:

1. Ignoring the transcendental nature of Hegel's methodology will lead to a truncated and distorted understanding of his writings;


2. The use of the transcendental method, all protests notwithstanding, permanently disables Hegel's philosophy from being able to make positive objective assertions concerning reality, except insofar as his transcendental deduction (the dialectic method of the system) leads him to such a point.

You cannot attain metaphysical truth if you do not begin with a metaphysical intent. One can either lament this assessment as a defect in the system or accept it as a price worth paying (I would take the former option), but one simply cannot regain that from which one has intentionally detached oneself as one's starting point—the chronic disease of much of modern philosophy, viz. Descartes and his successors.

This apparent deficiency (or intentional forfeiture), becomes particularly clear in the context of Hegel's thought in relation to Christian theology. This issue was obscured somewhat by the historical frenzy in the aftermath of Hegel's death, where the Left Wing Hegelians interpreted him as a virtual atheist and went on from there to stretch the alleged anti-Christian premises in Hegel's thought to extreme conclusions. In contrast to them, Hegel himself and the Right Wing of his followers can be thought of as "conservative" and, possibly even, as "orthodox and trinitarian." However, this characterization is true only by contrast, not by historical standards of biblical orthodoxy. Hegel's God, by virtue of being embedded as one of the "categories"—a shape of consciousness—of his self-sustaining system, which is grounded in transcendental subjectivity, can only be described as "panentheist," viz. a scheme according to which God and the world mutually depend on each other. His trinity carries an important speculative function in the system, but it is not the God of the Bible, as described in the creeds of Nicaea and Chalcedon.

So, what do I personally, your Thomistic bloggist, see in Hegel?

Some of my former students may still remember that I said in class once, "I admire it as I would admire a beautiful pagan statue." 

But more than that, given the unquestionable strong influence of Hegel on the last two centuries—some of it restricted to the speculative realm, some of it receiving practical (and usually unjustified and unjustifiable) application—Hegel is one of the many important figures of the history of Western thought whom I must know, and whom I must try to understand. He is said to be of particular influence in providing the philosophical undergirding for a number of theologians. Sometimes this is true; sometimes it isn't. I need to understand the theologians, and so I need to be able to discern their philosophical assumptions, and thus I must be able to recognize the presence of Hegelian thought in their writings. See my articles: "Hegelian Themes in Contemporary Theology" Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society 22/4 (December 1979):351–361; "Hegel in Rahner: A Study in Philosophical Theology" Harvard Theological Review 71(1978):285–298; "Transcendentalism: Hegel" in Norman L. Geisler, ed., Biblical Errancy: An Analysis of Its Philosophical Roots (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1981; now Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock 2004), 79-101. I already mentioned my recent article "The Theology of Hegel." 

In trying to understand the nature of our present-day culture, I must be aware of its philosophical roots. And if I should engage in such intellectual archaeology, then I should do so with awareness of the turf in which I am digging.

• Thus, if I were to claim that contemporary relativism arose from Hegel's dialectic, I should be sure that I understood the dialectic correctly--and I would not have. The whole point of his system is to "salvage" truth from within shapes of consciousness, never ever to declare that two contradictory propositions can be true simultaneously.


• If I asserted that Hegel's philosophy was the fountainhead of various forms of totalitarianism, I should be certain that this statement would be consistent with Hegel's own writings--and it would not be. I mean, how many times does Hegel have to state his fundamental assumption that human beings should be considered free simply because they are humans? How often does he have to insist that political tyranny is a bad thing?


• If I intended to hold Hegel's political philosophy responsible for the wars of the twentieth century, I should make that accusation only if I had strong grounds for doing so--and I would not be able to find them. In contemporary modal logic, it is frequently stated that among the propositions that are necessarily true are accurate statements about the past since it's impossible to change them. A world in which Beethoven was a great painter would have been possible, but now, after the fact, its denial and the actuality that he was a great composer are unalterably true. The same reasoning applies to wars throughout history. Looking back at the battle of Jena in 1806, it was a necessary condition to end the Holy Roman Empire. That is what Hegel considered to be the "necessity" of wars in history; it was not a call to arms and bloodshed in the present or future.

In short, accuracy in the history of philosophy is worthwhile for its own sake, it seems to me. But in particular, to point out the obvious, if I'm trying to find the cause of one or more phenomena in contemporary thought and settle on the wrong one, I'm missing the right one. As non-controversial as that observation sounds, some contemporary writers appear to shrug it off with the excuse that, since there is no scholarly unanimity, and since Hegel has been singled out as the "culprit" so many times anyway, there is no harm in keeping one more issue at hisdoorstep [references on request at my discretion]. Yikes! Aside from the dubious nature of such "scholarship," this attitude is lethal to any further advance in cultural analysis. Any subsequent attempts to correct a problem that has a distinct philosophical origin are going to founder because we have identified the wrong cause to begin with. For example, when Francis Schaeffer named Hegel as the "doorway" to philosophical despair (The God Who Is There, IVP, 1967), by which he meant that his "synthesis" led to relativism, which, in turn, led to skepticism, he did more than misrepresent Hegel; he directed the attention of his readers to the wrong person and, thereby, made them miss the right person to blame. (Who was it who gave himself an exemption from the law of contradiction? Do you remember? It wasn't Hegel.)

As I think we have seen, in Germany, the philosophy of Hegel was invoked and mutilated by the Left Wing Hegelians, with Hegel's own thought being left behind in the library stacks. As Andrew Seth (later called Andrew Seth Pringle-Pattison) discovered, by the end of the nineteenth century, true Hegelianism in Germany was no longer a part of the larger philosophical conversation. [Andrew Seth, From Kant to Hegel (London: Williams and Norgate, 1882).] As American philosophy was emerging, it assumed its celebrated pragmatic character, which had little use for Hegel's cosmic deliberations. The French were struggling with their own issues, which eventually led to the preeminence of Bergson--as well as the Existential Thomistic revival guided by Jacques Maritain and Etienne Gilson (whom I still admire, despite his absurd treatment of Hegel). However, in England, particularly at Cambridge University, idealism became a powerful school for a time, and a number of these idealists, e.g., John McTaggart (1866-1925), made heavy use of Hegel's philosophy. However, they presented Hegel's thought as based on that very rigid logical methodology (thesis-antithesis-synthesis), which is not a part of Hegel's own thought, and which deprived Hegel's thought of its creativity and, quite frankly, of interest. If the Hegelianism of the Cambridge Idealists reflected Hegel's philosophy, I would never have been fascinated by Hegel. Still, I needed to identify this school because in my subsequent notes, I will refer to it at times. "The Theology of Hegel"

As a Christian apologists, I am hoping that some of my co-workers in the field will come to a point of revising their wrong view of Hegel's philosophy sooner rather than later. Not too long ago, a speaker at an apolgetics conference once again intoned on Hegel's alleged "thesis-antithesis-synthesis." This continuous misappropiation does not particularly damage our reputation as Christian philosophers since most of the non-Christian world doesn't seem to get Hegel right either. But wouldn't it be nice of Christians could take leadership in some of these lesser understood areas of philosophy?