Abstract
This essay is about God. It is not a paper on religious matters. At least, this is so if one understands religious concerns to be about how properly to worship God and/or about the nature of revealed divine commands and truths. The notion of a God’s-eye perspective is addressed in this essay because of its cardinal moral significance as a final, unconditional perspective: a viewpoint unshaped by particular, socio-historical circumstances. Nevertheless, reflections on the importance of a God’s-eye perspective, indeed of the idea of God, are often mistakenly taken ipso facto to be religious reflections, given the significant impact of secularist and laicist ideological movements. This confusion prevails widely, despite the circumstance that appeals to God were made by philosophers ranging from Aristotle (384–322 B.C.), René Descartes (A.D. 1596–1650), Benedict Spinoza (A.D. 1632–1677), and Gottfried Leibnitz (A.D. 1646–1716), to Immanuel Kant (A.D. 1724–1804) independently of any religious concerns. These philosophers in different ways recognized the necessary place of a God’s-eye perspective in developing a coherent account of reality and/or morality. This essay speaks to the necessity of a God’s-eye perspective for a coherent attempt to speak of the common good.
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Notes
- 1.
Kant appreciated the necessity of engaging the idea of God, even though he was likely an atheist. As Manfred Kuehn puts it, “Kant did not really believe in God” (Kuehn 2001, pp. 391–392).
- 2.
Hegel’s “Glauben und Wissen oder Reflexionsphilosophie der Subjektivität in der Vollständigkeit ihrer Former als Kantische, Jacobische und Fichtesche Philosophie” originally appeared in Kritisches Journal der Philosophie, volume 2, number 1 (Tübingen: Cotta, 1802).
- 3.
Hegel eschewed all reference to transcendent reality ranging from the thing-in-itself to God. Instead of God, the final standpoint for Hegel was self-reflective thought, philosophy. It is philosophy that for Hegel is truth, as thought about being thinking itself. “Truth … is only possible as a universe or totality of thought…” (Hegel 1892, p. 24). For Hegel, philosophy, albeit always culturally and historically located, becomes in its self-reflection the God’s-eye perspective, the equivalent for Hegel of God. However, this God’s-eye perspective is radically immanentized. Hegel makes this point at the end of The Encyclopedia, which culminates in the standpoint of absolute spirit as philosophy, which is for Hegel the final and ultimate perspective. The standpoint of philosophical reflection is for Hegel the standpoint of God. It is in philosophy that Hegel’s “god” is self-conscious. “God is God only so far as he knows himself; his self-knowledge is, further, a self-consciousness in man and man’s knowledge of God, which proceeds to man’s self-knowledge in God” (Hegel 1991, p. 298, §564). Philosophy asks the final rational questions and answers them.
- 4.
Morality for Hegel gains content within his category Sittlichkeit, socio-historically conditioned mores. Morality’s content is acquired from being embedded in a particular and contingent socio-historical context, which context with its content is plural over space and time. It is Sittlichkeit that is the higher truth of Moralität. “In an ethical community, it is easy to say what man must do, what are the duties he has to fulfil in order to be virtuous: he has simply to follow the well-known and explicit rules of his own situation” (Hegel 1952, p. 107, § 150).
- 5.
For Hegel, only at the level of categorial reflection on the categories, that is, on a meta-ontological level, does one secure a final or absolute perspective. This perspective is, however, articulated within the horizon of the finite and the immanent (Engelhardt 2010d).
- 6.
Hegel takes the position that, as absolute spirit, that is, as philosophy changes its categories, reality itself changes because there is no standpoint from which to understand the canonical criteria for morality and reality beyond the standpoint of philosophy. “All cultural change reduces itself to a difference of categories. All revolutions, whether in the sciences or world history, occur merely because spirit has changed its categories in order to understand and examine what belongs to it, in order to possess and grasp itself in a truer, deeper, more intimate and unified manner” (Hegel 1970, p. 202, §246 Zusatz).
- 7.
Given the moral pluralism that defines the fallen human condition, there will be a diversity of moral communities each united around its own understanding of the moral life. Such moral communities find their exemplar instantiation in non-geographically-located communities, such as those of Orthodox Jews and Orthodox Christians.
- 8.
For an account of the character and scope of a minimal, but not more-than-minimal state, see chapter four of Engelhardt (1996).
- 9.
Germanic law and customs stressed the rights of individuals and their freedoms over against the state. Tacitus, for example, describes how authority flowed from individuals to the community. “On small matters the chiefs consult; on larger questions the community; but with this limitation, that even the subjects, the decision of which rests with the people, are first handled by the chiefs … It is a foible of their freedom that they do not meet at once and as if commanded, but a second and a third day is wasted by dilatoriness in assembling: when the mob is pleased to begin, they take their seats carrying arms” (Tacitus 1980, pp. 147, 149). This view is recaptured in the Magna Carta (June 15, 1215), especially in section 39, which recognizes the security of free men against the sovereign. This was built around an Anglo-Saxon common-law view of the prima facie untouchability of free persons.
The least touching of another’s person willfully, or in anger, is a battery; for the law cannot draw the line between different degrees of violence, and therefore totally prohibits the first and lowest stage of it: every man’s person being sacred, and no other having a right to meddle with it, in any the slightest manner. And therefore upon a similar principle the Cornelian law de injuriis prohibited pulsation as well as verberation; distinguishing verberation, which was accompanied with pain, from pulsation, which was attended with none… (Blackstone 1969, Book III, vol. 4, p. 120).
In the light of these concerns with personal freedom and forbearance rights, one can appreciate why the American Constitution, which in its body and amendments makes no reference to human dignity, human rights, or social justice, was understood as a limited compact among the states, a point made clear in the 9th and 10th Amendments in the Bill of Rights. “Amendment IX. The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people. Amendment X. The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.” For an account of the influence of Germanic ideas of freedom on sixteenth- to eighteenth-century thought, see also Hölzle (1925).
- 10.
Friedrich Hayek observes that social justice
Seems in particular to have been embraced by a large section of the clergy of all Christian denominations, who, while increasingly losing their faith in a supernatural revelation, appear to have sought a refuge and consolation in a new ‘social’ religion which substitutes a temporal for a celestial promise of justice, and who hope that they can thus continue their striving to do good (Hayek 1976, p. 66).
- 11.
Protagoras affirmed moral pluralism in arguing that there was not one canonical view regarding any moral issue. “Protagoras was the first to maintain that there are two sides to every question, opposed to each other, and he even argued in this fashion, being the first to do so” (Diogenes Laertius, vol. 2, p. 463).
- 12.
The resolution of moral controversies by sound rational argument requires conceding basic premises and rules of evidence, which are always controversial. “Should one say that Knowledge is founded on demonstration by a process of reasoning, let him hear that first principles are incapable of demonstration; for they are known neither by art nor sagacity” (Clement of Alexandria 1994, vol. 2, p. 350).
- 13.
An overview of Agrippa’s pente tropoi, his five ways of demonstrating that controversies such as those about the canonical content of morality cannot be resolved by sound rational argument, is provided by Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers, Pyrrho 9, 88–89. See also Sextus Empiricus, Outlines of Pyrrhonism, I.15.164–169.
- 14.
St. John Chrysostom articulates clearly the Orthodox Christian view that secular moral philosophical reflection leads at best to nonsensical if not immoral views. In the worst-case scenario, that the views of the pagan moral philosophers “are all inventions of devils, and contrary to nature, even nature herself would testify” (Chrysostom 1994, vol. 10, p. 5).
- 15.
In his second homily on the Gospel of St. John, St. John Chrysostom stresses the inability of philosophical reflection to comprehend the true context and condition of man. “The human soul is simply unable thus to philosophize on that pure and blessed nature; on the powers that come next to it; on immortality and endless life; on the nature of mortal bodies which shall hereafter be immortal; on punishment and the judgment to come; … what is the nature of virtue, what of vice” (Chrysostom 1994, vol. 14, p. 5).
- 16.
St. John Chrysostom’s view regarding the unreliability of secular moral reflection is one embraced generally by Orthodox Christian Fathers. St. Neilos of Sinai († ca. 430), for example, notes that
Many Greeks and not a few Jews attempted to philosophize; but only the disciples of Christ have pursued true wisdom, because they alone have Wisdom as their teacher, showing them by His example the way of life they should follow. For the Greeks, like actors on a stage, put on false masks; they were philosophers in name alone, but lacked true philosophy. …Some of the Greeks imagined themselves to be engaged in metaphysics, but they neglected the practice of the virtues altogether. … At times they even tried to theologize, although here the truth lies beyond man’s unaided grasp, and speculation is dangerous; yet in their way of life they were more degraded than swine wallowing in the mud (Neilos 1988, vol. 1, p. 200).
This hermeneutic of suspicion regarding secular philosophy in the Fathers before Augustine reflects St. Paul’s clear statements about the incapacities of secular wisdom and by implication philosophy.
Where is the one who is wise? Where is the scribe? Where is the debater of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? For since, in the wisdom of God, the world did not know God through wisdom, God decided, through the foolishness of our proclamation, to save those who believe. For Jews demand signs and Greeks desire wisdom, but we proclaim Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, but to those who are the called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. For God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and God’s weakness is stronger than human strength (I Corinthians 1:20–25).
This attitude towards theological knowledge remains central to the lived and prayed theology of the Church. Consider, for example, the Einos sung on the Sunday of the Holy Fathers of the Seventh Ecumenical Council:
When the blessed Christ-preachers received wholly the torch of the Holy Spirit, they spoke with divine intuition, with supernatural inspiration of few words and much meaning, bringing to the front the evangelical doctrines and traditions of true worship, which, when they were clearly revealed to them from on high, they were illuminated therewith, establishing the Faith they had received from God (Nassar 1993, p. 315).
The gulf between the theology of the Church of the first 500 years and that which developed in the West in the second millennium is substantial. See Engelhardt (2006) and (2000).
- 17.
In Kant’s account in The Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals, God has the perfectly good will, the coincidence of rationality and morally ordered volition. “Thus no imperatives hold for the divine will or, more generally, for a holy will. The ‘ought’ is here out of place, for the volition of itself is necessarily in unison with the law” (Kant 1959, p. 31, AK IV.415). For this will, there is no moral pluralism.
- 18.
In the appendix to the Dialectic of the first Critique, Kant argues for the necessity of affirming a regulative engagement of the idea of God as integral to approaching reality as if reality manifested a comprehensive unity:
This highest formal unity, which rests solely on concepts of reason, is the purposive unity of things. The speculative interest of reason makes it necessary to regard all order in the world as if it had originated in the purpose of a supreme reason. Such a principle opens out to our reason, as applied in the field of experience, altogether new views as to how the things of the world may be connected according to teleological laws, and so enables it to arrive at their greatest systematic unity. The assumption of a supreme intelligence, as the one and only cause of the universe, though in the idea alone, can therefore always benefit reason and can never injure it (Kant 1964, p. 560, A687f = B715f).
- 19.
The postulates of pure practical reason are for Kant necessary for the coherence of morality, in particular for the coherence of the right and the good. “These postulates are those of immortality, of freedom affirmatively regarded (as the causality of a being so far as he belongs to the intelligible world), and of the existence of God” (Kant 1956, p. 137, AK V.133).
- 20.
Immanuel Kant provides the following distinction between deist and theist:
Those who accept only a transcendental theology are called deists; those who also admit a natural theology are called theists. The former grant that we can know the existence of an original being solely through reason, but maintain that our concept of it is transcendental only, namely, the concept of a being which possesses all reality, but which we are unable to determine in any more specific fashion. The latter assert that reason is capable of determining its object more precisely through analogy with nature, namely, as a being which, through understanding and freedom, contains in itself the ultimate ground of everything else. Thus the deist represents this being merely as a cause of the world (whether by the necessary of its nature or through freedom, remains undecided), the theist as the Author of the world (Kant 1964, p. 525, A631-32 = B659-60).
- 21.
Habermas recognizes the break in the history of philosophy consequent on a loss of an acknowledgement of the centrality of an idea of God. Habermas notes “the methodical atheism of Hegelian philosophy and of all philosophical appropriation of essentially religious contents” (Habermas 2002, p. 68).
- 22.
With regard to Christian theology and in recognition of the centrality of one Person (the Father) to the significance of morality, one can appreciate the evil of the doctrine of the filioque (the later Western Christian claim that the Holy Spirit proceeds in eternity from both the Father and the Son). The filioque obscures the truth that all reality comes from one Person, the Person of the Father.
- 23.
The author of this chapter finds unconvincing the attempt made by A. N. Williams to narrow the gulf between St. Gregory Palamas and Thomas Aquinas; Williams fails to appreciate the empirical noetic character of Orthodox theology. See Williams (1999).
- 24.
On the basis of the history of thought underlying the emergence of the Western Christian philosophical and its theological synthesis, David Bradshaw argues that one is warranted in stepping back from the approach taken by Western Christianity regarding God (e.g., considering that God’s nature is knowable) that emerged in the second millennium tied to the emergence of Western Christianity itself.
We children of the Enlightenment pride ourselves on our willingness to question anything. Let us now ask whether the God who has been the subject of so much strife and contention through western history was ever anything more than an idol. We may find that Nietzsche was wrong – that the sun still rises, the horizon still stretches before us, and we have not yet managed to drink up the sea (Bradshaw 2004, p. 277).
The God Who is not an idol is the fully personal God Who transcends all concepts, but Whose uncreated energies we can experience.
- 25.
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Engelhardt, H.T. (2014). Beyond the Common Good: The Priority of Persons. In: Solomon, D., Lo, P. (eds) The Common Good: Chinese and American Perspectives. Philosophical Studies in Contemporary Culture, vol 23. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-7272-4_2
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