Hegel and the Infinite: Religion, Politics, and Dialectic

I approach the interpretation of Hegel’s philosophy of religion with diffidence for the obvious reason that it generates opposite interpretations. At one extreme, we encounter the pious Hegelians who find great consolation in what they take to be Hegel’s magnificent defense of religion, not least his efforts to make philosophy and Christianity at one with each other. At the other extreme, we find the atheistic Hegelians who finally do not take Hegel’s engagement with religion seriously, deeming it as perhaps nothing but a concession to the pious hoi polloi, a concession freeing up space for the inner secret of a postreligious humanism. I am not just referring to the split into the Right- and Left-Hegelians that occurred shortly after Hegel’s death. In some more contemporary commentary, we find the practice of ventriloquizing through Hegel—the Hegelian corpus becomes a means for the commentator to voice what he considers most dear to his own heart. I do not object to making use of Hegelian ideas, but the ventriloquizing approach often practices the incomparable art of Cinderella’s ugly sisters—the glass slipper must fit the foot, never mind the blood on the carpet. There are pious ugly sisters—they downplay the difficulties for religion entailed by Hegel’s philosophy, while playing up the putative advantages. There are impious ugly sisters—their faces turn stony at the suggestion of anything “metaphysical” in Hegel as they render an account not alarming to the comfort levels of the contemporary secular Zeitgeist wherein mention of the word “God” has an effect analogous to the effect in a respectable Victorian parlor of the word “sex.”

The pious Hegelians read Hegel too innocently. They are beguiled by the surface rhetoric of religious language that easily—too easily—invokes the sacred commonplaces of a Christian culture. Hegel can then be quoted almost as an edifying preacher, complete with pet citations from the good Book itself. The impious Hegelians read Hegel too suspiciously, or at least in a manner withholding of a certain credit, a credit that would acknowledge that there is more to the rhetoric than a concession to the religious Zeitgeist of his own time. The pious Hegelians give us a simplistic Hegel, the impious Hegelians give us a simplified Hegel. Neither seems entirely true to Hegel. Speaking for myself, I would prefer to speak for the community of the religious and the philosophical, and in that respect I have some sympathy for the intentions of the pious Hegelians. Nevertheless, the final effect of Hegel’s thought is to point to a postreligious humanism, and hence I understand something of what the impious Hegelians recommend. What they recommend I cannot endorse, namely, the loss of seriousness about the religious as such, not least its great challenge to living philosophical thought. We must inhabit the space between religion and philosophy and think in that space differently—neither as a pious nor impious Hegelian, nor indeed as any kind of Hegelian.

This split into Left- and Right-Hegelians is very revealing, symptomatic of an inherent equivocity in Hegel’s claim to provide a coincidentia oppositorum all along the line, whether of religion and philosophy, the finite and infinite, or the human and divine. Hegel’s speculative dialectic claims to surpass equivocities, but in my view it suspends equivocity in its own claim to a more inclusive unity. With a different pressure now from this side, now from that side, the equivocity reappears, and Hegel’s descendents will plump for one side of the “unity” rather than the other, for one side over against the other. You might say this proves the point in Hegel’s favor vis-à-vis his desire to be true to the many-sidedness of an issue. Yes, but this desire may play false with the equivocal situation, just in its claim to include opposites in its embrace. It may recess serious difficulties just in claim to meet these serious difficulties.

Note that, despite their difference, these interpretations are held together by this point of convergence: the immanence of Hegel’s God. This immanent God might be given a pantheist interpretation or a posttheist, atheist interpretation—if you like, a pious or impious reading. This immanent God may even make use of the Christian claim that God entered into time and became human, hence offering even a very highly qualified theist interpretation. But, one must ask if this interpretation counterfeits the biblical God in so reconfiguring divine transcendence, so that in the end there is no divine transcendence as irreducibly other. God becoming human in time is the human in time becoming God. Some commentators applaud Hegel’s immanence but I find serous difficulties with it. The Christian story is put to a use that risks emptying the story of its properly religious meaning. Claims about the end of divine transcendence are exploited to buttress pious platitudes sacred to the secular Zeitgeist of a putatively postreligious humanism. I suspect this is special pleading on the basis of a counterfeit double of God that evades the seriousness of the religious while seeming to make friends with it. Hegel’s own philosophical practice does not properly address the potential for equivocation in the relation of the human and divine but raises the potential to a “higher” equivocity in claiming to effect a dialectic-speculative reconciliation that overcomes equivocation. That the equivocation is only held in suspense by Hegel seems to be confirmed by the split into the pious and the impious, the religious and the atheist interpretation that followed him, that followed from him.

In regard to this I want to look at significant responses to the space between finitude and infinity, with special reference to what I will call Hegel’s sublationary infinitism. There are different ways of understanding our being between finitude and infinity, and Hegel’s way is not the only one and is by no means immune from serious question. I will look at an easy-too-easy dialectic, Kant’s postulatory moral deism, then more closely at Hegel’s own sublationary infinitism, as well as at what I call the postulatory infinitism and postulatory finitism of some of his successors. At the end, I will offer some remarks on the space between finitude and infinity, looked at in terms of a metaxological agapeics. This tries to stay true to the overdeterminacy of infinitude as communicated in the hyperboles of being in immanent finitude. In due course, what these terms mean will become evident, at least in some measure.

A first approach to the space between finite and infinite might be described as the easy-too-easy dialectic against dualism. In this approach, we univocalize the finite and the infinite as two terms set over against each other. A certain operation of negation is at work here. The infinite is not what the finite is; the finite is not what the infinite is. The finite is defined in more or less determinate terms. The infinite, as what the finite is not, is not so determinable. The infinite is the indeterminate and indeed has nothing but a privative character. We find a more privative definition of the infinite in ancient thought, for instance, in Aristotle (Physics 3.4–8). While this is not Hegel’s infinite, there is something of crucial relevance, namely, Hegel’s own attitude to the indeterminate. This is quite negative: without some determination there is for him no articulated intelligibility. For him, we might grant the indeterminate as a beginning but must move beyond it, not only in the direction of determination, but also self-determination. I will come to this later.

Here the stress on the determinate, wedded to the operation of negation, sets the finite and infinite over against each other, and the purported univocalization of each produces a dualism between them. By way of response, the easy-too-easy dialectic is found in many standard descriptions of Hegel’s thought. Starting with dualism, we find we cannot stay with dualism. If we think the finite, we also have to think what the finite is not. The fixed determination of finitude over against the infinite cannot be the last word. To think the first is necessarily to think the second and to pass over from finitude to the infinite. This easy dialectic works the other way also. If we think of infinitude over against the finite as determinable, we think a mere indetermination, and to think an indetermination is not to think. To think the infinite then must entail more than indeterminacy, and we find ourselves in a passage beyond indeterminacy to the finite. The coimplication of finite and infinite seems to result, and we begin on one side or the other.

Hegel is committed to some such view but, of course, the delicate question is the nature of this coimplication. I speak of an easy-too-easy dialectic since it seems to work all but analytically as simply trying to think what either finitude or infinity means. We find in thinking one, we cannot but think about the other, and this works both ways from finite to infinite, from infinite to finite. It all seems so easy. Why then do we not bow before the wisdom of this logic in a more docile way?

One response might be offered in the terms of Kant, a thinker whom Hegel normally judges guilty of fixating on a dualism of finitude and infinite. There is something of the latter in Kant. He does think of the infinite as a regulative ideal, and something about his philosophy as a whole marks it as a philosophy of finitude. Any defense of Kant has to meet the Hegelian objection: any plotting of a limit shows itself to be on both sides of the limit, and hence the limit plotted turns out not to be unsurpassable, as initially claimed. Hegel is right to press that argument, especially if our presupposition is that there is no fundamental heterogeneity between the finite and infinite. But it might well be that the Hegelian objection begs the question concerning homogeneity between what happens to be on the two sides of the limit. If we question this homogeneity, we must also look at limit differently, and this is so even if we grant that there is a surpassing of limit. The surpassing does not preclude the possibility of a fundamental heterogeneity relative to what lies on the different sides of a limit. One must consider this especially with respect to God: if there is an absolute singularity to God, then that cannot be homogenized into what is determinable in finite intelligibilities.

Otherwise put, there may be a passing between finite and infinite, but the passage one way may not be the same as the passage the other way. Heraclitus posits, to the contrary, that the way up and the way down may not be the same. There may be an irreducible asymmetry in the passages. The passage from infinite to finite may exhibit an otherness to the passage from finite to infinite. Whether or not such an asymmetry constitutes an element of Kant’s discourse, it raises an issue that complicates the situation against the standard Hegelian objection to plotting a limit without presupposing what lies beyond the limit plotted. Relevant to the God of biblical monotheism, I would say there is a difference of our erotic self-transcending from the side of finitude and the agapeic communication from the side of the God beyond finitude. These two passages cannot be reduced to the one same form of self-mediating speculative dialectic. Their heterogeneity requires a different inhabitation of the middle space between finite and infinite. Pascal offers us one instance where something of this difference to Hegel is evident.¹

To return to Kant, his response to the implied dualism of finite and infinite is postulatory. On one side, and on the basis of our moral being, we are driven to postulate a God. This is a response that need not simply collapse before the Hegelian objection, if there is an asymmetry between one side of the limit and the other, if there is something about the beyond that does not yield to the speculative homogenization. I am not attributing such an explicit idea to Kant,² but if there is this asymmetry, then the Hegelian objection loses some of its force, which comes just from the presupposition of homogeneity. Of course, Kant does speak of reason as the faculty of the unconditioned, and the unconditional is defined by the notion of totality. Thus, there are significant continuities between his philosophy and Hegel’s, continuities Hegel can exploit while claiming to correct and complete their inner intention. Nevertheless, whatever Kant’s explicit statements, there may be something about his deeper intentions, perhaps despite himself, which might be concerned with, so to say, keeping gaps open. Think of his strong demurral, by contrast with Hegel, with respect to anything smacking of Spinozism.

Kant is not free of equivocity in all of this, as in so much else. One might see him as bordering on a great tension: committed to respect what he saw as the limit, yet impelled to think at the boundary of the limit and indeed beyond, pulled on one side back within the limit, driven out from finitude on the other side, but driven out without the relatively secure univocities of the former. He is between finitude and infinity, though he often masks that intermediacy in a manner more intent on securing coherent univocity on this immanent side of the limit and letting the equivocal darkness beyond take care of itself. In truth, however, these two sides cannot be kept from each other in an uncontaminated purity. One might see the antinomic character of Kantian thinking as a kind of hovering on the limit in its equivocal character. But as Kant perhaps came to know, one cannot really hover for very long, and Kant often seems more vacillating than hovering: either tempted to reassert the secured univocities on this finite side of the limit or still equivocally longing for the epistemically unsecured unconditional beyond the limit.

With respect to the latter, Kant’s approach to God might be called a postulatory moral deism. It is postulatory because it projects from finitude into the beyond. It is moral because the postulation or projection is carried out on the basis of Kant’s understanding of our moral being. It is deism because the beyondness of his moral God seems to have little of the intimate involvement in immanence of the theistic God of biblical monotheism. A certain gap always remains, turn whichever way one will within finitude. The dualistic transcendence of this postulated deity remains a beyond. I think one can read the stress on transcendence more appreciatively and approach the beyond in a less dualistic frame of mind. Some of Kant’s successors do not evidence this appreciation, and they enact projects of a more radical, autonomous immanence. They postulate, they project something other to the moral God and feel licensed to do so in just that gap. Why a moral God of good will, they ask; why not, say, an amoral “god” of will to power, either in a Schopenhauerian or Nietzschean modality? The question calls out for a fuller exploration of our finite condition as communicating what exceeds finite immanence.

BETWEEN THE INFINITE AND ITS OWN FINITIZATION: HEGEL’S SUBLATIONARY INFINITISM

I turn more fully to Hegel’s sense of the infinite. First, one notes his rejection of the dualistic way of thinking. This is epitomized by the Verstand under whose dominance, Hegel claims, Kant philosophizes. The Verstand fixed on determinacies, fixes rightly, but it becomes fixated and hence cannot do justice to the passage between determinations or beyond them. Dialectic unfixes these fixations and allows us to see that opposites are defined by their own opposites. There is an internal relation between one thing and its opposites. As we saw, this holds for the finite and infinite as well: they are mutually implicated.

Something of this is portended in Kant’s discovery of the antinomic structure of reason itself. Fix as reason might on this determination, it will do so only to discover that an opposite determination equally has a claim on rational validation. Kant did not see the affirmative significance of the antinomies. This has much to do with the internal contradiction of merely finite thinking: finite thinking contradicts itself and points beyond finitude. Hence for Hegel one cannot define the infinite over against the finite. This would be a finite infinite. Equally, an infinite of succession is a merely indefinite becoming and not the true infinite. Here indeterminacy replaces determinacy, but its openness is empty. Beyond the determinate and the indeterminate, we need the self-determining.

Think of it this way: we move along the infinite of succession, which is one finite item after another. We move, and in moving from a determinacy to its beyond, then to the beyond of this beyond, it always seems we are attaining a different determinacy. But this is not quite so. There is something the same in the passing beyond, more than this determinacy following that. This is not just a mathematical rule that determines the move from one to the next and so on. It is the mindfulness of passage that comes to itself in passing from one to the next and so on. Mindfulness not only grasps the rule of passage but comes to itself in the passage. This coming to itself in passage is not one determinacy over against an other, is not the endless unfulfilled line that stretches out to empty indeterminacy. It is more a self-relating process that comes to itself, recovers itself again in passing beyond itself. In passing beyond itself it comes to be at home with itself in what seems other. The circle seems closed in this self-mediating process. Rather than definition by determination, or indefinition by indeterminacy, this is self-definition by self-determination.

Consult now Hegel’s description: “The infinite is … the self-sublation of [the one-sided] infinite and finite, as a single process—this is the true or genuine infinite.”³ The self-sublating infinite cannot be rendered by the dualistically defined finite and infinite. Hegel stresses the singleness of the process. No fixated determinations can do justice to process as such. Does a single process qua process suppress the differences of determinacy and give us no more than formless flux? I take Hegel’s response to stress a forming, indeed a self-forming. This is entailed by the self-sublating character Hegel mentions. To sublate is to negate, to surpass, and to preserve—to self-sublate is to self-negate, to self-surpass, and to self-preserve. The infinite of succession is not enough. If the negation of the earlier term by the later is not a replacement of the earlier but a self-negation of it, the process is a self-surpassing of itself. It is also a recurrence to itself, for in surpassing itself, it is still itself in the process of passage: in this consists the self-preservation of the self-sublation. This recurrence to self betokens a logic of self-mediation through its own otherness in the process of self-surpassing. If there is otherness to this Hegelian infinite, it is also an immanent otherness. The finite, if negated, is taken up into the self-mediating infinite process. On its own, as the one-sided finite, finitude has no standing but gives way to its other. In giving way the finite reveals itself as what it is—a moment of this more inclusive, self-including infinite.

Compare this with what he says of the “bad infinite” (die schlecte Unendlichkeit) as a mere “ought-to-be.”⁴ This is a rejoinder to the postulatory character of Kant’s infinite as a regulative ideal which may heuristically guide a process of becoming but is not constitutive of process as such. Hegel does have a point here, though one that has to be qualified differently than he does. A regulative ideal must be constitutive in some sense, if it is to function as a regulative ideal—otherwise its postulation merges uneasily into wishful thinking. That said, its modality of constitution must allow some openness to the further unfolding of process. If this is so, its constitutive nature might not be quite the same as the total immanence suggested by Hegel’s option. There can be an immanence of the infinite that yet reserves something of the fullness of itself, such that no immanence can exhaust what it communicates. The immanent can betoken the beyond of immanence. I will return to this with the hyperboles of being.

Hegel again: “But this infinite progression is not the genuine infinite, which consists rather in remaining at home with itself in its other, or (when it is expressed as a process) in coming to itself in its other.”⁵ The “bad infinite” does not come to itself, does not remain at home with itself in its own otherness. Of course, this begs the question in favor of an immanent otherness and hides the possibility of being at home in an otherness that is not one’s own, or for that matter being in a middle space between one’s own and what is not one’s own. It recesses the possibility that such a between is more truly communicative of the excess of the infinite to finite determinacy. Hegel is intent on closing the circle rather than of opening up the porosity of the between to what is beyond it, even in the network of immanent relations that define it.

I underscore Hegel’s stress on “coming to self.” Hegel once again (Encyclopaedia §95): “In its passing into another, something only comes together with itself; and this relation to itself in the passing, and in the other, is the genuine infinity.”⁶ Some commentators, admirers of Hegel who want to make him palatable in the postmodern discourse of difference, underplay this logic of coming to self which can be found pervasively in Hegel’s texts. Without this coming to self, there is no true infinite for Hegel, more accurately, no true whole. For coming to self is what closes the circle of a passage of becoming into a single process, now not inarticulate, formless flux, but forming that is self-forming and containing its own immanent differentiations within itself. Coming to self in one’s other is at the center of Hegel’s philosophy as a whole and his philosophy of religion. For instance, his critique of the Hindu Trimurti is precisely with respect to the lack of a proper third to close the circle, unlike the truer Trinitarianism of the Christian tradition. Of course, Hegel also owes much to Kant’s turn to the transcendental subject, even if that subject is rewritten by him as transcendental (inter)subjectivity, or self-relating negativity, or self-mediating Geist. Hegel famously speaks of “das reine Selbsterkennen im absoluten Anderssein, pure self-recognition in absolute otherness, or being-other.”⁷ This phrase is sometimes cited by Hegel’s admirers who want to make him a philosopher of radical otherness. I take the “absolute otherness,” Anderssein, being-other, precisely to be an “absolved” otherness that is a medial otherness through which the self passes to “pure self-recognition.” Hegel himself emphasizes the pure nature of the self-recognition: the absolute being-other is its own otherness, that is, of the self itself.

The equivocal nature of Hegel’s relation to otherness also holds for his true infinite. It may be questionable to think of a dualistic opposition of finite and infinite, as the easy-too-easy dialectic suggests. But there are questions equally to be asked about conceiving infinity entirely as holistic immanence. The self-sublating character of Hegel’s true infinite is intended to address just that absolute immanence. There is no irreducible otherness because the otherness is owned by the process of immanent formation itself. Is there a thinking of infinity and a certain transcendence to it that is not defined either by dualistic opposition or speculative dialectic? To see or grant this point we have to orient ourselves differently to the middle space between finite and infinite than does Hegel’s speculative dialectic and its self-sublating infinite.

Who or what is the “self” of the self-sublating infinite? You might object that “self” here is merely a placeholder for an operation for which there need be no “self.” I think this will not do, since Hegel clearly wants to ascribe some agency to Geist. It is not a mere selfless operation. Perhaps one might better call it a “selving.” To deny any kind of agency seems all but impossible if we insist on the language of self-sublating. Clearly, Hegel wants to think substance as subject, and hence the language of selving seems necessary. The selving is self-othering as process and in process is also self-returning, hence coming back to itself, beyond the strung out infinity of endless succession.

We might connect this with how Hegel resorts to the language of the Trinity: God as selving, God as self-othering, God as self-recognizing in self-othering: Father, Son, Spirit. This triadic movement also corresponds to Hegel’s logic of the concept (Begriff): universality, particularity, and individuality (or concrete universality). The first is indeterminate, the second determinate, the third self-determining. One might say: God-selving, God-othering, God-self-recognizing. But if these three correspond to indeterminacy, determinacy, and self-determination, once again there is no overdeterminacy. This is one reason I speak of Hegel’s God as an erotic absolute.⁸ God-selving takes the form of an erotic process of coming to self. The indeterminacy of the beginning is not properly absolute but must become itself to be fully itself. It must determine itself in otherness, and since this is its own self-othering, the determination is really self-determination. Only in the consummated self-determination is the lack of the indeterminate beginning overcome, and only God is truly absolute.

Taking the overdeterminacy into account, against Hegel, I would speak of an agapeic God. An agapeic God need not create itself to become itself; and when it creates, there is a giving that is not the self-othering of the divine, nor yet a necessitated return in which the second moment of otherness must be recuperated in the third and last, wherein the original first can truly be said to be itself. An absolute that has to become itself to be itself is not an agapeic absolute. There is surplus to the agapeic origin that is not spent either in the middle or the end and that yet frees the finite middle of creation to be for itself—and not just as the agapeic origin in self-externality. Here and there, Hegel might speak of a release of the absolute, but this release cannot be described as agapeic. There is no super-plus plenitude in the Hegelian origin, no overdeterminacy that would give beyond itself from its surplus. The Hegelian origin is an indeterminate, abstract, and impoverished beginning, which is nothing without its determination and self-determination.

There is no outside self-sublating infinitude in the God of Hegel. As Hegel puts it: “What God creates God himself is.”⁹ The circular metaphorics so loved by Hegelians is a spatialized way of thinking that is very representational—even when they accuse others of thinking representationally. “What God creates, God himself is”: divine creation would be God cloning himself. In an agapeic understanding of origination, the other to God that is given to be in creation is not God self-othered. The qualification “ex nihilo” in creatio ex nihilo is extremely important in so far as it tries to mark the infinitely qualitative difference of God and creature (to speak with Kierkegaard). With Aquinas, I find the notion of God as self-creating to border on the incoherent. A God that creates itself would have to be itself to create itself; but if it were itself, why would it have to create itself? An absolute that is only absolute by becoming absolute does not seem absolute in the first instance, much less capable of making itself absolute.

In sum, the Hegelian God is not truly agapeic, because the unsurpassable whole always comes in the return to self that completes the circle. This is self-determining freedom as absolute. “Freedom is only present where there is no other for me that is not myself.”¹⁰ Release of or for the other is penultimate to return to self. I find this at every level in Hegel—from the immanent life of Hegel’s God to the intermediations of social self-determination in the ultimate community of God on earth, the modern state. I have often asked the pluralistic Hegelians what they make of Hegel’s citation of Aristotle’s noēsis noēsis neoseōs at the end and apex of the Encyclopaedia (§577). I have never received a satisfactory answer and often have been greeted by uneasy silence. Whatever else one might say, Aristotle’s God is not agapeic.

If this is correct, Hegel is talking more about his sense of the whole than of the infinite as in excess of every whole. Hegel may grant the excess of the infinite to determinate finite wholes, but the self-sublating character of his infinite shows the holistic nature of his thinking. Given its active nature, one might even speak of the wholing of the whole. Nevertheless, any excess to the whole is reconfigured as immanent to the wholing as such. In religious terms, there is no longer any transcendence to the divine. There is no irreducible space between finite and infinite. The process of the wholing is between the infinite and itself in the forms of its own finitization. God, so to say, is making faces of himself in immanence and seeing himself again in those faces. The only between is between the whole and itself, articulated in an entirely immanent process of wholing. I have to ask then, if Hegel’s true infinite is a counterfeit double of the true infinite, then is the true infinite in excess not only of finite determinate wholes but of every self-determining whole?

Returning to the divide between those who take Hegel to preserve religion and those who take him to surpass and negate it, can we reverse the movement of sublation? Sublation moves from negating to surpassing to preserving; reverse sublation would move from preserving to surpassing to negating. Does Hegel’s sublationary infinitism preserve religion in a way that allows a reverse sublation in which preservation itself becomes a surpassing, and surpassing gives way to negation—itself claiming to be the true completion of the process?

I ask this because of the manner in which Hegel mingles the religious and the postreligious, giving encouragement to both the pious and the not so pious Hegelians. The admirers who affirm religion’s preservation might sympathetically cite consoling texts such as Hegel’s claim that his Science of Logic represents the “exposition of God [die Darstellung Gottes] as he is in his eternal essence before the creation of nature and finite spirit.”¹¹ Hegel also says that the logical determination of his Encyclopaedia Logic “may be looked upon as definitions of the Absolute, as the metaphysical definitions of God” (Encyclopaedia §85, Hegel’s emphasis). The nonmetaphysical Hegelian will be stony to all of this. They are not entirely wrong if there is something like a reverse sublation of the religious. We can take these citations seriously without becoming too pious, for they are still not the whole, and not the whole of Hegel’s concept of God. Speaking theologically, the immanent self-mediating life of Hegel’s God overreaches itself to nature and history. This overreaching is God’s own self-externalization: nature and history are the two temples in which God manifests himself.¹² In the Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion the “inclusive Trinity” comes into play, but this clearly communicates that neither in the abstraction of God without the creation of the world, nor in God’s concretely consummated actuality, which includes nature and history in its own immanent intermediation, is there any otherness genuinely outside of this God. God is consummately self-actualized in entirely immanent form as absolute spirit in the religious community first, but then in the worldly community of the modern state, indeed the Protestant state as the worldly consummation of the otherwise merely spiritual Protestant church. “It is nothing but a modern folly to try to alter a corrupt moral organization by altering its political constitution and code of laws without changing the religion,—to make a revolution without having made a reformation.”¹³ “Changing the religion”: there are changes and changes, and some changes finally offer us political changelings in place of the religious original changed. Reversing sublation? No revolution without a reformation, he says; but the revolution completes the immanent worldly self-determination won spiritually by the reformation. Nietzsche dreamed of “a Roman Caesar with the Soul of Christ,” but it is of a “higher” Caesar he dreams, not of Christ.¹⁴ We might conceive of Hegel saying: “A post-Napoleonic sovereign with the soul of Luther,” but it would be to the sovereign that would fall the last judgment in immanence: the State “actualizes and reveals itself … in world history as the universal world spirit [Weltgeist] whose right is supreme.”¹⁵

This is where we wonder about the reverse sublation: religion preserved as community of spirit is surpassed by the modern state as the immanent objective community of worldly freedom. Preserving religion by thus relativizing its ultimacy has consequences for the not so pious reading of Hegel, for the relativizing can now claim to complete itself only by radicalizing the negation of the religious. And this is precisely what we starkly see with some of Hegel’s most immediate inheritors.

Consider again how in Hegel’s version of the “inclusive Trinity” the difference of time and eternity is speculatively sublated. This is not an Augustinian view in which the difference in time of the cities of God and Man, in their equivocal minglings, must always be kept in mind, asking of us a religious discernment and historical finesse not amenable to a speculative system. Hegel’s overcoming of the difference of humanity and divinity ultimately points in the direction of a postreligious humanism. He is not to be absolved from all responsibility for cruder employments of dialectic by his inheritors. In his philosophy of history, it is unmistakable that the modern secular state is the more ultimate ethical community than the religious community of spirit. In the language I use,¹⁶ Hegel has not enough finesse for the religious community of agapeic service, which is nothing without reference to God as exceeding the measure of every immanent totality. He thinks too dominantly of the immanent political community of erotic sovereignty. One can legitimately argue that the Left-Hegelians were simply more honest in pushing through the consequences of Hegel on this score. To say this is not at all to endorse the Left-Hegelian’s project. But that these might be closer to the true inheritance of Hegel must give us pause about the full consequences of his postreligious humanism. They enacted a kind of reversed form of sublationary infinitism in humanistic form. Their reversed sublation becomes a postulatory infinitism, as we shall see.

On this issue, I grant that there is no uncontroversial way of reading Hegel. Recall the equivocities I noted at the outset in connection with Hegel’s immanent God. That his immanent God could engender atheistic successors who insisted that they were true to Hegel’s essential spirit is one of the most glaring facts that must be confronted by any reading of the religious Hegel. What was there in Hegel that could engender such an outcome? I do not find myself philosophically or religiously in sympathy with that line of inheritance, and Hegel is not marked by the crude atheism we find with figures like Marx, but there is a true sense in which he and others like him are genuinely Hegel’s sons. They were attuned to something in Hegel that in Hegel himself was much more wrapped in dialectical qualifications, qualifications I believe are dialectical equivocations. What more pious Hegelians take to be speculative solutions are dialectical equivocations that hide essential differences, even while claiming to sublate them into a reconciling unity. The way the Left-Hegelians broke apart that unity and found atheism at its kernel is not entirely untrue to Hegel, even if it is a coarse version of what Hegel was trying to effect. They thought Hegel mystified reason by appealing to religion. They might not be entirely wrong about that, but Hegel and the Left-Hegelian are closer to each other than someone who would affirm the transcendence and personalism of the biblical God.

By contrast with these early iconoclastic inheritors, the nonmetaphysical and humanistic readers of Hegel common today are blandly bourgeois. The humanists of the revolutionary Left have been overtaken by the humanists of postreligious persuasion for whom the critique of religion is not the basis of all critique: it is just an embarrassment. At most, religion is an expression of human “values.” By contrast with the last men of postreligious humanism, there is something to be said for the impatience of the young Hegelians in calling a spade a spade, in relation to Hegel’s speculative reconciliation of the human and divine. Humanus heisst der Heilige (Humanity is the holy of holies), they could say with their father Hegel, but they said it out louder. Hegel held an equivocation in suspense and called it a speculative reconciliation, but the young Hegelians were impatient with the suspense and the equivocation and turned the speculative reconciliation more radically in the humanistic direction, toward which Hegel himself pointed. One has to chuckle at the chutzpah of that “Trumpet of the Last Judgment Against Hegel the Atheist and Anti-Christ: An Ultimatum”¹⁷—a marvellous outburst by that one-time devoted Right-Hegelian, later apostate and young Hegelian, Bruno Bauer. The impatient sons shouted it out loud. The shuffling caressing whispers of the father Hegel kept it hidden. That being said, I prefer the shout and the whispering to the silence of the postreligious humanists. I would also prefer to speak otherwise than this shout, this whisper, or this silence.

I will now speak of two major developments that react to Hegel’s sublationary infinitism, what I call “postulatory infinitism” and “postulatory finitism.” Though they can pass into each other, for now I concentrate on postulatory infinitism. This view claims that the agency of Hegelian Geist is human. We are asked to return to the horizon of human finitude without speculative mystifications. Hegel’s inflated claims for his speculative system are taken to bring into discredit all metaphysical theology. Rather, the humanism hidden in Hegel must be further developed in directions outside of the reassuring embrace of the Hegelian system. Metaphysical theology comes to seem like a philosophical bubble blown up to remarkable proportions by thinking intoxicated with the thinking of itself. At a certain limit of idealistic inflations the bubble bursts, but a new bubble begins—a humanistic, antitheological bubble.

Reacting against the self-sublating infinitude, when Geist as the selving of the sublation is identified with God, the Left-Hegelians transcribe the process of the infinite from the divine Sprit to the human being. Humanity becomes the self-sublating infinity in history itself. One thinks of the humanistic Marx’s account of labor. Human labor is self-sublating in contributing to human self-creation in time. True labor sublates: we work on the otherness of nature but this otherness need be no alienated other if we recognize our own power in and through that otherness. Alienated labor, by contrast, short circuits the process of “self-recognition in being-other.”

This account is not only continuous with Hegel’s dialectic but also with what Kant speaks of as subreption (Critique of Judgment §27). Subreption, Kant says, is to attribute to an other what is truly of ourselves. For instance, in the experience of the sublime, we attribute to an object what is of the subject. The sublime is a subreption when we think that there is a sublime object. There is no sublime object; rather we, as supersensible moral beings, are the truly sublime. Hegel supplies the logic of subreption by calling systematic attention to our self-recovery in the being-other. Hegel’s logic is the process of subreption becoming self-knowing and systematic. When the process is unknowing, there are a whole series of subreption where we attribute to otherness what is properly our own. Waking up to ourselves, we realize we have been in thrall to our own subreptions, our self-otherings, all along. Being free is coming to recognize ourselves in that otherness. As coming back to ourselves out of the otherness, it is sublating oneself as an other. For the Left-Hegelians, if and when Hegel’s sublationary infinitism attributes the process of selving to Geist as a divine other, then he merely reinstates the speculative subreption and has not truly freed us into our immanent humanity. This freeing must be completed—self-completed.

Note that these critics are themselves marked by something like the Hegelian logic of self-mediation through the other and are in agreement with Hegel’s critique of divine transcendence, though they often attribute to Hegel unexpurgated allegiances to a transhuman transcendence. Divine transcendence is now reinterpreted, in line with the desired autonomy of human praxis in modernity, as a form of infinity not appropriate to enlightened and emancipated humanity. It must be surpassed by autonomous humanity, now claiming to be more completely self-sublating. The critics of Hegel, in my view, also participate in a similar culture in which a logic of self-determination has a kind of privilege. Even the post-Hegelian anti-Hegelians are often in agreement with Hegel in relativizing the claims of divine transcendence as other in favor of immanent self-determination.

Relevant again is the reconfiguration of the Christian story of God becoming human in time. Hegel reads that as the death of divine transcendence as irreducibly other, a transcendence he finds in the Father of the Old Testament, in Judaism as a kind of religion of dualism, in religions shaped by the opposition of divine master and human slave, in the unhappy consciousness divided without redress between immanence and transcendence as other. The postulatory infinitism of post-Hegelian atheism is the human project of that immanent redress. This is not a Kantian postulation of a beyond; it is the human being projecting itself into its own becoming divine. Here, Feuerbach is crucial in moving the discussion, after Hegel’s death, in the direction of a more humanistic interpretation of dialectic. A student of Hegel, he wrote to him that the inner essence of speculative philosophy was humanism. The younger son saw the older master as wearing a religious mask. All divine spirits are merely mystifications of the human spirit, as Marx will claim. Feuerbach’s claim is worth pondering: whatever Hegel’s avowals, the logic of the position must lead to the reduction of theology to anthropology. Hegel equivocates on the speculative subreption and fails to come clean on what is entailed if the other is the self-projected, the self-sublated. All of the attributes of God are secretly the attributes of humanity as the infinite genus and must be repatriated to the human home, recuperated fully for immanence itself.

Marx was delighted with this so far as it goes, but it does not go far enough. Beyond the contemplative recognition that there is no absolute beyond the human being, we need revolutionary praxis in which the implications of sublationary infinitism become no postulation of a beyond but a project for the transformation of history into the very process by which social humanity more and more fully mediates with itself. Postulatory infinitism becomes projective infinitism: the self-sublation of the communist totality as a single process—communist freedom is One. Mimicking the logical Hegel, the single infinite mediates with itself through the one-sided finite and one-sided infinite. A process of social self-sublation will allow humanity to overcome alienation and become absolutely self-determining. What is truly our own is not to be attributed to an other, for such an other then has stolen from us our own. It is somewhat the reverse of the mythical Prometheus. Prometheus, the thieving Titan, steals fire from Zeus, just as self-sublating humanity must do. What happens in alienated labor is that the fire of Prometheus is stolen by the owners, each an immanent Zeus of corporate capitalism: “All property is theft.” We need a reverse subreption. In postulatory infinitism thieving gets an immanent self-sublating humanistic interpretation, which becomes the basis of expropriation, reappropriation.

Postulatory infinitism here differentiates itself from the speculative overinflation of the Hegelian self-sublating infinite, sharing its return to immanence but reacting differently to the announcement: “There is no beyond.” “There is no beyond” issues in a different postulatory project than Kant’s postulatory moral deism. If one holds to Kant’s moral deism, there is still a kind of beyond. Hegel dialectically deconstructed that beyond, but the Marxist return to immanence is not a humble project of human finitude. It is the fullest possible appropriation of nature as other and human productive power, hitherto alienated from itself: dialectical mastery of human history in classless society. The project is between finitude and its own self-infinitization. Marx’s conviction that there was an immanent logic to this is very Hegelian. The atheology of the human Geist in history is determined to the end of the absolutely self-determining One: absolute social freedom, determined by the logic of productive humanity’s immanent self-determination. In time we have seen how this can produce a counterfeit of community in the name of “social justice.” The communist will to bring into being the socially redeemed totality reveals a mutation of erotic self-surpassing marked by unexpurgated will to power. The implications of the counterfeiting of community were initially perhaps more recessed. Later, when they came into power, the unpurged will to be the one totality was overtly expressed in the form of world-historical determinations, wherein social self-determining concretized itself in unsurpassed systems of tyranny.

Another major reaction to Hegel’s sublationary infinitism is postulatory finitism. This can also mutate into a variety of postulatory infinitisms, or it can be diversely deconstructed, into, say, autonomy disillusioned with itself, or self-lacerating, rather than full of confidence in its own powers of self-determining. We tend to find the confidence earlier, the self-laceration later. The self-laceration can also conceal deficiency in how we understand the relation of finite and infinite.

Elsewhere I have discussed postulatory finitism in Nietzsche and post-Nietzschean philosophy (in Heidegger, for instance).¹⁸ What is rightly addressed here is the need of a philosophy of finitude as such. In reaction to “metaphysics,” caricatured somewhat as a two-world Platonic theory of ideas, or as escape into the outer space of an empty beyond, or as Hegel’s onto-theology of absolute Geist, finitude as such is postulated as the ultimate context of all human significance. In truth, it is impossible to think finitude without invoking infinity in some manner. The question is how to invoke and what infinity to invoke. Postulatory finitism refuses any invocation, at least on the surface: there is nothing beyond finitude. Finitude is the horizon greater than which none can be conceived.

Postulated finitude here replaces Kant’s moral God and Hegel’s self-sublating Geist. That “greater than which none can be conceived” is how Anselm spoke of God in the ontological proof. Here, finitude as such functions as the absolute horizon. Such a position is finally incoherent as so stated, and Hegel’s arguments against it are not negligible. But while this is so, we need not commit ourselves to his self-sublating infinitism. There is a thinking between finitude and infinity that is neither sublationary infinitism nor postulatory finitism nor either postulatory infinitism. Nevertheless, I see some continuity between these last three: postulatory finitism develops in reaction against Hegel, with some resonances of Kant’s postulated deism but without the moral God. What is important is the resort to the “as if” structure. Kant: If the human person as a moral being must be thought of in such and such terms, then we must think “as if” there is a moral God. Postulatory finitism and its “as if” structure: If we must think of the finite qua finite and nothing but the finite, then certain things will follow, such as no resort to a transcendent God.

Consider Nietzsche, for whom a kind of postulatory atheism emerges rather than a postulatory moral deism. Very revealing is the declamation of his Zarathustra (“On the Blissful Islands”):

God is a supposition; but I want your supposing to reach no further than your creating will. Could you create a god?—so be silent about all gods! But you could surely create the superman…. God is a supposition: but I want your supposing to be bounded by conceivability. Could you conceive a god?—but may the will to truth mean this to you: that everything shall be transformed into the humanly conceivable, the humanly evident, the humanly palpable! You should follow your senses to the end. And you yourself should create what you have hitherto called the World: the World should be formed in your image, by your reason, your will, and your love!¹⁹

Here we see the explicit connection of the “as if” with the postulatory structure: “But let me reveal my heart to you entirely, my friends: if there were gods, how could I endure not to be a god! Therefore there are no gods. Though I drew this conclusion, now it draws me.”²⁰ (Sartre gives a similar “argument” in the twentieth century: If God, no freedom. I am free, therefore no God.) The entire declamation urges a putatively new project: the turning away from God and gods and the turning to the human. This is not quite so new: it is rhapsodic homiletics, a lyrical version of Feuerbach’s reduction of theology to anthropology.

This is not an argument; it is preaching. Zarathustra is delivering an exhortation on the basis of a different supposition. It is preaching that urges an orientation to life, said to follow from the rejection of a supposition now deemed impossible or unacceptable—namely, the suppositions of gods or God beyond humanity. “Rejection” is maybe too light-headed a word, since Nietzsche himself uses a bloodier word: murder. And after the murder of God? “Must we ourselves not become gods ourselves simply to appear worthy of it?”²¹ The faith of the new project for the liberated higher humanity: “being true to the earth.” This is the repeated refrain of this philosophy of finitude, but again it is postulatory: it proposes a project on the basis of a certain understanding of the human being from which God and gods have been excluded.

Notice how the supposition can now go underground. Once granted, it becomes taken for granted and falls asleep to its own suppositional character. “Though I drew this conclusion, now it draws me.” What first I proposed, now proposes for me. The supposing, as it were, disposes me, or disposes of me, in becoming a later hidden presupposing. Suppose the postulatory finitism goes underground in a more widespread sense, namely, with respect to an era in general, not just one or two particular thinkers. The supposition then turns into something like a kind of absolute presupposition, and the “as if” is entirely lost from sight in a wider sense. Affirming finitude and nothing but finitude, we fall into the sleep of finitude.²²

A token of this, for instance, is the continuity between Kant and Nietzsche, despite the surface impression of great discontinuity. Nietzsche was more a (grand)son of Kant than he knew or acknowledged, but he did know the als ob of a postulatory moral deism mutates into the als ob of a postulatory amoral a-theism. Was Nietzsche blowing Kant’s cover: taking off the mask on the equivocation of the als ob of God as beyond: there is to be no transcendence as other, only human self-transcendence? No God above us, and no man either! Not unlike the impatient Left-Hegelian sons of Hegel, Nietzsche is perhaps an impatient grandson, the black sheep even, in the family of German will, where good will now mutates into will as good in the form of will to power. I do not wish to homogenize Kant and Nietzsche. For Kant draws attention to a very important consideration in his own postulatory endeavor, namely, the unconditional dimension manifest with our moral being, and this must surely be of immense importance in thinking about God, restraining us from projecting just anything we wish. To his credit, Kant stood firm on something ethically fundamental, but religiously, theologically, he equivocates on the brink of disaster. Religion is not morality, though it is not immoral or antimoral and cannot be seamlessly folded back into practical reason consumed with satisfying itself, all the while asleep to its own defect of spiritual finesse and perhaps also lack of love.

Be that as it may, and turning to the sons of Nietzsche, we must ask if the philosophers of finitude are also being drawn by an “as if” similar to Nietzsche’s. If this is so, are they really being true to finitude? Is their project not also motivated by its own “suppose,” its own Muthmaassung: the supposition of finitude and nothing but finitude? For if this supposition has become a presupposition about the whole of being, almost inevitably its suppositional character falls in a space within which our transcending energies circulate, and since they circulate we have the feeling there is the utmost freedom, which is even more so the case since these energies also seem most intimately to circulate around themselves. What if this circling around ourselves were a counterfeit form of infinitude? Have we created the “false infinity” as this self-encirclement? I do not mean Hegel’s “bad infinite.” It is because of opposition to Hegel’s “sublationary infinitism” as not true enough to finitude, that “postulatory finitism” derives not a little of its contemporary persuasiveness. Nevertheless, once again they have in common a stress on unremitting immanence. Do we need a philosophy of finitude that is not postulatory, a philosophy of infinitude that is not sublationary or postulatory, a philosophy in which we are not closed off from rethinking transcendence in another sense?

Nietzsche seems entirely other to Marx and, as we know, he despised socialism as much as Christianity. In postmodern times we find strange mutations, one of which is the Left-Nietzschean. For there comes to be a postulatory infinitism in Nietzsche too, and it is the project(ion) of the Übermensch. Both Marx and Nietzsche are philosophers of immanent will to power. The ruling ideas of an epoch are the ideas of the ruling powers. Marx said this, but Nietzsche is in basic agreement. That their philosophies are both projects indicates their origin in the same gene pool. The genes of immanence in the different mutations do not themselves mutate into an opening to transcendence as other. To pretend otherwise is to perpetuate the dissimulation. Again, we suffer from the sleep of finitude, though we claim at last to now be awake.

In time we can come to understand, in the light of finitude, that immanent self-determination is not sufficient, even for itself. But we can also be paralyzed from raising the question of an other transcendence if our agreement with Hegel, despite the disagreement, continues. Early successors of Hegel were less diffident about the attempt to absolutize immanent autonomy. Even though we are finite, in seeking to circle around ourselves, we also enact our own configuration of infinite movement. The issue of infinity reappears, as we saw, newly postulatory and projecting the immanent self-infinitization of the human as such. But circling around ourselves, the circling is going nowhere, certainly not anywhere genuinely beyond itself, for in this self-encirclement the beyond of itself is again its own immanent beyond. The more lucid of postmodern thought has the suspicion that this is like padding around a cell of self-reflecting mirrors. We feel we are glutted with ourselves and might even want to smash the mirrors. That is no true way out. One must wonder if there is something askew in all of this. Have we been true to the full happening of human finitude, both its self-surpassing and its porosity that allows in what communicates to it from beyond itself? We need a further exploration of the space between finitude and infinity.

In a final approach, I propose a metaxological position that is neither sublationary infinitism nor postulatory finitism nor postulatory infinitism. Postulatory finitism leads to certain aporiai of finitude that it cannot address on its own terms. We may be the measure of things other than ourselves in finitude, but we are not the measure of our own finitude. We infinitely surpass ourselves—and not again toward ourselves only. Sublationary infinitism falls asleep, not just to finitude, but to the infinite as exceeding all wholes, even self-determining wholes. The metaxological approach affirms the difference between finite and infinite, yet allows that this difference grants a space of porosity across which communication can happen, though never such as to be captured by an immanent totality. The God of the between is not the between but is beyond the whole, a beyond at issue in the question of God being infinite.

In God and the Between I discuss God’s being infinite more fully with four conceptions of infinity: the numerical (or quantitative) infinite, the infinite of succession, the intentional infinitude, and actual infinitude.²³ These correlate with the indeterminate, the determinate, the self-determining, and the overdeterminate. The first two infinitudes correlate with determinacy and indeterminacy (in the sense of the indefinite) and their interplay; the third correlates with self-determination; the fourth with the overdeterminate. There is also a correlation with respective dominances in each of the univocal, equivocal, dialectical, and metaxological senses of being. The first form of infinity is based on the unit of numbering and the possibility of infinitely redoubling this unit. The second form of infinity explicitly implicates the mindfulness of process as dynamic; as marking successiveness it is temporal and temporizing infinity rather than mathematical or quantitative. A third form of infinity I call intentional infinitude.²⁴ I do not mean a process that is just master of itself; I mean more a mindful transcending that is as much an undergoing as a self-directing, as much a suffering as an acting. This is the kind of infinitude we might ascribe to human beings. The fourth sense of the actual infinite is defined by way of excess, not primarily relative to erotic infinity, but relative to communications of the surpluses of agapeic being in finitude itself. Agapeic, being in the between, is the hyperbolic image of this actual infinite. Given present limitations, I cannot say anything more about this fourfold conception, but must confine myself to connecting the infinite with the overdeterminate beyond the indeterminate, the determinate, and the self-determining. We will also see how this resituates Hegel’s concept of the self-sublating infinite.

In the metaxological space between finitude and infinity, we have to attend to what I call the hyperboles of being, which point to something of the overdeterminate excess of the divine infinity. The hyperbolic stresses something different to the postulatory and the self-sublating. The original Greek meaning of hyperballein suggest a “throwing above” or a “being thrown above.”²⁵ Being thrown above takes us beyond postulatory finitism, for we do not postulate but are carried above ourselves in a surpassing of self-exceeding. Nor is it self-sublating infinitism, for the infinite restlessness of our being caught up in self-exceeding is not the determining measure of its own movement above itself. Neither is the hyperballein a postulatory infinitism, for it is not our project or projection, as if it were we who threw ourselves above. (This entails a reversal of the directionality of the self-transcending of our intentional infinitude.) Between finitude and infinity there is a movement of being carried beyond every whole. This comes home to us when we attend to the signs of the overdeterminate in immanence. The hyperboles are happenings in immanence that are not determined by immanence alone: neither merely determinate, nor merely indeterminate, and not yet self-determining, something about them communicates of the overdeterminate. We need to attend to four especially significant hyperboles.

First, there is what I call the idiocy of being (in the Greek sense of idiot): the sheer “that it is” of given finite being. This can stun us into astonishment and rouse thought that is hyperbolic to finite determinacy or to our own self-determination. In the stunning of mindfulness, our thinking can become porous to what exceeds finite determination rather than insisting that immanent finitude is the horizon greater than which none is to be thought. The overdeterminacy of the “that it is” plays no role in Hegel’s thinking of the infinite. The “that it is” is a contingency that while acknowledged in its immediacy is merely indeterminate until mediated, and hence given proper intelligible determination. Hegel is deficient in ontological wonder and the agapeic astonishment that is the more original source of fertile metaphysical mindfulness.²⁶

Second, there is the aesthetics of happening: the incarnate glory of aesthetic happening as given also rouses astonishment and appreciation before finite being, yet it seems to exceed finitization. The aesthetic glory of finitude is impossible to characterize exhaustively in finite terms. We are inclined to liken it to a great work of art: richly determinate, yet exceeding fixation in any one determination or set of finite determinations. Something more is incarnated in the beauty and sublimity of finitude that communicates an otherness exceeding all finitization. Hegel again here strikes me as lacking in finesse: at most the sublime is an aesthetic Jenseits that he especially associated with the transcendence of the Jewish God.²⁷ Hegel does not understand the meaning of this asymmetrical transcendence. Its very beyondness is for him a defect. His defect is that he cannot see that a different sense of the overdeterminate infinite is to be acknowledged. (He would not appreciate Levinas’s privileging infinity over totality.) There is also a lack of appreciation of the sensuous as such—this is also a beyond resistant to Hegel’s will to sublate it in the philosophical form of thought thinking itself. The defect of the aesthetic for him is its tie to the sensuous as such. We might understand and appreciate this differently in a truly incarnational sense: the infinite as bodied forth in the sensuous finitude.

Third, there is the erotics of selving: finite though we are, we are also infinitely self-surpassing. We surpass ourselves beyond every finitely determined limit. But beyond the measure of ourselves as measure, we point and are pointed to a measure exceeding finite measure. The measure of human self-transcending that measures and makes the finite determinable is beyond the determination of finite measure. Marked as both finite and infinitely restlessness, we are the incarnate conjunction and tension of these two. The erotics of selving is more than a self-overcoming driven to its own most complete self-determination in immanence. It incarnates a primal porosity to what exceeds its own determination and self-transcending. In the fecund poverty of its given porosity, it is an opening to transcendence as other beyond immanent self-transcendence.

I see Hegel deriving the energy of his thinking from this source (in some ways corresponding to the intentional infinitude trying to self-sublate into actual infinity). For him the self-surpassing becomes self-sublating, for the surpassing of self to the other is again surpassing to self in the form of otherness. The circle is closed even on this level into a whole mediating with itself, and infinity is refigured in the whole or totality. I do not think this is true to the erotics of selving as hyperbolic, nor is it true to what is beyond the erotics of selving. Hegel does not metaxologically dwell on the boundary of the erotic selving and know its porosity to the overdeterminacy of the divine that is beyond its own self-mediation and self-sublation. (There is something about the erotics of selving that is also beyond the Dionysian self-transcendence of Nietzschean self-infinitizing—though at a certain limit, Nietzsche lays himself open to what is mysteriously beyond him.) We need to pay special attention to this fourth hyperbole to grant this.

Fourth, there is the agapeics of community: in our relation to others, our being is in receiving and in giving; we are receptive to the gift of the other, and we are free to give beyond ourselves to others, simply for the good of the other as other in some instances. In the finiteness of our lives, there is the promise of a generosity beyond finite reckoning. We are given to be before we can give ourselves to be. Finitude as such is given, but not given from itself alone. Nothing is alone; hence, the idea of finitude as for itself alone and nothing other cannot be taken as the last word or the first. Thus our being freed into ethical responsibility is difficult to render on purely finite terms, since the call of something unconditional emerges (Kant is to be heard here). In our ethical relation to the other, this unconditional is given before one’s freedom to determine oneself (Kant does not get this quite right). There is an agapeics of generosity beyond even moral reckoning. We are invited to consider a religious agape, more unconditional than the moral unconditional, a hyper-unconditional generosity toward finitude exceeding finitization. The agapeics of community intimates a surplus source of good that makes itself available in an absolute porosity, an absolved porosity of the passio essendi that ethically lives itself as a compassio essendi. This is a sign of something more than the ethical, since it incarnates the holy. The infinity of divine goodness is communicated in the holy.

The agapeics of community does not figure in a significant systematic way in Hegel’s account. Some commentators have claimed Hegel’s God is agapeic, but this is ventriloquizing through one or two sentences about love, which has an ambiguous suggestion of the agapeic. The agapeics of community are in no way thought through or assimilated to the systematic substance of Hegel’s philosophy as a whole.²⁸ Hegel’s God, as previously indicated, shows itself to be an erotic not an agapeic absolute.

I conclude that there are signs of the infinite in the idiotic overdeterminate givenness of being. There are signs in aesthetic happening, especially as shown in the sublime as the overdeterminate appearing in sensuous determinacy. There are signs in erotic selving as carried in its self-surpassing by an energy of being overdeterminate to all our self-determinings. There are signs in agapeic communications, where the overdeterminacy of divine goodness passes between finitude and infinity in a released metaxological community of surplus generosity.

1. On this, see William Desmond, Is There a Sabbath for Thought? Between Religion and Philosophy (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), chap. 2.

2. Kant’s differentiation between a “boundary” (Grenze) and a “limit” (Schranke) has some relevance here: “Bounds (in extended beings) always presuppose a certain definite space and inclosing it; limits do not require this, but are mere negations which affect a quantity so far as it is not absolutely complete. But our reason, as it were, sees in its surroundings a space for the cognition of things in themselves, though we can never have determinate concepts of them and are limited to appearances” (Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics, trans. James W. Ellington [revised from Paul Carus] [Indianapolis: Hackett, 1977], § 57, p. 93). The contrast of the determinate and the indeterminate is at work here, and Kant clearly sees the heterogeneity between what is mathematically and scientifically determinable and what is metaphysically thinkable. Whether he handles that heterogeneity satisfactorily is another question.

3. G. W. F. Hegel, Wissenschaft der Logik I, in Werke in zwanzig Bänder (Theorie-Werkausgabe), ed. Eva Moldenhauer and Karl Markus Michel (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1970), vol. 5, p. 149; Science of Logic, trans. A. V. Miller (New York: Humanities Press, 1969), p. 137 (“Das Unendliche ist … das Sichaufheben dieses Unendlichen wie des Endlichen als ein Prozeß—ist das warhhafte Unendliche”).

5. G. W. F. Hegel, Enzyclopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften I, in Werke (Theorie-Werkausgabe), ed. Eva Moldenhauer and Karl Markus Michel (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1970), vol. 8, p. 199; The Encylopaedia Logic, trans. with intro. and notes by T. F. Geraets, W. A. Suchting, and H. S. Harris (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1991), p. 149.

6. Hegel, Enzyclopädie I, p. 201; Encylopaedia Logic, p. 151 (“so geht hiermit Etwas in sienem Übergehen in Anderes nur mit sich selbst zusammen”).

7. G. W. F. Hegel, Phänomenologie des Geistes (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1952), p. 24; Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977), p. 14.

8. On this more fully, see William Desmond, Hegel’s God: A Counterfeit Double? (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003), esp. chap. 4.

9. G. W. F. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion: The Lectures of 1827, ed. Peter C. Hodgson, trans. R. F. Brown, P. C. Hodgson, and J. M. Stewart (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), p. 129.

10. “Freiheit ist nur da, wo kein Anderes für mich ist, das ich nicht selbst bin” (Hegel, §24A2; Enzyclopädie I, p. 84; Encyclopaedia Logic, p. 58).

12. Hegel, §140A; Enzyclopädie I, pp. 274ff.; Encyclopaedia Logic, pp. 210ff.

13. Hegel’s Philosophy of Mind: Part Three of the Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences (1830), Translated by William Wallace, Together with the Zusätze in Boumann’s Text (1845), trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), §552, p. 287.

15. G. W. F. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, ed. Allan W. Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), §33, pp. 62–63; see also §30.

16. G. W. F. Hegel, Ethics and the Between (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001), chaps. 15 and 16.

17. Bruno Bauer, The Trumpet of the Last Judgment Against Hegel the Atheist and Anti-Christ: An Ultimatum, trans. Lawrence Stepelevich (Lewiston, N.Y.: Mellen Press, 1989).

19. Friedrich Nietzsche, Also sprach Zarathustra, in Werke, ed. G. Colli and M. Montinari (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1968), vol. 6, pt. 1, pp. 105–106. The German word that Nietzsche uses is Muthmaassung, which Walter Kaufmann translates as “conjecture” (The Portable Nietzsche [New York: Viking Penguin, 1982], p. 197), and R. J. Hollingdale, as “supposition” (Thus Spoke Zarathustra [Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1961], p. 110); it might also be rendered as something like “guess” or “surmise.” (The quotation is from the Hollingdale translation.) Kant’s “Conjectural Beginning of Human History” (Mutmaßlicher Anfang der Menschengeschichte, 1786) uses the same word as Zarathustra. Kant’s conjecture wants to substitute a secular “likely story” or muthos for the religious muthos. In Die Religion innerhalb der Grenzen der blossen Vernunft [Religion Within the Bounds of Reason Alone], he makes up a moralized version of the Kingdom of God. I suspect this “ecclesiology” of being a rationalized (counterfeit) double of the intimate universal of the religious community.

21. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books, 1974), §125

23. William Desmond, God and the Between (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007), part 6, Seventh Metaphysical Canto: God Being Infinite.

24. A term I use in Desire, Dialectic and Otherness: An Essays on Origins (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1986), a work that, taken as a whole, plots the convergence of intentional and successive infinitudes in the between, convergence that metaxologically intermediates a sense of the hyperbolic infinity. I would now stress more strongly the qualification of our infinite self-surpassing by its being first a passio essendi in a received sense before being a conatus essendi in an endeavouring sense.

25. Contrast this with symbol as a sumballein, a “throwing together” or a “being thrown together.” The sense of “conjecture” I noted in Nietzsche and Kant (note 19) is more projective than genuinely con-jectural (in the meaning of “being thrown together or with” [jacere-con]). The sense of conjecture in Cusa as symbolic (sumballein) of the infinite stresses more this sense of con—opening it more to the huper, the “above” of huperballein. The religious significance of imagination as not just projective is here at stake; on this, see Desmond, Is There a Sabbath for Thought? chap. 4.

26. William Desmond, “Surplus Immediacy and the Defect(ion) of Hegel’s Concept,” in Philosophy and Culture: Essays in Honor of Donald Phillip Verene, ed. Glenn Alexander Magee (Charlottesville, Va.: Philosophy Documentation Center, 2002).

27. William Desmond, Art, Origins, Otherness: Between Art and Philosophy (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2003), chaps. 3 and 4.

28. See Peter C. Hodgson, Hegel and Christian Theology: A Reading of the Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), and the exchange between Hodgson and me concerning Hegel’s God in Owl of Minerva 36, no. 2 (2005): 153–163, 189–200.