“Works of Love” by Soren Kierkegaard (translated by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong)

Kierkegaard, from the very start, sets out what this book will be all about, “They are Christian deliberations, therefore not about love but about works of love.” He begins by explaining why the love of God is different from worldly love, “But you shall love God in unconditional obedience, even if what he requires of you might seem to you to be to your own harm, indeed, harmful to his cause; for God’s wisdom is beyond all comparison to yours, and God’s governance has no obligation of responsibility in relation to your sagacity. All you have to do is obey in love.”

Kierkegaard relates how being bound by love eternally is actually the truest form of freedom that a human has, “But the love that has undergone the change of eternity by becoming duty and loves because it shall love—that love is independent and has the law for its existence in the relation of love itself to the eternal…. Alas, we often think that freedom exists and it is law that binds freedom. Yet it is just the opposite; without law, freedom does not exist at all, and it is law that gives freedom…. If when another person says, “I cannot love you any longer,” one proudly answers, “Then I can also stop loving you”—is this independence? Alas, it is dependence, because whether he will continue to love or not depends upon whether the other will love. But the person who answers, “In that case I shall still continue to love you”—that person’s love is made eternally free in blessed independence. He does not say it proudly—dependent upon his pride—no, he says it humbly, humbling himself under eternity’s shall, and for that very reason he is independent.”

In fact, love only becomes true love when it becomes an eternal duty. “The love that has undergone eternity’s change by becoming duty is not exempted from misfortune, but it is saved from despair, in fortune and misfortune equally saved from despair…. See, passion inflames, worldly sagacity cools, but neither this heat nor this cold nor the combination of this heat and this cold is the pure air of the eternal…. But this “You shall love” removes all the unhealthiness and preserves the healthiness for eternity. So it is everywhere, this shall of eternity is the saving, the purifying, the ennobling element.” True love always requires an element of self-denial. “Wherever the essentially Christian is, there is also self-denial, which is Christianity’s essential form…. Self-denial is the very transformation by which a person becomes sober in the sense of eternity.” Universal love is also in constant danger of being replaced by particular loves, “But erotic love and friendship are the very peak of self-esteem, the I intoxicated in the other I. The more securely one I and another I join to become one I, the more this united I selfishly cuts itself from everyone else. At the peak of erotic love and friendship, the two actually do become one self, one I.”

True Christian love can only be recognized in the form of the love of one’s neighbor. One must love all of humanity equally and only in this way love God. But that also means loving your enemy just as you would love yourself, “The neighbor is the utterly unrecognizable dissimilarity between persons or is the eternal equality before God—the enemy, too, has this equality…. Shut your eyes and remember the commandment that you shall love; then you love—your enemy—no, then you love the neighbor, because you do not see that he is your enemy. In other words, when you shut your eyes, you do not see dissimilarities of earthly life…. The kinship is secured by each individual’s equal kinship with and relationship to God in Christ; because the Christian doctrine addresses itself equally to each individual…. Just as little as the Christian lives or can live without his body, so little can he live without the dissimilarity of earthly life that belongs to every human being in particular by birth, by position, by circumstances, by education etc.—none of us is pure humanity…. This must continue as long as temporality continues and must continue to tempt every human being who comes into the world, inasmuch as by being Christian he does not become exempt from dissimilarity, but by overcoming the temptation of dissimilarity he becomes a Christian. In so-called Christendom, therefore, the difference of earthly life still continually tempts—alas, perhaps it even more than tempts, so that one person is haughty and another defiantly envies. Both ways are in fact rebellion, are rebellion against the essentially Christian…. Christianity and worldliness will never come to a mutual understanding.”

Care for one’s station in the world is the enemy of Christian ethics. The temporal and eternity can never be reconciled. “Christianly the world’s opposition stands in an essential relationship to the inwardness of Christianity…. Christianity cannot keep anything other than what it has promised from the beginning: the world’s ingratitude, opposition, and derision, and continually to a higher degree the more earnest a Christian one becomes…. Therefore if anyone can demonstrate that the world or Christendom has now become essentially good, as if it were eternity, then I will also demonstrate that Christian self-denial has been made impossible and Christianity abolished, just as it will be abolished in eternity, where it will cease to be militant.”

Love is the only act that fulfills Christian law, “The relation of love to the Law is here like the relation of faith to understanding. The understanding counts and counts, calculates and calculates, but it never arrives at the certainty that faith possesses.” Love of your neighbor is the only debt in the temporal world worth owing,  “If possible, owe no one anything, no courtesy, no service, no sympathy in joy or in sorrow, no leniency in judging, no help in life, no advice in danger, no sacrifice, not even the hardest—no, in all this owe no one anything. But along with all this still remain in the debt that you certainly have not wished and before God have certainly not been able to pay off, the debt to love one another!”

The nature of true love is its immeasurability. It is immeasurable both for the lover and for the one loved. “In everything done for you by the one who loves, in the least little triviality as well as in the greatest sacrifice, there is always love along with it; and thereby the smallest service, which in the case of the hired servant you would scarcely find worth taking into account, becomes immeasurable…. The object of love confesses in love that with the least little thing the lover does infinitely more than all the others do with the greatest sacrifices; and the lover confesses to himself that in making every possible sacrifice he is doing infinitely less than he perceives the debt to be.”

In order to love one’s neighbor properly, there is the necessity of granting belief freely and giving to all the benefit of the doubt. “The person who loves believes all things. With the blessed joy of amazement, he will someday see that he was right; and if he made a mistake by believing too much of the good—to believe the good is in itself a blessing.” It is similar with hope. “That is why the person who hopes can never be deceived, because to hope is to expect the possibility of the good, but the possibility of the good is the eternal…. The loving one hopes all things. No indolence of habit, no pettiness of mind, no hairsplitting of sagacity, no quantities of experience, no slackness of years, no bitterness of evil passions corrupt for him his hope or counterfeit the possibility for him; every morning, yes, every moment, he renews his hope and refreshes possibility, while love abides and he in it…. Love hopes to the limit, yes, to the “last day,” for not until then is hope over.”

Kierkegaard circles back to the temptations of the worldly, “Acting sagaciously is, actually, a halfway approach, whereby one undeniably gets further ahead in the world, wins the world’s goods and advantages and the world’s honor, because, in the eternal sense, the world and world’s advantages are half-measures. But neither the eternal nor Holy Scripture has taught anyone to aspire to get ahead or furthest ahead in the world; on the contrary, it warns against getting too far ahead in the world in order, if possible, to keep oneself unstained by the defilement of the world…. If the hope is not fulfilled it perhaps will become apparent in one’s bitterness and despair how firmly one was attached to that for which it was a shame to hope.” The lust for money holds particular scorn for Kierkegaard, “From the eternal point of view money is less than nothing…. Think of eternity in whatever way you want to; only admit that many of the temporal things you have seen in temporality you wished to find again in eternity, that you wished to see trees and the flowers and the stars again, to hear the singing of birds and the murmuring of the brook again—but could it ever occur to you that there would be money in eternity? No, then the kingdom of heaven itself would again become a land of misery…. Of all the things you have seen, there is nothing of which you can be so sure that it will never enter heaven as—money.”

In fact, the rich and the poor can practice mercy alike. “Eternity understands only mercifulness; therefore if you want to learn to understand mercifulness, you must learn it from eternity. But if you are to have an understanding of the eternal, there must be stillness around you while you concentrate your attention completely on inwardness…. Mercifulness does not arouse amazement. What indeed is there to be amazed at if even the poorest wretch, and he best of all, can practice mercifulness? Mercifulness, if you in truth perceive it, does not arouse amazement; it stirs you, just because it is inwardness, it makes the deepest inward impression upon you.”

Kierkegaard concludes, “In the Christian sense, a person ultimately and essentially has only God to deal with in everything, although he still must remain in the world and in the earthly circumstances assigned to him…. The adult also readily imagines that his dealings with the world are actuality, but God brings him to understand that all this is only being used for his upbringing…. Thus God is the educator; his love is the greatest leniency and the greatest rigorousness…. But everything in you that is of flesh and blood and is timorousness and attachment to things of this earth must despair, so that you cannot acquire external certainty, a certainty once and for all, and in the easiest manner. See, this is the struggle of faith in which you can have occasion to be tried and tested every day.”

In the end, what happens on earth is irrelevant compared to eternity and God’s eternal love. Forgiveness of others is the necessary path to the forgiveness of yourself. “Christianity’s view is: forgiveness is forgiveness; your forgiveness is your forgiveness; your forgiveness of another is your own forgiveness; the forgiveness you give is the forgiveness you receive, not the reverse…. God forgives you neither more nor less nor otherwise than as you forgive those who have sinned against you.” Kierkegaard returns once again to the unknowability of God’s love, “How rigorous this Christian like for like is! The Jewish, the worldly, the bustling like for like is: as others do unto you, by all means take care that you also do likewise unto them. But the Christian like for like is: God will do unto you exactly as you do unto others. In the Christian sense, you have nothing at all to do with what others do unto you—it does not concern you; it is a curiosity, an impertinence, a lack of good sense on your part to meddle in things that are absolutely no more your concern than if you were not present. You have to do only with what you do onto others, or how you take what others do unto you. The direction is inward; essentially you have to do only with yourself before God…. The Christian like for like belongs to this world of inwardness…. In the Christian sense, to love people is to love God, and to love God is to love people.”

“Saving Beauty” by Byung-Chul Han (translated by Daniel Steuer)

This short monograph is a reflection, by Han, on the changing conceptions of beauty. As usual, Han brings to bear historical philosophical interpretations of the beautiful and contrasts them with the ideals of modernity. And again, as usual, he finds today’s digital social milieu lacking. Han asserts, “Today, the experience of beauty is impossible. Where the wish to please, the Like, edges its way to the foreground, experience, which is impossible without negativity, withers…. Smooth visual communication takes place in the form of contagion, without any aesthetic distance…. Communication reaches its maximum speed where like reacts to like…. Today, nothing endures. This impermanence also affects the ego and de-stabilizes it, makes it insecure.” Today, beauty is all about the Self. It only reflects back towards itself, the subject. He continues, “The temporality of digital beauty… is the immediate present without a future, even without history. It simply is present…. In this digital inwardness there can be no sense of wonder. The only thing human beings still like are themselves.”

Han contrasts modernity’s take on the beautiful with that of the sublime. “The aesthetics of beauty is a genuine phenomenon of modern times. Only, in the aesthetics of modern times, the beautiful and the sublime become separated…. The beautiful is juxtaposed to the sublime, which—due to its negativity—does not cause immediate pleasure.” Han begins his dive into the historical. “Plato… does not distinguish between beauty and the sublime. The beautiful is unsurpassable precisely because it is sublime…. The sight of beauty does not cause pleasure, but shocks…. The onlooker becomes ecstatic, is seized by awe and terror (ekplettontai). A ‘madness’ takes hold of him. Plato’s metaphysics of beauty is in sharp contrast to the modern aesthetics of pleasure which confirms the subject in its autonomy and complacency, instead of shocking it.” Han concludes, “Beauty and the sublime have the same origin. Instead of opposing the sublime to the beautiful, one should return to beauty a sublimity that cannot be subjected to inwardness, a de-subjectivizing sublimity, and thus undo the separation of beauty and the sublime.”

Han believes that true beauty must remain hidden behind its veil. It is never exposed and displayed, but remains in mystery. He quotes Walter Benjamin at length, “The task of art criticism is not to lift the veil but rather, through the most precise knowledge of it as a veil, to raise itself for the first time to the true view of the beautiful…. Never yet has a true work of art been grasped other than where it ineluctably represented itself as a secret.” Han riffs on Barthes’ distinction between the erotic and the pornographic. “The erotic photograph is a picture ‘that has been disturbed, fissured’. The pornographic photograph, by contrast, has neither fractures or fissures. It is smooth. Today all pictures are more or less pornographic. They are transparent.” Again, Barthes, “What I can name cannot really prick me. The incapacity to name is a good symptom of disturbance.” Rilke suggests beauty “is nothing but the beginning of terror, which we still are just able to endure.” Adorno adds, “The image of beauty as that of a single and differentiated something originates with the emancipation from the fear of the overpowering wholeness and undifferentiatedness of nature.” Han weighs in, “Negativity is the invigorating force of life. It also forms the essence of beauty. Inherent to beauty is a weakness, a fragility, and a brokenness [Gebrochenheit]. To this negativity, beauty owes its power to seduce…. Beauty is illness.” Adorno claims, “Beauty is such a curative sickness. It arrests life, and therefore its decay.”

In the modern world, beauty has even come to be opposed to that which is sexy. “Consumption and sexiness condition each other. The self that is based on sexual desire is a product of consumer capitalism…. The ideal of beauty evades consumption…. Sexiness is opposed to moral beauty or beauty of character. Morality, virtue and character have a specific temporality. They are based on duration, solidity and permanence…. Consumption and duration exclude each other…. The ideal consumer is a person without character.”

This wouldn’t be a Han book without a deep dive into Hegel. Han posits, “Central to Hegel’s aesthetics is the ‘concept’. It idealizes beauty and confers on it the brilliance of truth. Beauty results from the concept manifesting itself in the sensual, or ‘the Idea as the immediate unity of the Concept with its reality’…. No ‘aggregate’ is beautiful. Concepts take care that wholes do not disintegrate, or dissipate, into ‘heaps’…. The beautiful object is something over against the subject, something with which the subject develops a free relationship…. Only in the aesthetic relation with the object is the subject finally set free…. The beautiful object is an object over against the subject, in which any kind of dependance and compulsion has disappeared.” Hegel claims, “Thus the contemplation of beauty is of a liberal kind; it leaves objects alone as being inherently free and infinite; there is no wish to possess them or take advantage of them as useful for fulfilling finite needs and intentions.” Han continues, “Hegel’s aesthetic of beauty is an aesthetic of truth and freedom, which withdraws beauty from any form of consumption. Neither ‘truth’ nor the ‘concept’ can be consumed. Beauty is an end in itself…. Consumption and beauty are mutually exclusive…. [Beauty] does not tempt you to enjoy or to possess it. Rather, it invites you to linger in contemplation…. Beauty as well as truth is something exclusive. Thus they do not occur often [haufig].”

Han loves to linger. He critiques the modern world as one in which lingering has become verboten. We, moderns, are always in a rush: to do, to work, even to play. “Beauty itself actually invites us to linger; it is the will which stands in the way of contemplative lingering. But at the sight of beauty, willing retreats…. Beauty frees me from myself. The ego immerses itself in beauty. It rids itself of itself in the face of beauty.” Schopenhauer states, “Aesthetic pleasure in the beautiful consists to a large extent, in the fact that, when we enter the state of pure contemplation, we are raised for the moment above all willing, above all desires and cares; we are, so to speak, rid of ourselves.” Proust praises “the kind of beauty which infiltrates slowly, which we carry along with us almost unnoticed, and meet up with again in dreams.” Han concludes, “The experience of beauty as recollection evades consumption.”

“The Hebrew Bible: Genesis” (translated by Robert Alter)

Alter’s translation of the Hebrew Bible is now generally considered the gold standard of scholarship, both in terms of his textual translation, as well as the commentary and annotations that he provides. It is the capstone of Alter’s illustrious career working closely with these texts. Instead of reviewing or summarizing such a well known work, I will simply point out a few points of interest to me as I went along. In his own introduction, Alter reveals how contemporary scholarship has aided his work. “This [modern] period, moreover, is one in which our understanding of ancient Hebrew has become considerably more nuanced and precise than it once was, thanks to comparative Semitic philology aided by archaeology.” On his style of translation, Alter notes, “A translation that respects the literary precision of the biblical story must strive to reproduce its nice discrimination of terms, and cannot be free to translate a word here one way and there another, for the sake of variety or for the sake of context…. It becomes feasible to reproduce most of the Hebrew reconfigurations of syntax, preserving the thematic or psychological emphases they are meant to convey.” A specific note on Alter’s translation of biblical verse, as opposed to prose, “It has long been recognized by scholarship that biblical poetry reflects a stratum of Hebrew older than biblical prose…. No previous English translation has made a serious effort to represent the elevated and archaic nature of the poetic language in contradistinction to the prose, though that is clearly part of the intended literary effect of biblical narrative…. Biblical Hebrew, in sum, has a distinctive music, a lovely precision of lexical choice, a meaningful concreteness, and a suppleness of expressive syntax.”

On the Book of Genesis, particularly, Alter comments, “The Primeval History, in contrast to what follows in Genesis, cultivates a kind of narrative that is fablelike or legendary, and sometimes, residually mythic…. The style tends much more than that of the Patriarchal Tales to formal symmetries, refrainlike repetitions, parallelisms, and other rhetorical devices of a prose that often aspires to the dignity of poetry, or that invites us to hear the echo of epic poetry in its cadences.” He contrasts the Patriarchal Tales where, “The unfolding history of the family that is to become the people of Israel is seen… as the crucial focus of a larger, universal history…. National existence, moreover, is empathetically imagined as a strenuous effort to renew the act of creation.”

In Genesis 1:26, “Let us make a human in our image.” Alter observes, “a human. The term ‘adam, afterward consistently with a definite article, which is used both here and in the second account of the origins of humankind, is a generic term for human beings, not a proper noun. It also does not automatically suggest maleness, especially without the prefix ben, “son of,” and so the traditional rendering “man” is misleading.”

Alter comments on Genesis 2:4, “God now called YHWH ‘Elohim instead of ‘Elohim as in the first version, does not summon things into being from a lofty distance through the mere agency of divine speech, but works as a craftsman, fashioning (yatsar instead of bara’, “create”), blowing life-breath into nostrils, building a woman from a rib. Whatever the disparate historical origins of the two accounts, the redaction gives us first a harmonious cosmic overview of creation and then a plunge into the technological nitty-gritty and moral ambiguities of human origins.”

In Genesis 3:1, Alter remarks on the style and playfulness of the text, “cunning. In the kind of pun in which the ancient Hebrew writers delighted, ‘arum, “cunning,” plays against ‘arumim, “naked,” of the previous verse.” In Genesis 3:12, Alter cannot help but noting, “gave by me, she gave me. The repeated verb nicely catches the way the first man passes the buck, not only blaming the woman for giving him the fruit but virtually blaming God for giving him the woman. She in turn of course blames the serpent. God’s curse, framed in verse, follows the reverse order, from serpent to woman to man.”

Often Alter’s annotations deal with history, as much as with textual precision. In Genesis 3:24, he relates, “The cherubim, a common feature of ancient Near Eastern mythology, are not to be confused with the round-cheeked darlings of Renaissance iconography. The root of the term means either “hybrid” or, by an inversion of consonants, “mount,” “steed,” and they are the winged beasts, probably of fearsome aspect, on which the sky god of the old Canaanite myths and the poetry of Psalms goes riding through the air. The fiery sword, not mentioned elsewhere but referred to with the definite article as though it were a familiar image, is a suitable weapon to set alongside the formidable cherubim.” In Genesis 10, Alter notes, “The Table of Nations is a serious attempt, unprecedented in the ancient Near East, to sketch a panorama of all known human cultures—from Greece and Crete in the west through Asia Minor and Iran and down through Mesopotamia and the Arabian peninsula to northwestern Africa.”

In Genesis 14:13, Alter describes the use of the term Hebrew, “Abram the Hebrew. Only here is he given this designation. Although scholars have argued whether “Hebrew” is an ethnic or social term or even the name for a warrior class, it is clear that it is invoked only in contexts when Abraham and his descendants stand in relation to members of other national groups.” Alter also points out a discrepancy in Genesis 24:10, “camels. The camels here and elsewhere in Genesis are a problem. Archaeological and extra biblical literary evidence indicates that camels were not adopted as beasts of burden until several centuries after the Patriarchal period, and so their introduction in the story would have to be anachronistic. What is puzzling is that the narrative reflects careful attention to other details of historical authenticity: horses, which also were domesticated centuries later, are scrupulously excluded from the Patriarchal Tales, and when Abraham buys a gravesite, he deals in weights of silver, not in coins, as in the later Israelite period. The details of betrothal negotiation, with the brother acting as principal agent for the family, the bestowal of a dowry on the bride and betrothal gifts on the family, are equally accurate for the middle of the second millennium B.C.E. Perhaps the camels are an inadvertent anachronism because they had become so deeply associated in the minds of later writers and audiences with desert travel.”

Alter disputes the correctness of the common translation “ladder” in Genesis 28:12, “a ramp. The Hebrew term occurs only here. Although its etymology is doubtful, the traditional rendering of “ladder” is unlikely. As has often been observed, the references to both “its top reaching the heavens” and “the gate of the heavens” use phrases associated with the Mesopotamian ziggurat, and so the structure envisioned is probably a vast ramp with terraced landings. There is a certain appropriateness in the Mesopotamian motif, given the destination of Jacob’s journey. Jacob in general is represented as a border crosser, a man of liminal experiences: here, then in his return trip when he is confronted by Laban, and in the nocturnal encounter at the ford of the Jabbok.”

Alter often notes key and first moments in the biblical text. In Genesis 32:29, ““Not Jacob shall your name hence be said, but Israel”…. Whereas Abraham is invariably called “Abraham” once the name is changed from “Abram,” the narrative continues to refer to this patriarch in most instances as “Jacob.” Thus, “Israel” does not really replace his name but becomes a synonym for it—a practice reflected in the parallelism of biblical poetry, where “Jacob” is always used in the first half of the line and “Israel,” the poetic variation, in the second half.” In Genesis 32:33, Alter continues, “Therefore the children of Israel do not eat the sinew. This concluding etiological notice is more than a mechanical reflex. For the first time, after the naming-story, the Hebrews are referred to as “the children of Israel,” and this dietary prohibition observed by the audience of the story “to this day” marks a direct identification with, or reverence for, the eponymous ancestor who wrestled through the night with a man who was no man.”

Alter also points out the etymology of words and their historic import. Throughout this work, he is also quick to give previous scholars their due. In Genesis 41:1, Alter remarks, “by the Nile. Given the Nile’s importance as the source of Egypt’s fertility, it is appropriate that this dream of plenty and famine should take place on its banks, a point made as long ago as the thirteenth century in Narbonne by the Hebrew exegete David Kimhi. As this story set in the pharaonic court unfolds, its Egyptian color is brought out by a generous sprinkling of Egyptian loanwords in the Hebrew narrative, “Nile” (ye’or), “soothsayers” (hartumim), “rushes” (‘ahu) “ring” (taba’at), “fine linen” (shesh).”

In Genesis 46:4, Alter points out the unique nature of the monotheistic project in the Bible, “I Myself will go down with you. The first-person pronoun is emphatic because God uses the pronoun ‘anokhi, which is not strictly necessary, followed as it is by the imperfect tense of the verb conjugated in the first-person singular. The reassurance God offers—which is already the kernel of a theological concept that will play an important role in national consciousness both in the Babylonian exile and after the defeat by the Romans in 70 C.E.—is necessary because in the polytheistic view the theater of activity of a deity was typically imagined to be limited to the territorial borders of the deity’s worshippers. By contrast, this God solemnly promises to go down with His people to Egypt and to bring them back up.” Finally, in Genesis 50:26, Alter comments on the book’s final line, “and he was put in a coffin in Egypt. The book that began with an image of God’s breath moving across the vast expanses of the primordial deep to bring the world and all life into being ends with this image of a body in a box, a mummy in a coffin. (The Hebrews in Canaan appear not to have used coffins, and the term occurs only here.) Out of the contraction of this moment of mortuary enclosure, a new expansion, and new births, will follow.”

“Hegel” by Charles Taylor

I think it would be fair to say this book is almost as much about the philosophy of Taylor as it is about the philosophy of Hegel. Or at the very least, Hegel through a Taylorian lens. Because of this, it is fascinating. Taylor begins, “Hegel’s spirit, or Geist, although he is often called ‘God’, and although claimed to be clarifying Christian theology, is not the God of traditional theism; he is not a God who could exist quite independently of men…. He is a spirit who lives as spirit only through men. They are the vehicles, and the indispensable vehicles, of his spiritual existence, as consciousness, rationality, will. But at the same time Geist is not reducible to man, he is not identical with the human spirit, since he is also the spiritual reality underlying the universe as a whole.”  Hegel stated, “The geological organism is only vitality in itself, the truly living organism is its other.” Taylor expands, “For the mature Hegel, man comes to himself in the end when he sees himself as the vehicle of a larger spirit.”

Hegel’s Geist can be thought of as the embodiment of reason. “Our conception of spirit and its self-realization must have a place for reason if man is to be the vehicle of cosmic spirit and yet retain his autonomy…. Rational understanding is not possible without a clear consciousness of the distinction between subject and object, self and other, the rational and the affective. And just because of this, Hegel will insist that the ultimate synthesis incorporate division as well as unity…. Thus Hegel in his mature system developed an original stand vis-a-vis the generation to which he belonged in time and aspiration. He did not slough off their aspirations—to combine the fullest moral autonomy of the subject with the highest expressive unity within man, between men and with nature. He shared the hope that this unprecedented and epoch-making synthesis could be made only if one could win through to a vision of a spiritual reality underlying nature, a cosmic subject, to whom man could relate himself and in which he could ultimately find himself.” Hegel proclaimed, “In self-consciousness as the concept of Geist, consciousness comes to a turning point, at which it steps out of the multi-colored show of sensible immanence and the empty night of suprasensible transcendence into the spiritual daylight of presence.” Furthermore, Hegel believed it fell upon philosophy the task of “the cancellation of division.” He went on, “The Absolute itself is thus the identity of identity and non-identity; opposition and unity are both in it.” Taylor explains, “In Hegel’s final position, philosophy occupies the highest place, just because it is the only fully adequate expression of the highest unity, the medium in which spirit comes totally to itself, and hence the development of philosophical thought is essential to the perfection of this highest synthesis.”

Hegel considered himself a Christian. He tried to square the circle between reason and faith. Taylor exposits, “Faith triumphantly returns; indeed, [Hegel] would not agree to call it ‘faith’; it is the cornerstone of his philosophical system, the Hegelian notion of Vernunft (Reason)…. The fact that he pondered so long on man’s religious and social development made him use the categories of post-Kantian idealism with a much richer field of reference and to incomparably greater effect…. With Hegel philosophy is used to illuminate the whole field of human history—political, religious, philosophical, artistic.” Hegel had this to say about the effect of disenchantment brought on by the Protestant Enlightenment, “Christianity has depopulated Valhalla, hewn down the sacred groves, and rooted out the phantasy of the people as shameful superstition, as a diabolical poison.” He would also claim, “The Enlightenment, this vanity of the understanding, is philosophy’s most forceful opponent.”

Taylor describes Hegel’s dialectics of thought and being, as well as between subject and object, “Our thinking as finite subjects, turns out to be that of the cosmos itself, or the cosmic subject, God, whose vehicles we are. In the higher vision of speculative philosophy, the world loses its otherness to thought, and subjectivity goes beyond finitude, and hence the two meet. We overcome the dualism between subject and world, between knowing man and nature, in seeing the world as the necessary expression of thought, or rational necessity, while we see ourselves as the necessary vehicles of this thought, as the point where it becomes conscious…. This means that we come to see ourselves not just as finite subjects, with our own thoughts as it were, but as vehicles of a thought which is more than just ours, that is in a sense the thought of the universe as a whole, or in Hegel’s terms, God…. Hegel solves the problem of uniting finite to infinite spirit without loss of freedom through his notion of reason…. The rational agent loses none of his freedom in coming to accept his vocation as vehicle of cosmic necessity…. The infinite subject is such that in order to be he must have an external embodiment; and who says external embodiment says embodiment in space and time, an embodiment which is somewhere and sometime, in a particular living being, with all that this involves. The infinite subject can only be through a finite one.” Hegel pontificated, “The Oriental world knew only that one man was free—the king represented the absolute principle…. The Greek world won through to an intuition of freedom, but saw only that some were free…. Only with Christianity do we win through to the intuition that man as such is free.”

In the middle of this tome, Taylor goes into minute detail breaking down the chapters of “The Phenomenology of Spirit” (PhG) line by line. It is a critique in which he seeks to articulate how Hegel returns again and again to the basics of his dialectic, as he moves forward through human history, “The PhG intends to start with our ordinary consciousness of things (das naturliches BewuBtsein), and to take us from there to the true perspective of Geist. The work is called a ‘phenomenology’ because it deals with the way things appear for consciousness, or with forms of consciousness. But ‘appearance’ here is not to be contrasted with ‘reality’; what is most real, the absolute, is essentially self-appearance…. Our ordinary consciousness takes us to be individual, finite subjects set over against the world. The perspective of Geist, on the other hand, shows us as vehicles of a spirit which is also expressed in the world, so that this world is no longer distinct from us…. It is to show how ordinary consciousness carefully examined breaks down in contradiction and itself points beyond itself to a more adequate form…. This means that we must follow the dialectical movement in consciousness…. If the argument follows a dialectical movement, then this must be in the things themselves, not just in the way we reason about them…. And yet these partial realities, just because they exist externally, each alongside the others, make a standing claim to independence which belies their status as posited vehicles of the whole…. The whole furniture of the world is there in order to embody Geist and to manifest what he essentially is, self-knowing spirit, self-thinking thought, pure rational necessity.”

In the PhG, Hegel continued on with the concept of self-consciousness. Taylor argues, “With self-consciousness, the dialectic will be between the idea of ourselves, what we claim to be, and what we actually are. These are the two moments Hegel calls self-certainty and truth…. The dialectic of self-consciousness is thus a dialectic of human longing and aspiration, and their vicissitudes…. What is aimed at is integral expression, a consummation where the external reality which embodies us and on which we depend is fully expressive of us and contains nothing alien. This goal, which we can call a state of total integrity, is identified in Hegel with his conception of infinity, a condition in which the subject is not limited by anything outside…. The real thing can only be attained when men come to see themselves as emanation of universal Geist. For it is only then that they will not see the surrounding universe as a limit, an other.” Vocation is the means by which the self-consciousness is reconciled with external reality. Taylor states, “Work thus plays a crucial role in man’s struggle for integrity…. This is why the principal path to integrity lies through recognition by another…. Man can come to see himself in the natural environment by making it over in conformity with his own project…. In transforming things we change ourselves. By creating a standing reflection of ourselves as universal beings we become such beings.” Taylor reasserts Hegel’s dialectic of the finite reconciled with the infinite, “We are condemned to particular existence as finite spirits. All we can do is to work through our particular existence in order to realize a form of life capable of carrying universal consciousness. We have to work through sin to atonement; sin itself is unavoidable.” Hegel stressed, “Only inaction is innocent, like the way of being a stone, but not even that of a child.”

Taylor next returns to Hegel’s conception of the movement of the world through history—the dialectic of particular and infinite existence through the process of death and becoming. “Hence infinity, the self-subsistent whole which we are forced to assume once we grasp the mortality of the finite, can only be the whole system of changing determinate beings. There is no foundation for finite things outside the system of the finite. Hence there is no source outside the system on which we can draw to explain the coming to be of new finite things. Their coming to be is just the passing away of their predecessors…. Not only the passing away but the coming to be of finite things happens of necessity…. Thus the infinite as the whole system of changing finite things is the unfolding of conceptual necessity, for these things change and deploy themselves in a perpetual attempt to resolve contradiction. Contradiction is the motor of things. And it touches everything, so that everything is swept along in a perpetual becoming…. It is a totality, a whole whose parts are intrinsically related to each other, that is, where each can only be understood by its relations to the others…. It makes all the difference between seeing the whole as a contingent grouping of finite things, and seeing it as a totality which deserves to be called ‘infinite’ in Hegel’s sense of the term, and in which the finite is seen as having its truth in the Idea…. But Infinity is still a poor and abstract version of the Idea. For we only know that it has a necessary structure deployed in space and time.” Taylor later expands, “The infinite only achieves its identity by reconciling contradiction, by finding itself in its other…. The Idea is thus a process of positing its other and then recovering its unity with itself in its other (EL, 215, WL, II, 412)…. Thus the unity of Idea and reality cannot be simply an sich [in itself], as it is in Life, it must also be fur sich [for itself].” Hegel opined, “The Idea, by virtue of the freedom which the Concept attains in it, has also the most stubborn opposition within itself; its repose consists in the security and certainty with which it eternally creates and eternally overcomes this opposition, and comes together with itself in it [in ihm mit sich selbst zusammengeht].”

Taylor next interrogates Hegel’s conception of freedom. “The freedom of a civilized man is not to be found in defiance of the laws which necessitate his being other than he immediately is, but rather in his finding his own identity in this change, in this transformation of himself. He then understands and lives the rational necessity which corresponds to his own nature, which came first in the guise of external necessity, but which as rational, and his own, is freedom. Freedom is in living in rational, i.e., one’s own, necessity.” Hegel contrasted this with an absolute freedom, “Universal freedom can produce no positive work or deed; only negative action remains to it; it is only the fury of destruction.”

Unlike Kant, Hegel felt that mankind could grasp ontological reality. The real was not destined to be forever masked behind a veil of appearances. Taylor states, “The search for self-subsistent necessity only reaches its end in a vision of reality as a necessary totality…. Reality constituted a totality governed by necessity and which manifested this necessity…. The whole must display contingency on its surface, as it were, since this is inseparable from exteriority…. Reality as absolute or unconditioned necessity is structured by concepts…. Subjective thought reaches the same culmination as reality, that the concept in the mind is fundamentally one with the ontological concept…. The motor of this development is the ‘absolute contradiction’ (EL, 194) which consists in the fact that the real is at once a totality, whose parts are thus inwardly related, and yet also made up of parts which are integral and independent (selbstandig and vollstandig)…. We start off with things purely external and independent. Each thing is external and indifferent to the others. But this means that it is a mere aggregate in itself, for there is no reason to draw boundaries of a thing or object at any given level…. In teleology we have the fullest embodiment of internal necessity…. For this is the notion of a sense or purpose which is inherent in the object itself. The purpose is its essence, its most profound characterization…. Their form is also a necessity…. To conform to it is freedom for them.” Hegel related, “But men have a fate because they act out of their universal nature, and yet inevitably sin against this nature, fate being the retribution of the genus on the particular acting man.”

Taylor returns once again to the dialectic of embodied particulars, living in contingency, against the universal Idea, “We only achieve the return of Being to itself with the Idea, that is, with the understanding that reality is the locus of a double movement, only one of which starts from Being. The other, which is the more fundamental one, starts from the inner necessity, from the Idea, itself…. The multiplicity of determinate beings is bound together by necessity. The real return to unity comes when we see this necessity as absolute. But if necessity is absolute, then everything that exists, all being, exists for a purpose. So that the starting point is really this purpose itself, the inner formula of necessity, or the Idea…. So Hegel establishes his ontology. What is primary is subject or reason or conceptual necessity…. Hence both that the world exists and what it is like are necessary, given that reason, subject, necessity must be…. For in starting with Being, the simplest, emptiest, most inescapable postulate, that there is (some kind or other) of reality, he claims to have shown that the dependence of everything on reason or the Idea follows inescapably. Hence the circle is closed…. The teleology is internal.”

Taylor finishes by delving into Hegel’s views on history, politics, culture, art, religion, and philosophy. It is in the nature of man to relate to other men through the external world. Man is, by necessity, embodied, finite, and particular. Taylor begins by relating Hegel to Herder’s theory of language, “When we think of a human being, we do not simply mean a living organism, but a being who can think, feel, decide, be moved, respond, enter into relations with others; and all this implies a language, a related set of ways of experiencing the world, of interpreting his feelings, understanding his relation to others, to the past, the future, the absolute, and so on. It is the particular way he situates himself within this cultural world that we call his identity…. What we are as human beings, we are only in a cultural community…. The life of a language and culture is one whose locus is larger than that of the individual.” This culture has its unity in the State. Hegel claimed, “The state is not there for the sake of the citizens; one could say, it is the goal and they are its instruments. But this relation of ends and means is quite inappropriate here. For the state is not something abstract, standing over against the citizens; but rather they are moments as in organic life, where no member is end and none means…. The essence of the state is ethical life [die sittliche Lebendigkeit].” Hegel further explained how the individual and the State related to each other, “The principle of modern states has prodigious strength and depth because it allows the principle of subjectivity to progress to its culmination in the extreme of self-subsistent personal particularity, and yet at the same time brings it back to the substantive unity and so maintains this unity in the principle of subjectivity itself.” Taylor claims, “Thus what is strange and contestable in Hegel’s theory of the state is not the idea of a larger life in which men are immersed, or the notion that the public life of a society expresses certain ideas, which are thus in a sense the ideas of the society as a whole and not just of the individuals, so that we can speak of a people as having a certain ‘spirit’. For throughout most of human history men have lived most intensely in relation to the meanings expressed in the public life of their societies…. But where Hegel does make a substantial claim which is not easy to grant is in his basic ontological view, that man is the vehicle of cosmic spirit, and the corollary, that the state expresses the underlying formula of necessity by which this spirit posits the world… the thesis that men—and hence in their own way these Volkgeister [spirits of the peoples]—are vehicles of a cosmic spirit which is returning to self-consciousness through man…. Thus his ideal is not a condition in which individuals are means to an end, but rather a community in which like a living organism, the distinction between means and ends is overcome, everything is both means and ends…. The rational state will restore Sittlichkeit [ethics], the embodiment of the highest norms in an ongoing public life.”

Taylor expands on Hegel’s conception of morality. In this, Hegel somewhat follows Kant’s deontological reasoning. Taylor states of Hegel, “Man is a moral agent because as a bearer of will he ought to conform his will to universal reason…. But as the subject of morality man still figures as an individual. The demand of morality is that I come to recognize that I am under the obligation of willing universal reason, simply in virtue of being a man…. The demands of morality in other words are inner as well as outer…. I have to do the right because it is the right; and it follows from this that I have to understand the right myself…. Morality touches our intentions and not just our acts.” As a self-professed Christian, for Hegel, religion comes into ethics. Taylor asks, “How does a Hegelian philosopher pray? Certainly the prayer of petition has no meaning for him. Nor can he really thank God. What he does is to contemplate his identity with cosmic spirit…. Thus the Hegelian ontology itself in which everything can be grasped by reason because everything is founded on rational necessity is ultimately incompatible with Christian faith. Hegel’s philosophy is an extraordinary transposition which ‘saves the phenomena’ (that is, the dogmas) of Christianity, while abandoning its essence.” Taylor concludes, “Hegel himself was the first ‘death of God’ theologian. For we have seen that Christ’s death plays a crucial and necessary role as the indispensable basis for the coming of the Spirit and hence the Spiritualization of God’s presence, which is the same as the building of this presence into the life of the community. Men must first of all see God concentrated in a single man. But this point of concentration has to disappear, if the fuller truth is to emerge that men carry God as a community, that God is in each and beyond each. God is like a flame which passes from mortal candle to mortal candle, each destined to light and go out, but the flame to be eternal.”