Some Theses on Hegel and Christian Thought, Part 6
Determination and Negation, Being and Becoming, Truth and Method
Laitue (Sextidi), 16 Germinal, CCXXXIV
§19:
Omnis determinatio negatio est—so Spinoza assures us. All determination is negation. It is a maxim that holds without exception in the realm of the finite, as it is practically a tautology. The question of the One and the many has always been, among other things, the question of how it is that the One can both be itself and also really exist without thereby ceasing to be the One; at least, this is one way of phrasing the central dilemma of Plato’s Parmenides. Allied to this is the question of how the One can generate the many without being determined over against the finite, and whether then there is an essential poverty in the One that requires the supplement of the many in order to be the One. Is the negative intrinsic to the Absolute? And, if so, how is the Absolute truly the Absolute? Can there be a true infinite coincidentia oppositorum in God or the bonum diffusivum sui without the fructifying power of negation, or does the irrepressible diffusiveness of the Absolute indicate an original indeterminacy within the supposed simplicity and infinite actuality of its essence?
To all these questions, there is what might be called, for want of a better term, an ‘analogical’ answer, which took shape in Christian tradition as a specifically Trinitarian logic: God’s life is an infinite determination without need of the negative, the simple and eternal act of the Father fully expressing the divine essence in the Logos and ‘returning’ to himself in the fullness of the Spirit. These are, as one formulation has it, wholly subsistent relations within God rather than extrinsic relations between discrete substances; only secondarily is this absolute plenitude of divine being—within the mystery of divine generation and procession, in which there can be no unrealized potential or opposition—also expressed in a created order of finite determination and negation, act and potency. This, again, entails an utterly asymmetrical ontology of the infinite and the finite, according to which God, in Scholastic terms, has no ‘real relation’ with—is not qualified or actualized by—creatures, while creatures are, in their finitude, a dynamic movement of real relation with God. The terms of this asymmetry are inviolable: all logical necessity, metaphysical absoluteness, ontological aseity, and perfect actuality belong to the divine infinite; to finite creation belong all logical contingency, metaphysical indigence, ontological dependency, and unrealized potency. While the infinite gives all to the finite, the finite adds nothing to the infinite but can only restore what it receives. By this logic, God is Being precisely in not being an existent being. The Being of all must always be one, prior to any system of real relations. The pathos of the unthinkable apeiron is thus overcome by a metaphysics that excludes altogether the possibility of a dialectical ontology in the realm of the infinite. Even Trinitarian thought in its classical and mediaeval form requires the preservation of a perfect difference—an analogical and hence ontological difference—between the divine actus purus and the realm of the finite in which the dialectical is possible. The Trinity is not a dialectic, but it is the eternal structure of all reality, which allows for and expresses itself in the dialectical restlessness of creation.
Hegel proposes nothing less than the total reversal of this logic, and therefore the elevation of the dialectical to the station of the Absolute. Hegel’s God truly does exist, not as an anthropomorphic supernatural entity of course, but in the process of the Concept’s diremption in beings, which is an eternal structure of actualization and reconciliation. Once again, to employ Cusanus’s definition of God as the non aliud, in Hegel’s case this would no longer serve as a designation of God as transcendent of real relation or as a fullness to which creation adds nothing, but could only mean that God is not other than that “nur” that comes at the end of the Phenomenology, just before the revised lines from Schiller: the nur of human self-knowledge in freedom, the chalice of the realm of spirits from which God’s infinity foams forth within the Absolute. Between the divine life in itself and the realm of becoming, there is not for Hegel any apophatic or analogical or—and this is the ultimate issue—ontological differentiation. The final reconciliation of the infinite in absolute knowledge cannot be abstracted into some other ontological frame, at an ontological remove from becoming; it must be conceived as ontologically identical to the result of that becoming and so be grasped, once more, as a rational judgement on the totality. In Spirit, the Idea arrives not just as a speculative deduction but as a real ontological result. God is eternal as considered from the vantage of the Concept, but God truly also comes to be as considered from the vantage of the dialectical dynamisms of nature and history. The final, formal Idea is God not as a prior infinite plenitude of Being, but as substance truly become subject—Concept truly become Spirit.
It seems fair to grant that both answers are haunted by the specters of equivocation and willful ambiguity. Mind you, in the case of the older analogical ontology, this is less a galling failure than a tantalizing aporia, given that such an ontology presumes an apophatic interval within both its affirmations and its negations. And yet, as the Hegelian might justly protest, reason can tolerate only so much reticence or so much seeming paradox before it concludes that nothing now remains except contradictions, mystifications, and barren fideisms. On the other hand, the dialectical account of the One and the many, or of the Absolute and the conditioned, is arguably more gravely burdened by any failure of discursive completeness, inasmuch as any negation it cannot assimilate renders it demonstrably false. If the dialectic fails in any measure to yield the coherence that absolute epistemic comprehension demands, then it fails to be rational knowledge at all. The work of philosophy may never be finished, but not because it there is any paradox it cannot in principle surmount.
