“Only A God Could Save Us”: A Hegelian Reflection

Only a god can save us. The only possibility available to us is that by thinking and poetizing we prepare a readiness for the appearance of a god, or for the absence of a god in [our] decline, insofar as in view of the absent god we are in a state of decline.

— Martin Heidegger

I am not a Heideggerian. I have not read the interview from which this famous quote originates. I am, however, quite pleased to take the words of an alien thinker in order to vault off into speculations of my own. Therefore, here I make no claim to know what Heidegger meant, or what he intended. I only claim one thing: this statement can be speculatively understood and explicated. Heidegger surely explained it in his own way, but I shall explain it in a Hegelian way.

We are in a moment of history which is characterized by the feeling and outlook of hopeless doom. Surely the days of World War II were also characterized by this in a way more immediately intense due to the real possibility of physical annihilation. In the postwar world, the Jewish intellectuals of the Left looked upon a world of doomed spirituality with the victory of consumerist capitalism. Heidegger, in his own way, looked upon that world and saw the success of technical understanding, and the success of technological mastery in practice as a road to hell with no visible exit. Today we live at the beginning of the extreme end of Heidegger’s nightmare, where that external possibility of annihilation has finally been internalized in the spirit of a people. Atheism has won, there is no understanding but technical understanding, and nothing remains of Being as regards its value. So much is value gone that not even finite beings have any value.

Heidegger’s statement is not poetic waxing, but rational speculative insight and Truth. God is the Absolute, that of and from which everything is, and for which everything is. As the nihilism of mechanistic technicality has attained internally, the external nihilism of activity manifests. Purposes, being illusions of a dreaming mind, are thrown in the waste bin of history, replaced by the immediacy of pleasure at all costs. Whatever promises pleasure, regardless of its nature and impact on my prior nature, has no positive reason to be stopped. Because technological advance seems impossible to stop, since the machine of capitalism and research has momentum that goes beyond any individual or collective political power, the human being has become the object of an inhuman subject, and may survive only by adapting themselves to this new subject even if the result is a post-human existence utterly alien to the human being. There is no value judgment to this, only a resignation to the fact that to survive is to accept this change. Technology, unbeknownst to most humans, has become their implicit and increasingly explicit god.

God, Aletheia, and Speculation

In a prior piece, I explained Hegel’s relation to aletheia. Given what is written there, here I shall not repeat much. Understanding is not explicitly reflexive, and does not accept the reality of reflexivity. Speculation makes an advance on understanding in being explicitly reflexive, and in accepting that reflexivity is exactly what it has revealed itself to be. The moment of speculation is also the moment of genius, of inspiration, of flash insight, of enlightenment. Where the Understanding in its dynamic form rules, negation is victorious through dialectic, and skepticism and nihilism results. Where Reason rules, concrete universality and a new vantage of insight is the result.

God is the Absolute — the absolute concept. Hegel says that the concepts of the Science of Logic are definitions of God, ways in which we have understood the ultimate determining power, meaning, and purpose of the world. When the Absolute has revealed itself to be finite, it begins to fracture into seemingly irreconcilable oppositions. The pain, which is real both as physical and mental, of this diremption can continue for centuries. This pain, however, is itself the sign that something is wrong. The Understanding interprets this error as proceeding from a bad beginning point, a not well posed initial condition. While this is most often true, it is also true that sometimes the error is not an error at all. The error that is truth not taken all the way is the error that leads to the most dire consequences precisely because its truth is unignorable. There is nothing the understanding can do to extricate itself from this error, for to it there is no other way to be, and it cannot conceive another way. Humans can struggle vainly in the pursuit of insight, but since their minds are enframed by their finite understanding, even if the Truth is before them, they cannot see it. No quantity of a finite quality leads to the infinite leap which is a new paradigm, a new vantage point. No will that desires to transcend its enframement can overleap itself by sheer will towards an indefinite higher standpoint. That I strongly desire to see something new does not at all determine that I will see something new. Genius, speculation, or aletheia comes about when God has determined to give intellectual beings insight by their grace.

The Absolute is the Concept of the world, it is itself the worldview. The coming of a God is the coming of a new insight, a total reconceptualization of the world itself, and a revaluation of it according to its new principle.This happens through the cunning of Reason, in which the Truth is instantiated despite the Understanding’s blindness to the whole of its consequence as the fact of being. Heidegger speaks of the danger which is at once the saving power, but unlike Hegel, he does not understand it as a self-generative transcendence; rather, he frames it as a self-correcting through the approach of pain.

The Mythology of Reason:
Why Religion Will Become Philosophical

The earliest Programme for German Idealism, thought to be penned by Hegel, but whose thought is mostly Hölderlin’s, and whose impact most strongly continued in Schelling’s philosophy, speaks of the necessity of philosophy becoming mythological or religious, and mythology or religion becoming philosophical. Hegel abandons the hope for a mythology of Reason in his mature system. Philosophy cannot return to prior modes and pretend it is equal with them, so it cannot in sincerity present itself mythologically or religiously. Indeed, in the current historical moment, we cannot stand the attempts of this because we cannot believe it anymore, we know it is not genuine to philosophy, and we know it loses the heart of religion. Neither the common person nor the true intellectual can accept the abstractions of philosophy as being fit for religious veneration, and it is an insult to mythology that it be reduced to a mere representation of universal abstractions. Heidegger’s hatred for ontotheology is not just for the affront to philosophy that it makes, but the affront it is to religion. The so-called philosopher’s God is simply not the God of anyone, not the person to whom we pray and have spiritual communion with. For the religious person, God cannot be identified with the abstractions called Being or Idea. We see this already in the failures of the likes of Jordan Peterson to reinvigorate Christianity by clothing it in the metaphors of Jungian archetypes and relativist constructions trying to defend tradition. Peterson’s Christianity is anything but Christianity, a religion of a God that is only an empty regulative concept. If God must come anew in a modern revelation both of personality and reason, one in which the mistakes of the past are not repeated, there must not be an external identity, but an immanent relation of religion and reason such that what is unique to both remain.

Today’s religion must answer to reason. It is not enough to simply accept dogma and believe. The human yearns by nature to understand and comprehend God, to pry into the mysteries, and thereby to not be torn asunder by doubts born of the reason which was given to us by God themself. Theodicy, today more than ever, is necessary. Philosophy for its part alone cannot overtake religion’s place as the locus of the intuition of absolute value, purpose, and place in the whole of ultimate reality, it can only accentuate it. In religion there is the fact of a living tradition and community, a real sense of a person who cares for us, and who has a divine plan that is all good. The historical advent of revelations and the miraculous shows of their first prophets lay down the lived relation of God to the individual, the empirical proof they require that in God there is power, and though it does not come at our whim, it is efficacious and for a greater purpose which nonetheless necessarily includes us as individuals. 

Miracles of the stark nature of transforming matter, like turning water to wine, of walking on water, and so on, are extremely rare and not to be expected. Healings and premonitions are much less rare, but also not to be expected. Most people go their entire lives without experiencing a significant miracle themselves. What maintains faith for most people is not the direct miracles, although occasional miracles rekindle the faith, but the hope of achieving transcendence by following the purported laws of God. If one keeps the commandments and rituals, one is assured the reward of justice for oneself, and the joy of liberation or heaven. The afterlife becomes the place of guaranteed self-realization, whereas in this world God acts in mysterious ways which we cannot see or understand. Why does God heal some and not others? Why do the wicked prosper and the good suffer here? All shall be revealed in the afterlife — so we are told.

We are at a point where we cannot accept, and need not accept that we must wait for the afterlife to know God’s plan, and why they act so. This is why religion needs to rise to philosophy. The attempts to clamp down on the interpretation of the holy books, to retreat into an insular dogmatism where doubt is itself a sin, is unstable and untenable. In the end, no one can believe it. We can see that people do not believe in their religions by the way they live as opposed to what they say they believe. We can see that the tortured attempts at religious apologetics, which wish to present the dogma as rationally justified, do not satisfy even them. Of all religions, Christianity alone has the core doctrine in it which allows it to overcome the divide of faith and reason. In Christianity, above Islam and Judaism, it is a duty to know God, for through the mystery of Christ’s incarnation, the divine spark in all of us is affirmed, and through his resurrection it is confirmed that all humanity can be purified and join God in heaven in deification. The Spirit reveals all, and Christianity claims for itself the Holy Spirit.

None of this is to say that the mass and the sermon are to become philosophy lectures rather than edifying parables and songs. That would kill the beauty and heart of religion, which is why individuals seek it in the first place. All that it means is that religion can and must today rise above mere stipulations of dogma and the empty repetition of a heaven beyond this life in which all shall be clarified both as a matter of comprehension and execution of justice. From this author’s personal experience, it is attested that there are in fact everyday comprehensible ways to explain the mysteries of God and why God decrees and acts. There is no reason anyone can give for why the existence of God cannot be rationally explained and defended, why God’s measure of goodness cannot be explained and defended, and why the individual and collective purpose of humanity and the world cannot be explained and defended. The everyday layman does not need a philosophical monograph as their explanation, but they need to be shown that the word of God is not empty of rational meaning beyond that it says it is the word of God, and that the Bible is dogmatically asserted to be this word unerringly.

In a historical sense, the god that is coming to revelation in the Hegelian sense, is not a new god. Even if a new prophet comes with miracles, their message can only be the further clarification of Christianity in essence. This god’s transcendence of the momentary impasse of finite understanding, which has mistaken the world of mechanism as absolute and irresistibly divine, is not to be understood as a deus ex machina from beyond, a happenstance of mere grace disconnected from history and the problem itself. This god, which can only be God themself revealed yet again to rekindle the faith, is already present here and now in the very problem we are to be saved from. The trauma of History, the supplanting of world Spirits, world civilizations and their views, is all strung by a thread of immanent developments which none are privy to prior to the full revelation of reason itself. The problem of technology and the absolutization of mechanics and objectivity has in it the cunning of reason that runs the worldview of instrumentality to its limits. At this limit, three things can happen: 1) we pull back in total shock and retreat from the source of pain, i.e. we reject technology and its problems; 2) we push on to self-destruction by thinking that technology as such can cure the problems of technology; 3) we can understand the problem, and see how the extremes are necessary, yet can be mediated and harmonized in a higher whole. To understand, or rather comprehend, the problem is to know its parts, and its fundamental origin. The origin of the dominance of technical understanding, and more important, technical living, is the social formation of capitalism which has run rampant over everything. A social revolution is necessary, but those cannot be imposed from above without a people hungry for and ready to take up a new worldview.