“God Himself Is Dead”: Returning to Hegel’s Doctrine of Incarnation

Abstract

This essay presents a certain defense of Hegel’s doctrine of Incarnation. For Hegel, the logic of the Incarnation constitutes not only the highest insight of religion and theology but, arguably, the key to philosophy itself, as the perfected self-knowledge of the absolute. Such knowledge is what Hegel calls “absolute knowing”, and marks the absolute reconciliation of the knowing subject and its object, substance, or in other words: of the domains of, as it were, historical knowledge and eternal truth. Hegel discovers in the Christian doctrine of Incarnation the logic of this very reconciliation of history and eternity: truth, or the absolute, coincides with the subject’s knowledge of it, which not only includes but privileges the historical “dismemberment” involved in such knowing. Only in Christianity does God dismember himself, or become historical—sacrifice himself, die—in order to know and become himself. But this “death of God” is for Hegel the very meaning of modern subjectivity. For this reason, or if Hegel is right, the Hegelian subject constitutes the sole way in which the desire of philosophy—namely, for the other that truth is—can keep itself from becoming incoherent after the death of God. It is not merely that Hegel’s doctrine of the subject remains valid despite the death of God; rather, the Hegelian subject, whose logic is incarnational and for this reason founds itself on the “death of God”, stands as the sole coherent articulation of this event, even and especially in its Nietzschean guise.

1. Introduction

Hegel’s radical interpretation of the Christian doctrine of Incarnation is the keystone of not only his theology but his entire metaphysics. At the same time, this interpretation followed logically from this very metaphysics. That is, if Hegelian logic is essentially “incarnational”, kenotic,1—predicated upon the self-emptying, or as Hegel wrote, “self-sundering or stepping-forth”,2 character of being, or the absolute—this logic or metaphysics itself forces us to reconsider the doctrinal meaning of the Incarnation or kenosis of God, insofar as this constitutes the central teaching and uniqueness of Christianity. Hegelian metaphysics in this way aspired to nothing less than a transformation of our understanding of the very kernel of both Christian doctrine and theology.

It is on the other hand rare to find theologians, much less Christians, who today even betray much less declare the influence upon their theology and belief of Hegelian logic, not least to the extent that Hegel himself believed would be necessary if Christianity were to not only survive but come into its own, as it were, in what German Idealism established as the first truly scientific culture. And so perhaps this doctrine, in its Hegelian form, belongs now to the “history of ideas”, insofar as we may also consider Hegel’s metaphysics to itself belong to such a gallery or museum of things dead and gone, now merely “on display” to be wondered at. If Hegel’s metaphysics undeniably “failed”, why should one bother with the consequences of this metaphysics for the doctrine of Incarnation—which perhaps stands in no need of any metaphysics, besides?

Such an assessment would be hasty for at least the following reason. It is indisputable that both philosophy and religion now exist in a post-Nietzschean era. “God is dead” is not only the most famous slogan of this radically anti-Christian thinker—it is no less the formula for the nihilism in which even those who remain unaware of or uninterested in Nietzsche’s diagnosis are forced to exist, to think, to believe. To paraphrase Flannery O’Connor, nihilism is today not a position; it is the very air we breathe. Anyone who does not recognize nihilism and its detrimental effects on not only knowledge and belief, but their very possibility, has not yet caught up with the greatest believers and theologians of the past century and a half.

Although the phrase “God is dead” is always traced back to Nietzsche as its most famous (and loudest) preacher, it is in fact Hegel—an avowedly “Christian philosopher”—who first and literally announced it, claiming it not only for philosophy, but as the latter’s principle. That is to say, what this phrase indicates was already both the presupposition and the aim of Hegel’s philosophy. That God is dead means, according to Nietzsche, that God has been “killed”—and not only killed, but sacrificed. God has died in the historical movement of what Nietzsche calls the “will to truth”, which, as we shall see, is governed by a logic of sacrifice. Although originally determined as the desire for God, who alone is truth, the will to truth, in its ever more extreme sacrifice of humanity’s “idols”, inevitably turned itself against all gods with the emergence of scientific culture. Eventually, the will to truth would “run out” of idols to smash, and would, as its final act, turn its gaze upon itself. The will to truth would come to view not only its object, but its very desire with suspicion, and Nietzsche describes this result in terms of the emergence of the question of the value of this very will, or “the will to truth’s becoming-conscious-of-itself … as a problem”.3

This formulation is essentially Hegelian in both its terminology and its significance. As the Phenomenology of Spirit had demonstrated, the subject of knowledge, in coming to know its “other”, realizes its goal only in a self-knowledge that results in the annulment or sacrifice of this very relation, this very “other”. Science, or the knowledge of the other of the subject (i.e., substance), culminates in the sacrifice of both for the sake of their truth—that is to say, culminates in the sacrifice that the absolute makes of itself, against itself for the sake of itself. In the “Religion” section of his work, Hegel describes the negative side of this result, or the loss of the other of knowing, in theological terms:

God Himself is dead. This hard saying is the expression of innermost simple self-knowledge, the return of consciousness into the depths of the night in which “I”=“I”, a night which no longer distinguishes or knows anything outside of it.

4

For Hegel, the death of God, the loss of any “out-and-out Other”,5 because it returns the subject to the purest and simplest self-knowledge, plunging it into the “depths of the night” that it is, is the negative aspect of a knowing that has become absolute:

This feeling is, in fact, the loss of substance [i.e., of being and truth] and of its appearance over against consciousness; but it is at the same time the pure subjectivity of substance, or the pure certainty of itself which it lacked when it was object, or the immediate, or pure essence. This Knowing is the inbreathing of the Spirit, whereby Substance becomes Subject, by which its abstraction and lifelessness have died, and Substance therefore has become actual and simple and universal Self-consciousness.

6

The death of God is not merely the loss of substance, truth, but their discovery, insofar as both substance and truth mean “the pure subjectivity of substance [i.e., being], or the pure certainty of itself”. The “loss” of substance, in other words, is the determinate negation in and through which that which is lost returns to and, indeed, becomes itself, or what it is. In the loss of itself, substance reveals itself to be no less subject, subjectivity, or the certainty it possesses of itself as this self-relation, for which certainty and relation absolute self-loss will have been both necessary and sufficient.

As is the case for Nietzsche, the death of God for Hegel exposes, then, the true relation between knowing and its “other”, or the real situation of the subject in relation to its highest object, namely: that this object is nothing other than its own activity. As Nietzsche put it, the will to truth has become conscious of itself, has made itself its own object. And as he might say, what it has discovered, in truly looking at itself for the first time, is that truth and its desire are nothing at all “divine”, but human, all too human. On the other hand, the death of the other of knowledge at the hands of science, at the hands of knowledge itself, was the principle of Hegel’s thought because this death is, according to Hegel, already the essential revelation of Christianity itself; the becoming-self-conscious of the “will to truth” is thus, for Hegel, not only divine, but absolute reconciliation with the Divine as such. That God is dead means, for Hegel, that Christianity, as the consummate religion of reconciliation, is the truth.

Hegel is a self-consciously Christian philosopher, and it is because he is so that his philosophy in fact possesses more power than Nietzsche’s to expose the true significance of the death of God. For Hegel, this exposition coincides with the exposition of the subject itself. If Nietzsche essentially closes the case on the Incarnation as the event that (as Christianity teaches) is most indispensable for understanding ourselves—because he essentially treats this “event” as one among several of the most serious religious “fabrications”—Hegel paradoxically discovers in the Incarnation, explicated philosophically and with a far greater subtlety than Nietzsche was ever capable of, the event that was itself necessary for the development and certainty of modern subjectivity, which alone makes possible the ultimate overcoming of religious delusion and, indeed, of religion as such.

In pairing these thinkers along the axis of the question and place of the subject, we will not simply oppose Hegel to Nietzsche in defending the former’s thinking over the latter’s; rather, we will attempt to show, if only in outline, how Nietzsche’s construal of the death of God, considered in terms of its relevance for philosophy, not only is dependent upon the Hegelian logic of Christianity as that which pre-eminently “overcomes” itself, but proves lacking by comparison with his predecessor when it comes to the question of maintaining a coherent and, indeed, honest theory of the relationship between self-consciousness and truth.

2. The Sacrifice of God

Nietzsche perceived in the death of God the death of “man” himself. Primarily, the death of God marked the transference of the possibility and power of creation—or what Nietzsche calls the willing not merely of values, but of value as such—from the divine to the earthly realm. Indeed, the death of God meant in the first instance the imperative and, as it were, a certain necessity to create, to will, that which would be beyond both God and “man”, or the being who had always defined himself as religious, as moral. What lay beyond both God and man would be nothing but the possibility of a new evaluation of the “meaning of the earth”, namely: the overman: “Dead are all gods: now we want the overman to live!”7 Despite Zarathustra’s subsequent equivocation (in the second and third parts of Nietzsche’s magnum opus) on the meaning or even the possibility of the overman, it is nevertheless certain that the doctrine emerges and persists (in, e.g., the figures of the “free spirit” or the “philosopher commander”) for Nietzsche as the possibility of creation—or of the will to power in its affirmative truth—and, moreover, as this possibility and truth only relative to the double-sacrifice of God and man; or, otherwise said, relative to the radical alteration that has taken place in humanity’s relation to the divine, and therefore to itself. The overman, which constitutes an immanent and atheistic doctrine of creation, as it were, can even be said to represent, figuratively, nothing other than a new relation of man to the divine—Nietzsche calls this “atheism”—and for this reason to himself.8 The human becomes a creator, or discovers himself as will to power—“and nothing besides!”9 —when he finds in himself the power of ultimate evaluation that he hitherto ascribed to God; and, as On the Genealogy of Morality shows, he discovers himself as this power through his sacrifice of God in and through his will to truth.

The sacrifice of both God and man—of God at the hands of man, through the latter’s will to truth, and of man at the hands of himself, as the consequence of this “killing” of God—constitutes for Nietzsche, as it does for Hegel himself, the end of religion in two senses, namely, as both the annihilation and the aim of religion. This sacrifice must therefore be experienced (indeed suffered) as this end in the sense that it is as much (1) the abolishing of what Hegel called “religious consciousness” as it is (2) the aim or final desire of this very consciousness. This dialectic is, indeed, Hegelian, but it is Kierkegaard who expresses it most exquisitely. Religion is desire, the practice and discipline of the most passionate longing; indeed, it is passion itself, in the literal sense of suffering before and on account of the other. “But the highest power of every passion”, as Kierkegaard remarked, “is always to will its own annihilation.”10 That is, especially religious passion aspires to the annihilation of this passion in a perfect union with and knowledge of its “other”, its “object”. This is why, for Hegel, Christianity is the consummate religion: it reveals the truth of religion as such, inasmuch as religious consciousness desires to know both its other and—what this in fact means—itself in relation to this other, absolutely. But to know the relation of oneself to the other is to know oneself as this relation, and the other as the same. This means, then, to know oneself as the other, and the other as oneself, in the sacrifice of both—or better said, of their opposition—which sacrifice alone makes this coincidence, or ultimate reconciliation, both possible and necessary. Christianity, and it alone, entails not only the sacrifice of humanity for the sake of the other (Nietzsche calls this the “will to truth”), but in and through this very sacrifice, this very will to truth or passion, the sacrifice of God and the gods, in and through humanity.

Nietzsche as much as Hegel discerned this essential characteristic of Christianity, namely, that it would itself be the site and source of its own “overcoming”. As he asks in his Genealogy:

What, strictly speaking, has actually conquered the Christian God? The answer is in my Gay Science …: “Christian morality itself, the concept of truthfulness that was taken more and more seriously, the confessional punctiliousness of Christian conscience, translated and sublimated into scientific consciousness, into intellectual rigour at any price. Regarding nature as though it were a proof of God’s goodness and providence; interpreting history in honour of divine reason, as a constant testimonial to an ethical world order and ethical ultimate purpose; explaining all one’s own experiences in the way pious folk have done for long enough, as though everything were providence, a sign, intended, and sent for the salvation of the soul: now all that is over, it has conscience against it, every sensitive conscience sees it as indecent, dishonest, as a pack of lies, feminism, weakness, cowardice,—this severity makes us good Europeans if anything does, and heirs to Europe’s most protracted and bravest self-overcoming!”

11

That is to say, as men of science, who now know the truth of our relation to both the other and to ourselves, we are precisely the heirs of Christianity, or of its truth, which lies in the “bravest” self-overcoming yet accomplished by human beings. But how, or rather why, does—must—Christianity “overcome” itself? Why specifically does this most extreme of human passions, Christian existence, ultimately will, to again quote Kierkegaard, “its own annihilation”? According to Nietzsche, the Christian God, and the consciousness that stood in relation to this god, constituted the very being of European man, and always necessitated the most extreme sacrifices—indeed, the most severe cruelty: a cruelty toward oneself for the sake of truth. Christianity first revealed the meaning of humanity as sacrifice for the truth. But this sacrifice, which is without limits, inevitably turns on itself, resulting in the question of its very “reason for being”. That is, the imperative to honesty, to truthfulness, to “intellectual rigour at any price”, itself asks: Why honesty? Why truthfulness? Why intellectual rigor? But, for Nietzsche, this means: What value do truth and the will to truth in general really possess?

Who is it really that questions us here? What in us really wills the truth? In fact, we paused for a long time before the question of the cause of this will—until we finally came to a complete standstill in front of an even more fundamental question. We asked about the value of this will. Granted, we will truth: why not untruth instead? And uncertainty? Even ignorance? The problem of the value of truth came before us—or was it we who came before the problem? Which of us is Oedipus? Which one is the Sphinx? It seems we have a rendezvous of questions and question-marks—And, believe it or not, it ultimately looks to us as if the problem has never been raised until now—as if we were the first to ever see it, fix our gaze on it, risk it. Because this involves risk and perhaps no risk has ever been greater.

12

In a passage that recalls the Hegelian logic of sublation, Nietzsche explains how it is that the Christian “will to truth” resulted, then, not only in the self-overcoming and sacrifice of Christianity as a “dogma” and as a “morality”, but in the question—which is the meaning of “our being”—of the very value of this will to truth, this will to and for the other, through which Christianity both was and overcame itself. Humanity now stands on the brink of its final sacrifice: the sacrifice of the will to truth—which is not only a figure of morality but its very essence—as the culmination of this very will:

All great things bring about their own demise through an act of self-sublimation: that is the law of life, the law of necessary “self-overcoming” in the essence of life—the lawgiver himself is always ultimately exposed to the cry: “patere legem, quam ipse tulisti [submit to the law you yourself have made]”. In this way, Christianity as a dogma was destroyed by its own morality, in the same way Christianity as a morality must also be destroyed,—we stand on the threshold of this occurrence. After Christian truthfulness has drawn one conclusion after another, it will finally draw the strongest conclusion, that against itself; this will, however, happen when it asks itself, “What does all will to truth mean?” … and here I touch on my problem again, on our problem, my unknown friends (—because I don’t know of any friend as yet): what meaning does our being have, if it were not that the will to truth has become conscious of itself as a problem in us? … Without a doubt, from now on, morality will be destroyed by the will to truth’s becoming-conscious-of-itself: that great drama in a hundred acts reserved for Europe in the next two centuries, the most terrible, most questionable drama but perhaps also the one most rich in hope …

13

In the final sentence of this passage, Nietzsche suggests that the result of the will to truth’s becoming-conscious-of-itself, or questioning its very reason for being, is essentially historical, and indeed constitutes the inauguration of a new era or “drama”. The final result of Christianity—nihilism—is, therefore, not the end of history but a turning point—or perhaps even its beginning. It indicates in any case a crisis, in the literal sense of a moment of decision, i.e., of will. And this is at least a great part of the meaning of the human being’s new possibility as a creator and as will to power—as the willing of itself as “overman” and, indeed, of this man as the meaning of the earth.

And yet one might well ask: How is history supposed to be possible absent the irreducible integrity of its very condition? In other words, what would history be without both the will or desire for the other, and—as the condition of this will—a belief that this will, this desire, this other, means something, absolutely? As Derrida correctly observed, history is inextricably tied “to religious faith through a form of involvement with or relation to the other …”.14 Without a belief in the other, without “faith”, history becomes something impossible, without meaning. Or, as Hegel had already demonstrated, when the desire to know becomes conscious of itself as this desire—when knowing realizes that its relation to its other is nothing other than its relation to itself—and knowing therein becomes its own “object”, the sacrifice of the other “in itself” that takes place in this realization is, in the first place, the sacrifice of history itself. This is for no other reason than that, in achieving what Hegel calls absolute knowing, spirit—or knowing, insofar as it is historical—can no longer permit itself the belief in, or relation to, the being or other “in itself” that alone makes history as the will to knowledge or truth possible. This other no longer “means” anything, and this is why the will to truth has become conscious of itself as a problem, or why the very meaning of our being brings us to question: What does all will to truth mean? We shall return to the question of history in this connection further on.

Sacrifice, and especially the most extreme sacrifice that the will to truth is, depends essentially upon a relation to an other. Would the other, insofar as the will to truth means something, not then be irreducible? In a passage from Daybreak, Nietzsche recognized that this was so, and that truth was, irreducibly, the other to and for which alone humanity could achieve its very being as sacrifice:

Of all the means of producing exaltation, it has been human sacrifice which has at all times most exalted and elevated man. And perhaps every other endeavour could still be thrown down by one tremendous idea, so that it would achieve victory over the most victorious—the idea of humanity sacrificing itself. But to whom should humanity sacrifice itself? One could already take one’s oath that, if ever the constellation of this idea appears over the horizon, the knowledge of truth would remain as the one tremendous goal commensurate with such a sacrifice, because for this goal no sacrifice is too great.

15

Again, it is of particular importance that Nietzsche recognizes that every sacrifice is a sacrifice for and to something—or someone. To an “other”. And that as such, the other remains both the “goal” and thereby the condition of every sacrifice. But given that what is at stake in this passage, i.e., in “the idea of humanity sacrificing itself”—reading it through the “lens” of the Genealogy—is the sacrifice of sacrifice itself, of the will to truth itself or the most extreme sacrificial mode of being, one might rephrase Nietzsche’s question in the following, paradoxical terms: But to whom can humanity sacrifice its very being as sacrifice, i.e., its very relation to the “other” in and through which alone sacrifice is possible? To which other is it possible to sacrifice the other as such?

In fact, Nietzsche did not reach further than—and in fact he fell, as we shall see, rather short of—the Kierkegaardian paradox of a knowledge or will to truth that, in willing its own annihilation, depended upon itself for this very annihilation, or as Nietzsche put it, for the radical placing into question of itself. On the question of the relation between knowledge and its other, Kierkegaard had stated that

the understanding [i.e., the “will to truth”, to knowledge] cannot absolutely negate itself, but uses itself in order to do this and thus thinks this difference [between itself and its own absolute negation, its own annihilation] in its own terms, that it thinks via itself; it cannot go beyond itself absolutely and thus conceives this thing which transcends itself [that is, its own annihilation] by means of itself. … It would appear we have arrived at a paradox. … The understanding cannot think it, could not hit upon it, and when it is asserted, cannot understand it, but senses only that it must be its ruin. To this extent, the understanding has much to object to in the paradox, and yet, on the other hand the paradoxical passion of the understanding is to will its own annihilation.

16

This “paradox”, in which Kierkegaard perceived the ruin and self-annihilation of knowledge—the complete despair of reason—is also as far as Nietzsche’s thinking reaches. This is evidenced by the fact that the most severe contradiction characterizes especially his mature work, which contradiction nearly renders his thinking incoherent, and which can be described as follows: at the same time that Nietzsche’s thought only means anything insofar as we are able to encounter it as the most severe attempt yet by any philosopher to be as honest and as truthful as possible, this very thought no longer possesses the resources—indeed it destroys them—to be capable of justifying the “value” of truth, or of even saying what honesty, what truthfulness, positively mean. That is, Nietzsche’s thought is incapable of separating or justifying absolutely the value of the “imperative” of, or the desire for, honesty or truthfulness from its opposite, namely, the value of lying, of deceiving oneself—which deception is, in fact, more valuable for life. As a unique negation of life (or as Socrates famously said of philosophy, as the practice of death), the will to truth remains a “moral” imperative, or as Nietzsche states in his Genealogy, the very “kernel” of the “ascetic ideal”. And yet, insofar as the origins of this ideal have been exposed—have been reduced, in the most severe rejection of “idealism” imaginable, to a mere contingency within a godless cosmos defined exclusively in terms of relations of power—the result is that the will to truth must itself, in the final analysis, be defined solely in terms of such relations. But if this is so, then the “value” of truth becomes itself contingent upon the aims of power, and hence entirely “instrumental” for a certain mode of life—and for this reason not only relative but, on account of its “slavish” origins, uniquely suspect. What does all will to truth mean? We must hear in this question that unspoken and yet presupposed ground to which all “meaning” is relative for Nietzsche, namely, “life”, or the will to power that defines it. What does all will to truth mean relative to the will to power that defines all life?17

Essentially, it can mean neither more nor less than anything else: the will to truth is at bottom a mere peculiarity of “natural” existence; more specifically, it is merely the result of contingent relations of vital power, or of a style of racial and psychological breeding that was developed for the sake of altering these relations, of turning the ancient world upside-down. Having exposed the psychological and racial meaning of the will to truth as the mere invention or “power play”, as it were, of a particular form of life, Nietzsche is unable to justify his own “preference” for truth qua truth, and his own “honesty” and “truthfulness” fall prey to that which such have revealed, namely, a cosmos within which “being honest” and “desiring truth” at bottom mean nothing more than their opposite, namely, the merely useful intensification, for an animal that has been bred in a particular way, of certain quanta of force.

To his credit, Nietzsche recognized this problem repeatedly, as already evinced in the question he raises near the end of the Genealogy, and which we have quoted a number of times now. And yet the paradox—which Kierkegaard had already confronted in order to courageously and honestly refer it to the realm of faith, belief—is that the very question concerning the “truth of truth” presupposes that truth and the will to truth “mean” something, irreducibly, and perhaps everything. The question is posed to an other that not only does not exist, but perhaps much more problematically, no longer means anything. And yet Nietzsche would not even have been able to raise the question of the “truth of truth” without believing in the other who would alone render such a question meaningful:

The question, the request, and the appeal must indeed have begun, since the eve of their awakening, by receiving accreditation from the other: by being believed. Nietzsche must indeed believe he knows what believing means, unless he means it to make-believe.

18

In annihilating the other in the name of truthfulness, Nietzsche, unlike Kierkegaard, forgot that he still believed in this very other. He no less forgot—or rather, and again quite unlike Kierkegaard, he likely did not know—what the culminating philosophy of German Idealism had in fact achieved and demonstrated, namely, that the genuine overcoming of the abstract other—the other of religion, of morality, of the historical desire for truth—occurs not in its equally abstract annihilation, which can only ever be make-believe, but in its sublation.

Outside the Kierkegaardian self-conscious assignment of the paradox that knowledge results in its own annihilation to the domain of religion—where belief in the other of knowing becomes necessary, becomes the highest realization of the subject who, beyond the subject of mere reason, is the subject of faith—the only possibility here was, in fact, already demonstrated by Hegel. One can only sacrifice the other of knowledge, or the other “in itself”, to and for an other that has itself become “in and for itself”, or, in Nietzsche’s own words, to a “will to truth” that “has become conscious of itself”. And yet in order that this sacrifice not result in the annihilation of knowledge—which would no less be the annihilation of itself, or the becoming-meaningless of the will to truth and knowing, whereafter the will to truth must become a matter of mere “belief” and “faith”—the will to truth must be asserted and demonstrated to be irreducible: that is to say, primitive in its self-relation, radically self-founding. As such, this will, this desire, cannot itself be “located” by a genealogical method that, at the same time that its sole materialist principle is the contingent variations of racial and psychological “power”, nevertheless and incoherently insists upon—believes in—this very will to truth, or its own absolute difference from mere rhetoric.

To sacrifice the other, God, to the other that oneself is, i.e., to and for the sake of a knowledge that has become absolutely self-conscious and therefore absolutely other to itself, is to affirm the fact of subjectivity as irreducible. The subject “knows” its other “absolutely”—and therefore has “killed” this other—but this murder does not for this reason result in the abstract “annihilation” of the other. Rather, because knowledge knows itself to be the truth of its relation to the other, the other is sublated in a relation of identity between knowledge and its other, wherein both have become in and for themselves, or absolute. The subject is nothing other than this movement of negation, of sacrifice, in and through which, in both annulling and actualizing its relation to the other, reveals the irreducible and self-relating otherness that the subject (and therefore the other) is to itself. Only in this way can the sacrifice or death of God, of truth itself in the accomplishment of knowledge, be considered at the same time to be the attainment of truth, of knowledge. For truth is nothing but this absolute self-relation, wherein the subject establishes itself as the irreducible identity of truth and its own knowledge.

In his polemic against Christian and especially German philosophers, Nietzsche forgot about the subject, because he forgot about, or passed too swiftly over, Hegel. Or as Bataille remarked, Nietzsche “knew of Hegel only the usual vulgarization”.19

3. The Subject of Incarnation

The logic of the subject—defined as the sacrifice of its other for the sake of the other, and which sacrifice coincides with the sacrifice of itself for the sake of itself—and what this logic means for the relation between knowledge and truth, which is to say science, can be presented most acutely by investigating Hegel’s most provocative doctrine, absolute knowing, in terms of its significance in relation to history and to time itself, which, as intimated above, constitutes the horizon of the human being’s “spiritual” existence as the being that realizes this existence, or the truth of spirit, by sacrificing itself.

The cancellation or annulment of time, qua history, which takes place in absolute knowing, means nothing less than the annulment of world as such. This is not merely the most extreme or “purest” sacrifice; it is, ultimately—and this is the point—the very notion or concept of sacrifice, or the point wherein sacrifice becomes thought, and thought realizes or perfects itself as that which it always already was: the cancellation of world. Insofar as time as much as world, as one-sided shapes through which spirit realizes itself, are ravaged by their own otherness, by spirit’s relation to its other—which relation, in the act of sacrifice, realizes itself as an immanent or internal otherness, the otherness of spirit to itself—one might hazard the Hegelian formula that world as much as history “are” inasmuch as they are ravaged by a literally spirit-ual negativity that, outside the moment of absolute knowing, remains irreducibly abstract. Spirit and its movement, the self-sublation of the other in itself, which is no less spirit’s self-sublation in relation to its other, is history, its meaning and existence. History realizes itself, is itself, by annulling itself, the “other” that is its essential condition. Nietzsche perceived this closure of (Christian) history clearly, and diagnosed this annulment as the death of God and the emergence of nihilism.

And yet, as stated above, Nietzsche did not see the death of God and its consequences as the end of history as such, but rather as a turning point and, indeed, a new beginning. For Nietzsche, apparently, “history” meant something other than Christian history, or was, as it were, the genus of which Christian history was merely a species. But such a position was only possible inasmuch as he failed to see that the death of God meant nothing other than the fact of subjectivity—of the subject that comes to itself precisely in the closure of historical possibility as such. History just means the coming to itself of the subject, i.e., for Hegel, the revelation of the (Christian) truth of God in the death of God, or the revelation of the absolute subject, which is nothing less than the completion or end of history as such. Christianity is for this reason not merely one religion among others, one “history” among others—still less is it the result of the contingencies of racial and psychological power, which would suggest (and Nietzsche says as much) that it could be overcome and replaced through a radical and willed alteration of such power; on the contrary, Christianity, as that which culminates in the revelation of the truth of the relation between God and humanity—or, again, in the fact of subjectivity—is for this reason absolutely singular, and indeed singularity as such.20

The negativity—which Hegel calls “subject”—that collapses or sublates the difference between spirit and its other, the human and God, does not merely ravage the world and history, but defines them. In the Phenomenology of Spirit, being means, initially, the immediacy of substance, or the other of spirit (of subject), which develops of itself into the world and history, time; with absolute knowing, substance or the other comes to itself, and in coming to itself, in and through its relation to subject, sacrifices itself in a way that is final. This finality is not only the sacrifice of being, but the sacrifice of sacrifice itself—of finite and historical spirit that ultimately coincides with religion as a form of finite or one-sided consciousness. Being qua world as much as qua history, time, are, in themselves, sublated, and the true significance of being is revealed in its absolute coincidence with the subject of knowledge.

In the sacrifice of sacrifice, this subject, or knowing itself, becomes the ultimate meaning of sacrifice, and a philosophical concept of sacrifice first becomes both possible and necessary. In being itself defined as sacrifice, the subject thinks sacrifice, itself as absolute sacrifice. The result of the concept of sacrifice, the “becoming-thought” of sacrifice, is nothing less than the reflection of sacrifice into itself, its own destruction, or becoming-other to itself: everything that has been experienced or suffered to be sacrifice, historically, in relation to an indeterminate “other”—to an other that is not the otherness to itself of this very experience and suffering—is annulled, exposed as abstract. Being, as the essential historical experience of sacrifice in relation to the gods, now means, from the standpoint of absolute knowing, the sacrifice of itself, of its substantial and historical content, for the sake of itself as that which has transcended history, and therefore religion, absolutely: absolute sacrifice.

There are at least three senses in which absolute knowing can be said not only to be exemplary of sacrifice, but to expose the fact that the subject of knowledge, which is irreducible, means, as such, sacrifice. The subject of absolute knowing means the sacrifice

(1)

of world history and time itself in the absolute self-relation of knowing;21

(2)

of phenomenology, qua scientific method, and with it the standpoint of such a method or way, i.e., consciousness, in their sublation into pure thinking or “logic”;22 and

(3)

of knowledge itself, in its absolving itself of the totality of the merely finite content of consciousness, of the content “in itself” of every moment of the other-inflected development of knowing.23

In general, these aspects of the sacrifice that constitutes absolute knowing all indicate in the first place and literally the sacrifice of a religious way of being. Insofar as consciousness is historical, it relates to an “other” that it considers irreducible—which other, whatever other name it comes to possess, always means “God”. The term “way” (in our formula “the sacrifice of a religious way of being”) must be understood here in accordance with three distinct yet identical sacrifices made in and through absolute knowing: religion is sacrificed (1) as a mode of being, namely, as history; (2) as a method of being, or phenomenology, the science of mere experience; and (3) as a path of and to knowledge, or the anguish of religious consciousness and desire. Thus, to translate:

(1)

the sacrifice of history as a(n intrinsically) religious mode of being indicates that being qua temporal, i.e., historical being (in relation to the gods, to the other) has ended itself, has at the moment of its self-cancellation raised itself up to a higher, other-less, and godless mode of being; or, to be more precise, to a mode of being in which the subject of knowledge and desire is itself its own otherness;

(2)

the sacrifice of phenomenology, or of a finite standpoint in general, as a method of being—insofar as such can be defined as that standpoint and development of knowledge that always has its object “before it”, as something minimally external to its knowledge, something irreducibly other that escapes (at the same time that it compels) its knowing grasp—indicates that being or substance, insofar as it is an object of knowledge for the subject (up to and including the ultimate “object”, i.e., the divine being), has become the same as subject, or in other words: that the object of spirit is now unconditionally and only itself, i.e., thought thinking itself. Phenomenology—as that which preserves what “appears” in its allegedly rich depths and mysterious (unthinkable) origin (i.e., what appears is always simply given)—is an intrinsically religious approach to being, irreducibly dependent upon the interpretation or “indications” of being, which must inevitably be approached as the “other” that gives itself; with the sacrifice of phenomenology in and through itself, the method of thought as such becomes absolutely philosophical, i.e., logical, scientific, and radically irreligious;

(3)

the sacrifice of knowing, insofar as spirit has always known merely “historically” and therefore “religiously”, as the sacrifice of the collection of distinct and “positive” moments of consciousness’s path toward its object—which distinction in and for each moment, considered in isolation or “in themselves”, was at every point religiously “eternalized” or “hypostasized” (reified into an idol)—is the sacrifice of the abstraction that defines such moments, such idols, occupied in themselves and taken to be “the truth”; in the sacrifice of their abstraction or idolatrous being in themselves, what comes to the fore are these moments in the truth of their being, namely, as the mere gallery images of spirit’s determinate existence, as having come to know itself in time by doing away with or overcoming every idol, every form of fixed otherness, or otherness—the “divine”—“in itself”.

What this brief taxonomy is intended to demonstrate is how the final moment of the Phenomenology of Spirit, i.e., absolute knowing, accomplishes the absolute sacrifice of the intrinsically religious existence of merely historical humanity to and for the philosophical, i.e., scientific truth of this existence, namely, its being as subjectivity. The beginning of the Science of Logic, wherein the “result” of absolute knowing is “presupposed,”24 therefore marks the beginning and actuality of philosophy, which is no longer the mere “love of wisdom”, or a pagan (or Christian) reverence for the gods, but “wisdom” or knowledge—science—itself: the revelation of the certainty of the truth of the relation between humanity and its other.

And yet such certainty by no means indicates, as should be evident at this point, the mere annihilation of the other or, for this reason, the sterility of desire. Being in its determinate truth is as much the aim or “desire” as it is the presupposition or “certainty” of the Logic; and in the first place (at the beginning of science), being means the pure emptiness or nothing of pure thought, or the emptiness of a knowledge that has sacrificed the totality of its substantial content—all of which depended upon the subject’s relation to an abstract other—and, in this sacrifice, become absolutely free. Because thinking has shown itself to be, and indeed is, nothing other than its own sacrifice, its own self-emptying, thinking has become its own other—namely, being itself, or indeed God in himself, prior even to his act of Creation25 —and for this reason moves itself, not in relation to the abstract other of history but, like God himself, freely or solely on the basis of its own negativity, which has become in and for itself: absolute subject. The self-movement of thought—its essential movement with direction in and through itself—has as its “end” nothing other than its own determinate freedom, or the point at which it freely realizes or actualizes its own otherness, or itself as other, namely: its self-releasement or self-emptying (kenosis) into nature. Being comes to itself in the moment in which, qua completed Idea (absolute concept), it releases itself as and for the sake of (being) itself, and therefore into its “real” being, or existence, as sacrificed in nature and as spirit. Unlike spirit in its historical sojourn, the Idea, or pure thinking, freely sacrifices itself, empties itself of its own nothingness (being), and in this negation of negation, thinking, which is the same as being, externalizes and therefore realizes itself in the “real” domains of nature and spirit.

This is the philosophical or scientific truth of what religion, as Hegel put it, merely pictured to itself, dramatized, as the Incarnation of God: the subject of knowing and desire consists in the going-beyond of its mere being “in itself”, in order to achieve its being in and for itself, its existence as the free sacrifice of itself and the knowledge of itself as this sacrifice, which transfigures its death into the very meaning of freedom. Freedom—which is to say, the freedom to know and to desire, i.e., to actualize the truth of oneself, and indeed of selfhood as such—therefore coincides with the sacrifice of the subject as it exists, qua sacrifice or externalization of itself, in nature and as a finite spirit, insofar as these are it. The subject is the concrete or determinate existence of nature as spirit, which realizes nature as both history and its sublation.

To sacrifice oneself in this way, to make absolute sacrifice the very “meaning of being”, is to sacrifice the abstract and “fixed” other of a merely finite knowing and desire—wherein the subject remains equally abstract and fixed, objectified—in order to unconditionally affirm the loss and the discovery of oneself through the other that one is to oneself, or what might also simply be called love. Only a being that is essentially other to itself, that finds itself only in its “dismemberment”26, in and through such otherness, is capable of love.

In the Incarnation, God dismembers himself in and for himself, which is to say, in and through the other(ness) of himself. In sacrificing himself in and through the other, by becoming other to himself, God realizes himself as perfect love: as subject. Such love, or subjectivity, essentially consists, as stated, in the movement of loss and discovery, “crucifixion” and “resurrection”, or the realization of the truth of oneself only in such movement. In realizing oneself in and through the loss of oneself, one becomes who one is.

In Christianity, God “becomes” himself principally in two acts: Creation and Incarnation. What Hegel shows is that, from the standpoint of philosophy or science, Creation and Incarnation, because they constitute God as subject, are logically the same act, the same realization of the truth of the subject as love, or as that existence which, in and through its being “dismembered” by its relation to its other, finds its truth.

The act of Creation for this reason already implies the death of God, or his dismemberment and sacrifice at the hands of humanity, insofar as Creation already consists in God’s going beyond or outside himself irreversibly. Creation already reveals God’s being as sacrifice. Consequently, God’s creation of the world, “of nature and of a finite spirit,”27 is already his Incarnation, the revelation of his being as perfect love: his desire to be himself solely in and for the other, or by becoming other to himself. Creation is already God’s eternal going-beyond of Godself in and for the world, his eternal affirmation of himself in and through his dismembering involvement in the world, or, in other words: his ultimate sacrifice.