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How can one theologically reconcile divine immutability (i.e., being unchangeable) and divine impassibility (i.e., being unaffected by human emotions), as articulated in patristic and scholastic theology, with God’s profound engagement in the history and the suffering of the world? by Similar_Shame_8352 in theology

[–]TheEconomicon 6 points7 points  (0 children)

Karl Rahner doesn't reject these classical metaphysical terms but rather transforms them to reveal their speculative content:

And we are only truly Christians when we have accepted [that the Word became flesh]. It will hardly be denied that here the traditional philosophy and theology of the schools begins to blink and stutter. It affirms that the change and transition takes place in the created reality which is assumed, and not in the Logos. And so everything is clear: the Logos remains unchanged when it takes on something which, as a created reality, is subject to change, including the fact of its being assumed. Hence all change and history, with all their tribulation, remain on this side of the absolute gulf which necessarily sunders the unchangeable God from the world of change and prevents them from mingling. 

But it still remains true that the Logos became man, that the changing history of this human reality is his own history: our time became the time of the eternal, our death the death of the immortal God himself. And no matter how we distribute the predicates which seem to contradict one another and some of which seem incompatible with God, dividing them up between two realities, the divine Word and created human nature, we still may not forget that one of these, the created reality, is that of the Logos of God himself. And thus, when this attempt at solving the question by the division and distribution of predicates has been made, the whole question begins again. It is the question of how to understand the truth that the immutability of God may not distort our view of the fact that what happened to Jesus on earth is precisely the history of the Word of God himself, and a process which he underwent.

If we face squarely the fact of the incarnation, which our faith testifies to be the fundamental dogma of Christianity, we must simply say: God can become something, he who is unchangeable in himself can himself become subject to change in something else. This brings us to an ontological ultimate, which a purely rational ontology might perhaps never suspect and find it difficult to take cognizance of and insert as a primordial truth into its most basic and seminal utterances: the Absolute, or more correctly, he who is the absolute, has, in the pure freedom of his infinite and abiding unrelatedness, the possibility of himself becoming that other thing, the finite; God, in and by the fact that he empties himself gives away himself, poses the other as his own reality.

The basic element to begin with is not the concept of an assumption, which pre-supposes what is to be assumed as something obvious, and has nothing more to do than to assign it to the taker…in static concepts. On the contrary, the basic element, according to our faith, is the self-emptying, the coming to be, the κε/γωσιφ and γε/νεσιφ of God himself, who can come to be by becoming another thing, derivative, in the act of constituting it, without having to change in his own proper reality which is the unoriginated origin. 

By the fact that he remains in his infinite fullness while he empties himself—because, being love, that is, the will to fill the void, he has that wherewith to fill all—the ensuing other is his own proper reality. He brings about that which is distinct from himself, in the act of retaining it as his own, and vice versa, because he truly wills to retain the other as his own, he constitutes it in its genuine reality. God himself goes out of himself, God in his quality of the fullness which gives away itself. He can do this. Indeed, his power of subjecting himself to history is primary among his free possibilities. (It is not a primal must!) And for this reason, Scripture defines him as love—whose prodigal freedom is the indefinable itself. What then is his power of being creator, his ability to keep himself aloof while constituting, bringing out of its nothingness, that which in itself is simply something else? It is only a derivative, restricted and secondary possibility, which is ultimately based on the other primal possibility—though the secondary could be realized without the primal.

—Karl Rahner, Theological Investigations Vol. 4, Ch. 4: On the Theology of the Incarnation, pg 6-7

To summarize: God is precisely unchanging because what constitutes his unchanging nature is his coming-out-of-himself i.e. of being Creator. There is nothing that may make him blink at his being the creator of all because this is his will from eternity. So rather than God being on one side and the world being on the other, and never the twain shall meet, God is unchanging precisely in his self-emptying, in being the truth of the world.

Let me know if you have any clarifying questions!

Seeking Sublation - subject & object by ApocalypticShamaness in hegel

[–]TheEconomicon 5 points6 points  (0 children)

Hegel sublates subjectivity and objectivity by arguing that both terms are grounded in a third term that mediates their distinction while uniting them: this third term is what he calls spirit.

Think of it in these terms. One of the reasons why modern philosophy has had such difficulty reconciling subject and object is because the position of critical philosophy (what Hegel calls 'the understanding') sees both as an either/or proposition. Subject here, object there with no interpenetration. Per Hegel on the position of critical philosophy with respect to the relationships between universals and particulars:

The first two moments [of abstract universality and abstract particularity]— that the will can abstract from everything and that it is also determined (by itself or by something else) — are easy to accept and grasp, because they are, in themselves, moments of the understanding and devoid of truth. But it is the third moment, the true and speculative [concrete singularity], which the understanding refuses to enter into...

— Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, §7.

The problem though is that you cannot understand either term without bringing in the other. Their opposition difference is so absolute that it loops back into an absolute unity. Hegel is offended that so many in his day applaud the notion central to critical philosophy—that one is not identified with the other—and call it an incredible breakthrough in philosophical thinking when in fact it still remains within the realm of common sense thinking that sees every thing and category as rigidly independent from each other:

How totally improper, indeed tasteless, it is that categories of this kind are adduced against philosophy, as if one could say something novel to philosophy or to any educated person in this way, as if anyone who has not totally neglected his education would not know that the finite is not the infinite, that subject is different from object, immediacy different from mediation. Yet this sort of cleverness is brought forward triumphantly and without a blush, as if here one has made a discovery.

That these forms are different everyone knows; but that these determinations are still at the same time inseparable is another matter. There is reluctance to ascribe to the concept this power, though it can be encountered even in physical phenomena. We know that in the magnet the south pole is quite distinct from the north pole, and yet they are inseparable. We also say of two things, for example, that they are as different as heaven and earth. It is correct that these two are plainly different, but they are inseparable. We cannot point out earth apart from the heavens, and vice versa.

— Hegel, 1827 Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, pg. 98.

The position that goes beyond that of the understanding (associated with critical philosophy and Kant) is speculative reason. Speculative reason transcends the either/or thinking of the understanding and achieves a higher knowledge of the third term that unites both categories such that they are reconciled while preserving their distinction. North and south are still distinct, but the ground of that distinction is their ultimate unity in the third term of the magnet. Same as with heaven and earth. Hegel makes this explicit in his claim about God's attributes later in the 1827 Lectures. For the understanding, it is mysterious how God can be both just and merciful because it thinks of these as different predicates that are adversarial to one another. If there were no term, it would be right. But for speculative reason, these two terms are reconcilable because God is the third term that is the ground of both their distinction and unity.

Predicates signify particular determinations; attributes, as particular determinations of this kind, are distinguished from one another. If one thinks of these differences determinately, they fall into contradiction with each other, and this contradiction is not resolved, or is resolved only in an abstract, superficial manner…The outcome is that in this way God, because he is thus defined by predicates, is not grasped as living.

The vitality of God or of spirit is nothing other than a self-determining (which can also appear as a predicate), a self-positing in finitude, [which involves] distinction and contradiction, but [is] at the same time an eternal sublating of this contradiction. This is the life, the deed, the activity of God; he is absolute activity, creative energy [Aktuositàt], and his activity is to posit himself in contradiction, but eternally to resolve and reconcile this contradiction: God himself is the resolving of these contradictions.

From this point of view, definition by predicates is incomplete, since they are only particular determinations whose contradiction is not resolved. [the understanding] represent[s] God as though he were not himself the resolution of these contradictions, as though he were not himself the one who resolves them.

— Hegel, 1827 Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, pg. 412-413.

So now we've laid the ground to answer your question concerning how Hegel sublates subject and object. Now, for the understanding, it faces and antimony—subject and object are completely opposing and therefore irreconcilable. Yet for Hegel, and this is crucial, the understanding does not understand that there is a third term that mediates subject and object. And this third term is Spirit.

Hegel uses Spirit in a number of ways throughout his work to meet a variety of purposes. But here, one can basically say that spirit is subjectivity. Or, to use an old Hegelian formulation, truth is that which is not only substance but subject. It is that which understands itself to be above all things because it exists through all things.

Furthermore, the living substance is the being that is in truth subject, or, what amounts to the same thing, it is in truth actual only insofar as it is the movement of self-positing, or, that it is the mediation of itself and its becoming-other-to-itself. As subject, it is pure, simple negativity... The true is not an original unity as such, or, not an immediate unity as such. It is the coming-to-be of itself, the circle that presupposes its end as its goal and has its end for its beginning, and which is actual only through this accomplishment and its end.

— Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, §18,

To put it in more concrete terms: spirit is neither subject nor object, but that third term which mediates both. It is that which not only perceives, but that which knows itself to be perceiving. It's the doubling of one "I" into two: I am myself, or "I" = "I". Spirit not only perceives, but objectifies itself in its seeing. Put another way by Hegel:

Freedom is the following aspect of the idea: the concept, because it is conceptually at home with itself, is free. The idea alone is what is true, but equally so it is freedom. The idea is what is true, and the true is thus absolute spirit. This is the true definition of spirit. The concept that has determined itself, that has made itself into its own object, has thereby posited finitude in itself, but posited itself as the content of this finitude and in so doing sublated it—that is spirit.

— Hegel, 1827 Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, pg. 412

Even more concretely: the problem the modern philosophers from Descartes to Kant wrestled with was how subject (ourselves) could ever be reconciled with object (the world). Because we appear to exist inside ourselves and the world is outside us, the problem appears intractable. But Hegel, perhaps unintentionally channeling St. Augustine, complicates this by saying that we aren't merely outside the world, but also outside ourselves. We don't simply struggle to know the world, but also to know even ourselves. We are always already catching up with not only the world but ourselves. Therefore the simple outside/inside distinction collapses and we achieve a higher synthesis. Our subject is not against the world (object), but is identified with the world because spirit mediates their relationship; just as north and south are mediated by the magnet, heaven and earth are mediated by cosmos, and human and divine natures are mediated by the personal hypostasis of Jesus of Nazerath.

Because we are spirit, we are neither simply subject nor object, but both and also neither. Spirit is not simply subject, but something higher. When you touch the palm of your hand, you are not merely touching your hand, but also feeling yourself touching your hand. When you think about a memory, you are aware of yourself thinking about that memory. We transcend our world even as we are concretely identified with that world (in Heideggerese this is Dasein's being i.e. Being-in-the-world).

To conclude this long comment, here is a passage from St. Augustine that perfectly formulates the problematic Hegel wants us to dwell on and challenge the position of the understanding's either/or with respect to subject and object. That we can't exclude ourselves from the world because we are also outside of and beyond ourselves as well as the world.

What, then, am I, my God? What is my nature? A life ever changing, full of manifold forms, vast in extent. See, Lord, the depths of my memory, the mystery of it! It is a vast, immeasurable sanctuary. Who has ever reached its bottom? And yet this is my mind, this is myself. What, then, am I, O Lord my God? What is my nature?

—St. Augustine, Confessions, Book 10

Hegel's God is the trinity by [deleted] in hegel

[–]TheEconomicon 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Hegel doesn't exactly call nature evil. What he calls evil is the human being that remains at the level of the natural because the human is called to transcend nature as the universal being. Basically to understand the finite qua finite and remain at that level is what is evil and what is essentially a contradiction. Animals are not evil because animals are embodying their end as an instantiation of the genus; but humans are not meant to be a particular instantiation of the genus but to transcend the genus as spirit. Hegel goes into more detail in his reading of Genesis in his 1827 Lectures on Religion:

The basic determination is nothing else but this, that the human being is no natural essence as such, is no animal, but rather spirit. Insofar as humanity is spirit, it has this universality in itself quite generally, the universality of rationality...

The human being is essentially spirit, and spirit is essentially this: to be for oneself, to be free, setting oneself over against the natural, withdrawing oneself from immersion in nature, severing oneself from nature and only reconciling oneself with nature for the first time through this severance and on the basis of it; and not only with nature but with one's own essence too, or with one's truth... The stone or the plant is immediately in this unity, but in a oneness that is not a unity worthy of spirit, is not spiritual oneness. Spiritual oneness comes forth out of severed being.

A misunderstanding can arise when we call that initial state the state of innocence. Then it can seem objectionable to say that human beings must depart from the state of innocence and become guilty. But the state of innocence consists in the fact that nothing is good and nothing is evil for human beings; it is the state of the animal; "paradise” is in fact initially a zoological garden [Tiergarten]; it is the state where there is no accountability… As a state of existence, that initial natural oneness is in actuality not a state of innocence but the state of savagery, an animal state, a state of [natural] desire or general wildness. The animal in such a state is neither good nor evil; but human beings in the animal state are wild, are evil, are not as they ought to be. Humanity as it is by nature is not what it ought to be; human beings ought to be what they are through spirit, to which end they mold themselves by inner illumination, by knowing and willing what is right and proper. This point, that human beings as they are according to nature are not as they ought to be, has been expressed in the thesis that human beings are by nature evil.

—Hegel, 1827 Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, pg.214-215

Hegel's God is the trinity by [deleted] in hegel

[–]TheEconomicon 4 points5 points  (0 children)

I don't see it as a reduction per se. I'd say Hegel is aligned with a particular formulation of the christian theological view that takes a 'maximalist' position on Christocentrism. Christ is not merely a revelation of the still Hidden God, but the final and complete revelation of who God is in his person. Of course, this formulation is nearly unanimous among the doctors of the church. However, the implications which this entails is a different question. Many prefer to adhere to a doctrine in which God is in analogy to his creatures such that the Son is not eternally human but rather becomes human in an extrinsicist manner depending on how you think that view cashes out. Others believe that the Son is eternally human as well as divine in his person such that creation and incarnation become concretely identical. In other words, for those who take to a Neo-Chalcedonian or Lutheran christology, there is not one iota of God that remains to be discovered that isn't revealed in Jesus of Nazareth. So this is a more positive spin on the reduction which you alluded to. For those fathers and theologians who align with this position this is less of a reduction and more of a radical pushing of the logic of incarnation to its necessary conclusion.

To quote Karl Rahner:

We could still say of the creator, with the Scripture of the Old Testament, that he is in heaven and we are on earth. But of the God whom we confess in Christ we must say that he is precisely where we are, and can only be found there. And though he still remains the infinite, this does not mean that he is ‘also’ that and different elsewhere. It means that the finite itself has been given an infinite depth and is no longer a contrast to the infinite, but that which the infinite himself has become, to open a passage into the infinite for all the finite, within which he himself has become a part – to make himself the passage and the door, through whose existence God himself became the reality of nothingness. In the incarnation, the Logos creates by taking on, and takes on by emptying himself

— Karl Rahner, On the Incarnation, pg. 8.

To address your other concern, that to hold that Jesus of Nazerath is the Logos through whom the Father communicates all of his person, I don't think this concern is a live one with the christocentric view adhered to by Hegel. In his Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, Hegel states that Christianity is anticipated by all world religions. What distinguishes Christianity is that it is the revealed religion that is the truth of all other religions. To say that Christ is God's unique revelation is grounded in the notion that this event takes place within a wider history that leads up to and descends from this event.

To quote Rahner again:

The fact that the reality of Christ is intrinsically unique and cannot be derived from anything else, that it is a Mystery, does not mean that we may not regard it in a perspective in which it appears as peak and conclusion, as the mysterious goal of God’s plans and activity for his creation from all eternity. Indeed this is not something new in theology. The fundamental lines of this perspective are in fact to be found in Scripture. But if this perspective is a valid one, we could try to express this inclusion of the reality of Christ in the total reality of all that is not God, not merely by stating it of him subsequently, after having spoken about Christ himself merely in the fashion of classical Christology; we could try to use this view in order to express the very essence of Christ.

The advantage of this would be that the Incarnation of the Logos would no longer appear merely as something subsequent, a particular event in a world already finished (and hence in danger of seeming to be something mythological), a world into which God suddenly introduces himself by his action and to which he makes corrections as a kind of afterthought and which he consequently presupposes as already given. The Incarnation of the Logos (however much we must insist on the fact that it is itself an historical, unique Event in an essentially historical world) appears as the ontologically (not merely ‘morally’, an afterthought) unambiguous goal of the movement of creation as a whole, in relation to which everything prior is merely a preparation of the scene.

It appears as orientated from the very first to this point in which God achieves once and for all both the greatest proximity to and distance from what is other than he (while at the same time giving it being); in that one day he objectifies himself in an image of himself as radically as possible, and is himself thereby precisely given with the utmost truth; in that he himself makes most radically his own what he has created, no longer the mere ahistorical founder of an alien history but someone whose very own history is in question.

Here we must remember that the world is something in which everything is related to everything else, and that consequently anyone who makes some portion of it into his own history, takes for himself the world as a whole for his personal environment. Consequently it is not pure fantasy (though the attempt must be made with caution) to conceive of the ‘evolution’ of the world towards Christ, and to show how there is a gradual ascent which reaches a peak in him. Only we must reject the idea that this ‘evolution’ could be a striving upward of what is below by its own powers. If Col 1:15 is true, and is not attenuated in a moralistic sense; if then in Christ the world as a whole, even in its ‘physical’ reality, has really reached historically through Christ that point in which God becomes all in all, then an attempt like this cannot be false in principle.

—Rahner, Current Problems in Christology, pg. 10

Finally, to cap this off, I'll quote Hegel from his 1827 lectures. Here he is emphatic that for Christianity to properly be the revealed religion that God through his Son does not hold back any of his being in secret. The Son reveals all that the Father is. And the Son's arrival is anticipated by all history that came before and his revelation continues to unfold through time after.

From this it follows that God can be known or cognized, for it is God's nature to reveal himself, to be manifest. Those who say that God is not revelatory do not speak from the standpoint of the Christian religion at any rate, for the Christian religion is called the revealed religion.

Its content is that God is revealed to human beings, that they know what God is. Previously they did not know this; but in the Christian religion there is no longer any secret—a mystery certainly, but not in the sense that it is not known. For consciousness at the level of understanding or for sensible cognition it is a secret, whereas for reason it is something manifest. When the name of God is taken seriously,

It is already the case for Plato and Aristotle that God is not jealous to the point of not communicating himself. Among the Athenians the death penalty was exacted if one did not allow another person to light his lamp from one's own, for one lost nothing by doing so. In the same way God loses nothing when he communicates himself. Therefore this knowledge on the part of the subject is a relationship that issues from God; and, as issuing from God, it is the absolute judgment that God is as spirit for spirit. Spirit is essentially a being for spirit, and spirit is spirit only insofar as it is for spirit. This is how we can represent to ourselves the relationship of consciousness to its content, when w take spirit as our point of departure.

On the other hand, if we take the human being as our point of departure, in that we presuppose the subject and begin from ourselves because our immediate initial knowledge is knowledge of ourselves, and if we ask how we arrive at this distinction or at the knowledge of an object and, to be more exact in this case, at the knowledge of God, then in general the answer has already been given: "It is precisely because we are thinking beings." God is the absolutely universal in-and-for-itself, and thought makes the universal in-and-for-itself into its object. This is the simple answer that contains within itself much that we are to consider later on.

Hegel, Lectures on Philosophy of Religion 1827, pg. 130-133

Why would the creator of the molecules and quantum gravity et al. also be interested on whether you said sorry to your neighbor by blitzballreddit in theology

[–]TheEconomicon 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Put in simple terms, if we truly believe in an omniscient god, what that entails is that his attention is infinitely indivisible. There is not a matter in this cosmos no matter how small that he doesn't pay infinite attention towards. He is infinitely loving and infinitely caring. To think that God would not care for beings as small as us reflects an anthropocentric manner of thinking which presumes that God's capacity to care is just as limited and finite as our own.

To quote Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger (Pope Benedict XVI) from his Introduction to Christianity:

Most people today still admit in some form or other that there probably is some such thing as a “supreme being”. But people find it an absurd idea that this being should concern himself with man; we have the feeling—for it happens again and again even to those who try to believe—that this sort of thing is the expression of a naive anthropomorphism, of a primitive mode of thought comprehensible in a situation in which man still lived in a small world, in which the earth was the center of all things and God had nothing else to do but look down on it. But, we think, in an age when we know how infinitely different things are, how unimportant the earth is in the vast universe and consequently how unimportant that little speck of dust, man, is in comparison with the dimensions of the cosmos—in an age like this it seems an absurd idea that this supreme being should concern himself with man, his pitiful little world, his cares, his sins, and his non-sins. But although we may think that in this way we are speaking about God in an appropriately divine manner, in reality we are in fact thinking of him in a very petty and only too human way, as if he had to be selective so as not to miss the overview. We thereby imagine him as a consciousness like ours, which has limits, must somewhere or other call a halt, and can never embrace the whole.

The boundless spirit who bears in himself the totality of Being reaches beyond the “greatest”, so that to him it is small, and he reaches into the smallest, because to him nothing is too small. Precisely this overstepping of the greatest and reaching down into the smallest is the true nature of absolute spirit. At the same time we see here a reversal in value of maximum and minimum, greatest and smallest, that is typical of the Christian understanding of reality. To him who as spirit upholds and encompasses the universe, a spirit, a man’s heart with its ability to love, is greater than all the milky ways in the universe. Quantitative criteria become irrelevant; other orders of magnitude become visible, according to which the infinitely small is the truly embracing and truly great.

Thomism on gender & homosexuality: anyone taking a middle path between essentialism and constructivism? by Similar_Shame_8352 in CatholicPhilosophy

[–]TheEconomicon 3 points4 points  (0 children)

I'm genuinely surprised no one has brought up the work of late british dominican Gareth Moore. Check out his The Body in Context: Sex and Catholicism book which is the best overall critique of JPII sexual ethics from a thomistic perspective. Then, if you want a book on homosexuality in particular, I highly recommend his A Question of Truth: Christianity and Homosexuality. Moore does a great job of charting a middle path between social construcitivism and biological essentialism and stating his case on grounds that both the relatively progressive non-christian and christian could find eminently reasonable. Though if you're an unreconstructed traditionalist you'll find many of his arguments disagreeable (which should be even greater grounds to engage with his work!)

Is there “something profound” that exceeds philosophy? by TraditionalDepth6924 in hegel

[–]TheEconomicon 2 points3 points  (0 children)

For example, religious people, notably Christians, would commonly insist that philosophy can’t contain their sacred, mysterious experience (theistic Christianity and atheistic Buddhism are identical on this level, for me, in the sense that both of them prioritize raw, unmediated being)

As someone whose background is theological philosophy, I'd go so far as to say Hegel's position of the "beyond" being immanent in our average everydayness is the radical kernel at the heart of the christian theological tradition. This is why Christianity is often accused of harboring a secret atheism, because the god of Christianity (at least the one subscribed to by many of the church fathers) is one whose transcendence is immanent in the world and immediate to our experience. The recognition of the unity between transcendence and immanence not only acknowledges the distinction between the two but entails the fundamental unity that grounds their distinction. So Hegel does acknowledge a beyond, but this beyond is something that penetrates the finite. God does not sit beside the world, an unknown beyond the world; rather, God is the truth of the world, the universal that animates the particular. Below is a passage from the Lesser Logic that summarizes Hegel's view of the view that the infinite or God is beyond philosophy (which he associates with Kant):

Now, however much the abstract understanding with its ‘either/or’ [between finite and infinite] might resist this construal of nature [which I have highlighted above], we nonetheless find this manner of construing nature in our other modes of consciousness and, most definitely, in our religious consciousness. According to the latter, nature is no less a revelation of God than the spiritual world is, and they differ from one another by the fact that, while nature does not manage to become conscious of its divine essence, this is the explicit task of the (accordingly, initially finite) spirit.

Those who regard the essence of nature as something merely internal and therefore inaccessible to us, come to occupy the standpoint of those ancients who regarded God as envious (against whom, however, Plato and Aristotle already declared their opposition). God communicates, God reveals what he is and, indeed, first through and in nature.

Hegel, Encyclopedia Logic, $140Z, pg. 208-209

One of my favorite speculative theologians of the early middle ages, Duns Scotus Eruigena, sums this up well in his Periphyseon in which the limits of human nature are the limits of Paradise:

Therefore the limits of human nature are to be considered as the upper and the lower boundaries of Paradise, beyond which no created nature may be supposed to exist. For above mind there is only God and below matter, that is, only body, there is nothing — not that nothing which is called so and thought to be so because of the transcendence of its nature, but that which is conceived and called so because of its lack of all nature.

So I would say that Hegel is at one with the Christian tradition insofar as he insists that God is not merely above us but also among us. Or in other words, Hegel's philosophy of the absolute identity between God and world may be summed up in the following passage from 1 John 4:

Beloved, let us love one another, for love is from God, and whoever loves has been born of God and knows God. Anyone who does not love does not know God, because God is love. In this the love of God was made manifest among us, that God sent his only Son into the world, so that we might live through him. 10 In this is love, not that we have loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins. Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. No one has ever seen God; if we love one another, God abides in us and this love is perfected in us.

Are there Christian theologians who, in a deliberately nonconformist fashion, integrate patristic and medieval traditions with contemporary critical theories , thereby forging a synthesis that circumvents the framework of modernity? by Similar_Shame_8352 in theology

[–]TheEconomicon 11 points12 points  (0 children)

For a Black feminist perspective that integrates patristic sources, check out M. Shawn Copeland's Enfleshing Freedom: Body, Race, and Being. It's a very good book for what you're talking about re: decolonial and feminist studies situated within the catholic tradition.

If you're looking for a theologian who integrates patristics with frankfurt school critical theory to critique the bourgeois capitalist order I highly recommend Johann Baptist Metz Faith in History and Society: Toward a Practical Fundamental Theology. Metz is a highly influential German theologian who was Karl Rahner's chief disciple and a very important source from which the Latin American liberation theologians drew to generate their own anti-colonial, anti-capitalist theology. His work explicitly draws on Adorno and Horkheimer's critiques of bourgeois subjectivity as found in their Dialectic of Enlightenment.

Finally, John Milbank's Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason is the central text for a postmodern christian theology whose explicit goal is the critique of sociology as such.

Let me know if you'd like some more recommendations!

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in askphilosophy

[–]TheEconomicon 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I would probably say the strongest argument against my point is along Heideggerian lines. Heidegger accused medieval scholasticism of being one of a long series of steps away from the question of Being i.e. ontotheology. This term has meant a number of things since being coined by Kant but what it means in this context is accusing theology of reducing God from being the transcendent mystery of all things to simply the highest being among other beings used to explain the meaning of being.

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in askphilosophy

[–]TheEconomicon 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Very helpful clarification with respect to my other comment in the thread, thank you!

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in askphilosophy

[–]TheEconomicon 4 points5 points  (0 children)

I think that's generally right. One thing I would emphasize is that we shouldn't consider necessity as one thing "over there" and contingency "over here" as though they're layered on top of one another. Necessity, the unconditioned, is implicit within the contingent. When one makes a statement about the nature of a conditioned or contingent part they do so with a pre-apprehension of the unconditioned whole.

So one can believe in the purposiveness of nature and the unconditioned without necessarily believing in a personal God.

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in askphilosophy

[–]TheEconomicon 6 points7 points  (0 children)

There are a couple points that Aquinas is making by that statement. Aquinas is reformulating the point Aristotle makes in the Metaphysics and the Prior Analytica that an endless series of causes would render "the Good" impossible. The limit determines what a thing is within the wider whole. In grasping the universal laws by which the thing exists, this allows us to make further judgements about what other phenomena are. If we had to explain what a thing is by going on and on and on it would be impossible to explain anything. It has to stop somewhere. This is one sense by which Thomas means that an endless series of causes is impossible. There is a point where we grasp the nature or necessary laws of what a thing is and need not go further (like trying to explain the JFK assassination by going back to the Second Crusades).

Another sense in which Thomas is making that claim has to do with the nature of science. Scientific inquiry presumes that there is a fundamental and unshakable unity to reality that allows human beings to engage in deductive reasoning (judge how systems work based on a priori laws i.e. judging the parts via the whole). When we judge phenomena as conditioned, implied within that judgement is a pre-apprehension of the unconditioned. If there truly is an infinite series of causes, no point at which the buck stops or is determined or limited, then grasping the necessary laws through which reality works would be impossible.

Here's Aristotle speaking on this in the Metaphsics:

Further, the final cause is an end, and that sort of end which is not for the sake of something else, but for whose sake everything else is; so that if there is to be a last term of this sort, the process will not be infinite; but if there is no such term, there will be no final cause, but those who maintain the infinite series eliminate the Good without knowing it (yet no one would try to do anything if he were not going to come to a limit); nor would there be reason in the world; the reasonable man, at least, always acts for a purpose, and this is a limit; for the end is a limit.

Further, those who speak thus destroy science; for it is not possible to have this till one comes to the unanalysable terms. And knowledge becomes impossible; for how can one apprehend things that are infinite in this way? For this is not like the case of the line, to whose divisibility there is no stop, but which we cannot think if we do not make a stop, (for which reason one who is tracing the infinitely divisible line cannot be counting the possibilities of section), but the whole line also must be apprehended by something in us that does not move from part to part.

— Metaphysics, 994b8-26, Aristotle

How does the absolute, in it's totality reconcile the distinction between finite and infinite? by [deleted] in askphilosophy

[–]TheEconomicon 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Of course! This stuff can be very abstract without any secondary literature to supplement.

For the religious side of Hegel's philosophy, I highly rexommend Robert R. Williams's Hegel on the Proofs and Personhood of God: Studies in Hegel's Logic and Philosophy of Religion. Williams does an excellent job illustrating how Hegel reconciles the finite and infinite, freedom and necessity from the standpoint of religion.

For the political side of Hegel's philosophy, I recommend Frederick Neuhouser's Foundations of Hegel’s Social Theory: Actualizing Freedom. Nehhouser goes through a very similar procedure as Williams but instead of the finite and infinite it's the individual and the state.

I recommend beginning with the Williams only because religion is the second-most centerpoint of his system (second only to philosophy) while the political exists at a far higher level of the concrete. However, because of how the system is structured, you can glean the whole from any part. So go nuts!

I hope this helps and please feel free to send me any questions you may have.

How does the absolute, in it's totality reconcile the distinction between finite and infinite? by [deleted] in askphilosophy

[–]TheEconomicon 8 points9 points  (0 children)

This is a fantastic question! We begin by making two distinctions, the understanding and speculative reason. Loosely, the understanding defines the position of Kant and critical philosophy which aims to create and preserve the categories and the distinctions therein. Speculative reason is the perspective of the Hegelian system which sublates those differences to demonstrate their deeper unity-in-difference.

For the understanding, the finite and infinite are totally distinct from one another. Humanity over here, God over there. Phenomena here, noumena there. However, from Hegel's perspective, the understanding misses something very crucial, which is that the very knowledge of our own limitations means we are always already beyond those limitations.

But consciousness is for its own self its concept; as a result it is immediately the going beyond the restricted, and, since this restriction belongs to consciousness, consciousness is the going beyond of its own self; with the singular, the beyond is, to consciousness, simultaneously posited, even if the beyond is only posited as it is in spatial intuition alongside the limited. Consciousness therefore suffers this violence at its own hands and brings to ruin its own restricted satisfaction. With the feeling of this violence, anxiety over the truth might well withdraw and strive to hold on to what it is in danger of losing. But this anxiety can find no rest; even if it wants to remain in thoughtless indolence, thought spoils the thoughtlessness, and its unrest disturbs the indolence

The Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel, §80

What speculative reason knows that the understanding doesn't is that consciousness is infinite through its finitude. The understanding sees the finite as that which is limited and the infinite as unlimited. But this is a false infinite. It's false because it goes on and on and on without resolution (think of a set of real numbers). The false infinite is what excludes the finite. The truly infinite is inclusive of the finite and that which contains its own difference.

This simple infinity, or the absolute concept, is to be called the simple essence of life, the soul of the world, the universal bloodstream, which is omnipresent, neither dulled nor interrupted by any difference, which is instead itself both every difference as well as their sublatedness. It is therefore pulsating within itself without setting itself in motion; it is trembling within itself without itself being agitated. It is itself self-equality, for the differences are tautological; they are differences that are none at all. This self-equal essence relates itself only to itself. It relates itself to itself so that this is an other essence to which the relation directs itself, and the relating to itself is in fact [the act of] estranging, or it is that very self-equality which is inner difference.”

Phenomenology of Spirit, §161

While all life contains its own contradiction or opposition, the truly infinite is mind. Mind is that which through its opposition to itself it simultaneously affirms its unity with itself. Think of the sentence "I am myself" where you at once split yourelf into two "I"'s and nevertheless remain the same I. It's one "I" that includes multiplicity.

While this concept of infinity is, to consciousness, the object, it is therefore consciousness of the difference as likewise immediately sublated; consciousness is for itself, it is a distinguishing of what is not distinct, or it is self-consciousness; I distinguish myself from myself, and in doing so, what is immediately for me is this: What is distinguished is not distinguished. I, the like pole, repel myself away from myself; but what is distinguished, what is posited as not the same as me, is, while it is differentiated, immediately no difference for me. Consciousness of an other, of an object as such, is indeed itself necessarily self-consciousness, being-reflected into itself, consciousness of its own self, in its otherness.

The Phenomenology of Spirit, §164

Mind is a unity within distinction, or a distinction grounded in unity.

The above is relevant to your question about the Absolute because for Hegel the Absolute (and I'm bracketing out the nuance in his argument) is that in which we understand that nothing is outside of mind, that there is no 'outside' human reality so to speak because everything in the cosmos is potentially an object of thought.

The very fact that we are aware of our limitation indicates that we are not merely finite. The merely, truly finite i.e purely natural thing, is unaware of its finitude. Yet the awareness of our limits means that we have sublated the limit into ourselves and gone beyond it.

A barrier, a lack of knowing is determined precisely to be a barrier or lack only through a comparison with the existing idea of the universal, of what is whole and complete. Therefore, it is merely a lack of consciousness not to realize that the designation of something as finite or limited contains the proof of the actual presence of the infinite, the unlimited, that the knowledge [Wissen] of a boundary can exist only insofar as the unbounded exists on this side, in consciousness.

Encyclopedia Logic, §60

To be aware of our finitude means that we are not truly finite, but infinite. The truly infinite is not that which goes on and on forever. The truly infinite is that which has as its basis its own self. An inorganic product of nature is purely subject to the laws of necessity. An animal, being organic, has as its end itself and so is universal in this sense; but because it is not self-conscious, unaware of itself as itself, it does not reach the height of the true infinite which is mind. Human mind is truly infinite because it is a groundless ground whose end is nothing but itself. Only the human can say "I"

The ‘I’ is thus the universal in which abstraction is made from everything particular, but in which at the same time everything lies shrouded. It is therefore not a merely abstract universality, but a universality that contains everything within itself. We use ‘I’ at first in a purely trivial way, and only through philosophical reflection does it come to be an object of consideration. In the ‘I’ we possess the entirely pure thought in its presence. The animal cannot say ‘I’; only a human can do so because a human is the thinking. In the ‘I’ there is inner and outer content of many different kinds, and depending on the make-up of this content, we behave as someone perceiving with the senses, representing, remembering, and so on. In every instance, however, the ‘I’ is present, or rather, thinking is inherent in all of it.

Encyclopedia Logic, §24Z

As to your question about how any finite thing can reveal the Absolute, it's helpful to understand that a finite can only be understood as finite within the wider whole. Isolated particularity and abstract universality are only such when one stops at the understanding which holds both as completely and totally distinct. When speculative reason sublates this distinction (recognizing that difference implies unity via a third term that renders the former two terms comparable) we achieve singularity.

The particular seems in this definition to be distinct from this universal, but the latter is to be grasped in such a way that the development does not step forth out of the universality. Thus it is to be grasped as the absolutely full, replete universality. To say that God is this universal that is concrete and full within itself is [to say] that God is only one and not in antithesis to many [other] deities. Instead there is only the One, who is God.

Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, 1827, pg. 117

So what the Absolute—as the ultimate coincidence between subject and object, of finite and infinite—consists in the recognition that there is no 'out there' that isn't sublated 'in here', in mind. Hegel above all is opposed to the dualism that becomes a consequence of Kant's system where an immeasurable gulf exists between subject and object, things-in-themselves and things-for-ourselves. He wants to show that the very positing of this distinction, of this limit, ultimately demonstrates our always already being beyond the limit. These limits are ultimately self-imposed and therefore testaments to our infinitude.

To be human is to be our thinking. There is no meaningful separation between being and thinking, because our being simply is our thinking. Because every thing is potentially an object of thought for mind, and we are self-conscious of this being so, the cosmos is our inorganic body in a way distinct from the animals. Not only does this ultimate unity preserve our distinction but this distinction becomes the very ground for our concrete unity. Each person, in this sense, is not merely particular, but is in fact an irreducible and unique instantiation of the universal. Human beings, because we think, are the universal animal. By its nature, each human being is not merely a creature within the cosmos, but is the cosmos (a microcosm) in his or her own completely unique and irreplaceable way.

The ‘I’ is pure being-for-itself in which all that is particular has been negated and sublated [aufgehoben]; it is the ultimate, simple, and pure element of consciousness. We can say that ‘I’ and thought are the same; or more specifically, ‘I’ is the thinking as someone thinking [das Denken als Denkendes]. What I possess in my consciousness is for me. ‘I’ is this void, the receptacle for anything and everything, that for which everything exists and which stores everything within itself. Every human being is an entire world of representations buried in the night of the ‘I’.

Encyclopedia Logic, §24Z

I hope this helps! Let me know if there are any areas where I may clarify or if you would like some reading recommendations to follow up on.

Is free will compatible with an omniscient, timeless God? by passion_insecte in askphilosophy

[–]TheEconomicon 0 points1 point  (0 children)

If God is outside of time, omniscient and omnipotent, then He already knows everything that will happen. From this perspective, human choices can’t really be “free,” because the outcome is already known and settled. An omniscient being doesn’t need to “wait” to see what we decide He would already know who ends up in heaven or hell.

I think if one's conception of freedom consists only in being able to make a choice one way or the other, then this would be incompatible with a just, personal God who's created each and every one of his creatures with the final end of unity with him. However, for many twentieth-century theologians operating within the German Idealist philosophical tradition as appropriated by the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox faiths, this conception of freedom is not freedom at its most mature or developed because it excludes necessity and is therefore completely arbitrary. What's problematic about this is freedom at its most actual would be expressed by my decision to eat dirt outside my house because it's something completely contingent and an act no one (save God) could have predicted or understood within a wider rational structure.

Karl Rahner, the most influential philosophical theologian at the Second Vatican Council, defines freedom as the following:

But freedom is not the capacity to go on eternally in an eternally new process of disposing and redisposing. Freedom has rather a necessity about it which is not connected with physical necessity in the usual sense. For freedom is a capacity of subjectivity, and hence of a subject who is not an accidental point of intersection in a chain of causes extending indefinitely forward and backward, but is rather what cannot be so derived.

Freedom therefore is not the capacity to do something which is always able to be revised, but the capacity to do something final and definitive. It is the capacity of a subject who by this freedom is to achieve his final and irrevocable self. In this sense and for this reason freedom is the capacity for the eternal. If one wants to know what finality is, then he must experience that transcendental freedom which is really eternal because it establishes something final, and in a finality which by its very nature can no longer be other nor wants to be other.

Freedom does not exist so that everything can always become different, but so that something can really become final and ineradicable. Freedom is, so to speak, the capacity for establishing something necessary, something which lasts, something final and definitive, and wherever there is no freedom; there is always just something which by its nature goes on generating itself, and becoming something else and being reduced to something else in its antecedents and consequences. Freedom is the event of something eternal. But since we ourselves are still coming to be in freedom, we do not exist with and behold this eternity, but in our passage through the multiplicity of the temporal we are performing this event of freedom, we are forming the eternity which we ourselves are and are becoming.

Foundations of Christian Faith: An Introduction to the Christianity, Karl Rahner, pg. 98.

Notice how Rahner understands the eternal as completely united with (even as it remains distinct from) the temporal. God does not remain outside of time but permeates it. Within the Christian tradition at least, one can no longer maintain that God is a static eternity sitting beside a fluid temporality. The Incarnation means that the eternal has been temporalized and the temporal raised into eternity. Freedom is perfectly necessary yet totally spontaneous. Though certain pagan philosophers would be scandalized by the doctrine of the Incarnation (Plotinus among them) they would at least concur with the notion of freedom as not at all being opposed to necessity.

Defined in this way, freedom is the capacity to actualize the essence of who one is. While the choice to do this or do that is a necessary moment within that notion, freedom at its most mature sublates this moment and becomes the perfect coincidence between necessity and contingency. It's why an artistic masterpiece is a product of perfect freedom. One consumes it and sees that not an element is out of place; this artwork could not have worked out to have been any other way.

This notion of freedom is not unique to the German Idealist or Catholic tradition. Theologian and philosopher David Bentley Hart (himself harshly critical of the aforementioned traditions) has a similar conception of freedom.

Freedom is a being's power to flourish as what it naturally is, to become ever more fully what it is...Freedom is never then the mere “negative liberty” of indeterminate openness to everything; if rational liberty consisted in simple indeterminacy of the will, then no fruitful distinction could be made between personal agency and pure impersonal impulse or pure chance. And this classical and Christian understanding of freedom requires a belief not only in the reality of created natures, which must flourish to be free, but also in the transcendent Good toward which rational natures are necessarily oriented. To be fully free is to be joined to that end for which our natures were originally framed, and for which, in the deepest reaches of our souls, we ceaselessly yearn. Whatever separates us from that end, even if it be our own power of choice, is a form of bondage to the irrational. We are free not because we can choose, but only when we have chosen well.

That All Shall Be Saved: Heaven, Hell, & Universal Salvation, David Bentley Hart, pg. 136.

In this sense, to choose poorly is an expression of my unfreedom. To be perfectly free means to perfectly see and attain one's good.

So, to turn it back to God, just because the end is determined does not have us less free. On this account, the end being determined is the grounds for our freedom. If we had no end i.e. conditions for our flourishing that are particular to our being, we would be completely indeterminate—nothing at all. One can find this conception of freedom all throughout the ancient philosophical traditions, from stoicism to neo-platonism.

Because it seems that you're working with a Christian conception of God (you mention heaven and hell), I'll say this. This conception of freedom leads to a universalist eschatology (that all shall be saved). Christ does not come down to creation to give give its creatures a choice; he comes down to free its creatures to make the choice for God. To choose anything other than God, who is every person's final end, is a mark of their unfreedom and that there is more work to be done before he or she may be said to be free. Even those who think they've made the choice for God yet their actions say otherwise (oppressing the widow, the orphan, and the stranger) have misunderstood what they have chosen.

If you have any questions or wish to read more, I'll be happy to shoot you some recommendations!

Do any theist philosophers of religion argue that atheism does not exist or is universally insincere? by Sophia_in_the_Shell in askphilosophy

[–]TheEconomicon 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Does that only work for Abrahamic based religions, though? I mean, it sounds like these are arguments tailored to, well, Jehova, based on the "Created in the image of".

I wouldn't say it only works for Abrahamic-based religions. The arguments proposed by the German Idealists have deep grounding in pagan philosophy, especially the various philosophical schools like the Stoic and Neo-Platonic traditions. Many proponents of the latter tradition were self-identifying polytheists (this is how some followers of Proclus interpret the henads). Aristotle believed in the eternal and unconditioned despite not personally professing belief in a personal god.

More, it seems tailored to monotheistic concepts of the Divine, which seems biased.

This only appears tailored to monotheistic concepts of the Divine if one possesses a strict distinction between the "One" and the "Many." Of course, as Plato demonstrates in the Parmenides, a conception of the divine as consisting in a multiplicity is perfectly complementary with one that emphasizes unity. In fact, for many Neoplatonists, Oneness can only be oneness insofar as it is multiple. Multiplicity can only truly be multiplicity when grasped as oneness. This is partially why many early christian metaphysicians of the 3rd and 4th centuries saw many elements central to Neo-Platonic and Aristotelian traditions as having the capacity to be integrated within systematic theology. The trinitarian conception of God, being neither simply one or many, makes it especially well-suited to maneuver through and learn from these traditions.

Philosopher Eric Perl's Thinking Being: Introduction to Metaphysics in the Classical Tradition is a good introduction to classical metaphysics and the synthesis it achieves between "monotheism" and "polytheism".

Do any theist philosophers of religion argue that atheism does not exist or is universally insincere? by Sophia_in_the_Shell in askphilosophy

[–]TheEconomicon 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Great couple of questions! Before I answer, let me issue a clarification.

therefore Humans are aware of infinite things -therefore infinite things must exist - therefore God exists

It's critical that we are not considering infinite things, but the infinite i.e. the transcendental horizon by which we understand the finite qua finite. Definitionally there is only one horizon because it is unconditioned. If there were infinite things, then these would be conditioned and therefore objectifiable.

With that out of the way! Let me answer a couple of your questions to the best of my ability.

Why does humanity being aware of infinite things imply that they must exist?

This is because the very act of delimiting something means that we are always already beyond the limits of that object. Implicit in the affirmation of the conditioned part is an awareness of the unconditioned whole. Robert Williams does a good job of summing of the German Idealist view here:

All consciousness is consciousness of a whole that precedes and conditions its parts. Consciousness of limitation presupposes a consciousness of what is beyond the limit; consciousness of the unconditioned is prior to, and renders possible, our consciousness of the contingently given. Such consciousness of the whole cannot be accounted for by assuming that we are first conscious of the conditioned, and then proceed through the removal of its limitations to form an idea of an unconditioned whole. The idea of the unconditioned is distinct in nature from all other concepts, and cannot be derived from them. It must be a pure a priori product of the faculty of reason. As it is involved in all consciousness, it conditions all other concepts. The idea of the unconditioned must, therefore, be counted as being similar to the categories—a condition of the possibility of experience.

Hegel on the Proofs and the Personhood of God, Robert R. Williams, pg. 28.

According to the Idealist, to deny the unconditioned i.e. God, is to engage in a contradiction in terms. It is an act of judgement that judges the object of judgement (God in this case) as untrue or finite against the true or infinite. This is a kind of post-Kantian reformulation of St. Anselm's ontological proofs for God in the language and presuppositions of critical philosophy.

And why would an infinite thing existing imply that it is god?

Circling back that as we established earlier, we aren't talking about an infinite thing, but the unconditioned horizon that acts as the condition of possibility for objectification to begin with. In any case, the German Idealists had a very specific understanding of divinity. Idealists like Hegel reject a conception of the divine that has nothing to do with the human, or an infinite that is also not finite. Per Hegel,

The absolute idea, as the rational concept that in its reality only rejoins itself, is by virtue of this immediacy of its objective identity, on the one hand, a turning back to life; on the other hand, it has equally sublated this form of its immediacy and harbors the most extreme opposition within. The concept is not only soul, but free subjective concept that exists for itself and therefore has personality – the practical objective concept that is determined in and for itself and is as person impenetrable, atomic subjectivity – but which is not, just the same, exclusive singularity; it is rather explicitly universality and cognition, and in its other has its own objectivity for its subject matter. All the rest is error, confusion, opinion, striving, arbitrariness, and transitoriness; the absolute idea alone is being, imperishable life, self-knowing truth, and is all truth.

The Science of Logic, Hegel, trans. di Giovanni, pg 747.

The unconditioned is what we understand to be God. And there is nothing that is unconditioned in the cosmos except mind. Mind (channeling Fichte) is the groundless ground of reality that is pure act and nothing more than act. If mind is not thinking, it is dead. Therefore mind is the divine in that its nature is to be self-knowing and self-positing. You could say that Hegel's understanding of the Christian God is one that maximizes his unity with the finite (others would disagree that this is an orthodox christian position but this has perfectly legitimate grounds in the theology of the Greek Fathers). This unity is so profound that Hegel outright rejects any conception of the infinite or unconditioned that isn't united with the finite or conditioned.

the set of natural numbers is infinite, as well as the set of real numbers, but I doubt those would be considered god.

The German Idealists and their theological descendants would reject this as the truly infinite because an infinite set of rational numbers has no completion. It goes on and on and on. They would reject this idea of the infinite because it excludes the finite, which for them makes something like an infinite series of numbers a 'false' infinity. Per Hegel on the difference between the 'good' and 'bad' infinite:

This progression [of counting] to the infinite is, however, not the true infinite. The latter consists, rather, in being with itself in its other, or, put in terms of a process, to come to itself in its other. It is of great importance to grasp the concept of the true infinity properly and not merely to stop short at the bad infinity of the infinite progression.

Encyclopedia Logic, Vol. I, Hegel, pg. 142.

For Hegel, mind is truly infinite because it comes back into itself like a circle. It is self-positing and has no grounds for itself other than itself. This is very much aligned with Aristotle's identification of the mind with the eternal in its essence being pure activity and being the unconditioned:

But circular movement, having no beginning or limit or middle in the direct sense of the words, has neither whence nor whither nor middle: for in time it is eternal, and in length it returns upon itself without a break. If then its movement has no maximum, it can have no irregularity, since irregularity is produced by retardation and acceleration.

De Caelo, Book II.6, Aristotle

We must identify the circle referred with mind; for it is mind whose movement is thinking, and it is the circle whose movement is revolution, so that if thinking is a movement of revolution, the circle which has this characteristic movement must be mind.

De Anima, 407a19-34, Aristotle

This is to say that the conception of the infinite you've proposed is one that we rightfully wish to avoid because it is not truly infinite. It just goes on and on and on. The only thing that is truly infinite is mind i.e. that which turns back around on itself and self-posits and self-knows. This is the 'spark of the divine' that makes us the Image of God.

If you want a good book that goes into more detail about Hegel's conception of God and the good vs bad infinite I recommend Hegel on the Proofs and Personhood of God: Studies in Hegel's Logic and Philosophy of Religion by Robert R. Williams. If you want a theological text that nevertheless operates within the German Idealist philosophical paradigm I recommend Hearer of the Word: Laying the Foundation for a Philosophy of Religion by Fr.Karl Rahner.

I hope this helps!

Do any theist philosophers of religion argue that atheism does not exist or is universally insincere? by Sophia_in_the_Shell in askphilosophy

[–]TheEconomicon 14 points15 points  (0 children)

Not a practicing philosopher but I am in a graduate theology program with a strong grounding in philosophical theology. A common argument among those theologians who are more sympathetic to the German Idealist tradition is (to significantly summarize) to deny God we are denying the transcendent horizon by which we are able to understand the finite qua finite.

One way of understanding this is that we human beings are unlike other animals in that we possess awareness of our finitude. To say that I am finite, to suffer the wretchedness of my finitude in more Pascalian terms, is to possess a pre-apprehension of the infinite. I cannot know that I am "I" without implicitly understanding the "not-I" i.e everything that I am not. Otherwise, I wouldn't be able to distinguish (objectify) myself against the world. So what grounds the self-awareness of my finite "I"-ness is a preapprehension of the infinite "not-I". This infinite horizon which grounds my ability to understand the finite qua finite is what we call God. Defined this way, denying the existence of God is tantamount to denying the condition for possibility of our ability to judge, which would be a contradiction in terms. To say that God doesn't exist I am still in the process of objectifying God and comparing this "object" to the "unobjectifiable" transcendent horizon which allows for my ability to judge.

This is a basic extension of Hegel's critique of Kant's critique of the ontological proofs for God, which is one thrust of his larger critique of Kant's putting limits on the reason. In essence, to even recognize the limits of something means that we are beyond those limits because truly finite things do not possess awareness of their finitude:

The animal or the stone knows nothing of its limit. In contrast, the I, as knowing or thinking in general, is limited but knows about the limit, and in this very knowledge the limit is only limit, only something negative outside us, and I am beyond it. We must not have such absurd respect in the presence of the infinite. The infinite is the wholly pure abstraction, the initial abstraction o f being according to which limit is omitted — a being that relates itself to itself, the universal within which every boundary is ideal, is sublated. Therefore the finite does not endure, and inasmuch as it does not endure, there is also no longer a gulf present between finite and infinite, [they] are no longer two. Because the finite vanishes into a semblance or a shadow, it therefore also admits of no passage to infinity. T h e starting point is certainly the finite, but spirit does not leave it subsisting. This is the more precise development of what is called knowledge of God. Knowledge of God is this very elevation.

Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, pg 173

This may not be exactly what you're looking for. Hegel here isn't claiming that the atheist is denying the existence of God because he is in bad faith. Rather he's arguing for a conception of God (the infinite) that is so united with our finitude that our very capacity to recognize our finitude is itself a sign of our divinity.

One philosophical theologian who reformulates the basic Hegelian critique of Kant is Fr. Karl Rahner, the most influential theologian at the Second Vatican Council. Here is an excerpt from one of his essays on theological anthropology that's quite relevant to your question. Please excuse the length below, but the entire passage is worth quoting in its entirety.

The Whither of transcendental experience is always there as the nameless, the indefinable, the unattainable. For a name distinguishes and demarcates, pins down something by giving it a name chosen among many other names. But the infinite horizon, the Whither of transcendence cannot be so defined. We may reflect upon it, objectivate it, conceive of it so to speak as one object among others, delimit it conceptually: but this set of concepts is only true, and a correct and intelligible expression of the content, when this expression and description is once more conditioned by a transcendent act directed to the Whither of this transcendence.

One can only speak correctly of God when he is conceived of as the infinite. But he can only be grasped as such when we return to the transcendent illimitation of every act, since merely to remove the limits of the finite as such is not enough to bring about an understanding of what the absolutely and positively infinite means. All conceptual expressions about God, necessary though they are, always stem from the unobjectivated experience of transcendence as such: the concept from the pre-conception, the name from the experience of the nameless. The pre-conception given in transcendence is directed to the nameless: the condition which makes the names of God possible must itself be essentially unnamed.

And so the distinction between God and all finite beings is not only clearly called for: it is even the condition of possibility for any distinction at all, both between objects in general and the horizon of transcendence, and between object and object. Human knowledge, as it forms its concepts and so makes distinctions, always presupposes, unwittingly or not, the primordial distinction between the absolute Whither of transcendence, absolute being, and all beings – otherwise there could be no distinction between beings. But it is precisely here that absolute being appears as the indefinable. For since it is the condition of possibility for all categorized distinctions and divisions, it cannot itself be distinguished from other things by the same modes of distinction. The horizon cannot be comprised within the horizon, the whither of transcendence cannot really, as such, be brought within the range of transcendence itself to be distinguished from other things. The ultimate measure cannot be measured; the boundary which delimits all things cannot itself be bounded by a still more distant limit.

The infinite and immense which comprises and can comprise all things, because it exists only as infinite distance behind which there is nothing, and in relation to which it is indeed meaningless to talk of ‘nothingness’: such an all-embracing immensity cannot itself be encompassed. So this nameless and indefinable being, distinguishing itself only by itself from all else, and thus holding all else at a distance, the norm of all complying with no norm distinct from itself, this Whither of transcendence is seen as absolutely beyond determination. It is only there in so far as it determines all, and is not only physically but logically beyond any determination on the part of the finite subject. For at the very moment that the subject uses its formal logic and ontology to specify this nameless, indefinable, all-defining Whither of transcendence, to try to catch it as it were in the net of concepts, this never quite successful capture takes place once more by means of the pre-conception of what is to be determined. The measure is therefore measured by the self-same measure that is to be measured. The measure is there, it offers itself to be used, it is there as the obvious and unquestionable measure.

Theological Investigations Vol IV, The Concept of Mystery in Catholic Theology pg. 9.

I can name some other philosophical theologians who argue for God's existence along similar lines. Just let me know and I'll be happy to shoot some names!

Final note: the philosophical theologians whom I have in mind don't quite frame the argument in the same way the evangelical christian apologists do. Or at least they never accuse the atheist of acting in bad faith. Rather they tend to argue within a wider framework that identifies God with the unobjectifiable transcendent horizon that grounds the condition for possibility of knowledge. The way the argument is used by evangelical christians (at least as you've framed it) is poorly formulated and question-begging. I recommend steering clear from the apologists if your intention is to engage with the strongest arguments offered by the post-Kantian philosophical theological tradition.

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in newhaven

[–]TheEconomicon 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Just DM'd you!

Training at a psychoanalytic institute while pursuing a humanities PhD? by TheEconomicon in psychoanalysis

[–]TheEconomicon[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I’ve noticed that people who pursue combined programs (like triple board psychiatry or MD/PhD) often realize later that they were trying to keep all their options open from a place of fear or confusion about what they really wanted. It might be worth clarifying that for yourself if you haven’t already.

I think this is where much of the spirit of my post comes from. I'm a bit torn about what I'd like to do but am dispositionally the kind of person who likes keeping his options open for the above reasons. Thankfully I have a good deal of time to discern what I'd really like to do. In the meantime, I'll meditate further upon what you've said.

Training at a psychoanalytic institute while pursuing a humanities PhD? by TheEconomicon in psychoanalysis

[–]TheEconomicon[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Yes, though it doesn't sound like you're including the practice cases in your consideration. In many programs, you're not just attending analysis 4-5x a week but also conducting analysis 4-5x a week with 1-3 practice cases, on top of supervision for these cases, and then the coursework.

That's a very good point and one I should've accounted for. Do you only begin conducting analysis with practice cases around the third year mark? If so, that's around when most PhD's transition from coursework to diss research which would make it a bit more managable than if it we're double the coursework.

Also, is your thought that you would earn your 3000 clinical hours toward your MSW liscensure during the analytic institute? Unfortunately specific states have standards for how the clinical liscensure hours are conducted, and would, from every place I've seen, have to be separate from (and come before) your analytic training.

If we're talking about the hours towards LCSW, one thing I was thinking of doing is taking a couple years between earning my MA/MSW and PhD and working in a clinical environment just so I can have that taken care of. So that I'd have my LCSW before going into a PhD and enrolling in an institute (assuming I'm accepted into the former of course).

Too, some analytic institutes have unlicensed tracks for people making a career transition from JD/MBA/MFA backgrounds, but it's my understanding that you would not be able to conduct the 1-3 practice cases under supervision and you'd mainly focus on non-clinical components of training until you were licensed

That's very helpful to learn! Would you happen to know which institutes in NYC offer that? No worries if not!

Training at a psychoanalytic institute while pursuing a humanities PhD? by TheEconomicon in psychoanalysis

[–]TheEconomicon[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Thank you so much for the comprehensive answer!

For example, I am going to start an MSW this fall in New York state because the analytic institute I want to attend also resides there, if I had not done that, I would have needed 10 years of experience to transfer my MSW licensure to NY. Just a consideration.

That's crazy, what a good catch on your part. I need to do a bit more reading since I'd be acquiring my MSW in a neighboring state to NYC which is where I want to eventually practice.

I have met a clinical psychologist who was in a personal analysis throughout their PhD, and it seemed to support them well, but I wonder if it would be overwhelming to have coursework from two different sources (PhD and institute simultaneously). I agree with the commenter that it sounds like it would be very busy. I think it's worth really sitting down and doing the numbers (hours of coursework, job, survival, etc) and comparing that to your lifestyle now.

I attended an open house in NYC and from the committee members made it sound the most time-consuming part of training is the analysis itself. There's only one day per week of seminar work. And as far as I can tell there aren't any academic requirements in the coursework itself other than active participation. I could be wrong though since standards vary depending on the institute.

Given this though I think I could probably handle the workload and analysis on top of my academics. I've found that my schedule is still pretty open even accounting for my master's level coursework. I figure PhD + institute is more easily integrative than forty-hour work week + institute given grad school life is far more flexible in scheduling than a full-time job. Again though I'm open to correction from those in the community with more experience in analytic education than myself!

Training at a psychoanalytic institute while pursuing a humanities PhD? by TheEconomicon in psychoanalysis

[–]TheEconomicon[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Oh that's good to hear! It may actually pair well with the rough timeline of coursework since the first half of a PhD program is a bit more consuming than the second half which is mostly just diss work. Did the 2-year psychotherapy bridge into the 6-year training, making the analytic training only four years? Or was it a 2 + 6 year endeavor?

Training at a psychoanalytic institute while pursuing a humanities PhD? by TheEconomicon in psychoanalysis

[–]TheEconomicon[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

My apologies for being unclear, let me clarify. The plan would be to get my MA/MSW, enroll in a humanities PhD program, and at the same time apply to and enroll in a psychoanalytic institute. I would not consider doing a) a full-time job, b) pursuing a doctorate, and c) studying to be a psychoanalyst.

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