Some Problems of Interpretation

Abstract

It is no exaggeration, I think, to say that in Hegel’s philosophy the problem of God poses the central issue. To know God, we are told, as he is in himself, is the aim and end of all wisdom. Indeed the entire Hegelian logic could very fairly be described as a prolonged dialectical argument reaching out to the first principle of all things, namely Universal Spirit or the Absolute.¹ Hegel himself, as we have just seen, takes the classical ‘proofs’ of divine existence sufficiently seriously to wish to re-state them — the ontological especially — in terms of his own speculative thinking. He believed that with every advance of reason — more, that at every moment in the life of the mind — the being of God is implied. If experience leads us to discern at least a partial unity in things seemingly disparate it is because the human reason is so constituted as to demand a unity that is fundamental and all-comprehending. In other words, it is a requirement of the mind that reality should ultimately be one, that no essential element of discontinuity is rationally tolerable, and that finality in any given area indicates a teleology intrinsic to the universe as a whole. The very dynamism of reason testifies an appetite for that total truth which is identical with God himself.