God at the End of Language

Reflections on God seen by Hegel

Abstract

This article, written in German, wants to point to important aspects of the question of God in Hegel’s oeuvre. The first part introduces Hegel’s dialectic that finds its peak in Hegel’s Science of Logic. The second part tries to delineate the main results of Hegel’s first major work, The Phenomenology of Spirit, and argues that God can be understood there as the sphere in which the subject points beyond itself toward its other. The third part demonstrates that the language of the Logic is not denotative, as it does not aim at mirroring a world outside or within language. The absolute is shown to express itself in the successive sublation of the object of language and fixations attributed to it. Thus, the absolute Spirit in Hegel’s Logic is not only understood as the logos of language itself – as proclaimed in the metaphysical tradition -, but at the same time as its crisis, and therefore He is the not representable “Other” in relation to our symbolic orders who reveals Himself in freedom and creativity.