6 - Hegel

Summary

Hegel resists Kant’s criticism of Anselm, but his main concern is to repair Spinoza’s deficient account of nature, which, owing to the passivity of ‘substance’, left it in the precarious position of a collection of contingent ‘modes’ and not genuinely independent. Hence, Hegel regarded Spinoza as an acosmist, not as an atheist. Hegel avoided acosmism by replacing Spinoza’s substance with a ‘subject’, the categorial system expounded in his Logic, the all-embracing ‘Concept’ with enough dynamism to generate, or ‘release’, nature, a nature that is genuinely independent, while nevertheless structured by the concept that gave rise to it. This is an ontological argument of sorts, since it proceeds from a concept to an existence claim. The argument is obscure, as is its relevance to God. However, Hegel’s primary concern is not to prove the existence of nature, or even that of God, but to show that the existence of God is compatible with the real existence of the world, even if God is not dualistically distinct from the world. The drastic philosophical refurbishment to which Hegel subjects the conception of God makes it plausible, though not obligatory, to regard him as an atheist.