That's interesting because in theology relation is the only difference between persons of the Trinity. They are completely one, but a one that relates 3 ways

For Christians (which I am not) the Trinity has 3 persons sharing one 'nature' (reason and will, mind). It's basically three persons in one person. I love to discover ideas in other traditions that apply in ways to my own thoughts and beliefs. If God is closer to me than i am to myself then there is no duality there. Aquinas himself says that God is IN everything as cause, as presence, and surprisingly in his essence. At the end of his life he called his theology "straw" (animal food, fit for animals), as he apparently had a non-dual mystical experience that surpassed his carefully reasoned works

I am pretty sure that Hegel was not on board with that "postulation" as a description of what he was trying to do. Consider one of his objections to Kant:

This thought, which is proposed as the instrument of philosophic knowledge, itself calls for further explanation. We must understand in what way it possesses necessity or cogency: and when it claims to be equal to the task of apprehending the absolute objects (God, Spirit, Freedom), that claim must be substantiated. Such an explanation, however, is itself a lesson in philosophy, and properly falls within the scope of the science itself. A preliminary attempt to make matters plain would only be unphilosophical, and consist of a tissue of assumptions, assertions, and inferential pros and cons, i.e. of dogmatism without cogency, as against which there would be an equal right of counter-dogmatism.

A main line of argument in the Critical Philosophy bids us pause before proceeding to inquire into God or into the true being of things and tells us first of all to examine the faculty of cognition and see whether it is equal to such an effort. We ought, says Kant, to become acquainted with the instrument, before we undertake the work for which it is to be employed; for if the instrument be insufficient, all our trouble will be spent in vain. The plausibility of this suggestion has won for it general assent and admiration; the result of which has been to withdraw cognition from an interest in its objects and absorption in the study of them, and to direct it back upon itself; and so turn it to a question of form. Unless we wish to be deceived by words, it is easy to see what this amounts to. In the case of other instruments, we can try and criticize them in other ways than by setting about the special work for which they are destined. But the examination of knowledge can only be carried out by an act of knowledge. To examine this so-called instrument is the same thing as to know it. But to seek to know before we know is as absurd as the wise resolution of Scholasticus, not to venture into the water until he had learned to swim. — Hegel, Logic, paragraph 10

It is fair enough to question whether Hegel achieved the escape velocity to get beyond the presumptions Kant made. But he did give it a shot.

So maybe the question is, if there is and can be something infinite, what would that be? — Gregory

Although I've never read any of his writings, I'm superficially familiar with Hegel, due to his prominence in modern philosophical discussions. But, I'm not qualified to speculate on his particular notion of "absolute" or "something infinite". On the other hand, this thread may not really be about Hegel's formulation, but about any unwarranted assumption of an extra-sensory "something infinite" underlying the 4-Dimension world we all know via the physical senses. FWIW, my personal opinion of Infinity is based more on scientific concepts than on philosophical theories.

Unlike impractical Philosophy, for its pragmatic purposes, empirical Science typically ignores infinities as mathematical nuisances. That's because Logical thought requires well-defined boundaries. However, modern Cosmology --- a hybrid of science & philosophy --- has not been able to dismiss the real possibility of "something" outside the rational brackets of space & time. Which may also be free from the limiting laws of physics, hence essentially Absolute. Anything unconditional may not play by the conventional rules of human Reason, though.

The Big Bang theory, although initially met with derision by some anti-creation Astronomers, is now as fundamental to Cosmology as Evolution is to Biology. Yet, "what had a beginning" implies a Creation event, and leaves open the child-like question of what caused the Bang, and set the initial conditions for evolution to expand on. That's why, In the 21st century, some theoretical Astrophysicists, lacking experimental evidence, have begun to explore a variety of pre-Bang scenarios mathematically, since empirical methods are useless for a place-beyond-Space and a time-before-Time.

For instance, Inflationary Universe theories instantaneously expanded in the literature, but the fervor now seems to have cooled. Likewise, serious Multiverse and Many Worlds proposals have become staples of Science Fiction, but not of practical Science. Yet, mathematical physicist Max Tegmark continues to develop his theory of an immaterial time-free Mathematical foundation of the Reality we observe with our space-time senses. But, for the most part, speculations on Infinity & Eternity have been left behind as playthings for feckless philosophers. . . . including yours truly.

That said, all I can say is that whatever-it-might-be, the "something infinite" is not likely to be a being in any empirical or anthro-morphic sense of existence. Which may be why the ancients conjectured about some imaginary immaterial forms of being : such as Souls & Spirits. And Pure Math, per Tegmark, may be a modern term for immaterial "spiritual" existence. Mathematics is the science and study of quality, structure, space, and change. Those are abstractions that exist in rational minds, not in in the physical objects to which they are attributed. Hence, as ideal metaphysical concepts they are literally infinite ; not bound by the laws of physics.

However, mental abstractions do exist in some sense, don't they? Where is the realm of ideas? Plato postulated in his Theory of Forms, that they are timeless, absolute, and unchangeable. Likewise, my own notion of The Infinite, is built upon the concept of Form, defined as the active, determining principle of a thing. As we experience it in the 4D world, that Principle is equivalent to causal Energy plus defining Pattern/Code. I call it EnFormAction. But what is the ultimate Source of Guided Causation in the Real world? Frankly, I don't know. But, as an un-employed amateur philosopher, nothing in the world is keeping me from guessing about that mysterious "something" outside the world. :smile:


PS___My take-away from the philosophically floundering fact-free fairytales of Infinity is that it's a fool's errand. Yet, a philosophical forum is a fool's paradise. We can freely speculate without fear of consequences, except for derision by those defending fact-based belief systems such as Materialism & Realism. But ridicule is not a legitimate philosophical argument. So, "sticks & stones" . . . .


Is The Inflationary Universe A Scientific Theory? Not Anymore :
Inflation was proposed more than 35 years ago, among others, by Paul Steinhardt. But Steinhardt has become one of the theory’s most fervent critics. . . . “Inflationary cosmology, as we currently understand it, cannot be evaluated using the scientific method.”
https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2017/09/28/is-the-inflationary-universe-a-scientific-theory-not-anymore/

Is the universe written in math?
That is, the physical universe is not merely described by mathematics, but is mathematics — specifically, a mathematical structure. Mathematical existence equals physical existence, and all structures that exist mathematically exist physically as well. Observers, including humans, are "self-aware substructures (SASs)". . . . The MUH is based on the radical Platonist view that math is an external reality
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematical_universe_hypothesis

I have no problem with scientific philosophy. Physics, as you say, is half philosophy, half empirical. What floats my spiritual boat is God as forms. But words like God or Deus is not really important. When i see a lion, i can cognate ever deeper understanding of its nature and animality. There is some kind of dualism that seems nevessary within our consciousness

Confused by what your objection is. There is a difference between understanding a thing and cognating it. Ultimately cognition is to understand the infinite but it can never grasp it. It sees what they called the beatific vision but it does not turn it into something finite by which to understand

In the passage quoted, Hegel questions outlining conditions in which the 'understanding' may or may not be able to function. To that degree, he is challenging speculating upon the conditions you describe.

When Hegel speaks of understanding it is of a lower function than the intellect (which speculates in universals). Kant's intuitions where in his understanding. So what is true for the understanding may not apply to the mind as a whole, the intellect. This is the Absolute

You will have to cite where you get this interpretation from for me to follow along. I am not sure we are reading the same texts.

That's interesting because in theology relation is the only difference between persons of the Trinity. They are completely one, but a one that relates 3 ways — Gregory

A methodology with which to understand relation itself.

And in agential realism (based on quantum mechanics), which describes phenomena as ‘ontologically primitive relations - relations without pre-existing relata:

The crucial point is agential separability. It matters whether or not we are ‘looking’ inside the phenomenon (in which case the ‘instrument’ itself is excluded from the description, and it is only the marks on the ‘instrument’, indicating and correlated with the values intra-actively attributable to the ‘object’-in-the-phenomenon as described by a mixture, that are being taken account of), or viewing that particular phenomenon from the ‘outside’ (via its entanglement with a further apparatus, producing a new phenomenon, in which case the ‘inside’ phenomenon as ‘object’, including the previously defined ‘instrument’, is treated quantum mechanically). — Karen Barad, ‘Meeting the Universe Halfway’

There are many editions of the Logic. I have the one by the Hackett Publishing Company. Check out the last paragraph of the preface to Hegel's second edition. It says, "Just as it was rightly said of the true that it is 'index sui et falsi' but that the true is not known by starting from the false, so the Concept is the understanding both of itself and of the shape without Concept, but the latter does not from its own inner truth understand the Concept."

Do you find this in your edition?

He goes on: "Science [his logic/dialectic] understands feeling and faith, but science can only be assessed through the Concept (as that on which it rests."

So the end is already the beginning. Hegel critizes Kant a lot, but he was insistent that his logic takes different steps and and reflections from Kant. Does he not say here that one must know one's own mind??

"Now it is evident by the light of nature that there must be at least as much reality in the efficient and total cause as there is in the effect of that same cause. For whence, I ask, could an effect get it's reality, if not from it's cause? And how could the cause give that reality to the effect, unless it also possessed that reality? Hence it follows that something cannot come into being out of nothing, and also that what is more perfect (that is, what contains in itself more reality) cannot come into being from what is less perfect. But this is manifestly true not merely for the effects whose reality is actual or formal, but also for ideas in which only objective reality is considered... [T]he very nature of an idea is such that of itself it needs no formal reality other than what it borrows from my thought, of which it is the mode. But that a particular idea contains this as opposed to that objective reality is surely owing to some cause in which there is at least as much formal reality as there is objective reality contained in the idea... Moreover, even though the reality that I am considering in my ideas is merely objective reality, I ought not on that account to suspect that there is no need for the same reality to be formally in the cause of these ideas, but that it suffices for it to be in them objectively. For just as the objective mode of being belongs to ideas by there very nature, so a formal mode of being belongs to the cause of ideas".

That's Descartes in the Third Meditation. I think this argument is often overlooked, which is why i mentioned it in the OP

So maybe the question is, if there is and can be something infinite, what would that be? — Gregory

Arithmetically "infinite?" – no actual thing. Geometrically unbounded? – many things (e.g.) planets, moons, suns, apples, donuts, melodies, knots ...

https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/825315

Interestingly, Saint Augustine's semiotics are extremely similar to Peirce's Hegel-inspired semiotics, and his method is De Trinitate is very similar to Hegelian dialectical. I wonder whether either read his work; I imagine Hegel would have as a theology student.

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From a paper I am working on:

Despite being absent in De Magistro, this tripartite structure reappears implicitly in De Doctrina Christiana (426) and De Trinitate (419 or 426), with a much larger role for the Holy Spirit. In De Doctrina, a mature Augustine turns to the problem of the interpretation of the Bible, an issue of paramount importance for his theory of signs. Here we see the Spirit with a key role in the transmission meaning. It is the “implanting of the Holy Spirit,” which “yields the fruit… love of God and neighbor,” and this love is essential to draw the correct meaning from the Scriptures.1 More overtly, it is the “Holy Spirit [who] ministers unto us the aids and consolations [that come from] the Scriptures.”2

Similarly, Augustine, citing Mathew 10:19-20, admonishes those preparing to preach to seek the guidance of the Spirit, that they might understand the will of God.3 Thus, the Spirit has a twin role, both aiding the reader in properly interpreting what they read (a task accomplished solely by Christ in De Magistro), and in guiding the authors of the Scriptures as they infuse the words they set down with meaning. The Spirit helps us interpret the words, while “[Christ] is called the Word of the Father because it is through him that the Father is made known.”4

In this model, the Father is the source of all knowledge, the thing about which all signs ultimately refer, the ground of being; the Son is the Word, the mediating symbol through which all things are known; and the Holy Spirit is the meaning, the interpretant, that which indwells the soul and interprets. Thus, a model based on the Plotinian hypostases, with their necessarily hierarchical nature, gives way to a model where all three parts are equally necessary components for meaning to exist.

Augustine expands this model further in De Trinitate, where he explores how our souls are themselves trinitarian in nature, having been created in the image of God. In Book 11, Augustine describes the process of semiosis using the example of sight. For sight to occur we must have, “the object itself which we see,” “vision or the act of seeing,” and “the attention of the mind.” In Book 8, we see another example that hews even closer to Peirce’s model, where the Trinity is described as a Lover, the Beloved, and the Love between the two. At first glance, this example seems more dyadic than triadic, but it in fact closely parallels Peirce’s triangle of Firstness, Secondness, and Thirdness. Firstness is the ground (the Lover/the Father); Secondness is reference or reaction, (the Beloved/the Son); and the thirdness is “that wonderful operation of hypostatic abstraction5 which… furnishes us the means of turning predicates from being signs that we think or think through, into being subjects thought of.”xi

Augustine’s mature semiotics is able to find a distinct role for all the persons of the Trinity, while at the same time De Trinitate shows how the Trinity maps on to essential elements of experience. This shift allows Augustine to explain how signs convey intelligible meanings in a way that avoids having to rely on a necessarily hierarchical Neoplatonic model, while also arguably making Augustine’s model more compelling by tying it to the nature of experience.

Anyhow, also relevant to how Hegel's thought developed is that he read a lot of Christian mystics. I note some similarities here re: self-generation and eternal return/becoming/circularity.

Instead of considering the divine darkness as a final point of rest beyond the Trinity, as Eckhart had done, Ruusbroec identified it with the fertile hypostasis of the Father. The Father is darkness ready to break out in Light, silence about to speak the Word. Having reunited itself with the Word, the soul returns with that Word in the Spirit to the divine darkness. But it does not remain there. For in that point of origin the dynamic cycle recommences: “For in this darkness an incomprehensible light is born and shines forth—this is the Son of God in whom a person becomes able to see and to contemplate eternal life” ( Spiritual Espousals III/1). Ruusbroec’s vision not only leads out of the impasse of a consistently negative theology; it also initiates a spiritual theology of action. The human person is called to partake in the outgoing movement of the Trinity itself and, while sharing the common life of the triune God, to move outward into creation.

-From Light to Light - anthology edited by Louis Dupré and James A. Wiseman

The "darkness" also shows up in Pseudo-Dionysus' "Darkness Above the Light," the Ein Soph of Kabbalah, and the Unground of Jacob Boheme. The influence of mysticism is most clear in the fact that Hegel essentially cribs the first moves in the Greater Logic from Boheme.

If we ask why we should believe that knowledge of our own awakening should give us a key to understanding God, Boehme would answer that God is a conscious being (indeed, the conscious being). But consciousness arises only through opposition. Consciousness is consciousness of something. Furthermore, self-consciousness only arises through the encounter with otherness. It is only through encountering an other that opposes or frustrates me in some fashion that I turn inward and reflect on myself. “Nothing may be revealed to itself without opposition,” Boehme tells us.13 If God is a conscious being, then something that is not God must stand opposed to him. The obvious implication is that God requires creation to be conscious. Further, Boehme’s logic dictates that God could only be self-conscious through his encounter with this other...

It is, in fact, precisely by positing distinction within God that Boehme attempts both to explain God’s self-consciousness, and to uphold the traditional Judeo-Christian doctrine of the transcendence of God. Boehme does very often speak as if God achieves consciousness through creation. And yet equally often he retreats from this, for this position leads to two problems. First, it suggests that prior to creation God is not conscious, which in turn suggests that God, the supreme being, creates under some kind of compulsion – clearly an unacceptable conclusion. In addressing this problem, Boehme walks a fine line, on the one hand positing a dark, unconscious will within God and simultaneously insisting on God’s absolute freedom.

Second, Boehme’s position seems to suggest that creation “completes” or perfects God – another dangerous idea. And this implies, further, that creation is part of the Being of God. In Aurora, Boehme states that “you must elevate your mind in the spirit and consider how the whole of nature ... is the body of God [der Leib Gottes].”14 On the other hand, he tells us elsewhere that “The outer world is not God.... The world is merely a being [Wesen] in which God is manifesting himself.”15 Of course, there is no real contradiction here: Even if the world is God’s body, there is a distinction between the body and the spirit, the animating soul. Nature is God’s body, but the body is not all. In Signatura Rerum (1622), Boehme compares creation to an apple growing on a tree: Obviously, it is not the tree itself, but it is the fruit of the tree.16

And yet questions linger. Isn’t it correct to say that producing the fruit is the telos (end or goal) of the tree, and that with the emergence of the fruit, the tree completes or perfects itself? Yet in the same text Boehme insists that God did not create in order to perfect himself. This leads to a further, deeper question. Boehme makes it clear that nature is an expression of the Being of God, in the sense that the basic principles informing nature are analogous to the aspects of God’s Being. But if nature is an expression of God’s Being, what is God apart from this expression? The unexpressed God would seem to be inchoate, merely potential. In short, incomplete and imperfect. Boehme’s first step in addressing these problems looks typically kabbalistic: He distinguishes between God as he is in himself and God as he appears to us, or God manifest. “God as he is in himself” Boehme calls Ungrund. Literally, this means “Unground” or “Not-ground.” Sometimes it has been translated as “Abyss.” Like the Ein Sof of the kabbalists, Ungrund is completely withoutform or determination of any kind. Grund immediately calls to mind “ground of being,” and this is precisely what we expect God to be. But Boehme’s choice of Ungrund warns us not to predicate even something this indefinite of God.

Indeed, Ungrund is not a being at all. In Mysterium Magnum (1623), Boehme tells us, “In his essence [Wesen] God is not an essence [Wesen].”17 The German Wesen can be translated as “essence” or as “being.” Hence, Boehme may be understood here as saying “God in his essence is not a being” (or, “God in his Being is not a being”). In other words, as he is in himself God is not. In the same text Boehme states, “in the dark nature [within the Ungrund] he is not called God.”18 But how can the supreme being not be a being? How can God not be God? The answer to these riddles is to be found, again, in Mysterium Magnum. Just after telling us that “God in his essence is not a being,” Boehme writes that God as Ungrund is merely “the power or the understanding for being – as an unfathomable, eternal will in which all is contained, but the same all is only one, and desires to reveal itself.”19 Boehme tells us elsewhere that God “hungers after and covets being [Wesen].”20

The only Being that God possesses as Ungrund is becoming: a pure potentiality for becoming a being (i.e., a thing or substance). As Ungrund, God therefore hovers strangely between Being and not-Being. We cannot say, for example, that God as Ungrund “is” in the sense of “existing” in some primitive sense, for “to exist” literally means to stand forth, emerge, become manifest. But God as Ungrund has not done any of that yet. We are faced with what appears to be an unfathomable mystery: Ungrund, as the primal essence of God and the ground/not-ground of all, is and is not. Boehme says of God “in himself,” as Ungrund, “he is nothing and all.”21 While the Ungrund is utterly indeterminate, it contains (potentially) all determinations; it is non-Being, and potentially Being and all beings.

The will to manifest, to become present, can only express itself from a prior condition of concealment or absence. Boehme calls this darkness (Finsternis), whereas the will to manifest is light (Licht). But the darkness is not simply a state of concealment, it is an opposing will or tendency toward hiddenness. There are thus two conflicting wills within God. Boehme also uses the language of “contraction” and “expansion” to describe these wills, and “indrawing” and “outgoing.” The dark will is contraction: God draws into himself, unconscious and refusing manifestation. This is the “negative moment” within God, and it is also obvious that Boehme is describing the psychology of radical selfishness.

What is remarkable here is the idea of negativity within God. For Boehme, God subsumes not just the negative, but absolute negativity: the primal will to close, withdraw, refuse. But, as Pierre Deghaye writes, “Darkness means suffering.”22 God suffers in the dark aspect, as do all beings that are dominated by this quality of selfish, indrawing negativity. But this is a necessary moment in God, and in any being: Beings – of whatever kind – are only individual and substantial by virtue of possessing a “will” to separateness and coherency (i.e., “contraction”). Something is an individual being only in virtue of possessing some aspect, which can change from moment to moment, of hiddenness or absence, out of which it manifests or gives itself. Thus, “closing” or contraction (darkness) is matched by “opening” or expansion (light).

But how does God turn from the darkness to the light? How is this transition made? Through trial by fire. After all, how can there be light without fire? “Fire is the origin of light,” Boehme says.23 This brings us to another aspect of selfish will not touched on earlier: anger. Since Boehme’s methodology is to argue by analogy from human psychology to theology, we must consider the relation of selfishness and anger in an individual human soul. Very often we find that part of the negative psychology of selfishness is a destructive wrath directed at whatever is not the self, at otherness. Indeed, the desire to harm or destroy that which is other simply because it is other is the essence of evil. And, yes, the “absolute negativity” described above as a moment intrinsic to God is, indeed, evil.

Thus, for Boehme, the indrawing, dark will kindles a fire within God, and this fire is God’s wrath or anger (Grimm, Zorn). But just as light emerges from fire, so can love emerge from wrath. In human psychology, this happens when the nihilating wrath that follows the anguish of extreme, solipsistic selfishness essentially exhausts itself. What must occur in God for him to become God, and what can occur in a human soul, is an exhaustion of selfish will, leading to a kind of surrender to the light. The light, again, represents an outgoing will to manifest, to “give oneself.” This surrender is the birth of love (Liebe) within God, but it is also a kind of death.

So far we have discussed two of Boehme’s “three principles,” darkness and light (although as should now be clear, he has multiple ways of describing them). We have seen that these principles conflict with each other, but that this conflict is necessary and ultimately results in a kind of reconciliation. The third principle, in fact, just is the reconciliation of the first two. Deghaye refers to the “perpetual alternation” of light and darkness as itself constituting the third principle, which is also “our universe.”24 Nature as a whole is to be understood as “attunement” or equilibrium of the two opposing principles. But these three principles are also present in every individual being. If Boehme believes that the Being of God involves his expressing himself in the created world, in an other, this is only possible if the other truly isother. As I have said, this is only possible if it is characterized, at the deepest level, by self-will, by the desire to exist for itself. Thus, the dark principle is inherent in the Being of beings; the root of self-will, and the evil that inevitably springs from it, are necessary to existence, and to the self-actualization of God. If God had created all things so that they must turn from darkness to the light, then those things would entirely accord with the light-will of God and would not be truly “other” than him

Jacob Boehme and Christian Theosophy - Magee

Actually reminds me of some interesting stuff from the philosophy of information as well- the idea of lack of ignorance = lack of any suprisal, and thus any information, the way a 1 or 0 of itself, lacks any information, just as an infinite series of just 1s or just 0s does as well. There is definitely something to be written comparing the Science of Logic with information theory.

But what about Bad Infinite versus Good Infinite? Does the unbounded live up to the good type? Seems it still has limits.

The Bad Infinity

This is (a) that infinite being is simply that which finitude proves in truth to be, and (b) that in order to be explicitly in-finite, infinity must set itself apart from finite being as something other than the latter. As we are now about to see, however, in distinguishing itself from the finite in this way, infinite being logically deprives itself of the very quality that makes it infinite in the first place and turns itself into determinate, finite infinity.

In the second paragraph of 2.C.b, Hegel points out that though they are necessarily other than one another finitude and infinity are not purely other than or indifferent to one another. On the contrary, they are intimately related to one another. After all, it is still true that every finite thing is intrinsically destined to transform itself, and to be transformed, into something different and so to generate unending, infinite being. Infinite being is thus what all finite being itself intrinsically is and should come to be explicitly:

determinate [finite] being is posited with the determination to pass over into its in itself, to become infinite. Infinity is the nothing of the finite, it is what the latter is in itself, what it ought to be (dessen Ansichsein und Sollen), but this ought-to-be is at the same time reflected into itself, is realized. (SL 139/1: 151 [241])

...Understood like this, Hegel says, infinite being proves to be simply the “beyond of the finite” or the “non-finite” (das Nicht-Endliche) (SL 139/1: 152 [243]). Logically, therefore, infinity cannot just be the continuous being that finite things themselves generate; it must also come to be something that lies beyond finite things and to which their own being constantly refers.


Hegel famously names this transcendent infinite the “bad,” or “spurious,” infinite (das Schlecht-Unendliche). The word “bad” is not to be understood in a moral sense. Hegel is not arguing—at this point, at least—that the idea of a transcendent infinite leads to atheism or corrupts public morals. He deems the transcendent infinite to be “bad” simply because it is not actually infinite at all. To say this is not (yet) to claim that the bad infinite falls short of the conception of true infinity that will be reached later in the Logic. That conception has yet to be developed and so cannot be employed at this point as a standard of criticism. The bad infinite is bad, in Hegel’s view, because it falls short of what infinity has already proven to be…

Infinity is not limited just by finitude, however, but also gives itself a boundary at which it comes to an end by setting itself in relation to that which is not infinite. After all, the reason why there is finitude outside the infinite is that infinite being by its very nature is the negation of finitude and must come to be explicitly what it is implicitly. Infinity thus imposes a limit on itself, thereby giving itself an endpoint, and so is not merely limited but finite. To be finite, we recall, is not necessarily to bring oneself to an end over time but is just to come to a stop through what one is oneself. Bad infinity stops itself being simply infinite and unending by running up against finite being; in this sense, bad infinity logically is finite infinity. Accordingly, as Hegel puts it, “there are two worlds, one infinite and one finite, and in their relationship the infinite is only the limit (Grenze) of the finite and is thus only a determinate infinite, an infinite which is itself finite” (SL 139–40/1: 152 [243]).13 The bad infinite is bad, therefore, not for moral reasons but quite simply because it is a limited, finite infinite.

The question of whether there can be a mathematical infinity is a good question for mathematicians and physicists. We are back with Hegel being a pantheist in disguise. If the world is Spirit/God and God is infinite then the world is infinite. Yet reality is called the One by Hegel, because ultimately one and infinity are the same (Absolute Infinity). So it is pantheism. Parmenides wrote of non-duality, and his student Zeno tried to prove from logic that the world is both infinite and One. Hegel writes a lot about infinity because kant did

For what it's worth, I think that claims that Hegel was a "pantheist," are based on either confused or deflationary reading of Hegel. "God is in everything but contained in nothing," is, after all, a sentiment expressed by one of the pillars of Nicean orthodoxy (Augustine) and so this alone doesn't seem to preclude a more conventional faith. For his part, Hegel publicly asserted his Lutheranism throughout his life, although he was obviously open minded about religious traditions. We should not forget that he started as a theologian nor that Behemism and Pietism, which seem like very unorthodox, mystical, and "philosophical," ideas today, were actually a good deal more mainstream in German Lutheranism is Hegel's era.

When Hegel employs such terms as "God," "revelation," "elevation," "infinite (or absolute) Spirit," "trinity," "creation," and "incarnation," it is clear that the vocabulary is borrowed from Christian theology.Yet the terms, as he employs them, have a peculiarly philosophical significance, and it is questionable whether turning to the theological tradition will make their meaning clear, precisely because Hegel is quite definitely trying to make what is initially the content of faith rationally comprehensible.To put all this in another way, we might say this: There can be no question in anyone's mind that Hegel repeatedly employs the term "God"; nor should there be any question that, when he uses the term, he intends it not to refer to some unknown or unknowable being, but to have a conceptual content with which human reason can come to grips.

Has Hegel made God too comprehensible? Has he rationalized God out of existence?

When the questions are put in this way, we can, perhaps, see that the questions themselves may well be illegitimate, since they are based on three unverified (or unverifiable) presuppositions: (1) that rational thought is finite and only finite; (2) that the questioner knows precisely what Hegel means by "infinite"; and (3) that the questioner has drawn an intelligible distinction between "finite" and "infinite." If rational thought is finite and only finite, then of course it cannot know infinite Being; it can only, as did Kant, "postulate" infinite Being and resign itself to not knowing what it has postulated unless, of course, it is not infinity at all that has been postulated, but only indeterminacy. The human mind can come to grips with mathematical infinity, with the infinity of time or space, or with the infinity of endless repetition, but this would seem to run up against an equally grave problem, namely, the intelligibility of indeterminacyunless what is being said is that indeterminacy is preferable to intelligibility.

Perhaps Hegel too is postulating what he has no right to postulate, the intelligibility of reality, a necessary condition of which is an intelligible God.Perhaps, then, the trouble is that Hegel is too optimistic about the intelligibility of reality, even finite reality.

Because he simply will not accept an unintelligible realitywhich may very well be a nonphilosophical (or prephilosophical) refusal he will presuppose that intelligibility and then spell out in detail the necessary conditions for the conceivability of an intelligible reality. That is, after all, where his Logic takes him. But it takes him further than that: As he sees it, a condition for the reality of the real is that it be intelligible, susceptible of rational comprehension; and by the same token a condition of the intelligibility of the real is that it be actual, a determinate object of rational comprehension...

Hegel is content to let reality speak for itself, and he is convinced that it does speak, not only to the mind but also through the mind, in the mind's thinking. If we can go this far with Hegel, there seems to be no "logical" reason why we cannot go further and say that knowledge of being is being's self-revelation both to thinking spirit and in thought...

If, however, we remember that, for Hegel, to say that God is spirit is to say that God is trinity of persons and that the movement of trinitarian life involves (1) God in himself (universal), (2) the emergence of the reality which is this world in creation (particular), and (3) the divinizing of one man in the Incarnation (individual), all issuing in the dialectical identification of infinite Spirit and infinitized finite spirit, it may seem somewhat less strange.

Hegel's Conception of God - Lauer. I didn't want to post another long quote after the others but, first, your post recalled this to me, and second, I think this book is an absolute gem of Hegel scholarship and it doesn't get the attention that Taylor, Houlgate, Pinkhard, etc. get, which is a shame because it is great.

What I don't see in your descriptions is the long centuries of suffering required to approach the universal as something we could talk about. That is the central theme of the Phenomenology of Spirit and the lectures upon the Philosophy of History.

And those ideas prompt me to wonder about the following: Hegel considered the religious as a necessary element of our existence but went to some effort to distinguish that from philosophy.

Do you read these texts with distinctions like that in view?

Yes the Absolute for Hegel is an evolution of Spirit. There is a tension between Fate and Freedom in Hegel, and a tension between God and empirical history. He has it both ways, with God at the top and the bottom (which approaches the top). That's all i have time to write now. I respond to all the rest above in a few hours

There is a tension between Fate and Freedom in all of philosophy. I am asking how that plays out particularly in Hegel's writings.

I have no problem with scientific philosophy. Physics, as you say, is half philosophy, half empirical. What floats my spiritual boat is God as forms. But words like God or Deus is not really important. When i see a lion, i can cognate ever deeper understanding of its nature and animality. There is some kind of dualism that seems nevessary within our consciousness — Gregory

I assume that your equation of God with Platonic Form*1 may imply A> a separate-but-equal dualism of Ideal & Real, or B> a hierarchical superior vs inferior or ultimate vs proximate Reality (Heaven vs Earth). My philosophical BothAnd*2 dualism has a similar motivation, in that it attempts to reconcile Physical Reality, consisting of material objects & causal forces, with Metaphysical Ideality, consisting of imaginary concepts in individual human minds. Yet for religious purposes, those notions are typically projected into a unitary universal Mind. Which may seem philosophically necessary, but beyond the bounds of science, hence unprovable.

However, that Ideality may or may not be actually a supernatural Platonic realm of perfect Forms, or ding an sich perfections in the Mind of God. As far as I can tell, those higher realms are imaginary, existing in individual human minds, hence opinions that must be accepted by faith in the myths we tell each other. The commonality of supernatural notions among mankind, may or may not indicate that there really is some mysterious Force or Form or Agent in the Great Beyond. So, we disagree on the exact nature (features) of the inferred Absolute Form or form-maker.

Despite the uncertainty, we like to think of Ideality as a super-reality --- more real than apparent Reality. For the purposes of my own "scientific philosophy", I sometimes use the concept of G*D metaphorically to represent the unknowable pre-BigBang source of the energy & laws that necessarily existed prior to space-time, in order to explain the HOW questions of the BB. However, since I have no direct channel of communication to that hypothetical Designer, I must remain agnostic about the WHY questions. That's also a Deistic philosophy. :smile:



*1. Plato's Theory of Forms :
In basic terms, Plato's Theory of Forms asserts that the physical world is not really the 'real' world; instead, ultimate reality exists beyond our physical world.
https://study.com/learn/lesson/plato-theory-forms-realm-physical.html

*2. Both/And Principle :
*** My coinage for the holistic principle of Complementarity, as illustrated in the Yin/Yang symbol. Opposing or contrasting concepts are always part of a greater whole. Conflicts between parts can be reconciled or harmonized by putting them into the context of a whole system.
*** The Enformationism worldview entails the principles of Complementarity, Reciprocity & Holism, which are necessary to offset the negative effects of Fragmentation, Isolation & Reductionism. Analysis into parts is necessary for knowledge of the mechanics of the world, but synthesis of those parts into a whole system is required for the wisdom to integrate the self into the larger system. In a philosophical sense, all opposites in this world (e.g. space/time, good/evil) are ultimately reconciled in Enfernity (eternity & infinity), the whole of which our perceived reality is a part.
*** Conceptually, the BothAnd principle is similar to Einstein's theory of Relativity, in that what you see ─ what’s true for you ─ depends on your perspective, and your frame of reference; for example, subjective or objective, religious or scientific, reductive or holistic, pragmatic or romantic, conservative or liberal, earthbound or cosmic. Ultimate or absolute reality (ideality) doesn't change, but your conception of reality does. Opposing views are not right or wrong, but more or less accurate for a particular purpose.
*** This principle is also similar to the concept of Superposition in sub-atomic physics. In this ambiguous state a particle has no fixed identity until “observed” by an outside system. For example, in a Quantum Computer, a Qubit has a value of all possible fractions between 1 & 0. Therefore, you could say that it is both 1 and 0.
https://blog-glossary.enformationism.info/page10.html

"But what we have here is the free act of thinking putting itself at the standpoint where it is for its own self, producing its own object for itself thereby, and giving it to itself." Spinoza, as for as I know, never said we were God. So my question on this thread is how we can know whether we are finite or infinite and what this means. — Gregory

I think throughout your post you equate spirit with God. I think that is incorrect. God, (or religion) as far as I know in Hegel, is thought in the form of its presentation (Vorstelliung). God is thought posited as something outside of us, thought not grasping itself, but its image. Spirit is thought and this thought does not arise wily nilly. Thought, in spirit, captures its own history. It follows its own trail so to speak and understand itself as something with a trail and with turns and twists in its history. The history of spirit, which is actually none other than spirit, is the realization of thought for itself. Essentially it reaches past 'God', because it needs no representation outside of itself when it has spirit, i.e., itself.

We are not 'God', but we realize we have created him, he is a thought determination. In essence Hegel already proclaims the death of God much more dramatized by Nietzsche.

Now the absolute, something that spirits culminates in, is, I think, nothing else than the here and now. The here and now that thought always tries to comprehend and put in a process in history. The now is immediately taken up by thought and translated as a moment in a chain. For me for instance the 'now' is in the post I am not typing, the touch of my fingers on the key board, the exact sensation of contemplating the now, while writing. I put this 'now' immediately within the story of Tobias on this forum, of this forum in general, of its place in philosophical literature and so on. In that sense the now is infinite, your life is a history of infinite 'nows', passing by too quickly to comprehend, nothing really and still... it is always now, the now is inescapable and infinite until thought itself disappears. Is that possible? Well ... if thought is there than it is not dead and if it is dead there is no thought to consider its demise, see Epicurus. Likewise, thought, for better or for worse, is the infiinite, the measure of all things and all there is.

For Hegel on religion, the most important work is Lectures on the Proofs of the Existence of God. I am going to reread it sometime this year. The arguments about pantheism have to be understood in line with the Phenomenology of Mind, section on "Perception", however, which ends by saying that we never encounter a particular, but always universals. The argument extends throughout that whole section. At the end of the lesser Logic's second edition's Preface, Hegel writes "(S)ince science is the self-development of the Concept , an assessment of science through the Concept is not so much a judgment upon it as an advancing towards it." That gets right to the heart of the matter. Hegel's does have his cake and eats it to because that is the only way to do dialectic in the sense that he understood that word. A Universal is the Idea, which is Concept, which is Absolute by way of Notion. That's the ordering I understand them in. Is that pantheism? I think these are matters which don't fall into a one word category

In this model, the Father is the source of all knowledge, the thing about which all signs ultimately refer, the ground of being; the Son is the Word, the mediating symbol through which all things are known; and the Holy Spirit is the meaning, the interpretant, that which indwells the soul and interprets. T — Count Timothy von Icarus

Father= Absolute
Son= Notion
Holy Spirit= Concept

Do you read the texts differently?

Thus, the dark principle is inherent in the Being of beings; the root of self-will, and the evil that inevitably springs from it, are necessary to existence, and to the self-actualization of God. — Count Timothy von Icarus

This is like Ying and Yang. If we are free than our evil is not necessary. "Causality in accordance with laws of nature is not the only causality from which the appearances of the world can one and all be derived." (Kant's thesis for the Third Antimony). Paradox is essential to Hegel's scheme; he thinks paradox is good for the mind. It takes intuition and reason, the union of which is intellect. Then you can see freedom and fate united without having to combine their content.

The world is the unfolding of the Spirit. This table is a part of the unfolding. Therefore this table is Spirit. I think Hegel is making a distinction between the empirical and the rational. What is rational is actual and vice verse. But the empirical is just the empirical and we don't have to stop seeing leaves and kittens as other than finite things. It's about dialectic, which a mechanism cannot imitate

Should I conclude from these remarks, that the development of universals, that took up so much of Hegel's efforts, was merely a footnote against the theology you read in his texts?

Father= Absolute
Son= Notion
Holy Spirit= Concept

Do you read the texts differently?

Oh jeez, that's a tough one. I think so, just considering it now, but it's one of those things where I fear my intuition might get flipped if I begin digging into it.

Even with Augustine, who I have read a lot of with this in mind, the later work does still seem to blend the role of Christ and the Holy Spirit on occasion. I don't think Augustine himself ever explicitly maps the Trinity to his semiotics, mostly because he gets distracted by pastoral life and theo-political arguments, and never returns to his model in De Dialecta. But I also am fairly confident that it is heavily implied by the later works, if not strictly followed to a T.

This is like Ying and Yang. If we are free than our evil is not necessary.

Right. Good doesn't imply evil, it implies the possibility of evil. I was corrected on this once and it is a good subtlety to note.

Paradox is essential to Hegel's scheme; he thinks paradox is good for the mind. It takes intuition and reason, the union of which is intellect. Then you can see freedom and fate united without having to combine their content.

Yeah, I have come around on liking dialetheism and paraconsistent logics quite a bit. What they are missing is a definition of truth that is as robust and well-stated as the coherence, correspondence, and axiomatic views IMO. I have always wanted to learn more about Lawvere's formalism of Hegel's dialectical with category theory, but the amount of background work needed to make sense of it has kept me from getting there.

I feel like, if I could understand that, and ground up categorical constructions of quantum mechanics, ZX calculus, quantum logic, and the like, there might be some really neat comparisons there. I found a paper once on an information theoretic creation ex nihilo, the "Bit Bang" that got me thinking about that, but it was way outside my comfort zone to vet.

The world is the unfolding of the Spirit. This table is a part of the unfolding. Therefore this table is Spirit. I think Hegel is making a distinction between the empirical and the rational. What is rational is actual and vice verse. But the empirical is just the empirical and we don't have to stop seeing leaves and kittens as other than finite things. It's about dialectic, which a mechanism cannot imitate

:up:

Are you questioning that Hegel is an idealist? Most scholars say he was. The world is universals and we are Idea. His lectures on the philosophy of religion is theology as well

A Universal is the Idea, which is Concept, which is Absolute by way of Notion. — Gregory

The absolute cannot be simply universal because that would leave particulars as somehow unreal. It goes against the grain of the dialectic. In the logic the idea becomes more and more concrete, while a universal without concretization remains abstract. Also I remember his discussions about sugar cubes from the 'Pheno' and how both taking a nominalist view of a sugar cube as an essence misses the point as well as the view of a sugar cube as a collection of universal properties.

I think statements like: "The world is universals and we are idea" are quite meaningless. I am obviously not the idea, only perhaps some sort of instantiation or I partake in it, or whatever. I tend to read Hegel far less metaphysically thick as I just think that makes matters too obscure. Hegel's point is I think much more simple: through the history of philosophy, culminating in Spinozist, Kantian and Hegelian thought, we have come to see the development of thought as a process in which is enriches itself, but always also returns from where it came, a consideration of what is most abstract and general. That is still a bold statement but at least loses all the exalted religious metaphorism. By reading him as such, it is also easier to place him in the history of philosophy. He 'historicized' thought and made it possible to think about the way we think historically.

Hegel was an "idealist." He was a devoted Lutheran who saw the truth of religion as integral to the truth of philosophy. But he also said philosophy had to travel a long way before that could be realized.

The movement involved terrible suffering. Hegel did not make light of that or apologize for it in the way some did. The role of reason followed a different path from simple devotion to a belief.