Romanticism and nostalgia are two afflictions of the intellect against which I have tried to be particularly vigilant. The reason is obvious and requires little explanation. “The grass is always greener on the other side of the fence”, is a cliche, but it is nonetheless true. Also, I have come to be an enemy in my thinking of all counterfactuals. Though I have given up on any idea of “Divine Providence”, nevertheless I think that things happen for a reason, especially from our point of view. Or rather, our point of view is the result of things happening in a certain way, in a certain sequence, and so on. Thinking that they could have happened otherwise is a pointless exercise.

Nevertheless, it could be argued that one can be too vigilant against these afflictions, especially if you become blinded to other realities that exist in the here and now. That of course is the mentality of the imperialist conqueror who destroyed indigenous peoples throughout the world and committed genocide all under the impression that the world could not be otherwise. The danger among some leftist tendencies is to “baptize” such imperialist ideologies under the pretense that the destruction of other cultures is needed and inevitable. It is easy to wash ones hands like Pontius Pilate over the broken body of Jesus, stating that we didn’t bring this evil upon the world, but we shouldn’t let a good catastrophe go unexploited. That might be a “realistic” approach, but arguably it is not an ethical one.

It is in that light that I discuss hDr. Daniel Everett’s work, Don’t Sleep, There Are Snakes: Life and Language in the Amazonian Jungle. The book is the result of a unique story of one missionary’s encounter with a unique tribe in the Brazilian Amazon, the Pirahã. Dr. Everett arrived with his family to try to learn the Pirahã’s language in order to translate the Bible for them and thus convert them to Christianity. Many had tried to learn the Pirahã language, but few had been successful, and none to the point of being able to interact with the tribe and learn about their culture. In the process of learning their language, Everett discovered that it had no relation to any known language, and that Pirahã culture had aspects that made it unique among all of the world’s tribes. For one thing, the Pirahã have no words for or concept of numbers, colors, cardinal direction, or history. They have no religion, no gods, no sense of the afterlife, and no creation myths. According to Everett, they are natural empiricists and pragmatists: when Everett tries to tell the Pirahã about Jesus, they immediately ask him if he has ever met him. When he says that he hasn’t, the Pirahã response was, “Then why are you telling us about him?” Most significantly from a scholarly perspective, the Pirahã language has no recursion as far as most scholars can tell. This was the main thrust of Everett’s polemic with Noam Chomsky as the father of modern linguistics, and the primary theme of the documentary based on Everett’s book entitled, The Grammar of Happiness, that can be viewed in its entirety above.

Everett’s polemic against Chomsky summarizes the point that I would like to make here as well. Chomsky has written that recursion is an essential characteristic of human language because it reflects how the brain works; it is practically embedded in our DNA. Everett and many scholars trying to study the Pirahã have concluded that this is the one language in the world that is documented not to have recursion. According to Everett, if the Pirahã language doesn’t have recursion, then it could hardly be something essential to language. When talking about what is essential to language, especially in the Chomskyan schema wherein language is almost genetically encoded, exceptions don’t prove rules, they nullify them. In that sense, if something as basic as recursion is not essential to human nature, it is perhaps the case that neither are number, direction, history, or any other abstraction. Pace Neoplatonism, modern evolutionary ideologies, or any number of thought systems, the things that are embedded in the human mind that make us truly human may be few and of great variation.

The effect that this has on Pirahã life is quite noticeable as one might expect. The Pirahã live entirely in the present according to Everett, and don’t save for tomorrow. The Pirahã don’t have any rituals to speak of, or any ceremonies. Marriages are contracted and dissolved with little societal drama. Children are not physically disciplined, and there is no “baby talk” in Pirahã: a child is treated like an adult practically from birth, taking into account only physical limitations. The Pirahã live a rather Spartan lifestyle, working when they have to and often going a day or two without eating. In spite of having no sense of abstraction, they have a name for everything in their surroundings. And one thing that Everett asserts at the end of the book is that the Pirahã are probably the happiest people on earth. Anthropologists have measured the amount of time that the Pirahã are smiling or laughing, and it is by far greater than the sullen dispositions of many of the tribes and Brazilians around them. This encounter with the Pirahã results in Everett losing the faith that he was supposed to be sharing with the Pirahã in the first place.

That is not to say that they don’t have their problems. Everett casually comments on how one girls was gang raped by the men of the village, though he doesn’t elaborate why. Brazilian traders often try to give the Pirahã alcohol in exchange for various goods, and this results in drunken parties by the men in which the women and children flee the village for their own safety. Everett also describes various harrowing scenes in Pirahã life that seem cruel and almost inhuman to outsiders, specifically letting women and children die for reasons of benign and not-so-benign neglect. Their lives may be comparatively happy, but they are by far not easy. Rather ominously, however, at the end of the above documentary it is shown that the Brazilian government is trying to reach out to the Pirahã in the form of schools, building projects, and the introduction of modern technology into their lives.

The question here for me arises is how much of the sufferings of indigenous people throughout the world is caused not by their primordial poverty and ignorance but is rather as the result of outside violence of civilization and empire. Could the lack of abstraction and the seeming natural happiness of the Pirahã be due to the fact that their impenetrable language limited their contact with colonization and European influence? It is of course impossible to say. I have been thinking recently of the indigenous people who inhabited the place where I grew up. The Ohlone Indians were the tribe that inhabited the central coast of the state of California where I was born and raised. Of course, I have no blood relation to them, but I cannot help but wonder what the land must have looked like when they inhabited it. This brief segment highlights an oratorio based on the life of the last speaker of the Ohlone language. Ascención Solórsano de Cervantes:

From my reading of Ohlone life, they pretty much had it made before the Spanish came. The mild climate and the abundant flora and fauna made for a life in which they had to do little to get by. True, they didn’t live longer than we do, but they didn’t spend most of their time giving their life energy to feed the surplus of others who were not immediately part of their lives. Indeed, the first task of the missionaries was to get the Ohlone to develop a concept of work, because only in getting them sedentary and subjugated could they be properly “catechized”. Instead, they were pretty much wiped out.

I suppose I should wrap up my reflections in terms of formulating briefly the contrasts that I am discussing here. “Primitive” people are not by nature superstitious, as is seen in the Pirahã’s complete lack of religion. Nor is it possible to separate what we see as pernicious in “primitive” societies from their interaction with “civilization”. It is at least a supportable hypothesis that what we see in the Pirahã is the best example of a human society under-influenced by civilization: the impenetrability of their language made such influence virtually impossible. Thus, any philosophical idea of development or evolution is impossible: when something is not present, it cannot evolve. Indeed, these abstractions that are the foundation of our politics, our sciences, and our history could very well not exist, and we would be perfectly fine without them. We might even be happier if they didn’t exist. There is no way of knowing either way, but at the very least we should be aware that they might be in large part due to genocidal violence and thus are far from “natural”.

http://radicalprogress.info/2013/05/05/the-revolution-will-not-be-secularized-loves-communism-religion/

Well, it seems that the Great Purges have occurred on this blog, and I have come out as top dog. Long live the Glorious Socialist Blog Fatherland! I can tell that people are unsubscribing to this blog as I type this. This will give the rest the extra push needed to go on to more serious sites.

One thing I notice in reading other leftist “friends” on Facebook is how radically different my life is from theirs. Many are hopping from classroom, to cafe, to exciting lecture, discussing all of the minutiae of the latest theorist who they find exciting or pertinent in our current situation. Et. al. Me, I am changing diapers and blowing bubbles in the suburban backyard with my kids, waving at my neighbor who is cutting his grass in a wife-beater. The most exciting theoretical discussions I have with any random person is what restaurant has the best gumbo. True, if I were younger and less attached, I could hang out with the cool kids in the city, but my situation is what it is. I know what the pseudo-bohemian life is (I first got involved in activism in the Bay Area, after all). But give the average American a choice between your life, dear reader, with its mass transportation, crowded dirty streets, and irregular hours, and my life, with the clean strip malls, the parents pushing kids in strollers, and the joys of long distance commuting, most Americans would pick my version of things, hands down. If you as a leftist find no problem with this, then you are only in it for the glorious perks of being a weirdo. Hate to break it to you.

Similarly, most of my Facebook “friends” rhetoric would go over cold in this “red state” stronghold. For every awesome scheme that most socialists dream up, I have about ten neighbors who would think that this would be tantamount to totalitarianism. “You mean I have to give up my massive Ford truck and/or SUV and ride a bus with all of those [black] people?” “You mean you would allow my airhead sixteen year old to have rights and have a say over how his/her school is run?” “You mean that I would have to give up my big house with a big yard in order to live in a sustainable collective living situation where we sit in meetings all day discussing what color the washing machines should be?” You get the drift. Of course, I could be erecting straw men here (and reactionary ones at that), but as they are my neighbors’ straw men, I have to put them out there. Many of you are shuddering over your Mountain Dew and Cheetohs thinking that I must live in some awful boring racist dystopia. But the fact that you think that is precisely the problem. Without these people, your revolution isn’t going anywhere. You have dreams of what society should look like, solutions to all of the things that are wrong with the world, and so on. You envision a utopia that everyone should work towards. I am just telling you that most people think your utopia sucks.

Please don’t get me wrong. There are days (even entire months) where I wish I were magically transported back to the Bay Area fifteen years ago, where I had conversations with random ex-classmates talking about how they dropped their Latin class to focus on their Sanskrit. I would love to see Hare Krishnas processing down the street, or accept an invitation from a guy I met studying Portuguese to go see his modern dance theater troupe perform. I would love to again be within walking distance of five decent South Asian restaurants, as well as a sushi place, a jerk chicken diner, a little boutique shop that sells jamón serrano, etc. etc. It is strange that the political economy of the left as I experienced it was based on such places as these: on abundance and not lack. And it is no wonder that fast-food eating, radio talk-show listening, NASCAR-watching America hates your fucking guts. It’s not because you oppose empire, it is because you ARE empire, or rather, you get all the spoils, and they make all the sacrifices, or so they think. Okay, perhaps they could do without the ten Ethiopian restaurants on one street, but from where they see it, their humdrum average lives raising their kids in a boring conservative suburb is what feeds your supply of discontented youths who are so glad they fled those suburbs and the petit-bourgeois lifestyles of their parents, blah, blah, blah. Only, you claim to look out for their best interests, and they beg to differ. And the track record is proving them right, because what has the left done for them lately?

I am a person of the Left. I will be until my dying day. But I can’t stand the pretentiousness, the infighting, and the detachment from the reality of ordinary people that is symptomatic of leftist thought. That is why I think it won’t get anywhere. It doesn’t even know what it wants, let alone how to get it. And ordinary people, people who have to solve such exciting problems as to how to fix the leaky toilet and how to get their kids to bed on time can smell incompetency from a mile away. The “Left”, or progressives, or whatever you call it, has only shown itself to be good at propagating itself, and that is about it.

Switching gears a little bit, I have been following a certain polemic of one group of leftists against another. For the sake of protecting the identities of the guilty, I won’t name names. However, this particular leftist censuring comes concerning the Palestinian question. Apparently, one left talking head put out an internal memo saying that the only future for Palestine was as a “settler colonial state” of Israel, citing that this was the only thing possible for the Native Americans as well, etc. And at this, many other leftists (rightfully) went ballistic. It is of course a racist position to take: saying that the “bourgeois” nature of Israel trumps the right to self-determination of the Palestinian people (supposedly “non-bourgeois” and “pre-modern”) is myopic and idiotic. But the more I thought about it, the more I concluded: “Isn’t this what Marxists do anyway at all points in history?” In other words, for the orthodox Marxist, liberation only comes about when the material conditions for it exist in actual existing society. It could be argued that if the only way to drag the Palestinians kicking and screaming into modernity is through the Zionist tank, then how could a good materialist disagree with that? Would any Marxist come right out and say that slaves in ancient Rome had the absolute right to burn down the whole city if it meant their freedom? Would they have backed the “reactionary” peasants against the nascent bourgeoisie trying to take their land and thus force them to become the proto-urban proletariat? What would become of the vaccine for polio, the Apollo moon landing, and the latest iPhone model if the “right people” didn’t win those battles? I would also challenge any Marxist to give an alternative counterfactual model for bringing the indigenous peoples of the Americas into “modernity” (leaving aside that “modernity” is precisely the product of their mass genocide and enslavement). What if the hypothetical indigenous person outright turns down our Marxist humanitarian saying, “I appreciate the offer, but I have to be frank in saying that your utopia of modernity sans violence and genocide still sucks.”

Of course, a good Marxist would argue “apples and oranges”, and the game would be up for me on one level. Palestine isn’t the Americas 1491, and Netanyahu is not the World Spirit speaking from the halls of the Knesset. However, it still stands that the Marxist has some explaining to do. Once you conclude that human liberation can only be based on the abundance that modern capitalism produces, but supposedly mismanages, then your primary responsibility is to preserve the well-oiled machine of capital until its control falls into the “right hands”. Far be it from the good leftist to butcher the goose that lays the golden egg. I recently heard someone cite Ernst Bloch when he said that the reason Marx sounds the way he does at times is because he is trying to think like capital. In order to act like a fish, one must become a fish. In order to understand capitalism, one must write at times like a stuffy and anal accountant. From this we have the challenge and the dull ecstasy of reading Capital. However, how many “good” Marxists have lapsed into reaction and even outright barbarism because they got lost in the maze of trying to think “like capital”, for not wanting to sabotage all that is “revolutionary” in capital’s triumphalist march to the ends of the earth, and not wanting to pound the immorality of the present order of things too much lest we get lost in the ethereal realms of idealism? The answer is: “too many”. And it is the same tendency towards calculation that turns revolutionaries into professors, activists into bureaucrats, and people, like me into passive aggressive ex-Marxists with axes to grind. At the end of the day, you hang out in your hipster hookah bar, and I go back to watching Hello Kitty cartoons with my daughter, and nothing changes, precisely because we don’t want change. We like things the way they are, thank you very much.

If there are one thing that we as the “Left” lack it is a prophetic sense. Prophets in the Bible said stuff that got them killed just because it was right to say it. The left as a collective has either had its prophets killed off or silenced, since no one like a loser. Honestly, the only two very small prophetic voices I hear nowadays are the two or so remaining liberation theologians and anarcho-primitivists. What do they have in common? From my perspective, it is precisely the refusal to base change on “abundance”. If Jesus is both the first liberation theologian and anarcho-primitivist, it is precisely because he was willing to base his new “unKingdom” on the political economy of the backwaters of Galilee and even its surrounding deserts. “God will provide,” is just pious speak for, “shit will take care of itself, and if it doesn’t, oh well”. True enough, like the Israelites in the desert eating manna and doves, perhaps it won’t be pretty, or particularly fulfilling, but at least it can be sustainable. In the end, everyone’s utopia seems to suck, but at least this order of things will prove un-exploitative precisely because no one has anything to exploit. If anyone sees a better way out of this, I’m all ears.

It’s been fun.

Sincerely,

Derick

A helpful guide to reading Scripture from the point of view of resistance to empire is Wes Howard-Brook’s impressive volume, “Come Out My People!”: God’s Call Out of Empire in the Bible and Beyond. The book is a whirlwind tour that takes the reader from Genesis to Revelation with the simple trope of “the religion of Creation vs. the religion of Empire” as a guide. Though Howard-Brook gives sufficient nuance where appropriate, for me he convincingly argues that this theme is indeed the essential one in understanding the entire scope of Biblical history. In an intellectual climate where not wanting to resort to “easy answers” more often than not leads to academic and intellectual paralysis, Howard-Brook’s reading is refreshing for its depth of moral commitment and scholarly rigor that does not hide its biases. In the end, I think these biases turn out to be the very same ones expressed in the text itself.

Before proceeding further, one must define what “the religion of Creation” is as opposed to Empire. The author realizes that a term like “Empire” can be vague and pejorative to the point of being merely ominous without analytic rigor. Empire can very simply be defined as a major political unit having a territory of great extent or a number of territories or peoples under a single sovereign authority. This authority has political and ideological control over local elites who in turn govern a populace largely unable to respond to their exploitation by the powers above them. In contrast to this, the Biblical vision hearkens back to a time before empire, and thus before domination and exploitation, where egalitarian kinship and the idea of gift governed the order of society. In religious terms, the earth itself is God’s temple, whereas the first unit of empire, the Great City, is often founded around a temple made by human hands.

Howard-Brook’s narrative thus starts at the beginning, in Genesis, but this turns out to be the middle of the story. According to the contemporary scholarship that the author cites, Genesis is a book written around the time of the Babylonian exile in the 6th century BCE by Jewish elites who are contemplating what went horribly wrong in their state building efforts in ancient Israel. It was composed to counter the ancient Babylonian creation myths which would have had great sway over them as a conquered people living in exile. The main lesson is that the city is evil and the empire is not the source of life and order. Only the God found in the wilderness, the God who made heaven and earth, is truly enduring.

The next section of the volume goes back into a more chronological order in terms of when the books of the Hebrew Bible were actually written. Howard-Brook makes the obvious point that what would have been written first would have been the books documenting the reigns of the kings of Judah and Israel. Indeed, he documents definitively that the Book of Exodus was likely written against King Solomon, with the Pharaoh in the story of the departure from Egypt being a portrait of Solomon himself. Indeed, the ancient Israelites being enslaved to make bricks had more to do with the cost and toil needed to make Solomon’s temple in Jerusalem than anything that supposedly happened in Egypt centuries before. Even Solomon’s wish to God for knowledge of good and evil in I Kings 3 is the basis for the tree bearing forbidden fruit in the Garden of Eden at the beginning of Genesis. Solomon is then the real arch-villain throughout the Bible, even if he is not condemned directly. It is no wonder that even Jesus states that a wildflower in the field is more greatly adorned that the temple that Solomon built (Matthew 6: 28-29).

The rest of Howard-Brook’s narrative of the Bible is far too complicated to cover here. The overall sketch that one comes up with is that the drama of Israel is one of a once free people trying to define themselves against imperial domination from both within ancient Israel and from without. More than likely, the ancient Israelites obtained an identity as loosely confederated tribes resisting the efforts of hegemonic powers such as Egypt and Babylon to dominate them. They came under the rule of the southern region known as Judah with the understanding that this would protect them from foreign military domination. However, after the reign of Solomon, the northern tribes known as Israel separated off from the “protection” of Judah and its capital Jerusalem since that political arrangement turned out to be just another web of domination and exploitation. The voice of prophets emerged condemning the imperial ways of the kings of Israel and Judah, as well as forecasting disaster if justice was not obtained for the least of the people. In the end, a sort of uneasy whitewashing of the history occurred, particularly after the end of the Babylonian Captivity, and all of the stories, both imperial and anti-imperial, began to be joined into one book we now know as the Bible.

This is how it was up to Jesus’ time, but Jesus’ anti-establishment polemic against temple religion did not emerge from nowhere. Howard-Brook is quick to attribute much of the spirit of what evolved into Christian apocalypticism to the “Enoch tradition” that sought to trump claims that the imperial way of doing things could be founded on what the great lawgiver Moses passed down. The ambiguous figure of Enoch appears in the “approved” Scriptures only in Genesis chapter 5 as a just man who walked before the Lord and was “taken up”. In the “apocryphal” books of Enoch, criticism of the temple cult and the unjust social order that accompanied it was based on a source “older” than Moses. It is in this spirit that Jesus began his ministry and founded the revolutionary Christian message.

If these is one disadvantage of the book, it is that Howard-Brook seeks to cover the entire New Testament in less than one hundred pages. In all fairness, however, by the time he takes up the New Testament, the reader should have in place all of the exegetical tools to read Jesus’ preaching and actions against the religion of Empire. If Howard-Brook’s assessment of the Hebrew Bible is mixed in terms of its advocacy for a religion of Creation over a religion of Empire, the ministry of Jesus and the early Church is one that is definitively on the side of the former in the author’s estimation. Jesus’ mission is unambiguously against the Roman Empire and the temple cult that was the centerpiece of an exploitative political economy that robbed the bread of the widow and orphan. Jesus and his early followers were forging an uncompromising if nonviolent path towards resistance to Roman rule, as well as a clear rejection of the Temple itself that had its basis in previous apocalyptic and prophetic literature. In Howard-Brook’s estimation, even St. Paul’s core message was contrasting the order of the new assemblies, or “churches”, to the rule of Rome. The Bible of course ends with a clear anti-imperial text, the Book of Revelation cited above, in which Empire is portrayed as both Whore and Beast: appealing because of its impressive structures and complex cultures, but destructive of people and ultimately of the earth itself. It is only in the restoration of all things realized as the triumph of the religion of Creation that history itself is made whole again.

How does one approach this telling of the Biblical story from our own perspective living at the imperial center in 2013? Howard-Brook at the end of this book promises a sequel to show how Christianity became what it is for the most part today: an apology for empire employing the “pie in the sky when you die” promise of reward for those who collaborate with the present social order. Empire as a phenomenon is of course alive and well in the present. International capital with the United States being the military hegemon is perhaps the greatest empire the world has ever seen, determining the entire fate of nations by the mere movement of numbers on a computer screen. The first fundamental point perhaps would be that it is difficult for us as inhabitants of the center of Empire to see the full web of exploitation precisely because we are on the inside looking out. Hence, the story that begins this essay is something that would be almost blasphemous to the “average American”. For even the most reactionary and even bigoted person living elsewhere, the true nature of the political and economic order of the present world is abundantly clear.

I would like to step back for a second and begin my own overly-idiosyncratic view of the story so far, starting like Howard-Brook from the very beginning. For this, we will need to resort to historical abstraction, though hopefully the portrait will have some semblance to the actual reality of the imperial form as it has taken shape throughout history. Let us say that we have a random village of hunter-gatherers, horticulturalists, and/or pastoralists. One day, warriors arrive from the Great City and tell them that they are now subjects of the king of that city. From that day forward, they will have to give a certain portion of their crops / herds for the upkeep of that city, and if they don’t, their village will suffer the consequences. Soon, the ideology of that city, known as the religion, spreads to the village itself. Whereas before, there were local sacred groves, rivers, streams, mountains, and other places in nature thought to be the habitation of benevolent local spirits, the deity of the temple in the middle of the city also must be worshiped in the village, and may even take precedence over the local spirits, or be syncretized with them. Soon, true worship, just as true order, can only be achieved through the mediation of the Great City. Even their view of reality becomes centered on the order of a central deity who upholds the cosmos just as the King / Emperor / Tyrant orders all things for the “good” of everyone and everything.

In other words, “God” with a capital “G” is born: a God who excludes all other gods, local shrines, local beliefs, etc. or at the very least “properly orders them” in hierarchies of reverence and devotion. In my own readings of G.W.F. Hegel, particularly the Phenomenology of Spirit and the Philosophy of History, it is clear to me what God or the Absolute is for Hegel: God is the Soul of Empire. The Hegelian twist, which is nothing more than a clear exposition of the tensions that Howard-Brook expertly draws out in his text, is that the God of the Bible is a self-hating and/or conflicted God. This is a God after all who in the Hegelian reading dies on the Cross, revealing himself to be nothing other than human potential writ large. The Christian God is always attacking itself because it is a conflicted phenomenon of the religion of Creation (the religion of the village before coming under the Great City) and the religion of Empire. While it seems that the anecdote told above is one that has taken place in a primordial past, it is very much a confrontation still occurring throughout the world today. Wherever the local becomes merely a tool for the broader imperial whole, the process is repeated over again. This occurs just as much in the leveling of a shrine to a local “saint” in Latin America for the sake of broader Catholic orthodoxy as it does in the edict of the banker who attests that social services need to be cut on the national level for the sake of “economic growth”.

The real question at hand then is: “Can we really come out of Empire?” Is there a way to develop a social order apart from the domination of the periphery by the center that is based on a series of hierarchical dichotomies of domination: man over woman, white over dark skin, owner over producer, etc.? Are we doomed to always erect temples to which all resources must be sent like a bank, even if they are, you know, actual banks? And is “Creation” really an alternative that one can separate from Empire, or merely a nostalgic longing for a past that never was? I have expressed before my skepticism of the Gospel as a political program, and I reiterate that I still have some reservations here. I must make the rebuttal, however, that any anti-romanticism against “primitive societies” should take into consideration the egregious record of violence of modern civilization against those societies. There is no comparison between the occasional outbreak of personal violence in a hunter-gatherer society and the systematic genocide of those societies committed during the early modern and modern era by “civilized people”.

With Ched Myers, and perhaps Wes Howard-Brook, I repeat that what has been holding progressive forces back from opening the doors to new possibilities is the rejection of the Cross as a political program. I don’t mean this in a confessional or even a particularly religious sense. St. John in the Book of Revelation describes Empire as both Whore and Beast. The Beast characterization requires little explaining. The Empire is a Whore because it uses beauty, technology, riches, and comfort to lull its subjects into thinking that it propagates a just order of things. Some people just have to die, to paraphrase Caiaphas in the Gospels, so that the Empire might live, since the Empire is the source of all that is good. The acceptance of the Cross, the means by which Empire terrorizes people into subjection, means that Empire is rendered powerless. Once we reject Empire, with all of its pomps and works, we realize that we do not need it to eat, to shelter ourselves, to laugh, and to love. That is already provided by the earth itself without labor, and the proof is the past and continued existence of peoples who have little or nothing to do with the Empire in their daily lives.

To put it another way, for every reason to do justice in our current situation, there are two to commit injustice for the greater good of the economy, the nation, religious morality, etc. To move forward, we have to offer up someone as the scapegoat, or the victim, or the slave. And ultimately, we are afraid of the consequences of not doing so. It is arguable that even some radical ideologies such as Marxism either try to think away this dynamic, or condemn it only as temporary. Perhaps the message of the religion of Creation as outlined in Howard-Brook’s reading is that if true justice can be done, it cannot wait, and it cannot be done on the backs of some for the benefit of others. The temple at the center of the Great City must be thrown down, come what may. Whether the result of this radical rejection is the Cross or exile in the wilderness ultimately does not matter: the prophetic message of the Book of Revelation is that the Empire cannot stand. And the increasing awareness of ecological crisis in our context confirms this. The real question now is what will come after.

To end on a personal note, as a formerly devout Catholic, I have to say that it is hard for me to “leave Empire” considering my own religious history. I speak here not of any affinity for the current practice of the Church, but out of a nostalgia for previous empires of Christendom and all of their accouterments. To be quite frank, I still like Gregorian chant, Mozart Masses, Baroque religious paintings, ecclesiastical architecture, and even pomp and ceremony of clergy to a certain extent. I think in the United States in particular among a certain set of conservative Christians, the Catholic Church offers an impressive collection of historical artifacts, buildings, ideas, and organization. For many in an ever-changing world, this is an intoxicating option compared to most other disembodied and constantly shifting ideologies. But one must be reminded that these qualities come forth from a long history of oppression and domination; of empire, simply put. That is not what Jesus or the first Christians intended, and while even Protestants have sold out after an initial “Whore of Babylon” critique of the Catholic Church, the anti-imperial message is still the primary good news worth preserving in two millenia of “Christendom”.

More importantly, empire afflicts us in our comfortable suburbs, in our professional lives, and in our very personal relations with each other. We trade freedom for security and get neither. We exchange economic stability for growth and get only more poverty. We search for love in things and we only get more desire, flashed onto our televisions and computer screens in the form of images of things we can’t have and which wouldn’t make us happy even if we possessed them. That is the illusion of empire: the peace that is not really peace that the world gives. In showing us the Cross, the ultimate triumph over the “great imperial hologram” to paraphrase writer Joe Bageant, Jesus was not showing us merely a way to “immortality”, but also the only way out of this trap. We only need to build up the courage to finally come out of Empire.

Reblogged from Symptomatic Commentary:

Reblogged from Deterritorial Investigations Unit:

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The story goes like this: Earth is captured by a technocapital singularity as renaissance rationalitization and oceanic navigation lock into commoditization take-off. Logistically accelerating techno-economic interactivity crumbles social order in auto-sophisticating machine runaway. As markets learn to manufacture intelligence, politics modernizes, upgrades paranoia, and tries to get a grip. 1

These are the opening lines of “Meltdown,” a short, hallucinatory psalm, spoken on behalf of the capitalism of the information age and, more specifically, the schizoid bifurcation points occurring in the cracks and fissures it triggers across the globe.

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Reblogged from Idiot Joy Showland:

Monday of last week marked the first annual George Orwell Day, seeing Penguin's rerelease of several of his books, mass giveaways of his essay Politics and the English Language, and the launch of an Orwell season on BBC radio. (Purely by coincidence, it was also 'blue Monday' - the day calculated by to be the most depressing of the year.) For a supposedly radical writer, Orwell fits very comfortably into the cultural mainstream.

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Ryan Haecker is a scholar on the Christian theology of German Idealism,  analytic theology, and Catholic History. He and I set down to discuss how Hegel’s Christian context is oft not understood by many Hegelian thinkers.

C. Derick Varn: Why do you think Hegel’s relevance as a specifically Christian thinker has been downplayed over time?

Ryan Haecker: There is a long-standing reticence to acknowledge Hegel as a Christian theologian. Controversy surrounding the Christian and orthodox content of the philosophy of Hegel has swelled since before Hegel passed from the world in 1831: Hegel had already in his lifetime been accused of denying a personal God, logizing the Holy Trinity, theologizing history, eleaticizing Spinozism, Pantheism, materialism, idealism, reactionary conservatism, radical republicanism, Prussian nationalism, liberal cosmopolitanism and Bonapartist imperialism. Some of these allegations may be more warranted than others, but even a cursory glance through the diversity of allegations and appropriations which have been made of the philosophy of Hegel during and after his life testifies to the bewilderment, excitement, and animosity stirred up by Hegel’s philosophy. There are, to my mind, three primary reasons for this medley of bamboozlement and controversy: First, like no philosopher since Airstotle in the age of Alexander the Great, Hegel claimed, in the age of Napoleon, the imperial crown of sovereign philosophy by negating the conclusions of all hitherto existing philosophical systems, as well as asserting the superiority of his own doctrine – which simultaneously incorporated and appropriated the philosophies which he asserted himself to have superseded in thought. Second, Hegel announced the messianic and world-historical importance of his very own philosophy, which he held to have completed – as far as was possible in his own historical moment – the truth of religion and reason, that was only signified for imagination in the Christian Gospel. Ordinarily such claims would result in either confinement to a lunatic asylum or – as with Friederich Nietzsche – a struggle with immovable reality to the contrary that might well precipitate a mental collapse, but Hegel’s extraordinary claims were plausibly, as with those of Jesus Christ’s, fulfilled by extraordinary results. Third, there is the unmistakable circuitousness, complexity, and gothic intricacy of Hegel’s writings, which belabor scholars for years just as they baffle and frustrate casual readers. The consequence is a general unwillingness of most – even scholarly readers – to devote the considerable labor of thought required to grasp the central ideas of Hegelian philosophy. The grandness of Hegel’s self-estimation combined with the difficulty of his texts contributes to the suspicion and hostility towards the philosophy of Hegel among most thinkers, but especially among Christians for whom Hegel represents both the potential for the dialectical advancement, negation, and nullification of the central tenets of the Christian religion.

C.D.V.: What do you think is the key theological truth of Hegel?

R.H.: There is nothing in Hegel’s philosophy of Absolute Idealism which is not implicitly related to the Absolute, to theology, and to God. God is present from the first moment of sense-certainty, as the “richest and poorest truth,” to the complete realization, in thought, of the Absolute Idea. In the introduction to the Encyclopedia of Philosophical Sciences Hegel wrote: “The objects of philosophy, it is true, are upon the whole the same as those of religion. In both the object is Truth, in that supreme sense in which God and God only is the Truth. Both in like manner go on to treat of the finite worlds of Nature and the human Mind, with their relation to each other and to their truth in God.” All thought from the barest manifold of intuition to the most majestic apprehension of the entire cosmos is ideal participation in the divine life of God. For Hegel as with Paul of Tarsus, God is Hen Kai Pan - All in All -in whom we all ”live, and move, and have our being” (Acts 17:28). In this regard, Hegel follows the ancient idealist tradition of Parmenides, Plato, Philo, Plotinus, Porphyry, and Proclus; as well as the medieval mystics from Augustine and John Scotus of Eriugena to Bonaventure, Meister Eckhart and Joseph Boehme; and finally the modern idealists of Spinoza, Kant and Schelling.

Since the 13th century nominalists had overturned the great medieval synthesis of the Angelic Doctor Thomas Aquinas, theology had suffered from an ever-widening chasm between saecula (the sacred) and seculorum (the profane), Deus (God) and mundi (the World), Caelo (Heaven) andTerra (Earth). This is Lessing’s Chasm which characterizes the dualisms of modern philosophy. In the theology of Thomas Aquinas this chasm results from the transcendence of God’s simple unity over the composite created world; in the theology of John Duns Scotus this chasm was the consequence of the division between God’s necessary and accidental attributes, or between those things which are rationally necessary by divine reason and those things which are merely possible according to divine will; in the philosophy of Descartes this is the dualism of the perfect infinite incorporal God and the mechanistic corporal universe; in the philosophy of Leibniz this is the dualism of the Monad of Monads and the necessary cooperation of the infinite multiplicity of subordinate monads; in the philosophy of Spinoza, this is the dualism of thought and extension; and finally in the philosophy of Kant, this is the dualism of reason and intuition, concepts and percepts, and of the noumenal and the phenomenal realms. In every case, infinite Eleatic-Platonic simple transcendent One is opposed to finite multiple composite Milesian-Democritean atoms of material Nature. The ambition of the identity philosophy of Schelling and Hegel was conceived to be a purgative corrective to modernity’s infinite repetition of the antitheses of the infinite non-Ego with the finite self-positing of the Ego. Schelling writes:

“The genuinely speculative question remains: how may the absolutely One, the absolutely simple and eternal Will from which all things flow, expand into multiplicity and be reborn as a unity, i.e. into the moral world… The question would be an indispensable and unavoidable problem if this philosophy [of Fichte] actually made what is for it the Absolute into a principle as well – but it rather carefully guards against this and lets the whole of finitude be given to it, very conveniently along with the… common dogmatism that the Absolute is a result and something that needs a justification… What is the characteristic of this philosophy [of Fichte] is just that it has given new form to the age-old dichotomy between the infinite and the finite; but such forms may be legion – none lasts, and each carries impermanence within itself. It cannot found anything permanent. An enthusiasm that fancies itself to be great if it sets its own Ego up in its thoughts against the wild storms of elements, the thousand thousand suns and the ruins of the whole world, makes this philosophy popular; and also makes it dumb and hollow otherwise – a fruit of the age whose spirit has for a time exalted this empty form, until the age sinks back as its own ebb sets in, and the fruit along with it. What abides is only what supersedes all dichotomy; for only that is in truth One and unchangeably the same… Only what proceeds from the absolute unity of the infinite and finite is immediately and essentially capable of symbolic presentation; capable of true philosophy; of becoming religion, or an objective and eternal source of new intuition; a universal model of everything in which human action endeavors to portray the harmony of the universe.” - F. W. J. Schelling, On the Relationship of the Philosophy of Nature to the Philosophy in General, Kritisches Journal der Philosophie, I, no. 3, 1802

The philosophy of Spirit of G.W.F. Hegel can be conceived of as a dialectical reconciliation of the finite world of our ordinary experience with the infinite ideal life of the Absolute, which is God’s infinite being. The success of this reconciliation is meant to fulfill the promise, in thought, of the Christian religion and restore the august throne of speculative philosophy, or metaphysics, as the sovereign science: “The germ of Christianity was the feeling of separation of the world from God; its aim was the reconciliation with God -not through a raising of finitude to the infinite, but through the infinite’s becoming finite, or through God’s becoming man… All the symbols of Christianity exhibit the characteristic that they represent the identity of God with the world in images” (ibid.). The genuinely gnostic ambition of German Idealism is salvation, neither through faith or works alone, but through both together in the theoretical and fideistic praxis of philosophy, which is both devotion to God and love of holy wisdom – Hagia Sophia. Hegel considered himself a religious reformer. Yet unlike Luther, Hegel did not endeavor to widen but to reconcile the opposition of faith and reason; church and state; and man with God. He brought the sword of negativity down upon only those philosophies which maintained themselves in self-certain fixidity, refused to “tarry with the negative,” and thereby “blasphemed against the Holy Ghost.” Like Kant, Hegel’s purpose was irenic: to pacify the endemic strife of thought that tossed into ceaseless tumult the Republic of Letters - “Blessed are the Peacemakers for they shall be called sons of God.” (Mt. 5:9)

The key contributions of Hegelian philosophy to Christian theology corresponds  in a threefold way, to the persons of the Holy Trinity: First, the philosophy of Mind, in the Phenomenology of Spirit, is Christocentric as it aims at nothing less than the approach of the subject consciousness with the eternal reason of God: this culminates in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ in the final moment of religious consciousness; the dark night of the soul; the speculative Good Friday in which God is dead, that concludes the logical sequence of historical religions; dissolves all nature, objectivity, and natural religion into the subjective stages of consciousness; and reconstructs each and all according to the Spirit of Pentecost, the apostolic Church, and the Gospel of speculative philosophy. Second, the philosophy of logic, in the Science of Logic, is theocentric as it deduces the three persons of the Holy Trinity from logical generation of the heavenly Father into the three moments of Being, Essence and Concept; which come to be manifested in the encyclopedic divisions of Logic, Nature and Spirit; and which are altogether united in the ceaseless eternal self-loving - immanent and economic - logical procession of the Holy Trinity. Third, the philosophy of history, in the Lectures on the History of Philosophy and the Philosophy of History, is pnuematocentric as it illustrates the efflorescence and vital activity of the Holy Spirit as logic directs the sequence of events in history through the temporal realization of the eternal providence of God. The triadic division of Hegelian philosophy; into Father (Logic), Son (Mind) and Holy Spirit (History); is altogether integrally united in the Science of Logic, in which Hegel intends to demonstrate nothing less than the Trinitarian logic and essence of the Triune God. The result must, if correct, be at once the culmination and resolution of centuries of antitheses in theology, science and philosophy, and of no little interest to all speculative thinkers of some spiritual depth.

C.D.V.: Do you think reading Hegel without this Christian background has led to a profound misunderstanding of his work?   If so, what are the key misunderstandings?

R.H.: There is both an interpretation of the philosophy of Hegel in which his “Christian background” is denied, as well as an interpretation  in which his “Christian background” is acknowledged and yet considered inessential to his philosophy. In every case, the genuine question must be, not whether Hegel is acknowledged to have believed in Christianity or to have lived in a largely Christian nation, but rather whether his philosophy is essentially Christian. Hegel did not understood philosophy to be Christian because he himself was a Christian, any more than he held philosophy to be German because he was himself a German (although he once remarked that he would teach philosophy to speak German). Rather Hegel held religion to be essentially reasonable, and reason to be essentially religion, just as Christianity is essentially philosophical, and philosophy is essentially Christian. The opposite categories are altogether united in the speculative identity of the Absolute Idea. Hegel writes in the Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion:

“The human spirit, in its innermost nature is not something so divided up that two contradictory elements might subsist together in it. If discord has arisen between intellectual insight and religion, and is not overcome in knowledge, it leads to despair. This despair is reconciliation carried out in a one-sided manner. The one side is cast away, and the other left alone held fast; but man cannot win true peace in this way. The one alternative is, for divided spirit to reject the demands of the intellect and try to return to simple religious feeling. To this, however, the spirit can only attain by doing violence to itself, for the independence of consciousness demands satisfaction and to renounce independent thought is not within the power of a healthy mind. Religious feeling becomes yearning hypocrisy, and retains the moment of non-satisfaction. The other alternative is a one-sided attitude of indifference toward religion, which is either left unquestioned, or ultimately attacked and opposed. That is the course followed by shallow spirits.”

Thus, it is a misunderstanding to suppose that Christianity is somehow capriciously attached to the philosophy of Hegel, as an afterthought brought in through the window. Schelling and Hegel wrote:

 ”We do not even recognize as philosophy any view which is not already religion in its principle, [and] we reject any cognition of the Absolute which emerges merely as a result – we reject any view which thinks of God in himself in some empirical connection; precisely because the spirit of ethical life, and of philosophy, is for us one and the same; we reject any doctrine according to which the object of the intellect must, like nature, be just a means to the ethical life, and must on that account be deprived, in itself stripped of the inner substance of that life.” (Kritisches Journal der Philosophie, 1804)

In his celebrated three critiques of reason, Immanuel Kant believed himself to disclose the essence, potential and limits of reason itself. Following the Late-Medieval nominalist opposition between faith and reason, Kant held faith (glauben) to consist in beliefs that were wholly unsupported by reason (wissen). Hence, the limits of reason fenced in rational understanding just as much as they fenced out irrational belief, so that true religion, like true philosophy, must remain within the secure battlements of self-critical reason – the limits of reason alone. Kant defined the limits of reason to be the antinomies, or paralogisms of reason, which he held to necessarily arise from the uncritical speculation of ‘metaphysics’ beyond the sure lighthouses of analytic deduction and the safe harbors of sensory intuition: inferences of synthetic apriori concepts that, qua synthetic, contain the content of sensory intuition and yet purport to describe objects which are properly supersensible (e.g. the soul, the cosmos and God) cannot be reliably trusted: for every dogmatic supersensible inference, any equally valid yet contradictory inference may be affirmed; and the possibility of affirming valid contradictions results in antinomies, or a contradictions in the valid exercise of the laws of logic; such that reasoning which trespasses beyond self-critical boundaries ineluctably obliterates itself in self-contradictory paralogisms.  In this way, Kant anticipated the Verification Principle of A.J. Ayer and the Analytic Positivists in holding that consistent, i.e. non-contradictory, synthetic a priori truths of reason must be either analytically self-evident or empirically observable. This Kantian prohibition rendered knowledge of supersensible a priori concepts (e.g. the soul, the cosmos and God) totally inadmissible as theoretical knowledge, even while they were necessary for practical reason of ethics, politics and religion.

The consequence of the Kantian prohibition on supersensible a priori concepts was a series of dualisms, between reason and intuition, concepts and percepts, theory and practice, a priori and a posteriori truths, and the noumenal and phenomenal realms. Kant struggled to reconcile these dualisms in the Critique of Judgment, in which the faculty of aesthetic judgment was intended to mediate between reason and intuition, yet only succeeded in producing many more speculative paradoxes. The task of Kant’s immediate successors; e.g. Reinhold, Jacobi, Niebuhr, and Fichte; was to systematize the prolific yet disconnected medley of concepts expounded in Kant’s critical philosophy. This required a single axiom, or ur-form, to carry the weight as a cornerstone for the whole edifice of Kantian philosophy. Imagination, faith, practical reason, consciousness and the transcendental Ego were all proclaimed as sovereign axioms in a furious succession which culminated in the 1796 Wissenschaftslehre of J.G. Fichte. F.W.J. Schelling’s decisive contribution was to oppose the self-positing Ego of Fichte with the Absolute non-Ego of Spinoza’s Nature – Deus sive Natura - and unite both together in the speculative identity of the Absolute Ego, the idea of God. Thus did post-Kantian idealism return to St. Anselm of Canterbury’s “highest idea… than which nothing greater can be conceived.” (the Proslogion, 1078)

After Schelling’s departure from Jena in 1804, G.W.F. Hegel carried his erstwhile mentor’s Identitie-Philosophie even further in his drafted speculative systems. This formative activity culminated in the 1807 publication of the Phenomenology of Spirit, which departed from Schelling in two important respects: the Absolute Idea was placed at the conclusion, rather than at the beginning, of the speculative system; and the deduction of the concepts was dialectical and paraconsistent rather than analytic and consistent. The Kantian antinomies of reason compelled post-Kantian philosophers to choose between reason that was limited to empiricism and analyticity, or somehow embrace the self-contradictoriness of the  antinomies. Hegel departed from Fichte and Schelling; for whom the resolution of the antinomies was either simply self-posited or an ineffable aesthetic intuition; and boldly affirmed that all speculative reasoning must be self-contradictory, paraconsistent and dialectical. The operative principle of dialectic is contrary propositions (i.e. contra-diction). In the philosophy of Hegel, however, ‘contradiction’ does not simply refer to the affirmation and denial of the same proposition; for there can be no ‘fixed propositions’ at all; but rather to the contrary opposition of the conflicting properties of concepts which results in their mutual negation; and this negativity imparts dynamic self-movement to concepts. Just as Plato conceived the cosmos as a world-soul in the likeness of an animal organism in the Timaeus, so does Hegel conceive of concepts as ideal organisms in the full negativity of dynamic self-motion. The Absolute Idea is consequently, like Plato’s world-soul and Schelling’s Weltgeist, the self-contradictory concept of concepts – Forma Formarum - which absolutely envelops and supercedes all possible concepts, all thought and being, as that Reason (nous) which rules the world.

Reading Hegel without consideration of his ‘Christian context’ results in a profound misunderstanding because such readings neglect, dismiss, or diminish the essential role of Christianity in Hegel’s mature philosophical system. This essential role can be illustrated by describing how the Christian religion uniquely anticipated the particular philosophical contributions of Hegel in post-Kantian idealism and the history of philosophy in general.  In the mature writings (1807-1831) of Hegel, Christianity is explicitly dealt with in three places: the final part of C.C. Religion in the Phenomenology of Spirit, the third part (3.3.2.3.) of the Encyclopedia of Philosophical Sciences, and the third part of the Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion: of these, the lectures on the philosophy of religion constitute a more detailed exposition of the Encyclopedia; the Phenomenology of Spirit presents Christianity in from the standpoint of the self-development of human consciousness in history as the culmination of a dialectical sequence of absolute picture-thinking, or religion; and the Encyclopedia of Philosophical Sciences presents religion as the concept which mediates between the concepts of art and the philosophy, and Christianity as the absolute religion which subsumes natural and finite religions within itself. The place of the concept of the Christian religion in the Phenomenology and Encyclopedia systems of Hegelian philosophy signifies its relations to other concepts, both as they are subordinated, superordinated, and sublated. In the Phenomenology of Spirit, the Hegelian christology of the hypostatic union lies at the very pinnacle of the system as the completion of the dialectic of religion; which guarantees, through revelation from the Absolute to itself in mankind, the completion of the preceding dialectical movements, and the ultimate possibility of knowledge of the Absolute. In the Encyclopedia of Philosophical Sciences, the Christian religion is the ‘absolute religion’ through which aesthetic imagination becomes philosophy of the truth. The differing places of Christianity in the Phenomenology and Encyclopedia systems can be explained according to the differing systematic roles of the two works: while the Phenomenology of Spirit presents the successive dialectical movements of naive consciousness in relation to the Absolute, the Encyclopedia of Philosophical Sciences outlines the relation of the Absolute to itself in the successive dialectical movements of its own self-development. Thus, Christianity makes knowledge of the Absolute (C.DD. Absolute Knowledge) possible for-consciousness in the Phenomenology of Spirit, while Christianity mediates between art and philosophy, intuitions and concepts, in the absolute self-becoming of concepts in the Encyclopedia of Philosophical Sciences.

Hegel distinguishes Christianity from all dialectically prior revealed religions (e.g. Zoroastrianism, Judaism, Islam etc.) according to the uniqueness of the incarnation and the ‘death of God’ on the cross. The incarnation of Christ is not merely an act of divine intervention but a world-historical event that, when believed to be true, radically transforms our collective self-understanding; for we then acknowledge our self-same absolute freedom, sacrality, and divinity through the image of the God-man. The deeper meaning of Ecce Homo, “behold the man”, is precisely this; that man sees his own absoluteness in the person of Christ, in which the Absolute Idea of God is uniquely and substantially united with the essence of mankind. Through this revelation, the nature of man comes to be acknowledged as potentially absolute, and hence potentially sharing in the freedom, sacrality and divinity of God. For this reason, the gospels of Christ, through which the Absolute is imagistically revealed, is also an anthropology of man. Hegel held this Christian theological-anthropology to have world-historical importance for the development of reason itself, which is the spirit of the world – der Weltgeist. Faith in the hypostatic union of the dual natures of God and man in the person of Christ is the crucial presupposition that enables the reason to develop with complete confidence in knowing the objective world of the non-Ego and the Absolute. So long as subjective consciousness was opposed to an alien objective non-Ego, there could be no condition for the identity and synthesis of knowledge of things for-us and the things-in-themselves, and scientific knowledge of the cosmos could, with the ancient Skeptics, be assumed to be ultimately unknowable.

This problem is represented by Plato in the sixth and greatest difficulty (133a–134e)  of the dialogue the Parmenides: Parmenides argues against Socrates that, according to the Platonic epistemology, forms may only be related to other forms just as sensible things may only be related to other sensible things; humans cannot know forms just as the gods cannot know human affairs; so that there can never be knowledge of forms or relations of the gods to men. The problem of the greatest difficulty is the problem of mediating the dualist cosmology – the divided line - of Plato’s Middle-Period dialogues (e.g. Phaedo, Republic, Symposium) and resolving opposite ontic categories of form and matter into a consistent unity. This problem of dualism is represented in religious consciousness in the Messianism of the Jews after the Babylonian Exile (582-538 BC). Bereft of the anointed monarchy of the House of David and the Ark of the First Temple, the Jews groaned in agony and expectation for their salvation from invasion, contamination and occupation by foreign peoples (e.g. the Greeks and Romans). The unnamable God – the tetragrammaton ‘YHWH’ – beyond the world was expected to directly intervene as a champion Messiah to shepherd Lord’s people Israel to true freedom and everlasting majesty. The 71st Psalm petitions:

“Give to the king thy judgment, O God, and to the king’s son they justice… He shall judge the poor of the people, and he shall save the children of the poor, and he shall humble the oppressor, and he shall continue with the Sun and before the Moon, throughout all generations… In his day shall justice spring up, and abundance of peace, till the Moon be taken away. And he shall rule from sea to sea and from the river unto the ends of the Earth… And all kings of the Earth shall adore him; all nations shall serve him.”

Thus, both Jews and Gentiles – Jerusalem and Athens – awaited the absolute mediation of God with man at the conclusion of the political development of the antique world, in which the universal Roman Empire united all nations, and:

 ”All the conditions for its production [were] present… These forms [of personality, legal right, of Stoicism and Skepticism] compose, the periphery of the forms, which attend round the birthplace of Spirit as it becomes self-consciousness. Their center is the yearning agony of the unhappy despairing self-consciousness, a pain which permeates all of them and is the common birth-pain of its production — the simplicity of the pure notion, which contains those forms as its moments… The incarnation of the Divine Being, its having essentially and directly the shape of self-consciousness, is the simple content of Absolute Religion. Here the Divine Being is known as Spirit; this religion is the Divine Being’s consciousness concerning itself that it is Spirit… Spirit is known as self-consciousness, and to this self-consciousness it is directly revealed, for it is this self-consciousness itself. The divine nature is the same as the human, and it is this unity which is intuitively apprehended.” - Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, the Phenomenology of Spirit, C.CC. Religion C. Revealed Religion, par. 754-759

The Incarnation of Christ reveals the identity of consciousness and the Absolute through the hypostatic union of divine and human nature in the person of Jesus Christ: “I and my Father are one.” (Jn. 10:30) This revealed identity speculatively reconciles and mediates, for religious consciousness, between the dualities of reason; e.g. Ego and non-Ego, subject and object, sensible and supersensible, Man and God. Through the incarnation, Christianity affirms an indissoluble identity between the reason of man and the reason of God so that we may potentially come to know all things just as God knows himself. Jesus told his disciples: “If you had known me, you would have known my Father also: and from henceforth you know him, and have seen him.” (Jn. 14:7); “For nothing is secret, that shall not be made manifest; neither anything hid, that shall not be known and come to light.” (Lk. 8:17); and “you shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.” (Jn. 8:32). Hegel writes, in the Introduction to the Lectures on the Philosophy of History, “In the Christian Religion God has revealed God – that is, God has given us to understand what God is; so that God is no longer a concealed or secret existence.  And this possibility of knowing God, thus afforded us, renders such knowledge a duty…”  The speculative centrality of Christianity in the essential development of reason and the history of world-spirit is this speculative identity of God and Man in Christ; of all thought and being in the “Absolute Middle” that unites absolutely opposed categories of the subjective Ego and the objective non-Ego; and makes a philosophical science of absolute knowledge possible.

It is sometimes objected that Christianity cannot be the ‘absolute religion’ for this reason because the incarnation of God is not an element that is unique to Christianity: incarnations are also present, for example, in the ten Dashavatara, or avatars of Vishnu, such as Krishna in the Bhagavad Gita. While other religious traditions affirm that God has been incarnated, only Christianity describes the passion, death and resurrection of the God-man Jesus Christ. Hegel describes the ‘death of God’ in both Faith and Knowledge and the Phenomenology of Spirit from the standpoint of religious consciousness. Religious consciousness views God the Father and Christ the Son as indivisibly united in Jesus of Nazareth. The death of Jesus is thus viewed as the ‘death of God’ for both are united in the self-same appearance known through the logical sequence of these appearances. Hegel writes at the conclusion of section C.CC.III. Revealed Religion in the Phenomenology of Spirit:

 ”This [religious] self-consciousness does not therefore really die, as the particular person [of Jesus] is pictorially imagined to have really died; its particularity expires in its universality, i.e. in its knowledge, which is essential Being reconciling itself with itself. That immediately preceding element of figurative thinking is thus here affirmed as transcended, has, in other words, returned into the self, into its notion. What was in the former merely an (objective) existent has come to assume the form of Subject… When the death of the mediator is grasped by the self, this means the sublation of his factuality, of his particular independent existence: this particular self-existence has become universal self-consciousness…. The death of this pictorial idea implies at the same time the death of the abstraction of Divine Being, which is not yet affirmed as a self. ‘That death is the bitterness of feeling of the “unhappy consciousness”, when it feels that God Himself is dead. This harsh utterance is the expression of inmost self knowledge which has simply self for its content; it is the return of consciousness into the depth of darkness where Ego is nothing but bare identity with Ego, a darkness distinguishing and knowing nothing more outside it. This feeling thus means, in point of fact, the loss of the Substance and of its objective existence over against consciousness… This knowledge is thus spiritualization, whereby Substance becomes Subject, by which its abstraction and lifelessness have expired, and Substance therefore has become real, simple, and universal self-consciousness.” (PhG §785)

With the death of the God-man for religious consciousness, the concept of the universal essence of the “objective existence over against consciousness” (PhG §162) is lost and shattered even as “bare identity” of the Fichtean self-positing Ego continues in lonesome cognition. Hegel suggests that the ‘death of God’ phenomenologically reveals, for religious consciousness, the immediate self-certainty, self-subsistence and infinite freedom of the Ego in a way that had formerly been obscured by “the objective existence”, “abstraction and lifelessness” of the non-Ego “over against consciousness.” The positive result of the ‘death of God’ is the absolute dynamism and spiritualization of all thought. Thus the concept of the absolute Spinozist substance is baptized as the divine subject. Hegel first describes this in the preface to the Phenomenology of Spirit:

“The living substance is that being which is truly subject, or, what is the same thing, is truly realized and actual (wirklich) solely in the process of positing itself, or in mediating with its own self its transitions from one state or position to the opposite. As subject it is pure and simple negativity… True reality is merely this process of reinstating self-identity, of reflecting into its own self in and from its other, and is not an original and primal unity as such, not an immediate unity as such. It is the process of its own becoming, the circle which presupposes its end as its purpose, and has its end for its beginning; it becomes concrete and actual only by being carried out, and by the end it involves.” (PhG §18)

For religious consciousness, revealed Christian theology is revealed anthropology. The new conception of the God-man Jesus Christ constitutes a new Christian conception of man: human nature is affirmed to participate in divine reason and divine grace. The final end and highest good of human life is, no longer as with Aristotle magnanimity within a merely human political community (Zoon Politikon), but rather participation in the divine life of the Absolute being through the superabundant grace and beatitude of the Kingdom of Heaven. This echoes St. Paul of Tarsus’s description, in the Epistle to the Romans, of our participation in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ: just as Hegel affirms that Ego becomes certain of itself through the ‘death of God’, so St. Paul affirms that we die, are buried, and are resurrected with Jesus Christ, to establish a hitherto unknown relationship between man and God:

 ”we are buried with him by baptism into death: that like as Christ was raised up from the dead by the glory of the Father, even so we also should walk in newness of life. For if we have been planted together in the likeness of his death, we shall be also in the likeness of his resurrection: Knowing this, that our old man is crucified with him, that the body of sin might be destroyed, that henceforth we should not serve sin. For he that is dead is freed from sin. Now if we be dead with Christ, we believe that we shall also live with him: Knowing that Christ being raised from the dead dieth no more; death hath no more dominion over him. For in that he died, he died unto sin once: but in that he liveth, he liveth unto God. Likewise reckon ye also yourselves to be dead indeed unto sin, but alive unto God through Jesus Christ our Lord.” (Rom 6:4-11)

The ‘death of God’ in Hegel, like the death of Christ in St. Paul, signifies the self-negation of the Absolute.  For the Christian religious consciousness, the self-negating loss of “objective existence” is just as much the death of our objective bodily existence as “we are crucified with [Christ]” so that we might “liveth unto God.” Christianity is thus distinguished from other incarnational religions by, not merely the absolute reconciliation of opposite categories through the incarnation, but also by the absolute self-negation of objective being through the passion, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Hegel’s ‘speculative Good Friday’ is the self-negation of all concepts in the Absolute idea:

 ”Infinity is the pure nullification of the antithesis or of finitude; but it is at the same time also the spring of eternal movement, the spring of that finitude which is infinite, because it eternally nullifies itself. Out of this nothing and pure night of infinity, as out of the secret abyss that is its birthplace, the truth lifts itself upward… the pure concept or infinity as the abyss of nothingness in which all being is engulfed, must signify the infinite grief [of the finite] purely as a moment of the supreme Idea, and no more than a moment… Thereby it must re-establish for philosophy the Idea of absolute freedom and along with it the absolute Passion, the speculative Good Friday in place of the historic Good Friday. Good Friday must be speculatively re-established in the whole truth and harshness of its God-forsakenness… the highest totality can and must achieve its resurrection solely from this harsh consciousness of loss, encompassing everything, and ascending in all its earnestness and out of its deepest ground to the most serene freedom of its shape.” (Faith and Knowledge, 1802)

The “absolute freedom” of the “pure concept” results from the absolute self-negation signified of the ‘death of God’ in religious consciousness. The drama of the Christian religion and the history of reason are united in the “absolute passion” of the ‘speculative Good Friday’, through which the totality of concepts are altogether negated in “infinite grief” and posited anew – resurrected from Hell and “ascending in all earnestness and out of its deepest ground” – of the Absolute Idea.

Hegel’s trinitarian theology  confers the crown of absoluteness upon the Christian religion. Hegel describes at the conclusion of the Encyclopedia of Philosophical Sciences (§575 – 577), how the dialectical moments may be read in three different sequences, with three different subjects, and from three different beginnings: (i) Logic – Nature – Spirit; (ii) Nature – Spirit – Logic; and (iii) Spirit – Logic – Nature.  The divine persons of the Holy Trinity within the triune God are mutually and recursively related, just as the conceptual moments of God are mutually and recursively related:  Logic corresponds to God the Father, Nature to God the Son, and Spirit to the Holy Spirit. The major divisions and subdivisions of Hegel’s work must correspond to the persons of the Holy Trinity because Hegel’s dialectical logic is essentially trinitarian, and Hegel’s conception of the Holy Trinity is essentially logical: the simplest seminal first moment (i.e. thesis) is the Father, the second self-alienated opposed moment (i.e. antithesis) is the Son, and the third reconciling dynamic moment (i.e. synthesis) is the Holy Spirit. The mystery of the Holy Trinity is an absolute self-contradiction: ‘God is one’ and ‘God is three’. Hegel absolutizes contradiction in his Logic by affirming that the Holy Trinity is the absolute contradiction of three divine persons in one God and the eternal universal and living essence of all logic, consistency and contrareity: the contrariness of the Trinity is also Hegel’s dialectical principle of identity in difference, through which he holds contrary opposite concepts to be resolved into the self-identical unity of a master concept [i.e. (A = A∗)&(A ≠ A∗)].  Subsumption (Aufhebung) is this process of resolution, which is simultaneous  supercession, negation and preservation of differing and opposed concepts within a fuller and richer conceptual unity. The triadic relations of the concepts that pervade and dynamize the philosophy of Hegel instantiate these trinitarian logical relations. The conceptual moments of God may relate to one another, as that which is sublated and that which sublates, in as many ways as there are relations between the divine persons of the Holy Trinity. Thus, Hegel’s Christian trinitarian conception of logic and contrareity informed his philosophical contributions to post-Kantian idealism. Hegel’s elliptical axiom “Alles was vernünftig ist ist wirklich, und alles was wirklich ist ist vernünftig” (“All that is rational is real, and all that is real is rational”), can just as well be logicized as the axiom ‘All logic is theological, and all theology is logical.’ The revelation, intelligibility, and divination of universal reason in Christ the Logos was long ago acknowledged by Christian Neo-Platonists such as Clement and Origin of Alexandrian. The Thirteenth Century Dominican mystic Meister Ekhart describes this in the sermon on the Self Communication of God:

“The Father is a revelation of the Godhead, the Son is an image and countenance of the Father, and the Holy Ghost is an effulgence of that countenance, and a mutual love between Them, and these properties They have always possessed in Themselves.”

Dynamic movement is the result of the negative activity of potentiality in actuality, or of some recurring absence within the fullness of substance. Thus negation begets dynamic movement within a self-moving substance. For Hegel and Schelling, the substances of concepts are dynamic when self-negated by contrary opposite concepts: “The Concept is what is alive, is what mediates itself with itself.  One of its determinations is also Being… This is the Concept as such, the Concept of God, the Absolute Concept; this is just what God is. As Spirit or as Love, God is this Self-particularizing.” (G.W.F. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion p. 436) Christianity is the most dynamic concept of religion because, for religious consciousness, the ‘death of God’ is the total negation the concept of the objectified Absolute. St. Paul writes: “Christ Jesus, who being in the form of God… emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, being made in the likeness of men… humbled himself, becoming obedient unto death, even to the death of the cross.” (Phil. 2:5-8) The absolute self-negation of Christianity in the ‘death of God’ is also the most extreme self-alienation and opposition of concepts in the sacred history of God’s children Israel. The dark night of the soul of Good Friday, in which Christ calls out “‘Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani?’ that is ‘My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?’” (Mt. 27:46), historically recalls the grief of the 22nd Psalm over the ostensible abandonment of God’s covenant with Israel during the sack of Jerusalem and the Babylonian Captivity; but also speculatively anticipates the apocalyptic opposition of all concepts, in the moment of our most heart-rending despair, when the essential coherency and self-identity of absolutely everything seems lost: when “things fall apart; the centre cannot hold/ mere anarchy is loosed upon the world” (William Butler Yeats, the Second Coming).

The dynamism of Christianity propels Christian religious consciousness into an expectation of future reconciliation – the Second Coming of Christ – in which the covenantal promise of sacred history is expected to be fully realized. The absolute antithesis of the crucifixion demands an absolute resolution and finale. Any opposed pair of contrary concepts logically demands some third concept to mediate and reconcile each into a coherent self-identity. As (C.CC.) Religion completes (C.) Reason for-consciousness in the Phenomenology of Spirit, so does the teleological end of religion superordain and determine the end of the (C.BB.) Spirit of history. The hopes of the City of Man are informed by the City of God, and the absolute expectations of Christian sacred history inform the expectations of secular philosophies of history, or theories of historicism. The future horizon of sacred history is the theological origin, in revealed religion, of all subsequent progressivist historicism. The ancient pagan Greeks and Roman acknowledged no absolute progress in history. The epics of Homer and the theogony of Hesiod depict a lengthy historical regress from the resplendent reign of the immortal gods to the pygmy age of mortal men. Likewise did the Jews count themselves to be lesser men than their fathers, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. Christian’s affirmed history to be progressive because Christians trust in the promised atonement of their savior, Jesus Christ, by whose death and resurrection God is believed to have conquered sin and death, and restored the pilgrim Church in the progress of faith towards the highest good of eternal beatitude: this hope for the restoration of the world in the eternal goodness of God is signified in the Lord’s Prayer: “Thy kingdom come/ thy will be done/ on Earth as it is in Heaven.” In the Lectures on the Philosophy of History Hegel described the logical and theological origin of this eschatological orientation that is common to all progressivist historicism:

“The truth, then, that a Providence of God presides over the events of the World – consorts with the proposition in question; for Divine Providence is Wisdom, endowed with an infinite Power which realizes its aim in the absolute rational-design of the World… the world is not abandoned to chance and external contingent causes, but that a Providence controls it… The insight to which Philosophy is to lead us is that the real world is at it ought to be; that the truly Good – the Universal Divine Reason – is not a mere abstraction, but a vital principle capable of realizing itself. This Good, this Reason, in its most concrete form, is God… The World Spirit corresponds to the Divine Spirit, which is the Absolute Spirit.”

History is providential simply because God is universal reason, all that is real is rational (“alles was wirklich ist ist vernünftig”), and reality is obedient to God. Hegel’s progressivist historicism is the direct consequence of his trinitarian dialectical logic, in which thesis begets its opposite and opposites are reconciled into a richer unity, and the Absolute is placed at the end as the product rather than the axiom of philosophy. The Lectures on the Philosophy of History should be read as an illustration of historicism determined by the eternal forms of reason described in the Science of Logic. As Karl Rahner would later elaborate, this picture of the self-development of Spirit in history is essentially the dynamic efflorescence of God’s grace, a “universal pnuematology”, and a “salvation history” (Geist in Welt,1939, and Hörer des Wortes, 1944). In the drama of sacred history, the proto-evangelium of the Old Testament is the first act, the Gospels of the New Testament are the second act, and the Acts of the Apostles begin the third and final act, which is prophesied to be completed by the Apocalypse of St. John. The order of the Mass re-presents this trinitarian drama of sacred history as well in the three parts; the Service of Prayer, Service of Instruction, and the Eucharistic Sacrifice; in which the priest assumes the sacramental role as the person of Christ to reenact the sacrifice of the Last Supper, the Passion and the Resurrection. The celebration of the Mass can thus be understood as a ritual re-presentation of the Hegelian themes of progressivist historicism, reason in history, and our eternal and eschatological salvation through our liturgical and sacramental participation in the self-giving Logos of Jesus Christ.

Interpretations of Hegel vary widely, not merely because of the gothic-intricacy of Hegel’s prose, but more especially because readers of Hegel’s texts ineluctably interpret his speculative glosses as re-affirming their own preconceptions. One of literary master-strokes of Hegel was, like Plato, to favorably present opposed theses while neighter affirming nor denying any definite conclusions. By this artifice, Hegel retained for himself a veil of vagaries that elicited from his students a perpetual self-reciprocating dialectic of opposed questions and answers. Consequently, an interpretation of Hegel which purports to show that God is can with no less plausibility be opposed by an interpretation that God is not; just as the interpretation that the philosophy of Hegel is Christian can be opposed by the interpretation that Hegel is not a Christian, but perhaps a crypto-Feuerbachian. The opposed interpretations of the philosophy of Hegel; which were first publicly manifested in the conflict between the so-called old ‘Right Hegelians’ and the young ‘Left Hegelians’; has continued to this day in Christian transcendentist and Marxian immanentist interpretations. It is plausible that my own Christian and ‘Right Hegelian’ interpretation of Hegel has been pervasively conditioned by the preconceived categories of Christian religious consciousness, just as the interpretations of those who may disagree have been conditioned by some rejection of religious consciousness. The formal relation of the concepts in Hegel’s system may frame, but not resolve, the dispute over the importance of the content of religion. The key misunderstanding is then to simply entirely reject the importance of religion in philosophy. As philosophy, like religion, purports to describe the truth, a true reading of true philosophy may only be judged according to the self-legislated norms of reason itself. In this way, confessional conflicts of religious faith are reintroduced into philosophical hermeneutics. The genuine question of whether the philosophy of Hegel is essentially Christian must therefore remain disputed so long there remain doubts about Christianity.

C.D.V.: What do you make of philosophers like Zizek trying to deal with Christianity of Hegel without just dismissing it as incidental while also trying to reconcile it with the materialism of Marx?

 R.H.: The most Hegelian approach to the procession of ideas in history is the synthesis of all differentia and opposites within the Absolute Idea. There is, for this reason, nothing contrary to the spirit of Hegel in working to speculatively reconcile ostensibly opposed concepts such as Christianity with Marxism, or religion with historical materialism: this speculative enterprise can, perhaps, be understood more generally as the synthesis of transcendent supersensible forms revealed in religious consciousness with the natural operations of the material world observe through sensation; as a return to the Platonic project of reconciling the purely actual Being of Parmenides with the ever-changing conflux of Heraclitus; or as the return to the Kantian project of reconciling the immutable windowless monads of Leibniz with the extended and self-developing substance of Spinoza. In every case, speculative philosophy endeavors to unify the dualistic opposition of pure thought and intuition in an absolute concept that envelops and subsumes the true concepts of all reality. The project of reconciling Christian transcendence with socialist justice has in the past been undertaken from the standpoint of Christian theology; for example in the Franciscan Fraticelli, the Christian Socialism of Dorothy Day, and the Liberation Theology of Gustavo Gutiérrez; and from the standpoint of Marxist theory; as in the writings of Ernst Bloch who wrote in The Principle of Hope “Where Lenin is, there is Jerusalem” and “the Bolshevist fulfillment of Communism is part of the age-old fight for God.”

For either Christian theology or Marxist theory to be fully explanatory of the world, it would seem that each must offer some account of the pervasive appeal of the other: Christian theology must account for the Socialist contests against the social iniquities of modern capitalist economies, just as Marxist theory must account for the spiritual conditions of Christian religious consciousness: Marxists must explain the persisting desire for self-transcending faith and devotion, for which “religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions”, just as Christians must explain how they are to bring justice to the present material conditions of society, for which they are commanded to “love thy neighbor as thyself.” Hegel is the key to open each concept for the other. Hegel is not only a seminal thinker for Marxist theory, but also a great modern Christian theologian. In Hegelian terms, both Christian theology and Marxist theory must endeavor to speculatively sublate, negate, and preserve the other, so as to unlock, open, and take possession of all of the riches of Pharaoh from the land of Egypt.

Although I have some suspicions about Prof. Žižek’s interpretations of Hegel, it would be irresponsible for me to comment on an author’s whose publications I am largely ignorant of. Some interpreters of Hegel are tempted by their preconceptions to deny Hegel’s exuberant Christian confessions as little more than pious nods to the Restoration-era faith of the Kingdom of Prussia. For example, Prof. Robert Solomon interprets Hegel as “essentially an atheist” (In the Spirit of Hegel, 1983, p.582). Such esoteric interpretations, which maintain that Hegel was a writer who deliberately deceived his readers regarding his Christian faith, are (while not indubitably false) demanding of a much more conniving interpretation of Hegel than his fiercely independent and outspoken tone would seem to suggest. In his book review, Prof. Michael Rosen called Prof. Solomon’s interpretation “extremely disappointing” and “bizarre” (The Philosophical Review, pp.115-117, 1986). Thus, leaving aside these interpretations, there appear to be three major ways in which Marxist theoreticians may seek to “deal with the Christianity of Hegel” by de-Christianizing the philosophy of Hegel to be more amenable to an ostensibly irreligious Marxist theory: by re-conceiving of (i) the formal relations of the system, (ii) the metaphysics, and (iii) the sociology of Hegel.

(i) Christian interpreters of Hegel have earnestly and decisively emphasized the systematic place and function of the concept of Christian revealed religion in the system of Hegel (e.g. James Sterling, Emil Fakenheim, William Wallace etc.). Christianity is not only acclaimed as the ‘absolute religion’ which subsumes all prior religions in religious consciousness, but furthermore as the concept that superordinately determines the essence of the subordinate concepts: in the Phenomenology of Spirit, for instance, the concept of (C.CC.III) Christian revealed religion is the apex of the concept of (C.CC) Religion which subordinates and subsumes, in (C) Reason, the concepts of (C.AA) Free Concrete Mind and (C.BB) Spirit; which in turn subsumes (A) Consciousness and (B) Self-Consciousness. Thus, the crowning concept of Christian subsumes all other concepts within itself. Although Christianity is enthroned at the zenith of the system of the Phenomenology of Spirit, it is not itself (C.DD) Absolute Knowing but merely the handmaid of the philosophical-theology of Absolute Idealism. The Phenomenology of Spirit is merely a prolegomena, for historically alienated consciousness, of the system of philosophy which Hegel begins in the Science of Logic and outlines in the Encyclopedia of Philosophical Sciences.

As the Phenomenology of Spirit stands in the relation of the Absolute to consciousness as a mediating prelude to Hegel’s mature philosophical science, it may be mystically envisaged to assume the filial role of Christ the Son in relation to the seminal role of God the Father in the Science of Logic, and the dynamic efflorescence of the Holy Spirit in the Berlin Lectures on the History of Philosophy and the Philosophy of History. Consequently, the sovereign concept of (C.CC.III) Christian Revealed Religion in the Phenomenology of Spirit must be understood, like Jesus Christ, to be the mediating concept between human consciousness and the Absolute Idea of God, just as (3.3.2) Religion appears again in the Encyclopedia of Philosophical Sciences as the mediating concept between (3.3.1) Art and (3.3.3) Philosophy (e.g. S-M-P or Father-Son-Holy Spirit). Religion mediates between art and philosophy in the Absolute Idea because Hegel, with Aristotle, Aquinas, and Kant, held all formal concepts to require the content of intuition: the universal philosophical concept is constructed from the content of aesthetic intuition related to the absolute truth of religion and yet formally purified of the content any particular intuition. The majestic tradition of Christian art, from the earliest hymns to the cantatas of Mozart, is for Hegel the spiritual flowering of the concerted imaginations of the children of God to manifest the Absolute Idea through the variegated forms aesthetic intuition. In the oldest systematic fragment on German Idealism describes the centrality of art to philosophy:

“the idea which unites all, the idea of beauty, the word taken in the higher platonic sense. I am convinced that the highest act of reason, which, in that it comprises all ideas, is an aesthetic act, and that truth and goodness are united like sisters only in beauty – the philosopher must possess just as much aesthetic power as the poet. The people without aesthetic sense are our philosophers of the letter. The philosophy of the spirit is an aesthetic philosophy. One cannot be clever in anything, one cannot even reason cleverly in history – without aesthetic sense.”

Interpreters who wish to de-Christianize Hegelian philosophy may allege that the subordinate and mediating role of religion in the system of Hegel means that the Christian religion is suppressed by the superior concept of (C.DD) Absolute Knowing and (3.3.3) Philosophy: just as the universal concept purifies philosophy of the particular content of intuition, so does it seem to exorcise philosophical reason of religion. However, this interpretation confuses the Hegelian principle of subsumption (Aufhebung), which preserves the subordinate concepts, with bad skepticism, which suppresses and rejects the subordinate concepts. Hegel describes the difference between subsumption and skepticism in the Introduction to the Phenomenology of Spirit:

  “For this view is skepticism, which always sees in the result only pure nothingness, and abstracts from the fact that this nothing is determinate, is the nothing of that out of which it comes as a result… The skepticism which ends with the abstraction “nothing” or “emptiness” can advance from this not a step farther, but must wait and see whether there is possibly anything new offered, and what that is — in order to cast it into the same abysmal void. When once, on the other hand, the result is apprehended, as it truly is, as determinate negation, a new form has thereby immediately arisen; and in the negation the transition is made by which the progress through the complete succession of forms comes about of itself.” (PhG §79)

Lest we fall into the most abysmal skepticism which cannot advance a step further, thinking must incorporate the determinate negations of all concepts to “progress through the complete succession of forms”: rather than being cast into the void, the Christian religion is denied merely as absolute knowledge just as it is preserved as a concept that is essential to this knowledge, viz. the negation of negation or the determinate negation (determinatio est negatio): the concept of Christianity is negated as containing the fullness of purely conceptual truth even while it is affirmed, viz. this negation, to be altogether necessary for the emergence of philosophical truth. In the (3.3) Absolute Idea of the Encyclopedia of Philosophical Sciences, (3.3.2) Religion objectifies the varied aesthetic imaginings into a sacred drama of the self-revelation of the Absolute to consciousness.

The Christian religion is essential as the most synthetic and dynamic form of religion which, through divine revelation, uniquely allows consciousness to imagine and know philosophical science. If religious consciousness were, on the contrary, consigned to the abysmal void of unthought, then there could be no warranted claim to scientific knowledge. This problem of the doxastic foundations of science in religious belief continues to resurface in anti-realist and anti-foundationalist critiques of natural science and scientific naturalism, such as Paul Feyerabend’s Against Method (1975), Alvin Plantinga’s evolutionary argument against naturalism (1993), and Thomas Nagel’s recent book Mind and Cosmos (2012). The necessity of the mediating concept of Religion in the philosophy of Hegel thus inverts the common understanding of the relation of faith and reason: faith is not the ghostly shadow of reason the necessary precondition of reason itself. So Hegel may affirm, with St. Anselm, that we must have faith seeking understanding (Credo ut Intellegam), and with the proverbs that  the “fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, and the knowledge of the holy is understanding.” (Pr. 9:10)

(ii) Hegel’s fundamental metaphysical commitments can perhaps be radically reconceived as materialist and anthropocentric rather than absolute idealist and theocentric. This approach was first pursued by the disenfranchised students of Hegelian philosophy who wished to weaponize the Hegelian dialectic against the alliance of altar and throne in the Kingdom of Prussia and the Holy Alliance (c.1815-1848).These radical critics of the established order of the world were called by David Strauss the ‘Young Hegelians’, in contrast to the doctrinaire former students of Hegel, or the ‘Old Hegelians’. They counted among themselves such future luminaries as Ludwig Andreas Feuerbach, Max Stirner, Bruno Bauer, Friederich Engels and Karl Marx. Feuerbach interpreted Hegel’s Absolute Idea to be no more Platonic and real than an idea in the human mind. The idea of God and the Absolute should, on this account, become the absolute knowledge and power of mankind. Marx and Engels followed Feuerbach in juxtaposing critical, realist, and empirical dialectical materialism to Hegel’s purportedly spiritualist, speculative and phantasmagoric absolute idealism. In each case, the Young Hegelians sought to unravel the unity of the systemic tapestry of the philosophy of Hegel, and then to re-conceive its formal relations and basic constituents in a way more suitable to the achievement of their social and political ambitions. Yet, as their aims differed as wildly as their re-conceptions, the Young Hegelians could produce no consistent school or system of philosophy. Each and all stand in relation to the speculative empire of Hegel as, what Marx once memorably described as, the successor generals (diadochi) of the spirit tearing and rending the corpse of their world-conquering great-king Alexander.

Feuerbach denied the subjectivity of the Absolute to be anything other than the subjectivity of man, and consequently re-centered the Absolute Idea into the mind of man rather than the mind of God. Feuerbach’s anthropocentrism rejected the Schellingian identity between the knowledge of the finite human Ego and the absolute divine Ego, the Berkeleyan subsistence of the universe in the perception of God, and the whole Platonic inheritance of preternatural transcendent forms. The consequence was not only the rejection of the priority of the pure forms of logic to the extended matter of nature but the implicit denial of the very possibility of a science of true philosophy: absolute knowledge requires an absolute knower as the subject which knows the object of truth, just as the truth of the particulars is the universal in which they are altogether united. The rejection of God, Platonic universals, and Logic from the metaphysics of Hegel, viz. the anthropocentric reduction, consequently makes true, universal and scientific knowledge impossible. The Absolute is the truth. To deny that there is truth is just as much to deny that this denial of truth is itself true, which is to affirm, viz. the Law of Excluded Middle, that this denial is false. Thus any denial of the truth self-contradictory. This is the problem of any anthropocentric reduction of absolute truth that relativizes truth to the human mind. Therefore, according to classical logic, Feuerbach cannot affirm an anthropocentrism or naturalism that excludes the Absolute, universals, and logic, without also contradicting himself.

Marx and Engels re-conceived of Hegel’s Absolute as the immanent dynamic self-development of nature which they called dialectical materialism, in opposition to the transcendent spiritualist idealism which they attributed to Hegel. This materalists-idealist juxtaposition reiterates Aristotle’s abstract opposition of form and matter in concrete substance, Spinoza’s two attributes of thought and extension in divine nature (Deus sive Natura), Kant’s division of concepts and intuition in the apperceptive unity of thought, and Schelling’s realism and idealism in the self-identity of the Absolute; for in each case the materialist-idealist juxtaposition seeks to subordinate form to matter, the thought to extension, the concept to the intuition, and the ideal to the real, so as to affirm, against the purportedly mystical spiritualism of Hegel, that dialectical materialism stands upright on the firm metaphysical ground matter. The motivation is to ground an ontologically and epistemological foundation in sensible material reality. Kantian criticism quickly exposes the untenability of this one-sided opposition of foundational matter to epiphenomenal form. What is the essence of matter? How is the essence of matter deduced without dogmatic presuppositions? Where is matter to be sensibly intuited? How is matter without form dialectical? Can the ground of materialism be turtles all the way down? These embarrassing questions soon reveal that dialectical materialism simply subordinates one side of each conceptual dichotomy to the other, to suppress and banish the turtle from the shell, and affirm nature as the armored panoply of certain knowledge. Not only does the promised foundation of material nature prove to be no foundation at all, but materialism poisons philosophy with its essential finitude, closure, and finality. The essence of matter is simply the self-limited and self-subsisting atomic particles of Democritus. No whole can arise from the agglomeration of many merely self-related parts. Neither can any set of formal relations join together totally self-enclosed particles. The consequence of materialism is, then, either a tower of material bricks which reaches to the heavens but crumbles like the Tower of Babel under the weight of its own antinomies, or a spiritualized matter that is indistinguishable from Fichte’s intellective being within Schelling’s identity-philosophy. Fichte’s ideal being for-consciousness that is identical to the reality of the Absolute in-itself is simply the phenomenological movement of what Hegel calls Spirit: where materialism affirms a pre-critical mechanistic relation of static material particles, the Hegelian spirit of properly critical dialectical materialism affirms a dynamic self-particularizing totality of all thought and being in Logic, Nature and Spirit. With the rejection of the mechanistic materialism, viz. the disjunctive inference, Hegelian Spirit is must be affirmed as the very substance becoming subject of the Absolute.

(iii) The (i) systematic and the (ii) metaphysical re-conceptions of the philosophy of Hegel are together united in the (iii) interpretation of Hegelianism as sociology. In this way, the negative re-conceptions of Hegel constitute a sort of negative dialectical triad, in which the dialectical reconciliation of opposites produces a more false and discordant rather than a more true and harmonious concept, in a way reminiscent of the negative dialectic of modern philosophy of subjectivity in Glauben und Wissen (Faith and Knowledge, 1802). The sociological re-conception affirms that the philosophy of Hegel can only be interpreted as the historical development of the self-understanding of society, and denies that any ‘metaphysical’, idealist, or platonizing interpretation is possible. Prof. Terry Pinkard summarizes this interpretative approach in the Successor to Metaphysics: Absolute Idea and Absolute Spirit (Monist, July 1991, Vol. 74, Issue 3). Prof. Pinkard conflates Kant’s term ‘metaphysics’ with the term ‘dogmatism’ and simplistically presumes that all metaphysical reasoning is dogmatic and rejected by post-Kantian idealists. Thus, Pinkard’s non-metaphysical interpretation simply purports  to be critical philosophy without dogmatic assumptions about the reality or structure of being. The conflation of metaphysics with dogmatism leads Pinkard to reject all of the reality of all supra-physical and supersensible entities of theology and logic as the relics of a pre-critical metaphysics of substance. This is the occamist razor which shaves Logic from Pinkard’s sociology of Spirit.

With Feuerbach, Pinkard interprets the philosophy of Hegel from the anthropocentric perspective of a historical human community, and rejects the pure Platonic forms of preternatural and pre-human logic which are posited by God’s seminal reason (rationes seminales, or logoi spermatikoi) rather than man. With Marx and Engels, Pinkard must assume a naturalistic cosmology reminiscent of dialectical materialism. This becomes even clearer when the presuppositions of sociology are investigated: sociology is the logic of human society, which is inter-subjectively constituted by social human actors, who are each themselves either the formal apperceptive unity of transcendental self-consciousness or the empirical composite of material nature; sociology thus methodologically assumes Kantian empiricism; rejects the self-subsistence of the transcendental self-conscious and affirms only empirical and material composition; therefore, sociology reduces to materialism which reduces to absurdity. In this way, the (iii) sociological interpretation inherits the errors of the (i) systematic and the (ii) metaphysical re-conceptions of the philosophy of Hegel: the sociological interpretation dogmatically assumes that (i) society may subsist by itself or through the activity of social actors without any further mediation of society, and (ii) assumes the self-subsistence of society and persons to be supported by the real ground of material nature. However, the (i) unmediated self-subsistent society is merely assumed as a concept of (3) Spirit that floats alone as a postulate of thought wholly indifferent to any mediating conceptual relation to the (1) Logic and (2) Nature, which are the very necessary conditions of its conceptual possibility. Philosophy is for Hegel an absolute and all-encompassing science which cannot tolerate dogmatic postulates of wholly unmediated concepts, any more than the human body can tolerate gangrene infection. The (ii) materialist self-subsistence of society thus equally succumbs to materialist poison of finitude, closure, and finality, which threatens to collapse upon itself as soon as it is erected. The whole edifice is either unsupported and simply postulated, or closed in upon itself like a windowless castle of so many finite material bricks.

In suppressing the pure forms of theology and logic, these interpretations (i, ii & iii) construct a locked and irreformable system. All of the concepts of nature and society are enclosed in finite vessels from which none can interact and none can escape. The castle that was intended to reach to the heavens becomes a god-forsaken dungeon in which, with the messianic yearning of the Jews in exile, mankind ceaselessly awaits an unforeseeable eschatological emancipation. No freedom of the spirit is possible for such an interpretation of the philosophy of Hegel according to the letter of the fixed proposition, in which propositions are understood simply by-themselves as the predicate of a subject and are (i) not mediated within and through the self-particularizing Absolute; (ii) exclude or suppress the pure forms of Logic; and assume an (i) unmediated and (ii) materially subsisting (iii) merely postulated society. Every de-Christianizing interpretation, that intends to unravel the system of Hegel, either returns safely to the harbor of the speculative Absolute Idea or crashes upon the rocks of its own dogmatic presuppositions. The stumbling-block for all of these impious interpretations is what Slavoj Žižek has called the monstrosity of Christ: it is putatively absurd to believe that God became man in the person of Jesus of Nazareth; was crucified; died; and was resurrected. Thus Tertulian confessed “Credo quia absurdum” (“I believe because it is absurd”). Christianity seems to be the most absurd religion of all because it absolutely negates itself through the self-negation of the Absolute. However this absolute self-negation is, in the philosophy of Hegel, the very unsurpassed dynamism and spiritual vitality of Christianity. There could be no greater self-negation, and no greater dynamism, than the visible self-annihilation of the God-man in the ‘death of God’ for “greater love has no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.” (Jn. 15:13)

I just got done listening to Douglas Lain and C. Derick Varn discuss Rene Girard and Siskel & Ebert. I don’t have much input concerning movie criticism, except to say that I too am of the generation that remembers fondly watching the two on television before the age of the Internet and all of our other intoxicating gadgets. My reflections bend more towards the Rene Girard part of the interview and some brief comments concerning this theorist. I have to admit that I first heard of Girard by accident and in person. My now-wife and I were going to some talk at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley that Girard unexpectedly crashed and thus became the center of attention for the evening. He gave a brief exposition of his theories and then took questions and answers. To give the Readers’ Digest version of Girard’s theory as I understand it, it is that the “scapegoat mechanism” is at the heart of all civilization. That is, people in their inherent being want to “keep up with the Joneses”, to the point that you only desire because you want to imitate (mimesis) those around you. This competition culminates in the scapegoat: because we all can’t have something, it must be someone’s fault, so let’s go find that person and kill her or him. Once dead, we all feel really bad about what we did, even if that person was guilty, and we end up deifying that person. For Girard, this is the essence and origin of myth, and thus, religion. The scapegoating mechanism is only broken in Jesus who is both innocent and killed, and triumphs over scapegoating by his resurrection. For “orthodox” Catholics and other Christians, this has become an appealing alternative soteriology to the classic vicarious satisfaction advanced in the Epistle to the Hebrews and St. Anselm, among other places.

During that evening, I remember a heated exchange with one Western Buddhist that was particularly pointed. She was insisting that his story didn’t really explain the Buddhist version of things. That is, there is no “redemptive violence” in the Buddhist narrative. Girard, however, dug in his heels in that way that only old men can. I later brought up the same point to a Muslim, and he just shrugged. Girard perhaps would say that in other belief systems, including the atheistic secular one, the scapegoat problem goes unresolved and continues to arise in non-religious settings (Stalin’s show trials, the Cultural Revolution in China, today’s anti-immigrant nativism, etc.) For devout Christians, this becomes another argument in favor of Christianity: only in Jesus is the vicious cycle of scapegoating and violence overcome. It should be pointed out that Girard is a devout Catholic.

To be frank, I have Girard’s Violence and the Sacred sitting on my shelf unread, and it has been so for almost three years now. Other things have always come up. The odd thing about the “scapegoat” metaphor is that has arisen in other areas that I have been investigating. One of the Lares and Penates in my own life is the person featured in the video above. Juan Soldado, or Juan Castillo Morales, was an army private from the state of Oaxaca who was accused and convicted of the rape and murder of eight year old Olga Camacho in Tijuana in 1938. Due to the vicious nature of the crime, the people of Tijuana wanted to lynch him on the spot, and threatened to burn the jail down if he was not turned over. Within a few days of the murder and capture of the suspect, the order came from the President of Mexico himself, Lazaro Cardenas, to apply swift military justice known as la ley fuga, which was to let the convicted free and tell him to run, while the firing squad shoots him in the back. This was done in Castillo Morales’s case, but later people felt guilty for their blood lust, and some began to think that his commanding officer had really committed the murder, etc. His tomb has thus become a shrine for people in Tijuana, particularly people aiming to sneak across the border into the United States. In this case, the scapegoat mechanism functioned in a modern context twenty years before Girard even devised it: a person is guilty, blamed for a crime, viciously executed, and then “deified” (made into a popular “saint” with supernatural powers). In my own family, my grandmother had an altar to Juan Soldado because she attributed my father’s survival in the Vietnam War to his intercession and protection.

While this seems a pretty clear piece of evidence for Girard’s theory, it all is just too neat to me. What else was going on in Tijuana in 1938 that led to these events? What was the relationship with the Church in this border territory? What was the social makeup of the lynch mobs clamoring for Castillo Morales’s blood? There are of course books on this subject, but that is what has bothered me about Girard’s theory as I understand it. And now that I think of it, it also neglects the fact that these people who are murdered by power (either wrongly, as in the case of the Jesus of “orthodox theology” or “rightly” in the case of Juan Soldado) were killed by flesh and blood people, with real armies and real socio-economic systems, etc. To explain Jesus’ death in purely metaphysical terms is not only intellectually lazy, but an outright crime of human thought. Jesus faced a real empire, with real soldiers and real swords, with real high priests who really did steal the inheritance of widows. To the extent that Girard’s theory should be studied because it reveals certain superficial patterns is understandable. We just should not forget the real concrete, this-worldly foundations of things.

Still, this is one more reason to read that unread book by Girard on my shelf.