Hegel is a theorist of the Absolute. His system resembles premodern metaphysics in that it situates the Absolute in the divine Mind, Geist. The divine Mind is the object both of philosophy and theology. The innovative quality of Hegel’s system is that it explains why the Mind allows for these different perspectives, and why philosophy is the most adequate perspective to understand what the Mind is.

In the second preface of his Encyclopedia, Hegel compares the duality of perspectives on the Mind to the Aristotelian idea that religion and philosophy are the two modes or languages that we may use to describe first substance. First substance may be characterized from the standpoint of ontology or of theology, but: “Der Gehalt ist derselbe,” the object of these languages is the same. Philosophy and religion ultimately coincide because they talk about the same thing.

The superiority of philosophy does not make religion superfluous. Indeed, there should be religion: the “Religion des Geistes.” Religion is required insofar as philosophy depends on it, for religion can exist without philosophy, but philosophy cannot exist without religion. Religion posits the Geist that philosophy explains. Or, more precisely: religion proposes the divine Mind as an object of veneration, whereas philosophy reveals that this Mind is not simply an object to be venerated, but a reality in which the very categories of subjectivity and objectivity coincide. Philosophy tells us that our understanding of the Mind is what the Mind itself actually and inherently is. Our thinking is the thinking of the Mind.

In the second paragraph of the introduction to the Encyclopedia, Hegel puts this concept of the Mind in the perspective of ancient philosophy. He says about the Mind that it is “the cause of the world,” “die Ursache der Welt.” With this idea, Hegel resuscitates one of the foundational ideas of Western philosophy, dating back to Anaxagoras and Plato’s Timaios: the idea that the cosmic Mind, nous (which Hegel mentions expressis verbis), is the cause of the cosmos. These philosophers, as well as Aristotle, the Neoplatonists, the medieval scholastics etc., tell us that the world was conceived, through a process of intellectual articulation, in the divine Mind. This Mind, the intellectus divinus, is not something irreconcilably transcendent. The constitution of the Mind is reflected in our intellectual constitution. We, too, are minds; and our thinking of the Mind is the self-articulation of the Mind in us. We are not separate from God, but the thinking parts of his thought.

Terry Pinkard and Robert Pippin disagree. They think that the conceptual and linguistic parallelisms between Hegel on the one hand, and late antique Neoplatonism and Christianity on the other hand are either coincidental, or ironical, or simply meaningless. They see Hegel, not as as a theorist of the Absolute, but as a theorist of rationality. When Hegel talks about Geist, he just talks about our shared intellectual constitution. Everything he says must be decoded and deciphered, so as to reveal the non-metaphysical subtext of the metaphysical text.

With their project of decoding Hegel, Pinkard and Pippin undertake an exegetical task that has many parallels in the history of religion. At the early stage of Christian Bible exegesis, Christian theologians tended to interpret the holy scriptures in a purely allegorical and non-historical way. They made the Bible speak in a way that contradicted its immediate meaning. To that end, they had to rearrange the text, start where the text ends, elide the meaningful passages, focus on the margins, and convince the reader that the text is less important than their interpretation of it. They made the Bible say what they wanted it to say.

Pinkard’s and Pippin’s reading of Hegel is, one could say, allegorical. They think that everytime Hegel speaks of one thing, clearly and obviously, he actually means another thing. When he says that the nous is the cause of the world, he just says that collective rationality shapes the history of the world. When he affirms that religion and philosophy have the same object, he intends to say that God is not really an existing thing, but just a projection of reason. Each thing that resembles a statement about an objectively existing, cosmic Mind, is in reality a statement about the immanence of rationality. Hegel’s whole writing thus points to a meta-metaphysical reading, grounded in an allegorical unraveling of his metaphysical statements. This unraveling is necessary because Kant has overcome metaphysics, and because metaphysics has generally become incompatible with our contemporary way of thinking. Hence, we have no choice but to read Hegel as a philosopher of rationality and discourse, not as a metaphysical theorist of the Absolute.

How does one arrive at such a reading?

Pippin and Pinkard’s main strategy is to dismiss the history of philosophy. For example, Pinkard shifts, in his Hegel’s Naturalism, the attention from Hegel to his sources and distorts those sources. He presents Aristotle as a naturalist. He then concludes that Hegel is a naturalist because he was influenced by Aristotle’s naturalism. Here, an informed reader might object: Was the ancient commentarial tradition–Simplicius, Syrianus, Alexander of Aphrodisias–not unanimous in the identification of the Aristotelian first substance (prote ousia) with the divine Mind (nous)? Did the Middle Ages not see the divine intellect’s function as prime mover as the very proof of its existence? Is first substance in any way reducible to nature, as the immanent dynamics of the physical world? Should one not rather say that Hegel is a theologian because Aristotle is also a theologian?

Pinkard does not know Greek and might not know Latin either. His footnotes do not reveal any traces of a deeper reading of Aristotle or the Aristotelian tradition. Pinkard instead devotes his first chapter to animals and the immediacy of experience. By beginning in the margin of Aristotle’s philosophy, he can distract from what Aristotle’s point is, namely, that first substance is not “natural.” He turns Aristotle into a naturalist by eliding Aristotle’s main ideas, similarly to how some ancient Christian apologists liked to turn the Old Testament, which they read in Latin translation, and without having any cultural sensibility to its history, into a prophecy about Christ.

Elision is one way to make a text speak allegorically. Another way is by playing on words.

In his introduction to Hegel’s Idealism, Pippin describes how some people have seen in Hegel an “idiosyncratic Christian, romantic metaphysician, a ‘world soul,’ or a ‘cosmic spirit’ theologian.” But, he continues, that is not the “historically influential” Hegel.

What does it mean that this Hegel is not the historically influential one? Does it mean that Hegel’s historically influential version is the one on which we should focus–i.e., should we study those works of Hegel’s students that influenced mainstream philosophy? Or does it mean that the actual, historical Hegel, who became influential through his works, is not the metaphysician described earlier on? In other words: Does Pippin say that Hegel is not really whom we thought him to be, or that his “real version” has become uninteresting to our time, and that we should thus only study his influence on those philosophers that are compatible with our time? Is Pippin reading Hegel for us, or proposing us a new Hegel whom we could potentially see as an ally?

Pippin and Pinkard are intelligent enough to avoid presenting their Hegel as the real one, because they know that Hegel and the Old Hegelians speak against them. Hegel’s doctoral dissertation is about Christ; his language is as close to that of the Neoplatonists as German can be close to Greek; he does not hide, in his history of philosophy, his admiration for Plotinus and Proclus. The first generation of Hegelians were mostly theologians: Strauß, Marheineke, Daub, Baur. Those theologians saw Hegel as the promoter of the ideas that Pippin and Pinkard reject.

Elision–elision of text and history–is a powerful hermeneutical tool. History has shown that it is possible to bring about disproportionately large intellectual shifts by relying on the erasure of the obvious. And it seems to me that the erasure of the obvious, that we find in Pinkard’s and Pippin’s Hegel, is an archetypal expression of North American philosophy. When something does not conform to the paradigm of naturalism, i.e. the ideology that what we see is what there is, and when something falls out of the intellectual frame of neoliberalism, i.e. the ideology that, apart from discourse and reason, there can be no commitment to something that goes beyond one’s individual corporeal and psychological existence, the easiest way to avoid dealing with that thing is to silence it. Refusing to learn its language, ignoring its historical reality, endlessly circling back to one’s own assumptions–it seems that by practicing this form of gaslighting long enough, one can make people believe that even Hegel, who declares himself to be a theorist of the Absolute, is not a theorist of the Absolute.

Ultimately, it seems that Pippin and Pinkard have won the battle. By being unclear about the line between the real Hegel and their interpretation of Hegel, they have managed to entertain the impression that Hegel was a pragmatic philosopher. They have accomplished an upside-down allegory: instead of manifesting the spirit of the text, the have used the text to extinguish the Geist. The Spirit is dead–Hegel stands there as a lifeless advocate of discursive rationality.