Can Hegel Count to Two?

In a brilliant chapter of his book on Hegel’s God, William Desmond asks whether Hegel can count to two. He wonders if Hegel is capable of accounting “for the true otherness of creation as temporal and not as eternal?” More,

“Let God’s self-movement be eternal, but the self-becoming in time is not thus eternal (even if endless). How account for the difference? Is it enough to see it as an eternally vanishing or sublated moment? How does this accord with our own experience of finitude as intermediate being in the between? Does the homogenization of the difference of ‘way up’ and ‘way down,’ and the blurring of the difference between the eternal self-mediating of God and the arising of creation as an other in time, make incoherent the relation of time and eternity? Does this plant the seed of deep equivocity in Hegel which can be cultivated differently, for their own purposes, by either right or left Hegelians, the lovers of eternity and the lovers of time.”

While Hegel is trying to overcome a dualistic either/or, but “a dialectic-speculative both/and raises equally troubling questions about the best way to think the togetherness and difference of time and eternity that is true to their community and otherness. Has Hegel’s speculative solution merely renamed , and so passed quickly over, a radical equivocity here, and not been aware of so doing? Has he then solved the problem by dissolving it, though the dissolution seems to work as either dissolving time in eternity or eternity in time.” Because of this equivocation in his doctrine of God, other problems arise: “poverty of conceptual resources to give due weight to otherness as other, whether the released otherness of finite creation, the negative otherness of evil, or the promise of agapeic otherness that is the endowment of a community of religious service.”

Hegel speaks of the process of self-determination as a “circuit” by which spirit achieves determinacy, but Desmond wonders if this leaves everything dissolved into “one grand circuit,” and also wonders whether this circuit is to be understood as eternal or temporal: “If the circuit is eternal , what then of the historical determinations of religions, and how does Hegel know its logic? If the circuit is temporal , how does Hegel know its eternity? If the circuit is eternal and temporal, can it be a circuit at all, if these two are two? If they are not two, then either eternity ‘sublates’ time, or time ‘dissolves’ eternity into itself, or perhaps eternity dissolves itself (kenotically?) in time. In all cases, their difference seems destined to vanish, one way or the other. If so, are we not back with Parmenides, with Hegel impotent to speak truly of their difference ? And if so, is Hegel’s speech no speech? Or does he just then equivocally slide between one and the other? Are we wrong to worry that all the moves made, either within Godself, or between God and finite, in the end amount to quasi -moves?”

After sketching Hegel’s “erotic” Trinity, in which the other is the means for my own self-realization, he asks “Can Hegel count to two? But does he not count to three? Yes, it seems. But is it not also so that, in counting to two, the second is the first self-doubled, and the third is the self-recognition of the first in the second? In counting to three, is he not still just counting to one? Does he then really count to to at all? In order to count to two, must we count to four , such that if there is self-doubling, there is more than one such ‘self, and hence a different redoubling that pluralizes beyond one?”