Lectures on the Proofs of the Existence of God

by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Peter C. Hodgson (Editor, Translator)

Hegel's lectures have had as great a historical impact as the works he himself published. Important elements of his system are elaborated only in the lectures, especially those given in Berlin during the last decade of his life. The original editors conflated materials from different sources and dates, obscuring the development and logic of Hegel's thought. The Hegel Lectures Series is based on a selection of extant and recently discovered transcripts and manuscripts. The original lecture series are reconstructed so that the structure of Hegel's argument can be followed. Each volume presents an accurate new translation accompanied by an editorial introduction and annotations on the text, which make possible the identification of Hegel's many allusions and sources.

Hegel lectured on the proofs of the existence of God as a separate topic in 1829. He also discussed the proofs in the context of his lectures on the philosophy of religion (1821-31), where the different types of proofs were considered mostly in relation to specific religions. The text that he prepared for his lectures in 1829 was a fully formulated manuscript and appears to have been the first draft of a work that he intended to publish and for which he signed a contract shortly before his death in 1831. The 16 lectures include an introduction to the problem of the proofs and a detailed discussion of the cosmological proof. Philipp Marheineke published these lectures in 1832 as an appendix to the lectures on the philosophy of religion, together with an earlier manuscript fragment on the cosmological proof and the treatment of the teleological and ontological proofs as found in the 1831 philosophy of religion lectures.

Hegel's 1829 lectures on the proofs are of particular importance because they represent what he actually wrote as distinct from auditors' transcriptions of oral lectures. Moreover, they cone late in his career and offer his final and most seasoned thinking on a topic of obvious significance to him, that of the reality status of God and ways of knowing God. These materials show how Hegel conceived the connection between the cosmological, teleological, and ontological proofs.

All of this material has been newly translated by Peter C. Hodgson from the German critical editions by Walter Jaeschke. This edition includes an editorial introduction, annotations on the text, and a glossary and bibliography.

Genres: Philosophy, Theology

213 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1830

About the author

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831) was a German philosopher and one of the founding figures of German Idealism. Influenced by Kant's transcendental idealism and Rousseau's politics, Hegel formulated an elaborate system of historical development of ethics, government, and religion through the dialectical unfolding of the Absolute. Hegel was one of the most well-known historicist philosopher, and his thought presaged continental philosophy, including postmodernism. His system was inverted into a materialist ideology by Karl Marx, originally a member of the Young Hegelian faction.

Reviews

[J.]

A little sparring (with Hegel (is good for the complexion)):

Hegel: "[N:]umber has the unit as its principle and is the putting together of a multiplicity of independent units; thus it is a completely external combination."

jb: Number (not a number) has as its principle the unsurpassable duality (not substance dualism) of the sameness (phenomenal participation - the symmetry group) and difference (ontological chorism - diagonalization) of the one and the indefinite dyad; thus it is a site of dialectical thinking.

Hegel: "The consistency of proof is not, however, confined to mathematical content, but enters into all departments of natural and spiritual material."

jb: The cause of this penetration or interpenetration is not found in the universal transcendence of logic over a defined mathematical field of the quantitative and at the same time also over all the others (which is ultimately the Aristotelian retrogression in logic). Rather, it is found in the double role of the mathematical (which Plato parses as separation and participation) as both exclusively self-describing and also, in a different way, the dimension of form of everything with form. So the Aristotelian demotion of mathematics is the same as his bid to shut down the dialectic of participation and separation, which of course is rooted in the duality that Aristotle misreads as substance dualism. Aristotle's logic and his metaphysics are constituted by the same trivializing gesture w/r/t mathematics, which would make of dialectical duality an abstract derivative of the primary, monistic unity of form and matter in the thing. What kind of thing? Well, one can never say quite decisively, since form and matter keep coming apart. So, Aristotle will say, I mean the concrete individual spatiotemporal thing, but redoubled with its species, the first level of abstraction, and vice versa. Rather than being embarrassed at this reduplication, Aristotle takes it as the occasion for one more grand gesture of synthesis: entelecheia. Denying the Two any ethical role in desire and the Good, he instead reposits the Two-for-the-sake-of-One. Those who only notice that this gesture is also found in Plato must be assuming that it retains its independent identity in the context of the also-asserted countermovement of the duality, the separation of the One from Being, and of each form from instantiation. Again, this double movement is found in the mathematical from the very beginning, though not in the sterile, typed doublet of the transcendental and the empirical.

Conversely, as we now know, as we now know, though mathematics unarguably develops the duality from the side of consistency, inconsistency turns out to be inseparable from the completeness that mathematics sustains an internal though nonidentical relation to - at the level of desire if nothing else. (When we take up this element of desire as such, we plunge over to the existential leaf, and have the opportunity to note a fleeting ethical moment.)

Hegel: "[T:]hose forms that are called genera, laws, forces, etc. [...:] are more concrete than mathematical figures..."

jb: What the dualist gets to deny is a single, totalizing scale of being in the modern sense - whatever is real). To me it seems a bit perverse to notice that the reason this hierarchy is present in Plato is not because a Platonist need be a totalizing monist (as the Neoplatonists), but simply because he uses "being" in a limited, formal sense, and has other terms, perhaps nonaccidentally multiple, for what disrupts this hierarchy - becoming / apeiron / multiplicity...

(I don't finally give a damn what Plato thought per se (I don't believe there is any such thing) - my point is that someone who learns from the Platonic arguments is not compelled to endorse a totalizing great chain of being or whatever, and even is given the first moves toward seeing why and how one ought to reject such - without destroying thought.)

It seems clear that Hegel thinks there's a continuum of richness of content, and that mathematical forms lie between the emptiest most abstract categories of logic (for him, demonstratives) and the categories of a pure physics, on the way to the concrete. So it would be important to ask something like this: Is there a limit to the complexity of a "mathematical figure"? Is there a point at which a form is too complex to be mathematical? Could this happen at any other point than the in-(or trans-)consistent? If that's the case, then doesn't this scale of content-richness, which at this moment in Hegel seems (ironically!) merely quantitative, get fundamentally altered in its topology: now a two-dimensional matrix of consistency (One) and completeness (All). Impossible not to ask: What happens on the diagonal? Something very interesting and truly nontrivial. It turns out *not* to be a simple matter of identifying the diagonal with a resultant hyper-maximum of these two maxima, which would collapse the dimensionality of the matrix back again into that of a linear continuum. such a collapse does take place, but only locally that is, (in terms appropriately reinscribed into the duality) as a hyper-one that breaks with totality, functioning as a not-all; in other words, a local excess and a global lack. But this is exactly, down to the letter, the form of Cantorian / Godelian diagonalization.

Hegel: "It is asserted that the kind of knowledge that is insufficient for the higher truth is the sole and exclusive kind of knowledge. The two assumptions are most closely connected. On the one side, we must, in the investigation of what we have undertaken to consider free such knowledge from its one-sidedness, and at the same time provide evidence that there is another kind of knowledge than that which is given out as the only kind. On the other side, the pretension that faith as such advances against knowledge is a prejudice..."

jb: Hegel's desire for logico-ethical synthesis (<--> for synthesis within each term, thus monism in all senses) leads him to be convinced that he's found the alternative to the extremisms of modern thought (noncognitive faith vs. a reason limited to the understanding) in another kind of knowledge. Perhaps he fails to see that this synthesis has always-already been the essence of religion, and of the failure to experience its own tortured vacillation between theology and pietistic purification consciously that constitutes its history. Religion wants to say at one and the same time that what it has to say is above the understanding and also that it has content. It wants to effect a positive synthesis between knowledge and immediacy. Dialectic as I understand it, however, knows as the Good only the negative synthesis between these two, whose modern form has been the incompatibility of consistency and completeness.

You might say, this incompatability is only from the side of consistency, but this is a serious mistake. Think of consistency as the active principle, the foreground, the yang, if you like. You can say then that from the side of consistency consistency withdraws from synthesis, and that from the side of completeness completeness is withdrawn from, without any effort needed on its part. On the other hand, if you prefer to think of withdrawal in Heideggerian fashion as the deepest passivity, then completeness or the background is what withdraws (itself) nonrelationally from the consistency that (relationally) marks the withdrawal. It's not a matter of saying that one or the other of these is the right account. One always has to give a double account of the duality.

We have various terms for our alternatively construed relation to the completeness side of the duality (which for a mind is always the Other side). Sometimes it is appropriate to speak of the mystical (even of the mystical as logical form), of emptiness, of emplacement and facticity, of historicity, of the existential, of care (my favorite - as it can be used in most of these senses, and we can watch the inversions in both Plato and Heidegger), of desire and drive, of the unconscious, of semiotic khora, and sometimes in a preliminary sense, of ethical need (especially in the sense of the need for an ethics, rather than cleaving to already-established ethical rules, in which Levinas rightly and not un-Socratically finds the primary sense of the ethical).

Philosophy is not another knowledge, philosophical logic is not a science. There is no knowledge but (mathematical) knowledge - but there are different relations, modes of relation, to this knowledge, different uses of it in life: among them, weaving (synthesis, ethical side), unweaving (analysis, mathematical side), and showing the weave (philosophy).

Monism, religion, presents itself as the assertion, at once, of another knowledge and another world (and of course, presents these as the same: the Word = Christ = the Kingdom = Truth etc.) But a dualist dialectic should be more careful with quantifiers (to put it as dryly as possible.) Not another world, but the other-than-world + not another knowledge, but the other-than-knowledge.

Not religion but ethics, not science but mathematics, not logic but dialectic.

Hegel: "In accord with the old belief that what is substantial and true can be reached only by meditative thought [Nachdenken:], we accomplish the purification of this elevation into its essentiality and necessity by the exposition of it in thought; and we give to thought, which has the absolute right of a wholly different right to satisfaction than feeling, intuition, or representation, this satisfaction."

jb: I start, of course, from partial agreement with a dialectical thinker, even if Hegel's solutions are opposed to my Platonic ones. Rightly apprehended, what we call meditative and calculative thinking are not two but Two. Not two in the sense of two ones, a mere change of subject, where the other is consigned to oblivion, but inadequate ways of thinking the Two. This requires that we see in meditative and calculative thinking two ways of repressing the duality, two one-sidednesses in need not of a synthesis but of becoming Two. This duality is the ethics of thought. The first step is that the calculative has to be opened to the Two by becoming genuinely mathematical, which in a way has always-already been the case but can become true for-itself only at the point of a metalogical crisis, whether incommensurability, incompleteness, incompressibility, etc. But likewise, the meditative has to be opened to the Two by a relentless critique of everything sovereign in it that would give it the privilege and reprieve of a transcendental distinction of types: another world, another language than the mathematical, even another use when this other use ceases to be the pure philosophical gesture of a break with the given and becomes commodified / sedimented as doctrine or even as text.

[Andrew Noselli · Rating 3 out of 5]

Basically sketching out Godel's incompleteness theorem nearly 150 years ahead of time, in this series of lectures Hegel claims that the any attempt on humanity's part to reason out the necessary conditions of a proof of God's existence that is deemed to be correct is hindered in that it necessarily relies on presuppositions which are themselves without foundation. While the ontological proof of God founders on this essential obstacle in the psychology of any human understanding which seeks to attain a scientific precision and specificity, nevertheless, faith must stand as the ultimate arbiter of the truth of God's existence in man's attempt to understand Him. Three stars.