The Owl of Minerva

The paper expresses appreciation for Williams's fine study, which restores Hegel's lectures on the philosophy of religion and on the proofs of the existence of God to a central place in his system, and rejects the anti-metaphysical reading of Hegel that is regnant today. The paper attempts to show how the proofs are co-constitutive and self-supporting. It demonstrates the importance to Hegel of both the concrete historical "this" and the community of faith. It ends with reflections on Hegel's lectures on the philosophy of world history, which offer an interpretation as to how God is efficaciously present in history without violating the fabric of history.

In this essay, I examine Robert Williams’s account of Hegel’s concept of divine “personhood.” I endorse Williams’s claims that God, for Hegel, is not a person but exhibits only personhood, and that divine personhood realises itself in a human community based on mutual recognition. I take issue, however, with Williams’s further claim that Hegel also takes God and humanity to stand in a relation of mutual recognition to one another, since this claim, in my view, risks turning God into a person after all. To conclude, I briefly consider a difference between Williams and myself concerning the relation of right to mutual recognition.

Robert R. Williams’s last book, Hegel on the Proofs and the Personhood of God (Oxford University Press, 2017) undertakes to reconnect with and revive the largely forgotten “centrist” interpretation of Hegel’s philosophy from the early 1840s, associated especially with the work of Karl Michelet. An immediate consequence of this move is to direct renewed attention to the connection between Hegel’s Logic and his philosophy of religion. Taking this connection seriously appears to entail a re-interpretation of the absolute idea, adding an explicit level of theological significance to it in retrospect which would not appear to be required when the Logic is read on its own. And yet the Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion unambiguously seem to require such a re-reading of the Logic. Such a development may appear to raise questions about the possibility of a “presuppositionless” reading of the Logic, along with questions about how the truth claims of the Realphilosophie can be justified. A possible resolution of such questions could be found if one takes seriously George di Giovanni’s suggestion that the Logic must be regarded both as the first element of Hegel’s system, and also the final one. The appropriateness of such a second reading appears to be strongly supported by Errol Harris’s interpretation of the Logic. The additional layers of meaning, the theological interpretation, can be read into the Logic as the final element of the system, without affecting a “presuppositionless” reading of it as the first element.

Robert R. Williams, in Hegel on the Proofs and the Personhood of God, offers an important examination of the notion of absolute spirit, a central but under-examined notion in Hegel’s thought. Williams argues that absolute spirit, along with Hegel’s other core notions such as the concept and the absolute idea, is best conceived as an organic whole. This approach, he claims, best captures the self-determination and dynamism of the whole. What absolute spirit seeks to describe is how spirit can both produce itself and legitimate itself. I argue that the model of the organism, and any onto-theological claim for absolute spirit, misses the post-critical aspiration of this notion.

This essay focuses on the way Williams elaborates, defends, and recommends Hegel’s revision of Christianity, which makes possible a Christianity free from the defects of its pre-modern form without collapsing into atheism and humanism. The essay begins by examining the development of Williams’s case in Hegel on the Proofs and Personhood of God and in Tragedy, Recognition, and the Death of God. This examination shows that (1) Williams uses Hegel’s critique of pre-modern Christianity to demonstrate that modernity, in which discourse, practices, and forms of life are regulated by freedom and reason, means the end of orthodox theology, and (2) uses Hegel’s logic of relations and reciprocal determination to interpret the God-world relation and the internal constitution of the divinity so that it preserves divine transcendence and independence. The second section of the essay challenges Williams’s position by showing (1) how reciprocal determination does not just revise and qualify the asymmetrical dependence that is the lynchpin of classical theism, it completely disqualifies it, (2) how the analysis of the Trinity involves the divinity in a complete emptying of itself into the world and its being as the world, (3) so that Williams’s God cannot preserve even a hair’s breadth of the transcendence required for qualifying as a form of Christianity. The essay concludes from this that Williams’s appropriation of Hegel’s revised Christianity is infected with an element that destabilizes its ability to mediate between pre-modern insistence on God’s transcendence and independence and modernity’s insistence on human freedom and the universal status of its rational subjectivity, with a decisive leaning towards the humanistic posture.

This paper argues that Hegel’s Philosophical Outlines of Justice develops an incisive natural law theory by providing a comprehensive moral theory of a modern republic. Hegel’s Outlines adopt and augment a neglected species of moral constructivism which is altogether neutral about moral realism, moral motivation, and whether reasons for action are linked ‘internally’ or ‘externally’ to motives. Hegel shows that, even if basic moral norms and institutions are our artefacts, they are strictly objectively valid because for our very finite form of semi-rational embodied agency they are necessary and because sufficient justifying grounds for these norms and institutions can be addressed to all persons. Hegel’s moral constructivism identifies and justifies the core content of a natural law theory, without invoking metaphysical issues of moral realism, anti-realism, irrealism or ‘truth makers’ (of moral propositions), etc. I begin with Socrates’ question to Euthyphro to distinguish between moral realism and moral irrealism (§2). I then summarise basic points of constructivist method (§3) and how Hume’s theory of justice inaugurates this distinctive species of natural law constructivism (§4). How this approach addresses issues of political legitimacy is highlighted by Rousseau’s juridical innovation (§5). How this approach is better articulated and justified by Kant’s specifically Critical method is briefly considered in connection with his justification of rights to possession (§6), so that we can then recognise Hegel’s natural law constructivism in his Outlines (§7). Hegel’s account of rights to possession corresponds closely to Kant’s (§8), and his account of juridical relations as human interrelations accords with natural law constructivism (§9). This finding is corroborated by some central features of Hegel’s account of Sittlichkeit, including how Hegel adopts, undergirds and augments Rousseau’s and Kant’s Independence Requirement for political legitimacy (§10).

In a series of impressive articles, Kenneth Westphal argues that Hegel should be understood as a natural law constructivist. In this essay, I examine what Westphal means by this, showing that any such position requires postulating rights or duties that exist prior to the formation of political institutions. I show that Hegel consistently denies the existence of any such natural rights or duties and conclude that he must have a fundamentally different, non-foundationalist conception of the fundamental task of moral philosophy.

Kenneth Westphal, in his “Hegel, Natural Law & Moral Constructivism,” offers an argument to the effect that Hegel elaborated a theory of natural law. Westphal contrasts such a natural law with positivism. Such a contrast holds out an either-or prospect: either Hegel is a legal positivist or he is a natural law thinker. I ask whether it is possible that Hegel elaborated a third theory of law other than that of positivism or of natural law. In addressing this possibility, I first raise a problem in Westphal’s adoption of Hegel’s regressive argument. The ultimate justification, according to Westphal, is an a priori concept: namely, the equal rational will. I then exemplify the importance of the problem when a constitutional lawyer identifies intermediate principles justifiable with reference to such a final referent of justification. The problem raises the prospect that Hegel’s theory of law has elements of both natural law and positivist law. Section 3 highlights the need to situate any natural law claim in the particular ethos of the movement of legal consciousness through the experience of time.

I begin my comment on Westphal’s study by exploring briefly his refutation of “the arbitrariness thesis,” and then focusing on the “conditio humanae,” i.e. the conditions of life as freedom realized in common life. As I understand it, coordination and cooperation among persons are required because employing freedom in the presence of others presupposes an act of recognition that acknowledges a priori the necessity of universal respect. The right to use and possess things within the institution of property is an illustrative example of this necessity. Justice requires possession not in the form of some equal distribution (which is a matter of contingency) but as a normative requirement that “everyone shall have property.” One must have property in order to enter the world of inter-subjectivity and become a person. This has important implications for determining how poverty is related to the validity of laws, which depends on the joint legislative will of all persons.