Hegel's Trinitarian Claim: A Critical Reflection

6. From Finite to Infinite

6 From Finite to Infinite 1. Recapitulative Overview With his claim that God could be conceived of as Subject, Person and Spirit only on the basis of an elaboration of a trinitarian divine subjectivity ,1 Hegel had stated in philosophically informed religious representational language his theory of an attained absolute self-mediation in, of and through thought. Hegel gave this self-mediating movement of absolute Spirit essentially a logical, phenomenological, philosophy of religion and philosophical formulation. It was necessary here at least in principle directly or indirectly to have made a critique of all these various formulations in order now to assert that Hegel could not establish his trinitarian claim in the way in which he had proposed it. Stated very inadequately, Hegel had proposed to establish his trinitarian claim by means of a progression from God to world. More exactly, for Hegel the divine was necessarily2 to have othered itself as world in the dualism of nature and finite Spirit and to have returned enriched to itself through finite Spirit’s sublation in absolute Spirit as philosophic thought. The world was to have been the finite other of God.3 Hegel’s mature dialectic was to have been a movement beginning from infinity (Unendlichkeit, das Unendliche) as an sich totality to its necessary selfothering as finitude (Endlichkeit, das Endliche), again dialectically speaking taken as momentary totality, and then enriching return as inclusive infinite. When infinite and finite are not maintained in abstraction from one another, for Hegel there is this to be said about the coming or going forth of the finite from the infinite: the infinite goes forth out of itself into finitude because, being grasped as an abstract unity, it 159 160 Hegel’s Trinitarian Claim has no truth, no enduring being within it; and conversely the finite goes into the infinite for the same reason, namely that it is a nullity.4 It is a logical beginning with the infinite which Hegel cannot argue to in the public realm of thought and discourse. And to the extent that other trinitarian formulations would be dependent upon or reducible to Hegel’s deductively argued position or even to its structure, they would as well be vulnerable to the critique directed here specifically against Hegel’s position. That Hegel could not defend his deductively argued trinitarian claim in its directionality from infinite to finite to enriched infinite as a movement of self-positing thought has been argued in this study’s preceding Parts One and Two. In a wide sense Part One, composed of Chapters One and Two, was concerned with Etwas, only the beginning of the Subject.5 Chapter One sketched the seductive rhythm of pure thought with its culmination in absolute Idea as method so as to establish the Logic as logical reformulation of the true content of Trinity. Chapter Two worked through Etwas back to pure thought in its primordial, elementary instantiation as being/nothing/becoming. Out of a critique of this initial triadic, in which Hegel had unsuccessfully tried to establish subjectivity’s beginning in pure determinationlessness as its determination, there flowed the conclusion that any becoming available to human thought was necessarily finite and determinate. Part Two consisted in a turn to Hegel’s realphilosophical spheres. It was effectively an examination of Hegel’s understanding of syllogism both in syllogism’s purity as thought determination and in its realization in trinitarian reconciliation. Chapter Three provided a first, encyclopedic overview of Hegel’s syllogistically structured trinitarian reconciliation and a criterion for evaluating the success of Hegel’s argumentation in his breakthrough text, the Phenomenology. Chapter Four concentrated on an examination and critique of trinitarian reconciliation in its incarnational immediacy and concluded to the givenness of finite, determinate becoming as enriching growth and qualitative increment. Chapter Five treated of Hegel’s indisputably syllogistically structured trinitarian reconciliation in the 1827 Lectures on the third element of absolute religion. As concluded in Chapter Five, with syllogism Hegel had correctly sensed the necessarily triadic formal structure of any becoming, though he was not able to develop that structure convincingly as an immanent and 161 From Finite to Infinite consistent self-grounding movement of self-determining pure thought. In the conclusion to Chapter Five it was proposed that the irreducible constituent elements of becoming as enriching growth and qualitative increment are initial Selfhood, otherness and...