II. The object of philosophy

Beginning in the prefaces to the Encyclopaedia, Hegel first tries to introduce the understanding of the reader to ‘another way of thinking than its own’ (EC: 11). He describes this as the ‘new reworking of philosophy according to a method that will some day be recognised, I hope, as the only true method’ (EC: 5). This new and ‘true method’ consists in a specific form of necessity, the ‘necessity of the concept’ (EC: 6), which I will discuss in more detail in part III. What needs to be said at this point is that this necessity requires ‘presuppositionlessness’ (Voraussetzungslosigkeit), as Hegel goes on to argue.Footnote ⁸ Philosophy cannot presuppose an ‘endorsed’ object, nor any ‘acknowledged method of knowing’ (EC: §1, 28) right from the beginning. Everything has to be proven true and nothing can be taken for granted. However, this does not mean that we cannot start with anything. It only means that we cannot presuppose a content or method to be already true at the start. This is why Hegel continues that we indeed have a ‘familiarity’ (EC: §1, 28) with philosophy’s object. But that does not mean that we know its truth in the scope of necessity and science—and the ‘aforementioned familiarity with this content thus turns out to be insufficient’ (EC: §1, 28). So what object is philosophy ‘familiar’ with in the beginning?

Hegel gets straight to this point in §1 of the introduction of the Berlin Encyclopaedias 1827/30:Footnote ⁹ Philosophy ‘shares its object with religion’ in that ‘both have the truth for their object, and more precisely the truth in the highest sense, in the sense that God and God alone is the truth’ (EC: §1, 28). Hence, there is one familiar object, truth, which Hegel understands ‘more precisely’ as God.Footnote ¹⁰ It is because of religion that Hegel concludes that ‘philosophy thus may definitely presuppose a familiarity with its objects’ (EC: §1, 28). For Hegel there is a certainty to religiosity: ‘we may presuppose [vorauszusetzen] that the reader is sufficiently educated to know not only that God is actual—that he is what is most actual, indeed that he alone is what is truly [wahrhaft] actual’ (EC: §6, 33). Hegel clearly accepts as valid and necessary a rudimentary ‘knowledge of God’ (EC: §12, 40). It is this ‘fact [Factum] of […] in particular also religious vitality’ (EC: 10) that philosophy is aware of. Against this background it becomes comprehensible why Hegel is so concerned with current theological debates, as can be seen in the prefaces to the second and third edition—especially in the case of the preface of the third edition, which involves a lengthy discussion of a contemporary debateFootnote ¹¹ between ‘piousness [Frömmigkeit]’ (EC: 25) and ‘enlightened theology [aufgeklärte Theologie]’ (EC: 25), two extremes which are equally wrong, in Hegel’s opinion. The adherents of the former ‘deliberately scorn with invectives the development of the doctrine that is the foundation of the faith of the Christian Church’ (EC: 24) while the latter is stuck with the ‘formalism of the negative’ of ‘freedom of conscience, freedom of thought, freedom of teaching’ without being able to tell ‘what sort of content free belief and thought might have and teach’ (EC: 25). This discussion is important to Hegel not because philosophy is synonymous with religion but because philosophy ‘shares its object with religion’. The concurrence in the same object is so central that Hegel even holds that ‘philosophy cannot exist without religion’ (EC: 16). This stark claim goes beyond the structure of sublation; instead, philosophy has to justify its results to religion. It is philosophy’s task that ‘in relation to the objects of religion, however, truth generally, it would have to prove its capacity to know them by its own light’ and ‘would have to justify its own diverging determinations’ (EC: 16) of the truth, hence of God as the object of religion (EC: §4, 32). So, the relation of philosophy and religion is twofold thus far. Firstly, philosophy cannot exist without religion in the sense that it needs to have that object of religion, God, which Hegel presupposes on behalf of the ‘sufficiently educated’ reader. This clearly underlines the importance of God and religion for philosophy. Secondly, philosophy makes specifically philosophical claims about its object (God), the validity of which it needs to prove to religion. This clearly underlines a distinctive difference between philosophy and religion.

This specific difference of philosophy’s ‘own diverging determinations’ (EC: §4, 32) is the key distinction between the God of religious representation and God as the absolute and object of conceptual philosophy. While philosophy does share the object of religion, it is when philosophy elaborates on this object ‘by its own light’ where it marks its ‘difference from the religious representations’ (EC: §4, 32). That philosophy is not pursuing religious ends, Hegel makes clear in the second preface too: ‘religion is the manner of consciousness in which the truth exists for all human beings […] scientific knowledge of the truth, however, is a particular sort of consciousness of it, the labour of which not everyone, indeed only a few undertake’ (EC: 15). So overall we can see two levels in which the truth and God, which philosophy and religion share as their object, is present. There is the truth ‘for everybody’, concerning God in the sphere of religion, and then there is the ‘scientific knowledge’ of that truth in philosophy, which remains concerned with God nonetheless. While it is undoubtedly remarkable that philosophy shares its object with religion, cannot exist without religion, and even has to prove and justify itself to religion, philosophy crucially proceeds in a different way than religion, which is the cause of its diverging determinations. I argue that this different characteristic of philosophy consists in the new ‘true method’ Hegel foreshadowed in the prefaces, which rests heavily—as we have seen in the beginning of the introductions—on not presupposing any fixed and already known concept of God or truth. How that method actually proceeds, however, will be discussed in part III. So far, we can note that the truth and God are not yet known philosophically. Or, put differently, for philosophy it is thus far entirely unclear what God or the truth is. This is where the genuinely ‘scientific’ (EC: 15) character of philosophy comes into play: Everything there is conceptually has yet to be philosophically elaborated and determined by that genuinely new philosophical method, the ‘necessity of the concept’. But what will be elaborated is the truth or God, which Hegel is, as I hope to have shown, explicit about.

With this emphasis on the philosophical method of the necessity of the concept I want to discuss Clinton Tolley’s (Reference Tolley2018) illuminating arguments on this topic as a substantiation and conclusion of this part of the paper. I will express some concerns about the role of finite subjectivity in Tolley’s Hegel, which eventually lead on to part III, in which I will explore this topic of subjectivity, and then the difference between theology and philosophy (part IV) in more detail.

While I have focused on the introductory passages of the Encyclopaedia thus far, Tolley draws Hegel’s theistic trajectory more heavily from the whole of the Science of Logic, the Encyclopaedia Logic and the Phenomenology. At its core, Tolley’s critical assessment is directed against a finite, subjective understanding of the object of Hegel’s Logic, which Tolley justifies by highlighting Hegel’s clear emphasis on an infinite, non-subjective concept as the purpose of his philosophy, namely God. Tolley basically shows, firstly, that there is plenty of textual evidence across all of these key works that addresses God as the object of Logic and underpins the idea that ‘logical determinations’ ‘can be regarded as definitions of the absolute, as metaphysical definitions of God’ (Tolley Reference Tolley2018: 147). Secondly, he claims that Hegel rejects Kant’s standpoint, centred on a subjective and discursive conception of ‘human mental capacity’ (Tolley Reference Tolley2018: 148), altogether. Hegel merely uses Kant’s ideas as a ‘heuristic’ means, an exemplifying ‘analogy to help his readers better come to understand what Hegel himself means by ‘the concept’’ (Tolley Reference Tolley2018: 145–46). Thirdly, Tolley follows this up by claiming that the logic in the Logic is not the logic of a subject but the logic of God, a divine logic. According to him, already the Phenomenology argues to a great extent against the position of Kantian subjectivity and for the claim that the subject became self-consciousness only as objective spirit (Tolley Reference Tolley2018: 156–58), which is why Logic, as the successor of the Phenomenology, cannot inherit the standpoint of apperceptive-discursive subjectivity at all. While I agree with Tolley’s critical assessment and his reconstruction in general, I partly disagree with his conclusion and would like to nuance it.

I could not agree more with Tolley’s first claim, just as with his critical differentiation between Kant and Hegel in part III of his paper (Tolley Reference Tolley2018: 148–51), and could only reiterate what I have said above concerning the status of God in the prefaces and introductions of the Encyclopaedia. However, my first concern stems from those same introductory passages of the Encyclopaedia. It regards the status of finite subjectivity, more specifically the fact that the subject is just as indispensable in the introductions as is God, as I will detail in the upcoming part III. What Tolley, as I understand him, seems to leave aside in his study is the fact that the epistemic recognition of our finite subjectivity permeates the ontological object of the logical divine subjectivity—it is the pure form of our thought which we inquire into in the Logic, and this results in the cognition of the absolute or divine thought. They become, on their pure level, identical. However, in Tolley’s reading it seems as if God itself is reconstructing its divine thought in the Logic, which finite subjects somehow cognize but from which subjective thoughts remain different. So Tolley by no means excludes subjectivity from Hegel’s philosophy, as is apparent when he claims that in logic ‘it is not just the activity of finite subjective self-conscious spirit […] but rather that all things will share these determinations’ (Tolley Reference Tolley2018: 162; my italics in the first case). For Tolley we finite subjects certainly cognize logic and retrace the manifestations of its divine logical idea through nature and spirit: it is ‘the logical determinations with respect to both their concretization in self-conscious human subjectivity and in nature’ (Tolley Reference Tolley2018: 163). But it makes a difference if, as Tolley holds in these passages, the logical idea manifests as nature and then as spirit, and in the Science of Logic we philosophers, different from it because it is divine and we are not, think about this divine object of Logic. Or, if we finite subjects and philosophers in thinking purely about our thinking, at the same time, think the absolute and divine thinking. Which, then, manifests itself in nature and the now more concrete forms of subjective and objective spirit. And I think it is the latter that captures Hegel’s meaning. It is our pure thinking about our thinking that is identical with the pure structural form of the absolute idea, which is, in the realm of representation, God’s thoughts. By purely thinking about our thoughts, we think God’s thoughts. This is Hegel’s, admittedly bold, philosophical conception. Tolley seems to hold that we think a pure divine thinking, being the object of Logic, which is not inherently entangled with our finite thinking. And in that I sense a problematic subject-object bifurcation which is not the concept of speculative philosophy. Rather, I would like to make the point that it is both, that finite thinking and absolute thinking are in their pure form identical. Thus, in purifying our finite subjectivity by thinking purely about our finite thoughts they lose their finitude, and we unveil within our thoughts the divine thoughts that are, later on, within nature just as they are in our more concrete forms and social practices. Hence, the Logic is finite and infinite in different respects at the same time. It is finite in that a particular subject reveals its negative-dialectical development and structure, and it is infinite in that this structure is a divine and absolute one.

Thus, I suggest refining Tolley’s account, with its evading divinity and its deflated significance of finite subjectivity. While I do think with Tolley that Hegel, indeed, rejects Kant’s critical philosophy as a philosophy of ‘enclosed’ (GW 13: §5, 18) subjectivity that puts too much emphasis on apperception of finite subjects, I think that, at the same time, Hegel holds one aspect of finite subjectivity (and Kantian philosophy) especially dear—that of our contradicting reason: Hegel thinks highly of Kant’s insight that the individual’s reason itself strives with its Vernunftideen beyond the empirical world and in doing so encounters a necessary ‘contradiction posited in the realm of reason […] [that] must be regarded as one of the most important and profound advances in the philosophy of recent times’ (EL: §48, 93). This takes Hegel to his method of speculative dialectics. According to my understanding of the matter, Tolley seems to take into account the first aspect—that reason strives beyond itself. However, what I do not see him addressing is the fact that Hegel orients his own method concerning the necessity of the concept and speculative dialectics, to a great extent, around the necessary contradiction within the individual’s reason(ing) encountered in this striving, as I will show in part III. This move of Hegel’s is unprecedented, and it is something he owes to Kant and finite subjectivity alike, claiming that it ‘is among his greatest merits’, that ‘Kant had a higher regard for dialectic’ ‘and presented it as a necessary operation of reason’ (SL: 21.39). The difference between Hegel and Kant is that Hegel’s dialectics is not isolated in the cognition of finite subjectivity, but permeates and constitutes the essence of everything that exists, including the absolute, i.e. in the realm of representation of God. Thus, a finite subject can recognize the absolute structure, the essence of the universe and the essentiality of things.Footnote ¹²

As I try to emphasize in what follows, I think that Hegel does consider the subject’s ‘ordinary’ process of apperception and thought to be the starting point which leads to speculative philosophy and that this individual subjectivity is still present in speculative philosophy in that it is a finite being that thinks infinite concepts of the absolute, or, put in the realm of representation, God’s thoughts. It is not God, or an absolute or any form of (divine) noetic structure that considers itself in Logic, but it is rather the individual finite thinker that has permeating access, ‘direct ontological consciousness’ (Houlgate Reference Houlgate2022: 131), to this (divine) noetic structure by means of a special form of thinking that is identical with its content.Footnote ¹³ This special form of thinking is Hegel’s new method, speculative-dialectical reason, which represents, as mentioned above, ‘another way of thinking’ (EC: 11) and the ‘new reworking of philosophy according to a method […] as the only true method’ (EC: 5).Footnote ¹⁴ Otherwise, Tolley’s interpretation falls prey to the simple, yet pertinent question Pippin asks Horstmann concerning the Logic: ‘But if all there is is thinking, what is the status of this “consciousness of thinking”? Whose consciousness?’ (Pippin Reference Pippin2019: 1068), and runs the risk of doing away with subject-object identity by deflating the individual thinking subject to the point of its vanishment into the ‘infinite divine subject’ (Tolley Reference Tolley2018: 166). As Pippin expresses this danger, according to such interpretations, the finite subject ‘collapses into a self-moving noetic structure, an object-monism’ (Pippin Reference Pippin2019: 1067). While I support Pippin’s objection here, I think it is mistaken to claim that the noetic structure is inaccessible to finite subjectivity (for more on this see endnote 12). Rather, the finite subject is the divine object in the specific respect that it is part of and has epistemic access to it and is manifested by it. So, while I strongly support Tolley’s arguments against a subjectivist reading which ignores the absolute or God and according to which Hegel is concerned only or primarily with our mental capacities as a discursive apperceptive entity, I think his claim of a divine subjectivity reaches too far in that we finite reasoning subjects are being left aside at some point at the end of the Phenomenology and throughout the Logic. Thus, I want to argue with Tolley that the subject’s activity is no longer an ‘enclosed product [eingeschlossenen Erzeugnisses]’ (GW 13: §5, 18) with a ‘fear of the object’ (SL: 21.35), which is how Hegel understood Kant’s subjective idealism, and that it is a divine object that we encounter in the Logic.Footnote ¹⁵ However, I want to argue against Tolley that it is the finite thinking subject that directly accesses that divine noetic structure of the universe by means of his special dialectical-speculative method of thinking because the finite thinking is, by virtue of its dialectics, ‘identical with the content’ of the divine thoughts of Logic (EC: 5) as Hegel says programmatically about his philosophy. Any proclaimed absence of finite subjectivity in the absolute for the sake of divinity leads to serious problems in the vein of the aforementioned object-monism, which Hegel has rigorously fought against since the Phenomenology, namely against the incomprehensible night, ‘Nacht’ (GW 9: 17), of the absolute.

III. The subject and its method in philosophy

The very first aspect of the re-theologizing reading is that God is the object of Hegel’s philosophy. This position as argued in part II I share, I think, with Tolley’s Hegel. However, since God is not taken into account as a simply ‘given’ or ‘ready-made’ representation, as is the case in religion, but has to be elaborated scientifically as the absolute, the question arises as to the extent to which we can still call this object ‘God’. This amounts to a challenge for the re-theologizing claim. What is the merit of a re-theologizing reading in contrast to an ‘orthodox’ metaphysical one when the notion of God is just another name, namely a non-conceptual and merely representational one, for the philosophical absolute? Thus far, the notion of God seems to be almost synonymous with what Hegel calls the absolute idea, which already is dealt with in numerous non-re-theologizing metaphysical approaches to Hegel. Thus, what new light does the insistence on God shed on Hegel exactly? In short, and as will be elaborated in detail in part IV, it supports the metaphysical claim that for Hegel philosophy is concerned with the essentiality of things because, in representational terms, God is the essence of things. Thus, a sought recognition of the object ‘God’ is the strongest possible argument for the recognition of the essentialities of things being the object of philosophy. To set the scene for this argument, in the following I will, firstly, furnish the concept that Hegel is employing, the method of philosophy that the finite subject is thinking with. I will start to elaborate on that subjectivity and flesh out how the method of speculative dialectics arises within finite subjectivity as the key, so to speak, that unlocks the absolute or, as representation, God.

Concerning subjectivity, there is a significant difference in detail and in the extent of the discussion between the introduction of the Heidelberg (1817) and Berlin Encyclopaedias (1827/30). In Heidelberg Hegel rather stipulates the overcoming of the opposition of consciousness between a subject and an object. He outlines philosophy as the ‘science of reason’ in which ‘reason becomes aware of itself as all being’ (GW 13: §5, 17). This ‘can too’ be called the ‘science of freedom’, ‘because in it all alienness of the objects and thus finitude of consciousness disappears’ (GW 13: §5, 18). Both passages equally argue for the dissolution of the opposition of consciousness which amounts to the standpoint of speculative philosophy: The subject in philosophy is not isolated but rather, as a ‘particularity against objects’, ‘sublated and in the universality of reason immersed [versenkt]’ (GW 13: §5, 18).Footnote ¹⁶ In that immersion the subject of philosophy can unfold the true structures of the world and the divine absolute. Albeit stipulative, these passages of the first edition already clearly do not argue for the annihilation of the subject, but for its ‘Versenkung’, which means ‘to immerse oneself in’ the thought of that universality. In contrast to the rushed elaborations of 1817, both Berlin Encyclopaedias 1827/30 unfold that achieved standpoint of speculative thought in detail as follows.

Hegel outlines his position by setting out the ordinary way in which philosophy starts, by thinking over and translating representations into thought.Footnote ¹⁷ One could say that Hegel tries to ‘demystify’ what speculative philosophy does and seeks to make it as accessible as possible after many years of harsh critique, filled with ‘nasty passions of conceit, haughtiness, envy, mockery’ (EC: 22), as he notes ruefully. To facilitate this access, Hegel starts bottom-up with the basic contents of the subject’s consciousness and illustrates the development of thought within that consciousness to the point of speculative philosophy. He first distinguishes different forms of the content of consciousness. There are the most basic forms, such as ‘feeling, intuition, representation’ (EC: §2, 29), or ‘feelings, intuitions, images, representations’ (EC: §3, 30), and there is the ‘form of thought’ or ‘thought as form’ (EC: §2, 29). The relation between these forms is that ‘philosophy puts thoughts and categories, but more specifically concepts, in the place of representations’ (EC: §3, 30–31; my italics). Thus, Hegel explicitly calls for philosophy to be ‘translation into the form of thought and the concept’ (EC: §5, 32), which means that it is ‘transforming the feelings, representations, etc., into thoughts’ (EC: §5, 32). By this ‘translation’ or ‘transformation’ the individual philosopher wants to know the ‘true in objects and events’ (EC: §5, 32), which Hegel calls thinking over, nachdenken. Later on, he designates a second form, the properly speculative philosophical nachdenken, which I will discuss shortly. However, thus far Hegel wants to picture a rather simple idea, which is that in sentences like ‘“this leaf is green”—,categories such as being, singularity, are already part of the mix’ (EC: §3, 31) and philosophy now wants to think of ‘thought entirely without any such admixture’ (EC: §3, 30). This process is already philosophical, since Hegel explicitly refers to it as ‘philosophy’ (EC: §3, 30), although in a not yet specified form. In short, philosophy is thinking as thinking over and a form of our consciousness that elaborates categories that every feeling or representation, as another form of our consciousness, already contains. In saying this, Hegel aims to make his project of speculative philosophy accessible, and to show that philosophical thinking is just one form, as common to our finite consciousness as other, non-intellectual forms. The activity of philosophy is not alien to the everyday activity of our consciousness. Klaus Brinkmann describes this approach elegantly as a philosophy of ‘Radical Immanence’ (Brinkmann Reference Brinkmann2011: 71) and the ‘extraction of the rational structure inherent in the content of other forms of consciousness’ (Brinkmann Reference Brinkmann, Fonnescu and Ziglioli2016: 48).Footnote ¹⁸

Interestingly, and even more striking in the context of my claim about subjectivity, Hegel expresses a bi-directional relationship of correspondence between representation and thought, such that, in the process of their translation, ‘representations’ have a ‘meaning for thinking [Bedeutung für das Denken]’ and ‘conversely’, ‘thoughts and concepts’ have ‘representations, intuitions, feelings’ that ‘correspond to them’ (EC: §3, 31). However, that relation of correspondence is an integral cause of the ‘incomprehensibility [Unverständlichkeit]’ (EC: §3, 31) of philosophy. It consists, firstly, in ‘a lack of training [Ungewohntheit] to think abstractly, i.e. to hold on to pure thoughts and to move among them’ (EC: §3, 31); and, secondly, the ‘impatience, of wanting to have before oneself in the form of a representation what exists in our consciousness in the form of thought and a concept’ (EC: §3, 31). I will discuss this aspect of translation between representation and thought in more detail in part IV. Returning to my argument at this point, Hegel thus far clearly addresses the subject’s consciousness as the starting point of philosophy, which is thinking over (nachdenken) as a yet unspecified process of translation from representations and even feelings to thoughts and vice versa. Furthermore, in doing so that consciousness is confronted with the specifically subjective ‘incomprehensibility’ of philosophy that branches out as ‘a lack of training’ and ‘impatience’. When we agree that this process of translation is a philosophical one, a transition to speculative philosophy which at the same time retains the notion of individual subjectivity is only one step away, as will be demonstrated in what follows.

Hegel introduces the genuine, speculative aspect of the thought of philosophy by considering a related discipline of thought first, namely empirical science. This approach is not an arbitrary one because it serves to sketch, again, bottom-up the different levels of thinking subjectivity in an accessible fashion. Over the course of Hegel’s examination, the empirical sciences gain a pioneering role for philosophy: (a) The empirical sciences share with philosophy the intention of knowing ‘the thoughts of what there is’ (EC: §7, 35), but they lack the proper necessity. In search of that necessity the subject first forms an abstract idea of God or absolute metaphysical concept. (b) This abstract idea, however, is insufficient for the empirical sciences themselves, which provides the thinker with the impulse towards speculative philosophy and the pure ‘development from out of itself’ (EC: §12, 40) of thought.

(a) Firstly, especially in §§7–9, Hegel contrasts empirical science in two respects with philosophical science, so that philosophical science finds its distinctive outlines ex negativo. At the beginning, he starts with the similarities of philosophy and the empirical sciences in their activity of thinking over: ‘empirical sciences […] aim at and produce […] laws, general propositions, a theory, i.e. the thoughts of what there is’ (EC: §7, 35). For Hegel, this is why in his time instruments of the empirical science were called ‘philosophical instruments’, or why Newton calls his physics ‘philosophy of nature’ (EC: §7, 35)—because that characteristic of ‘thinking over’ (EC: §7, 34) was ‘thrown’ ‘upon the seemingly immense material of the world of appearance’ (EC: §7, 35). Thus, in short and at first, philosophy and empirical science share their activity of thinking over with the intention of uncovering the ‘thoughts of what there is’. However, Hegel then introduces a difference from philosophy. There are two aspects the empirical science lacks. ‘In the first place’ there is ‘yet another domain of objects’ empirical science does not concern, ‘freedom, spirit, and God’ (EC: §8, 36), although these objects, and God especially, as I have shown in part II, are objects of concern for thought. ‘Second’, and this will be the backbone for speculative philosophy, the procedures of the empirical sciences do not amount to ‘justice being done to the form of necessity’ (EC: §9, 37), this form being the genuine philosophical aspect that Hegel foreshadowed in the prefaces as the new method. So, what is that form and why is it not done justice in empirical science? Hegel only outlines his position negatively and briefly in the introductions, by showing how the form of necessity is not applied in the empirical sciences: Firstly, ‘the universal […] is not intrinsically connected to the particular’ (EC: §9, 37). Secondly, ‘the starting-points are throughout immediacies, accidental findings, presuppositions’ (EC: §9, 37). We encounter the same critique in 1817, when Hegel addresses the fact that empirical sciences, in contrast to philosophy, can presuppose their content and method and ‘do not have to justify the necessity of their object, that they consider, as such’ (GW 13: §1, 15). This critique of a lack of necessity in the empirical sciences returns in 1817 in §10 and 1827/30 in §16, and is almost identical throughout all editions. There is a kind of insufficiency in empirical science. Now, it is in that context of the insufficiency of empirical science that the special philosophical ‘need [Bedürfnisse]’ of ‘subjective reason’ (EC: §9, 37) emerges, which consists in, again, the ‘satisfaction in terms of form. This form is the necessity in general (cf. §1)’ (EC: §9, 37). Supporting my claim about individual subjectivity, it is a ‘need’ of explicitly ‘subjective reason’. We, as individual subjects, encounter an insufficiency in those empirical sciences when we closely consider them and develop that very subjective need to do justice to the form of necessity. And it is in the context of this subjective need that Hegel introduces, eventually, speculative philosophy, as the second and genuinely philosophical form of thinking:

That aforementioned ‘need’ to satisfy the form of necessity returns fleshed out in §11 and §12. Hegel, in even more subjective terms, considers the need to be a ‘stimulus [Reiz]’ (EC: §12, 40) for thinking: Stimulated by this need the thinking subject turns away from externality, and ‘further’ retreats to its ‘unalloyed selfhood’, ‘loftiest inwardness, namely thinking’ (EC: §11, 39) in order to satisfy the form of necessity. Thus, the place where the form of necessity finds its elaboration is narrowed down as our retreat to thinking. It becomes evident that this is not a retreat away from God or the Absolute when Hegel claims quite on the contrary that it is in this retreat that God, as the object of our thought, arises in the first place: ‘thinking […] elevating itself above the natural, sensory […] into its own unmixed element’ finds a first ‘satisfaction’ in a ‘more or less abstract’ idea of ‘the absolute, God’ as the ‘universal essence of these appearances’ (EC: §12, 40) of experience. We as finite subjects find that first satisfaction in God. Historically, he locates this first satisfaction not only in religion but also ‘with the universalities of ideas […] of the first philosophies (think of being in the Eleatic school, becoming in Heraclitus)’ (EC: §12, 41). Hegel is arguing that in order to satisfy the form of necessity—which was not yet satisfied in the empirical sciences—thinking individuals form religion just as they form metaphysical conceptions of an absolute as an alleged foundation of their experiences.

(b) However, this is the point where the empirical sciences return in a different way. While at first they may have lacked the form of necessity, here they too are not content with the ‘assured satisfaction’ ‘from the universality’ (EC: §12, 40) of an abstract absolute such as God or Heraclitus’s becoming. The subject’s thought is not yet satisfied with those abstract ideas because they too lack the form of necessity, they are merely posited. Thus, empirical science ‘tears thinking away’ (EC: §12, 40) from that abstract universality and, ultimately, leads thinking to that form of necessity by the genuinely philosophical ‘development from out of itself’ of a ‘content that emerges purely in accordance with the necessity of the subject matter itself’ (EC: §12, 40). Thus, Hegel deepens the aforementioned ‘theory, i.e. the thoughts of what there is’ (EC: §7, 35) with the help of the empirical sciences: they push thinking to the point where it seeks its ‘development from out of itself’ (EC: §12, 40). The empirical sciences gain a crucial, trailblazing function for philosophy even if they lack the proper necessity of form: This pioneering role of empirical science is remarkable; without it there would be no philosophy: ‘philosophy owes its development to the empirical sciences’ (EC: §12, 41). However, they do not carry out that thinking from out of itself but only mark its necessity. Speculative philosophy, then, will conduct this way of thinking. Thus, at the same time ‘it does not say much’ (EC: §12, 40) that philosophy owes its development to empirical science because the genuinely unique aspect of speculative philosophy, the satisfaction of the necessity—the ‘corroboration of being necessary’ (EC: §12, 41)—is not to be found in empirical science but only in the unique activity of philosophy in terms of the ‘development from out of itself’ (EC: §12, 40) mentioned above. The empirical sciences can only do their part until, eventually, they push thinking to the point of speculative philosophy, in which the form of necessity is developed from within.

Now, in aiming at that highest necessity from out of itself, ‘thinking becomes entangled in contradictions’ (EC: §11, 39), which marks the decisive starting point for speculative philosophy. What does this mean? My understanding is that as soon as the subject tries to elaborate on concepts like ‘being’ or ‘singularity’ (EC: §3, 31)—as in Hegel’s example of ‘this leaf is green’—solely by reason and without apperception, the subject encounters contradictions within its reasoning itself. This insight Hegel took from Kant’s transcendental dialectic and its antinomies, which finds recent support in interpretations from James Kreines (Reference Kreines2018; Reference Kreines2022). Hegel clearly lauds Kant’s discovery of the antinomial tendencies of pure reason here, claiming ‘that the contradiction posited in the realm of reason […] must be regarded as of the most important and profound advances in the philosophy of recent times’ (EL: §48, 93). And Hegel does not state this praise out of context; it is rather the very underpinning of the form of necessity and the concept as he understands the matter. And it is precisely here that Hegel goes beyond Kant and—ultimately—rejects Kant’s enclosed subjectivism as a ‘fear of the object’ (SL: 21.35). In contrast to Kant, for Hegel thinking does not stop at the alleged error of a contradicting antinomy, which would throw thinking back to a presumably safe haven within the bounds of possible apperceptive experience. Instead, there is no need for apperception, the antinomy itself is already a positive solution in that the thinking reason appreciates its contradictions and the even ‘higher aspiration [höhere Bedürfniß]’ arises to ‘not let go of itself’ and to ‘bring about the resolution of its own contradictions’ (EC: §11, 39). This is part of the process of the form of necessity that Hegel does not further elaborate positively in the introductions because his entire subsequent system of philosophy is the implementation of that form of necessity qua his new ‘true method’ (see part II). However, what can be said here is that, when confronted with its own contradictions, thinking in the form of speculative reason sublates the matter in question in the form of a positive result, which is the core operation of determinate negativity.

Now, what is that positive result that speculative philosophy comes up with? What does philosophy actually know in the end? Nothing less than the essence of the universe. I will substantiate this claim in the following last part of this essay, by reconstructing the main aspects of the relation between philosophy and religion in Hegel’s lectures on Philosophy of Religion. It is here that Hegel puts both God and the absolute in the position of being the essence of the universe that we aim to know scientifically in philosophy.

IV. The absolute and God as essence of things

I want to broaden the textual basis of this interpretation somewhat by taking into account Hegel’s lectures on the Philosophy of Religion and his inaugural lecture in Berlin from 1818. With the religious representation of God and its accompanying properties of divine power and creation, Hegel is pointing out the crucial role that the manifestation of the absolute in nature and finite subjectivity has, which is teleologically necessary for the constitutional process of the absolute itself. As I understand Hegel’s systematic trajectory, the infinite absolute produces finitude, nature for example. In Hegel’s philosophy of nature, nature is the realm of transient appearances that are nonetheless grounded and determined by the intelligible structures of the absolute idea which results as laws of nature or universal classifications. Those transient, finite appearances are not simply given but produced by the absolute in order to realize itself teleologically as the true, infinite absolute through them, namely as an infinite absolute that contains and is not opposed to and thus restricted by finitude as a limit to the infinite. Thus, while God in some way may be just another word for the absolute, it also represents Hegel’s reference to the production of finitude by infinity which is represented in religion as divine creation. This production of finitude by the infinite, I think, is metaphysically very rich, and remarkably represented with the representation of God.

Now, turning to the lectures on Philosophy of Religion and the inaugural lecture from 1818, in correspondence with parts II and III above I divide the following into a section in which the consistency between philosophy and religion is predominant (as seen in part II on the object) and a section in which the crucial distinction between philosophy and religion is predominant (as seen in part III on the subject). It is important to attend to the aspect of ‘predominance’ here, since in his lectures on religion Hegel addresses the relation between philosophy and religion in such a way that he mentions both sides, but with different emphases. Thus, neither of these sides is purely foregrounding difference or unity in a strongly opposing way. Either the side of unity that is found in the object prevails, or the side of the distinction that is found in how we go about knowing this object prevails.

Firstly, regarding the consistency between philosophy and religion Hegel holds in summer 1824 that:

Hegel clearly draws the unity of philosophy and religion regarding their object of God tightly. He even goes on to call philosophy Gottesdienst. While Gottesdienst primarily means church service or divine worship, in its literal translation it is something along the lines of ‘service for God’. We find those passages in summer 1827:

This part is particularly interesting. On the one hand we have the strongest possible connection between philosophy and religion, they coincide in such a way that philosophy becomes divine worship. At the same time though, philosophy is a peculiar (eigentümliche) way of divine worship. And the peculiarity of this worship seems to be so great that, yet again, it seems ‘impossible’ that they coincide. Thus, there is already a tension which foreshadows at least the appearance of a difference of philosophy and religion to which we will return shortly. Hegel repeats this aspect of divine worship a few years later in summer 1831, thus his terminology was no loose exception or error of student minutes:

Thus, although Hegel sees a strong bond between philosophy and religion, so strong that they even coincide in their object, he yet draws a distinction between the way in which they elaborate on their shared object. This leads Hegel to the aspect of the form in which religion and philosophy differ, which I already discussed above in part III. In the following God already becomes the philosophical notion of truth and the absolute:

The crucial part of philosophy is that it wants to know with ‘absolute necessity’, which results in the important difference in methodological form. As demonstrated in part III, thought and finite subjects are not content with assured representations. When we take a step back even further and consider Hegel’s draft of his inaugural lecture on the Encyclopaedia in Berlin from 1818, the concurrence of God as the subject of philosophy and religion consolidates again. Hegel’s inaugural lecture was outlined as the introduction to his first lecture on the Encyclopaedia in Berlin, thus it might be considered the introduction to the introduction to Hegel’s system. Firstly, Hegel laments that at his time philosophy ‘assures’ that there is ‘no recognition of the truth, God, the essence of the world and the spirit is something incomprehensible, inconceivable’ (TWA: 10, 402). Truth, God, and the essence of the world are put on the same level, which will be important to remember for our last thoughts in part V that the absolute and God are the truth of the universe. However, back to this passage, Hegel continues that by claiming that there is no recognition of truth or God philosophy at his time, unfortunately, has accepted what has been ‘most disgraceful, most unworthy’ for philosophy before, namely to ‘renounce the knowledge of the truth’ (TWA: 10, 402). And even worse, this renouncement was ‘elevated’ ‘to the highest triumph of the spirit’ (TWA: 10, 403). So clearly the knowledge of God is synonymous with the knowledge of truth—and their philosophical elaboration is urged by Hegel. They, God just as truth, shall not be renounced. However, in this inaugural lecture from 1818 Hegel as well underlines the difference between philosophy and religion, much in line with what we said about the translation from representation to thought in part III:

Thus, the different form of philosophy and the consequent different treatment of the same object, God, does not serve to contradict religion but serves to justify the content, God, in a philosophical, different form—in a speculative conceptual form and not a representational form.

At this point I want to more closely examine this difference of form. This difference of form lies in the difference between representation and conceptual thinking. First, the transition from representation to thought and concept is not externally but internally driven. It begins with a ‘lack of representation’ that motivates the ‘self-propulsion of the concept’ (GW 29.1: 29). However, what does the representation of religion lack exactly? Again, referring back to part II of this paper, it is finite subjectivity itself that propels this: In religion the content of representation is in me ‘as a given [gegebener] for me’, which results in a form of compulsion: ‘I must identify myself with the content’. However, that is not satisfactory for the finite subject: ‘but I am also something else, not merely this heart, need, but also something concrete […] and thinking as determining itself, i.e. as a concept […]. In religion the concept does not find its satisfaction, and therefore the instinct of reason urges towards comprehending cognition, not towards uplifting of the sentiment’ (GW 29.1: 30). The operation of self-determination is crucial at this juncture, it is the very nature of the concept and its method: ‘There can be only one method in all science, in all knowledge: method is the concept that makes itself explicit,—nothing else,—and this is only one’ (GW 29.2: 15).

Philosophy and the concept of philosophy, now, pursue a reference to representation, in this scenario to God, only after the conceptual speculative dialectical elaborations. Thus, philosophy does not start with the representation ‘God’ and try to prove this subject matter, but searches at the end of its inquiry with the absolute idea for a representation of its philosophical content:

Hegel differentiates two things here. There is a first step which is the philosophical, conceptual elaboration, based on the internal method of speculative dialectics. Thus, we do not begin with God, but with the object of philosophical science which is to know the absolute. However, this necessarily leads us to representations and to the question as to with what we can correspond the conceptual result, in this case the philosophical absolute. And it is here that philosophy finds the representation of God to correspond to the conceptual absolute. Philosophy shall not take a representation and ask ‘is it true?’. Instead, it may only turn to the representation at the end of a conceptual elaboration. This leads to an important conclusion: When Hegel says that philosophy is the translation of representation into thought—as he did in the introduction to the Encyclopaedia—this only means that philosophy finds at the end a conceptual philosophical elaboration, a corresponding representation to its concept—and it is only thereby that it translates the representation into thought: by connecting (in which way this connection and correspondence works remains unclear) the representation to the conceptual subject matter that it, as a representation, represents.

All in all, this also means that when philosophy begins it does not begin with the object that it wants to know, that is God. Thus, God still is the object of philosophy but only at the end, in terms of a representation to which philosophy can correspond the conceptual absolute and truth. Rather, philosophy begins with the conceptual elaboration of truth, the necessity and essence of everything there is qua speculative dialectics, and in the course of this philosophy ends up with God as the appropriate representation of its absolute subject matter. But Hegel is also right to say that God is also the object of philosophy, because Hegel knows in retrospect, on the basis of his philosophy, that God is the representational object that happens to correspond to the philosophical absolute.

V. Concluding thoughts on the merit of a speculative re-theologizing reading

With all this I hope to have shown, firstly, that God is the object of Hegel’s philosophy (part II) and that this object is perfectly intelligible for a finite subjectivity proceeding by a new method (part III). This object of God, however, is not theistically present, as in religious representations, but philosophically reconstructed as the noetic structure of the universe (part IV). In the course of spelling this out, I defended aspects of Tolley’s Hegel (part II), then criticized that account for the absence in it of a cognizing finite subject, inspired by Pippin’s Hegel (part III), and finally drew on both positions in claiming that it is finite subjectivity (as per Pippin) that elaborates and, eventually, knows the divine noetic structure of the universe (as per Tolley).

However, finally, I want to argue the case that there are important metaphysical conclusions to be drawn from the concurrence of philosophy and religion in God as their object. Albeit philosophy does only refer to God in a representational sense, this foregrounds the strong metaphysical claim that the absolute, reason, or an infinite intelligibility is the truth of the universe. Since in contemporary scholarship it is still discussed if Hegel is concerned with the ‘furniture of the universe’ (Pippin Reference Pippin, Stein and Wretzel2021: 14), i.e. the noetic structure of the universe, which is the ‘“really” real’ (Horstmann Reference Horstmann2019: 1043; Pippin Reference Pippin, Stein and Wretzel2021: 11), I hope to have shed some light on this by highlighting that the intended knowledge of the absolute or God is identical with knowledge of the universe. A crucial aspect of this claim is that the absolute, or God, produces and manifests finitude as nature, or as finite spirit:

This passage argues that finitude is produced by the absolute idea (or in the realm of representation: created by God) so it can realize itself by sublation of its finitude. I think this is a powerful metaphysical claim that puts non-metaphysical readings of Hegel in trouble. Thus, philosophy is ultimately about the truth of the universe, not about the truth of finite apperceptive or discursive subjectivity but about the universe as such:

This almost Spinozist claim, that in philosophy everything is elaborated under an eternal point of view, comes yet again with the caveat of a difference of speculative method and absolute subjectivity. However, the divine is not alien to thought or philosophical inquiry, as Hegel says in his inaugural lecture: ‘The intention of this lecture is to give you a reasonable [vernünftiges] picture of the universe’ (TWA: 10, 405). And this universe is known in its essence:

The essence of the universe is accessible to finite reason, to our courage of cognition—and it is not merely our cognition itself (be it discursive, or apperceptive, or something else that remains enclosed in my subjectivity) that is accessible to the courage of cognition, but it is the ‘essence’ [Wesen] of the universe that is accessible to subjectivity; it is the very essence of the world itself that is recognized.

While this essence may be divine, philosophy is not pursuing theology or religion in the elaboration of this essence because it operates conceptually. This marks the concurrence and difference of philosophy and religion. And it is worthwhile to take into account their concurrence, and thereby to adopt a mediated, re-theologizing reading of Hegel, since this concurrence sheds light on a genuinely metaphysical aspect of his system which is that philosophy wants to know the essence of the universe, which in the realm of religion is addressed as God.

The object of this article was to mediate the re-theologizing reading with the de-theologized reading of Hegel by taking into account the prefaces and introductions of the Encyclopaedia as a unique and commonly overlooked place in which Hegel ties God and the individual subject closely together. Towards the end, we also appealed to the lectures on Philosophy of Religion to furnish the difference and commonality of philosophy and religion in a more extensive manner and highlight the metaphysical merit of a mediated re-theologizing reading.

While the re-theologizing reading tends to focus on a deflationary conception of subjectivity and the de-theologizing reading tends to focus on a deflationary conception of God (if not ignoring Hegel’s remarks about God altogether), I have pointed out that Hegel has a simultaneous conception of God and subjectivity. This allows for my mediated version of the re-theologizing reading in which the merit of the representation of God as the truth of the universe is highlighted as substantiation for any metaphysical reading of Hegel.

However, my speculative, re-theologizing reading does not claim that Hegel’s philosophical task is identical to religion or theology. Instead, he elaborates speculatively on the absolute. While Hegel situates God rather stipulatively as the ‘familiar’ object that philosophy wants to know (part II), it is the method of speculative-dialectical thinking that arises out of the thought process of finite subjects, from representations to thoughts, (part III) that recognizes the truth and God scientifically in becoming, at its purest logical level of thinking, identical with divine subjectivity. Eventually, this provides a robust metaphysical reading of Hegel, enriched by the mediated re-theologizing reading, which holds philosophy to be the conceptually scientific knowledge of the essence of the universe, which finds its counterpart in representation as God (part IV).Footnote ²⁰