Alan Saunders: Hello, and welcome to another trek through the luxuriant and fascinating jungle that is the thought of one of the greatest philosophers of the 19th century, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel.

This week on The Philosopher's Zone, we're looking at Hegel's God, and at Hegel as a rational mystic. Hi, I'm Alan Saunders.

My guest again is Robert Wallace, a philosopher, best-known for his book Hegel's Philosophy of Reality, Freedom and God, and a man with a keen interest in philosophical mysticism. Bob, welcome back to The Philosopher's Zone.

Robert M. Wallace: Thank you, Alan.

Alan Saunders: To begin with, liberal theologians, during the last century and a half, have wanted to articulate a conception of God that would satisfy people's spiritual longings without conflicting with Darwinian evolution and other well-established scientific discoveries. And you believe, don't you, that Hegel had in fact already done that?

Robert M. Wallace: I do indeed. The issues raised by Darwinian science are not brand new; the issue had already been present in Western consciousness for many centuries of how our animal nature relates to our higher aspirations. Darwin poses that question in a very dramatic way, but it was not the beginning of the discussion: it had been going on for a long time. And Hegel, though he lived before Darwin and did not anticipate Darwin, was very much aware of the underlying issue, and this is what most of his thought is addressed to in fact.

Alan Saunders: Now the idea that Hegel has something to do with God has tended very often not to be taken seriously, because he was well known as a significant influence on Karl Marx and Marx, of course, was well-known as an atheist.

Robert M. Wallace: Correct. Yes, so those who on the left, including Marxists who for some reason consider Hegel's thinking an important source, and I'm never quite sure why they consider it an important source: Marx claims to treasure something he calls the dialectic which he thinks he got from Hegel, but I'm not sure why it's important he got it from Hegel. But nevertheless, there is this desire among progressive people who consider themselves materialists and atheists, there is often a desire nevertheless, to extract something of value from Hegel's philosophy and so there's a long tradition of trying to diminish the religious or theistic or metaphysical side of Hegel, in order to make it plausible that one could extract perhaps the most important or the defensible or the valuable part of Hegel without leaving behind anything essential.

Alan Saunders: Just as a sidebar on the subject of the dialectic, you can find this in Greek philosophy. It's - what is it? It's essentially is it sort of seeking the truth through dialogue?

Robert M. Wallace: Well that's the etymology of the word, yes. And that's roughly what it means in Greek discussion: dialectic is dialogue or is the comparison of conflicting positions with one another in the effort to extract some kind of truth from the conflict. In Hegel it has a slightly more specific meaning: dialectic is the effort to clarify the relationship between finite and infinite phenomena.. Freedom, as Hegel understands it, is the effort to go beyond the finite and so freedom and spirit and the divine all partake of the infinite in some sense, and consequently the relationship between the infinite and the finite is a crucial issue for Hegel, and most of his conceptual work is intended to try to clarify that in some fashion. It involves paradox. The idea that the infinite is accessible to us finite creatures and involved in us and that the finite is indeed the infinite, essentially needs to include the finite - these are all paradoxical ideas which Hegel's what he calls his dialectic, is meant to quantify.

Alan Saunders: Well, let's look at Hegel's God. Hegel begins, doesn't he, with a radical criticism of conventional ways of thinking about God?

Robert M. Wallace: That's right. To what extent these are the ways of thinking characteristic of sophisticated theology is something that ought to be explored. But certainly the standard conventional way of thinking of God is as a being who has certain remarkable qualities, such as omniscience and omnipotence and so forth. And Hegel goes right to the beginning of this definition- let's call it a definition of God - and says, 'How could God be a being? Because if God were a being, there would be other beings alongside God, presumably many of them much smaller and less glorious and less powerful, but still independent beings existing separate from God, alongside God as it were, and then, if that were the case, God, Hegel suggests, would be limited, because God, this God, would not be the other beings alongside him and, by virtue of not being those things, there would be limits to this God. And if God is meant to be unlimited, or infinite, then this God who's one being among others, has failed to be what he's supposed to be.

Alan Saunders: So God isn't just like us, only bigger and more powerful?

Robert M. Wallace: He'd better not be, right, or he won't be infinite.

Alan Saunders: But if he isn't a being, what is he? Assuming it makes sense to talk about him as a 'he'.

Robert M. Wallace: Yes, we always have these pronoun problems. I often use the pronoun 'it', but then of course it sounds like we're talking about another kind of thing, without any life or consciousness, that's unfortunate. What is God if God is not a being? This is a question that Hegel's entire metaphysical project is directed at. God, as Hegel understands God, is the process of self-determination and the reality of self-determination in everything. In you and me, in the universe as a whole, to the extent that we succeed in being self-determining, which is Hegel's account of what freedom is, to the extent that we succeed in being free, in being ourselves (by virtue of being self-determining, we are real as ourselves) to the extent that we achieve any of this, we are going beyond the finite, as I said, and we are participating in God, we are contributing to God or we are instantiating God.

Alan Saunders: In the 17th century the great philosopher Spinoza talked about 'Deus sive Natura', God or Nature, and basically he thinks that God and Nature are the same. It's essentially a pantheistic view: everything is God. Is that was Hegel is saying here?

Robert M. Wallace: Well, t hat would be one way of interpreting what I just said, right? However, Hegel's emphasis on going beyond the finite makes it clear that he isn't simply identifying God with everything: all this stuff, material logics, the universe, and nature in that sense, they do not constitute God because they're all finite. No matter how vast they're all particular things, limited by not being other things, and therefore finite. Whereas the Divine is the process of becoming infinite, of not being limited by other things, and so it is certainly not identical with nature as we ordinarily understand it .

Alan Saunders: He does make what sounds like the rather extraordinary point, that there's a sense in which finite things, like you and me, fail to be as real as possible. What does he mean by that?

Robert M. Wallace: Well, we are certainly real in the ordinary sense that you can measure us, you can bump into us - all these kinds of reality we do possess. However, Hegel suggests that something that makes itself what it is, rather than being made, deserves to be called fully real, in a way that things that are made simply by other things, aren't. Fully real in the sense that what makes itself what it is itself in a stronger sense, than something that's simply the product of other things.

Alan Saunders: So I'm in fact more real at some times than at others when I'm stepping back from myself and thinking about what I should do, making myself.

Robert M. Wallace: If you're engaging in open-minded thought about either what you should do or what you should believe, to that extent you're being self-determining. You're refusing to simply be told what to do or believe. You're seeking to determine what you will do or believe in a more rational way than simply being an extension of your environment.

Alan Saunders: On ABC Radio National you're with The Philosopher's Zone, and I'm talking to Robert M. Wallace about Hegel and Hegel's God.

Bob, there are two ways of looking at God. You can talk about him as being immanent, that is, he is in some sense in the world, informs the world, or you can talk about him as being transcendent, above the world. Now from what you've said, I would expect Hegel really to have an immanentist view of god, but you say he goes for transcendence, doesn't he?

Robert M. Wallace: I would say he does both. God is in the world and beyond the world. In the world insofar as he is our, we are involved, he is our self-determination, he is the self-determination of finite things, but out of the world insofar as self-determination takes us beyond being merely finite. So both at the same time. This is the dialectic, Alan.

Alan Saunders: It's difficult to understand how there can be a view that's neither identical with us and the world, nor a separate being from us and the world. It's difficult to know even how to talk about it.

Robert M. Wallace: Indeed, yes. It's a difficulty that is familiar from the mystics. If you read Meister Eckhart or Jalâl ad-Dîn Rumi, the great Sufi poet who has become popular in recent years, in English translation, or any of the other mystical poets, Rilke, Whitman, they all stammer, right? When it comes to expressing the relationship between the divine and the world. But what they want to share with us is the discovery that the divine is in the world, that in some sense, it's present everywhere, and we can be aware of this presence. So the mystical poets stammer and the mystical philosophers stammer too, but they try to stammer in a more coherent way.

Alan Saunders: Yes, so you actually see, would you, Hegel as having these mystical insights, but being, because he's a philosopher, more systematic about their expression?

Robert M. Wallace: Exactly.

Alan Saunders: And do you think - I said he had mystical insights - do you think that he arrives at his conclusions in the way that a mystic would have arrived at them, or is it all nuts and bolts? Is it all put together by the process of thought?

Alan Saunders: Well if the process of thought were putting together nuts and bolts that would not be an accurate description at all of the process that Hegel went through, But I have to assume that he had significant, what we might call religious experience, and that this extended through his life and that he tried to clarify this religious experience, in relation to, or understand its relation to, his cognitive experience, his thinking. And this is exactly what the tradition of philosophical mysticism does. It tries to do the two things at the same time, to experience the world in a different way from the everyday experience, or what we often think is our everyday experience, but without losing track of the connection between the two, and that's what the systematic thinking is trying to clarify.

Alan Saunders: In a moment of mystical insight, St Augustine described God as 'more inward to me than my most inward part.' And in fact Hegel also, didn't he, drew the conclusion that we can know God more intimately than we can know ourselves?

Robert M. Wallace: More intimately than we can know the physical world, yes. Not more intimately than we know ourselves, because the essential self that we understand, or that we know, if we do know it, is, Hegel thinks, an aspect of God. So to the extent that we know ourselves, we know God and vice versa: to the extent that we know God we know ourselves. This kind of knowledge is certainly different from the knowledge that we have of our physical bodies, and the knowledge that we have of the other bodies around us in the physical world.

Alan Saunders: It's not clear, though, that Hegel's God has what it has to do with what we think of as God: the God who created the world in 7 days sent his son to save us from our sins, and will judge us at the end of time. So rather than using the name 'God' for Hegel's fullest reality, why shouldn't we talk about the absolute, or the ground of being which wouldn't imply any particular connection with traditional religion?

Robert M. Wallace: Yes, well this has been suggested by critics of what they call the philosopher's god repeatedly, that it's not really God and we shouldn't use that word. Hegel answers this in numerous ways. First of all, by showing how this process of self-determination that I've been describing, is not by any means merely intellectual. It is intellectual in an important way, but it's also very emotional. That is it involves emotions in principle and in many ways. This is a connection that Plato made explicit long before, and which Hegel inherits. Plato is a philosopher of freedom and reason and everyone or most people know, Plato as a philosopher of love, and he sees no dividing line between those. So that his exploration of love is an exploration of its relation to reason and vice versa. He believes that a fully free person will necessarily, by virtue of that freedom, engage with the people around him in a loving way, this is the doctrine of Plato's Symposium, and Diotima's speech, that the philosopher, or anyone who seeks freedom and loves the good, will seek to share that love and that freedom with everyone who they come into contact with. That's the process that Diotima calls 'giving birth', in giving birth in beauty, and Socrates is famous for his midwife activity. Well this is Socrates' way of enacting love.

Hegel takes for granted that this inseparability of freedom and love, and indeed, he doesn't only take it for granted, he tries to demonstrate it, why it's necessary, and that's the overarching argument of his great book The Science of Logic is that is aimed at the final conclusion that we are in each other, we are involved in each other, so our individual freedom is something necessarily and appropriately shared with one another. Individuality is inseparable from sharing.

So the upshot of this is that what might sound like a highly intellectual and perhaps in that sense, arid exercise, I mean Plato and Hegel obviously is isn't using intellectual means to the max. What might sound like a purely intellectual exercise, is in fact a very emotional exercise. It's just as much about love, just as much about the emotions, as it is about the intellect. This may be news to many people, but there's a great line in the final section of Hegel's Logic where he describes what he calls the concept, which is the intellectual structure of the world, of reality: the concept is boundless love and bliss. This is not often quoted by those who think that Hegel is dry and arid.

Alan Saunders: And what about us? The traditional God destines us for eternal happiness or eternal damnation. Does Hegel's God get up to that sort of thing?

Robert M. Wallace: Well Hegel's God is very much involved in us, right? He's not out there pulling strings. He, she it is a process of which we are necessary parts. So rather than judging our souls after our death, God is constantly judging us, and we're judging ourselves in that process, these phenomena are really indistinguishable. Insofar as we orient ourselves towards the reality and participate in the reality that I've been trying to describe, which is both free and loving, we are ourselves as real as we could possibly be. We experience the love and the bliss that I just quoted from Hegel's Logic. This is Hegel's account of what salvation would be.

Insofar as we fail to appreciate and participate in these things, we fail to be as fully real as we conceivably might have been, and this is our punishment, imposed on us by ourselves.

Alan Saunders: And these rewards and punishments are this-worldly, however.

Robert M. Wallace: They are in our experience, which is the reality that religion is about, Hegel wants us to think. And so his point is that the true topic of religion is not a separate life after life, after death: it's this life. But that is not to say that the true topic of religion is simply eating and drinking and sex and rock 'n' roll, it includes those and it goes beyond those. And that's the message that the mystical poets have been sharing with us all along and Hegel shares it, it's the same as if Hegel was articulating. So to return to your question of what is Hegel saying, why is it appropriate to use the name of god for the reality that Hegel has described, if the name of God is appropriately, necessarily tied to something other than us and other than our world and other than our experience, then it should not be applied to what Hegel's describing. But traditionally, the claim made for God is that God is infinite, and this is of course the crucial characteristic that Hegel is not going to abandon, and his complaint about the conventional conceptions of the God as other than us and other than the world, is that they prevent God from being infinite. And so a truly infinite God will be involved with us in the ways that Hegel's been describing, and will not any longer be a merely finite manipulator of these other finite things that supposedly survive after our death.

Alan Saunders: Well, Bob Wallace, we've emerged from the intellectual jungle and I think we can now see the light. Thank you very much for being our guide.

Robert M. Wallace: Thank you, Alan, it's been a pleasure.

Alan Saunders: For more Hegelian guidance from Robert M. Wallace, have a look at his website. You'll find a link to it on our website.

The Philosopher's Zone is produced by Kyla Slaven, with Charlie McKune as sound engineer. I'm Alan Saunders and I'll be back next week.