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66 three Hegel The Onto-theological Pantheism of Spirit Like Spinoza, Hegel is a pantheist, though of an importantly different sort. He provides another site at which to explore the debate over cosmological transcendence. Because for Hegel the world is only penultimately the world of nature and ultimately the world of the human spirit and its history, the term ‘cosmological’ is no longer quite apt. But, since the debate between both species of pantheism and theism is over the nature of the difference between God and the world of finite beings, we can retain the term, even while mentally putting it in scare quotes. N.B. The debate is not whether there is a difference between God and the world but how it should be construed. For, as we have seen in the case of Spinoza, pantheism is not the denial of any difference between the two, since he distinguishes substance or natura naturans from its modes or natura naturata. It is rather the denial that God’s reality is ontologically independent of the world, in short that there could be God without the world. We will find a similar distinction and a similar denial in Hegel. Another obvious advantage of turning to Hegel is that he is one of Heidegger ’s two prime paradigms of onto-theology. Heidegger introduced this term in Hegel 67 1949 in relation to Aristotle’s completion of his ontology with a theology of the Unmoved Mover. When he returned to this theme in 1957, it was in the context of a seminar on Hegel’s Science of Logic. It was in the latter essay that he described onto-theology as allowing God to enter philosophical discourse only on philosophy’s terms and in the service of its project, and he complained , in the spirit of Pascal and Kierkegaard, that this God was religiously otiose.1 What he says there specifically about Hegel will best be understood after we see in what sense Hegel is a pantheist. It is possible to date quite precisely the time when Hegel abandoned theism for good. Ironically, it was in 1795 in correspondence with his two friends from seminary days at Tübingen. Schelling and Hölderlin had become Fichte enthusiasts, as we see from letters they sent to Hegel early that year. On the basis of prepublication access to Fichte’s 1794 Wissenschaftslehre, Schelling wrote on January 5, Philosophy is not yet at an end. Kant has provided the results. The premises are still missing. And who can understand the results without the premises ? . . . Kant has swept everything away, but how is the crowd to notice? One must smash it to pieces before their very eyes, so they grasp it in their hands. The great Kantians now everywhere to be seen have got stuck on the letter . . . the old superstition of so-called natural religion as well as of positive religion has in the minds of most already once more been combined with the Kantian letter. It is fun to see how quickly they get to the moral proof. Before you can turn around the deus ex machina springs forth, the personal individual Being who sits in Heaven above! Fichte will raise philosophy to a height at which even most of the hitherto Kantians will become giddy. . . . Now I am working on an ethic à la Spinoza. (HL 29) Toward the end of the month, Hegel responded. Right in the middle of his famous battle cry, ‘‘May the Kingdom of God come, and our hands not be idle! . . . Reason and Freedom remain our password, and the Invisible Church our rallying point,’’ he writes, ‘‘There is one expression in your letter concerning the moral proof that I do not entirely understand: ‘which they know how to manipulate so that out springs the individual, personal Being.’ Do you really believe we fail to get so far?’’ (HL 32). At about the same time and as if to anticipate Schelling’s reply, Hölderlin wrote to Hegel from Jena where he had been attending Fichte’s lectures, expressing his enthusiasm for both the 1794 Wissenschaftslehre and On the Vocation of the Scholar. [Fichte’s] Absolute Self, which equals Spinoza’s Substance, contains all reality; it is everything, and outside it, is nothing. There is thus no object for this Absolute Self, since otherwise all reality would not be in it. Yet a consciousness without an object is inconceivable. . . . Thus, in the Absolute 1. For details, see chapter 1 above. [18.218...

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