Religion

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Hegel on the Proofs and the Personhood of God:

Studies in Hegel’s Logic and Philosophy of Religion
by Robert R. Williams, Oxford University Press, New York, 2017, xvi + 319 pp.,
US$95.00 (hardback) ISBN 978 0 1987 952 23; US$94.99 (ebook) ISBN 978 0
1987 952 23

Matthew C. Bagger

To cite this article: Matthew C. Bagger (2020): Hegel on the Proofs and the
Personhood of God: Studies in Hegel’s Logic and Philosophy of Religion, Religion, DOI:
10.1080/0048721X.2020.1799694

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/0048721X.2020.1799694

Published online: 17 Aug 2020.

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RELIGION

BOOK REVIEW

Hegel on the Proofs and the Personhood of God: Studies in Hegel’s Logic and
Philosophy of Religion, by Robert R. Williams, Oxford University Press, New York,
2017, xvi + 319 pp., US$95.00 (hardback) ISBN 978 0 1987 952 23; US$94.99 (ebook)
ISBN 978 0 1987 952 23

John Ernest Worrell Keely, perhaps America’s most famous Gilded Age fraudster, claimed to
have invented an extraordinarily powerful motor fueled exclusively by air and modest quan-
tities of tap water. Explaining that his motor operates by means of a principle he called ‘vibra-
tory sympathy,’ Keely managed to secure great sums of investment capital from leading
plutocrats such as John Jacob Astor IV. Undermined in time by lawsuits and skeptical mech-
anical engineers, the Keely motor scam began to collapse around 1890.
In 1893, the philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce described Hegel’s philosophy as a Keely
motor. ‘The whole movement [of cosmic evolution, as Hegel characterizes it],’ Peirce writes in
‘Evolutionary Love’ (1955), ‘is that of a vast engine impelled by a vis a tergo, with a blind and mys-
terious fate of arriving at a lofty goal. I mean that such an engine it would be, if it really worked; but
in point of fact, it is a Keely motor. Grant that it really acts as it professes to act, and there is nothing
to do but accept the philosophy’ (Peirce 1955, 365–366). Every link in Hegel’s chain of reasoning
is, Peirce asserts, ‘a handful of sand, squeezed into shape in a dream.’ Resorting to one final meta-
phor, Peirce disparages Hegel’s philosophy as ‘a pasteboard model … that in reality does not exist.’
In this scathing passage, Peirce alludes to the immanent teleology of Hegel’s so-called absolute
idea and alleges that Hegel presents it as the motive force (the vis a tergo) driving cosmic
history to ‘a foreordained perfection.’ Peirce implies that crediting Hegel’s metaphysics, like cred-
iting Keely’s motor, requires a willing and interested suspension of disbelief.
Rescuing Hegel from this sort of dismissive judgment, several recent scholars have reinter-
preted or reconstructed his philosophy. In (what have come to be called) ‘non-metaphysical’
readings, they portray Hegel not as proposing a fanciful cosmology, but instead as primarily
addressing issues in epistemology or semantics. Jeffrey Stout’s ‘Hegelian pragmatism’ in
‘The Spirit of Pragmatism’ (2012), which uses Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit both to
fortify the pragmatist account of objectivity and to refine the pragmatist account of inquiry,
is probably the non-metaphysical reading most relevant to religious studies because of its
theoretical and methodological implications. The undeniable philosophical interest of the
non-metaphysical readings notwithstanding, in The Cambridge Companion to Hegel (1993)
Frederick Beiser deems ‘the metaphysical dimension of Hegel’s thought … stubbornly irredu-
cible’ and characterizes the current state of Hegel scholarship as confronting ‘the classical
dilemma that plagues all history of philosophy: that between anachronism and antiquarianism’
(Beiser 1993, 5, 7). The more one neglects the metaphysical dimension of Hegel’s thought, the
more anachronistic one’s reading of his philosophy becomes. Conversely, the more one
acknowledges the metaphysical dimension, the more antiquarian one’s reading becomes.
In Hegel on the Proofs and the Personhood of God the late Robert R. Williams appears not to
feel the force of the dilemma. Although the book primarily consists of dense and laboriously
documented exposition of Hegel’s ontotheology, Williams suggests in his introduction that
Hegel’s metaphysics in fact remedies the ‘cultural spirit of our time’ (1). Post-Kantian skepti-
cism, he reports, has ‘overtaken’ religion and philosophy, leading to unsustainable ‘chaos and
nihilism’ (2, 6). Hegel’s metaphysics, so the reader is led to believe, can restore coherence to
modernity.
2 BOOK REVIEW

Williams divides Hegel on the Proofs and the Personhood of God into two parts. The first
part examines Hegel’s discussion of the ontological argument in his Lectures on the Proofs
for the Existence of God as well as The Science of Logic. This half of the book argues that
Hegel reconceives the ontological argument as a description of the natural logic that inheres
and unfolds in communal religious praxis and which culminates in the absolute idea. The
second part unpacks Hegel’s view of the personhood of God. This half argues that Hegel’s dia-
lectical logic informs his account of God’s absolute personhood. The triadic structure of
Hegel’s logic, which Williams labels ‘philosophical trinitarianism,’ lays the foundation for
Hegel’s ‘theological trinitarianism,’ in which the relations of mutual recognition that constitute
absolute spirit reproduce the logical moments of the dialectic.
Williams identifies the concept of the ‘true infinite’ as the ‘nucleus’ of Hegel’s thought (235).
In the Encyclopedia Logic Hegel himself describes the true infinite as ‘the basic concept of phil-
osophy’ (quoted in Williams, 80). Hegel reasons that consciousness of contingent finitude gen-
erates the concept of its other. The concept of the infinite [unendlichkeit] arises by negating the
limits of the finite. Any so-called infinite that subsists over and against the finite is a spurious
infinite, however, because it is limited by the finite it excludes. The true infinite, therefore,
must include its other, the finite. Hegel insists, furthermore, that to prevent the finite from eva-
nescing in the abyss of the infinite, the true infinite must maintain the difference between
finitude and the infinite. The true infinite ‘preserves the distinction of the finite from the
infinite within the infinite. The true infinite is not beyond (Jenseits), but present in its
members as the whole in which they are united’ (85, italics in original). Hegel’s true infinite con-
stitutes an identity of identity and difference. Williams argues that in Hegel’s philosophy the
concept of the true infinite forms the ‘deep structure’ of the absolute idea, trinitarian logic, per-
sonhood, and absolute spirit (235).
According to Williams, Hegel recasts the ontological argument as a cosmic achievement.
Were the infinite merely a subjective concept, it would be limited and, therefore, a spurious
infinite. The true infinite necessarily removes this defect by objectifying itself and resolving
the distinction between concept and objectivity in an identity of identity and difference. Con-
sisting in a dynamic totality with a drive toward self-actualization, the true infinite embodies
the principle of organism, in which the whole gives its constituent parts their separate identi-
ties, organizes them in relation to one another, and unites them in their differences. The absol-
ute idea (i.e., God) – the necessary identity of concept and reality in a fully articulated totality –
acts as a final cause impelling the true infinite’s self-development. Conforming to its own
immanent teleology, the concept develops in the same manner as any other organism. ‘This
positing and resolving of the contradiction between the ideal unity and the real separateness
of the members,’ Hegel explains, ‘constitutes the constant process of life, and life is only by
being a process … . This is the idealism of life’ (quoted in Williams, 39, italics in original).
The true infinite develops by producing its own differentiated elements and integrating
them in an articulated totality. Hegel’s trinitarian logic recapitulates this process. He abstracts
its three moments – identity or unity, particularity or difference, and totality or the identity of
identity and difference – from the organic career of the true infinite.
Hegel’s conception of personhood reprises and fulfills the true infinite’s dialectic of self-
concretization. Humans can abstract from their finite and determinate particularities (e.g.
age, sex, ethnic and cultural background, biological needs, inclinations, etc.) to imagine pos-
sibilities. In this respect human subjectivity is infinite. Lest this infinite be ‘merely subjective,’
however, it must ‘suspend this limitation and give itself reality’ (Hegel, quoted by Williams,
174–175). Personhood consists, for Hegel, in the free activity of sublating the contradiction
between infinite subjectivity and finite particularity, creating a concrete identity of identity
 RELIGION 3

and difference. This activity produces an ‘immediate’ totality that nevertheless remains
deficient because others limit and pose a threat to the self’s free self-determination.
To confirm and realize its freedom, therefore, a person must find its freedom freely recog-
nized by another, and likewise for the other. The self acknowledges the autonomy of the other
by seeking the other’s free acknowledgment of its autonomy, and vice versa. Each recognizes
itself in the other, and each mediates the other’s personhood. In mutual recognition the ‘I’
becomes a ‘we.’ This identity of identity (self) and difference (other) establishes a ‘universal,’
articulated totality in which ‘difference, determinacy, and limit are no longer regarded as
obstacles to freedom but rather are transformed into conditions of its realization’ (184).
Hegel labels this structure of self-realization through mutual recognition ‘spirit.’
Williams argues that Hegel attributes personhood to the absolute idea (i.e., God) because,
like a person, but on a cosmic scale, it acts to unite infinite subjectivity and finite objectivity in
an articulated totality. The two halves of Williams’s book converge because divine personhood
and the reconceived ontological argument turn out to be ‘different aspects and dimensions of
one and the same action’ (175). Williams glosses Hegel’s notoriously obscure notion of absol-
ute spirit as mutual recognition between the personhood of God and finite spirit. In the same
way that human persons confirm and realize their personhood in mutual recognition, God’s
personhood is completed and realized in absolute spirit, the ‘universal’ totality in which ‘the
consciousness of finite spirit is the material, the concrete being in which the concept of God
and God’s purpose is realized, recognized, and venerated’ (246). ‘Humanity knows God
only insofar as God knows godself in humanity’ (Hegel, quoted in Williams, 247). Conversely,
God’s recognition of finite spirit (through its preservation in the true infinite) consoles and
confers infinite worth on persons.
Hegel on the Proofs and the Personhood of God is a convincing, if tedious, interpretation of
Hegel’s ontotheology. Williams succeeds in making the case that the revised ontological proof
and divine personhood are both central to Hegel’s project. He also demonstrates that Hegel
derives the bootstrapping logic, on which they rely, from the concept of the infinite. Williams
supplies no reason, however, to accept Hegel’s conviction that the peculiar self-sublating logic
of the term ‘infinite’ has metaphysical, rather than merely grammatical, significance. Semantic
naturalism of the sort that prioritizes social practices (in some cases inspired, ironically, by
non-metaphysical readings of Hegel) cautions against ‘subliming’ a mere kink or tangle in
the norms regulating the use of the term ‘infinite.’ Absent a convincing reason to grant the
grammar of the term ‘infinite’ metaphysical significance, readers will suspect that Peirce
rightly labeled Hegel’s metaphysics – the purported antidote to modernity’s ‘chaos and nihi-
lism’ – a Keely motor.

References
Beiser, Frederick, C. 1993. The Cambridge Companion to Hegel. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Peirce, Charles, S. 1955. “Evolutionary Love.” In Philosophical Writings of Peirce, edited by Justus Buchler, 361–
374. New York: Dover Publications.
Stout, Jeffrey. 2012. “The Spirit of Pragmatism: Bernstein’s Variations on Hegelian Themes.” Graduate Faculty
Philosophy Journal 33: 185–246.

Matthew C. Bagger
Northport, Alabama
matthew.c.bagger@gmail.com
© 2020 Matthew C. Bagger
https://doi.org/10.1080/0048721X.2020.1799694