Comet 12P Between Rosette and Cone Nebulas
Sandro Botticelli, Dante and Beatrice, n.d., The University of Texas, Austin
Light I beheld which as a river flowed,
Fulgid with splendour; and on either shore
The colours of a wondrous springtime showed.
And from the stream arose a glittering store
Of living sparks which, winging mid the blooms,
To rubies set in gold resemblance bore.
Dante, The Divine Comedy, Paradise, Canto XXX
11.3.11.5 With what does the Science of Logic begin?
My contention is that for philosophical and creative reasons, Hegel conflated the Neoplatonic hypostases with Proclus’ triad Being, Life and Intelligence which Proclus ‘suspended’ from the first hypostasis, the One.
Hegel’s philosophical reasons were that this triad of triads gave him the greatest potential for the development of Neoplatonic dialectics and that, with one stroke, it enabled him to obviate the impossibility of the cognition of the One. Now the entirety of the Neoplatonic system was open to the full development of ‘reason’.
Hegel’s creative motives were that by conflating the hypostases with Proclus’ triad and overlying the Christian Trinity across and weaving it into his use of it, every aspect of the Neoplatonic system could be illustrated and made more metaphorically rich – divine ‘mind’ and divine Being were now interchangeable with the Neoplatonic One and Absolute, with the Christian God, Father, Son and Spirit.1 Hegel used God, Christ and Spirit to symbolise every stage in the process of emanation and return.
By further anchoring Neoplatonism in the world through the coming of Christ and the Christian Spirit to it, Hegel aimed to make this austere, mystical philosophy more relevant to those who were drawn to the cultus he believed necessary for his time. In arguing thus, he also protected his career.
Hegel described the broad flow of his Science of Logic in Neoplatonic terms
The essential requirement for the science of logic is not so much that the beginning be a pure immediacy, but rather that the whole of the science be within itself a circle in which the first is also the last and the last is also the first.2
Despite writing that it must begin without presuppositions, Hegel then appeared to emphatically contradict himself
God has the absolutely undisputed right that the beginning be made with him3
Magee wrote of this
Hegel believed that before Christianity appeared philosophy could not have presented absolute truth in a fully adequate form. This leaves us with a troubling question: how can one square this claim about philosophy’s dependence on religion with Hegel’s claim that his philosophy is ‘presuppositionless’?…the thought that thinks the Logic is the thought of modern man shaped by Christianity, and much else. …Spirit had to undergo its encounter with Christianity in order to know the whole.4
But what did Hegel have to say of this beginning of his Science of Logic? That it must be made in pure knowing, without distinction; that it must be an absolute, that
it cannot contain within itself any determination, any content; for any such would be a distinguishing and an inter-relationship of distinct moments…The beginning therefore is pure being. …it is not truly known5
and
that which constitutes the beginning, the beginning itself, is to be taken as something unanalysable, taken in its simple, unfilled immediacy, and therefore as being, as the completely empty being.6 (all my italics)
These descriptions are philosophical not religious7 and are applicable not to the Christian God but to Plotinus’ One when brought into Intellectual-Principle, into the first element of Proclus’ triad – Being – and made the equivalent of that Being. Of the One Plotinus wrote
It is precisely because there is nothing within the One that all things are from it8
and Henry
The One is the One and nothing else, and even to assert that it ‘is’ or that it is ‘One’ is false, since it is beyond being or essence. No ‘name’ can apply to it; it eludes all definition, all knowledge9
While Hegel did argue that Christianity is the religion of absolute spirit – volume III of his Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion is sub-titled ‘The Consummate Religion’ – his philosophy identifies the God that has the right that the Science of Logic begins with him and the religious basis for the presentation of absolute truth in ‘a fully adequate form’ as Neoplatonic.10 What Magee considers a ‘troubling question’ was, for Hegel – as he correctly wrote – a philosophical requisite.
Notes
1. ‘it is the abstract God, the supreme being, the Father, who dies in the death of the Son, and who is, as it were, reborn as concrete, world-encompassing Spirit.’ Hodgson in Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, op. cit., vol. III, 53; ‘if pure being is to be considered as the unity into which knowing has collapsed at the extreme point of its union with the object, then knowing itself has vanished in that unity, (my italics)’ Hegel, Hegel’s Science of Logic, op. cit., 73 ↩
2. ‘We begin with a knowing that cancels the distinction between subject and object – and we end with Absolute Idea, which is the unity of subjectivity and objectivity. …The end returns to the beginning, though the movement from beginning to end involves the self-specification of Absolute Knowing into the myriad forms of the Logic. The goal of the whole system (and, Hegel thinks, of reality itself) is implicit in the beginning and, in a way, known immediately: the sublation of subject and object.’ Magee, The Hegel Dictionary, op. cit., 113 ↩
3. Hegel, Hegel’s Science of Logic, op. cit., 75, 78. Schlitt wrote that ‘the entire Hegelian system begins in the Encyclopaedia with God.’ Schlitt, Hegel’s Trinitarian Claim: A Critical Reflection, op. cit., 36 ↩
4. Magee, The Hegel Dictionary, op. cit., 246-247 ↩
5. Hegel, Hegel’s Science of Logic, op. cit., 70-72 ↩
6. Ibid., 75; ’this emptiness is therefore simply as such the beginning of philosophy.’ Ibid., 78 ↩
7. Plant wrote that Hegel believed that a philosophical reinterpretation of religion would enable the achievement of community and argued that this is ambiguous, asking why religion would be needed by a community that had achieved the philosophical perspective. Plant, Hegel, An Introduction, op. cit., 196-197 ↩
8. Plotinus, The Enneads (Abridged), op. cit., V.2.1 ↩
9. Henry, ‘The Place of Plotinus in the History of Thought,’ op. cit., liii-liv ↩
10. ‘while the object or content of religion is the absolute, religion itself does not entail absolute knowledge of the absolute: that is the role of philosophy. The representational forms of religious expression, even of the Christian religion, must be “sublated” (annulled and preserved) in philosophical concepts. …Whether religion as such is to be superseded by philosophy is another question…’ Hogdson in Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, op. cit., vol. III, 4 ↩
The Swirling Core of the Crab Nebula. While many other images of the famous Crab Nebula nebula have focused on the filaments in the outer part of the nebula, this image shows the very heart of the Crab Nebula including the central neutron star — it is the rightmost of the two bright stars near the centre of this image. The rapid motion of the material nearest to the central star is revealed by the subtle rainbow of colours in this time-lapse image, the rainbow effect being due to the movement of material over the time between one image and another.
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I think I have been lucky to have, overall, had a good brand of Christianity passed on to me. I have come across people in their 30s, 40s and 50s who grew up in very unwholesome environments (Catholic or Protestant) and are very much haunted by memories – you cannot blame them. I value the spirit of skepticism (I myself have plenty of doubts) – though feel that most human beings require some kind of closure/certitude to build up a cohesive community. So perhaps constant and unlimited questioning has a downside.
Regarding Creator/Creation: From what I have read and observed, most cultures did not carefully distinguish between nature and supernature – this was something worked out in detail in medieval Christian Europe and may have aided the development of the physical sciences. There are two reasons: (1). Because God the Creator was transcendent here, nature was stripped of divine status and therefore, could be experimented upon. (2). Because nature was thought to have been “created rationally”, it was deemed intelligible and therefore, could be understood by the human mind. Take India, where nature was considered divine, there was no proper culture of physics, chemistry or biology until the arrival of the Europeans. Maths, yes, but not physical science. People were too busy worshipping nature to be able to analyse it. I see people thinking of Galileo and Darwin and immediately jumping to the conclusion that Christianity was an obstacle to scientific progress. The bigger question is — why did people like Galileo and Darwin only emerge out of a Christian framework and not out of any other? Of course, one cannot discount the scientific legacy of Greece and Rome but the Biblical worldview is far more important than most people realise and has its own place in the development of Western science…and world culture in general. Even non-believers can agree.
I also feel the idea of “divinity as something outside nature” has helped diffuse political and social power (to a great extent) within human society. Because God was thought to be removed from (but intimate with) all of nature, human beings could be valued equally (slaves too) and be subjected to the same amount of scrutiny (masters too). Hope I’m making sense! The current culture of human rights in the West has quite a lot to do with the Judeo-Christian legacy I guess — though that doesn’t mean that other traditions have nothing to offer in this field.
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Hi Tulika,
thank you for your thorough and excellent reply!
Similar to the significance of Christianity to the rise of science in the West, I think mysticism has also shown the same significance.
In addition to the influence Neoplatonism had on Christianity, I think it influenced Copernicus’ heliocentrism (he thought the divine light is at the centre and without Copernicus there would have been no Darwin) and it certainly influenced Kepler (that the world is imperfect is reflected in his discovery of the elliptical orbits of the planets).
Particularly, having been ‘stood on its feet’ by Marx by his incorporating it into materialism (making materialism dialectical), Neoplatonism has brought immense, necessary potential to our knowing the world.
Just as Plotinus encouraged the recognition of the wonder of the world, Neoplatonism also focuses on the worth of each individual and was central to the rise of humanism in the Renaissance.
Neoplatonism in particular has had the most profound effect on creativity in the West – only one example is its formative influence via Bergson on Cubism.
I think not only that dialectical materialism, which has contradiction at its core, is the epistemological way forward in a world which has contradiction at its core (the latter is reflected in the former), there are still lessons to be learnt from mysticism itself – both from its theory and practice.
Best wishes,
Filippo del mondo
materialism, mysticism and art 
