Religion as a Problem

Religion is an exciting topic. Not just for philosophers, but of course also for sociologists, psychologists, theologians, and many other disciplines and beyond the arena of academics almost all people. Whether they are ‘believers’ in any religion or not. My own identity as a person in the western world is mixed up with many questions and opinions concerning the relevance and validity of the Christian faith, and the meaning of Islam that is changing the cultural landscape in Europe. All of which is expressed in the single word that refers to all of this: “God”.

For believers and non-believers the significance of that word is obvious. It is either the imaginary friend or fictional Big Brother that functions like an invisible Korean dictator that punishes ‘mind crime’ (Christopher Hitchens). Or it is the name for the Ultimate reality, the origin and source of everything we are, the highly personal Heavenly Father to which all our prayers need to be addressed. The New Atheists deplore the mindboggling superstition that is at work here, the religions of the world seem shrouded in their complacent certainty about absolute truth.

Religion seems to be concerned with what is Truth in the highest and most encompassing sense. It is concerned with the absolute as a ‘region’ in which all riddles of the world, all contradictions of our thoughts and all the pain of our feelings are resolved. Eternal truth and eternal peace – that is the absolute as ‘God’. Everything we do and are is ultimately focused on this one single ‘entity’ God – all human relations (love thy neighbor as a commandment), all moral behavior, all sciences and arts have their center in ‘God’. God functions as the beginning and the end of all things, it is the source of everything and the limit and goal of everything.

According to Hegel this ‘God’ is the only and exclusive object of philosophy. In God everything must be known. Everything must be understood with reference to God, everything particular has its origin and meaning in God. That is why

Philosophy is theology, and the involvement with philosophy or rather within her is ‘worship’ (Gottesdienst). (Vorlesungen uber die Philosophie der Religion (Manuskript), Meiner, 1993, p. 4) 

To know about this God involves however only the labor of reason. Hegel locates his own endeavor to understand God within the tradition of ‘natural theology’  – “the extent of what pure reason could know about God.” (Ibid, p. 3) Hegel begins with the distinction between pure rational knowledge about God and ”positive, revealed religion” that is known by other means than rational means alone.  Theologians concern themselves  always with “religion and its contents, yet only religion itself is lost from sight.” There is a kind of professorial industriousness concerning historical circumstances, philological matters, Church history etc, that produces a mass of historical – and irrelevant – knowledge.

The question is now, how Christian doctrine (that is concerned with understanding the nature and essence of God on the basis of revelation) is related to the philosophy of religion (that is concerned with ‘God’ as a pure thought).

The State and the Pursuit of Wealth

The question

Whatever we can say politically about the State and in every analysis of its sociological condition, the State must somehow be identified as the condition of our existence as citizens and as necessary for our survival. This function of the State is not obvious from our experience alone. In its most immediate and unreflective form, we experience the State as a Power that directs and limits our freedom. Yet, on the level of reflection we understand its necessity for survival.

But the role of the State goes beyond that of securing the fulfilment of our basic needs. It is also on the basis of this social reality that human beings are able to amass wealth and become to some degree independent. It is this function of the State that appears to be somewhat paradoxical. Though the State provides the conditions for the pursuit of wealth, the effect of wealth is also to some extent a negation of the State. People like Paul Getty and Bill Gates may not be above the Law, but even within it they enjoy a freedom that is beyond the imagination of most people. Wealth provides them with the means to express their individuality beyond the definition that society gives them as equal under the Law, as a citizen in short.

Although the conditions of survival are universal for all citizens, wealth by contrast is a highly personal category, as it is the result of chance and labour that is attached to an individual being. The category of “property” is just part of what we mean when we talk about wealth, as we will see. Beyond that legal category, wealth is connected to a degree of personal freedom, and independence from the vicissitudes of ordinary life. Money, simply put, can bail you out; justice can be bought. If so, then even injustice can be procured if you have the means to employ a good lawyer.

On an anecdotal level, much can be said about the way wealth functions in our society, how people may profit from the current economic crisis and are shielded from its consequences, while others have seen their wealth vanish before their eyes and some have been reduced to dire poverty.

This crisis poses many questions, but not all of them are political or economic. One of the more fundamental questions surely, is the question how the power of the state and the power of wealth in our society are related. Questions about too much state regulation or the demand that the State should intervene to prevent crises like this have been posed by politicians and economists.

So how are State and wealth related? It may require a philosophical investigation to get to the heart of the matter. The economic crisis that sweeps over the western world warrants a philosophical debate about the principles involved in the current debate about the economy and especially about the State’s responsibility either to resolve that crisis now or her response to the criticism that she has somehow caused it.

Let me next try to explain what I understand economists to be saying about this crisis.

Summary of the Phenomenology

http://hegelcourses.posterous.com/summary-of-the-phenomenology

 

 

 

The New Season

Hi all,

Hegelcourses.com is going to take a break, once again, just for a month or so. August will be a time for reflection, study and leisure – and decision making.

After two years of teaching and discussing the Phenomenology I have to admit that I didn’t find the time to study the materials – again – in depth, and that I somehow lost my interest in the intricate details of Hegel’s system. My philosophical questions have moved, with some vehemence, to questions that are vital to me and my current profession.

So, I am going to take a break from the Phenomenology, that is from the reading of the text page after page, chapter after chapter. I am even going to take a break  – well in part- from Hegel himself. Because my questions are getting urgent.

What are my questions then?

First of all, a question that haunts me from my early youth is the question concerning the existence of God. What does it mean to affirm that existence? What does it imply for my existence if I can affirm it? What problems arise from philosophical scrutiny of such affirmations? And what does such an affirmation actually entail? Or rather, what does “God’ mean?

Secondly, I have questions concerning the understanding of society. What does liberty mean? Why is ‘happiness’ something that ‘all men aspire to’? What is the State and what is its role within social life? What is the justification of power and is a society without violence possible?

Both these questions are somehow interconnected, ‘God’ being the symbol that in earlier days was used to affirm the solid foundation of statehood – of sovereign power controlling all social life. Not so long ago, a Dutch philosopher even pleaded for the return of religion in order to produce a more solid binding between members of society. That moral responsibility was evaporating could only be counteracted by a religious fervor that would make such morality more ‘absolute’ and more based on neighborly love.

From the viewpoint of a theologian – one of my viewpoints therefore – these questions are certainly loaded with significance. Almost every Sunday I deliver a sermon in my Church, I teach dogmatics and ethics from biblical texts, and speak to the faithful about our common faith, as expressed in the Nicene Creed in the 5th century. “I believe in God the Father, creator of heavens and earth, etc.” What if after all God did not exist? What am I doing then?

And the same goes for my other question. If the State is truly “God on earth’ then the Kingdom of the heavens is a religiously formulated ideal, that should be expressed secularly if only to get more support. Then social justice is not about the intervention of a divine ruler, but about the progress in the righteousness of our institutions – only a direct political struggle would then be meaningful. My theological point of view, that takes issue with the self-evident nature of the State, rejects ‘statism’  as a form of idolatry and therefore views the Kingdom of God as an Intervention, should then be corrected. Either Hegel is right, or the theology of the eschatological Kingdom.

Such are my questions. And there is very little time to do much about them, unless I can somehow incorporate them into my site. I can’t do both. Well, why not? My site after all is MY site. I can do with it whatever I like. If you like to join in, you are welcome. If not,  I’m sorry to see you leave, but I still need to be faithful to my questions. As do you, I understand that…

So a change is coming up. Maybe the site – and the wiziq lectures connected to them – will focus more directly on my questions, which implies a reading of Hegelian texts of a different nature:

1. Hegel’s texts on Religion

2. Hegel’s texts on social philosophy.

And even more to the point: it will involve reading others besides Hegel, Adorno e.g. and Jacques Ellul, Derrida, Heidegger, Kant and Levinas, and of course: Slavoj Zizek.

The wiziq lectures would be free studies of themes, the lectures without any previous structure, apart from the fact that they revolve around God and the State. Most of the teaching would be in the form of audio or video lessons, made available on wiziq or on the site. Most of the interaction would be through email or wiziq, at the most two hours a week.

Let me try that for a year. There will always be time to return to the line by line reading of the Phenomenology. It will still be there. Waiting patiently to be explored. As the rabbi’s would say: we will return unto you, Phenomenology. But not for a while.

So my holiday: starting on august 4th, and ending august 29th. After that I will make the announcements. If you see a blog appearing in between, you bet I am just having fun during my vacation.

The Truth of Perception: Encyclopedia par. 422

The Encyclopedic version of the Phenomenology can be used as a guide line for the interpretation of the separate Phenomenology – of course only with regard to the chapters on Consciousness, Self-consciousness and Reason because Spirit, Religion and Absolute knowledge are missing in the Encyclopedia. Elsewhere I have tried to answer the question why this is so.

When reading the chapter on Force and the Understanding, it can be useful to read the corresponding section in the Encyclopedia: par. 422 – 424. It gives the logical structure of the transition and not the dialectical development – which is in conformity with the character of the Encyclopedia.

In par 422 Hegel calls it the “near truth of perception” that the object of consciousness is ‘appearance’ of something that in itself is universal. This universal is, as we know from the separate Phenomenology the unconditioned universal that no longer refers to the multitude of sense-certainties. When we take the object as the outward manifestation of a thought – a thought that contains the determinacy of the thing perceived – we understand that thing to be an appearance.

Appearances are not perceived, consciousness therefore has moved away from that mode of cognition. It is no longer perception but ‘reason’ . (That is finite reason: Verstand and not infinite reason: Vernunft.)

This universal thought that is thee inner being of the appearances, is described by Hegel with two separate ideas.

First, it is abstract identity. It is whatever sense-certainty and perception actually sense and perceive, it is that very same content. The universal thought here is just everything that ‘goes on’ in whatever we perceive: the contradictions, the logical forms, the movement from the One to the Many e.g. all of that taken together. Hegel speaks about the “sublated manifold of the sensuous” that is posited and negated at the same time. The summary of all of the experience of consciousness in sense-certainty and perception is simply that this (individual) is a ‘what’ it is (universal). Every thing that I perceive becomes an expression of the thought that I have of it too. And that thought is also the condition of me perceiving it in this manner.

Hegel uses the word “Force” in the separate Phenomenology and in the ‘Zusatz’ to par. 422. to express such an abstract identity.

Maybe the example of the magnet can help. The magnet and the metal object beside it as perceived objects. I see the one attracting the other. The universal is that there is such a thing as magnetic force, that may be found in many perceived objects all of which are magnets. The individual thing here (this particular magnet) then becomes an appearance of magnetic force in general.  So the thought of magnetic force can now be seen as the ‘abstract identity’ behind the perceived object – summarizing the perceived things and their relationships, including all of their inner contradictions.

Second, this manifold of perceived qualities are also contained in the notion of appearance. But this content of the appearance is not an absolute given, but a ‘inner and simple distinction’. The difference between magnets and metal objects, the movement of attraction and repulsion, is simply an expression of the universal. They are instances of a law. There is a regularity to the appearances and their vanishing and appearing, that can be expressed as a ‘quiet and universal depiction’ (a mirror image), or as a realm of the ‘laws’ of appearances.

Such laws do not explain, but summarize in an universal form, whatever the appearances are.

That we have truly arrived at the level of understanding, of thinking, is expressed in the opening sentence of par. 423.

The law has its necessity in itself. Why? because the distinction between law and the apperances it governs, are only within itself. Let me try to explain. When I apply a law, I do so on the basis of the appearances that I perceive. The law contains nothing but those appearances in the form of the universal. These appearances themselves are what they are, and ‘behave’ according to that law. In the perceived objects – as appearances –  therefore there is no distinction between the law according to which they behave and whatever they are themselves.

I can make that distinction however within myself  and talk about the application of a law, or interpret the appearances as giving rise to (soliciting) that application. The distinction therefore falls within me and the law that I think of is not dependent upon  something in reality outside of it. If not dependent upon something other than my own thought, it is necessary within itself. The determinations that I can talk about are immediately contained in the other: the distinctions within the law are at the same time the distinctions within the appearances.

What does it mean however to have such a distinction between law and appearance – between thought and perceived reality – only within myself? In reality the Law is active within the object – in my thought it is the same though I can make the distinction. I can further distinguish between reality that follows the law and its appearances as indistinguishable and myself who is able to make that distinction. The distinction that I make therefore in my thought, is actually no distinction at all in reality. I distinguish what is indistinguishable in reality. But since law and appearances in my thought are identical to the same in reality, the distinction is actually no distinction at all.

The shape of consciousness that tried to oppose subject and object and keep them separate and independent, is now vanished. The final distinction is lost and seen as a formal addition that actually does not imply a distinction at all. Consciousness, the subject of it, has an object that is actually not distinct from it. It is a consciousness (as subject) of consciousness (as object). It is therefore self-consciousness in the sense of this consciousness of itself as object! This ‘ as object’ is important to note here. It is NOT a consciousness of itself as such. Consciousness knows itself as its object.

That only means that consciousness knows everything it knows to be ‘his’. I know about myself in every sense-certainty, perception and understanding of an object. The self-consciousness that Hegel will deal with in the next chapter is therefore tainted by this abstract identity. It is abstract individual self-consciousness, and not the universal self-c0nsciousness that is Reason itself.