Laitue (Sextidi), 16 Germinal, CCXXXIV
§19:
Omnis determinatio negatio est—so Spinoza assures us. All determination is negation. It is a maxim, as I have noted, that holds without exception in the realm of the finite, as it is basically a tautological definition of finitude. 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 an actual infinite coincidentia oppositorum in God or in the bonum diffusivum sui without the fructifying force 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 that took form within Christian tradition: the assertion of a Trinitarian logic according to which God’s life is an infinite determination without need of the negative, an infinite and simple eternal act of the Father fully expressing the divine essence in the Son who is his 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 whose actuality there can be no unrealized potential or opposition, also expressed in a created order whose finite determinations and negations and relations of act and potency participate in the divine life. 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. This is the logic that dictates for us that God can be conceived of as Being only in not being conceived of as 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, though 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 so the elevation of the dialectical to a station in the Absolute it had ever before occupied. Hegel’s God truly does exist, not as an anthropomorphic supernatural entity of course, but in and as the process of the Concept’s diremption in beings, understood as an eternal structure of divine actualization and reconciliation. Again, Hegel in one sense could be said to agree with Cusanus’s definition of God as the non aliud, but in Hegel’s case that definition would no longer mean that God is transcendent of real relation or that the divine nature a fullness to which creation adds nothing, but only 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, most crucially, ontological differentiation. In the System, 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 judgment on the totality. In Spirit, the Idea arrives not just as a speculative deduction but as a real ontological consequence. God is eternal, as considered from the vantage of the Concept; but, as considered from the vantage of the dialectical dynamisms of nature and history, God also really comes to be. 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 only fair to grant that both answers are haunted by the specters of equivocation and ambiguity. Mind you, in the case of the older analogical ontology, this is less a galling failure than a tantalizing uncertainty, 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 thwarted altogether by any failure of discursive completeness on its part, 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 knowledge demands, then it fails to be rational knowledge at all. The work of philosophy may never be finished, from the Hegelian vantage, but not because there is any paradox it cannot in principle surmount.
