{Is Assange the “world-spirit embodied”? A Hegel scholar reports from the Žižek/Assange Troxy gig}

WikiLeaks combats the hidden but constant brutality of institutionalized violence, not just by the news content it brings to light but by disturbing the formal functioning of power itself: it has the power to circumvent the oblique ways in which information flows and thereby rewrite the very rules which regulate how rules can be violated. The critical task is to keep this disruptive strength alive. 

–

After firing off his rapid salvo of ideologico-critical nuggets on the 1st of July at Cadogan Hall in London, Slovenian philosopher and cultural theorist Slavoj Žižek revealed what he considers his favourite meeting between a famous thinker and a famous agent of change. The thinker in question was, of course, the great philosopher of freedom Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, and the protagonist Napoleon Bonaparte, the year 1806. Hegel, then on the cusp of completing his first major work, The Phenomenology of Spirit, long enthused about Napoleon as the “world-spirit embodied.” That is to say precisely as an agent (a capable one, to be sure) only contingently thrust into the world’s limelight, pursuing his own aims – mostly oblivious to the true extent of the societal changes the processes he nominally leads are engendering – but nonetheless producing emancipation in his wake.

It is only all too tempting to link this anecdote to the proceedings on the very next day, when Žižek (who is himself on the verge of completing a book on Hegel) met with the founder of WikiLeaks, Julian Assange, for a two-hour conversation moderated by the award-winning journalist Amy Goodman of Democracy Now! The flow of the relaxed event, held at the Troxy in Eastern London in front of over 9000 online viewers on top of the nearly 2000 present in the hall, was carefully balanced: Goodman set the scene clearly and posed questions about the past and present of WikiLeaks to Assange, Assange then gave measured and factual responses, after which Žižek was let loose to try and elucidate what he saw as the broader significance of WikiLeaks and the replies given.

Although the atmosphere at the Troxy was very genial, and Žižek generally enthusiastic about WikiLeaks (as he was in the London Review of Books article he published about it), there was a distinct tension between the rather standard Enlightenment rhetoric employed by Assange (more facts, a more complete historical record, better educated journalists)  and the significantly more radical conclusions the philosopher was drawing. This is why – whilst it should no doubt be read in a similar light as Žižek’s own remarks on his position during the conversation (I feel now like that Stalinist commentator: the leader has spoken, I provide the deeper meaning) – the ventured analogy nevertheless contains a kernel of truth beyond its bombast: defining the emancipatory significance of phenomena should not be left to the actors alone.

To illustrate: in response to Goodman’s initial question on the significance of the Iraq war logs, Assange primarily emphasized the concrete revelations WikiLeaks had provided. He mentioned the 400.000 cables leaked, 15.000 previously unreported deaths revealed, a video of an American helicopter mowing down civilians, and so on. In contrast, Žižek went far enough to say that even if WikiLeaks had not revealed a single new thing, it should be considered game-changing. Why? Because of the very way it functions. For the philosopher, our democracies not only have rules regarding what can be revealed, but also rules which regulate the transgression of those first rules (the independent press, NGOs, etc). The contention then is that WikiLeaks operates outside both these sets of rules, and that there is the source of its power.

In this way, the reply was firmly anchored in the key trope Žižek has championed since his first major work in English: that ideology in today’s “post-ideological” world is not dead, but rather more powerful than ever – alive not so much on the level of knowledge but in the ways it structures social reality itself. In other words, we can play a game of where I know that you know (about, say, the everyday violence that underpins our free society), and you know that I know, although only so far. Once confronted with information in a naked enough way, the we (the public) can no longer ignore its false cynical distance to it. Or so Žižek contended using as an example the difference between a husband knowing abstractly about his wife’s infidelity contrasted with the visceral reaction to seeing a picture of the act itself. WikiLeaks, he argues, does just this.

That Wikileaks is disruptive is amply shown by the vast reaction against it, whether through the calls (which Goodman listed) to label Assange a terrorist and assassinate him, in the financial blockade enacted by Mastercard and Visa (which, as Assange pointed out, have been deemed unlawful), or by the seemingly extralegal way his extradition is being handled. Here, Žižek points out, the innocence of the accusers is anything but innocent; they decry the violence of WikiLeaks revelations, themselves oblivious to the military, economic, political and social framework of everyday violence that goes unmentioned in public discourse. The violence of leaks is on a formal level, and precisely this is at the root of the Slovene’s exclamation to Assange: “Yes, you are a terrorist, but by God, then what are they?”

By casting WikiLeaks as a emancipatory, even heroic, phenomenon under constant threat we get to the true import of the initial analogy: just as the French armies did not fully bring the kind of lasting social liberation many expected from them, and just as Hegelian philosophy was grossly distorted and misappropriated after his death, the danger remains that whatever disruptive power WikiLeaks has will be defused, or even hijacked to work against its original liberating potential. If this is so then what, precisely, can be done to prevent this?

Sadly, sharp answers were lacking at the Troxy and time ran out before the audience could grill the all-too-friendly participants with questions. Žižek did voice his main concern, however: the risk of WikiLeaks being directly domesticated into the functioning of the official system via a rhetoric of accepting the project’s principle whilst only allowing the ‘right’ figures to run it.

This I would nonetheless take away as the key message: WikiLeaks should not be seen as merely another chapter in investigative journalism and free flow of information, but a positive, subversive emancipatory force by virtue of the way it operates outside the system of secrets and allowed revelations. What then remains ahead is the hard task of keeping this subversive strength alive. Remember, by 1814 Hegel had re-appraised the great emancipatory power he had once encountered, as a “genius destroyed by mediocrity.”

Master and Slave

Now that the dialectic has been made clear and distinct, it’s time to move on to today’s life lesson:

How to escape nihilism?

–

“I find no reason to believe in the existence of anything beyond my own passing impressions”

–

Short answer:

Bondage

Long answer:

Lordship and bondage

From the first paragraph of the introduction to his Phenomenology on, Hegel is worried about nihilism, the lack of belief in anything outside the self’s transient impressions. The problem is particularly acute for Hegel because it is seemingly a result of the Kantian/Fichtean principle of ‘subject-object identity’, which traps the self inside the circuit of its own consciousness.  The principle postulates that the self knows a priori of objects only what it creates according to its own inherent laws. From this point of view, the subject has no right to postulate the reality of things-in-themselves.

Hegel would need to show how criticism breaks outside of the circle of consciousness through its internal dialectic. This in turn is part of what’s going on in chapters IV and IVA of his Phenomenology : ‘Self-Consciousness’, ‘The Truth of Self-Certainty and ‘Lordship and Bondage’. The goal here (per Beiser) is for the self to attain its intersubjective self-awareness as spirit, the strategy remarkably simple: arguing against the Cartesian tradition that self-knowledge as a rational being is possible only through mutual recognition. The posited motivation for the subject is thus the desire for independence, the desire for freedom: without the recognition of others the self is unable to prove its claim to be a rational being, therefore being unable to know itself as rational. Tantalizingly, in this way intersubjectivity for Hegel is not supplanting realism but acting as its very foundation. Does it work? It’s worth a look in the least. It’s perhaps helpful to break the process down into stages:

Stage one: the need for recognition

The initial position. The claim is that a being can only be independent if it is in control of the world and that it can only be fully in control of the world if it can make those things in the world he considers as being alive obey his commands. Beiser emphasizes that even though this presupposes the existence of an other for the being, it does not suppose that this other is granted independent and equal existence, i.e. the others might be robots/animals without an inner life.

Stage two: the life/death struggle

Here the idea is that in order to wrest that obedience from the other, a struggle must commence and be won. Crucially, the argument continues, the being must be willing to commit his life in this struggle in order to prove that they are above their animal desires and mere biological contingency. Thus, contra Hobbes, Hegel claims that freedom can be a much more important goal for an individual than mere self-protection and survival.

Stage three: mercy to the foe

The victor of the struggle cannot, however, extinguish the vanquished, as that would leave no-one to do the recognizing. Thus the life of the defeated is spared.

Stage four: master versus slave

The foe, allowed to live, cannot be set free for fear of reprisal, the solution is thus enslavement. Nonetheless, the being now become master does not respect the fresh slave as an equal, even if the slave’s desires are acknowledged and life sustained, for the slave is being used as a means to the masters own ends. And since, as the dialectic has progressed this far, the slave has preferred his life over death in the struggle for recognition and not proved himself to be rational in the sense required by stage two. This step is still an advancement in the master’s ‘education as a rational being,’ since now there is something in the world that the being can no longer blithely consume. Utterly ignoring the needs of the slave will lead to the slave’s death, which undermines the master’s own need for recognition. This master’s recognition of the slave, even as a lower being, is thereby the crucial step outside the circle of consciousness.

Stage five: collapse of the master/slave relationship

It is this tension, the  inability for either being to fully recognize each other, that fundamentally undermines the relationship. As the master cannot see the slave as another equal rational being, recognition gained from the vanquished is thus worth only a little if anything. What’s more, Hegel traces a subtle advantage of the slave over the master: while the master merely consumes the fruits of the slave’s labour, the slave gains independence over his objects through labour. Because the master treats the slave only as an instrument and consumes all objects apart from the slave as he desires, he slips back to the stage of animal desires.  As Beiser puts it: just as the slave is not able to give recognition, the master is not worth receiving it.

Stage six: liberation of the slave

The master will thus only be able to prove to himself that he is rational by treating the slave as an end in itself, the enslavement must end for the master to attain his goal of freedom.

BOOM! So much for the metaphysical reading, nihilism begone. If you want to confirm your status as a free and rational being, you need mutual recognition (or be a grouch and don’t admit it, Hegel would concede, but you can’t live like that).  Sounds legit to me. But how adequately can the above schema be imposed upon other phenomena, as it profusely¹ has been? Assuming concrete individuals were performing the master/slave dance, would it be necessary for the mutual recognition to persist, or would it be possible for the master to convince himself that he is rational and then do away with the slave? Would it be enough to have two masters and 6 billion slaves? In a travel book I erred recently to read, a tory MP professed as much, contemplating a variant of the problem of other minds under Peruvian stars and postulating that there are only a few real people in the world while all the other billions we meet in life are mere apparitions and ghostless shells (explains a lot).

Moreover, in this reading the dissolving of the master/slave relationship is a dialectical necessity traced post facto, after all this has ‘happened’ with a rational, ‘absolutely knowing’ person emerging at the end, trying to elaborate for himself what he already is in himself. Keeping in mind the nature of the dialectic then, there is no conceptual necessity that such a master/slave relationship, if found as a contingent structure/fact in the world, will dissolve or end in the full recognition of the slave. From the endpoint we can hope to trace the tension in the development that led to the resolution, but this does not mean there is an unavoidable teleological march towards similar outcomes in other cases. And is this not a bane to any populist dialectical materialist?

¹e.g. Marx, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Lacan, Sartre, De Beauvoir, US-China relations, etcetera

pan ache

–

ooOOooOO What is the Hegelian dialectic? OOooOOoo

–

[First: recourse to the dreaded, fantastic Kantian triad thesis-antithesis-synthesis is advisable just about only if one wants to be singled out as a blessed someone who has never read Hegel first hand. Hegel himself, besides criticizing the use of all schemata, never used that terminology (although he outlined something partially analogous, coming up) and throws poop pies at anyone who does.]

–

In the Beiserian Metaphysical Reading™, it is an attempt, among [too] much else, to correct the chief insufficiencies of past metaphysics, potently criticized by Kant and labeled as dogmatic due to their failure to investigate the powers and limits of reason. Instead of succumbing to pre-Kantian dogmatism, Hegel would take the criticism further, insisting that Kant had not gone far enough on at least three accounts: first, he did not investigate the inherent logic of concepts themselves, but just classified concepts as either subjective or objective according to his presupposed epistemological principles; second, Kant insisted that there should be a criterion of knowledge before we make claims to knowledge, but this demand created an infinite regress; and third, Kant did not see that we cannot criticize forms of thinking without first using them – likened by Hegel to the attempts of the wise Scholasticus to learn to swim without jumping in the water.

–

This amounts to the charge that Kantian criticism is external, presupposing a privileged criticism which does not derive from the concepts themselves. Contra Kant, the ever-immanent Hegel insisted that criticism of knowledge must be internal, that each subject matter must be evaluated according to its own inherent standards and goals. This is lead to a desperate search for the right kind of method to justify the new metaphysics, blossoming in the Phenomenology of the Spirit as that (anti-)method of the self-examination or self-criticism of consciousness labeled the dialectic.

–

(By the by, this recognition of the potency of Kant’s critique lead Hegel to forsake the concept of intellectual intuition as the organ of absolute knowledge – a position he once championed with Schelling)

–

This method is anti-methodical precisely in the sense that it is opposed to the usual way a ‘method’ consists in certain standards, rules and guidelines that are justified a priori. Hegel argued that the philosopher should bracket his standards, rules and guidelines in favour of examining the subject matter for its own sake.

–

Hegel’s own term for this anti-methodology is ‘the concept’ (der Begriff), which designates the inherent form of an object, its inner form or purpose, which is to be grasped through enquiry.  According to Beiser, when Hegel himself uses the ‘dialectic’ it usually designates the ‘self-organization’ of the subject matter, its ‘inner necessity’ and ‘inherent movement’  – that which follows from the concept of the thing. Thus it is contrary to Hegel’s intention to assume that the dialectic is an a priori methodology or a kind of logic to be applied to any subject matter. The dialectic is the opposite: the inner movement of the subject matter, emanating/arising/evolving from it rather than through a pre-selected logic applied by the philosopher.

Still, while rejecting the idea that the proper method for a subject matter can be determined a priori at the beginning of an enquiry, he holds that it can be determined a posteriori at its end. At the end of a subject matter’s dialectic, an abstract general structure can be extracted, although only with post facto validity. Accordingly, there is a detailed discussion of methodology at the end of the Science of Logic. Discussing methodology prior to enquiry, as Hegel does in the Phenomenology, can be done only with the recognition of the preliminariness of the resulting conclusions. Thus we can talk of Hegel’s dialectic, given that we take it as nothing more than an a posteriori summary of the formal structure of his investigations.

–

Here we must take care to dispel other popular misconceptions of the dialectic besides the TAS-syndrome: that it is some kind of alternative logic competing with traditional logic [it was never meant to be a formal logic determining the fundamental laws of inference governing all propositions – in its most general form it is a metaphysics whose humble main task is to determine the general structure of being]; and that it is committed to denying the laws of identity and contradiction. To be sure, Hegel has criticized traditional logic for its rigid adherence to the laws of identity, contradiction and excluded middle (and the naughty esotericist even seems to countenance contradiction in places, flirting with disaster as breaking those laws makes it possible to prove and law whatsoever), but his dialectic is not committed to a denial of those laws. So he does not reject these laws themselves, rather the metaphysical application of them. He is criticizing a very specific metaphysical doctrine: that we can completely determine substance, reality in itself, through one predicate alone.  Per Beiser, Hegel rejects this because he believes (on independent metaphysical grounds) that ‘reality in itself is the universe as a whole, which has to be described as both F and –F, where F and –F are true of distinct parts of the whole, thus not violating the law of contradiction. The point of the dialectic will be to remove contradictions by showing how contradictory predicates that seem true of the same thing are really only true of different parts or aspects of the same thing. To clarify, Hegel has a grudge not with the law of contradiction itself, but the confusion of this law with the metaphysical claim that reality in itself must have one property and not another. The move from ‘no single thing is both F and –F at the same time’ to ‘reality as a whole cannot be both F and –F at the same time’ may be natural for us, but it is fallacious.

–

Consequently, the dialectic is an answer to the contradictions of human understanding (Verstand) – an understanding which separates things as if they were completely independent of each other, and connects them, as if neither could exist apart from the other. Reason (Vernunft) is the necessary result of the understanding’s immanent movement – reason is not only a form of mechanical explanation, showing how one finite thing depends upon another, but also a self-transcending form of holistic explanation which shows all things as a part of a wider whole, uniting the phenomenal and the noumenal, showing how the conditioned is within the unconditioned.

–

In the Encyclopedia (§§80-82) Hegel does outline three specific stages to the dialectic: the moment of abstraction (the understanding); the dialectical or negatively rational moment; and the speculative or positively rational moment:

—

The moment of abstraction or the understanding

Analogous to the Kantian thesis, this moment is where the understanding postulates something unconditioned/absolute, which it attempts to conceive in itself, as if it were independent and self-sufficient, the moment which makes sharp and fast distinctions between things – in doing so the understanding is making a metaphysical claim: that something exists in itself, that it can exist on its own without other things.

–

The dialectical or negatively rational moment

Analogous to the Kantian antithesis, it designates the activity of the understanding which upon examining one of its terms finds it not to be self-sufficient after all, and instead only comprehensible through its relation to other things. Because it is artificial or arbitrary to stop at any given point, the understanding must seek the reason for its apparently self-sufficient terms. This stage is dialectical because the understanding is trapped in a contradiction, it must affirm that the unit of analysis is both unconditioned and conditioned, both dependent and independent.

–

The speculative or positively rational moment

The specifically Hegelian stage, where the understanding finds that ‘the only way to resolve the contradiction is to say that what is absolute or independent is not one thing alone, but the whole of that thing and all others upon which it depends.’ By admitting that there is something self-sufficient or unconditioned while also holding on to the negatively rational moment – that any particular thing is dependent or conditioned – we avoid the contradiction through ascension to a higher level. The parts of the whole are conditioned and dependent, while the whole itself is unconditioned and independent with respect to them.

–

Thus, a single iteration of the dialectic is complete. But since only the Absolute, that which includes everything within itself, is truly unconditioned, the stage is set for the dialectic to continue with the same contradiction arising on the new, higher level. Easy.

—

Now the task is to read and comprehend the Phenomenology and ensure each of its arguments is correct in order to establish a critical foundation for metaphysics and save the world from ignorance.

schizoanalysis

‘vegetarianism is an orgy of mass death on an appalling scale’

Dreamt about home forests, puffballs trampled as a child, slow erupting clouds, deeper stretch three plaiting trees part of a hollow sphere which they’ve set to grow long ago, now gray beings coming to meet and fetch, they had hands and feet, mouths, mirror enough, representations of what lurks

Terence McKenna

let’s be spore-based lifeforms percolating the universe

(von Neumann probes would populate the entire galaxy within a few million years)

UI

VESI JOKA LASKEE MÄKEÄSI ALAS SYÖ POHJAAN AUKON

UI SIINÄ

UI SIINÄ

SANAT OVAT MUURAHAISIA

ELÄMÄ KEKO

JOKIN MEISSÄ ON HILJAA

From sensuous pleasure to a horror without limits

"No one can imagine a world where burning passion would definitively cease to trouble us.
No one, on the other hand, can envisage the possibility of a life that would no longer be
bound by calculation. Civilization in its entirety, the possibility of human life, depends
upon a reasoned estimation of the means to assure life. But this life – this civilized
life – which we are responsible for assuring, cannot be reduced to these means, which make
it possible. Beyond calculated means, we look for the end – or the ends - of these means. 

It is banal to devote oneself to an end when that end is clearly only a means.
The quest for wealth – sometimes the wealth of egotistic individuals, sometimes wealth
held in common – is obviously only a means. Work is only a means.

The response to erotic desire – and to the perhaps most human (least physical)
desire of poetry and of ecstasy (but is it so decisively easy to grasp the difference
between eroticism and poetry, and between eroticism and ecstasy?) – the response to
erotic desire is, on the contrary, an end."

"The essence of man as given in sexuality - which is his origin and beginning - poses
a problem for him that has no other outcome than wild turmoil.
This turmoil is given in the 'little death'. How can I fully live the 'little death'
if not as a foretaste of final death?

The violence of spasmodic joy lies deep in my heart. This violence, at the same time,
and I tremble as I say it, is the heart of death: it opens itself up in me!
The ambiguity of this human life is really that of mad laughter and of sobbing tears.
It comes from the difficulty of harmonizing reason's calculations with these tears.
... With this horrible laugh..."

"With its first step, this book's meaning is the opening up of consciousness
to the identity of this 'little death,' and of definitive death. From sensuous
pleasure, from madness, to a horror without limits.
This is the first step.
Which brings us to the forgetting of the puerility of reason!
Of a reason that was never able to measure its limits.

These limits are given in the fact that, inevitably, the end of reason,
which exceeds reason, is not opposed to the overcoming of reason!
In the violence of the overcoming, in the disorder of my laughter and my sobbing,
in the excess of raptures that shatter me, I seize on the similarity between
a horror and a voluptuousness that goes beyond me, between an ultimate pain
and an unbearable joy!"

Georges Bataille, The Tears of Eros

Das Rosen-Innere

Essays done, scenery switched, dog walked & asleep.

I find a growing interest in tracing connections between Hegel and some currently less reputable thinkers/feelers which seem to have been largely purged from accounts of H’s thought. The cobbler, Jacob Böhme, in particular seems to have exerted an influence, from the idea of a necessary separation of a primordial unity onwards. Maybe all this just because of Blavatsky’s stare pouncing me from the wall of that theosophical lodge lurking on my way to uni.

In other news, a text submission is due Sunday which means I shouldn’t have planned all this tomfoolery between now and then. Physics society mixed sauna anyone? o.O Anyway, I’m drawn to find the right way to explore the next stage of my dear Hamish’s afterlife. Having been liquidified and having met his maker, he’s rebuilt himself and can/must yammer on with a new voice, lucid. Right now I’m thinking a late Willam Carlos Williamsian triadic form where the lines are of equal speaking length might trundle along nicely. Bumped into it a while ago in David Young’s recent translation of R.M.Rilke’s Duinese Elegies – fluid to digest, supplementing my creaking German well. Maybe it’ll be too monotone, maybe it’s beyond my rhythmless mind. Plus I find it difficult to let myself drop from the calculated convolutedness of what’s gone on before. Irregardless, pathosmonger Rilke is supergreat:

Das Lied vom Meer

Uraltes Wehn vom Meer,
Meerwind bei Nacht:
du kommst zu keinem her;
wenn einer wacht,
so muß er sehn, wie er
dich übersteht:
uraltes Wehn vom Meer
welches weht
nur wie für Ur-Gestein,
lauter Raum
reißend von weit herein…

O wie fühlt dich ein
treibender Feigenbaum
oben im Mondschein.

A language without Ur is no language at all.

RRRRainer!

Edit: This is what came out in the end

Hegel Evangelion

Summary of the chapter on Hegel and religion

.

After Hegel’s death, his right-wing and left-wing followers debated the religious dimension of his thought. For the right he was the Thomas Aquinas of the Protestant Prussian Church, for the left he was a humanist or pantheist.

Points for the left: Hegel’s God was immanent, not transcendent; no time for miracles and the Bible; criticised Christianity as a form of alienation between the self and the world

Points for the right: Hegel’s interest in combining knowledge and faith; his attempts to rationalise the trinity; his enthusiasm for finding reason in extant institutions; and his express declaration of being a Lutheran

What place faith in Hegel’s system?

He claims that philosophy and religion both have the divine for their subject matter

(crucial for this is the conception that emotion and thought are not dualistic)

In his early writings, Hegel expresses a lack of interest towards theology, objective religion (dogma & doctrine) while enthusing about subjective religion, a matter of feeling and action

‘Everything depends on subjective religion; this is what has inherent and true worth’

In his Berne and Tübingen writings, H critiques Christianity in the vein of radical Enlightenment thinking:

prefers Socrates to Jesus as a teacher of morality; the respect of individual freedom over a prescribed path

doesn’t like the doctrine of eternal salvation a it undermines autonomy

sees duty and virtues as self-sufficient, standing apart from a Christian God

___

Hegel wants to craft a modern civil religion whose doctrines satisfy three criteria

1) founded on reason

2) appeal to the heart and imagination

3) serve all the needs of life

[the desire to worship pervades us, its focus shifts]

___

Hegel undergoes a reversal in Frankfurt

In the Spirit of Christianity and its Fate he defends mystical religious experience

shifting towards the importance of love

he wants to combine Christianity and his idea of a civic religion

___

In his Jena years, most important passage is the chapter on the ‘Unhappy Consciousness’ in the Phenomenology

H argues that the death of Christ means that God has withdrawn from the world and that there are no more direct mediators between individual and God, the unhappy consciousness concludes that God is dead

Hegel’s aim is to overcome the alienation between self and world

(Christ’s death i s a negation to be negated by the resurrection)

the death and resurrection are to be seen as a metaphor for the life of the spirit

we must lose and discover ourselves in the experience of love and the development of reason

___

Did Hegel abandon his ideal of a new religion in Jena?

‘the task of philosophy is to find the rational core behind religion and state’

back to the double dictum ‘the actual is rational, and the rational is actual‘:

there is some rationality in the Church, but not everything that exists qualifies as actual

(this gives critical distance between Hegel’s philosophy vs. state & religion)

So Hegel’s philosophy can be seen as both an apology and a critique of Christianity

trying to purge its non-rational elements

What is Hegel’s conception of God?

infinite & immanent

God must include the world

‘without the world, God is not God’

contrary to Spinoza, God is not only substance but also subject

nature & culture, organic & spiritual, life & its self-consciousness

[although, like Spinoza, he’s a monist]