Most interpreters agree that Hegel was an atheist.

Though indoctrinated in Lutheranism as a child, Hegel rejected Christianity in his college years. In his early religious writings, he inveighed against religion. But for professional reasons, beginning around 1800, he tried to create the impression that he was a believer. Solomon explains: "Hegel really did have a secret, and...it has been well kept. The secret, abruptly stated, is that Hegel was an atheist. His 'Christianity' is nothing but nominal, an elaborate subterfuge to protect his professional ambitions in the most religiously conservative country in northern Europe." [21] What has Hegel's atheism to do with his need for subterfuge? Terry Pinkard writes: "Hegel was desperate for a position [professorship], and to get a position he needed a book."[22] But writing a book that openly espoused atheism would be professional suicide. Solomon elaborates: "Hegel had seen Spinoza's Ethics condemned in Germany. He had seen Kant, whom he considered to be unquestioningly orthodox, censured and censored by the narrow-minded regime of Frederick Wilhelm II. He had seen Fichte dismissed from the University of Jena for views that were (incorrectly) considered atheistic."[23] The University of Jena is where Hegel was seeking a professorship. The book he was writing, which became Phenomenology of Spirit, was a book that espoused atheism by covertly redefining God as, in essence, humanity. Solomon puts it this way: "What then does Hegel's conception of God [in Phenomenology] admit which any atheist would not? To say that God exists is no more than to say that humanity exists. That is atheism."[24] Hegel redefined God by creating a character he usually called Spirit but sometimes called God. He tried to make "God" sound theistic by giving God a mind. In some passages, this mind was made to resemble the transcendent mind (existing apart from the universe) of Christianity's theistic God. But some interpreters recognized that Spirit's mind was actually nothing but the collective mind of man. For this reason, and also because Spirit had a physical aspect of which man was a part, God/Spirit was essentially humanity. And Hegel's occasional references to Spirit as "God" were deliberate attempts to make readers believe that he was a theist. Findlay explains: "Hegels philosophy is...one that remains most within the pale of ordinary experience , and which accords no place to entities or properties lying beyond that experience, or to facts undiscoverable by ordinary methods of investigation. Hegel often speaks the language of a metaphysical theology, but such language, it is plain, is a mere concession to the pictorial mode of religious expression. As a philosopher, Hegel believes in no God and no Absolute." [25] Although some interpreters, particularly religious ones, have given c redence to Hegels use of the word "God", Hegels atheism is widely recognized. Tucker (1961) writes: "The whole system is spun out of a formula concerning mans self -elevation from finite to infinite [divine] life. The finite mind [mans] is seen as aggrandizing itself to infinity, becoming universal [Gods] mind...From the standpoint of the Hebraic-Christian theology...this would of course have to be qualified as 'atheism.'"[26] Kaufmann (1966) remarks that Hegels discussion of Spirit "should have caused no misunderstanding, had it not been for Hegels occasional references to God." He later adds that "his [Hegels] religious position may be safely characterized a s a form of humanism."[27] Hyppolite (1974) says that, in Hegels "Revealed Religion" discussion, "the death of Christ is not only the death of the God -man [God incarnate on earth], but also the death of the abstract God [God in heaven] whose transcendence radically separated human existence from his divine essence."[28] Beiser (1993) says this: "Schelling and Hegel...insist that their metaphysics has nothing to do with the supernatural. Their conception of metaphysics is indeed profoundly naturalistic. They banish all occult forces and the supernatural from the universe, explaining everything in terms of natural laws."[29] Pinkard (1994) and Westphal (1998) dont explicitly call Hegel

an atheist but they do interpret Spirit as society and its institutions.[30] These two authors relate Spirit to humanity (human society) and reject the notion that Spirit is a supernatural entity. Thesis-Antithesis-Synthesis "Dialectical" Triads[edit source] Hegel is best known for his use of thesis-antithesis-synthesis dialectics. His thought includes 28 dialectics in Phenomenology of Spiritand 10 in The Philosophy of History, not counting many variants of these 38 dialectics.[31] The chief purpose of these dialectics, which are well hidden and only recently came to light, was to conceal Hegels atheism. Hegel needed to conceal his atheism in order to remain employable in his chosen profession. Solomon explains: [Hegels] Christianity is nothing but nominal, an e laborate subterfuge to protect his professional ambitions in the most religiously conservative country in northern Europe.<Robert Solomon, From Hegel to Existentialism (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), 582</ref> To conceal his hidden messag e of atheism (essentially the message that God is humanity), Hegel used cleverly hidden dialectics. Hegel hid - but hinted at - his dialectics by using inconspicuous substitute terms. Thesis, for example, became primitive stage, first stage, first moment, first realization, the positive element, and many other terms - most commonly just plain moment (meaning stage of a three-stage dialectic).[32] In Phenomenology, the basic overarching dialectic describes the three-stage life of an ersatz God Hegel usually calls Spirit but sometimes (to mislead) calls God. Spirit, defined by Hegel as all reality, has a physical side and a mental side. The phy sical side is every object in the universe, including both natural objects (stars, flowers, rivers, mice, humans) and artificial objects (fences, barns, teacups, doorknobs, shirts). The mental side is the collective mind of man, for which reason Spirit is essentially humanity. Spirits life begins in a prehuman state of nature. Here Spirit has no mind, hence no consciousness, because man (the source of Spirits mind) is not yet present on earth. Pinkard writes, "God, as spirit, is already metaphorically asleep [unconscious] i n nature, and the divine principle of 'spirit' comes to fruition only as humans appear on the planet and create religions." When humans arrive, "spirit . . . wakes up from its natural slumber and becomes conscious of itself."[52] Without a mind, Spirit is not conscious of the many seemingly separate objects that constitute reality, so Spirit is unconsciously united as one entity. This is the thesis stage: unconscious unity. When man arrives on the planet, Spirit acquires its mind and becomes conscious. Each person or subject perceives a multitude of seemingly alien objects that subject (Spirits mind) does not recognize as essentially itself, Spirit. T his is the antithesis stage: conscious separation. Finally, Hegel arrives and becomes part of Spirits mind. In Spirits act of se lfrealization, Hegel realizes that all the alien objects are essentially himself, Spirit, because the inner reality of every thing is Spirit. This is the synthesis stage of Spirits life: conscious unity. The dialectic:

Thesis: unconscious + unity Antithesis: conscious + separation Synthesis: conscious + unity[33]

This dialectic illustrates Hegels usual (but not sole) dialectical format. That format has four cha racteristics: (1) Each stage features two simple concepts that usually consist of just one or two words. (2) Each antithesis concept is the opposite of, not just different from, its thesis counterpart (conscious is the opposite of unconscious, separation the opposite of unity). (3) The synthesis truly

synthesizes (combines), borrowing one concept from the thesis (unity) and one from the antithesis (conscious). (4) The di alectic embodies the Bibles Johannine concept of separation and return, separating from and returning to something in the thesis.[34] (Paul Tillich, himself a dialectician, wrote: Obviously - and it was so intended by Hegel - his dialectics are the religious symbols of estrangement [separation] and reconciliation [return] reduced to empirical descriptions.. [35]) The above dialectic leads to a closely related one. In the closing pages of Phenomenology, Hegel three times characterizes self realization (the synthesis) as achieving freedom. Freedom is a concept that, according to almost all interpreters who have discussed Hegels concept of freedom, involves reaching a proper balance between the rights of the state and the rights of the individual. But that balance hasnt been discussed in Phenomenology. Hegel is instead treating freedom as the opposite of bondage, or slavery. In its initial unconscious state (stage 1: thesis), Spirit has no mind, hence hasnt created gods and cant be in bondage to them. So Spirit is potentially free but cant be actually free until it has a mind. Recall Pinkards statement that, when Spirit achieves consciousness (stage 2: antithesis), the humans who give Spirit its mind and its consciousness create religions. Man thus enters into bondage to - becomes a slave of - God and religious superstition. The bondage entails worship, prayer, monetary support, obedience to arbitrary rules (e.g., kill every witch), embarrassing confessions and penance (in Catholicism), selfflagellation (in Islam), inquisitions, and the gnawing fear of burning in hell for all eternity for such petty offenses as sa ying you fool, premarital sex, or being rich. Self-realization (stage 3: synthesis) destroys God and religion by elevating man to godhood, or infinity; the supernatural God vanishes. The result is the freedom dialectic:

Thesis: potential + freedom Antithesis: actual + bondage Synthesis: actual + freedom

Among the 10 dialectics in Hegels Philosophy of History is this one:

Thesis: One ruler + one territory (Oriental despotism) Antithesis: Many rulers + many territories (Greco-Roman democracy and aristocracy) Synthesis: One ruler + many territories (Prussia, or Hegels Germanic monarchy)[36]

Some of Hegels dialectics depart from the two-concepts-per-stage and use a format in which the synthesis reveals that the antithesis is really the thesis in disguise. In his famous master-and-slave parable, Hegel uses the following dialectic to encode his hidden message that the true God is humanity:

Thesis: man (the slave) Antithesis: God (the master) Synthesis: man = God (slave becomes master, thereby gaining "freedom")[37]

Finite and Infinite[edit source] Hegel's thinking can be understood as a constructive development within the broad tradition that includes Plato and Kant. To this list one could add Proclus, Meister Eckhart, Leibniz, Plotinus, Jakob Boehme, and Rousseau. What all these thinkers share, which

distinguishes them from materialists like Epicurus, the Stoics, and Thomas Hobbes, and from empiricists like David Hume, is that they regard freedom or self-determination both as real. In Hegel's case, however, freedom is not necessarily real; it materializes only in persons who cease to believe in the supernatural. In his discussion of "Spirit" in his Encyclopedia, Hegel praises Aristotle's On the Soul as "by far the most admirable, perhaps even the sole, work of philosophical value on this topic".[38] In his Phenomenology of Spirit and his Science of Logic, Hegel's concern with Kantian topics such as freedom and morality is pervasive. Rather than simply rejecting Kant's dualism of freedom versus nature, Hegel aims to subsume it within "true infinity", the "Concept" (or "Notion": Begriff), "Spirit", and "ethical life" in such a way that the Kantian duality is rendered intelligible, rather than remaining a brute "given." What Hegel is really saying, in deliberately obscure language, is that man (finite) achieves freedom when he elevates himself to godhood (becomes the infinite) by ceasing to believe in the supernatural God of "picture-thinking." The reason this subsumption takes place in a series of concepts is that Hegel's method, in his Science of Logic and his Encyclopedia, is to begin with basic concepts like Being and Nothing, and to develop these through a long sequence of elaborations, including those already mentioned. In this manner, a solution that is reached, in principle, in the account of "true infinity" in the Science of Logic's chapter on "Quality", is repeated in new guises at later stages, all the way to "Spirit" and "ethical life", in the third volume of theEncyclopedia. But to understand what Hegel is really saying (in guarded language) one must understand the meanings he gives to "finite" and "infinite." In Hegel's jargon, "finite" is a synonym for "man" and for "human"; "infinite" is a synonym for "God" and for "divine." And the hidden message that unfolds in Phenomenology is that man is God, or finite = infinite. Tucker explains: "Hegelianism . . . is a religion of self-worship whose fundamental theme is given in Hegel's image of the man who aspires to be God himself, who demands 'something more, namely infinity.' The whole system is spun out of the formula concerning man's self-elevation from finite to infinite life. The finite mind [man's] is seen aggrandizing itself to infinity, becoming universal [God's] mind."[39] The result is "a picture of a self-glorifying humanity striving compulsively, and at the end successfully, to rise to divinity."[40] In this way, Hegel intends to defend the germ of truth in Kantian dualism against reductive or eliminative programs like those of materialism and empiricism. Like Plato, with his dualism of soul versus bodily appetites, Kant pursues the mind's ability to question its felt inclinations or appetites and to come up with a standard of "duty" (or, in Plato's case, "good") which transcends bodily restrictiveness. Hegel preserves this essential Platonic and Kantian concern in the form of (1) infinity going beyond the finite (a process that Hegel in fact relates to "freedom"man's becoming Godand the "ought"[41]), (2) the universal going beyond the particular (in the Concept), and (3) Spirit going beyond Nature (to include humanity and the human mind, the source of Spirit's consciousness). And Hegel renders these dualities intelligible by (ultimately) his argument in the "Quality" chapter of the "Science of Logic." The finite (man) has to become infinite (God, or the divine) in order to achieve reality (Hegel's Spirit is "all reality"). The idea of the absolute excludes multiplicity so "subject" (any observer, part of Spirit's mind) must achieve dialectical synthesis with observed "objects"subject and object must become identicalfor "self-realization" to occur. This is because, as Hegel suggests by his introduction of the concept of "reality",[42] what determines itself - rather than depending on its relations to other things for its essential character - is more fully "real" (following the Latin etymology of "real": more "thing-like") than what does not. Finite things

don't determine themselves, because, as "finite" things, their essential character is determined by their boundaries, over against other finite things. So, in order to become "real" (Spirit is "all reality"), they must go beyond their finitude by becoming infinite, or divine ("finitude is only as a transcending of itself"[43]). The result of this argument is that finite and infiniteand, by extension, particular (any object, always finite or individual) and universal (Spirit, the infinite or general category), bondage and freedom don't face one another as two independent realities. Instead, the members of each pair are, respectively, an antithesis and a synthesis. The latter (in each case) is the transcending of the former.[44]Infinity, universality, and freedom are states reached when Spirit achieves self-realization: when Hegel (part of Spirit's entirely human mind) arrives and "realizes" that the many external "objects" he sees are not really "alien" but are himself, because the inner reality of everything in the universe is Spirit, Hegel's redefined atheistic God. The relationships between (1) finite and infinite, (2) human and divine, (3) natural (man) and artificial (the man-made God of theism), (4) particular (man) and universal (Spirit, the nonsupernatural God), (5) consciousness (viewing external "objects" as "alien") and self-consciousness (viewing external objects as one's self, because both are Spirit or "God") and (5) bondage (religious belief) and freedom (atheism) become intelligible. In each of the preceding five pairs of concepts, the first member is transformed into the second (synthesis replaces antithesis) when self-realization occurs--when a human realizes the he and not the man-made (artificial) God imagined to exist in heaven is the true infinite. Progress[edit source] The obscure writings of Jakob Bhme had a strong effect on Hegel. Bhme had written that the Fall of Man was a necessary stage in the evolution of the universe. This evolution was, itself, the result of God's desire for complete self-awareness. Hegel was fascinated by the works of Kant, Rousseau, and Goethe, and by the French Revolution. Modern philosophy, culture, and society seemed to Hegel fraught with contradictions and tensions, such as those between the subject and object of knowledge, mind and nature, self and Other, freedom and authority, knowledge and faith, the Enlightenment and Romanticism. Hegel's main philosophical project was to take these contradictions and tensions and interpret them as part of a comprehensive, evolving, rational unity that, in different contexts, he called "the absolute idea" or "absolute knowledge". According to Hegel, the main characteristic of this unity was that it evolved through and manifested itself in contradiction and negation. Contradiction and negation have a dynamic quality that at every point in each domain of realityconsciousness, history, philosophy, art, nature, societyleads to further development until a rational unity is reached. This unity preserves the contradictions as phases and sub-parts by lifting them up (Aufhebung) to a higher unity. This whole is mental because it is mind that can comprehend all of these phases and sub-parts as steps in its own process of comprehension. It is rational because the same, underlying, logical, developmental order underlies every domain of reality and is ultimately the order of self-conscious rational thought, although only in the later stages of development does it come to full self-consciousness. The rational, selfconscious whole is not a thing or being that lies outside of other existing things or minds. Rather, it is something that comes to completion only in the philosophical comprehension of individual existing human minds. The minds, through their own eventual understanding, bring this developmental process to its fruition.

"Mind" and "Spirit" are the common English translations of Hegel's use of the German "Geist". Some[who?] have argued that either of these terms overly "psychologize" Hegel,[citation needed] implying a kind of disembodied, solipsistic consciousness like ghost or "soul." Geist combines the meaning of spiritas in god, ghost or mindwith an intentional force. In Hegel's early philosophy of nature (draft manuscripts written during his time at the University of Jena), Hegel's notion of "Geist" was tightly bound to the notion of "Aether" from which Hegel also derived the concepts of space and time; however in his later works (after Jena) Hegel did not explicitly use his old notion of "Aether" any more.[45] Central to Hegel's conception of knowledge and mind (and therefore also of reality) was the notion of identity in difference. A human observer ("subject") perceives an "object" that, before self-realization occurs, is thought to be "alien," meaning something other than "subject." This misperception occurs because "subject" is judging the "object" by it's outer appearance rather than by its inner reality. But in truth the "alien" object is identical to the observing subject, for both are Spirit: both have Spirit as their inner reality. Hegel can therefor state: "The object is revealed to it [to "subject"] by [as] something alien, and it does not recognize itself."[46] When selfrealization occurs, "subject" (Hegel in this case) recognizes "object" as itself rather than something "alien": subject realizes that every object in the universe, including "subject" and other humans, is part of Spirit and is therefore divine or infinite, or the true God (contrasted with the false God of religious supernaturalism). "Identity in difference" is the basis for Hegel's subject-object identity dialectic, which uses the format in which the synthesis reveals that the antithesis is really the thesis in disguise:

Thesis: subject (the observer) Antithesis: object (the observed, ostensibly the opposite of subject) Synthesis: subject = object (subject and object are both Spirit)[47]

Subject-object identity is also the basis for Hegel's "Observing Reason" and "Physiognomy-Phrenology" dialectic, the outer-inner dialectic. This dialectic contrasts the outer appearance of the observed "object" with its inner reality:

Thesis: outer (what the "alien" object appears to be on its outside) Antithesis: inner (what the object actually is on the inside) Synthesis: outer = inner (the object is both outer and inner, or appearance and inner reality)[48]

Civil society[edit source] See also: Civil society Hegel made the distinction between civil society and state in his Elements of the Philosophy of Right.[49] In this work, civil society (Hegel used the term "brgerliche Gesellschaft" though it is now referred to as Zivilgesellschaft in German to emphasize a more inclusive community) was a stage in the dialectical relationship that occurs between Hegel's perceived opposites, the macrocommunity of the state and the micro-community of the family.[50] Broadly speaking, the term was split, like Hegel's followers, to the political leftand right. On the left, it became the foundation for Karl Marx's civil society as an economic base;[51] to the right, it became a description for all non-state aspects of society, including culture, society and politics. [52] This liberal distinction between political society and civil society was followed by Alexis de Tocqueville.[51] In fact, Hegel's distinctions as to what he meant by civil society are often unclear. For example, while it seems to be the case that he felt that a civil-society such as the German

society in which he lived was an inevitable movement of the dialectic, he made way for the crushing of other types of "lesser" and not fully realized types of civil society, as these societies were not fully conscious or aware, as it were, as to the lack of progress in their societies. Thus, it was perfectly legitimate in the eyes of Hegel for a conqueror, such as Napoleon, to come along and destroy that which was not fully realized. Heraclitus[edit source] According to Hegel, "Heraclitus is the one who first declared the nature of the infinite and first grasped nature as in itself infinite, that is, its essence as process. The origin of philosophy is to be dated from Heraclitus. His is the persistent Idea that is the same in all philosophers up to the present day, as it was the Idea of Plato and Aristotle." [53] For Hegel, Heraclitus's great achievements were to have understood the nature of the infinite, which for Hegel includes understanding the inherent contradictoriness and negativity of reality, and to have grasped that reality is becoming or process, and that "being" and "nothingness" are mere empty abstractions. According to Hegel, Heraclitus's "obscurity" comes from his being a true (in Hegel's terms "speculative") philosopher who grasped the ultimate philosophical truth and therefore expressed himself in a way that goes beyond the abstract and limited nature of common sense and is difficult to grasp by those who operate within common sense. Hegel asserted that in Heraclitus he had an antecedent for his logic: "... there is no proposition of Heraclitus which I have not adopted in my logic.