Hegelian Inconsistencies, related to God II

The problem with every conception of God is that it is based on a logical necessity and only then as existential; which means to base existence on a logical —and therefore apparent— necessity as reality itself; which is nevertheless only conventional, since it derives its consistency from this convention of logic, as transcendental. This is the basic problem with Hegel, whose subtlety —like that of Scotus— lies in avoiding the problem rather than solving it; for the logical excess of German Transcendentalism seeks to preserve the convention of God in the conflict over nature[1].

This is Hegel's problem, as the culmination of the last cycle of rationalism, which would have started with Kant; in what will be Irrationalism, but not as a negation of Reason, but its understanding as Transcendental; in an intuition about the distinction of the real, which still subordinates the immanent to its transcendence. The conflict is not small but serious, and existential in a way, just that exclusively for philosophers; which since the problem of universals has gone out of the way politically, as only the Patristics before it[2].

The conflict is not gratuitous either, with the excess only be in that subordination of the immanent to its transcendence; which is erroneous, inasmuch as transcendence is a condition of to the immanent, as immanence is proper to Being. This distortion is due to the fact that we always start from the problem of God, as theocentric and not from that of man; already solved by the Patristic Christology, but contracted now because the risk of relativism, which is a political conflict.

Transcendentalism thus aims at the comprehension of the real as inmano-transcendent, in the Hegelian absolute; with an instrument as efficient as Logic, as Practical Reason —supra-rational— in its transcendence. However, this cannot be comprehended, in the subjection to the necessity of an absolute transcendence of God; which cannot be questioned, on pain of dismantling the hermeneutical spectrum of Christianity, which grants the political order.

As already seen, a God’s absolute transcendence would not be affected by an absolute immanence of His; but that is something difficult to understand, in a spectrum that operates on the dichotomous principle of dialectics; the one that opposed a rational purism to the theological complex of Trinitarianism, with Arianism. As hermeneutic, the crisis would not then be initiated by the Cartesian protest against syllogism, which is anecdotal; but by the Protestant Reformation, with its immediate political impact, rejecting Catholicism as superstition[3]; and by which it creates the extensive problem of the philosophies of nature, deriving into that of God with Transcendentalism.

This crisis is then what is organized around Rationalism, but as an instrument and not as a cause, on ontology[4]; allowing the development of this new spectrum of modern Idealism, as a renewal of the classical in its Transcendentalism. Hence, it becomes a hyper-specialization of Augustinian dogmatism, against the relativism of Casuistry; but for which it turns to Logic as Transcendent Reason, postulated as practical —against Pure Reason— in Kant.

This would be what produces the complexity of Transcendentalism, trying to explain the real in terms of absolute; ending in that self-referential quality of logic, with the loop of dialectics, because the relativity of the real. It is also the dynamic that produces the first distortion —since the Council of Nicaea— of culture, by Christianity; imposing its determinations from politics and not the other way, as that same transcendent immano problem of the real[5].

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[1] . From the point of view of English naturalism, the problem of Nature is not the nature of things, but the real in its own manifestation.

[2] . In fact, the Patristics would produce the Arian conflict, to be resolved only by imperial authority.

[3] . This is the attempt —even as a principle— of determinate culture from politics, as at the beginning with Plato; distorting the functional structure of culture as reality, with the artificiality of the dialectic conflicts in nature.  

[4] . This refers to the “I think, therefore I am” as the ontological scope of Cartesianism.

[5] . It is worth noting here that the transcendent immano value is transcendental, insofar as it affects the immanent by its transcendence; so the intuition of transcendentalism is efficient as a principle, only insufficient, and in this — paradoxically — excessive. This conclusion would prove here the hermeneutical nature of the problem, as with the ancient cosmologies; in their function of understanding of reality, even equally regulated by the supra structural function —not nature— of religion.