Thinking Hegelian Thoughts

It can happen to you anywhere, and sometimes with the least provocation. You can be having a good day, a clear day, a day when you know what you know and what you should do. It can be a day of teaching, of administrating, or of reading and studying. It can be a day like other good days. . . But then it happens: Suddenly, capriciously Hegel makes sense.

Now I don’t mean to say that one suddenly grasps the system, that one comes to clarity about how mediated immediacy works with respect to the whole of ideal and historical reality, or even that one succeeds in actually learning something more about Hegel’s thought. It is not really a greater appreciation of Hegel that one has, but rather that all of a sudden, and quite out of the blue, one discovers one is Hegelian; one grasps that what Hegel says is deeply true.

My own recent insightful moment occurred on a day like other days. I was lecturing on the problems bequeathed by Kant and was talking about how Fichte, Schelling and Hegel responded to these problems. I was talking about how, for Kant, the forms imposed by the subject on things were due to our autonomous transcendental synthesizing activity, and that Hegel believed that Kant had allowed that the particularity of the forms so imposed was ultimately inexplicable, or, in Hegel’s terms, “shot from the pistol.” Famously, Hegel had accused Kant of allowing these forms to stand in “bare externality,” and that what was thus needed was a way to show how this “moment” was itself the result of some higher movement of the Spirit, or some more lofty unpacking of the Idea. (At this point undergraduate students are generally thinking about something fun they shall be doing in the summer.) On this recent day in class, I appealed to Hegel’s implicit presupposition of the Principle of Sufficient Reason in explaining why Hegel could not leave the forms in mere bare externality and, I must admit, I was even a little proud in showing how Hegel was thusly continuing in the German rationalist tradition. But then it happened: Hegel’s solution simply seemed inescapable! Of course, one cannot merely leave the Kantian subject in externality; one must finally “take it up” in the higher movement of Spirit. If one does not do so, one is guilty of hanging the Kantian subject out to dry in the arena of the irrational; one is, in other words, condemning the Kantian subject to the abyss of Value.

The story goes like this: For many philosophers prior to Kant, the world is merely given; it is thus the subject’s obligation to conform itself to the objective structure of the world. But the skeptical trajectory culminating in Hume had shown how the objectivity of the natural sciences could not be maintained without a move to the subject. In order to ground the objectivity of experience, Kant deduced those necessary conditions for the possibility of experience. These included, as is well known, the pure a priori forms of intuition (space and time), and the pure a priori forms of understanding (quantity, quality, relation, and modality). Of these, the two most famous fall under ‘relation’, the pure a priori concepts of substance and cause. Since philosophers had shown that substance and causality were not part of the structure of the world in itself, they must be located elsewhere if they are to be retained. Kant famously located them in the autonomy of the transcendental synthesis that gives rise to the self/world structure. It is because human being in its transcendental be-ing, imposes form upon the world, that human being in its subjective be-ing can come to know the world as a formed content. Kant showed, in effect, that since the necessary forms employed in modern science could not be derived from the content of the world in itself, that they must be grounded in the synthesizing activity of the subject. The transcendental condition for the possibility of a formed world was not a world that came as formed, but a synthesis that imposed the form of the subject upon a formless world. (Theologically, one could say that without the Word there could be no World.) So Kant did not allow the world to stand in its immediacy, but rather showed that all knowledge of the world demanded a mediacy by the subject.

Now enter the heroic Hegelian solution: Instead of leaving the transcendental condition for the possibility of a formed world to be just the way things are (“shot from the pistol”), Hegel showed how this transcendental synthesizing activity was itself accounted for by the movement of Geist (Spirit) that is, by definition, no longer something that needs accounting for. Whereas the content of the world is formed by the form of transcendental synthesis, the form of that synthesis is itself the result of the content of Spirit, a formed Spirit whose content is both form and content. So it is that the abyss of Value is grounded once more in Truth.

Thinking about Hegel makes one think Trinitarian thoughts. The content of the world is the result of the form of the Word: God speaks all things into being. But this divine speaking is never something wholly external to those with eyes to see, because the One speaking is identical to the One testifying to the speaking. There is thus an identity of being and thinking.

Lutheran theology is a Trinitarian theology. Hegel is a Lutheran. And so it happens that Hegelian philosophy is profoundly Trinitarian theology.

So with the insight that Hegel is true, what does one do? One approaches with ontological humility the contour of the world; one explores with epistemological humility the contour of the self knowing the world; and one discerns with religious humility the contour of the divine upon whose absolute ground the subject knows its object.

Why Worry about Not Being Able to Do Other than What One Did Do?

So many Lutherans care so desperately about freedom that one would think it is part of our tradition.

Of course, in some sense it clearly is part of our tradition. Did not Luther talk about the freedom of the Christian believer before God? Are we not free before God so that we might become dutiful servants to our neighbors?

The word 'free' can be used in many senses and Lutherans are not immune to confusing them. On the one hand, we say that 'x is free with respect to A' if and only if 'x is not externally compelled to do A.' People marching around with signs proclaiming "Freedom Now!" are mostly concerned with this sense of freedom.

On the other hand, we can mean by 'x is free with respect to A' that x has the inner resources to do A when x has determined that A ought to be done, or that somehow the oughtness of A no longer binds the conscience of x. The freedom of a Christian seems to be freedom of this kind. Accordingly, one is given the gift of A no longer standing over and against x as something that x ought to do without x having the wherewithal to do it.

The sense of freedom that I want to briefly discuss, however, is not freedom in either of these two senses. It is instead a deeply philosophical notion of freedom. I am interested in whether or not each and every human action has sufficient causal conditions for its occurrence. Accordingly, 'x is free with respect to A' if and only if x, in doing A, could nonetheless had done ~A. The question is whether there are causally sufficient conditions which realize rather than ~A. If there are such conditions then A is determined for x by those conditions; if not then A is free for x.

It is interesting to note that most Christians in America these days seem quite interested in having freedom in the sense of the preceding paragraph. People do not want to believe that God disallows freedom in this sense. This has struck me as odd, however, because many of these people do not seem at all concerned that our basic materialist or physicalist worldview precludes such freedom. After all, if all human beings are ultimately comprised of those beings which our fundamental physical theories quantify over, then it seems that the apparent freedom we have as rational and moral agents must be ultimately explained by the motion of those fundamental particles or energies. But if freedom cannot finally be explicated in that way, and if we are confident that these fundamental particles exist, then it follows that our freedom to do other than what we did do is appearance and not reality. This seems true for both reductive and nonreductive physicalist accounts.

The general problem of trying to find a place for free rational and moral agency in a natural world has occupied philosophers for the last four centuries. The good news is that we know much more about our neurophysiology than we did in the past. We know a great deal about what brain functions or states correlate with what mental functions and states, and what changes in brain state are sufficient for bringing about certain changes in mental states. The bad news, however, is that we still don't have any real approach to the most difficult problem of modernity and post-modernity alike: Given that consciousness, intentionality, language, and even rationality can be given a naturalist explanation, how is it that freedom itself can be given such an explanation? How is decision-making realized within the physical structure of the brain? How is freedom possible in a physicalist universe?

What intrigues me theologically about this question is this: How is it that our age more-or-less gives a pass to scientists who reject the possibility of freedom of the will, but attack those who, on religious grounds, assert that the human will is captive, that is, as Luther says, is either ridden by God or the devil? In other words, why is being bound to the will of God so much harder to stomach than being bound to the seemingly capricious movement of neurophysical or microphysical processes? It seems like there is something deep at issue here: Human beings seemingly would rather be "ridden" by their molecules, than by a transcendent God. Why do Christian men and women want to be able freely to "make a decision" for Christ, when they often, in other contexts, wholly deny the freedom to "make a decision" that is not driven by their nuerophysical constitution? Why precisely is it easier to say that our deciding to do A is neuro-state x6542je than a particular volitional state in God?

The answer is easy, I think. Human beings by their nature want to be their own God. They want to own themselves. Somehow, it seems, being owned by their own microphysical processes is to be preferred over being owned by a creator God. Somehow people find it easier to be driven by their own neural events than by a transcendent God. Somehow we think we hold on better to what Kant called "the dear little self" in the former rather than the latter.

Human sin is not wanting God to be God. We run from Him in myriad and sundry ways. We do so as well, seemingly, in the choice of those things to which we ultimately allow ourselves to lose our freedom.

The "Sexuality Issue"

Members of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA) are confused these days about sexuality. They want to figure out if engaging in homoerotic behavior is consonant with assuming the predigtamt (preaching office) within a congregation. They also are contemplating whether pastors should be blessing same sex relationships.

The problem with talking about this issue is that few care about the arguments actually used to determine the positions adopted. People just want to know who is for and who is against it; they don't want to know why. Thus, it is with some trepidation that I offer the following analysis of the sexuality issue. Those that read this blog will know now that I am against it. I offer this analysis, however, not as an interesting psychological fact about me (e.g., that I am against it), but rather as a justification for being against it. I believe that one's justification for holding something true is much more than a fact about the speaker. It is a public argument offered in logical space, an argument that, in principle, gives others grounds for being against it. While what I say is not terribly original, the succinctness in how I have said it may well be. I offer this argument to people of reason who might want to consider these grounds in arriving at their own well-informed position:

Every human being has two mothers, the one from whose womb they emerged, and the language (mother tongue) they learned early in life, that language through and by which they structured and understood their world. The naming and predicative machinery of the mother tongue determines in large part the objects, kinds of objects, and qualities of objects one can encounter. The "immediacy" of human experience is mediated by that language by and through which it is had.

Clearly, human beings possess genetic characteristics that strongly affect their dispositions to behave. There is general agreement that early experience (and thus language) greatly influences these dispositional characteristics. However, later experience and reflection within a language also strongly influence dispositional development. The mother language in which one lives “breaks” and “orders” the world for the speaker; its conceptual machinery forms the a priori basis for the possibility of particular objects, and for general categories of objects. Consequently, one cannot be a person of a particular psychological type without first being able to conceive and order the world as a place where such types are possible. Property determination is logically prior to property instantiation.

Within oue native language there are certain communal narratives that operate to grant meaning, identity, and purpose. Some of the statements within these narratives are constative; they claim that something obtains. Further reflection and experiment can falsify or provisionally countenance the truth of these statements. However, all such statements presuppose the particularity of the conceptual equipment historically transmitted by language. The “metanarrative” of the providence of God is one in which there are putatively factual statements making claims of truth. Given our conceptual grid, statements about God can be either true or false.

In their pre-linguistic state, the behavior of human beings, like all animals, is understandable as satisfying a complex set of stimulus-response conditionals. Some humans, due to genetic and early imprinting conditions, respond to greater or lesser degrees to same-sex sexual stimulation. However, humans always need narratives in order to have meaning and identity. We humans are creatures of time in ways different from the rest of the animal world. We humans know the passing of time, and thus understand what is against the backdrop of what is not. We shall not always be, and this deep sense of not always being sends us hunting after meaning, purpose and identity.

In the late nineteenth century a narrative began to develop about homosexuality that was amplified, adjusted, and codified throughout the twentieth century, such that in the last days of the twentieth-century, people could talk confidently about the state of “being homosexual” versus “acting in homosexual ways,” and about “discovering” this homosexuality. The narrative supposed homosexuality to be a general disposition, not unlike fragility. Just as fragile things are fragile even when they don’t always break, so too, it was thought that homosexuals are homosexual even when they do not act in homosexual ways. The messiness of history was pretty much forgotten in the chase to get clear on this issue. For instance, ancient Greek culture countenanced and sometimes encouraged homosexucal behavior seemingly without regard to genetic dispositions and without having the category of "the homosexual'.

As the century developed, the myth took a new twist. The disposition of homosexuality was understood to be a primary identity of the person, and thus civil rights were brought into play. Just as minorities and women must be protected by the law, so too must homosexual people. The disanalogy between the two was not noticed. After all, homosexuality is, prima facie, nothing at all like skin color, or gender. There are no “natural boundaries” to it. What was overlooked is that doing a similar exploration and thematization of the psychological character of people could issue in the same type of narratives for different psychological features - - if there were interest to do such. For instance, one might well have isolated the dispositions to steal of certain people, made that an identity issue, and then make the possession of that disposition a natural rights issue. One could have done it with dispositions toward shyness, dispositions toward sexual promiscuity, dispositions toward niggardliness, dispositions towards prolixity, etc. That one would never do so displays the difference in meaning of these various dispositions. It is difficult to see how possessing the disposition of prolixity can grant existential identity, meaning, and destiny.

Given the socially constructed “identity” of the homosexual, the interpretive framework of that identity was used to interpret the multivariagatedness of human experience into certain patterns of sexual response, such that experience itself - -antifoundational because of language and narrative - - was misused as a foundational source for theological reflection. Thus contemporary pseudo-intellectuals could declare that “some people are just made that way” and that “the Bible does not know anything about the homosexual.” The biblical text was thus read by those occupying a hermeneutical horizon openly antipodal to the hermeneutical cradle from which the text emerged. This antithetical horizon could only judge the “immediacy of human experience” - - anything but immediate as I have argued - - as something trumping the mediated historical horizon of an alien text.

If we could see the problem clearly, we could see that the "sexuality issue" has emerged from our contemporary mythology. The “discovery of my homosexuality” is an Enlightenment-inspired myth that fills life with identity, meaning and purpose; it is a myth grounded in the fundamentality of "my experience." Theologically, of course, the problem goes back to the primitive, “did God really say that?” Are there dispositions that are not my dispositions that ought to be my dispositions? Does this question make sense for us apart from obvious utilitarian concerns? Theologically, one might claim that Luther is right. We are either ridden by God or Satan. Understanding that, however, takes a depth that most no longer have.

Perhaps the primary sin of our times is that we have sold our birthright as beings of reason. We have forgotten that reason is involved in every activity of faith. Perhaps what makes the faith of our day so underdeveloped is that our reason is so underdeveloped. There is considerable irony in this. But what is better for the Evil One than to have beings who are asleep at the wheel while they “entertain themselves to death?"

The Power of Words

lI am always am disquieted when I hear theologians talk confidently about the "power" of the Biblical word and then go on to claim that Biblical language is not referential, but rather performative. The reason for my disquiet is simply that such an understanding of language does not distinguish well between the performance itself, and the context in which that performance must perform.

Think about Julie saying to Bob, "I love you." This certainly can be said in a number of different instances. But to really empower Bob, the hearer of the word, there must be some sense in which Julie's remarks aptly display what psychological states she is in. If Julie tells Bob that she loves him, it is all-important to Bob that there is a Julie and she actually possesses the property of having love towards Bob. It is highly unlikely for Bob to be empowered by the words, 'I love you', when there is no Julie possessing an attitude of love toward Bob. There must be some basis upon which the locution empowers. It just does not make sense for human beings that performative utterances nakedly empower. A computer program spitting out 'I love you' fails to empower because we do not believe the program is an agent that could possess the relevant propositional attitudes that would make the locution even relevant.

So how can it be that so many theologians want to talk about the powerful effect of words without supposing that those words refer? The answer is quite simple. If one begins with the presupposition that God cannot be an entity causally involved in the life of the universe, then one's semantics must be adjusted accordingly. Words cannot refer because there is nothing to which those words can refer. What they can do is empower; they can free us; they can heal us; they can give us life; they can open up for us new possibilites. The theological trajectory that assumes a power in the words without a reference is a trajectory that allows for very good preaching, and a very good bedside manner.

The problem, of course, is that one cannot come clean on one's semantics to those with whom one speaks. The problem is that the man and woman in the pew are likely being empowered by the words only because they are assuming a referential, and not donational, semantics. One must have a high degree of existential sophistication, I suppose, to be empowred by a naked 'I love you' from a Julie who is not an agent and cannot have any propositional states. It may not be impossible to find some Bob so empowered, but his kind are clearly not found in abundance. In a parallel fashion, I suppose it would take a high level of theological sophistication to be empowered by 'You are saved by grace because of Christ's love,' in the absence of there being any God with a propositional attitude of wrath from whom to be saved. It is a rare bird whose existential anxieties are quelled by 'God loves you' who nonetheless believes that God is not an agent that can in principle possess a propositional attitude, or even an intent towards human beings.

Is it not time that we think deeply about these presuppositions in theology that allow us to use the language of a sacred canopy long after we have come of age to the fact that the skies are forever black? Maybe it is time to either eliminate the discourse or give it robust truth-conditions. Maybe the time is long overdo that we take God-talk very seriously.

Nomological Confusions

Lutheran theology classically distinguishes the first and second use of the law. The first use is civil. Here the law works to keep human beings from descending into lawless chaos. The law in its first use functions to order society and to establish those requisite structures that make possible human life together. While this law is a curb, the second use of the law functions as a mirror so that we can see our waywardness and be driven by this realization to the foot of the cross. This theological use of the law was clearly thematized during the Reformation.

Lately there has been confusion in some otherwise solid Lutheran quarters about how the first and second use of the law connect to one another. Some have argued that human reason alone can establish the content established by the first use of the law. They have claimed that reason can establish that both homosexuality and mendacity are wrong. This reading claims, in nfact, that some ethical theory can provide solid grounds as to what is good and bad, right and wrong. For instance, instead of looking at divine proscription, they would argue that homosexuality is wrong on either an act or rule utilitarian perspective. The argument goes this way:

1) One ought to do those actions which conduce to the greatest happiness.
2) Homosexual actions cause physical and mental pain for the participants and their families.
3) Thus, one ought not to do homosexual actions.

The thing to notice about this argument is its consequentialism. It is, of course, the nature of a consequentialist argument to disagree about what consequences will likely follow from an act. To say that a homosexual act is wrong because it has a greater likelihood of causing medical problems in the participants, that it comcomittantly places a greater strain on medical resources, and that those so inclined to homosexual action would suffer more pain from engaging in the action than not engaging is to take part in a thoroughgoingly hermeneutical task. It is a question of the horizon of one's interpretation. Two intelligent people, equally well-trained in philosophy could disagree as to the extent that homosexual actions cause physical and mental pain. In such a case, as is well known, one's motivation for finding things to be a certain way can determine the way that one finds thing. Interpretations, after all, are entirely human matters. An interpretation is, in fact, in many ways like an artefact: One's motive partially manufactures it. An interpretation does not depend upon that which lies outside the self, rather it is autonomously produced by the self.

Now the rub comes. If an interpretation is a human artefact, and interpretations can be changed by the interpretants, then the material content of the first use of the law is determined by human reason. But how can that which is identified (and constructed) by human reason ever drive someone to the foot of the cross? Surely, to be driven to the foot of the cross presupposes that one is not who one ultimately should be, and that someone in power is upset by this. It seems to me that only if one deeply knows that he is not whom he should be could he ever be driven to the foot of the cross. Thus arises repentance and contrition, and the perceived need for the saving grace of the gospel.

Making the material content of the first use depend upon human autonomy, and the material content of the second upon divine heteronomy, clearly destroys the unity of the law and leads to nomological confusions. Within the context of such confusion, the old temptation of antinomianism flourishes alive and well.

The Authority of Scripture

Many people are concerned about the problem of the authority of scripture. But how can the Bible have such authority when seeming textual authority has been undermined by various methods that penetrate beyond the text and claim to recover deeper meaning? Moreover, how is scriptural authority possible when the homogeneity of hermeneutical method and stance has been broken?

In the early Christian tradition monks slavishly labored to copy perfectly Holy Scripture so as to preserve its syntax. Not always knowledgable about the truth and meaning of the text, these scribes were interested in preserving the text's form and structure. Developing normative canons for syntactic probity, it was relatively easy to diagnose deviant syntactic trajectories. Authority could be defined structurally in terms of proper and improper strings.

But the authority of syntax has never been as important in Christianity as semantic authority. What the text means is what is important, and for many this textual meaning is thought to be as objective as the syntax which mediates and carries this meaning. Identifying deviant semantic trajectories is thus a task of reporting the willful waywardness of deviant interpreters. What the Bible says is clear, it is thought; what is at issue is the interpretation of what it says.

But we postmoderns are not comfortable asserting an objective or normative semantic configuration tied intrinsically to the text. There is no intrisicality to semantics, we think. The idea that semantics supervenes on syntax - - any two worlds indiscernible with respect to their syntactic distributions are indiscernible with respect to their semantic distributions - - is problematic. Any supervenience of semantics upon syntax must presuppose an extrisnsicality of the former not needed for the latter. But when such semantic extrinsicality is admitted, then what becomes of textual authority? Does it finally not devolve to the relatum of textual extrinsicality, to the interpreter himself/herself? But if this is so, then is it not merely an instance of power? The text has a particular semantic normativity because there is a capriousness and arbitrariness of interpretation powerfully supported by the community. The text is given a particular normative semantic interpretation because of the power of the community to enforce its reading. Normativity of interpretation thus becomes a function of communal sanction.

All of this just points out the problem if Scriptural authority somehow gets conceived as a relationship of text to semantic interpretation, or text to that interpretation which is related to community enforcement. Clearly, scriptural authority must finally become merely a projection of a community's will to power. The authority of Scripture is reduced to the authority of the community to whom the text is authoratative. Those wanting to argue divine scriptural authority are marginalized because they do not know the true springs of that authority: human community.

If we are to make progress on the problem of Scriptural authority, we cannot start within the problematic of an innocuous intrinsicality hiding a nefarious extrinsicality. What is needed, of course, is recourse to the benign extrinsicality of the Holy Spirit. The Bible must interpret itself, and the wings of that interpretation must be the activity of the Holy Spirit. Just as postmodernity recognizes that the power of human community drives the semantics of the Biblical text, so too must it recognize that the power of the Holy Spirit also drives the interpretation of the text. The extrinsic moment within the dynamics of interpretation is God's own!

Thus, I do not see how Scriptural authority can be grounded apart from the activity of the Spirit. It is this divine breath of God that determines the contour of scriptural semantics, and ultimately the authority of Scripture itself.

On Semantics in Theology

I am convinced that the mainline denominations are dying because they have violated semantic probity. While there seems to be some prima facie absurdity in this, I think that it is so. I believe that people who are profoundly interested in Christianity think that the language of Christianity somehow makes truth claims. That is not to say that every interested Christian is a naive realist. It is to say, however, that an understanding of religious and theological language that construes the specificity of that language as due entirely to human experience is problematic. The crucial realist question is simply this: If there were no human sentience, could one still affirm, in principle, the reality of God? Does it make sense to speak about God's existence apart from the human self/world structure? If there is no possible world - - no self-consistent description of how the world could have gone - - in which God is apart from human conciousness, then God must be causally inert.

The causal impotence of God is related to the internal relatedness of God to the world. If the concept of God is such that God must be related to that which is not God in order for God to be God, then we cannot affirm an intrinsicality to God that could, in principle, retain causal powers. But a God without robust causal powers simply cannot be God - - or so I would argue. The reason is simply that conceptually God must be construed as that which none greater can be thought. But clearly a God with causal power is greater than a God without it. Thus, in order for God to be God, God must have causal power. This is such a basic insight, that I am surprised many theologians no longer find it important to even ask the question of divine causality. For many, in fact, the notion that God can cause anything is taken to be a category mistake, like saying, with Ryle, that she left in a sedan and came home in a rage. This is unfortunate, and tips the theological hat since Kant in a decidedly Platonic direction, though most have not seen this. Just as Plato believed that coneptual analysis in the order of being gets at knowledge more than an examination of cause and effect within the spatio-temporal order, so too have theologians since Kant assumed that thinking about God, or reporting the experience of the divine aims at truth more than examining how God might actually causally relate to the word.

The problem for the last 200+ years is that the use of religious and theological language has continued unabated and that most outside the initiate have no idea that when the preacher uses theological and religious language, he or she does not mean what the unitiate think is meant. Because of this "semantic shift" in religious and theological language, even the "cultured despisers" of religion are put out of work. One does not know what precisely is meant by the language; one can specify no states of affairs making the putative assertions false. How can one talk meaningfully about what cannot be unambiguously and clearly stated?