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HEGEL: THE THEOLOGICAL ROOTS OF HIS DIALECTIC SHORTLY BEFORE he died of cholera in 1831 Hegel completed a third edition of the Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences. Since he bestowed on no other one of his ponderous works comparable care, this one has therefore special authority. It is, moreover, the most comprehensive single statement of his thought and, of all his strictly theoretical writings, the one easiest to read and understand. This relative lucidity of the work was due to the circumstance that Hegel wrote it for the classroom. And although in that situation he made considerable demands upon his students/ he could not totally disregard their ability to understand and to react. Responding to these restrictions he had therefore of necessity to give the Encyclopedia something of the form of a dialogue. He had to curtail metaphors and speak more directly to the point. As a consequence of this he left in the work clearer evidence of how he in the first instance came to posit the dialectic as the principle of nature and thought, and how, subsequently, he developed his notion of it. In the Encyclopedia he shows that it has at least three consistent sources: Aristotle's doctrine of the N ous; Kant's expose of the antinomies of Pure Reason; and the Christian doctrine of the Trinity. By terminating the work with the citation from Aristotle's Metaphysics, Hegel strikingly acknowledges the first source: Now thinking in itself is concerned with that which is in itself best, and thinking in the highest sense with that which is in the highest sense best. And thought thinks itself through participation in the 1 Hegel's Letter to Niethammer, cited in Owl of Minerva ~. 4 (June, 1971), p. 1. 734 HEGEL; THE THEOLOGICAL ROOTS OF HIS DIALECTIC 735 object of thought; for it becomes an object of thought in the act of apprehension and thinking, so that thought and the object of thought are the same, because that which is receptive of the object, i.e., essence, is thought. And it actually functions when it possesses this object. Hence it is actuality rather than potentiality that is held to be the divine possession of rational thought, and its active contemplation is that which is most pleasant and best. If, then, the happiness which God always enjoys is as great as that which we enjoy sometimes, it is marvelous; and if it is greater, this is still more marvelous. Nevertheless it is so. Moreover, life belongs to God. For the actuality of thought is life, and God is actuality; and the essential actuality of God is life most good and eternal. We hold then that God is a living being, eternal, most good; and therefore life and a continuous eternal existence belong to God; for that is what God is.2 By terminating the Encyclopedia with this text Hegel approved it as a resume of what he was trying to say. And by this approval he professed his essential agreement with Aristotle that everything begins and ends in the self-consciousness of the supreme Nous. All that is not this Nous, he thereby implied, is from and for it. The dialectic, which structures such intermediary things, is therefore a relational and dynamic structure grounded in absolute self-consciousness, which selfconsciousness is, as Aritotle puts it, the highest thought thinking itself, God living on the loftiest plane. Hegel came to this conclusion, the Encyclopedia reveals, by critical reflection upon the implications of Kant's antinomies. The section in which he describes this reflection is perhaps the best in the work. Essentially it argues the thesis that Kant made the most important contribution to the philosophy of his day by discovering that the use of the categories of judgment to think the transensible necessarily leads to contradictory assertions. But he did not fully understand the significance of this result. He thought that it served only to demonstrate the impossibility of metaphysics. But if he had applied it not only to cosmology but also to the analysis of all representations, concepts, and ideas whatsoever, he would have realized that it • Metaphysics xii, 7, 107fl b 18. 736 KEVIN WALL actually discloses the inner...

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